Their skin felt like the top of a mushroom.
The teller lived with their grandmother, a nurse for more than thirty years and, at 69, as sharp as ever. Asked for the strangest thing that ever happened to her, she hesitated for days before telling it, and made the teller promise to keep it private. Years later the teller asked an uncle, who had been five at the time, and he told almost exactly the same story.
About thirty-five years earlier, the grandmother lived alone with her four children, aged five to nine, in a house on a small hill in a Chicago suburb. It sat several hundred yards from the main road, with a big yard and about a mile of woods behind it. Neighbours were close but out of sight.
One late-summer evening, as she was getting the children ready for bed, lights came on outside, like car headlights pulling up. That wasn't unheard of. But then they realized the lights were shining in through every window at once, from every side of the house.
She was overwhelmed by terror, a pure sense that she and her children were in danger. She herded all four into the big closet in her bedroom, whispered fiercely at them to be silent, and held the door shut. The children were too young to understand. The uncle remembers his sister asking about a strange smell. It was their mother's fear-sweat.
Then she heard the front door and the back door open, one right after the other. Both had been locked for the night. Footsteps came through the house and straight to her bedroom closet, as if whoever it was knew exactly where they were.
In that instant, she and her son both say, the fear vanished, as if a switch had been flipped. She let go of the handle. The door swung open onto a blinding light. Neither of them could see who stood in it, but they heard a calm voice say it was the woman in the rocking chair. That was a gentle presence the whole family believed lived in the house, a chair that rocked on its own. The grandmother felt certain that if they went along quietly, everything would be fine.
That is where the uncle's memory ends. The grandmother remembers being led out by the hand, her youngest on her hip and the other children beside and behind her, walking willingly toward the lights with two small figures. The hand holding hers was tiny, and its skin felt like the top of a mushroom. After that, nothing. They all woke in their beds the next morning, and her whole body ached.
The other three children remember only fragments: the lights, the whispering, the smell. When the subject comes up, they say they don't remember and change it. Not long afterward the grandmother was diagnosed with leukaemia, and she recovered. The teller adds, for what it's worth, that the uncle says he hasn't had a single infection since he was five.