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170BIG SUR

blessing would soothe the whole issue—But the bat comes silently flapping around me again, I see him clearly in the moonlight now his little head of darkness and wings that zigzag maddeningly so you cant even get a look at them—Suddenly I hear a hum, a definite flying saucer is hovering right over those trees where the hum must be, there are orders in there, “They’re coming to get me O my God!”—I jump up and glare at the tree, I’m going to defend myself—The bat flaps in front of my face—“The bat is their representative in the canyon, his radar message they got, why dont they leave? doesnt Dave hear that awful hum?”—Billie is dead asleep but little Elliott suddenly thumps his foot, once—I realize he’s not even asleep and knows everything that’s going on—I lie down again and peek at him across the porch floor: I suddenly realizing he’s staring at the moon and there he goes again, thumping his foot: he’s sending messages—He’s a warlock disguised as a little boy, he’s also destroying Billie—I get up to look at him feeling guilty too realizing this is all nonsense probably but he is not properly covered, his little bare arms are outside the blankets in the cold night, he hasnt even got a nightshirt, I curse at Billie—I cover him up and he whimpers—go back and lie down with mad eyes looking deep inside me, suddenly a bliss comes over me as the sleep mechanism takes sinking hold—And there I am dreaming me and two kids are hired to work in the mountains on the same “ridge” as Desolation Peak (ie. Mien Mo Mountain again) and start with a cliffside river crew who tell us two workers have apparently sunk in the cliffside snow and we must lean over sheer drops and see if we can “dump them out” or haul them in—All we do is lie there on crumbly snow a thousand foot fall to the river crumbling the snow off in slabs so big you wouldnt know if men were trapped in em or not—Not only that the bosses have special shoes on sliders that are holding them to the safe shore (like ski clamps) so I begin to realize they’re only fooling us poor kids and we could have