The Selectors

The Selectors

Claire Manning - Copyright © 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior

written consent of the author. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations,

places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are entirely coincidental.

Chapter 1

My story...start

I am part of the baby boomer generation. I grew up in a village that had approximately 1500 living souls making up the entire population. This village was situated on the flank of the Appalachian Mountains 2000 feet above sea level. It was a very quiet place where the one type of entertainment that I cherished as a kid during our short summers and was also the most interesting to me was to gather with the whole family, sit in the dark in a solarium to watch the approach of a thunderstorm coming our way. As it got darker, my father would repetitively explain to us the reason behind the impressive lighting and why we would hear the thundering sounds following soon after. He was great at explaining everything. He was a pedagogue by profession and this certainly helped him in explaining things to us.

His explanations of this sequence of lighting and thunder left us free of any fear of this natural phenomenon. It was simply a matter of understanding nature & physics and I must say despite my young age, I found it funny at the time when my class mates would explain their versions of what they believed it to be all about. I strongly felt that what my father had told me and my siblings made way more sense than anything else I was being told at the time.

It was just a matter of knowing how everything worked. It gave me, at a very young age, the proof that anything, any mystery could be logically explained and I always found this to be very satisfying. I never liked to be told something for which there was no tangible proof. I always wanted to see for myself.

I remember that I, more often than not, played bowling with my school bag, sliding it on the linoleum floor from the dining room to the living room until it hit and glided under one of the chesterfields; pretending and telling my parents that I was going to my father’s study to study. 

Usually not long after dinner, having done with the dishes, I would spend a lot of time in there, grabbing one of those huge and very heavy encyclopedia books that had so many interesting colour pictures, explaining everything. As a very curious mind, always eager to find out new things about the world I’d entered into and was now living in; it was for me an absolute delight feeding my young mind; I was saying to myself that I wanted to know everything. At times, I found it difficult to grasp the entirety of exactly who I was and what I would be dealing with for the rest of my life. There was so much to discover, to learn. Would I have enough time to learn everything I wanted to know? Only time would tell...

As a kid, most of the time, I was happy and appreciative of what my parents had so generously provided me; more specifically regarding music, world history, writing and art. Later something changed.

Despite having a good life, there was something in the back of my mind that I continuously kept looking for. Something to tell me what was going on; something that I had experienced at a very young age that has lasted through the years; something for which I had never been able to find a motive or an explanation.

Not long after I’d lie down on my bed at night, I would have this terrifying feeling that there was a mysterious presence standing close to me. At the time, I called it a ghost visit, having no other word for it and this being the only way I could explain to myself. At night, I had this terrifying feeling which gave me sweaty chills. Lying on my back, I was so scared at the time that I always took my bed sheet to cover myself from head to toe. Along my body, there was this pressure on the mattress which lowered my body and made me sort of lean to the right.

I couldn’t count the number of times this happened to me; I would leave my bedroom and go to a place that has never been disclosed to me; then to return to my room the same night. I’ve always wondered if time had been frozen during my encounters. It always seemed to me to take many hours before I’d return.

I remember during summers starting at six years of age, playing alone in the backyard where I’d pick dandelions. I’d pull their seeds one by one and blow them way up in the air. As the wind gusts took them away, I’d watch them going way up into the sky. My young mind just wished that I would soon get some answers that would help explain everything about these very frightening moments during this period of my young life. I have never spoken about it to anyone. I kept it a secret my entire life, being very reluctant about receiving awful or negative reactions as an exchange for revealing these very unusual happenings. I couldn’t clearly explain them to myself, so I couldn’t imagine how someone else could ever comprehend them.

For the rest of my life, I’ve never looked at dandelions the same way...

What was this inexplicable fright that I felt on any given night they decided to meet me? This continued until the point where I’d reached my teenage years.

As I started my menstrual cycle, the pain was excruciating every single month. I would always get this feeling of a painful tear happening inside my abdomen.

It’s was only later in my life, after going under the scalpel, i.e. a surgery, more specifically a partial hysterectomy that I found out that inside this specific part of my body, that there were several deep scars around and inside this area for which, as noticed by my surgeon, had no tangible explanation as to why they were there. At the time, finally being relived from the pain, I never happened to make an association to my child ghost events as this surgery had become a promise of no more of this pain for the rest of my life.

Then another phenomenon started to appear and it is still happening to this day. Whenever I would go outside, I would always feel a car coming or someone that I did not first physically see but would appear seconds after I felt them with this new perception. It was as if I had an invisible sphere around and over me that made me feel a gentle jolt that warned me about something or someone entering into my space. 

All these phenomena, these inexplicable but observable happenings had remained total mysteries until a special late summer evening event, which I never expected to happen, made me mentally rewind my past, until I reached the moment of the first visit of my nightly ghosts.

I met someone who called himself Edvard who finally explained everything I needed to know about my out of these world extraordinary events.

I had this feeling that maybe one day I might come face to face with my ghosts again, and somehow interact with them while still living in this Earthly world...

As I aged, I had this great interest in all kinds of literature related to E.Ts, U.F.Os, abduction stories, etc. These subjects were fascinating to me. I’ve read quite a lot of books related to these subjects. But they have never brought to light what I was looking for. There were also so many conspiracy theories floating around in cyberspace that I finally withdrew from the subject for years, as I had never gotten hold of a tangible answer for that which I had been seeking to obtain for so long.

So, I simply carried on with my life; I tried to set these events aside in my mind, but what if this could happen, still