About the same time I was experiencing the terror of the shadows in the hall, I began seeing or hearing (or both) something that I called “beezers”. As I lay in my crib, I would look up, thinking I would see swarms circling over my head. I could hear them. They sounded like a swarm of bees. I don’t recall anything bad ever happening to me, and I’d never before been stung, so I wasn’t afraid of bees. Actually, I got stung for the first time just a few months ago. I’m still not afraid of bees. Anyway, hearing the buzzing and sensing the swarm around me, I would go into full-on panic attacks that often interrupted the Parental Units’ and Aunt Tudi’s rest.
I would try to tell them what was going on, at least as how I perceived it, but not being able to talk very well, all I could really say is that they were called beezers. I clearly recall my horror that I was in a room alone with these things, whatever they were.
As the years marched on, my last conscious beezers experience was sometime around the age of seven. I convinced myself that it was my overactive imagination, and carried on as if the whole thing was a bad dream, or a night terror.
But, when I read Whitley Strieber’s Communion, I was taken aback by his assertion that people would often have alien encounters as children first, and those encounters would engender in the contactees being fascinated with owls, deer, and insects. A little later on, when I saw the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode about the nanites, watching those tiny robots swarm threw me right back into my childhood. All this was going on at the same time I began fashioning the bones of The Vampire Relics, and I have no doubt in my mind that I dubbed the worldwide Vampire community “The Great Hive,” because the link between Incubi/Succubi, combined with my research on Lilith (AKA The Night Monster), and beezers was formed before I even knew it had done so.
The closest thing to what the beezers displayed to me is the murmuration of starlings, behaving as though they are part of a hive mind. Their stark blackness against the sky are highly suggestive of the tiny black swarms over my crib.
Were they real? Were they a product of a very young imagination that did not yet have the proper words to describe what it had seen? Were they what my mind decided to fabricate to gloss over memories of alien contact? Or were they just a hallucination produced by a brain that may have had, or still has, chemical imbalances?
I doubt I’ll ever know.
The only thing I do know is that almost 40 years after my last beezer experience, I am still deeply unsettled by their memory.
