Late last evening shadows began to appear, fiendish apparitions meandering under a starlit window.

Tiny shadows, ink black and swirling.

Alert and restless I lay, sheets tossed aside in the wake of feverish and shivering night terrors.

Then the first contact came, a touch, cold and alien, firm and insistent. Stabbing roughly into my solar plexus.

Then eyes appeared, as black as hell, and as large as eggs, hovering at the edge of my vision.

Unwelcome spectators, bore silent witness to my abduction, as I rose slowly to my feet, lost in some sort of mesmeric trance.

Silence and unconsciousness followed, only to return me to awareness, where I found myself bound securely in involuntary contact with a cold metallic and sterile table.

Lights abounded, not bright or glaring, but multiple and varying, as though seeking to counter the dimness of light with quantity of it.

I tried to speak but managed only a hushed whimper, like the sound of a pathetic alpaca at feeding time.

Three fingered hands poked and pointed and gestured meaninglessly over my bared body, pinching and jabbing me with maddening carelessness, all over my chest and abdomen, and groping me roughly, like a breeder marketing his wares.

Throaty sounds came from the motionless bulbous mask-like head above me and, to my amazement, I understood its blithering alien gibberish. It was a clear and ominous warning that what comes next is going to be very, very painful.

Then it came, a startling and maddening agony filled my whole existence.

I screamed with all my might, but in silence, throat tissue tearing with the strain, arms and knees hyperextending against their straps, yet no sound could be heard, even as a long, narrow silver cylinder plunged deep into my navel.

Terror, pain and rage combined to induce another blackout.

But with this final burst of merciless agony, a blast of thought pictures flooded my mind, filling my pain-racked consciousness with endless, meaningless groupings of zeros and ones, but only for an instant, then sinking deeply with me into my mindless and dreamless sleep.

When I awoke again, to the safety and warmth of my own bedroom, I searched the tabula rasa of my previous night's dreams and found nothing to work with.

But just then, a tiny brown bird fluttered against my bedroom window, chirping joyously of the coming day, and tapping out a fleeting tune with softly feathered wings.

Surprised, I sat up with a start, heart racing, and as I listened to that pitiful little bird, that evil, feathered menace, maliciously tapping out the very same coded message that had been branded mercilessly into my brain from somewhere in my pain darkened memory.

A terrible series of familiar binary clicks, now on, now off, shifting and alternating, poured from the wings of this avian intruder outside my window, treacherously spilling out dark and secret words, the very words that shall forever echo through the chambers of my abducted and molested mind.