Leaf Storm

Well, the police are no help. I told them all about the burglar being in one of the Jericho houseboats. They just told me they’ll ‘add it to their list of potential locations’. I don’t get it.

Okay, burglary isn’t a big deal when they’ve taken nothing massively valuable. But burglary after a murder? But no. No connection, that’s what they believe.

Jackie’s a nice lady. She takes good care of me. But she hasn’t got broadband Internet access. It was one thing to find a second hand book, but for the full-on Mayan investigation, I really need that. So I’ve ended up at the library after all. Ha, ha, TopShopPrincess. You can come by if you fancy. Or not. Whatever.

Mum asked me to come and spend the night in her hospital room, which has a little extra bed. I was a bit nervous but it seems pretty cool. The doctors don’t wear white coats. You can’t tell who’s sick and who isn’t.

I didn’t tell her about the burglary, of course not. I don’t tell her that I tried – and failed - to replace one of the few possessions she might really care about.

There was a full moon. Its light filled the room with a soft glow. I woke up to find Mum awake, standing by the window.

I said, “Please Mum, please get better.What am I supposed to do if you fall apart?”

She only shook her head. “You don’t know how this feels Josh. I hope you never do. It’s all gone for me - vanished, like mist.”

“They’re wrong about Dad,” I told her. I wanted to tell her about the emails I’ve found, but I couldn’t – not until there’s a bit more to go on. “I’m going to prove it. You wait and see.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I turned onto my stomach and slept. I’ve noticed that my dreams are more vivid when I sleep on my front. But last night’s dream was really weird – one of those where you could actually believe you’re there.

In the dream, I’m dizzy, floundering, caught in the middle of a leaf storm. The leaves surround and enclose me. I close my eyes. In the heart of that storm, I’m suddenly calm. When I open my eyes again, the leaves are gone. I’m standing in a small room with a thatched roof. There are candles everywhere, and the smell of autumn smoke mixed with something acrid, like linseed oil. My eyes sting a little and I blink hard. The room is filled with a thin film of smoke. There’s a man lying on the straw-covered floor. I don’t recognise him – in fact, I have no clue who he could be. He’s oldish – late forties maybe, grey hair. And he’s coughing, choking, shaking. His eyes almost pop out of his head. He turns purple. This guy is in bad shape, no doubt about it. I don’t move though, I don’t help. I just look on and I feel nothing, not a shred of pity. It feels like the incense is making me dizzy. Looks like the guy on the floor is breathing his last. In fact – I’m sure of it. I don’t take a closer look, but I light a candle I’m holding. I hear myself mumble a string of strange words. I could swear he’s done for. But then, without warning his eyes snap open. And he looks me dead in the eye, says something that sounds like “Summon the Bakabix”.

The rest of the dream was just flashes; a small statue of a Buddha-like figure, water lapping around a decrepit old boat, a pier with two matching straw huts, a mist hanging low over water.

Ideas, anyone?

Raiders of the Lost Codex!

I am NOT even joking. Seriously, my Dad was involved in some major stuff. I just found evidence (not going to give details) that he found some Mayan inscription which might lead to one of the rarest finds in Mayan archaeology. A long-lost book, or codex, with a Mayan prophecy about the end of the world – in 2012!

This Is A Low

Mum spent today in bed again. It’s been over a week. Well, I feel like I’m grinding through it, going to school every day, which takes my mind of stuff for a few hours. But each day I come home to find that Mum hasn’t moved. When I came home today, I found her listening to “Waters of March”. She and Dad didn’t have one ‘tune’ but I’d guess that one was probably in their top five. She’d put it on a continuous loop and was lying flat on their bed, staring up at the ceiling.

Since Dad’s death, jazz has been banned from our house. Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Tom Jobim and all those guys – that’s my Dad’s music. Me, I’m not a fan but you get used to it. Mum and me - we have this unwritten rule, now. Hearing jazz is just too miserable – for us both.

And yet there she was, wallowing in it.

Well, I said nothing. Just closed the door quietly so that I didn’t have to listen.

I’m trying to keep things going here. I even cook sick-person food for Mum. Tomato soup with soft white bread. Chicken broth and buttered crackers.

But still she won’t eat. Finding out what really happened to my Dad seems to have finished her off.

What the heck am I supposed to do?

Four Missing Days and a Murder

So it’s official. My Dad is dead. Not only dead, but murdered.

I thought it was bad before. But after today I’m just sort of tired. There’s a weird kind of numbness. Like I’ve reached a limit.

Aeromexico Pilot Films UFOs in Campeche!

I’ve been spending a lot of my time looking through UFO sightings reports. It’s amazing what you can find on the Web. People I might once have called ‘nutters’, logging up hours online to post information, rumours, opinion. I can’t get enough of it. If I keep looking, I might find the one report which will lead me to Dad. It’s not unheard of. People often get abducted in groups. Years later, they find each other again. No connection in their normal lives, but they know each other, somehow. I’m not talking about déjà vu. This is real. Total strangers who know stuff about each other that they couldn’t know if they hadn’t met.

If Dad was taken along with anyone else, there might be hope.

We hear about the plane crash a few days back. I’ve been tracking rumours in the UFO boards.

Now, they’ve hit the mainstream news.

So I’m not just going on the words of some random UFO-fans. A commercial airline pilot with Aeromexico is one of my key witnesses!

Aeromexico Pilot Films ‘UFOs’

“In the late evening of June 15th, a commercial airline pilot flying Aeromexico Flight 231 filmed six unidentified flying objects in the skies over southern Campeche state, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed.

In a sighting which bears an uncanny resemblance to the widely reported event of March 2004, in which pilots of the Mexican airforce filmed 11 UFOs, a videotape made widely available to the news media shows the bright objects, some sharp points of light and others like large headlights, moving rapidly in what appears to be a late-evening sky.”

The Joshua Files

So here’s the thing – everyone thinks I’m crazy.

Well, it’s weird. When people reckon you’re going a bit barmy, they don’t actually use words like ‘barmy’, ‘crazy’, or even ‘psycho’. They say things like ‘normal grief response’ and ‘therapy’.

What’s really baffling my Mum and her friends is that I’m not even getting ‘barmy’ right. Maybe she’d prefer it if I were crying loads, or just sitting staring into space. But it’s like there’s a sign taped to my forehead: Does not fit the textbooks.

All I’m doing is looking at the circumstances of this plane crash and asking a few questions that don’t seem to interest anyone else.

1. Dad told Mum and me that he was going to Cancuen, in Guatamela. Some Mayan king was murdered there, hundreds of years ago. So…why was Dad’s plane found hundreds of miles from where he’d rented it and hundreds of miles from Cancuen?

2. Why did the local newspaper not have a single witness who saw the plane come down?

3. Why did that same local newspaper carry eyewitness reports of a major UFO sighting close to where they said his plane had come down?

Seems to me, you get some information like that, you should ask some serious questions. Maybe wonder about the truth of statements like ‘Dr. Andres Garcia crashed his Cessna in the jungle of Southern Mexico and suffered fatal injuries on impact.’

Why am I the only one wondering about this? Seems totally normal to me. But the more I go on the more Mum thinks I’m losing it.

What is it with UFOs anyway? Why are you automtically a headcase just because you say you’ve seen a UFO? So many people nowadays have - it’s not hundreds of people, it’s hundreds of thousands. From all backgrounds, all ages, all types of braininess. UFO sightings are rampant; you can’t ignore something that so many people see.

I took those three facts about my Dad’s plane crash and I put them together like this:

What if that body belongs to someone else? What if Dad wasn’t in the crash at all? What if he was abducted by the UFOs? What if he isn’t dead, just missing?

Mum’s first reaction, I have to say, was very reasonable. She said “Okay. Let’s assume that there really was a UFO. What about the body in the plane? What about the luggage? No-one else was reported missing, just your father.”

Then she gave me a big hug and said “I understand sweetheart, you don’t want this to be true. Neither do I. It’s unthinkable, unbearable.”

Then she began slowly to cry, and it was me who had to comfort her.

Which I can do, because now I’m not so sure that he’s dead.