My Father didn't know how long they had been watching him, but he told me when they first made contact.
It was nighttime, and he was walking home from a late practice across a large field, and that's when he saw it. Illuminated by the moonlight.
The entity was humanoid at first, but then its tail appeared. It became bright, and when it moved, it was quick, beyond his eye's comprehension. In the blink of an eye, it was upon him.
He distinctly remembers feeling its fangs puncture his neck and the world swimming around him in a nauseous swirl.
As he was sprinting home, he felt something that he hadn't before; it wasn't fear, but it was nothingness. A nothingness so deep he almost fell flat on his face. But that was his first dark spot.
The feeling would come and go randomly at that time, some months more frequent than others. His mom even took him to the doctors, and after a few visits, they prescribed him some medicine. I think it was for focus, and it seemed to help. He would still get those 'nothingness' spots, but it was much less frequent.
Eventually, the medicine stopped being as effective, or the phenomenon got stronger, as more abnormalities would occur throughout his life. They were minor at first, but he'd find that he would lose pieces of clothes, and new items of clothing would appear in his drawer that he knew he didn't buy. A friend's car might change colors from one day to the next, and when questioned, they would look at him in confusion.
Some months later, he was going to take a shower, and he blinked and ended up naked near his church. It was barely morning time, still dark out, but people were awake. Luckily, a friend's home was just a block away. Despite the constant jokes within his friend group, no one else seemed to bring it up. But that incident forced my father to realize that the creature he had seen that night, almost a year prior, was still affecting him.
That's when a girl knocked on his door. When he opened it, he was a bit taken aback when this random girl went in and kissed him. "Um, hi?" he said dumbly. "
"Oh, shut up." She rolled her eyes.
Now, my grandfather isn't an idiot. He can read the room. So, through some basic leading questions, he figured out a few things. One, he had his first-ever girlfriend. Two, they had been together for a little over two months. Three, she was planning a two-week-long trip for them the day after graduation. They'd fly from California Island to India.
After learning the third fact, he knew something was definitely amiss, as he knew he had no intention of ever going there. After looking around, he realized what had happened. He had another dark spot. Looking at the date, my father told me that this was the most horrifying feeling of his life. He had lost over four months of time, where his body seemed to be on autopilot the whole time. My father now had a girlfriend, a job, and had been accepted into a university.
Not knowing what else to do, but knowing he had to get help, he locked in. My dad said he had read over one hundred books in the first year. He would occasionally bring this phenomenon up to others, and his attempts of research led to nothing.
He went out and bought a journal, and for the next two years, he would ritualistically write every minute but consistent detail in his life: the dates of birthdays, the names of streets, the colors of homes, the date and time of sporting events, the names of coworkers and classmen, and the names of his friends' coworkers. Each time one of these changed, he would know.
Eventually, this seemed to stop working. One day, he was at the beach with a two-month-old puppy named Lo, gifted to him by his girlfriend, who walked along beside him on the pier, when he looked down and noticed a large diamond ring on her finger.
"Where'd you get that?" My dad asked.
"What are you talking about?" She would laugh, but she decided to play along. "You bought it for me. We got married, y'know." His face must've been something, because his girlfriend- or I guess, wife…my mom, we'll call her, gave him a weird look and asked if he was alright.
My dad said his heart felt like it weighed a million pounds. He didn't know how much time was lost to the nothingness, but he had missed his wedding. First, he had missed the start of their relationship, and now he had skipped out on his own wedding. He didn't know what he did to deserve any of this.
To avoid ruining the day, he just smiled and tried to keep up, laughing at the references he wasn't there for.
Months passed, and one day, he blinked, and he was sitting on a random couch in a home he'd never been in before. He stood up slowly, walking around. It didn't take long to discover that this was their new house. The pictures on the walls confirmed that.
While touring the place, he saw his wife sitting on the back porch, looking very pregnant. He guessed that she would be due in about a month.
My father couldn't help but smile, seeing her like that.
She turned, hearing the sliding glass door open, smiling back at him.
One day, while exercising in the backyard, a small boy scurried from the sliding door, running up to him with an eager expression. "Holy shit!" my dad said with surprise.
"Daddy! You swore!" The boy screamed joyfully.
I've never seen anything like it; the look in my father's eyes when he told me this.
My dad felt a deep agony burning inside his heart. He had missed my birth as well as some of the most developmental years of a child's life.
He stood in the warm, chest-high tropical ocean, holding Tobi, his son, out in front of him as he paddled his legs, teaching him to swim. He looked back to the beach, watching his wife engrossed in a comic book. He wondered what type of existence this was? As if his perception of life was akin to that of an audience watching a film. Each scene transition, every cut, every slip up, or every mistake in the background not going unnoticed.
In that moment, my father said he gave in. He stopped journaling. He stopped fighting. He stopped attempting to learn.
Next, my sister appeared in his life. He said when he first saw her, she was the cutest baby he'd ever seen. About five years younger than me.
He said that with her came a blessing—a blessing with the knowledge that he was always there, even when he had his spots of nothingness.
However, as time progressed, the frequency between these large gaps decreased. With barely enough time in between to form any kind of relationship with the people before he was ripped away once more.
He stood, older, staring at the TV, a news anchor he'd never seen before, when a boy, black, tall, about to be in his teenage years stepped in front of his vision.
"Uh, Dad?" The boy looked concerned, but for the life of him, my dad couldn't place why he looked so familiar.
"I'm sorry, I don't know you."
The boy's eyes became teary, but he held it together and pointed behind him to a shy-looking girl who stood by the doorway. "Yesterday, you said you wanted to meet her. Her name's Londeen."
"Um, hi," she waved meekly. "I, uh, met Tobi at this afterschool halloween event."
My dad blinked, and she was gone, with only that boy in the room.
"Hey," my dad looked at him.
"Yeah?" He said, eagerly, glad he was talking to him.
The earlier conversation spurred something deep inside, "Do you know anything about demons?"
A frown crossed the boy's face, as his father told him everything. When my dad was finished, I just stared at him, not sure what to make of what I had just heard. "For real?" Was all I could think to say.
After explaining it once more, his son put his head down, deep in concentration, thinking. Trying to understand what his father was trying to say. The way that he said names and places would change…How he would blink forwards in time seemingly at random. The boy looked up, and tears were streaming down his cheeks. "Okay, Dad. I'm going to save you. I promise I will."
The next time my father opened his eyes he was looking at the faces of his family above him, though he didn't recognize them, as they all looked years older from when he last saw them. The boy was probably a highschooler now.
My father tried to lift himself from the bed, attempting to get a bearing of his surroundings. The consistent and annoying beep of something in the room, clearly agitating him. His head couldn't even make it an inch off the bed. He felt so old and frail. He made eye contact with those he only vaguely recognized who stood around what he now realized was a hospital bed.
"Oh, Tobi, is…that you?" he asked. He craned his neck, looking at the floor, asking, "Where's Lo?"
"He's been gone for about six months," my sister said.
"Gone?" His face contorted with confusion.
When all the others left, Tobi stood by the bed as he always would for an extra ten minutes or so.
"What is happening to me?" His father asked.
"The doctor's think it's some type of early alzeheimer's."
"What?"
Tobi looked around as if scared someone would hear overhear, "I've been doing research on this. That's basically all I've been doing. I don't know if I can help fight whatever has taken your memories, but I know I can stop it in time."
"In time." he repeated. His body ached, and with every breath, a fire spread throughout every cell.
"Yeah. I've seen this mystic stuff, as well as going into the medical field, I know I can! Even if you do have Alzeheimer's, it's not over. There's gotta be something more metaphysical to all of this. If we can-"
Looking at me in the eyes, he asked, "Tobi, was I ever there for you?"
I nodded, "Everyday."
He smiled, closing his eyes, "that's good."
A week later, I watched my father die in that hospital bed. He was delirious with no idea who or where he was.
I'm going to figure out what happened to him, and I'm going to stop it.