Victim of a Hoax(Charles E.J. Moulton) The artwork to the right here on this page, "Stormy Sea", was painted by Charles E.J. Moulton on April 14th, 2014

Victim of a Hoax
A short story by Charles E.J. Moulton

It felt like a movie, it felt like some kind of a strange science-fiction-story, that’s how all this felt to Peter. This crazy situation had merged into this live-action perversity with made up characters that could only come from a sick mind. Stones came to life in a strange game of life. Imagined situations, where alien factions battled against each other in a game of cosmic chess. Of course, the entire thing had the feeling of a game, but eventually the borderline became undefined. The game became real and yet: was it real? Was it not?
The most dangerous part of it was the fact that no one knew about it.
The game, played by the two boys, had been prompted by the fact that they had seen a UFO together. Not a saucer. A triangular one with a flat bottom with small foot-size wings, a UFO the size of a car, with six spotlights in the back, from a distance of 10 feet. An unexplained phenomenon. Silent. It had shocked both boys, naturally. 13 year old boys, one a suburban atheist, the other an artistic Christian, both in the same school, both interested in astronomy, both UFO-interested, got catapulted into a tale that at least one was not ready for.
The whole thing turned strange once they saw the thing the second time around, around the same time, six months later, from the room window of a new apartment, where George and his mother had moved without his dad.
The boys began wondering why this vehicle, this strange otherworldly UFO, showed itself to the same two boys in a completely different place.

So, because they had no explanation as to why this UFO showed itself to them in another place, they began making up a story about the UFO, who was in it, who had sat behind the wheel, where the aliens came from, and so on.
Sadly enough, scared little Peter, the artistic fellow, was actually the one who came up with the idea with the telepathy. He said that he heard voices. That, of course, was hogwash. He did not hear any voices talking to him. He had seen it in a science-fiction-movie and now he was pretending to hear them just because he was in a science-fiction-kind of mood. George asked him repeatedly if he was sure and Peter said he was.
The hoax began and Peter had given George a permit to go fool him.

The snowball started rolling and soon it was very, very difficult to tell the difference where reality ended and where fiction commenced. Soon, the snowball had become an avalanche that threatened to kill them all, at least figuratively speaking. Neither of the boys really had an explanation for the two strange sightings, so George began making up the wildest stories in the name of the aliens that populated this seen ship, saying they told him so through their telepathy. Because it was a secret, Peter became immersed in the story, deeper than he wanted to be.

“Never tell anyone about this,” George said one day. “If you do, the alien boss will kill you. That is what he is saying to me right now in my head.”
It was a very dangerous game. Imagined brain games. One not even supported by any UFO-organization, all of them who had researched the case and found nothing.

Peter moved abroad, but returned to visit George every summer during vacation.

The problem remained: George and Peter were opposites in just about everything.

They had fun together, but they were really not good for each other.

One summer during the 1980’s, Peter realized that he had to end this or suffer the consequences. He realized that George’s mad staging of all these superbly ridiculous facts were turning dangerous and quite lethal. There was no borderline between what was real and what was imagined. Whilst running in the forest, pretending to be chased by aliens, it hit Peter like a bolt of lightning.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he thought to himself. “If I had a choice, I would actually leave this place. This is not me. This is becoming dangerous.”

His friend criss-crossed the valleys, hid behind trees, jumping into holes, hiding behind bushes, telling him that the aliens had “changed everything since they had been here yesterday” and that the alien boss had built a hidden base under the forest ground, that the evil aliens were fighting each other through their brains, that the bad aliens fighting their friends from the ship they had seen were about to kill them.

“Hey, Peter, hide,” he spat. “One of them is over there. They’re gonna get us.”

Peter did as he was told, he did what George told him to do. He hid. God help him, but he hid. George’s down-to-Earth practical personality seemed rather strange and dull, no, even quirkey, when he mingled it with his strange posture. He loafed around like an opposum and yet, this strange, shy guy managed to use Peter to the extent of giving him an almost neurotic fear of authority.
Damn it, Peter thought to himself. I am turning into a compulsive freak. I have to get out of this before it turns mean. Yes, the alien boss that George had invented, to explain why the UFO had appeared to them twice, was such a very dominating and horrendous figure that it gave Peter sleepless nights. In later years, he would spend years trying to talk himself out of that fear. In fact, George had created this image in Peter’s brain of a vengant alien that would kill them if he revealed who he was. Because the UFO had been triangular, the boys had to carry with them a pencil-marked and cut triangle at all times in their wallets as protection. In addition to this, any time that the boys saw an actual triangle laying on the ground in the form of stones or sticks, or on a road or a path they walked on, they had to walk around it or forever by damned. In fact, George told Peter in no uncertain terms that the dangerous aliens, battling the good ones, could come and kill them with big knives at any time, as a horrible battle was being fought between the alien factions. The whole problem began that summer when they were teenagers, running in the forest, inspired by this UFO. Peter realized he just had to pull out and tell George to call it quits. It was obvious that this was getting dangerous.

Peter sat behind the stone, peeking over it, wondering what the hell he actually was doing being friends with an atheist. Okay, George had a wild and dangerous imagination. But ... this?

“George?”

His friend looked over at him, surprised, his pointy, fox-like face more of an undernourished parody of imagination than anything else. That and the fact that he walked around like a giraffe really made Peter feel that he had chosen the wrong friend. The fact that they had seen what they had seen together, that they shared this strange secret, made it even stranger. Peter had been caught, imprisoned inside this thing.

“Shhh,” George spat. “They’ll hear us.”

Peter raised his eyebrows in a disbelieving gesture, that insecure feeling of weirdness haunting him. Okay, he wanted to believe in this alien thing. After all, they had seen the same strange UFO twice in two different places. Yes, it had been the same UFO and they had seen it from the same distance and it had been in two different places.

But the whole telepathy game had been started by Peter, not George.

That had given George the real stuff in creating the story, making up the alien boss and pretending to see monsters in the forest, all that had come from George.

“Do you really believe in this shit? Really, truly?” George looked at Peter.

“What?” Peter sighed.

“I said, do you really believe in this shit? Or are we making this up as we go along? Look, we are 16 years old. We are not kids anymore. We can’t see the forest for the trees. We do not know what that darned UFO was. We saw it. We don’t haved an explanation. So what?”

George’s face dropped an inch. His entire intensity dropped, as well. No more of that extreme fear, that Mission Impossible-attitude, came oozing out of his personality. Now, his persona just projected calm, he had been caught with his hand in the ... well, not the cookie-jar, but the UFO-files.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, George, we are making this up, aren’t we? I mean, we are not really hearing these voices, are we? We can’t actually believe that these damn aliens are occupying our minds, can we?”

George’s lanky, undernourished personality and his weird sense of perverse adventure dropped into oblivion. His eagerness to kick some terror into other Peter, because Peter was too nice to protest, had come to a close. Peter wouldn’t serve as a cushion anymore. He knew what this game was meant to be. George’s extreme shyness in school had made him search for a victim, a person that he could use in order to feel his power rise.

“I have no idea what you are talking about, Peter,” he said, slumping down on the ground behind the stone in the forest. Now, this patch was no longer an alien base and the monsters were no longer chasing them. George was just a strange guy and Peter was just a friend. A friend? Well, okay, a deep confidant that shared an amazing amount of imagination.

“George,” Peter said, now receiving a self-confidence that he had not had before. “You know very well what I am talking about. We saw a UFO together, but we are making this up. I don’t want to be nerd, man.”

George pursed his lips, giving him a hurt look. Then he smiled. “I dunno.”

“So, what are we doing here? Pretending to be chased by aliens.”

“I don’t know,” George said.

“Just tell me,” Peter said, falling down into the grass. “’Cause this is getting weird. I don’t know any more if this is pretense or reality. We read these bloody things in books, see pictures of aliens and incorporate it into our story to explain what we saw.”

A young woman jogged by them on the path and it seemed that the world passed by without anyone having any idea what was going on. The weirdest thing in this whole strange deal seemed to be that the whole world thought George was the shy little boy next door. No one, not even his divorced little mom, knew that George was the author of a very intricate story about alien invasion. Okay, it was all based on a strange thing these two boys saw. Somehow, fate had brought these two very different boys together to see this thing. But enough was enough.

“So, you are saying you are chickening out?”

Now, that other Peter came out, the one that had been there all along, one that always had sat in the corner and not been able to come out. Peter had moved abroad, George was still in the school that they had been at together. Summer vacation was still spent together. But enough was enough.

“Look,” Peter said, pointing at George. “I like playing these games with you, but let’s face it: we are getting into a very strange area here. We are basing these games on what? On a UFO we saw together three years ago. It was silent, triangular, appeared out of nowhere, we saw it twice in two different places, both your homes,” Peter spat. “You seem like the initiator of these events. I know you are not, but had it not been such an obviously strange and spectacular event, I really would’ve thought you staged it. Both these sightings occured at eight o’clock in the evening. But other than that, all that telepathy thing was made up. We have no explanation for this thing, no question, we don’t know. But I am going crazy. We have to define this thing, man. Because I know if we don’t define this, I will go crazy, I will turn into a nutcase. So,” Peter said to George, smiling, “what is this? Reality or fiction? Do we really believe that these strange aliens flew that thing and that they are fighting a damn brain war on our heads? We have to define this or you will find me in the looney bin sooner than you think.”

George leaned against the stone that, one moment ago, had been the gateway to an alien base. His fox-like face looked down at his thin hands and his practical and religion-denying brain searched his nails for some speck of dirt that could serve as a symbol for this odd situation. Peter saw it in the guy’s face. Of course George used Peter as a tool to gather self-confidence. George had no proof of these aliens. All he had seen was the UFO, nothing else.

He sighed, looked up at the trees, saw the leaves blowing back and forth in the trees and in the rocking motion of the invisible wind, the occasional bird taking off to gather worms for his child, the cloud passing by.

“I can’t spend my life being so scared, George.”

George looked at Peter, now with an expression of honesty. For the first time, this 16-year old boy did what a 16-year old boy should do: not run around a forest pretending to be chased by aliens. But being honest about not really knowing what had appeared on those two nights. George, for the first time in their now four year friendship, saw that he really had terrified Peter.

“You scared me, George,” Peter said, biting his nails. “I mean, you even planted this OCD-thing on me. Taught me what compulsive disorders are, told me that there are things like manipulation and that your imagined aliens want us to obey them by being compulsive. That is strange shit, George, and I want no part of it. I want safety for my family, I want happiness and I want success, I want love and I want health. One thing is watching Star Trek. Living it? No, thanks. And then, when I start making up this whole thing about the telepathy, you start making up that aliens flew that ship and they will invade Earth ten years from now and that they will save us and our family. Define this, George. You are mixing the reality of the UFO with fiction of this thing. I have to end this friendship before I go crazy. You are making this up, right?”

George nodded, pursing his lips and smiling.

“I am just making this up,” he said. “I did not plant that UFO or stage it. I just took your thing with the telepathy and turned it into something else. I am sorry. You have been the victim of a hoax.”

Peter smiled, really having made a decision. The friendship was over.

“I am an artist, George, brought up on music and religion. You are not me. I know we have lots of fun together making this shit up, but I have definately let this go too far.”

George waved it off.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Fiction and reality, whatever.”

“No, George,” Peter maintained. “Not whatever. Everyone who knows you, thinks you are a shy guy that dares nothing at all, undernourished and feeble. But the fact of the matter is that you are someone who told me that you wanted to join the army and fight for your country. But could you really, really do that? Would you last a day there? You are shy, physically unfit and I have never seen you eat more than a hot dog. You have used me, George, and made up this story on the basis of what? A UFO that appeared to us twice has turned into a hurricane of emotions.”

“Fiction and reality,” George said. “I know.”

Suddenly, the look on his face transformed into one of guilt. He sighed.

“I know. I took a sensitive, gullible person like you and used you in order to gather some power for me. That was wrong.”

“You know what was wrong, George?”
He looked up, shaking his head.

“That you first introduced me to this compulsive obsession, even told me how to get stuck inside obsessions and somehow linked the whole damn thing to the UFO-story. I don’t know how you did that. I don’t even know why. Why me? Why not write a story about it? Why terrify me? Why use me, man? You have caused me so much pain.”

“Well, look, Peter. When we were in school together, you were so dependant on me. You even followed me home. You practically begged me to use you.”

“Oh, holy crap, boy. Kiss my ass,” Peter spat. “You are such a rotten individual. That is a fascist attitude. God, you ought to see a shrink. Is that right? Using someone because they are not strong enough to defend themselves? You are a nazi, man.”
George sat there silent, picking at leaves.

Peter heard the birds chirp, he smelled the summer leaves, he felt the wind on his face, he remembered his family, he saw the people passing by, remembered how he had pretended to believe in this whole alien story just because of an unexplained phenomenon.

“Let me ask you, George: you told me that you saw the UFO a third time and it tried to pick you up and take you away, but that it flew away again. Was that true?”

George looked at me, closed his eyes and shook his head.
“I am getting my bags, I am going back to my grandmother. It is just a four hour ride with the train. It is best we never see each other again. If you call me again, I will sue you.”

Peter stood up, brushed himself off and sighed. George remained seated by his stone, bitter, hurt, an amateur ufologist and a storyteller who turned his fiction into reality.

Peter looked back at the pedestrians and the dogs and the squirrels. He knew, in spite of the fact that an unusual alien phenomenon actually bound them together, this was the end of their friendship. “You know, George, that the fact that a guy like you managed to use me has made me completely dependant on people. I have crawled under people who are way below my level. I have feared superstition like crazy just because you invented this story based on this thing we saw. What we saw was cool. What you made up wasn’t. The most horrible thing about it is that nobody knows about it. Nobody. They all think our friendship is just a cool, nice friendship of some damn pair of half-gay loser-guys. I have become so neurotic. You introduced me to neurosis.”

George stood up. “Are you finished?”

“With you, yes.”

“I know I have used you, made up this story, introduced you to the concept of obsessive behavior and all that, but you were a willing target.”

“As I said, George, that is no excuse. That is the problem with our world. We use people, just because we can. The Chinese use the Africans, the Russians use the Ukrainians, the whites use the blacks, the humans use the animals. What kind of world would this be if everyone was like that? Thanks to God there are good people who know that there is more than just the body. We are souls, George. Not bodies. We have feelings. We are beings, not bodies. The worst cases in history are based on people who simply use people because they don’t protest. Just look at the history books. That kind of behavior is the reason why we have a problem on the planet. You have a chance to change.”

George slowly stood up, picked up a few stones, threw them at the trees and strode along the path. Something defeated and sad now rested over him, but there was an element of tranquility there, as well.

“Change.”

George and Peter walked in absolute silence through the forest to George’s apartment building. George’s mother said nothing when Peter announced he was leaving early. Hell, she only knew about the UFO-sighting. Barely. Peter packed his bag in silence, put on his coat, shook hands with the mother, felt a bit sad that he actually was leaving, knowing that he did have something in common with George. But he also knew that it was important for him to leave, because George had lost grip about what was real and what was not. Yes, they had seen something extraordinary together. But no one could say from where that spaceship had come. Making up a story like that and implanting terror into a boy’s brain, stories about torture and invasions from outer space, it was an irresponsible thing.

Leaving was the only option.

Peter told George that he still liked him, somehow, and that maybe someday that might be in contact again.

George saw him to the railway station.

Nothing much was said on the way there.
Peter got into the train, sat down and looked out the window for the entire remainder of the ride. He read a book for five minutes, but put it down rather quickly. He looked forward to seeing his family and sleeping in a bed, at last not being afraid of invasions or aliens or any terrible threats about revenge or obsession. He felt happy that he had seen a UFO, but realized that he could not know from where it came. If he ever spoke to George again, he would tell him that his family would thank him for becoming a realist.
He has no ill wills against George.
He forgave him.
That was the most important thing.
And he blessed the rest of humanity and just tried to spend the rest of his life trying to make everyone happy.
That one experience had taught Peter that even sinners have souls. He knew that if you couldn’t forgive the culprits after you told them off, what good were the victims themselves and how would the victims ever rise to the occasion?
God helped Peter rise to the occasion, getting over being the victim of a hoax. Peter swore himself to be a good person and respect other people for what they were and not what he wanted them to be. After all, that was what his parents had taught him to do. He swore to bless his family and bless humanity, working to bless humankind.

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