After our town's TV station stopped showing Elvira in the evenings, the guy from the local Toyota dealership sponsored a 'Friday Night Fright Night' program for awhile. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, a movie about worms that rained down from the sky and drilled into people's bodies, and the remake of The Blob.

I never wanted to be a short lived 'extra' , especially in The Blob, but that seemed to be my fate.

The moment I got pulled under, my first thought had been that Sovirox had somehow tricked me again, but I caught no sight of him or his glowing red eyes anywhere around this 'bog', and he'd prefer to watch me get devoured by Fungus Man, not some random slime monster hidden in the wilderness. Besides, how would he have found me anyway? Even I didn't know where I was!

The thing engulfed me like an amoeba. I screamed until slime filled my lungs and I could no longer breathe. Deeper and deeper I sank into the viscous substance, every part in my flesh tingling from the seeping fluid.

At one point, I swore I heard it speaking to me.

I fought and struggled to surface, but the blob seized my arms and legs, forcing me further into the deep.

The thing had a bottom. As the fluid reached its blackest point, I dropped through a hole, into open air.

I fell for a few feet, landing painfully on a rocky floor. Nothing got broken, though, as I still wore my gliding cape, and the height compared to hopping off the low sloping roof of my friend's back porch.

A cave, illuminated by glowing coral and luminescent moss of some type. I staggered ahead, trying to get my bearings.

I had to get out. I wandered forward, eyes searching nervously around for loose rocks, pitfalls, suspicious looking shadows.

Something red glowed ahead of me.

At first I thought it to be Sovirox, and made to turn and run, but then it pulsated in a warm familiar way.

The same glow I'd seen coming from my alien friend in a body bag all those weeks ago, and afterwards from his chest as he stood in the back of a government truck, alive. This, and the accompanying thrumming sound, encouraged me to come closer.

The moment I marched after the alien, he scampered away into the dark, leaving me running after his faint glow.

I turned a corner, entering a chamber carved with bas reliefs. I only recognized icons for bronze era oil lamps. A pool of glowing water glowed from the floor.

As I leaned over to see what made it glow, it rippled, and I could see through it like a window.

Beyond: My whole family, seated around a dinner table in my old house in California. Mom, Dad, older brother, Gertie, all wearing kippots. They had a menorah on the table, everything set for a Seder meal.

I saw myself enter through the front door.

"You're late," Dad said. "We had the observance and ate without you."

ET, with a napkin on his head, quietly nibbled on the last piece of matzo.

Mom ate a piece of bacon. "There's still some food left..."

I looked around, but could only find a Kahlua pig and a plate of shrimp.

Michael picked up a shofar, playing the same notes I heard coming from the trees earlier.

"Who's doing this!" I cried.

No one answered me. I shivered in horror at what might be the cause of such a ghastly thing.

"Why does this disturb you?" asked a disembodied voice.

It didn't sound like ET or anyone I'd ever met before. I saw nobody, just a Reese's pieces on the ground.

"Who are you!"

"A friend." ET's mouth was moving, but the voice sounded strange, and the sounds vibrated my entire body.

"How are you pulling this out of my head? Why are you showing me this?"

This person, or thing in charge, whoever it was, didn't answer my question. "Why does this imagery disturb you?"

I felt I had to say something in my defense. "It offends me because..." I knew at this point better to waste time with complicated terms that aliens didn't understand, like 'Jewish.' "...It's against my religious beliefs. Uh...against what my god tells me to do."

ET, or the thing impersonating him, paused in thought. "What is God?"

A glowing bearded man appeared in the water.

"You must obey a thing that is not real?" it asked.

"No, no, He is real!"

"You have not seen it."

"No...Just because you can't prove He exists doesn't mean He doesn't. Anyways, no one can see him and live."

"This thing sounds dangerous. It threatens you into doing what it orders you you to do?"

"No, it, He does what's best for us."

"You cannot consume animal meat. Like the Qulpari."

"Most animal meat."

"Why?"

"Because He says not to."

"No other reason?"

"It's...Bad for your health."

"Because he will kill you if you disobey."

"Well, no..."

"Is there a law regarding the cleaning of teeth? That also has health benefits..."

"Um , no. They didn't have toothbrushes back then."

"You obey outdated rules. Why?"

"They're not outdated. Just because they don't cover everything doesn't mean that they're meaningless."

"I see." The ET thing paused in thought. "This food is not food."

I furrowed my brow. "What?"

"This...food is not food. It is a thing that represents something else. "

"You're reading my mind. What do you want?"

"I have been alone for centuries. I must understand you before I absorb you into my being."

I trembled in terror. "But I don't want to be absorbed into your being! Go away from me!"

"No."

I ran down a passage, but found nothing but a maze of tunnels, many doubling back on each other. The voice followed me.

"Why is your food not food?"

"It's my subconscious," I whimpered. "I don't know. Maybe...Something I've done in my life isn't kosher."

"Hmm."

I looked down and saw I hadn't gone anywhere. I still stood directly above the glowing pool. This thing, it seemed, could mess with people's minds, without any outside help from beings like Sovirox. The scene in the water continued to unfold.

A group of men in white hazmat suits entered the house, government guys that had had been trying to capture me and ET earlier, but with swastika armbands and double lightning bolts printed across the chests. My family saw them, but sat frozen at the table. My reflected self watched helpless as each got carried away like department store mannequins.

At last the other me got the ability to move. I broke into a run, fleeing down a hallway, but the men ran just as quickly.

I threw open Gertie's bedroom door.

The vision ended, the water resuming its glowing once more.

The voice spoke again, but faintly.

"What?"

I looked down. The Reese's pieces had now became a trail, leading further into the cavern. I followed.

I came to a cavern lined with mosaics that looked like they'd been drawn with an Atari.

A Qulpari in a hole in the ground.

A Qulpari levitating out.

A Qulpari on a green field grabbing dots.

The Qulpari being chased by a stick man.

A purple spherical spacecraft.

The spacecraft rising in the air.

The candy came to an abrupt end on top of what appeared to be a marble headstone. I read the inscription and wept.

"Stop this!" I sobbed. "What is this to you? Some kind of game?"

ET's voice replied, "I am trying to understand."

The voice came from a piece of candy!

I picked it up and stared. "This isn't helping either of us one bit. What are you? I know you're not literally candy."

"I am Ihyokxa."

The Reese's pieces turned into glowing plasma that vanished into my hand.

I blinked and found myself buried under piles of stuffed animals inside Gertie's old bedroom closet.

I climbed out, but then blinding white light came shining through the Venetian blinds, the gloved fingers of hazmat suited Nazis prying open the slats to look in. I climbed back in the closet, hoping they didn't see me.

Seconds later, the slatted doors came swinging open, and ET stared back at me. He screamed.

The hazmat Nazis burst into the room, dragging me off to a lab.

Me and ET lay on matching examination tables, suited figures hovering over each of us with scalpels.

As I watched with helpless horror at a surgeon pressing a blade into ET's chest, my own rib cage opened, as if cut by an invisible blade.

The surgeon expanded the incision, pulled back the skin, pinned it down with clamps.

ET suddenly became my sister, and my body turned Qulpari, screaming as the surgeon pulled my beating heart out of my chest like that guy on Temple of Doom.

He is not of your kind, said the heart. Why this reaction to his pain?

"Love."

Jamie appeared next to my table. "Your species are incompatible, but you wish to produce offspring with him?"

I blushed. "No! Never that!"

"I do not understand."

I shook my head. I had no words to verbalize an explanation.

I thought about Gertie and started crying.

She appeared beside me now.

"Family..." The creature mused. Gertie shifted into a Qulpari dressed in her clothing. "Love."

My chest glowed and pulsated like ET had once done, my heart full of pain and worry and care, of just wanting to be out of this thing's clutches and being with those I cared about.

Apparently the creature couldn't handle all those intense emotions, for then the lab and everything around me broke apart like clumps of grease suspended in dish soap, dispelling the illusion. I hadn't actually moved anywhere, I still floated in the gray-green ooze. I doubt I'd even been inside a cave.

ET regarded me with a grave expression from above the surface, but it could have been another one of Ihyokxa's tricks.

I could breathe in the slime, though I didn't think it good for me. I thrashed and squirmed, trying to fight my way to the top, but couldn't escape.

"Are you friends with Sovirox? I've been tricked like this before."

I do not know that name.

"I guess if you did, you wouldn't tell me anyway, would you?"

It has been lonely these many centuries. I have absorbed animals and Qulpari, but never one of you. You will become one with me and stay within me always and forever.

So. No connection to Sovirox, except maybe him leading me into this trap. The creature just had attachment issues. "I don't want to stay with you! Let me go! I have to get back to my sister!"

I can't let you go. I must understand these foreign emotions.

"Foreign! You ate Qulpari! Don't they have those feelings too?"

"You are different. You give me thoughts and images I haven't seen before. You will be a part of me. We will become a new thing with feeling. My mind will become your mind, and yours will become mine. We will be together always. I will have this 'love.'"

"No!" I yelled, gurgling in slime. "Release me!"

I saw a vision of my mother, digging through a pile of papers for a tax receipt.

See? She will be fine without you.

Mom stared at one of my old drawings from art class mixed in with the pile and suddenly burst into tears.

Then came the image of the headstone I'd seen with Gertie's name chiseled into it.

"Let me go! My sister needs me!"

I need you!

"This isn't love! Let me go!"

My head tingled, then, to my surprise, the fluid around me trembled like Jell-O in an earthquake. What is this you have in your brain!

All of a sudden I felt cold. "My...brain?"

You have a thing in your brain! A bad dead thing!

"Dead thing! What do I have in my brain?" I thought about cancer and a chill ran down my back. Did I really want to know?"

The creature didn't explain. "Begone from me!"

Without warning, Ihyokxa spat me into the air like a whale blowing water from its blowhole.

I came crashing down on a muddy shore amidst a scattering crowd of land shrimp. I coughed, vomited a mound of slime, then lay gasping on the ground a long time.

When I finally groaned and pulled myself into a sitting position, the blob gurgled and bellowed, a neon pink color spreading across its surface. The more it spread, the more the thing boiled and let out inhuman screams.

Confused, slime caked and weary, I staggered back in the general direction of the tent, wondering if this is what a Ghostbuster felt like.

'Dad' lied to me. I had no idea how to get back, and the glowing coral and the moons, which should have made my search easier, actually made it difficult to find our brightly illuminated encampment.

In my wanderings, I passed an obelisk covered in indecipherable carvings, the very same type of mysterious object my alien friends on the moon had mentioned as I described my confusion about Captain Power. The obelisk, up close, yielded no more enlightening secrets to me than the stone heads at Easter Island...Unless the ancients made it to warn people about the talking slime thing.

"Elliott!"

I looked around for a moment before catching sight of a winged shape flitting between the coral. After all I'd been through, I couldn't help but think it to be another illusion. "Charlie! Boy am I glad to see you! I'm lost! How do I get back?"

"You aren't going back," said a voice.

Waves of black slime came rolling in from nearby giant coral, solidifying into the shape of the rotting Qulpari thing with the mushroom hat. "You've had my tracker in your brain this whole time. I hope you didn't think you escaped me."