I listened carefully. The noise just didn't make sense. I sat up in bed, shocked and very curious. There was an edge of fear. The night was dead still, windless. My eyes went straight to the burglar-alarm panel beside the bed. The system was armed and working perfectly. Not a covered window or door was opened, and nobody had entered-at least according to the row of glowing lights.

What I did next may seem peculiar. I settled back in bed. For some reason the extreme strangeness of what I was hearing did not rouse me to action. Over the course of this narrative this sort of inappropriate response will be repeated many times. If something is strange enough, the reaction is very different from what one would think. The mind seems to tune it out as if by some sort of instinct.

No sooner had I settled back than I noticed that one of the double doors leading into our bedroom was moving closed. As they close outward, this meant that the opening was getting smaller, concealing whatever was behind that door. I sat up again. My mind was sharp. I was not asleep, nor in a hypnopompic state between sleep and waking. I wish to be clear that I felt, at that moment, wide awake and in full possession of all my faculties. I could easily have gotten up and read a book or listened to the radio or gone for a midnight walk in the snow.

I could not imagine what could be going on, and I got very uneasy. My heart started beating harder. wasn't settled back anymore; I was sitting up, a question just forming in my mind. What could be moving the door?

Then I saw edging around it a compact figure. It was so distinct and yet so completely, impossibly astonishing that at first I could not understand it at all. I simply sat there staring, too stunned to move.

Months and months later, I discovered that another person who has had the visitor experience first encountered it through the medium of this same peculiar figure rushing toward her in exactly the way that this one now rushed toward me.

Before I narrate those next few seconds, though, I would like to give an exact description of how the figure looked to me. First, I will describe the physical conditions under which I was seeing it. The room was dim but not dark. The burglar-alarm panel alone emitted enough light for me to see. In addition, there was snow on the ground and that added some ambient light. Had it been a person king into the room, I could have trade out his or peek features-clearly.