I last smelled it in 1972 or 1973. My wife and I had gone down to San Antonio to see my family, and we were sleeping in my sister's old bedroom on the second floor of the house.

Across the hall was another bedroom, which had been mine when I was a boy. In the middle of the night I suddenly awoke with the impression that I'd just heard a loud noise. I decided to get a glass of water. As I left our bedroom I noticed a strange smell, like smoldering cardboard.

As I went toward the bathroom to get my water, a small, dark figure with a red light in its hand burst out of my old bedroom and dashed downstairs. I was momentarily astonished, but decided that it must have been a family member. The fact that this individual was much smaller than a human being did not bother me in the least, nor even give me pause. Why not?

Maybe for the same reason that none of us remembered the events of the night of October 4.

Maybe I was led to reason thus.

There are reports of visitors carrying small lights, and the fairy lore contains dozens of instances of "fairy stones" that glowed.

There was no sequel to the appearance of the small figure, except perhaps a family member's comment the next morning that he had had a terrible nightmare. Nothing further was said then, and he does not now remember the incident at all, much less the contents of the nightmare.

I am amazed to think how much of a fugitive I have been. Another individual I have met who has had visitor experiences, a young woman whose story of a disappearing pregnancy is medically documented as not being of hysterical origin, also describes a lifetime of running.

"All of my life I wanted to move to New York because of the lights and the people."

So did I. And it turns out that she lives a block from me. We have both been running like mad, and we wound up around the corner from one another. A coincidence? Probably, but the mind seeks for large and subtle designs, images in clouds, hunters marching the stars, always for the hidden sense of the world. The same urgency to understanding that drew early man to imagine the constellations in the random spatter of the night sky might draw me to make false connections. And yet, without a general theory of coincidence, how could I know what was finally true? I searched on, deep into my past.