Monsters that we can't define because we know not what they are.

Well this is inspired of course by the book that I've written with Dan Mitchell and his ongoing encounters with what he could only call a harlequin figure. For him, it began in 1981 when he was five years old. And yet it seems that there are many more monsters just like this that are out there that people have encountered.

But perhaps the term monsters is really far too generic.

But what else do we call them?

Well for Dan, when he lived in Milwaukee with his family in 1981 at the age of five,

he would begin to experience visitations that would haunt him for years to come.

He called the tooth fairy initially, when he was still a young child.

It would enter his room in the dead of night, and it would communicate with him without words.

Dan said that it communicated through a series of movements that he was intuitively able to understand,

but gradually he gave it the name the harlequin.

The name he says he came up with many years later, when struggling to find a cultural analogue to fit this being.

He said it was the closest match he could find.

Its body was very live, its movements

extraordinarily graceful. He says he struggles to remember its clothing, but that they appeared to be

rather motley in appearance. He says it was unmistakably androgynous. His face had an almost

ancient appearance. His eyes were very large and blue. But he said that the most memorable feature was its hands. Those hands, he said, looked very much like his mother's hands. And as he grew older, they began to look similar to his own. He said that the sight of its hands always made

him feel as though it was somehow related to him and his family. But he adds that the only trait

he could never understand was its mouth, which was always open as if trapped in a state of perpetual

horror in the shape of an O in the beginning he never felt that these visitations were strange or unusual because to his innocent mind this tooth fairy was as real as his mother or his brothers

but it seemed to gain his acceptance deceptively

by manifesting itself as something familiar

rather than as a stranger,

...