Why did I decide to write about “blobs?” They’re related to something my husband and I encountered while living in Singapore.
We were renting a two-bedroom apartment at the time. I found the place dark and dingy, and I never liked going into one of the bedrooms. Other than that, I was fine with the apartment. It was temporary, until we could find somewhere better.
Mike’s experiences were a little more bizarre. He occasionally saw dark shadows—akin to the blobs in The Four Perils—darting around the apartment at night. He chased after them, thinking they were roaches. He never caught any. He sometimes thought he had one trapped in a corner, but there wouldn’t be anything there.
It was a puzzle, but he wasn’t overly concerned. He assumed the shadows were created by lights outside shining in through the windows, or maybe an optical illusion of some kind.
He also had weird dreams in the apartment. We slept on a mattress on the floor because it didn’t make sense to buy a bed until we had a permanent place. One morning at first light, he awoke to find a boy, about 10 years old or so, looking down at us from the foot of the mattress.
Mike saw him clearly, even though he told me he couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not. In fact, it felt so real he actually thought there was a stranger in our apartment. He blinked (or fully woke up), and the boy was gone.
On another night, he had a dream that something was pulling at his blanket. When he looked over to his side, he saw something lying on the floor next to him. It was the size of a child and vaguely human, with a bony spine. The sight of it shocked him out of his sleep.
Looking back, I think there was something uncanny about the apartment that my husband, who is more sensitive than I am, could sense. We were both happy to leave when we found a new place. Mike’s strange dreams and blob sightings ended once we left.
Anyway, that’s the inspiration for the blobs in The Four Perils.