About 9 years ago (roughly), I was working as a sales person in a camera store. I had not yet found my direction in life and was kind of stuck in a rut working retail hours and pandering on a day to day basis to demanding retail clients. Suffice it to say, I'm glad that I managed to escape the endless hours of 'May I help you?' and 'Let's see what we can do to get you a better price...' As some of you know, I now make my living as a writer. I hope one day to make the transition from writer to author but that is a step that may take some time.

Anyway, there I was, making a meagre living as a retail 'May I help you monkey', selling cameras and other odds and ends, spending my days standing, staring into space, watching the clock and hoping against hope that one day I might actually feel happy about going into work. It was a sunny winter day around lunchtime and the store was quiet as it was on most weekdays, when suddenly I noticed an unusual presence in the store. He stood in the warm light of the doorway, an oddly shaped shadow blocking out our normal view of the Centurion Lake which the store overlooked. He sauntered in, smiling broadly to reveal a set of unkempt teeth beneath a long beard and moustache. His head was topped by a turban and he wore a silk shirt in a pinkish colour with smart blue trousers. He greeted us all, the staff at work, in a happy, salesman-like voice marked by a strong Hindi accent. 'Hello, happy people... healthy people,' or something along those lines. 'I am fortune teller. I read for you your future for special price today, special price.'

The strange repetition he made use of in just about every sentence he uttered gave him an air of humility and servitude somehow, and myself and my friend Cheryl, the girl who managed the cash and the counter in the store, thought we'd humour him. So we took the would be mystic to the back of the store and took our turns having him look at our palms. His vision of our futures was, as I suspected, suspiciously bright. 'You will be a wealthy man, happy man...' he said as he held my hand in his strangely gnarled digits. 'You will live long, make money have a family, happy man, healthy man.' Cheryl and I each handed him a crisp fifty buck bill and smiled dryly at each other, thinking that this made a rather entertaining change from our normal 'May I help you?' days. Before he turned to leave us, he turned to me and held out his hand. 'Keep this, he said, revealing a small yellow bead in his palm. 'It is so that I can find you if you need me.' I took the bead from him, thinking that it was nothing more than another part of his fortune telling fakery and I put it in my trouser pocket.

The man in the turban turned to go and as he walked out of the store, our store manager, Craig returned from a trip to one of the other shops in the centre. He looked suspiciously at the man as he walked out the door and approached Cheryl and I with a stern look on his face. 'What was that?' he said with a surprising amount of tension in his voice. 'Just a fortune teller,' I said. 'I think he was a bit of a conman but it was fun'. The tension in Craig's voice became more tangible as he shook his finger at Cheryl and I saying, 'I never want to see him in our store again! Those guys are dangerous. They bring bad things!' I agreed - to placate him - a little stunned by what I felt was rather a large overreaction to a harmless charlatan, and we went about our day as normal.

That night I went to bed - late as I often do, being something of an insomniac - but found it even harder than normal to get to sleep. There was something in the air that was making me uneasy. I had put the little yellow bead on my bedside table and thought nothing of it. I was in need of a good night's rest. It had been a long week in retail. Eventually I found myself drifting into that place somehwere between sleep and waking, but just before my eyes fell closed I was startled awake by a sight that made me cold all over. Hovering above my chest (and I swear, this is true - I really am perfectly sane) was a spiral of black smoke, probably about 30 centimetres high. It spun over my chest like a tiny black tornado. Having had experiences in my life before, which I shall not go into here, I was not as terrified by the sight as I may once have been, and took a deep breath, summoned up the courage to speak and screamed out something along the lines of 'Leave me alone! Go away!'

The tiny black tornado disappeared and I had an uneasy night wondering if it might come back. The next morning I considered the little yellow bead and our strange visitor in the turban. Could they perhaps have had something to do with the strange apparition that appeared to me the night before? I didn't want to take any chances, so I picked up the bead and threw it out of my bedroom window into the garden.

The next night I arrived back from work and went over to the window to draw the curtains. There on the floor by the window, to my surprise, was the little yellow bead. Somehow it had returned from the garden and made its way back into my room. I threw it out again. In the years since, however, I have come across the bead in a variety of places - sometime I see it in the street, other times I see it on the floor in my house. I have pointed it out to others too and they are as baffled by its presence when I tell them this odd story as I am. I haven't seen it in about a year now. Maybe it's just because I've been preoccupied with other things but I am sure that it is likely to turn up again.

Why am I telling you this? I don't know. I guess I just had to get it out of my system. I don't know if you believe me or not but I certainly know it to be true. I believe that there are things out there that are bigger than us, or if not bigger, certainly more mysterious. Perhaps these things can appear to be as deceivingly small as a little yellow bead.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.