Prologue
On the video debriefing, one can see a stocky man with a surprisingly cherubic face, given his profession, sitting uncomfortably on a metal folding chair. Before him is a card table as utilitarian as the chair is, on which the video camera is ostensibly placed. Whoever is conducting the interview is off-camera; his voice is low, humorless, and suggests a vague air of education. The voice states for official record that the date is 3 March 2019, and that the following interview of Officer Carl Hornsby is being conducted at Paragon Corp, Quarantine Facility 18.
“Can you, in your own words,” the serious voice begins, “tell us the events of this morning’s incident as you perceived them? Please be as specific and detailed as possible.”
The stocky man, presumably Carl Hornsby, clears his throat, shifts his bulk awkwardly in his seat, and says, “Okay. Sure. This is the official record?” He gestures at the camera while looking over it, presumably at the owner of the serious voice.
“Yes, Officer Hornsby. Any incident involving Paragon Corporation or its employees is taken extremely seriously, and we endeavor to collect as much information as possible in order to rectify, modify, and solidify good business practices.”
Carl’s reaction to this is a subtle ripple of features that only the most astute observer might take for suspicion. He says, “Okay, well, Lefine and I—”
The serious voice breaks in here, “For the record, that is Lieutenant Darryl Lefine, forty-seven, of Haversham, New Jersey.”
“Right,” Carl says. “My partner. So anyway, we arrived at the residence at 1806 Forge Road, Haversham, at approximately 7:43 a.m. We were responding to a wellness check call put in to our dispatcher by a neighbor, Kurt Kriswell, who lived across the street and, as I understand it, was an acquaintance of Dr. Van Houten’s.” On the tape, Carl pauses, glances directly into the camera and then looks back up and over its field of vision again. “I hesitate to use the word ‘friend.’ The man was described as highly intelligent, neat, and organized, but was socially awkward and—”.
The serious voice breaks in again to say, “Reference neighbor Kurt Kriswell, Interview 3 in Appendix 2, and wife Alaina, Interview 4 in Appendix 2.”
Carl, whose features again ripple with something that might be annoyance at being interrupted or discomfort from the chair, continues. “—a loner. He was a bit of a loner. Upon interviewing the Kriswells, we learned that Dr. Van Houten, who they described as a stickler for routine, had not been seen coming or going in days. He lived and died by schedules, they said, and his clearly breaking his morning and evening routine was cause for alarm.” As Carl talks, that cherubic expression morphs subtly, and one can see the cop beneath. It might strike someone watching the video that the minute shifts in expression indicate he is more comfortable wearing that face, the cop face, than the pleasant and almost childlike aspect used to relate to others.
“The Kriswells told us they had tried to get in. Dr. Van Houten kept a spare key in a secret section of loose siding, near the front door, but they were unable to locate that key. The Kriswells then pointed out the first-floor windows toward the rear and the eastern side of the residence. Our first indication of something truly outside the norm was Kriswell’s description of an object on the floor at the rear of the house.”
“Could you please relate that conversation as close to verbatim as you can recall?” the serious voice asks.
Carl clears his throat again and says, “Uh, well, I asked Mr. Kriswell if it was possible that Dr. Van Houten had gone on a vacation and just not told anybody. Mr. Kriswell got this weird look on his face and told me no. He said, ‘John doesn’t take vacations. I think he’s in there. Hurt.’ Then his wife said, ‘Tell them, Kurt. Tell them what you saw. Tell them what you told me.’”
Carl glances at the camera again. Each time he does so, there’s a flicker in his eyes of mistrust, like he somehow thinks the camera is going to betray him by twisting his words. “Kurt let out this long sigh and then said, ‘There’s a huddled mass in the back room there. John’s spare bedroom. It’s covered in shadows and it’s shivering violently. The windows are closed. It can’t be the wind moving it around like that. It’s big, too. The size of a man. Even …even kind of the shape of a man. But I don’t think it’s made of anything a man is made of.’ When I asked him what he meant by that, he just shook his head and told me to go see for myself.”
“What did you think then about what the Kriswells told you?” the serious voice asks.
Carl shrugs. “Nothing much, at first. When you’ve been patrolling Haversham as long as Lefine and I have, you hear it all: psychotic creatures parading around as nurses over at the hospital, doorways to Hell in the woods, UFOs, cryptids, even giants. You get all kinds of crazy reports, and you go out to each one and reassure the frantic local, most times someone who’s been drinking all night or smoking weed or can only see out of one eye and even then not so good nowadays. Some of it, yeah, it’s legitimately strange. We have a file for those incidents. But mostly, human beings make terrible witnesses, because they see what they want to, or worse, what they really don’t want to, and not what’s there. And people in this town, they talk about it. They even talk about what you folks are doing up here on the hill.”
This time, the uncomfortable cough comes from off-camera, and the serious voice says, “Okay. Please continue.”
“Can I get a glass of water? I’m parched.”
“Certainly. Julian, will you get Officer Hornsby a glass of water?”
There are some shuffling sounds off-camera as, one can assume, Julian gets up to fetch a glass of water for Carl. The police officer seems to confirm this by watching someone move away from him. Then he fixes his gaze on the owner of the serious voice again.
“So Lefine and I thank the Kriswells and move around back. From our vantage point through the rear window, it’s hard to see much of anything. I’m guessing it was Mr. Kriswell’s familiarity with the home which made him more quickly and easily able to recognize something out of place. At first, we didn’t see anything like what had been described. Then Lefine said, ‘Carl, look.’ I did. And I saw it.”
On the video, a male forearm and hand descend on the image and deliver Carl a bottle of Poland Spring water, which Carl takes and cracks open with a smile and an appreciative nod to the arm’s owner. After taking a healthy gulp from the bottle, he replaces the cap and says, “Lefine’s flashlight was trained on what we perceived as a gray blanket over a huddled body crouching on the floor. He handed the flashlight over to me and told me he’d see to it that the Kriswells returned to their residence and then meet me inside to see if we needed an ambulance or the CSU.
“Kriswell had told me that the front door had a deadbolt, since Dr. Van Houten was apparently as much a stickler for security as schedules. The back door, though, was a chain and I was able to force the lock pretty easily, having probable cause to enter. That was around …hold on, I’ll tell you.” Carl shifts in his chair with a tiny grunt, reaches into a back pocket of his pants, and pulls out a little black notebook. “That was around 7:55 a.m. My preliminary observations set off some red flags. That the house was in darkness wasn’t all that strange, but I tried the light switches in that back mudroom, the kitchen, and in the dining room, but no juice. I noted that there was an apparent circuit breaker failure. I found the spare bedroom off from the dining room. The door was closed but unlocked. When I went in, I detected a faint unpleasant smell—a mix of them, really. A light smell beneath a heavier kind of stink. The former reminded me of rubbing alcohol. It was some sort of chemical like that, and at first I thought I ought to get out of there because that chemical smell seemed to fill the inside of my head and make me a little dizzy.” Before the serious voice can put the question to him, Carl elaborates. “My vision blurred just a little, just so that all the corners of things looked stretched or squished. Furniture sat at odd slants, that sort of thing. And I could see laughing faces in the curtains or the grain of wood in doors. Then that cleared up and went away, so I kept going.
“Anyway, the other smell—I knew that one. I don’t think you can be a cop as long as I have and never smell human decay. Something was dead or dying in that house.” He takes another gulp of water and sighs before continuing. He’s sweating a little now, although he doesn’t seem nervous. Rather, it seems like he’s tensing, trying subconsciously to pull away from what he’s remembering.
“I cleared the rest of the house first. There was no one else there. That’s one of those parts of the job that never gets easier. You never know what to expect. You shouldn’t expect anything anyway, because then you get sloppy and start missing things. Forget to check behind a door or something and get shot. I guess I didn’t really think I’d find another person. Didn’t really think I’d find Dr. Van Houten, to be honest. What I did find in the first floor bathroom was assorted first aid supplies in the sink and strewn about the bathroom.” He checks his notebook again. “Gauze, bandages and bandage tape, iodine, hydrogen peroxide, and aloe gel. There was also a kind of burgundy-colored film over everything. I don’t think it was blood, but it had that kind of consistency, if blood were just a little fuzzy. It’s hard to explain. I didn’t touch the stuff, but it was splattered all over the sink basin and on several crumpled up tissues in the wastebasket.
“I met Lt. Lefine in the kitchen and we proceeded to the rear spare bedroom. Lefine discovered a fetal form approximately three feet from the foot of the bed.”
Here the serious voice cuts in again to reference Appendix A-1, labeled Marked Floor Plan of Van Houten Residence. During this brief interlude, Carl takes another long sip of water. He isn’t looking at the owner of the serious voice now; he’s fidgeting with the cap to the water bottle. It would be hard to tell from his expression exactly what he’s thinking (or perhaps what he feels about the memory he’s relating), but it’s seeping through in little downturned lines around his eyes and eyebrows.
When he starts talking again, his voice is a little softer, a little more gruff. “It was where the smell of rubbing alcohol and rot was strongest. It wasn’t a gray blanket we found, but I think you know that.” He looks up finally from his fidgeting and targets the owner of the serious voice with a level gaze. “Initial observation showed it to be a kind of growth reminiscent of fluffy dust which had completely overtaken the form beneath. There was a form beneath, and it was moving. Kriswell had been right. And it was nearly the size of a man. Nearly.
“Lefine had a box of rubber gloves in our patrol car’s glove compartment, so he ran out and got us each a pair. We knelt by the form and inspected it more closely. I couldn’t speak officially on record as to what it was, but it appeared to be millions of tiny mushrooms that smeared into a kind of oil when touched. We tried to pull some of it free and it disintegrated on our fingers.” Carl does his best to repress a small shudder, but the video picks it up. “We found that whatever it was, it had rooted itself into semi-liquefied layers of human skin. Our tugging at it only pulled loose the skin beneath, and more of that burgundy gel oozed up from between the hairlike stalks. And the stuff vibrated. Different spots at different times, big patches of it, creating the appearance of shivering. It was the stuff shivering, although whether it was due to our voices or our poking at it or because of the form beneath, well, that I don’t know.” Carl arches an eyebrow at them, maybe hoping they would explain, but several seconds pass in silence, so he continues.
“The body—by this point, we had come to think of it as a body, although we couldn’t confirm that it was dead or even human at all. Anyway the body twitched then and seemed to uncurl, and suddenly we’re looking down on a face. Well, part of a face.” Carl shakes his head. When he speaks again, his voice is as low and serious as that of his interviewer. “We saw one blue eye, the right, lidless and staring up at us. We also made out a partial left hand with a man’s ring which I imagine will be identified as belonging to Dr. Van Houten. Lefine noted part of a right knee, shin and foot. Those had exposed bone, although that stuff was working hard to cover it up again. Like moss on an old tree trunk.
“Then I caught a whiff of something stale and dusty and Lefine mentioned something about spores, so we backed way off. Lefine called in the CSU, and we sat and waited. I remember mentioning to Lefine that prints lifted from the house would probably match prints from that partial left hand.” Carl gestures with his own. “I suppose you’ll be adding the coroner’s findings to one of your Appendices, there.”
“We would be most appreciative, although we conduct such tests here at our labs as well.” The serious voice spaces each word just enough to indicate this is generous information on his part, and neither to be questioned or elaborated upon.
Carl nods. “Yeah, so Lefine went outside to call CSU and notify Hazmat and CDC per protocol, I don’t know what happened out there, other than Lefine grumbling in passing that you guys were already on the lawn, waiting for us, and took his phone.”
“And you, Officer Hornsby—you stayed inside to secure the scene?”
The police officer looks down at his bottle of water again. His body language and the expression on his face suggest that he wishes he could dive into it and swim away from the whole sordid affair.
“I did.”
“And did you see anything else? Anything of note?”
Carl looks up again, over the field of view of the camera. His expression is not kind. It is hard, not very much like a cherub at all. “Like what?”
“You tell us. Please. If there was any other observation you made—”
This time Carl cuts off the serious voice. “There was. I observed that calling the CSU might have been premature.”
“In what way, Officer Hornsby?”
Carl finishes off the last of his water and lets the weight of his hand thump the empty bottle loudly on the table. He glares at the owner of the serious voice.
“The man—what was left of him that was still a man—was alive. Fuck. We didn’t …we couldn’t …It tried to talk. I think it was trying to ask for help, and that—that’s what I still hear in my head, the sound it made.”
“Thank you, Officer Hornsby. This interview has concluded. The time is now—”
“I hope to God,” Carl says, still glaring, “that when you killed him, you did it quick. Did him at least that one small favor.”
“Officer—”
“Don’t,” Carl says, looking into the camera for the last time. “Don’t. I told you all I know. Now let me go the fuck home already.”
* * * *
Kathy Ryan had been back a few days from her most recent consulting job when she received several electronic files regarding the Paragon Corporation. She had to admit both to herself and to her boyfriend, Reece Teagan, that she was surprised the request for help had come from Paragon itself. The materials described their most recent government-subsidized project, MK-Ostium, which involved the first successful human endeavor in opening an inter-dimensional portal and the discovery of a world on the other side. Paragon had admitted to all of it with surprising candor, and had provided both semi-public and private information outlining the problem at hand. Kathy had been given police reports and news articles, in-house email correspondence, schematics, memoranda, articles, and a number of notes and journal entries from a key player in the discovery and exploration of the newly discovered world.
The Network had, amazingly, been able to provide little else that Paragon hadn’t turned over already, and that suggested to her that Paragon’s problem was significant enough that even they recognized the need to outsource for a solution. It was Kathy’s experience that people who messed around with such things usually didn’t have the foresight or common sense to do anything other than try to cover it up. Their asking Kathy for help suggested a mere cover-up wouldn’t be enough, and while she could appreciate Paragon’s forthrightness, it meant the problem was bigger than company resources could handle.
In Kathy’s line of work, that was invariably a very bad sign.
* * * *
Paragon Corporation email transcripts:
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
CC:
[email protected];
[email protected]
Date: 1 March 2019
Subject: Team meeting
Claire –
John’s missing. I was over at the safe house two days ago with the Paragon and MJ-12 sweepers—thought maybe I could get to him before they did. No luck. He and his notes have disappeared. I think he might have gone back home.
We all need to be on the same page. I’ve cc’ed Rick and Terry on this—they should be aware. We need a team meeting on Monday.
I think John’s in trouble.
Jose
Dr. Jose Rodriguez, Cryptocultural Anthropology
Paragon Corporation
Dept. of Exploration
Facility 18
973-555-8062
* * * *
Paragon Corporation company email transcripts:
From:
[email protected]
To: Greenteamgroup
Date: 4 March 2019
Subject: Clean Up Code 5
Team—we have a contagion issue. Department Chief George R. Sherman of AtX-904736/MK-Ostium has requested immediate containment of the property at 1806 Forge Road, Haversham, New Jersey. I regret to report that Dr. John Van Houten has been terminated. The public statement regarding John’s death will be “short illness” and followed by a closed coffin service for friends and colleagues to pay their respects. John has no immediate family—his body already has been sent through to the other side.
Company memorial brunch is tomorrow at 9 a.m. in the Parasol Cafe section of the cafeteria on subfloor 30.
Dr. Claire Banks, Cryptobiological Sciences
Paragon Corporation
Dept. of Exploration
Facility 18
973-555-8064
* * * *
Excerpt from the Bloomwood Ledger, March 5, 2019
HAVERSHAM, NJ—The body of 58-year-old theoretical physicist Dr. John Van Houten was discovered at 8 p.m. on Sunday, March 3, in his home. While police would not give details, they did issue a statement that the cause of Van Houten’s death was “undetermined, pending medical examination.”
Van Houten had been employed for the last thirty years at Paragon Corporation’s Facility 18 in Haversham in their anthropology research department, according to sources. Paragon officials issued a statement yesterday that Van Houten’s death was unrelated to his research work at Facility 18.
Surrounding residents say that Van Houten was a model neighbor. He maintained a fastidiously neat yard, kept to himself but was polite when spoken to, didn’t make noise, had no children or other family, pets, or visitors, and was, according to neighbors, very much a creature of habit. He left for work at the Paragon Corporation at 8 a.m. every morning and returned home by 7 p.m. every evening. When the newspapers began to pile up on his front stoop, a nearby resident, Alaina Kriswell, as stated to the Ledger, thought it likely something was wrong and pressed her husband to go across the street and knock on the door. Kurt Kriswell did, but no one answered. The door was locked but through a window, he saw what he described as “a huddled mass covered in shadows, shivering violently.” He and his wife called the police.
Neither Officer Carl Hornsby, first on the scene, nor his partner, Lt. Darryl Lefine, was available for comment on the cause of death or condition of the body. For reasons unclear at the time of this writing, representatives of the Paragon Corporation were on the scene…
* * * *
From the journal of Claire Banks, Tuesday, April 2, 2019
It will be hours still before the sun goes down. The sky, now hazy blue, has twin orbs of silvery-white making slow rotations across its dome; we are fairly certain they are moons. Tonight, we believe it may be overcast, with a soft batting of grayish clouds to keep the sharp steel peaks of the mountains beyond from letting strange stars and illimitable black pour through.
Other than John’s exploratory robots, which Paragon has been sending through for the last two months, we’re the first from this world to touch the soil of a world in an alternate universe. It’s so exciting! We have been here now six times. John had to be convinced to join us; he was content to tinker with those robots, but we managed to convince him in the end by agreeing to bring only limited but efficient equipment with small, smart teams so as to minimize the Observer Effect. We have been following blue team’s protocols for safety, reducing risk of contamination with our presence, and avoiding the alteration of our surroundings as much as we can.
I wish John were still here to see it all.
Six times, and still, this place fascinates me. I’d like to describe it here in as much detail as I can, and for future reference. This journal entry will serve as a basis for a supplemental report.
Beyond the forest about three miles to, I assume, . . .
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