Ever since the disintegrating man, Carl Hornsby had been having strange dreams.
His wife Alison was a light sleeper, so he’d taken to the couch the last week or so, despite her protests to the contrary. The couch was hard on his back, but Alison was a nurse, and sleep was more precious to her than sex and chocolate. Carl hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night anyway since joining the police force nineteen years prior, so the back aches were a bearable and hopefully temporary trade-off to make sure that his wife got the sleep she needed.
Unfortunately, those few hours of sleep he did get, he really needed, and the dreams were starting to wear into him. No matter what he did, just before dawn, his sleeping self was pulled into nightmares that in some ways were so real they might have been memories. Their realism, though, only made the surreal things that happened that much more awful.
In one dream, he wandered from room to room in a house that was, by dream-logic, supposed to be his but looked nothing like it. As he did so, he took great pains to avoid touching the layers of fluffy gray dust that had accumulated on all the furniture. Within some rooms, it had begun to collect like a five o’clock shadow on the walls and even gather in the corners of the ceiling. His dream-self was revolted by it, nauseated by it, but he couldn’t seem to get away from it.
In another, he was on a small island with an indigo ocean stretching as far as the horizon in every direction. The island was rocky and constantly buffeted by storms, and he could hear the screams of drowning men and women, drowning children, but he couldn’t see them and he couldn’t save them. Eventually their bloated and chewed-on bodies would wash ashore, stinking of dead fish and leaving inky trails of fluids and pulverized viscera in the violent surf.
In another dream, Carl’s skin would dissolve, starting with his fingertips, crossing the backs of his hands and up his arms, then spreading across his chest. By the time the rot had climbed up his neck and begun to sink into and eat away at the flesh on his cheeks, he’d manage to shake himself awake.
The worst were the ones where he was trapped in what seemed like an endless labyrinth of city streets made of some kind of faintly glowing blue stone. The buildings lurched and staggered, their surfaces not quite matching their frames. Their slopes and angles refused to match up as they grasped dizzyingly toward a bruise-colored sky overhead. In those, the shadows gave way to movement, and the movement shrank and swelled into shapes that weren’t quite people. In those dreams, there were faces in curtained windows that whispered the most horrific things. In fact, there were faces everywhere he looked—in the stony surfaces of the buildings, in the architectural details, even in the street itself. Many looked like they were laughing—or screaming. Few of them looked entirely human.
In the dreams about the city, he felt loss. It blew it across his back like a chilly breeze, giving him goosebumps. He felt desperation each time his feet pounded the stones of the street. He felt a kind of drunk aggression that the whispers of the myriad faces seemed to pour into, and the more lost in the maze of streets he got, the angrier he felt, and the less shocking the things that the faces were whispering about seemed to be. He wanted the bloodshed, the violence, the depravity they spoke of. And when he woke, he couldn’t shake the feeling that in the blackout time between the dream and waking, that he had done terrible, terrible things.
He’d been quarantined after that call on the Van Houten house, he and Lefine both. They’d been put into a large white van with PARAGON CORPORATION painted neatly on the side in red and blue. He supposed the subtle suggestion of patriotism in the coloring was meant to counteract the nefarious and sinister reputation such privately funded and federally affiliated weapons research corporations always seemed to have. Carl, who spent stakeouts listening to Clyde Lewis’s Ground Zero podcast and Coast to Coast AM, had all of David Icke’s books on aliens and other consciousnesses, and never missed a Steven M. Greer lecture if it was even remotely local, was not reassured. He felt instinctively nettled by Paragon’s presence at the scene and almost threatened by the corporation’s insistence that he and Lefine enjoy a free medical checkup with the finest professionals Paragon Corporation money could buy.
The staff both in the van and at Facility 18 itself, a stucco building as white as the van with the same neat, no-nonsense lettering in red and blue across the top, had been exceedingly respectful and polite. They’d done their best to be soothing and pleasant while pointedly dodging questions that Carl and Lefine had peppered them with throughout the experience. Carl had been told, for example, that he and his partner were being quarantined for their safety as first responders, since it was believed Van Houten had contracted a kind of superflu in the lab where he worked.
Carl didn’t believe it, of course, although his own general practitioner confirmed a few days later what the government doctors had told him—he was free and clear of disease. That all his tests were negative, he supposed, was the only true thing the Paragon personnel had told him. He suspected they already knew he would be fine, and had, instead, intercepted Carl and his partner to learn what they knew about Van Houten and his metamorphosis. The police officers didn’t know much, except that John Van Houten didn’t have any kind of superflu. No strain, no matter how bad, did…that to a body.
That man had been reduced to a quivering mass of gray dust that looked as if it might somehow be greasy or smeary if touched. Whatever had formerly been actual human being had been mostly eaten through by the stuff, so that other than the basic shape, which had itself been losing form, there would have been nothing to suggest it had ever been a person.
Except…except that it had still been alive. It had reached out with some appendage, something that had once been an arm, maybe, as if it were pleading for help, and Carl would have sworn it had tried to talk. God help the thing, it had tried to talk. What had come out wasn’t words, more of a syllabic gurgle, but it had purpose. There was meaning behind it, although that meaning was lost with the dissolution of John Van Houten’s vocal cords.
Carl was pretty sure that the Paragon and government folks had rushed him out of Van Houten’s house so that he wouldn’t see them put the gray mass out of its misery. What they had loaded into the back of a truck in a dark green thick vinyl bag had stopped quivering entirely.
Upon Carl’s release from quarantine, he’d had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Carl had, in fact, been made to feel like his release from quarantine was in large part contingent upon his signing of the document. He’d been assured it would not conflict with his professional duties, since federal officials were now taking over the death investigation, and that it was the wish of the Van Houten family that the entire matter be kept quiet. He supposed that had been another reason for detaining him—to assure his silence. As if to underscore the point, he had been compensated with a sizeable check from Paragon and a warm reception from his commanding officer the morning he’d returned to work. His boss had strongly advised him to just enjoy being a “hero” for saving the town of Haversham from a possible outbreak of superflu, and to forget about answers to any other questions he might have. Paragon was a wealthy and powerful company with a literal arsenal of government support, and they liked tidy conclusions. It wasn’t in Carl’s best interest to be untidy in that regard.
Still, Carl had become a cop precisely because he wasn’t the kind of guy who just let questions lie unanswered. He didn’t just let things go. He generally saw that as a character strength, and not a flaw. For Alison’s sake, though, he’d tried to just put the whole thing out of his mind, to be glad he hadn’t contracted their so-called superflu, and deposit his check.
However, swallowing it all, he was sure, was the reason he was having bad dreams. It had to stop.
On his off hours when Alison was sleeping and he couldn’t, he looked into the Paragon Corporation and was amazed to find that there was very, very little to find. Their web presence was, if anything, understated—no social media platforms and a website that was subtly reticent in supplying information for those who didn’t already land there with knowledge and a purpose. There was a sparse “About the Company” page, declaring that Paragon Corporation had been founded in 1942 by Henry Garvin Wallinger, a business entrepreneur with old family money. The company was primarily known for developing conventional, chemical, biological, and nuclear munitions for the government, but there were branches that extensively researched medical and pharmaceutical advancements and technologies, environmental protection strategies, and even non-aeronautic terraforming and interplanetary colonization methods, dipping occasionally into robotics engineering.
For such a busy company theoretically looking to better humanity, the planet, and beyond, they were an awfully tight-lipped group. No crowing about their great works, no media outlets reporting for good or ill on their doings, no interviews with big-wigs, nothing.
It didn’t surprise Carl, he supposed, but there was no contact page or any reference to emails or phone numbers on the Paragon website, either. There were only two names anywhere on the site at all, both buried way down in the footer of the Home page in tiny type—a George R. Sherman, listed as a Department Chief, and an Edwin Bilsby, CEO. The former name was hyperlinked to a very generic email, queries@paragoncorp.com.
Despite four emails requesting information, Carl had received no response from Sherman or Bilsby, and hadn’t really expected to. He did receive a generic answer from some nameless intern who thanked him for his interest in the company, and for his understanding that his inquiries could be met only with limited responses. National security and all, Carl was told. Sorry, you’re not tall enough for this ride, was more like it.
He decided to look into individual employees at Faculty 18 instead. Through channels at work, he had learned little that he didn’t already know or surmise from his own experience. For the last sixteen years, John Van Houten had worked at Paragon in their research division on projects related to theoretical physics, a topic Carl knew nothing about. The man’s memorial service was closed to the public, which made sense, but contrary to what Carl had been told in quarantine, there was no surviving Van Houten family to care about discretion. A brief retrospective of Van Houten’s life noted his multiple doctorates from Yale in astrophysics and robotics, his visiting scholarships at various prestigious universities, his revolutionary contributions to string theory, and his research regarding dark matter and alternate universes and dimensions. There was little on the man’s personal life or the specifics of his job at Paragon other than an obituary in the local paper, which pretty much regurgitated what other sources said.
The rumors about town regarding the corporation and its employees were not much help, either. There was a reason a conspiracy nut like Carl thrived in a place like Haversham, and that was because the place had always been a magnet for tragedy of the strangest sort, the kinds of things that proved the adage that truth was stranger than fiction. In Haversham, that kind of strange ran beneath the town like ley lines or the pipework of some terrible supernatural machine. Carl knew this; all the cops knew it. People were skittish with that hospital for the criminally insane on the hill, and that Giants’ Table dolmen out in the woods where all those hikers went missing. People were isolated by choice and socially quirky in Haversham, and always had been. A lot of towns out that way—Thrall, Zarephath, Blight’s Corners—they were all like that. For places where weird was natural, anything unexplainable was eventually given to the rumor mill to sort out. So it was hard to take seriously rumors like the Paragon Corporation’s Haversham office experimenting with a super-secret CERN-like device powered by the minds of the broken, the shattered, and the insane. Even in Haversham, with a police force generally inclined to cite conspiracy theories even in their reports, police work still had to be firmly rooted in facts. Regarding the work at Paragon, there were no facts to work with.
Overall, the hunt for answers regarding the disintegrating man had been intensely frustrating. He had hit so many dead-ends regarding John Van Houten that even he had nearly reached the point of cold-casing the whole thing and resigning himself to the nightmares. They were getting worse, though. Much worse…
On the same day that Warner Müller was attacked by his couch, Carl Hornsby woke up on his covered in sweat, with echoes of guilt pulsing through him like a heartbeat. He’d had a terrible time of things in that labyrinth city, and although he couldn’t remember all the particulars, he could still feel the animal lust that had driven him to do barbaric things to terrified, half-naked echoes of people —things that no god in any universe could forgive.
He also felt the pressure of needing to take a piss, and that quickly took precedence. Moaning, he hoisted himself off the couch and made his way toward the first-floor bathroom. He barely glanced at the haggard face in the mirror, at the beginnings of waxy gray that were replacing the light brown of his hair, at the lines around his eyes like tiny fissures in rock, or the way his eyes themselves always seemed to be looking somewhere else. Nowadays, everything ached—the joints of his fingers and knees when it was going to rain, his back, his neck, his chest when he got too stressed. And when he woke up from bad dreams, the aches and the faraway look of glazed discomfort that accompanied them was just a little more than he needed to see when starting a new day.
His morning routine was uneventful, unless one counted his lingering in the shower a little longer to let the hot water pelt his aching muscles for a while. It wasn’t until he happened to glance with casual disinterest at the new memo on his desk that the first inklings of a light at the end of the broken-sleep tunnel twinkled before him:
Haversham Police Department
Operations Division
Municipal Building, 404 East Prospect Avenue, Suite 140, Haversham NJ 07873
Interoffice Memorandum
To: Patrol Divisions Personnel
Date: May 3rd, 2019
From: Captain Joseph Kowalski
Subject: Consultant Protocol re: Kathy Ryan
On May 5, 2019, legal and corporate occult security consultant Katherine M. Ryan will be arriving in town to discuss some matters of utmost sensitivity regarding the Paragon Corporation, specifically the Haversham office, Facility 18, located at 551 West Caldera Street. Should Ms. Ryan choose to interview you, please note that the nature of your conversation is to be held in the strictest of confidence per corporation request, barring anything your sworn oath as a law enforcement officer would compel you to disclose. Please provide Ms. Ryan with readily forthcoming answers and whatever else she may ask you to assist in, again provided that it does not violate your ethical code and legal responsibility as an officer.
I know that as representatives of this police department, you’ll do your brothers and sisters in blue proud and your exemplary conduct and assistance will reflect positively on the department in particular and the town as a whole.
Thank you for your cooperation in this manner.
The usual grumbling commenced, including complaints of condescension from Kowalski, wastes of police time and the unlikelihood of overtime pay, having to hold the hand of government people, and, half-whispered and half-jokingly, the old familiar rumors about Paragon Corporation. Carl wasn’t complaining, though. He intended to make himself indispensable to this Kathy Ryan person and, one way or another, get the answers he needed. If anyone knew why Paragon let one of their best and brightest turn into some kind of giant, possibly contagious dust bunny that they then put down like a rabid dog, or how it was even possible for John Van Houten to have become a giant dust bunny in the first place, this woman would. It was all there in the subtext of the memo: this woman knew things, wanted to talk about things.
Let her talk, Carl thought. I want to listen.
* * * *
If “militman84” was running from the Paragon Corporation, he hadn’t run very far. Kathy passed the Paragon facility on the hill and less than half an hour later turned onto Orchard Avenue in Haversham, around five o’clock in the afternoon. The house on the property was a white colonial with navy trim, clearly old but well-maintained. The mailbox at the curb confirmed house number 35 and the name Müller. She parked and got out of her car, making her way up the stone path to the front porch. She noticed that the curtains in one of the downstairs windows were torn to shreds, as if someone had slashed at them repeatedly with something sharp. Frowning, she noted to herself that there might be a problem in a room on the front left side of the house. She had a gun in the bag slung over her shoulder; she hoped she wouldn’t need it, but its presence reassured her.
It didn’t bode well for Mr. Militman, though.
She knocked on the door and then waited. After a few minutes, she knocked again.
When there was still no answer, Kathy tried the knob, justifying to herself that since she wasn’t police, she didn’t need a warrant. She was simply a concerned citizen, alerted to possible trouble by the slashed curtains in the window.
“Hello? Mr. Müller? Are you home?”
The front hall was dark; light from the open door caught tiny dust motes twisting in the still air.
“Mr. Warner Müller?” she called again, stepping over the threshold.
A moan came from the room on the left, a living room—the one with the slashed curtains, she noticed. She moved to the doorway and peered in.
The room was empty as far as Kathy could tell. A chair stood on one side, while a couch took up a good portion of the back wall. Like the house, neither piece of furniture was new, but they looked serviceable, comfortable enough, and clean…well, except for that odd brown stain on one of the couch cushions. From where Kathy stood, it looked sort of like the impression of a face.
She was about to turn away when she heard the whispering. It seemed to be coming from several voices in different sections of the wall, and although she couldn’t make out all the words, she got the gist of the things the whispering suggested. They were awful—things about Reece, things about her brother, things it suggested she do to both, and things it swore they wanted to do to her. The thing was, the longer she stood there listening to it, the harder it was to pull away. She could see faces in the light and shadow playing off the wall through the torn curtains, and those faces made terrible promises. She began to feel lightheaded and tried to brace herself against the door frame to pull herself free of the room, but she could only manage to sway back and forth where she stood. The whispering got louder and louder inside her head until it filled up her skull, and she thought she might be falling…
A hand clamped down on her shoulder and the world came back into focus. The whispering cut off as if someone had shut off a static station on a radio, and the faces, if they had ever been there to begin with, were no more than slips of light and dark cast onto a white wall. Even the stain on the couch cushion had grown shapeless.
She whirled around to find a barefoot man in blue jeans and a white sleeveless undershirt, his black hair rumpled from sleep, or maybe sleeplessness. She was surprised to find his face looked familiar to her. She recognized him from his Paragon personnel file—Jose Rodriguez.
“Mr. Rodriguez,” she said, a little out of breath, though she wasn’t sure why. She was sure something unnatural had happened, but in reeling from it, she couldn’t quite wrap her brain around it just then.
He looked surprised, and drew his hand away. “Do I know you?”
“I’m Kathy Ryan,” she said. “And first of all, thank you. Whatever just happened—”
“The room’s infected,” he muttered. “You need to get away from it.”
“Infected? Well, I appreciate your help just now.”
He shrugged, and then, as if it had just occurred to him, asked, “How did you get in here?”
“The door was unlocked,” she replied, nonplussed. “I knocked a few times, but no one answered. And I saw the state of the curtains, so I came in.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No,” she answered, and left it at that for the time being.
“You looking for Warner?” Rodriguez asked.
She shook her head, offering a small smile. “Not really. I was actually looking for you.”
He frowned, genuinely confused. “But no one knows I’m here. No one knows I’m out. I—” He stopped, glancing around slowly. “I got out and…” His voice trailed off.
“You’ve survived something traumatic; I understand that,” she replied in her best attempt at a soothing voice. “I know about your employment under Ms. Claire Banks at Paragon, and your participation in MK-Ostium. I know about the other world you found—Hesychia, you call it—and about the disappearance of your team. Paragon has hired me to find out what happened and bring them back, if I can.” Seeing the question on his face, she added, “I found you through your post on a conspiracy website. I’m assuming you thought it safe, given the forum and its evident disregard for anything like true facts, logic, or sane and cogent debate.”
Rodriguez eyed her with weary suspicion. “Are you…here to eliminate me for talking about it?”
Kathy offered what she hoped was a warm smile. “No, of course not, Mr. Rodriguez. I saw to it that both your post and your ISP footprint were removed from the site, so I can’t imagine the government would see any reason to remove you at present. If anything, I think they would find your debriefing them on your experience incredibly helpful. Right now, you are the only link left to your field team. I was hoping you could fill me in on what happened to them.”
The shift in Rodriguez’s facial expression to one of genuine fear might have moved Kathy to sympathy if she didn’t need the information she was sure he had.
“I’m not going back there,” he said in a shaky voice. “I’m not. I’d rather you just shot me right here.”
Kathy shook her head. “You don’t have to. But I am going to need you to tell me why. What happened in that other world?”
Rodriguez looked at her blankly for a moment, then turned away. “I should check on Warner.”
“Then I’ll come with you.”
He paused, turning suddenly to her. “You’re not a reporter?”
“No.”
“Or a cop? A sweeper, then?”
“No, Mr. Rodriguez. I’m just a consultant, hired to find your team,” she said.
He searched her face and, seeming to find something there to satisfy him, he nodded and gestured for her to follow him. Kathy never much cared for people scrutinizing her face so closely, but she noticed Rodriguez neither glanced at the scar across her eye socket and cheek, nor made obvious attempts not to. It was as if he truly didn’t notice it, or frankly didn’t care, and whether that was intentional or not, Kathy liked him for it.
She followed him through a few rooms of the house to a back guest room off from the kitchen. It was sparsely decorated, with a simple twin bed, a few sepia portraits of dour-faced people, and a needlepoint of a beach scene. On the bed, a thin, balding man in his fifties lay on his back beneath a thin blanket, his hands trembling. One side of his face was red and splotchy, and beneath it, a spider web working of black veins snaked beneath the skin.
“What happened to him?” Kathy asked.
“He’s not contagious,” Rodriguez informed her. The tattoos on his upper arms rippled over lean muscles as he fussed at the man’s blankets. “At least, not by contact. Prolonged exposure to the living room did it, and anything from that place, you only catch it if you’re exposed to the source, not other infected people.”
“Is that what happened with John Van Houten?”
Rodriguez looked up at her. He had brown eyes nestled in a face with tanned, lightly lined skin. Those eyes were kind enough, but they had seen a lot, and the exhaustion in them was a bone-deep thing, an exhaustion of the soul as well as the body.
“It killed John,” he told her. “The mushroom things he found had spores, and they latched onto…something in him. Something they only found in him. This,” he gestured at the man on the bed, “is from the faces.”
Kathy didn’t answer, and Rodriguez seemed to take her silence as disbelief.
“I know it sounds crazy,” he said. “But you said you knew—about Hesychia, I mean. We thought nothing from there could come back through here. Not counting seeds, not one single organic sample we collected survived, not one. Except whatever came back in John’s body. And…and the faces. Maybe they came back in me.”
Kathy sat down at the foot of the bed. “Let’s start at the beginning,” she said. “Or at the end, and work our way back. Whichever’s easier. It’s my job—my particular skill set, if you will—to stop these kinds of things from happening, and put inter-dimensional and multi-universal things back where they belong. But I need information. I need to know what you know, okay?”
Rodriguez nodded. “Okay. Okay. Here’s what I know.”