RIMATION
A Narrative Fiction Podcast
Written by Mickey Fisher
Rimation: (noun) a narrow, fissure like opening or cleft
CONCEPT OVERVIEW
When I was a kid, I would spend the weekends at my grandma’s house and stay up late to watch reruns of THE TWILIGHT ZONE with her. As a kid, I fell in love with stories of seemingly ordinary people, caught up in the extraordinary, the surreal, and the uncanny. Looking back now, one of the things I appreciate most is that as a 10-year-old, I was sitting on the couch next to my grandma, in her 50’s, both of us equally spellbound. Last year, my 13-year-old nephew, 17-year-old niece, and I binged the entire third season of STRANGER THINGS over four days. I had the same experience from the other side of the generational gap.
When I started thinking about writing a scripted podcast, I knew I wanted to recreate that experience in audio form, telling a thought-provoking, emotionally charged genre story that a family with pre-teen kids and teenagers could binge on a road trip, just the same as a couple in their 20’s, or sci-fi/supernatural fans of any age. RIMATION is a sci-fi thriller, an ideal genre for a medium that lets you immerse the listener in atmospheric tension, make an intimate connection with them, and let them fill the space with their imagination.
It’s based on a short story I wrote about a high school science teacher and his family who find themselves fighting for survival after strange supernatural beings invade their small, midwestern town. The podcast frames the story as a series of leaked, classified audio files from the M-THEORY DIVISION, a Defense Department program tasked with studying the existence of inter-dimensional beings. It pieces together recorded interrogations, CCTV footage, cell phone and HAM radio conversations, personal documentation, and more. In success, this six-episode season would be the first in an anthology of “leaked” M-Theory Division investigations into bizarre inter-dimensional occurrences.
MICKEY FISHER
MICKEY FISHER (Creator/Writer) is the creator of the sci-fi event series EXTANT (CBS), Executive Produced by Steven Spielberg and Amblin Television, starring Halle Berry, and REVERIE (NBC), Executive Produced by Amblin Television, starring Sarah Shahi.
He was also a Consulting Producer on MARS (NatGeo), Executive Produced by Ron Howard and Imagine, a Co-Executive Producer for THE STRAIN (FX), Executive Produced by Guillermo Del Toro and Carlton Cuse, Consulting Producer for Season Two of JACK RYAN (Amazon), Executive Produced by Carlton Cuse.
Fisher’s sci-fi play REPLICA had its world premiere at Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston in 2018. Originally from Ironton, Ohio, Mickey attended The University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music for Musical Theater. Mickey is repped by WME.
Most recently, Fisher is co-creating FIREKEEPER’S DAUGHTER for Netflix, based on the novel by Angeline Boulley, Executive Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions.
RIMATION
short story by Mickey Fisher
DOD: MTD Admin.
CID# 45638-OH
The following is a written transcript of Benjamin McDowell’s statement regarding the occurrence at Mineral City, Ohio, given 04/18/2020.
Dr. Gettler’s followup summary is included afterward.
Ben McDowell:
It’s funny the things that pop into your head.
Just before you found me, I was thinking, “This is it.This is the end.”
Which got me thinking about that song by The Doors.
One of the verses starts with a line, “There’s a danger on the edge of town.”
Come to think of it, there are a bunch of other lyrics that fit.
“All the children are insane.”
“Weird scenes inside the gold mine.”
“I’ll never look into your eyes again.”
You want to know about the morning they showed up, but it really started the night before. With the explosion at Carter Energy.
We live on the East side of town, not far from the highway, with the mine on the other side. The blast was powerful enough to wake us up and rattle the windows of the house.
Abby and I jumped out of bed and threw back the curtains to see if we could tell where it came from. Liddy came running from her room down the hall, scared out of her mind. Somehow, Noah slept through the whole thing.
Outside, a bunch of the neighbors were coming out on their lawns, wearing their night gowns and pulling on slippers, some of them barefoot. We got there just in time to hear the sirens and catch the flicker of police cruisers and emergency vehicles headed out toward 93.
Mr. Libee walked across the street to join us, said, “I just pray to God nobody was hurt.”
I remember thinking, “That would be a miracle.”
I don’t believe in miracles.
But, then that’s exactly what happened.
***
The next morning, Abby went on a ride-along with the Sheriff, Jim Gillam, and she called home to tell me what happened. A pipeline exploded, and miraculously… nobody was hurt.
I was relieved, not just because you never want to see anybody get hurt, but because getting the mine up and running had pretty much split the town in two. On the one side, there were people who were praying for the kind of economic miracle that fracking provided other communities around the state.
Then, there were people like Abby and me.
She took the Deputy Director job at the health department back in August because she wanted to help the lower income families who live out in the county, exactly the people who’d be affected if the creeks became contaminated.
I teach Earth Science at the high school, so while I understood and appreciated the cutting edge technology involved, I had my doubts about safety. Not to mention, Carter was a relatively new company, with no personal ties to the community. Whose to say they had our best interests at heart? After Dupont and Parkersburg, we didn’t want to take any chances.
We went to city council meetings, we talked with county commissioners, pushed for delays so we could study the environmental impact. There were passionate arguments, and hurt feelings. There are people who still won’t talk to me to this day. I saw Bill Jensen at Save-Mart a few weeks ago and he walked to the entrance clear on the other side of the parking lot just to avoid saying, “Hello.” In the end, the town was facing an existential crisis that only good paying jobs and tax revenue could solve.
The amount of money Carter was talking about was transformative.
I mean, the town is called Mineral City. At some point, I guess it was inevitable.
Carter hired around sixty local people to start, in addition to the specialized crews coming in from out of town. They rented houses and spent money in the grocery stores and restaurants. Abby and I moved on. I focused on the kids at school and coaching track. She got drafted into this new program at the health department, trying to do something about the opioid epidemic. We got back to spending time with Liddy and Noah.
The mood around town was changing. People were hopeful again. A lot of the older residents said it was starting to feel like it did back in the seventies, back when you could walk out of high school and into a job that paid you well enough to support a family and still have enough left over every year to take a trip down to Myrtle Beach for a week or so. A disaster at the mine would have put us back at square one. So, when Abby told me nobody was hurt, the biggest thing I felt was relief.
I had no idea the worst was coming.
***
While she was out with the Sheriff, I was home, making breakfast for the kids and yelling at them to get ready for school.
The biggest crisis we were facing at that point was a couple of Liddy’s eighth-grade classmates had taken her school picture and turned it into a meme. She’s got a beauty mark on the left side of her chin, and one of her classmates added a thought bubble to it and titled it, “Deep thoughts from Liddy’s mole.” They posted it all over social media. By the time she woke up it already had a couple dozen likes, which pretty much meant it was “trending” at Mineral City Middle School. She locked herself in the bathroom and ran through the greatest hits of how she wasn’t going to school and how she hated everybody there and the whole town was stupid. While I was talking her down, the smoke detectors started going off downstairs.
Noah was making toast.
When I got down there, he had the vent going and was opening up windows. I looked at the dial on the toaster. It was set all the way to five. I asked him why he didn’t just put the dial on four and leave it. He said, “Four doesn’t get it dark enough,” so he liked to put it on five and flip it up before it burned. The problem was, of course, that he never flipped it up in time. He’d start looking at his phone and get distracted and before you know it, the kitchen was filling up with smoke and the alarms were going off through the house.
I told him he’s seventeen, he had to start using his head, being more aware. He said fine, he’d just eat the burnt pieces and get cancer, if that would make me happy.
Basically, it was your average ordinary weekday.
I finally caved in and made Liddy a deal. I told her she could skip her school but that she was going with me to sit in on my Earth science class.
Fourth period is when everything changed.
****
Noah was a couple of rooms down the hall in AP English. I was in the middle of a lesson about the assimilation stage of the nitrogen cycle. Liddy was off in the corner, taking notes on a yellow pad, like she was any other sophomore.
I looked up and saw Austin Whitley in the back row, showing Beth Crimshaw something on his phone. I told him if he didn’t put it away I was going to take it and I was going to keep it this time. He looked up at me like he’d forgotten where he was or what he was doing. He was totally mesmerized by whatever he was looking at and told me I should see it, too. He said, “My cousin just sent this. He swears to God it’s real.”
He brought me the phone and I took a look. It was a picture of the World War Two Memorial that sits at the foot of the exit ramp from the highway, the first thing people see when they’re coming into Mineral City, right past the sign that says, “Home to two Medal of Honor Winners.” It’s basically just a decommissioned tank, a couple of granite walls with the names of veterans from the town etched in, then there’s a granite obelisk, a twelve foot replica of the Washington Monument.
What got him freaked out was that next to the obelisk there was a man.
A man made entirely of shadow.
That’s not entirely accurate, I’m sorry.
It wasn’t a man, exactly. It was humanoid, in shape, but it had to be seven feet tall, judging by its relation to the monument. Austin told me that his cousin said it wasn’t doing anything. It was just standing there, not moving at all.
I gave him back the phone, but before he got to his seat, other phones started going off, vibrating in the pockets of a few other kids. I snapped. I told them all to turn their damn phones off and they pulled them out to follow orders, but one by one, they just kind of froze in their seats. They were all getting pictures of the same kind of figure.
There were six more of them, positioned at different locations on the perimeter of the city.
There was one in Greenlawn Industrial Park to the South, standing not far from a marble statue of a lion at the gate. There was one standing in the mouth of the abandoned train tunnel on the ridge overlooking the highway to the East. Another was standing in the center of the bridge that spanned Storms Creek, cutting off traffic to the county.
They were lining the outside of town.
Surrounding us.
The kids were all starting to panic now, Liddy included. I tried to keep them calm and talk through rational explanations. I’m a science teacher, that’s what I do. That morning on the phone, Abby told me Sheriff Gillam had been called to a farm out on 230 Henry Caudill thought a bunch of high school kids had played a prank on him and dropped a couple dozen dead birds in his yard. I was sure it had to be something like that.
A hoax.
Then, Principal Briggs’s voice came over the intercom saying he was putting the school on lockdown. The anxiety in the room spiked. We followed the active shooter protocol, locking the doors and turning off the lights. The kids in the last row sprang into action, doing their part of the drill, pulling down the window blinds. Austin stopped mid-pull, paralyzed in his tracks, and pointed to something out the window. The rest of the kids crowded around to look and I had to fight my way through to see what he was pointing at.
It took my eyes a second to adjust, but then I saw it.
One of the figures was perched on a rock ledge, just across the highway.
It was less than a hundred yards away. Standing completely still, just like Austin’s cousin had said. It never occurred to me that they might actually exist. But, there it was. I was seeing one of them with my own two eyes.
I’m a pretty literal guy. I believe what I can see, or what I can prove. There’s a sign on the wall by my desk that says, “What do we want? Science. When do we want it? After peer review.” The cognitive dissonance of this moment opened up a fault line in my brain and I froze, just like the kids.
The sound of fluorescent light bulbs popping snapped me out of my trance.
One by one, they started going out, until some kind of electromagnetic surge took out the power in the whole building. Later, we learned that it was happening all over town and was spreading to the neighboring villages. Whatever it was took out the nearby cell towers as well.
We were stuck, with no way to call for help.
A few minutes later, Principal Briggs and Vice Principal Lewis went from room to room to update teachers. The figure was standing near the East side of the building. They had a plan to evacuate students on the West side of the school, out of its view.
My students were quieter than they’ve ever been as I led them down the back stairs, through the old gym and into the boy’s locker room. From there, we took the tunnels that ran from the locker rooms out to the football field on the other side.
When we hit the astroturf, I scanned the other lines of students until I found Mrs. Arman’s class. I spotted Noah with the others, they were all pretty anxious to get on the busses that would take us to Central City Church, the fallback location in the event of an active shooter. He was scanning the other groups too, looking for me. We made eye contact just before we boarded our respective busses. I gave him a nod to let him know we were safe and helped Liddy up the steps. When we got in our seats, I put my arm around her and felt her whole body shaking. I squeezed her tight and whispered, “We’re going to be all right.”
***
The reason Abby started going on the ride-alongs with the Sheriff and his deputies was that she wanted to see first hand the effects of the epidemic she was trying to fight. When she was growing up here, “partying” meant you took a case of Natural Light or a couple of bottles of Boone’s Farm to the riverbank or the cement plant.
A lot has changed since then.
Over the past few years, Mineral City found itself squarely in the crosshairs of the opioid crisis. Everybody in town knows somebody who has been affected by it. A relative, a friend, a neighbor, a student. A batch of pills laced with Fentanyl sarted circulating around town recently. That batch led to two overdoses last week. That only thing that saved them was a drug called Narcan that gets sprayed up the nose and revives the victim until the paramedics can get there. Those were the kinds of calls Abby was used to going on with Jim Gillam.
So, when his dispatcher, Kimmy, called him over the two-way to tell him someone had a ghost in their driveway, he immediately assumed it was drugs. Maybe it was someone smoking weed laced with LSD, that happened every now and then.
The fourth call was someone claiming to have seen an alien standing in the middle of the Storms Creek bridge. That’s when Jim decided he probably oughta check it out and took Abby along with him.
The bridge connects Mineral City to the rest of the county via county road 240. Jim pulled the cruiser to a stop as soon as he saw it, forty yards or so from the bridge. He’s a man of few words in general, but Abby said it took him a long time to say anything and when he did, all he said was, “What the hell.”
He made Abby stay in the car while he got out with his binoculars and posted up behind the driver’s side door to take a look. He described it to her, saying it was like a bunch of coal dust swirling around, held together by something he couldn’t see. It wasn’t moving, it was just standing still like the others, seemingly staring right at him.
Jim got back in the car and radioed Kimmy and told her to have his deputies start setting up security perimeters around town. He was mid-sentence when the thing took a couple of steps forward, toward the cruiser. Jim dropped the radio and drew his weapon, then it stopped moving again.
Kimmy’s voice came back over the two-way, he had a call coming in. Gillam said, “I’m a little busy right now.” But, Kimmy came back, saying, “It’s Homeland Security.”
They were sending a team to take control of the situation. Another sheriff might have felt threatened by that, or pulled the whole, “This is my jurisdiction,” thing, but Abby said Jim looked relieved. This was already well above his pay grade. With the feds on the way, he could focus on keeping his citizens safe.
He was in the middle of responding when the electromagnetic surge fried his radio.
The town is only a couple of miles wide, between the highway and the river, and a little over four miles long from Green Lawn industrial park on one end to the memorial on the other. The local first responders, per Jim’s instructions, redirected all the traffic to the four main arteries than ran through the middle of town and set up emergency shelters at the churches and schools.
People were showing up at the shelters with reports that these beings, whatever they are, weren’t just confined to the perimeter, anymore. They were moving around town, appearing and disappearing at will. Jim decided it was better safe than sorry. While we were waiting for the Home Sec forces, he sounded the tornado siren to let people know they should stay off the street and inside their houses. Within a couple of hours, we’d gone from putting the school on lockdown to putting the whole city on lockdown.
***
Abby met us back at the house.
Once we were safe, Liddy broke down crying. I tried explaining that there had to be some rational, scientific explanation. Maybe they were aliens who traveled here using some technology that NASA couldn’t even dream of, yet. Maybe they’re friendly, maybe they just want to observe us or deliver some kind of message. She didn’t find that nearly as exciting as I did. In fact, it only made her more upset.
So, Abby said, “Let’s do what we always do when we’re afraid. Let’s pray.” Noah joined in and the three of them held hands there in the center of the living room and prayed for God to protect them. I went upstairs.
Like I said, I don’t really believe in that sort of thing.
Unlike most of the people in Mineral City, I wasn’t born here. I grew up in a suburb outside Cleveland. My family went to church on Easter and Christmas, but mostly out of obligation to my grandparents. My mom and dad were academics. Anything that smacked of pseudo-science or religion was looked down on. By the time I was in my early twenties, I was an avowed and proud atheist, which meant I was every bit as insufferable as some Christians.
I met Abby when we were both in grad school at Miami and fell in love with her passion for her hometown. A lot of her high school classmates had moved away, but she was determined to come back here and make a difference. So, we made a deal. Once the kids graduated we’d spend a few years traveling, living in bigger cities. Somewhere with museums, and Thai food.
It took me a little time to settle in. My northern attitude rubbed more than a few people the wrong way, but after a couple of years, Mineral City started to feel like home. Still, I never got used to the Evangelical thing. These people would pray at the drop of a hat. Before high school football games, the start of parades, grand openings of grocery stores. I just got used to not taking part, and I was okay with that.
So was Abby.
Except this time.
In fact, she was really pissed. She felt like I could have at least pretended to pray, to comfort Lydia. But, I didn’t want to do that. It would be hypocritical, and anyway, it would be teaching her exactly the thing I don’t believe, which is that in times of distress, you should put your faith in some higher power to swoop in and save you, or solve all your problems. I don’t think there are supernatural forces at work in the world. Angels and demons, a devil that sits around thinking up ways to make you do bad things. Too many people use it as an excuse. I think we’re responsible for our own choices and consequences. This is what I teach my kids, in school and on the track team. “Action is character. Character is destiny.” The choices you make determine the person you’re going to be become. You want to be a good person, you want to have a good life? Make good choices.
Later that night, Liddy asked me why I didn’t believe in God and I told her that the concept of hell never made any sense to me. I loved her more than anything in the world and I would never want anything bad to happen to her, much less cast her in a lake of fire for all eternity for not doing something I told her. But, I also left some space for her to question. I told her that it’s not that I don’t believe God could exist. It’s just that I don’t know for sure. The universe is vast and mysterious, and it is full of uncertainty. But, I’m okay with uncertainty because that leaves a space for hope. I had hope that everything was going to be okay, and I promised her that no matter what, I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her.
All four of us spent the night in the living room but I’m not sure any of slept.
***
At some point, we heard the helicopters and the SUV’s roaring through town. I figured it was the team from Homeland Security who were coming to assess the situation.
The way it was explained to me, Doctor Gettler introduced herself to Sheriff Gillam as the head of a division at the Defense Department concerning M-Theory. She told him she studied, “The potential existence of other dimensions and, consequently, the existence of inter-dimensional beings.”
Jim Gillam was dealing with absolute chaos at the Sheriff’s department, with all these people freaking out over the arrival of these figures. Addicts were overdosing at the shelters because they’d been using Oxycontin to cope with the stress. The EMT’s were running out of Narcan kits, which is the only hope they had of keeping some of these people alive. And, here’s this woman coming in, telling him her job is studying creatures from other dimensions on behalf of the government. But, remember, he’d seen one of them, so any and all skepticism had already been drained out of him. He told her to do whatever she had to do, he was focused on keeping his citizens from killing themselves or each other. They set up a command post at the courthouse.
He showed up at the house the next morning to ask Abby about the Narcan kits in storage at the health department, and she told him they were down to two or three. Maybe LaGrange, the village on the other side of the industrial park, had a couple on hand. Problem was, we still couldn’t reach them by phone and one of these things, Gillam was calling them “Watchers” now, had been spotted in the industrial park in between.
Abby was worried. She’d gone to a convention in Columbus awhile back where they talked about how, in times of stress, substance abuse skyrockets. After 9/11, drug and alcohol abuse rates doubled the baseline. It was already happening in the shelters and it was only going to get worse. The conditions were ripe for a wave of overdoses.
Jim and he said he’d try to send someone there as soon as possible but with everything else going on, trying to keep the peace and restore power, it would have to go lower on the priority list. Abby offered to go but he said it was too dangerous and besides, the people from HomeSec didn’t want anybody else on the streets.
I’ve been married to this woman for twenty years, I knew exactly what she was going to do when he left. There was no way she was going to sit around waiting for permission from some out of town bureaucrat.
I think it’s safe to say our discussion was spirited. You can’t call it an argument, because that implies something one can win. There was no winning this. She was going and that was all there was to it. I wasn’t going to sit around while she went by herself, and neither one of us wanted to risk taking the kids. So, we called Abby’s dad Henry to see if he’d stay with them while we went off on our little adventure. Henry’s in his seventies and doesn’t drive anymore, so I went to pick him up while Abby stayed with Noah and Liddy.
I’d driven to Henry’s house thousands of times over the past couple decades. Down sixth street, past Mrs. Meadows, who was always out pulling weeds in her front yard. Past the mail man. Past the corner pharmacy, people coming in and out. Kids on their bikes, buying candy or putting coins in the pop machine. But, nobody was out, now. The streets were pretty much deserted. It was so surreal. For years, I’ve heard people talk about how the town was dying, that too many young people were moving away, looking for better paying jobs in Columbus, or Cincinnati.
The place was a ghost town, now.
That’s what I was thinking a split second before a Watcher appeared in front of me, standing in the middle of the street.
I jerked the wheel just in time but I lost control of the car and slammed into a telephone pole on the corner. It rang my bell pretty hard but it didn’t deploy the airbag. I tried to restart the car but it wasn’t turning over. I was stuck and I was pretty sure that thing was less than ten yards away. I jumped out of the car and looked around. I didn’t see it anywhere.
I was only six or seven blocks from Henry’s house on Pine Street so I jogged the rest of it on foot. He wasn’t driving anymore but he still had his Buick in the garage. It didn’t take us long to get it started. Just before we pulled out, I spotted the battery-powered HAM radio on his work table. That was one of his hobbies after Abby’s mom passed away. He’d take a six pack out to the garage and spend the evening talking to people all over the world. We brought it with us almost as an afterthought.
On the ride back, we saw a number of Watchers walking the streets of town. Sometimes, they would appear and disappear in the space of a few moments. With Henry’s blessing, I pulled over to watch them. I couldn’t help myself. I had to know more. He asked me what I thought they were and I told him I had no idea. He kind of chuckled and said something about how maybe all those science degrees weren’t that helpful after all.
I saw one of them pass through the wall of a closed down furniture store before disappearing on the other side. If they could pass through matter at will, that meant they could enter our houses. I pulled out my cell phone and tapped on the camera icon. I couldn’t make calls but I thought I could at least get some video for proof. But as I was powering it up, Henry started slapping my arm, telling me to, “Go, go, go!” I looked over just in time to see one of them closing in on us from a few feet away. I mean, it was coming right towards us. I threw the car in drive and jammed down the gas. As we passed by, it turned its head to watch us go. Up to that point, it was almost like it hadn’t seen us.
Or couldn’t.
When we got back to the house, I took Abby into the kitchen and told her about the Watcher in the furniture store. I was worried one of them might come in the house while Jim and the kids were here alone, but she and Henry assured me he could handle it. The plan was, he’d take the kids down in the basement under the guise of playing with the HAM radio until we got back.
On the way to the industrial park, I made a spur of the moment decision to stop by the high school. A couple of years ago I bought a student Geiger Counter to do experiments testing radiation in the classroom. Gillam had told us about Doctor Gettler and her inter-dimensional beings theory, and I wondered if the might be emitting some higher level of cosmic radiation. I knew we were going to pass one of them in the Industrial Park and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do a little science.
I wasn’t used to being in the school when it was so quiet. Without the sound of kids laughing and messing around, shuffling between classes with their rolly bags. Lockers slamming open and closed. We crept upstairs to my classroom, whispering to each other under our breath. Under the circumstances, it felt a little bit like being in a haunted house. We just wanted to get in and out of there as fast as possible and draw as little attention to ourselves as possible. It didn’t take long to find the counter, power it up, and run a quick background test. I hate to admit it, but part of me was actually kind of excited for this little experiment. How many chances does a high school science teacher in a small town in Appalachia get to seek out a deeper understanding of the universe?
Careful what you wish for.
When Abby and I got to the first floor of the school, we rounded the corner for the side exit, the one to the teacher’s parking lot, and found a Watcher standing in the hallway. It turned and looked right at us and started moving toward us, with a purpose. The door to the band room was open and I pulled Abby inside. The lights were off and I tumbled over a stack of music stands, sending them crashing. We ran to the instrument closet and hid inside, closing the door behind us and barricading ourselves in with cases.
We could see a tiny bit of sunlight through the crack in the door. We held our breath and held onto each other as the Watcher got closer and its presence eclipsed the last bit of light. It was standing just on the other side of the door, looking for us. I looked down at the Geiger Counter and it was pegging out. Whatever it was, it was emitting a lot of radiation. I was worried it was going to give away our hiding spot so I turned it off again. A few seconds later, the sunlight appeared again. The Watcher was moving on.
I remembered being in the car with Henry and pulling up the camera app on my phone. That’s when the Watcher made a beeline for the car. This one didn’t move until I turned on the Geiger counter. I told Abby my theory, that maybe these beings couldn’t see us or hear us in any conventional way, but instead were drawn to electromagnetic radiation.
The stronger the device, the more powerful the signal. My stomach dropped.
We left Henry and the kids back home, playing with a HAM radio.
Abby beat me back to the car and jumped in the driver’s seat.
The sun was going down now and all hell was about to break loose again.
I heard the stories from Gillam about the night before. About the paranoid homeowners, holed up in their houses, drinking to calm their nerves. This is the kind of town where you see an NRA sticker on two out of every five vehicles, and signs posted on fences that say, “Forget the dog, beware the owner,” with silhouettes brandishing handguns.
It was a perfect storm for tragedy.
The night before, Jenny Cox and a bunch of her friends were trying to make the best of it, drinking beer and playing with a ouija board by candlelight, when they heard footsteps in the hallway upstairs. Jenny’s a peace-loving person but she also manages a liquor store and carries a pink gun in her purse for when she has to make deposits in the bank late at night. When a Watcher started coming down the stairs, she shot at it, and quickly discovered it was a friend playing a trick on them. Hit him right in the gut. With no way to call for help, they had to put him in the car and haul ass to the hospital where a couple of EMT’s cleaned and stitched him up via work lights and emergency power.
Then, there was the group of people who decided they were going to defy the curfew and make a break on foot for the bridge that spans the Ohio River to Kentucky. When they got to the other side, they found the road barricaded by armed Homeland Security personnel who forced them to turn around at gunpoint. They weren’t letting anybody in or out until they figured out exactly what the hell was going on. That only poured fuel on the fire of our panic. The sun was going down. We were going to have to ride out the night with these things walking around. No electricity. Nowhere to go and no idea what they were going to do to us if we stayed. That was the worst part.
The waiting.
The anticipation.
Abby was doing eighty as she passed through the center of town, which caught the attention of one Jim’s deputies and a government SUV. They both flipped on the sirens and tried to get her to pull over but there was no way in hell she was going to stop.
When we got home, our worst fear had come true.
Henry had been entertaining the kids with the HAM radio. After an hour or so, Liddy had to go the bathroom, so Henry made them all go back upstairs as a group. He and Noah stood guard outside the door and promised they wouldn’t leave her.
Noah heard her scream and he threw open the door but she was gone. She had just vanished, into thin air. The window was locked from the inside and he’d been standing guard by the door, there’s no way Liddy could have gotten out without him seeing. In a panic, Noah and Henry tore through the house looking for her, yelling themselves hoarse. But, she was gone.
Abby and I showed up with the Sheriff’s deputy and a couple of HomeSec spec ops types on our heels. Noah and Henry told us and the spec ops guys what happened and before we knew it we were all in the SUV headed to their command post.
On the way there I noticed one of them had a Border Patrol Tactical Unit badge. I remember thinking, “These guys are a long way from the border.” Noah was distraught, feeling like it was his fault his sister was missing. Abby was asking him all kinds of questions and one of the spec ops guys told us to stop talking. Like we were criminals and he didn’t want us getting our story straight.
Doctor Gettler had taken over the lobby of the courthouse downtown, with its massive center lobby and fortified security. She and her team of researchers had set up a kind of mission control with monitors and laptops and instruments I’d never even seen before. On one of them, there was a digital map of the area with intersecting lines drawn on top. There was a Golden Retriever laying underneath one of the desks that the researchers called “Forteana.” The spec ops types separated us into different rooms and Doctor Gettler questioned each of us on Liddy’s disappearance.
When Doctor Gettler came into the room, I asked if she had any idea where our daughter was and she said, “Not yet.” I told her about what I’d learned about the electromagnetic radiation and asked about the lines on the image I saw in the lobby. She told me they were “ley lines.” I’d heard the term when I was in college, back when I was smoking pot with my roommates and reading to each other from the gospel of Carl Sagan. One of them was really into pseudo-science and ancient aliens, clairvoyance, all that stuff. I would play devil’s advocate, shooting down her theories with cold, hard science, and in turn, she would pity me for my lack of faith in anything beyond what was two feet in front of my face. I didn’t have any need for mystery, only a need for truth. And, I definitely didn’t believe there was any truth to ley lines.
Now, here I was, in a room with the head of a government-sanctioned program who was telling me that the specific intersection of the lines running underneath Mineral City had created a complex matrix of magnetic energy that signaled the presence of at least one other dimension, with only a thin “membrane” separating us from them. Her theory was that the explosion at Carter Energy had pierced the membrane, allowing the Watchers to pass back and forth between them. She still didn’t know what they were or where Lydia was.
Doctor Gettler thought maybe the membrane was weakening enough so there were spots that allowed objects and people to slip through. There had been a number of bizarre occurrences over the past twenty-four hours.
A house cat that appeared to be on a loop, walking through a widow’s house.
A drone that vanished mid-flight.
Perhaps, Liddy had slipped through one of these weak spots to whatever was on the other side of the membrane. Dr. Gettler’s biggest worry was that the more interaction there was between the two dimensions, the more it would compromise the structural integrity of each. Both were in danger.
I was scared and angry, but apparently I was way more calm than Abhy who was being questioned in a room down the hall. She grabbed Doctor Gettler by the sport coat and shoved her up against the wall to force more information out of her. It took three of the spec ops guys to pull her off.
When we got back to the lobby, Sheriff Gillam was waiting for us. HomeSec had ordered him to keep us in custody in case they needed more information, but he didn’t have any intention of doing that. He and Abby went to high school together. Liddy is on a dance team with his daughter. He’s family, and he was willing to do anything we needed to get her back.
I told him and Abby Doctor Gettler’s theory, about the membrane separating two different dimensions, and that Liddy had to be on the other side. If I could just find a way through it, I could search for her and maybe bring her back. Out of earshot from the others, Jim said, “I want to show you something.”
Henry took Noah to Central City church to wait while Jim drove us out to the Carter Energy mine. On the way, he explained that he came out here after the pipeline exploded, thinking there were going to be casualties. Miraculously, nobody was hurt. There wasn’t even all that much damage to the pipeline or the mine surrounding it. The night supervisor couldn’t explain it. He was certain it had been much worse. He led Gillam around the site and everything looked in order until they got to the pit well, where they keep the water they’re going to use for the fracking. It was completely empty.
But, there was a crack in the wall of the pit, about three feet in diameter, with some kind of black substance covering it. At the time, Jim assumed it was a by-product of the process, or oil that had seeped in from nearby equipment. But, when he saw the Watcher on Storms Creek bridge, something about it reminded him of that crack. He came back out last night to check it out and climbed down into the pit with his flashlight. The substance covering the pit looked exactly like the same substance that made up the Watcher on the pit, a mass of swirling particles, held together by something he couldn’t see. While he was looking at it, a Watcher lurched out of the substance and walked right past him, then disappeared again.
He told Doctor Gettler about it and escorted her and a team back to the site. They used instruments to test the substance and flew a drone through that never returned. She left behind a couple of the Spec Ops team to guard it while she went back to study the results. On the way back, he overheard one of her researchers calling the crack a “rimation.”
We hiked up to the ridge overlooking Carter Energy site, careful to avoid the deep crevices. There were guard shacks and vehicles. We spotted four the Spec Ops types guarding the pit well. There were work lights and cameras aiming at the crack in the wall. I knew what I had to do.
I had to go through it.
Abby and Sheriff Gillam were against it at first. I told them Doctor Gettler and her team weren’t going to risk their lives for our daughter until they knew for sure it was safe. Every minute we spent waiting around was another minute that Liddy was out there, alone and afraid. It had to be me. I’m the one who promised her that I’d never let anything bad happen to her. Jim had a family of his own and a town to protect. Abby would still be here for Noah and her dad, if anything happened to me. I told them, “Think of it as an experiment. I’m a science teacher.”
Jim and Abby used the cruiser to distract the Spec Ops guys on one side of the pit, giving me enough time to scramble down the other side. I made my way to the rimation, the substance of swirling particles that looked like a living shadow. For the first time in my life, I was about to take a true leap of faith. Like I told Liddy the night before, “The universe is a vast and mysterious place.” I was overwhelmed with uncertainty, but inside… I had hope.
It felt like a heavy mist, falling across my face. Then, through my face and body, then out the other side. Almost as if it was passing through me, and not the other way around.
When I opened my eyes again, I was still in the pit well.
There was no sign of Abby or Jim, or the Spec Ops guards. I could see work lights over the ridge and flashing emergency beacons. Quietly, I climbed up to the edge of the pit well and peeked over the edge. There were dozens of first responders and emergency workers, coming through what was clearly the wreckage of the Carter Energy site. The whole thing had been leveled. Trees in the surrounding woods had been blown over or cracked in two.
I made a decision to stay out of sight until I could figure out what was going on, and made my way up to the ridge overlooking the town. There were helicopters hovering overhead and the night sky was illuminated by temporary work lights and emergency vehicles. When I finally reached the top and got my first look at town, my heart dropped.
The entire eastern side of town had been leveled. Houses and buildings reduced to piles of rubble. There were emergency crews combing through the debris, and teams with search dogs clearly looking for survivors. I thought about Doctor Gettler’s theory, about the other dimension just beyond our own, separated by a thin membrane. It slowly began to dawn on me that I was looking at that other dimension right now. In this reality, the destruction from the pipeline explosion had been devastating. I started to wonder if it was the explosion itself that created this alternate dimension of Mineral City.
And, if so, which one came first?
Which one was “real?”
Looking at the rescue teams in their Hazmat suits, I saw that they were roughly the same size and shape as the Watchers we had seen in my reality. The equipment they were using must have weakened the membrane enough for us to detect their presence.
It redoubled my desire to stay below the radar. I didn’t want to do anything that could alter or upset the reality of this dimension. So, on the way into town, I swiped a respirator, a windbreaker, and a hat from the back of an emergency vehicle to cover my face.
The closer I got to the devastation, the more heartbreaking it was. Entire neighborhoods filled with people I know and love were just gone. Wiped off the map in an instant. We were asleep when the blast happened, like everybody else in town. The people in this dimension, the ones who passed, they would have never known what hit them.
I walked the last couple of blocks to our house.
There was only one wall partially standing, near the master bedroom. The rest of it was completely leveled. A jumbled pile of bricks and wood. No signs of life. I turned and made my way toward Central City Church, our primary emergency fallback shelter.
I walked past search and rescue teams, sifting through the remains of houses looking for any signs of life. The sense of despair was palpable. Until I got closer to Central City Church.
I heard the singing from a few blocks away. Hundreds of voices, lifted up together, singing hymns. People of all faiths were holding hands, surrounding the church. This wasn’t something I’d ever seen in Mineral City. A lot of the denominations keep to themselves. I’ve heard more than one evangelical preacher refer to Catholicism as a cult who worships the Virgin Mary.
But, here they were, standing side by side.
It was the first time I understood the purpose of prayer. Not the appealing to a higher power for salvation part, but the part that’s about reaching out on behalf of the people you love. At its most basic level, prayer was an act of connection and compassion. It was beautiful.
One whole side of the church was covered in pictures, the lawn in front of it filled with flowers and stuffed animals. It was a memorial wall. I steeled my nerves and made my over to look at the faces in the pictures. I saw them, toward the end of a row in the middle.
Abby. Noah. Liddy.
But, there was no picture of me.
How could that be? I was there with them, in the same house when it happened.
I heard someone say my name over a loudspeaker. I panicked and hid behind a cargo truck, thinking I’d been found out. But, then I saw… there’s no good way to explain this.
It was me.
Or, the alternate reality version of me.
In this reality, I had survived the explosion.
The preacher was on the microphone, talking about miracles. He said, “God has returned Liddy to her father.” I saw Liddy standing next to this other version of me. Liddy from my dimension. She looked scared and confused, but people were throwing their arms around her and showering her with love, with tears in their eyes. In their eyes, they were witnessing a miracle. In this reality, Liddy had died during the explosion. And now, here she was again. The town was pulling behind this alternate version of me, overwhelming me with their love and support.
***
The alternate reality version of me took Liddy to the parking lot, to Henry’s car. Ours must have been totaled in the blast. I watched them leave the lot and make the turn onto 6th street, headed North. I assumed he was taking her to Henry’s. He would have been far enough away from the blast radius that his house was likely still in tact.
I kept to the alleys, staying out of sight until I got to Henry’s block, and climbed over the neighbor’s fence and into his backyard. I hid behind the shed and peered through the windows. I could hear Liddy crying, trying to explain to the other me, and the alternate Henry, that she was confused, she didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t, anymore. The other me told her that she was going to be all right. They were going to get through it, together.
I should have waited until they were all asleep. I should have broken in and stolen her away in the middle of the night and taken her back through the portal before anybody knew what happened.
But, that’s not what I did.
While I was hiding behind the shed, I heard the sliding door open and footsteps on the patio. Then, I heard a man sobbing. It was the alternate reality me, breaking down out of sight from Henry and Liddy. There’s no way to explain how it felt, other than to say that I was suddenly overcome with pity for myself.
I stepped out of the darkness with my finger to my lips, signaling him to stay quiet.
He was so startled that he stumbled backwards across the patio and nearly knocked over Henry’s glass table, before he steadied himself again and just stared at me, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He was sure he was going crazy. I told him he wasn’t. I explained what had happened, that the explosion at the mine had created two realities. In my reality, nobody died in the blast, but the explosion had created a condition where his world was bleeding over.
He told me he didn’t remember the blast, only coming to as the rescue workers were digging him out. They took him to a makeshift emergency tent. Other than a concussion and some scrapes and bruises he was going to be okay. It was just sheer luck, he was positioned near the one wall that was still standing. He was told that three bodies had been recovered. They were in the process of being identified, but he hadn’t seen them yet.
He came to stay with Henry, and Henry left his HAM radio running next to the police scanner, listening for any updates. The alternate me was lying on the couch when he heard voices coming over the HAM radio. It was Noah and Liddy. I realize now that what he was hearing was their transmission from our house, in my dimension. Thinking it was a sign, he drove back to the wrecked house with a flashlight, and called their names. He heard a scream and panned the beam over, and there was Liddy standing in the rubble. She was confused and terrified. She kept telling him that there was some mistake, that she wasn’t supposed to be here. But, he thought that she’d just been knocked unconscious, that she’d created this whole other reality as a way to process the trauma. He’d come up with a perfectly rational explanation for her story. I would have done the same thing.
But, then I showed up.
I was upending everything he’d ever known or believed about the universe. He asked me to start over and explain the whole thing, again. Was I really telling him that on the other side of this rift, the rimation, there was another reality where his whole family was still alive? I promised him I was telling the truth. He had a lot of questions about the membrane and Doctor Gettler. He wanted to see it for himself.
We decided it was best if nobody saw the two of us side by side, so I climbed into the trunk of Henry’s car and hid there until we got outside of town. The alternate version of me grabbed a couple of flashlights and we set off on foot toward the pit well.
We climbed the hill and carefully made our way over the crevices, until we got to the ridge overlooking the mine. The emergency crews were still hard at work, assessing the damage and making plans for repairs. I pointed to the section of the pit well where the black substance was covering the rimation. He said, “That’s it? Are you sure?” I told him that was it, that was how I’d come through. The other reality was waiting just beyond. Satisfied, we began the hike back to the car.
I should have known something was wrong by how quiet he was on the way back. I remember telling him that now he’d seen it, surely he understood the situation. Liddy didn’t belong here. She belonged with us. She belonged at home.
The other me shined a light on a wide crevice and signaled me to go ahead, and to be careful. I paused for a second to get my footing. That’s when I felt the first blow to the back of the head. He slammed the flashlight as hard as he could into my skull, sending me sprawling toward the crevice. I was confused at first. It never crossed my mind that he would attack me. He was me, for God’s sake. I would never intentionally try to kill another human being.
Now I know better.
He wasn’t me. Not really.
We’d stopped being the same person from the moment of the blast. He woke up in a world where he had lost everything. And, then I showed up in his father-in-law’s backyard to tell him that what he lost was waiting for him, just on the other side of the rift. He was already thinking ahead to the next problem. Only one of us could go back and live that life.
I would do anything for my family.
Of course, he would, too.
I tried to fight back, but my eyes were watering, my ears were ringing, my nose and mouth were filling up with blood. I tried to run but I kept stumbling over rocks and roots, and he just kept coming. It was a primal fight for survival, and I was losing, on the verge of death.
I did the only thing I could think to do. I pretended to lose my footing and stumbled over the edge of the crevice. I plummeted thirty feet and broke my left leg on the fall. Even though the pain was excruciating, I kept my eyes closed and slowed my breathing while he shined the flashlight down on me to see if I had survived. I figured he wouldn’t risk climbing down here to finish me off, not without any equipment or backup. Nobody knew where we were. After a couple of minutes, he left and I slipped into unconsciousness.
When I finally came to again, it was morning. There was no way I was going to make it back to top of the crevice, not with a compound fracture and still disoriented from my injuries. So, I did the only thing I could do. I started yelling for help. Over and over again, as loud as I could. For hours. No one heard me. I gave up. That’s the moment I was telling you about before. I thought, “This is the end.” Then, I did something I never thought I would do.
I prayed.
I said, “If you’re there, and you get me back to my family, I will believe. I will tell the world how wrong I was.” And, then I heard voices up on the ridge. Volunteer crews were coming to cleanup at the mine. I started yelling again, and this time, somebody heard me.
I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that I lost my mind when my wife and kids were killed in the blast. You’re going to say that I made up this whole other reality in response to the physical injuries and emotional trauma, and that in some kind of fugue state, I wandered out there searching for a rift. You think the rift is all in my mind.
I would have said the same thing before all this. I would searched for a logical answer.
I know you won’t believe me.
But, he took my daughter back through the rimation.
He’s with them right now. Taking my place.
I don’t belong here.
Now, all I can do is hope for a miracle.
All I can do is pray.
END TRANSCRIPT
* See Dr. Gettler’s followup summary below
Dr. Susan Gettler
Deputy Director
M-Theory Division
04/21/2020
Dear Madame Secretary,
After reviewing Mr. McDowell’s statement, my team traveled to Mineral City to investigate. We found no evidence of an active rimation, nor did we discover any residual echoes of inter-dimensional activity. As a precaution, we’ve purchased Carter Energy Company, which will allow us to monitor any potential activity under the pretense of operating a fossil fuel company.
There are a number of unanswered questions. For instance, how did he know about the M-Theory Division? Or, the name of my dog, Forteana? I’m left to conclude that there may have indeed been a rift due to the explosion, but the alternate version of me has sealed the opening and initiated containment protocols. It’s exactly what I would do here. In any case, given the emotional distress he’s suffered, I see no reason to keep him in confinement or deny him access to the HAM radio he’s requested. We will continue to observe.
Sincerely,
Dr. Susan Gettler
POTENTIAL FUTURE SEASONS
EMINENCE: A group of high school students searching for Indian burial mounds discover a long-buried manuscript from a controversial cult figure who believed in the existence of another dimension he called, “The Absolute.” When they begin meeting up to put his teachings into practice, they document the entire process, including the terrifying aftermath, when traces of the Absolute follow them back into our dimension.
HALF-LIGHT: A day trip to a national forest turns into a nightmare when a young mother’s two-year old son goes missing and she becomes the prime suspect in his disappearance. When she partners with an ambitious young reporter in an attempt to prove her innocence, she stumbles onto the biggest story of the century and unmasks a top secret government program that tracks the existence of inter-dimensional beings.
PROJECT 216: A struggling actress spends her days doing self-tape auditions in an apartment building dedicated to artists and scientists. After discovering a series of bizarre messages embedded in her audition tapes, she digs into the secret history of the apartment building and uncovers the truth behind the mysterious death of a troubled young scientist in that very same apartment half a century before she was born.
