This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.
It was a small facility on the western side of Atlanta, Georgia. Nestled in the woods, you might never have thought anyone up there was up to anything.
Nothing going on here.
It was one of those places. It was a solid red brick building covered in kudzu. It was easy to just pass it by, especially with the inscribed door that said General scientific facility west, Do not Enter.
The building was much larger than expected and positioned as it was in the landscape you couldn’t tell that there was any more to the building than the eye could see. Built into a hill, the rest of it went deep underground. From the surface, it just looked like it was a single story. There were a couple of cars parked outside.
It would take a native from that side of town to know that it was always the same two cars and that they never moved. One of them couldn’t move at all and was long ago abandoned by some teenagers who had escaped from the local police after being caught at it in the back seat. They escaped over the fence years ago, and never had the nerve to come back and get the car. Good for them. Married now, they had two kids. He hated his job, she didn’t like hers, and ends were stretching thin these days, but they never forgot that night. This is not their story, it’s just something fun to think about.
The other car was not a car anymore now than it was anything else. It didn’t run. Most of its guts were torn apart years ago and replaced with strange and bizarre scientific equipment, surveillance cameras and other things that were difficult to explain because they were from another world. Patched into the old SUV was enough equipment, crossed with enough other things around the small compound that if a chipmunk farted too hard a hundred feet from the front door, you could tell how many acorns he had in his mouth at the moment.
The back door was the only one that anyone ever used anymore. There were a few cars, and a light bus parked back there where employees came in and out on a regular basis. It was an odd 48-hour schedule. At the moment, everyone was at work, and there was something in the air. Something was going to happen, and no one knew what it was. Some of the scientists thought they knew what it was. Some of the military officials who were visiting today thought they knew what it was too, but none of them knew what was going to happen.
It was sad.
Of all the things that people shouldn’t be screwing around with, This was it. The people inside, with all their experience and knowledge, were just too stupid to realize it.
Simon Dunbar stood by the back door, with a cigarette in his mouth, and a pale expression on his face. His work overalls were dirty and seemed to be steaming. There was a stain on his leg that seemed to have a life of its own. He looked at it and brushed away as if it were nothing. It jumped from his pant leg, fell to the ground and then became a still puddle on the loading dock.
“Heh,” he said, and tossed the butt of his cigarette at it. It burst into flame and sank into the ground, disappearing in a mist of purple fire.
“That’s enough of that crap. Assholes don’t know what the hell they’re up to in there. Goddam military assholes.”
He stood up, took his mop, and finished wringing it out.
“You’d think they’d have some kind of robot or something to clean up the place by now.”
Simon looked around himself. Just like always, there was nothing. Nobody there. Nothing ever happened around here and nothing ever did.
“You’d think these guys would understand it. Here I am, top security clearance, and I’m emptying the trash cans.”
He looked around himself again and shrugged off the feeling that someone was watching him. Someone almost always was.
He made his way through the screen door, and on through another secured door behind that, which was three feet thick.
As soon as Simon was behind the door, a dark sedan pulled up. It looked like it was half new and half old. New equipment modern dashboards and a dusty black finish on the outside with fins that looked like they were from the 1950s. It looked like the car was both clean, and that it hadn’t been washed in about a hundred years. It was impossible not to be a total wreck of rusted garbage by now, yet it hummed right along, smooth as any modern car.
Mr. Michael David Christopher opened the door and stood from the car. He walked by the old SUV that was loaded with sensors and equipment, none of which was able to pick him up in the slightest. He looked in through the driver’s window on the SUV. He put on the white jacket to his suit, and then, adjusting his tie and fedora, he reached in and pulled the plug on the sensors. Then he pulled a small electrical device from his pocket, and doused the sensors in orange light, cutting the device the rest of the way from the dash.
Within a moment, the camera turned back on, there was a slight flicker. It appeared otherwise to continue reporting that everything was all clear. It even beeped to let you know everything was as right as rain.
Michael looked around and slipped passed the fence like it wasn’t locked, which it was, with lots of padlocks and barbed wire and electric shock wire on top of that. The thing was, when Michael came to the gate, none of it was there. He just pushed it open and slipped through, and on to the back deck. A moment later he heard it clang closed behind him, and when it did, it was completely locked up again. Anyone else walking up to the gate would see it covered in wire and padlocks. They just didn’t exist when Michael was looking at them.
He moved forward. It was now starting to get a little dark, but that didn’t matter. He worked his way around to the back door, and pushed open the screen door, and walked through it. There was a small greenhouse there, about ten feet square, with a door on the other side with a large computer key-code lock. Around him were plants of various kinds and sizes. A few were ornamentals. There were flowers on one side, with a Schefflera. There were various kinds of fruits and vegetables on the other side. There was a small bench there as well, with some digging tools next to it.
He looked over at the computer key-code system and sat on the bench to take a close look at it. He crossed one leg over the other one, took a pack of gum from his pocket, and began to chew it as he sat there and thought about it. It looked like a regular telephone keypad, and it looked like there was some kind of a swipe card mechanism on the other side of it as well.
“Double sure,” he said. “Double indeed. They are out of their minds. How am I supposed to get through that? No matter. Someone will open it for me.”
He sat for a moment and imagined someone opening the door from the inside. He thought of someone coming out to check something, while he snuck in. He closed his eyes and he imagined the door opening up. That someone coming out and beginning to tend the plants that were there, and just not noticing as he waltzed right in.
He opened his eyes and the door was hanging open. Standing before him a mid-forty-something man was beginning to kneel at the bed of plants in front of him. He was listening to music at top volume on some headphones. Bopping along, the man had no idea and did not look up as Michael walked right by him.
He had that knack, for keeping out of people’s way. He’d always had it, best not to think about it or he might get caught.
Through the great electronic door, that was at least three feet thick, he made his way through and down into the corridors. Already past three more guards, each unable to detect him for completely different coincidental reasons, he remembered that he was thinking about being sneaky again.
Simon looked at the spill. He nudged it. It looked back at him with disgust.
He stepped into the spill, sending droplets of the curious creature splashing in all directions. He scraped his foot through it, and then off of his work boot on the edge of his rolling mop bucket. The liquid glowed with a phosphorescent sheen in the darkness of the upper level of the underground laboratory. He was up on a ledge near the catwalks that spanned over the middle of the place. He reached out with his mop and wiped out the stain. It complained a bit and whimpered as he dropped the mop into the bucket, and pulled the yellow handle to wring the mop out with. The stain fell into the bucket, and swirled around in there, biting at the sides.
It taunted him and growled.
Simon stooped over the bucket and lined up his shot. He was carrying a small container with an eyedropper. In it was a purple steaming liquid.
“Take that,” he said and dropped a single drop of the green liquid into the bucket. It began to fizzle. Soon the water was clear.
There, he thought. Enough of that nonsense for the evening. He leaned on the handrails nearby and looked down at the little men in white coats who were bustling around checking their equipment. They were moving around like bees with nothing to do. He liked to watch them, even though he had no idea what he should do about them.
Something about them wasn’t right. It made him hungry and nauseous to work in here sometimes. He patted his stomach. It would go away.
They were busy today, it looked like something more than normal was up, but he couldn’t tell what it was. The truth was most of what they were up to didn’t make a lot of sense.
He stepped backward, pulling his bucket and mop with him into a small elevator with no front door, and held on as it slid down to the bottom floor of the laboratory. He worked his way through, listening to everyone as he kept a careful mind about making sure he watched the floor like he was paying attention to what he was doing.
In the middle of the floor was a large open space, where great huge spikes rose into the air, and matching ones hung from the ceiling. It looked like the mouth of a futuristic vampire of some kind.
Little pops of energy spiked from point to point as the lab techs jumped around, tweaking dials and checking their work against large print-outs, which they immediately threw away where they piled onto the floor.
“Hey you,” one of them said.
“Me?” said Simon.
“Yeah, you. We need you to make sure that lane over there is spotless.”
It looked like a series of benches in a circle near the spikes that were coming from the floor.
“Are you sure that’s wise? The electricity and all?”
“We’ll tell you when things are safe around here, now, get in there. We’re about to begin!”
Simon trudged in, shaking his head, and looking around as little as possible. He was aware of the mess in front of him. It looked like more of the ghoulish sentient slime, and a combination of human blood and alien vomit.
“Where did they get this stuff?”
Behind him, a count-down started in large orange numbers. They were pulsating up there and counting down as the heat and crackle of the spiked probes began to spark up again. He shuffled his way to the side and took a moment to look around.
He almost saw Michael there, but missed him by a blink, as did many others in the room as he made his way through. Those who did see him walk in thought he belonged there and dismissed his presence.
Michael stepped forward over the catwalk and marked his path, looking down over the sparking arcs. He’d seen something like this before, but he wasn’t sure what to call it. It was definitely some kind of a gate or something, or was it a trans-dimensional rift? He couldn’t remember. When science and alien tech mixed in the name of any of the world’s governments, it was never a good idea.
He looked down through the electric zaps and pops of purple energy arcing back and forth and kept it in the back of his mind that no one would notice him up here while he worked. He looked around and accepted the fact that no one was looking in his direction. Then took that idea for granted, and lowered himself from one catwalk to another one, down where he could get a closer look.
US soldiers were patrolling on this level, overseeing the project, but not close enough to get in the way. They walked right passed him as he stood way off to the left side of the walkway. He kneeled and lay down on the catwalk and reached down as close to the arcing energy as he could stretch to.
Behind him, on the walls was the countdown. Was it ten days or ten minutes? How fast was it all going? He watched a minute finish ticking off. Ugh, it was ten minutes. Not much time to figure out what they were up to here.
He reached down again and held out his hand. Clenched in his fist was a small device, it looked like a green thumb-shaped item, glowing on one end. He reached it out, allowing all thoughts of being caught or even being noticed to pass over him, and out of his mind. The end of the green item opened. He squeezed a small button that sucked a tiny amount of the arcing electricity into it. It processed for a couple of seconds, and then the answer went straight into Michael’s mind. His eyes glowed with a green flicker, as the transfer happened.
Of course, that’s what they were up to. They were trying to open a gate into a parallel dimension. Why would they want that? What would be the point? Well, there were the obvious reasons, but most of them didn’t make any sense, even time travel wasn’t worth it when it came down to it. I mean, how many times could you go to the first game of the 1963 world series for a first date anyway? Even in a separate dimension, there was a possibility of meeting yourself. It made for a terrible social life.
He stood up and looked both ways. The military police were talking about sports, and about their wives. They talked about what they were expecting to see during their next chance at leave. He looked down and the men in lab coats were too busy to look up. The arcs were flying, and it looked a little unstable, but you could never tell.
This was always the problem with dimensional travel, especially when you were opening gates from one to another like this. You just never knew what it was that was going to come through. Sometimes you got lucky, and there would be a nice meadow with a couple of cow-like creatures you could snag just to prove you did it. Other times you could find a place like Earth where they brought their summer movies out three months earlier than we did. You could score an early screening of the next big blockbuster. Otherwise, dimensional travel was a pretty useless thing, unless you were hoping for a disaster to happen. If you knew what you were doing, that could be even more dangerous. It could be a nightmare.
“What were they up to?” said Michael.
Simon sloshed forward, the black liquid was starting to spew from thin air into the room from where the arcs of energy were crossing just a little too much. He looked around, up and down, and thought about it. Where would that stuff be coming from? He shook it off. Just clean it up. That’s all he was supposed to do.
“Just clean it up.”
He shuffled forward and sloshed an amount of water onto the floor. The black liquid seemed to soak into the mop with vicious speed, and disappear. Simon was proud of himself. He shook the mop into the wringer. It was already dry. He pulled the mop up to his face and watched as the strands dried up before his eyes and the stain reached the entire length of the mop and then dried to a solid black mass. Then it started flaking off like fresh ash.
“I’m going to have to get a fresh mop again, that’s like the third time today.”
Pulling the rolling bucket, now without a mop stick to help him maneuver it around, he plodded over to a small locker, where he kept his supplies and pulled out a fresh mop. He tossed the remains of the other aside, where it clattered to the ground and then shattered into a million pieces. A wind from below spread the ash out.
He shook his head. Something else to clean up.
He took the fresh mop and pulled a broom and dustpan out as well, and while the mop was starting its initial soak, he gathered up the remains of his old mop. He dropped a couple of extra drops of his fizzing liquid into his bucket. He threw the ash into a nearby bin marked ‘unstable do not touch,’ and continued working on the spill with a fresh mop.
The large display was counting down fast, and if he hadn’t seen them do this a thousand times already, he would have been concerned, like he was the first fifty or so times before it got boring.
Michael, while he’d seen this kind of thing before, was still anxious as hell about it. He’d seen times when this kind of thing had gone wrong before, but also because he’d seen how foolish people could be, especially with technology. Below him now, not twenty feet away, Simon was working on another spill pouring into the lab from some other dimension and time. This time it was still dark in color, but definitely green and rough and glop-like in texture. It just sort of splattered on the floor, and with each half-gallon, Simon’s brow seemed to furrow even more than Michael thought it was possible to do so.
He heard footsteps and froze. He imagined himself in another place and time, out of range of the scientists below who were looking at less than three minutes to go before all hell broke loose. A small pack of them slipped by him, crouched on the catwalk, and never noticed that his tie was dangling right in front of them.
Michael watched as Simon heaved full mop-load after load of the green stuff into the bucket. The stuff seemed to be disappearing as he did it. What was that stuff he was using to drop in there? Did it transport toxic waste to another dimension?
Simon looked up.
Michael looked down.
Their eyes locked.
“He’s seen me!”
Michael fell from the catwalk, ten feet from Simon and darted for the small open elevator that carried people up to the upper catwalks. Simon watched him make the climb. No one else seemed to care that he was there. Maybe he was down from the main office? Something like that? He didn’t know and didn’t care. What concerned him was how he was going to keep this part of the floor from disintegrating before his eyes. The arcs of purple were even more intense than usual this time. He could hear the scientists and military men in the control booth calling out numbers and coordinates. Someone called for someone else to keep it focused this time. It didn’t concern him much, and as for the guy, what guy?
Michael stayed in a corner, imagining that he was on a beach in Florida rather than here at the moment, and how there seemed to be more money for books, and less interest in going to play mini-golf than he thought at first for this trip when he went totally unseen again. Simon, now a hundred feet below was concentrating on a piece of the floor that was starting to rip away before his eyes.
The countdown on the clock was close to zero.
It was almost there.
Time seemed to slow down as the last few seconds elapsed on the board. When it reached critically there was a massive explosion. Save for the purple arcing lights, which transformed themselves into a massive circular gateway, everything else in the room simultaneously exploded, imploded, fried and then exploded again. Metal shrapnel went everywhere. It’s possible that the first casualties got it from exploding iron filings, built up in their blood. Michael was never sure.
The gate opened with a white-hot light and creatures of every description began to pour into the room. They were dark and slimy, their eyes rose on great stalks, and small fluttery useless wings beat behind their forearms like broken umbrellas attached to elephants. Many of the scientists were immediately trampled. Others lost their minds on the spot, which started to leak from their left ears. The creatures, three-legged behemoths, romped around the room and up the walls. They tore down catwalks and rampaged over everyone.
Michael stayed silent, and unseen, something he saw as necessary. He would admit he was a coward, but it was the right thing to do if he was going to stop this from spreading any further. He was about to send a message to his car outside when one of the creatures picked up Simon with its central foot, which doubled as a thrashing arm and threw him into the portal. At that moment the white-hot light of the portal exploded again. Everyone, including the creatures, smashed against the walls. Simon’s body also flew against the wall, but in the darkness, no one could see it.
Michael’s body stayed put.
The gate remained open, flickering.
Michael slipped down, pulling a flashlight from his pocket, and making his way down the remains of the wall. At the base of the gate, was a power station. If he could just get to that. He reached out and pulled the power switch. Would he see the end of this fiasco, or would he help create a larger mess?
The explosion rocked the hillside where the laboratory was. Out on the surface, the building fell into the ground, as if sucked into another dimension, which is what was happening to it. Michael’s car remained still, held by its own internal force.
The gate remained rock steady.
Standing at the base of it, looking out at the now open sky stood Michael.
Standing next to him was Simon, or at least the remains of Simon. Still in his overalls and work shirt, what stood there now was the spliced remains of two creatures. One the janitor of the unheard of, and the other a creature from another dimension. It was white, pale, and gibbering.
Michael stood there and watched Simon, wondering if the former janitor-thing would kill him before he could escape.