Blackwater Lights

by Michael M. Hughes

  “Thanks.” He spooned a mouthful. Not bad. Cinnamon. “So what’s your deal, Mantu? You’re part of this thing, too?”

  Mantu grunted. His arms were thick as bedposts, muscled and veined. “You could say that, sure.” He pointed to the bowl. “Finish your oatmeal.”

  Micah entered and stood at the foot of the bed. “Well, you look much, much better, Ray. Alan worked on you while you slept. His qigong and poultices look like they stopped the inflammation.”

  Ray rubbed his leg. His knee still hurt, but the pain was a magnitude less. And the swelling had nearly subsided. “Whatever he did, it worked.”

  Mantu nodded. “Alan’s good. The best. We call him Dr. Qi.”

  Ray ran his fingers along the cut in his buttock. It had already scabbed over. “Okay. You guys are good. I get it. I trust you. But I need to know what’s going on.”

  Micah and Mantu exchanged glances. Micah’s eyes narrowed. “Word has come to us that Sheriff Morton is looking for you.”

  “Morton? For what?”

  Micah’s rheumy eyes reflected the orange glow from the fire. “A young woman has gone missing. Morton has pictures of you with her. Pictures that would put you away for a very long time. Crawford plays for keeps, Ray. That’s why we’re trying to help you.”

  Ray’s fists clenched. “But there’s a woman in town … who I got involved with. I have to make sure she’s okay. I need to know she’s okay.” He wasn’t sure it made sense, but he was worried about her. Intensely.

  Micah sat on his chair and pulled it closer to the bed. “We have no indication he’s after anyone but you. But just in case, let us know who this woman is and we’ll keep an eye on her.”

  “Her name is Ellen Davis. She works at the diner. She has a kid named William. So who’s going to be watching her?”

  “Our associates. The same ones who kept an eye on you. The ones who let us know you were probably lost somewhere in the woods, if you hadn’t drowned.”

  Ray shook his head. “I hope you’re telling the truth. Because I can’t let anything happen to her—it’s my fault she got mixed up in this. I need to see her. Or talk to her.”

  Micah grabbed Ray’s hand. His grip was almost painful. “I’m trying to explain to you how much danger you’re in. He will follow you. If he follows you and you go to her, you will lead him right to her. Is that what you want—to take him directly to her? I can’t even begin to tell you the horrible things he’s done to people who make him angry. If you get up and walk out of here now, the best thing you can hope for is that Morton will find you first and throw you in jail and deliver you to Crawford after he’s done with you. And that’s the best-case scenario. Is that what you want?”

  “Then what am I supposed to do? What are my options?”

  Micah exhaled loudly. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You don’t know?”

  Mantu walked to the foot of the bed. “It’s an honest answer.”

  Ray rubbed his eyes with his fists.

  Micah nodded. “I won’t lie to you, Ray. You deserve the truth. When I first saw you, I felt something stir. For whatever reason, for whatever purpose, your arrival set in motion a chain of events that is now moving faster than we could have foreseen. Faster than we can predict.”

  “You’re saying it’s my fault that all this is happening?” Denny had called him a catalyst, as if his mere presence had started a chemical reaction bubbling. Maybe he was right.

  “No, of course not. But you’ve accelerated things. The vipers are stirring. You poked their nest with a stick, and they’re agitated and angry because they’ve lost control.”

  Ray closed his eyes. His teeth scraped and his head throbbed. “What am I supposed to do? What can I do?”

  “You can help us find some answers to our questions. And we can help you find answers to yours.”

  “Fine.” He’d go along. He owed them.

  Micah stood and faced the stove. “Let’s start with what we know. It was the height of the Cold War, and if you knew the right people you could get funding for almost anything. Uncle Sam was throwing untraceable money at all sorts of projects, and there was a lot of interest in esoteric matters in those days—the supernatural, witchcraft, extrasensory perception, and the like. The military was at the center of that interest.”

  Ray nodded. “My uncle—Uncle Bill, the guy who took me to the camp—was into all that. Uri Geller and Kreskin and bending spoons. He tried to get me to bend a spoon with my mind. I couldn’t do it, and my mom thought he was nuts. But he was serious.”

  “Many people were serious about those things. Including the governments of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and both of them thought the other was gaining the advantage. And factions within the governments were obsessed with the pursuit of occult knowledge. In particular, the MKULTRA and BLUEBIRD contingents. And the remote viewers at Fort Meade. Project ONE. And MIRROR, of course.”

  “Your uncle,” Mantu said, “was a sociopathic piece of shit.”

  Micah held up his hand to quiet Mantu. “One group, which formed in 1947, was infamous for its research into … well, very unusual subjects. They were mostly CIA, but later also NSA and high-level military intel. They traveled around the world studying occult technologies from many cultures, from Asia to Africa to the Amazon and Haiti. Particularly shamanism and witchcraft.”

  Witchcraft. Something he never would have believed in only a few days earlier.

  “It was known informally as Project MIRROR. And it was enormously successful—way beyond what they had expected. But their success came with a heavy price. The men who got in the deepest—the ones putting the techniques into practice—had a tendency to die early. Or lose their minds.”

  The hair on the back of Ray’s neck stiffened. “This is about the lights, isn’t it?”

  Mantu nodded to Micah. “He’s getting it.”

  He didn’t want to believe it, but he felt the truth rising around him like an unexpected and dangerous ocean wave. “I don’t like where this is going.”

  “That’s understandable. I don’t like it, either. But it’s history—your history. So you must understand.”

  Ray ran his hands through his hair. He didn’t want to understand. He’d give everything to not understand, to be back home watching TV in his boxer briefs doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.

  “The project moved to Blackwater in the seventies. The lights weren’t well known, even in paranormal circles. But one of the Air Force officers came—and he saw them. The entire project relocated here. That’s where it all ended.”

  “Crawford was part of it?”

  “No. He learned about the original Project MIRROR about fifteen years ago. The lights became his fixation—his hobby, if you will. The problem was, even Crawford couldn’t get his hands on the data because it had all been destroyed. All of the records. All the documentation.”

  “Destroyed? How?”

  “The Project MIRROR people got in over their heads. Way over their heads. Many of them never recovered. Like your uncle. Do you know how things ended for him?”

  Crazy, rambling, incoherent Uncle Bill. “He died in an institution. In the eighties. My mom hardly ever talked about it.”

  Micah nodded. “The energy was more than they could handle, even the best of them. It blew them out. Like overloaded circuits. Even those who didn’t break right away—like your uncle—it got them eventually. And Congress was digging into abuses of covert activity. The Church Committee started getting too close, so the LAM Project records went up in smoke.”

  “Lamb Project?”

  Mantu corrected him. “L-A-M. A subproject of MIRROR. Ritual magic to invoke and communicate with discarnate entities.”

  “That’s not important right now,” Micah said. “The records were burned. The names of the children used in the study, including yours”—he pointed a knotted finger at Ray—“were lost. And the men involved in the study all died within twenty years after it ended. Som
e were murdered, most likely to keep them quiet.”

  “But Crawford … How did he—if everything was burned …”

  “Almost everything. Crawford found a partial list of names of the children several years ago, though we’re not sure how. Your friend Kevin was on that list.”

  Ray squeezed the bridge of his nose. His head ached. And it was only going to get much, much worse. He was sure of that. “So he got Kevin. And Kevin told him about me. But for what? What is so important about what happened? What did happen?” His mouth had gone dry. “What happened to me?”

  No one spoke. He looked from Micah to Mantu and back to the old man. “Again, we’re not a hundred percent sure. But we know the basics. The working group had one purpose—to make contact with the intelligences behind the lights.”

  “Did they?”

  “We believe they did. But their approach was … a bit unorthodox. They believed—based upon some CIA research done in Mexico in the 1950s and ’60s—that the best way to establish contact with noncorporeal intelligences wasn’t through external means, such as flashing lights at them or sending radio signals, but through the mind. Minds shaped by hypnosis and the proper combination of chemicals. And the best minds for the task were young, pliant, and open. Minds not burdened with doubt and skepticism.”

  Ray nodded. “Children.”

  “Yes. They sought out gifted children. The sensitive. The emotionally fragile. Those they thought might be the most receptive to their programming.”

  “So my uncle used me.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Mantu turned to Ray. “He was NSA. Did you know that?”

  “I knew he had been in the military, and that he worked for the government, but nothing else. If my mom knew, she never mentioned it.”

  “She wouldn’t have known. He worked almost exclusively on black-ops psychic projects. Telekinesis. The early remote-viewing stuff at Fort Meade. He knew everyone on the occult circuit, from San Francisco to New York and New Orleans.”

  Micah nodded. “He dabbled in everything. But his biggest interest was ritual magic. Making contact with nonphysical entities. Spirits. Angels. Aliens. Demons. Or whatever you want to call them.”

  “Okay, fine. So he was off the deep end. I knew that. But what happened to me? What did they do to me?”

  “Ray, do you know what dissociation means?”

  “Sure—the counselor my mom sent me to in high school told me I did it once in a while. When I’d just space out. He said I was prone to it.”

  “Well, dissociation can be useful. It’s an altered state, brought on through meditation, fasting, drugs, fear, trauma, or pain. The aim is to separate the mind from the body. Once freed from the flesh, the mind becomes greatly enhanced—much more receptive to outside influences. And manipulation.”

  “Okay, sure. But can we talk about specifics, please? I remember machines. What were they?”

  Mantu answered, “Psychotronics. Primitive EEGs to monitor your brainwaves. Electroshock, probably. They would have used what they knew was effective: a combination of sensory deprivation, disorientation, and a cycle of fear and reward. Drugs, too, very likely—mescaline, LSD, or some of the shorter-acting, experimental psychedelics they were cooking up at Edgewood. All to depattern you and break down what Huxley called the ‘doors of perception.’

  “They wanted to see what was behind the doors,” Mantu added. “Through the magic mirror. To touch it. To speak to it.”

  “And,” Micah said, “ultimately, to control it or to make use of its power. That was always their goal: power. It’s still their goal. That’s what drives them. That’s what consumes them.”

  Ray shook his head. “You’re telling me I was drugged, shocked, maybe tortured, so these guys could test their crazy theories?”

  “Yes,” Micah said. “But they weren’t crazy theories.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Micah looked grave. “They made contact with the entity or entities behind the lights. We don’t know what, if anything, they learned. But they used the minds of children—including yours—to open a doorway. And something saw that door open and came through.” The firelight dimmed, then flared. “Tell him, Mantu.”

  Mantu wiped sweat from his brow. “There’s only one oral account, from a witness who confessed to his wife before he died of cancer. According to him, they took the kids out into the woods. To an old, ancient spot. They made them sit in a circle, and set up movie cameras to document everything. The kids had been taught to enter a receptive state and to call to the lights. To invite them. And they did come. Just like that—right over their heads.” He looked at Micah, then back to Ray. “And then the children all started singing together.

  “Each child sang a different song. But when they sang together, under the lights, something happened. First, all the electronics blew out. Generators, lights, cameras, tape recorders, everything. The guy who confessed said the noise the kids made was like nothing he’d ever heard before and hoped never to hear again. He said it was like every tormented soul in hell babbling at the same time. Just wild, crazy gibberish, like a chorus of lunatics in an asylum, or millions of buzzing flies.”

  Ray’s heartbeat drummed in his ears.

  “And the men all started to scream. They couldn’t take it. Some of them ran off into the woods. Some just shit their pants and dropped right there, completely catatonic. One guy ripped at his ears until there was nothing left on the sides of his head but bloody holes. And the motherfuckers started shooting. Just pulling out their guns and shooting at anything that moved.

  “And then, a minute or two later, it stopped. The kids all shut up at the same time, like a switch had been turned off. But by then, eight men were dead or dying. Most of those remaining were blown out, insane, totally gone. Only a few—maybe half a dozen—came out without permanent mental damage. As far as we know. The rest—” He waved his finger in a circle around his ear. “Looney fucking Tunes.”

  “Mantu, please,” Micah said. “A little decorum. Ray, is hearing this helping you to remember more?”

  “Yes.” His mind reeled. “A lot of it is coming back. But what about the other kids? And me? Why don’t—why didn’t I remember any of this?”

  “Amnesia,” Micah said. “Their methods were crude but effective. They didn’t want any of their precious data getting into the wrong hands. So when they taught you to dissociate, they taught you to take anything that happened in that state and lock it away. In a secret room in your mind.”

  “Why? What good does it do them?”

  “They programmed in a key—a code, or phrase, or some sort of trigger—that would allow them to access those experiences. With the right words, sounds, or gestures they could open up that part of your mind and access that information.”

  “The ultimate cryptography,” Mantu said. “Using humans to hide data. The people carrying the data have no idea they’re being used. And only a few of the bigwigs running the project knew the password to get at the data. It was brilliant.”

  Micah nodded. “It was indeed. Virtually unbreakable.”

  “And Crawford has the password?”

  Micah shook his head. “I don’t think so—otherwise he would have just gotten what he needed from you while they had you. He probably wanted to gain your confidence, to have you work with him willingly. It’s always easier that way. Even Crawford would have a hard time getting inside the mind of someone who actively resists. The rumors tell us the code was distributed among the children, so no one individual had the full sequence. But he knows you have a piece of what he’s after. We can only imagine by now that he’s found many of the others, like you, and accessed them. Broken the seals hiding what’s embedded in their minds. He’s heard their part of the strange song that came through all of you that night. We believe he’s close to putting it all together. So he can finally make contact.”

  “And now he wants to hear you play your solo,” Mantu said.

  He told them eve
rything he remembered over a dinner of spicy stewed vegetables and dark bread.

  Micah scooped up the last of his soup with a hunk of bread. “If Crawford is the brains behind their lodge, Lily is the power. Without her, he’d never have gotten as far as he has.” He chewed, staring at the empty bowl. “And you say you refused her?”

  “She invited me into her house. I refused her. Yes.”

  Mantu recoiled. “You are one strong motherfucker to resist her. Queen Bee doesn’t like it when somebody turns her down. The bitch doesn’t like that at all.” Ray nodded. “Yeah. I got that.”

  The room grew quiet. Logs popped and snapped in the woodstove.

  At last Micah spoke in a low, slow voice. “Ray, we need you. We need your help. You’ve given us the chance to catch them off guard. For years, they’ve carried on and all the while we could only watch and wait. And now you’ve stirred them up—you’ve enraged them. They need you, but we need you, too. You can help us.”

  Ray stiffened. Now he understood where all of this was going.

  “Ray, you can help draw them out.”

  They looked so weak and powerless, the two men across from him. The scarred, feeble preacher, leader of a backwoods cult with delusions of grandeur, and his deluded sycophant. Going up against people like Crawford—filthy-rich, highly connected criminals—with what? Prayers? White magic? Voodoo?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t. I’m not going to be your bait. I’m not going to fight your war. I didn’t want any of this. I’m not cut out for this.”

  Micah lowered, then shook, his head. Mantu turned and faced the fire.

  Ray stared at his hands—pale, empty hands. “I can’t help you. I’m grateful for all you’ve done for me. I just need to get out of here.” The words were hollow and weak, but true nonetheless. If he didn’t get out of this web of insanity, he was going to fracture.

  Micah pointed to the door with a turn of his head. Mantu left the room, leaving the door cracked. Micah leaned closer, putting his warm, leathery hand on Ray’s shoulder. “How old were you when you were brought here?”