“Dealt with it how?”
“Tying black arts and whatnot into the tests they were performing.”
“Why? Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What were they trying to achieve?”
“Gino, I promise you, I have no fucking idea.”
“Give me your best guess.”
Herm thought about it a while. “Well, as for the Japanese specifically, I know their culture is steeped in the spiritual world. Ghosts, for example, play a huge part in their history and culture even to this day. I think they likely would’ve incorporated magic or rituals they were familiar with culturally—which accounts for the salt and talisman—but at the end of the day, seems like the point was to tap into whatever lies beyond our reality and utilize it for their own purposes. First and foremost, governments always try to figure out how something can be weaponized or used for power and control. Why would anything they may have come across in the world of the occult be any different?”
“Maybe because the world of the occult doesn’t exist?” Quinn scoffed.
Gino glanced at her dismissively. “Herm, you said something about entities. What was that shit all about?”
“Supposedly the Japanese introduced black magic and dark rituals into these occult programs to try and see into other realms. You know, the afterlife, other dimensions, the spirit world, that kind of thing. I didn’t take it that seriously, to be honest. I assumed it was something that happened because they’d broken these people’s minds during the tests and torture. Our government did something similar with the MK-Ultra Project. All sorts of depravation tests were done, there was horrible physical, sexual and psychological abuse, and in a lot of those cases, once the subjects’ minds were shattered they started to see shit too.”
“Entities and other realities?” Gino asked. “Like these motherfuckers?”
Herm shrugged helplessly. “I—yeah—I guess so.”
“Was it real? Did it actually happen?”
“Of course not,” Quinn interrupted. “The poor souls were hallucinating.”
“Problem is, if they were hallucinating,” Herm said, “somehow they all saw the same things.”
“They likely saw similar things,” Quinn countered, “not identical.”
“The man asked what I knew, Quinn. I’m doing my best to answer him, all right? According to what little I’ve read on this, the reports claimed the test subjects saw the same entities, the same realms. Not similar, the same. Maybe that’s bullshit, but—”
“Maybe? Seriously?”
“I don’t know,” Gino said. “This shit looks pretty real to me.”
Quinn pushed by them, heading back toward the corridor. “The death, torture and horrors that took place here were obviously very real. But it was human beings that did these things. There’s no such thing as spirits or demons. God forgive them for what they did here, but the only monsters in this world are human.”
“In this world,” Dallas said.
“Yeah, Dal, in this world. You know, the one we’re in.”
“What about whatever’s out there?”
Quinn stopped in the doorway and looked back. Her eyes found her husband in the darkness. “What about it?”
“Maybe it’s…”
“Whatever’s on this island with us is as human as we are. It has to be.”
Harper’s eyes filled with tears. “But it’s not,” she said, trembling.
Rather than respond, Quinn turned and slipped into the corridor.
The others followed, leaving the room, and all its carnage to the dark.
Where it belonged.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They stood by the firelight, staring at the iron contraptions before them.
“Depravation chambers,” Quinn said.
Most were large enough to easily accommodate a grown man, but a couple were smaller, and designed for the subject to be forced into a fetal position before the lid was closed and locked behind them. All but two were outfitted with a round window in the front roughly the size of a saucer. On the opposite wall was a long table and some overturned chairs, which had once most likely served as some sort of observation and reporting area. In one of the chairs still upright, a body sat crumpled over, clad in what was left of a tattered lab coat, head resting on the table, skeletal arms dangling, fingers of bone frozen in a reach for the floor. Closer inspection revealed a pistol near his feet, and a large hole blown out through the back of the man’s skull. Whatever had happened here, he’d chosen to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger rather than face it.
Three more skeletons lay on the floor near the depravation tanks. All three had been executed, shot in the head while kneeling. Two were without clothing, hands bound with wire at the wrist and fastened behind their backs.
The third wore a uniform, but it was different than the others they’d seen.
Kicking a pair of old helmets and other debris out of the way, Herm crouched down next to the body and studied the markings and patches on the clothing. “This one was Australian,” he said. “Good chance these others were too. Must’ve been POWs.”
Along the other wall, Quinn found a series of shelves holding an array of jars and other items. But it wasn’t until she held the torch closer that she realized the things in the jars were human body parts and internal organs floating in murky fluid. She forced a swallow and backed away, but the others had seen it too.
“My God,” she said in a loud whisper. “What is wrong with us?”
“Don’t lump us in with this fucking scum,” Gino scoffed, turning toward her with one of his typical confrontational poses. “I’ve never done anything like this, have you? Would you? Could you?”
Quinn never gave him an answer, but not because she didn’t have one.
“Hey, through here,” Herm said, noticing a door that led to another room. An old ring of keys still hung from the lock, but the door was open, so he ventured inside.
The others followed.
A small and boxy area, a row of three concrete cells lined the back wall.
A closer look revealed the thick wood doors on each cell had been outfitted with a small slot one could look through, but due to the lack of light, it was impossible to make out anything.
Herm tried the first door. Locked.
The second was unlocked, but except for a wooden pallet in the corner that looked to have been some sort of primitive bed, it was empty.
Herm moved to the third door. It too was unlocked, but as he stepped inside, allowing the torch to illuminate the cell around him, the walls came to life. Completely covered with an eerie series of scrawls and writing scratched into the concrete itself, it looked like what it probably was, the scribblings of a madman.
“Holy shit,” Herm mumbled.
A skeleton sat slumped over in one corner. The cell contained the same sort of pallet bed the previous one had, but this one had been torn apart. The planks lay in a pile, nails protruding from many of them. Herm swept the torch back over to the body. A nail was still clutched in the prisoner’s skeletal hand.
“These torches aren’t going to last much longer,” Quinn said from somewhere behind him. “We need to…”
Her voice fell silent when she saw the walls, and then the body.
Herm had already begun reading what he could. “He was Australian, an officer, a POW they transported here with a bunch of others. His name and rank are here. He…”
Much of what was there was difficult to read, partly because much of it had faded, partly because the writing was scratched and done in an obviously weak and shaky hand, and partly because the man had been put in this cell and starved to death while being monitored and studied.
“He was trying to tell his story here,” Herm said through a hard swallow. “They put him in here and just watched him die. Slowly, over time. No food or water. It’s hard to follow but he was trying to tell what happened here, the things they were doing.”
> “Why would they let him write that on the walls?” Dallas asked.
“Not sure. Maybe seeing what he’d do and what he was thinking was part of the experiment.”
“But why would they leave it there? I mean, if this whole thing was so secretive, why allow a prisoner to leave behind evidence and explanations of what was going on?”
“Because this guy wasn’t going anywhere,” Gino said. “He was gonna die in that cell and nobody was ever gonna come for him or even find this place, so who cares what the poor bastard scratches into the walls?”
Herm ran his free hand over his face then continued to read where he could make out the words. After several minutes, he continued to relay what he could to the others. “He knew he was dying, he…he says goodbye to his parents and his sister, he—it’s hard to make out everything—he...he keeps writing he’s in Hell.” He continued reading, frantically trying to piece together the ramblings scrawled there by a man seventy years ago. “The others that came here with him, the other prisoners, most were killed during the experiments, he…he could hear them dying, their screams, how one pleaded for mercy, begged for his mother but…”
Despite the fire, it seemed to get darker just then.
“He…he says something about evil, they—they’re bringing Hell here, they’re trying to…Jesus…most of this is really hard to read or make sense of, he…he’s talking about them bringing these things here…”
“Things?”
Herm looked away from the wall and over at the others. “Demons.”
“The entities you were talking about,” Gino said. “These fuckers were doing rituals and experiments that conjured fucking demons?”
“There’s no such thing,” Quinn said.
“You sure about that?”
“Are you seriously telling me you—”
“I don’t know. These guys were seeing something.”
“They put this man in a cell and left him there,” she reminded him. “Watched him slowly die with no food or water, watched him lose his mind and eventually his life, studying the process to see how long it took and how it played out. By the time he was writing these things he was probably already completely out of his mind.”
“No,” Herm said, turning back to the scrawls, moving the torch slowly in an attempt to read more. “No, he wasn’t, he—I don’t think he was, Quinn, he—he knew he was dying, he knew he was losing it but that’s why he was scratching these things into the walls, he—he needed to tell what he was seeing and hearing and experiencing, even if he thought no one would ever see it. He needed to get it out, maybe—maybe it was the only way he could process it himself. They could look in on him through the slot in the door, but he could look out too. And he did. He saw things, he—he heard and witnessed things—he may have gone crazy but what he’s saying, it…it fits with the things I’ve read before. He’s talking about how they figured out how to bring these things here through the pain and torture but they couldn’t…they couldn’t…” He kept reading, bending down to follow a series of lines near the floor. “Those photographs, it makes sense, it—he’s saying—I mean, it’s in bits and pieces and it rambles into other things here and there, it—it doesn’t always make perfect sense, okay? The poor bastard wrote this over what was probably weeks, and he only had a rudimentary grasp of Japanese he’d picked up over time, but the gist, far as I can tell, is they were able to make these entities—whatever the hell they were—manifest, and once they did, the subject, the—the ones who saw them—were invaded.”
“That’s why they looked possessed,” Gino said. “Because they were.”
Herm nodded vigorously. “Yeah, they—it didn’t work, it—they couldn’t control these things. Once inside the subjects they tore them apart—or they tore themselves apart, it—it’s not clear, I mean, a lot of this makes no sense, it—”
“And this does?” Quinn asked.
“Look, there’s a lot of this I can’t even make out, but I’m pretty sure what he means here,” Herm said, running a finger along one section of cell wall, “is they started to try the same thing but with dead bodies. It didn’t work with the living, so they tried it with the recently dead to…”
“Animate them?” Dallas asked softly.
Quinn shot him a look. “Not you too. You’re buying into this?”
“He’s written ‘It’s Coming’ at least ten times here. He says they kept trying to conjure something specific from the others they tried, something big…a…a warrior spirit…but it didn’t work.” Herm looked up at them, his face twisted with terror and disbelief. “Until it did.”
“The man was out of his mind. And there’s something else. It almost seems too perfect. Like maybe we were supposed to find all this.”
“You’re overthinking it, Quinn, getting paranoid. Trust me, nobody wanted this place found.” Flame from the torch moved across Herm’s face. “Remember when I told you that with the Japanese the wall between the spirit world and this one is much thinner than in our culture? In the beliefs of many—and even more so back then—there’s a long history of bringing the dead back, of them returning as both protective and vengeful spirits, do you understand? That’s what this man was saying, that’s what he’s telling us all these years later. They figured out that when human beings are tortured and deprived of most if not all of their senses and they’re being introduced to levels of pain and abuse beyond anything we’re designed to handle, and likely being given mind-altering drugs on top of it, slowly, as the body breaks and the mind follows, the subjects begin to see these things. Just like the subjects did in the Nazi’s experiments and those that were used in the MK-Ultra tests. Supposedly, once these entities manifested, not only the subjects saw them, but those conducting the tests did too. These things somehow passed from the spirit world to ours, or maybe it was an interdimensional thing, I—I don’t know, I know it sounds insane, but I’m pretty sure they were trying to conjure demonic warrior spirits in this place, vengeful spirits that would protect and serve them. Ultimate soldiers, in a sense. No feelings, no remorse or morality, just a blind loyalty to protect and avenge. They tried it with living subjects, but it didn’t work because they couldn’t be contained, and these things tore their hosts to shreds. So they tried it with dead bodies. And it worked. At least once, it worked. That’s what this poor sonofabitch witnessed as they slowly starved him to death. The result was a killing machine. Pure rage and violence. And that’s exactly what this thing would have been.”
“Would’ve been?” Gino asked. “Or still is?”
“We’ve already established none of these people could still be alive,” Quinn said.
“If this is real,” Herm said, “it’s not alive. Not really.”
“Whoever’s out there isn’t a spirit or some fucking ghost!” Quinn snapped. “It’s physical, it’s flesh and blood! It killed Murdoch!”
“It’s using the physical…a body long dead, it—”
“Do you hear yourself?”
“Maybe possession alters physical limitations, slows down the decaying process or something, alters it somehow, I have no fucking idea.”
“This is real life, Herm.”
“Thank you, Quinn, for that amazing bit of in-depth analysis.”
“Oh, fuck you. This is ridiculous. I know you’re scared. I am too. But this is crazy horror movie bullshit. This is fantasy. This is fucking insane. You’re taking literally the scribblings of a madman who was—”
“Wait.” Herm came up out of his crouch and stumbled right by Quinn and out of the cell. “Harper, you—you saw this fucking thing.”
Harper winced and grabbed hold of Gino.
“Focus up, goddamn it,” Herm growled. “You need to answer me.”
Gino pulled himself free of her. “Do what he says, honey.”
Herm began to pace, trying to put his thoughts together, his mind reeling. “You said it looked like a monster, that it had horns and it looked like it was covered in metal. Right? That’s what
you said, isn’t it?”
Harper said nothing, but nodded slowly.
“Could those horns have been part of a helmet? Could the metal you saw have been armor? Think back to what you saw.”
She shrugged and began to tremble.
“Damn it, is that what you saw?”
“What are you on to?” Dallas asked.
“I got a…a theory maybe, a…an idea, I…I don’t know but…” Herm turned away from her, pacing again nervously. “Okay…Okay…just hear me out a second, I—I think I may have something here. One of the more prominent protective and vengeful spirits in the Japanese culture are the spirits of great samurai warriors, okay? I’m thinking out loud here, so go with me. If you go back to traditional samurai warriors of the, say, the seventeenth century, when they’re in full regalia, they’re…they’d be…they’re horrifying. Squares of metal body armor, iron helmets with horns—basically a kind of stylized deer antler kind of thing—ah, face—faceplates of iron or leather, sometimes both. That’s exactly what they looked like. They were deadly, highly skilled killers, and the most prominent weapon they carried was a huge sword. The Empire would’ve had access to these historical things, and if this worked, like the shit all over these walls says it did…then…then maybe they couldn’t control this thing so they just cut and ran. Or the war ended and they abandoned the place. I don’t know, maybe they purified the ground where it was conjured but it didn’t work. I’m saying…”
“What?” Gino pressed. “You’re saying what?”
Herm’s shoulders slumped and he hung his head. “I—I don’t know what the hell I’m saying because it makes no sense and Quinn’s right, it’s—”
“Say it anyway.”
Herm removed his glasses and wiped perspiration from his face with his free hand. “This thing, maybe it went to sleep. Or something like sleep. And when we came here, all these years later, it woke up. And now it’s doing what it was designed to do, protecting this island with a level of vengeance and violence we can’t even imagine. It slaughters anything that gets in its way or comes across its path.”
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