Orphans of Wonderland

by Greg F. Gifune

  Joel’s gut tightened. “Trent, where are we going?”

  “It’s okay,” he answered, pulling onto a desolate road near the water.

  But Joel knew exactly where they were. The deserted side street littered with abandoned old factories and mills, the road that led to Tuser Industries. “Trent—”

  “We’re not going to the same place they took you. Relax.”

  “You were there?”

  “I was nearby and watching what went down.”

  “Why didn’t you do something then? They could’ve killed me.”

  “If they’d wanted to kill you at that point, you’d have already been dead.”

  “Barney…”

  Trent glanced at him. “The homeless guy?”

  Joel nodded.

  “Collateral damage. Nothing I could do.”

  “You could’ve stopped it. You could’ve saved that old man’s life.”

  “I told you, the time had to be right. I had to show myself to you when you were ready to see me, ready to believe what I have to tell you.” He pulled into the weed-infested lot in front of an old mill, and then drove around back, traversing the rugged terrain until he’d found a spot sufficiently hidden from the road. “Let’s go.” He shut the Jeep off and hopped out.

  Joel followed him through a blown-out door at the rear of the building and into a shadowy hallway that smelled like vomit and urine. Shielding his nose, he and Trent climbed a battered staircase to the second floor and into a large room with a row of mostly broken windows along the wall that faced the street. A few old pieces of furniture lay about amid the debris and trash, and Joel noticed a bedroll and pile of personal items he assumed belonged to Trent. Along with a gas-operated hotplate and other camping gear, the items appeared as if he’d been here for some time.

  Without explanation, Trent crouched down and began rummaging around in an old knapsack on the floor. He removed a bottle of water, a tin and two metal mugs, and then, using a small cylinder of propane, fired up his hotplate.

  “Jesus,” Joel said, his voice echoing in the vast, empty space, “you’ve been living here?”

  “Lived in worse.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Since right before they killed Lonnie.” Trent put coffee from the tin into each mug, then filled them with water, stirred them and placed them on the hotplate. “I tried to help him, but…”

  “Why’d you come back?”

  “Same as you, I didn’t have much choice. They only make it look that way.”

  “You ran away years ago.”

  “Same can be said of you, my friend.”

  “I got married, moved to Maine.”

  “Only it wasn’t that simple, was it?”

  “I was trying my best to live my life, Trent, to forget—”

  “But you never really did. Neither did the rest of us.” He returned the water bottle and coffee tin to his knapsack, then stood up and wiped his hands on his duster. “I tried the same thing. Got married, did the regular life bit, but I couldn’t shake the rest of it. The dreams, the…nightmares…the memories and the fear.”

  Joel turned to the windows, watched the snowfall and the lonely road beyond.

  “I got as far away from here as I could. Wound up on the other side of the country. I needed to know what happened to us, and why. Fell in with some other people, more victims like us. They’ve done it to more than you know. And it’s getting worse; they’ve been ratcheting it up for years. Everything was underground back in the day: hard to find, harder to decipher and even harder to prove. Then the Internet came into existence and everything changed. Information, and the exchange of information, became so much easier and readily available. I did my research and followed that rabbit right down the goddamn hole. There really is a Wonderland, Joel. It’s covered in fire, and we’ve been burning in it for years, but it’s there.”

  “I’ve talked to Sal and Dorsey.”

  “I know.”

  “They’re both a mess.”

  “Why shouldn’t they be?”

  “Why didn’t you let them know you were here?”

  “It’s never really been that much about them. Or even Lonnie, really.”

  Joel turned back to him. “I don’t understand.”

  “It involved all of us, because to one degree or another, we were all able to do what they wanted. But it wasn’t Lonnie, Sal and Dorsey that really mattered to them in the end. They weren’t their star pupils.” Trent grimaced. “You and I were.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  They stood in the silence of the abandoned building.

  “You want me to take a look at that shoulder?” Trent asked.

  “Are you a doctor too?”

  “When you go deep underground like I have, you learn to do a lot of things for yourself.” He motioned casually to another knapsack a few feet away. “I’ve got medical supplies.”

  Before Joel could answer, the rattling of the tin cups distracted them both. Trent turned the propane off, then grabbed both mugs. “No cream or sugar, hope you don’t mind it black.” He held one out for Joel.

  “You realize that’s not how you make instant coffee, right? You want to boil the water first, then add it to the coffee.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Olsen. You want one or not?”

  Joel took it. At least it warmed his hands. “Let’s worry about my shoulder later,” he said. “You said I needed to know what you know. I’m listening.”

  “Little background history. Up until the end of World War II, the Office of Strategic Services, known as the OSS, handled the intelligence and espionage duties for the government. After the war, when the Cold War began, along came the National Security Act of 1947, and the Central Intelligence Agency was born. The idea was for the CIA to expand and improve upon what the OSS had begun, and to establish an official organization that could supervise and manage all of the covert espionage and intelligence-gathering operations on a worldwide scale.”

  Joel sipped the coffee. It was horrid. “I’m familiar with all that.”

  Trent continued, unfazed. “One of the first things the CIA did was to delve into something called behavioral engineering. Mind control, and all the satellites thereof. Far as anyone knows, this started in the early 1950s. MKULTRA was the name they gave the project. It would officially continue for the next twenty years. Numerous test subjects—primarily American citizens—were unknowingly experimented on with drugs, sensory deprivation and various forms of torture and abuse. This was sanctioned largely because of what had come before it. During World War II, US intelligence officers and former Nazi scientists first conducted these kinds of experiments. It was known as Project Paperclip. They experimented with mind control and the use of torture to achieve it, and while it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, it opened the door for bigger and more involved experiments down the road. Projects like MKULTRA.”

  Joel sat on a nearby overturned crate.

  “Everything was done in secret, of course, but it wasn’t just government facilities that were used. We’re talking numerous pharmaceutical companies, universities, hospitals, prisons and private companies—all paid by and used as fronts for the CIA to conduct these heinous experiments on unsuspecting human beings. In some cases it went so deep and was so secretive that the people doing the research didn’t know who they were working for, and even some of the CIA operatives knew nothing beyond their own individual projects.”

  “This was all about influencing the mind so information could be extracted during interrogation, right?” Joel asked. “I’ve done some basic reading and research on it and—”

  “Originally, yes. It was mainly about that and also to check the feasibility of creating a Manchurian Candidate, an assassin or operative who could be turned on and off to perform certain tasks without their knowledge or me
mory. In theory, they’d also be capable of being given secret information without fear of divulging it—even under interrogation or torture by the enemy—because they’d have no idea they were in possession of it in the first place. The result would be, arguably, the perfect assassin, the perfect spy, the perfect soldier, as it were, in their covert war. But it went much deeper than that. Those were only the starter projects. When they started using LSD, things got stranger. It had been around since 1938, but even by the 1950s nobody really knew that much about it. They wanted people with low levels of resistance for subjects, so they began with patients in nursing homes and mental hospitals, inmates in prisons and the like. Many of the victims were children with psychological or physical ailments. Children, Joel.”

  “Like us.”

  “They needed subjects who wouldn’t talk, or who’d never be taken seriously if they did. Who’s going to believe a child, a sick child at that, with wild stories that sound like nightmares? Who’s going to believe a drug addict or hopeless alcoholic, a homeless person, a prisoner, a prostitute or someone with a history of mental illness? Nobody. They tested with other drugs too: mescaline, sodium pentothal, even weed. But LSD was the star. In one study they gave it to a subject every day for 174 days. Think about that for a minute. There wasn’t much left of that poor bastard’s mind when they were through with it. And that’s nothing compared to what they did to some people.” Trent sipped his coffee. “Later, in the 1990s, although most of the records were supposedly long destroyed, the government admitted to these atrocities—many, though certainly not all—and told the American people and the world that these programs had ceased and were abandoned years ago. In 1973, they said, but of course that was just a cover, and many of the projects continued. Many continue to this day.”

  Joel forced another swallow of coffee down. It was awful, but he was freezing. He tried to find some shred of the punk rocker Trent had once been, some small piece of the kid he’d known, but that version of him was long gone. This was a devastated middle-aged man just like the others, a nervous and brooding soul who had seen the darkness up close. He’d lived it.

  “In addition to the espionage angle,” Trent went on, “there were other avenues as well. One was to study control, the ability to create subservient and easily controlled human beings that could be utilized in espionage if necessary, but also in other ways, including as sexual slaves. The third was to study those who might have abilities beyond the norm when put in these situations and under such conditions.”

  “Abilities?” Joel asked.

  “In one program in particular, test subjects were given LSD, but in massive amounts that were slowly increased over a short period of time. They also wouldn’t allow them to sleep—sometimes for days at a clip—and of course the subjects began to lose their minds. They started to hallucinate, but they were in such terrible shape by then they could no longer distinguish between their hallucinations and reality. Lack of sleep and the LSD, combined with constant barrages of strange sounds and images, broke them down even further. After several days of this, one by one, the subjects began reporting that they were seeing entities. Not surprising, until the doctors realized the subjects were independently describing identical entities. Initially, they thought it might just be a consistent hallucination, because the test subjects had all been exposed to the exact same things.” Trent stopped a moment, ran a hand across the stubble on his chin. “Until doctors and staff started seeing them too.”

  “The same entities we’ve seen?” Joel asked.

  Trent nodded. “Supposedly the program was scrapped at that point, the subjects were sent back to their prisons and hospitals and that was that. Whatever the hell they’d tapped into, they wanted no part of it. That was the official story anyway. In reality, the powers that be were fascinated. It was a possible link to the occult, to another world or another level of consciousness. Whatever these things were, they needed to know if they were friendly or malevolent. Where did they come from? What, exactly, were they? Could they be used in some way to benefit or further the government’s needs and desires? Did they have military applications?”

  “What are they, Trent?”

  “Not hallucinations, I can promise you that.”

  “What then? What are they really?”

  “Evil incarnate.”

  “Demons?” Joel asked, his voice suddenly reduced to a loud whisper.

  “What people don’t understand is that the MKULTRA project was ultimately based on nothing but the occult. Our entire nation was founded on it. Every great empire in the history of man has been. There are deep black ops and covert military intelligence groups that have been delving into these things for years. Every major power, before the Nazis and after, has studied the occult and tried to harness the power of its dark side. What does that tell you? Does that tell you it doesn’t exist? That it’s a bunch of fairy tales and nonsense? No one chases those things, Joel, spends millions of dollars and dedicates enormous amounts of manpower and resources on bedtime stories for the simpleminded. They chase it, try to learn about it and control it because it’s real.” He took another sip of coffee. “Most people have no clue about the real history of this country, much less this world. They know what they’ve been taught and believe what they’ve been told. Or they hold on tight to bullshit they’ve made up themselves from scraps of other truths. Problem is you’ve got two basic sides, the true believers and the skeptics. One believes everything, the other believes nothing, and they’re both falsely smug because they’re both wrong. The reality is that evil is very real. It may be subjective in a sense, but it exists and it rules this world of ours, always has. Doesn’t mean there isn’t good; there’s plenty of it. My God, there’s so much beauty and love in this world sometimes it’s hard to comprehend it. But neither of those things is the dominant force in our universe. Those who seek power above all else seek evil because that’s where the greatest concentration of power is. Be it short-lived or even false, for however long that candle burns, it burns strong and bright. And who really knows what lies beyond this world? Nobody. Not the atheists, not the religious fanatics. Nobody. But there’s definitely something. Space dust, the pearly gates or something else, it all comes down to what.” He stood before the windows and watched the snowfall. “You know Area 51, right?”

  “Sure,” Joel said. “Groom Lake. It’s in Nevada, a base where they test top secret and experimental aircraft. Some say even alien technology.”

  “You know what else they call it?” Trent looked back over his shoulder at him. “Dreamland.”

  “There are supposedly all sorts of strange experiments going on out there.”

  “Right. Now stay with me. Ever heard of Aleister Crowley?”

  “He was a famous British occultist.”

  “Called himself the Beast, 666. The father, to some, of modern black magic, what he called sex magic, and founder of his own occult order, the Ordo Templi Orientis.” Trent looked back to the snow. “Okay, so there was a guy named Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist, engineer and a chemist, a pioneer in those areas, actually, someone who ought to be very famous and well-known, but isn’t because of his occult ties and black magic practices. Due to that, he’s been largely forgotten in history and in some instances purposely written out of it. Truth is he was an occultist and an avid follower of Crowley’s OTO, but as a scientist his contributions to rocket propulsion and design are legendary. He’s one of the more important figures in the history of our country. His inventions led to NASA sending astronauts to the moon in 1969, and even today, the solid-fuel rocket boosters used for the Space Shuttle were based on Parsons’ innovations. There’s actually a crater on the moon named for him. Every year, on Halloween if you can believe it, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory holds a memorial for Parsons. They call it ‘Nativity Day’. Yet very few people outside of the jet propulsion community even know who he is.”

  “What does any o
f this have to do with us?”

  “Stay with me,” he said again. “As an occultist, Parsons is credited with being most responsible for spreading Crowley’s religion across North America. One of Parsons’ closest associates was the man he would eventually lose his then-girlfriend to and the man who would go on to found Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. Together, in the deserts of Nevada, they and others performed what were known as the Babalon Working, a series of occult rituals designed to bring forth an entity, the literal incarnation of a divine feminine archetype they worshiped, known as Babalon. During this period Crowley was in contact with Parsons and warned him about the potential for error. He warned them not to overreact to what they were attempting to conjure but also not to underestimate the danger of it either, because the idea was to open a literal interdimensional gateway that would allow passage. Problem was, there was no telling what might come through. For many years, in certain circles, it’s been well known that Parsons was successful in his occult and black magic sex rituals out in the desert. He tore a hole in space-time, and something crossed over into our reality. But not in the way he had hoped. He hadn’t conjured Babalon at all, but something much more horrific, evil and enormously powerful. This caused other authorities to get involved, the same authorities that operated in the shadows of the government and conducted their own rituals. Because through these satanic rituals in the desert, contact was established with what they referred to as ‘the Old Ones.’ Demons, Joel. Later, on the site of the rituals where the portal was opened, a top-secret military base was constructed.” Trent turned from the windows. “That base is known today as Area 51.”

  A chill danced along Joel’s spine. He drank more coffee. “I’m aware of the evil in this world, Trent. I wrote a book about it, remember?”

  “I’m trying to tell you it goes much deeper than a bunch of clowns out in the woods sacrificing animals to Satan.”

  “I know that too, and frankly, your oversimplification of what I wrote about and dealt with, what some people died for, is pretty goddamn infuriating.” Joel stood up. “So how about we cut through all the bullshit and secret agent man crap and you tell me what you know about why Lonnie was killed and what happened to all of us that day with the black car?”