Passengers passing through the scanner reported that the security lines moved faster than they’d ever seen, and they enjoyed the convenience of not taking off their shoes or other clothing.
“It’s great,” said Geoff, a tall, tattooed man with a pierced nose. “Usually they have to check all my piercings by hand. And, well, there’s more than you see above the neck.” He lowered his voice and added, “I think some of ‘em liked it better that way, you know?”
Oregonian, November 22, 2017
Mass Hallucination Causes Travel Delays
PORTLAND, OR—Portland Mayor Charlie Hales called for calm today after several dozen travelers and TSA agents experienced a brief mass hallucination in the security line at Portland International Airport’s international terminal. Passengers and agents alike reported seeing a gigantic creature appear in midair and attack a traveler.
“Police and federal agents are currently investigating the cause of the incident,” Hales said. “The victims have been taken to Oregon Health and Sciences University Hospital, where they have been isolated. Some have required sedation because of the nature of the hallucination, but all are expected to make a full recovery. Bloodwork and other tests are underway to determine whether a drug or nerve gas of some sort was involved.”
Asked whether the incident was a terrorist attack, Hales declined to speculate.
A TSA agent, speaking on condition of anonymity, stated that everything had seemed normal to her. “The line moves really fast here with the new scanners—with the Thanksgiving crowd we just left them running, people go through that fast—so we don’t have as long to observe passengers, you know, to look for suspicious behavior. I suppose someone could have slipped something past us.” She was not a victim of the hallucination, but said that those who were appeared to be terrified, running and screaming from whatever they thought they saw. “One woman even dropped her purse and some loose clothes she was carrying. She’s lucky nobody grabbed her bag and ran off with it. We packed everything up and sent it to the hospital, so she should get her ID and all back soon.”
The agent was not free to share the victim’s identity. Families of the victims will be contacted by police before the names of victims are released.
Portland Mercury, November 23, 2017
Passengers, Agents Claim Earlier Airport Hallucinations
PORTLAND, OR—Over two dozen passengers and eleven TSA agents have come forward with stories of hallucinations at Portland International Airport’s international terminal over the last two months. The hallucinations were very brief, usually not lasting more than a second or two.
“I just saw something big and weird out the corner of my eye,” said traveler Shawna Jackson. “But I turned to look, and it was gone. Thought it was my mind playing tricks, kept it to myself.”
A TSA agent, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that he and two of his co-workers had also seen something. “It was huge, with lots of eyes and a big gaping mouth, just floating through the air. And we all saw it. How could we all have the same hallucination? No, that’s no hallucination, it’s a ghost or a monster or something. That terminal’s haunted, and whatever it is, it’s angry.”
Asked why they hadn’t reported their experience, the agent explained that they feared loss of their jobs if they were perceived as “mentally unfit”.
Oregonian, November 23, 2017
Missing from Airport: Jennifer Babson
PORTLAND, OR—Hallucinations and panic led to quarantines and some minor injuries. Tragically, there is also one missing person.
Jennifer Babson of Tigard was taking advantage of the long holiday weekend to visit family in Vancouver, BC. She checked in for her flight at Portland International Airport’s international terminal (Alaska Air 2624). Security footage captures her waiting in line and passing through security just before the mass hallucination, but she cannot be found in the ensuing panic.
Ms. Babson’s purse and a loose change of clothing were found by TSA agents on the terminal floor. It is believed that Ms. Babson may have had an emotional breakdown and run off. Portland police ask that anyone with information on her whereabouts contact them immediately.
Weekly World News, December 1, 2017
What Happened to Jennifer Babson? TSA Lies!
The Transportation Security Administration claims that Jennifer Babson dropped her purse and ‘a loose change of clothes’ and ran off during the so-called ‘mass hallucination’ at Portland’s airport earlier this week. We examined the security footage, and you won’t believe what we found!
Continued: Babson, p. 3
Investor’s Business Daily, December 4, 2017
Resonation Acquired by Northrup Grumman
NEW YORK—Share prices skyrocketed as optics research company and ResoViz scanner manufacturer Resonation (NYSE: RESO) fell prey to a hostile takeover bid by aerospace and defense contractor Northrup Grumman (NOC) today.
CEO Lucinda Tillinghast issued a statement announcing her resignation. “I am deeply disappointed that my great-uncle’s work will be controlled by the military-industrial complex, and will have no part in whatever vile plans these weapon-builders may have. I am resigning effective immediately.
“I’m sorry.”
Ms. Tillinghast was not available for comment.
New York Times, July 3, 2018
Abandoned Russian Cruiser Adrift in Bering Sea
A Russian warship, the Varyag, was found drifting in American waters off the coast of Alaska earlier this week and boarded by crew of the fishing vessel Fnord. No crew were found onboard.
“Left in a awful hurry, they did,” said Fnord crewman Joey Langtree. “Dropped clothes everywhere, didn’t even take none of their stuff. Weird.”
Fnord captain Nora Simmons’s hopes of high-value salvage were dashed when the Coast Guard, and then the U.S. Navy, appeared on the scene. “They just kicked us off the ship and told us to get lost,” Simmons complained. “Maritime law! We found it, we get salvage rights!”
The U.S. Navy has taken control of the Varyag, a Slava-class Cruiser and flagship of Russia’s Pacific Fleet, and is investigating the bizarre incident. Navy spokesman Captain Darryn James withheld comment, citing Navy policy of not discussing incidents under investigation.
INFERNAL ATTRACTORS
Cody Goodfellow
“Turn it on,” she said.
When he didn’t move, she cocked the gun. Even so, Marc hesitated, his hand over the knife switch at the heart of the sprawling machine.
“It’s not safe,” he said, trying not to whine.
“I know.” The raw silk in her weary voice turning to rusted steel. “That’s why I need it.” She laid down the gun, certain of his obedience, and began to unbutton her long black dress. It slithered off her angular, hungry curves to pool round her feet. Her stockings were the color of smoke. She wore nothing else. The sheen of her perspiration made her pale body glimmer in the moonlight. Her long burgundy bangs hid her eyes. “Turn it on, and open it up all the way.”
He had built it for her with the weird old components she always seemed to find just when they were needed, and the yellowing circuit diagrams stamped PROJECT BIFROST: ABOVE TOP SECRET. Whenever he asked her about it, she had fucked him until he forgot his questions. But this morning, he had done some digging and found out just enough about what he had built that he tried to destroy it.
Thus, the gun.
She’d told him some of it, when she had to. She didn’t have to spell it out. He had to be an idiot or crazy, not to realize how far out of his league she was. When they’d met on a makers’ message board thread about teledildonics and orgone generators, he’d played along with what he was sure was a joke. Something that’ll make Sex and Drugs obsolete, was all she had to say. Meeting her in person was a shock. Her picture didn’t begin to do her justice.
Like so many girls who dyed their hair a new color every week and covered themselves in tattoos, there was spectacular damage behind her intriguin
g façade, desperation and despair between the whirlwind binges of thrill seeking. She warned him she was “a bit of a nymphomaniac,” and there was a sleepy confession that she’d been to rehab, been committed, experimented on. He didn’t care about her past, any more than he cared if she really loved him, or what the hell a Tillinghast resonator was, until it was too late.
They had played with the freaky machine for a week, enjoying the crystallizing buzz it conveyed, like a half-tab of acid with a vasopressin chaser, the weird hallucinations that only got more intense when you challenged them, the sense of the walls of the world withering away from the glowing bones of something hidden in plain sight and more real than reality itself. Sex in the resonator’s field was a mystical experience—the visible sparks of Shirley’s orgasms coursing up her spine and out the top of her skull like latent lightning—but perhaps too mystical, for he always felt as if something was watching them.
He threw the switch and instantly felt the itching in the front of his brain, felt it become a tingle long before the eccentric acceleration of the activated resonator became a bowel-tickling hum. He consulted the mildew-spotted researcher’s journal she’d brought him, something she “found at an estate sale.” He turned the master frequency dial up until the hum became a throbbing, subsonic roar.
The moonlight seeping through the dingy windows dwindled and died. The warehouse loft was enfolded in a gray void, but within, the air itself seemed to glow with a nacreous, magenta light. The resonator’s hum became a sinusoidal cascade of chimes when all the other electronics shorted out and stopped dead. Distorted by rippling currents like heat mirages in a desert, the room seemed to rot away, and a host of shadowy shapes swam through the ghostly walls. By strangely layered turns, the room became like the floor of a pre-Cambrian sea, as the phantasmal shadows took on a terrible solidity.
Great whorled nautiloids floated past, regarding them with lambent spotlight eyes. Razor-winged lampreys slithered towards them, gulping the ionized air and groping with manifest eagerness for Shirley’s white body, only to dart away as if electrified. Arachnids with far too many legs clung to each other and stalked their prey with scimitar antennae longer than their bodies. Their victims, drifting neon jellyfish that circled like moths around the resonator’s tuning fork array. And still more and stranger forms swarmed into the feeding frenzy, too alien to register, even to his enhanced mind, as more than spectral distortions of the light and momentary pulses of utterly foreign ecstasy.
Shirley rose from the chair and sprawled out on the floor. “You see it, Marc? Do you feel it? How could you not want to see this?” She arched her back and threw out her arms, basking in the overwhelming rush of new perception, the otherworldly arousal that the resonator seemed to directly ignite in the human nervous system. His cock stirred and jabbed at his trousers, but he was riddled with fear—not of the eager flying eels, but of Shirley.
Her naked, ink-scarred skin shimmered with the heat of her arousal and seemed to shed trails that anticipated her movements, flowing backwards in time to meet her as her black fingernails dug into her flesh and drew blood. He started to rise to stop her, but the slightest motion brought wriggling predators groping towards him until he froze.
Shirley raked her back as if trying to tear off her own skin. The tattoos on her back––eyes, feathers, scales, and more eyes––ran and reformed as she dragged a boiling black cloud out of herself and set it adrift overhead.
She beckoned for him to come and join her, but he retreated behind the control console. His hand hovered over the kill switch.
She writhed on the floor as if embracing a phantom. “It’s not enough. Open it wider...”
He could not bear to look up from the console. It was too much, the visions and the realization that this was not a hallucination, but the truth, compared to which any hideous sight was a blessed white lie.
She would never be satisfied. If there was any hope of snapping her out of it, of getting her back, it would come from giving her more than she could handle.
He turned the oscillation cycle to 37,000, the level at which the journal’s crabbed, careful notes became looping gibberish and spiky mandalas, eclipsed by maroon stains.
The livid pink light deepened to an abyssal violet. Marc could barely see Shirley through the shadow that seemed to pin her to the floor. He rose and rushed to reach out to her, but then recoiled in shock.
Up close, it was not a shadow, but something almost too strange for his eyes to process. It seemed to perch astride her back like a rider on a horse, its trailing, nebulous limbs penetrating her skull and spine like a leash and reins, lazily tugged upon to elicit mewling sighs of pleasure.
“So,” she moaned, “you see it too?”
It was like a massive armored octopus, a billowing, vaporous body enfolded in an exoskeleton that glowed a sullen, sordid red, like molten iron underwater. Its countless branching tentacles drifted on subatomic winds like flaccid hagfish, but dozens of them were fused with Shirley’s spine, jacked into her chakras like astral spinal taps.
“Do you really want to know why I am the way I am, Marc? Well, now you do.” She twisted a translucent leash and kissed it, making it shiver. “I was never molested or abused, but I always had what Mom called a devil on my shoulder. Something in me that fed off danger and sin...”
She twisted around under the floating incubus and took hold of two thick spinal reins and lifted herself off the floor to cling to it like a stripper’s pole. Seeming to become more tangible from arousal alone, the phantom parasite enfolded her in an uneasy embrace of spiny, segmented arms; but with a growl of effort, she seized the parasitic cords connecting it to her like a leash, and brought the thing to heel.
Scissoring legs spread wide to straddle its chitinous thorax, she gently stroked the ethereal tentacles that transfixed her spine until the armored body was suffused with an excited lava-lamp glow. With a hiss like the gutting of a fish, the armor split open.
A flurry of velvety fronds like the venomous petals of a sea anemone erupted from the phantom to enfold and impale Shirley. She rolled and wriggled on a bed of avid, adept tongues, moaning with delight at their electric touch, reveling in the trails of rainbow saliva etched from her neck to the pierced and pleated cleft of her groin.
While it held her suspended in the air, Shirley’s devil braided its tentacles together into a luridly glowing scorpion stinger that throbbed and swelled and coiled to strike.
Marc threw the kill-switch.
He would have been surprised if it actually worked. The resonator was recycling power or drawing it directly from the hidden reality they had tapped into. He shuddered with rage and frustrated lust. This thing was no alien to Shirley, being something that had attached itself to her, fueled her dangerous behavior and fed off her, for most of her life. But now, she could touch it as it had touched her. She had used him to make it possible for her to seduce her own lust.
He moved slowly out from behind the console, watching the teeming alien predators, but they seemed to have retreated for fear of Shirley’s demon lover.
There was no shutting it off, no reasoning with her to make it stop. But there, forgotten on the arm of the chair, was her gun.
Shirley opened her mouth to fellate a probing anemone-tongue, eliciting a strobing ultraviolet seizure from the incubus. The strange lightning poured out of her, illuminating her nervous system like overloaded Xmas lights, silhouetting her skeleton and seeming to dissolve her flesh in an acid bath of light. Marc shielded his eyes, but still saw her through the thin curtain of his transparent fingers. He saw her thrust herself onto the quivering stinger, and could not look away as her glowing plasma body engulfed it down to the root.
Somehow, his fingers found the pistol. He couldn’t risk hitting Shirley. He turned and tried to shoot the tuning array, but the bullets only burst the clouds of jellyfish and pinged harmlessly off the screaming tuning forks.
“This is what you wanted, wasn’t it, baby?” She purred
and gyrated on the phantom parasite’s monstrous organ. He could see the impossibly large thing quivering and thrashing inside of her, trying to match her violent rhythm. Ethereal clouds of vapor streamed off its glowing shell. “All those things you made me do, you didn’t just want to watch and feed off the heat, did you?”
Marc reached up to pull her away, but the incubus swept him aside with a thorny whip-limb that flayed his forearm to the bone.
“You wanted this...wanted to touch me...have me...but you never thought it would kill you, did you?”
With an agonized cry, she flexed herself against the engorged stinger and wrung it dry. Her orgasm was a wrenching seizure that tore through her in waves, splaying her lovely limbs out as if she’d been electrocuted.
Her demon lover spasmed in her embrace and seemed almost to melt with the explosive force of its own release. Its armor was riven by cracks of ultraviolet light, and waves of iridescent energy spilled out of it seemed to flow down its shrinking stinger and up Shirley’s neon spine, into the brain of its erstwhile host.
With a contemptuous sweep of her hand, she ripped away the shriveled spinal taps and kicked away from her spent lover. She hit the floor and gracefully danced away from the impact, but then swooned into the chair.
Shirley’s crippled parasite drifted across the room like a flaccid helium balloon. A swarm of lampreys descended upon it, feasting on its helpless, sex-shocked flesh like remora devouring the wreckage of a shark’s breakfast.
Abruptly, finally, the deep violet light and the unholy hum cut out with an anticlimactic pop. The gray void dissolved into an ugly predawn industrial cyclorama.
Probably, they’d blown the circuit, or even the whole grid. It didn’t matter. It was over, and she was alive. Wasn’t she?
Shirley rolled over on the floor, over and over, laughing and hugging her bloody knees to her chest. He thought twice before he put down the gun, but then he rushed to her and draped her in a bathrobe. “I thought you were—I tried to—”
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 3
