The Sacrifice Area

by Peter Idone

  The decision to use Pine Haven as a research site by the Air Force scientists was not as arbitrary as it might appear on the surface. The USAF wanted this project to be separated from its other research directorates and desired a reasonably quiet place to conduct their experiments; whatever those experiments might be.

  If one were to question local residents of the Essex community about Pine Haven and its owner, August Fergusson, their response would invariably concern the wealth he had acquired in pharmaceuticals and industry and his marriage to Elizabeth Brown, the daughter of a wealthy businessman who owned mills and factories throughout New York and New England. What about Fergusson’s connection to black magic and the arcane arts? The response would be that Pine Haven had the reputation of being haunted. It was said that hidden rooms in the mansion were painted with strange symbols, long since covered over, and that séances were conducted. Other than that not much was known about the goings-on at the estate. Interestingly enough Fergusson belonged to the Society of the Golden Dawn and was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, as was the magus, “the Great Beast,” Aleister Crowley. There is every indication to suggest that Fergusson and wife Elizabeth were part of Crowley’s circle when he came to New York in 1918 and took residence in Manhattan. It is rumored that at some point Crowley had even visited the Pine Haven estate as Fergusson’s guest during the magician’s travels throughout the area.

  One of the more enduring stories about Pine Haven since its destruction was the secret project revolving around interdimensional portals and direct observation and communication with non-human intelligences. It is also interesting to note that one of the lead scientists on the project, Dr. X, was rumored to be a Thelmite and dabbled in the Typhonian Order. He may have been a high priest or ranking member of these Crowlian disciplines.

  During his stay in Manhattan, Crowley was involved in a number of incantations, or workings, as it was called, the most astonishing being the “Amalantrah Workings.” The purpose of these workings was to open an interdimensional portal that would allow him access to beings from another dimension. A being did manifest itself through this opening, this portal. Shortly thereafter Crowley had sketched a portrait of this creature; one of a number of artistic renderings the occultist had displayed at a New York art exhibit. Crowley sought contact with non-human intelligences and it appears he was successful when the portal he had incanted opened, thus ushering into our dimensional reality the entity called Lam. The extraordinary thing about Lam, as sketched by Crowley, is that the entity bore a remarkable similarity to what we now refer to as “Greys,” the creature most associated with an alien life form. This had all occurred in 1918–1919 well before any UFO/abduction literature described the Greys in any detail or was even remotely considered at the time.

  When considering the Pine Haven Project and the secrecy of its “workings” to this day, it is not so farfetched an idea that an experimental physicist like Dr. X dabbled in the arcane arts. One needs only to look toward Jack Parsons, the rocket fuel engineer and one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Parsons was an acolyte of Crowley and along with his friend, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, apparently succeeded in opening a doorway into a magical realm through Parsons’ construct of the “Babylon Workings,” an effort to usher into the world a “magickal child” with his girlfriend, Marjorie Cameron. Apparently the apprentice, against the advice of his master, Crowley, proceeded to incant and make contact with forces he could not control. A portal was successfully opened but the ability of Parsons to reseal the breech was beyond his capabilities. Ever since the “Babylon Workings” this portal, unstable and decaying, has remained open and it is believed the primary reason why so many UFO sightings, alien visitations and abductions have occurred since 1947, the year of Parsons’ botched attempt. Whatever Dr. X was involved in, he had brought disaster upon himself and his entire team. It is interesting to note that Parsons had eventually blown himself up in a laboratory experiment while working with unstable chemicals. Had a doorway to another dimension opened at Pine Haven with a combination of physics and Satanism? Had contact been established with some higher order of being—Lam—or some other unknown entity? And if so what was the USAF agenda? Whatever was going on the scientists, technicians, and military personnel paid a very dear price with their lives.

  If this is the case, then it would be why the Air Force and the Department of Defense has remained silent on the subject. The embarrassment would be real. There is a very straight laced, religious and overtly zealous aspect of the USAF and some possibly rogue, off the radar research unit dabbling in science and necromancy would be impossible to explain away to the public should the real story ever leak out.

  Logan folded the printouts and returned them to his coat pocket. He didn’t know what to make of the one he had just read. He had found it on a website that dealt with haunted and occult places in North America, of which Pine Haven was listed as one. He knew next to nothing about the occult, and as for UFOs, aliens, and abductions, he knew about as much as the next person from television shows and the Internet. The subject matter had become somewhat pervasive in popular culture, but he wasn’t absorbed by it. He hadn’t invested much thought in whether the planet was visited or manipulated by beings from another planet or dimension. He had never seen a UFO and hadn’t seen anything purported to have been flying over the estate. He was open enough to know that some phenomena was taking place, but wouldn’t commit to a belief about what exactly it was. He had more mundane problems to surmount at the moment, and delving into this subject matter was a detour he could not afford to take. Maybe there was a connection between Pine Haven and the dog-man that had killed Tara, but he hadn’t enough information to make a clear connection, and he certainly didn’t want to include Aleister Crowley, incantations, or aliens into the mix. The stories were imaginative, lurid, and even entertaining, but were of very little value to him at the moment.

  He got off the cold, damp fieldstone and stretched. There was still plenty of daylight left, and there were a couple of places from which he wanted to observe the perimeter. He hiked back to the truck.

  ***

  While driving back on Raven’s Perch, Logan surprised himself by turning onto Farm Road. He would go north on the highway, take the first available exit after the closed Pine Haven main entrance road, and then head toward the river. Besides, he was curious about what was going on at Lennox Farms and thought he could have a word with the owners.

  At the farm, there was no Tactical blockade, which he would have had to steel himself to contend with, but there were SUVs parked near the main house. Logan wasn’t about to stop, since the vehicles had an official look about them. The barn had been thoroughly razed, and a charred odor still lingered in the air.

  He stayed on the highway only about five miles before he turned off and drove down several miles of pleasant country road flanked by pastures and woodland. When he reached the county road, he turned right, heading east. To his right were houses spread far apart and small businesses: a body shop, hardware store, small market, and filling station with a sign that read “no more gas today.” The only question was when the place last had any. Logan made a mental note to check it out sometime in the future if the fuel gauge wasn’t too low. It was easy to get stranded looking for gasoline. There were never any bargains, except, of course, not having to go to Frenchy’s. Even Frenchy must be without at times, but Logan surmised that he supplied fuel for the local Tactical patrols when necessary and had probably secured a steady supply.

  At an intersection with a blinking caution light, Logan turned left onto a narrow blacktop road, buckled and cracked, that headed in the direction of the river. He passed an abandoned factory that at one time manufactured batteries but had closed during the last decade. It was a two-story structure made of brick, with boarded windows and doors. The parking lot was in as bad a shape as the road he drove on; dry, dead weeds grew nearly three feet high through the cracks
in the asphalt. He turned in and parked.

  The landscape was a floodplain. From where he stood, the surroundings looked like an enormous marsh: a broad swath of autumn-brown reeds and cattails surrounding small, confined pools of silvery gray water, unnatural in color. In the distance, high-tension-line towers appeared as giant stickmen frozen in their stride toward the river. Everything seemed so terribly gray, remote.

  A truck was chugging its way down the potholed, uneven blacktop. It was a medium-sized tanker with a large pump plant apparatus at the rear. Mounted on the side near the pump controls was a thick hose coiled on a three-foot-diameter reel. In large, black, dripping letters, some comedian had spray-painted the words ICE CREAM on the hull of the worn aluminum tank. With yellow running lights blinking and a warning signal beeping, the truck came to a full stop, and two men hopped out of the cab. They were dressed in rubber protective gear, one also in what appeared to be hip waders. He took hold of the nozzle end of the thick, industrial-sized hose and started pulling. The driver of the vehicle threw a switch that activated the electric motor on the hose reel to make it easier to unfurl. At the other end, the assistant dragged the hose into the marsh. Once established in knee-high water, the hose maintaining a broad curvature of slack, he signaled to the driver, who then activated a series of valves and threw the switch on an electric motor that began to whir noisily. The length of hose came to life, stiffened, and soon a gout of dark purplish liquid surged from the nozzle.

  At first look, one might have thought this procedure was some illegal dumping of toxic waste into an environment that was given up as already lost. It was the opposite, in fact, as Logan already knew. The damage had long since been accomplished. The river had always been a workhorse, whether for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mills or twentieth-century factories and manufacturing plants. Textile mills had sprouted on both banks and were replaced by metallurgy and electronics plants for industrial and military products for decades. Upriver was the Triumph nuclear power station, which either leaked, or was released on purpose; the radioactive water that was discharged was alleged to have been within reasonable safety limits. The marsh used to support a variety of amphibian life and had served as a major stopover for migratory birds. That had all ceased. When he was little, Logan had come with his father and sister to watch the geese, ducks, and an array of fowl he could neither name nor imagine. The creatures were beautiful, but they no longer came, those great flocks of squawking and cackling birds. Mere remnants flew by before continuing on their journey, hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. The great flocks no longer existed, here or anywhere else.

  This fountain of purple liquid being injected into the landscape was actually genetically engineered bacteria that devoured the heavy metals, polyvinyl chlorides, and other manmade compounds that had been flushed from the water supply and settled into the muck on the bottom. After consuming these elements, the bacteria would eventually starve to death. There was only one catch: this rich diet was never in short supply, and the tanker trucks made frequent visits along the river during the course of the year.

  The steady stream of liquid became a trickle, and the driver switched off the pump and closed the valves. His partner then straddled the hose and shook the last drops from the end of the prodigious nozzle. This action elicited a snide laugh from the driver, who then activated the motor, which slowly retracted the hose back onto the revolving reel. The assistant followed, keeping the nozzle end uplifted as he made his way back to the truck. After securing the hose and making some final checks to the machinery, the two men climbed back into the cab and started off again, slowly, toward another section of the river.

  Then Logan saw movement at the edge of the road. A procession of life forms was working its way out of the purple-stained muck and across the road. Turtles, frogs, salamanders, even a few ducks, stunted and obviously undernourished. It was a parade of mutants. The frogs were especially malformed; the permutation of the outside environment had made them the bellwether of the local ecology. And it was obviously not healthy. Some were multilegged, others had two heads on one body, and still others were partially joined, sharing the same set of legs front and back.

  Logan observed this diaspora as the creatures made their way haphazardly across the road, seeking refuge from the alien fluid dispersed into their collapsed ecosystem. He could only wonder if these animals would eventually make their way back to the marsh or try to carve out a new niche for themselves on the opposite side of the road and beyond. Identifying with the plight of these creatures, Logan said aloud, “Christ that could be me someday. Maybe even the whole human race.” He returned to the pickup and drove home.

  10

  On the way back home, Logan stopped off at the local market to pick up some groceries to tide him over for next few days. He had a hankering for pork chops and a fresh vegetable. Adding milk, a small packet of coffee, butter, and rolls to the list, he gagged at the price for the few items purchased. He’d never make it through winter at this rate, he thought glumly. It spurred his motivation to continue a job search on the computer when he got home, though he ate first so the depressing unavailability for work didn’t cause him indigestion. He called the employment broker and left a message saying he was ready and willing to do any job that was to be had. He was even disposed to the idea of throwing a few bucks to a broker if he would consider him. All those pricks took kickbacks; it helped supplement their own miserable salaries. Kickbacks were how the working poor paid out bonuses. What an obscene joke it all had become.

  He cursed Jill for leaving. They had managed to get by on both paychecks since they had no rent to pay. The house was free and clear of mortgage payments because his parents had paid up years ago. He never forgot how happy his mother was when she sent the very last check to the mortgage company. But then again, his folks had lived in the house since they were married, over thirty-five years. Nobody seemed to live that long in the same house anymore. Well, maybe now they did, if they were lucky to still own one. Not long after his mother was diagnosed with cancer, an entirely different set of fiscal worries took over. Fortunately his father’s health insurance working for the utility company was pretty decent; but his mother was gone in a little over a year. There were still bills to pay, and Logan helped his old man out when he could; just having him and Jill at the house helped, not being alone, sharing the grief. It took the edge off a little, yet Logan knew his father was inconsolable. His father liked Jill; the woman could do no wrong. He wished Jill’s father was as half as nice to him. But his ex-wife very much liked to be in control and would speak to the old man a bit too sharply, even disrespectfully, when she had a mind. His father was a pretty easygoing guy and took it quietly. When Logan spoke to Jill about her acerbic tongue lashing, she acted as though he didn’t know what he was talking about. Toward the end of his father’s life, and near their own separation, her manner of speaking had become a bone of contention between the two of them.

  He wondered what she was doing at the moment, where in Vermont she was living, what she was doing for work. Jill had a lot of unrealized expectations about what she wanted to do and how she wanted to live her life. Logan knew she believed her father to be wealthier than he actually was, though he did have a nice house in the Hills and a reasonably decent local insurance business. She wanted to open her own nightclub, something classy, with live music and different stand-up acts and magicians. The theme she was going for was rather nebulous, but he knew she was inspired by the Moulin Rouge aspect, having seen that old movie a thousand times since junior high. If she couldn’t get a club off the ground, then her second choice was a restaurant, though not anywhere in Essex or the local surroundings, but preferably in a city, the larger the better. She reasoned her father and some of his business associates would put up a large chunk of money for this venture; she assumed she had backers, and it was only a matter of choosing the right time to present the project. Logan suggested she think of a roadhouse type of place, something l
ocal, with good food and a cozy atmosphere that would appeal to a wide range of people and give her some real experience in the business before she ventured into the nightclub or trendy restaurant scene. It was the first time Jill’s father ever agreed with anything Logan had said. The reality of the situation was that the economy was too unsound and shortages were just starting to make themselves felt. Costs were becoming astronomical because of fuel and freight charges to support the manner in which business had always been done. Plus a new phase of the Central Asian conflict was in full swing, and the world was on the cusp of yet another major war.

  Jill believed that a lot of people were trying to hold her back, including Logan. She confided in her old man a lot more than she did in him, and Logan wouldn’t be surprised if he’d offered his daughter a little financial incentive to cut herself loose from that boy who came from the other side of the tracks. Then she was living on that other side. And his father-in-law hated him for that more than anything. The thought that some Irish German, working-class, no-account from the Station had the audacity to sleep with his precious little girl filled the man with loathing.

  William St. John Fowler, “Big Bill” as he was known to dear friends and associates, stood over six feet tall and had a complexion made ruddy from Chivas Regal. He let his opinion that his middle daughter, Jill, had married beneath her become well-known. His wife, Phyllis, was as equally a snob as her husband, and maintained a pretense of blue-bloodedness that would prove false if one bothered to check the genealogy. They came from a long line of farmers and woodsmen. not industrialists or timber barons. But the Fowlers lived in the Hills, which made them wealthier than most and thus, in their minds, better.