Genesis of Madness

To anyone who reads the words that follow, I have to warn you: you're taking on a responsibility you won't be able to put down. What's written here came from a mind whose ignorance ended in a revelation more powerful than anything divine. It was the unfolding of these events, and what came after, that pushed me to break the vows I swore to live by — turning my back on the beliefs I once held with such fever, and gutting what was left of my faith.

I no longer serve as a priest. I asked the Church to replace me, because I couldn't go on drowning in a knowledge that leaves me standing on such fragile ground in reality.

Salvaging what little is left of my soul, I mean to settle certain legal matters with the state of Oregon, and to answer the oldest philosophical questions there are. My name is Thomas Coughlin, and I'm going to tell the truth about the supernatural events in Deschutes County. These are strange times, and everyone wants to find the source of the evil that's been stalking us from the dark forest of madness.

That October of 1972 was traumatic for me. I couldn't tell hallucination from fact — but thanks to a shift in how I see the world, I can finally set down what happened to me in Blaysville on these pages.

It all started on Wednesday, September 26th, with the arrival of a singular man. I wasn't at the parish that day, but Father Otto was, and he heard the man's confession. According to him, the visitor was a devout Christian, a man of solid values. He told me his name and where he came from, without breaking any rule of the confessional. Montgomery had come all the way from Idaho — a long way from our little town lost in the Deschutes Valley — and he carried FBI identification, which was extraordinary out here. At first I didn't think much of it. That would change.

I met him myself two days later, on the second of October, during Mass. He was a mature man, broad-built, with a coldness to his movements that sat oddly against how kind he was. After the service he came up to me, we greeted each other warmly, and at his invitation we walked together through the plaza. I took the chance to tell him about Blaysville's history — how it traced back to California adventurers, among them Hispanic Catholics who'd raised the Church of Saint Florence out of a barren stretch of land. The plaza and the town's main buildings grew up around that church. Later, English settlers arrived and, unlike the ones before them, built their homes and businesses around the old village. Even so, the church never stopped being the heart of everything worth admiring — its Gothic architecture stood out from a distance, imposing. We both praised the work the county's young historical preservation office had put into keeping it standing.

At the right moment, as discreetly as I could, I asked him what had brought him here. He seemed surprised by the question, and told me it was only work — he was there to reinforce the local police, given a rise in criminal activity around Blaysville. We exchanged a few more words, and then he said his goodbyes. I was left unsettled. That town was as peaceful as anywhere in scripture.

We had an altar boy living with us, Johannes — an orphan we'd taken in for the fascination he showed toward the scriptures, and who helped us with nearly everything. He was sixteen at the time, thin, and wore his blond hair with a kind of pride, trying his best to look like the man he admired so much. Every Monday morning Otto would send him out for groceries, and along with them, for a copy of *Back in the 60s* — a magazine put out by a local publisher covering geopolitics, nature, and odd curiosities.

Otto was well-read on these subjects, and every issue stirred up an insatiable curiosity in him, especially the ones marked "UNPUBLISHED," which usually told war stories from the sailors of the USS Olympia — the ship's captain had been born in our town, a devout man and a benefactor to the parish. But that week's issue carried no tale of the sea, and no article from the geology institute on the South Sister eruption either. Instead, there was a headline in bold that read: "A Third Murder? No One Knows."

The piece was about a third death under identical circumstances in the surrounding area. None of the victims had been reported missing beforehand, and all of them were found naked in open fields outside town, showing signs of asphyxiation, with no trace of drugs or psychedelics in their systems. There was also a list of names, laid out in order from the date each person had died, along with where they'd been found:

Cleaurnd's name headed the list — a professor at the University of Bren, found dead just outside his own house. Next came Anderson, a well-regarded pediatrician and a friend of mine, who'd fallen into disgrace after a new medical center opened in town; his body turned up in a ditch off Route 8. Third, and the most recent at the time, was Ryan McDouglas, an old-fashioned cowboy who'd gone mad after his son's death; his wife found his body in a pond two kilometers from their farm.

There was real turmoil at the church that day. Anderson hadn't just been an old friend — he'd been a respected man who'd sunk into drinking to cut himself off from the world. The other two we didn't know personally, but we grieved them all the same. We couldn't understand why none of this had made the news sooner, and figured those men must have lived apart from the rest of the community. It's impossible for a priest in a small town to stay out of things. We heard the mourning and the celebrations, the complaints and the demands, and even the strangest confessions — the kind that, if not for the confidentiality the church offers, would've raised more than a few eyebrows. It was one of those confessions, in fact, that led to my brief interview with investigator Montgomery.

After the South Sister incident, the weather turned strange in ways no one could explain. Black clouds began covering the horizon in every direction, giving off sharp bursts of light and low, muffled rumblings — not thunder, not lightning, but something with that same violent, hateful character that plants itself in a man's chest and mind. Johannes swore he could hear the devil's own screaming in the early hours, when the rumblings grew louder and the light on the horizon leaked in through the windows and the cracks in the walls.

He wasn't the only one.

The interview I mentioned took place after one of the worst nights since the incident began — nobody had managed to sleep. It was the fourth of October, around five in the afternoon. The investigator asked for my help in solving the horrible case that had shattered the town's peace, and I agreed, as any decent man would. It also helped that he understood the nature of my work, and what it meant for the privacy owed to my parishioners.

He didn't get much out of our short conversation. I explained that we had no television or radio at the church, and that our only printed source was *Back in the 60s*. There had been no rumors within the church, either. It was only afterward that I noticed something I didn't dare bring up with him, whether out of fear or caution: the dead men had all been atheists, or believers of other faiths, with no ties to the town's Christians. We were old-fashioned people here, so they must have been buried in the county cemetery rather than the parish one. With nothing more to add, the professional visit came to an end, and the big man left looking defeated.

Over the following days, the chapel filled with people seeking absolution before God, asking forgiveness for any unwitting part they might have played in those deaths. From what I overheard in confession, Montgomery had questioned everyone without a shred of restraint, at odds with the polished, well-mannered man I'd met. I concluded that if everyone was a suspect, then no one really was, and that the investigator ought to wrap up his work soon. Everyone at the church wished he'd leave town, as if he — not the case he was investigating — were the source of all this misery. We were far too hopeful, chalking the deaths up to cruel coincidence.

Then the news broke of a fourth death. By this point we had a radio, donated by one of the parishioners. This time the tragedy had played out in front of dozens of witnesses, and reporters got straight to interviewing them. According to what they said, Elizabeth Peterson had been at the museum with her students when she began showing signs of asphyxiation. She ran for the balcony on the second floor, tearing off her clothes as she went, her bare skin glowing red-hot — and then she fell. Some swore she'd jumped; the more skeptical said she'd slipped. But the most chilling accounts came from the ones standing closest, who said they heard her chanting in some strange language none of them recognized.

Peterson had been young, with a promising career ahead of her — she taught English at the elementary school and helped with the Latin lessons we held at our own house. Her death was a terrible loss for the town. It also raised the possibility that all of these people had taken their own lives, which is a far more sinister idea than any theory involving a killer. Montgomery seemed thrown by it, and no one could imagine what that meant for his investigation.

According to some of the parishioners, the investigator started moving through Blaysville like a shadow, day and night, out among the streets and the fields. Sometimes he called people down to the station, sometimes he went straight to their homes. That Sunday he came to Mass. He looked worn thin, his eyelids swollen, his face exhausted. After the service, he was the first one into the chapel to confess. He spoke of his frustration with the investigation — no cause, no culprit, no instigator to be found — and he'd started calling the dead "suicides." Faced with a man in that state, I turned to the word of God and whatever eloquence I could muster. My words seemed to do real good for his state of mind. For an hour he laid out his theories and turned over everything he knew so far.

He told me he'd been out at The Big Cow, the McDouglas farm, talking to the widow about the deaths of her husband and son. He said the old cowboy used to go out every night looking for Ryan Junior, rifle in hand, dressed warm against the cold — but lately he'd broken from that habit, heading out unarmed and barely clothed, straight into the most tangled parts of the county. Elizabeth's case wasn't so different: her boyfriend had complained about her nighttime disappearances, and noticed the same shifts in her mood and behavior. Anderson's apprentice, though not exactly cooperative, admitted that his mentor used to take long walks through the woods, then shut himself up in his study for hours after. About Cleaurnd, he'd found nothing at all.

Piecing it together, he'd worked out that all three "suicides" had taken nighttime walks along the trails of a small forest reserve called Tregglyft, tucked away among the canyons and steep hills of the Deschutes Valley. By morning they'd go back to their lives, sunk into some dark undertow of thought that no one around them could explain. At that point the investigator shot up from the little chair he'd been leaning against. He was sure that out there, in that forest, he'd find some piece of the truth that kept slipping through his fingers. The whole ordeal had cost him his composure — he was too exhausted to see the light even where it burned brightest. He blamed the weather, said those clouds and that thunder had clouded his own judgment, stirred up impulses he wouldn't describe. Nobody was quite themselves in those days.

The county's mythology is a thin one — only a handful of people, the ones everyone calls crazy, talk about shapeshifters or things from beyond the stars. They describe terrifying creatures glimpsed at the bottom of the cliffs or along the ridgelines, but I promise you: not even the wildest imagination of a madman could dream up the horror that Montgomery and I — each in our own way, and to very different degrees — witnessed at Tregglyft.

If what I say from here makes you doubt me, I won't hold it against you. Gentlemen, all I can hope for is that ignorance reigns long over the affairs of men, so that they never have to see, through some other lens, the truth of what is — mercifully, for most — beyond the reach of reason.

The worst was still to come. Montgomery had vanished, and Sheriff Roland Bowman organized search parties with whatever neighbors were willing to help — most of them reluctantly. I felt a very rational fear at the thought that a man as strong and capable as him might have fallen victim to whatever unknown thing was working on people's minds. It wasn't an armed man or a loose animal out there — it was some unknown force pulling people toward death, or at least that's how I pictured it, in my worst moments of clarity.

Even my faith couldn't make me feel safe. I, a priest, a man who spoke for the word of God, couldn't turn to that same word to calm myself. My fear only deepened when the worst storm ever recorded in the county broke over us. I remember that Monday afternoon like it was yesterday. The northwestern horizon vanished behind a thick, flickering wall of cloud, bearing down on Blaysville without slowing.

Shapes formed in that threatening murk that seemed pulled straight from the darkest verses of Revelation. Gusts of wind tore at the rooftops with a violence that felt almost personal, as if they meant to wreck whatever they touched. Then came the rain, hammering down in sheets and hail meant to terrify the farmland, the parks, the soul itself. All week long the weather stayed abnormal and unrelenting. Whenever the storm's fury gave way to silence, a freezing fog rolled in behind it. People moved through it carefully — plenty of them terrified of something unspeakable that seemed to drift through the mist, an opalescent light of its own. Some spoke of demonic cherubs, made of some thick, whitish substance; others admitted, without shame, that they'd been running from demons — winged satyrs, they said, flying overhead, tormenting them without mercy, ugly and mocking.

One thing every one of those stories agreed on: the sounds were real. The voices, the whispers, and worse than either — the whistling of flutes, so grating and vile that it ruined the memory of what a flute was even meant to sound like. I tried to explain it all away as fear.

I couldn't.

The church itself held firm, though the roof beams and the wooden columns bearing up the towers groaned under the strain. The altar boy had shut himself in his room. We knew he was praying — we could hear him murmuring words we couldn't quite make out — but the voice saying them was guttural, stammering, nothing like the boy we knew. Slowly the pitch climbed until it broke into screams that matched the thunder, howling out warnings of horror between the shrieks. Otto said it was Satan himself taking hold of him, and with a bravery I still envy, he pushed the door open and went in. Johannes was in a frenzy, shouting, oblivious to the fact we were even there.

We managed to bring him down into a hypnotic calm by reciting Psalm 23: *Dominus pascit me et nihil mihi deerit, in pascuis virentibus me collocat…* The boy kept forming words the whole time, and I strained to understand him. Listening closely, I caught what sounded like a prayer, in a dialect I didn't recognize — and I should mention, I'm no amateur when it comes to old languages: Latin, Semitic, Mesopotamian. Those words repeated the same phrase, over and over: *"Sorh-Nahballha, demeretos ei-dann ine Imeree, Sorh-Nahballha Dahal."*

To this day, those words twist through my memory like a snake shedding a skin that weeps the cruelest, most caustic poisons nature has to offer. For a moment I remembered the rumbling that had rolled across the sky, and how, somewhere in the darkest corners of my mind, I'd found myself echoing that same wicked prayer.

So much of what was happening had started working on me in the worst way — making me think paranoia had taken root among the townsfolk. Johannes's ravings weren't helping, and Montgomery was still missing. That last part kept gnawing at me more than anything — I was the only one who knew where the fearless investigator had gone. I didn't dare go looking for him, didn't dare report it to the local authorities, didn't even dare leave the church. Johannes hadn't taken the bells down from the tower, and their ringing kept pace with the grief of more than two hundred families across Blaysville.

Looking back now, I think of the townspeople — devout believers in God and, by the same measure, in the Devil as the author of all evil. I know that, like me, they were on their knees, praying for our souls, shaken by the despair and agony that storm had brought down on us.

By the tenth of October, the fog had lifted and the storm had finally burned itself out. Blaysville was no longer the beautiful, faith-filled town it had been. The residential streets lay in ruin. The plaza was buried under debris. Cars had been driven straight into the fronts of shops, and woodwork lay scattered across the sidewalks. The church bells had given way to the wind — one had crashed down onto the Honor Motel, which by luck had already been evacuated.

When the radio station's antenna was finally repaired, we learned of the death of a journalist from Illinois — he hadn't been able to find shelter, and no one in town had come to help when his RV was crushed by the other bell. A stark reminder of just how far panic can push people, even good people, away from decency. I felt responsible for his death, and went looking through his old house for some paperwork, hoping to find family I could notify. Instead, I found the papers of Charles Brown — but I'll get to those notes another time.

For two days I received visitors in the chapel. Some of the faithful wanted to talk about whether the scriptures were true, whether this was the Apocalypse foretold. Others just came for God's forgiveness. But the most unsettling confessions came from the non-believers — people who came to me speaking of the very same voices that had tormented Johannes during the fog. They forced out that same prayer, in that same unknown tongue, struggling with every syllable, hoping I could offer some comfort, some answer to their fear. I gave them false translations to ease their minds, and they went away believing it was some kind of merciful angel, speaking to them in the Lord's own tongue — a tongue that stirred up far more fear than peace.

Montgomery was still missing.

No newspaper and no radio broadcast was needed to spread the news of October 15th — it moved through Blaysville on its own, like something contagious. Nearly every family in town reported a missing member that day, mostly teenagers and young adults, as if the night had simply swallowed them whole. I went from house to house offering what comfort I could, leaning on whatever scripture seemed to fit. The police tried to investigate, but it was an impossible task for so few officers. At some point I started asking questions of my own — innocently, at first, until it turned into a string of interrogations that put the men in uniform to shame.

Damn the curiosity that condemned me for the rest of my life!

None of this was really my place, but I've always held onto certain values, and I couldn't just look away from what I'd found. I knew it then: prayer alone wasn't going to be enough anymore.

Thanks to Montgomery's investigation, which I knew in painstaking detail, I started to see a pattern in how these young people had been behaving. At least a dozen of them kept disappearing, and others had turned violent — but every single one of them had been taking frequent nighttime walks through the canyons leading to Tregglyft. None of them, I should add, had shown the slightest interest in theology or philosophy before — a connection as unsettling as it was strange. After a short but intense argument with myself, driven by a kind of elation I'd never felt before, I made up my mind to walk straight into the horror that promised nothing but madness and death.

It was hard just remembering where Tregglyft was, as if that particular memory had come unmoored from time and place. Nearly every stretch of the Deschutes carried some memory of mine or one of my neighbors, and we could all talk about them easily enough — but Tregglyft repelled the mind. Its very name felt as empty as a poorly imagined fantasy. When I tried to work out how to get there, I couldn't find a single path or landmark in my memory that led to it. Bowman couldn't remember either — in fact, he hadn't even thought to extend the search party out to the reserve, and when the idea crossed his mind, it made him flinch. He'd never once considered pushing the search that far.

I asked him to point me the way, and he handed me an old map that, thanks to my time serving overseas, I could still read. On that yellowed paper were lines and shapes that didn't match the local terrain — but there it was, that dreamlike hollow sunk among the rolling depressions. I straightened my cassock and my hat, took up my crucifix, and tucked the Bible under my arm. I set off with the feeling I'd never come back. Even now, I still believe my soul never did — that what I am now is just a shell of bone and flesh.

It was two in the afternoon when I left on foot, without an umbrella, without a lantern. I walked along Route 8, then turned northwest and followed the paths Bowman had marked out. The halfway point was the Warren farm, at the foot of the hill that shared their name — I had to climb it and follow its ridge east. I was never much of an athlete, but I made the climb and kept going. The Deschutes landscape was beautiful — snow-capped peaks catching the midday sun, and the canyons cut by the black river offering the perfect contrast.

I followed the map until the lines it traced simply ran out, and still there was no sign of Tregglyft anywhere. Worn out and resigned, I collapsed onto the rocks, cursing those names — Cleaurnd, Anderson, Ryan, Elizabeth, and finally, almost against my will, Montgomery. I felt no regret.

That's when I heard the sky and the earth begin to rumble. The sinister landscape appeared all at once. An early night settled over everything, and the mountains gave way to a darkness with no bottom to it. A stepped path wound down the slope into the valley floor, flanked by columns of red stone crusted with pale grass and grey sagebrush. In that moment, I couldn't make sense of anything. I could hear a dead language on the wind, and felt the ground rise up and cling to my cassock. Fear gripped me for a few seconds, but something inside me pushed past it, and I began my descent into that abyssal world. I'd like to say I moved against my own will, but it was my own feet carrying me forward, and every time some part of me tried to stop, it was overridden by a force I couldn't name.

I went down the smooth stone steps, hearing a rhythmic pounding and a choir that seemed to be guiding me. At the bottom stood a forest of bald, gloomy fir trees. This was Tregglyft.

The thicket was lit by shafts of light filtering down through the canopy into the undergrowth, letting me pick my way between fallen trunks and streams. Everything around me felt wrong — the branches twisted into unnatural shapes, the stones looked almost hand-carved, and the water spiraled upward instead of down, while the light itself seemed to flow in serpentine streaks from a reddish sky. That place was a warped, almost mocking imitation of the world outside it. I moved through it like a moth in the dark, hunting for some light to fix on, because I had reasons to be there. I thought of the families back in Blaysville — they were my anchor to reality. The deeper I went, the clearer that polyphony became. The thunder was drums; the whistling wind was flutes; and the choir was a cacophony of human voices, straining against their own instrument.

My torn cassock revealed deep wounds across my skin, blood gathering at the edges of the cuts. My shoes grew so waterlogged I stopped feeling my toes against the cold. I kept moving only because I craved answers to what I didn't understand. I was discovering one of man's most primitive instincts: curiosity.

I found myself in the middle of that gloom with no idea which way to turn, until a chill ran down my spine. I turned and saw a pit, a warm firelight rising up out of it. Straining to listen, I caught the harsh sound of instruments and men singing with something like contempt. I moved to the edge and looked down over the rim. My mind couldn't take in what I was seeing — it's only been through the years that I've managed to put a shape to that blasphemous ritual.

The pit was shallow, shallow enough to make out every detail of it. Its rim was carved from a single block of uniform stone, and the bottom was covered in a layer of crystalline gravel. The whole structure shared the same reddish material as the columns along the path, except here it looked artificial, sterile. Five bonfires were arranged in the shape of a star, throwing their light across the men dancing and playing their instruments, all chanting a prayer I already knew: *"Sorh-Nahballha, demeretos ei-dann ine Imeree, Sorh-Nahballha Dahal."*

At the center of the circle was something beyond any concept, scientific or theological. No biologist has ever cataloged a creature like it, and neither the Bible, nor any of its wretched apocrypha, ever prophesied one.

The description that follows comes from my later research — back then, I wouldn't have had the vocabulary or the precision to put it into words properly. If I had to compare that thing to some creature I actually know, the closest I could get would be a worm. It was long and cylindrical, coiling in on itself like an irritated earthworm. Its glandular skin was garnet-colored, coated in a viscous, nauseating film.

What set it apart from any worm were its limbs, and part of its digestive tract — details that broke with every rule of logic I knew. It began with a mouth wildly out of proportion, bearing a grotesque resemblance to human lips and teeth, and on either side hung long, bony arm-like appendages. Along the rest of its body coiled another appendage, similar but far longer, which seemed to help it digest whatever vile thing it had eaten. Its anus stood out not for how it looked, but for what came out of it. I have no scientific name for it — nothing like it exists in cryptozoology, and certainly nothing like it exists in Christian scripture.

Up to that point I hadn't understood the point of the ritual, or the differences between the cultists themselves. All of them were naked; some were missing limbs, others had no facial features at all. Their skin glowed the same deep red as the creature at the center. They danced to that grim melody, chanting their prayer with something close to joy. Over and over —

*"Sorh-Nahballha, demeretos ei-dann ine Imeree, Sorh-Nahballha Dahal."*

Then, with no warning, no ceremony, they began to shout:

*"Nahyud, Nahyud, Nahyud! Manifest in this body we have made for you, so your soul may dwell among the living and walk among us. Cleanse this earth, lay waste to those who do not share the garnet blood, and to those who have served you, grant us your immortality."*

I was paralyzed, desperate to turn and run, but my trembling legs wouldn't obey me. My eyes stayed fixed on the ritual, and I could do nothing but curse the clarity of mind with which I watched it unfold. Then came the most horrific part. Two of the cultists, unmarked by any mutilation, armed themselves with rusted knives, ready to carve up — as savagely, as bloodily as possible — the small, naked body of a teenage girl. It was the missing Valencia girl. I recognized her at once, thanks to a memory I've never been able to lose. Her face in my memory looked nothing like the head now swaying, tied by its blond hair to the arm of the man tearing her apart. The rest of her body was offered piece by piece to that foul worm. The creature's main limbs seized each piece and pushed it between its enameled teeth.

The sound of those bones cracking between its teeth still freezes my blood to this day.

The most incredible part came during the creature's evacuation. What came out of it wasn't waste — it was another being, one that, like everything else in Tregglyft, seemed less like a living thing than a twisted idea of one. The length of its fingers, its impossibly thin frame, the paleness of its skin, its misshapen jaw, and a gaze that seemed lost somewhere in the night, unable even to comprehend its own existence — it was the most inhuman thing I have ever seen or felt. What washed over me wasn't just fear of its creator or the cultists around it — it was something closer to true horror. That small, man-shaped thing was the offspring of a place fundamentally at odds with nature, where the reflection of reality itself had been warped by a ritual whose purpose I couldn't grasp, though its malevolence was plain enough just from standing there.

For a moment, I saw Cleaurnd's face in that clouded, smoke-and-plasma-slicked visage.

I can tell it now with something close to indifference, but in that moment, fear consumed me entirely. All at once my strength returned, as if Tregglyft had released me, having shown me its innards. I got to my feet and ran for the church faster than I've ever run in my life, ignoring completely the limits of a sixty-seven-year-old priest's body.

You'll think this belongs on the fantasy shelf of some bookstore. Maybe. But by this point, nearly all of us have seen, felt, or heard something strange within that freezing fog — something that's made us doubt our own senses, and everything we thought we knew about our world. We're watching society spiral into a kind of madness and distrust we've never seen before, because now everything has become possible, even the things that make no sense at all.

I'm an old man now, writing these words, still looking for some way out of my own ruin. I renounced God. I know now that He doesn't exist. Faith can only offer us comfort within our own ignorance — it can't change the facts that push us toward the abyss. Only knowledge, I believe, can lift us high enough to accept our place in this universe. From up there, we might finally see the shapes and beings hidden from our small ideas and perceptions — at the cost of never again having faith, or feeling hope.

I spent days shut inside the church, unable to eat or sleep, abandoning every responsibility I had. Otto kept me updated on everything happening in the streets from that day forward. The freezing fog laid waste to Blaysville, and the ghosts of the missing young people began appearing in the streets, urging their own families to die in the worst ways imaginable, to kill in ways beyond imagining, even to curse the Christian faith itself.

On my last night in that town, a red moon crowned the sky and turned the field of stars into a sea of blood that fell over us in ribbons of serpentine light. Tregglyft was manifesting now — not just in those distant canyons, but across every valley, every corner of the county.

I couldn't stop thinking about the worm in that pit. I kept imagining every person in town turned into one of those cultists, and myself in the worst position of all: devoured, transformed into something I couldn't even begin to picture.

Everything kept getting worse, and the church filled to bursting with believers and non-believers alike. All of them looking for God, torn between fear and hope. Looking for forgiveness for their sins, for some explanation, for shelter — because they could all feel that new world's revulsion toward them. Their ignorance left them defenseless against the conspiracies of that unnatural thing.

I couldn't take any more of it. It wasn't a nightmare. It felt like one, but it was real.

Neither could Johannes. What happened to him was the last straw for whatever patience I had left. The boy wouldn't stop crying, tormented night after night by his own biblical demons. Nothing helped — not Otto's sermons, not his prayers, not even the sedatives the doctor had prescribed earlier. The final collapse came after his first attempt to hurt himself. At first he'd just clench his jaw until his teeth cracked — I assumed he was trying not to repeat those cursed words. Then he started cutting his own skin with whatever sharp thing he could find, trying to write out the prayer his tongue couldn't form. In the end, garnet-colored bruises started appearing across his body, spreading, swallowing up the white of his skin.

In one rare moment of clarity, he predicted his own transformation and cursed it. The way he described it matched, in detail, what I'd seen at the bottom of that pit in Tregglyft. Something settled over my chest, draining what strength I had left to answer him. He begged me to end his life. I refused, shaking my head. A minute later he broke free of the restraints holding him to the chair and, with a speed no human should have, climbed up into the ruined bell tower. He stood there, and let the wind take him. He landed right at the threshold of our church, dying a few minutes after impact. Johannes had been like a son to me, and watching him die that way was unbearable. At least Otto remained ignorant of everything else — he could still blame the Devil and his demons. That's the line where we humans set our hope.

The town had become a disaster waiting to happen. No one could make sense of anything, and I wasn't going to give them the details. I packed my bags and left before the end of the month. To my dismay, the misfortune hadn't confined itself to Blaysville alone. The fields were blanketed in that freezing fog, reflecting the world back like a warped mirror, showing the worst nightmares and horrors that, to my great misfortune, weren't fiction at all.

The road stretched out in fits of desolation. Every so often a car would race past without the slightest intention of stopping. I walked until my feet wanted to give out beneath me, but my luck changed when a car burst through the wall of fog covering the road. It swerved right and skidded to a stop right in front of me. Several men in trench coats got out, flashing their FBI credentials with a kind of pride. Among them was investigator Montgomery. When they asked me to come with them to Idaho, I didn't hesitate.

On the drive, Montgomery told me that from Clatsop to Malheur, and in the states around them, there'd been outbreaks of mass hysteria following the South Sister incident — but he said nothing at all about what had happened at Tregglyft.

I spent a few days housed at the FBI field office in Idaho. For some reason, every agent there wanted to interview me, but I refused. Under different circumstances, they might have locked me in a cell for days, or worse, for not cooperating. Fortunately, most of the officers were Catholic, and they agreed to let me speak with Montgomery alone.

I remember the two of us sitting across from each other in that cold, brightly lit room, decorated with nothing but a mirror of absurd proportions, separated by a steel table with a single folder resting on it. We started by talking about faith, and found ourselves agreeing that God, as religion imagines Him, is really just a manifestation of our fears — something our own minds invented to soothe the misery of being conscious in the first place. For me, it had been enough to witness that macabre ritual, to feel sensations that had no place in this world. For Montgomery, the break from faith had been less terrifying — built instead on scientific evidence and a discovery without precedent. I told him everything I've written here. Once I finished, I was left stunned.

Montgomery didn't so much as flinch. His look of indifference made me feel like a madman confessing hallucinations to a psychiatrist. He pulled out a document, dense with strange diagrams, formulas, equations, and page after page of hurried, cramped handwriting. He squinted to make out the tangled writing, and began reading aloud in an academic tone. From here, I'll quote him word for word:

"In these calculations and theories lies the answer to what's happening. Every prophecy, every myth, even every skeptic's argument — all of it disproven here. But first, let me explain the facts and circumstances that led to this discovery. As you know, I made my way to Tregglyft, but I found no monster there — only a small group of foreigners, mutilating Elizabeth Peterson's body. They'd torn off her limbs, emptied her eye sockets, pulled out her organs. I took them down with my sidearm, and I'll admit, it felt good. One important detail: as they tried to run, they called out for Nahyud's help."

My reaction to that name was impossible to hide. I noticed something shift in his voice, subtle but there. He was afraid.

"At the time, that word meant nothing to me. They kept repeating it, even as they died. I didn't stop firing, not for a second. Once it was over, I went through the scene and, after a short look around, found parts of Anderson and Ryan in the same condition as Elizabeth — but nothing on Cleaurnd. That night, I went to check his grave."

It was empty.

It's no secret that gravediggers can be bribed — susceptible, too, to a good threat. The professor had been a wealthy man, and no doubt he'd been buried in something worth stealing. I questioned them without promising anything, and got a horrifying answer. The burial had been a sham — his body had been dug up the very next day by a group of hooded strangers who'd paid off the cemetery staff to keep quiet. I connected the professor and those madmen to what had happened in Blaysville. Maybe I was being paranoid, maybe not, but I had a thread between my fingers, and I meant to follow it wherever it led.

There was only one place in the country I could find anything on Stmitzeshen: the offices of the A.C.C.O. — a West Coast scientific association — in Bren. I got there as fast as I could. The institute had almost nothing on his personal life. Stmitzeshen was originally from Europe, a physics professor with a real record of academic merit back home, before falling out of favor. He lived in a kind of bitter frustration — his papers had been discredited in the journals, and he faced mockery and accusations of fraud from his own colleagues. His writing tackled subjects as far-flung as alternate dimensions and consciousness within inorganic matter. He held a deep hatred for modern science, and an even deeper one for religion — enough that he'd been declared persona non grata in more than one Eastern European country. When the storm started, I was still going through every treatise the man had ever published, one by one. One stood out — written with real bitterness, full of theories the A.C.C.O. dismissed as completely absurd, which is exactly why they never took him seriously.

The treatise comes in two parts. The first was written and submitted to the A.C.C.O., and a copy of it still sits there today. The second turned up among the wreckage of the professor's lab on Mount South Sister — the same mountain that exploded a month ago. Together, they're titled the Inter-Dimensional Treatise I and II. Their purpose is to lay out a hypothesis on how the brain connects to other dimensions of our reality — and to explain how, during deep sleep, and in some cases even while awake, human beings can communicate with other forms of life through what he called 'points of convergence between dimensions.' He claims that in quantum space, material beings drift and wave, made of substances foreign to our world, possessing a kind of consciousness entirely unlike our own. According to Stmitzeshen, they're conscious — and infinitely powerful and intelligent, with a demonstrable influence over our world. He argues we can't see them because they exist hidden from our perception, tucked away in micro-universes separated from ours since the Great Inflation. It's still all theory, of course — but backed by solid argument. What the professor wanted, more than anything, was proof he could show the public, and especially the A.C.C.O.

"He built a machine capable of recreating the most intense dream-state connections, and projected them onto a series of sensors and monitors, getting the results he was after. That experiment is what caused the incident that knocked out power across a huge stretch of the coastal cities, and killed roughly two hundred people in the explosion."

The treatise's second part goes into far more detail about the results of his experiment. It's written quickly, almost frantically, and sets out to describe the origin of a spatial event on a quantum scale — one that defies everything modern physics understands. Stmitzeshen called it Genesis: his final theory on interdimensional beings, backed, he claimed, with demonstrable evidence. Among that evidence was a photograph of what he called "a specimen foreign to this universe."

The investigator pulled a photograph from the folder and slid it across the table. It showed a mass whose shape I simply couldn't parse. It was ringed by small points of white light, all bending their glow toward that thing — or, as Cleaurnd would have put it, toward the being. That image burned itself into my memory the same way that hateful chant did — as if those words had somehow given shape to its impossible deformity.

"By Cleaurnd's own conclusions, his experiment had managed to concentrate enough energy to warp space itself on a quantum scale, producing an exchange of particles that briefly brought every dimension into alignment at a single point — for milliseconds, no more. But long enough for something to cross over into our world. Whatever it was, it must have started coming apart the instant it met the laws that govern our universe, its nature too far removed from ours to hold together. It lost its form, and scattered across the landscape like a freezing mist."

No one knows what became of the professor, but his terrifying legacy lives on, printed across pages of yellowed paper that Montgomery refused to burn. I've done my part. What you do with the truth now is up to you. It eats at me, knowing they're still debating those treatises in the halls of the A.C.C.O. — what to do with them, what use they might someday serve — because we men will always justify tampering with nature under the banner of science and knowledge. And in that pursuit, doors will open that were locked from the inside by the very limits of what we're able to understand — and that will be the true gateway into the cosmic underworld.

"In Tregglyft, the lost children of Blaysville still dance, keeping time with their drums and their flutes, announcing to anyone who'll listen the genesis of madness."