If you get off the Interstate 5 in Olympia, Washington and take the highway out to Aberdeen, you may see many unusual sights, if you know exactly what it is you’re supposed to be looking for. If you don’t realize what you’re looking at, you still may feel a queer sense of unease.

There are the streetlights, for example. This section of highway was rebuilt and redeveloped in the late 1960s. At the time, a corrupt and penny-pinching highway department sought to save costs by accepting the lowest bid on a manufacturer who designed and manufactured streetlight posts.

The company which manufactured these posts only existed for five years, from 1966 to 1971, before a series of consolidations and bankruptcies forced them to close. Their factory was located in Sandberg, Indiana.

The difference between these streetlight posts and any other on any stretch of road in any part of the world is subtle. This is one of the reasons you need to know what to look for.

Other than a vaguely unique shape and form to their design, there’s one other feature that makes these streetlights remarkable. When viewed directly, they seem to be placed in a perfectly even and reasonable cadence. When viewed indirectly, they convey a message. Not in light, but in shadow.

The only way to see this message is by being in a vehicle. Not as the driver of the vehicle, that is too distracting, but as a passenger. The vehicle will need to be traveling at, or about, the speed limit. It helps a great deal if it is a very large, roomy vehicle, such as a van, where the observer has room to turn about. It must, by necessity, be at night. You’re not to look at the lights directly, but at the interior surfaces of the vehicle. It’s the way shadows shift as they move across the interior of the vehicle. It’s in the way the angles change as you drive underneath the light. They are not at all regular, like the posts themselves are, which makes no sense. Even if you’re looking for a message, you might not see it in a car. In the back of an empty and spacious van, however, the message becomes obvious.

It’s the way the light and the dark moves about your surroundings that conveys the message. It is similar to Morse code, though it is not Morse code. There is no prior training to interpret the message. You will simply know it when you see it.

The message is incomplete. It is only a portion, one third of the entire message. Before folding, the factory which built these street lights produced a batch delivered to Washington state. Florida. And Delaware.

Nobody has ever completed the full message. There are those within our organization going through substantial efforts to make sure no one ever does. Then again, a few are very curious.

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Then there are the businesses to the side of the highway. Not all of them are what they seem. You will see dealerships selling agricultural equipment, like tractors. Others sell boats. A business selling small prefabricated barns.

It would appear that these businesses are accessed from a road that runs parallel to the highway, but if you try to exit the highway, and find these roads, and the businesses in question, you will not find them.

The businesses never sell the presumed products. They make no profit off of them. On rare occasions they will rotate their stock, as it weathers and erodes in the long years the stock sits there in their lots, easily viewable from the highway. These businesses are all fronts for something else. They do very brisk business. Just don’t dig into it.

Then there are the parks. The rest stops. The various greenways administered by the Parks Department. Similar to the Highway Department, the Parks Department was very active throughout the 1960s, and since then has only maintained its work. Prior to the interest in public beautification, Satsop county had been ravaged by clear cut logging, the area’s primary industry.

Naturally, the parks department set to work, filling their green places by planting trees. This was still in the early years when people were only beginning to think about environmental health. There was not a lot of thought in the selection of what sort of species to plant, nor consideration of diversity, native species, proper spacing, how the parks might look once the trees grew to size, and so on.

If you go to a park now, all the trees seem similar. Same size. Same species. Widely spaced. They all grow very tall and very straight, and don’t resemble the sort of natural growth trees you’d find in a proper forest. It provides an unnatural, uncanny feeling. For that matter, there seems to be something strangely uncanny about the other park features, the style of the signage, the architecture of the buildings, like the restrooms and the covered picnic shelters, the parking lots themselves. The strangeness somehow amalgamates with the strangeness of the trees.

If you look very closely, more closely than anybody should ever look at trees, you will see that they are perfectly identical. Down to every single detail.

Unless you dig, you’ll never notice how these trees connect underground.

Then there’s a certain house, in Elma, a town about halfway to Aberdeen. A trailer really, double wide. It sits in a now worn out trailer park that had been built in the 1970s. Its original intended occupants had been young engineers and construction workers, and their families, who had been brought to Elma temporarily to build the Ajax nuclear reactor. That project was canceled and those workers left. You can still see the old cooling towers from the highway, they were never finished. At least not in this world.

In another world, that plant was finished, in a manner of speaking. It’s good for our world that it was never finished here. In the other world, the consequences were very unexpected. That trailer was abandoned in January, 1981. The current residents of the trailer park never acknowledge the presence of that home. No one had gone in since its abandonment, though the doors were left unlocked.

Though a small interior door near the back of that trailer, a part of that other world leaks through an open door in its twin. It’s enough to cause serious problems within our world, though it’s unrelated to any of the strange phenomena previously mentioned. At least it’s hoped it’s got nothing to do with that message.