Even at home, the sense of defeat was ripe. I was regularly known by my friends and peers as a master detective. Every case I took on resulted in a success for me, and I thrived on that wave of happiness. By no means was I regularly unhappy, of course, but I loved the feeling so much. Not just the feeling of success, but the knowledge that I had helped. I’d made my community just a bit safer.
But, not this time. This was my failure. The poor man who had been shot wouldn’t find his killer, and it seemed that I wouldn’t either.
Actually, part of that was a lie. I’d failed once before, only about a year and a half ago. And remembering this, I pulled out some of the old papers from my desk.
I gave the case files a good, long look. Come to think of it, that case was pretty similar to this one. It read:
THE THEMENS MURDERS
RICHARD THEMENS HAS BEEN SUSPECTED OF THE ASSAULT AND EVENTUAL MURDER OF FIVE YOUNG WOMEN AND TWO MEN. HIS CURRENT LOCATION IS UNKNOWN.
MARITAL STATUS: DIVORCED
APPEARANCE/HERITAGE: ENGLISH, GERMAN DESCENT
AGE: 39
OCCUPATION: WORKS AT A SUBSTATION OF CERN IN THE TERRAK LABORATORY
HIS APARTMENT HAS NOT YET BEEN INVESTIGATED.
And underneath that, I wrote a few of my notes.
Look for possible motives?
* Failed marriage as a motive?
Early life?
In my relatively short time as a detective, I was quite successful. Except for this one case. The Themens case.
Similar to today’s case, which had been dubbed as the Hansen case after the name of the hotel, it appeared very simple on the surface. But, also like the Hansen case, it turned out to be much stranger than originally thought.
Henry was out sick around this time, and I had explored Richard Themens’ apartment alone. I had to know two things: if he really was the murderer, and where he was now. Without a hitch, I found traces of poorly-cleaned blood on some of his clothes, and several fingerprints of missing people in his car. And on top of that, I had even found a possible motive; upon doing some digging, I found signs, and eventually confirmation of Themens receiving child abuse early in his life. All was going well. At that point, I only had to find his location. Easy, right? Just go to his work, find information, and track him down.
Richard Themens worked at a CERN laboratory, researching particle accelerators. Specifically, his facility researched the effects smashing particles into each other had on spacetime. Stuff I wasn’t really interested in.
It turned out that, at Themens’ job, something had gone down. All the power was out, and upon entering the facility, I heard sirens blaring.
To my surprise, nobody else but me was in the facility at the time. The lack of human sounds was even more deafening than the red alarms blaring overhead. At that point, I had pulled out my gun and was ready to defend myself.
What had caught my attention as I traversed deeper into the dead and crumbling facility was a bloodied fingerprint on the wall. I pulled out Richard Themens’ fingerprint for reference—a perfect match. He was nearby, and, somehow, he was a part of this incident.
Then, I heard a voice. It was male, and just a bit higher than my own, coming from a hallway to my left. I sprinted down the hall towards the source of the noise, trigger finger ready, until I saw a blinding flash of crimson light. I turned the corner to see… nothing. Nothing but a cluttered, empty room, full of scientific equipment and a viewport into a seemingly nonfunctional particle accelerator.
I shouted, “Hey! Whoever’s here, come out!” in the hopes of getting a response, but the only thing that answered was the blaring alarm overhead. I searched the supply closets, every nearby hall, but found nothing. And not long after, I was prompted to leave by geiger counters mounted on the walls all simultaneously clicking to life. I went home that night without any answers as to where Themens went, or how he disappeared.
And that first ever failure put perspective into my work as a detective. In the end, it was probably a good thing that I failed—I had built up plenty of ego as a detective up until then, and a failure was most likely in my best interest.
But now, the Themens case held a different meaning in my head. Not just in the sense that it was my first of now two failed cases, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the Themens case and the Hansen case were undoubtedly connected somehow. But as to how, I wouldn’t find out until later.
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The next day, to my disappointment, was not nearly as nice as the previous one. It was cloudy and overcast, and there was a tension in the sky that looked as if it would break at any moment.
Other detectives continued to investigate the Hansen hotel for more clues, attempting to solve the problems that Henry, Sarah and I had discovered. The station that morning was just as busy as before, if not more so, fueled by the new mysteries of the Hansen case.
Henry, as usual, had found his way over to me with astonishing speed. In the hopes of avoiding him, I briskly walked to my post at the station. He began to speak, yammering on about new information uncovered at the Hansen hotel. I wasn’t in the mood for it.
“Henry, would you kindly shut it for once? I know all that. All of it. I’m not an ignorant detective.”
“You sure you’ve heard all of it?”
This poke at my pride sent a sharp breath up my nose. “I-”
And I was quickly interrupted by a woman I didn’t recognise calling my name, a telephone in her hand. I pushed past Henry to get to her.
“Charlie. It’s Oscar. You’ll want to see it.”
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Not an hour later I found myself at the Hawkins cemetery, looking over the body of Oscar. Blood pooled beneath him, and he was lying face-down in it. He had been killed, a bloody hole in the top of his head. And just like before, a hole was nearby, a perfect circle in the marble floor of the cemetery entrance.
Who knew how far that goddamned hole went.
A tear of mine fell down by Oscar’s body. Whatever had gotten that poor man at the Hansen hotel had gotten Oscar, and he was gone forever. This wasn’t the kind of thing that could be caught by the authorities, or put into cuffs. It was a force, something beyond what a detective or a policeman could handle...
A bundle of flowers by Oscar’s corpse caught my attention.
...But by god would I try to handle it.
Setting aside my grief, I tried my hardest to put my mindset into that of a detective. I wiped my tears and sniffed back my sadness, and I got a better look at the flowers.
They had been spilled over the same concrete floor Oscar was on, but marks were apparent on the stems. Marks from a hand. A hand had been holding the flowers—Oscar. He was visiting someone at the cemetery. A memory came to me, of him sitting at a pub with me, a bit too much to drink. He’d mentioned the unfortunate death of his dad in a throwaway sentence—the kind of detail any usual person would forget in a state of intoxication.
Now, I just had to find the tombstone.
I wandered around the cemetery, weaving between the graves, until I came across an angular-shaped tombstone. It had the name Arnold Williams on it—Oscar’s dad. I read the epitaph.
THOUGH KILLED BY A KILLER
HIS MEMORIES ARE UNDYING
WE WILL MISS HIM
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Hours of painstaking searching through newspapers gave me no clues as to who the killer of Arnold Willams was. After looking through yet another article, I threw it aside onto the massive pile of newspapers I had reviewed. No luck. The sweet grasp of sleep was calling me now, and I used all of my willpower to keep me awake.
Until, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the news articles I had posted about the Themens case and his victims. Could it be?
I sluggishly pushed myself up from my chair and walked over to the article to get a closer look. I began to feel the dreading feeling that I had overlooked something I should have thought of hours ago…
And it was true—among the list of Richard Themens’ victims, was the face and name of Arnold Williams.
And at that very moment, my telephone began to ring. It was Sarah. I picked it up.
“Charlie, I’m so sorry about Oscar. But I thought you’d want to know—the autopsy reports for the Hansen case came through. Not sure if Henry already told you, but they found that the body was radioactive, along with a lot of stuff at the crime scene. Do you have any leads?”
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The events that took place at the Terrak laboratory those years ago flashed in my mind. Everything was coming together…
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I met Henry and Sarah back at the station, having shared with them the events at the cemetery and my suspicions about Themens, along with the story of his disappearance.
“So you’re saying Themens is alive?” Henry queried in disbelief.
“I’m… not sure. Themens is involved in this, somehow,” I replied, silently praying for them to believe me.
“I’m not perfectly following you…” Sarah started, “but I’d be willing to help you to solve this. What’s your plan?”
It was hard to make my sigh of relief silent. “Firstly, I’ll need the both of you to stay completely, and I mean completely quiet about this. I’ve no interest in losing my job, and I doubt either of you have any either. There’s no way in hell I’d get anyone else but you two to side with me on this.”
“What could it-” Henry started, before I interrupted him.
“We need to go back to the Terrak laboratory. I feel like… I feel like we’re going to find some answers there. Something. There’s so many things going on that I don’t understand, and I think going there will help us understand it.”
Henry, Sarah and I all looked between each other, until Henry spoke.
“I believe you. I think that’s our only real option.”
I grinned a big smile. “Brilliant. And one last thing—I’ll need one of you to steal a geiger counter from the station. If radiation is something we can expect, we won’t want to be exposing ourselves to too much of it.”
Sarah’s face turned dark again. “I do hope you realize that stealing from the station marks our division from it. We won’t be able to turn back. We’ll be going rogue.”
Confidence filled my voice. “If that’s what it takes to solve this, so be it.”
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Since the first time I came to the Terrak laboratory, it had only gotten less hospitable. A sick, chemical must filled the dim corridors, lit only by our flashlights and the fading light from behind the dark clouds that covered the sky. Henry, I noticed, was beginning to have his second thoughts.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said.
“Sarah, do you have the geiger counter on?” I asked, ignoring Henry’s comment.
“Yes, and I turned on Henry’s as well. Good move, taking two,” she nodded to Henry.
Henry accepted the compliment with a feeble nod, holding the flashlight yet tighter.
The background radiation of the facility was much higher than it was outside, that being proven by the geiger counters’ occasional clicks. As we passed through cramped, decrepit corridors, I secretly wished I could understand the many warning signs posted on the doors.
At some point, I noticed a familiar hallway. We were approaching the place where I had seen that eerie red light that year or two ago.
“We’re getting close,” I informed them.
And once we arrived, I took in the environment. Unlike other places in the facility, which had the occasional sign of plant life, this room was exactly how I left it so long ago. Lifeless. The broken window into the particle accelerator was still the same, and buttons on the seemingly endless control panels still glowed a faint light.
“It looks like this area is still getting powered somehow,” Henry managed, echoing my own thoughts.
Memories of my previous visit came to mind once more. “Watch the geiger counters,” I warned.
Suddenly, the room sprung to life. Fluorescent lights emitted a hum above, bathing the room in a bluish-white light. A large screen nearby began its noisy start-up sequence, startling the three of us. After we had calmed down, Sarah spoke.
“What exactly are we looking for here?”
“Anything,” I replied. “Anything that might give us answers. This room was the last place I heard Themens before he… vanished. There has to be something here.”
We split up, digging around the room for evidence and sifting through countless documents and files. I was stationed at the large screen, poking around the interface which was far more advanced than I was used to, hoping to discover something.
And eventually, I found a folder under Themens’ account, buried in an egregious number of other folders. It was titled:
Outerthem encounters
This, especially contrasted against the fruitless discoveries I had made thus far, intrigued me. I dug deeper.
Upon clicking on the folder, a series of video files met my eyes. They were labeled as “encounters,” numbering from one to six. I opened the first video.
On the screen was the enlarged and excited face of Richard Themens. After taking a breath, he began to speak.
“Today, I made an exciting discovery. I plan on keeping this a secret from the rest of the team for two major reasons: one, I do not think that they will believe me. And two… well, I think that this discovery was meant for me alone.”
From his voice alone, it was impossible to imagine that he was a killer. However, hearing it was only made more haunting from the knowledge that it was the last thing his victims had heard. Henry and Sarah had left their tasks and were watching the video with me.
“The particle accelerator behind me has recently undergone an upgrade. It has far more power than before, and many of my colleagues have enjoyed the new findings it has revealed. It’s incredible, the things one can discover with the power of science. Anyway, I digress. While analyzing some of the waveforms from the latest test, I noticed an odd pattern in one of them. It was a mostly uniform sine wave, with a portion of it altered in a mysterious fashion. It would form troughs, and then peaks, and then more peaks, and then a few troughs, all in a seemingly random pattern. And it didn’t take me long to realize that the waveform was not, in fact, random. Because that sine wave had encoded in it a message in binary. Peaks for ones, and troughs for zeroes. And when I translated that binary into English, it formed the sentence ‘are you there?’” He then pushed a piece of paper towards the camera, on it a series of sine waves, along with notes of his written in messy handwriting. When it no longer occupied the screen, Themens’ face was filled with glee. He spoke one final time:
“I’ll be pursuing this further.”
And then the video ended.
“Play the next one,” Sarah said, her mouth open in shock. I obliged. The face of Richard Themens appeared on screen once more.
“By using the same particles and setup from last time, I attempted sending a message. After convincing my colleagues to let me man the accelerator, I used it to encode a response, also in binary, smashing electrons for a ‘one,’ and smashing protons for a ‘zero.’ I only replied with the word ‘yes.’ And the following day, after getting the waveform readings from a test, I found the same broken sine wave. This time, after decoding it, it was a longer message. Much longer. It detailed that the… thing contacting me was a force, or a species, that lived in a dimension higher than ours. And by using our particle accelerators, and by testing our own laws of physics to the brink, we were leaking messages into the 4th dimension, just through the sheer effect on spacetime that the accelerators had. It was something that I could hardly believe by just seeing it. And their message finished with just the words, ‘we see you.’ By the description they gave, I’ve decided to name them ‘the Outerthem.’ I plan on continuing our conversation.”
Without a word from any of us, I began the next video. And then the next. We only watched in utter silence, baffled by the sheer enormity of it all. But, by session #5, something changed in Themens. I played the video.
This time, he was much more unkempt. He began the tape with a manic smile on his face.
“The Outerthem have revealed to me something very, very important. They told me that they know who I am. They see me. They see everyone. They’re on a higher plane of existence, farther than we can comprehend.” He pulled a piece of blank paper from off his desk, held it up, and pointed at it frantically. “Imagine that there was a bunch of beings that lived on a flat plane, like this piece of paper.” He now put the paper back on his desk and began scribbling on the paper insanely, a few moments of the video only containing the sounds of his writing. When he showed the paper to the screen again, there were crude drawings of creatures on it, along with a misshapen house containing one of them. “They can go about doing what they like, moving around in their two-dimensional world, going in and out of their two-dimensional houses, whatever they want. But if someone from our world were to come across that two-dimensional plane of existence, we could interrupt that without them even noticing us. We could-” he snatched a pen from behind the camera, and stabbed it through one of the creatures. “We could interact with them however we so choose. We could kill them. We’re outside of the two-dimensional world. We’re gods to them.” He took a break from his insane ranting, sitting himself comfortably down in his seat. He stared off somewhere behind the camera for a moment, before staring at it again.
“What if you were one of those 2d creatures, and someone from a higher dimension asked you if you wanted to visit the 3d world? That’s the situation I find myself in. They know about my killings. They’ve seen me do them, just how any human would be able to watch a 2d world go by. They want me. And they’re offering me their weapons.” He picked up the pen he used to stab the creature with. “This pen could kill any of these 2d creatures with ease. I just-” He stabbed two more of them, leaving only one left. “I just use my 3d weapon. And it seems as if the Outerthem are about to give me their own ‘pen.’ It’s a gun. It’s called the Arrikale. They know my desire to kill, and they want me to fuel this desire with their weapon. They only want one thing in return; but I’ll talk about that in the next session.” He turned off the camera without any further word.
Before opening the final file, I looked down at my hand and noticed that it was shaking. I opened the sixth and final session.
Now, Richard Themens looked worse than ever. His hair was completely unkempt, and his lab coat was crumpled in places. His eyes were imprinted with tiredness, but an inhuman vitality kept them open and alive.
“It’s happening today. I’m leaving this world. All of our worlds. I’m coming with the Outerthem. And it’s perfect, honestly. I’m being hunted by the police, and I’ll have my flawless getaway. The Outerthem agreed to protect my secret by letting me kill anyone I wished, and anyone who tried to pursue me, in return for me giving them our-”
Suddenly, the geiger counters being held by Sarah and Henry clicked to life. The clicking sped up exponentially, until the only sound they made was a loud hissing static. And the old geiger counters on the wall did the same, turning the room from silent to deafening. Sarah and Henry ran, but I lingered in front of the screen for a moment longer. I could only make out a few words:
“With the Arrikale, I’ll be a god. And to anyone who pissed me off, you’d better bow to me while you can.”
Finally, I sprinted out of the room after my partners. Even after leaving the room, the sound of hissing geiger counters was audible from all over the facility. At every corner, and in every room, they were all activating at once. It could only mean one thing:
The Arrikale was coming.
I was still alone in the halls. There was no sign of Sarah or Henry, and pure terror fueled my escape. All I could hear was that goddamned clicking. After turning a corner, I saw Sarah calling for me, a panicked look on her face. When I reached her, she said:
“Charlie! We need to hide! Henry’s already hidden himself in the-”
Suddenly, there was a boom. It rocked my body, and sent a deafening shockwave along the halls. The sound was unearthly, and my ears tried to reject its noise. Sarah’s already panicked face became one of utter horror, mangled by pure fear, making me want to look away. But the shock forced me to watch her.
“It got him,” she sobbed. “Themens—the Outerthem—got Henry.” She finally sprinted back down the hall, away from the shockwave, holding my hand with gripping force. I couldn’t process it.
We hid inside a dark room, filled with equipment that I had no chance of recognizing. The sounds of the geiger counters were still audible, and Sarah had shut hers off. We sat in a corner, staying as quiet as death, as the sounds slowly started to fade. After what felt like hours of just… waiting… Sarah spoke the words both of us were thinking.
“You can’t run from it, you can’t hide from it. It will hunt you down from a dimension we can’t even see, much less experience, and disappear as fast as it kills you. And after the bullet rips through your brain, it’ll keep travelling for—kilometers, god knows how far. It’s the Arrikale. And as long as Themens wants your life, he’ll get it.”
She said all this while staring blankly forward, a tear rolling down her cheek. She finally looked at me.
“Charlie… I’m scared. I don’t want to see that… thing. I don’t want to die.”
Suddenly, the geiger counters in the facility roared to life again. Sarah quietly turned hers on, only giving off the occasional click.
“It’s not nearby…” she uttered.
And, by listening closely, the clicking was audible from only one side of the hall at a time. I heard the geiger counters activate down the right side of the hall, then slowly get quieter, reducing to only a couple clicks, and then get louder again. The noise got louder in our hall, slowly bringing to life the geiger counters on the left side of the hall. It sounded like the noise a monster made, roaming the halls.
“It’s looking for us,” she whispered again.
We stared through the open door in our dark room, watching the invisible noise travel across the hallway. Sarah’s geiger counter, which was placed on the ground in between us, slowly quickened in its clicking. It was coming.
Sarah closed her eyes and pressed herself up against the wall, gripping my hand. I gripped it in return, closing my eyes as well. The noise got louder and louder, the clicking faster and faster, until it suddenly stopped. All of the clicking stopped, even in the hall. We waited a few moments, slowly opening our eyes, until I saw it.
It was the barrel of an exotic-looking gun, floating in the air between realities. Its perfectly shiny silvery-white surface gleamed, reflecting everything around it. The barrel was impossibly long, stretching halfway across the room. The Arrikale adjusted its aim between my eyes, and fired.