Third in the series. Read after the break…
Insight
By Scott Lowther
Copyright 2019
1937, March: Hobart, Tasmania
It had been a long trip… train from Denver to San Francisco, Clipper from San Francisco to Hawaii, ship from Hawaii to Tasmania. But under the circumstances Assistant Director Healy felt it was necessary.
Six years earlier, the Miskatonic Expedition to Antarctica had returned, a disaster. Many lives lost, aircraft lost, money flushed down the drain. Nothing especially surprising for expeditions to the polar regions. The expedition had split into several groups; weather had come down on them hard, and many had been lost. The story of the expeditions failure was sad, but essentially mundane. The Office of Insight took no particular interest in it.
At least not until news of the planned Starkweather-Moore Expedition hit the press several years later. The new scientific exploration mission would cover much of the same ground as the earlier, and use some of the same techniques – in particular, aircraft – but was much better funded and provisioned. Smart money suggested that it should do better than the earlier expedition.
But one of the survivors of the earlier mission, Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University, began a public letter-writing campaign to the leaders of the new expedition, begging them to stop. He included a new narrative about the Miskatonic Expedition, laying out an almost novel-length tale of weird horror featuring monsters from the depths of Earth and the depths of space. Dr. Dyer had been in a particularly doomed segment of the expedition; he now claimed that only he and one other man, a graduate student named Danforth, had seen a long dead alien city beyond a mountain range unlike any other on earth. Dr. Dyers evidence included his manuscript, several notebooks full of drawings… and now photographs. The photos were hard to ignore. Certainly harder to ignore than the fact that since the expedition Dr. Dyer had been in a state of nervous exhaustion and Danforth had been in a state asylum.
This new evidence attracted the attention of the Office of Insight. Some of the claims matched up with ancient myths and legends that some of Insights scholars had been aware of and on the alert for. Just a few years earlier, Healy would have found all of this to be patently ridiculous superstitious nonsense from a less enlightened time… but since then he’d seen enough to no longer automatically reject the seemingly insane. And so, the Office of Insight took an interest in the Starkweather-Moore Expedition. The expedition leaders suddenly found themselves with some welcome new investors… enough extra money for another aircraft and a dozen new team members. All of whom were agents of the OoI.
The agents mission was simple enough: see if Dyer was telling the truth. If there was, indeed, an ancient city built by creatures from another world, the United States needed to own it. The world was becoming a disturbing place… not just the Nazis and Imperial Japanese seemingly wanting to take over the world, with Stalin not far behind, there were forces out there well beyond petty human politics. There might be something in that city that would help defend the USA not only from Hitler but also from the “Great Old Ones” the scholars were always going on about.
And now the Starkweather-Moore Expedition was concluded, its ship due to dock in Hobart this very day. The radio reports that had been received indicated a successful expedition, if a somewhat disappointing one… good science and good mapping had been accomplished, but never once did the expedition mention the vast mountains that the Miskatonic Expedition had. Of course, there were several good reasons for the agents to have kept radio silent on the issue.
Assistant Director Healy wanted to know the truth, and he wanted it now. So, he’d traveled to the far side of the world to get the facts as soon as possible.
The Expeditions ship sailed into the port of Hobart with some fanfare. Soon, the crew was pouring off the ship, scattering to the haunts and diversions that appealed to them. A dozen of them, though, seemingly less boisterous than the rest, casually separated themselves and made their way further into town to a higher-class and altogether quieter hotel. They were promptly shown to AD Healy’s room, the best – and biggest – in the place.
“Well?” Healy asked as soon as the door was closed, his hands folded behind his back.
“Majority report… nothing,” the leader of the group said. “Not a damn thing.”
“No creatures from outer space. No monsters, no city, no mountains taller then the Himalayas?”
“No, sir,” the group leader replied, betraying in word and tone his military background. “None of that. And we flew directly over where the city was said to be, and where the mountain chains were supposed to be. Nothing was there except snow and ice. Hundreds of miles of it, far as the eye could see.”
“Hmmm.” Healy paced slowly back and forth, looking at his feet. Then he looked up, scanning the faces of the men. “Alright. Minority report?”
“Just one, sir,” the group leader said. “Valdes.”
AD Healy stopped pacing and looked directly at Joe Valdes. “Yes?” he asked.
“Sir,” Valdes replied while digging out a small notebook, “while flying over the region of the supposed tallest mountains, we saw, as Lieutenant Hendrik said, nothing but featureless snow and ice for miles.”
“Except?” Healy prodded.
Valdes flipped through the notebook, looking for something he’d scribbled down in code. “On January 27, at approximately 3:15 PM, while looking out the window of the aircraft I saw mountains. Just for a second.”
“Explain.”
“Well, it was a cloudless day, full sun. As I said, nothing to see except a flat stretch of snow, all the way to the horizon. But suddenly, we were flying parallel to a mountain range, no more than ten miles distant. I saw them plain as day, sir. And then they were gone.”
Healy squinted at Valdes. “Did anyone else see this… vision? Did you obtain photos?”
Valdes did not squirm under his bosses stern gaze. “No, sir, to both. Before I could speak up, the mountains were gone.”
“Lieutenant Henrik,” Healy said, keeping his eyes on Valdes’, “Is this man a drinker?”
“No sir.”
“Given to flights of fancy? Under any especial strain at the time, lacking in sleep, ill in any way?”
“No, sir, to all.”
“Hmm. Alright. How did the mountains appear and disappear? Did they blink in and out, ripple like a mirage, was a veil opened and closed, what?”
Valdes thought for a second. “They seemed almost to… ‘unfold’ would be the best word. But it happened very quickly.”
“’Unfold’,” Healy repeated, rubbing his chin. He sighed, then looked away from Valdes. “Alright, gentlemen. Make your way back to the rest of the expedition crew, enjoy yourselves in port. Good job.”
Lieutenant Hendrik did not look especially happy. “We didn’t seem to accomplish much,” he said, “except to confirm that Dyer is insane.”
“Perhaps not,” Healy replied. “There are… powers out there beyond comprehension. And a lot of them do things with geometry that we can’t explain. I have personally visited a house where a corner of one room had somehow ‘folded’ out of visibility. A ‘pocket in the fourth dimension’ is I believe how one of the researchers explained it, a temporary phenomenon. So perhaps – just perhaps, mind you – that’s what’s happened here.”
“Entire mountain ranges folded out of existence?”
“Not out of existence, just out of accessibility.” Healy paced a little more, then gave the group a weak smile. “And as strange as it may sound, that’s hardly the oddest thing I’ve heard of.”
Lieutenant Hendrik scowled slightly. “That’s disconcerting.”
Healy’s weak smile broadened. “You bet your ass it is. Alright, head on back to the boat. I’ll see you all back at headquarters in a few weeks.” With that, the group turned and silently shuffled out of the room, out of the hotel and back towards the harbor.
Healy sat alone in his room, thinking. As soon as the men had left, he’d called down to the front desk to have them send a telegram; in code it had simply said that things were status quo. Another message he could have sent, had the expedition reported the alien city outright, would have caused the Director to try to get the United States Navy to seize the site. Optimally, a troop transport and an aircraft carrier would be sent from Pearl Harbor. This would not have gone un-noticed by the Japanese, and would almost certainly have precipitated a war. So he was just as happy to have not had to send that message.
But Valdes’ report, as easy as it would be to write off as just a momentary daydream, fit too well with the stories he’d heard and the things he’d witnessed. If the great mountains Dyer reported had stayed hidden for months except for one blink of an eye, then chances were good they’d stay hidden in the future. But it would do well to keep an eye on the place… perhaps send an airplane over every few months. But if they were hidden, they were probably inaccessible, so there was no point in even trying to get to them. Just wait and see. Perhaps one day they would appear again.
And now… When AD Healy had shown his counterparts from the British Empire around one of the Deep One detention facilities in Wyoming three months earlier, the Australian agent had invited him to see something in the Great Sandy Desert of western Australia. So, he had to go catch a boat to Adelaide, and then an airplane into the western part of that island continent.
“Great,” he mumbled to himself. “Another goddamn desert. This had better be worth the trip…”