Tales To Tell In The Dark

The Harbinger Experiment

The world we live in is full of things we don't understand. Being the curious humans that we are, we naturally try and seek these things out. Doing so has lead us to remarkable discoveries and inventions that we never could have imagined a hundred years ago. We have defeated disease, built to the sky itself and even created machines that could take us beyond the clouds and into the stars. If our ancestors could see us and what we have created, I'm sure many of them would see us as gods.

Our innate curiosity and lust for knowledge has not always led us to greatness, however. True evil and darkness have also been uncovered in humanities conquest of knowledge. And in the end, I fear this evil will be our doom.
I do not say this from the standpoint of a great philosopher who has sat and simply pondered things either, no, I say this because I have seen it; experienced it. I was a part of it.

The event I am about to relay to you is true in its entirety, this I swear. I feel certain that this will fall on deaf ears and many of you will believe this to be just another spooky story meant to give you cheap thrills, but I promise you that this is neither my intent nor my purpose. The purpose of this story is to simply warn you of what lurks beyond the veil of what we can see and understand; to show you what awaits us in the darkness. Even if I myself don't understand it.

What I am about to tell you has happened, and I feel certain it will happen again.

In 1971 a not-so-well-known scientist began preparations for an extremely secretive project known simply as "The Harbinger Experiment". I would like to keep the identity of the scientist a secret for personal reasons, so throughout this recounting I will refer to him as "Zimmerman". Zimmerman's background is unclear at best beyond 1971. All that is known about him before that time is that he had grown up somewhere in Maryland with a strange fascination of the occult and supernatural. This later made him an outcast among his fellow scientists due to how scoffed upon the metaphysical was (and still is) at the time. Zimmerman's opinions concerning the "other worldly" were not the sole cause for him being an outcast though; it was his methods that made him widely unaccepted among his peers. Zimmerman was well known during his time for being ruthless and cold beyond measure. He never cared about the means; all that mattered to him was results, and if he predicted the results to be valuable enough, anything would be worth obtaining them. It was this insatiable and brutal lust for the truth that made him feared among those that knew of him. And the few that knew of him and did not fear him believed in him and followed him and his work closely.

The word harbinger itself has such a mysterious and intimidating taste to it. Maybe it's the way it rolls from our tongues or maybe it's simply due to its association with the project, but the word always seems to carry a certain amount of doom with it. Which would make sense, the word itself means to warn or forebode. I can't imagine Zimmerman's reason for giving the experiment this title, but in retrospect, it fits perfectly.

Zimmerman came to a select few (me being one of them), he told us he was working on "something big" and that he needed people who could keep confidentiality and not spread idle gossip of his work. While he did not fully trust some of us, he did know that we were professionals and that for some reason or another, we were all in dire need of employment. I had worked at the local clinic as a doctor, but I was caught stealing medication and was promptly fired. This left a very dark mark on my resume, so work was hard to find. I was also a native to Alaska and lived near where the experiment would take place, so I guess you could say I was a convenient choice. As you can imagine, I jumped at the opportunity. It was hard not to when I saw the payout.

Fifteen of us were hired in total. Some were colleagues of his that has been working with him for a while, some were maintenance workers and a few were hired as "private security". I was the only medical professional to be hired. It is still a wonder to me how he even attained the funds necessary for the experiment, I would not be wholly surprised if his financing was not entirely legal. But legal or not, I needed the money and he was paying. Looking back, it's a decision I have come to regret.