File C909-2

File C909-2 The Doctor

Government File: Class C909-2, administrative access only.

Information Origin: Confiscated recording tape found in the library of [Redacted]. Original source, unknown.

A man begins speaking into a recording device. There is a note of static in the background and you can hear his breaths between bursts of words. "Hospitals, clean cut sanitized places. Never disturbed me before. Some people get an illogical fear when they enter, like one of the patients will have the black plague or something, and it'll want to jump down their throat like a demon possessed frog. They don't. They never do. But that place. That wasn't no hospital. That man" His voice squeaks on the word man. He breaths heavily. "He ain't no doctor. I was travelin for work, something about some server bank stored down in the middle of nowhere actin up. I don't really remember the town's name that well. T'wasn't the first thing on my mind at the time, and mattered even less so later. All I could think of was getting away. Don't think I can't tell you. But you musn't go there, you must not speak it, you cannot think it. Its name was [Redacted]. Simply uttering it sends shivers down my spine and goose bumps to my skin. I drove the company van, our logo plastered over the side like a banner proclaiming our greatness. I sighted the first traffic light in the town. It was strobing like it had a loose wire. My first thought was that it needed an epilepsy warning plastered to it. I grinned. Didn't do much of that later on. It was a long light. I rifled through some magazines before noticing the green light a few seconds after it had already appeared. Not that it really mattered. No one lives out there, or well, no one sane lives out there. Not that sane people don't go there, but what that place'll do to you. Heh. I forged farther into the beast. The blank building sides with oppressively empty store fronts seemed to bear down upon me from each angle, like a cloth coming to my mouth to smother me from existence. Like a warning. A fear every man knows deep down inside him where the old wicked things used to dance. Like an itch you just can't scratch. A screeching terror subverted by logic and our pridefully infallible reason. There it was, the painfully cubic building looking like a giant lego placed down in the middle of the town. Everything about it was flat. Even the roof wasn't slanted. Dark windows peered into its soul yet revealed nothing to my casual glance. Just another job. Just another day of slogging through seemingly meaningless tasks till I reached the end of the grimy tunnel with the paycheck it included and crawled my way into the next. Maybe They have a point, maybe our existence doesn't have a purpose. Maybe we're worthless after all." The man falls silent for a time. "But whatever, we're here, They're here, no one can change that. I got out my kit and wrestled with the rusted door handle for a few moments. I stuffed the keys back in my pocket, about to get a sledge hammer from the back of my truck, when the door fell open itself. Must've loosened up I figured. Probably some sort of draft in there anyways. Less work for me. I flicked my hand in the darkness where I assumed the light switch would be. Couldn't find the damn thing. I muttered and went back to the truck for a light. The door was swinging slightly when I got back but I didn't feel any wind that might've moved it. I doubt that place even has air conditioning. I pushed the rubber button to switch on the flashlight. It didn't reveal much. Lot of dust, lot of nothing. I sighed. Was gonna be a long day. I walked around the entrance for a while searching for signs of a switch to light up the large building but eventually gave up. Somebody was probably too cheap to install lights. Not like anyone human would be here anyways. Had I only known how much of a friend the darkness could've been to me. Anyways, I journeyed down the throat of the squat building. Despite its obvious lack of stature I couldn't see the roof no matter how hard I looked. Odd I thought. I assumed my flashlight needed new batteries. A quick answer for everything. Finally I reached the servers. From what I could tell they couldn't have taken up but half the space, considering how far I had walked to get to them. There should've been a terminal somewhere that I could access, maybe get a clue as to what the hell was going on so I could get myself out of that god forsaken place. Just another job I kept telling myself. Inconvenient and maybe spooky, but just another job. I entered the myriad of servers, a constant whirring sound in my ears. From what sense of direction I had left, I knew the building couldn't have gone this far back. There just wasn't any possible way. For a moment as I walked through the pillars of processing power I wondered if the whole floor was on a slant and if it went under the other wall. I bent over and placed my flashlight on the chilled concrete floor. It didn't roll. Was I walking in circles? I suddenly got dizzy, like I had vertigo or something. I've had a history of panic attacks. They felt like a void was suddenly opening up to swallow me whole. I leaned against a stack of computers and breathed heavily. Just be calm I told myself. Just another job.. Just another job. I recollected myself. I grinned an insane grin. Wasn't gonna let myself get beaten by a creaky old building with bad lighting. I laughed. It was all a facade, but it made me feel better about myself. I could imagine a camera crew jumping out and showing me the treadmill I'd been walking on the whole time. I continued further into the servers. Bingo. Control panel. Stark white light shone from the various displays. The thing was seriously fucked up. There were black letters and numbers strobing across the white screen in random patterns, occasionally coming together to form strange sentences. 'The time is ticking like the iceborn clock,' or 'The wolf hunts tonight,' Suddenly the screen went all white with gray fuzz. 'It sees us,' the screen flashed. What? Was this some sort of prank? I fished around in my tool belt, got out a flash drive with my company's anti-malware program. Like that'd do any good against Them. I stuffed it in the computer with a bit of satisfaction. To my horror it liquefied into a white goo and slithered into the computer. Yes, slithered. It didn't ooze as one might expect. It acted as if alive and sentient. I could almost hear the computer laughing at me. Apparently I wasn't going to solve this one by just tapping the thing, not that there wasn't something besides a minor virus seriously wrong with this computer. Or whatever it was at that point. I tried to get the screen back on. Nothing. Just the white yawning maw of something I couldn't begin to comprehend. I kicked it and stubbed my toe. I bent over cursing. Thats when I saw Him. I blinked and I was in a bleached out hospital room, staring up at a tall man in a white surgical ensemble, with a white mask and thick glasses. I couldn't see any of his skin. His hair seemed to be the gray of a man's hair near death. I couldn't move. I was strapped down to a cold table made of marble. Small indentations led down from the center of the top to etchings carved into the side which led to a channel around the bottom. The man reached over beside me and picked up a knife. I wanted to scream, run, something. Anything to get away. He placed the knife on the skin of my chest. It cut through my shirt like butter. Almost immediately it drew blood. Suddenly a man robed in black appeared from what seemed to be a hole in this twisted reality, a black void totally out of place in the sea of white. His face was obscured by what looked like cloth wrappings, and he had what appeared to be ear muffs on either side of his head. I saw his hand grab the surgeon's wrist and squeeze tight, closing almost fully as if there was barely anything under the sleeve. The knife clattered to the ground beside me. I winced as it dug a cut down my side as it fell. The man in black had out a pair of tonfa. Sorta like a nightstick with a handle about a third of the way down. They looked like they were some sort of darkened metal. Maybe steel with some sort of special finish. Whatever they were made of though, they apparently couldn't be cut. The surgeon had drawn some sort of bladed apparatus and was slashing at the man. I was sweating with panic and fright. I was like a deer cornered between two fighting bears and I needed out. I strained against the bonds upon my wrists and ankles. A slight budge. Something was happening though.. The table was humming beneath me, almost vibrating, like a sickening massage. The blood was still pouring warm down my side. It showed no sign of clotting. The blood in the channel was beginning to turn sickly pale pink and ooze towards the doctor. I had to get free. I heard a loud clang as the doctor was swiped across the face by a tonfa, and SNAP, my bonds gave way. I rolled off the table and bruised my ribs, they were the color of an ash covered grave when I next looked in a mirror. The white blood slithered up the side of the doctor and formed a pointed protrusion where his hand should've been. He dodged a strike from a tonfa and jumped backwards with inhuman speed. He jerked the bladed arm upwards and formed what seemed to be a tear in reality, somehow whiter still than the bleached room around us, quickly ducking through it to disappear like a wraith in the night. Then the world began to end. Rifts of blighted darkness smeared across my vision, ripping at the fabric which held together the hospital office. The man in black grabbed and pulled me roughly. I blacked out for a moment before awakening in the server room. Many of the surrounding computers had been trashed, like someone had come through with a chainsaw. The main computer was unrecognizable. The only sound was the slight fizzling of broken computer parts. The man in the robes led me outside without uttering a word. The trip out felt shorter than the one in, like the building was the size that it should've been all of a sudden. Once we got outside and in the moonlight I could see that my savior was in fact a woman. She turned her piercing green eyes to me. I could tell she'd seen some shit. They were hard but fractured somehow, like something deep down was internally wrong. I was panting but I breathed out, 'Who are you, who are you with?' She pulled down her face covering and grinned a crooked grin. 'I'm nobody, and I'm with the hood.' With that she disappeared into the night. It was like she dissolved into the darkness in the air around her. I began the long drive back to headquarters. When I went to report that there was extreme damage to the system, I found that the server bank had apparently never existed. I was on call somewhere in Detroit and had supposedly fixed a system there. I got some weird looks from my supervisor, but changed my story quickly and walked out of the office deeply confused. They really knew how to set things up. Not sure what happened in Detroit, probably something with the hood. As for me, well, I don't mess around with computers and such anymore. I gave that up after my experience with Them. I mostly give hiking tours in the mountains and do personal training, though I never hike at night. I still see Them occasionally too, lurking at the edges of my dreams; They can't hurt me though, not as long as I stay away from the light.