“Keep going,” the monitor encouraged.
“Nothing exists there. It’s like a drop out in reality. There’s no matter there — as we understand matter. It’s vibrating on another level — slower, colder, darker.”
I shuddered in contact with the anomaly. That told me I had successfully bilocated to the target area. My senses felt like they were swimming through static.
The monitor commanded, “Move to a point northwest of the center of the black area, please.”
I found myself perceptually at a far different place. Something familiar about it. I reported my aesthetic perceptions.
“Concept of factory. Sense of purpose. Darkness and secrecy around the latter. I see beings. Bipeds. A mixture of human and not. Decoding as centaurs, but not centaurs. No horse attributes. Some type of bioengineered half-human hybrids. They function as slaves and slave-drivers.”
“Enter factory.”
I tried. I really did. But I was blocked. I felt an impenetrable membrane.
It reminded me of the time I viewed the current location of the Ark of the Covenant. I got in, but something forcibly ejected me. Something powerful.
“Denied area,” I reported.
“Recon vicinity for impressions, Number 4.”
The ground gave up nothing but a cold staticky energy. But when I shifted my focus skyward, I detected something.
“Sense of clouds above. But these are not meteorological clouds. They pulsate, then brighten. No recognizable atmospheric phenomena correlate to these changes. But I sense a connection between the activity in the factory and the clouds above.”
“Describe this connection.”
After a period of struggling with inchoate impressions, I reported, “Cannot.”
“Are you blocked, Number 4?”
“Negative. Feels more like I lack a frame of reference to comprehend the exact nature of the activity within as relates to the overhanging clouds.”
“Okay. Come back.”
When I attempted to sit up, I felt like a truck had hit me. My brain expanded against the cavern of my brain pan like a fat balloon. I closed my chakras down as best I could.
By candlelight, I wrote my report. Secondary impressions of a rendering plant danced in my head, but I left them out as imaginal artifacts.
The director had me in his office within the hour. My report was on his desk.
“Number 4, I want you to recon this so-called factory.”
“In person, sir?”
“Only someone with your clairvoyant abilities can get close without detection. Determine what’s going on in there.”
“But — ”
“This is not a request. You are not a volunteer. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” It was a death sentence, but how could one care? The entire race was under a death watch.
The locality was outside the former Richmond, Virgina. A short ride. I took a train. Some were still running.
As the engine pulled me through the unrelieved night, I looked up at the star-starved sky. A narrow face stared down from the clouds. It was a confusion of luminous contra blue and purple, suggesting a sharp-featured demon with a round open mouth. Too round. Like a black orifice.
Once you train up to Master Remote Viewer, you are always in viewing mode. The only question is whether or not your inner perceptions reach the conscious mind’s level.
This time they were. I had the distinct feeling that the demon of the clouds was looking exclusively at me, and would swallow me if he could. Was it a presentiment — or a warning?
The demon passed from view. But I still felt its hollow eyes upon me. They reminded me of those nightmarish canine apparitions.
The train let me off short of the dormant crater that had been Richmond. I walked from there. It was like a trek through a minefield of the unknown. Even the leafless locust trees had a stark look, as if shocked by their new habitation.
Three miles along, I encountered trouble breathing. I backed up and worked around it. No-oxygen zones. They were growing. The Old Ones didn’t need oxygen, people said. I wondered if the factory was dedicated to atmosphere conversion.
Even as the thought glimmered my mind, I intuited that the truth was more dire. Far more dire. But I could not conceive how much.
People filed along the road, coming from somewhere, but going nowhere.
Everyone understood that, so talk was shunned. I was reminded of Springsteen’s mournful end-of-the-world song, “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Welcome to the new world order.
You don’t fully understand time and timelessness until the sun and moon and the familiar planets are no longer there to help mark the celestial procession. Against a fading blue web spun by the star-quenching Sothis Radiant, Nug and Yeb careened crazily through the vacant sky, confusing matters.
I walked for hours, but it felt more like an elastic eternity. Nothing to look forward to. No hope of natural light. My flashlight helped to guide me. Then I encountered a darkness it could neither penetrate nor dispel.
A black ovoid lay in the road. It looked unnatural, so I approached it gingerly.
Vibrationally, it reminded me of the black blot I had mentally come into contact with — the old Richmond. This was smaller. Superficially, it resembled a hole in the earth. But my light failed to illuminate the sides of the “hole.” And it lacked any sense of dimensionality.
I dropped a stone into it. It abruptly vanished, as if relocating to another reality.
Only then did I sense a disturbing connection between this hole and the gaping mouth of the demonic cloud face that had regarded me so singularly.
I rushed on.
When I came upon an orderly file of people, I joined them, as if to lose myself in their numbers. They walked along in a single file of the condemned.
I turned to one and asked, “Where are you going?”
He pointed to the others ahead of him. “Wherever they are,” he said dully.
“Don’t you know?”
He nodded. “This is the food line.”
“There’s food up ahead?”
“No, we are the food.” He said it without hope, fear, or caring.
I stepped out of line.
I saw my first centaur then. That is, with my physical eyes. My non-physical vision had detected one during the RV session.
This one stood taller than a man. From approximately the thorax up, he looked human. He was a big burly black man, muscular in the extreme. His skull was shaven and his torso rippled with undraped muscles.
Where his pelvis devolved into legs, no legs as we know them supported the rest. The pelvis instead flared out into a wide skirt of some unappetizing flesh, like a columnar snail. It stood on this pad, moved on it via some snail-like form of locomotion.
But the lower appendage was not flesh, or even organic matter. I sensed this, and my perception was confirmed when the centaur glided over a great patch of unrelieved black that lay off the roadside like a pool of tar.
The black patch supported it. It would never support a physical man.
Confirmation of this came almost immediately.
A maddened dog tore running out of somewhere and lunged for it. The dog charged across grass and brush and seemed oblivious to the blackness until its paws came into contact with its unreflective surface.
Then its snarling was swallowed whole — as was the damned and doomed dog.
