A branch snaps in the wind, and I jerk my head up, straining to see into the darkness around me. Even though I know the Montauk Project isn’t real, there’s still something eerie about being here late at night. I can’t help but think of the countless times I’ve walked through these woods with my grandfather, and worse, all of the years I spent believing in his theories.
I was seven years old when my grandfather brought me here for the first time. Camp Hero had only just been turned into a state park, and parts of it were still closed to the public. Before that it had been an abandoned military base with NO TRESPASSING signs scattered around the woods. Of course that never stopped my grandfather from exploring. He’d sneak in through holes in the fence and run whenever he heard dogs barking or the sound of a patrol car.
But by my first visit most of the fences were gone, and a parking lot sat near the cliffs. It was late July, and the air was heavy with the promise of a storm. As we parked the car, the sky already looked like a new bruise—blotches of purple, blue, and black. The trail leading to the bluffs was empty, the tourists scared off by the rising wind and the water crashing against the rocks below. Grandpa led me right to the edge of the cliffs, ignoring the signs that warned visitors to stay back at least twenty-five feet. Below us, rough waves broke against the sharp gray rocks. The Atlantic Ocean stretched out in front of us on all sides, so that the whole world seemed made of water.
That day, deterred by the rain, we didn’t get past the parking lot, but it wasn’t long before we came back again, and then again and again. In the early mornings we would leave my parents sleeping and drive through the small downtown center of Montauk, past the Fort Hill Cemetery, the Deep Hollow Ranch. When we were almost at the farthest eastern point of Long Island, we would make the turn into Camp Hero.
We’d spend the day hiking together looking for signs of the Montauk Project. My grandfather would point out manhole covers in the ground and tell me how they led to the underground facilities. We would inspect the concrete bunkers that were stuck into the sides of every hill—though they weren’t natural hills, according to my grandfather, but top-secret government labs.
He told me about Nikola Tesla, a famous scientist he believed had faked his death to develop new psychological warfare tactics for the American government during World War II. The army base on Montauk Point became a cover for the experiments under the ground.
For years I believed all of his stories and theories about Camp Hero. Sometimes I’d even think I felt eyes on us, watching as we prowled the grounds of the camp, looking for proof that the underground lab was still active.
One cold day when I was ten, my grandfather took me to his favorite spot at Hero—a bunker hidden deep in the woods. It was late autumn, and the leaves were changing. The bright reds and yellows obscured the concrete bunker as it receded into the side of a manmade hill. There was a cement door blocking the entrance, with a sign that read DO NOT ENTER. My grandfather told me that before they turned Camp Hero into a park, there was an apple-sized hole in the cement. If you looked through it at the right angle, you could see a large room filled with debris and a line of doors.
“Why would they have all of those doors if it was just for storage?” he asked. “Think about that.” I did, but had no answers, so I stayed quiet, sitting on the damp grass. My grandfather is a tall man with a full head of steel-gray hair that was almost the same color as the concrete door of the bunker. “There are just too many questions. Not enough answers.” He was mumbling to himself. Talking under his breath. “This is where they took my father,” he whispered finally, so softly I could barely make out the words. He ran his hands almost reverently across the cement, tracing the grooves in the rough surface.
“What are you talking about, Grandpa?” I asked.
He turned to face me. He looked different, wide-eyed and manic, and I shrunk away from him as he came forward. He pulled something from his pocket and shoved it into my hands. It was an old leather-bound journal. I carefully opened it, not sure what I was looking at.
“This is my father’s journal. This is the proof.”
I knew his father had disappeared when he was a little boy, almost sixty-five years ago. But my grandfather never talked about it, and my father told me not to bring it up. This was the first time I had ever heard him mention it.
“Look. Look how he wrote the name Tesla in the margins. Look how he writes about a secret project he was working on.”
I tried to skim the pages, but my grandfather kept flipping them over, faster and faster. My eyes started to blur. I wanted to be away from this person who seemed so different from my steady, strong grandfather.
“Don’t you see, Lydia? My father was part of the Montauk Project. It’s why he disappeared.”
I nodded, though I knew, for the first time ever, that I didn’t believe what he was saying. I could no longer deny the small voice of doubt that I had ignored for so long, the people in
