Semua Bab Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders: Bab 31 - Bab 40

“This was Dr. Milton.” The research lab manager lifted the bloody sheet from the corpse. As an anthropologist, I’d studied and been around a lot of dead bodies, most of them skeletons that had been dead for a long, long time. I wasn’t prepared for the grotesquery that my eyes fell upon under that sheet. The man’s throat had been ripped out, savagely. I managed to not flinch or look away, though. I kept up the image of a professional who saw worse things than this all the time. I wondered how often in the future I might. The manager looked up at X, addressing him as his disguised persona. “What do you think, Mr. M?”“I think it's a good idea you called me in, sir,” X responded in his imitation of how the stereotypical Man in Black spoke, nearly monotone and emotionless, rather than his usual bouncy exuberance. “What can you tell me about other unusual things going on around here or seen around here lately? Have there been any?” X pulled from his jacket a small notebook and began taki

What we were looking for was a location where we could get a clear comm signal to Control and wait for them to come pick us up. Hopefully, we’d avoid the whole Dirt blowing in thing. It was still Saturday. We still had plenty of time, just not as much as before. As we hiked, I realized that I was a little disappointed at the proposition of being extracted from the Dust Bowl area by Control and missing the Dirt. In spite of how it might bring in horrors, I realized that a part of me actually wanted to see it. My world had become so much wider and deeper since I’d taken up X on his offer that day in my office that now seemed so long ago. During a pause on a trail we’d found that made hiking a little easier, I wiped sweat from my brow, replacing the moisture with a long pull from my canteen. I gazed at the arid Arizona landscape around me as I thought of all the strange things I’d experienced as an Agent of Control: Black-Eyed Kids, UFOs/UAPs, meeting a real mage and a real shaman, befri

A vetala has two drives, a physical one and a psychological one, much like we living humans have both physical needs and psychological ones. Physically, a vetala seeks the physical pleasure of drinking human blood. That’s the reason it’s analogized so much as the Hindu version of what in the West is called a vampire. Psychologically, it wants to test us, us humans, to test us in moral and ethical dilemmas, to test our survival instincts, to test our intelligence levels, etc. It has a sick and sadistic curiosity about us. So, it wants to consume our blood, but, like a cat, it wants to play with its food first. Since a vetala is a spirit inhabiting a body, it can’t itself be killed, but it can be banished. Banishment is achieved by killing its current body and making sure the body is buried with all the proper ceremonies. Of course the main difficulty in this is that the vetala spirit certainly doesn’t want to be banished and it can jump into the body of someone who is trying to subdue

First came the wind. The wind howled like a thing alive. Even though I was anything but cold in late May in Arizona, the sound of that howling wind chilled me and made me think of winter storms of the coldest winters and most frigid places I had ever lived in my life. I remembered when I was a kid, my parents had moved to South Dakota, just twenty miles south of the border with North Dakota, for a year because of my dad’s job. That year, of all years by chance, had been a record-breaking coldest winter South Dakota had had for the previous one hundred eighty years. That had been cold. Although it wasn’t cold, the wind howled like the winds of one of those South Dakota storms. It didn’t chill me on the outside though, but on the inside, in my soul. Next, came the first particles of the Dirt. We could hear them hitting the cabin walls and roof. They didn’t sound like rain, of course, because they weren’t drops of liquid, but they weren’t large and solid enough to sound like pieces of ha

We walked through the Dirt in a silence that wasn’t quite silence. The wind moved around us softly, like a breath on the back of the neck—gentle, deliberate, wrong. Fine particles of dust drifted down from the sky in lazy spirals, clinging to my eyebrows, the creases of my coat, the corners of my mouth. It settled with intention, as if it had a memory of me.I’d studied the real Dust Bowl. Watched the grainy documentaries, read the survivor interviews. I knew the numbers—how many acres went sterile, how many families fled west, how many lungs turned to concrete inside ribcages. In the 1930s, the dust came with violence. It scraped its way through windowpanes and keyholes. It howled like a living thing. People wrapped rags around their faces and stuffed wet sheets under doors to keep from suffocating in their own homes.This wasn’t that.This storm didn’t scream. It whispered.It let us breathe, which somehow made it worse. It let us speak, though no one wanted to. It let us see—too cl