The Neutralizers

  By Will Greenwald

  It was dark. Silent. Late.

  Ray should have been asleep. He was in a comfortable bed, tucked under soft bamboo sheets. He had been awake for the last sixteen hours, and he could feel his body relax as the mild sedative he just took coursed through his system.

  His eyelids drooped, then fluttered open. Sleep still failed to take him.

  The room was almost completely dark. No streetlights shined through the single window. No hallway lights peeked under the closed door. The only disruption was the dim light of the clock next to his bed, took weak to illuminate anything around him.

  Simple, complete darkness. Just a sheet of black before his eyes and the peripheral awareness of the time being cast near his head. Ray didn't bother to check; he just stared at nothing.

  The nothing became fuzzy, congealing into random blobs that seemed slightly darker or lighter than the rest of the room.

  Optical illusions, Ray thought. Echoes of any lingering impressions on my retinas. That's it.

  The blobs floated gently before Ray's eyes. A dark patch seemed to get darker. It grew, stretching and warping until it split the room nearly in half with its presence, a shadow eclipsing shadows.

  The top of the blob distended, expanding into an oval. The shape almost looked like the silhouette of a person.

  Ray tried to look away, tried to close his eyes or roll onto his side. His body didn't respond.

  Oh, great. This again.

  The form in front of his eyes tightened, developing harder borders between its total blackness and the dark of the rest of the room. The head--and it was a head--twitched and developed a mouth.

  Even in the dark, Ray could see it. A lamprey-like hole, filled with teeth. The only detail on a completely smooth, pale, faceless surface.

  Ray tried to close his eyes again. He couldn't. He shuddered internally, but his body wouldn't allow even that.

  The figure hissed quietly as it grew closer. Its body distended to form fingers. No, they were claws, arranged like fingers on stick-thin arms with too many joints. They brushed against his shoulders and Ray could feel whispers of ice through the sheet.

  The face leaned in towards his. The mouth seemed to grow, the teeth sharpening and multiplying.

  Ray felt the creature's breath, not the hot exhalation of a primal hunter but a chilling wind sucked inward by the mouth. It was so close, and he was helpless.

  "I see it."

  A voice spoke calmly from the shadows, before the darkness was broken by a harsh beam of light. Ray shuddered, his body finally responding as his eyelids snapped shut to block out the sudden brightness.

  The hiss of the creature raised in pitch and volume until it was nearly a shriek, and Ray could feel it thrashing above him, shaking the bed and making him convulse with a few more icy brushes of its spasming limbs.

  He tried to open his eyes and caught a glimpse of the creature before it exploded, scattered into fading slivers of shadow against the flashlight like dust in a sunbeam.

  "It's clear. You get that?"

  The ceiling burst with light, cold fluorescent tubes clicking on and obliterating any stray shadow in the room.

  Ray shouted at the sudden brightness. "Augh! Dammit!" He shot up, sitting upright in the bed and pushing the sheets off his body. He turned and set his feet down on the floor. "You better have gotten that! I'm not doing it again. Lindy, get that flashlight out of my eyes? You already blinded me, you don't have to do it any more."

  The flashlight clicked off and the burning stars in Ray's vision shank until he could look around the room again. A woman in a black jumpsuit was sitting on a gray fabric couch on the other side of the room. Her feet were kicked up, and a long metal flashlight was dangling loosely in her fingers.

  The window behind Ray flickered and the dark panel cleared to show three observers in the adjoining room. They wore lab coats and stood over consoles that controlled his room's environment and measured any changes in it. A speaker above the window clicked and a fuzzy voice came through.

  "We got it. Total and immediate destruction at 150 lumens. Judging from the dispersal, we could probably get the same results at 100."

  "You're not testing that until February." Ray grumbled. "Every two months is already too often. I hate sleep paralysis tests."

  The woman stood up and slipped the flashlight into her belt, next to an empty holster. "You know it's harmless now, Ray."

  He looked around the room. Every trace of the faceless creature was gone. "Harmless to you, Lindy. It scares the crap out of me every time. How close did it get?"

  She shrugged, "Oh, about two inches. You were fine."

  "Two inches." Ray shook his head. "And how long before that could you see it?"

  Lindy glanced down at her watch. "Thirty-five seconds."

  "Over half a minute?" Ray shouted, then calmed down. "Fine. Test is over. External identification made, subject was destroyed, everything's fine. It's fine." He called out at the window behind him. "Everything's fine, right?"

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  The speaker clicked again. "All clear here. No flags, clean data. Looks like incremental weakening from last test. Trend is consistent."

  "At least it's more contained, then." Ray rolled his shoulders, stretching. "Can we please screen the staff again to see if anyone else can take these damn tests? I don't care how safe it is, I almost had a damn heart attack."

  "You know the conditions, Ray. It's not our fault the rest of us sleep soundly." Lindy clapped her hand on his back. "I barely saw it anyway. Manifestation's definitely getting weaker. The hamstringing is working."

  He turned away from her, taking the towel that was sitting neatly folded next to the clock. He wiped his face, which was dripping with sweat. "It doesn't feel any weaker. It's terrifying every time."

  "And you whine about it every time. At least you're not on the forest crew. Now that's the really dangerous duty."

  Ray shuddered at the thought. Observing and evaluating forest presences was definitely worse.

  He hopped out of bed and looked down at himself. Plain black t-shirt, jeans, belt, white socks. The department had proper pajamas and loungewear available, but he didn't want to get quite that casual. He slipped his feet into the black loafers he set at the foot of the bed.

  Lindy handed him his work shirt, a simple light blue oxford. Ray shrugged it over his shoulders and buttoned it up. "Thanks for watching, as usual."

  She shrugged and waved her hand. "It's the job. So, going to go home and get some proper sleep for once?"

  Ray snorted and rubbed his eyes with his fingers. "Of course not. I'll whip up the first-hand report and hand it to Pri before the lab coats finish theirs." He paused, then called toward the window. "Sorry, lab coats!"

  The intercom clicked. "You don't have to crunch numbers for your part of the work, Ray."

  "And I'm thankful for that, Mitch." Ray shuddered again. Forest duty might have been worse than sleep paralysis testing, but he was pretty sure he'd rather get stalked in the woods than run endless comparative thermal models. "Anyway, off I go."

  Lindy winced, "You might want to let it simmer a bit, Ray. Pri was reading your spookies at lunch. She might not be in the mood for you."

  Ray bit his lip. "Do you think she didn't like them?"

  "No, I think she loved them."

  Oh. Now that was worse.

  ***

  Priyanka Chauhan drummed her short, manicured nails on her desk as she listened to Ray's account of the test.

  "The subject appeared about forty-five minutes into testing and demonstrated standard behavior. According to Agent Lindburgh, it spent approximately thirty-five seconds after manifestation approaching me."

  She glanced at the stack of papers next to her hand, perhaps fifty pages bound across the top by a bulldog clip. "Uh-huh."

  Ray shifted on his feet and cleared his throat. "The subject reached a distance of approximately two inches from me before Agent Lindburgh intervened. It disincorporated immediately upon exposure to her issued light source."

  Director Chauhan ran her thumb along the bottom edge of the paper stack. "Right."

  Ray continued, trying to ignore her reaction. It just was a skin of impassivity. "The, uh, the technicians overseeing the test are still analyzing the data they recorded, but my initial evaluation is that the subject's neutralization status is consistent, if not improving."

  "Your boogieman is still in the can. No surprises. I'll see what the boffins say on the details." The director tapped her finger slowly on the papers.

  "Everything was fine on my end, sir. If there isn't anything else, I'd like to-"

  "Raymond." She exhaled, finally setting her dark, unamused eyes on his face. She picked up the bundle of papers. "I've just finished going over your most recent submissions."

  Ray suppressed a wince. "Is there anything wrong with them, sir?"

  Director Chauhan began flipping through the pages, pretending to look over them. "Wrong? On the contrary, they're fantastic. Compelling character perspective, evocative descriptions, genuinely frightening situations strung together with tension and mystery. Even some humor I got a chuckle from without getting pulled out of the horror."

  Oh, it was building. "Thank you, sir."

  She flipped through a few more pages, theatrically. "The characterization of subject 138 is masterful. Oppressive, even unstoppable, but with enough unsaid to really get the reader to fill in the blanks with the worst things they can imagine. I was enraptured, with a shiver on my spine from beginning to end." She picked up the bundle of papers.

  "I'm glad you thought so, sir." Here it came.

  The director tossed the bundle toward Ray. It bounced on the far edge of her desk and fell to the floor. "Are you trying to make a tulpa?" She shouted, her eyes burning. "Or actually empower the damn subject? What's wrong with you?"

  Ray shrank. "I just wanted to tell a good ghost story," he mumbled.

  "And you did! A great ghost story! Which isn't the damn job, Raymond!" She sat back in her chair and sighed. "Look, the whole point of spreading spookies is to cripple the really dangerous things out there. We can't do that if you make them compellingly terrifying. You know this."

  He nodded weakly. "I know, sir. I just-"

  She interrupted him. "No one here doubts your talent, Raymond. It's why you're in this department in the first place. But you need to let go of your pride with this. Learn to be sloppy."

  Ray wasn't sure he knew how. "When I'm writing, sir, it's-"

  Priyanka held up her hand, shushing him. "You aren't writing for us. You're working for us. If you want to put real effort into telling stories, do it on your own time." She pointed at Ray's feet, and the stack of papers sitting in front of them.

  "Scrap the last two chapters. Give the subject a stupid reveal, like it's the narrator's dead brother or something. And go back over the rest and mess it up a little. Switch tenses, add typos, pick the wrong words. It doesn't need to be trash, but it needs to be flawed, got it?"

  Ray bent down and picked up the bundle. The pages were scattered with blue ink marks circling entire paragraphs and effusively praising them. "I'll get back to it, sir."

  The director seemed satisfied. "Good. And be less careful next time. Save your best writing for yourself, Ray. What we need is immersion-breaking crap."

  Ray aligned the pages loosened by the fall and adjusted the clip. "I'll do my best, sir. Er, you know what I mean. I'll try."

  Priyanka nodded sharply. "Good. I'll expect your revisions by Thursday. We want to start uploading before next week. And save the better bits you come up with. They deserve more than anonymous scattering."

  He straightened and turned around. "You got it, sir!" Ray walked out of the office with bittersweet pride in his chest, pulling the door closed with a quiet click.

  Director Chauhan shook her head and sighed, then turned to her computer. The higher-ups wanted an update on the whole project. The department was only a few years old, and it still needed to prove it was valuable. She stared at a half-written sentence, then deleted it and began typing again.

  Words have power, and so words also have weakness. That is the purpose of this department. As our sibling agencies and our predecessors have both established, it is attention and obsession that empowers many of the dangerous supernatural phenomena we must safeguard against.

  Just as many of these phenomena get stronger as their stories are told and fear of them spread, they can be weakened through the same means. When the tale is imperfect, when it is undermined, when it is sabotaged, power is taken away. We have confirmed this.

  This department has demonstrated the effectiveness of these measures with multiple subjects so far. The Suited Man (subject 21), the Empty House (subject 34), and three separate Nocturnal Feeders (subjects 16, 17, and 28) have all shown significantly decreased activity and drops in both infections and fatalities since the department was formed. This is working.

  Identify, undermine, amplify, and neutralize. These are the steps that have saved lives without any of the direct actions and collateral damage typical of our sibling agencies. The attached budget proposal outlines expansions to the department that will enable us to be more effective. We've shown how effective we are. We can do even more.

  With the pen, we make sure that nightmares stay only nightmares.

  -Priyanka Chauhan, Director, Department of Active Memetic Neutralization.