Prologue

1979

It was a normal enough day for Jed Harrison, driving along in his big rig trying to make New Mexico by morning so he could swing back to Amarillo by his son's seventh birthday.

Normal enough until he saw the boy standing by the side of the road next to an old beater of a pick-up truck, standing with his thumb out. Notable in and of itself in this day and age of horrible things happening everywhere, but there was, of course, the fact the young man was covered head to toe in what looked very much like dried blood. It couldn't have all been his or he'd be dead. Jed immediately hit the brakes, not imagining how he could pass by – the kid didn't look dangerous. He was very slight, judging by his height next to the truck, and he didn't exactly look like a great hulk of a man. Whatever had happened, he surely hadn't been the perpetrator.

The big rig ground to a very slow halt, during which time the young man lowered his thumb but didn't otherwise move. "Are you okay?!" Jed called out the door as he opened it.

"I'm fine," the darkheaded boy answered, but he had a thousand yard stare in his large green eyes.

"Get on in – I'll call for help on the rad …"
"Please don't," the boy said quickly as he climbed in. He favored one side as he did – the most serious wound Jed could see was a gash in his side that looked very serious, but he was nicked and cut all over and it looked like his palms were burned. From what Jed could tell, the kid was dressed very nicely – like a Mormon or a med student in a pressed white … well, used to be white … shirt and black pants.

"Kid, you need a doctor – and I can tell something awful must have happened, the police need to …"
"It was just an accident. I … tripped and fell in a thresher …" the boy said, clearly groping for a lie. He didn't have any accent to speak of – he must not be from around here.

"Pick a better lie, son – if you'd have done that you'd have been dead," Jed said. He was quickly growing nervous, realizing he'd made a mistake.

"What size of clothes do you wear?" the boy asked as he looked at Jed appraisingly through thick-rimmed glasses. What Jed had initially taken for shell shock was actually an eerie calm – far too calm for someone who had just been through some unknown hell. Jed ignored the question. "I'm calling the police – they need to get out here …" he turned to reach for the CB … and therein made his second mistake.

Jed gasped as he felt the tie around his neck – the kid had taken off his tie so quickly and quietly he hadn't heard it. The boy had looked so harmless he wasn't on guard, even once he noticed something off about the kid. Jed tried to get his fingers under the tie to loosen it enough to breathe, and failing that clawed at the boy's hands, to no avail. "Don't tell the police anything about me," the kid hissed in his ear just before everything went black.

1980

Marta waited for a long, unbearable minute. And then, over the sounds of the motorboat, she heard the telltale sound of the fish-man swimming after it, fooled by her deception. "I'm so sorry, Skyler," she whispered, even though she knew Skyler was beyond hearing. Skyler was the only one she could carry – so she'd propped her up in the pilot seat after figuring out she could set off the motorboat to hopefully fool the creature. She was sacrificing a quick getaway, but she'd seen how fast this thing moved – she had no hope if it came down on her with its full speed and strength. At least with the kayak, she had a prayer of escaping its notice for a while, and she could hear it coming without having to listen over the sound of the motor.

When she was sure it was a fair distance away, she pushed the kayak into the water and got in, not gracefully but she didn't tip it over. She paddled until her arms were sore, leaning forward and blocking out everything but listening for danger behind her and the goal of getting to shore. Grief, fear, anger – all of that was pushed into the back of her mind, a dull ache instead of the knock-down pain it would be once she was safe back in civilization again. All that mattered was this kayak, the beach that was still a few hundred feet ahead of her, keeping her ears peeled for whatever the hell it was that had killed her friends, and the flare gun that was her last line of defense if she did hear it.

The slight, pretty Latina finally hit shore – literally hit it. She was paddling so hard and fast and didn't bother slowing down as she approached the shore and she ran the kayak into the damp sand of the beach. It buried itself deep and she felt the jarring impact. She jumped out into shin-deep water, with flare gun still in hand, and ran, not wasting time securing the kayak. She couldn't have given less of a damn about the security deposit if it was only two cents instead of two hundred dollars she was going to have to serve a lot of beer and burgers to make up. She could hear it coming now – she could smell it coming now – she had to go fast. She didn't think it could go very fast on land but she wasn't taking the chance.

She was almost out of the water, almost safe. One last wave rolled in and touched her feet, and then something else did. She whirled around and fire the flare gun right in its evil, fishy face just as it grabbed her ankle. The flare gun went off with so much force it hurt her wrist, but she ignored the pain. It fell back in surprise, scratching her ankle on the way and making an odd gurgling howl of pain, and she ran like hell, adding the pain in her wrist and ankle and the smell of burning fish and the smoke of the flare gun to things she was ignoring. She was finally completely on land, but she didn't stop. She chose the shortest distance up the hill and into the little fishing village, heedless to the branches that tore at her clothes and skin and the sharp unpleasant things that bit into her bare feet as she tore through a wooded area. Now that she was close to help and the creature obviously knew where she was already, she screamed her head off – she screamed, "Fire!" and "Fuego!" alternately, knowing that people would be more likely to help if it might affect them, and also that screaming about a monster or a half-human serial killer or whatever the hell it was would not exactly garner a lot of reliable help.

She made it into the village proper, and her screaming caused several people to come pouring out of their homes. The creature wasn't stupid enough to try to take on so many people at once, and if it did, surely even that horror could be outdone by sheer numbers, assuming of course it was any threat at all on land. She collapsed then onto the paved street, further scraping her knees, and sobbed hysterically as the grief and horror she'd been holding back hit full force and the images of her mutilated friends played through her mind and she imagined having to tell Jack what happened to Skyler … What she had done to get away.

Two locals helped her to her feet and ushered her inside, and the small-town sheriff tried to get the truth out of her. Marta tried to explain but knew she sounded batshit crazy, raving about a half-fish monster eating the faces off her friends and chasing her from the island to the shore, half in English and half in Spanish, but it just didn't occur to her to lie.

Eventually the local doctor came with a sedative, and Marta finally was able to slip into some semblance of peace.

1981

Officer Martin Cox pulled up slowly, assuming that the call was some kind of prank. He quickly realized it wasn't as he saw the girl, pretty and slight, walking along the side of the dirt road, barefoot and wearing nothing but a University of Chicago t-shirt and (thankfully) the requisite underwear. Her hair was long and blond and put into two ponytails – as he pulled up he could see it looked like she'd gotten wet but dried off now. Troublingly, her shirt was stained with blood that hadn't entirely come out whenever she got wet. She wore a thousand yard stare as she looked straight ahead. She looked up to see the car pull up, stopped, and much to his surprise, smiled broadly. "Sweetie, you okay?" he asked, rolling down the window. The smell of river water was overwhelming – this poor baby must have swam through the river. He couldn't think of her as anything else – he wasn't a young man, he was just a few years from retirement, and he had beautiful twin daughters the same age as the girl. She couldn't have been any older than twenty-two or so – she looked more she was eighteen or nineteen though. Maybe it was the ponytails that made her look so young.

"I think so, Officer," she answered cheerfully. Her feet by now were bloody from walking barefoot so long – as she stood still she alternated from one to the other, wincing as she'd switch.

"Sweetie – are you hurt?" he asked.

"I don't think so, Officer," the girl answered. She had a very think Jersey accent – she wasn't from around here. But she must be going to school in the city … but even so she was a long way from there too. What on Earth had happened?
"Sweetie, can you tell me your name?" She stood looking at him for a long time, with her head cocked to one side. "What's your name, sweetie?" Cox repeated.

"Ya know what, I don't know," she said after another moment's thought. "I don't remember much at all."

"Why don't you get in, sweetie – I'm gonna take you to the hospital," Cox said, opening the front door. He couldn't bring himself to make her sit in the back like a criminal.

"Okay – can I make the sirens go?" she asked happily as she climbed in.

"Of course you can," Cox said, and then picked up his radio to call in the strange situation. The girl waited patiently while he did so.

Whatever had happened to her, she'd blocked it out – and everything else too.

1982

The world came perilously close to ending.

Jane Doe slept peacefully through the whole thing in an asylum in Illinois. The time of year meant nothing to her – very little meant much to her. She might have had a vague awareness of having been in the asylum for about a year, but not much else. She slept with a small stuffed animal she'd been given by the staff – a little stuffed bear wearing a University of Chicago t-shirt that she had dubbed Gary Bearstein. The next morning she woke up, had breakfast of dry toast and orange juice, and then went to art therapy, none the wiser to the terror felt by a handful of people in charge of the fate of the other four point six billion people on Earth for several terrifying minutes.

Marta Ortiz remembered her friends with a glass of wine. Several glasses, in fact. In fact she was very, very intoxicated. And despite that intoxication, or perhaps because of it, she was weeping.

She fell asleep in the chair of her little office in the Highgarden house, knocking over a final glass of wine onto the desk in sleep, narrowly missing some of the papers she had received from the library. They all told bizarre stories – of people who claimed to have been attacked by odd creatures, of young people vanishing in clusters, and of bizarre murders. She looked for anything strange – anything that might give her some context for the tragedy that tore apart her life two years prior. But tonight … on the anniversary of the day she came ashore on a beach in Mexico, running for help after a night of hell, there was no purpose or action that could help her state of mind. Only grief and a pungent remembrance of terror.

Marta's grief was undisturbed by the shaking of the Earth in a distant part of the country, or the frantic last-ditch efforts at damage control.

It occurred to Herbert West as he tied his tie that he'd managed to forget the third anniversary of the … unfortunate hastening towards this chapter of his life … two days prior. Losing Charlie was … deeply unfortunate. The others were tragic too … surely. Not that he had known them.

He never did find out if Charlie was the familiar form of Charlotte or something more atypical, such as Charlene or Charlize. She'd always refused to say. They had been her friends, mostly, the other victims.

He went on to class at the Swiss medical school where he was technically registered as Jonas Darwin but everyone referred to him by his actual name. His assumed name appeared on all official paperwork but he still introduced himself as Herbert West – he hoped he was safe that way.

Microbiology was a tough beast even for him – the only person in their cohort who found the course easy was a future pathologist who'd volunteered in a hospital lab as an undergraduate. Herbert had tried to ingratiate himself with her to get study help and failed handily – that tended to happen, unfortunately. So it had to be conquered with sheer force of will – he studied alone for hours on end in the library or his little apartment, determined to conquer the subject.

After class he returned to his apartment, poured himself coffee and opened the supplemental textbook the professor had "suggested." He was vaguely aware of a slight tremor in the Earth, but it ended soon enough and there were no earthquakes in this part of the world so he dismissed it as his own imaginings brought on by a medical student's overreliance on coffee, unaware of how close all his worries had been to being over.

Director of Operations Ann Darvis had spent the last fourteen years terrified of these words, imagined them being said in so many ways so many nights as she tried in vain to fall asleep. And yet, they were unimaginable.

"The last sacrifice has failed. The Ancient Ones are waking," Collier, the head of mission control, intoned, her voice hollow from complete and utter terror. A low, ominous alarm blared – headquarters had just entered a red alert situation. For the first and last time.

"Tell all facilities to trigger containment procedures," Darvis commanded with what remained of her calm. The containment procedures had never been tested – but they were projected to fail. Most likely they would just serve to slow the Ancient Ones down for a few hours, long enough, perhaps to mobilize the militaries of the countries beneath which they slumbered, who then may or may not be able to stop them. Most likely not, and if they did it would surely be with thousands if not millions of civilian casualties, to say nothing of the soldiers who would lay down their lives or the societal chaos that would ensue after this revelation. As unimaginable as it was, millions of dead was now the best case scenario.

"The Delta base is not responding," Collier said, emotion in her voice again. "It looks like there was a system purge … Oh God … a system purge without security measures in place …" A system purge was used to glass a facility in case of emergency – all the monsters were released directly into the hallway full of the thing that could kill them. Why in God's name had Delta been triggered in the first place, especially without security measures? Not that it mattered now.

"Take over and do it remotely," Darvis commanded. They had a back-up system so that the central command could take over any facility as needed.

"I'm trying … oh God, it started there, it may already be too late …" So this was it. Even if the containment measures at the other four facilities, against all odds, actually worked, even if the military could make a dent against them … America was going to be gone very soon. That was the absolute best case scenario.

"Ruskin, Juarez, implement protocol Gojira, the rest of you get Delta facility online!" Darvis commanded, though she knew they were already trying. Ruskin and Juarez sent messages to the military of all countries, starting with those beneath whom the Ancient Ones slumbered who would therefore be affected first and then all the countries around them in an outward spreading wing until anybody with a military that was anything more than teenagers with pistols knew something big was about to happen. Darvis' eyes fell on Collier as she worked frantically, her fingers flying over the keys so quickly they almost seemed a blur, only betraying her panic with muttered curses as she worked. Her colleagues were just as diligent and brave – all except one, a new father barely back from parental leave who started to weep uncontrollably as nothing he or anyone else did worked to bring the Delta facility online. His family lived just a hundred miles away from it.

There was nothing more to do. Nothing more to try. Every sacrifice this year had failed. Darvis closed her eyes and tried to breathe, tried not to think of her nieces and nephews … tried not to think of her own life … tried not to think of all the young people that had died in vain to prevent this very thing … Begged for forgiveness and mercy from a God she hadn't believed in since seeing what slumbered under the Earth … prayed at the very least the other containment fields would hold …

And then, as suddenly as the alarm had started, the alarms stopped. Darvis didn't dare breathe – she didn't dare believe that it was really over. "That's it. Readings on all ancient ones are returning to normal, according to all outposts except Delta," Collier announced, her tone not as joyous as you would expect – like Darvis, she wasn't sure she believed it.

"And Delta?" Darvis asked. She could guess what had happened – the sacrifice had worked at the very last minute, probably because the young people who started the mess happened to die in the right order from the chaos they themselves had unleashed, and the Ancient Ones had gone back to sleep, too exhausted from a long slumber to awake at such a small overshoot of the deadline.

"I've got Delta!" Jenkins, the new father, called. He must have still been doing good work despite his weeping – of course no one got this far unless they could be cool no matter the crisis. "And I can now say all four entities are returning to sleep."

A cheer went up through all of headquarters then, and Darvis knew that the controllers in the three other major facilities cheered too. Darvis took a sharp intake of breath – it was over.

Well … not over. God only knew what had escaped Delta facility during the system purge, and all of the personnel there would have to be replaced and equipment repaired, which would be dangerous and arduous and probably meant Delta was out of the running for next year …

And even with four parallel sacrifices, this year had proven something could go wrong with each and every single one. Perhaps Alpha, Beta, and Gamma should double up, just to hedge their bets …

Or maybe it was time to dust off their other options.

As soon as she thought about it for even a second, Darvis knew the answer. This system was too perilous, too fraught with risk for the unaware citizens of Earth. "Collier, contact all heads of department, inform them there's an emergency meeting to take place now, by phone, in my office. We need to discuss what happened and how to prevent it next year. Tell them I'm putting Project Theseus back on the table."

Author's Note

Cover Image: "Halloween 2014" by UnidColor. Found on Deviantart. Used by permission.

Welcome to this story! I suppose. Gonna be posting it over the month of October assuming of course life doesn't prevent me from finishing it in that time frame. I only recently lost my horror movie virginity after a lifetime of wussiness so you know what the problem is if I make any n00b goofs.

Yes I'm fudging the hell out of the timeline. Cabin in the Woods clearly did not happen in 1982, and if you assume that release date is the year it takes place unless otherwise stated within the film, I'm also going to have to fudge the timeframe of Halloween and the Friday the Thirteenth sequels slightly. But compared to saying Myers is under a Gaelic curse to eliminate his clan or whatever that was and sending Jason to space, I don't think fudging the timeline by a matter of a few years is the worst crime to befall either of those franchises.

I defend the use of the merman by noting it was released from a different facility so Hadley wouldn't have seen it in action up close and personal, yet because it had been used so recently at another facility everyone was well aware of the fact it makes a mess. A big mess.