The Deal with the Devil – Issue #1

Hallo dear readers. I’m Dr. Ludwig, currently unlicensed medic and medical physicist. Urgh! That’s for another story. Anyways, disregard the fact I’ve lost my license. I don’t even know why I brought it up. Ok, the facts are as follows. I will be narrating my own experiences with the paranormal field of study, in which I’ve become a big enthusiast. Not by nature, but raher as a victim of the circumstances.

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September, 1920.

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The coffee at the laboratory has always been too soft and bad-tasting. As a scientist myself, I’ve had to find a way of making it enjoyable, or at least drinkable. Not too long ago, I’ve read about some special coffee beans naturally growing in the deep forests located in China. I do agree it’s very odd that something this insignificant had such an impactful effect on me. At least I’d change the morbid practice for, perhaps, getting to know new botanic herbals, often easily altered to compose medicines, and poison. Yes, poison.

My basic theory on this was that making better coffee would imply in better work, plus I could put in practice some of the most bizarre and yet fascinating experiences. Totally worthwhile. It’s not like people would stop mysteriously disappearing or dying without explainable causes if I left for a couple of days.

But before I could set off to the dark, mysterious woods, I had to finish an ongoing experiment. I don’t really want to enter into details, but it involved a few dozen lab rats, two terminal patients and [REDACTED]. Turns out I managed to finish it just in time. What came out of it will shock the world, hopefully after I come back.

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A few days later.

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Although I had some military experience, have being a field doctor in a series of black ops operations, I couldn’t enter the cave that stood before me unaccompanied. Basically, to put it short, my main contractor is a faced company that represents the interest of oil barons all over the United States, and as such, I had a few colleagues. Sharp shooting, refined engineering and pyromaniac sort of colleagues.

We have met in the designated zone one day ago and while mapping the area for the special bean of coffee, we found the entrance to what seems to be an uncharted gallery of caves. At least, that’s what we thought back then.

Upon entering the dark cave, our colleague made the courtesy of bursting a long, bright flame from his… Urgh, I’m not entirely sure how the Americans call it. I don’t even know if this said colleague is even American to be quite honest. Anyways, with one single burst of his flammen-waffe, the entirety of the first room became bright enough to reveal a set of military equipment. A specific set of military hardware, mainly used by a rival company.

I will be honest here. The fact that other “company” was there wasn’t really what shocked us all. On a deeper inspection, what first felt like water on the sole of our boots, revealed to be blood. Recently extracted blood, how I like to call it. It’s a long story… As soon as we found out we were not facing another human threat, we changed our plan.

Gladly, at the time, our engineering colleague have brought some of his fancy working material, including his worldwide famous spectrometer prototype. It rapidly appointed a variation in the wave lengths commonly detectable by specialized sensors. On his own words, it could only indicate a sign of unclarified or undiscovered force of nature, meaning whatever was causing the interference wasn’t really from this world. Yes, I know my colleague and his technical mannerism. He meant what he meant and it was just enough.

And luckily for me, and everyone else, I had brought my medical equipment, and most importantly, my old reliable bone saw. Whatever lurked inside that set of apparently never ending caves, I would have the honor to open, split apart, disembowel and finally study it. The four of us began to crawl down deeper inside the cave.

Inside the next room, or more like a hall, we discovered a set of complex writings on the walls. The ink? Human blood. As long as I have studied, or my engineering colleague also have, we had never seem such a form of writing. It wasn’t a human language. Oh, and before you ask yourself, our pyromaniac colleague haven’t studied at all. Nothing. It’s just flames and games for him. And regarding our sharpshooting colleague, let’s say all he knows is wind velocity and the weight of his bullet tips. He always said it was enough for his field of work.

Moving on, we decided to collect some blood samples and write down the enigmatic symbols laid before our eyes, and just as we finished, we have heard a grotesque human scream even deeper into the cave. I confess our sharpshooting colleague let slip a subtle face expression of fear. Meanwhile, our pyromaniac colleague was already running toward the scream, exactly as a careless children running toward the ball he kicked in a heavy traffic zone. Nothing else mattered.

Not surprisingly, the sharpshooter proposed to wait outside and offer cover if anything followed us on or way out, and so me and the engineer decided to run on the pyro’s aid…

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End of issue #1.

Next chapter 01/23.