Dr. F. Johansson: Can you please describe your job?
Mr. Byron: Sure. I was working for the organization in question, it's not the GOC, but one of several others who are still somewhat prominent today. The refinery was a front, and we were monitoring several very small anomalous occurrences within the county. The north Midwest is very close to a major nexus, and while Molinsky isn't close, I can safely state that there's a fair bit of traffic through the county.
Dr. F. Johansson: You were a field agent, correct?
Mr. Byron: That's correct, I was trained to handle anomalous entities by the GOC once I got out of the United States Army, the organization I was last employed to then headhunted me. At the refinery site, I was a police liaison, it was how we were first alerted to the call.
Dr. F. Johansson: What was the call?
Mr. Byron: Many people reported creatures suddenly appeared in their houses without warning. When Molinsky PD arrived they were justifiably alarmed, but then something odd happened. Agents from the State Police were affected somehow by the creatures, claimed nothing was wrong. We at the site figured the entities had a memetic effect, which is to say there was a property of the creatures that affected people's minds.
Dr. F. Johansson: Our readership is familiar with memetics, Mr. Byron.
Mr. Byron: Oh? Oh well, never mind then.
Dr. F. Johansson: We are a scientific journal of the Anomalous, remember? I told you that when we first met.
Mr. Byron: Did you? I must have forgotten. I do that a lot these days. Going back to the story, none of the creatures brought in for analysis matched any sort of description of an anomaly we had in containment.
Dr. F. Johansson: What did these creatures look like, Mr. Byron?
Mr. Byron: Furry, quadruped, somewhat docile. They were roughly similar to a cat, but across the examples I retrieved from houses there were gross physical differences. One animal was short and squat with this horrifically squashed face. The poor thing had trouble breathing and kept doing this horrific wheezing. The researchers who autopsied it noticed that its joints were deformed, and it had some of the most severe hip dysplasia they had seen on an animal. There was another who had a permanently melting face, all drooping off the skull, with these bloodshot eyes that just looked at you really pitifully. Some looked like squirrels, some like horses, but they were all wrong. We sort of picked up that they were basically similar to each other, maybe the same species, but there was something about all of them that universally upset the other agents and me. Looking at them was like looking at an alien.
And you have to understand, Dr. Johansson, monsters are my thing. My speciality. I don't freak out easily during my time working for the GOC, there was one incident when I led a team of soldiers, and we stopped a cult ritual in rural Massachusetts. Group of hooded fleshcrafters in the woods prodding and poking this huge fleshy thing covered in eyes and shoes and assholes. I guess they were amateurs, the poor thing was no eldritch god, that's for sure. Bleeding from every orifice, juddering around, big monstrous lump, right? Horrible. Looking at the damn thing made your eyes hurt, all of us collectively relaxed the moment we blew it to smithereens.
But this? This was worse.
Dr. F. Johansson: Worse?
Mr. Byron: I couldn't look at them without feeling my soul jump. Like there was something in my brain that actively resisted them. Holding them, feeling them squirm and yelp and howl just made me want to throw up. Couple of my friends did, which only made them howl more, and made retrieval more difficult. There's something about them that's an emptiness, a void, and even as we forgot to feed them, and were reluctant to approach them, this void got bigger despite that. And to boot, some of them were predators. I mean, we knew they all ate meat, but none of them ever attacked the residents when they appeared in the houses, which was weird. But it was clear that there were variations with purpose. The smaller ones were faster, smarter, the bigger ones more like lions, like apex predators. There was a truly colossal one once with shaggy fur, about the size of a mountain lion.
Dr. F. Johansson: You said you had a close encounter with one of these things beyond a laboratory setting.
Mr. Byron: I came home from the site, tired and with a killer headache, when I realized one was in my home. A horse-shaped thing, shaggy. Even looked more alien than the rest, if that's possible. I didn't notice until it crawled onto my bed that night.
I was lying, nearly asleep when it stumbled in. I could hear it bounding up the stairs first, and my heart was in my throat. I quickly gathered that my domicile was one of the ones that spawned them. I watched it silhouetted against the hall light, watched it trot in. For the first time in my life, I was seized with a fear I had never known before. My head started to burn, the hole in my head opening wider and wider. It climbed up on my bed and that empty feeling just got worse. My neurons sucked into a black hole, the warmth and heaviness of it on my chest, there was no difference to me between those two sensations. They felt equal. Looking at the fucking thing, I then gradually started to feel this disturbing twinge in my chest of something approximating, I dunno, affection. A rush of unwanted serotonin. There was that black nothingness in my head though, and it had almost consumed me entirely. My psyche was screaming, I felt reality slipping away. All of that was reflected in its eyes, and then I could feel it spreading through my body. It was like if memory could catch cancer.
I pushed the creature off, and beat it with a nearby encyclopedia from my bookshelf. I could hear it whining, yelping, like it was scared of me. But I had to do something, anything to get the hole in my head to go away. I had half a mind to shoot it between its empty black eyes, I couldn't. I wanted to so badly but something was pulling at me to stop. Because once I got it to bleed, it turned and loped away, looking back on me one with those eyes. Its gaze filled the hallway. It was upset I had somehow betrayed it.
Dr. F. Johansson: You could read its emotions?
Mr. Byron: Yeah, I assumed it was part of the memetic effect when we interviewed those affected, but when it happened to me there was the awful sinking feeling that it was some bond that was permanently severed. The hole was keeping me from this thing. It felt like I had once known it, once loved it. I have no idea how I was ever able to love something that alien, that monstrous. That was the worst thing of all, the fact that even as a trained agent there was still the possibility that this disgusting monster could affect me, that even many years of mental resistance training could not stop me from whatever it was doing. It was utterly wrong, but every time I tried to defend myself its eyes just became sadder and sadder.
Dr. F. Johansson: Wait, you didn't turn it in immediately?
Mr. Byron: I couldn't even pick it up without the hole burning into my brain. I did give it over to the site, but only after a few days later when it started to attack me despite my best efforts. But even as it bit my hand, the eyes just got sadder and sadder. You ever try to fight something that's got a grip on your soul? It was something…that goes beyond memetics. I betrayed it. That's the only word for what the feeling was. I struggle with the fact that the betrayal never happened, it was impossible. But the evidence kept piling up. I later found cans of disgusting meat with some pictures of the entities on them, inedible cookies I never purchased, even a photograph of me holding the goddamn fucking thing on an elastic strip. Something happened, whether a reality shift or sudden visitation or something more insidious I'm not sure, but these monsters never just dropped out of the sky. There was something beyond their alien quality that made them wrong, some ineffable connection. I was told by the onsite memeticist a day later following their arrival that most people had been affected by the same meme that affected the state police, made them unconcerned. The outside world owned them, called them "doogs" or something. Maybe doges. I'll stick with doogs, sounds closer.
Dr. F. Johansson: That must be incorrect. Having seen the photographs you've provided, I can safely say no people outside Molinsky or even Wisconsin have ever seen a "doog." We're interviewing you so the public can know to avoid these creatures.
Mr. Byron: Really? I'm glad people have seen the light. I was aware recently they had appeared outside Molinsky and the county. I saw a show on TV where they were jumping through hoops and my head had never felt worse.
Dr. F. Johansson: One last question. Why did you and your colleagues feel the need to disguise the site as a refinery? It seems unnecessary.
Mr. Byron: Hmm. I honestly forget. I think perhaps it had something to do with the doogs. Like you know how the FBI or NSA used to disguise data collection sites? But I doubt the town would have been scared, since organizations containing the anomalous have been in the public eye as long as I can remember.
Dr. F. Johansson: But the nature of the animals would have alarmed people.
Mr. Byron: Yes, there would have been mass panic.
Dr. F. Johansson: Jamie Byron, thank you.
Mr. Byron: No problem.
