A Series of Interviews on the Rollins Cult

Jul 22

On the 19th March 2006, 63 people living in a community on the Kenthworth farm were discovered dead. Considered one of the worst mass suicides in recent history, the events described have so far eluded significant press attention for reasons that are not readily apparent. Listed here are several interviews with various figures associated with the discovery of the scene and what was found within the Kentworth compound.

The first interviewee is Andrew Willard, a tall man with large hands. Standing 6’4 and rakishly thin, his almond coloured eyes look out at me from beneath a low set furrowed brow with a mix of curiosity and concern. He has been in my office for fifteen minutes and has asked to smoke three times. Each time I say no, but Mr Willard holds a cigarette between his two fingers anyway, tapping it against my desk and leaving a trail of tobacco crumbs. As soon as my equipment is set up, I ask Mr Willard to begin his account for the recording. What follows is the resultant transcript.

I was around thirty when the Rollins moved in just off the Kentworth land. There were just a few of them back then, squatters or gypsies we figured most likely, but we didn’t much care so long as they weren’t settling in on any of our property. Sometimes you’d see the youngest one coming into town to pick a few things up, and while she was a grotty looking thing with dead teeth and raggedy hair, she didn’t act much like any gypsie I’d seen. She was quiet and kept to herself, and I remember looking at her and thinking she might’ve been a pretty thing in another life. There was always gossip but I paid it no mind. We didn’t know nothing about them and so it might as well have all been fiction.

Davies told me he saw signs of construction on the land, and a passing solicitor let slip that the Rollins were the new owners and he’d been sent in to work on planning permission. He was a real slick bugger, and the first hint any of us got that the Rollins were rich. Course, over time, all that faded into the background. I didn’t much like them, though I always felt a kind of pity if I saw one wandering around town. But mostly I just didn’t trust them, didn’t trust their choice of home or why they lived such lonely lives. If you act all secretive it’s only natural people figure you got secrets.

Course, I didn’t have a damn clue just how bad it was. They’d been living up there close to twenty years when that car came rolling towards my end of the road. I could hear it coming from a mile off, drumming its burst tyres against the tarmac while the bumper screeched something awful from half-way under the radiator. And I remember just thinking that something horrific had happened. That sound worked its way under my skin like nails on a chalkboard. I didn’t know what it was, just that it was bad and coming my way.

It came to a stop outside my house, just outside. It was the strangest thing, like someone had tapped the brakes at just the right time to get my attention. I tried telling the police who came that the handbrake was on when I reached it, and that was a pretty damn odd thing to notice. But they didn’t seem to think so, and I’ve spent a long time since wondering if I maybe pulled it up without thinking. God knows I don’t remember too much of what I saw in that thing, at least not in an easy-going way. It’s still in there, rattling around my head, what I saw, smelled, and heard. I feel it when I sleep, or sometimes even when I just close my eyes. I’ll be sitting there and I’ll blink for half-a-second too long and poof, I can see those three girls sat next to each other, all naked and cut up. And I hear those blue bottles crawling around their belly buttons, and I can smell the mess they made in fear and the smell of their muscles turning to mush, of fat curdling beneath the skin.

That car came howling out of the woods with a little piece of hell trapped inside and I had the misfortune of seeing it. I think about it every day, every night. I think about that handbrake pulled upright. I think about the gentle curve of the road, and I wonder if a car really can roll all that distance on its own. And I think about those girls. I think about them a lot. I guess I can’t help but wonder what they went through, why they’d soiled themselves, why their mascara was all run from crying, and most importantly, why they were grinning ear-to-ear.

Jesus…

Is it okay if I smoke?

No?

Dr Alsley is a sad looking man in his sixties. He has spent the last few years battling an addiction to prescription medication and retired six months ago in order to avoid being struck off as a medical practitioner. We meet for coffee at a small restaurant just a few hundred feet from the rehabilitation clinic where he has lived for the last ten weeks. He has grey hooded eyes, with a chubby face and stubby fingers that are constantly scratching his jaw, neck, and shoulders.

No one’s ever interviewed me before. At the time I was just a student, not a doctor or coroner or anyone else most people think to ask at times like that. But I was still there. I was there in the minibus as we drove past those creaky chainlink fences and corrugate-iron shacks. I stood on the grounds and looked up at the amber-windowed spire of the Kentworth Manor house, observed the smashed up garbage cans with still burning fires, saw rats the size of cats scurry away between piles of trash lying sparsely across the muddy grassless yard. And right outside the front door were thirteen bodies all lined up in neat little rows. They’d bussed some of us in to help with the clean up and we went on to find another 38 bodies hidden inside the main house. Even in the middle of a full blown investigation everyone was just silent. The cops, the doctors, the paramedics. I mean, you expect it maybe from a bunch of final year med students but not those guys, right? They’re in the thick of it every day. But no one joked or gossiped. There were only ever curt nods and terse orders delivered in breathless snippets.

I won’t go as far as to say my time spent with the Rollins is what led me to where I am but… it didn’t help. There were five of us but they’d built that place up something stupid. They’d added two new floors and probably around another 45 rooms via various annexes. And that’s not counting the shitty little portacabins they had set up as classrooms, dormitories, so on. Dozens of ‘em. It took days to clear it room by room for bodies just to make sure and the whole time I was there, right in the thick of it.

And the bodies, they were all fuckin’ smiling. I asked about it and I hoped that I’d get some kind of dismissive, “Oh it doesn’t matter just do your job. It’s just rigor mortis.” But the guy I asked just shook his head and put his hand on my shoulder and that felt worse somehow. Like no one had any answers, no one could comfort me or tell me to just get over it. I wanted to be told my fear wasn’t valid, but no one could do that.

All those bodies had been cut up awful, some hiding in terror, others lying down as if going for a nap. The official verdict was poison or some kind of hallucinogenic episode, but just about everyone I saw was cut up in some real nasty ways. There were strips of flayed skin, denucleated eyeballs, scalps hanging off like the lid of a bin. One woman had cut her throat so deep she’d practically decapitated herself. For others it wasn’t so clear if they’d hurt themselves or if someone else had done it. It was clear a lot had been trying to escape something or someone, but I can’t quite imagine how a random attacker could clear out a building of so many people without being overpowered. The Rollins family weren’t naïve, they had some big guys there who weren’t exactly defenceless.

First couple of days there were all these people around but once they figured how long the job was gonna take, they soon found a way to make themselves scarce. There were times when I’d be left alone in that place and I’m not sure I’ve had a good night’s sleep since. The worst I had it was when we were still clearing out the main assembly hall, right at the start. There were 23 bodies in there and me and my friend had to move them out and start on clean up, and at some point towards the end of the day, my friend popped off to the toilet and I was left alone with each and every one of those bodies. It didn’t really help that most of them had been bagged up. If anything, I found it made it worse. I started to get these images in my head of one of them sitting upright, real slow, like a vampire in those old horror films except there was nothing cheap and low budget about the picture in my mind.

Somewhere on the wall up ahead the clock was ticking. The kind of thing you’d have in a classroom, and I took in the lectern and the benches and the folded up ping-pong table in one corner. It was a place where people lived. God knows what they were doing but they were still just living, really. That guy I was zipping up? That guy with bloodshot eyes that wouldn’t stay closed and blue puffy lips with the tongue half-chewed firmly between his teeth, he’d once sat on those benches and stared at that clock. And something about that just scared the hell out of me.

I decided to leave, to go find someone, anyone. God they’d understand, wouldn’t they? They’d understand why a young guy like me could get a bit spooked? I stood up and started making my way to the door when I heard it. I didn’t even look back. I couldn’t. I just fucking ran and I gave a little shriek too, something to leave behind as I sprinted past the threshold like someone struck with a jolt of lightning. My muscles bunched tight like springs, my scalp turned ice cold and seemed to shrink around my skull, and all I could think was that things like this shouldn’t happen. I’d got spooked, that’s all. That’s why I wanted to leave. It was a feeling, not something real.

Sure, the image of one of those bags sitting upright had been playing over and over in my mind for the last few minutes but it was akin to a joke. It was a fantasy, a game I played with myself. It wasn’t meant to be real. It wasn’t meant to be anything but a thought. But I’d heard it, so damn loud and clear I could’ve sworn the clock held its breath just so to make sure I noticed. It started as a shuffle, audible somewhere behind me. A noise that seamlessly turned into the crumpling of plastic, followed by the skin-crawling sound of a zipper being drawn.

Mr Allswell is built like a linebacker and struggles to fit into the chair I’ve placed in front of my desk. He is wearing a tailored suit, tan with a fine-stitched herringbone pattern. He asks to compare watches, but I decline and instead ask him to recount verbally what we had previously discussed over phone. Apparently chastened, he agrees.

We recovered a whole boatload of documents. Most of it was mundane stuff, accounting stuff related to the dodgy shit he got into it. He liked to gamble, horses and stocks. And apparently he had a helluva system because it paid for most of what he got. Some of the other stuff we pulled was a little more spooky. The kind of thing you might expect from a place were 50 people offed themselves. I’m talking about weird drawings, manifestos ranting about purity and blood, weird symbols, y’know. I figured it all for gibberish. Cults are all pyramid schemes. They’re about filling you up with hot air, just throwing words out there like some professor hoping to get laid. It don’t mean nothing.

I got a stripper friend, right? And she tells me the funniest fucking thing. Every day these men come in, and she works just off an airport so this place sees good foot traffic, and they come in paying her cash to see her tits. And these guys, these fucking guys, they lie to her. She asks what they do, who they are, and they all lie.

“I’m a fighter pilot for the RAF. I work for MI6. I’m an oil baron who’s best friends with Yeezy and oh did I mention, I’m a black-belt in krag magav.”

I’m just saying, it’s all bullshit. It weren’t about nothing except chasing tail. What happened was, people went in there expecting something spooky and that’s what they got. All those paramedics, volunteers, tech teams, whatever they were, hell even the other cops, they went in hoping to see something odd. Most of them, one way or another, got their wish but it was all just consummation bias, y’know? People just looking out for what they already suspect is there.

Even I had some moments! But it’s like… what? Did I actually see or hear what I thought I saw? Or was I just tired and stressed? That makes more sense to me. I don’t know if you’re planning on using these interviews to stir this shit up or to debunk it or what, but I hope it’s the latter. We can all look ourselves in the eyes and admit the truth, right? There was nothing in that place.

But anyway, right. I’d been there for a long time and back then I was just uniformed and helping with the search. 20 acres and we had no idea how many people did or didn’t live there. We never found the bodies of any kids but there was some stuff that suggested people had given birth there, so it was real important we knew for a fact there weren’t a half-dozen inbred infants starving to death in some bunker – real fucked up stuff. But we needed to do it, so we did. And that mostly involved a good old fashioned search, which is what me and about a dozen other officers spent the best part of three weeks doing.

Anyway, there I am mucking around the creek that runs through the back end of the property when I spot it – a storm drain. It’s big, big enough to stand up in, and it’s leaking piss-coloured water into the river from the Rollins’ side of the property. I radio in for help but they’re gonna be a few minutes so I decide to saddle up a little closer and see if I can spot anything. Now, yeah, okay, I got a little freaked out. Where I’m standing this thing is at about chest height right, my ankles are up to here in the water, and I’m leaning my head into this massive drain and I’m tired and wound up and… well, that’s when I hear it.

Crying. Children crying. Except it didn’t sound like children, it sounded like my children. And y’know, I guess that papa bear instinct kicked in because even though I could’ve shit myself with fear I still hauled myself up—making a helluva mess of my clothes—and went looking for that sound. I didn’t really let any thoughts form in my head. In rough times that can be a bad idea. I just took a deep breath and kept on going.

And going.

I must have walked, God, two, three hours? Maybe? I don’t know. It was a dream, I figure. Just one long halluc—hallucigenen--hallucigenic episode. Kept hearing my kids crying for me though. They were begging me to hurry up. By the time I finally found the end of the tunnel it opened up onto a kind of nursery, I guess. It looked like a normal sort of classroom for kids, aged 3-5, but only at a glance. Yeah sure there were pictures drawn in crayon but a closer look showed some fucking blood-red eye hovering over the sky while mommy and daddy broke bones and took it a little further than just PG-13. The books were all these hand-made sort of things, the art was pretty good, but again it wasn’t your usual Dr Seuss.

One story talked about two friends who wanted to be closer than ever, except one of their families is about to move. So the whole book goes on normal as you would expect, talking about the girls’ fears and worries about being apart, only for the plot to go totally fucking haywire and show them stitching their fucking faces together. Turns out well, apparently! The book shows them growing together, eating the same food and shitting it out a different arse, closing one set of eyes and using the other to see, and the whole town is so amazed and impressed that both families decide to stay. And that’s the end then, just all these people cheering around these two girls that are just… just growing into each other like a fucking horror movie from the 80s.

Anyway, all that, all of it lit by a kind of red emergency lighting bulb, but no fuckin’ kids. Blackboard, chalk, little desks, small play area… couldn’t have had more than 10 kids in there at a time and some of the desks looked unused. But no matter how hard I looked, there was no one in there. It was all just my head messing with me. I mean, this isn’t rocket science. I was out there looking for kids – can’t be a surprise my sleep added brain started conjuring sounds out of nothing. And a river? That’s some white noise right there and stuff like that can make you hear all kinds of shit. I got a friend, every time it rains he hears his father talking to him. It’s more common than you think, like tinnitus. It’s just the brain looking for patterns that ain’t there.

I was tense is all. You know I never told anyone this but… but I was so fucked up I that I took that book home. I must have, when I wasn’t looking. I musta just pocketed it, taken it back to my little girl. There’s no other explanation, not really, cause the next morning before setting off again I look down and there she is, my little angel, giggling her arse off at the pictures of these two girls merging like a pair of crunchy amoeba. I get a lot of flak from the Mrs and my girl—all grown up now—about my drinking and temper. I don’t feel guilty about any of that though. I feel guilty about bringing that fucking book back. With everything turning out how it did, it was alright in the end, but there were long stretches there when Bethany was out there doped up out of her head doing God knows what with who and the Mrs and I could barely breathe or blink with sheer worry and…

If I did fuck that girl up, no matter how much people tell me it was the drinking, the screaming, the shouting, the occasional slap around the head, I can’t help but feel like it was letting that book get into her hands that did it. That was my sin. That’s what keeps me up at night. Which is funny cause… well she swears blind it turned up on her shelf the night before I got home.

Course, that just can’t be true.

Professor Ligotti works at the University of Aberdeen and was brought in to consult on the material found at the Kentworth compound. He was initially unhappy to receive my call, but seemed pleased when I made it clear he would not be expected to answer direct questions.

So, comparative mythology is a lot of fun, but you need to be sceptical. It’s not hard to read a thousand stories and find what’s common to them, and most people come to me with talk of ancient aliens and silly conspiracies. The simple truth is these legends probably came from the same source which was just an older legend. Yeah, all cultures mention dragons, but doesn’t it make more sense that the thing that inspired those legends was, say, another legend? And not a real dragon? Alright, yeah sure, maybe dinosaur bones come into play, but not actual dragons.

And yet every time someone wants to speak to me it’s about Mayan and Egyptian pyramids and something to do with aliens and all that lark. I like a bit of fantasy but I get fed up of my work being used to come up with rubbish. At least Peter Rollins paid. The guy was a loon, a difficult angry self-important loon, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least he used his charm to exploit people, but at least he paid for my insights.

So, he wanted to know about, um, I guess I’ll call it the Evil Eye. Most cultures treat this as a kind of curse, or a stare, but older records show the idea bleeding into the notion of “God as an observer”. The idea is that it is fundamental to the human psyche to feel watched, because without that sense of being an individual amidst a sea of other individuals, it can become harder to, sort of, construct an identity. It’s very interesting stuff actually, because not only does it fit into ideas of morality and guilt (y’know, God is watching so I must be kind), but also the very raw building blocks we use to understand ourselves as human. There is God. There is man. We feel it, deep inside ourselves, and culturally this sense of never really being alone it kinda stems from the way we exist in a mental space where there’s no boundary between us and our own thoughts. Like, your mind exists within your mind, you can picture a chair right and there it is in your head, a chair, but not only is it a false chair—an imagined chair—but it’s actually you. It’s your neurons firing in your head to make something that is, well it’s made out of you.

It’s weird, but in your head there’s you—that mental voice or whatever—and then there’s all this other stuff that is also you. And it kind of bleeds into this idea that we’re not alone in our own heads, so much so that some argue it’s the foundation to all theism, this sense that our actions matter, that we matter. That something is watching, and we can feel that something watching us.

But similarly, just as many religions and cultures have beliefs about how God has turned his eye away from our existence. Peter was very interested in that idea, the concept that we were no longer of interest to who’d made us, that our world was denied that “observation” so we replaced it with the voices in our head which are just our voices. He let slip, once or twice, that he thought it was possible to get God’s attention back to us. His background was in neuroscience and mathematics—particularly complexity theory—so a surprising amount of what he said went over my head, although I guess that kind of bullshittery is the point of a cult (yes he did try to recruit me).

He also tied it into quantum physics, talking about how observers alter the physical laws of reality? I’ve checked and some physicist in the university say it’s essentially true, albeit nowhere near as mystical as Peter made it out to be. But he said if he could get God’s attention back to us, something to do with receivers and signals and neural synchronicity, then he would have the power to alter reality. Or maybe something to that effect.

Anyway, the last time I spoke to him it was because I asked if that was something he really wanted. He flew into a terrible rage, but I was only trying to humour him. And I felt like I had a point! I mean, if we are all naughty kids on a cosmic time-out step, do we really want to get God’s attention? He must’ve left for a reason, I’m not sure he’d be pleased if we started throwing shit on the walls to get him back over to our little corner of creation.

But that’s not really what I wanted to ask him. Not really. I don’t know why I didn’t ask him but… what was really going through my head was:

What if it’s not God’s attention we get?

Mr Coast has agreed to meet me in the garden of his home. In 2009 his construction and refurbishment company agreed to take on a contract on behalf of the local council in order to begin demolition of the Kentworth compound. He is currently involved in a lawsuit with the government over its supposed failure to disclose the property’s history, and subsequent claims made by Mr Coast and several of his staff that their work at the site resulted in long-lasting and debilitating injuries, both psychological and physical. He has historically resisted efforts at interview, but for unknown reasons agreed to speak with me.

The hardest thing has been dealing with something no one wants to admit too. I used to think there was some big conspiracy but as time’s gone on I wonder if there isn’t a simpler explanation. It started out with me and the boys fighting tooth and nail to get the council just to admit to what they’d done. You could go onto the street and ask anyone in that town what had happened in that place and they’d tell you, but as far as the council was concerned it was just a bunch of bricks and we weren’t entitled to know squat. But it’s been about ten years since I filed the first lawsuit and one by one everyone else has dropped out, even after I agreed to cover any legal bills. When I talk to them now it’s like they don’t even want to admit it. I mean, these guys, they were there with me, we were all in the thick of it. I don’t sit around doing paperwork, that’s not the kinda company I run. We were friends, the lot of us. Half of them have moved to the other side of the world and the other half have disappeared off the map, guzzling stolen beer in a gutter somewhere.

The ones who are left don’t want to talk about it. I feel like they only let me put their names down out of a sense of obligation to me, like they owe me something for fighting for them but deep down they wish I didn’t bother. Because sooner or later some judge or barrister asks the single question that actually matters and we get called up to answer and it’s just…

“What happened?” they ask, and none of us want to answer.

We arrived six months after the suicides. No one said what or why. We were told there was an old house and we had to go in and bring it all down, take everything out and demolish it brick by brick. We were given an accepted list of equipment we could hire on the government’s behalf and it wasn’t exactly great—I think they expected us to do it all with sledgehammers and picks—but damn if it wasn’t tempting when they offered us a blank cheque. Public sector work is great like that. Money just gets thrown around willy nilly and I sure did fancy some.

But can you imagine rolling into that place? We had no idea what we were in for. One look and it suddenly made sense why we were told to pick a quote once the job was done and the council would pay it. There were these ridiculous annexes on the house. They’d added fucking floors! Whole new floors, so many the place looked like something out of a kid’s picture book. Alongside that there were four portacabins that needed dealing with, and over 20 acres we found another seventeen structures that had sprung up, made out of corrugated iron, concrete, and chainlink mesh. Oh and then there were the bunkers.

Jesus Christ…

Right from the start we weren’t happy about any of it, but we didn’t have any real way of saying how. We just knew it was wrong. There were still books on shelves, food in cupboards. All those people, they left their stuff behind and the police did a piss poor job of cleaning up. So in a way all we had to complain about was that it was a bit bigger than we thought, and the council didn’t take our complaints very seriously. But in another way, I had to ask my employees to go clear out the still-full rucksacks of a bunch of dead kids. It’s tough work. Every new room had something truly fucked up and the worst part was how often it’d linger in your head like a kind of non-detail until you’d be lying there late at night and some deeply worrying question would pop up and you’d have no way to answer.

Like, there was a small room, a small clinical space with a washbasin and a shower except big enough for a few people to get inside. And y’know I didn’t really make much of it. The mirror had been smashed, a small utility cupboard in the corner had the door taken off the hinges, there were some scratches in the floor. But that stuff was all over the place. You couldn’t help but feel like you were walking through the scene of a siege. So that stuff, that wasn’t unusual. No. What got me was the calendar. I didn’t think much of it at first. There were all these girls’ names on certain dates, each one had the day or around it highlighted and this repeated every 28 days like clockwork. Amberly, May 16th. Mary, June 4th. Alicia, September 9th. When I flipped back, some of the names had been overlaid with gold stars or frowny stickers, like something you see at school.

Anyway, it didn’t strike me as odd until I went home and my wife, she had a calendar herself, something she kept beside the bed. And before I’m going to sleep she leans over and scribbles away and mutters something under her breath and I ask her about it and she explains that she’ll be ovulating on that weekend. You see, we were trying for a baby at the time. So she tracked her cycle, highlighting the days when we’d have the best chance of conceiving.

Well, it all clicked into place then, didn’t it? And I was left with a question I didn’t have a comfortable answer to. I think I must ask myself twice a day, “How old were those girls?”

That kind of shit alone should entitle me to some compensation. By the end of the first week we were all fucked. Three guys had called in sick, one of the older gents had fallen off the wagon which had me very concerned, and every day I woke up wondering if I could bring myself to return. But the real kicker was how that place wasn’t dead. I don’t know if everyone there died or not, I don’t know exactly what it was, but it wasn’t dead. It wasn’t done doing whatever it wanted to do. Maybe it was some ghost, some imprint of all that misery lingering behind, or if their fucked up hoodoo tainted it or what.

We had one kid get locked in a room on the 5th floor and it took us two hours to find him. A wedge had been shoved under the door from the other side and I know for a fact that’s not the sort of joke my guys would play. When we finally got him out he’d stopped screaming for about an hour and was just huddled up on the floor sobbing into his own knees. And the room, it was just silent, just an empty quiet room with a bed in one corner and some pictures on the wall. We kept asking him what happened but the only thing he’d do is look at the bed, just staring at it like a lion was gonna pop out.

His clothes were shredded, he had cuts all up his arms, his shoes were missing. Fuck we never found those, never. But he was a mess and he went straight off to hospital and afterwards I went back and flipped that bed and I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t a trapdoor. I had to stop one of the guys trying to go down it. Something about the way it just led into nothingness—the way there was a kind of faint, almost candlelike, light at the bottom of that long impossible shaft—that kept me from letting anyone trying.

If it led to a space between the walls or some secret compartment, which was most likely, then it’d all come crashing down with the rest of the house and that was just fine by me. But that poor lad never did come back and as far as I know he’s living in a home with carers now, shocked senseless by whatever he saw coming out of that door.

There were other, lesser, incidents. Some guy lost a finger to some machinery he swore blind he’d switched off and unplugged. One guy had the lights go off on him in the basement and while he got out unhurt, he came up screaming his head off about someone else being down in there with him, someone who’d grabbed the cuff of his trousers as he ran back up the stairs and held him there, their pale greasy hand clutching onto the fabric so hard it began to tear and that’s how he finally freed himself.

By the time the second week was over, we all committed to working in groups and that seemed to stop the accidents, or whatever they were, from happening for a while. I mean, the whole place just felt hostile, like it was ready to off us on a moment’s notice just for being there. You felt watched, like a thousand eyes were on the back of your head and the second it got quiet—too quiet—and you were all alone, it’d take you and gobble you up in a heartbeat.

And then there were the bunkers. Fuck me. The bunkers. Three of them, I think? We gave up after the last one. For all I know there are more down there. Way, way, more. In fact, deep down, I reckon there’s at least another one with live people still in it. I guess for context I should mention it took the police about a week to dig up all the corpses in their various hidey holes. Sure, some were lying down in the assembly hall, but at least another dozen were jammed in cupboards, closest, crawlspaces, or dangling from attic rafters with their bony fingers still pressed to their lips.

But there were even more in the bunkers. There was an empty one, a classroom at a guess. That was cleared out nice and easy though some guys kept saying sound carried funny down there cause they kept catching the snippets of kids singing or playing. But another one was a proper little safe space and it was a fucking massacre. No gore, aside from broken nails or whatever they’d done to themselves in panic. But they were all piled up against the door trying to force it shut only it was too late because they never got it all the way closed. Whatever followed floored them in seconds, must’ve been.

At least that’s what the cops told us. What they didn’t tell us, because they didn’t know, was that there was another bunker and that was left to us to find. And just like the last one it was filled with corpses, but this time there weren’t no police to cart them off before any rot set in and it was left to us to stumble across them by smell alone.

Six of them. One adult, five kids. The kids were hiding in different places but hiding like kids do, hiding under bed sheets or in dark corners with their fists balled into their eyes. And the adult was slumped against the door, trying so hard to push it shut. Funny thing is the damn thing swung open easily with just a shove when we got there, and it’s never been clear to me why all those people had such a hard time getting them closed. But what does it matter? Something evil had stormed up that last drain tunnel and come barrelling towards them and it got them, just like it had gotten all the others.

You know when you what something is, and you don’t wanna see it, but you look anyway? It was clear to us what we’d found the second we entered but I still took a few steps in and looked around. I saw kids still standing, or sitting upright, thumbs in mouths… rotting grimacing mouths with lips pulled back so far their teeth and gums jutted out. And on the top bunk was a lump, someone sitting under a sheet. I mean, fuck, I knew what that was, right? So why did I pull the sheet back?

Their eyes were still open, looking at me. Not through me, not behind me, not beside me. No. They were looking right at me, teddy bear in one hand, balled up pyjama bottoms in the other, and an ancient piss stain soaked into the mattress.

They were smiling.

Like I said, after that we quit and got the police to come in. They didn’t sound surprised more bodies had been found and if I had to have a guess, I’d say they suffered every second in that place just like we had and they were in just as much of a rush to get it over with and leave. They knew it was half-finished, and while I sympathise with them in some ways, I’ll never fucking forgive them for letting us go in and suffer on their behalf.

Everyone wants to forget. I did too, for a long time. But yesterday my daughter called me, balling her eyes out from her Mum’s place. You know what she said? She said she came back from the toilet in the middle of the night and someone was sitting in her bed, the sheet pulled over them so they were just this upright shape, sobbing quietly, saying quietly over and over and over,

“They can’t see me. They can’t see me. They can’t see me.”

I swear on my fucking life I heard those same words whispered in that bunker.

The current subject wishes to remain unnamed and undescribed.

Rollins was a fucking trip man, Gene that is, not Peter. I never really knew the younger one, not really. His whole family were interested in custom psychedelics and there aren’t many labs still out there ready to innovate like I am. But like I said, I always dealt with Gene. The older one, he was funny and wild and he had a poet’s soul. I told him I wanted to drive from one coast of the States to the other and write a book along the way and he decided to join me, so we wound up hitting the road tanked up with so much fucking mescaline and peyote it was a miracle we ever came back.

Shame we were in Amsterdam at the time. I think we got to Utrecht? It was a blast anyway. In hindsight, we should’ve realised they don’t have many canal boats in Nevada. But like I said Gene was down to party and he spoke to me a lot about his old man who was a special case of fucked up. He was a mine inspector or something like that—a geologist maybe?—and anyway, one day he went down a dark hole and came back all kinds of different. He was dark, nasty, abusive in just about every way you could be and he insisted on home schooling his kids. Gene was around 16 at the time and just upped and left, but Peter? Peter was younger, maybe 8 or 9. Gene told me it fucked him up to leave his brother behind, but he had to.

When I finally met Peter he was a lot like his brother but a little darker, a little less fun. For the first few years I kinda thought of him as like a photocopy of Gene, something slightly different, maybe faded. But he wasn’t. Gene was all about the journey, the fun. Sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll baby. He and I were about keeping that dream alive right up into the Bush era. But Peter had very specific requests about what I made for him, and it was while working with him on the actual chemistry side of stuff that I realised he was smart in a way Gene never was.

You know you might get the chance to speak to some of the cops who went into that compound and uh, one of them got it right. He looks like a fucking gorilla in a suit but he got it right. He’ll tell you all those symbols and voodoo shit was just rubbish meant to distract and he was right. It was never about that. It was about the water supply. I didn’t realise Peter was putting this stuff in their water. Hell! I didn’t even know what “this stuff” was. He told what to make and how and I did it, sometimes doing other favours for him too, and he’d pay me enough cash to keep on tripping for a whole year.

Somewhere along the line Gene faded out of the scene. God knows what he’s doing now – cooking barbeque with his wife and kids and saying ‘ooh golly’ instead of swearing, probably. But Peter kept on ticking and sooner or later I knew we’d come to blows. You see, me, I’ve travelled farther than anyone else alive and I’ve done it from the comfort of my own home and let me tell you what’s out there. Let me tell you the secret behind human spirituality…

Nothing. We’re a bunch of hairless monkeys clinging to a fucking rock, just jerking off. Once you come to peace with that all that’s left is to grab a banana with one hand and your cock with the other. It’s liberating! But, uh, Peter, he disagreed, violently disagreed. Not only did he feel offended by the idea that there was nothing out there, he actually thought that the right mental state could be used to send out some kind of broadcast, a kind of “hey look at us over here!”. I never really learned what he meant, just that he wanted to get something’s attention and it was all about tuning his mind into the right frequencies and then sort of… broadcasting an idea. Later on he’d tell me that he was close, that it was all about getting the right numbers, like launching a dozen flares instead of just one.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this next bit aside. I better actually remain fuckin’ anonymous… But I sabotaged the last batch. I guess I had a bad trip or something. I just woke up one day with the idea in my head that he couldn’t be allowed to keep on broadcasting this signal out into the world, not with all those people. I don’t know. I never changed my mind. I’m still adamant there’s nothing spiritual out there, not really. There’s no meaning, that’s the only lesson we need to learn. But fuck, staring into that darkness one night, high as a fucking kite on acid, the idea that something might be staring back just wormed its way into me and…

I just couldn’t have it. I never really understood what it was I’d been making but I knew a few slight adjustments to it would turn it into coffee sweetener. Hell I’d taken it myself a few times and as far as I could tell it wasn’t even psychoactive. So what the hell was he doing it dosing his followers up every day with the damn stuff? I couldn’t say but… but I figured what difference would it make if I swapped a H with a C and turned it into chemical gibberish with no real effect on the body?

If something is out there, I didn’t want that fucker getting its attention.

I didn’t know it would… I didn’t know they’d built up a dependency. I didn’t know how its absence would… apparently it is psychoactive. And it’s also extremely addictive. And when people experience withdrawal they don’t experience it quietly. I know a lot of bodies were found peacefully resting in the main assembly hall, but do you notice how rarely the police throw around the word “poisoned” even though that’s the official verdict? They weren’t poisoned. Just look at the girls in that car man, they were fuckin’ butchered!

The truth is no one actually knows what happened up there. But deep down I’m pretty sure I was responsible somehow.

This interviewee will not speak to me openly, but specifically wrote the following testimony and asked for its inclusion.

I was about 9 when we moved in. I hated it. I hated it something special. Dad left Mum when I was about three and he’d always been the provider. She had dropped school when she was 14 and had no qualifications, she had no home, no family, so she got a job as a cleaner and then when it became clear that wouldn’t be enough, she got another job, and then had to get another one on top. All my brothers and sisters were adults with their own kids and their own problems, so Mum couldn’t count on them.

I loved her right to the end. Even after everything that happened. I get it. She had a rough life and somehow she got caught up with this Rollins guy. She was so happy right up until she turned up and saw how young all the other girls were. Every night she was a wreck, drinking and sobbing quietly about how this was her last chance at true happiness. She couldn’t understand why he’d picked her to come along but even as a kid I knew why. I saw it in the way the teachers looked at us, the way they spoke to us. Our lessons were meditation, plenty of water, and hours spent focusing on different shapes and weird images. They looked like static and colours, sometimes videos, and every day we’d have to focus on them and it was hard but over time it got easier, better. Sometimes kids would fall over shaking, bleeding out their noses, mouths, eyes. Sometimes they’d start screaming and if they did they’d be dragged away and would spend hours drawing what they’d seen in the static.

It was a slow effect, something that didn’t go away just because you stopped looking at the pictures. Those images burned themselves into your eyes and that was the point. To this day I’m adamant they put something in our food or our water, I don’t know. The whole time I was there I felt different, funny, but it wasn’t like I was high or anything. I just felt watched, all the time. I think there was something about the combination of pictures and whatever they were doing to our heads that was the point of it all. All the masses and prayers and special rituals were just set dressing. It was the kids who mattered.

Towards the end, I started to get into it. I started to get this sense I was looking at something and it was looking back, but it was out of focus and it was like a kind of puzzle and I loved puzzles. I didn’t enjoy the way those pictures made me feel, but I hated seeing the other kids get rewards for doing better than me. If you drew a good picture, a great one, the kind of thing Mr Rollins would take for his personal collection, then they’d let you shower and have other treats. To this day I have never hated anyone as much as I hated the kids who got to have butter on their toast at breakfast time.

Looking back, it was sick, all of it. But I wanted to make my Mum proud, I wanted her to be happy. If I could be good enough to get Mr Rollins’s attention then maybe we’d get our own room, maybe Mum could have a day off on the weekend, maybe they’d let her work on laundry instead of having to clean their toilets. Peter Rollins was a nasty piece of work. He had his claws in each and every one of us. He knew exactly how to twist and turn his words so that you thought you wanted to do what he wanted.

They never did find his body. They never know what happened to him.

But I did.

It started slow. A few people started to get a little ill, not violently or anything. They’d just lose all their energy and start sleeping, collapsing where they worked or making beds out of whatever they could find at hand. People started forgetting stuff. Mr Rollins would forget his speeches during the morning communion. Our teachers would come in and just sit there staring at the walls. All the kids stopped playing one by one. We just turned into zombies and the word going around was there was a disease, but then other rumours started talking about a “comedown”, which I didn’t understand as a kid. The whole time there had been a sheen to life in that place, a kind of haze you didn’t realise was there until it was gone.

It got worse pretty quickly, even Mr Rollins got sick and went into his room and we didn’t see him again until right at the end. Soon people stopped waking up or leaving bed, and once the higher ups got it, all functioning broke down. We stopped harvesting crops, stopped going to town to buy essentials, we even stopped opening the gates for deliveries. Everyone was either slumped down somewhere or asleep. There were a few nights like that, of total silence, and then talking started. At first people would just mumble and it seemed kind of normal if you only saw one of them doing it. Except in the dorms it was obvious something was wrong. People were mumbling in sync, making the same weird grunts and half-words as each other and at the exact same time. Soon it was full-blown speech, talking about everything and nothing. Mum got it pretty bad, and she was one of the first to open her eyes. It was eerie, holding her hand while she lay there speaking in an unfamiliar accent, unblinking eyes fixed on some distant point behind the ceiling.

“Indices. Indecent. Recent. Reform. To feel the reform beneath us. Bequeath. Because. Because we feel the iridescent cries of nonbelievers.”

It was gibberish, all of it. But I remember sitting there and begging her to stop, thinking it quietly to myself over and over and over. Please stop, Mum. Please wake up.

“Please wake up,” she said, the choir of voices reverberating throughout the whole compound. “Please stop, Mum.”

By that point people had stopped drinking, eating, even moving. One guy had collapsed outside, face to the sky, and after a day or two lying in the sun his skin was starting to crack and bleed. Most of the kids were getting away with it half-alright. The sickness was awful, felt like getting hit by a freight train, like the worst God damn hangover in the world except you’re just a kid and you don’t know why. But we would still move around and try to help where we could, although all of us had pretty much spent our time riveted to the side of our parents, feeding and giving them water. Even the youngest of us got a sense that things were deeply, darkly, wrong. You couldn’t hear that chanting and feel any other way.

My mother was the first to get up. She threw her legs to the side and looked at me and she was still talking but looking right at me and all I saw was hate. It was the most terrifying, heart-breaking thing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t fathom why she looked at me like that but she did, and it hurt me so bad that I fell ass backwards and started bawling like a toddler. I knew she was going to kill me. I knew it and I accepted it because in my kid head I couldn’t imagine doing anything against her. She’d been the arbiter of my whole life, my creator and nurturer, and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop her.

My screaming rose to a higher pitch when she grabbed the knife, rising and rising until all sound disappeared and it became a shrill whistle of air escaping from my lips like a dreamer’s cries to wake up. When she stuck the knife in her throat, the nubby little blade disappearing into her skin like a magic trick, I stopped wailing and stared. She pulled it across the whole way, and I became aware that all around me other adults had stood up. One of them, I can’t remember, she was speaking, asking what had happened and taking it all in. But I wasn’t really paying attention to her. I was watching my mother whose throat had run rivers of red down her dingy vest. She wasn’t gurgling, or crying, or even moving much at all. She just waited a few long seconds before pulling it out and started again, this time on her belly.

I ran, slipping at one point and hitting my head hard, but I kept going, glimpsing people all over the compound rising and moving to unknown goals. Some were adults who’d come back normal, one tried to even grab me and herd me along with some other kids to a safe place, but I shook free and made for the fence. When a few dozen of the chanting adults finally broke down the front door to the farmhouse, that’s when the screams hit fever pitch. I’ll never know what they did to each other exactly, but it didn’t sound nice. By the time I looked back I was right by the fence, probably two hundred metres from the house itself, and I could see figures moving in the windows but the shapes were confusing.

I think they were butchering each other, and over the sounds of terrible cries, a few of them were singing. It wasn’t a sound like anything I’d ever heard before, but it practically knocked me out and I had to fight the urge to just collapse and give up. I knew there was a small spot near the fence that was big enough to crawl through, and that’s what I used to get clear of the house. It’s a long drive to the property though, a single muddy lane that I had to navigate in darkness. At one point a car came rumbling past and I nearly jumped out to cry for help but I remembered where it was coming from, and instead I jumped into a ditch and hid in the shadows as its blinding light flashed overhead. Once it passed I tried to get a look at who was in it, but all I could pick out were a few heads and something on the roof of the car. I think it looked like a person, but some deep rooted part of my mind told me it wasn’t.

In my nightmares I’m back on that road, walking and walking and I know it’ll never end and the sun will never rise. I might see a far off sign that tells me I’m close to the main road, but I know my eyes can’t be trusted. Just as I know that something has left the compound to come looking for me. There’s no cover, just open fields and a few hedges, but in the dark it’s all just inkblots that I can’t focus on, contrasting only against the bluish night sky that sometimes isn’t very bluish or much like a sky, but rather like a membrane of rotting oil-paints.

Mr Rollins… I found him clambering out of a storm drain way at the edge of the four mile driveway. Figures he’d have some kind of escape route, but the poor bastard hadn’t really thought it out. Somewhere along the line, he’d ordered it shut off with a cast iron gate locked with a padlock only he had the key for. That’s what he told me anyway, screaming and crying for some kind of help. He was naked, clearly without the key he desperately needed, and I tried to help him. But it was clear even to my childish mind that there was no moving that gate, not without tearing the damn hinges out of the concrete.

Meanwhile his cries kept growing worse and worse, and in the end I had to step away because he started to grab and pull at me. He was trying to yank my arm into the tunnel, casting furtive glances over his shoulder. I didn’t like the look in his eye, and when I heard the pitter patter of footsteps behind him I knew why.

“Please kid,” he sobbed. “Just give me your hand.”

Something clattered in the tunnel, just out of sight, but so damn close it was the loudest thing in the night. Just like that, all the pleading mercy fell from Mr Rollins’s face.

“Give me your fucking hand!” he screamed, his face bunched up like an animal’s. “Give it here and fucking die with me you piece of shit!”

I turned and ran away, terrified by the sounds that came out of that grate. Not just his screaming, mind you, but the actual sounds of what was happening to his body. I remember him saying on my very first day that when God’s gaze returned to our humble world, he’d be first and foremost in the Lord’s attention. Personally, I’m not convinced it was God looking our way at all, but I do think Mr Rollins was given special attention.

Gary Willow is a former YouTube and Instagram influencer, better known for being a member of Riley Alton’s entourage. A lifelong friend of Riley’s, Gary left his job in 2011 to work for Riley’s growing production company. Specialising in urban exploration and spiritual phenomena, Riley’s YouTube channel boasted millions followers and viewers, although after his death the account was taken down and all content removed. In 2013, as part of a segment on mass suicide and cults, Riley along with Gary and three other members of his crew, broke into the Kentworth compound to film what was expected to be one of their most popular videos.

You know it was never fake. I’m not saying we actually got ghosts or anything, but everyone was so adamant that we just made it all up I swear half our audience were sceptics desperate to prove us wrong. Like at that abandoned club we went to in Brazil, where all those people got shot up, I swear on my life that door moved on its own. No fishing line, it legit just moved on its own. Riley was a lot of things but he wasn’t actually that fake. I’ve met a lot of influencers and yeah he was cut from the same cloth, but at the same time he was a lot better than most of them.

And it was me, funnily enough, who got wind of the Kentworth compound, not Riley. I got a tip from someone and usually they’re all bullshit but the more I followed up on this one the realer the story became. I couldn’t believe no one was talking about this place and the Rollins cult. Sure it wasn’t exactly huge in terms of fatalities but the sheer weirdness of it all was just awesome. Of course, in hindsight, given what happened to our YouTube channel it’s obvious why the story was so subdued and outright censored in some parts. Enough money can buy you just about anything.

We were such idiots. We rolled up there thinking it was a goldmine. We’d gotten so desensitised that the goosebumps on our skin and the voice screaming in the back of our heads to get out was just another sign we’d made the right call to drive all the way out there. Parts of the house were half demolished, windows smashed up, plasterwork pulled apart, tools and diggers still rotting where the last construction company had tried (and failed) to finish the job. It was perfect. You could walk into one room and get a shot of a wall half-crumbled, the bricks crushing a child’s tricycle, and in another room there’d be a dining table with the cutlery still laid out. I’m talking blood streaks on windows, fingernails left scattered over floors next to gouges in the wood, smashed in kitchen cupboards with children’s blankets balled up in the back, soaked in God-knows-what.

And it was silent out there, absolutely haunting, like when you’re at a funeral parlour and your mind starts playing tricks on you so you think you can hear the sound of something breathing but is it just the sound of blood vessels pumping in your own skull? Like there was this sense you could hear something almost embedded in the white noise of your own head, like voices coming from a scrambled TV signal.

Even when stuff started moving we all thought it was just great footage. Windows opening with no reason, doors slamming shut, music playing from smashed up speakers. We just kept goading it for fun, right up until we made it to the very top floor where the leader’s room had been. I went in first to get some opening shots and even though Riley and the others were no more than a few feet behind I felt scared, truly properly scared, for the first time. A chill came over me as if I’d just stepped on my own grave, and when I looked around the bare walls and ascetic bed I noticed something tore that a hole through my belly, like the whole world had dropped right out from under me.

There was a hand, a nasty misshapen thing, grey in the faint light of the moonlight, all the fingers different lengths like a mangled spider. It was a ghoul’s hand, the kind of thing you picture scratching at your bedroom window late at night. And when I spotted it, I stayed perfectly still, hyperventilating while I wrestled with the implications of what I saw. All that tension in me finally broke when that hand moved, inching slightly further out from beneath the bed, and I turned to dart towards the door. That’s when the door behind me slammed shut.

I dislocated my shoulder trying to break it down. Somehow, even with a large circular window set in one wall and the moon out full, that room started getting darker and I felt this cloying desperate need to escape. I was screaming so loud I didn’t notice the others were screaming for help too. All that mattered to me was leaving, getting out at any cost. I didn’t want to look back, everything in my head was just pure nightmare, so I kept my face fixed on the door that I punched and kicked while the skin on my back tightened and I got so damn terrified I could feel my vision start to blur. I was close to passing out, that’s how scared I was. It wasn’t just the shadows. No, I knew with absolute certainty that something was approaching me. The air was getting colder, a faint scraping was present just beneath the sound of my screeching cries, and that thing’s mere presence made the skin on my back crawl, and the feeling was getting worse with every second.

It got so bad I turned around desperate to get rid of the fear. That’s how it works, right? You scare yourself up over something that isn’t real, like say a hand beneath a bed, and then your mind does the rest. All you need to do is to reassert yourself, fight against the darkness and face it, and you’ll see it was all just make-believe.

But there really was something else in that room with me, a man or something like a man. He had long hair, straight hair, but his face looked like a mess of folds. There was no expression because he had nothing to express with, no eyes or mouth, just a kind of mass of churning skin like braided bread dough. I think there were eyes but they looked more like spider’s eyes buried in between the cracks of a crab’s shell. Something about that face, the way I couldn’t read it or its intentions, the way it so utterly defied everything I knew about living beings, it pushed me off the edge and I passed out. When I came to I was out in the yard, my camera smashed up and I was missing three fingers, bitten right off at the knuckle. Doctor thought it looked like a turtle had done it, and sometimes at night I get these images of my hand being dragged towards a snapping beak hidden beneath liquid flesh that’s damn and cold to touch.

There was no sign of anyone else around me when I woke up, but I didn’t stick around to look. I ran right out to the car and I drove away so God damn fast I nearly flipped the car taking the left turn out of the drive. Right by the property line, just as I swerved, I saw an old storm drain, something bolted over with heavy iron bars. I only glanced at it out of sheer chance, and I was going too fast to get a proper look, but I swear I saw someone’s hand gripping those bars. Not a nasty pustule-ridden hand like the one that had come clawing out of that bed, but a familiar one, a normal one. It was one of the others who’d gone with me, I think.

They call it survivor’s guilt, and they tell me it’s normal but nothing about what I experienced was normal. And I think what really gets to me is that deep down I’m scared that I’m not the only survivor, and that hand I saw gripping those bars? I fear that the owner’s still down there, still trapped. All of them, taken by that place and… and… and that’s the thing. I just don’t know.

I’ll never know.

None of us will.

Arnold Millson is a short man with sideburns and patchy facial hair, and he stands watching me with beady eyes as I approach the front porch of his house as though I am liable to bite him. I know that he is in his late forties, but he appears significantly older.

You always hear about it being something that happens to kids, wandering around in places where they oughtn’t, fucking about near a well and then plop, in they go. I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that I went down, what with my bad leg. But the truth is, the first thing I felt when I opened my eyes wasn’t pain or confusion, it was just sheer embarrassment. You always hear about kids falling down wells, not 38-year-old men. But there I was, slightly dodgy hip, lodged in a fucking thirty foot hole in the ground.

Not that there had been any warning. No signs, no wall, just a literal hole half-way down the slope of a hill that I’d come cresting over. Just bad luck really. Coming the other way, I would have spotted it a mile away and avoided it easily enough. But I didn’t, and I was left stuck in the darkness in waist high water that was stale and dark and smelled of piss (possibly mine). Thank fuck I had my phone on me and it had kept dry in jacket pocket. A quick call and my sister was on her way with the police, but what did that mean really? Well, it meant I wouldn’t die in there, but it wasn’t like I could give her my exact location. I didn’t have GPS—couldn’t get it down there either—and she had to get the police and then come find me and that wasn’t going to be quick.

So I was stuck down there, not forever, but in the end it took them 11 hours to find me, and a further two to rescue me.

Those thirteen hours? To me, they were like the longest book ever written. It started with a kind of patient stoicism. I resisted the urge to panic, especially knowing help was on the way. I disregarded my surroundings and focused on the light overhead, I ignored the smell around me and the way the water made my skin tingle. I told myself I wouldn’t let it get to me, the blind panic. I focused on my breathing, spoke aloud to break the silence, I even sang for a while.

That was the first hour. Sooner or later my mind was going to wander, it had to. So I tried to set it on an organised path. I kicked around with my feet until I hit something solid. It was a beam of wood, I stood up on it, lifted myself a further six inches out of the water, then stood back down. It was too hard to balance on, what with my leg. But that was pretty much all I could sense around me. It sounds silly now, but I didn’t want to look around too much, so I kept my phone light off for that fist hour.

It was the spiders. I knew they were down there. I’m terrified of them and I know from experience the best place to find the big nasty hairy ones is in a dark hole rarely tread by human feet. And oh boy, was this place hallowed ground for arachnids. So far I’d roughly figured out that the wall was soft earth with thick roots bulging out, but I could hear something dripping and it wasn’t above or below it was next to me, and somehow it sounded far away. I told myself this was exactly why I had to keep my mind on track; the dripping didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. But it was a long time to stand there and pretend like I wasn’t terrified so in the end I gave in, I turned the light on and regretted it instantly.

There were at least seven of them, massive enormous hairy things. Too big for home living, these weren’t the kind of house spider you’d find under a sofa. I hated them, I hated the sight of them, their sheer presence burning a hole in my skin right through the clothes. The biggest one was nearly as wide as my palm, and for a brief moment I told myself I’d fallen right into my personal hell.

The thought was right, my timing was wrong. As soon as it was on, my light sent all the buggers crawling away, and okay, while the sight of their wiry legs clamouring over each other nearly made me sick, the truth was that’s all there was to it. They were harmless, utterly and completely benign. And once they were gone I was finally able to recall why I’d turned my light on in the first place, and I swung it around looking for the source of the dripping until I spotted a small cast-iron grate in the wall.

I’m not exactly an expert on wells, so I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I generally figured wells were full of water or just big holes. If any tunnels intersected them they ought to be full of water too, or at the very least made by underground rivers and so on. Who, I wondered, took the time or effort to stick a great big bloody grate on one of these tunnels and for what possible reason? To keep someone out? To keep them in?

And this tunnel was no more than two or three foot high, and the grate even smaller than that, maybe a foot at most. I tried angling the light around but all I saw were dripping walls thick with clay and stone, a place so utterly dark it practically resisted the torch. For a brief moment I considered trying to pull the grate loose, but I was concerned it might damage the structure of the well. I also couldn’t say for sure whether I wanted to get much closer to it than I already was.

I tried telling myself that it was a calming presence. The tunnel right beside me should have done something to break up the oppressive sense of enclosing space, but if anything it made me feel vulnerable. I looked up towards the light and saw no sign of anything, just a pale blue disk, and I wondered briefly if the spiders had left me behind for… well, for what? I didn’t know. I was thinking silly things that at the time didn’t seem rational. But the feeling felt as real as the water soaking my hips and legs. I felt vulnerable once I knew about the tunnel. I didn’t like having it there, right by me, and without thinking I angled away towards the opposite wall. I turned my light off and, desperate to clear my mind of this worry, I looked back up towards the sky.

And someone was looking down. I should have leaped with joy, and for a moment I almost did. But I couldn’t see this person. It wasn’t like glimpsing a mate on the street. All I could see was an outline, a shadow cut right out of the sky. The distance felt alienating, I couldn’t hear or see a thing about them. It was all drips and splashes by me but from up there? Nothing but the stony silence of a gentle breeze. And this person, they were leaning over the hole with both arms across the span as if they were surveying a catch. I suddenly felt a little like a trapped rodent.

“Hello!” I cried out. “I’ve fallen down! I’ve fallen…”

They slid away without making a noise. It could have been nothing, no one there at all except a trick of the light. Or perhaps there was someone and all they saw was darkness. Perhaps the wind was so strong up there they had no chance of hearing me. Or perhaps…

I looked back at the grating, that sense of vulnerability magnified. My mind was making the strangest connections. Wasn’t the Kentworth compound nearby? Didn’t they dig tunnels? Kids talk about strange shapes and noises up there all the time. But that’s just hearsay and rumour, isn’t it?

By now my heart was racing. Isn’t it amazing how vivid the imagination can be sometimes? I got lost in my own head, standing there, eyes wide, staring at the patch of shadow where I felt a gentle draft waft through. I couldn’t see a damn thing but in my head I could picture everything clearly. Right there, just a few feet away, was a twisted monster, their smile pinned wide to either side of their head like in that Hellraiser film that scared the hell out of me as a kid. And I kept replaying this scene over and over, torturing myself. Sometimes it’d be a dead kid, pale hands clutching either side of the bar, a malicious ghost intent on trapping me in a twisted re-enactment of their own death. Other times it’d be spiders, one great big one popping the grate aside so its crooked knotted legs could envelope and drag me towards the centre of its octagonal body. Or maybe even thousands of little ones bulging through the bars like jelly pushed through a sieve!

To think that kind of terror lies beneath all our feet. All I had to work with were slippery walls, water, and mud, but in a few short hours my own head turned that place into Hades itself. I kept wondering how it had gone from a brisk morning walk to unrelenting psychological torture in a single misplaced step. And eventually it got too much to bear. I checked my phone and saw that it had been no more than half an hour since I last looked. All that my imagination had done was slow down the passage of time and make it infinitely worse so I worked up the nerve to turn on the light and re-examine the small tunnel. It was just like before, just mud and stagnant water that trickled so faintly into the well, it didn’t even make a noise.

I moved the light around some more, but every time I did the shadow cast by the bars moved all over the place. It was like a strobe light and I was getting ready to give up when my brain told me to freeze. I didn’t know why, not straight away, but it had done so with such urgency that I stopped completely. And that’s when I saw it – movement that had been masked by my own. I still couldn’t say what exactly it was, but it looked almost like the wall itself was moving.

And then the wall looked at me. What was just seconds ago a misshapen pile of mud was a head turning to look right fucking at me. There was no nose, not even a mouth really, just features cut into clay, but those eyes were bloodshot orbs, rich and vivid with detail, familiar but somehow utterly alien. I couldn’t read them, their expression, and that scared the hell out of me. My mind was on fire with a thousand questions about who they were, how they got there, if they were even human… But the one that was embossed in red letters and splayed across my mind like a neon exit sight, that was the one that I seized on and couldn’t let go.

What did they want?

They didn’t flinch when I spotted them, but they did start moving faster. It felt like I was watching myself from afar, like an out of body experience. I couldn’t fathom that this was happening. That someone was down there, looking like something out of a horror film and moving right towards me. When they reached the grate they started to push against it, and this thing was exactly riveted into concrete. I could see it starting to bulge, and I ran forward and slammed a foot against the metal to hold it in place.

That meant getting closer though, and it meant I got a glimpse of them before I kicked the grate back into place. All I saw were bits and pieces, eyes, rotting teeth, something shiny that caught the light. I soon got to find out what that was when something slid into the heel of my foot, long and sharp. I pulled back immediately, shocked and disgusted at the sight of blood running and mixing with the rancid ground water I stood in, and when I looked back there was a glistening blade slip jutting from between the bars.

And then, it repeated. The grate started to move, started to push. A single eye, penny sized pupils with ghostly reflections, looked back at me with terrifying apathy. I stepped forward and kicked again, this time they missed. But I saw the full length of that blade and part of me registered just how bad the situation was. The next time I kicked at them, I wasn’t so lucky and the blade slipped right into the arch of my foot, tearing through the roof of my hiking shoes and painting a gristly image on the way back out. But I didn’t let up, I kept it there, holding it tight while my attacker indulged and hacked away like they were breaking up ice. The only sounds were my yelping, the splashing water, and the heavy gurgling breaths of whatever lay on the other side.

And I thought it had been hell before…

When they eventually stopped attacking, my right foot was in ribbons and I fell back into the water with relief. Thank God I landed on that beam, it kept my head above the water and stopped me losing all balance. That thing grinned right then, stretching a toothless mouth from ear to ear that dribbled with pink froth. There was still no nose, no hair, just a shape carved right out of the mud. At least that’s what it looked like. That hungry gullet must have led to a real flesh and blood stomach, my attacker probably no more than a lunatic caked in clay, but whoever they were they’d been twisted so far from the human ideal they scared me worse than any special effect I’d ever seen.

I found myself starting to scream. This thing wasn’t going away. It wasn’t slinking back into the depths. It was savouring this experience, savouring my terror and suffering. At least that’s what I imagined, because in truth I don’t know what it wanted. That face, even when smiling, looked like an idiot’s face devoid of all rational thought. It just kept breathing, panting, slobbering, eyes fixed on me like a pervert in the bushes. And I just wanted it to stop. I wanted to wake up, to burst the bubble and escape the hallucination.

Anything except staying there like that, stuck in its line of sight while my mind turned the seconds into decades.

I didn’t pass out. I didn’t wake up. It didn’t try breaking through again. There was no conclusion, no inciting incident to push past the fear. Just me and that thing, less than a metre apart, and it would take another seven hours before I finally escaped.

They amputated my foot, not just from the sheer damage that had been done to it, but because of the rancid infection that grew. The diseases lurking in that water damn near killed me and the official word is I broke my leg in a gnarly way and spent half a day trapped in a fever dream. Oh boy, I sure wish that was something I could believe. But every one of those long agonising seconds trapped down there are still engraved in my memory like an obituary in granite. I pinched myself, slapped myself, cried, wept, jumped up and down. Nothing about my time down there was a dream. It was hard, real, and when it caught the light it glistened like metal.

The current interviewee has requested strict anonynimity.

The acquisition of the compound in question was never up for discussion, with us or any one on the research team. It had been found, that was all that mattered. If not for that letter I would never have drawn the connection between the compound we tested and the events at the Kentworth compound. On one hand it was a relief to realise that this thing was bigger than just us, but at the same time I think we’d all secretly been hoping we’d been going mad and this suggested otherwise.

Thank God we never moved onto human testing. It’s bad enough we weren’t really equipped for the job. You always think that the government will choose people at the top of their game for this secret spy shit but more often than not they contract a company like ours and just don’t tell anyone the truth. I’ve heard they single out firms with poor safety records as a cover and we’d just come out of a horrific scandal involving some children, a river, and a chemical that turns you blue. Even at the time I remember thinking we’d make some pretty good patsies if that’s what they were looking for.

I was vindicated with time, but not before the worst of it. Like I said, we never got onto humans but we started out testing with mice and rats. When we’d first mapped the chemical structure of the compound all our software told us it’d be inert in the central nervous system, although one deep learning algorithm we sometimes use on forensic cases went buck wild and practically melted. We didn’t think anything of it because the early tests that immediately followed showed that the compound was exactly that – inert. There were no behavioural changes whatsoever, and aside from odd electrical readings on an EEG, brain scans also showed no differences.

Of course, some things need to accumulate over time. And brain scans are very limited in what they really tell us. It’s like trying to predict what software a computer is running by getting a heat map of its components. Sure, it does tell you something. But it’s not exactly a magic window into the underlying activity. All you can do is just keep testing and see what comes of it.

I suppose I should mention at this point that our lab was based in a pretty remote location. Our firm is a subsidiary of a subsidiary to some massive PMC, and we were housed with a few other teams on an oil rig looking into certain bacteria. And, well, this was a pretty tough place to live at the best of times. It was lonely but always busy, always teeming with hundreds of faceless people who ignored you as they rushed past. And my team, we were buried way down in the depths of this place, hanging over the sea beneath.

So people got spooked. I don’t know how exactly, but they did. It hadn’t happened before, but one-by-one my staff start calling in sick more and more often until pretty soon I’m left wondering why I’ve been left in the lurch. Turns out, after a very frank and heated meeting I held one day in our lunchroom, that there was a kind of spreading anxiety. There were maybe six of us at most, and I listened as they told me about the way the rodents stared at them, the way machines were breaking at ten times the usual rate, and the way they felt watched in any given room when left alone.

The worst thing was that I’d noticed it too. The mice and rats had slowly changed. Behaviour had altered by degrees over the space of a month, and now they no longer squeaked or played or groomed. Instead they simply watched, and it was always us who held their attention. They stopped sleeping, eating, even moving. And a fair few of them started to die from sheer lethargy. That was when someone stepped up and told me how they’d seen something particularly worrying. They were cleaning out the tank one day, dumping the dead rats into a special refuse sack ready for incineration, when they’d reached in and the live ones attacked her, nipping at the heavy duty glove and fighting so violently that she lost it to their grip. Thankfully she pulled her hand out in time and snapped the glass lid shut, but the nightmare wasn’t over.

Because that was when the bag moved, the one filled with dozens of dead pink bodies, their dull-red eyes glaring at her from pointed albino faces.

Thank God the incinerator is right there in the lab and thank God she’d had the sense to turn it on ready. In one swift burst of terror and bravery she snatched the bag and practically threw it into the flames, crying at the sound of their pained squeals.

But what was all of this I was hearing, exactly? I had to do something with the information, that was for sure, but I didn’t know what. We took on dangerous work, we knew that. In the end I agreed to a new rule where no one would be left alone in the lab, even if someone had to go to the toilet they’d just have to go in pairs and stay close. I treated it as a kind of infectious fear, dismissing my concerns that we were all long-time staff used to the work conditions.

I also decided to take on more of the lab work itself. And just to show everyone we were in no real threat, I took on a number of late-night tasks and did them on my own. I used to go in at night ready to run any necessary tests and do my best to pretend everything was okay. The thrum of the ocean and the endless cacophony of machines seemed impossibly distant down in that lab, and pretty soon I got the vague sense of being buried underground. It was the silence, see. That place was never silent, not even at night. There were thousands of specimens in that room and the other four that were adjacent. Mice, rats, rhesus monkeys, zebra fish, you name it, we had it. It wasn’t like we could pop down to the corner shop we had to stock up and somehow, everything was just dead silent. Not a peep, squeak, howl, or gibber.

The first time I noticed it I took stock of my surroundings and tried to swallow my terror. The specimens weren’t sleeping, at least not the rats. They were all wide eyed, backs pressed to their cages, glaring at the glass observation cases we used for testing. And the rats, in turn, were watching me, hind legs bunched ready to pounce, their pink ears upright and alert, and their slithering tails coiled around their rotund bodies. In the end I gave up pretending. I ran the tests so quickly I dropped a bottle of iodine and left it where it was rather than clean up. I decided I’d come in early the next day to sort it out. Anything, I told myself, anything was better than staying there on my own.

When it came time to run a new condition, to take half the rats that had survived and stop their intake of the compound, I thought it’d be good to see what happened. I was still naïve enough to find all this oh so slightly thrilling. The pulse pounding terror I felt was still just alien enough, and things still seemed safe enough, that I wanted to go ahead. I couldn’t even imagine just how… I mean, I figured they’d die or go back to normal, right?

They tore through themselves, and then the glass. And that’s not an exaggeration. They tore through themselves first and then, with limbs half severed and guts exposed, they moved onto the glass and gored themselves making a hole. We’re still not entirely sure how they did it, but as soon as they were through they made a beeline for the other rats, the ones still on the drug, still unaffected. One of the technicians tried to interfere but pulled back after a few of the rats broke away from the quivering sea of furry bodies and started nipping at his heels. By the time someone finally rigged up some liquid nitrogen to blast them with, they’d broken through to their companions and soaked the walls in blood.

When it was over we were left with one hell of an ice sculpture. The way they’d obscured the glass with bloody smears meant we never got a proper look at what was going on, but once the mist had cleared and all you could hear was the cracking of ice and flesh we saw a mound of half-melted flesh. It was like a battle-scene paused in time, except the mountain of gore took on a strange quality close to the centre. We spotted rats with three eyes, five legs, two tails, so on. It was like they had started to merge, like cell division in reverse.

I remember we were arguing over whether to incinerate it. I was attempting to put forward the case for keeping it, arguing we owed our employer results and this was one of the most profound things we could offer them. Maybe they’d even up our funding! The others weren’t having it though, crying for me to just let them dump the whole thing in the fire. I was dead set against it until, from behind, I heard a quiet rustling. I looked back. We’d spent hours staring at that thing and arguing with each other, and close to the very top you could see the frost receding. And where it had faded, and white fur bunched together in impossible knots began to thaw, there was the faintest motion of a single claw flexing and scrabbling at the ice, as if making to break free.

I burned it. The others thought it was a moral victory of some kind. Hell, even I felt a flush of rightness as three of us hurled it into the searing heat. But I also knew we didn’t live in a fairy tale, and our employers would want to know what happened. Maybe it was because I was the guy who’d have to explain it to them, but I didn’t think they’d be too happy with what I had to say.

And of course, they weren’t. Any hopes of a funding rise went out the window, and I was told pretty much point blank I’d lose my job if we didn’t carry on with further tests. I asked if that meant more rats and the answer made me feel like I was losing my mind.

Oh no, they said. We were moving onto the monkeys.

The man before me is unusual only in that he is wearing sunglasses even in a darkened room. Unlike all other interviewees, he reached out to me to discuss his thoughts on the Kentworth compound and insisted I hear his thoughts on the matter. He is wiry but exudes a calm energy, amongst other things, and speaks calmly into the microphone.

You’re smaller than I expected. Sorry, that was a little joke. It’s just I’ve heard of you, have you heard of me? I’m something of a writer and, I don’t know. Maybe Peter read my book or one of the others at his cult. I met him once, bought a book off his father. He was rude. I think he thought I was a tourist, someone passing through looking for a bit of inspiration to write another cheap novel. I thought he was a little shit, truth be told. And I ignored the angry teenager until his father finally sent him out the room and our business continued. If you’d told me he would go on to do what he did, I would have thought it unlikely.

Despite all his supposed power, Peter was just a little boy trying to reach his mother. She had been a strict Christian, and she met a mysterious end not long after her husband returned from a most peculiar overseas trip. I can bloody well imagine how she must have reacted to her first glimpse of his nocturnal activities. What I can’t imagine is her going along with it. I think Peter figured that out too, and I think he spent the rest of his life desperately trying to prove her right. But, at the same time, the power within those books is undeniable. Their mere existence pisses all over the notion of an Abrahamic god, or at least one who cares about us.

And there, I think, lay the first seed of Peter Rollins’s very strange activities. He wanted to find God and he wanted to do it in a way that proved once and for all that his mother and father could have coexisted. But what do I know? I’m just a writer, an armchair psychologist. I can’t help but wonder if you know that, though. Or whether it might be necessary to afford a little context to the things you see.

Context is always good, I explain.

Well, that was why Peter went looking for God. What he found, of course, was an observer, someone who watches. Only Peter had never really thought too hard about philosophy, or the world, or the very essence of knowledge. It didn’t occur to him that in the same way we have the idea of something—let’s say a chair—in our head, so too must this other thing learn and remember us. To be known is a very powerful thing, some might say the very building blocks of our existence are made out of nothing more than neurons and molecules. We think nothing of it, looking at something and making a representation of it buried deep within our minds.

If Peter had read his father’s work a little more closely he might have realised that there are some things that do not think in electricity, but rather in bubbling meat and hard physical matter. Whole universes made of a single living thing whose mind works on the turning of planets and the dying of stars. A cosmic brain where everything thought is rendered not in abstract patterns of neural activity, but in actual real physical matter.

And everything it sees, observes, knows, gets added to its mind. Which of course means Peter is still alive, in a sense. You know we have this saying about how the dead “live on in our memories”? Well, depending on who’s remembering you, that’s not always a good thing. Especially not when your own memories and thoughts are part of reality and so you’re just kind of spilling out everywhere. And that’s not even to get onto the topic of the other things that are tucked away in the memory of this Cosmic being. When Peter first burst the membrane between realities I’d hazard a guess more things poured out than were sucked in. That bit of land won’t be right again for another million years by my estimate. Everything’s a little thinner there now, and I’d bet some things are still very keen on reaching right on over and reliving the last party they had. It’s like sticking your hand through the bars of a lion cage.

I guess the irony is Peter went looking for God, but he wound up finding a pretty good substitute for the Christian notion of Hell. Then again, he’s also in a place where his own thoughts can be reality. I bet he gets off on that. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s just recreated the Kentworth compound with more underage girls and no money troubles. He really did strike me as that shallow. Although somehow I doubt he’s having a ball over there. At least he has friends, right? And an ever-expanding list at that.

They’re unlikely to cross paths.

Ah, right, big place.

Bigger than you can imagine.

I suspect that’s by design. We humans weren’t meant to know everything. I guess that must make all of this [The interviewee gestures to my body] a bit of a trip.

Can I ask something?

Do they know? Am I giving it away? Where do you even publish this? I guess it doesn’t matter to you does it. All that matters are that people read it because you only need a flicker of their attention to recognise them and then, boom, got ‘em. You can look anywhere, just so long as you know where it is you want to look.

I’m not hurting anyone.

No but I think most people would agree it’s an eerie idea. Anyone you look at… I mean, am I being remade right now over there? In your world? Well, I guess time isn’t linear for you is it? What was it I read: it expands ever outwards like the stars in the sky? So in a sense your idea of Peter predated the real, actual Peter.

Apples and oranges.

Well, I suppose the upside of it is that I’m sort of immortal now, aren’t I? There’ll always be an exact physical copy of me over there, living, breathing, existing. It’s just a little uncomfortable to imagine what exactly that must be like. And everyone else? Anyone who reads this?

It would be like asking you to unremember a chair you just looked at. Everyone who is made of aware of me, is in turn brought to my attention.

Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. Are you going to go for the whole world or just a nice collection?

I haven’t actually thought about it. I have certainly enjoyed the observing of people up close, just as I have enjoyed watching the people who read the transcripts.

Well, you have all the time in the world to decide.

Yes, I suppose I do.

I don’t suppose while I’ve got you here you have anything to do with my own little predicament do you?

No, that was entirely your own doing. Do you have anything else to add to your testimony? I am, after all, meant to be doing the observing.

No, no, that’s fair enough. I understand. I appreciate you speaking to me like this. It’s been a long journey getting here.

I know.

Right, of course you do. You have created an atom-perfect replica of my own brain. And, in fact, you created it before I was born.

Try not to think about it.

I could tell you the same thing!

I guess if I do have anything to add, it’s that you should know Peter Rollins was a nasty piece of work but his followers were all just down on their luck. I’m not an overly compassionate fellow but I’d like to think they’re not at the mercy of whatever else lurks in the literal corridors of your mind. I’d like to think that if they are burning, that somehow, Peter’s fire is a little bit hotter than everyone else’s. Because I know what some of those rites involved, I also know the kind of pain you have to inflict on a person to learn what he learned, and well…

He really does deserve it.

Christian Wallis

A Series of Interviews on the Rollins Cult

The Patient

The Zolg

If you’d like bespoke content, proofing, editing, or just to join my workshop, drop me a line.