By David William Jurgenson

Harding felt a pit of dread in his stomach as his boss Jeyaseelan called on him to talk about his end-of-year accruals. He smiled and said, “Um, eh, eh, hhhhhe. Sure.”

Chowden’s eyes bulged, and for a moment, Harding thought the Senior Managing Director’s eyes might pop out of his head.

“What did you conclude in your assessment?”  prompted Jeyaseelan.

“Ah, ah, ah, sure, thanks for this opportunity to present. Sorry! As you can tell, I have a bit of a, ah, haah,” Harding clenched his fists in frustration, drawing a deep breath, trying to calm his thumping heart, “haa, haaaaah, speech impediment.”

Jeyaseelan gave him an encouraging nod.

“And, uh, my conclusion, heh, heh, heeeeeh, is that our department accruals are in alignment with our actual expenses.  Uh, I found, heh, that everything, heeeeh, balanced.”

Chowden forced a smile. “That’s great Harding. Can you just write everything up and email it to me? Sorry, I don’t have a lot of time right now. I’ve got some fires I need to put out.”

Harding nodded. Jeyaseelan furtively looked at Chowden.

“Thanks Harding. Send that off to Chowden and we’ll work on next steps,” said Jeyaseelan.

“Ah, heh, heeeh, sure.” His boss ended the Zoom call. The look on Chowden’s face made Harding wish he could make the earth open up to permanently hide there. Chowden hated him. He had wanted to replace him ever since he recently became the department head.

Fortunately, Jeyaseelan was his boss, not Chowden, and he supported him because his accounting work was good. If it wasn’t, he didn’t think he would have tolerated him.

Harding didn’t feel well. His whole body tingled, and his ears were starting to ring. He padded over to his bed and lay down.

He closed his eyes to get comfortable. When he opened his eyes again, his home had disappeared, replaced by some kind of alternate reality. He felt like he was experiencing a glitch in the Matrix, as though he was inside a holograph that had a power outage.

He looked down and saw he had breasts, was wearing a dress, and his nails had grown long and were carefully painted red. This can’t be real.

He heard himself sobbing in a female voice. His body vibrated like a bomb cyclone. He saw he had metal restraints on his wrists and ankles. He was locked inside a glass cage like livestock. A chill went down his spine, like someone had just dropped an ice cube down his shirt.

He sensed movement coming from a window in a control room. Against his will, his slender fist hopelessly pounded against the thick glass of his cage. He could see a reflection of his face in the glass. His face was beautiful, with high cheekbones and bright eyes that were streaked with tears. As he looked at himself, he felt unsettled the face wasn’t his own.

A face with leathery gray skin, a large bulbous cranium, and dark black voids for eyes looked at him from the control room window. He shrieked himself awake.

Harding sat bolt upright in his bed, his pulse pounding, gasping for air. He was hyperventilating, not knowing where he was or if he was even awake. Then everything came back to him. He saw he was in his bedroom. They were torturing that woman. Those monsters! They were so sick and barbaric!

Harding looked at his wrists. He had straight purple bruises around them and his ankles, too. He felt like he was going to be sick. He tried to calm his heart and slow down his breathing.

 That didn’t seem like a dream. Who was that woman? She seemed like she was in serious danger.

Whoever she was, it was clear she had been trying to tell him something.

Harding got out of bed, walked back to his office, and sat in his chair. He rested there for a few minutes, regaining his composure. One part of him wanted to take a Trazodone, fall asleep, and forget everything. But another part of him, a crazier side, wanted him to screw up his courage and rescue this woman, like he was some kind of knight in shining armor. That was hilarious. It was stupid. But he shrugged. Screw his damn rational side. He would do it anyway. He wanted to find out where she was and save her from that concentration camp.

Harding awakened his computer screen. He opened a new tab in his browser and typed woman + alien greys + current location. The top result of his search displayed an article about a woman named Myrna Hansen. The headline said Hansen and her 13-year-old son, Scott, had been abducted by aliens in Dulce, New Mexico. Harding clicked on the article and started reading.

Hansen had been driving with her son after giving a clairvoyant reading to a client when she had to brake for a herd of agitated cows that had broken into the road. Suddenly, they saw bright lights in the sky from a floating craft.  The son Scott said they saw a bright light move onto one of the cows. The cow panicked, trying to run away, but the light pulled it up into the air, levitating it into the craft.

Hansen and Scott got out of the car to look at what was happening, and then the light turned on them. The next thing Scott knew, he was back in the car. The engine was off, and hours had passed. Scott couldn’t remember a thing about what had happened when he got out of the car.

The authorities looked for Hansen for days, searching the fields for her body. No sign of her was ever found. To this day, the Myrna Hansen missing person case was still open.

The article was dated three years ago. It said Hansen had been abducted 20 miles away from Harding’s house. Harding looked at the picture of Myrna Hansen. She looked exactly like the person in the reflection of the glass.

Harding heard a ringing in his ears. He wondered if maybe Hansen was trying to communicate with him again.

He stood up and flung open the front door. Snow covered his lawn, walkway, and driveway. It looked like a lunar landscape. His breath came out quickly, like plumes of a frost-breathing dragon. The ringing was quieter outside. Harding closed the door and went back inside.

Now the ringing increased again. He followed the sound throughout his house. The ringing was the loudest at the cellar door.

Harding opened the door, pulled the string on a naked lightbulb hanging above the stairs, and then went down the creaky stairs. As he walked across the cellar floor, the wooden floorboards groaned like moaning ghosts.

 The ringing was shrill down here. Hansen, what are you trying to tell me?

Before he could think about it, Harding’s body began to shake. He felt like he was having an epileptic seizure. Harding crashed to the floor, losing all control of his muscle functions.

He blinked and saw he was in a lab, lying on his back. His basement was gone. Harding now had breasts again, he was naked, his belly was huge, and his legs were raised up in stirrups.

All over his body was painted strange-looking alien symbols and markings. A lightning bolt of excruciating pain shot through his groin. Harding felt like he was being ripped open. He screamed and looked around wildly, his heart racing. There were aliens in lab coats surrounding him, putting their grey hands on his body.

He looked down and saw he was having a baby. A mirror showed a head was crowning out of his vagina. He felt a violent nausea hit his stomach and a strong desire to look away. This didn’t seem like an ordinary baby. The skin was grey, it had no nose, only puncture wounds.

Harding turned his head away. After a while of pushing, the baby emerged from his vagina and began crying. Harding reluctantly turned and looked at his baby. The baby slowly opened its eyes and looked at him. The eyes that stared back at him were not human, they were black pools of oil.

Harding screamed.

Then it was over and he was back in his basement on the ground. Slowly he sat up, looking around in disbelief. Hansen was having a baby? Were the aliens using humans for cross-breeding? Maybe that’s why Hansen was never found.

Harding took a few deep breaths, trying to calm himself down, to slow his pulse. A muffled voice came from beneath the rickety floorboards.  It sounded like a female weeping. His heart leaped. She is here! That’s what she has been trying to tell me! “Don’t, heh, heh, heeeeeeh, worry Myrna! I’m ah, ah, ah, coming! Hang in there!”

Harding went to his workbench and grabbed a crowbar, shovel, and pick axe. For the next hour, he pulled up the loose floorboards. When it was done, he heard Hansen’s weeping grow louder. Beneath the boards there was concrete. He stomped his foot onto it. It sounded hollow.

Harding used his pickaxe on the concrete making a hole. When it was large enough, he grabbed a flashlight and shined it down the hole. Below was a cavernous bunker. Holy crap! Has this complex always been here beneath my house? The structure looked preternatural. It had huge greasy tentacles lining the walls everywhere. And below the tentacles, fleshy keloids were growing on the walls like a disease. It looked like this place had once been operational but had long since been abandoned.

Harding jumped down into the hole and landed inside a huge hallway. He heard Hansen’s weeping clearly now. He followed her voice down the hallway. The shadows on the walls shot at him like claws. God, it’s so spooky down here. I feel like someone is going to jump out at me any second. Harding paused at a door. He recognized familiar alien symbols on it. They looked similar to the ones that had been on him in his vision.

Harding wedged his crowbar into the seal of the door. Surprisingly, the door wrenched open in one pull.

Inside was an abandoned medical lab he recognized from his vision.  He saw a glass holding cage. Inside the holding cage was an emaciated skeleton with its jaw open, frozen in a terrible rictus scream. ​​The glass cage was filled with green gelatinous goo. Fleshy looking feeding tubes snaked out of the cage into what he thought looked like a processing machine.

He had found Hansen, but he had been too late. She looked like she had been dead for years.

But if Hansen was dead, who had contacted him?

Harding made a sharp intake of breath as he realized who it was. It wasn’t Hansen who had contacted him, it was her ghost. She had been a psychic. He noticed the lab walls looked like they had been built with lead. The lead must have trapped the energy of Hansen’s spirit, making it haunt this place for years, seeking its release.  He saw a tentacle had recently burrowed in through the wall, making a crack in the wall that looked fresh. That must have been how Hansen had been finally able to reach out to him and psychically contact him. But now I’ve set her spirit free!

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David William Jurgenson is an author who has been published in Literary Yard, Down in the Dirt, Mobius Blvd, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and Bristol Noir magazines. As an undergraduate, David got his English writing minor at the University of San Francisco. He was an exchange student at Oxford University, England, where he studied writing fiction.  David plays drums in a rock band in Northern California and lives in Novato with his puppy Honey Whiskey.