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Most people don't want the truth. It's kind of like that movie where "You can't handle the truth" is yelled out. Yeah. They don't want to hear that the president is getting sex from interns, or that their favorite celebrity couple is breaking up, or that some star they idolized back when they were in high school is a pedophile.
The truth scares them. People want to be safe and comforted in the fact that the world as they see it is the only one out there. That if they do what they're told, they have nothing to fear from terrorists, or biological weapons, or whatever.
I don't deal with those truths. No, I deal with pretty much the first thing parents lie to their children about. When your mommy or daddy told you there were no monsters in your closet, or under your bed. Or that the old house on the hill wasn't haunted. Or that Dracula, like in the movies, wasn't real. Maybe they had to go so far as to open the closet door and show you, but eventually you believed them.
Here's the truth. Monsters are real.
Less then a mile from here is a building. It has six stories. Only, from the inside, it only has five. You go from the fifth floor to the roof, and it only feels like one flight of stairs. Hell, we've measured it. But sometimes, you can see something, people maybe, moving around behind the windows on the sixth floor. We've had that building under surveillance since 1959, and so far, nothing.
Downtown is a homeless shelter where, among other things, a madman lives. He's clearly insane by all normal standards of the day, and all the other homeless there leave him alone. He sees demons, so he says. And he's right. As near as we can tell, demons have been walking the earth since at least 1945. And this deranged man is one of the few people who can tell who is a demon and who isn't. He's killed at least six that we know of, and we have no idea how he's managed that. Demons are, and I should know, notoriously difficult to kill.
A few floors down from here is a small girl. Her name is Rebecca, and she's nine years old. She's been nine for at least the last hundred years. She doesn't get older. She spends most of her days playing with her dolls and having stories read to her. About ten years ago, a women named Danielle read stories to Rebecca every day, up to the day she was killed by a mugger. Rebecca disappeared for three days. Don't know how she got out, don't know how she got back in. Heck, up till then, we had no record of her leaving the facility prior to the '30s. The day after she returned, the skin of the mugger was found. Just the skin. Had to pull in a few favors to keep that from being noticed.
We have a psychic down in the lowest sub-basement of the building. He's been dead since 2002, but every couple of months, his body shouts out prophecies.
There are parts of the old subway system that we've had to fill in with reinforced concrete just to keep things from spreading. And at best, it's a stop-gap measure. Current predictions have us losing containment in 2019.
According to satellite imagery and every telescope we could turn that way in time, for 39 seconds, in June of 2005, Mars disappeared.
We deal with the things no one else wants to, or can. We have to hide and live with the uncomfortable real truths of the world.
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Author's note: Not really sure where this came from, but I did just re-read Planetary not too long ago. I'm not entirely happy with the effort on this one, but I knew if I didn't get it typed down soon, I'd either lose it or scrap it.
The truth scares them. People want to be safe and comforted in the fact that the world as they see it is the only one out there. That if they do what they're told, they have nothing to fear from terrorists, or biological weapons, or whatever.
I don't deal with those truths. No, I deal with pretty much the first thing parents lie to their children about. When your mommy or daddy told you there were no monsters in your closet, or under your bed. Or that the old house on the hill wasn't haunted. Or that Dracula, like in the movies, wasn't real. Maybe they had to go so far as to open the closet door and show you, but eventually you believed them.
Here's the truth. Monsters are real.
Less then a mile from here is a building. It has six stories. Only, from the inside, it only has five. You go from the fifth floor to the roof, and it only feels like one flight of stairs. Hell, we've measured it. But sometimes, you can see something, people maybe, moving around behind the windows on the sixth floor. We've had that building under surveillance since 1959, and so far, nothing.
Downtown is a homeless shelter where, among other things, a madman lives. He's clearly insane by all normal standards of the day, and all the other homeless there leave him alone. He sees demons, so he says. And he's right. As near as we can tell, demons have been walking the earth since at least 1945. And this deranged man is one of the few people who can tell who is a demon and who isn't. He's killed at least six that we know of, and we have no idea how he's managed that. Demons are, and I should know, notoriously difficult to kill.
A few floors down from here is a small girl. Her name is Rebecca, and she's nine years old. She's been nine for at least the last hundred years. She doesn't get older. She spends most of her days playing with her dolls and having stories read to her. About ten years ago, a women named Danielle read stories to Rebecca every day, up to the day she was killed by a mugger. Rebecca disappeared for three days. Don't know how she got out, don't know how she got back in. Heck, up till then, we had no record of her leaving the facility prior to the '30s. The day after she returned, the skin of the mugger was found. Just the skin. Had to pull in a few favors to keep that from being noticed.
We have a psychic down in the lowest sub-basement of the building. He's been dead since 2002, but every couple of months, his body shouts out prophecies.
There are parts of the old subway system that we've had to fill in with reinforced concrete just to keep things from spreading. And at best, it's a stop-gap measure. Current predictions have us losing containment in 2019.
According to satellite imagery and every telescope we could turn that way in time, for 39 seconds, in June of 2005, Mars disappeared.
We deal with the things no one else wants to, or can. We have to hide and live with the uncomfortable real truths of the world.
-----------
Author's note: Not really sure where this came from, but I did just re-read Planetary not too long ago. I'm not entirely happy with the effort on this one, but I knew if I didn't get it typed down soon, I'd either lose it or scrap it.