Once again, we were in the basement, one of us decked out with gauges and meters. This time, however, they weren’t for finding ghosts.

“I don’t see why I’m the one who has to go down there.” Gabe grumbled, eyeing the full face mask hooked up to an oxygen cylinder. Jeff merely shrugged his shoulders, and Dahlia looked away guiltily. Mrs. Thorne was the one to answer him.

“It’s because you’re the shortest, so you get sent down into the deep tunnels. Tough luck, chuckle-fuck. Just like in ‘nam. Here, take my 1911.” Mrs. Thorne reached beneath her shirt, pulling out a worn-out handgun, the kind you’d always see in old ww2 war movies. I noticed the grips had a pin-up photo of a handsome woman in a tuxedo.

“We’re all GWOT here. And you were a pog.”

“Eh, minor details. So it’s like early Iraq. So get down in that spider hole and look for the red silhouette labeled Saddam so we can drag it back up here and force it to watch cartoons where he’s Satan’s husband.”

“What the hell does that even mean.” I find myself forced to ask.

“It’s kind of hilarious actually. The Marines in charge of watching Saddam forced him to watch that one Southpark movie. It’s fucking hilarious. Imagine being able to show a genocidal dictator built on machismo and mustache a depiction of himself married to Satan and being voiced by a couple of Coloradans.”

“War. War never changes.” Jeff said, doing his best to maintain a solemn tone, and failing miserably.

“It does too. Modern war was completely different back then, compared to now with both sides heading into battle with anime patches and other weird- Oh, I guess it really doesn’t. Bin Laden was a huge Case Closed fan. The CIA releasing the contents of his hard drives onto their public, searchable archive servers was major boon for bored military linguists looking for Arabic anime subs, and a major clusterfuck for the CIA lawyers dealing with anime studio DMCA’s.”

“You’re missing my initial point. I’m not the shortest here.” Gabe shifted, readjusting the tank on his back.

“Correction: You’re the shortest here with the proper OSHA certs. The one person here shorter than you is just a college art student and part-time house cat. And if there’s one thing we try to to fuck around with too much when we can help it, it’s busybodies with too much time on their hand who only enforce the stupid rules. And confined space protocols aren’t the stupid rules.”

“Yet somehow, they didn’t give a shit about me having to stir a burning pile of shit and diesel fuel.”

“Funny how that works. I still haven’t gotten my payment from the 3M earpro lawsuit myself. But lung cancer goes unnoticed for a while, compared to the kind of thing that leads to mass casualty incidents like a room full of CO2. You know the drill.”

“I’m just complaining about the tank.”

“Well if you had drank your milk growing up then I would have been the one stuck doing this. Now chop-chop.” Gabe placed on his mask, stepping onto the ladder into the dark hole. And with Mrs. Thorne’s handgun still in-hand.

Looking down, using a headlamp to supplement the two floodlights Mrs. Thornef had brought to shine down the hole, he descended, one-handed, the other pointed below. Each rung down, each step, he checked his meters. Despite the tense atmosphere-bad pun right there- I had a burning question I needed to ask.

“Why weren’t you this careful for that cave?” I asked Mrs. Everly, nervous after our last encounter.

“That was a natural cave, and the entrance was at its lowest point. Still dangerous, but not dangerous enough for this level of precaution. Since we were at the outlet of a spring, though, it was worth the risk. And things are all about balancing risk.”

“And is what we’re doing worth the risk?” I asked again. I could still remember the terror of seeing that demon.

“We’re about to find out.” She said, before yelling down to Gabe, who had just hit the bottom. “How are things down there. Is the proverbial canary dead?”

“Nope, still alive and kicking, and would be even with the mask off.”

“We can’t be sure yet, but, fuck. I’ll be down shortly so you can check out the rest of the room. A good leader leads from the front, after all.”

“Well why didn’t you put on the fucking scuba tank?” The masked figure of Gabe mimed what looked like a disgruntled huff. That was all my own interpretation, of course.

“When have I ever been a good leader? But I do need to check.” She stepped down onto the ladder while, beneath, I could spy Gabe peering into the darkness.

“There’s a lot of shit down here.” Gabe said. Mrs. Ever- Mrs. Thorn, paused.

“Spooky shit?” She asked down into the darkness.

“WW2 mundane spooky, maybe. The comparatively normal spooky, like splitting the atom beneath Columbia University. Not the ‘us’ kind, at least that I can see.” A look of what I could swear was excitement, grin and a twitch that could have been a fist-pump, shivered through Mrs. Thorne’s figure for a moment, before her free hand dropped to her sidearm.

“I’ll be down. Be careful. Be fucking careful. You know the combination projects are the worst.” She hurried down the rest of the way.

She reached the bottom of the stairs, shining a newly grabbed flashlight into the room to join with the beam from Gabe’s. She froze, then muttered something. A strange light flooded over her and was gone. Then, she shouted.

“Fuck OSHA, we need to hit that switch now! Gabe, follow me! The rest of you, get your asses down that ladder!” She darted into the room, M9 raised, and Gabe followed after.

Not even sure why I was bothering to listen to her orders, I found myself jumping onto the ladder, with Daliah following on my heels. By the time my feet hit stone I felt foolish. What the hell could I even do without a gun? Glare menacingly? At least Daliah could turn into a cat and do whatever other magical nonsense she could do.

Looking into the darkness, I could see the figures of Mrs. Thorne and Gabe leaned against a wall about, say, a tennis court away, shoulders heaving as they leaned against the far wall. The room between was poorly lit, with dark shapes blocking out what little light we had. Mrs. Thorne moved again, reaching for a dark rectangle on the wall, and the dim yellowish light of antique incandescent lamps flipped on.

It looked like a control room from the Manhattan Project. I had seen a few documentaries, and that’s what it resembled the most. Consoles, vacuum tubes, dials and levers. Ash trays still filled with cigarette butts, but the tobacco stink wasn’t perceivable over the must of a room long unattended. Presumably the air was safe to breath, based on the fact that none of us were dead, and despite the dust there was some airflow. And, apparently, power.

Mrs. Thorne, rather than marveling at the electricity, was glaring at a wall, one all the consoles seemed directed towards. It was stone, solid stone; on it had been painted symbols in red paint, surrounding thin lines carved into the living rock. It looked, from what I could tell, like the one from The Lord of the Rings. “Speak Friend and Enter.” Except for the symbols painted around it, and the consoles, and desks, and Daliah glaring at it with hackles raised.

“Jeff. You and Daliah go fetch Sandra. You should stay behind to babysit the other intern after you tell her to get her ass over here. You, other intern, stay here. You have a whole heap of extra paperwork to sign after seeing this, but this concerns you, at least slightly, so you’re saying here.” She slouched against the wall, reaching into her bag and pulling out a beer. “It’s a neat find, if I’m right, but holy shit is this a clusterfuck.” She muttered while popping the tab.

“What is it?” I had to ask. It felt disturbing, like I was being both dragged towards the wall and repelled at the same time.

“It’s something we want our actual ceremonial magician to look at. Jeff and Gabe are good in a fight, but they’re just witch-hunters, and clearly not that good at it if they let me run about.” She took a long draw from her can. I walked over to one of the consoles, looking down at the dust.

“Don’t tempt me. I’m still not happy about being sent down into the dark tunnel with your magical 1911.” His voice echoes in the darkness.

“We still haven’t cleared this whole complex. Unless all the staff were sleeping upstairs there’s probably more rooms down here.”

“Just because I’m the only one with the proper cert.”

“This isn’t ‘nam, this is bowl- sketchy spooky shit, there are rules.”

“That joke’s just over the line, Amy. If you keep it up you’re about to enter a world of pain.” He slapped the borrowed 1911 against his thigh as he let out a snort, one answered by Mrs. Thorne.

“Just be glad you’re short so I’m not calling you Jésus.” She mutters under her breath. I can’t hear it completely from across the room, but I hear the number ‘eight.’

“Say what you want about the creep of a character, I did kind of like the mariachi cover of ‘Hotel California.’ It slapped.”

“I’d rather have Creedence.”

“Can you stop tying everything to ‘nam? We’re literally millennials.”

“No, I meant like ‘I Put a Spell On You.’ Why, did you think I was going to talk about my privileged background or undying patriotism? That ain’t me.”

“You’re literally working for the government, just like the rest of us.”

“Okay, fine, yes, I do have some level of ‘our system sucks slightly less than the other people’s systems’ in me because holy shit things could be so much worse. But I at least want to try to seem aloof of all that. You know. The Witch Abides.” She drained her beer, crushing it and leaving the can at her feet.

“Even more ham-fisted than the ‘it ain’t me.’”

We were interrupted, thankfully, by the clatter of shoes heading down the ladder. The clunk of boots against the stone floor followed, and the clomp of them stepping onto the raised platform of the room.

“Why did you so desperately need to call me? Oh. Shit.” Sandra said as she looked at the wall.

“Yup. Knew you’d say that.” Mrs. Thorne cackled as the little color on Sandra’s face fled from the paint and carving in the wall. “Sure, you have your own crimes, but this is ‘interdisciplinary’ fuckery.”

“And you didn’t think to warn us?” Sandra scowled, eyes darting between the wall, consoles, and boxes lining the walls studded with vacuum tubes.

“The very possibility of this was ‘off the record,’ and in a way that implied it almost certainly wouldn’t happen. Which meant I did more research in the archives in the off chance it did. That said, you’re still our leading expert on the practical side of things.” She headed towards shelves in the back of the room, laden with papers. “Well, would you look at that. I think this falls under our jurisdiction. Finders, keepers.”

“What reading did you do?” Sandra looked like she had bitten into a lemon.

“Operation Paperclip.”

“Fuck.”

“Oh no, it gets worse. Did you look at the equipment? No really. Look.”

“It just looks like old equipment.”

“Old equipment? None of this is post-WW2. Meaning this is the occult-sciences equivalent of finding a quartz watch in an unopened Egyptian tomb. Or maybe that’s too on the nose?”

“Amy.” Gabe cut in. “You know it’s not like the tv show.”

“Well obviously. But a targetable interdimensional portal, one that’s a bastardization of magic and technology, just fell into our hands. And since I’ve been told I can’t have bricks of C4 as often as I want I have to content myself with normal references instead.”

“Amy, that’s typically a bad thing.”

“I know, I know. I’ve read about Highjump.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Gabe said. “We still sometimes get missions going after the random errant Ahnenerbe sorcerer. We’ve got the worst of it locked down at Amundsen-Scott.”

“This is going to be a hell of a time meeting with the homeowners. Why the hell did this house even go on the market post-war?”

“They were surplussing everything after WWII. I guess this just got tied in with it.”

“God I hate eminent-domain. Now we’re the bad guys.”