Shadows Out of Time

Nineteen Minutes FREDERIC S. DURBIN

Documents pertaining to the investigation of the Tuttle-Bigelow incident of September 9, 2022.

From the personal journal of Jeremy Tuttle, age 44, entry dated September 6, 2022:

“The Uncanny City”—that’s what I call Pittsburgh, this urban sprawl in the hills, built atop ruins. Its names are mythic: Runs and Furnaces and Hot Metal and Elfinwilds. It’s at once vibrant and half-swallowed by the earth, which always wins in the end. Go around a city block, and you’re lost in the woods; then you come out in the middle of the middle, where you might get run over by a garbage truck, or you might fall off a cliff. Deep, dark ravines…trees dense on the vertical…more bridges than in Venice; at least, that was true for a while — it may not be now. See the part about the earth swallowing and winning.

There are gaping basement pits, doorways in the hillsides, haphazard brickwork, vine-clad chimneys in the forest, and stairs. Stairs and stairs. A street may become a stairway without warning. Just because a map or a sign tells you it’s a street, don’t believe it. Steps climb and descend the banks, connecting level to level. Some of them no longer go anywhere but into the woods.

That place in particular, on the back slopes of Mt. Washington, has an eerie beauty but hardly seems a site likely for such attention, such an event. Yet therein, perhaps, may be witnessed the elegance of the mathematics governing the cosmos — the choreography behind the vast dance of the stars and worlds. Who can know whether Kafti speaks the truth or is only delusional? Can the two discrete sources of information and their terrible harmony be coincidence? I mean to find out, and so I will return there three nights from now, and I will be standing on those crumbling city stairs at the hour of 8:43 p.m. That’s the time Jen was given. I hope she won’t go there. I told her not to. If she does, well, I’ll be there first.

“Terrible harmony,” I wrote. I like that. Hmm.

This evening after dark I parked beside the fenced lot of the empty Vancilly Metals building, its windows grilled and boarded. The lot was cracked, weed-grown, and so faded with age that it seemed to be covered in frost. Asphalt goes gray just like people do. Gladys Street runs right along the woods there at the base of the steep rise. There are ferny brickworks in the hillside, the overgrown remains of old houses and garages. Peeking out among the roots, through the low branches, they look like the edge of a subterranean town, something like a dungeon in D&D or Tolkien’s Moria. “Speak Friend and enter.”

I found the entrance to Benton Avenue, still marked by a street sign. It’s called an avenue, but it’s a stairway with a 41-degree grade, punctuated by landings every so often. It climbs right up into the forest. Thick scrub trees wall it in like a tunnel and roof it over in many places. As I trudged up the steps, I could hear the traffic on Sebring Furnace Extension rattling over the potholes. It was humid on the Benton stairs and really dark — sort of breathless, like the trees were already watching and waiting. Weirdly, I had the feeling that I shouldn’t go up too far, that I was trespassing somehow. But I kept onward.

The whole “avenue” is barely a tenth of a mile. Halfway up, there’s an arm of the stairs that angles to the right and just stops — it literally goes nowhere. The last step gives way to spongy soil and nettles, and I could see the glow of a streetlight above me, through a stand of oaks all skirted around with bushes — impassable. The main flight climbs on up to Halfirth, though there’s no street sign at the intersection there; it’s pitchblack, facing a row of tumbledown apartments not far from the mountain’s spine.

An owl hooted in the branches somewhere close by, a sound so mournful and abrupt that I yelled out. Heart racing, I headed back down into the well of darkness.

Mission accomplished for tonight: I know the place now.

Notes from the E.R. of Grace-St. Vincent’s Hospital, Pittsburgh, September 9, 2022:

White female identified as Jen Bigelow, age 33, arrived by ambulance at 10:39 p.m. Close-range GSW to the right chest, exit wound right dorsal. Collapsed lung. B.P. 104/69, rate erratic. Immediate surgery D. Kress.

Addendum by Detective David Colby: Patient survived three-hour surgery. Initially found unresponsive near the corner of Gale and Sebring Furnace Extension, Beechview. 911 call by DeMarius Bryan of Beechview.

Partial transcript of SESSION 3, subject Jen Bigelow, placed under hypnosis by Jeremy Tuttle, August 28, 2022:

JT: You are completely comfortable. Everything around you is peaceful and quiet. There is nothing to worry about. You are in your bed, warm — just warm enough. Safe. It’s earlier this month, not long ago. You are beginning to dream. Images in your mind. No worries…just pictures in your head. Can you see them?

JB: [Murmurs indistinctly.]

JT: What was that? Do you see something? JB: [Lengthy pause.] Yes.

JT: What do you see?

JB: There’s a…there’s a bird.

JT: What kind of bird? Is it flying?

JB: On a branch. Trees…lots of trees. It’s dark.

JT: Is it a forest?

JB: Yes.

JT: Tell me about the bird. What is it doing?

JB: There’s…light. Light — like morning. But it’s night. Behind the bird. Voices. A voice.

JT: Is someone behind the bird? Someone speaking?

JB: It’s speaking. It’s…[JB becoming agitated].

JT: The bird is speaking?

JB: [Breathing heavily] It’s saying name…names.

Ben…Benton. Nine…nine nine.

JT: Nein nein? Is it speaking German? German or English?

JB: Number nine. Month…day. Nine-nine. Wants me to come there. It says stairs. I have to go there. [Increasingly agitated.] When it says, I have to. I have to go.

JT: The bird is asking you to go somewhere?

JB: [Sobbing violently, thrashing. Screams the next words.] It’s not a bird.

From the personal journal of Jeremy Tuttle, entry dated August 12, 2022:

Fascinating conversation with Kafti at Mike’s tonight. Others were there; the two of us withdrew to the room off the kitchen so he could talk while I took notes. Several blunts: grain of salt, of course, BUT. Wild stuff. Kafti in fine form — had only met him twice before tonight. Mike met him in Frick Park, like homeless or something, but he’s not.

Kafti calls himself a prophet. He has dreams. Swears that his dreams have accurately foretold the future on many occasions. Would love to hypnotize him. Maybe when I know him better, or if he asks. I sense it could get frightening and/or out of hand. Not sure. He seems to be an old soul — maybe an ancient soul.

Anyway, I was asking about a manuscript he’d given me. I returned it to him with some notes. Not sure if he intended it as a story or as his prophetic vision. Hard to tell with Kafti.

Story says that in the year 3011, the Glorious Next arise— successors of humankind, gigantic, luminous beings. They come from deep beneath the sea, where they have been sleeping. Subjugate humankind. Not subjugate, exactly. Kafti says it’s a relationship we slide into naturally with them, since they are greater and we are like lower order beasts to them. Human race performs menial tasks, manual labor for the Glorious Next, inheritors of the planet.

Sounds a lot like Lovecraft so far, but I pressed Kafti along those lines, and he never mentioned Cthulhu et al., and those names didn’t seem to mean anything to him. Zilch.

Kafti went into a sort of trance-like state, and I thought he might be done for the night, but then he sat straight up and said more. He was talking now — this wasn’t in the manuscript. In 4064, a meteorite brings a virus to Earth that wipes out the human race. The Glorious Next are desperate, because they’ve become dependent on us in so many ways that their survival is now threatened.

The key to solving their problem lies in a possibility for time travel they’ve discovered. It’s very limited, a natural phenomenon over which they have no control, though they can make use of it. Because of alignments of stars and responsive energies within the Earth, “windows” open briefly and in different places, through which matter can pass from the present to a specific different time and back again, so long as the “window” stays open. It only opens for nineteen minutes, Kafti says, and only one such “window” will do the Glorious Next any good.

As Kafti tells it, they have wiped the virus away; the Earth is safe for humankind again, but the Next need unspoiled, uninfected human tissue in order to regenerate our species. They can get it from the past — all they need is one of us, one specimen. All they need to do is snatch one of us through the nineteenminute “window” and drag that one back — forward, that is, through time — to the year 4064, after the virus is gone, but before the demise of their own species.

Here’s the part that’s awfully far-fetched: the only “window” from 4064 back into a time when the human race is alive and well opens into Pittsburgh. Kafti doesn’t know exactly where in the city or when, but he is convinced it will happen really soon. He’s dreaming about it every night.

Kafti doesn’t know why he has these visions, why he’s singled out to know the minds of the Glorious Next. But he’s sensitive — super-sensitive to such things, like a big radar dish turned up to eleven, like those ones SETI had in the desert, listening for whispers from space. He says that the Next can’t afford to waste their opportunity. Just nineteen minutes, and the “window” might not open in a place where there are people around, usually. So he thinks they might be calling somehow— calling across time. How they could do that is anybody’s guess, but just because we can’t imagine how doesn’t mean they can’t do it, right? They’re greater than us in the way that we’re greater than fleas. Maybe a lot greater than that. He thinks they might be calling a person from our time, from around here, to come to just the right place and moment when the “window” will open, and WHAMMO! Venus’s flytrap, open and shut.

Kafti got a bit paranoid then. He was worried that the Glorious Next might be on to him — the Abyss looking back and all that. They’ll want to cover their tracks. They’ll call one human to come to them, but they won’t want any others to know. They’ll sweep up after themselves. Not that there’s a thing we could do to stop them, even if we all knew what they were up to. I thought about Kafti’s paranoia, his fear of being swept away for knowing. I said, “Thanks for telling me all this” and called him an asshole. We had a laugh.

Weird shit. Very, very weird.

I snagged some of Mike’s moonshine for Kafti and me. We had a discussion about whether this vision of his, if it’s true, is a good thing or a bad one. Should we hope these monsters fail to abduct one of us? It’s nonconsensual, of course, a life lost here, and the continued enslavement of our species in the far-distant future.

But it’s survival, too, isn’t it? It’s our human race going on, overcoming our extinction with help from our masters. Without them, the virus would have killed us, end of story, bam. Or will kill us…pick a verb tense that helps to sort it out. And here’s the thing: if we survive then, even as bugs, even as slaves, we might one day get the upper hand again. We’ve had it before. In fact, wouldn’t you be honored if you were the chosen and called? You’d be like a new Adam. The Next would treat you well, wouldn’t they, because you were so important to their purpose? You might not really have to be a slave. What if you had a glimpse, away from all this, of the 41st century?

That’s why I’m into hypnosis and metaphysical stuff. I think there are things — realities — beyond what we can see, and we live like sheep. I think we need to take our blinders off, get our heads out of the sand. I like finding answers.

Before the night collapsed upon itself, Kafti and I ended up drinking to the Glorious Next, wishing them all the best.

Addendum by Detective David Colby: Michael Anthony Nagy and others present at the house mentioned here on the night of August 12 have been questioned extensively. The identity of “Kafti” and his whereabouts are undetermined. It is bewildering how little is known about him. No one seems to have met him more than a few times, and he is gone now. I would speculate that he was no more than a fictional creation of Jeremy Tuttle, save for the fact that Nagy and others attest that “Kafti” is an actual person. About 5’7”-5’9”, thin build, dark or olive complexion, dark brown wavy hair, pronounced accent. “From India, Nepal, Tibet, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mongolia, the Middle East, or Texas”—that’s the consensus. Very helpful.

Transcript: assessment interview with patient Jen Bigelow by Dr. Neela Kaneda, Psy.D., September 20, 2022:

NK: You understand that our conversation is being witnessed by Detective Colby and recorded for review. Please say “yes” if that’s okay.

JB: Yes.

NK: If at any time you would like to stop, please let me know, okay?

JB: Okay.

NK: We want to help you get better. After what you experienced, your memories may not come back all at once. We’re trying to help you with that, all right?

JB: Okay.

NK: Now…I know you’ve been asked this a lot, but you’ve told the police that you never saw the man who assailed you— Jeremy Tuttle — before that night of September 9. Is that still correct?

JB: That’s correct.

NK: You were not his hypnosis patient?

JB: No.

NK: You weren’t having nightmares that you hoped he could help with — help get rid of?

JB: Huh-uh. No.

NK: You had never known him in any capacity? JB: No. Never.

NK: Okay. That’s fine. There’s water right here if you need it. This is not pleasant, I know, but could you tell me one more time about that night?

JB: Why? Oh — how many times do I…?

NK: I’m sorry. Sometimes there are memories that are like splinters that have to work themselves out. If you would, please. Take your time. Why were you on the stairs of Benton Avenue?

JB: Like I said, I don’t know. That night was a blur. I was on medication.

NK: The Anaprocil, for your depression?

JB: Yes. I was downtown with friends who went home, and somehow — I guess — I don’t know.

NK: You don’t know how you got to Beechview?

JB: No.

NK: Do you know what time it was? JB: No.

NK: Were you driving?

JB: No.

NK: Was anyone with you after downtown?

JB: No.

NK: Someone dropped you off?

JB: [Pause.] Maybe. I…I remember walking a long way.

NK: Were you going up or down the stairs?

JB: Up. I think. I saw him…I saw him above me. Coming down.

NK: Jeremy Tuttle?

JB: Yes.

NK: And—

JB: [Suddenly distressed.] And he shot me! He pulled out a gun and he shot me. I…I ran down the stairs.

NK: Okay, okay. Just — okay, just lie back. Did you see him after that? Did he follow you?

JB: I looked back to see if he was coming down. He was ststanding there. [Emotional.] He…was looking at me.

NK: Did he say anything?

JB: He said, “I’ll do this. You don’t have to. Go.”

NK: You heard that clearly?

JB: Yes.

NK: Why would he say that?

JB: I don’t know.

NK: Do you know what he meant?

JB: That I should go.

NK: What was he doing then?

JB: He turned and he…went up. There was light. In the trees.

NK: Like a flashlight?

JB: No. More. Different. He went up into it. To them.

NK: Them?

JB: [Cries out suddenly, clutches temples.]

NK: It’s okay. You’re okay. Do you want to—

[Indistinct voice of Detective Colby.]

NK: Okay. Who was there? Who were “they”?

JB: [Long pause, sobbing, labored breath.]

NK: Jen, who was with him? Who were “they”?

JB: Not…no, no, no, no one. There…there was a bird.

NK: A—

JB: I want to stop, I want to stop now I want to stop now I want to stop now stop now.

Forensic assessment by Janine Paxton, PSM, 3935D12, September 10, 2022:

The close-range gunshot wound to Jen Bigelow was possibly self-inflicted based on muzzle proximity, trajectory, and wound position. All consistent with recovered Ruger LCP. Exit wound, slug not recovered.

Addendum by Detective David Colby: Only Bigelow’s prints on the weapon, no others. Ruger LCP retrieved at the scene, 11:51 p.m., September 9, 2022. Blood belonging to Bigelow at the presumed shooting site, intermittent blood trail continuing down the Benton Avenue stairs and along Gladys Street northwestward, southwest on Ronacky, south on Gale to the intersection with Sebring Furnace Extension. Ruger LCP registered to Jen Bigelow. No evidence of any other persons, items, or activity on Benton Avenue up to Halfirth or in the surrounding area, which is heavily wooded.

2012 Chevrolet Cruze registered to Jeremy Tuttle found parked along Gladys Street, approx. 140 feet southeast of Benton Avenue entrance. Nothing unusual in or around vehicle.

Tuttle’s whereabouts remain unknown.

Text of “Sweeping,” song by The Dire Janes, April 2023:

Why’d you do it, Molly Mae?

Why’d you go so hurtfully?

Did the music tell you to?

Did the night bird call to you?

Yeah, we won and lost for keeps.

So the rolling ocean sweeps

The footprints from the sand away.

And you couldn’t, couldn’t stay,

Molly Mae, Molly Mae.

That’s the way it had to be.