The screaming in the hall echoed and distorted as new voices joined it. Sometimes the subjects screamed so loudly and for so long they ripped their vocal cords apart or would start spewing blood from torn capillaries in their throats.

I smiled to myself. Personally, I had nothing against any of these men and women here, even though some of them were from al Qaeda, the Islamic State, or Mexican drug cartels. We had murderers, torturers, rapists, terrorists and gang members galore to experiment on. But who was I to judge their actions? After all, I wasn’t a much better person- I was just on a different side. I tortured people for the CIA, and to protect the USA above all.

“Jay,” a chubby blonde secretary with a moon face said from behind me. I turned to look at her.

“Cheryl,” I said, nodding my head and smiling pleasantly. Cheryl was the ultimate in compartmentalization. At home, she was just a regular soccer mom with kids and PTA meetings. Here, she was an efficient bureaucrat for a secret black ops project that regularly tortured people, sometimes even to death. She kept each part of her life separate and never seemed bothered by switching from one to the other. Her help had likely prevented dozens of terrorist attacks and kidnappings across the globe.

The screaming was almost deafening now so I pulled her by her arm and we headed towards a nearby break room, where I poured myself a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette.

“So I have good news,” she said cheerily, smiling a fake, sweet smile at me. “Your new method of enhanced interrogation has a 95% success rate.”

“95%!” I exclaimed, elated. “That’s higher than waterboarding or sensory deprivation or anything else. Actually, that’s exponentially higher.”

The new method of enhanced interrogation, a euphemism for torture, involved a drug called Salvia divinorum. We would extract the main psychoactive chemical from it, which was called Salvinorin A, and run an IV drip into the subjects. Normally, Salvia divinorum was smoked and created intense, dysphoric hallucinations that rapidly faded after a few minutes. But by running an IV drip of the drug, we could keep the subjects drugged in a nightmare horror state for days or weeks. Their minds would start to snap after weeks straight of the drug, however. At times we would combine the effects of the drug with sensory deprivation or waterboarding on the most hardened subjects.

Being a scientific man myself, I had tried a single IV syringe of Salvinorin A, so that I would know what the subjects were going through. Just that one dose was immensely horrible. I saw myself getting cut up into five pieces, the room falling apart, the fake plastic plants decorating my office started talking to me and mocking me with sarcastic movements. It was an incredibly uncomfortable and disorienting experience for the three or four minutes that it lasted, and I could see why even the most psychopathic killer would start to crack after days straight of living in that constantly nightmarish world.

Cheryl held out a folder to me, a Top Secret label and CIA insignia embedded into the front of it. I frowned and took it.

“What’s this?” I asked, opening it up.

“You are being moved,” she said, putting her hands up. “Look, I tried to argue against it, telling them your research here wasn’t finished, but they insisted they have something far more important for you stateside. They want you to leave Guantanamo Bay within fifteen minutes. They have a helicopter waiting for you outside already.”

“This is ridiculous!” I said, my heart rate rising and a warm flush taking over my face. “I am not even close to finishing my research here. I need at least another week to finalize the results.” She shook her head at me.

“Orders from the top brass. Sorry Jay,” she said, turning to leave. Fuming, I went to my office and packed up the most important files in a briefcase, then walked out to the helipad. It was already running, blowing the salty Caribbean air around me in a deafening cacophony.

The pilot took off as soon as I was in the helicopter. Looking to my left, I saw Cheryl. She smiled wanly at me, then looked down at her phone. I sat back in the seat, feeling the vibrations of the craft resonate through my body as we headed towards Florida.

What could they have wanted me to see that was so important it needed me to immediately leave my current assignment? I wondered. I had seen some horrible things- men breaking their bones as they strained against the drowning horror of waterboarding, men tearing their own eyeballs out after they had lost their sanity, prisoners killing other prisoners by ripping throats out with their teeth. I hoped that what they had waiting for me would not leave me with any deeper PTSD than I already suffered. I already had enough nightmares to last me a thousand years. I had woken up screaming for the past week straight, and at times I was afraid to fall asleep for what I would see in the dreamworld.

Soon I could see the white sand of the Florida beaches approaching. The black ops site was surrounded by three layers of razor wire-topped electric fences. Guards in sniper towers formed an outer perimeter every few hundred feet. No one had ever escaped from this site, which we simply called the Lighthouse.

Inside the razor wire stood a single behemoth of a building, pure white with no windows or insignia anywhere. It rose up and became narrower as it did so, each floor formed in a perfect circle, and at the top lay a helipad where the pilot now aimed the chopper. It did resemble a lighthouse in some ways, hence the nickname. That wasn’t the only reason why we called it that, however. This was also the main hub of psychic research for the entire Eastern seaboard. The prisoners here were chosen for their supposed paranormal or mystical abilities, to be studied at leisure by the scientists and agents of the CIA.

As I got out of the chopper, an agent with black sunglasses and a black suit was waiting for me.

“Dr. Salem?” he asked me, shaking my hand.

“You can just call me Jay,” I said, smiling my fake smile. With a gentle guiding hand on my shoulder, he led me down to the top level.

“We have been following your research with the Salvinorin agent with rapture,” he said, a dead-pan expression on his face. As we entered the staircase, the fluorescent lights began to flicker. “We actually modified the agent somewhat, synthetically strengthened it and added some chemical functional groups that make it cross into the brain more effectively. We are about to test it on the first patient here- a shaman we kidnapped from the Amazon after witnessing his ability to levitate objects, to create light out of his hands in pure darkness, as well as other psychic phenomena.” I followed him down a sterile gray hall to a gray metal door labeled “1308”. He opened it and I followed him inside.

A naked, bronze-skinned man was strapped down to a metal gurney, an IV tube leading from his arm to a machine. From the top of the IV pole hung a solution labeled “Salvinorin ethoxy-alpha C.” A doctor in a lab coat stood next to him, smiling as we walked in. The CIA agent nodded at him, and he turned on the machine, letting the solution begin to drip down the clear plastic tubing and into the vein of the restrained man before me.

His eyes widened in surprise, and he lifted his head and looked straight at me. The fires of Hell seemed to dance behind his dilated pupils. His face transformed into a vicious snarl, his frown lines deepening to cracks as he regarded me with abject hatred.

“You will see how damned you are,” he said with a thick Spanish accent, never taking his gaze off of me, “and you will see Hell unleashed before you. You are demons in human skin, but the real demons are here to reclaim their throne.” He smiled wickedly, the grin appearing to move unnaturally wide until it reached from ear to ear. “The slit wrists of the sky will open up and the horrors of Hell will be with you.”

“Why is he still talking?” I asked the doctor. “Usually subjects become immediately incapacitated by the intensity and dysphoria of the experience. I’ve never seen one able to talk before even on Salvinorin A, and you claim this chemical is much stronger than that.” The doctor shook his head.

“This is not a normal subject, Dr. Salem,” he said to me. “This man broke the necks of two soldiers as we brought him in, without even touching them. In terms of psychic powers, he is one of the strongest specimens we have ever seen. We have given him large doses of other drugs, such as LSD and barbiturates, and he seems to metabolize them much faster and remain mostly unaffected even when he is injected with heavy doses.” I looked back at the shaman and immediately realized something was immensely wrong.

Where there had been a white wall behind him, there now stood a fiery red hallway that seemed to extend for a thousand feet. His gaze had left me and now stared into the back of the room. A massive metal door that looked hundreds of feet tall stood there. With a shriek of metal, it began to slide open slowly.

“That door hasn’t opened for a hundred thousand years,” the shaman said, his voice rising with a mixture of euphoria and rage. “But I have opened it for you now.”

Smoke and fire poured forward from the door as dozens of blackened, grasping hands grasped it, trying to push it forward faster. The mammoth weight of it held them in for a few seconds longer, but as more and more hands joined in it started to fly open, then smashed into the wall with a deafening roar, like a gunshot going off.

I turned to run then, but found the door behind me locked. I ran to it, trying to open the knob or turn the deadbolt, but it felt like I was fighting against a solid metal wall. Looking back behind me, I saw the first of the beings had reached the end of the hellish entryway and reached the CIA agent and the doctor.

The beings that ran into our room had blackened, sizzling skin, smoke still billowing behind them. They had no clothes but only burnt flesh. Their eyes glowed red, their hair all gone from the constant fires they lived in, and they began to rip the CIA agent and doctor apart with their bare hands. They tore off their skin, leaving blackened marks as they flayed them with sheer brute strength, licking the blood off their hands with sighs of pleasure.

At that moment the door to the room burst open and a team of CIA agents in SWAT gear entered, assault rifles raised. I let them all run past me and then tore off down the hall. Behind me, I heard screams that echoed after me. I ran back to the helipad and told the pilot what had happened, and we quickly left that den of horror.

I don’t know what happened back at the Lighthouse, but I got out alive. The pilot and I were the only ones, as far as I know, who left that place alive. Hopefully the evil was contained within its walls, but if it gets out, it may lead to the end of our world.