I’m bored today, so I am revisiting a story I wrote ages ago. And I am reorganizing it into a new synopsis. And I am going to pitch it to Netflix as a series. I’m told they will throw money at any project that has strong market potential. So, are you listening, Netflix? Of course, you’re not. But let’s go anyway – just for the sake of killing time.
This opus of mine is entitled The Spaces Between (as seen in the featured image above). The title was lifted from a famous quote from the dark and mysterious book, The Necronomicon, which is neither dark nor mysterious if viewed through the lens that says it was actually created by that mad racist, H.P. Lovecraft. The authorship of The Necronomicon is attributed to one Abdul al-Hazred, the “Mad Arab.” This is believed by literary scholars to have been a nickname given to the bookish Lovecraft by his friends, and is a play on Abdul All-Has-Read, a pun aimed at his propensity for the printed word.
The quote itself reads thusly: “Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.” (I chose to paraphrase it as, “They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen, not in the spaces we know, but in the spaces between.”)
As you can tell, this line lends itself well to the title of my story, and to my knowledge of a much larger world all around us that remains invisible to all of our corporeal senses. If you glance back at random posts throughout this blog, you will see a common theme, and that is this: We are all just brains in jars, experiencing reality through the second-hand interpretation of our physical faculties. As their perception is limited, we cannot currently comprehend the full content of the larger reality. As I have said before, this corporeal reality we experience is little more than a nursery for infant consciousness.
We are each an infant consciousness, intended to grow into infinite consciousness. Once we develop the integrity to survive outside these physical bodies, we will move up to the higher dimensions. At least, that is the hope. Unfortunately, there are also lower dimensions, and our societies are mutually corrupted by human failings such as greed, fear, and narcissism, which draw us down into the lower fields. Misery does love company. So, no, not everyone is movin’ on up, as the Jeffersons would have advised.
But I am getting a head of myself. Here is the synopsis of my story (are you paying attention, Netflix? Still no? Who cares, here I go anyway): The Spaces Between follows a ragtag group of writers from the holy city of Pittsburgh. They all work for an online and periodically printed publication known as “The Lone Nut,” owned and operated by one T. Thomas Grace, editor-in-chief. As the name suggests, “The Lone Nut” follows all of the top conspiracy theories currently dogging the media and thereby the collective consciousness of humanity.
To add a little character detail, T. Thomas Grace has an undescended testicle, providing a reoccurring pun that results in witty banter such as this exchange between ace reporter for TLN, Stan Dresel, and a flight attendant:
Stan works infrequently at The Lone Nut offices located in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, alongside Aaron, his former college friend that Stan brings on board due to a recent bout with unemployment. Stan explains that “The Nut” isn’t a main source of income, but it has grown in popularity in recent years as the only websites on the internet that are more popular than porn are the conspiracy sites. The office usually recruits wanna-be writers from the local universities as interns, but they have recently landed on a story that has international interest. It is this story that drags Aaron into a world he never wanted to get dragged down into and reveals there is more to his own background and genetic make-up than even he had been aware.
Revelations abound for many of the other characters, including one Kite McIntyre, who works as head of advertising and media relations for the publication. Her full name is Kathleen Dee McIntyre, but due to her family hailing from Bessemer, Alabama, and the heavy southern drawl of her dear departed grandma having pronounced her given nickname of Kate as “Kite,” she had adopted it as her go-to moniker. She and her would-be boyfriend, Theodore “Ted” Tully, who at one point finds himself confronting an alien-eating ancient general at Nellis AFB, both find themselves becoming skeptics as the story progresses.
Yes – skeptics. In the true sense of the word. Many characters take on the job for its convenience and open working hours but have no real interest or belief in the stories that frequent the Lone Nut headlines – UFOs and UAPs, skinwalkers and shadow people, Deep Underground Military Bases, cryptids and parallel dimensions, etc. They see it as just another tabloid, if not one that has jumped in readership in recent years, and an easy opportunity to showcase their professional skills. However, the more they see and experience throughout the story, the more skeptical they become — of the so-called “official” story of our accepted reality.
In our first episode, “Things Come Together at The Point,” Stan has just returned from an uneventful fact-finding mission to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Two Medicine, Montana. They had picked up a rumor of a DUMB (Deep Underground Military Base) in that area upsetting the Tribe, but Stan has returned empty-handed, only to run into his old college buddy, Aaron, staggering drunkenly around The Point – a particular spot central to Pittsburgh, located at the convergence of the legendary Three Rivers, which, as the story reveals, creates a vortex in the veil separating our world from another, which is why the Ohio River Valley is a hotbed of weirdness (see The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel, as well as the Kecksburg UFO Incident). According to my tale, this vortex can at times create an energy field so strong that it once pulled a B-25 Mitchell bomber, carrying mysterious cargo, right into the Monongahela River.
It also provides a doorway into our world for entities from beyond the veil via a mysterious staircase that appears at the convergence of The Point – but I digress.
Recovering from a night of drinking, Stan and Aaron awake at the offices of The Lone Nut to learn that a train carrying a powerful toxin has derailed near Two Medicine, and the National Guard is evacuating the entire local population. Editor-in-Chief T. Thomas Grace is convinced Stan missed something in his investigation and sends him, along with Aaron and a young photographer, to find out what’s really going on.
Sadly, to meet with some of the witnesses at Two Medicine, they must visit the Kicking Horse Methadone Clinic on Native lands, as the opioid crisis has decimated the tribe’s younger population. As it turns out, the government has been intentionally doping the Native population to conceal a heinous cover-up. Many natives have reported seeing a grinning man, often described as having reptilian features. During the course of their investigation, the intrepid reporters learn that the land they are digging in was once populated by troodons, a species of dinosaur that walked around what is now Montana millions of years ago — specifically, a troodon called Stenonychosaurus, which Native elder and amateur paleontologist Bruce Red Thorn believes had an opposable claw that acted like a thumb, enabling the species to become tool users.
Again, I am getting ahead of myself. Allow me to book-end this monstrosity.
We open on an Australian beach in the year 1770, where we see an Aboriginal man, a member of the Gweagal Clan, gazing out at the waters. He squints into the sunlight reflecting off the waters, and as he stares, the waters in the distance start to part. He sees strange figures that appear to be moving from the horizon to the shore, and in the air, high above the churning sea, he can see a red flag blowing in the breeze. As the strange white men in even stranger clothing step ashore, the Native man mutters the words in his language that mean, “You’re dead!”
Jump ahead to present day, and a stoned farmhand staring up into the starry skies over rural Pennsylvania. As he stares, a bright red light gradually grows out of the starry blackness of the Milky Way. He looks away and toward a herd of dairy cows, now agitated and mooing loudly, as they, too, appear to be spooked by this unusual sight.
The story ends not at Nellis Air Force Base (“Area 51”), but at the Atlantic Undersea Testing and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), an above-to-secret black site located in the Bermuda Triangle used for experimenting with portals into other realities. Area 51 is just a display site where the US government often sends up strange-looking drones covered in Christmas lights to distract public attention from the real work — the Great Work, the harnessing of the noosphere. Aaron carries a key to this work in his own DNA, a key to an ancient mystery that could unite all of humanity as one part of the Greater Consciousness, a.k.a. “God.”
Anyone up for season two? Hit me up, Netflix. There are other excerpts from the book scattered around this blog. Happy hunting.
Note: The Spaces Between is an ongoing work in progress and therefore is very open to alterations. I will be adding more strong female characters like Kite, as well as People of Color, Natives, and other socially marginalized people. However, as a stupid white man and product of the 1980s and 90s, I am uncertain of how best to write for these characters without showing my ignorance, which I no doubt already have. Much love and respect to all of God’s children.
Elevator pitch: Think of it as The X-Files meets Ghostbusters.
thecontemplativeape 