Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly (A Novel of the Cthulhu Mythos)

Part One: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: Now I know in part; but then shall I know even also as I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” —I Corinthians ch. 13, v.1
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” —William BlakeIn the Fugue
At the Focus.
It wasn’t a dream.
He was watching himself from above, but not in some abstract sense. He saw himself from a height of a dozen meters or more, cowering amid low-standing ferns with his M-16 forgotten at his feet, dressed in ridiculously oversized fatigues stained with red mud. Others were there, but they were lost in their own terror. Somehow, though he knew them, he couldn’t place them. They weren’t what drew his attention.
He was looking at something which split the night like a magnesium flare. His face—younger than he recalled—was agape, considering what his mind wouldn’t bring into focus. He looked terrified, seconds from death.
But that was not the only self he saw. He also stood in a stark hospital room, older now, covering his face with a hand that clutched a pistol, trying to shield his eyes. The shift from the first scene to the second was as simple as tilting one’s head. In one corner of his vision he saw the jungle, in the other the hospital room. They were seamlessly connected. That same light played across the room, engulfing it, obscuring what was in the bed. A low hum pulsed like a rocketing freight train on a collision course with his mind, shaking everything like it would tear the world to pieces.
Even as he looked away, there were more hims, more selves. Now he stood, older still, in a long, narrow, tall hallway hung with timber rafters, and the same light spilled over him. The door at the end of the unfinished hall was open and filled with light. The sound was worse, but also fascinating—beautiful and haunting…