The night event¶
The night event was a nocturnal anomaly over the party's guest house on the Sherman Ranch, in which each agent suffered a different hallucination, Andrew Howard levitated, the Biz lost every dental filling, and the house shifted on its foundations before a flood of white light ended it.
| Type | Anomalous event |
| Aliases | Psychic modulation event (Kurt's term) |
| Location | The guest house ("little house") on the Sherman Ranch |
| Date | The night before Election Day, early November 1992 |
| Cause | Never established |
| First appearance | Walkers 05 |
The event¶
After a cold afternoon spent chaining their car to four posts in front of the big house, the party goes to bed in the guest house. In Walkers 05, each of them is hit by a separate hallucination:
- Huell wakes to screaming as the world pivots 90 degrees and the house feels like a tumble dryer. He goes to look for the source, gun in hand. His Act Under Pressure roll (a 6, with a minus one) fails, and he crashes through the little card table next to the fridge.
- Kurt wakes in Saigon, with jungle, wild pigs scampering through the undergrowth and a pounding head. He shouts in Vietnamese, "You'll never take me alive," and takes cover behind the dresser, which is the nearest bush. His roll to remember his mission is a mixed result: part of him still believes he is in Saigon, so he bites his LSD tooth to shift into a more familiar broken state.
- The Biz wakes to find the left side of his visual field is outer space, crumbling away down the middle, with a horrible keening noise. His hands shake uncontrollably and he tastes blood.
- Andrew Howard believes he has been buried alive, freezing and hammering on the edges of his coffin.
Kurt sees the refrigerator, which is screaming, as the trunk of an ancient tree and opens it. Andrew spills out, flailing, and begins to float toward the ceiling; Kurt pulls him down by the ankle toward a bed as white light pours through the windows. Everyone drops to the carpet, and their cognition returns to normal apart from the effects of Kurt's LSD tooth. Andrew lands badly on his shoulder but takes no harm because of the pendant he never takes off, and Rita (as Andrew) is furious that he "almost got abducted" (Walkers 05).
Aftermath¶
- The Biz's teeth. He finds in the mirror that every one of his fillings is gone. Kurt, citing his training for a "psychic modulation event", has him swish cocaine from the heel of Kurt's shoe around his mouth, which stops the bleeding. The next morning Walt drives the party to a Roosevelt dentist, who has never seen someone lose all his fillings and has only gold to replace them with; Dante (as Kurt) notes that gold is non-magnetic (Walkers 05).
- The house. Guns, badges and wallets are scattered, the silverware is in a pile on the couch, and the phone is on the other side of the room. Outside, the house has shifted a few inches, so that the stairs no longer line up with the front porch, and it feels noticeably warmer than the surrounding air (Walkers 05).
- Bigelow's response. Robert Bigelow phones asking whether they saw a light; a white floodlight woke him. Later he shows the party a frozen frame from the sky camera and asks whether they have heard of the Black Sun. The thermal camera whited out. He agrees to set up a big ring of cameras around the party's house, and says that his staff have had nightmares and been prescribed sleep aids (Walkers 05).
- Video. The footage shows a bright white ring with a slightly purple glow, oscillating for seconds. Bigelow calls it a clear-cut event that has been escalating nonlinearly for a few weeks, and says the team "may be on the verge of making contact" (Walkers 05).
Theories¶
Kurt tells Bigelow that the agency trained him for the possibility that the Russians would develop some kind of neurological weapon. Andrew thinks the party narrowly missed being abducted (Walkers 05). The party gives Bigelow's staff psychiatrist a 45-minute debrief, in which the Biz holds back the fillings and shares the neurological disruption. It belongs with the other happenings in the Sherman Ranch phenomenon, alongside the dusk event and the vanishing car.
Memorable quotes¶
Quote
"God damn it, I almost got abducted. Why weren't the windows open?" Rita (as Andrew Howard), after the event.