The Influence – Lars Altman

September 19, 2025

I have been inducted into a group that meets every Sunday in a dark, concrete basement to save your life. I won’t say where, only that you wouldn’t believe this empty hotel has a basement. It’s a wide space with low ceilings, badly lit by a few cordless standing lamps which contort shadows into improbable shapes. At the deep end of the dusty man-made cavern, we sit on cheap black rolling office chairs around a long conference table. The president calls the meeting to order by clapping his hands together. He smiles pleasantly from the head of the table. If there’s chatter, he wipes his mouth on the handkerchief he keeps inside his navy jacket and clears his throat. Nobody is brave enough to push him further. The president is old. He’s ill, he doesn’t have long to live, but he’ll outlive the rest of us. If I fail, he may outlive you.

There is no secretary. Meeting minutes are recorded in the memories of those who listen. For my own well-being, I only pay close attention to matters that concern my specific role, but that isn’t discussed until the latter half of our gathering. Instead, we start with Treatment.

An old woman with frizzy hair and a crispy voice begins roll call. She sits at the head of the table opposite the president. Going clockwise, one by one, we speak our titles and then give brief updates on the state of our deterioration, though some people along our rectangle are less brief than others. Based on what we say, based on the information collected on us by the old woman’s spies who sit to her left and smile at me like we’re all in this together, Leadership can judge our level of affliction. Those with significant enough deterioration stop attending. Sometimes they pass from natural causes, like a rapid-onset illness or the acceleration of a medical condition pre-dating their exposure. Other times it’s a traffic fatality, or a home invasion. I suspect that some sitting along the table help facilitate these disappearances, but I dare not ask. The president will press his lips together before saying something somber, but it feels rote. The old woman with the crackling voice will hug her earth-toned shawls tight to her bony figure and urge compliance with Leadership’s advice to avoid a similar fate, but ultimately, we will all meet this fate. That’s just the nature of this thing we’ve been exposed to, this thing we’re protecting you from, this thing I’ll eradicate if it’s the last thing I do.

How did I find myself in that chilly gray sanatorium? I was a Class “CC” private investigator’s assistant at the end of my probationary period with a reputable agency when my supervisor let me handle my first and last case. Our client, a fit woman in her fifties with dirty blond hair and spotless white nails, suspected her husband of an affair – or rather, another affair after he had broken off the one from six years ago. He was becoming jittery, gloomy, and increasingly distracted. His left foot was swelling for no discernible reason. The migraines he had conquered years ago by cutting out alcohol, caffeine, and sugar were back. He had been going somewhere on Sunday nights, but when the client asked where, he refused to tell. He said it was for her own good. Knowing what I now know, his discretion saved her from sharing his fate. Our fate.

I searched the Lexis Nexus database, then Tracer’s. His record was pristine until an arrest for public intoxication a month prior, then trespass two weeks after that. Both charges were dropped. Though my client already suspected him of drinking again, she was surprised at the arrests. She was even more surprised when I notified her that her credit score had fallen from 722 to 515 in just the past two months. With her authorization, I ran a report and found three credit cards opened in her name, presumably by the husband, all of which were spent to the limit and collecting late charges. I advised that she call the card companies and allege fraud, but she didn’t want to risk ruining her husband’s career and reputation until she understood why he did it.

That very Sunday, I followed the husband to a hotel in the middle of nowhere, but by the time I parked and stepped into the deserted lobby, I couldn’t find him. The following morning, I woke up early and traced his commute towards the government building where he worked as City Attorney. When he left the building at six thirty, I stuck to best practices and kept one car between us.

Our client called me Tuesday evening. After her husband left for work, while she was out training with her cycling group, somebody had broken into her home and ransacked her husband’s office, his nightstand, and his closet, but to her eye, nothing valuable was missing. Whoever they were, they didn’t bother cleaning up or hiding their trail. I added my supervisor to the call and he advised that our client call the police, but once again, she wouldn’t risk ruining his reputation until she understood what was going on.

On Thursday, I showed up before my target and pretended to be busy with my phone on the long wooden bench beside the lobby’s gray switchback staircase. The husband arrived, and after he made his way up the first flight of stairs, I followed him. I kept my distance as he turned into a hallway with a faded blue carpet and doors on either side. When he reached his office and inserted his key, I passed him and stepped into the men’s room where, according to his wife, he would soon spend a serious amount of time. He came in minutes after and entered the stall furthest from mine.

The moment his gray pants and black belt lowered to his ankles, I left my stall, ran the water, and hurried to his office. I opened his door and stepped into a tidy mess of binders, beige file folders, and papers both loose and stapled, stacked into leaning towers, bejeweled with paper clips and post-it-notes, and supported by bookshelves and walls. Past the chair floating in the center of the blue carpet, through the clutter and around his black desk I found a jumble of papers. I raised my phone and took a picture of each page. His monitor was on and I took a photo of each open window before trying to open his desk drawers, but they were locked, so I turned my attention back to his screen and opened his email Sent folder.

There were footsteps outside the door. I held my breath and stiffened, praying it was somebody else just passing by, preparing to be discovered, debating whether to shoulder past them and run to my car or apologize for accidentally entering the wrong room. The second option felt safer, but it was susceptible to follow-up questions I couldn’t hope to answer. Why was I behind the desk? Which office did I think I was in? Did I work there, and if so, what was my name and title? Where was my ID? Did they even wear IDs? I crept up to the entrance, closed my eyes, and listened, but the only thing I could hear was the pounding of my own heart. After another breathe, I turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped out without checking if anyone saw me. I wasn’t brave enough to look back until I reached the corner. Nobody was there. When I returned to my car, I reviewed the photos I had taken in the City Attorney’s office; I would soon learn that this act condemned me to my seat at the table in that dim, subterranean chamber.

From this point forward, I can no longer guarantee your safety. I will try to spare you the more malignant specifics that pushed my exposure over the threshold. Do not go searching for identifying information; if by accident you come across it, have a drink and forget. It is hazardous to dwell on these matters.

From the desk: correspondence from a commercial landlord regarding a zoning violation; a memo warning the City Attorney about the optics of awarding a no-bid contract for road and sidewalk repairs; and a letter from the mayor’s office demanding that the City Attorney return his calls, answer his emails, obtain proper approval from the Department of Transportation before green-lighting the road and sidewalk repairs. From his computer: a drycleaning delivery company’s confirmation of account cancellation; an email chain with the Department of Transportation’s director in which the City Attorney argued that the cost and impact reports were, contrary to the official determination, compliant; a web browser search for reliable knives that could be concealed; and the account summary screen for a credit card opened in his wife’s name.

When Sunday came again, I arrived at the hotel early and waited inside a dark room with a view of the empty lobby. I took off my shoes and stretched a thick pair of black socks over them before putting them back on – a trick I learned from a detective novel. The first to arrive were a pair of stocky twins with shaved heads and full beards, followed by a lanky man with combed blond hair. Then the old man I now recognize as the president entered alongside the woman with puffy hair and her many shawls. Next, a short handsome guy, then a taller handsomer guy in suit pants, a button-down shirt, and black Oxford shoes. When the City Attorney walked in, he passed through the lobby and turned left just like the others before him. I crept after him on custard-colored tiles, past scuffed elevator doors, bathrooms, and an empty convenience store with nobody behind the counter. I kept too much distance and lost my target right before the restaurant with a Closed for Repairs sign. I ducked into the deserted restaurant and waited by the door. Luckily, the City Attorney wasn’t the last attendee, and I managed to slip behind a man so forgettable that, to this day, I can never remember he exists unless I’m looking directly at him. I kept just enough space to catch sight of a large wooden door shutting. The plaque to its left read “Pomegranate Room”.

I placed my ear against the door but didn’t hear a thing. I couldn’t be sure how many more would come, so I went around the corner and hid. The door opened twice more in the next ten minutes. Whatever it is this odd assembly did in the Pomegranate Room, they did it for an hour and a half before the door opened again. I only glanced around the corner the first time – I saw three people leaving and could have sworn that one of them saw me, but she didn’t say anything. The door opened three more times. I didn’t risk a peek.

Ten minutes passed, then twenty. With slick palms, I grabbed the large bronze door handle and pulled it open just a little. Confirming that nobody was there, I entered in a swift motion and let the door shut behind me. I was inside a clean, open space the size of a small ballroom. Aside from an elevator at the far end and strange raised curtains that could descend and hide that elevator away from the doorway’s line of sight, the room was bare. I opened my camera application, snapped a few photos of the suspicious curtains, and approached the elevator.

Was it by chance that I chose to descend into this empty hotel’s chilly concrete basement? Leadership would say that for us, there is no more chance. For the afflicted, every tumbling die settles onto your worst possible number. I might have been more cautious. I might have asked myself why a dinged-up elevator with a keyhole but no key would just open for me when I approached it. Having stepped in, I might have noticed that the interior didn’t have any buttons and exited before the doors scraped shut. After a shaky descent, when the doors opened in uneven jerks, the president and the old woman were sitting at opposite ends of the conference table waiting for me. They knew who I was, what I did, the target of my investigation, and who it was that hired our agency. They apologized for failing to intervene earlier, but by taking photos and then reviewing the City Attorney’s papers and monitor, I’d crossed the threshold. Whether I liked it or not, I was already one of them.

You’re right to suspect that I’ve been avoiding the issue. It’s a delicate matter, because the more I explain the nature of this thing, the more likely I am to sabotage our group’s mission by exposing you. However, having read this far, you’re bound to wonder what it is that we’re protecting you from, and fixating on that question is lethal.

We call it the Influence. The less you know about it, the longer you have. Don’t linger on the questions that naturally arise. Don’t investigate what lies at the core, at the epicenter of this thing. Understanding is poison, and specificity is an accelerant towards death. All you have to know is that once you’ve crossed threshold exposure, every facet of your life will degrade. Your body and health will fail. Your looks will suffer. Your relationships with family and friends will come apart. Your career will fizzle and your bank accounts will drain. Everything that makes life worth living will fade away until you do too. The president likens it to radiation poisoning, but instead of ionizing particles shredding you at the cellular level like subatomic shrapnel, it’s more akin to acutely toxic knowledge melting away at your well-being. Infection doesn’t have to be direct. Under the proper conditions, even incidental learning about something close enough to the source will do it.

In my case, it was the correspondence about the road and sidewalk repairs, the names of the parties involved, and crucially, one specific address listed in the email description of the impact report. I’ll spare you that particular contaminant. In a different setting, under different circumstances, reading that street address wouldn’t have been enough, but seeing it in connection with the government dispute over road repairs, in the context of my investigation of the afflicted City Attorney, together with my knowledge of the hotel at which this strange group assembles every Sunday tangled me in. I was one of them. My Sunday evening attendance in the empty hotel’s concrete basement was compulsory, but the president assured me this was for my own good. They would teach me to slow my deterioration, prolong what remained of my life, and avoid contaminating others.

I didn’t immediately believe the president and the old woman, not about their vague horror nor its tightening squeeze into everything I cared for. The concept was eerie, but I had no intention of returning to that underground room, not until I got back to my car, opened the driver’s side door, and found the passenger seat littered with a week’s worth of Polaroid photos taken of me in my sleep.

At the instruction of Leadership, I told my client that I couldn’t find anything about her husband outside of the arrest reports I had already disclosed. And where did he go on Sunday nights? And how about the credit cards opened in her name? I deflected; Leadership hadn’t provided me with convenient lies. She called my supervisor, who then called me into his office to scold me: I failed to close a simple investigation, I mishandled the client and her expectations, and I was behind on my filing duties for the other investigators. Because of these factors, I would not be advancing beyond the agency’s probationary period. And what could I say in my defense? That I had been threatened by two visibly-ill seniors in an improbable, strangely-lit basement that stretched our shadows all wrong? That they claimed to be protecting that very supervisor, our client, you, and everyone else from a conceptual terror that, at the time, I barely understood, and even if I had understood, I couldn’t allude to it without spreading the contagion and undermining this group’s efforts? Of course not. I suppressed my urge to defend myself and thanked him for the opportunity. I walked to my cubicle and collected my coffee mug and the ergonomic mouse and keyboard set that my oldest sister gifted me as congratulations for getting this job. On the drive home, halfway through a left turn, while my blinkers were on, I was blind-sided by a pick-up truck that ran a red light and smashed into my front passenger-side door.

The concussion was mild. My broken forearm and dislocated shoulder remain in a sling; I’ve applied for unemployment and disability with my left hand. The medical bills hurt worse than the collision. My debts accumulate fast and I’m experimenting with strategic nonpayment where possible. Because the guilty driver was uninsured, the lawyer I hired to sue her is pressuring me to accept a settlement that won’t even make a dent. The president, the old woman, and their assignments occupy my days, the herniated discs in my neck and mid-spine keep me awake at nights, and the more that day and night become one contiguous line, the more that an ambient uneasiness creeps into my uninterrupted waking hours so that it’s hard to know which moments are being poisoned by leaking nightmares and which are just corroding under the Influence.

The Influence soaks everything. After a few sessions around that conference table, having listened to account after account of accumulating misfortune for those in attendance and their loved ones, I cut off all contact with my friends and family; I am a vector for a disease that is beyond my comprehension. This group I’ve been forced to join schemes in the basement to protect others from our affliction, to slow both the spread of the psychic contagion and our own deterioration, but sometimes it seems like the only members with any stability of circumstance are the president, the old lady, and a few of their favorites.

Leadership’s big initiative is the “road repair” project of which I learned in the City Attorney’s papers and emails. The goal is to secure its approval from the City Department of Transportation and award the contract to the company of a man who sits along our conference table. His crew will break the street, demolish the sidewalks, and place caution signs, barricades and all manner of obstructions to close off most paths to the epicenter of the Influence. After making the mess impenetrable to vehicles, the crew will stall and fail and overdo and undo and redo and re-break and re-draw and unfill and refill and keep it going as long as they can. The goal is to create a quarantine around that wretched address. While this won’t stop contamination entirely, Leadership believes it will significantly reduce new cases.

However, there are people working against us. Leadership calls them Collaborationists, a group of cowards who would expose you to the Influence in the hopes that this nightmare will value them like a tiger values a zookeeper who feeds it expired steak. The Collaborationists imagine themselves to be trading nourishment to the Influence for a slowing of their own decay. The president assures us this plan is folly, that Collaborationists attribute too much animal agency to this phenomenon and misunderstand it on a conceptual level, but there’s no denying their determination.

It was the Collaborationists who broke into the City Attorney’s home, and they found exactly what they were looking for. Their ultimatum: either the City Attorney sabotage the road demolition project or they would produce evidence of his stake in an “independent” security firm that the city pays three hundred thousand-dollars a year to. Leadership instructed him to persevere, but instead he vanished. Once again, I was tasked with tracking him. This time I couldn’t find a trace.

Blackmail and threats fly in all directions. My limited skillset as an apprentice private investigator is put to the group’s purposes against both Collaborationists and government employees obstructing our quarantine initiative. We are in the process of recruiting a deputy director in the Department of Transportation to speed our project’s approval along. I am sickened that my efforts will result in the curated exposure of a woman who otherwise wouldn’t have been exposed. I am unconvinced by Leadership’s assurance that this one intentional contamination will help prevent the contamination of many others, but I don’t have the energy to argue. There’s too much work being done by too few of us, forcing that thing we must not think about to the forefront of our thoughts, increasing our own levels of contamination. Three in our assembly have succumbed to the Influence since I was inducted. Meanwhile Leadership and their favorites maintain their health by doing relatively little.

I suspect that our isolation play will fail. Whatever it is, the Influence is too absolute to be contained by our little group. The United States government is aware of it, but only obliquely. Those in charge know just enough to learn as little as possible, so they’ve sent a dapper representative on a slow suicide mission. I don’t know who he is or which agency he’s with, but the taller handsome man who wears pressed button-down shirts and sits to the president’s right is from some US Department of Plausible Deniability. If he isn’t part of Leadership, then he’s one of their favorites.

Progress on approving the road demolition isn’t fast enough. My injuries aren’t healing. I don’t sleep. I’ve developed flu-like symptoms that won’t go away. I’m isolated. I’m running out of savings, the settlement my lawyer is forcing on me won’t even cover a month of expenses, and I’m too occupied to find a job. Leadership is working me beyond my limits, furthering my contamination and offering nothing in return. The president’s statements of appreciation are less than helpful, but they’re preferable to his drawn handkerchief, cleared throat, and roundabout threats; I suspect that one of the three who have succumbed since my induction were eliminated on the orders of Leadership.

The president cautions everyone against trying to destroy the Influence. He claims it’s impossible, and beyond that, the level of fixation required to even make the attempt would shorten and worsen our lives, but, how much worse can my life get? My exposure is astronomical, even the old lady says so. She says I have to practice mindfulness, to think about the Influence less, but how can I think about it less when her and the president keep me working on it all day? Mostly, I try to evade her notice, but it’s difficult to escape the spies sitting to her left who keep her appraised of everyone’s condition.

Considering the impossibility of my circumstances, I’ve made a decision. I will extinguish the Influence at its source, at the street address of the epicenter of the thing. I don’t know what I’ll find there, not in any tangible sense. Maybe it’s an ancient Native American burial site or a graven image etched into a foundation, a cursed rose or a shriveled old hag with an unthinkable shadow, a haunted house or a video tape that kills you in seven days, an empty Scythian urn or a strand of cosmic lint pulsating with an unmeasurable force of psychic rot, the devil himself or his lieutenant or an uncatalogued quantum pathogen. I don’t know what the Influence is, but if it has a physical location in our material world, it can be destroyed, right? I pray that I’m right.

Over these past few days, I’ve completed my preparations in the invisible hours of the deep night when the old woman’s spies are asleep. I’ve practiced siphoning gas from my car into a hose with a spray nozzle that I purchased with cash at Home Depot. On top of my full tank, I’ve bought fifteen gallons of additional gasoline along with jugs of butane and many types of matches and lighters. I’ve studied the route between my apartment and the wretched address so that I can make the drive without a map or GPS. At four in the morning tomorrow, I will burn everything there to ashes. I will incinerate the vague horror and release myself from its hideous grip.

If I fail, Leadership will not forgive me for the attempt. I will be disposed of and replaced, but hopefully not by you. I’ve been careful to avoid any specifics to minimize your exposure, but there’s no exact science to this. It may already be too much. If it is, you may be required to attend a Sunday meeting in a chilly concrete basement beneath a deserted hotel. You may even be assigned to the cheap black office chair in which I sat and watched as the feeble light from the standing lamps stretched my shadow into something frail and terrible.