“Yes, in part. It is the driver, but it is not the engine. The goal of my original experiment was to capture one of these nightmare feeders and find a way to magnify its strength.”

“Your goal was to make the boogieman stronger?” Mosh was incredulous. “Are you nuts?”

“Shhh.” Holly put her hand on his arm. “The boogieman is different.”

The doctor sighed. “I will try to keep it simple for our sideshow freak.”

“Now that’s just unnecessary—”

“The alp, or nightmare feeder as it is colloquially known, hails from another…plane. It is a sort of nightmare world that only rarely connects with our own, and when it does, it barely registers in the human subconscious. My doctoral research documented the creatures, and we even succeeded in capturing one for study. Though fascinating, it was relatively weak, hardly dangerous at all. Our worst side effects were discomforting dreams and headaches. After the war began, we were invited to continue our work at Los Alamos, where we succeed in capturing several more alps. One of the other projects came up with a way to magnify the alp’s strength through exposure to…Never mind. I could talk for days about the details. What matters is we made the alps far more capable. Now the test targets were overwhelmed with nightmare stimuli, even while awake. It was astounding. Imagine, ending a war simply because the enemy populace was too terrified and distressed to continue fighting…”

“You tried to enslave otherworldy creatures to use as a weapon.” Holly spat. “Gee whiz, I’m shocked that didn’t work out.”

That offended him. “I was trying to save lives, young lady. My project was considered a psychological weapon rather than a destructive one. You have no idea how desperate we were. Nothing was off the table. My compatriots were a diverse group, ranging from the keenest scientific minds to the strangest masters of the occult. Compared to the other projects that were being contemplated at the time, mine was one of the least lethal. We were trying to use imaginary horrors to prevent real horrors. We had no choice. The things that the other side were dabbling in were just as terrible or worse. The alp itself, even after being augmented, is an unfocused, erratic—”

“Evil,” Holly supplied.

“Misunderstood being. Alps are not intelligent enough to be capable of esoteric concepts like good or evil. They are little more than cunning animals that feed on psychic distress. Ours were more capable, but still a far more pleasant alternative than dropping an Elder Thing on Berlin. We had a weapon, but no way to control it, no way to aim it. We needed a delivery system. But what if we could give the alp a controller? My research suggested that we could bond the creature to a human controller, sort of like how they bonded to a dreamer naturally while they fed, but a more complete, synergistic bonding. We found volunteers, young soldiers who fit certain psychological and intellectual criteria, and who were also physically and culturally capable of blending into the target populations. The first bonding procedures worked fine. Early testing demonstrated we would be able to break the connections and release the alps from their human hosts when the war was over. It seemed to be a smashing success, only we didn’t realize what would happen when Project Thirteen went off the rails.”