The Strange Case of idHide

The glow of a computer screen hung on the furrowed brow of an investigator too deeply ensnared in a recent series of crimes. Dark eyes scanned an ominous message sent to him just after midnight. Just when he’d normally resign to bed to continue his sleepless wondering, the notification begged him to stay. Regaled him the truth about the monster of Massachusetts.

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I know what I have done, and I see now that it was, and is, wholly unethical. A scientific fumble born of a debauched hunger, the likes of which should never reach the grasp of another scientist. Really, another human at all. I’m writing to you, Detective, because someone must know the truth of what I’ve done.

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With a sudden jolt to his feet, Marcus Seek abandoned his computer to rummage through his home like a twister. He haphazardly dressed into uniform, slung on a long coat for the chilly bite of a late night in wintry Massachusetts, and headed for the door. With his phone in hand, he contacted another detective.

“Jacobson, get your ass up. I’ve got a tip about idHide.”

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The warmth of the Tacoma welcomed detective Jacobson, who hurried into the passenger seat with steaming breath from the soft dusting of snow that was beginning to fall from the blackened night sky.

“What’d you find?” Jacobson said, gloved hands rubbing together furiously as the pickup truck rumbled into motion.

“Hard to say.” Seek’s Bostonian accent strong as he cast a glance to his paler companion. Jacobson was a newer transplant to the New England area- and its unforgiving winters. “S’like I got a letter from a madman.”

With a press of his thumb to his phone screen, other hand still on the wheel, Seek unlocked his phone and slid it across the center console. Jacobson didn’t hesitate, scrolling through the message while reading it under his breath.

“It started with…”

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It started with my termination from NIMH. I had become incredibly involved in the search for methamphetamine alternatives for the treatment of ADHD. I’d been part of a team that had discovered a new drug class- a type of chemical neuromodulator that simulated the same focus-enhancing effects as a stimulant drug and electrical treatments, without the hazards of either. A non-addictive substance with a safe cardiac profile. Of course, it didn’t make it to human testing. Not even animal testing. There was just so much more to discover.

So, when I lost my job due to federal funding cuts, I decided to pursue the answers and solutions on my own. I moved out here with full intent to singlehandedly finish what we had started.

For months now, I’ve been working on a drug I would’ve called Libercitare. It was meant to free those with ADHD from the confines of their diagnosis, allowing them to find cognitive sharpness and thorough, rounded thinking without a significant crash.

But what I actually created in this lab, Detective… I created something far worse.

I let my ambitions go too far. And with my ambitions, the unbridled rage and disgust I had yet to resolve from being laid off from the career of my dreams…

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The Tacoma pulled through a circular driveway and came to a stop just in front of the home. It was a simple, spacious pale neutral home with black shutters. The snow had begun to cling to black rooftiles and empty windowsills, and speckled wet spots over the cobbled walkway to the front door.

The two men approached with Seek leading in broad strides. Jacobson hurriedly followed in the other man’s shadow with hands tucked into his coat and shoulders bristled.

“Police, open up.” Seek announced after banging his fist against the glossy sable door. No reply. Just the sound of Jacobson shuffling behind him to keep warm.

“Open up, Chicopee Police Department.” Somehow, he’d made his voice even louder- a gruff disturbance to the delicate snowfall and silent winter’s night. He rapped his fist against the door again, each strike more demanding than the last.

No answer.

“That note, it sounded like a-“ Jacobson began, only to be cut off.

“I know what it sounded like. You ready?” Seek began backpedaling away from the door. Jacobson stepped forward, sizing up how to break the door down.

Seek, before getting too far gone, sent out a quick request for backup before moving to the nearest window. Just as Jacobson prepared to act, the shrill shattering of glass echoed from Seek’s direction. He’d elbowed out the window and was carefully sweeping out the glass fragments.

“Think smarter, not harder.”

Seek helped Jacobson into the home, the silence now broken by an alarm system. The warning continued until Seek was let in the front door by his partner and alerted the security company of their presence.

The silence, once returned, was far more bitter than before. The sound of boots on hardwood and breathing felt as if magnified by a megaphone in this empty place. Sparse furnishings kept the home from being completely empty, and it was unnaturally clean. It looked more like a house from a magazine than somewhere someone had been living in. There didn’t seem to be pets, or guests, or any life here. Seek drew his firearm and clutched it with arms outstretched.

What had led them here, this goose chase, was a string of assaults that had turned into serial murders. A child, at first, battered by what she’d described as a monster. Another, a man who’d bumped aimlessly into someone on the street, only to be bludgeoned within an inch of his life in a matter of seconds. And it only got more bizarre as it went. An untraceable murderer, leaving crumbs online under the username “idHide.”

And now they were here- the home of a scientist who was known by his community as an awkward, sweet gentleman. All connected by a strange email which read like a suicide note written on psychotropics.

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At first, I tried to conduct animal testing in my small laboratory. The guinea pigs responded extraordinarily. They were able to respond to tasks with precision and efficacy, the likes of which I’d never seen. They were unhindered by distractions altogether, displaying quick understanding of- and acquisition of- any motivators in testing. They always found the food at the end of the maze; solved puzzles quickly for rare treats. It seemed well enough, with only one documented account of abnormal behavior when they returned to an enclosure altogether and began to show aggression towards one another.

Getting human testing done though, that’s a different issue. I can’t ethically source volunteers and monitor them myself. There’s the whole legality front with ethical experimentation and trying to maintain a control group versus an experimental group. You surely know the conclusion I came to.

I decided to be the first human trial for Libercitare.

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Seek and Jacobson swept the kitchen, then upstairs through several mostly empty rooms. The only sign of life existed in the master bedroom where the sheets were lazily folded over the mattress. Back downstairs, they both felt the growing tension.

“This ain't good...” Seek mumbled, hearing the very faint song of sirens against the eerie pin-drop silence. Turning a corner past the kitchen, he noticed a fated door with several locks. Seek undid one after the other, until he’d unlocked a total of five various mechanisms on the door. When he opened it, an obvious bright, medicinal fluorescence made itself known at the bottom of the metal stairs.

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What came over me, I didn’t understand. It was as if that which is innately human yet wicked had grown. An ivy slithered up through the cracks of my polished nature. A wildness I had never truly explored, now a thing of its own. A being with its own volition and voice. I know now it was me, but at once it was not.

I became another man. One who was a brute. A juggernaut. A villain in the very essence of the word. He was all the depravity I had coddled deep down inside and kept swept beneath, unleashed with a hundred-fold the ferocity. For a night, I was him and he was I. He moved through the city, with my very cells now commanded as his own.

And I know only of what he did by his own confession to me, by some schizoaffective echo- some inexplicable haunting of my own creation. That, and the news confirming what horrific actions he’d undertaken. And he’d claimed them too. Every single time he gained control, he gleefully confessed his crimes to millions of strangers.

He wrote of them anonymously online under the name, idHide.

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The basement was the laboratory. Just as it was written. Except instead of pristine and flawlessly clean like the rest of the house, it was in great disarray. Busted beakers on the floors and hairless guinea pigs running around from toppled, bent and broken cages. On a large center island stood a centrifuge filled with multiple vials- many of which were now empty. A few had a lackluster periwinkle concoction still lingering within, and strewn across the counter was one vial broken open forcefully with a much more virulent, bright blue liquid clinging scarcely to the fragments.

Seek steadied the gun as he turned, and by now Jacobson had also drawn his service pistol. The two looked around slowly, observing the chaos of everything around them.

On the walls, corkboard was littered with pins and threads and pictures and letters. Many, notably, were of recent homicide victims. The victims that Seek and Jacobson had been looking to provide justice for. Elsewhere, dinged whiteboards beheld erratically scrawled dry-erase formulas and depictions of neurotransmitters.

It was, in truth, the evidence to match the confession of a madman Seek had been sent. And as they maneuvered carefully around the large center island, Seek froze and shifted his gun, seeing the partial sight of a single man’s shoe haplessly out of place- the shoestrings broken and frayed as if something had exploded out of it with force unbeknownst to men.

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Hide has done bad things. I’ve done bad things, I should say. It is my id, if you indulge in Freudian philosophy, that has been unleashed. The first taste was desirous; a lavish lustful thing I had to try twice. After all, I’m a scientist, and I had to refine and test my work again. My flaw was embedded in the fact that, by giving my id its own power in my scientific exploration, I was no longer testing a drug. I was harboring a fugitive within my own skin- one who would inevitably begin vying for his own escape.

I am writing you to say this, Detective.

I no longer wish to harbor this fugitive. And I fear I am running out of time. He grows in strength. He was once an echo, but now he is a roar. A tornado’s train-wreck siren I can’t silence. Hide thirsts for violence, for sin, for vices plentiful and wide without a care of how it affects others. Humanity is not a term he would ever understand. What I am talking about, Detective, is an insatiable evil.

My devil has been long caged. Soon, I fear, he shall know no such bars or binds. I cannot create a cure fast enough, and I cannot forgive myself the harm already done. Much less can I stomach the knowledge of pain and suffering to come if I allow idHide to continue.

If you are reading this, Detective Seek, it is because I am perishing. One way or another, tonight. Either I will succeed in ending my and his life together, or he shall awaken, never to sleep again. I asked my neighbor to lock up the house for me- including the basement, where I am currently.

Come find us, Detective. And I pray, when you do, that my death marks the end of this rampage.

- Dr. J. E. Kyll

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Step by step, the two detectives rounded the island with guns focused on what lay in wait. The sirens had neared the house, and police cars could be heard pulling into the circular driveway above.

“Is that-“ Jacobson began, with astonishment lifting his whispered tone.

Seek laid his eyes upon the body of what may’ve once been Dr. Kyll. It looked to be a scientist’s outfit, after all. A white lab coat over burgundy scrubs, a set of broken spectacles nearby. But the clothes were torn. Threads ripped savagely by a forceful pressure from outgrowing them all too quickly. A grey-pink flesh shone between every rip and tear, lined with thick, sprawling veins and heaps of lumping, motionless muscle. The hands of the creature were large enough to singlehandedly cradle a human head and perhaps crush it, with fingertips like hammer heads. Along its back, a stretching ridge of spinal vertebrae led up to a swollen, thick neck. Atop it, a head tufted with a mess of black curls matted down to the scalp. Even along the neck and scalp, the vasculature was pronounced with blueish tinges that matched the color of the stilled lips. Half-lidded eyes partially bulged from their orbits in a grotesque display, pupils dilated and hazy.

Carefully, Seek crouched next to the creature known as Hide, and extended a hand. Two fingers stuck out, gently brushing against the neck of the beast. At first, Seek felt the curve of the jaw. Then, he followed it down into a crevice where the carotid should be. With pressure, he waited in silence.

After ten seconds had passed, he drew his hand back with a sigh, nodding.

“It’s our… culprit.” Seek said after a long, unsure pause. “Dr. Kyll. But also, it’s the beast behind the username idHide.”

The sound of boots echoed through the house. Jacobson called out, and their fellow CPD officers joined them.

Each officer that entered joined an awestruck circle around the creature. After what felt like an eternity, Seek finally dismissed himself from the group. As he went, firearm returned to its holster, he gave more and more attention to the walls and their memoirs of a madman. He recounted each victim of his case- those that were alive and the many that weren’t. Counted them down like minutes to midnight, mentally marking off every single one. When he’d reached the stairs, he looked back to the huddle of police breaking out of their dazed disbelief to begin processing the crime scene.

Just like that, the long hunt for the monster of Massachusetts had come to an end.