JUPITER METEOR NGUYEN — INTERNSHIP FIELD REPORT

The Memory Gate at 100 W. 2nd St.

Roosevelt County Courthouse · Portales , NEW MEXICO · 2026-10-20
Black-and-white recreation of the historic location
Roosevelt County Courthouse and Jail, 100 W.

The Memory Gate at 100 W. 2nd St.

Roosevelt County Courthouse & Jail, Portales, New Mexico Weird Little Server Daily Report — Entry #???

The courthouse wasn’t built on the land. It was filed into it.

Mr. Davenport read on the internet about a “strings phenomenon” happening at the Roosevelt County Courthouse in Portales. I didn’t ask which forum. We drove from Florida in the van, and Cletus spent most of the trip with her head out the window, jowls flapping in the crosswind. My left forearm, cut from a snapped cable at the last job, ached the whole way. I fiddled with the GPS and tried not to complain about the humidity we’d left behind.

We pulled into Portales in the late afternoon. The courthouse occupies the entire block of the Original Townsite plat, a four-story rectangle of buff brick and poured concrete. Its pyramid-like massing and Art Deco details—Zia motifs in the spandrels, a cast stone bas relief of horsemen beneath a frontispiece—make it a civic anchor in the middle of a town square. It was built between 1938 and 1939 with a Public Works Administration grant and a county bond issue, designed by architect Robert E. Merrell. The southeast-facing principal entrance is reached by a symmetrical curvilinear staircase. The air was still. The golden-hour light made the brick look like warm sand.

JOE Place looks like it was stamped, not built. Like a form somebody filled out.

JUPITER It’s Art Deco, Mr. Davenport. It’s supposed to look geometric.

JOE I know what Art Deco is. I read about that, too. This is different. It’s like the building’s waiting for something to be filed.

I stood at the base of the staircase, calibrating the laser rangefinder. Joe leaned against the van, flipping through his notebook. Cletus lay in the shade near the wheel well, panting. I logged the GPS coordinates and the ambient temperature. Joe muttered something about “temporal strings” from a Time-Life book.

JOE They said sometimes a place gets… sticky. Like it’s holding onto a moment that didn’t finish happening.

JUPITER Who’s “they”?

JOE The book. The one with the picture of the fog coming out of the ground in Scotland. It’s a documented thing.

Cletus lifted her head, sniffed the air, and dropped back down with a sigh. In my peripheral vision, the Zia motifs on the spandrels seemed to shimmer. I blinked, and they were just brick again.

JUPITER We should go inside before dusk. The light’s going to cut our visibility.

Joe nodded, slapping his notebook shut. Cletus rose and trotted after us as we headed for the glass-encased vestibule added in the mid-1990s on the northwest side. It replaced an exterior metal staircase, providing handicapped access to the elevator.

The interior central hall was cool and quiet, with grey marble walls and terrazzo floors. A five-color map of Roosevelt County, made from marble chips, was embedded in the floor near the center. Dusk was settling; the overhead fluorescent lights flickered on with a low buzz.

I walked the perimeter, setting up the laser grid to measure spatial consistency. Joe trailed behind, running a hand over the terrazzo, then crouching to examine the marble map. He pulled out his notebook and started sketching.

JOE See how the county lines are laid out? It’s like a diagram. Not a picture.

JUPITER It’s a map, Mr. Davenport. That’s what maps are.

JOE Yeah, but this one feels… filed. Like it’s part of the paperwork.

Cletus wandered over, sniffed the marble map intently, then circled it twice before lying down directly on top of Roosevelt County. Her belly pressed against the colored chips.

A small, localized curl of infernal smoke—sulfur and burnt velvet—puffed into existence near the van’s wheel well, just inside the open vestibule door. From it stepped Beelzebubba the Third, two and a half feet of lanky, sharp-grinned showman in a shabby striped suit and a feathered hat. Cletus immediately lifted her head and stared.

BEELZEBUBBA Ah. The filing clerk arrives. And she brings her hound. How terribly administrative.

I froze, the laser grid in my hand emitting a low whine. The grid’s lines flickered and died. Beneath Cletus, the marble map pulsed once, a faint glow that vanished as quickly as it came.

JUPITER What… who are you?

BEELZEBUBBA Beelzebubba the Third, at your service. Or rather, at the service of the file. We’ve been expecting your notation, Meteor.

He knew my name. My full name. Cletus pushed herself up and padded over to him, sniffing his pointed, curled shoe. Beelzebubba looked down, affronted.

BEELZEBUBBA Madam, personal space is a concept. Acquaint yourself with it.

Joe turned toward me, his brow furrowed. He saw Cletus sniffing empty air about a foot off the ground.

JOE What’s got into her? She find a bug?

JUPITER It’s not a bug.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the imp. Joe saw only Cletus and my alarmed expression.

JOE You okay? You look like you saw a… well, you know.

BEELZEBUBBA He cannot perceive me. A tragic limitation of his filing status. He’s all cover sheet, no appendix.

The laser grid unit in my hand gave a final crackle and went dark. I dropped it. The sound made Joe jump.

JOE Whoa. Equipment failure. That’s a data point.

BEELZEBUBBA Not a failure. A correction. The grid was measuring negotiation, not space. A common error.

Joe walked over, picking up the dead grid. He shook it.

JOE Battery’s fine. Must be interference. Maybe the old jail bars on the third floor—tool proof steel, that could mess with signals.

JUPITER Tool proof bars wouldn’t kill a laser, Mr. Davenport.

BEELZEBUBBA He’s not wrong about the jail. It’s where they kept the unfiled. Quite drafty.

Cletus planted a paw directly on Beelzebubba’s shoe. He recoiled with a hiss of smoke.

BEELZEBUBBA Unhand the footwear, you ambulatory affidavit.

I took a step back. My forearm throbbed.

JUPITER What do you want?

BEELZEBUBba Want? I don’t want. I observe. And currently, I observe that the gate is cycling. The memory is requesting its address. You’re standing in the return queue.

He vanished in another puff of smoke, leaving behind the scent of ozone and old paper. Cletus sniffed the empty spot on the floor.

Joe was staring at me, holding the dead laser grid.

JOE You were talking to nothing. And your arm’s bleeding.

I looked down. The old cut on my forearm had reopened, a thin line of blood welling up without any fresh trauma. I pressed my sleeve against it.

JUPITER It’s nothing. Let’s check the exterior. The compass was acting up earlier.

Night had fallen. The artificial lights around the building cast long, sharp shadows. I knelt by the northwest vestibule, adjusting the digital compass. Joe stood by the van, checking the battery terminals. Cletus stood at the edge of the parking lot, nose to the earth, utterly still.

JOE Battery’s fine. Connections are clean.

JUPITER My compass isn’t.

The display showed the needle locked, pointing straight down into the ground. Not south. Down.

Beelzebubba reappeared, leaning casually against the van’s front fender near the wheel well, one ankle crossed over the other.

BEELZEBUBBA Down is the only direction left. The file has been sinking for quite some time.

The van’s headlights flared on by themselves. The engine didn’t turn over; there was no sound. Just the twin beams cutting through the darkness, illuminating the bare earth of the parking lot.

JOE What the hell? Van’s on its own again.

He walked toward the driver’s side door. Cletus didn’t move from her spot, but her eyes tracked Beelzebubba.

BEELZEBUBBA It’s not on its own. It’s for its own. There’s a destination. A very old one.

A low hum began, vibrating up through the soles of my shoes. Three Hertz. A sub-pulse, felt more than heard. The ground seemed to soften.

JUPITER Mr. Davenport, step back.

JOE It’s a resonance! Like the book said—structural memory! The foundation’s singing!

The hum rose in pitch. The buff brick facade of the courthouse began to tilt. Not collapse. It tilted, as if the entire four-story block were a page being lifted at one corner. The Zia motifs in the spandrels distorted, their symmetrical rays stretching into alien, non-closing glyphs. The cast stone bas relief of horsemen and an Indian guide seemed to flow, the figures turning their heads toward us.

BEELZEBUBBA Ah. The retrieval. Watch closely, Meteor. This is how a place remembers it was built on a diagram.

The ground beneath the foundation—the entire city block—peeled back. It didn’t crack or crumble. It folded open, like the cover of a massive ledger, revealing a cavity beneath. But not a hole. A non-Euclidean space, at least three hundred feet deep, walls of raw, glossy black stone meeting at angles that made my eyes water. Submerged within it were ruins—tilted towers, archways that led into ceilings, stairways that spiraled into voids. The geometry was wrong. It was a drowned city, but not one made by human hands. It was green-black and glossy, and its windows were just windows, but taller than any building should allow.

The Drowned Cities and Their Wrong Angles.

The van’s engine roared to life, still in park. The headlights brightened, projecting a solid beam not of light, but of path, a ramp of condensed air that led from the wheel well down into the cavity.

Cletus, who had been staring at Beelzebubba, turned her head toward the wheel well. She didn’t bark. She didn’t whine. She took one step, then two, toward that illuminated path.

JOE Cletus! No!

He lunged for her. The ground lurched. The staircases on the courthouse facade—the beautiful, symmetrical curvilinear staircases—unspooled, their steps spiraling away into the void like ribbons.

Cletus reached the wheel well. She didn’t jump. She was drawn in, her body sliding smoothly into the space where the tire should be, as if it were an open doorway. She vanished.

The beam from the headlights snapped off. The engine cut.

The cavity collapsed inward with a sound like a thousand pages being slammed shut in a giant binder. The courthouse snapped back into its proper geometry. The brick was just brick. The Zia motifs were just motifs. The ground was solid asphalt.

Silence.

Joe was on his hands and knees where Cletus had been. I stood frozen, the compass still in my hand, its needle pointing rigidly down. My forearm bled freely now, soaking through my sleeve.

Beelzebubba stood where he had been, untouched. He brushed a speck of dust from his lapel.

BEELZEBUBBA The filing’s finally taking. Pity about the hound. She was an excellent witness.

He tipped his feathered hat to me, gave a sharp, theatrical bow, and vanished in his signature puff of smoke.

Joe stood up slowly. His face was pale. He looked at the van, then at the perfectly normal courthouse, then at me.

JOE Where did she go?

JUPITER I don’t know.

He walked to his notebook, which lay open on the hood of the van. He’d been trying to write in it when the event began. Every line, every margin, was now filled with the same phrase, written in his own handwriting: Disposition: Not Filed.

I pulled out my phone to check the time. The screen was locked. The digital timestamp read, and continued to read: 1885-04-17.

We searched for an hour. Called her name. Shook the treat bag. There was no sign of Cletus, no prints, no fur, nothing. The van was just a van. The courthouse was just a courthouse, its Art Deco details sharp under the streetlights. The glass vestibule reflected our own exhausted faces.

Joe finally stopped, leaning against the van. He wasn’t crying. He just looked hollow.

JOE This building isn’t a courthouse.

JUPITER What is it?

JOE It’s a procedural archive that never completed its filing cycle. I read about something like this… not this, but… places that hold data. Physical data. The structure is holding it. We just triggered a retrieval.

JUPITER A retrieval of what?

JOE Of whatever was supposed to be filed here. A memory. A decision. A person. I don’t know. And we… we missed the address. We were present for the filing, and we missed where it was supposed to go.

He looked at his notebook, at the endless Disposition: Not Filed.

JOE Cletus didn’t run away. She was filed.

We got in the van. I drove. Joe sat in the passenger seat, staring at his notebook. My compass remained on the dashboard, its needle pointing straight down through the floorboards, through the road, into the earth.

We weren’t investigating a haunting. We were present for a filing. And we missed the address.

FIELD NOTES

Black-and-white recreation of an investigation scene
Interior vestibule of Roosevelt County Courthouse and Jail, 100 W.