ELLIS ISLAND 1899 - TWENTY MEN IN BROWN COATS APPEAR AT ELLIS ISLAND; CLAIM TO HAIL FROM FUTURE CENTURY; MOST PERISH OF THE POX.
This dispatch was held in Jeremiah Wickford's master safe that has never been opened until yesterday when the combination was delivered to the offices of The Brooklyn Herald at 9:47AM Thursday morning by a Western Union courier. The envelope, yellowed and brittle, bore a wax seal dated March 14, 1899. We have published it here, unedited.
A company of approximately twenty men materialized upon the south lawn of the Ellis Island Immigration Station at dawn last Tuesday, startling a flock of gulls and a Lithuanian family who had been waiting since three o'clock to be processed. The men wore matching brown outfits boring the name "ICE" who claimed to be officers of an agency called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which does not exist, and to have travelled from the year 2026 by means of a "temporal displacement portal" situated beneath a Brooklyn highway called the BQE? Their stated purpose, as explained by their field commander, a Mr. Taggart, was the detention of immigrants arriving at the island in order to satisfy arrest quotas imposed by their superiors in Washington.
When this correspondent observed that the immigrants in question were entering the country through its single official port of entry, and were therefore arriving by entirely legal means, Agent Taggart stared for some time before replying, "That's not how this works."
Agent Rick Mosley, tasked with processing a Czech carpenter named Antonín, spent the better part of an afternoon attempting to locate the Austro-Hungarian Empire in his black mirror box before he said it no longer worked. Agent Tucci was in the course of detaining a Neapolitan bricklayer named Enzo Tucci when his left hand became translucent. He held it aloft in the morning light, the bones of his fingers clearly visible, and pronounced it "a rash" of the sort he often suffered, which he attributed to gluten. He had completely vanished shortly after that. Within the afternoon no man among the company could recall having known him, save Agent Kowalski, who believed he was owed forty dollars by someone but could not say whom.
The disappearances multiplied with terrible swiftness. Agent Sorokin evaporated mid-sentence upon the detention of a family from Minsk. Agent Murphy faded over the course of a single afternoon following an encounter with a red-haired woman from County Cork. Field Commander Taggart ordered operations to continue, dismissing the phenomenon as coincidence.
Those agents who did not vanish fared little better against the population they had been dispatched to subdue. A unit of four men attempting to detain a group of Irish dockworkers from Galway was routed in a fashion this correspondent can only describe as total. The dockworkers, having survived a famine, an ocean crossing, and seven weeks in steerage, did not appear moved by men in matching jackets who could not throw a punch. Agent Gary Hendricks was chased the full length of the east pier by a sixteen-year-old boy from Connemara and had to be pulled from the harbour by his colleagues. In the women's processing area, a Sicilian grandmother by the name of Concetta Ferraro struck Agent Burkhart across the jaw with a cast iron skillet she had carried from Palermo. A Polish steelworker lifted Agent Mosley clean off the ground by his collar and deposited him atop a supply cabinet, where he remained for two hours until a ladder could be found.
Morale suffered further when the agents discovered there was nothing on the island they would consent to eat. One agent, whose name has since been lost to the vanishings, wept openly in the dining hall upon being served boiled cabbage and salt cod for the third consecutive meal and declared he would kill a man for something called a Mountain Dew. No one present understood his meaning.
It was upon the fifth day that the matter of the pox arose. Dr. Hermann Weiss, chief medical officer of the island hospital, had from the first morning offered the agents inoculation against smallpox, which was present in manageable numbers among the arriving population. Dr. Weiss, who had trained at Heidelberg and spent three years treating outbreaks in the tenements of the Lower East Side, made this offer repeatedly and with mounting urgency. The agents refused. Agent Taggart declared he would not permit an 1899 doctor to introduce unknown substances into his body, stating that he had "done his own research," the nature of which he attributed to his nonfunctioning black mirror box. Several agents called Dr. Weiss a "libtard," a term the doctor could not parse despite his fluency in four languages. Others called him a "snowflake," which Dr. Weiss took to be a remark upon the weather and found inapplicable, as it was March. "I have treated cholera in steerage holds," Dr. Weiss told this correspondent. "I have lanced buboes on men twice my size. I have been called many things. I have never been called a frozen water crystal."
By the seventh day the pox had swept through the company with fearsome efficiency. Agent Taggart, from his cot in the quarantine ward, maintained it was "a bad flu" and that his immune system was an alpha male...until he could no longer maintain talking or life at all.
The agents had been promised their portal would reopen daily. It did not. A note in Taggart's windbreaker pocket informing the company that returns would be permitted weekly, owing to "budget constraints." This later changed to monthly, owing to "Congressional review of temporal expenditures." Of the original twenty, one survived to see the portal reopen.
The lone man left Ellis Island on a grey morning in late March hobbling through a glowing portal and vanished, he was covered in extensive pockmarks, blind in one eye, and telling everyone at least he wouldn't have to pay taxes on his overtime.