Final Writings

SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of suicide, mental health, substance abuse and mild physical violence

19/12/1995

THE LONDON TRIBUNE

An abridged version of the final writings extracted from ex-journalist Alexander Hilton, 1994, originally cited to be published to The London Tribune.

‘I have searched for the extraordinary all my life. It is a peculiar thing to search for, it isn’t something you can pull up a in dictionary and recite a definition to a foreigner, or some particularly nit-witted travel storeowner to get you a nudge in the right direction. People give you funny looks, blab away with stupid questions like ‘are you sure that exists’ or ‘are you off your rocker’ and always end up being very unhelpful to qualified explorers of the supernatural.

Even once you’ve battled your way through tour guides and historians and the old ‘someone’s brother’s best friend’s cousin’ to track down all the heresy to a single source, you come up short. When a fossilised mermaid corpse is just a madman’s frankensteined fish-monkey, you begin to doubt there’s anything strange to be searched for at all.

My job is to prove you wrong.

I’d had my sights set on the government laboratory on the outskirts of Arizona [left unnamed for contractual reasons] for years by the time they finally responded to an email. Tales of the place as a highly classified, top-secret facility attracted the attention of journalists worldwide, yet in all its years of operation only a single writer has been allowed in to record it.

Patrick Bullman, renowned journalist of 50 years, committed suicide a week after his own visit.

So naturally when I was granted a visit I jumped at the opportunity. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, to see the inside of a place that fewer people had walked on the moon than been inside, constituted the immediate purchase of a plane ticket from London and my swift arrival.

I managed to secure a room at the closest place you could stay from the facility- a stuffy little motel with peeling paint on its yellow room walls. It was about a hundred miles from the lab.

I was ecstatic. The night before I found no sleep in my little single bed, and not only because the mattress was tough as concrete. My mind was alight with theories. I could only dream of the treasures they could’ve kept in that place;

perhaps evidence of life in space, proof of communications that were so dreadful they could never be shared with the public. Or ancient skeletons of creatures from mythos, real only to those elite few who worked there. The only thing I could have been sure of was that whatever hid behind those walls and walls of concrete and thick barbed wire fences, was sure to be truly extraordinary…

The morning of my trip I found myself waiting eagerly outside my motel, strung like a clothing rack with different bits of cameras and tripods and notepads. I had booked a cab in advance, as to not dare risk being late for my appointment, when what looked like a road-modified tank pulled up in a barrage of exhaust smoke next to me. I coughed, keeled over and dropped a lens and before I could even get a good look at the thing the door swung wide open and a burly man in all black stepped out.

‘Alexander Hilton?’ he asked, though it was more of a demand than a question,

‘Uhm, yes,’ I did my best to brush myself off and look dignified, ‘I called for-‘

‘No need,’ the man interrupted. It was at that moment I became aware that I hadn’t hired a team of bodyguards, and if I had then the taxi company I’d booked it with should have had a few more positive reviews to its name. Complimentary bodyguards were no cheap novelty.

As the large man gave me a hefty shove I managed to splutter an ‘are you people charging for this? Because I was prepared to travel regular-‘

BANG.

Approximately two hours later I awoke to realise the sound had been my head slamming hard against the car floor.

-

There was a quiet, rhythmic creaking coming from above me that had slunk its way into my dark world of dreamless sleep.

In hindsight, giving myself the time to mentally prepare to wake up in the strangest place I’d ever seen instead of jumping to my feet might have prevented the pressing headache that would soon settle in.

I was in a little white room lit by a swinging light, as harsh and sterile as the kind they use at dentists that you need sunglasses to even get close to. The thing rocked back and forth on its hinges like a gust of wind had just passed by, but as far as I could tell I was boxed in on all four sides. With no windows in sight, I had to assume I was somewhere deep, deep underground. On the fourth wall sat a white door, complete with a hardly noticeable in-looking peephole that you might’ve missed if you weren’t looking close enough. I felt a shiver down my spine. I might have felt alone, but how could I know many people were watching me now?

So I stared at the rocking light. They had stripped me of all my equipment. Thousands of pounds worth of videography equipment, gone, and I somehow figured I wouldn’t be getting it back. All I was left with was the little notebook I had grabbed on my way out.

Standing there, in that cold, sterile little room, the time seemed to stand still. I couldn’t tell you if I stood there for a minute or hours if you begged me. And considering my escorts had confiscated my watch, I was truly at a loss.

Just as I’d accepted my fate as a viewing monkey, the door creaked open. I recognised the men from earlier, dark-faced and stoic as ever, yet they stood to the side as a smaller figure pushed his way forward.

‘Uhm,’ said the newcomer, who I could have only assumed was in charge since he wasn’t confined to a strict black uniform and instead looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, ‘I suppose I should welcome you,’

‘Oh, yes,’ I lifted my head, towering even further over him to try and show some form of indignation at my treatment, ‘I’m feeling quite welcome,’

The man looked down. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not ideal, but we’re not supposed to let anyone in on our location. Safety procedures and all, you know,’

I didn’t know. Looking down at the scrawny little man before me, with his loose laces and hair that looked like it’d had an electric current run straight through it, the best way I could describe him was ‘fire hazard.’ Which wasn’t boding well for his supposed efforts to keep up those safety procedures.

‘Well. Anyway,’ the stranger broke the silence, ‘I’m Jamie. They sent me to…’

What he did next was quite strange. Jamie trailed off, staring right through me like I wasn’t there, then blinked twice and stuck out his hand. When I grasped it, tentatively on my end, he squeezed me tight and pulled away even quicker.

‘Right,’ said my tour guide (which I’d figured was what he’d failed to announce) ‘We’ve got a long way to go.’

-

I’d been naïve to think the trip here would be as easy as I’d planned. Still, there was no part of me ready for the sheer amount of effort my company was taking to keep me under a strict veil of confusion. Although they’d allowed me to skip the blindfold, over the heads of the dozen security guards that pressed against me as we walked I could just make out the scaffolding draped across every inch of the building’s insides. Strange shapes loomed above me, some certainly doors or equipment but some forming massive, organic shapes so unusual I wouldn’t be able to guess what lay under the blue covers if I pondered for nights on end. I was allowed here to see one thing, and one thing only. The rest of this place would keep its secrets to itself.

I couldn’t help but wonder about my tour guide’s health. He hadn’t looked me in the eye since we’d met, instead having taken off on a hasty stride straight to our destination, but beyond his sloppy outfit, baggy tracksuit pants and mystery-stained sweater, there was an air of anxiety he seemed to pass right on to me. Occasionally his shoulders would jump up, he’d duck his head or involuntarily clench his fists, and I soon found myself twitching as well. Even my brain was telling me I shouldn’t have been there.

I busied myself with jotting down my thoughts. Some meaningless writings of my nerves and the facility’s odd way of covering up everything along our path. I was two pages in before Jamie finally stopped dead in his tracks at the end of a hallway, causing me to stumble right into him. He didn’t seem to notice.

‘Okay,’ there was an unmissable quaver in his voice, ‘this is it. Please don’t touch anything unless permitted to, and…’

I never heard what came after ‘and,’ since Jamie seemed to have forgotten what was coming and only finished with a sharp breath in.

He reached for the door.

The room was as large as a stadium. Marble white walls stretched on for ages, all lit by blinding white office lights that did their job so well there was not a single shift in tone along the entire stretches of wall. It was akin to walking into a void. Reality fell away at my feet as I stepped into the nothingness after Jamie, and for the first time since I’d been picked up a felt some apprehension coming from the poker-faced guards behind us. They would not be joining us. Then, with as much enthusiasm as a corpse, one of them slammed the door shut.

In the middle of the white expanse stood a small, rickety-looking white cupboard. It was one of those models that every person has seen before, yet not one would be able to give a name to its model or recognise it as belonging in some place they’ve seen before. Nothing changed about the cupboard as Jamie and I approached, it only stood there in all its mundanity and existed. The thing must have been some off-brand IKEA model, barely taller than I was with its four white-painted walls, slightly peeled paint and its exposed, splintery wooden sides that hadn’t been sealed off with rubber to ensure a child could not hurt themselves on it.

The pure insignificance of it was extraordinary, and yet- it beckoned me forward, as if begging me to step inside.

‘Pardon me for the bluntness,’ I began, unable to tear my eyes away, ‘but… that’s it? It’s really quite… unremarkable, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Jamie’s voice was weak, ‘Unremarkable.’

Unremarkable. That was all there was to it, really. The thing stood there in the middle of the room, with its chipped white edges and shoddily fitted doors collecting dust. It could have belonged in an office storage room. It could have belonged anywhere and not seem out of place, I thought, not in a child’s bedroom or in a millionaire’s mansion or even here, in a top-secret state of the art laboratory for governmental research of the unusual.

In fact, it was so extraordinary how so remarkably unremarkable this little white cupboard was, it was almost menacing.

Jamie cleared his throat. ‘We call it P42. It…’ he trailed off, his gaze distant, then he shook his head and stuffed a hand into his pocket.

‘Measure it,’ Jamie handed me a tape measure.

Dumbfounded, I did what I was told. Lengthwise, the cupboard measured sixty-two point five centimetres. In width it was thirty-four. I relayed the numbers to Jamie, who gave me a tense nod and pointed at the walls.

‘Two centimetres thick,’ I swore I could hear him hold back a choke, ‘Right?’

I measured them. I nodded.

‘Do the inside.’

If there was anything awful lying behind those doors it vanished as soon as I flung them open. The inside was just as plain as its out, a small white space with its floor coated in wood splinters from its steadily rotting walls. I measured it.

‘Sixty… two. Point seven.’

Silence. Jamie stared at me with his twitchy, tired eyes. I stared at the tape.

‘That’s not possible,’ I said finally.

He nodded again. With a tingling in my fingers, I bent down again and stretched the tape along the outside. Sixty-two point five. Thirty-four point zero. Then, again along the inside. Sixty-two point seven.

Again. Sixty-two point seven. And again. Sixty-two point seven. Jamie didn’t stop me. Again and again and again until I leaned back and closed my eyes and the numbers flashed bright behind my eyelids.

I wanted to step back. To run to the door and lock it behind me and grapple with the numbers far, far away from this thing. I’d find a way to convince myself, lying in bed under the safety of the covers that the numbers were correct and that there was nothing abnormal about the dimensions of a cupboard from IKEA that was locked away under hundreds of tons of dirt and cement in a top-secret government facility. But when I tried to stand, my legs shook and my hands clutched tight to the tape measurer. Begging me to try again. Make it make sense.

Suddenly, I felt a presence over my shoulder and forced my head to turn. Jamie was offering a hand, an unmistakably pitying look in his eyes. I gripped it tight, sweat dripping off my own and he helped me to my feet. He gave me an awkward pat on the back.

‘We don’t know,’ he started, absent-mindedly staring at the cupboard, ‘How…’

And he said no more. So I stared with him, a million thoughts and simultaneously none running through my head.

‘Just unremarkable,’ I breathed finally, as much as an observation as a desperate attempt to convince myself there was nothing more to think about. No cosmic anomaly manifesting itself as a tiny rift in our reality. No unaccounted space. No menacing cupboard being studied by the greatest minds of our time.

-

I can’t recall the walk back outside, or the ride back to the motel that I surely was blindfolded for or knocked unconscious for. It took me a solid week to realise I hadn’t taken a single note at the site, a realisation that was ultimately harmless as the experience has failed to leave me any space in my brain for my own thoughts. As I write this, I can assure you my memories of the experience remain intact. Nothing has been altered from my experience and I can promise you if you somehow manage to book a visit for yourself you will find it entirely accurate. It won’t allow itself to be forgotten.

Still, I hope that my writings will numb your curiosity as I warn you to keep yourself away. I wouldn’t wish these lingering thoughts on anyone. No fame is worth breaking your mind.'

Extract end. Alexander Hilton was found deceased in his apartment in London three days after this draft was written, allegedly by drug-related means. More information on the matter will be released shortly.