Twinned with Area 51

Twinned with Area 51 by Chris Green

Warchester – Twinned with Area 51, the sign said. This ought to have triggered alarm bells but it didn’t. Area 51 was just a remote place in the US that I had heard reference to in random conversations. At the time, I knew little about the clandestine goings-on there. Ignoring the yellow and black notices of some clandestine activity that took place behind a barbed wire fence, I drove on into the centre of the town. I was not planning to spend much time in Warchester. I was just using it as a stop-off so what could possibly go wrong?

Warchester seemed quieter than you might expect for a town of its size but I put the lack of people down to the heavy rain we had had earlier in the day. On the plus side, it meant I had no trouble parking the car close to a nice looking café called Dreamland. There was no signal to be had on my phone but this did not surprise me greatly. Coverage was not so comprehensive back then and my network had been having problems. As I ate my mid-morning breakfast, some soft jazz music played, Theolonius Monk or Bill Evans perhaps. A middle-aged couple on a nearby table discussed the previous night’s night’s episode of The X Files and across from me, a geeky man with blue glasses was doing the Guardian cryptic crossword. There was nothing I could consider out of the ordinary. It was not until I got outside and found that my car was no longer there that I got the feeling that things might not be going to plan.

……………………………………….

The bizarre conversation that was going on in Warchester police station did nothing to ease my concerns.

‘Where was it again that you said the craft landed, Mr Spayne?’ Sergeant Sargent was saying.

‘Up by the reservoir,’ the man in the cream windcheater raincoat in front of me at the desk told him. ‘I was out walking Trevor.’

‘And Trevor is your dog, I take it.’

‘No,’ Mr Spayne said ‘Trevor is my ferret. My dog is called Fenton. He’s a terrier. Fenton is a good name for a terrier, don’t you think? Much better than Fido or Rover. I used to have two dogs, Sergeant but sadly now I only have the one, Fenton.’

‘To save time, Mr Spayne, I won’t ask what your other dog was called,’ the Sergeant said.

‘Oh, that’s all right, Sergeant. I’m not in a hurry,’ Mr Spayne said. ‘My other dog was called Flynn. Flynn was a retriever. He died last ……. ‘

‘So let me get this right, Mr Spayne, you were out walking …. Trevor when you saw the little green men emerge from the landing craft.’

‘That’s right, Sergeant, except they weren’t little, they weren’t green and they weren’t men. More like big black blobs.’

‘Mr Spayne. I do appreciate that you may feel that you have witnessed something strange but I’m wondering if the police are the right people to deal with this particular matter,’ Sergeant Sargent said. ‘Is it your belief perhaps that these …… aliens have committed a crime?’

‘I was coming to that, Sergeant but you kept interrupting me,’ Mr Spayne said. ‘These black blobs tried to abduct Trevor. They were after my ferret. Abducting a ferret is a crime, is it not?’

I had been waiting a few minutes now and was anxious to talk to someone. ‘I have a real crime to report,’ I said.

Mr Spayne seemed equally keen to continue with his science fiction story. Landing craft. Big black blobs indeed. What a load of twaddle!

Eventually, Sergeant Sargent managed to placate Mr Spayne with the promise that he would look into the attempted ferret abduction and he left. I joked that perhaps Mr Spayne’s elevator didn’t go right to the top but he just shrugged. Maybe there were a lot of crazy people around those parts. I began to tell the Sergeant about my stolen car.

‘We don’t do any of that stuff here, he said. ‘Car theft is with a ……. private contractor. You could have phoned the details through to them.’

‘No phone signal,’ I told him.

‘Ah yes. That can be a problem around here. You may have noticed there are no phone shops. They don’t do seem to do very well in Warchester. Look. As you’ve been kept waiting, I’ll log your information into CarCrime’s page for you.’

I gave him the details and he keyed these in. Chat was minimal, but I did not feel particularly chatty anyhow.

‘CarCrime will be in touch,’ he said.

‘When do you think that might be?’ I asked.

‘Difficult to say,’ he said. ‘If you don’t hear from them by ……….’

Should I stay or should I go? I wondered. I didn’t think I wanted to be there. I couldn’t imagine for the life of me why the directions I was given had sent me this way in the first place. There must have been a more convenient place to break the journey, closer to the motorway. But what was done was done. I could have hired a car and been out of here in no time at all. But, I would have still had to return to Warchester when they found my car. I decided it was best to hang around until I heard something. I asked Sergeant Sargent about hotels. He told me he was not a travel agent but directed me to an establishment down the road.

……………………………………….

I found myself at the curiously named Paradise Ranch Hotel. The lobby, although large was theatrical like a 1920s black and white film set but disarmingly dark. A lugubrious man dressed formally in a long-tailed coat and a dress shirt greeted me. He was long and lean, perhaps six foot six tall and moved slowly. He had a dome-shaped forehead which served to emphasise both his age and his baldness. He stopped short of saying, ‘we’ve been expecting you.’ But as his deep voice echoed around the calignous space, his presence felt menacing in an occult kind of way. He handed me the key to Room 109 which he told me was on the third floor. The lift was ancient and instead of floor numbers on the four buttons, there were strange runic symbols. Another theatrical frill, surely. I assumed they must equate to Ground, First, Second and Third but still I hesitated a little before pressing the top one. As the lift ascended, I had a sense of foreboding. I couldn’t help but wonder why Room 109 was on the third floor.

Room 109 must have been the only hotel room I’d taken that had no window. As a result, it felt claustrophobic. An unpleasant aroma pervaded, organic, yet at the same time oddly metallic. To add to this, there was a disturbing background hum, a low pitched sound that appeared to be all around me. I remembered reading that our ears have trouble determining the direction low frequencies are coming from. This is why you can hear the bass from the Reggae DJ down the road from a long way off yet have no idea which house it’s coming from. I tried to get online but no luck. Nor was there a phone signal. How would I know when they had found my car? I needed to get down to some research about what went on in this town. I made my way down to the lobby to ask about it and to see if perhaps I could change rooms but the horror film character had disappeared, I rang the bell on the desk and waited around but no-one appeared.

How had I got myself into this odd situation? Why was all this happening? I had had plans for a fun weekend. I needed to take stock. My head was doing cartwheels. I really needed to get on the internet to find out more about Warchester. What, for instance, was it that went on at the place with the barbed wire fence that I had passed on the approach road? The one that I foolishly had taken no notice of. Was it a surveillance centre? Was it a research establishment? How could I get any information about it? There must be a library in town. They would have computers and they would be bound to have stacks of reference books, then this would all begin to make sense.

……………………………………….

I managed to find the library without too much trouble but it was boarded up. Closed Until Further Notice, said a sign. Cutbacks, I supposed. They were happening all over the country. But, why were the post boxes on the main street all sealed up and why were there no public phone booths? Everything about the town seemed wrong. I made my way back to Dreamland café. At least there were signs of normality here when I had dropped by earlier, although now I thought of it, the coffee had tasted a little bitter. Perhaps I was now looking for further anomalies and shouldn’t get too carried away. I could ask the proprietor what was going on.

Alas, I found that the shutters were down. Dreamland had closed for the day. Strange, it was only 1:30. Perhaps it was siesta time in Warchester. This may not have been the Mediterranean but everything else here seemed out of kilter. I considered asking a stranger on the street for information but looking around me there was no-one about I could ask. I’d only seen three or four people since I’d left the hotel and each of these had looked a little creepy. One or two shops had sign-writing in a strange alphabet but these too seemed to be closed. No Conspiracy Theorists Here read a notice in the window of a Cancer Research charity shop. At least it was open. I was about to go in to look around when I was accosted by two sturdy police officers. This pair were altogether different to Sergeant Sargent. They were dressed in urban camouflage gear and they had guns.

‘Get your ass over there!’ ordered the one with the gallery of face tattoos.

There was really no need as the one with the shaved head and the funky badge on his tunic, brandishing the handcuffs was already escorting me by the collar in the direction of the armoured vehicle parked on the corner. I was terrified but also baffled. If they had wanted to pick me up so badly, why hadn’t they done so when I arrived in Warchester or at the police station when I had gone in to report my stolen car? If they wanted me out of the way, why had they taken my car? I would have been long gone by now.

The one with the face tattoos tied my hands behind my back and blindfolded me. They uttered a few more threats and threw me into the vehicle. In the short journey that followed, I tried to retrace my steps since I arrived in Warchester. To see if anything fell into place. I had noticed very little as I was driving in. I had had no reason to. I was not aiming to be in Warchester very long. The first thing I could remember was the sign. Twinned with Area 51, it had said. Hadn’t I once half-watched a television programme about it on Channel 4? There had been something about the Moon landings having been filmed in Area 51. And, hadn’t an alien spacecraft landed nearby? Weren’t they reported to have captured the aliens? I seemed to remember some excited geeks in woolly hats banging on about all the things that were kept hidden from them. But this was all I can dredge up from the depths. I’d never been good with documentaries. Short attention span.

……………………………………….

We arrived at our destination and I was roughly bundled up some steps and into a building and taken up in a screaky stop-start lift. Because of the blindfold, I could not be sure but I was pushed into what felt like a dark room. I could smell the same disconcerting aromas that I had been able to in the hotel earlier. Might this be the same hotel, I wondered? Might this be Room 109 again?

‘Why don’t you tell me who you are?’ I spluttered.

No response.

‘What am I supposed to have done.’

No response. These paramilitary cops did not seem to engage much in conversation.

‘Why don’t you tell me why I’m here?’ I continued.

There was a lot of shuffling around as if they were rearranging furniture or something. And then they were gone. The door closed behind them.

‘Just tell me what it is you want from me,’ I shouted after them.

‘You might as well save your breath,’ said a voice from behind me. A soft female voice.

‘What? …… Who?’

‘I kicked off a bit when they first left me here,’ she continued. ‘No-one came. ……… And before you ask, I don’t know why they’ve brought me here either. I only came to Warchester because I was told there was a Farfetch designer outlet here.’

‘And I’m guessing there isn’t,’ I said.

‘No bloody shops at all, are there?’ she said. ‘Unless you count that joke shop.’

‘Joke shop?’ I said.

‘The one that sells the quicksand and the chocolate teapots,’ she said.

Was this going to be another of those surreal exchanges that ended up going nowhere, I wondered. But, thankfully things quickly moved on. While we were both bound and blindfolded, we worked out that with a little effort and ingenuity, we would be able to free one another. As we were doing so, realisation began to take hold. This was all part of the plan.

‘I’m Maddie,’ she said, meeting my gaze. A powerful surge of electricity seemed to pass between us.

‘I’m Jon,’ I said. ‘Jon Straight.’

‘Right, Jon,’ she said. ‘I don’t imagine you’ve been bending spoons or have walked through any walls lately. So, any teeny weeny suspicion about why you might be here? ‘

‘Same reason as you, I’m hoping,’ I said.

Arguably circumstances played their part but I was instantly taken by Maddie’s breezy personality. I was surprised that you could actually buy floral dungarees like the ones she was wearing but she was certainly attractive.

……………………………………….

‘So that’s how the two of you met,’ Simon says. ‘Cool.’

‘Yes. son. The Mystery Adventure Weekend Dating Service. Although, neither of us expected that the adventure part would be so ……. surreal. We thought it might involve a little orienteering or white water rafting or something. We certainly didn’t expect to be spending the time in a nightmare place like Warchester. I still don’t know how they did that. It’s not on the map, you know?’

‘Oh well,’ Simon says. ‘You can’t have everything. But, do you know what? I think Mum’s still got those floral dungarees.’

© Chris Green 2017: All rights reserved