Helena pushed the last piece of steak and ale pie around her plate and stared aimlessly out at the North Sea. It was a calm but foggy night, a thick salty mist rolling in like a wall and covering the moonlight which she would use to navigate home. The Cross Keys was her preferred pub of the 3 available in the village of Aldeburgh, a hamlet dating back goodness knows how long and now sometime tourist hotspot on the Suffolk coast during the summer months. But it was November now and the crowds of families in their bathers were long gone. She liked the pub for it’s oldy worldy feel, all Tudor beams and horse brasses. It was nothing like the kind of thing she had frequented when she was still living in London.
London seems like a long time ago now. The days since graduating top of her class at Kings College had initially flown by but now ground to a halt. Having a career at the Ministry of Defence had not even crossed her mind until she had been approached by Mr Dames, a visiting American researcher who gave a seminar on increased tensions with the Soviets since Brezhnev had started taking a more hardline approach to maintaining his regime. He had been impressed, he said, that she had asked such intelligent questions about how Britain could step more to the forefront of the conflict, now heading into its third decade. Within almost no time at all of their meeting, Helena had been trained and coached, passed tests with flying colours, then shipped off rather unceremoniously to the less than glamorous Suffolk coast to sit in rooms with very boring men looking at and recording readings from dials and numbers and print outs for days on end.
Sitting by the window in the Cross Keys was her respite away from the incessant whirring and beeping, the sound of reams of paper printing figures and numbers, and the inane chat of the men who examined them. Orford Ness, she had been told, was the jewel in the crown for the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. It represented Britain’s stake in the Cold War, a marvel of British engineering that, she was told, would finally see us established once again as a world power. The research team sat in one building with all the computers and gizmos where codes were typed and buttons flashed and switches were switched, while the actual magic happened in one of the steel pagodas that sat further out on the shingle beach. When the team had done their part, 10 to 15 minutes would pass and then the ticker tapes would go wild. Phillip and Charlie, the two researchers who worked on Helena’s station — both decked out with huge horn rimmed NHS glasses, greasy hair and stern expressions — would gather up the read outs and record them on the database. It was her job to send daily reports of their findings back to Mr Dames. There were 4 stations at Orford Ness, each with a team of 3 researchers, each with its own corresponding pagoda.
What the pagodas contained and what the numbers and figures meant she had no idea, nor it seemed did anyone else who worked at the centre. Much of the content on the printouts were standard letters and numbers, but there were also other figures that she didn’t recognise. Initially Phillip dismissed these as cyrillic, but she had read and seen enough Russian and Greek text to know these were something else entirely — they appeared to be more like hieroglyphs, rune markings or some kind of cipher like those that had been decoded at Bletchley. As for the pagodas themselves, they were approximately 10 foot square and had no doors or windows to speak of. On inspection they appeared to be completely sealed, although no one could get up too close thanks to the razor wire fences that separated the area. Whatever was in there, the MoD really didn’t want anyone to get close enough to even get an inkling. When the tests were carried out, they made no sound, movement or changed in any way. When Helena had asked Mr Dames what they were when she had first arrived, he had said they contained nuclear materials but wouldn’t explain any further when pressed — all he would tell her was how important the tests were and what an important job she would be doing for her country in the fight against the Red Menace. Although his vagueness had annoyed her, not to mention the fact she had no idea what she was meant to be doing or if she was doing it properly, she had grown tired of asking and instead just did as she was told, and was paid handsomely for it. But almost a year had passed since she had begun work on the project and the lack of any real feedback was becoming a source of frustration. She had tried to bring it up with Philip and Charlie but they barely exchanged any words with her outside of the activity around the tests. She tried not to take this personally, however she knew that being a woman in this field would not gain her any respect from her male peers, regardless of her educational prowess.
Time was called and so Helena finished the last dregs of her drink, gathered her things and left the Cross Keys. It would be approximately a mile walk back along the uneven path close to the shore to get back to the boarding house where the research teams had been put up. She had grown used to the thick winter fog and had bought herself a small flashlight to help navigate as this small, sleepy part of the country was yet to get any adequate street lighting. She walked maybe 15 minutes and got to the part of the path where she would have to turn inland and head for home; the part where dead ahead sat the Orford Ness test site along the shingle spit. She stared at it for a moment — something didn’t look right. Although a little unsteady on her feet on the pebbles, she carefully walked towards the area where the pagodas sat. The razor wire perimeter fence seemed to have a gate. A gate! She must’ve walked this route every day at least twice and had never seen a gate before. Not only was this a way in she had previously overlooked, but it was open. She must’ve just not looked carefully enough she thought, but knew this couldn’t be right. She walked up to it and put her arm through the opening, just to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her, and sure enough this was a way through. A chill of fear ran across her but she knew she couldn’t pass up this opportunity to take a closer look. Pagoda 1 stood only a few feet away and it was only just after 10pm — she could inspect one for a few minutes and be back in time before the lady at the front desk would lock the boarding house for the night.
There was a thin concrete path that ran from the gate to the Pagoda 1 — another thing she had failed to notice before now. She shone her flashlight along the path and quickly and quietly moved towards the structure, hoping that whoever had opened the gate wouldn’t notice her. She placed her hand on it; it was solid concrete, smooth, wet and cold with condensation from the fog. She walked around the perimeter and, sure enough, on the side facing the sea — the side not visible from behind the fence — there was a door. The door was also open. This was the point at which she knew she should leave; it didn’t feel safe and if whoever was in there saw her, she would certainly be dismissed from her post, or worse court martialled and professionally disgraced. And yet her curiosity to see what she had been working for all this time was too great to resist and she crept inside. Once inside, everything felt strange. The room was dark and cold, she shone to torch along the wall to look for a light — she located a panel of buttons and levers to the right and flipped one. The familiar hum of tube lighting followed and the room lit up as bright as day. There was a metal floor with rows of small channels that stretched the length and breadth of the room, and the walls were covered in vertical steel slots, some of which had strange equipment attached she had never seen before. The ceiling was covered in layers upon layers of wires in between the lights. But, she thought, the room was impossible; its dimensions inside stretched out the size of a football pitch, far greater than the outside suggested. It was like something out of a science fiction novel. How could this be! She approached one of the pieces of equipment on the wall; it was a metal cylinder with wires sticking out that ran up into the ceiling, and a series of dials and a small screen. The cylinder was large and shiny, almost spanning the height of the wall. She went to place her hand on it but felt a burning heat emitting from it as she got closer. She was about to take a closer look at the control panel when she heard something from behind. Unmistakably, it was the sound of a woman sobbing.
Helena turned around to face the centre of the room and there was indeed a woman sitting on the floor with her back to her. She must’ve been the one who had come in, maybe she was MoD staff. Although she knew this would put her at risk of losing her job if she told on her, Helena couldn’t leave without checking she was alright at least. She made her way across the floor, trying not to trip on the channels that covered the surface.
“Excuse me, are you ok? I work here and I was working late when I noticed the gate was open. I thought there might be something wrong. Do you need help?”
The crying continued but she heard a faint voice come from the woman. “Please… I need to get out… I can’t… I can’t get out.”
“How did you get here? Do you work here? I’ve not seen you round here before.”
“They… they want to open the portal… they want to use my gifts to open the portal… I’ve been tortured… please help.”
Helena walked around to face the woman and what she saw horrified her. The woman, dressed in a thin linen dress, was chained by her ankles to the floor and had wires sticking out of her head and wrists, running into the metal channels on the floor. The parts of her body that were visible were covered in bruises and the ends of her fingers bloody stumps where she had been clearly trying to escape her bonds.
“Who are you? What’s happened to you?!”
The woman lifted her head — her eyes were milky white as the moon and her face was covered in thin red veins. She looked as if she was in terrible pain. “They came to my house and took me and my sisters away… I’ve been here since then… please help!” She stretched out her arms and grabbed Helena’s leg. She wasn’t able to stand and her arms were painfully thin as if she had been starved. Helena knelt down next to her and took her handkerchief out of her handbag in a vain attempt to comfort the woman.
“Who brought you here? When did you last eat?”
Her voice was very weak and frail. “Men… army? I don’t know. They had heard we had the gift of the sight and came to our home and took us away… the man wants us to open the portal… to destroy the Russians… he said if we would do it, we would be set free… please help… please… before he comes back… “
“What portal? This is an atomic weapons test centre, I don’t know what you mean.” Helena leant in closer to hear.
The woman’s face started to change. A grim, terrifying smile spread across her thin, cracked lips. “You fool…” Quick as a flash, she lunged forward at Helena and grabbed her by the back of the head. A whirring sound came from the floor, like the sound of an electrical generator starting up. The floor suddenly erupted in a deathly screech and the room was bathed in a bright white light that burned Helena’s eyes. She screamed. The woman screamed. The ceiling opened. And then all went black.
What went on at Orford Ness is unknown. Now designated a Scheduled Monument by Historic England, and the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment’s work sealed for national security reasons, it’s test rooms sit rusting on the beach in Suffolk.