My name is Compton Smythe, but my few friends call me Smithie.  I am a writer, illustrator assigned to a rather obscure department simply called the Ministry.  You will not find any reference to it or any information that I would consider public knowledge.  A secret organisation would also imply some accountability or government awareness yet the Ministry does not fall into any such category of definition.  You see to all intents and purposes the Ministry does not exist yet we have lots of files to show you.  Well let’s start at the beginning or the first file upon the stack.

June 19 1943

The gruff voice on the phone had said:

127 Harlington Court 7.30pm, do not be late.

I had only been in England for little over a year and my job with the London Evening Standard had kept me very busy.  My few friends were really colleagues and we worked in the small office covering obscure reports that had been sent in by officers or anomalous individuals that had encountered the fantastic and unbelievable.  Stories from the field that no sane person would believe or even want to have any understanding of, a Spitfire that had landed after a sortie and had sat upon the airfield only to find that no pilot was present in the cockpit, or U462’s last intercepted transmission by a radio ham in Scotland saying that she had encountered a beacon that was pulling them into a trench. We had scores of such strange and unverifiable incidents and all we were allowed to do was to collate them and forward them onto a Post Office box number in Westminster.

I placed the receiver down and looked around the office, they were all busy collecting there things, heading to the Lion for drinks.  

The door had opened and I was ushered into a large dimly lit room with a single chair facing a huge heavy black curtain.  

“Mr Smythe please sit in the chair provided and do try and not interrupt, you will be allowed to ask questions later but we may not answer them.”  The voice was the same one that had telephoned the request for me to be here now.

The man behind the curtain had told me more about myself than I had even realised, my mother’s maiden name, which I had completely forgotten, my medical and school history bringing back memories of a past that I had chosen to forget.  The voice had droned on replaying my career highs and lows, even the time that I had falsified a report to protect the reputation of a lose woman married to a diplomat, then came the questions:

Not the mundane questions revolving around concepts of loyalty, integrity and reliability but the sort of questions regarding belief in those things that a society protected its citizens from, the secrets of the unexplainable, the happenings that went beyond the rational and the realisations that our species lived an illusion of convenient denial; this was how I had been recruited into the Ministry and so began my extraordinary career that would take me to the edge of my sanity and beyond.   

Rawlings was told to forget everything he had witnessed that week after the US. Infantry division had retaken the besieged town back from the Germans.  I remember the cold, the smoke and the dead as the tanks crushed on towards Ettelbrook.

The file sat on the desk and Rawlings wanted to turn the page but his hand fumbled around his whisky glass, another gulp to dull the mind as it grappled with the unimaginable.

He had been a sergeant with the Royal Engineers, part of the secret allied presence that had been hastily assembled by the Ministry, after what the American 80^th infantry division had found inside the bombed out ruins of the old station.  

I turned the file around and opened it; Rawlings took a deep breath and spread the pages out across the desk.  We were the last ones alive, the rest of our team taken by the void one way or another.The desk light had illuminated the picture, a tank cleaved in two by some type of energy weapon, a laser blast we would eventually learn.

“Remember how I thought that it was some Nazi secret weapon, you had all looked dumbfounded at the neatly burnt through cross section, like the illustrations you see in those books.”

“Yeh we had no idea what we were dealing with then, the horrors had just kept coming but this was the first real proof that we had seen for ourselves.”

Ettelbrook Station December 1944.

The half track came to a stop and the engine idled.

“Ok you lot get out and secure the area.”  Becker jumped down and grabbed his gear.  The rest of us followed guns at the ready; Tom manned the machine gun just in case we had to make a quick retreat.  The mist had cleared and we could clearly see the burnt out part of the tank as if it had been sliced down one side, its insides exposed.  

“Blimey hav you ever seen the like?”  Becker shouldered his gun and placed his hand on the fuselage.

“No crew, no blood and no frigging gun that I know of that could do this.”   

The Americans had sealed off the station and had left us to it.  We were to collect first hand information and prepare the site for removal by the Special Forces crew that had already landed at the airfield and would be here by sunset.  Becker was the egg head, a science nerd and the oldest amongst the group.  He lit his pipe and walked around the exposed tank, mumbling by the numbers, Rawlings had said.

Jules stood back, her perfume now mingled with the aromatic tobacco smoke.  She was our coordinator, responsible for liaison and ultimately reported to the Ministry.  She was of course better looking than all of us put together.  Trent had a thing for her but she kept everything professional.

“Right the real item of interest is in the station so I suppose we had better take a look at what the yanks had got a little nervous of.”

“You mean apart from the tank and the huge scorch mark across the tracks.”  Becker had said pointing out across the yard.

We left Trent to photo graph all he could and trundled off towards the smouldering remains of the station house.  No birds, no insects just the crackling of burnt embers and the distant sounds of heavy machinery as the Americans searched the town. 

“Bloody spooky if you ask me, can you feel that vibration?”

It was coming up through the ground, a gentle rhythmic pulse that we had not noticed until now.Rawlings had bent down and felt the gravel.

“It’s all around us.”

The exposed brick of the station had another one of those scorch marks spread across it, smaller than the one in the yard that had hit the tank, but it had still exploded bricks into fragments leaving a narrow line cut through the wall.  

Becker had unholstered his rifle and pointed it towards the station door or what was left of it.  

I was the first to reach the part opened door and the first to see the three German corpses that had been burnt to a crisp, but not in the way one might expect.  Localised burns of such magnitude that looked almost surgical, one of the faces still looked up, a grimace of total wonder still etched upon his unmarked face.  I pushed the door open and that was when I saw it.  A black smooth biped lying on the floor, a head unlike any I had ever seen before, a helmet with a golden faceplate that shimmered in the morning light as if a strand of golden dust had escaped and spread around the station room.

That was how we had become infected by the essence of the thing that had come to this planet so long ago, the thing that had almost turned us insane.  It would be many years later that we would come to know her as Spotnik.

Concept story by CJFoster. 2019

File 136. SPITFIRE

RAF Duxford June 22, 1942

Crakburn watched the idiots fooling around, he had a headache and was feeling cranky, it had been three full days since the last Luftwaffe attack and some of the men were getting bored.  

“Ok you lot get that mess room back into shape.”  He lit up a fag and sat back, quite time at last.

The heat rose up from the airfield in the distance and Crakburn closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the lost whispers of fallen comrades.  Memories of the battle to save Britain, most of his old mates were dead or had their faces burnt away.  Dark times, but it was also the best of times, mateship and purpose had replaced a sublime false peace, no one wanted the war yet it had come and political procrastination had most likely resulted in countless more young souls taken into the void.

The dull drone had invaded his quite time, a distant hum slowly but surely getting louder and louder.  He knew that sound well the unmistakable throb of the Spitfire as she dropped altitude preparing for her final approach.  His eyes were open now and scanning the distant horizon.

“Crawley pass those binoculars.”  The spindly Crawley extended his arm and Crakburn grabbed the binoculars without taking his eyes from the sky. 

“There she is, what the devil, no flights inbound reported by command: dammed irregular.”

By the time she had touched down most of the squadron had emerged out of the mess and watched the distant fighter as she turned and idled down.  

Crakburn looked at her rear flank, QV-H.  His heart had already skipped a beat and a small pool of sweat had started to appear over his eyebrows.  

“Get the truck.”  He shouted.

Some of the men had started to ask questions.  Crakburn knew that if he was right there could be no answers to those questions, for the air craft that he had now recognised had been lost over East Anglia, missing in action since 1940 when squadron 19 had been called in to assist 11 Group at the onset of the Battle of Britain.

The Ministry London 1943

I had been transferred to the invisible department of the Ministry.  We had no working address just a very discreet heavy steel door that was accessed underground via a disused tunnel that had once formed the eastern line of the tube network.  There were during those early days only the three of us, myself, Jules and Rawlings.  The blitz was over and London enjoyed a quite spell, the odd unexploded bomb would sometimes rattle our underground domain and it was from here that I would read the first of those unexplained classified reports.  The file lay open upon my desk after Rawlings had retrieved it and told me to brush up on some of the more bizarre cases.

Rawlings lit his pipe and sweet smoke filled the room.  

“That was my first investigation for the Ministry.”  He said taking another suck and watching the strands of smoke as they hit the dim yellow lights.

I thumbed through the photos of the Spitfire; she was immaculate as if she had just rolled off the production line.  What was so special about this one I had thought, and then I had read the transcript.

Disappeared in 1940 listed as MIA and to add to the mix she had reappeared almost two years later landing at her home base but with one very disturbing attribute.

She had landed with no pilot in the cockpit.

RAF Duxford June 22, 1942

Krakburn had watched the government types as they went over every inch of the aircraft and had found nothing that could explain away the situation.  Eventually they had towed the craft to a hanger on the far side of the airfield and he and his squadron were left to muse over the unexplainable.  Krakburn had been asked countless questions about the Spitfires pilot, Badger Billings, but all he could tell them was that he had taken off when they had scrambled into action on that warm summers day.  It was mayhem as the squadrons merged to form a wing formation and when they hit the Luftwaffe wave all hell had broken lose.  He had lost six mates that day but he had never seen Badger’s plane go down.  Come to think of it no one had seen him shot down at all, it was if he had taken off and had just disappeared.  No wreckage had ever been discovered and that in itself was dammed odd.  

The Londoners had left him alone but the funny thing was that something felt different, something he could just not quite put his finger upon and that was a feeling that he did not like one little bit.

Badjor had idled his plain to a stop and withdrew the canopy.  He sat in the cockpit looking out across the airfield, the truck in the distance closing in on his position.  He climbed down and stood looking at the wind sock as it fluttered in the breeze, it was a different colour to the one he had looked at before taking to the skies.

Krakburn had got out of the truck and raced over to the fighter.  Badger shouted out to him but he had raced right past him as if he had not even seen him at all.  The other men, who Badger did not know had also assembled around his Spitfire some of them scratching their heads in bewilderment.  

“What the frigging hell, hey I am right here you morons.”  Badger went to shove past the group to get to his mate but he had simply pushed right through them and had found himself hitting the Spitfire’s fuselage.  The thump had caused those standing around to suddenly step back and he could hear them as they struggled to comprehend what had caused the noise.  After a while they returned to the truck and Badger was forced to walk to the mess room.

That night all he could hear were the endless questions and speculations as to how or why the plane had returned.  How was this possible, what happened to Badger, Is this some kind of sick elaborate joke?  No one had come up with anything that made any sense, except for the uncomfortable realisation that Badger was in fact dead and trapped in that place between the void and the world of men.

Badger started to think about his fiancée Gloria and he had an overwhelming urge to see her.  He was just about to turn and head out of the mess room when he caught sight of the newspaper and the date:  Monday, June 22, 1942.  No, No that’s simply not possible, that’s nearly two years out of date.  

Badger started to go through all that had happened since he had taken off.  As far as he was aware it were as if he had taken off that morning and had returned to the airfield but the more he struggled to think of these events the more he became confused.  

The plane had dropped altitude and his radio was down, instruments went haywire and he struggled to right the aircraft.  The light in the sky, an object triangular and spinning, it was pulling him in and it was all he could do to keep his plane level.  Then nothing just blackness and he flew right through the spinning object and back up into the clouds.  The sky was clear and he returned to the airfield.  

What had that thing done to him?  Was he forever trapped between two dimensions, like those science fiction stories he had read as a boy. His mind could not take it all in so he had resigned himself to making sure that his Gloria was alright and that she had been taken care of.

Badger had hung around his mate Krakburn as he struggled to unravel the mystery.  He had watched as his friend had been relentlessly questioned by the man and the woman from London.  The plane had been examined and the radio the only thing not functional, as far as they could determine the plane was the same one that had been listed as missing in action.  Machine markings and serial numbers all a perfect match, the big burly guy had ruled out replication and Badger was in the hanger with them as they concluded their report as unresolved.

Badger could still touch his aircraft as if it was still a part of his world but anything else was like walking through a state of dense liquid.  The denser the object the harder it was for him to push through it.  

Krakburn had been told to say nothing about this to anyone and he and his squadron were placed under the seal of the official secrets act.  Krakburn waited for the Londoners to go and he struggled with his conscious before finally deciding to telephone Badgers fiancée Gloria.  The feeling of his friend’s presence had almost become tangible, he could hear him in his head as they joked and relived the good times.

Gloria had answered his call, she was still in the village and Krakburn had felt guilty about not calling upon her more often.  She had driven out to the airfield and Badger had followed Krakburn out to meet her.  She looked drawn and her face had a pain that Badger had seen too many times before when one of the boys had been lost in the fight and one of them had to go and tell their loved ones.  To Badger it was as if they had only hugged and kissed yesterday, yet for Gloria it had been almost two years since Krakburn had told her that Badger had not returned from a sortie.  He wanted to comfort her, shower her in kisses and tell her it was all going to be OK, but it was not OK, not at all.  This cruel twisted joke that the universe had played was not funny at all.     

Krakburn ushered her into the hanger using a rear door.  Badger had watched them as his friend revealed the Spitfire and told the story of how it had somehow returned.  Gloria had broken down in tears, the realisation simply unbearable to contemplate.  Krakburn thought that he ought not to have said anything, but she had a right to know the truth, the right to see for herself.  He comforted her and eventually she had asked:  How is this possible?  Krakburn had no answers to give her, how could he this was simply too far beyond anything rational.  Badger had remained in the hanger after they had left, he was distraught but a single compulsion had come over him, an all encompassing calmness had taken hold and he knew that it was time for him to leave this place.

Krakburn had heard the sound of the engine turn before roaring into life.  He spun around just as the Spitfire had trundled out of the exposed hanger and headed for the nearest runway.  Gloria had looked confused as they both stood looking at the empty cockpit as the plane taxed towards the runway.  No words could explain what they were witnessing, and in silence they watched as the Spitfire full throttled and thrust herself up into the clear blue sky.

Rawlings had come up to my desk and cleared his throat.

“Interesting case that one.”

“I suppose no other sighting of the plane since?”

“No, radar had it tracked for a while but it climbed above the ceiling and we lost her.”

“What do you reckon happened?”

“I omitted a footnote to all of this, choosing to not muddle the facts.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gloria the fiancée, a week later she disappeared without trace, her friend had told the local bobby that she had seen her walk into a light that had appeared out of nowhere.  That was the last reported sighting of her.  If you ask me I reckon she went to the same place he did, probably still there.  The thing about this job is that we are confronted by the impossible, the bizarre and the extraordinary.  We just do not know, probably not meant to know.  We live out our ignorant lives with just a glimpse of the unimaginable.

I closed the file the red UNRESOLVED stamp faded but still readable.

Concept story by CJFoster. 2019