A New Europe

It is almost impossible to find a point at which to begin a coherent study of those who, throughout the years, guarded The Prophecy House. Of the dozens of fragments left to us down the centuries, few of them offer a full picture of this most secretive of organisations; and fewer still provide us with any sort of entry into their world – their origins, their motives, their goals. It is only by taking each fragment and piecing it together with the next that we can obtain even the slightest notion of how they are twisted into the thread of history, and what purpose if any they serve in this world.

Of the sparse accounts of their activities across the years, it is one of the more recent which provides perhaps the best starting point, despite barely featuring any account or mention of The Prophecy House. Indeed, it has only come to light in the past few years although looking at it now it seems impossible to me that we had missed it all this time, so clearly is it connected to what we already know.

Theresa Blake and the war in Europe
In October 1944, British photographer Theresa Blake was accredited to the US Army as the official War Correspondent of Edinburgh’s Oracle magazine. Travelling with the 3rd Battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment, she was amongst the first correspondents to cover the aftermath of the Battle of Aachen. It was her coverage of the carnage which followed the brutal street fighting of this battle which earned her a reputation for being one of the most unblinking of the eyes turned upon the war, for the images she captured were and remain among the most extreme and graphic ever shown – a great many of them remaining locked in the Oracle’s vault for decades after.

Where this hardness came from is quite the mystery. The daughter of a wealthy Edinburgh professor and his socialite wife, the young Theresa Blake had been shielded from the poverty and squalor which could be found just a short walk from her doorstep. Educated privately, her knowledge of war was constrained to what she had read in her history books and, possibly, the stories of her father who himself was a veteran of the Boer War. Prior to the outbreak of the second world war, Blake’s photography had mostly consisted of socialite coverage for some of the Cities more prestigious periodicals, punctuated with the occasional artistic nude. What drew her to war remains an enigma, as the controversy surrounding her graphic images and her own reticence to engage with the press following her return from the continent mean that interviews with her are few and far between. In fact, it seems that only fragments of a single interview, conducted only a few months prior to her death in 1974, remain.

It is these interviews, and a smattering of photographs taken both by and of Theresa Blake in October and November 1944, which provides us with one of the most intriguing accounts of The Ascendancy’s activities. Unearthed from an unmarked box in the archives of the Edinburgh Oracle only a few years ago, they appear to have been intended for a retrospective issue on this almost forgotten figure. Yet that issue never appeared, and the full interview is now long lost and presumed destroyed. Why the fragments were retained, and why they were placed with such a strange suite of photographs (and by whom!) is, like to many things, unknown.

As far as we can tell, the interview took place at Blake’s family home in South Uist during the Autumn of 1974. Only sixty-four at the time, the remaining fragments suggest that she was still of sound mind and that her recollection of her wartime days was strong. There is no reference to the heart condition which would finish her off before the end of the year. The interviewer’s name is not shown on the papers found with the interview but is likely to have been either John Maybury or Anne Herbert who were responsible for most of the Oracle’s interviews in the mid to late seventies. Unfortunately, both were dead by the end of the decade – Maybury succumbing to cancer in 1978, and Herbert in a plane crash over Antartica the following year.

It is Blake’s lucidness and the seriousness of her interviewer which make the contents of what remains of the interview all the more startling. It is presumed that, over the course of their time together, they discussed Blake’s career in its entirety, yet the portion which remains covers only a few days of her time in Germany during the allied advance. It begins in the aftermath of battle, presumably the liberation Aachen, with Blake attached to a small detachment of GI’s moving across the countryside on reconnaissance. She speaks of her fear at what might lie ahead for the young men she is travelling with, and for herself.

“When I looked back at the city we had left all I could see above the tree-line were tendrils of black smoke, and I was reminded of a photograph I had taken just two days before. It was of a young German soldier who had been caught in the rubble of the Rathaus and who, it appeared, had burned to death. The smoke reminded me of his fingers, black and ragged, which reached up to the sky as if imploring, in his final moments, for some god or another to come and take him away. Of course, no one came.”

“This made me look at the men around me and consider their fate. They were younger than me for the most part – even some of the officers. And unfailingly polite. My days were dotted with ‘ma’ams’. ‘Can I help you with anything, ma’am?’, ‘This way, ma’am.’ But then I have no doubt that the German youth I’d seen in the rubble would have been exactly the same. I found myself wondering how many of them would find themselves broken or immolated, unrecognisable. And of course I wondered about myself, whether a stray shot would find itself into my temple and I would be left to fester in one of the many destroyed towns and cities through which we would doubtless pass moving forward.”

The interviewer comments at this point that it seems strange that the young American soldiers would be so deferential to her since she was such a striking figure. She laughs this off, but looking at photographs of Blake in the field it is certain that there is some truth in this. The fatigues she wears hang loose around her figure, but her face is slim and dominated by her elfin eyes. The short, straight-fringed haircut she is seen to sport in pre-war photographs has been allowed to grow, although it looks as if she may have attempted a ‘field haircut’ herself with limited success, into a set of compact curls. It seems unlikely that the GI’s would have viewed her as the mother figure she seems to think, but Blake was not a naïve woman and it is likely that her comments merely reflect the modesty of an older lady.

Following this aside, Blake tells of the trek across fields churned and pitted by artillery fire and, frankly, gives an account of relieving herself in the forest only to notice afterwards that she was urinating on a dozen mummified corpses of various woodland animals.

“It seems strange that they were all gathered in that single patch of land. Had they sensed their oncoming apocalypse and gathered together for comfort? Or had this been the feeding area of a larger animal? The question disturbed me for a good few hours. You don’t have much to think about when marching overland.”

The actual objective of the unit Blake joined is not explained in the fragments left to us. It is suggested that they have been asked to probe to the North-West of the city and secure the area. However, after a couple of days, Blake mentions that they lost their way and that a heated argument broke out between the two senior officers over their position.

“They had a series of maps spread out over the bonnet of their jeep and were arguing, low but through gritted teeth. I made my way near to find out what the problem was and it seemed that the field and forest ahead of us did not correspond to where they thought we were on the map. One officer thought that we had drifted some twenty kilometres off course and were further north than intended. The other refused to believe that was the case and cursed everything from bad Intelligence to clumsily drawn maps. The latter had superiority and decreed that the following day we would pass through the forest ahead and, depending on what awaited us there, would take stock of our situation then.”

“So we camped for the night and come the icy dawn off we set again. The men around me were restless, their mood blackened by the lack of rest they’d had since last they saw action and the cold, drab conditions. I think they viewed this mission as a wild goose chase and there’s little more dangerous to a solider than boredom. There was a dull, angry atmosphere over the unit which wasn’t helped when at around noon that day we came through the other side of the forest and were greeted by yet another identical field although this time, on the horizon, sat a small village. A cluster of small, stunted houses with a single spire rising from its centre.”

“When, finally, the CO arrived (having had to take his vehicles around the forest) a fresh argument sprung up based around the presence of this village. It corresponded to nowhere on the map, either around where we were supposed to be or the northern area where the other officer seemed convinced we were the previous day. They must have gone at it for an hour if not more. Eventually one of their more sensible soldiers suggested that the best way for them to ascertain their position was to send a scouting party forward to the village on the horizon and find out its name. By then locating it on the map they would be able to pinpoint their position perfectly. While they were debating their course of action, I took the time to borrow a pair of binoculars to view the town. Through them I could see no sign of life, hostile or otherwise, although from a few of the chimneys small puffs of smoke could be seen. What was interesting to me, though, was that both the ground immediately around the village and the village itself seemed entirely undamaged, spared from the bombardment which had destroyed the surrounding countryside. This seemed strange to me and, of course given my curious nature, I wanted to find out more.”

The village of Wahrheit and beyond
One of the photographs included with the interview shows what is assumed to be the village she describes. Taken from a considerable distance, it shows nothing more than is mentioned elsewhere, but it does confirm Blake’s observation that the ground surrounding it was completely unscathed. The effect it the photograph is actually quite unsettling, making the village appear to be settled on an island surrounded by an ocean of churned mud. The destroyed forest, glimpsed to the side of the frame renders the entire scene stranger still.

Unsurprisingly, Blake volunteered to accompany the detachment of twenty or so men who were sent to investigate the village. According to their account it took them a good few hours to arrive due to the village seeming to “recede from us even as we grew closer. It felt as if it was shirking from our presence, looking for a place to hide. Of course, we had seen this effect before – the destruction of the land means it is difficult to judge distances with any true accuracy. But I had never seen it so pronounced, and the stillness of the village made it all the more disquieting.”

“It was dark by the time we reached the outskirts of the village, and brutally cold. The field we crossed had frozen solid and it was hard going. My breath was ghosting up past my face. The village was even more still than it appeared earlier in the day, and only a few lights could be seen, mostly in the windows of the houses to the centre. My detachment made its way towards the main road, really not much more than a dirt track cutting across the fields. And before long we were at the very edge of the village, the headlights of the officer’s jeep trained on an old, old looking sign half obscured by overgrown hedge.”

“The name of the village was Wahrheit.”

In the next photograph the sign which Blake speaks of is just visible to the right of the frame, the second syllable hidden by the foliage. On the road can be seen the front of a jeep around which several uniformed figures can be seen. Due to the deep frowns on their faces it is assumed that they are poring over a map of the area for, as Blake goes on to say, “the officer and others consulted their maps again, but there was no sign of a Wahrheit or anywhere with a similar name.”

“It was suggested that many of the smaller villages around the local countryside still went by names which had been long forgotten and that, perhaps, it was shown on the map by a more modern name. I found this argument… unconvincing, but there seemed to be little option other than to investigate the town further and find out if any of the locals could shed some light on where exactly we were.”

“Perhaps it was the stillness of the village, or the falling darkness, or the cold, but the men were growing irritable. I suspect that several of them felt that this mission in the first instance was something of a distraction from the task at hand. The worst thing you can make a soldier feel is useless, and many of them just couldn’t see the point in wandering off into the countryside like this when there was a job to be done elsewhere. Whatever the reason, the mood as we moved cautiously into the village was growing foul. Everything was so still. The squat buildings were shuttered and silent. The only sounds I could hear were the rustling of our packs and equipment, and the breath of the October wind.”

“I suppose we must have got lost, as it seemed that we were navigating our way through the narrow streets of Wahrheit for far longer than it should have taken to make our way to the centre. There was no real sense to the layout of the village; the streets curved drunkenly around the slumping, sleeping houses. The radio operator nearby me was cursing the place, calling it a ‘fucking Mickey Mouse village’ and other such complaints. From ahead I fancied that we could hear faint music and the occasional sound of doors opening and closing, but every time I thought I would catch it, the wind would rise up and carry it away.”

“Eventually, I started to notice one or two cobblestones peeking through the dirt and gravel of the path. Then more. After a while I realised that the footsteps of the soldiers ahead were louder, falling heavily on stone. The path formed itself beneath my feet. Ahead, the houses leant back, opening out on a wide circular courtyard at the centre of which stood a large and initially undistinguishable structure. Along the edge of the space were flickering lamps, which barely served to illuminate the centre. The soldiers spread out around the courtyard, low; it never ceased to amaze me how those young men could snap from the casual ease with which they approached their quieter hours to rigid alert, tight models of efficiency. As they cleared the alleys leading into the centre, I walked around the construction which dominated the space, finally coming to see what it was. It was a stage, raised perhaps six feet from the ground and sheltered by a vast arch, like the mouth of a cave. Before it sat several rows of raised stone benches, and at the end of one of the furthest, sat an old man.”

“As two of the soldiers flanked around him, he looked up – slowly, as if he were moving in a different time. His hair was grey and cropped closely, as was his beard. He wore a simple waistcoat over a white shirt and trousers. I remember that his sleeves were rolled up despite the bite in the air. Placing his hands on his knees, he pushed himself up from the stone pew and gradually raised his hands in the air. Noticing that his lips were moving, I stepped forward automatically to try and make out his words, but of course he was speaking softly in German. The CO had likewise made his way towards the man, gesturing to the two soldiers to lower their weapons. His translator came quickly behind him.”

“I stood close to listen in. Via the translator, the CO interrogated the old man charmlessly. What was the name of the town? Wahrheit. Did it go by any other names? No, it was always Wahrheit. Then he asked whether there were any Wermacht forces in the town and the old man just looked at him blankly, frowning. The translator attempted to elaborate, spoke of the war, pointed East to where, just days ago, we had been caught in brutal street-by-street warfare. But there was not a glimmer of recognition in the man’s eyes. All he would do was shrug, shake his head and occasionally mutter the words, ‘No, sir, there is no war here.’”

“There was clear frustration running through the men as the officer beckoned the man over towards one of the benches and spread out his maps as the translator asked him to show where the town was positioned. I stood close, looking through their bodies as the old man squinted over the grids and lines, the lines on his face deepening. He must have pored over the maps for a good five or six minutes before straightening and shaking his head, speaking silently. The translator turned to his officer: “Not on this map,” he said.”

“Well, the officer lost his temper then (Here Blake falls into a surprisingly convincing coarse American accent), “Of course it’s on the goddamn map. Ask him again.” And the translator did as he was told, only to be met with another shrug and those same words over again. “Not on this map.”

“It goes without saying that didn’t go down too well. Now, it was a long time ago, but I’m sure the exact words the officer used were: “Right, if this old fucking Nazi can’t read a map tell him to go and find someone in this place who can.” The translator relayed a sanitised version of this message to the old man who muttered back. He would try his best, apparently, and the officer dispatched three or four of his men to accompany the man across to what seemed to be the town hall on the opposite side of the town centre. From where we stood, the long and low building appeared deserted, yet that was where the man had indicated they might find someone to help them. The officer was fuming at some of his subordinates, again voicing his frustration at their mission. By then, though, I was distracted again by the large stage, lit faintly from the fringes of the space. I stepped over the benches and across to the edge of the stage, following it around to the painted wooden steps which led up. The steps looked newer than the stone construction they served, but let out a damp creak as I stepped on the first of them. Carefully, I made my way up, stood on the stone floor and looked into the dark mouth of the stage. It was deep, running back for a good twenty feet or so before sloping down into a deeper black. I could not clearly see the rear wall of the structure, but fancied for a few moments that there were shapes there, a mural of sorts, which due to a trick of the light as I walked the length of the stage seemed to move with me haltingly, like film being paused or sped-up at random intervals. Looking up at the arched roof above it seemed that whatever images could be seen on the back wall had been daubed there also, but the lip of the arch kept the light from entering that area and, again, I was left picking abstract shapes out of the gloom. What did I see there? Fire, it seemed, twisting around all else. Destroyed cities and villages, twig-like bodies piled in barren ice-pits. Who knows? Perhaps all I was seeing was that which had been imprinted behind my eyelids over the past few months. But there was more. Other figures, on the edge of all of this, figures with their hands bound tight before them, their bodies pained and mutilated, their eyes blank and their grins twisted in madness. So much spinning in the black, just beyond comprehension. I was fumbling for my torch, keen to make sense of this strange pit I was gazing into, when there came a series of shouts from the soldiers down on the ground. I turned to find the source of the commotion, and for a few moments it felt as if there were some kind of barrier between me and them. As I stood on the stage, looking down, it was rather as if I was the only thing that was real and that what was occurring before me – the uniformed men pointing past the stage towards something on the other side of the square, rushing around one scared looking soldier – was something that I was in some way observing from another place. A serene detachment came over me, a calmness which I had not felt since long before I left the UK, and the urge was there to simply sit and watch and record everything that was occurring around me. The affairs of men became to me no more important than those of a group of ants scattering around my boot and the black tar of the atrocities I had witnessed throughout the war was simply washed away from me. I could have honestly have just sat down there on that stage and never moved again.”

“It was fear in the end which galvanised me to move. Whatever had come over me standing on that cold stone stage in the middle of a darkened and deserted West German town felt like it had in some way dulled my humanity, almost stripped me of all emotion, and of that I was terrified. I pulled myself free of whatever gripped me and ran to the steps. On the ground, the dozen or so remaining soldiers had gathered around a single, white-faced young private whose name was Hasford. He pointed to the building where a handful of men had escorted the old man just a few minutes earlier – the building which be believed to be the town hall. I followed his gesture, but from what I could see the building remained as it had been what we first viewed it, lightless and devoid of life. Yet Hasford was chattering that he had seen something just moments ago, one of their fellow soldiers, a man named DiMarco. At first it was difficult to understand his chattering, but I soon understood that he thought he had seen one of the lights in the upper window of the hall flicker on for a moment and he had seen DiMarco – and I use his words here – ‘standing at the window, face all white and almost blank but his eyes were scared, holding up his hand for help. And behind him… behind him were these shapes. It looked like something coming apart.’”

“As you can imagine, we were unsure what to make of that. Even the officer, who was still running on anger at that point, hesitated uncertainly before making his next move. Ultimately he led us over to the town hall and began to hammer on the door, demanding to be admitted in the name of the US Army. There was no response, and when he tried the handle the door was locked fast. Behind me, I could hear some of the younger soldiers whispering about the carvings on the door, carvings which appeared to echo those bound figures I fancied I had seen in the darkness, but within moments the officer was back down on the square again, gazing up at the darkened windows, and I followed him to see what was going on. He was barking at Hasford, trying to get more sense from the man, but all the young private could do was repeat what he had seen again and again. One of the sergeants offered to shoot the lock off the door, but the officer was reticent to open fire whilst there was no enemy to engage. At this, the sergeant was incensed. He stormed away shouting that something had ‘fucking well happened to those men’ at which point the officer, perhaps with a mind to calming his insubordination, ordered him to take a detachment of men, a radio, and start banging on doors. ‘Wake this town up,’ he said ‘and find out what the hell is going on.’”

“That left around seven of us, standing between the shell-like back of the stage and the blank town hall. That we needed to get in, to find out what had happened to DiMarco and the others, was clear. The officer ordered one of his men to set to work on the heavy doors with a crowbar from the jeep’s tool kit. When the man complained that it was too dark to work a man was dispatched to drive the jeep around and direct its headlights at the door. Tall shadows crawled across the walls as the vehicle was manoeuvred into position, the carvings on the door cast into deep relief. It may have been the deep blacks cast by the headlights but, under such stark light, it appeared to me that the images etched into the wood had become something else. Strangely distorted versions of familiar shapes – it was almost a map, but one which differed from the one you would have seen in any atlas. A new Europe perhaps? I felt that I’d perhaps had a glimpse of how this continent might look not after this war, but after all wars had passed. Or alternatively, what I might have seen was a view of how things had looked thousands of years ago, before war. I couldn’t say then, and I truly cannot say now. My view of the carvings was fleeting to say the least, for within moments of the light being trained on it, three men were around attempting to force open the doors.”

At this point Blake appears to have taken the opportunity to take several of the photos which were found alongside the interview. Due to the low quality of the light it is difficult to say at first what one is looking at when viewing them, but taken within the context of her story it begins to come clear. One shows the silhouettes of the three young soldiers working against a large, seemingly ornate door, although the details of whatever has been carved into the wood is invisible due to the darkness and the distance from which the photograph was taken. Another shows an anxious looking officer sitting in his jeep, smoking, face hidden by the frame of the windshield. Narrow buildings can be seen behind him, storefronts, although again the details are difficult to make out. Another appears to show a low-angle shot of what we assume to be the town hall, its many windows as lifeless as Blake’s account suggests, the sky above it leaden with low cloud.

The most interesting of shots shows the side and rear edge of the stage Blake claims to have seen in the centre of the courtyard, a massive structure curving back into the very stone of the ground itself as if it has somehow grown from the paving. Aside from its peculiar shape and size there is little else to distinguish it – the stone itself being mostly featureless – and it is a source of some frustration that there are no photographs of the front or interior of the stage. Blake’s experience was such that this cannot be put down to incompetence or even fear, therefore it can only be assumed that she documented the courtyard and its strange central structure in its entirety, but that these photographs, along with so much more, have since been lost.

Following the last passage, Blake goes on explain that the GI’s continued to work on the sturdy wooden door for some time without any luck. They had been attempting to pry it open for some fifteen minutes or so when, abruptly, the lights circling the courtyard started to go out.

“We could see no reason for it, and although the wind was cold it was not strong. Yet the flames on the opposite side of the courtyard stuttered once or twice and then died. And within seconds, the same happened to the one next to it, and then the next one on, the dark of the night working its way around to us. We all tensed, fearful, not knowing what was happening. The men at the door worked frantically to try and open it before the darkness touched us. It was around the same time that we heard rifle shots from somewhere in the town, but they seemed distant, beyond the town limits and somehow insubstantial. I could see the radio man moving to raise the sergeant’s detachment but at that point the darkness which was engulfing the lamps swept across us, faster now, and continued on to complete its circuit of the courtyard. We found ourselves trapped in the cone of light from the jeep’s headlights, surrounded on all sides by a complete void. I heard prayers, curses, the splintering of wood. Then, with a burst of static, the radio came to life – so suddenly that the operator, in his fright, almost kicked it out of the jeep.”

“What did we hear then? It was indistinct, but very clearly the voice of the sergeant who had taken the other soldiers to try and find someone else alive in the town. Static faded in over him intermittently and he sounded distant, even more so than those primitive radios tended to make people sound. They were lost, he was saying, turned around in the alleyways and the streets. ‘We see people – children, mostly,’ he said ‘but they’re running, hiding from us. And when we get to where they were hiding they’re gone. So much sound here, laughing, screaming. It’s all around.’ And do you know, when he stopped talking, in-between those bursts of radio noise, you could hear it. You could hear the laughter of dozens of children underscored by some terrible roar. How much of it was the static playing tricks on my senses, I don’t know, but I swear there was someone else there. Yet a dirge like that anywhere in the town should have been audible to us without the radio, but aside from those muffled gunshots we could hear nothing.”

“The sergeant spoke still, but his voice grew fainter. There were ‘lights in a house ahead.’ Or maybe he said ‘light around a house ahead’, I couldn’t say for certain. ‘Lost the rest of my men,’ he told us. ‘Shooting at something on the rooftops. It’s not just children in the alleys. Going to take cover in this house – Christ, the light – the town is larger than we thought. Not sure where – Christ, the light-’”

“And then he was gone. There were no more gunshots.”

“The officer, whose anger had been drained from him by now, sat in stunned silence. His men, including poor Hasford, were clustered around the doorway to the town hall where one of them still worked frantically with the crowbar. There came a loud series of cracks and a grunt of success and the men toppled away from the steps as, finally, the door to the town hall swung open. And not before time either, for as the wood around the lock splintered the headlights of the jeep, without any warning, blinked out.”

“It seemed then that we had no choice. The men turned their torches inwards, illuminating the reception area of the hall, and the officer and I stepped up behind them to peer inside. There was little I could see that was out of the ordinary – the curve of the reception desk, a flutter of papers waving us in; a few low couches around a small table; a fake chandelier hanging from the high roof above a mezzanine balcony. Beyond the reception desk and the balcony a series of doors led off, all closed and with no signage or indication of where each might lead.”

“Hasford and another of the soldiers dragged the main doors closed behind us while another stepped further inside to try and find a light switch. The beams of their torches (and my own) jousted across the dark room. I crossed over to the reception desk and flicked through the papers there, but although the documents appeared to bear an official stamp of sorts, the words written on them looked to me to be nothing more than a collection of randomised letters and fonts, ordered in such a way that they would appear from a distance to appropriate a composed document but, when viewed up close, would be revealed to be nothing more than a jumble of nonsense. I ventured behind the desk to see what its drawers and compartments would reveal, but each of the drawers was locked tight and, in the small open indentations I found only sheaths of blank paper and apparently unused writing implements. Around me, the soldiers were gathering and attempting to find their way to the room where it seemed DiMarco had appeared. They opened each of the doors which led from the reception in turn, looking for a stairway. The first revealed only another corridor with another half dozen doors leading from it. The second a narrow and undecorated passageway which, from a glance along its length, led to a kitchen area. On the third – the door just to the side of the reception desk – they discovered another series of doors but also the foot of a staircase, angling up to the first floor.”

“This was the route we took, winding up the two flights to find ourselves in a small, featureless landing. From here there were two doors, the first leading to the balcony we had seen from the reception – which in turn led to yet another door – and the second opening into a small office room, warmed by candle lamps. Shelves of books covered one wall almost entirely and, in the centre of the room, nesting on a thick rug, stood a heavy oak desk behind which sat a comfortably padded chair. Tramped across the carpet, around the desk and to the door beyond it, were several damp footprints, each trailing the occasional clump of mud and grass. The officer signalled his men forward and they moved across the room. Keeping a close distance behind them, I glanced across at the old spines propped up by the bookshelves. Here again I found the illusion of sense, words which were not words, only now other symbols were mixed in with the our own alphabet, symbols which resembled other letters in other languages – Greek, Hebrew, Syriac and others which I did not recognise at the time but now believe to be derivations of Proto-Sinaitic script. Doubtless there were many more which I did not have a chance to see for, even as I was taking in this baffling information, the soldiers were opening the next door.”

“Almost immediately, the temperature in the room changed, an invisible whirlwind of ice and heat filling the space around us. A brief blaze of light flared in the doorway, but faded within moments, leaving us staring down a long passageway of blank concrete lit only intermittently by the bronze gas lamps which jutted from the walls. The floor was pitted and damp, small puddles having gathered in its imperfections. But from these a light steam was rising, entwined tendrils rising up in insubstantial columns. On approaching the door, I was struck by the humid heat emanating from the corridor beyond; yet there was a chill shot through it, as if whatever was producing the warmth had at its core a cold, cold heart.”

“We moved forward, of course; what choice did we have? The darkness outside was complete now and we knew from the sergeant’s final cryptic message that we were not alone in that town and that whatever walked its streets meant us harm. And so we filed into that corridor, following it to its end where we were confronted by more turns, more doors, slopes and stairs. Each door we tried on our way was locked, but I would make a point of pressing my hand or my ear to each of them. They were often hot, often damp, often ice-cold, and it felt that should I step through any of them I might find myself alternately in the centre of a tropical forest, a desert or lost in the middle of an arctic snowstorm.  There were sounds too, of running water or of old, dying machinery. From time to time I thought I heard nothing but, as I took my ear away from the wood, would realise that underneath the silence was an enormous, though distant, rumble coming from somewhere far beyond the door.”

“The corridors would turn, fold back on themselves and from time to time we were faced with a row of doors which could only have led back to the corridor running parallel to the one in which we then stood. Never once did we break the dimensions of the town hall, but we ascended and descended so many steps that it soon became a source of confusion as to which floor we were on. Fatigued, it became clear that we were making little progress and the officer started making sounds about following our route back to the reception and trying some of the other doors. Hasford seemed convinced by this, but the others, maintained by their loyalty to their lost colleagues wanted to push on, to find the source of the troubles which had beset us. I was torn, personally, between the great fear which encompassed all of us and my own curiosity as to what lay at the end of this series of twisting passages. An argument kicked off between the two sides, which I stood apart from, ending with the officer, Hasford and another of the men heading back the way we had come and the others proceeding onwards. I waited a moment, uncertain which path to take, before realising that the others had all turned out of sight and quickly followed the group of soldiers who had continued on along the passageway.”

“I swear I must have been no more than twenty or thirty seconds behind them, but when I turned the corner I found myself faced with an entirely empty corridor of doors. Of the soldiers there was no sign. I glanced back and called out for the officer, but there was no response from either him or Hasford. I was frozen in place, that warm smoke as always swirling around me. I realised that I was suddenly alone in this labyrinth, surrounded by impossible doors, the only positive outcome an escape into a hostile town. Behind each door I could hear movement, something shifting, and it became clear to me that staying in one place was the only course of action which was no longer an option.”

“I started to run then, down the corridor and through the steam at the end which if anything seemed even thicker than it had been before. The path turned, leading me to a long series of wooden steps – the kind you’d see leading into a basement – only these led up, supported by ancient looking struts of broken wood. It looked as if it would collapse at any moment, but I didn’t care. I sprinted up them, desperate to escape that maddening sequence of passages. The steps shook and groaned with every step I took, but I kept moving regardless. Thick spirals of vapour surrounded me. At the top I expected nothing more than another featureless passage, but instead was confronted by a door. Had it been locked I am almost certain that I would have thrown myself from the tops of those stairs and made an end of it there and then, but the handle turned and clicked and I almost fell into the room on the other side.”

“It was empty. The old floorboards coated with dust and grime, the walls blank. But there was evidence of recent activity. Fresh boot prints and drag marks imprinted in the dirty floor. Directly ahead of me were three tall windows, uncontained, looking out across the town courtyard. To my left and right were doors. It was clear to me that this was the room in which DiMarco had been standing when he had been glimpsed earlier, but aside from the marks on the floor there was no sign of the soldier or the men he had been with. I crossed the room and looked down on the courtyard. It was illuminated again, but empty still. The jeep, which we had left dead at the door of the town hall, was gone.”

“If, as I suspected, this was the room where DiMarco had disappeared, then I knew the door to my left would lead me back in the direction of the reception area. Again, I expected the door to be locked, to be forced further again from the outside world, but it was not. It led me to a lightly decorated hall on the walls of which were picturesque paintings of the town and courtyard. Not wishing to stall much longer I failed to look at them in any great detail but it was clear even from a cursory glance that there was one fundamental problem with each of them – in the paintings of the courtyard and town centre, the stage was entirely absent.”

“With little difficulty, I found my way back to the reception area and pulled open the main doors. There was no sign of whoever had taken the jeep, or relit the lamps around the courtyard. Expecting at any moment for something – something which looked as if it were ‘coming apart’ - to pluck me from where I stood I ventured across the cobbles. The dark alleyways which radiated off the town centre drew my eyes to them, but there was no one there, no sounds, no lights.”

“I was on the very edge of the courtyard, ready to start making my way out of the town to try and find my way back to the city when I heard the distant crackle of a radio. A voice fought its way through the static, lost and as distant as those we had heard before but recognisable as that of the officer. It repeated a single phrase over and over, fading all the time before finally being drowned by static entirely: ‘I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.’”

“I looked back then, for the final time, and saw light hanging in the centre of the stage. It was nothing more than a low glow, but under its illumination I could see the confused figures of young men in the wings, stumbling around, pushed and pulled by indistinct presences which would not make themselves fully known. But as quickly as it was glimpsed the tableau faded and the light was gone. There then was nothing left aside from an empty stage and a single old man, standing by the steps, his hands clasped before him as he nodded farewell and stepped back into the curtain of darkness.”

Afterword
It is here that Theresa Blake’s account ends, as does the fragment of the interview discovered in the Oracle’s vaults. As mentioned elsewhere, both potential interviewers are long dead and with them any indication of the substance of what  was discussed following Blake’s account of what happened in the town of Wahrheit. It goes without saying that no town by that name exists in the vicinity described by Blake, nor is there any account of the fate of any of the soldiers she mentions by name – the most likely candidates being described as MIA in the fighting around Aachen.

Theresa Blake’s work throughout the remainder of the war, including her striking photographs and accounts of her experiences during the fall of Berlin are, of course, widely known and respected. Following the war she retired from the public life and travelled so extensively that for considerable periods her movements are entirely unaccounted for. Never found wanting financially, she was seemingly capable of dropping off the world entirely. Indeed, several attempted biographies of her have been aborted when it is discovered that, for example, she returned to Europe in 1948 and that no record of her movements exists for the following six years.

There is truth to her account, as any student of that peculiar structure we refer to as The Prophecy House and its many guardians will see. Yet a great many questions remain unanswered around why Blake was allowed to walk free while the detachment she arrived in Wahrheit with were so ruthlessly removed. Perhaps the clue is in the words of the old man who met them in the centre of that strange town, unscathed by the fighting which was tearing the entire continent around it apart. ‘There is no war here’, he had said. And perhaps there were forces who intended to ensure that this particular status quo remained.

It is assumed that Theresa Blake found her answers during her many travels following the war, and it may be that she found more. But for the rest of us the mystery remains behind one of those many doors to The Prophecy House, scattered across the globe, always hidden, always locked.

Copyright John Forth 2008

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