The Gloomy Portal

I met up with Eddie, an old colleague from The Factory the other week, and we were reminiscing about old times, old colleagues and our days working in the place.

We went through various memories of characters that stood out in our workplace for assorted reasons, good, bad, and ugly, and drank a few coffees in the process.

‘So, Grant, you seem to remember everyone pretty well, do you remember Susanna Regan?’ he said.

I did but vaguely, she was a fairly small woman with short blonde hair, who sat very quietly at her desk, kept herself to herself, and never ‘said boo to a goose,’ as we said back then.

Eddie said that Susanna had disappeared, had left for work one day, and just dropped out of existence, disappeared without a trace.

This was in the days before the Internet, remember, so it was not so easy to track and trace people as it is now.

Lots of rumours had circulated about her disappearance, apparently , she had lied about her qualifications for the job, and her lies had caught up with her, and thought it best to leave, she had been the victim of the North-East’s ‘Bible John’ type serial killer, there were more, but the one I believed, was she had disappeared within the Factory, in one of the unused parts of the building,  like the haunted Room 6, which you will have read about.

There was also the Lift, which had been used daily for years, there were rumours about it having supernatural powers. It had an ‘elevator music’ all its own,  not like the ‘muzak’  that could be heard in the new shopping centres of our city,  something weird and unnerving, a slithering , scratching sound when it was in operation, like a creature of some sort trying to get in or even get out, I would say something a bit bigger than the occasional rat that could be heard scuttling inside the walls of the building. Aisling O’Hare was looking into that possibility as she was really interested in that sort of thing, in fact as I have previously said, she was something of an expert in the field of supernatural issues.

For what it is worth, I never used the Lift, as I had been stuck in one as a child, when my grandparents moved into a new high rise building in the early part of the seventies. I was scared out of my wits thinking that I would never get out of this metal chamber, which I’d mistakenly thought would be like the Tardis in Dr Who, but it was a lot smaller and claustrophobic inside and having asthma didn’t help me in that situation.

Of course, in the Factory, I didn’t admit to this fear, I always took the stairs, claiming it was my way of keeping fit, and keeping my weight down, as we always had cake and sweets at hand in the office, and my willpower was nil in that area,

Anyway, during a visit to the library, Aisling had unearthed an article from the local newspapers about a girl who had disappeared from our old office building years before we were all there, in the early seventies.

‘A young lady called Fiona Sinclair, who was a very diligent secretary, had stayed late to finish off some work,’ said the article. Miss Sinclair had apparently ‘disappeared ‘after being seen going into the ‘lift’ as they called it, by one of the cleaning staff. A witness named David Smith was referred to in the article was quoted as saying that he heard her screams coming from the lift, an animalistic squeal, as if a wild creature was in there with her.

Smith had written a somewhat creative description of the incident, though I think his imagination may have run riot a wee bit.

She also obtained an extract from his ‘statement’: -

The back wall of the lift opened into a grotesque netherworld, a dark cavern of a place. It stank, like a sewer or something rank and quite possibly dead. She heard a slithering sound, like something wet and squishy making its way towards her through the dankness. There was a muffled chattering. The squishing came closer and closer. The lift shaft door seemed to grow further and further away then urgently slammed shut. Fiona was enveloped in darkness and felt cold wet tentacles grabbing at her. Her screams filled the dark void..."

With my fear of lifts, I often think of a line from a hymn I used to sing as a choirboy back in the early ‘seventies, it was one we sang at Easter, and the words ‘gloomy portal’ were mentioned.  I always wondered what a gloomy portal would be and pestered my dad constantly asking him what it was. He said it would be something like a doorway. I think the door into the lift may have been a gloomy portal, but a portal to where, hell or death, or both?

I thought back to what Old Mitchell said a while back , it was something like the Lambton Worm from the legend in County Durham, I had read about that one, maybe it was a giant worm that lived underground, devouring anything that got in its way. I would look into this one, as I did with Fish Face, for my own information and for my records for my potential book on Ghosts and Mysterious Happenings in the Factory, there was an Aberdeen Worm, something like that.

I told Eddie all my information, and he laughed, ‘so you reckon the lift swallowed her, then? ‘You’ll be telling me about ‘The Great Orm of Loch Ness’ next!

‘You clearly haven’t changed,  what a guy for imagination you are,’ he grinned at me , incredulously.

He did not believe in the stuff that I believed in , the supernatural and mysterious happenings that had taken place in the Factory, mind you , he had not been keeping record of it like I had.

I had been keeping diaries of the weird and wonderful goings-on, for years, since the eighties, and only now have I seen fit to post my findings online, for anyone who wishes to read them. I’m not sure about all this blogs and podcasts and stuff, they are not really for me, I mean all those authors I admired did all right with books, so meantime I can do ok with just online postings, and possibly look at cobbling together a book some day, as I said previously, before I become a ghost myself.

I said goodbye to Eddie, and made arrangements to go for a pint in the near future, he walked back into his evidently successful life, and I did to my next port of call which was the Royal Athenaeum to seek out Old Mitchell to see if he had any information about the mysterious disappearance of Susanna Regan from the Factory, If anyone could assist me , it would be him. I would dedicate my book to him once it was published, I thought, I hoped.

(Tales from the Factory # 3 by Grant Wilson)