I found the journal of Harold Upkiss wrapped in an old plastic carrier bag, resting in a drainage tunnel buried under a bank of sand. He had been missing for thirty-five years, and I had finally found out why.
My crew had been assigned to a copse of trees surrounded by farmers fields known locally as ‘Sandbank’ to install new drainage channels to prevent flooding, a common problem in the Fenlands surrounding Wisbech. Back in the eighties this became a sudden dumping ground for tons of sand which smothered the small woodland, and the area got fenced off as a local hazard. The government restricted the land for forty years before giving it up to the local council. Aside from the drainage problems it was merely a local oddity, an irrelevance.
While digging out the sand around the edge of the copse we discovered a large corrugated metal pipe. We pulled the tunnel out with a digger and the top just shattered, brittle with rust. Sat on top of a thick stew of mud which half-filled the pipe was a white and blue, tattered carrier bag. It pulled apart like tissue paper and inside was a brown leather-bound book. Written on the front in thick black pen was, ‘Journal of Harold Upkiss… do not touch!’
I ignored his warning and flicked through the pages, scanning through towards the final entry. The journal documented his daily routine. Every meal he had was meticulously noted and reviewed, no matter how mundane. He would log the weather, what he wore, who he spoke to, and where he went with his friends. Other than the fact he was logging it all, it was a fairly normal routine for a boy of thirteen. I read the last entry to see what led to the journal being left here. After a normal day he experienced something unusual.
Journal entry - 13th July, 1988
Approx 4PM. Out in the fields with Michael P and David C. Michael had made a bow and arrow from an old bull whip he had found. He stripped off the leather binding, exposing a flexible plastic core. He managed to attach a string and whittled some arrows out of sticks. We gathered feathers as flights. It was fun until Michael stopped shooting across the field and aimed the bow straight up in the sky. He let loose, and the arrow disappeared into the sky. Michael ran, David and I scrambled randomly. The arrow thumped into the dirt twenty feet away from me.
“What the fuck are you doing?” David asked, half angry, yet the sudden excitement fuelled maniacal laughter.
Michael shrugged, “Chances are it wasn’t going to hit any of us.”
“You’re mental.” David replied. For a moment I thought David was going to thump him, but he just picked up some of the arrows that were stuck in the ground, snapped them over his knee and walked off home. Michael was furious and ran up behind David, brandishing the bow like a club. David ran ahead. Michael then stopped and searched his backpack. He pulled out an arrow and got ready to aim it at David until I shouted out.
Michael paused, lowered the bow, then calmly asked me, “Want to make some more arrows?”
“Not really.” I said.
Michael replied, “I’ve got some more spares anyway.”
Evening was closing in so we started heading back for our street.
I stopped and sat on a short wall by the old barn to update my journal, which annoyed Michael. He always thought I was documenting evidence against him. “Maybe I am.” I’d reply. But he would always wait for me.
While we were sitting there I heard a whining, metallic screeching sound overhead, then a flash of blinding bright light. I didn’t see anything but felt a tremor pass through the ground, up the wall, enough to make my arse numb. Then came a rain of dirt. I shielded my head with my backpack for a few seconds until it stopped. Then I finally looked at Michael.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked.
Michael was as confused as me, but he pointed over towards the copse. One large tree, I think it’s an Ash tree, was broken and splintered, and it looked like steam was rising from amongst the trees. Michael started walking straight over to it. Without a word I followed.
When we got to the copse I could hear a hissing sounds, then it became a violent buzzing, electrical sound, as if a loose cable was zapping erratically like an enraged snake. We went to enter the copse over one of the drainage ditches, but as Michael reached the crest on the far side he ducked down.
“Watch it!” he said, “Something’s there!”
“What?” I whispered back.
Michael turned back and followed the ditch around to an old tunnel all the kids in the area knew as a good hiding spot. It was overgrown with brambles at the entrance but a trail was worn away by wildlife. Badgers, I guessed. The tunnel was too small for deer as it was almost half filled with dirt, but there was enough room for us to get through on our knees. Michael crawled up the tunnel and I followed. When we got towards the end of the tunnel, where the land suddenly slopes upwards to join the copse, Michael took out his bow, and pulled three arrows from his backpack. I had no idea why. He had one ready to shoot as he emerged from the edge of the tunnel and looked over the earth slope.
I pulled myself up alongside him and saw the cranage of trees, snapped and splintered by whatever had crashed here. At the base of the tree was wreckage. A small aircraft of some kind I assumed but there were no wings I could see. It was a shell of dark metal, about the size of a car. Some small pieces of debris were scattered around the ground. It appeared to be a completely smooth shell as I couldn’t see any sort of joins or gaps in the bodywork, but suddenly a panel that was seamless then moved out and folded downwards like a small door, though too small for a grown man. Inside something moved but I didn’t see what. We both ducked out of sight
I looked at Michael and saw he was holding something metal. He held it out proudly. It was a curved, triangular piece of dark grey metal, thicker at one end, and it didn’t show any sign of damage. When he handed it to me it seemed impossibly light, as if I was holding a piece of paper. Yet even at its thinnest point it felt incredibly strong. It also felt… warm on my skin, not like it was hot, but as if a chilli pepper was rubbed against my skin. It left a tingling sensation. Michael snatched it back quickly.
I went up for another look, but didn’t see any movement. The door, or hatch, was still open. The hiss of steam was getting quieter and the electrical zaps were getting less frequent, but still loud. Every so often the electrical sound randomly cracked like a whip making us both duck for cover in the pipe.
Then the trucks came. Out of the first truck a man got out and shouted, “It’s here! We’ve got it!”. Then others followed. It was impossible to tell how many, the sound of their idling diesel engines made the tunnel a cacophony of noise. We both froze in place.
“We should go out.” I said.
“Are you stupid!?” Michael said, “We’ve seen something we shouldn’t have. Something top secret, something… alien. If we come crawling out they’re not taking us home. They’ll lock us up. That’s if we’re lucky. If it’s the army they could shoot us!”
I didn’t know if he was right, but I had seen the news stories from Northern Ireland. If they justified a ‘shoot to kill’ policy there, then maybe they would do that for whatever was happening here.
So we waited. I started to feel sick. I didn’t know if it was the mix of nerves and excitement, or just sitting for a prolonged period in this damp drainage tunnel. But I was nauseous, my mind was foggy and every movement ached. Michael was looking sick too, though he didn’t say anything. He was breathing heavily and looking pale in the fading light of the tunnel. He coughed at one point, and blamed the diesel fumes from the vehicles above.
Evening was setting in. Michael took a torch from his backpack, he told me he often snuck out alone at night, occasionally he flicked the torch on to look at the piece of metal he had found. He looked at it in awe. He barely spoke to me other than when he was thinking out loud. “I wonder what I’ve got.” he would say, or “What is it i’ve found?”. He seemed convinced it was part of an alien spaceship, and that he had something incredibly valuable.
At one point Michael needed to take a piss and he did so with not a thought as to where it would end up. The golden stream crept towards me and I had to arch my body like a startled cat to avoid it. He found this hilarious. Stifling his laughter only to avoid being heard by the men above. Soon his attention went back to the ‘spaceship fragment’ as he called it.
Then the thunder started, and the rain followed. A gentle stream filled the bottom of the ditch and ran into the drainage tunnel, turning the dusty loose soil into a thick black mud. Water crept in until the mud was unavoidable, covering the floor of the whole tunnel. Above us I could hear a lot of heavy vehicles moving. There was a lot of chatter between what we assumed were soldiers. One thing I overheard amidst the noise was that those soldiers were being rotated away from the crash site every thirty minutes or so.
After the longest period of heavy machinery, shouting and metal clanking noises there was relative quiet. We were waiting for our chance to escape when some other machines then rumbled overhead. We stayed put. A diesel engine rattled and revved occasionally, then we heard some shouting. Then a loud metal clattering and what sounded like a sudden downpour of rain. Only it wasn’t rain, it was sand. We saw some come flowing down the slope on the copse side of the tunnel. It started as a trickle, but then whatever was pouring the sand moved towards us and it was enough to cause us to move away from that end of the tunnel.
I said, “We’ve got to go.” and Michael nodded. I made my way down the tunnel first, but the rainfall had made the mud into a quagmire. It was difficult to move anyway while feeling so nauseous, but then my feet got bogged down and my knees got sucked into the mud like a vacuum. I put all my effort into driving forwards until I got exhausted, and I had barely moved an inch. I was stuck, only able to get my hands free with barely enough room to kneel upright.
Michael had the idea of throwing sand on the mud to try to make it more firm, but it did nothing but add a crust to its surface. Michael looked down the tunnel and began to panic. I urged him not to try and crawl past me and get stuck too, so he didn’t. Instead, he pushed me down, forcing me face down in the mud, and used my body as a bridge to get further down the tunnel. When I looked ahead I saw what caused his panic, more sand began to trickle down on the other side of the tunnel.
As he climbed over me I grabbed at him, hoping he would drag me out of the mud. But he didn’t, he tried to shrug me off and keep going. When he had his feet on my shoulders he tried to jump as far forward as he could, but I grabbed his ankle in the hope he would pull me forward with him. He fell short on his jump and kicked out at me to shake me off. I asked what he was doing, but he didn’t respond. He just didn’t care. He wanted out of the tunnel and I was slowing him down. I was irrelevant to him, just like when he shot that arrow right up in the air, I was there for his amusement and now that purpose had ended.
He was kicking like a donkey at my arm and eventually, with hands coated in mud, I lost my grip. I managed to reach over and grab a strap of his backpack. He squirmed loose, slipping the straps off his shoulders. Then started shouting, “No, you can’t have it, it’s mine!” I didn’t even realise what he was talking about, but when I had grabbed the backpack out of instinct he thought I was trying to steal his piece of metal.
“It’s mine!” he screamed. He kicked at me furiously while pulling on the backpack. The bag tore open and all the belongings poured out. He dived into the mud to grab the piece of spaceship which when pulled out of the mud, somehow remained clean, the mud just dropped off it. Michael pulled back with a smile on his face he looked me in the eye and said, “Fuck you, Harry. Write that in your journal!”
Further down the tunnel the mud was more diluted and Michael was able to trudge his way through, out of the end of the tunnel, under the increasingly heavy shower of sand. Once out of the tunnel Michael stumbled then ran out of sight. The darkness grew in the tunnel, a combination of the failing evening sun and the pouring sand making a veil over the only remaining opening. Any hope Michael might get me help faded quickly. I wish David was here. He would have stopped Michael. He would have helped me.
My one piece of fortune was that with the clutter from Michael’s bag I got his torch. It is by the light of my torch that I write this journal now. Both ends of the tunnel are covered in sand. I shouted for hours, I screamed for help.
It is agony. My throat hurts, my head is swimming.
I have vomited a few times. I could still hear movement overhead, but they couldn’t hear me. I banged on the tunnel but the noise was muffled. Nobody can hear me.
Everything went quiet. I am still stuck in the mud. So I write this, because that is what I do. I hope one day someone finds my journal. Because I am here. Sick. waiting to die. I want people to know what happened to me.
-
It was heartbreaking to read the final entry in his journal. The remains of Harold Upkiss were found in the mud where he had become stuck. I called the police and his bones were eventually taken so his family could have a proper burial of the boy who had been missing for thirty-five years. And yet, maybe the Upkiss family didn’t share the most unfortunate fate. Michael Porter returned home and claimed never to have seen where young Harry had ended up, leaving him to die under the bank of sand just so he could keep his piece of spaceship to himself. He hid it in his house, and never told anyone about it.
Never may seem like a long time, but for Michael P and his foster-family it was two days. His foster-mum took him to hospital when his vomiting and diarrhoea gave way to bouts of violent seizures. Michael died in hospital at 14 years old. His foster family, including two foster-sisters, all became similarly sick, radiation sickness as it turned out, and were suddenly taken from their home by the military, who closed off the street. Within the decade they had all died, most of them due to cancer. They had found Michael’s prized piece of metal wrapped in a pillowcase and hidden under his mattress, radiating death through the house.
I remember standing at the end of the road watching as some big, white lorry marked ‘British Army’ wheeled down the road after decontaminating Michael’s house. The police and army cleared the roadblocks and told everyone it was safe to go home. At the time I remember feeling sorry for Michael, he was annoying, and dangerous, but he was just a boy who had a tough life. Since I found Harry’s journal it made me feel pure hatred for the kid. Whatever weirdness happened at the copse, people speculate it was some air force test that went wrong, it hardly matters to me. The three of us were all together on that day, I never should have left Harry alone with Michael. I could have saved him.
- David Copeland