Episode Transcript
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio,
1:20
podcasts. Is
1:24
this it? Yeah,
1:26
this is it. What
1:29
a shit hole. We're
1:32
standing in the woods just up from the village of
1:34
Dunwich on the Suffolk coast. Where
1:37
we are now is just a hundred yards or so from
1:39
where the cliffs drop down into the North Sea. And
1:43
there's a house here in the woods. The
1:45
lane that led up to it is long forgotten, overgrown.
1:49
It's a Victorian house and
1:52
it doesn't look like anyone has lived in it for decades.
1:56
But this is it. This
1:58
is the house that Robert Blake was leading us to. It
2:02
was about a half an hour after Matt had stormed
2:04
out of the studio. Victorieness
2:07
and Marcus Byron had gone after him to
2:09
make sure he didn't do anything stupid. We
2:12
didn't know at the time just how stupid
2:14
his plans were. Eleanor and
2:16
I discussed the problem we'd been having with Matt and
2:18
the new aspects of his personality that were not making
2:21
it onto any of the recordings. And
2:23
while we were doing that, I had spotted
2:25
a strange anomaly with the notebooks. So
2:28
I set up a distress flare. And while I
2:30
was waiting, Victorieness returned. I've
2:33
left Marcus with him. Two on one. Seemed
2:35
like overkill. What's Matt doing? Stomping
2:38
about like a petulant child as far as I can tell.
2:40
You know,
2:41
man stuff. Ah, okay,
2:43
here we go. Alright, Kay?
2:46
Yeah, good. Where are you? South
2:49
of France, made by the pool. Cousin's wedding. Shit,
2:51
okay. What's up? I've got a puzzle
2:54
to solve. Ghosts and shit? Yeah,
2:56
something like that. Can
2:59
you see this? That looks like a book. Yeah, it's
3:01
a notebook. I think on paper, mate. Old tech, not
3:03
my area. I can make a bonfire out
3:05
of it. I recognise that, Syene. Doctor Peck is in the house. Hello,
3:07
Slide. Who's the other hottie? I'm sorry,
3:09
what? Slide, it's the page numbers in this notebook. Because
3:12
he can't count. Can I see? I think the missing
3:14
numbers
3:15
are code. I'm sorry,
3:15
what? I'm sorry, what? Slide,
3:18
it's the page numbers in this notebook. He's numbered
3:20
the pages by hand, but he's missed some out. Because he can't
3:23
count. Can I see?
3:26
I think the missing numbers are code. You
3:30
were right. Crafty old sod,
3:33
everything we were trying to decipher was nonsense
3:35
and he knew it. This whole notebook
3:38
is a giant red herring.
3:39
Well, sounds like Charlie's Angels have
3:41
cracked it there. You don't need me.
3:44
I've got numbers. They don't mean anything. Is it a planet again?
3:46
Did you try planets? There's going
3:48
to be some exfilish shit.
3:50
It's not a planet. GPS. Can we
3:52
assume I've tried everything that you're going to suggest? I'm
3:55
going to send you the numbers now. It's
4:00
not a GPS.
4:00
You think? I'm not sure
4:02
what
4:03
this is. But you can figure
4:05
it out. I can't buy the pool, okay?
4:08
So figure it out by
4:09
the pool.
4:11
And figure it out he did. The missing page numbers in
4:13
Robert Blake's notebook
4:15
corresponded to a document in his Majesty's Land Registry.
4:19
That is to say, it was the deed to a piece of land. This
4:22
piece of land. With this old, deserted house on
4:25
it. A house that was purchased back
4:27
in 1897 by
4:30
the Marsh Refinery Company of Innsmouth. This
4:34
was Obed Marsh's house. So,
4:37
are
4:37
we going in? Should we wait?
4:39
Before
4:41
Matt? Marcus Byron had called and told
4:43
us what Matt had done and the consequences
4:46
of those actions. The studio being shut down by Caroline
4:48
Morse, who turned out to be
4:50
the real power behind Wilberforce Ashton Heath just before the
4:52
war. The real power behind Wilberforce
4:55
Ashton Heath, just as her grandmother, Abigail
4:57
Fisher, had been the real power behind the church's
4:59
story wisdom and supposedly the
5:01
curse of the 20th century.
5:02
Hey, we're just fine. You didn't sound fine.
5:06
We only have a small window here. Caroline
5:08
Morse and her people have the notebook now. It won't take them
5:10
very long to work out where this place is. Matt,
5:13
I think maybe he should stay out of this. Kennedy,
5:15
are you coming in? No. No,
5:18
I'm going to wait for Matt. Okay.
5:21
Let's go. Okay.
5:23
I'm fine.
5:24
Matt's going to be fine. He's with Marcus. Not
5:27
worried about Matt. Okay. How
5:29
long have you known Marcus? 20 years. Wow,
5:31
okay. I married him for 15.
5:33
What? Seriously? Good.
5:37
I love that you're a joker, Matt. We're
5:42
heading up to Suffolk to Dunwich to meet
5:44
up with Kennedy and Eleanor and Victoria
5:46
Ness. This is a good
5:48
sign. What is it?
5:51
A new recording. Well, this is all
5:53
we have left now, isn't it?
5:55
Marcus Byron had watched Caroline
5:57
Morse and her goons enter the studio. and
6:00
had waited for them to leave again before he came and
6:02
found me and told me where Kennedy and the others
6:04
had gone. Before that, he
6:07
had seen my altercation with Wilberforce
6:09
Ashton Heath. So I think he was
6:11
well aware that I wasn't really on solid
6:13
ground, psychologically speaking. You were
6:15
away for a long time. You've been to the
6:17
kind of places you were at,
6:19
but just for an hour or two at the most. I
6:21
know what it does to you mentally. Considering
6:24
you were gone for three years, I'd say you
6:26
were holding up pretty well. Do I hold the
6:28
record? You actually
6:30
might. How much do you remember?
6:32
Nothing. Dreams.
6:36
No. Bullshit. You've
6:40
got to let people know what's going
6:42
on with you. You can't bottle
6:44
it up. No one has the capacity
6:46
to hold all that in. And
6:49
if I let it out, you'll go mad. You
6:51
might. But you might not. If
6:54
you do, you might recover. Keep
6:56
it inside, it will just explode. Eventually
6:58
I've seen it.
6:59
No one comes back from that. How
7:01
do you come back? This
7:04
is a cop. A
7:06
function, but it
7:08
changes you. You have
7:10
to accept that. There's medication
7:13
that can take the edge off the nightmares. And
7:15
there's some studies being done, mostly in the Middle
7:18
East, about
7:18
how to safely curtail deep sleeps
7:21
so the memories don't get a good hold on your
7:23
mind. But there's no returning
7:25
to normal. What's normal? No,
7:29
there's no way back to where you were. That's
7:31
true of anything, isn't it? Experience
7:33
changes you. You could go on a nice
7:36
beach holiday and you wouldn't be the same person
7:38
when you're going back. This wasn't a beach holiday.
7:40
I
7:43
don't imagine it was. Oh,
7:49
we're gonna have to break a window. Last resort. Stay
7:52
here. I'll see if there's another way.
7:58
I get that Matt's had a bad experience.
8:00
I pissed off that he didn't talk to me. I
8:03
pissed off that he couldn't control his behavior, that he just
8:05
got angry every time I tried to talk to him about it.
8:09
And he went and blew the whole thing and got us shut down.
8:14
You're going to be listening to this at some point, Matt, so there
8:17
it is. It's a bunch of male
8:19
pride bullshit, and this whole thing is too
8:21
important. All
8:23
that time I've been trying to find you. I've
8:26
been all over the world. I've been digging everywhere. I
8:28
didn't give up.
8:31
And after three years, three
8:34
years,
8:34
you show up again, and you're acting like
8:37
a hormonal teenager.
8:38
And
8:40
I get it. I
8:41
can't imagine what it was like or
8:44
what you went through. But I was
8:46
just trying to help. I
8:48
wasn't expecting it to be easy
8:50
or quick, which is why I played
8:53
along and pretended it was all fine. Because
8:55
I thought sooner or later he'd open up about it.
8:57
But you didn't. You just
9:00
blew it all.
9:02
You didn't let me help.
9:03
You didn't talk to me.
9:07
Whatever happens now,
9:10
I'm sorry. But
9:12
that's why we left you outside. Bingo.
9:25
This place has definitely
9:27
not been occupied for a long time. It's
9:30
really big. Victorian, as you said.
9:33
There's no carpet. The walls
9:35
are pretty much bare. I
9:37
don't even know if there was ever electricity put in here.
9:39
And be careful where you're
9:41
walking. There's probably a cell underneath us, and a lot
9:43
of these floorboards that were awesome. So
9:45
this is the Church of Stary Wisdom. I don't think so.
9:47
I think it's a weigh-in. Okay, that
9:49
sounds ominous. It does, doesn't it?
9:52
Probably is.
9:54
Should we
9:56
wait for a market? No, we could do. Or
9:59
we could...
9:59
I'm just driving you with the person who trained
10:02
for us. OK. I
10:06
don't want the door upstairs. Why?
10:08
What do you think is up there?
10:09
I have no idea. But I don't think the stairs
10:11
will hold. And I think
10:13
whatever we're looking for is going to be down.
10:17
In the cellar? In
10:18
the cellar. Ready?
10:20
No
10:22
isn't an option really, is it?
10:31
OK then.
10:36
The only illumination we had were
10:38
the flashlights on our ferns.
10:40
A set of stone steps led down into
10:43
a long, low cellar that seemed
10:45
to be about the same area again as the
10:47
ground floor of the house.
10:49
Whatever this space was used for, it
10:52
clearly hadn't been disturbed
10:53
for years.
10:55
There were wooden shelving units all along
10:57
one side.
10:59
Large glass specimen
11:00
jars were arranged in rows on these, covered
11:03
in dust. After
11:05
my experiences under the Devil's Reef trailer
11:07
park, I knew not to look too
11:09
closely. Babies.
11:22
Babies. Babies.
11:25
I don't think we've done much at all.
11:27
I suggest we're in the right place, sir. At
11:30
the far end of the space, there was another
11:32
door. Give me a
11:34
hand. Wide
11:45
stone steps descended away from us,
11:47
seemingly in
11:48
a spiral. These
11:50
stairs seemed older and more permanent
11:53
than the house above them. And
11:55
around them was a cavern, an
11:57
apparently limitless dark space.
11:59
that didn't make any sense existing
12:02
beneath the quiet woods of Dunwich.
12:03
Didn't bring a radio. You
12:06
think this is a breach? It's
12:08
weird. Weird? Good?
12:11
No.
12:14
This is it? Through
12:16
those trees according to the map.
12:17
Okay. How
12:30
are you feeling?
12:32
Like an idiot. Dude, you're an idiot.
12:36
I'm sorry. I'll
12:38
cheerfully beat the shit out of you later. Where's
12:40
Kennedy? Inside, with Ness. You let them
12:42
go in?
12:43
Let? Have you met Victoria
12:45
Ness? So what do we do? We wait.
12:48
We don't know what's in there. No
12:50
we don't, which means we could blunder in and screw it all up for them. So
12:52
we wait. For
12:54
what? I'm
12:57
not sure yet. Get under the trees.
12:59
Is
13:02
it them? They found this fast. Does that
13:05
change the plan? Yeah. It
13:07
changes the plan. I
13:18
reckon they've gone 40 or 50 meters in a row.
13:22
It's those little bits of a kit. We
13:25
kept going down and down for a few more
13:27
minutes. And then the steps stopped
13:29
abruptly. Okay.
13:34
We're standing
13:38
in darkness. It
13:40
seems to extend infinitely all around
13:42
us. The ground
13:44
is rocky, not even.
13:48
What now? I'm not sure. There's
13:51
nothing here. Even the new system built a
13:53
massive staircase and nothing. Maybe
13:55
whatever it was wasn't finished.
13:59
This is a
14:02
path. Be
14:05
careful with the bridge. Jesus.
14:11
There was a path marked out on the ground, just
14:14
a strip of rock that looks more worn than
14:16
the rest. But where Victoria
14:18
Nes was standing, our flashlights
14:21
showed that the strip of rock extended out
14:23
across darkness.
14:25
There was no way of knowing how deep the abyss
14:27
went on either side. But
14:29
the path itself was only a couple
14:31
of feet wide.
14:33
I think this is where we're
14:36
meant to go. I don't fall off. I
14:40
don't think I've ever had a worse few minutes
14:42
in my
14:42
entire life, and I've been
14:44
through some stuff. The drop
14:46
to either side of us could have been a few meters or
14:49
half a mile.
14:50
The bridge was narrow and uneven
14:53
and slippery underfoot. Every
14:55
now and then, water would drip down on
14:57
us from somewhere above.
14:59
I'm
15:01
so cold. I
15:04
think we're under the sea bed.
15:06
And it's leaking.
15:09
By my calculation, the bridge was
15:11
about 40 meters long.
15:13
As we got to the other side, we
15:16
saw a large oak door on
15:18
heavy iron hinges cut into
15:20
the rock wall. The
15:22
door was ajar.
15:32
Okay. We're
15:34
in a long room with a smooth stone wall.
15:38
A stone floor, it's a crypt under
15:40
the sea. Well, it is. Maybe then it wasn't.
15:43
One of the Danish churches before the town sank? How
15:45
is it not flooded? Because it hasn't sunk yet.
15:48
This is a bridge. This church is in Old Danish. We're
15:51
in the 13th century. Kind of.
15:53
More outside of time than in a particular
15:55
period. Wherever we were in
15:57
time, as our flashlights illuminated,
15:59
the familiar Inakian characters etched
16:02
into the walls,
16:03
it became clear where we were in space.
16:07
This was the Church of
16:09
Starry Wisdom. From
16:28
the makers of the Battersea Goldengast and
16:31
Uncanny, a new... paranormal
16:33
podcast series from BBC Radio 4.
16:37
The Witchvar, people of the South, was
16:39
castered in a long time.
16:41
They bloody were waddlers. The
16:44
Witchvar is the true story of an
16:46
ordinary couple in an extraordinary,
16:48
terrifying situation. I
16:51
don't think I've ever come across the case with
16:53
this much phenomena. I
16:55
call her the Grey Lady. Like a black and white
16:57
image, there's no colour to her at all. So
17:00
you believe that
17:01
the devil is real?
17:02
The devil. Leave us
17:04
alone! Leave us alone!
17:08
The
17:12
Witchvar subscribed and she's dead.
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