SPECTRA: An Anonymous Account

We were led into a large room with a very high ceiling – it seemed to be an old industrial building. The place was unused, but still in fairly good condition. The floor was herring bone parquet; the kind you see in many church halls. Arranged in the centre of the room was a long trestle table with tablecloths on, and a large boiler at the end. A cheerful man with a beard was wearing an apron and serving tea and cakes, for which there were fifteen or so takers. There were little festoons of flags and bunting around the walls.  Most strange of all though was a kind of hut on wooden stilts up against a wall on one side of the room. It was black and made of wood – a bit like a shed with a flat roof, but the front had eight square horn shaped apertures on it, instead of a window. They were black and white in a kind of check pattern, and I realized I had seen something similar in Dungeness. A small brick building, which appeared to house some extra fog signal horns for the lighthouse, although it was taller and thinner than the structure I’m trying to describe. This wooden hut had steps leading up to a door in the side, and every so often another man would usher four of the tea-drinkers up the steps and inside. All at once a loud throbbing drone would emanate from the front, made up seemingly of several notes, but very close together. It seemed to be related to whatever the people who had gone up there were doing.

Presently, it was my turn, along with three others, and we ascended the steps and found ourselves inside a fairly featureless small dark room, except that the walls were covered in a coarse black cloth. The front wall of the hut seemed to be made of a clear plastic with the same cloth set into it, giving it a slightly underwater appearance – something enhanced by air bubbles here and there which gave off a silvery light. In this front wall were four letterbox shaped windows – one for each of us, and underneath a bright light shone upwards. Peering through the windows, we could see the others drinking tea below, but the whole room and everything in it shimmered and oscillated slightly. As I looked closer, the strange drone started up again, with the throbbing rhythmic quality seemingly in time with the shimmering pattern. As I backed away slightly it grew fainter, and stronger again according to how close my face was to the small window. The same seemed to happen to the others, and together the effect sounded somewhat similar to an old aeroplane. The whole box vibrated slightly with whatever was causing the noise, and, it seemed, the odd shimmering effect. It was impossible to tell what it was.

After maybe 10 minutes, we were led back down the steps, and out of the main room. I passed another doorway and found a smaller dark room with a film being projected on the opposite wall with a few chairs in front – just like you see in many art galleries. The film was of a grey sky and a rough sea stretching to the horizon. The whole scene shimmered and vibrated in just the same way as the view from the hut, and along with the sound of the wind and waves, you could make out the same droning noise…