Dangerous Games

Epilogue

So that's how it all played out. Sugden was right when he said that the story would eventually die. Starved of any hard facts, the press finally stopped printing nothing but speculation about what had being going on. Face it, what had actually been witnessed? The girl disappeared, there was about a week of frenzied activity, a few unreliable witnesses saying that they'd made some mystical journey, a respected academic saying it was a fraud, and about a month later one of the police officers finds the missing girl, admittedly in somewhat suspicious circumstances. That's all.

Speaking of witnesses, one of the questions that was raised was why Charlotte Fleming and Professor Wise hadn't been through what I'd been through. After all, we had some evidence – good evidence, you might say – that something weird had happened to them as well, but neither of them described anything like what I'd been through, and indeed the Professor claimed that nothing had happened to him at all.

Well, who knows? Perhaps it's different for everyone. Perhaps everyone who tries it goes to their own personal limbo, heaven, underworld, whatever it is. We never did get access to that tape the professor made. Indeed, as far as I know it never saw the light of day.

It is worth noting that neither Miss Fleming nor the good professor benefited in any way from their trips to the Twilight Zone. Professor Wise retired from academic life and his university career within a few months of his experiment in Lakeside House and became almost a recluse. Charlotte Fleming went completely off the rails and ended up with a string of convictions for petty offences. She's in some mental institution now, I believe. Coincidence? Maybe.

Ambigem Building Management did indeed get their tapes back, eventually, but only after they had threatened to go to court to recover them. I don't know if they ever tried to make anything of them, or even if they realised their significance. If they did, we never got to hear anything about it down here in Kingston. And Claire and I, we still have our copies, plus the 'highlights' disk, of course. There are times when I start to doubt myself – did I actually go to that dreadful place, or did I dream it? – and at times like that, I put that disk on and watch it through. Yes, it definitely happened. I didn't imagine the whole thing, and this disk is the evidence. It is, after all, the only hard evidence that we have that any of it is true.

And Ambigem weren't the only company to have a beef with the Metropolitan Police. No, Lakeside House Management wrote a strongly worded letter of complaint to our regional commander pointing out that our exploits had caused them twenty thousand pounds' worth of damage to one of their lifts, and what were we going to do about compensating them? I was shown the letter, which mentioned gear wheels missing teeth, panel joints almost ripped apart and lift cables shredded and on the point of snapping. Still, one of the perks to being a celebrity is that other people end up picking up the pieces. As a result, it was all handled by someone else back at head office, and I had nothing to worry about.

There was a great deal of interest about the case – at the time, anyway – and as Claire said, I was something of a hero for a while, firstly in the press – I've got a scrapbook of cuttings about it somewhere – and then for a while longer on the various social media sites. Of course, what interested people was the supernatural factor – the remote chance that it was indeed possible to travel to a different dimension and return, that something you had only previously seen in films and books was actually real. If I'd just travelled to the top of a tall building and happened to find a girl who'd been missing for a month, no-one would have turned a hair. My fame would no doubt have ended a day or two later wrapped round countless fish and chip suppers.

I followed Sugden's advice about taking a few days complete rest. Well, I barely left the house, but I spent the time writing up what I could remember while it was still fresh in my memory. For the first week or two the telephone was ringing off the hook as you can imagine, and I got sick of telling people that there was no story and would they mind respecting my privacy please. It wasn't just journalists, either. I was deluged with enquiries from institutions for psychic research, religious groups, even respected academic institutions, and of course, the countless nameless members of the public.