THE DOOR

5 - What IS Going On?

After dinner, I turned off the television and told Hazel about my surveillance.

'You do need to be careful, you know. There are laws about invasion of privacy and such like,' warned my lawyer wife.

'You won't want to look at the video then?'

She laughed and said, 'Well... if I must.'

I plugged the drone memory card into an adaptor for the television, opened the file and ran the video. It was surprisingly good quality.

'There's the chapel,' Hazel said.

We watched the sequence as it rose and looked towards the house. Hazel shouted, 'Stop!'

I paused the movie.

'Rewind to where you turned towards the convent.'

I did and returned to play mode, but with my hand on the pause button.

'There!'

I pressed pause.

'What?' I asked. I couldn't see anything unusual.

'In the upstairs right and downstairs left windows.'

Good grief! There were people. They were clearly visible. In the downstairs window, we could see three or four people in a quite animated conversation. Another figure in the upstairs window looked as if he was on a mobile phone.

I pressed slo-mo and the action moved forward in increments.

'Oh, look,' Hazel exclaimed, 'the upstairs person has seen the drone. He's watching it.'

Unfortunately, at that moment I had rotated the drone and was bringing it back towards me so that was all we saw of the house. Then it turned to the right, where I wanted to see the hemispherical platform inside the vanishing gate.

'Good God, Hazel. Look! There in the wall. It's the green door,' I said, hitting pause again.

'Oh, yes. I can see it clearly. Henry, this is getting scary. What have we stumbled upon?'

'Don't know.'

'I don't like this one little bit. You shouldn't have filmed it.'

'No one knows it was me.'

'The way that man looked at the drone. Don't think he was amused.'

I started the video again. The camera turned back towards where I had been standing. Abbess Road was visible over the wall. The drone approached the chapel and we distinctly saw a figure come out of the building and look up at it.

I paused, rewound, and played the sequence again in slo-mo. It was a woman. She stepped out of the chapel, must have heard the drone, and looked straight up at it. Her gaze stayed on it as it flew overhead and we lost sight of her.

As the movie sequence came to an end, we both sat in silence for at least a minute. We were dumbfounded.

Eventually I spoke, 'I suppose it could just have been coincidence that the owners were showing some people around while I was filming.'

'Come off it, Henry. And the mysterious vanishing door or gate just happens to make an appearance at the same time? I don't think so.'

'Well, what do you think?'

She switched into solicitor mode, looking at me incredibly seriously, 'I think you shouldn't have flown over the property and it'd be better to just forget about it in future. It might be some secret government project or something. You could get yourself in real trouble.'