the last room , room 36 is the least impressive room on the floor. it was empty apart from and old desk and a large safe sitting against the wall. It almost seems forgotten about.
I opened an envelope which was sitting on top of the desk.
there was a key to the safe in an envelope. “property of NZ PM”
it turned out that the safe wasnt really a safe at all. it was simply a rather secure door that led to the top of a small spiral staircase.
this basement actually had a basement. a rather secret one at that.
another floor of ten rooms. these ones numbered 1 to 10.
what was i going to find here ? a nuclear bunker for the prime minister of New Zealand? or maybe the key just belonged to someone with the initials PM ?
only one way to find out.
Rooms 1 to 9 contained an assortment of the same stuff that was upstairs.
a room full of strange books and manuscripts. another full of files written in code with “TOP SECRET” stamped all over the place.
yet more rooms of gadgets.
a couple of rooms with machines and blueprints.
by the time that I got to room number 10, I was pretty sure that I was going to find another safe leading to another staircase.
rooms 11 to 26 must be down there..
Well , I couldn’t have been more wrong!
That’s when I got the literal fright of my life.
I brazenly opened the unlocked door , fully expecting an abandoned room with a large safe in the corner and a table with a key on it.
“you took your time ” she said as she looked up at me.
I just about had a heart attack. I didn’t know whether to run back along the corridor and upstairs to safety.
There was a 60 year grey haired woman sitting at a desk , peering up at me.
“Cat got your tongue?”
I was in full panic mode. Was she real ? Was she a ghost?
“Mary’ Scartino’s the name” she smiled. “They call me Scary Mary, or at least they used to. I think they have forgotten all about me, if any of them are still alive…” You had better come in . Take a seat.”
And to cut a long story short, that’s how it all got started..
the Scartino Research Institute.
Over the next hour , Mary, proceeded to explain how the New Zealand Ministry for Paranormal Research had been set up by a couple of old University Lecturers in the 1970’s. She called them David and Roger.
They had managed to persuade a sympathetic civil servant to allocate a set of offices and a small annual research fund.
They started it up as a sort of joke, but soon realised that as they because they had the apparent official backing of the NZ Government could make applications for small research grants and so forth.
They started to attend international “paranormal” conferences and were soon exchanging reports and data with other paranormal organisations throughout the world.
Mary was hired in 1987, fresh out of university. She wasn’t meant to be much more than an admin assistant. The NZPRU had managed to get a small grant to employ a secretary. The research unit at that point wasn’t much more than a sort of university sponsored ghost hunting society . But it gave the founders a chance to travel the world and make connections with other paranormal enthusiasts all over the globe.
Then in one day in 1989 the shit really hit the pan.
The Berlin Wall fell.
9th November 1989.
Mary received a fax from Moscow.
Would the NZPRU be in the position to store some documents and artefacts for the Soviet Ministry for Paranormal Research ? Victor Antonovich , their head researcher feared that his research department would be shut down and his facility would be looted by members of the new regime. Victor had met the members of the NZPRU at a conference in Peru in 1988. The kiwis had joked that NZ was literally at the arse end of the world.
Victor remembered this and took it to heart literally. He felt he had to get his research projects as far away from the incoming government as possible. Where better than the arse end of the world? Could his comrades in Wellington help him out for a year or two until things settled down in his homeland?
And that is how 14 shipping containers full of soviet paranormal research documents and artefacts arrived in Wellington, one February summer morning in 1990.
The kiwis were expecting 14 boxes of files,as the shipping document was in Russian .It took them a month or so just to get the containers unloaded and dump the stuff an old abandonded wing at the university.
Later that year. Mary received a letter from one of Victor’s colleagues informing her that Victor has died of a suspected drugs overdose and that his unit had been disbanded and not to expect any further communications from Moscow.
Mary went on to explain that they spent the next couple of years cataloging of the Russian Deliveries. That was their secret word for anything they considered special. Deliveries, their secret little code word.
The three of them had spent the next 10 years studying their Russian Deliveries. The made it their mission to turn the deliveries into discoveries. They attended conferences less and less as they realised that they had discovered some world changing shit. Shit they suspected that the rest of the world wouldn’t be able to handle.
The 2 old guys died around about 12 years ago and that had left Mary on her own to keep working away , researching and experimenting. Her salary had been set on a standing order.
Her official post of Senior Admin Assistant had been paid for by a government department called Ancilliary Services.
Higgins’s Department., I chimed in.
Yes , Higgins, indeed.
And therein lay a problem. A very big problem.
Mary had managed to hack into computers the Ancilliary Services Department.
She could see all of the up coming cutbacks that Higgins was about to make. Her research unit , as I knew, was about to be ,closed down and announced as a cutback. She would have to leave. Their office would be rented out to someone else. That was a big enough problem. She was arranging to move all of “her” stuff to a new location.
The biggest problem she said was that the very last cutback that Higgins was scheduled to announce was the closing down of the Ancilliary Services department itself.
Poor Higgins, didnt know yet that he was about to cutback his very own department.
The cutback king would be victim to his very own cutback.
Mary thought that poetic justice .
There would be no one to pay the rent, pay her salary, pay out most of the grant money that had kept her research going on for the last 30 odd years.
No more Ancilliary Services meant no more NZPRU.
She had long suspected this day would come or she would be visited by a not so nice comrades looking for their fun stuff back.
Do you think you would be able to help me? she asked .
Sure , I can help until the end of the month. I have a van.
I was thinking more long term, a job, said Mary, a real researchers job. Well more of a paranormal jack of all trades.
But how would we get paid?
I have a few ideas, she said.
They don’t call me Scary Mary for nothing.
I told her about these facebook posts. She had a look and said “Leave them up. We might have to be a little less reclusive and secretive if we are going to have a go at it in the private sector..”
And so the Scartino Research Institute was officially born.
Do you have any concrete ideas for making some cash?, I asked.
Let’s start by scraring the living bejesus out of people.
We have some pretty useful tech that has never even seen the light of day.
Do you have anything in particular in mind?
Let’s start with a few some seances and poltergeists !