THE SHANTASE HILL EXPERIMENT

"I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God."

"Well your Honour, it began…

Somewhere in England, nearer the western side than the eastern, there used to lie a small village, the population only being a hundred and thirty or so. This village was special, but the inhabitants did not know it, there was a government funded Biochemical Research Laboratory on the highest point in the village area, Shantase Hill. Somehow, no matter what the weather was, the modern BRL always managed to look very dark and forbidding at the top of the hill. It looked like a castle out of a Dracula novel. Y’know, the one where the lightning crackles down behind it and illuminates the shape of the castle. The difference was that in this one the lab had armed guards and mines and god knows what else in it. Sometimes stories are told, round a few beers in the local pub, about strange experiments being conducted. Experiments such as making an Emu give birth to the eggs of a Dodo, or a dog that can actually talk, not only talk but speak lots of different languages. Or the one about them creating a new type of human, one that can change shape at will. Of course these are stories told to get attention, told over the beer table to get an audience, they are massive exaggerations of the actual truth, or are they? Well I didn’t know but now I do.

            Sometime in October a new experiment was taking place, something to do with a hamster and a new type of hormone which increases its muscle size. Well, needless to say the village got hold of this on the Monday and from this tiny bit of evidence, by Wednesday the story went along the lines of Demonic hamsters from another time, universe and dimension were being fed on the blood of sacrificial chickens who had this brain/muscle/size/cunning/scheming increasing hormone in it. All of the villagers reckoned that this was the best story yet to come out of the Satanic lab.

            Well, enough of the babble. This testimony starts, in the cold beginnings of a strange December, two months after the start of the experiment. This hormone had been taken from lots of other hamsters pituitary glands, and then injected into the test breed of hamsters. The effects were immediate, at first the hamster lay down, as if dead, then before the cage door was closed the hamster would make a giant leap to escape. It would only be a matter of time before either the injector was too slow to close the door or they would begin to pick the lock or chew their way out. A man by the name of Berrins saw it coming but there was nothing he could do, he was only a cleaner, nobody would listen to him. Anyway, on the second of December the BRL closed down as usual, the dog was asleep, dreaming of going to Italy for its holidays, the Emu was ‘under sedation’ for biting an assistant and the four hamsters were asleep. To correct that, they were not asleep, just pretending, their mental agility had too far a span for them to sleep, they thought it would keep the scientists keep on injecting them with the serum, and they were right. The hamsters were in fact far more intelligent than an average IQ student, more like IQ’s of two-hundred-and-thirty or above. This, combined with their increased agility and cunning, made them virtually invincible.

As the local (the village forty miles away) village’s story goes from this point on, the hamsters escaped, ate the security men and then the whole village, and were only destroyed when forty kilotonne nuclear warheads were employed to devastate the entire area and wipe out any trace of the experiments and of the hamsters. Well, that’s what I call a whopper. Don’t believe it m’Lud. The true way of events goes as I am saying now.

            At six o’clock on the second the facility was shut down for the night, and, as every other day, no-one gave any thought to the hamsters escaping.

            Inside, in the underground bunkers, where all the testing takes place, inside one of the two cages where the hamsters live, a long, high whistling sound emanated from the plastic house. The one who made the sound, casually called Chirrup by the scientists, rose and smelt around the locked cage. Good. At last. There were enough metal shavings from the key to make a very small metal saw. They did not want to damage their teeth, as the lab’s vets aren’t all that efficient, and it hurts too. One of them found this out when he chipped his tooth on part of the needle used for the injection. They used their tiny whiskers to move the shavings into a pile they then moved the pieces bit by bit over to the top left hand corner. About eleven centimeters from this there was a small electric cable, only going to the radio that is sometimes put on. The other hamster in the cage, Einstein (as he showed the most intelligence) broke up the plastic house into strips, about two inches long. Using his razor sharp teeth, he fixed three together so he would have a long bar about six inches long. He then slowly bent one of the ends into a kind of hook. Under Chirrup’s watchfulness, very gingerly he hooked the plastic over the cable and dragged it back into reaching distance from the cage. He dropped the plastic hook and lightning quick grabbed the cable before it swung back. Knowing that the cable was live he got Chirrup to sharpen a bit of the plastic into a sharp edge, like a knife. Chirrup then cut away at the cable to expose bare copper wire, holding two hundred and forty volts. They used each of the largest metal shavings to touch the smaller ones onto the bare cable. This took them half an hour to make a saw by fusing the metal filings together. Chirrup gave another whistle and started sawing at the metal bar, between the door and the side. After a couple of minutes of frantic sawing, the door swung open. A couple of squeaks of joy erupted from Einstein and Chirrup. They immediately started work on the door of their friend’s cage. Another couple of minutes later the second door swung open, another couple of squeaks of joy, from Bey and Hammie.

Now almost free, they started interfering with some of the instruments in the underground lab, the electric drill was made to short circuit and electrocute anything which touched the ‘on’ switch. The devious minds of the hamsters was powered by intellect, cunning and the fact that most of their species are pets in households all over the world. Their motto was simple – ‘REVENGE’! They wanted justice for the whole world, but all the hamsters caused was injustice, because their victims had no chance for freedom – all were slaughtered.

            Einstein was the elected ‘Big Cheese’ and so he started making his authority known, a little nip of Bey’s ear here and a medium to large bite out of Hammie’s tail there and all three took him seriously. Chirrup was intelligent enough to obey Einstein and so was not bitten. Einstein was a bit of a bully, probably because he felt that he was responsible for all of his brothers. He called a meeting, and they discussed the downfall of the BRL and all of the world’s owners of hamsters. He decided that they should start now, to immediately go out and slaughter the village’s population, breed with those hamsters already there and spread out across the country, wiping out human settlements everywhere and eating the carcasses.

Cautiously they jumped down off the table where their cages sat, both doors open and the bare copper wire touching the cage. Einstein was leading the others out of the doors and down the long, white corridor.

They glanced at notices on the door and they stopped at one called ‘Stairs to Boiler Room and Emergency Generators’. It was locked. No problem. Using his saw teeth Einstein started drilling away at the bottom corner of the door. Einstein decided that this would be too slow and so he positioned himself in a launch position. Chirrup and Hammie knew what he was going to do and what was required of them. Using their noses they threw Einstein up towards the handle and the lock. Einstein caught the handle and drew himself up. He peered into the keyhole and immediately thrust a paw in. A resounding click sounded when the lock went. Einstein turned the handle and the three on the ground pulled the door open. Einstein jumped down and they all went through the door. When they were inside, they went downstairs to the boiler room. They zipped around and made whatever could short circuit, short circuit. They short circuited the wires leading to the boiler, making the automatic cut off switch inoperable. It was only a matter of time before the boiler room blew.

            They scuttled back up the stairs, closed the door and went off down the long corridor. At that moment they were three floors underground. They needed to find an elevator or some stairs. Einstein made everyone stop and sniff for mechanical oil. Immediately Bey moved off through a door, the rest followed and in no time they were assembled in front of a service lift, a bucket and mop were casually lent against it. The mop and bucket operator was no-where to be found, which was lucky for him.

            Chirrup climbed the mop, pushed the button and jumped back down to watch the numbers counting slowly down from five to one. With a ping the door parted and they leaped the crack between the lift and the floor. Using the same technique that was used on the boiler room door, Chirrup and Hammie flung Einstein up to the handrails. From there he managed to push the button for the fourth floor. The lift hitched a little then started moving jumpily upwards.

When the doors opened a very surprised clerk was standing there, staring at Einstein who had just finished getting of the handrails. Wasting no time, all but Einstein rushed the clerk. One at his stomach. One went for his neck and one went for his heart. He never managed a sound. Just the squirting bodily fluids sounded dismally in the silence. The lifeless shell fell to the floor with a dull thud.

They regrouped and cleaned themselves up a bit before they moved off to watch the security guard sitting at his desk. After twenty minutes they started getting restless, but a show of Einstein’s teeth and the other stopped. As if the guard felt the uneasiness, he got up and went to the toilet. The hamster’s chance was now. Three went to the electric doors and waited for the fourth to press the button to open the doors. He then sprinted to the doors and got through just before they closed.

They were out. Only one more barrier. The electric fence and the underground six-foot high metal sheets. These were there to prevent anyone or anything digging in or out.

Now that they were on a pathway there were no Laser alarm systems or land mines to impede their progress. Hiding by the side of the path they made their way to the parked vans and cars. One important decision had to made, should they take a car or a van? After a quick conference squeaking, they decided on a van, a nice plain, white van. As they got into one, an R-reg, a well built man walked over from the cargo area and had reached the van the murderous hamsters were intending to filch. Whistling, he found his keys and pulled them out of his pocket, along with bits of fluff, chocolate flakes and a coin. His ‘lucky’ five-pound coin. As he bent down to retrieve it he glanced over to another van near to him. It was one of those vans which had the back made into a mirror. He saw four ‘friendly’ hamster faces peering over the top of the passenger’s window. Suspecting nothing, he turned round and had a closer look, the hamsters pretended to be your bog standard, run of the mill, very ordinary quad of hamsters. He started to smile and reached through the open window.

Quicker than you can say ‘no’ (in a surprised tone) or ‘uh-huh’, Chirrup, Hammie and Bey were already halfway along the man’s right arm. Surprised, the man tried to shake them off, but his surprise soon turned to fear, and panic, when Hammie bit into his soft, fleshy biceps. He choked back a cry and instead grunted. While his left hand moved to pull Hammie off, Chirrup went for the hand and Bey went for his throat. In seconds the man was crippled, both arms were useless and he now could not scream, however much he wanted to – Chirrup had done an expert operation on his larynx. It had been ripped out and now lay on the floor in a shallow pool of thick, red blood. The man fell to his knees in pain. Hammie accidentally swallowed a few drops of blood, choked and then, liking the viscous liquid, started drinking it. He hadn’t eaten for a good four hours. Chirrup then got to his thigh’s and started burrowing into the man’s burly flesh looking for his tendon. But in his search he chewed through the femoral artery, spraying blood everywhere, he then found the tendon and bit it, snapping it. By now the man was almost unconscious, his only movements were extremely feeble, which was just as well because Bey was eating away his nose, with intent to suck out his juicy grey brain matter. Einstein, thinking that he was missing out, jumped down onto the man’s face and ordered Bey to get him the two eyeballs. He pawed at them and soon one had come out, with a faint pop. Einstein seized it and gnawed at it, first breaking the sclera and then he sucked up the liquid inside. With a new frenzy, he dug at the half eaten nose and started scraping it away, a minute later a clear liquid squirted out through a small hole. Egged on by the other three, Einstein ripped away the last shreds of nose and dived inside, into the soft, grey and mushy brain. The man convulsed once as he died, his last thought being of his wife and child, and that he would never ever hear or touch or see them again. At least not in this life.

I think the hamsters had got carried away, when the clean-up (who I should imagine were army or government) found the man, the only way to find out who he was, was because he had a tattoo on his index finger and, of course, from his dental records.

After this horrendous killing, the hamsters again cleaned themselves off and got back into the van, now fully sated. After another meeting, it was decided that Einstein was to hot-wire the van and also look out of the windscreen, Chirrup was to steer and the other two were to operate the two pedals and the automatic gears.

With a roar the engine started and the van jumped forward a bit, it was put into Drive and the noise settled to a quiet humming. Inch by inch the van moved forward, until the two on the pedals had got the hang of driving. Hammie pushed on the accelerator and Einstein directed Chirrup to steer. After reversing into some bins, the car went forward and Einstein directed the van along the road to the main gates. Increasing speed to around sixty-odd, the van sped along to the gates. Alarmed by the engine sound, the gate security man jumped up and out of his little hut, he was just in time to see that there was no driver before it struck him full on. He must have flown fifty feet and had enough time to think that getting up this morning was a really, really bad idea. No matter to him he thought, he believed in reincarnation. He landed head downwards, the force smashing his skull on the black, rough country road before mashing his insides.

The van crashed through the gate, setting off every alarm known. Almost instantaneously the boiler three floors down and all of its radiators blew. A sound much akin to an artillery shell going off ten meters underground echoed across the grounds, burning steam billowed out of the shattered windows. The scientist who worked on the project was vaporised as he had just walked past the boiler room door a second before it blew up. He was on his way to check on the hamsters, after his coffee break.

The hamsters knew one place to start looking, it was the house of the man they had gruesomely eaten alive, barely ten minutes ago. Driving along the country road was a bad experience, twice Chirrup and been bumped off the wheel and the van had almost gone into the ditch. In the end they made it to the village, they drove down the high street and turned left at the lights. Not a hundred meters away, a poor innocent ‘common’ hamster was imprisoned in a metal cage, quite like the one they escaped. They screeched to a halt outside the house of the man and quickly exited the vehicle. They hastened to the front door which had just been opened by his wife who was going to put out the rubbish. In seconds she was on the floor, her life-blood was squirting out of her throat and pumping out of her stomach and chest. No sounds. Quickened by a need for revenge they went to the child’s room, the door open so they slid inside. The four year old boy was lying on his bed reading a comic, ‘Revenge of the Killer Rats.’ "How ironic," Einstein thought, (in hamster language of course) "little does he know." He glanced to the right of the room and saw his meek little brother in a small cage, with a turn wheel in it. On a squeak the four leaped onto the bed and onto the boy. At first he thought it was a present from his Dad, but that was replaced with blank thoughts, much like that when you are sleeping, (but with no dreams and no hope of waking up) after he saw his blood spurting from his jugular vein, thighs and heart. He screamed once, (if it was possible for a boy to scream) it was long, high pitched and then tapered off to a sort of strangled muffle when his jaw and tongue was ripped away. (Note to the court: I will save the complete detail of his death, as it was too horrible, (for want of a better word,) to describe.) By the end of it, every bone in the little boy’s body was neatly set out on the bed, the bones white and shining. They were set out in a sentence on the blood soaked duvet cover. ‘We will not stop,’ according to the inspector’s report after the night. Just as well they knew English really. Most of the rest of the boy was in a large, liquidy heap at the end of the sentence, like a large full stop, that is the rest of what the hamsters didn’t eat or drink.

This started the night of the rabid hamster’s revenge. Over a hundred and ten British citizens, men, women and children perished that night. That was eleven years ago. I still remember entering the house and seeing my sister sprawled all over the floor, literally. I saw tiny teeth marks here and there and sussed out that no person had (or would have) done this. In the garage I had a blow torch, at maximum the flame was about two inches long. I went a-hunting for rodent flesh, grilled. As I walked along the pavement, down the high street, I heard a scream. One short, sharp scream. I ran to where it had originated and was just in time to see four hamsters attacking a woman, Mrs Bidduiter I think, well I wasn’t sure because her face was no longer there. When they were engrossed in killing her, I crept up behind them and let them have it. I must have got two of them ugly sonsovabitches before the other two got wise. I ran. And believe me I could have beaten Linford Christie if these hamsters were chasing me on a race track. I sprinted out of the house and back up the high street, these two hamsters chasing me. They must have got tired, maybe from all of the flesh they had eaten, as they stopped, and ran back, maybe to see if they could save (or salvage parts from) their two pals. Anyway, after they had gone back into the house, the whole place exploded, like those car bombs you see in films, the force took the roof off. Sirens approached, army jeeps and a tank or two came over the brow of the hill, headlights shining. A jeep flew over the brow of the hill and screamed towards me. It skidded to a halt half a metre in front of me and out jumped four men. They pinned my arms to my sides so I could not move then one of them handcuffed me. They did not listen to my shouts of "I’m a British citizen", secondly, "You can’t do this to me" and then "Let me go or you’ll be very, very sorry!" One of them said "Oh yeah, what are you going to do? Bite us to death when our backs are turned!" These cries went unanswered as they shoved me into the back of the jeep, put a bag over my head and drove me somewhere.

Then, after God knows how long, we stopped and I was bundled into a room. The room was quite a humble abode, everything was provided for. I wanted for nothing, for nine years I lived in that room. We, (there were around twenty of us surviving) were allowed to go outside at certain times and were allowed papers, television and a radio. There was an ensuite bathroom and a kitchen, we had whatever we wanted to cook with. The army did this, it was a military base, somewhere in Britain, I know because there were armed soldiers patrolling the perimeter fence, in British military garb.

I did nothing but plan of escape until…

Five weeks ago I escaped this tedious life, I was being taken somewhere new when I bashed the soldier on my right, clobbered the one on the left and jumped out of the moving truck. I had escaped, and was safe after I gave the jeep the slip. I walked for a few hours and ended up in Southam, near Manchester. I was in the midlands. After that I went to nearest police station, was assured everything was fine and was asked which mental institute I had escaped from. After giving up they sent me down to London. I immediately went around looking for people to help me in my quest for justice and what happened to me and that I didn’t have any compensation for what happened."

"An interesting story Mr Goschles, but have you any evidence apart from the fact that you were missing for ten years?"

"Er, no. No. wait. Yes I do. Go to the village where it all happened. I guarantee that there is no-one there and one house has been totally blown apart."

"Mr Goschles, you know that the court has already looked and there is no evidence for your story. The bodies are or were, I should say, there but there is no evidence of hamsters mass murdering. However, this trial is not over. Now it is you on trail and why you murdered over a hundred people in cold blood, but I feel that you are in fact insane, and that none of this ever happened. Only a madman would speak like you do, think the thoughts that you do, act like you do. This court is in recess for a period of one hour, to discuss the governmental case towards this man here."

An hour later, the High Judge has re-entered the room.

"Mr Goschles, this court has thought over your evidence yet again and we feel that you are incapable of murdering those people but, and I stress but, this court feel that you are mentally unstable. Primarily we have wondered how you knew every move the hamsters made."

"Your honour, please. This is true, I know it because I had to gather the evidence, it is just unfortunate that I have no physical evidence. I am not mentally unstable. Please your Honour. Please, (the prisoner laughs madly) heeow! There’s a hamster, and another. Quick everybody run. Can’t you see, they’re eating the judge. Agghh…" (Defendant/accuser is clamped over the mouth by officer J. F. Johnson.)

"Therefore, especially after this outburst, that you will be a patient of the Midlands Psychiatric Hospital for a period of ten years. That is the ruling of this court and that alone."

The defendant was led from the court in muffled silence by two police men.

The defendant defies accusations that he has been lying under oath

Addendum: Mr Goschles was found dead a day later in his ground-floor prison holding cell while en route to the Institute. The cause of death was stated as a point-blank gunshot wound to the head. The gun was in his hand, at a glance it looked like suicide but from the spray pattern the bullet came from the window. No slug has yet been found.

Case writer: James D. Smith,

Date: 11^th March 1997

Case number: 625-PHC-59708

Case information: Active.