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Statement of Bridget Virtanen regarding a marble garden she found in Turkey.  Original statement given first October, 2010.  Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.  Statement begins.

I never really liked the color red.  

Sure, it's a plenty fine color, my brother Dexter absolutely adores it, it just sets my teeth on edge.  Especially not after...

Let me start over from the beginning.  It all started after a nasty breakup with my then-boyfriend at the time, Gabriel DiAngelo.  He was a rookie cop, and... you know how it is with cops.  So we broke up, and I was left in a bit of a funk afterwords, which is normal when you have a breakup I think.  The reminders of the person you broke it off with are everywhere.  And my brother got the brilliant idea to just, 'Hey, let's pop out of town for a week, my treat!' and not give me any room to say no.  It might have actually done me some good if things didn't turn out the way they did.

For context, I'm a bit of a history buff, especially war history?  So Dexter decided what I needed was a vacation in Hisarlık out in Turkey.  It's the historical location of the city of Troy in ancient times, with literal layers and layers of the city being buried on top of one another.  They're still working on excavating it all, I think, and nine layers have been found so far.  Really fascinating stuff, and my brother was super thoughtful on planning this trip because he was right on the money with it distracting me.

We - well, mostly I - spent the majority of that week exploring the publically available sections of the city, and even some... less officially accessible areas.  I wanted to see everything I could, and in all honesty I'd still be exploring if I were able to and if I weren't worried about... running into the garden again.

The seventh layer of Troy almost certainly wasn't meant to be accessed by the public, but I ignored all the warning signs strung up around the place to warn archeologists about falling debris and the like and caved on through.  It was... day number three, I think, of the trip.  Hard to say, time got a bit fuzzy around then.  But I'd been exploring the layers of Troy near constantly.  It was like my own personal playground.  The city was dark, almost choking out every scrap of light it caught in the dust, and I could feel in my bones that I had been the first person to truly walk those ancient roads for the first time in centuries.  The thought was sort of exciting to me.  Like I had found some old, hidden secret no one else had seen in millenia.  I'll be the first to admit, my exploration methods were a bit stupid.  I didn't bring supplies with me in my excitement to see the breadth of the ancient city, so I basically shot myself in the foot.

... Man, that's a really morbid turn of phrase.

I had brought a flashlight with me that had ended up dying on me, so I reached a point where I was left wandering the hallways in pitch blackness, so the only way I could navigate was by keeping my hand on the wall to my right like they say to do in mazes.  At some point I realized a doorway was lit from within, like fluorescent bulbs had been installed in the ceiling.  It would have been the first light I had seen in what felt like hours, so I tried to walk in its general direction to see if it was another excavated section close to the way out because at that point I was tired and hungry and admittedly underprepared for exploring ancient ruins underground.  

The doorway with the light was... strange I think is the only word to describe it.  The ground and walls leading up to it had become porous and spongy, almost like it had become fabric soaked through despite definitely still being stone.  It was a deep, dirty red like a bloodstain and I realized I smelled copper on the air, ever so faintly, under the smell of dirt and earth and stagnant air.  The doorway itself, though, was perfectly pristine, white marble that looked freshly cleaned and polished down its crisp and unworn grooves with the black door carved with designs I couldn't make out in the dim light leaking out from behind the door.  So, with no other options besides becoming lost in the darkness again, I opened the door.

I immediately regretted it, though, because what laid behind it was such a bright white it was literally blinding.  After a few minutes, of course, I had gotten used to it and what I found was... the best way to describe it is like a marble garden.  Literally everything was a stark, sterile white, from the lopsided crosses to the walls, to the fake marble trees, to the ceilings where no lights actually hung from but still glowed, to the door as it slammed shut behind me.  Even the grass under my feet was a pure marble white and snapped like brittle branches as I wandered through the impossibly white garden.  It was so pristine that my shoes didn't even leave dusty footprints behind like I expected.  White particulate floated in the air, and it made me realize that it was all real , just... petrified with white ash in the air.  The thought made me feel a bit queasy as I kept scooting onwards.

I suppose now I should bring up the fact that my left arm is a prosthetic.  My brother, he had built it for me after an... accident.  This is important because on the floor in front of me, in a splatter of what to my eyes and nose could only be blood, sat some sort of... machine .  Its arms were mismatched, and also a different color from its dirty yellow chassis.  Two left arms and missing a right, one red and one green.  The machine was humanoid, disconcertingly so, and sat in the middle of a hallway that had six empty pedestals dotting at regular intervals.  It looked like the robot's head used to be something like a camcorder but had been smashed into the ground until it died, likely from some kind of ambush.

I... don't know what came over me, but part of my brain realized that the robot's arms matched my prosthetic arm, closely enough to be eerie and closely enough that I could probably... well, you can draw your own conclusions.  I had to stop myself from just compulsively ripping the arms off of it because it was an insane line of thought, and I had no clue why I even wanted them!  I took several moments to try and reason myself out until I realized I heard something.

I think it was music?  Almost, if you could call faint meandering notes on guitar music .  It certainly did follow a distinct series of notes in a sort of repeating, looping pattern.  And something about that made me feel like I needed to arm myself .  I felt uneasy because of it, and the area clearly wasn't as safe as I thought it was.  And if machines could bleed, I didn't want to know what else would .  So I... looted the machine.  It was completely compulsive and self defense as an excuse can only go so far in a situation, but it was the only rationalization I could come up with at the time.  I... stole its arms.  Both of them.  One seemed to have miniature shotguns embedded in the knuckles, and the other was effectively a grappling hook.  I tested swapping them out to make sure they'd be useful, and the fact that it was a perfect fit should have bothered me more than I did.  I'd then picked up the gun the machine had evidently been carrying, some sort of strange pistol with no way to reload it from what I could tell.  As long as it could shoot and injure when I needed it to, I didn't care where its bullets came from.

After that became... sort of a haze.  Like watching someone else pilot my body around, but at the same time that someone else is still me but some suppressed part I can't remember.  Or something like that.  I don't want to imply that I had multiple personalities, it's just that something about that place brought out... a more savage side of myself.  It scared me, what my hands were capable of, of the monsters I felled with my own wit and a few well-placed shots.  It was like I had become a machine full of blood myself, marching onwards to sate my own bloodlust and curiosity and only dimly realizing just how horrified I was with myself.

There were definitely more machines after the dead one.  All sorts, high-tech floating psychic ones and overengineered sniper rifles and old walking tanks.  Some reminded me of old fashioned diving suits from a game I liked, looking absolutely ancient in comparison to the other machines I was seeing.  Machines weren't the only thing there though, because there were also... the only word that comes to mind when I think of them is demon , though not in the standard sense you may think.  The ones I met were statuesque and white, with faint red smears along the seams like silk stained with blood.  The limbs were made of clasping hands around disembodied wrists, and the faces were almost deliberately upside-down, and they posed silently when they wanted you to ignore them.  But they were fast and hardy and I'm almost certain they're what killed that first robot I'd found.

I fought for my life against robots who shed blood and statues that could move with blinding speed.  I could tell there was... something more to this place, as I felt its eyes everywhere on my back, but couldn't shake the haze of wanting - needing - to see more of that hypnotizing color.  The music seemed to agree, the guitar seeming to almost wail at me for what I was doing as it crescendoed and layered itself.  Or maybe the one wailing was me.  It's always hard to tell.  

As terrible as it sounds... watching the blood splatter as the marble started to slowly degrade around me was almost beautiful, in a morbid way.  It could be so easy to shed the distinct hue and just... paint the world red.  As if rending lives apart and spilling what kept you alive was a form of art .  I think I started dissociating, because I barely remembered meeting a bull-shaped demon thing that just... ran into the last intact room.  It seemed to stare at me before running off again.  I don't think I was what it expected.  And I wasn't expecting it, either.  Or the room after it.

It was like the marble had been split asunder by a mortar shell, revealing the ruined remains of a city in a rising tide of boiling bloody mud.  The sky was a dark, deep red with the stars falling constantly like missiles across the sky.  On the horizon stood silhouettes of massive machines, big blocky structures the size of mountains, watching over the fight.  I could only see three of them, but there could have been more for all I know.  I could only watch in stunned silence as one of the mountain machines began to charge up a weapon mounted to it, illuminating its side and all the valleys and mountains in its metal flesh, and it shot what looked like a beam of solid light directly into one of the other two machines.  It was like a brief moment of the sun peeking out of the clouds. It was completely and utterly impossible . My blood haze cleared at the sight for a moment, long enough for me to force myself to rest.  I sat against a crumbling wall and found what felt like a book under my hand.  I'd picked it up to read, since I was curious, and found myself surprised that not only was it intact, but also written in English and fully intelligible.  And what it said has burned into my mind.

"This is the only way it could have ended.  

War no longer needed its ultimate practitioner.  It had become a self-sustaining system.  Man was crushed under the wheels of a machine created to create the machine to crush the machine.  Samsara of cut sinew and crushed bone, death without life, null ouroboros.  All that remained is war without reason.  

A magnum opus, a cold tower of steel.  A machine built to end war was always a machine built to continue war.  You were beautiful, outstretched like antennas to heaven.  You were beyond your creators.  You reached out for God, and you fell.  None were left to speak your eulogy.  No final words, no concluding statement.  No point.  Perfect closure.  

This is the only way it should have ended."

And I don't know why, but something about the short passage in the book moved me.  Maybe it was the reverence in the words for the machines I was bleeding dry.  Maybe it was the poetic prose.  Maybe I'd never know why.  But it resolved me to find a way out of this place.  I wanted to take the book with me, so I stuffed it in my fanny pack where I kept my flashlight all rolled up like a newspaper.  And as I fought through the toppling clocktowers and hordes of robots baying for my ichor, I found myself keenly aware that I wasn't suddenly being puppeted around anymore.  I moved with muscle memory of my own volition, jumping and shooting and punching and repelling and dashing without that odd hazy feeling returning.  But it... it felt weirdly good.   Getting out all my frustration and aggression on these annoying insects getting in my way.  And realizing that I was thinking of my opponents like that scared me more than the actual imagery around me of bodies buried in blood-soaked soil and mortar shells shining through the sky like stars.  Gunfire filled my ears yet all I heard was my own irritation.  I froze once, trying to dodge one of the mannequin-demon things, realizing that I wasn't even blinking at coating myself in all of this blood.  Anyone in my shoes would be horrified.  Was I desensitized due to my accident?  Was this place still affecting my mind like with the haze except with apathy at all of the slaughtering I'd been doing?  Even in self defense, I'd still be distraught about it normally.  I don't think I was ignoring it, either.  There was a moment where I... tried to lick a bit of it off of my hand.  It tasted like, well, blood , and I obviously gagged at it.  I don't even know why I did it. Grim curiosity, I guess.

Fighting my way out of the ruined area felt surprisingly mundane and normal.  Maybe I had just gotten used to it.  Maybe I was dissociating.  Maybe I was dreaming.  But feeling flesh and sinew come undone from metal shells scarcely phased me in the moment.  I came out into a dark room and froze for a moment before I realized my gun had a flashlight equipped.  Handy, honestly.  The area it illuminated remained dark and dreary to me, but I caught sight of grey, ash-colored grass underfoot, and gnarled tree roots darting in and out.  I followed them, up a knotted trunk shaped uncomfortably similarly to a human screaming in pain.  And as I turned my light between different trees, I realized they all looked like that.  The tallest among them by far was one that outright looked like someone being impaled through their middle and suspended midair for the tree to grow through.  It was horriffic, like a torture method trapped in the boughs of a tree fore eternity.  I stared dumbly at the trees until I heard the sounds of fighting up ahead.

The machines and demons were... fighting each other .  Some shot off gouts of flame, catching on the grass and trees and vines growing across the walls as it tried to torch a demon that looked like a zombie with a face made of mouth and arms made of gone.  I had no interest in continuing to fight, exhaustion, hunger, and thirst finally starting to catch up to me now that I had a moment to slow down a bit, so I simply... watched.  While I watched, I noticed that the blood that spilled onto the ground was quickly sapped away, and the tree would turn a bit more red like a filling meter.  I watched as the tree slowly filled to its topmost branches, and... it bloomed .  The red tree burst in a shower of bloody petals and leaves, actually glowing a bit and showering the ground below in its discarded blooms.  The sole surviving opponent of the battle, one of the robots with a flamethrower attached to it whirled on me and fired, and I had to scramble to get out of its way.  It was the closest call I think I'd had down there, and I was lucky my hair only got a little singed.  It chased me, though, catching on some vines that were holding a door closed, so I let myself fall into the groove of battle again.  Turns out, the flamethrower robots have giant tanks of their backs of flammable liquids that explode when you shoot them, and doing just that sent me flying through the burnt-open doors and bouncing off the ground.  

I whacked my head against the stone, so I think I lost consciousness, though I can't be sure of that because when I woke up, it was to the stark white of a hospital wing.  I had apparently been missing for seven days though I had been certain it had only been hours I was down there.  They'd obviously confiscated the robot weapon arms, and my gun went missing, but they let me keep the book.  It probably wasn't useful to the investigation.  You can have it.  The poem doesn't ring as much as it did back in that winding maze, to the point that the words lost all meaning now, so take this as corroborating evidence.  Even if I ended up in some weird violence hell dimension, it did wonders on helping me forget about my breakup.  Sometimes I think I still hear the music, faint and off in the distance as if being played from across a silent street.  

And I'm still not a very big fan of the color red.

Statement ends.  It should go without saying that no, Hisarlık does not have a buried hell dimension beneath it.  The nine excavated layers are thoroughly documented, and nothing like the marble garden in Miss Virtanen described, publically accessible or not.  We would have conducted a follow-up with Miss Virtanen or her family had she not gone into a frenzy three years later and beat her brother to death with her bear hands.  The police reports indicate a level of damage to the skull remarked to be, quote, impossible by human hands , unquote, as well as rip his left arm clear off of his body.  She is known to be still at large, and as such I doubt she very much wants to discuss her statement so long as she has a bone in her that cares for self preservation.  I, for one, am losing no sleep over the idea that any of my assistants nor myself will not be dealing with speaking to her.

End recording.