[INT. MAGNUS INSTITUTE, ARCHIVES]
[TAPE CLICKS ON.]
[Some papers rustle.]
BREEKON: (low, dark) Don’t say a word.
[More rustling. The door opens, and the Archivist comes in.]
BASIRA: Jon. Don’t turn on the light. Go get Melanie, quickly.
ARCHIVIST: It’s alright, Basira, I know he’s here.
BASIRA: So what are you doing?
ARCHIVIST: I imagine he’s here to deliver something. Thought it might need signing for.
BREEKON: That’s right. Just wanted to - to drop off a package.
BASIRA: Right, look, what the hell is this? Did you bring him here?
ARCHIVIST: No.
BASIRA: Is he here for revenge?
ARCHIVIST: I don’t - I don’t know. Ask him.
BASIRA: Like he’s going to answer me.
ARCHIVIST: Fine. (inhale)
ARCHIVIST: (to Breekon) Are you here for revenge?
[As he asks the question, a static builds in the background; this is compulsion in effect.]
BREEKON: (heh) Yeah. Just like when we.. when I fed the copper to the pit.
[Basira bristles with a incensed breath.]
ARCHIVIST: Easy, Basira.
[The static gets stronger. A low rumbling begins to accompany it.]
ARCHIVIST (CONT’D): What pit.
BREEKON: In here.
[He knocks twice against Breekon and Hope’s trademark coffin.]
BREEKON (CONT’D): Realized I’m not tied- to it anymore. Not on my own. Thought you could have it. Pay your respects like -
BASIRA: Daisy’s in there.
BREEKON: That’s its name? Then sure, ‘t’s in there, whatever’s left. Find out if you like.
ARCHIVIST: Would you please drop that ridiculous voice?
BREEKON: (terrible Russian accent) Apologies. Is preferred like so?
ARCHIVIST: Christ, that’s worse.
[Breekon laughs, still in the “accent.”]
ARCHIVIST (CONT’D): (with compulsion) What is your real voice?
[Breekon laughs again, back to the original voice, though not as darkly intoned.]
BREEKON: Nikola said you were funny. Didn’t believe it.
BASIRA: What do you want. Why are you here?
[Silence. The Archivist sighs.]
ARCHIVIST: (with compulsion) Why are you here?
BREEKON: Dunno.
BREEKON: (pause) ‘S not right, on my own. Not right. No point in doing it on my own. Don’t know what happens now. (pause) Thought I might kill you. Missed my chance. Thought I might just deliver something. So here’s a coffin.
[He slides the coffin closer.]
BREEKON: In case you want- to join your friend.
[Basira takes a breath.]
BASIRA: Get out.
ARCHIVIST: Basira.
[Static is building in the background; there’s a strange rustling sort of sound.]
BASIRA: Get. Out.
BREEKON: Make me.
[And all at once there’s a strange sound, musical yet hollow, and it seems to be building to -]
ARCHIVIST: Stop.
[There’s a new static layered on top, now, high-pitched - like feedback from microphones too close to each other, but angelic, somehow.]
BREEKON: What’re you doing?
[No answer. The strange new static combination continues; whatever’s happening, we have no clues as to its nature.]
BASIRA: Jon, what are you doing?
BREEKON: What are you - stop it.
[The static becomes more intense.]
BREEKON (CONT’D): Stop it!
[When the Archivist speaks, it has an echo to it, reminiscent of the hollowness from earlier:]
ARCHIVIST: No.
[He says nothing further, but Breekon begins to make an uncomfortable, almost choking sound.]
BREEKON: E-Enough - stop - looking at me-
[The static - from rumbling to regular static to feedback-grows even stronger. Breekon makes more gurgling/choking sounds, and then begins to yell, but almost immediately after he begins, his voice begins to fade. His scream is still clearly at high intensity; it’s more as if someone took the knob controlling his volume and turned it down mid-yell.]
[Something makes a knocking or banging sort of sound as this happens; it’s possible that Breekon has been pushed out the door.]
[The static continues, and then the Archivist lets out a soft gasp and begins breathing hard, as if needing air.]
[He takes one final, steadying breath, after which the static begins to fade.]
BASIRA: Jon?
ARCHIVIST: (quickly) It’s fine. (more himself) Get me a pen. Please.
[He takes a shaky breath.]
TAPE CLICKS OFF.
INT. MAGNUS INSTITUTE, ARCHIVES, JON’S OFFICE
TAPE CLICKS ON.
[The Archivist takes a deep, steadying breath.]
ARCHIVIST: (clearing his throat) Mm - Statement of the surviving half of the being calling itself ‘Breekon and Hope’ regarding its.. existence. Statement… extracted from subject, 3rd March, 2018. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.
ARCHIVIST: Statement begins.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): We started in a plague. Not like the nasty crawlers, but like bringing any other doom. We had a cart of corpses, faces twisted, screaming, leaking pus. Knock on doors and cry roughly to bring their dead to us. I tended the shrunken, mangy mule, and he took the remains on shoulder, slinging them onto the stinking pile.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): I remember it clear. The fear on their faces as we rolled towards their hovels. Mud-caked peasant or bloated lord, every one of them saw us coming and trembled. It wasn’t the plague they feared; it wasn’t the death that waited in our wagon. It was us. Two strangers rolling towards them, unstoppable and uncertain, wearing faces they would only half-remember, bringing a fate they would beg their god to forget. They could not hate us, anymore than they could hate the rock that falls on them from a crumbling cliff. They did not know us, but they knew what we might do to them. What we might bring them.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): And we did. Villages that might have no bodies for us when we arrived would pile high our cart before we left. We did not kill them, did not lift a finger. We were the bringers of their awful fate, not its executors. They knew this and feared us in kind. And we drank it down, the taste of it sweeter than the food that now rotted on our plates or the drink that curdled in our cups. And we both tasted it together.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): When we left our destination, the mule whining at the new weight behind it, he would reach behind us and find a face, sagging, sloughing off its skull, and pull it to him. He’d place it over the one he wore already and he would laugh and laugh and laugh. Sometimes it fell off. Sometimes it stayed for weeks. I kept the face we chose, but I loved him for our levity. And the corpses piled ever higher.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): We served aboard the Robert Small, bodies of the time crammed into uniform as sloppily as anyone would expect. Enlistment wasn’t needed, nor was drafting. We were on the list for any crew that deserved us. And we were fitting deckhands for the Robert Small, as it made its slow and mournful passage to Australia. The quartermaster was too precise, though, and in counting out the rations saw us for what we were. I ate the quartermaster’s pen. He ate the quartermaster’s tongue. And that was that.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): The journey was magnificent. No waiting, no searching for a delivery. Every moment moved us towards, towards the completion of the task and the culmination of our charge’s terror. Poor wretches who emerged from Millbank, with tales of Australia and its cruelties on their lips, bundled into the cramped and creaking ship that would drag them away from everything they loved. And towards everything they feared.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): That was the first time we saw what would become this place: The Eye’s Pedestal. But we were drunk on the dawning horror of transportation and took no heed of it.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): A young man named Jack tried to leap overboard. When he caught the lad, there was such begging and pleading as you’ve never heard, just to let them drown, allow the sea to take its due. But he just laughed and laughed, and Jack died on land as he had always been meant to.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): We were conductors on a train, prim suits and scowls, a relentless beast of iron and steam that never seemed to get you exactly where you wanted to be unless there was something dreadful waiting for you. We punched tickets, ignored questions, and threw off those who looked like they were having too fine a time of it. We didn’t like this job, too many sat aboard dreaming sweetly of progress and the future, too few alive to the truth of dirt and struggle in front of them. We woke those we could, but too many stepped off with a smile.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): We had some luggage, once, a thrumming silk-wrapped thing of the spider, hiding away in an old steamer trunk. We stepped heavy through the dining car and found an old woman near the caboose. “Something strange in the luggage car,” he said, and I finished as was our way - “You should come and see it.” She stood and walked with us readily enough, though tears flowed silent down her cheeks and pattered onto the fading carpet.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): The Spider’s always an easy job, no fuss, no complications, everything planned and prepared. It knows too much to truly be a stranger, but hides its knowing well enough to endure. We knew she wouldn’t scream as she was hollowed out and drunk, but still he thought best to cover the sounds with a laugh. He was always our humor. (pause) I remember our first automobile, black and reliable, just about presentable for the London auction-houses we served. He squeezed its first owner until they stopped, and dumped them in a river, and I stayed with the second until they didn’t know who they were, anymore than they knew what they were.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): And then we had a car. It was noisy, and it juddered, but the name on the wooden siding was respectable, and now it was ours and good enough for Sotheby’s. We moved a lot of things in those years. Some of them even harmless. My favorite was the old knife, rusted from the trenches and lied about by a barking auctioneer. We delivered it to a leering banker who knew the second they saw us what they’d done.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): Sweat dripped from under their bowler hat as they took the knife from its dented metal case and screamed. They lunged at me, stabbing me over and through, then moved on to him, but he just laughed as the blade went in and out and no blood flowed from the holes they cut. And when the banker had screamed all the curses they had learned from German gas attacks, the knife turned back again and cut them, piece by piece. We delivered it back to Christie’s, and that was the end of the auction jobs.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): Then were the good times, the circus times. We always take what jobs are before us, deliver whatever will bring that fear and misery, but there is no joy in carrying meat, in shifting writhing spiral things. But with the circus, we were among our own kind at last. They all had names, true enough, but none would dare pretend that names were real. Faces changed more often than clothes, and nobody truly knew who anybody was, save for their function within the show. We carried and lifted and helped the circus move towards its next destination, the next doomed town. Sometimes we joined the show, lifting weights and things that looks like animals. Sometimes we lifted members of the audience. Sometimes we even put them down again.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): Even in our stillness, people were afraid. The winter in Russia was cold, and in the icy air, the absence of our breath was clear for all to see. I could taste their discomfort. But none ever mentioned it. We didn’t like the puppet, when Orsinov began to carve it. It seemed wrong to us to try and bring one like us about, to create or remake it in such a solid, static shape.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): We were wrong, of course, and when Orsinov carved into the thing that had once called itself Grimaldi, and fed the pieces they didn’t need to the shuddering organist, even we found ourselves impressed. And when the faceless puppet peeled its creator and moved itself with their tendon strings, he looked at me and laughed and laughed.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): We followed her a while, but she was unpredictable, while we are things of point and purpose. When she lost the ancient skin, we went our separate ways, and found ourselves a lorry, long and dirty-grey. We drove the motorways and country roads, and took great crates of nothing to and fro, driving towards a different sort of terror. It wasn’t our cargo that brought fear, then. We brought fear to our cargo. Smiling, waiting patiently by the road, with cardboard signs of gentle hopes. In they went to the back, that silent heavy place, with boxes that seemed too big or too warm. They usually screamed as we drove and drove, fear thick in the air, and sometimes they died.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): Some tried to leap from the back into the road, and one even made it through. Most stayed, getting weaker and weaker, their cries fading away as hunger and thirst and despair took their final hold. But we were not content. He didn’t laugh like he used to, driving aimless, waiting for the call sat badly with us, who were meant to know our destination. We were meant to have a cargo and an address, so it was we found a man named Breekon, and took everything they were until there was nothing left but the sweet taste of a broken soul’s disquiet and confusion.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): We took the van and started to deliver once again. But we were reckless, desperate for the surety we had not felt since leaving the circus. And so we took the casket, a hungry thing of the earth, a crushing, choking tomb that will not let you die because it is too much what it is for death to find you there, within its mocking shape, buried alive.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): It was one like us that found it, a thing of shifting names and deja-vu. A fool, that believed because it found the coffin in chains, it would be an easy thing to control, to bargain with. But there was no remorse when the test finally failed, and it fed on the thing that considered itself the master. No face to change in the cold, dark earth, no eye to fool where it is now.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): But there was no mention of us in the deal, no thought to what might happen should a victim pass the test. And what happened was: we were stuck with it. It was still our cargo, nowhere to take it, no address or destination. So back in the van it went.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): A long time we’ve carried it, keeping it as close as it wants, not listening to it sing in the rain. Even when the mannequin that now called itself Orsinov came back to us, told us we could help the world unknow and fear again the coming of strangers, still we had to drag it with us, an unclaimed package.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): But I suppose it was worth it, in the end. When that Hunter killed him, when she took her violence of mindless instinct and unleashed it on us, it was there. It was waiting. I fed her to it. She took him from me, made us a me. And she doesn’t get to die for that. She gets to live, trapped and helpless, and entombed forever. No prey, no hunt. No movement.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT): We failed, but I have at least that comfort. I am without him now. I am. I can feel myself fading, weak, no reason to move, nothing to deliver. But I am no longer tied to the casket, so you can have it. You can stare at it, knowing how your feral friend suffers, knowing how powerless you are to help. And when you can’t bear it any longer, knowing that you can climb in, and join her. I have never known hate before. I have never known loss. But now they are with me always, and I desire nothing but to share them with you.
ARCHIVIST: (voice shaky) Statement.. ends.
[He collapses.]
[TAPE CLICKS OFF.]
[INT. MAGNUS INSTITUTE, ARCHIVES, JON’S OFFICE, A BIT LATER]
[TAPE CLICKS ON.]
[The Archivist inhales.]
BASIRA: Here.
[She sets a cup down.]
ARCHIVIST: Thank you.
[He picks up the cup.]
BASIRA: Was it worth it?
ARCHIVIST: I - I don’t know. Maybe?
BASIRA: Did you at least learn anything?
[Pause.]
ARCHIVIST: Daisy’s alive, in there.
BASIRA: Right.
ARCHIVIST: Basira, we- we can’t [open-]
BASIRA: Yeah, I can read.
[Pause.]
ARCHIVIST: Right.
ARCHIVIST: Short pause.
BASIRA: So why give it to us?
ARCHIVIST: I don’t- I don’t know. T-to taunt us? To (inhale) lure us in as well?
[He sighs.]
BASIRA: Hm.
ARCHIVIST: I-I saw that - thing’s mind; it’s lost on it’s own, no partner, no - purpose, I-I-I honestly think it just wanted to do another delivery.
BASIRA: And there’s no chance more of the circus survived the explosion?
ARCHIVIST: I don’t think so. I - at least - Breekon didn’t think so.
[He sighs.]
BASIRA: Where does the coffin lead?
ARCHIVIST: The Buried.
BASIRA: Right.
[Silence.]
BASIRA (CONT’D): (inhale, set) Right. Keep it safe; I’ll be gone a few days. I have some leads I need to follow up.
[We hear the rustling of her moving as she’s speaking.]
ARCHIVIST: Sorry?
BASIRA: You heard me. Don’t ask about them. And don’t know about them either.
ARCHIVIST: Well, I can’t exactly control that.
BASIRA: (cutting him off) Learn.
ARCHIVIST: (sighing) I’ll do my best. (breath) You can trust me, Basira.
BASIRA: Stop saying that.
[Silence.]
BASIRA (CONT’D): Do you know how I survived that-the Unknowing?
ARCHIVIST: I… No. No I don’t.
BASIRA: No powers, no.. magic or help. I was trapped in that place, and so I tried to figure it out. And I did, a little. So I kept doing it. I kept going through until I got out, I… reasoned my way out of that nightmare.
ARCHIVIST: Good Lord.
BASIRA: Then everything ended and Daisy was gone. And you were gone. And Tim.
BASIRA: And then I got back to the Institute and Martin sent me to meet the new boss. Then I stood alone in an empty office for more than an hour.
BASIRA: I can trust me, Jon. That’s it.
[The Archivist sighs.]
BASIRA (CONT’D): I’ll try and be back in a week or two. Don’t think about me.
ARCHIVIST: Right.
BASIRA: And don’t open the coffin.
[The Archivist laughs dryly.]
ARCHIVIST: It is addressed to me, (silence)
ARCHIVIST: (somber) Yes, alright. Alright.