Extended Surveillance
[CLICK]
ELIAS
Good evening, Detective.
[BASIRA IMMEDIATELY ASSAULTS HIM.]
Ow!
BASIRA
Useless, scheming piece of shit!
ELIAS
– Detective, this is quite unnecessary –
[ANGRY NOISE]
[FURTHER VIOLENCE]
BASIRA
I’m sorry, was that unnecessary?
ELIAS
Ow!
BASIRA
Because this is the most helpful you’ve been so far!
Unless you’ve got another crisis for me.
ELIAS
[gasping] No, no, no – it’s fine… I’m sorry?
BASIRA
Oh, yeah? For which part?
ELIAS
…all of it?
BASIRA
You sent us to the North fucking Pole for no goddamn reason!
ELIAS
A, um, miscalculation –
BASIRA
No, no, I’m done with your game –
ELIAS
That’s – Basira –
BASIRA
And when exactly were you planning to tell us he’s been feeding on innocents?!
ELIAS
– I’ve – I’ve always thought that a man’s eating habits were his own private business –
BASIRA
Mm-hm.
ELIAS
– but… I can see how maybe I should have mentioned it.
BASIRA
Or that we were being stalked by some freaky spider woman? Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that.
ELIAS
Uh, yes, well, to be honest I – I’d advise you to leave that one well alone.
BASIRA
Oh, yeah?
ELIAS
Look, look – I’ve been doing this a long time now, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Web, it’s that it plays its own game. All you can really do is hope it doesn’t get in the way of whatever your plan is. Because the Spider usually wins.
Assuming you have a plan.
Do you have a plan, Detective?
BASIRA
Why do you do that? What is that?
ELIAS
Do what?
BASIRA
You always call me “Detective.” Is that supposed to mean something?
ELIAS
Honestly, I just like the way it sounds.
BASIRA
[exasperated noise]
So: why did you agree to see me?
ELIAS
I missed you.
BASIRA
Right. That’s why you’ve been refusing my visits since we got back.
ELIAS
I thought it might have… been an idea to give you some space.
BASIRA
Oh? And how’d that work out for you?
ELIAS
Um, not ideally?
BASIRA
So what now? Another wild goose chase? More gloating about John’s “destiny?” Because right now, I’m having a real hard time figuring out why I shouldn’t just tell them to throw your little deal out the window, and see how you do in here without special treatment.
ELIAS
I mean, you have plenty of reasons to do that, of course, but I’m not sure that they have any reason to listen to you.
BASIRA
I’ll make them listen.
ELIAS
Will you? You’re not police anymore. You’ve done them some favors, but they’ve done you some, as well. And I think you’ll find the information that I’ve been giving to them has been far more consistently useful. You want to issue an ultimatum? go right ahead. I’m just not sure it’ll go quite how you hope.
And, um, no more violence, Detective. Or I may have to call in the guards.
BASIRA
So that’s it, then.
ELIAS
As far as I can tell, you have no interest in anything I have to say, and maybe came here to let off some steam – so, yes, that’s probably it.
BASIRA
Surprised you didn’t foresee it.
ELIAS
Well, that’s always been my problem. Ever the optimist.
BASIRA
You know, when you have no more useful information and they’re done with you –
ELIAS
You’ll kill me. Yes. I’m sorry to say it, Detective, but you’re becoming predictable.
BASIRA
[exasperated noise]
ELIAS
Goodbye, Detective. I shall miss our little chats.
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Well?
BASIRA
Just useless gloating. Like I said he would.
ARCHIVIST
You should have let me come with.
BASIRA
No. Besides, he wouldn’t have seen me if I had.
ARCHIVIST
I can’t believe you’ve been seeing him all this time.
BASIRA
Oh, yeah. That’s the terrible secret sabotaging the trust between us.
ARCHIVIST
[huff]
…Did he mention it at all…? My, uh…
BASIRA
Oh, your new diet? Nothing useful. Didn’t seem too fazed by it.
ARCHIVIST
Right.
BASIRA
What.
ARCHIVIST
I don’t know – I mean, we still don’t really know what Elias actually is? I thought maybe if he was more like me than we realize…
BASIRA
He might have some advice?
ARCHIVIST
Stupid, I know…
BASIRA
Yeah. John, We’ve been over this. the key is to not force people to feed you their trauma. You know – just don’t do it?
ARCHIVIST
It’s not that simple.
BASIRA
No. It is. Or I put you down.
ARCHIVIST
…
I mean, that’s hardly –
BASIRA
Daisy’s been managing.
ARCHIVIST
Daisy is… yeah. She’s managing.
Did he say anything about Annabelle?
BASIRA
Not really. Sounds like he’s not too worried, though. Says to just ignore it.
ARCHIVIST
Yeah, good luck with that.
BASIRA
Any luck finding her?
ARCHIVIST
I haven’t really been trying. Doing that sort of thing consciously… makes me hungry.
BASIRA
Oh, well then: find a statement to your tastes, and read it.
ARCHIVIST
Yes, yes, I know, thank you.
…Basira?
BASIRA
Yeah?
ARCHIVIST
I have been meaning to ask: the tape, the one of the uh… my victim. You said Martin gave it to you.
BASIRA
Yeah.
ARCHIVIST
How was he? How did he look – was he – uh –
BASIRA
[interrupting; sounding slightly less harsh] I don’t know. I didn’t see him. He just left it on my desk with a note.
ARCHIVIST
Oh. Right.
BASIRA
Yeah.
ARCHIVIST
Can I ask what it said?
BASIRA
Um, yeah. It said, uh. “Talk to him”
ARCHIVIST
[harsh breathing/sobbing sounds]
I’m gonna get something to eat.
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
Statement of Sunil Maraj regarding their work as a security guard and the disappearance of their co-worker, Samson Stiller. Original statement given 3rd April, 2011. Audio recording by Jonathan Simms, the Archivist.
Statement begins.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
So I lost my job last week. I mean, I quit, they didn’t fire me or nothing. But you know how like sometimes you quit because you want to, and sometimes you quit because you’ve got to? Well, this was the second, although I’m not gonna pretend I’m not glad to see the back of the place.
It’s ‘cause I kept asking about Samson, you know? And what I saw. And they really, really don’t want me to make a stink about that. Because if he just disappeared one day, didn’t come into work, that’s fine – I mean, not fine for his family, obviously, or the police who have to find him, but fine for the company. If he disappeared at work, though – if what I think happened is even close to what actually happened – then that’s real bad news for them, and opens them up to all sorts of lawsuits and liability.
I mean, it’s fine, I can get other jobs, and it’s not like I really want to be working there after what happened, but I just wish someone would take it seriously. It’s messed up, and I’m having a real hard time getting out of my head.
So, I work security right? Used to be, a company or shop would have its own little security force they put together, did all the in-store and CCTV vigilance stuff. These days, it’s all centralized, though. You tend to have a building or a shopping central contract all the security work out to a single company, who’ll then cover all the businesses or shops. It’s easier, from a centralizing point of view, and cheaper, if that’s what the owners like.
But it does mean that there tends to be a lot less stability and how it’s all structured, personnel-wise, at least. If you’re lucky, you’ll be assigned to a post and stay there for years, getting to know the place, the systems, your co-workers. If you’re unlucky, or there’s contract difficulties, you could easily end up moving through two or three different places in as many months.
That was kind of the case for me and Samson. We were the odd men out in a lot of ways. We’d originally been brought in for a big corporate office block near Liverpool Street, but there’d been some problem and the whole place had to be closed up for months. Samson said they found asbestos, I heard it was a lease issue, but it doesn’t really matter. Point is, they hired us for a job that no longer existed.
I expected they’d just get rid of us, but I mean to their credit, they did try to do right. They did their best to fit us in with other security teams: I mean, over the last two years we did a couple of data centers, a digital marketing hub – whatever that is – three different office buildings near Kings Cross… trouble was, every time, almost as soon as we got there, there’d be some personnel changes, or expiring contracts, or some other trouble, and generally, as the last in the door, we were the first to get reassigned. Started to feel a bit like we were cursed, you know?
Samson took it harder than I did. I mean, I’m young, my mum’s got a flat in Hackney, and to be honest, most of my evenings are out with friends or in with black ops, so the moving around was pretty much fine with me. Sam had a three-year-old, though, and lived way down in Morden, so being thrown from one post to another all the time was really kind of getting to him. He tried to talk to me about it a few times, but honestly, we weren’t that close. Or rather, we were close because we’d always worked together, but we didn’t have a huge amount in common. I mean, I tried to talk to him about football for a while, but I think he could tell I was talking out of my ass. Anyway, point is, when we were reassigned to a shopping centre in Stratford, he wasn’t in a great place.
Now, I’m not sure I can legally name the shopping center I was working in to you guys, but let’s just say it wasn’t the Westfield. It was old, clearly been around decades, and the security systems really showed it. I mean, one of the shops still had the original alarms from the late 70s, and plenty of them still had cameras that recorded to VHS, for God’s sake.
The security office was a mess. The company I worked for – again, dunno if I can legally say them, but you can look it up, you know – they have a package where they replace all your equipment and systems with the stuff we use. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it, if only because we all know exactly how to use that stuff.
Whoever was running this shopping center had very much not opted for that particular contract. I mean, the teams before us had made a valiant effort to centralize and integrate all the feeds and setups into just the one control room, but… damn, that place was a mess. Flat screens, next to banks of old CRT monitors that some of the cameras had to feed into, next to racks of channel banks, and a few actual, honest-to-god computers, that tried their best to wrestle everything into something that was almost usable.
I found it properly overwhelming, didn’t like the place at all. But Sam actually seemed to get on with it pretty well almost from the get-go. He’d apparently been an engineer back in the day, and something about all those old surveillance systems, all tied together, all wrapping into and around each other like some weird nest of cameras… it seemed to really appeal to him. The first week he was there he spent almost the entire time playing with the system and the wiring… left me to do most of the other work on my own. Well, I mean… there were the other guys working there, of course, but even the ones who’d been there awhile started to get the picture and gave Samson a bit of a wide berth after a few days.
He really did seem to get the place in a bit better order. I mean, some of it, only he really understood, but soon enough it actually made sense – what we were watching and when – and he managed to get rid of some of the delay, so that we even managed to catch a couple of shoplifters.
There was only one piece of equipment that seemed to give him any trouble. It was this old Tecton multicamera recorder from the late 80s, managed the feeds for one of the various budget shoe shops that lined the promenade.
It didn’t seem all that complicated when you just looked at it, but trying to use it was an absolute nightmare. None the buttons seemed to do exactly what you wanted them to do, and there were all sorts of sequences where pressing a button, holding a button, pressing it three times, all that – they’d all do really different things.
Sam spent almost a whole month wrestling with it, before he finally cracked and he asked Dave – the bearded old guy who we all sort of assumed had been there the longest? – whether they still had any of the old operating manuals.
I remember the smell of dust when Dave went and cracked open the filing cabinet in the back room, before waving his arms in the direction of the drawer and shrugging. I mean, I’d have just left it, obviously, but I think Samson was taking the whole knowing how the system works thing as like – a point of pride? Something he could salvage from the whole situation. Just a way of getting some control over his life, you know?
So he found the manual. More of a pamphlet, really. Can’t have been more than ten pages of A5 in the whole thing, yellowed and water-damaged. Well-used, though. Someone had even put their name in the front, like they were afraid people were gonna steal a manky instruction book.
Still, Sam just couldn’t put it down. I mean, it was like 10 in the morning when we finally found it, and when I went in at 2:00 to see if he’d taken his lunch break yet, he was still sat there, just staring at it. I mean, I’m not a fast reader, or anything but that’s a lot, right?
And like – okay, so this is the part that you’re definitely gonna think I’m having a joke with you, but I’m honestly not, I’m dead serious. Because I saw some of the pages over his shoulder, and on one of them there was, there was a picture of me.
Like, a black-and-white photo of my face. I didn’t get a good look, but it certainly wasn’t one that I remember having taken. Not that would make it any less weird for it to be printed in an old CCTV manual from back when I was doing nappies. And I’m not making it up, I swear.
Then Samson turned, and he looked at me, and I don’t know, I got real spooked. His eyes were all – messed up. Like, weird. And glassy. It was really, really freaky, and I just turned and I got out of there. That wasn’t the end of it, though. If it had been then sure, maybe I write it off as a weird dream, where I was tired or whatever, but no. Because from that point, on Samson just gets creepier.
For a start, he’s always at work. I mean, we’re not always on the same shift, so it takes me a while to notice, but when I ask him about it, he just says that our schedules must have synced up weird. But whenever I arrived, there he was, staring at the monitors, watching all the people come and go, his eyes wide like he was drinking it all in. And whenever I was there late, and it was my turn to close up, he’d always say that he was happy to do it, say I could head off a few minutes early.
So, I never actually saw him leave. I tried to stay once, said I needed to do it myself, but he just got real quiet, like… real quiet, and stared at me.
The bank of monitors was behind him, and I’m just trying to come up with something to say, get him to talk to me… and one by one, they began to just wink off, turning dark.
And I got this feeling, deep in my gut, that if that last monitor turned off, then something really bad was gonna happen to me. It was one of the old CRT sets, big, and bulky, and the picture on it was never that clear, but for a moment it looked like it was me on there. Staring right back at myself as the screens slowly went black, getting closer and closer. The face on the monitor looked absolutely terrified, and I was starting to feel it myself.
So I just tried to smile, told him not to worry about it, and I headed out as quick as I could. My legs were shaking so hard I almost fell on the way out.
Then there were the actual cameras. I mean, you work in a shopping center, obviously you do a bunch of shopping there. I used to get my lunch, for one, and usually pick up any of the essentials I needed. Sometimes, if I was feeling hard done by and it was payday, I might buy myself a new shirt, or a game, or something.
And obviously, because I work security, I know where all the cameras are. where they cover, even how they move. A lot of them are completely static, just pointing at one place. But gradually, I start to notice something when I’m shopping. It’s like a tickling, creeping sensation all over the back of my neck. Like I’m being watched.
So I start to keep an eye on the cameras when I’m in the shops, and you know what, I’m right. They’re following me. Whenever I look at them – doesn’t matter where it was they were meant to be aimed – they’re always focused right on me.
I keep staring at them, moving around, and they just shift to keep the lens pointed at me. But they’re not articulated, they don’t have any motor or swivel mount they just… move. Pointed right at me.
One time, when no one in the store was looking, I threw a can of deodorant at one of them. Hit it square on. Samson wore sunglasses for the next two days, and when I caught a glimpse of him without them, there was a crack right down the center of his eye.
I tried to talk to the others. I’m pretty sure that they were getting similar weirdness from them. they were all jumpy and nervous those last few months. But I was known as Sam’s friend. We’d come in together and everyone just assumed we were close. When I started to ask about it, about what was going on, they just clammed up like I was trying to get them in trouble. My nerves were all shot to hell.
I wasn’t in work the week he disappeared. I’d called in with a bullshit stomach thing. I just needed a break, some time to get my head right. It was almost working, you know? A little distance, a little space to relax. I was starting to feel good.
Then I got the call from Dave. He was frantic.
I couldn’t make out half of what he was saying over the bad line, but he kept saying Samson’s name. Asking me if I “knew,” if he’d “told me.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but he kept screaming at me. He kept saying, I must know, he must have told me what was going on. He kept saying, “what do we do with his eyes?”
I mean, I didn’t know what the hell to say, I just went quiet listening to Dave as he started sobbing down the phone
“He won’t stop,” he said. “We can’t get rid of his face.”
I hung up. And Dave was gone when I went back in. A bunch of them were, all quit suddenly. I wanted to check in with them, find out what happened, but we’d never really been friends, and I didn’t know any of their details.
I never saw Samson again, either. Though, I did find his old work shirt in the back. It was torn to shreds, wrapped around that old instruction manual. I put it back in the filing cabinet, and I threw the shirt away.
I tried to stick around, to do my job, but I was asking too many questions for the folks upstairs, I think. I wanted to know why Samson hadn’t signed out of the building before he disappeared. Why, no matter who tried to reset the system, it always logged back in as him.
Why, whenever I was watching the monitors alone, I’d see him on that old CRT screen. Staring right back at me. Quietly calling for me to join him.
ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.
[exhale] Hm. Better.
Does reading a statement of the Ceaseless Watcher count as a sort of auto-cannibalism, I wonder? Or some sort of bird-like regurgitation of fear? Re-consuming secondhand terror.
Whatever the analogy, I’m finding it harder and harder to ignore the diminishing returns – how much less satisfaction each one gives me. My desire for follow-up, for verification, for… [frustrated laugh/sputter] proper digestion – the experience, it grows less and less.
I honestly don’t care if Mr. Maraj was chased down and consumed by his voyeuristic former friend, or if he has forgotten the whole affair, living in blissful ignorance.
I just find my mind already wandering to the next statement, in the hopes that it won’t be quite as stale.
End recording.