Archive of Our Own

[CLICK]

BASIRA
[the sound initially disrupted during set-up, first part of the sentence inaudible]

… get you anything else? We’ve got a tin of biscuits round somewhere, think they might be alright.

NOAH
No. Ta, though. The tea’s perfect. So, like, how’d you guys usually go about this?

BASIRA
You can write your statement down if you'd prefer. Most people get on better with the interview set-up though. Flows better.

NOAH
Speaking into the gadget there?

BASIRA
The recorder’s there for your statement, yes. Procedure.

NOAH
It doesn’t… this isn’t going to get passed on to the police, right?

BASIRA
… That would depend. On what you’re worried about them finding out.

NOAH
[jumpier than before] Nothing bad! I’ve not, you know, killed anyone or anything like that. S’just… the place I was living at the time – I mean I’m not living there now! All above board and all that, I just – at the time I didn’t [huff of air, deep from the chest, self-conscious] ... I wasn’t exactly there legally, y’know.

BASIRA
Your secrets are safe with us.

NOAH
[noticeably deflating, relieved] Kay. That's, that's cool. You’re the boss.

BASIRA
Right. Might as well get started. What we’ll do now is I’ll introduce the recording, and when you want to start, go right on ahead.

NOAH
Sure.

BASIRA
OK. Case number #0181130. Statement of Noah Schubach, regarding his former neighbours. Original statement given by subject, November 30th 2018. Audio recording by Basira Hussain, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.

Whenever you’re ready.

NOAH
[clears throat, the first few words catching gritty] Er. Sure. So, it was - um, about six weeks after I moved in that they arrived. I was… I’d had to leave home for - it’s not important really, but long story short, I’d left and got the first train out of there. Which was, you know, great, brave new scary world away from all that shit I was leaving far behind and all that, but practicality-wise, I didn’t have a job and I sure as anything didn’t have money. I spent a few nights rough, and then I found this place over in Lewisham. It was a good find, I was really lucky there – you can see it if you take the Tube past, near abouts. A series of squat blocks of flats, the surrounding area a bit wooded and nature-y in a half-arsed way, though it was obviously becoming overgrown. The outside was a mess; there was a skip near-full of junk that no-one had collected, and around the entrances there was broken wood slats and glass, and strewn rubbish and empty plastic bottles, and then on the lower levels you had windows smashed in and shitty graffiti from local kids.

Ha, I’m not doing a good job of selling it, and I'm not going to lie, on the outside it looked like an absolute dive. But once you got inside, and moved up from the bottom floor, the rest of it was pretty well-kept. Completely empty, 'course, for the most part. Not sure why it was in such a state, abandoned like that. One of those things, you get them a lot around London once you get out of the centre. Maybe there was a tax issue, or the company folded and couldn’t sell the building, hey, maybe there was a problem with the cladding or y’know it had asbestos in the walls. But the flat I managed to get into, third floor, knocking in the lock without too much effort, it was spacious enough. I wasn't up for being picky, you can imagine. Someone hadn't even moved out a sofa, a few chairs and a table, so, score one for me. Better than a fucked-out old mattress I thought I was going to have to nick from the skip. And, extra bonus, the landlord must have forgotten to disconnect the water because it came through the shower just fine. Cold, but hey, better than nothing.

So, that’s where I was living. I got a job, the first one that would take me and not ask too many questions, pay me cash in hand and by the hour. I mostly worked nights – I was a cleaner, looked after a few of the buildings in the financial district. It was unusual for me to be home before dawn, my shift being from ten pm to around six am, and then it was seven by the time I sloped back to the flat. But there wasn’t much doing that night and my boss told me to head back early. Which is why I was back home for about half three on the night they moved in, lying there twitching and shifting in discomfort, feeling wired with awakeness, trying not to use my phone too much so I had some charge left for the morning when I could lurk in a Starbucks or a Costa and use the plugs there. And it had been a long few months, you know, so I was restless, worrying, you know the sort of feeling that can hit you at that hour, all the burdens of the world suddenly the biggest things in your head.

And then I hear this, this slumping sound.

The flats were empty, except for me. I might not have heard them if I hadn't been awake, but lucky me, I was, and the sound, it – it travels you know, at that hour. Lingers. It was before dawn and light pollution made the night a sickly mucky colour, and up the stairwell the sound was moving, echoing in cycles of throaty rings, like a rock clattering down to the bottom of a well.

I was, well, you can't blame me can you, I was terrified. Thought at first it was kids. Broken in or something. That they were drunk, that for some reason they'd make their way to the third floor – and maybe they'd seen me come in, maybe I hadn't been careful enough – and I'd fixed up the lock but you know, I'm not a locksmith, one good kick would have done it in easily. I wasn't panicking, not yet, but my breathing had gotten faster. I held my body so still it hurt with the stiffness, listening as the sound rolled up agonisingly floor by floor. A dragging, slumping sound. Like someone carrying a body.

It was tottering, and irregular, staggered like it was stopping for breath every other step. I'd sat up at this point, and the cheap duvet I'd bought had slithered off, pooled to the floor. My phone white-knuckled in my hand.

My room was right at the end of the corridor. I wanted it to be near a stairwell, ‘cuz my thinking was it would make it easier to bolt if anyone came. At the end, immediately on the right when you come out of my flat, there’s a door that leads into a small space like an entrance way that has a ratty abandoned pin-board that used to have relevant posters, emergency numbers for the plumber, the landlord, etc. And then immediately after that, you'd a heavier fire door, which leads out onto a small landing, a break in the stairwell that you walk up or down from.

Those were two sets of doors, right, three if you counted mine, and this sound just needled through them, inciting a mimicry of the same noise as it climbed.

The thumping was more obvious now the closer it got. A dead-weight, wet sound. Like when you come in out of a storm, yeah, and it’s turned nasty and you’re drenched, and you get in the door and you’re stripping off your clothes, and they’re clinging and sodden, and there’s that dense, squelchy gross sound as they splat to the floor. Like that. Laden. Heavy. And I couldn’t tell how many people there were because there weren’t clear footsteps. Or when there were, they must have caught an afterimage of sound because where every one foot came down, there was the trailing patter of another few shortly after.

It was too dark and my lock felt too flimsy and I just listened to this [makes a verbal approximation] sound, kinda like that, but I'm not really doing it justice.

Anyway, I nearly jumped when I heard the cry. It wasn't like any animal I knew. The noise... it struck the walls wrong. It was a sonorous, punched-out thing, an unwilling sound torn from behind teeth. Another stumbling step, another keened groan, and maybe words there I couldn't decipher. There was a louder shudder, like the entire weight of something hitting the floor. Everything stopped. I strained my ears, but there wasn’t anything for a long while. Then, something different, a rattling, wheezing in-and-out of breathing, harsh and grating like a zip being rapidly opened and closed.

“Come on,” I think it said, the words louder now. “Come on, get up, get up.” It sounded slurred, and my theory of it being drunks or something took weight. And then there was another wrenching groan, and I tensed, winced as it gave a scraping hiss of pain. And then the dragging started up again, stumbling and unsteady. It worked its way laboriously up to the floor above me and then along. And then I heard the door above me whine open, and then the noise was right over my head. A final sound like a footfall, a few more sounds that weren’t clear, hissing noises like an old-fashioned kettle, and then silence.

It was a long time before I felt safe enough to move. After several moments that spindled outwards in this horrible, waiting silence, I stood up, toed on my shoes from where I'd kicked them off near the sofa, and made my way ever so gingerly to the door, avoiding the parts of the floor that creaked. Upstairs held its mausoleum silence and I mimicked it without thinking as I padded across the floor.

With my first wage packet – cash in hand, you know how it is, under the table so to speak – I went to Argos and bought the cheapest, heaviest piece of sports equipment that I could realistically use as a weapon in a pinch. I'd much rather leg it in a fight, but it's nice to feel you have that back-up when you're squatting alone in an abandoned building. So anyway, I grabbed the cricket bat propped up by the door, first wiping my hand free of muggy sweat, and tucked it under my armpit while I checked the lock; my phone was clamped in my hand, and I felt brave enough to use the flashlight for a wired second of illumination. As quietly as I could, I moved a chair from the kitchen in front of the door. Tried to wedge it up against it like I’d seen in movies, but that didn’t work out, and I didn't really know how that was meant to work anyway without making loads of noise, so it just sat there right in front while I went back to the sofa.

I didn’t think I’d sleep after that, but weirdly, I did. Cricket bat in hand, phone in the other. There was no more noise from upstairs, and whatever it was, I didn't feel like investigating, not at fuck-off o'clock in the morning with only my phone light.

And it's probably no wonder, but... god, I remember that night I had the worst nightmares. Worse than I'd had in a long while. Sickeningly vivid, but in that awful way where you know you're dreaming, sort-of, but you puppet through your role anyway. The most terrible moments laid out like the Bayeux sodding tapestry, and I had to trudge through them, moments wound through like a VHS tape. And then when they concluded, they'd loop back, replay another matinee performance, the quality diminishing by repetition. Until by the end it was a dry rote of expected hurts, sharp words flattened, dulled through overuse. And all the while, there was something else in the bedrooms and corridors and waiting areas of my life, something that hadn't been there before, and its presence dwarfed the edges where it squatted, leaning greedily over my shoulder, devouring every moment with a parched intensity.

It didn't interfere. It just watched.

I woke up shivering and wrung out. Not even scared, really. Just, it had taken everything out of me. It was about seven-ish, I think, early enough to not be dark, and I slipped out of the flat. The stairwell heading down is your standard grotty concrete affair, broken up by little offerings of morning from barred glass-less windows. There was something dribbled off-colour all the way down the steps. Dark, marred with dirt, like something filthy and rotting and dug-up had been carried. Here and there, it was spotted heavily with some dried liquid stained into the stone – not blood, I'd guessed at the time, not the right colour.

I sat outside on a broken bank of a wall. I kicked away a plastic sandwich container and avoided the syringes and the shrapnel of triangular glass pieces. I rolled three cigarettes with the last of my tobacco, and smoked all of them, rocking my legs against the brickwork and wondering what the hell had happened last night.

I thought pretty seriously about leaving. And yeah, it would have been the sensible option. Best case scenario, whatever had crawled upstairs had died, which, fine, but I didn't much fancy living under a dead body. If it was even a person. Worst case, it didn't go anywhere whatever it was, and it might notice me eventually.

But I didn't have anywhere else to go. So, I stayed.

Whatever moved in upstairs hadn’t died. I’d hear it shuffling about with its unsteady, unfamiliar footfalls, some creaking noises, nothing very disruptive. Actually, there was some benefits; whoever was there, they must have been able to tweak the system somehow because suddenly the electricity was re-connected. I had hot water for the first time in months, and I almost scalded myself in finding out.

It was an odd first week. I’d sneak around when I got back from work, trying not to let on that I was living there, but I think whoever – whatever it was, and at some point I realised that there wasn't just one person up there, but two – well, whoever they were, they slept a lot. Their movements were erratic, at odd hours. They didn’t seem to notice I was there which suited me perfectly. Honestly, it was working out pretty well. Whatever sketchy neighbours I had, using the flat upstairs as a – I dunno, drug den, or just squatting like me, it meant I had hot water and electricity – which meant the fridge and oven now worked, which, let me tell you, was awesome after weeks of cold cans and same-day sandwiches from the reduced aisle.

The trade-off was... it will sound mad but bear with me, alright? I know correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation and all that jazz, but as soon as they moved in, firstly, there was suddenly loads of spiders? Like, loads. I'm not all that bothered by them, and at the time I'd assumed it was because autumn was getting on and it was becoming colder outside. Also, I had all those strangely intense nightmares. Played out until they were wrung out and desiccated.

It wasn't long afterwards that I had the first... Look, it wasn't a nightmare. And it wasn't bad exactly... I don't know how to put it. You must get a lot of this, right? People who've taken something too strong and seen some spooky shit, or they've had some weird and horrid bout of sleep paralysis with some creepy slender-man type weirdo hanging out at the end of their bed, and they chalk it up to the supernatural and come haring over here, babbling about ghouls and ghosts and the like. And I bet you're left trying to be all patient but really you're going to bin whatever they've said as soon as they're out of the door. Guess I can understand that.

I'll do my best to explain it. So, like I said, I was having nightmares. And it felt like as soon as I dropped off, boom, I'd be back in this played-out dreamscape of my memories, and the – the colour, if you like, the sensation of them was getting all frayed, tired and over-played. More boring than scary. And that... that presence, I said about before, it was getting bigger. Stronger. Growing denser, taking up more room, and it was more obvious. Like if you've turned the brightness up on a screen to look at a photo, and the details come into focus more.

Right, so, after like a week of this, I fall asleep and it's something different. I didn't even realise I'd dropped off, but – in the dream – I opened my eyes and the room was dark. The time on my phone said it was the middle of the afternoon, and the blinds weren't completely shut, but there was no daylight peeking through the slats. I've a fake gas fireplace in the corner, and I've blue-tacked band poster on the wall over the mantel to try and make the room a bit more homey, yeah, but the colours of the pictures were off, the faces like those weird uncanny valley CGI faces, the eyes sprouting large like lamps. It took me a minute to realise the details were all backwards, a reflection.

I sat there, and the room grew its blinking roots around me. Motion twitched under the skin of the wallpaper with the jumpy anxiety of a trapped nerve. And I was there for a while, thoughts out of focus, kind of drifting, and the dark erased parts of the room into a blurriness, no lines between wall and floor and ceiling. And then in the dream, I remember realising with that sudden kick, the drop when you've almost slipped into sleep, that I was lying with my back to the door, like usual, only I hadn't looked behind me. That there was something there. At the threshold, some visitor I'd only just noticed.

My body seized with fear, a tension up my back, camping in my shoulders and throat, and I knew it was watching me. At the doorway, as though it was waiting to be invited in.

I breathed in and out, and the thing supplied an echo to the sound, delayed a second behind so the noise dragged out too long. I stopped, holding my breath, and the thing did the same. I breathed faster, it copied me after a stunned moment of catching up. Creepy, right. And yeah, I was bricking it because I thought I was going to be murdered by like, a ghost or something.

I lay there, half-blind, in the dark, and there was something, something right behind me. And I thought, deliriously, that I should look, that I should grab my phone, flick on the light.

And I did start to, you know – I made a move to crane my neck, angle my head slowly. And I saw, briefly, for a second... what I saw, it wasn't logical. I get that. I had that whole… that surreal dream sense where things that aren't comprehensible in daylight are allowed to be as they are, unquestioned.

There was a flash of skin, curved, circling a hollow crushed inside like a tin-can flattened underfoot. The texture of a rotting apple peel. A scaffold of dark broken branches that creaked over me, smashed and violated by some unforgiving storm. There were eyes, not where they should have been, poking out from gouges in the skin, grooves where that battered skin had split under strain. There were so many of them, and they were wrong, you know. Not like people's eyes. There wasn't the... I dunno what they're called, the tear ducts? That little pink corner of your eyes, it didn't have that. And the pupil itself, it kept dividing. The pupil swelling wide like blown glass, and then dividing into two, three. Separating like cells, a gentle fuzzing noise accompanying it like soap bubbles popping. I saw all this for like, a second, and I don't know how much I've added to the memory since. But I chanced a look, and the thing that was not a person flinched at the attention.

I stopped then. Turned back round, resolutely staring forward.

And god, you're brave aren't you, in dreams. Braver than you'd be awake. Because I remember really clearly apologising. Promising not to look.

“You just scared me a little,” I told the apparition. I wasn't worried anymore. It's hard to be frightened of something when they’d pulled back like that, hunched up with shamed shadows. The early morning was graveyard-quiet, and there was a strong smell of dust and dirt and cloying earth. And the thing breathed, copying me like it couldn't remember how to itself. And the eyes in the wall blinked slowly and flicked apologetically away when I met their gaze. Like they were embarrassed at being caught staring.

“S'ok,” I think I told it. “You can stay.”

I dunno why I said it, but it was true. It didn't mean me any harm, and it was a dream right, so it didn't matter anyway, and when I woke up to the actual morning, I felt like I'd slept better than I had in weeks.

Anyway, aside from the odd upgrade to my nightmares, I had my new neighbours to contend with. And yeah, it seems really obvious now, but at the time I didn’t a hundred percent click that both things – my odd dream visitor and those two – might be related. Whatever they were up to, they were respectful at least, and there were definitely two of them, I worked out, as their sounds gradually began to coalesce into individual patterns.

I’d hear one of them the most. He had long strides as he paced with a noticeable limp and that pattering echo to his steps. He’d speak in a low voice, murmuring like he was reading things aloud, that sort of storytelling cadence to a recitation, and he'd sometimes do it for hours, his voice wearing down like a riverbed. He'd take an exhausted breather every so often, and then I'd hear him ask if he should read another one, and his companion must have given him some clue, a nod or a gesture of equal meaning, because it wouldn't be long before he'd start up again. He’d sometimes leave the flat for a couple of hours, never long, clicking the door shut quietly so I assumed it was when the other one was asleep.

I rarely heard the other one. OK, that’s not - that’s not really true because I heard him lots. He - I assume a he but I’m not going to lie I was generalising based on tone and pitch because I hadn’t seen either of them – didn't speak a lot. But he was struck by these... these excruciating fits of coughing, like he was trying to single-handedly bring up one of his lungs. You know the type of cough, that harrowing, hacking spasm you get from people who've smoked forty a day for forty years, starting dry and wheezing and degrading to this wet and gasping choke. And he clearly tried to stay as quiet as he could, to stifle it behind his arm or fabric or whatever but Christ, it didn’t half sound painful. Like there was something compacted in his lungs, terminal and cancerous rotting up his innards.

“Breathe, Angel,” the low-voiced one would tell him, and maybe that was the guy’s name, he used it often enough. It's the only moniker I heard him use. “Breathe,” he'd repeat, “you're doing great, just breathe.” And then I’d hear Angel, the rare few times he’d speak with a scraped-out, jagged voice, and he'd barely be able to retch the words out, moaning that there was no air, that he couldn't, that he was trying, but he couldn't, that there was just too much dirt.

There was something wrong with them. With the whole situation. And at this point, yeah, it probably sounds like I was creeping on them, OK, but that wasn't it. They lived right above me, and the walls weren't exactly thick, and well, you know, paying attention to them was a nice break to worrying about my own situation.

I'd hear things through the ceiling. Sometimes. Things I don’t think I was meant to hear, that it wasn't my business to listen in on. Rags of a conversation I wasn’t part of, carrying on behind a curtain I couldn’t lift.

Once, they woke me up. About eleven in the morning or so, a horrendous bang of something colliding with something else, a few more heavy sounds of tumbling contact, and then a god-awful screech that snagged over my ears, made me curl up foetal to try and get away from the noise. And afterwards there was a cold silence, like that absence you get, when you've dropped something valuable and you're just staring down at the damage, and then nothing at all but a blossoming of terrible, heartbroken apologising from the guy called Angel, the sorries running into each other like cars in a pile up, fervent and babbling. Overflowing with regret, ugly with pained sincerity, and they'd be interspersed with 'what have I dones' and 'I didn't mean its' and they spoke of such a betrayal that they turned my stomach. The other low-voiced one was panting, trying to say it was OK, that it was OK, that it had been an accident, but each word was too hard-won to be truthful. Upstairs was quiet after that, for a long time.

I had questions, ‘course I did. But their battles were theirs and I couldn’t help them.

Usually though, there was no bother, or I couldn’t hear them. And, in the way anything can if you go through the motions long enough, it became routine. I'd work my shift, the scent of bleach and detergent and industrial cleaning fluids wadded in my nose, and then I'd walk the forty minutes back to the flat. The weather was dipping its toes into a wet season by now, and most mornings, I'd get back with sodden socks and my hair acting as guttering, funnelling drops of water down my face despite any attempts to wrestle with an umbrella or a waterproof coat. It would be about seven, the sky sometimes hinting at light, and I'd trudge up the stairs as quietly as I was able before letting myself into the flat. I'd sleep for hours, undisturbed by noise, sometimes dreaming my strange dreams of being watched, sometimes hearing the pacing or the murmuring of the low-voiced one, the terrible cough of the other.

My dreams had progressed to being every other night. Always the same, my visitor at the threshold, swaying like a branch in low wind like it was dizzy. Eyes would pop up like forming bubbles, layer over each other like scales or slide into each other, the faint rainbow gleam like a petrol sheen. It didn't move, or speak, and I never felt like it would hurt me. It just breathed when I did and watched me.

It will... look, it'll sound like I'd lost it, and yeah, it was not the easiest time of my life, maybe I was cracking a little with the strain, but I felt like I was being... being seen, you know? And it was nice, to be at the centre of that. In the sea of the dark room, in those dreams, I'd open my eyes and feel beheld. Knowing that it was looking right at me, but there was none of the - the bullshit that comes with that. You look at people, yeah, and you aren’t just looking at them. You bring skin into that game of observation. You judge, you assume, you’ve expectations drawn from a million other encounters you’ve survived before. It’s a people thing. But this thing I kept dreaming about, this shape that couldn't charitably be called human, it wasn’t people. I could feel it staring, and it looked through me, at everything, at everything, but it wasn’t looking for anything, there wasn’t any expectations or disappointments or conclusions. It saw me, the complexity of all that involves, the me I’ve had to mould kicking and screaming and fuck anyone who doesn’t like what came out the other side. And the passive acceptance was almost like relief.

It took me a long time, but I spoke with it again. It was... I was restless. I get like that, sometimes. My head full of memories I don't want, doubts I haven't quite exorcised, and I didn't think I'd be able to sleep, but I must have dropped off because in the dream the canopy of the thing's twisted wings loomed over me like the foliage of some great tree.

I was tired. I wanted someone to talk to, and being seen gave me a strange, comforting bravado. I think I'd come to understand, slowly and with that settled way that accepts things even if there's no proof, that this wasn't a dream, at least not in the proper sense of the word.

“Why do you come here?” I asked it, cracking the silence quietly. I didn't want to spook it.

The thing stopped breathing. I held myself very still, wanting to let it know it was OK.

The pause was long enough that I wondered if it knew how to answer the question I'd put to it, if it was too hard somehow. So, I mean, I'd committed now, so I tried another one.

“Do you have a name?”

Another long vacant moment. I thought, wildly for a moment, that maybe it couldn't answer. I don't think whatever counted as its face had a mouth. From between the feathers of its battered wings, more eyes fluttered open to stare down and over me cautiously.

“I did,” came the answer finally. I don't know where the sound was coming from exactly. The room thrummed with it.

I asked what had happened, and the silence this time was more considered.

“Lost it...” it replied carefully. Like it was trying out how the sound worked in its mouth. It was gravelly, scratched, jumped weirdly like an overplayed vinyl. It was gentle though. That was the impression I got anyway. “For a time.”

“And now? Did you get it back?” I asked.

“We – I have it. Almost. Sometimes I lose sight. I am trying to fit it again,” the thing replied. Its answer doesn't make sense now, but at the time, I knew exactly what it was trying to say, the impression of old hurts and loss it was attempting to communicate.

“Why do you come here?” I asked again.

Another long, thoughtful pause.

“To check,” it said, the words more unwilling than they'd been before. “That you have not been harmed.”

“Why?” I frowned and it said:

“This place is not safe, and this world is not kind. And I – I am not... I am not myself, nor the person I have made of myself. I could hurt you.”

“But you haven't,” I said.

“No,” it conceded in a voice warped like wet wood.

“Do you want to?” I asked, and it replied no. Tremulous. Anxious, but a dug-in steel there somewhere. It said it didn't, so it wouldn't.

I fell back asleep knowing that.

And so it went. These confusions of information that didn't add up. Mostly I slept undisturbed. The thing would be there, I knew, but it meant me no harm and that was that. If I had dreams, I barely remembered them.

I never put all the pieces together, if that's what you're hoping for. I never found out what happened, or what they were, or what went so wrong they were hiding out there. What had hurt them both so badly. The biggest clue I got, and I'm aware that's not a load to go on really, was an overheard argument, about a month maybe into their tenancy.

It was a conversation, at first. Rumbled like a TV in another room, and I was unable to pick most of the words out. It was a weekday, in the evening, but unusually I was at the flat – one of the guys at work was on holiday, and we had a few off sick, so there’d been a couple of shift swaps, meaning this week I was working the day shifts, which, honestly, I was hating. Anyway, not getting side-tracked, that's why I was home, about five-ish, working on my CV on my shitty laptop and trying to keep the clatter of my keys down. I think they'd been napping or at least keeping quiet most of the afternoon, but there'd been movement for the last half hour – the restless one with the low voice keeping up most of the conversation in a flow of sound – but then sometimes, to his credit, trailing with a faintly forced effort, like he was having to work for every syllable, was Angel. He sounded bad that day. Worse than was usual.

Their voices started rising after a while. Frustration colouring sentences, an ugly desperateness to it. A brewing fight, domestic in all the wrong ways. The worst fights are with your loved ones, aren't they? They know exactly what to say that will puncture, the weak skin you've tried to armour with scales and teeth.

I started fumbling to try and find my headphones as the volume got louder. Yeah, I was curious, but I didn't want to be nosy, you know? Wasn't my business.

“...should have left me there,” Angel kept repeating, and then the other scoffed angrily, saying something like “so I should apologise then? Oh, excuse me for making the effort to save your life.” And then the usual snap-backs – 'That's not the point and you know it', one said, then the other responded “So what is your point, huh?” – and Angel kept repeating that it wasn't safe, that he should have been left there, that it wasn't getting better.

And they both would have been raging furious, blistering and sniping at each other if it wasn't for the fact they were both so run ragged, worn numbed. Their argument was an old one relived on a precipice both of them were standing at.

The low voiced one tried a different tack – slipping into something reassuring, telling him he was being ridiculous, that he was doing well, that he was improving and that it just needed time was all, but Angel spoke over him, dismissive if it wasn't for the panic there; “I'd rather go back,” I remember him saying, pitched and reedy, “I'd rather go back than get lost again. It will hurt you and it won't – my dear, it won't even think it's wrong, or cruel, it will just simply want to know you and see you, and my dear, I couldn't bear it if....” He trailed off, and he hiccupped, his voice damp. He dissolved into coughing then, and his throat was slick. Clogged with a wetness.

“Crowley, listen,” he tried again, over and over, clearly getting more and more upset. “My dear, please, Crowley, you simply must listen to me. I am so hungry, it is not safe to have me untethered so often, please, you aren't taking precautions, perhaps to the Archives or at least here, bound in some fashion...”

“I won't be your jailer,” the other snarled, and I thought that Crowley must be his name, then. It was the first time I'd heard it used.

My headphones were tangled again from being shoved into my coat pocket. I was desperately trying to unknot them from their bundle, because it was... it was wrong, wasn't it, what I was hearing. They didn't know someone was listening in, and it felt too private an intrusion. There was a painful story here, some trauma not yet made historical, and it wasn't fair to be a party to it.

“Angel, come on,” Crowley kept repeating, like he could convince himself. “Come on, you're getting better, you're doing so well, the statements are helping aren't they, you’re getting better.”

Angel attempted to reply but the coughing came back, and that retching and choking was gagging and obscene.

“Such misplaced hope, weaver,” another voice finally replied.

I stiffened. Dropped my headphones with a plasticky clatter. My whole body straightened like I'd been over-wound. I couldn't turn my neck because I was wildly, terrifying convinced that, for a moment, for a long, falling moment, that there was something behind me, all around me. Lent over my neck, out of my line of sight, a flutter of sound in my ears like the buzz of white noise.

There was another voice upstairs. A third person, I assumed at the time, voice like wind hissing in the gap under a door. It – it sounded off. Like a scratched recording, or a static built up like grime on a window. It was flat and cruel-sounding, but not with that particular invested glee of someone who wants to hurt you, the one that comes with a smirk. It was with that cruelty that comes from disinterest, pitched like an automated message.

I can... huh, I can remember every word of that conversation now I'm telling you. I can barely remember to charge my phone, but that – I couldn't forget that. Not a bit. I assumed I might have forgotten some of it. Remembered the concept, the dread it broiled in my gut, but being here, every word is all of a sudden so clear.

The sensation of being suddenly, horrifyingly looked at was immense, and right behind me, and above me and over me.

The third voice said: “The man he was got crunched up and scattered in the dirt. I – or he or we – am a poor replacement. He or we cannot separate ourselves so easily. The Choke tore us up and I am the pieces left. We feasted on ourselves so much our belly is bloated. Such a life lived, and all of it chewed to pulp.”

“Hey,” cut in Crowley. Sharp, and dark. “Don't talk like that.”

“Like what, my dear,” the voice replied. The shift was jarring. Like missing the bottom step of a stairwell. There was one voice, then there was another, more like the guy he called Angel, or I don't know, maybe it was both. Like a radio hovering between stations. I didn't know who was speaking any more.

“Like that,” Crowley hissed. “With his voice.”

There was laughter. No, it's not right, not really, to call it that. It never changed tone, or pitch, just a dead hahahaha like a toy gurgling its final sound-effects before the batteries drain.

“Oh, my dear boy,” the voice continued with this – this surreal affectation, like it was playing posh, you know that sort of voice, “I rather think you're being somewhat foolish. It's my voice, after all.”

“It's not,” Crowley insisted. “Don't mock him, don't use his words like that.”

The voice responded: “But maybe they aren't his anymore. Maybe they are mine. If I died in there, you wouldn't know, would you? Maybe you didn't get us out. Maybe you were too late. And then you found us, crushed and mutilated by the earth, sought us out with the help of the Mother, and you wrapped your spindling legs around us even as Too-Deep-And-Cannot-Breathe squeezed and snapped your fragile limbs and ...you almost didn't get out, and I would rather have remained down in that awful deep than have you trapped down there with me.... The dirt pressed in too close, and I was gagging with the soil stuffed solid in my throat, and you had lost track of which way the sky was, and you were being so terribly brave, my darling... And then you got us out.”

I was trying not to listen. It wasn't right, to eavesdrop, but I couldn't... the tension in my body ached and thrummed, and I felt stabbed like an insect displayed in glass as I listened to something that could not have been a human being speak.

It continued and so I heard: “But we hurt people, didn't we, weaver? You got us out, leveraging all your weight on every snapping string of web and he was so hungry, feverish with the hollowness, and he – I tried to – oh, I didn't mean it, I tried, I really tried not – we wanted to drag the trauma out of their heads, the woman with the rage that scalds her on the inside, the man stinking of the Lonely. Oh, but then you were such a feast to distract us, enough to stun, drag us here like a guilty little secret, hidden away.”

“Enough for a full stomach,” Crowley replied bitterly.

“Not by half,” the third voice carried on. “You know how hungry I am. He is. We are. He's always hungry, fights so desperately, the effort of trying to remember himself enough not consume you. You're right here, and the stench of this room is pungent with your terror, and all your little pieces of paper aren't working as fast as you hope to rebuild him. I'm trying so so hard not to rip the stories from your head. He's so scared as well, you see. That you'd just let us.”

“They got their Archivist back,” Crowley replied. “They got Jon back from bloody Lukas, I'll be damned if some bloody box is going to get the best of you.”

That weird flat laughing again, only it trailed off into something weaker, a hiccup of wet noise like a sob.

“Crowley,” the ill one, Angel, was speaking again. “Crowley,” he kept repeating, like he was asking for something, like he was begging. “Crowley, I – but weaver, I am not an Archivist. We have never been a person before. We aren't people, neither of us. A spider on two legs and a sightless eye. It's a joke, don't you see? A performance. It's been a charade, a practice built like sediment over time. But you can lose the script of a story. Back to square one, all that hard-won ground subsumed again, back into us. What if this is what he has left? What if that's what we have left? There are fragments in here, of personhood, enough to hold human form, to speak language as they would. There are fragments too of the human he was. Would you like to know what memories he has clung to, weaver? Because they're all of you, they were all so fought for even as everything else got ground up into grave-soil.”

“He'll come back,” Crowley insisted. “He's trying, he's making progress, you're just a fucking afterthought, a nightmare he can't shake. He needs more statements, more time, and then this mockery of him will be a footnote.”

“Always so full of hope,” the voice said, and at that point it wasn't clear which one was speaking, the third voice or Angel, before it went back to the scratching one that held me taut and terrified and continued: “You can't put a shattered window back together with your patience. What if this is the only thing that remains? An imperfect mimic. Monstrous, but we're wearing our face, aren't we? It brings you comfort to see it. I could tell you I love you, with his mouth, with my voice. Would that help? We might not even be lying. I might mean it in the way I think I'm able to.”

“Stop it,” the man said again, and he was shaking as I was, I think. “Stop it.”

“Are you warning me?” the voice asked.

“I'm telling you to shut up,” Crowley snarled.

“Would you stopper my mouth, spider?” the voice inquired. “Would you puppet him to move as you want? Pull your strings and zip up his lips. You've already given one of the humans over to your god, why not give this one too?”

There was a vicious intake of air, like a slash of something sharp, pained and hurt. There was a silence, and it was rotten and dreadful and I was pinned by the weight of it.

A harsh breathing, close to tears. “Crowley, it wants to know you. It wants to take it – And it would be so – don't permit me. Please, Crowley."

“OK,” replied Crowley, and he was doing an incredible job at sounding in control. “OK.”

He continued in short, clipped words that did not shiver, saying this wouldn't hurt, that he was so so sorry, that it was to give him time, to heal and rest and come back to himself. That it wouldn't be for long. That he loved him, and that they'd fix this. He said all things in the same breath, like they were all equally as true for him.

There was a murmuring response that I couldn't catch. A patter of limbs and a dull noise, like a lock being turned or like something sharp puncturing skin. A weight being lowered to the floor. The sensation of being so violently watched faded like a vanishing headache. My face was wet with a grief that wasn't originally mine. For a long time, I couldn't stop crying, my unused headphones twisted around my fingers like webbing, and I didn't know why.

Once, I thought I heard a sound upstairs, a broken, shattered noise, but I might have imagined it.

When my legs felt like working again, I went downstairs, out the fire door, and fished a packet of tobacco out of my pocket. Took me a messy several minutes to roll even one up, with the shaking getting it all over my fingers and the end result wonky and uneven, but I managed. I had a long think as the evening darkened into a mottled sunset.

Something had happened to those two. Something horrendous, and painful, and something they couldn't fix as easily as they wanted. There was something monstrous in them, and there was something monstrous in my dreams, and I didn't know what to do. What I even could do.

I was still musing and smoking, having rolled a few more to have something to do with my hands, when I saw two men walking towards me, picking their way over the scrubby grass, the detritus of glass and broken wood. I stood up straighter, suddenly anxious that it was someone who owned the building, but I forced myself to stand like I'd every right to be there. Gets you a lot of places in life.

The shorter one – dark hair greying too fast, kinda mussed up by the light wind, this sort of resting bitch face on him – was fairly average looking, kind of forgettable in every way other than his eyes. They were hard, and they didn't blink enough. There was nothing wrong with them, they were the right colour, shape, they just didn't look at me right, and he really was looking directly at me, you know how I mean, when someone's set their sights on you? Like I was a window he was staring through. I wanted to ask him what the fuck he thought he was looking at, but I took another drag instead.

“You live here?” he asked brusquely when he made his way over to me, and my dislike for him doubled instantly. So, I asked what was it to him, and fixed him dead in the eye, wondering if he was going to challenge me on it. We were about the same height, give or take but I'd – I'd had a long day. I'd had a long few months. Apparently, I had some monsters or whatever living above me and occasionally moonlighting in my dreams. So, he didn't frighten me like he maybe would have before.

He asked again, the cheek of him, a different tone to his voice, those eyes just staring, and I found myself answering. I think – maybe I answered because I didn't like his attitude. Wanted to see what he'd do next. Stake my claim to this place somehow. I dunno. I'm not really sure why. I said yes, surprising myself. I recovered by dropping my fag-end – I know you shouldn't litter, bad for the planet and all, but the outside was such a shitshow anyway I wasn't really adding to the mess – and tried to look harder than I felt.

The taller one on the right wasn't as imposing. One of those people who would take up more space if they didn't hunch over so much, trying to be less noticeable. Wide shoulders, floppy hair, freckles, big toothy smile, and not going to lie, if I'd been on a night out, exactly the type I might have tried to get to come home with me. I'm a sucker for a man who thinks an open flannel shirt and a plain t-shirt combo is the height of fashion.

He was clearly the people-person of the two anyhow. He stuck out a hand with a smiling little 'hey' – and yeah, I took it, didn't want to knock my chances by being an arse, and when I lit a new cigarette, I offered him one, which he politely refused. He apologised for his partner's forward behaviour – and you can't be sure, not when some people go around playing the pronoun game, but I remember hoping that it was partner as in business partner, not as in you know, partner partner, because tall-and-smiley could do so much better than short-and-arsehole. Martin, he said his name was. Feral and bastard-eyes was Jon, apparently. He said they had some friends living in the building.

Martin had a satchel slung over his chest, groaning wide with its contents, bumping hard into his hip when he moved, and he unclasped the top to show me the inside, fat and stuffed with papers and folders and cassette tapes. I think I made some comment about him carting around 'ancient technology' and Martin laughed and then we traded some light-hearted little comments about millennials or whatever – I was chalking it up to some mild flirting on my part, and I was kind of spitefully enjoying how put-out feral-and-bastard-eyes was seeming, so a win-win for me, really.

“We need to get these to them,” Martin explained eventually. “Crowley – that's one of our friend's – he usually comes to collect them but he didn't show up today.”

It was weird. This whole situation really. Two men trudging out to an obviously abandoned block of flats to deliver a bag full of papers like they were spies or whatever. But it had been a weird day.

I shrugged, and nodded, and said I'd take them up.

The shorter one – Jon – butted in, saying they'd rather deliver them personally, but I shook my head.

“It's not a good time,” I told them. Without going into detail, I laid out in no uncertain terms that it had been a bad day, one of them wasn't well, they likely weren't up for visitors, and so I'd drop them off.

“I'm sure we could handle it,” Jon replied, and he clearly did not trust me, not by the unimpressed look on his face, but I gave another shrug and threw the butt of my fag to the floor, grinding out the final embers under heel.

“Don't care,” I told him. “You aren't coming in.” They needed to be left alone. Didn't need people coming in, bothering them with questions and papers. If they'd invited them, sure. But I didn't know him from Adam. They could be anyone. So I'd give them the papers, if they were so important.

I didn't know why I was so defensive. Not really. Not sure even now what got my back up, or why I was so insistent. Even if it had been the good-looking lad with the satchel, I don't think I would have let him in either. This was my building. And those two, they were my neighbours, weren't they? One or both of them were having a shitty time, dealing with things I couldn't understand. They needed space, and time to find themselves again, and not to be bothered. I got that. Knew what that was like.

Jon had such a face on him, looked like he might say something, but Martin smiled, weirdly like I'd said exactly what he'd wanted me too. You wouldn't mind, would you, he said, and then he hefted the satchel over his shoulder and handed it over. It was a dead weight, but I took it, and Martin shot the other one a look I couldn't decipher. It seemed to diffuse the situation, because the other one gave me another once over with those odd eyes before nodding shortly, giving me a brisk 'Thank you Mr Schubach' before the two of them turned away. Martin gave me a bright smile and a little wave. I waved back far too eagerly, like some sort of dumbass idiot. Wished I'd given him my number.

It took me a moment to realise I hadn't given either of them my name.

I delivered the folders. Not going to lie, I was nosy, so I glanced at them. Little reports, official looking, all printed on office paper with a watermark for some institute or other in central London. Wasn't one I'd heard of, although later figured out it was yours. Slipped them under the door one by one – I didn't fancy knocking and disturbing them, especially if the ill one was asleep – and left.

When I got back from work the next day, I could hear them, a low murmuring as I walked up the hallway. I got as close to the door as I dared and listened. Crowley sounded like he was reading. Muffled by the door, steady. I couldn't hear the words, but the sound didn't let up. I dropped off to that murmur of sound with the constancy of a river, and he was still going even when I woke up.

It wasn't the last I heard, little islands of arguments, but they were more desperate than angry, never as bad as the first one had been. Actually, more often, I'd hear Crowley out on the stairwell, clearly trying to keep his voice down, speaking to someone on the phone. “These bloody statements,” Crowley would be arguing with a whispered hiss, “they're next to fucking useless. There's only snatches here, some bogeyman full of eyes, this can't help him – no, I know that, I know, that's not the bloody point, Archivist.” He would seethe in a series of bitten-down replies, complaining at length in that half-whispered hiss, and I didn't understand half of it. I managed to work out they were talking about Angel, the things that were wrong, that he would forget. The crux of the issue seemed to be that the statements weren't helping.

“Not enough,” Crowley would complain, “they're too abstract, he'll pop up like a narrative flourish and then the rest of it will be about the sodding personal issues of whoever you got to talk to you. It doesn't remind him of who he was.”

 And there would be a few more back-and-forths of the conversation, yeses and nos, and eventually he'd sigh, go quiet, say that he wasn't giving up, that it was just taking longer than he'd hope, was all.

And that’s how it was, mostly. Weeks into months. And my visitor kept coming. Some nights, it would just stand there, swaying unsteadily, and its gaze prickled over my skin. I caught more glimpses of it sometimes, the caverns its shadow made of my room, limbs curved as a whale’s ribcage. My hauntings upstairs spoke mostly in murmurs.

I kept an eye out for them. Make sure no one bothered them. When the coughing got bad, I'd leave a bottle of cough syrup or throat soothers outside their door. Sometimes one of those free papers I picked up from the Tube. I don't think they clocked I was down here, though I'm not sure quite how I managed that. I kept an eye out for Jon or Martin but if they came back it was never when I was around.

I can tell you exactly when it changed. They might have stayed my neighbours forever, but really, look, something needed to give somewhere. I was putting a plaster over my thumb where I'd sliced it trying to cut up veg for a stir fry, and there was the sound of a chair being moved, a click like a tape recorder being started, and Crowley saying very clearly, “right, we're doing this”.

Angel was groggy sounding, confused, but then when he understood, he started getting all agitated, saying how he mustn't, that it was a bad idea, that he'd never ask him, that he refused, he simply wouldn't. And Crowley cut him off and said that no one was going to be asking anyone anything. That he'd thought about it, how all those bloody idiots with their stupid stories never got it, never remembered the right things, and so you will just sit there, Angel, alright and listen to my stupid story, OK?

“I've never wanted your statement,” Angel said, sounding distressed, and Crowley replied with a snort.

“The eye has wanted my sodding statement for years, and I'll be damned if it's getting it,” he said. “But no, Angel, I'm not giving you a statement, not really. It's a reminder. A full disclosure. Of everything you've been to me. So –” and here he cleared his throat and the chair he was in creaked, “statement of the entity known as Crowley, regarding – regarding, well, you know what it's going to be about.”

I shoved my headphones in at that point and deliberately took a very long walk.

I think it did. Get better after that, I mean. I'd hear Angel more, fussing over one thing or another – “my goodness, Crowley,” I heard him say once, ever so indignant, “when did you last change your bandages, gracious me you will sit right there while I sort these out don't you dare move.” A few times I'd hear singing or humming or a low bubble of laughter, and I think I kind of knew that once they were all healed up, off they'd go.

I knew it would be the last time when my visitor showed up again after days of absent dreams. It could have chosen a better time for it because, honestly, I was, well, I was having a bad night. My parents had been in touch. Maybe you know how it is. I couldn’t sleep, and I’d been festering in my thoughts all though work. I was angry and sad and I couldn’t tell which one was winning. And that night, the thing at the threshold seemed so much bigger, blurred like peering at the edges of a mirror. It or its shadow or both was a cradle arching over me, blocking all sound except for the clamour of my head, and I started, I don't know why, I just started gasping with tears, and I wailed into my knees that it was unfair, it was unfair, that I’d done nothing but be honest, that that was all I had to give. I had words, furious, pitiful raging histories crammed like dirt in my throat, and I wanted to scream.

There were more eyes than usual. Peeling open like petals. A faint popping like bubbles coming to surface. The eyes were soft, and pupil-less and a giddy blue, like a patch of sky glimpsed from the bottom of a well. I was Seen in such a way I couldn't comprehend.

“May I perhaps come in?” said my visitor. It was the first time it had asked. Soft and genteel and almost identical to the voice of the man called Angel upstairs. I’d guessed they were one in the same for a while now.

I nodded, and it moved in like a sea front. The darkness taking up a hundred unblinking marbles of intent focus, and it held me. Sort of. It wasn’t a person. It had a body in its own way, but its skin was wrapped around it like an accessory, a thick blocky bracelet that looped in spiralling bands. Face dipped inwards like a bowl, collapsed inwards, an entrance way already held open to a chasm that bubbled and flexed and whorled like a lava lamp. I could not look at it easily. I… It’s hard to remember now. Its features. It had wings, or something like it. Bruised, crooked, like when someone's broken their nose and it’s healed wrong, Marred and hobbled with trauma. It shook out this mess of scarring and rebuilding over me, but they were... they really were beautiful.

Its arms were numerous, boneless, wired up with vessels, and they bore me in a land-locked embrace. I felt held and beheld and it looked with every eye unblinking and it was becoming too bright to keep my eyes open.

“Tell me your story, Noah Schubach?” it asked in that crackling staticky voice and it picked at me like unknotting thread, and it demanded nothing from me but the truth, mine, using my name, the one I'd taken so long to find. I felt my mouth opening of its own accord, and then it all came out, a riverbank welling up and spilling over. The thing listened, and I felt smothered by the weight of its attention, those eyes that would not look away, and it was so… I felt watched, and safe, and noticed, and you’ve no idea how…

When I finished speaking, I felt dizzy. Wrung out. I think I’d cried but honestly, everything was just so overwhelming I couldn’t tell. The eyes didn’t blink and it held me up for the longest time.

“You know who you are,” it said finally, words like the focusing of a lens. “This is important. You are deserving of being seen.”

I breathed out and I did not have the words to tell it how much that meant to me.

“It is so hard, my dear,” said my strange comforter. “But it seems to me that you have come so far. No small feat, I assure you. You are doing so well. The person you are, treasure yourself. You will be known and loved by those who matter.”

It took me a while to recover from this. Eventually, a question bubbled up to the forefront of my mind. I asked because I knew that this would be the last dream we shared. That it could give me nothing more.

“I won’t see you again, will I?” I said.

“Perhaps not,” it replied.

I pushed through my sudden tiredness. “You told me you lost your name before. Do you know who you are now?”

It made a hum without a mouth. The inside of its body boiled over, spilled out before merging back with its skin.

“Some of it is still lost to me,” it said. “The little fragments that make up a life, you will understand I trust, the bits that come together, as it were, to make up a person. But I am beheld by those who are patient, who will wait while I find my pieces again.”

“I hope you find them again,” I replied, wiping my own face with my sleeve, and all the eyes blinked at once in a way that felt like a smile.

“You have been a good neighbour,” it said. “It will be safe for us to leave soon but you have been a kindness over these months. Crowley hasn't been in the best frame of mind, but I have noticed you. Your small gestures of help. An exchange is only fair. Tomorrow will be a better day for you. That is our gift of thanks.”

It was right though. I fell asleep with the recollection of light still behind my eyelids, and when I woke up, I felt better than I had in a long time. Stronger, you know? Like when you've endured something you didn't think you could. Deleted my parent's number, for a start. Called some friends I’ve been avoiding talking to. Met up with one of them that day even. They were surprised to see how I'd changed, but it wasn't... it was not in the bad way I'd expected. They were… they were just happy, I guess, to see I was happier now. The way I hadn't been back then, when they knew me from before, when I was pretending to be someone I wasn't.

There was a letter, pushed with difficulty under my door, and it took me ages to notice it when I got back.

Inside there were a few things. It was bulky, and its insides were heavier than paper, but I pushed down my curiosity for the moment and I read the letter first.

Noah, it said in looping precise handwriting. For the future. Fondest wishes, your neighbours.

It was not signed. Attached to the letter was a job application for some place nearby, in a more upmarket area of London. Tell the manager Crowley sent you, dictated the spidery pencil scratch at the bottom - and then further down, squashed right at the end of the page like a PS, an address.

I turned over to find another missive: Sorted for six months, scrawled the handwriting. Landlord owes me. neighbours won’t be as interesting, c’est la vie and all that. Key under the plant-pot. Ribbon plant. Don’t over-water.

'Course I tried to thank them. But when I went upstairs, knocking on the door for the first time, no one was home, and it was all quiet again. Think I knew they would be gone. S’why I thought to come here, actually though it took me a bit to remember the name of this place. Wanted to see if you had a contact or something. Or, yeah, I get it, might be confidential information or something but really I just wanted...

…

Just. Tell them thanks. Tell them that it's working out. That things are – things are much better.

BASIRA
I’ll be sure to let them know if I see them. End of statement.

NOAH
Thanks.

[a release of air, like a weight being dropped]

Is that everything you needed?

BASIRA
Think so. Just being thorough. Tying up loose ends.

NOAH
They. They're both... they're OK?

BASIRA
As far as I know they're getting there, yes.

NOAH
That's great. That's really great.

…

Could I… erm, could I ask a cheeky favour? You couldn’t give this to Martin, could you? You know him, right? It’s… well, I thought I might as well see if he wants coffee sometime.

BASIRA
[a careful pause, crinkling of paper] I don’t think Martin’s boyfriend would be pleased.

NOAH
… the small, grumpy one?

BASIRA
[trying to be diplomatic] Those are words which have sometimes been used to describe him.

NOAH
Ah well. Gave it a shot. [chair protesting] You mind if I head off now?

BASIRA
Sure. Thank you for your time, Mr Schubach.

NOAH
No bother. Cheers.

[door closing]

[a brief pause of papers being shuffled and organised; a creak of the door]

DAISY
Busy?

BASIRA
Just finished with a statement. Another one for the Fell and Crowley pile.

DAISY
File it with all the others?

BASIRA
We’re going to need a bigger box eventually. Oh. Hey … Check this out.

DAISY
That’s… oh-ho. That from statement-guy?

BASIRA
Yep.

DAISY
Can’t wait to see Jon’s face when he sees that.

DAISY
Speaking of. Jon and Martin?

BASIRA
Won’t be back for a few hours, I think.

DAISY
Ah well. Put it to one side, with the other bits he needs to file. He can have a look at it when he gets back.

BASIRA
A light snack.

DAISY
Oh hush you. C'mon. Melanie's waiting, we're going to head around the corner for a few.

BASIRA
We celebrating something?

DAISY
Another month not consumed by eldritch horrors or our eyeball of a boss, I suppose.

BASIRA
Why not. I'll grab my bag.

[CLICK]