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ARCHIVIST
Statement of James Saunders regarding his life and relationship to loneliness. Original statement given 14th of October, 2017. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.
Statement begins.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I’m not quite sure why I’m here, really. I don’t think there’s much you can do in the way of helping me at this point, and I’m not even sure I’d want you to if you could. Regardless, I guess there’s still a lingering part of me that wanted to tell my story, so here I am. Not sure how much longer that sociable part of me will stick around. I suppose it’s not too bad anyway. You don’t even know I’m here. I snuck in, snagged one of your statement forms and now find myself offering up my life’s story. I’ll leave this on your desk when I’m done. Maybe you’ll read it once you’ve woken up, Archivist, feed your god. I harbour no ill will towards the Eye, so feel free. Though I hear nowadays Peter Lukas is in charge. Pity. It’s a real shame that I have to share an entity with that old sod. Anyways, I guess I’ll go from the beginning.
I was a pretty lonely kid. I had friends and a loving family, sure, but I always felt… separate from them. Was never able to really connect with people. Back then I actually liked talking to people, despite not really understanding how socialization worked. I liked talking about the things I enjoyed and hearing others talk about what they found interesting in turn. The thing was, most people I talked to didn’t really like talking to me. My two “best friends” were never kind to me. They made cruel comments about my appearance and behaviour which they always brushed off as jokes whenever I told them how much I hated it. They would always exclude me when they played together. It was miserable, but no one else in my year would tolerate my presence more than a passing conversation in class, so I stuck with them. I started to withdraw, then, started to bury myself in books and television because those at least made me feel something positive.
This isolation persisted into my secondary school years. I rarely left my house anymore outside of school hours and avoided speaking to others out of fear of burdening them with my problems. My mental health went on a downward spiral, and eventually, I just became numb. Any emotions I felt were dulled, and I would just go around every day feeling this gnawing pit of nothingness in my chest. Around this point, I also figured out I was trans, and that only aided in my isolation. Nobody wanted to be friends with the weird kid who had suddenly decided he was a boy. After a couple of years, people stopped paying me any mind, though, and I just faded into the background.
I went to a tiny, tiny school, only eighty people in my year, and yet I still managed to become a quiet, unassuming presence at the back of the classroom. I did well in class, but not well enough to stand out above my classmates. I drew a lot and was good at it, but I never showed off my work to others, so that never really got me much attention. I had friends, I suppose, but we rarely spoke outside of the confines of that school building, and even at lunch hour we often just sat in silence. We had little in common beyond all being outcasts, and we were just sitting in our shared solitude. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I grew accustomed to it, and once it became my normal it was difficult to distinguish whether I liked it or not.
I made some genuine friends for the first time my first year at uni, but even then I was sparsely present at social gatherings. Crowds exhausted me, as did prolonged socialization, so I spent most of my time alone in my dorm room. I had two roommates that year, but the first moved out after four days and the second dropped out after only a couple weeks, so I got the room to myself. While not always pleasant, it was at least familiar, and that was comfort enough for me.
It was during my second year, after I took on an RA position, that things started to get weird. I was in charge of the first-year dorm, the same cramped, falling apart building I’d spent the year prior in, but now none of those people I had befriended occupied it. I was surrounded by people who I didn’t know and couldn’t fully connect with them due to the position of authority I held over them. I’m not entirely sure why, whether it was not wanting to put in the effort or just feeling happier by my lonesome, but I didn't reach out to my friends. I stopped talking to others, and while they did their best to call, to text, to check up on me, I would only ever respond in short, placating messages, never engaging more than I had to to keep them from checking up on me in person.
I started taking walks to avoid the claustrophobia of the small suite-style dorm rooms, but it did little to make me feel connected to others. I went to uni in America, New York City to be specific. There’s something so oddly isolating about walking through the streets of a huge, sprawling city all on your own. One of the busiest cities in the world, and yet even in the bustling crowd you still feel so very alone.
The first time it happened I didn't even notice at first. It was a miserable, stormy day, and the rain had let up long enough for a thick layer of fog to settle over the city streets. I’d had to deal with a particularly unpleasant dispute between two students early in the day, so I had decided to go on a walk, trying to clear my head. I began along my usual route, heading west down 23rd Street, but after about ten minutes of walking, I realized that I was completely alone. There was not a single person in sight. 23rd Street is one of the busier streets in Manhattan, and my dorm wasn’t far from the Flatiron Building, so it was inconceivable that it would just be empty , regardless of how terrible the weather was that day. But there I was, surrounded by nothing but fog and looming skyscrapers.
I was scared, of course I was. I started trying to remember the last time I’d seen another person. When I’d left the dorms, had I passed a security guard in the lobby? Had I had to brush by anyone as I joined the typical early evening crowd? Or had I been alone all this time and somehow just not noticed until now? I began wandering the streets, popping my head into every store I passed, but there was no one. After nearly an hour of searching, I gave up and started walking back to my dorm. I didn’t know what was going on, and I was afraid and confused and exhausted, so I hoped that maybe if I just went to sleep it would go back to normal.
When I entered the dorm and saw a security guard waiting for me, asking me to show my ID, I didn’t feel nearly as relieved as I should have been.
The next time it happened I wasn’t even surprised. Nothing particularly bad had happened that day, other than just a general feeling of being burnt out. This time the weather had actually been nice, so when the fog began to follow me I just knew . I decided to just continue my walk, enjoying the serene quiet of the normally bustling city. It reminded me of the quietness of my suburban hometown. It was comforting. I figured it’d end eventually, and just let the numbing coolness of the fog embrace me.
I think it was once I accepted the loneliness fully that I started being able to control it. It became rare for me to slip out into the city without a thick cloud of fog creeping in almost as soon as I’d set foot on the street. It became a comfort, knowing that if things got too overwhelming that I could just slip away into the quiet, gentle fog. Things always felt muted there, the pain, the exhaustion, the frustration. Seeing as my experience of emotions had always been somewhat subdued, I often found myself overwhelmed when I did feel these things. The fog was a place I could go to escape all of that, to return to my safe, comfortable place of relative numbness.
I came to realize that when I escaped to the fog, it wasn’t that everyone else had disappeared. Everyone else was still there, but I was just… somewhere else. They couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see them. Eventually, I figured out how to disappear while still seeing others. It’s a useful trick, being able to vanish like that. I’ve always found an odd sort of enjoyment in knowing things others don’t, and it’s unbelievably easy to learn things when no one knows you’re there. I suppose you’d understand that, Archivist. I mean, that’s your whole schtick, isn’t it? Maybe in another life, I would have fallen to the Ceaseless Watcher’s influence as well, but I’m comfortable where I am, held in Forsaken’s embrace.
The first time I vanished someone else, I was horrified. I didn’t mean to do it, didn’t know I could . I wasn’t particularly shaken up about who it was, some asshole sitting on a street corner with a bunch of cardboard signs spouting all sorts of bigoted garbage. One moment he was there, shouting me down for having a pride pin on my jacket, the next he was just gone. I knew instantly that I had cast him into the fog, and it terrified me.
At first, I was afraid people would know , that someone had seen and would turn me in to the authorities, but a couple of moments passed and no one seemed to pay the now empty space any mind. People always do tend to ignore nuts like that in the city, I suppose.
Then I began to worry that the next time I’d slip into the fog that he would be there, and that thought made my skin crawl. The fog was meant to be an escape from these kinds of people, had I now marred that sanctity? Thankfully, I never saw that man again, but the thought still shook me up for a good while. And of course, I didn’t want to think about the implications of what I’d done. I hoped that the man had had no family, no one that would miss him, and just pushed it to the back of my mind.
What I couldn’t ignore is how after that first vanishing, I suddenly felt more powerful. I had this surplus of energy that I hadn’t felt in years, if ever , and then, after a couple of weeks, I began to feel drained. At first, I didn’t want to put the pieces together, but inevitably I succumbed to some primal part of me that just knew and took to stalking the streets, seeking out some other asshole, someone who I could vanish and rationalize away the guilt I felt over it.
It became a habit, another need that I had to satisfy just as one needs to eat or drink or breathe. They say that humans are naturally social creatures, that interacting with others is as much a need as any of these other things. I wonder if being touched by the fog has replaced that innate human desire for the presence of others with this new form of hunger, to feed the Forsaken, as I’ve learned it’s called. I hated it, but as more and more time passed, I became numb to it, just as I had become numb to the loneliness all those years ago.
I dropped out of uni after my third year. It was an art school, and more often than not students would drop out to take up job offers before they finished their degrees. I had gotten an offer to do character design on a feature for a studio back in London, so I took it and left. I couldn’t stand having to deal with all those students for another year. The job lets me work from home, so I don’t even have to see other people at work. I just draw at my desk all day and send off the occasional email to my employer. It works.
The vanishing hasn’t stopped. Sometimes I don’t even realize when I’ve done it. The other day I vanished some library worker who kept looking at me funny. Suppose it’s the hair. It’s not every day that you see a twenty-two-year-old whose hair has gone completely white, eyebrows, eyelashes and all. Plus it starts to go a bit… fog-like when you look at it for too long.
I still don’t like vanishing people. The guilt it causes me is dampened somewhat by the fog, but it’s still there, underneath it all. I know these are people, people with families, friends who will miss them, but if I don’t do it then I think I might just… waste away. I’m not sure if I can survive anymore without feeding the fog.
I came to your Institute hoping that maybe I’d find some answers, learn what exactly has happened to me, find out if there’s a way to stop it. I did find some answers, I suppose. I discovered Smirke’s taxonomy of fourteen, the entities. I know that mine is called the Lonely, or Forsaken, The One Alone. Obviously they’re just theories, but I know of your lot and Forsaken, and I’m pretty sure I’ve brushed paths with the Web before, unfortunately.
I didn’t find anything on stopping this, though. I don’t really know if I want to stop this. Not anymore. I think that now the fear, the guilt, it’s matched by the feeling of security I feel whenever I feed my entity. I think that if continuing to cast people into the Lonely means that I get to remain in the cool, comforting embrace of the fog, then maybe it’s worth it. Maybe I can learn to live with the guilt.
ARCHIVIST
(shakey exhale) Statement ends.
I found this underneath a pile of old paperwork on my desk. Seems as though there was, in fact, a statement given while I was… incapacitated. I find it interesting that Mr Saunders found his way to the Institute only after it fell under the direction of another avatar of the Lonely, though he doesn’t seem to be particularly fond of Peter Lukas.
I wonder if there’s a reason I’m finding this now . I felt… drawn to it, for some reason. Saunders mentions an interest in the Eye, that he could see himself serving it. I… it may just be me reaching for connections, but maybe it has something to do with Martin’s plan? It doesn’t bring any revelations about what's going on, other than being more proof that an avatar can serve more than one entity, but… I suppose I already knew that. It’s just… a statement specifically regarding both the Eye and the Lonely—
...No. I’m just reading into it what I want to hear. (sigh) I just… I’m worried. Whatever he’s doing, I trust him, but… the more I read about the Lonely, the more uneasy it makes me. I think it’s how almost normal it is that gets me. Most of the other entities are more… abstract. Body horror, fooling the senses, scary monsters in the dark, but this… this is just everyday, all-consuming loneliness.
(dry laugh, humourless) Perhaps that’s why I found this. Maybe this is how Martin feels. Or will feel, if it’s not too late. Christ...
I just hope that this can all be over soon. I... I don’t like the distance.
[PAUSE]
(sigh) End recording.
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