Work Text:
[tape recorder clicks on and a faint crackling begins]
Statement of Samantha Kiers, regarding their unusual reaction to a set of windows in an old hydroelectric plant. Original statement given seventh June, 2017. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute.
Statement begins.
[The Archivist’s voice takes on a slightly higher pitch, words punctuated with uncharacteristic hesitation, as though the words are unsure of themselves.]
I get bored very easily.
Well, that’s perhaps not the most accurate way to say it. It is more accurate to say that I lose interest in specific activities very easily.
This has only rarely been a problem for me. I can always find something else to do. I consider myself quite adept in the skill of “idle distraction”.
When I was a kid, I took my mother’s mantra “smart people don’t get bored” as a challenge and threw myself into any hobby that could hold my interest for more than a few minutes. A pencil or a crayon could keep me busy enough—doodling on any available scrap of paper, though it was nothing I would ever have called art. It was too idle for the term art. But the doodling moved into drawing and then drawing gave in to boredom and I did something else.
I would strip the paper wrapping off my crayons and carve into them with the pocket knife my father gave me for my eighth birthday. It was just a little thing, dull as any knife you would give to an eight-year-old—for comparison my mother was always adamant that if I was to help in the kitchen, I would be given the child’s knife, not anything sharp or dangerous.
The pocketknife was probably my father’s way of giving me a wink, an implicit “See if your mother can argue with this.”
But in any case, the dull edge on the thing wasn’t an impediment. I carved a lot of ferrets. A lot of snakes with their scales meticulously patterned out of colored wax. Flowers. I got very good at tiny pieces of fruit.
I always made sure to collect the crayon shavings. On weekends when my mother wasn’t traveling for work, she and I would melt them down into new crayons or into little wax shapes with swirling colors and designs. I once made a toucan of which I was rather proud. I think my father still has it hanging up in his office at work, even all these years later. Mother always kept a sloppy, curled sunflower in her briefcase.
The point of all this, though, is that I have difficulty focusing on any one thing. I move quickly between interests, though there is often a clear avenue of approach. Doodling to drawing to crayon carving to wax melting to framing to photography. Photography kept my interest for longer than most things, lasting me through from my twelfth birthday—my father gifted me with an old film camera he’d dug out of the attic—up through age sixteen.
Of course, I interspersed photography with various other things. I gained a love of hiking, more as a vehicle for photography than anything else, but it was fun to drive out to some local forest or park and walk about. Find a strange bug or stake out some animal tracks in hope of seeing the elusive beast. I fancied myself quite the adventurer.
After collecting quite the folio of photos, I felt the need to do something with them and dove into photo manipulation and digital art. I can’t draw anything grand in digital like still-lives or portraits, but I do like to mess around with what’s already there. I’m quite good at changing people’s hair color or editing smiles or complexions. Made a bit of a business of it in grade 10. Teenage vanity and all that. People wanted good pictures of themselves for social media and who was I to deny a bit of cash on the side?
Hiking scratched most of the photography itch. My father bought me a bird atlas, but after a few hours flipping through it, trying to memorize the different beaks and wingspans and silhouettes, I got bored of it. Snapping shots of the birds themselves was far more interesting. I could spend hours staking out the nest of some bird I didn’t recognize for the chance to get photographic evidence. Once I got a good photo, I moved on to the next thing, usually leaving behind a pile of twigs carved or tied into various shapes. (It was just something to fidget with while I waited. Collect the twigs, sort them, tie them in bunches, carve the stragglers into something strange and curling, and oh look there’s my bird. I didn’t keep any of the twigs or shapes I carved, though I’d evolved from ferrets and snakes to intricate knotwork.)
Amongst all this, I was also gaining a love of getting into places I shouldn’t have. I wanted to take photos of things I found interesting, you know? And anything I could find easily on the internet was… not interesting. It was at my fingertips. It was findable. Birds were… fine, I suppose. But the boredom crept in eventually and I lost what little passion I had for it. God, but I hate the word passion. A fire that burns out when it’s eaten all the gasoline I can afford to give it. And after a while hiking got boring. Only so many parks within driving distance. Only so many paths I could traverse so many times.
Hence the B&E charge when I was seventeen.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a pretty average in terms of things I will and won’t do? I smoke a bit of weed here and there with friends, I drink irresponsibly sometimes, but I don’t drink and drive. I don’t shoplift or steal or whatever. I don’t get violent or confrontational with people. I’ve never been in a fight, even jokingly. But damn if I’m going to let a locked gate on an abandoned industrial park tell me I can’t take photos of what’s inside.
I’m telling you all this because… well. I don’t know why I’m telling you, but I think it’s important that you know I’m not some screw-up. I’m not crazy. I just get so bored. Underneath the smile and the everyday rigamarole of data entry and admin and shaking hands with my coworkers, I’m just fundamentally… bored. And if I don’t do something to fill that gap, the malaise becomes unbearable. Existential ennui. Lackadaisical everything.
I can’t stand it. It gets… really bad sometimes. I don’t like to think about it. I’ll lay in bed for days, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes I think I see patterns in the crackling, years old paint. Sometimes I trace the patterns for hours, finding more patterns and then realizing it’s all a figment of my over-bored imagination. It makes me want to itch out of my skin, the way I can get so bored of it all. My hands twitch, my muscles ache from tensing and relaxing so frequently without sleep, my teeth feel like they grind to powder in my mouth.
So, when I saw the old hydro-electric plant on a drive past with my friend Angela Schmidt… well. I asked her to stop the car so I could get out.
I’d been in the middle of a long stint of boredom. I’d gotten into embroidery recently, for Christ’s sake. Knot tying to bracelet making to belt weaving to rug braiding to sewing to embroidery. It’s not like I’m dismissive about arts and crafts, traditionally feminine things or whatever, but even as my hands worked and my fingers blistered from friction burns, I was so incorrigibly bored. I was willing to do anything to take up the time when I wasn’t at work. Had been smoking more than usual, just to pass the time faster between hours at work and asleep.
So, understandably, I jumped at the chance to go out with Angela when she called. On the way out, my old film camera caught my eye. It sat on its shelf, dusty and innocuous, and I put it in my backpack on a whim.
As soon as I saw the hydroelectric plant, I knew the camera was going to get some use. I’d upgraded to digital for most of my work, but I still liked the retro feel of film and the surprise and delight of getting it back from the developers, seeing what I’d managed to get. I was a bit out of practice with the ISO and aperture stuff since I’d been shooting automatic for a while, but I figured enough of the windows of the plant were probably broken out that I wouldn’t have problems with under-exposure. And I could keep to the better lit areas when I was taking photos. We were still in the middle of town so the ambient street lighting should have been sufficient. And I probably wouldn’t be able to find photos of the interior of this place online.
It was a lot of mental gymnastics to justify a B&E, is basically what I’m saying.
Angela knew I was into this kind of thing and rolled her eyes, but agreed to come back in an hour and pick me back up. She wasn’t nearly as dismissive of a B&E charge as I was. She was working on her firefighting certifications and that sort of thing will get you kicked out real quick.
It wasn’t difficult to find a section of fence around the perimeter that was already cut through. I figured this place was popular with urbex crowds. Proper abandoned. Unlikely to even have security cameras.
As I said, this wasn’t my first rodeo. I’m not proud of that B&E charge. But I am proud that it’s the only one I’ve got.
So, in under the fence, down a little slope, and through a broken window that seemed to be the main point of ingress. I was wary of the broken glass and rusted metal jutting out of the frame, but got through with only the smallest bit of tearing. Hadn’t cared for that shirt anyway.
The window opened onto a broken stairwell. It looked as though the concrete had either given out or been intentionally demolished going up, so I went down, not bothering to test for integrity once I saw more footprints in the dust. Definitely the main entry point for urbex or people who wanted to strip metals out of the building.
Once I got down farther, I pulled out the flashlight I keep in my backpack for emergencies and started to take a good look around.
It was what I expected, crumbling concrete and rebar sticking out from walls where there used to be wooden flooring or maybe metal cross-grating? Not a lot of it was left, rotted away from the nearby river’s moisture or stripped out by the company that had closed the place. I was careful not to kick any bricks or metal scraps laying around. I wasn’t exactly in the right gear for this and didn’t want to risk injury. Plus, kicking up dust wasn’t a great idea. Old buildings like that were lousy with asbestos. Better not to test my luck.
What I found striking as I wandered deeper into the complex was the distinct lack of graffiti. These places attract artists and taggers like flies to rotten meat. They’re usually a breeding ground for that sort of thing. To see walls empty of color—despite noticing a few abandoned paint cans—was really quite unnerving. And it wasn’t like anyone was going to come in there to wash it all off, right? The property value was already shot.
I checked my camera for film, adjusted my settings and snapped a few photos of the windows above me. They’d been busted out in what looked at first glance like random order—by the elements or human hands, I didn’t know—but I couldn’t help but feel there was something more to it. Maybe it was the unnerve I felt from the lack of paint or maybe it was the three pints I’d had with Angela, but I was certain there was more going on with those windows.
It was around then that my mobile buzzed in my pocket. Angela, saying she was here to pick me up. It was only then that I realized an hour had passed. It seemed ridiculous at the time. I could have sworn I’d only been in there for ten, fifteen minutes tops. But I had poked down a few corridors and up a few flights of stairs. Time flies, you know? I sent her back a text with a quick snap of the windows and told her that I’d find my own ride back. She didn’t have to wait for me. She replied with a shrug emoji and wished me luck.
I found another set of stairs and went deeper.
A bit about the hydroelectric plant. I looked it up when I got home. It was built back in the 1920’s by an automobile manufacturer who wanted to use the river for steam power or whatever. It was later retrofitted for city energy production. It had closed down more than fifteen years ago with the completion of a new plant outside the city, farther up the river. But that’s not what interested me. What interested me was that it was due for demolition soon. It should have been peak time to get photos or scavenge metal before it was gone. Probably there should have been other people around, doing the same thing as me.
Of course, I didn’t know any of that on my first delve, so I just took a good look around, some photos of weird machinery, and those blown out windows. I didn’t know why, but those windows were just… mesmerizing. In the moment, I couldn’t work out what it was. It was a bank of windows, panes about six by eight inches, maybe about a hundred panes wide, fifty tall? But the way they were broken looked wrong. It wasn’t that they were unusually jagged or smooth. They weren’t punched out in any regular pattern that I could recognize. Not every other or every third. No Fibonacci sequence or other additive code. They didn’t make a picture or form words. But every bit of me was screaming that they were somehow wrong.
An unfamiliar feeling began to bubble up from inside me. It was somewhere between the stomach lurching sensation of tipping back too far in your chair and the rising confusion of too many vodka shots. The closest thing I could compare it to was gut wrenching uncertainty. Like when you’re faced with a person at the office holiday party you know you’ve met before, know you’ve talked with, and know has an absurd amount of sway over the continuation of your employment, but for the life of you, you can’t remember the name of? And they’ve got the reputation of being really nasty. What could I do? What could I say to keep the encroaching doom—yes, doom. Maybe that was a good word for it. What could I do to keep that impending sense of doom away from me? Every time a new swell of it threatened to overtake me, I pressed on the shutter and felt it recede just a little. But it came back again and again until I thought it would fill every inch of me with the waves of it.
The thing that finally stopped my panicked scrutiny and slow descent into roiling doom was luck. My thumb stuck on the film feed as it hit the resistance at the end of the roll and it was just enough incongruity to snap me out of my trance. I’d gone through all the remaining exposures on the film roll.
As soon as I could take my eyes off the window, the feeling vanished, leaving me hollow and a bit dazed. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what had been so interesting about the window or what had kept me staring at it for so long.
I remember thinking it was a bit of a waste, using more than half my exposures on the thing. There were so many other interesting shots to take at the plant. Should have gotten more of those, right?
In a bit of a daze, I floundered my way back out of the derelict building and onto the street. A bit down the road I found a gas station and asked them to call a cab. My phone had died at some point. I wasn’t sure.
The fog of what had happened was still looming over me as I wandered out into the lot. I cast my eyes about for something to focus on, something to stave off the encroaching empty, twitching, bored feeling I knew so well. An idle glance at my watch punched me clean out of my ennui.
It was nearly three in the morning, which meant I would have been in the plant for five hours.
That would have been fine. I’ve been distracted by less interesting things for longer.
But the date was wrong. It had been two entire days that I was in that place.
I tried to swallow and all the sudden found my throat completely parched. I had to duck back into the station to buy a bottle of water. I downed the entire thing in one go and then went back for another. When the cab pulled up, my driver just seemed bored, didn’t ask what I’d been doing out so late, didn’t spot any of the panic or confusion I was sure was written across my face. Probably just assumed I’d been out drinking and only just managed to figure out I should go home. Not like it wasn’t true. It was just… skipping the bits in between.
I barely noticed the ride home. I was too freaked out by the lost time. I kept turning my camera over in my hands, wondering if the film would turn out at all. It had been dark, but the windows were such a start contrast to the rest of the building that they should have at least turned out okay, right? It was the only thing that kept me from totally losing my shit. There had to be some sort of proof in the photos of—
Well. I didn’t know what of. But there had to be something, right?
Time passed. I got home and passed out with my clothes on. I spent the next day with a headache I didn’t deserve. Had to call into work. After enough painkillers and water and food, I felt almost human again. I dropped the film off for development when I thought I could do the walk.
For the first time in months, though, I wasn’t bored. The feeling had bubbled up from somewhere deep, deep down.
Excitement.
Curiosity.
Ravenous curiosity.
I was… eager to see how the photos turned out and was willing to wait the time it took to get them back. I dug my old film scanner out of the boxes leftover from my last move and made sure all the drivers on my computer were up to date. Angela had texted a few times, asking if I’d made it home okay. She was used to me not replying for a day or more at a time, though. I sent a few apologies, told her I must have picked up a bug while we were out, been down sick the past few days. She didn’t seem worried.
I didn’t mention anything about the lost time, about the windows. There was something about it, now that the fear had passed, that felt… personal. Private. I didn’t want anyone else to know yet.
Spent the evening doodling, mostly. A hobby I hadn’t partaken in in some years. I’d sold my drawing tablet a while back for some extra cash for stained glass making lessons, but I’ve always got bits of paper laying around.
I drew grids of rectangles, coloring them in at random. At some point I realized I was trying to recreate the pattern from the windows. It unnerved me a bit and so instead I looked up the history of the plant. Spent the rest of entirety of Monday at work going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. It was great. Boredom averted.
Picked up the film on Tuesday after work.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that’s when everything started to go… weirder.
I mean, it was already weird? At a stretch, I could excuse the lost time as being unusual but not out of the realms of possibility. Some sort of fit? Undiagnosed epilepsy triggered by the weird pattern of the windows? It was a longshot but I felt fine. I’ve got this thing about hospitals. Hate them. Too clean. They smell like…
They smell.
But aside from the lost time, the hydroelectric plant was pretty normal. The lack of graffiti was weird but maybe the walls just didn’t hold paint well? It had all just melted or something? Maybe most of the tagging had happened in a section of the plant I didn’t find? Maybe there was some kind of turf war between taggers and they washed each other’s stuff off the walls? I didn’t know how that stuff worked, I’d just been exploring, you know? I didn’t want to think about it. The windows had been weird and my reaction to them, more so, but I’d also been out drinking and had been tired, on the tail end of one of my stints of boredom in which my world always became a little detached. My reaction had been extreme, but probably not unnatural in any way.
Dissociative state brought on by extreme existential ennui. Sure. Yeah. Like that was gonna fly to any kind of psychiatric professional.
I refused to think about it.
Weird, but I could ignore it.
The photos, though. At only a glance I could tell they were weird. Like, proper weird. The first eight on the roll were from things I’d completely forgotten about. A friend’s birthday party. A couple of ducks at a local park. A sunflower in my mother’s garden.
And then wham, I shuffled to the next photo and there they were. Those windows. Perfectly clear, barely any graininess. I was surprised because I was certain the exposure was going to be too low to see them well. It had been the middle of the night, out by the river without proper lighting. The film should have been grainy as all Hell, or at least blurred with as wide as I’d cranked the aperture and as long as I’d set the exposure.
But they were perfect. Pristine.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a decent photographer. I know how to handle film cameras. Maybe I’m out of practice, but you don’t lose everything after just a few years.
But this was just weird.
I flipped through to the next photo. And then the next. And the next. They were all shots of the windows, subtly different every time. Enough to know that the guy at the photo shop hadn’t just printed the same exposure multiple times, but like… I was certain I’d taken other photos. There had been a really strange switchboard a few floors down I’d taken at least three shots of, with and without the light of my flashlight. I shuffled through all 36 photos, then glanced at the preview card and, sure enough, twenty-eight of them were those windows.
With nothing else to do, I scanned the film onto my computer.
Four hours later I blinked.
My eyes ached. I felt like I was on day four of the flu fevers with no view on recovery. My mouth was dry as the Sahara and the headache throbbing in my temples and behind my eye sockets was worse than any hangover I’d ever had.
The clock blinked 10:49PM at me.
My computer monitor wasn’t dark with inactivity, though. The opposite. It still showed what I must have been doing, though I couldn’t remember anything from when I started scanning the film. I had the photos open in my editing program. For some reason I’d superimposed them all and put filtering layers over the top. If you’ve got any experience with photoshop, you know there’s about a million different effects to pick and choose from and it seemed like I’d used as many as my terrible graphics processor could render.
I stared at the screen for a minute before I saw what I had done. When I realized, I think I swore.
I’ve got to tell you, I’m not like into weird conspiracies. I’ve gone down a lot of Wikipedia rabbit holes about them, sure. Anything to alleviate the boredom. But fractals? Sacred geometry? Occult numerology? Those have never been something I’ve cared to think about as anything other than weird shapes or mathematical concepts that were interesting in a distant, hand-waving isn’t it grand sort of way. Fractals in nature and the use of the golden ratio in architecture and art are neat and all, but I’d never really… gotten what the big deal was.
But for some reason, I’d spend the last four hours meticulously picking out the golden ratio spiral on those damn windows. It was stupid. It shouldn’t be there. It was just because of all the filters, right? But the windows were broken out in the closest approximation to the golden ratio that I guessed they could. And then I blinked and it was perfectly the golden ratio spiral. It was crazy.
I swapped to another layer and immediately had to look away. I wasn’t sure what was there, but it was instantly headache inducing. Squinting to avoid seeing any of the new pattern, I minimized the program. All I’d been able to make out of it was a shape I knew to be called the Mandelbrot set.
Hesitantly, I turned to the internet for answers. I found all the normal things about fractals. Those mathematical theories that made no sense to me in anything other than abstract concepts. Lots of art. Lots of weird conspiracy type things. Bits on Chaos Theory, but I lumped that in with math and ignored it. Except for one website, advertising a 2D and 3D fractal generation program. ChaosPro or something. Their website was minimal. Didn’t look like it had been updated in years. One bit caught my eye though.
“Is it suitable for me-” said the website. The “I” in “is” was a strange thing that reminded me of a New York Times header.
“Is it suitable for me – Well, it depends on what you are looking for when visiting this site,” it said. “The answer maybe yes, if: you would like to create computer generated art. You are interested in fractals. You want to experiment with something new. You want to know what your computer dreams at night.”
I turned off my computer and threw myself into bed.
I couldn’t sleep.
I lay there for hours. Staring up at the ceiling. And all I could see was that damned shape. I closed my eyes and it was there. A pattern of windows burned into the back of my eyelids. I wanted to scream. I think I did, maybe. Into my pillow.
At three AM I gave up. I rolled out of bed, put on hiking clothes, and drove back out to the plant.
Nothing seemed to have changed. The chain link fence was still cut and rolled back. I didn’t see any traces that someone had been there since me, but who knew. It had rained. Made the way down the embankment dangerously slick, but there were enough tree roots and things to hold that I made it safe.
Over the windowsill, down the concrete stairs, through a set of tunnels, and up onto the production floor.
It was different.
I wanted to scream.
The bank of windows was still there, but every single one was broken out. Not a single pane was in evidence and certainly not into any facsimile of fractal nonsense. There was a shatter haze of glass on the floor that gritted unpleasantly under my feet as I moved to get a better view up at the west facing windows. Nothing. There was nothing there.
Anger bubbled up from inside me, followed by curiosity, followed by a strange sort of acceptance that gave no hint to the other two emotions having existed at all.
I hadn’t imagined it. I know I hadn’t. I had the photo evidence at home on film and scanned to my computer. That meant one of a few things could have happened. Someone could have come in and broken the rest out. There was a rooftop on the other side of the windows. They weren’t impossible to reach. The storm from the other day could have gotten them. There was no cover from the elements on that side of the building. The full force of Twin City April rains could have been brought to bear on them. It could happen.
Seemed unlikely that the glass had lasted so long only to break this week.
But it could happen.
No, I decided, someone had to have broken them out. Vandals. Kids with air guns.
I crossed the production floor and retraced my steps through the plant. Everything looked the same. Everything. The empty chemical tanks I’d noted the previous Friday were just as rusted. The containment vats were still full of trash and detritus. The bottom levels were still flooded. The shine of recently cut copper still glinted in the light of my torch.
Everything was silent.
It was so silent.
None of the sound from the outside cities could work its way down that far. No traffic noises, no wind whipping in through broken windows. There wasn’t even the telltale drip-drip-drip of water that I’d come to associate with the place. No leaks. No slow seepage from the walls and into the standing pools all around.
It was unnatural.
Everything looked the same, but at the same time it looked so wrong. It looked the exact same. But it was wrong and I was so sure of that. One-hundred percent certain.
The windows above had been wrong and broken and everything else looked wrong and broken because of that. Like they were the cornerstone on which my memory of the place was built.
Maybe they were.
Without the windows, that fragile barrier between the outside world and this grey concrete maze, I thought I might not make my way out. It didn’t make sense. How could a missing barrier make me feel trapped?
My breathing sped up and I could feel sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades. It wasn’t even that hot in the building but I felt like my skin was on fire. My eyes throbbed. I screwed them shut and tried to breathe deep, calm myself down. Nothing like this had ever happened before those damned windows. A panic attack maybe? I didn’t know what that was supposed to feel like. Panic was the opposite of boredom. And I always fell into boredom. I remember feeling almost offended that panic would dare to hit me right then and right there.
The upwelling, stomach churning feeling of doom overwhelmed me and I knelt down—well, more like my legs wouldn’t support my weight if I’m being honest. The concrete floor beneath my knees was hard and cold, moisture soaking through my jeans in an instant. But all my focus was on that overwhelming everything from nothing roiling chaotic mess inside me. It coiled and turned and rushed along my bones, leeching into my veins and pumping around my body.
It hurt. It hurt, but…
But I felt…
I got my breathing and heart rate under control and opened my eyes, expecting grey concrete.
Everything around me was color.
I’d wondered before where all the graffiti went. There had been spray paint cans kicked into corners, empty and rusting. Some newer and some only half full. But no sign of tags or art or anything even close to something that wasn’t peeling caution-mark yellow.
When I’d closed my eyes, the grey concrete around me had been… grey. Blank. Void of anything even resembling graffiti.
But when I opened my eyes…
It was there. Every inch of concrete around me was saturated with paint. In looping colors and swirling patterns that hurt my eyes and sent violent shuddering through my chest and muscles and bones, it was there. Even as I watched, the paint seemed to drip like it was freshly laid, the viscous liquids streaming together into more and more complex patterns. They pressed in on me from all sides, screaming in silence with all the bright and nonsensical violence that they could muster.
Was it a product of my sleep deprived mind? The residue of staring for two days at those windows while spacing out? A psychotic break? No, whatever they were, I was certain that they were alive. And I was certain that they wanted me. I can’t explain how I knew it or how paint encrusted on walls, layers thick with the patterns of years could want me, but they did. They wanted me and… I…
I was scared. I was terrified.
But I wanted them too.
For the first time in years, I thought that something could fill the hole inside of me. The hungry, aching hole that itched for something, anything to keep its attention. To keep me from mind-numbing, horrible, screaming violence.
I opened my mouth and drank it all in. The vision of paint and color poured in through my eyes and the thick, chemical brilliance ran down my throat. I felt it run down my esophagus, into my stomach, fill me up until there was nothing else to be filled. From there it burst and spilled outward, surrounding my body, cocooning me in frenetic waves of glorious confusion.
I don’t know who called the police. Maybe when I didn’t show up to work they got worried and called up some of my friends. Probably it was Angela who told them about the hydroelectric plant.
When I was sat in the station, cuffed to a desk, but with a blanket round my shoulders and a Styrofoam cup of tea, I asked the cop who’d brought me in about the paint. About the paint dripping off the walls and across the floor and into my eyes and mouth and where had it gone.
He looked at me long and hard. I guess he thought I was sleep deprived, babbling, high, or all three. I’m not sure I could have said he was wrong.
But it was the funniest thing. When he looked at me over the rims of his glasses… I almost thought I could see my own reflection in them.
And it looked like my reflection had too many colors.
It’s been six months since then. The demolition of the hydroelectric plant started over the summer. I only went back one more time before that, but I wanted to get a second opinion. Took some convincing, but Angela went in with me. I asked her to tell me what she saw.
And she told me.
And she told me.
And she told me.
On and on and on, the words, the sounds, the colors of it all spilled from her mouth.
Took a few days for her to realize she didn’t know what she saw.
I led her slowly back out to the street and called someone to come pick her up. I thought I owed her that much.
She is my friend, after all.
[The Archivist’s voice returns to its usual pitch and tempo.]
I really wish we didn’t have such a great number of statements belonging to avatars of the powers themselves. It’s rather clear to me that this Samantha Kiers was just beginning to understand the possibilities of the Spiral, though I find it… interesting… that they were so adamant that their friend Angela was just that—a friend.
Very strange the lengths that an avatar will go to in order to feed their god, even while maintaining the appearances and values of humanity. Would a friend lead an unknowing person into danger, in fact, into likely harm to sate a… a curiosity?
A friend, indeed.
End recording.
[Tape recorder whirrs for a moment, the Archivist’s disgust hanging in the air. Then, it clicks off.]