Chapter Text
Statement of Coral Ivers, regarding her childhood encounters with the entity known as ‘The Dark’ and her father's subsequent passing. Original statement given ########.
Statement begins.
My dad was never a very kind man. Comes with the job, I suppose.
When I was little, I'd have said I wanted to work in a prison. Like any young girl, I looked up to my dad like he was the coolest person in the world so when I heard all his gruesome stories of the people he dealt with at work and how he put them in their place, well, naturally I wanted to do the same.
But as time went on and I watched what became of my dad, I began to reconsider.
You see, the first straw was probably my mum leaving. I was only young at the time, maybe seven or eight, so I never really got the specifics of it but I knew it was because of my dad. Though he'd always had a soft spot for me, he was not a nice person. He was no stranger to raising his voice, frequently shouting abuse at people and I don't think he ever quite learned to take off his prison guard persona. Or maybe the problem was it was never a persona in the first place, that job just brought out the worst in him.
I never saw him hit my mum but I don't think that was the point. He screamed at her enough that I got the jist: he was violent and impulsive which was not a good mix.
My mum never fought for custody of me. If I'd been wondering before, I guess this proved to me that she never cared much for me. My dad's double, as she'd always say.
I guess I get it. But it doesn't make me despise her any less.
So then, it was just me and Dad. He drank a lot after that.
But one thing I can credit him for (and one of the only things I can credit him for) was that he never turned his anger on me. After Mum, I think he learned to keep a lot of that anger at work, direct it at the people who actually deserved it rather than me.
My dad did love me. For all the complicated feelings I harbour towards him, I will give him that. I didn't, for even a moment, doubt that my dad loved me.
Even when things were rough, he'd still make the time to take me to the park or watch a film with me or just listen to me ramble about all the meaningless stuff kids talk about. But one of my favourite things he did was when we'd sit down and he'd tell me all the stories from work.
There were a lot of stories from work, as you'd expect. Though, no matter how many he told me, he never seemed to run out… Maybe he'd started making them up, I mean, towards the end, they had started getting a bit strange, but younger me was never bothered. Real or not, I liked hearing my dad's stories.
They did get a bit disturbing at times and looking back, there were more than a few that he probably shouldn't have been telling a twelve-year-old about. You see, my dad worked in the Close Supervision Center — the CSC, or rather, the Exceptional Risk Unit — which was basically where the worst of the worst ended up: child murders, serial killers, the lot. According to him, it was a pretty new unit when he was assigned there and it could only hold eight prisoners but those eight prisoners were a nasty bunch.
When my dad told me all the horrible things he did to those prisoners, to beat them down and punish them, I didn't feel bad. In my eyes, those people deserved to suffer and if my dad was willing to do that then he was a hero.
A ‘hero’ who messed with stuff he really shouldn't have.
The day they brought Calder Seaver into the Exceptional Risk Unit, my dad came home pretty shaken.
This was a rare occurrence, despite what you might think. My dad was a tough man and I mean that. He'd met the worst people Britain had to offer without so much as batting an eyelid. Leaving him this shaken was an accomplishment.
That night, when he tucked me into bed as he always insisted on doing despite me being sixteen at the time, I asked for a story. I didn't care that they gave me nightmares, I just liked listening to my dad. He really seemed in his element when he spoke about the prison. Admittedly, that said a lot about the type of person he was.
Usually, he'd be more than happy to go off on a tangent about brutal murders he'd heard about or the grisly prison fights he'd had to break apart but that night, he seemed reluctant.
He'd kneeled down beside my bed, clasped his hands around mine, and told me that there were some awful people in the world.
I questioned him about where this had come from and after a bit of pushing, he finally admitted that a new inmate had been brought into the Exceptional Risk Unit. Calder Seaver. A serial killer.
Now, serial killers in the prison weren't exactly an uncommon occurrence. Sure, it wasn't every day they wandered in but, well, they were the main demographic in mind for the Exceptional Risk Unit so there were a decent few.
But this man was different, my dad told me, and even if he hadn't, I already knew. I'd heard his name before.
Calder Seaver was the man who had killed forty people. His face was all over the news.
When you hear so much about crime, as horrible as it is, you do become somewhat desensitised to it. I can claim that myself. However, it's numbers like that which will snap you right back to reality and remind you just how evil some people can be.
Forty people. Forty individual lives with families and friends and hobbies and interests, gone.
I tried to quantify that. I couldn't.
For the next few weeks, I didn’t receive any more stories from my dad, only snippets. Usually, if I pushed him a bit, I got vague mentions of the inmates; Sam starting trouble again, Thomas behaving for once, sometimes I'd even get a quick reference to Calder before my dad would go quiet again.
He… changed a lot in those few weeks.
Whenever he came home from work, he was angry. He was always just angry.
I tried to stay clear of him, I know he didn't want to lose his temper with me but I had this awful feeling whenever I was around him that at any minute, he would explode. And neither of us wanted that.
I watched him from my room though, ranting on the phone about how he couldn't take it anymore, how he was the one causing all their problems, how they had to get rid of him.
And well, they didn't have to.
Exactly three weeks after being admitted to the Exceptional Risk Unit, Calder Seaver was found dead in his cell after the thrilling events of a power cut. His body had been horribly mutilated. My dad didn't sleep that night.
For a while, that part confused me. My dad had explained all sorts of gruesome scenes to me in his stories and hadn't seemed one bit bothered, so what was so different now? I later realised it wasn't the state of the body that had freaked him, it was the fact that nobody in the prison could have possibly done it. Something else had.
After that, my dad became paranoid. He was sacked from his job, someone had to take the blame for Calder's death, and with his newfound free time, he spent every second of every day looking over his shoulder, making sure the doors were locked, checking the lights were still working.
We went through a lot of bulbs back then. They seemed to blow almost constantly. I'd actually consider myself an expert lightbulb changer from the sheer amount of times I had to do it. My dad was convinced it was some sort of scheme, someone out to get us, and of course, I told him it was only the faulty wiring but he wouldn’t hear it.
Strange books began showing up around the house. Out of childish curiosity, I'd pick them up and have a flick through every time I noticed a new one. They covered all sorts: the occult, warding off evil spirits, hauntings. My dad had never believed in that ‘nonsense’ — as he called it — so I had no clue where this sudden interest in the paranormal came from but I just knew it had something to do with Calder Seaver.
Something had happened the night he died, something my dad wasn’t telling me. In the end, I never did find out what happened… I tried for years to research, find out what I could, but it seemed the only people who truly knew what had happened were my dad and Calder. And, well, the thing that got him and tried to get my dad.
And it sure did try. I don’t remember when I decided that the constant bulb blowing and the weird noises in the closet and the stagnant water were the doings of something paranormal but eventually, that was the conclusion I reached. It certainly wasn’t anything normal and I had been reading up on my dad's new books so can you really blame me?
I started paying more attention every time one of these strange things would happen and I would notice the way my dad's face would drop every single time. He was seeing the pattern too and he knew what it meant.
Whatever had got Calder Seaver was now after him.
Though I guess, if nothing else, he could brag that it never technically caught him…
I’d been out all day. You see, it was my birthday and some friends from school offered to treat me to lunch so with the promise of free food (and quality time, I guess) I said sure. But I remember wanting to get back before dark because my dad had promised to be home early so we could celebrate by ourselves. So around six o’clock, I rushed to the train station and took the train home.
It was rather peaceful actually; watching the streets and villages and fields all rush past the window. Even as the sun began to set, I didn’t feel uncomfortable. For once, I wasn’t worried about what would be waiting in the shadows when night finally came. It felt like a great burden had been lifted.
When I got back to our flat, it was maybe about seven. The sun had pretty much set by then but I knew my dad was home because I’d seen his shitty little car parked up on the pavement outside as I’d walked past, but strangely enough, I found the door locked.
Luckily, I’d brought my keys just in case but I did have a good grumble about having to dig them out from the bottom of my bag, especially since my hands were full with the cake I’d brought back.
As soon as I got the door open, the cake slipped from my hands and tumbled to the floor.
I’m surprised I didn’t scream, I really am. I mean, in all the nightmares I had of this exact moment, I screamed. Fuck, I screamed my head off, got the police called a good few times. And yet, in the moment… I don’t know. Nothing came.
When faced with the hanging corpse of my father, I just stood there.
I didn’t process what had happened until I’d run half a mile through the city streets of Glasgow. Hell, I hadn’t even processed that I’d run until I was doubled over, panting and heaving up my lunch.
I only had the bag I’d left with and whatever junk I’d stuffed in my jacket pockets but I didn’t plan on going back. I couldn’t face that again. I wandered for a while.
Walking around in a daze, nobody bothered me, though I knew they wanted to. I didn’t care. I just needed some time to think. I couldn’t seem to get the image of my dad’s dead body out of my mind.
Why had he done it? I know things had been bothering him recently but I hadn’t thought they were that bad… He’d seemed normal earlier, and he’d had something to look forward to in terms of the cake and our own little birthday celebration. Had something happened while I was out? I mean, something clearly had to have happened because he was driven to do that.
But really, there was one question that nagged at me the most.
Why was he blindfolded?