Work Text:
The tape recorder clicks to life, the button sinking into its slot with a satisfying shunk. The tape inside spins, curling its way from one spool to another as he sits there, breathing as quietly as he can. Not that there was anyone to hear him, exactly, anyone with half a social life at all had left the office long before he had, but… here he stood, coat over the back of his chair, hair in his eyes, elbows planted on the table.
Better start the recording somewhere, right?
“Audio log,” his voice crackled up out of his throat, the first words he’d spoken in hours, “Eighth of February, 2028. About nine in the evening. Simon Blackquill recording.”
A pause.
“As always.”
Simon hunched further over the table and the spread of his notes across its surface, the fabric of his rolled sleeves bunching around his elbows. Were they any tighter, he’d be cutting off circulation. Were he any less tired, he might just care about that.
“Recording pertaining to the continued study of the… subject.” It felt wrong to say its name, despite how much he may want to. He’d gone long enough denying himself what he wished – seven years of it, really – and he was practised enough at it he could do it easier than breathing. Speaking of… he inhaled and filled his lungs with air, then continued to speak as he exhaled:
“It continues to refuse to say a word,” he said, voice steady and betraying nothing of the agony he may feel, “No matter how anyone pokes or prods it, it continues its silent vigil over its perceived territory- for lack of a better descriptor, its cell.”
What else would you call it?
“I… have yet to go in alone,” he admitted very quietly to the tape recorder – it was a very patient listener, “And I have a few reasons as to why. One, if my going to see it alone does nothing, then I have worked myself up for precisely that, and I will feel an absolute fool. I dislike feeling foolish, and take such pains to avoid it, that I fear my pride gets in the way on this first count. As for the second…”
He found himself trailing off. The room filled itself instead with the faint whirring and clicking of the tape recorder, a monument to his descent into exhaustion and late nights and lack of sleep and agonizing over seven years he’ll never forget all over again. Time he will never get back, time he will relive as long as he himself draws breath, time he can never escape. Time that was, in essence, for nothing, and yet was for so absolutely everything that it did not matter how much nothing he’d found in it.
He opened his mouth and confessed to the tape recorder like it was the priest who visited him in prison:
“Two, if my going in there alone was the key to it speaking these many months,” he said, very slowly, “Then I will feel utterly stupid to not have attempted it before.”
Despite what his criminal record might show, he could murder his words as he spoke them just as well as they’d once thought he could murder a mentor. It paid to be flexible.
“If the only thing that needed to be done for it to speak was for my presence to be the only one aside from its own in that damned cell, then the inability to function I have found myself trapped in would have been for nothing, and I do not enjoy doing things for nothing.” Simon said to the tape recorder.
The two eyes of the tape – damned ancient technology, where had Gumshoe found it? – stared unblinking back at him. An impassive visitor, an attentive listener, committing his words to memory for whomever found these tapes. Not that he left them out in the open. Or anyone at the office knew about them. He wasn’t even supposed to be here this late. The office was empty and quiet, the only sound coming from the humming of the electricity in the walls and the tape recorder itself. The world was empty, it seemed.
Simon took a breath and continued: “I do not enjoy sitting idle, I’ve had quite enough of it over the past decade, but this… I find myself at a standstill. I am standing before a split track and a lever, with a vicious murderer on one side and myself on the other.”
He paused.
“An impossible choice, I suppose.”
Slowly, Simon got to his feet, and he plucked the tape recorder off the surface of the desk in one hand. The sound quality would be less than ideal, but it would serve to do the job he needed it to. He did not need perfection when it came to talking about the thing in the cell, only needed perfection when he was talking to it. Perhaps he’d find perfection some time today. Or tomorrow. Or, perhaps, never. And perhaps he’d be able to live the rest of his lie without an ounce of thought going toward the damned thing. Blissful, almost, was the thought of not having any worries so complicated as this.
Simon found himself pacing the room, tape recorder in hand, the motion sensor lights in the hallway flickering on whenever he got too near the door of his makeshift office. On, then off again, then on again, then off again.
When the room proved itself to be empty and lifeless, Simon dragged his sleepless corpse out into the hallway and trailed down it, skin not quite fitting over his bones as he went. He kept his pace brisk, quick, as if he were a salary man with somewhere to be rather than whatever he’d become in the months-long silence that had led him here. It was a chemical sort of silence, concocted and maintained at will, supposedly easily shattered if he could just find the right key to put in the right slot. The sound of the air system in the walls pulled at his skin as he walked, taunting him with possibilities and promises he knew were as good as nothing at all.
It was eerie, frankly. The doors were all shut and the hallway lights flicked on as he approached and flicked off as he left their circle of light. It was a feeling almost like being followed, like there were eyes at his back, like something was there.
He stopped walking.
“I find myself unable to decide,” he said into the tape recorder, “Whether to continue what I’m doing or abandon it. It would be simpler if I could leave it alone, but it would always sit there in the back of my mind, leaned against a wall, growing into a thorny little bitch of a plant. I know it will never leave me.”
He inhaled, found that it echoed. He scuffed the heel of his boot into the carpeted floor.
“If I could learn to keep my nose out of things, we’d all be better for it,” he hissed, “You’d think I’d be better at quelling the urge after years and years of practice- mind your business and they’ll leave you alone, Blackquill, isn’t that what one told me? Stick your head out and they’ll cut it off.
“Perhaps I could do with some trimming of the sort,” he mused, continuing to walk toward the end of the hallway. “Perhaps a beheading would liven my subject up a little. Perhaps a violent death would spark its interest. Perhaps then it would speak.”
As he walked toward the door to the stairwell at the end of the hall, he did his best to tamp down on his anger. Being angry has not served him these past few months, and it had no place in his work. Oh, how he’s changed.
“I have to wonder if it actually knows anything at all,” Simon whispered, “Or if it’s simply biding its time until its employer comes to retrieve it. Maybe then it will be back in hands it trusts. Or-”
Before he could continue, he felt the elastic band keeping his hair tied back snap. The tension was gone in an instant, and his hair fell loose against his back. Some even crept over his shoulder and fell in his eyes.
Idly, Simon lifted his free hand to touch it. He really ought to get it cut.
For a moment, he almost felt something retreating from his back, but when he looked back and found nothing, he dismissed it. The elastic fell to the floor. He left it in the dark as he approached the door.
“Perhaps familiarity will make it more comfortable.” his hand found the door handle and he turned it, “Perhaps it is a very adept liar. A knowledge of psychology will do that.”
The door did not move, and Simon cursed to himself as he reached into a pocket to retrieve a key card.
As he tapped it against the sensor next to the door, and as the sensor beeped its ascent of the card, he thought he heard something behind him again. Simon turned to look, glared into the pitch darkness. It had sounded like shifting fabric, like something landing on carpeted floors.
He took a single step forward, hand reaching for- what, a sword? A sword he did not wear?- and he found the sound echoed.
For a moment, all that could be heard was the tape recorder whirring in his hand.
Footsteps do not echo in carpeted rooms.
He shut the tape recorder off, and the silence descended upon him like a thick, scratchy blanket.
“I do not appreciate being stalked,” Simon told the darkness ahead of him. “So I suggest you identify yourself before I call the police.”
It was a lie at best, he’d left his phone in the office. But he’d long since known he could lie with the best of them.
He must have been still too long, as the light directly above him flicked off.
Silence and darkness greeted him. Then so too did his own heartbeat in his ears. It was fast, his skin prickled. His eyes adjusted slowly, too slowly.
There was a sound just ahead of him, like an exhale of breath.
When the light flickered back on, it was the one just above him, and standing before him was-
The same white suit, the same hair, the same everything. The same gloved hands, the same buttons, the same tie, the same shirt. All of it. Not a thread out of place. Nothing was wrong. Nothing except for the face.
Staring into his eyes was an empty void, spiralling back into the meat and bone of the skull, fleshy and dark and wet . It was an empty cavern where nasal bones, a hard and soft palate, teeth should be. And yet there was only void and flesh. No eyes, no cavities for them either, no cheekbones or eyebrow bones, nor even a forehead or jaw, truly.
The Phantom stared at him, and Simon stared back.
The light flicked off above them.
When the Phantom’s hand twitched out, an eel from its reef, to snare around Simon’s wrist, it lit them up again. The Phantom’s thumb jammed into his wrist, the pad of it shoving into the joint, and the strength of its grip was enough to make Simon drop the recorder. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that it would have shattered his wrist if he’d waited a moment longer. Yet when the recorder clattered to the floor, tape port popping open and sending the tape he’d been using onto the floor, he found the Phantom did not release him. Instead, it almost seemed to be… cradling his wrist, thumb twitching against the place where a bruise would find itself the next day.
This was not supposed to be possible. How had it escaped? Had its cell always been inadequate? How could they have known? And yet here it was, standing just shy of his own height, just as it always had been. He was surprised it hadn’t changed its shape, that it wasn’t adjusting. He supposed it had no resources. He supposed it was alone, left dead in the water – or to die in it. Drown, perhaps. Starve. Tear out its own throat.
Perhaps it had no self destruct prerogative.
Or perhaps it did not have the power to execute it.
Simon could hear it breathing, could see its chest rising and falling.
“How long have you been following me?” he asked it.
Slowly, it shook whatever was left of its head.
Simon was silent.
Then-
“How often do you follow me?”
It did not move, at first.
And then, slow as before, it nodded. Up and down, just once.
“How are you out?”
Its thumbnail sank into the flesh above his wrist joint, and the scent of iron and salt sparked into the air. Simon felt a fat, warm droplet of his own blood trace its way down the contours of his hand, then his index finger, to then finally drip-drip- drip onto the floor.
“Do you follow me every night?”
The nail retreated from the wound, and the pad of its thumb traced a circle over it.
The Phantom nodded.
“After everyone else leaves?”
It nodded again. Its thumb almost caressed the bones of his wrist.
“Why?”
It simply nodded once again, up and down. Its thumb moved to pet at the ligament down the centre of his forearm.
“Will you speak to me?”
It did not give a response. Its head did not move.
“Can you speak?”
The light shut off again above them. In the darkness, Simon could not help but wonder if the Phantom had blinked yet, if it still needed to, or if the pit in place of its face had eyes at all.
“You cannot speak.” Simon whispered, not a question this time. “And so you cannot speak to me.”
Silence. Another drop of his blood hit the floor.
“If you could speak,” Simon breathed, frozen in place even without the threat of violence. “Would you speak to me?”
The light blinked back on, and when Simon cleared his vision of the flash he found the Phantom nodding at him. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down.
He caught his breath and stared into the pit.
From a place deep in the body’s chest, he heard a hum. A low, agonized, contented sort of hum. It twitched and writhed as it made itself known, but it was there all the same. When it petered off, the silence around them crackled back into place.
It almost sounded like a question.
“If I find you a face,” Simon whispered, quieter than before, “Will you speak with me?”
It went utterly still.
“No recorders, no people,” he whispered, “No cameras. No daylight.”
He swallowed.
“Just me.”
In the silence that followed, Simon wondered if he’d made a horrible mistake.
Simon felt the Phantom’s grip loosen on his grip. Then its fingertips twitched and shifted, turning, then began to trace down the palm of his hand, pressing through the trail of his blood. The Phantom laced their fingers together. Then, very slowly, it nodded just once.
Seemed it was a deal.
Perhaps the worst he’d ever made.