Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. It's two eighteen am in the
Municipal Records Building, where the corridors brewed under a sickly
web of flickering fluorescent tubes. I pace these holes alone,
my shoes scuffin dull terrezo tiles, buff flat by decades
of feet that now only exist in the margins of
yellowed look books. The air is heavy, faintly sweet, with
the ghosts of age and paper, and somber assistant thread
of ozen that rides the ventilation. When I walk, A
hush is never perfect. Vence cough to life are overhead,
low and reptilian. Somewhere a wheelcut growns a sound that
doesn't belong, but which repeats enough to be familiar. Far
behind me, ancient pipes paying and shudder settling sculles with
the midnight shell. Usually I find comfort in this abandoned cacophony.
The reminders of the living world above, an as system
bake enough to go on without any single watcher. Tonight,
though the patterns have shifted. My rants take me past
the regular chipments, the security console of the supply cause
it of old copper tona, the personnel lockers, there's the
hallway that runs along the boundary of the eldest wing,
where the paint is patched like its hiding root rot,
and the wall clocks all tell slightly different lies. It
leads inevitably to file Room seven. On the maps, File
Room seven is a dead end, a box shut since
nineteen seventy nine. It's never on any duty log, never
mentioned on THEAF reports. The story among the day shift clerks,
when they recall it at all, goes that it was
condemned for asbestos, then sealed and left to settle into mythology.
But to night, my pass down the old corridor reveals
more than it ever should. A draft sneaks under the
solid fire door, not the usual stything warmth of the stacks,
but something fresh and cold. The brass plaque file Room
seven is clean of dust. Through the upper window of
grimeral glass, a strange silver light pulses against a dull
yellow bars cast by the emergency bulb overhead. My pulse
thumps against my clipboard, a check, almost ritualistically the lock.
It's the original mortars, kind, tough as the building's charter.
My universal key never worked on it before, but to
night with a cautious twist, the bolt would draw smoothly.
The doors wings open on oiled silent hinges, and a
step across a thresholder should never have been able to breach.
The air inside tastes dustless, awfully sweet. It's neither cold
nor warm, but left in a perpetual pre dawn hush.
Less a room than a stage, perfectly set. Every object
in this office's crisped with unused intent. A battered desk
lamp floods everything with a calm white glow, the circle
of brightness, throwing the rest of the room into an
ambiguity of shadow. The batter duck desk looks like it
was buff that morning. A legal pad sits dead center,
covered in dense writing, names underlined and marked missing. The
top file is rubber Stampton scarletink received nineteen seventy four,
but the last entry is dated next Tuesday, and the
event notation references a property on Mercer Avenue that Steuwford
demolition in two weeks. There's a stack of other folders,
though tabbed mediculously, labeled with the names of vanished residents
people I recognize from the more recent digital side of
the city archive. None of this makes any sense that
the strangest detail anchors me more than the paper of
the dustless floor. On the far corner of the desk
sits a bone China mark, the kind duck went out
of fashion before the city's first high rise chip along
the rim. Wisps of steam rise from the tea, a
tangible sign that the room is more live now than
it has any right to be. The sent bergermart and
cream reminds me for a moment of breakfast with my
grandmother before the world ever carried this kind of haunted weight.
A chair upholstered and button backed, stands pushed out as
if someone rose just before I entered and will return
any moment. Strewn notes pinned to an old cork board,
less names I saw uploadd just last month. Fresh entries
for missing persons vanishing with unerving speed from digital and
physical logs alike. Scraps of correspondence lay beneath glassway paperweights
speak of city council deliberations that never made it past
the proposal phase. My phone buzzes weekly in my back pocket.
I try to unlock it only to watch the screen
flicker go static and then n settlingly display the clock
frozen at two eighteen. The signal strength bass pulse, but
nothing loads. I pocket it an edge closer to the desk,
hard in my throat. There's a metallic climb from somewhere
behind the inner wall, not far, in noise and connected
to any schedule, like a file cut pushed too hard
against concrete, or maybe something more deliberate. I reach for
the top folder, intent on nabbing proof. At that moment,
the overhead lights stot as fractions of darkness and light
trading places in frigid rhythm. The chair seems to slide
a half inch, though I didn't touch it. I stepped
back suddenly, Serta and Anne not alone. My own reflection
in the small window of the inner door seems slightly
out of sink, its movement to beat behind mine. Every
instinct screens at me to run, to slam the door
and relock every remembered boundary. Instead, I force myself to
scan the names on the legal pad again. They are
recent Helen Court, George Mendez, Stephenhouse, persons marked missing in
just a last three weeks. Below, their names rendered in
a careful, old fashioned hand a note. All records must
reconcile before the shiff set double check for anomalies. My
hands tremble as I stuffed the top folder under my
jacket for once, wishing for daylight. Were a hum of
other lives, But the building refuses comfort something deeper than
procedural air hums. Here a gap in had time and
memory are supposed to range themselves. As I close the door,
locking it with the milledless pressure, the metallic climb resumes
farther away, as if what moves behind these walls has
noticed much trespiss Far under my jacket feels uncomfortably warm
as I walk away. It's impossible paper were whispering hidden
edicts against the marrow of the city itself. I didn't
always fear this place. The Municipal Archive had for all
these years served as a haven of sorts, of place
to disappear without the mess of business of running away.
When I took the night clerk job, it was less
out of ambition and necessity, a shelter from complications waiting
in my daytime life. I'd never meant to become indispensable
or even particularly involved. My reasons were practical at first.
The building itself is a monolith of municipal intention. New
deal ear brick, determined to repress both weather and memory.
Six floors, all pack of box deeds, sent us rolls,
scattered property manifests, binders of Brital police locks, and city
council minutes so dense with small betrayals that you'd think
even time would get bored and look elsewhere. The security
office kicks out a tableau of gerrish toc TV screens,
a kind of bulbous black and white display tubes that
wheeze when they warm up. Every hour, I make my
perimeter circuit logging by hand, as the system requires this
comfort in the repetition of feeling, I can stick my
eyes to get into a routine quilt the pattern said,
and immune to disruption. Most nights, my only company is
the hum of ancient heating ducks and the occasional chuck
of a cleaning cot, always just out of sight, ghosts
in polister uniforms. Missus Krik, the janitor, sometimes waves as
she disappears down the service stair, her face a patchwork
of dim light and fatigue. Sometimes a records assistant might
be finishing up after eyes on another level, but it's
rare anyone else works as late as I do. Staffing
has been pared back for years. Even the security company
all absent minded day's shift bullies rarely swing by after ten.
My tats are wrote, check each door, sign off on
every fire exit. Compare electronic entry locks to handrit and
tallers of policy left over from a ransom were scare.
In two thousand seven. The main record rooms, ten in all,
hold the city's most vital evidence of existence, berths, tests,
transfers of blame, and title fortune to muster lost one
address at a time, but barely one percent of those
boxes are ever requested. There's a vast mythology of triviadi
stretching in every direction between here and eiteen ninety one.
My desk is tut behind the central lobby, come afast
among the tangle of filing cabinets and out of deep
phone directories. That's where I fill out the daily and
tick chots of tax slots for missing on, missolve ricos,
and chase the endless tide of forms with mute resignation.
Sometimes I read off old council minutes, entertaining myself with
tales of so owning amendments. Decided by acrimony and ten
dollar bribes. Sometimes I just let my mind run flat,
watching the second hand chase itself along the clock's yellowed face.
The staff, such as we are, has always allowed a
polite distance. The daytime crowd treats a place with a
mixture of reverence and frustration. Old mister Paley, the senior archivist,
likes to complain that the building remembers too much. I
keep to my alcove, careful about office gossip. The incident
with the lost property records from the nine has taught
me to avoid the left of her animosities. I am civil, efficient,
cosmically unremarkable by design. Some coworkers act as if the
archive is a vault against the city's mess. Others treated
as a masleum. Either way, it treats all equally with
indifference in dust. Why hang on here then, years after intended?
Maybe out of a maybe because my father's Parkinson's keeps
me local, or because the night shift shelters me from destructions.
They'd rather not face thickening debts, ruined prospects, the perpetual
leak of a marriage that never started. Time in these
stacks moves as it pleases. The solitude is honest the size.
It's easy to tell myself that what happens outside of murdows, bankruptcies,
disappearances isn't really my concern. When and guard dogging their
paper foot prints in the small eyos, Yet the building
resists true familiarity, no matter how harmless the blueprints insisted.
Is odd spaces appeared between the walls, gaps and alcoves
that don't natch any documented renovation. There are aisles in
certain stacks that shift as if two rows of shelves
have one too many columns between them. Shadows slip across
the far end of your vision. They're verging by a
step or two before snapping back as the light catches up.
At least three times are caught flashes of motion and
corners where no person could stand. Once wheeling up the
fire stairs, I smell burnt ozone, sharp and unmistakable, the
nearest thing to an electrical fire, except there was none.
Some records boxes I would swear change their shelf overnight.
Row twenty seven gains an extra container with a smatched
slid a previously full slot turns are benty in the morning.
The labels called by a hand I don't recognize. My
first few weeks, I blamed it on absent minded cleaning crews.
Later I stopped mentioning it altogether. One night, closing up,
I heard whispering funneling down the airduct's actual words lost,
but tones urgent heard. By the time I got within earshot,
it tapered off into nothing but the grown up event
van still alone to wear it all was part of
the job. The half perceived the unaccountable. Over time, I
got good at ignoring gentle discomfort. After all, if every file,
every whisper, every chill meant something, no one would last
a week here and there lasted months until to night
when the rules bent far enough to snap. The iro
was after my first breach of file Room seven. Pass
in crawling increments, every routine check colored now by sharp
edges of anxiety. I keep returning to the folder. I
found its paper heavy, slightly tacky with warmth, something that
persists longer than it should. I slipped back into the
circuit of night rounds. It's supposed to be muscle memory.
Flick the corner light, peer into Duck and Dukovs. Note
the hum of the water heater, but the calm is shattered.
There are things I should not have seen. At three twelve,
I pull a request to locate the file of one
Denishahaman listed as a missing person. A paperwork should be
in Record Room four box three hundred eleven. I cross
reference the location and the catalog and find that tap
color has switched from the annotated active city case open
to the yellowed retired slash permanent arcave. The corresponding slot
on the shelven chart, though, is black. I checked downstairs,
searching the overflow locker. The record is gone. I swing
back to the front desk, running my finger along the
night lock. Three other requests came in over the last
week for missing persons records, and none of those files
are in the proper locations either. I pull each night's lock.
They registered the files as checked out after arrows, often
between two fifteen and two thirty, and by staff credentials
that seem unfamiliar. The clerk reference I d for last
night match is no current worker. Curious, I scrolled down
the previous week. The names come up again, but with
first initials reversed, as if twisted through some cow's code
protocol demands for I'll move nowhere without two signatures. But
these entranes have been slipped in with forged sign offs
in the neat antique Scriptas earlier in File Room seven,
the dates are wrong to not in a simple way,
but off by exactly four decades for Sam, or by
barely a day for others. As I page back through
last year's digital looks, I notice something even stranger. The
same files have been declared, checked out and pending review
multiple times, and sequences that defied the order of events
listed in their own contents. Paranoid prickles up my back.
I scanned for physical evidence, even walking the full perimeter
from lobby to basement. Those sections are always sealed at
night as of fire code demands. Yet standing outside the
door to File Room seven, I find it locked tight
once more, at the glowing bar of light gone. When
I dare to wrest my hand against the brassknot, a
warmth pulses through the metal, unmistakable as if someone just
vacated the space within. Knocking softly, I'm met only with
the slab muted thud of my own touch. There's no
sign of the cup or its companion papers. Through the
milky glass pane, I press my ear to the door,
half expecting to catch a whisper or a stifled colugh,
nothing but my own ragged breath. I pull out my
own note book, jotting down the cattle of numbers are tracked.
They're enigmatic, ordered in a riddm I can't name, but
they set my nerve singing as I turn. The corridor
at my back stretches longer than before, a trick of
prospective or nerves, perhaps, But the ceiling lights ahead blink out,
then flare, worn at a time, as if disturbed by
an insane draft. On the way back to my desk,
I can't shake the sense of being observed, a kind
that culls into you, scalp and sits behind your eyes.
A darkened alcove seems to watch back. The next moment,
it's simply an empty doorway. Every step carry is more
weight than the last. My fingers dam beswat smudge the
pale legal pat holding my list of missing files. If
any one else was here, I'd call for back up.
But the building, like the evidence I carry, refuses to
let me ease away from its teeth. The next day,
I show up early for my shift, hoping the sun
might make the anomalies lest daunting it fails. The city
outside feels all the remote, like a stage set, with
the rump props, commuter's bustle as usual, and lunchtime traffic
fears away from the archives with practiced and attention in
administrative routines churn on as though nothing ever happens. At midnight,
I spend the daytime portion of my shift working with
another night clerk, Hannah, who seems preoccupied with the drudgery
of a four a m. Call from her toddler and
doesn't notice my jumpiness. I try casual inquiries whether she
ever saw anything odd in Room seven, whether the logs
have struck her as off lately. Her answers are polite
but confused. Room seven. That's condemned right, been paying to
jut since my dad played tea ball. She giggles, apologizes,
and pivots back to her screen, as though disinterested. Is
a survival mechanism. The supervisor, mister Laurenceon, asks if I
can cover some overtime. His tone is friendly, but he
avoids eye contact, a trait of all good bureaucrats. But
to night, I wonder if he knows more than he
says Lawrence's own signature appears on a file which roll
for a missing child, the time stamped at two twenty
seven a m. During a week he was supposedly on vacation.
I memorize the penanship, which does not quite match the
loops and sharp descend us he uses in person. A
routine security check yields stranger results. The building's camera grid
logs every motion sensor trigger in the last month, nearly
every night. I precisely to nantine m. An event is
registered in the foul room seven feet, on the microfiche
room below, and in stack sea of the basement. But
the archived fritage is a ruined thing sliced with static
whole minutes flickering in staccato darkness day or night. The
records show the corruptions never happen outside that window. For
the sake of my fraying nerves, I try to fag
the incident to facilities. Their reply returned with automaton cheer.
Minor camera malfunctions and heritage buildings are common during heating cycles.
Please place an I request, if, as she persists, I
could almost laugh at how bureaucracy becomes its own shield.
But none of this gives my skin rest. As dawn breaks,
I find myself face to face with Missus Crook as
she polishes the entry tiles with her ancient mop. She's
been here longer than I have, one of those city
whole fixtures who knows more than she oversays. When she
swipes her badge at the rear entrance, she frowns in
my direction, as if weighing whether to speak. I take
the chance, ever see anything strange by the basement stairs.
I keep my tone light. She shakes her head half
an used strange how I thought? Maybe I don't know?
Some one after ires, Missus Kriik leans on her mop,
the tired lines in her face creasing towards suspicion and
a dash of pity. Sometimes I catch shapes, men in
old suits, hats, like lawyers out of a faded newspaper.
Not your crowd, mind, But they only appear on the
little TV in the cleaning room static if you ask me,
the old flows down. They run on their own schedule,
and rooms evant. She just shakes her head. The some
doors it's better not to open again. Things belong where
he left them. Mestr Sam. She glides her mop back
into motion. Unwilling to say more, Her warning does little
to blunt my obsession. As night falls and the building
drains of people, I've become convinced something is run, not
just in the records, but in their keepers. I check
my own loggins. Several recent interest show my bad swiped
on levels I haven't visited in weeks times, even when
I was logged out to lunch. The handwriting in a
few entries under my name is almost but not quite mine.
The angles are too sharp, the cuffs of rigid stuck
from imitation or rehearsal. I dig through every foul storage
anomally from the way last season, cataloging, serial numbers, cross listing,
checkout patterns, looping three days so precise that even most
skepticism buys in. The missing records drift together like orfering ripples,
always tied to property seizures, banishing tenants a neighborhood in
the city's oldest quarter. Each oddy radiates outward, folding inward
on itself, suggesting a mind at the center of force
orchstrating history, not by accident or attrition, but by stealth.
What gnaws most, though, is the sense that my attention
is anticipated, not persisted. When I write a catalog number
in my notebook, I find that I could in the
margins of the very files I'm searching for rink old
and oily, each note ending in a caloque I count reproduce.
Half an hour or later, the entry vanishes altogether from
the digital listing. My awareness itself feels baited. There's only
one place left to turn to night. At two seventeen sharp,
I step into the corridor again. Sharper more resolved file
Room seven is back, and the internal map pulsing is
a lit node striding down the lengthening hall. A clutchbow
master keys, the folder from last night wished inside my docket,
and a lot book set have never had reason to
get use. The lights overhead blink and bob their rhythm off,
as if remote hands or cycling circuits in time with
my steps. The old door yields before I even draw
the key from mining an invitation or the last warning.
The physical lock turns in loose, obedient silence. The air
inside is color rich with the herbal time that's not
quite tea but not quite unfamiliar. The room has changed.
Floor tiles are polished to a lock of gray. On
the near wall, a massive city map from nineteen seventy
one is burding, faded but unnotated with recent notes. Pushbin's
mark at least a dozen addresses, all aligned with homes
recently scheduled for a demolition under the city's urban renewal plan.
The desk beaar's fresh stacks of unfiled paperwork crossing two
ears bran new property workers mixed with police, missing persons
formed stamped in wrored, their edges crispy and immaculate. On
the far side, a battered rilt of reel tape re
corder sits humming with the quietest, most purposeful were I
press plate holding my breath? Immediately, A chorus of voices
fills the chilly air, some calm, some clipped with fear.
As cis transfer Section B update records by thirteen hundred,
reconvene if witnesses persist. Another voice Laura measured no gaps,
neutralize all record traces, but reconcile before the looper set
The voices tick through formaladies never use in names while
referencing a vanished bureaucratic order. A council with the force
and chill of a court verdict. Then quietly, another voice,
familiar encadence speaks, Do not omit new observers. All files
must close before the next circle. I freeze. This last
voice belongs to the senior archivist, Mysta Paleid, whose pension
should have taken him out of this story decades ago.
I scrambled to the drawers, desperate for something tangible. My
hand close is on a stack of polaroids dated nineteen
seventy five, not just an ink, but faded to the
orange haze of old instant film picture. The three homes
I recognized from my nighty cross checks. Their mail boxes
caught in each frame show names that have appeared on
missing persons files labeled open this week. In the lower corners,
some one has scrolled featured dates in blue grease penciled
entterest for inspections demolition requests still to be reviewed. At
the bottom of the pile is a legal sheet with
my own full name encircled in black. Beside it reads
next observer assigned. Do not let them in. I stare
at the words until my vision pulses the familiar threat
in a simple imperative. Then the lamp flickers and the
shadows in the rumor set by inches as if called
back toward the wall. Invisible motion tugs the edge of
the desk, papers the reel to reel tape and spools.
With a sigh, I stagger backward. The photos and confession
clutch tight in the sudden hush. The rising sense of
intelligence is absolutely not the burden of ghosts, but of
something colder, more deliberate, as if the building itself has
chosen at last to defend its own secrets. The door
slams behind me, The hall is darker, the geometry off
a left turn where none should be light bends away
from the window behind me. Every instinct says I've crossed
a line, that observation has made me vulnerable. In the
forked glow of the corridor, the legal pad in my
hand whispers a promise of violence and percussion. For the
first time since I began trusting this job with my small,
safe anonimity, I realize the truth is not something I
can set aside. The puzzle now wraps around me, and
I am both investigator and intended exhibit. If File Rooms
seven is meant to be se yield, it is because
some history is a structure to resist exposure and whatever
watches from those shuttered corridors which were writing the rules
in real time, starting most likely with me. I stand there,
barely breathing, struggling to gather up the loose sheets and poloids.
My fingers feel not each photo stuck to the necks
by sweat and static. Slowly my senses recalibrate, tuned out
to a frequency I never meant to hear. The whole
building seems to throw with the back round pulse. That's
not quite the ancient plumbing, not quite electrical either. More,
the low, insistent hum of presents just out of frame
outside the door. The corridor stretches longer than I remember.
It's lent, slightly warped, as if the geometry of the
archive has been gently but unmistakably rerouted by design or
something worse. The fluorescent bulbs overhead was louder when I approach,
and the air tastes faintly metallic, like the inside of
a battery. I force myself forward, unwilling to give the
darkness purchase. With every step back toward my desk, I
check over from my shoulder, half expecting to see the
foul room door echine open or a tip of a
shadow creeping interview. I duck through a narrow stairwell, the
walls down cool under my hand. My usual short cut
done to the main level comes out somewhare wrong adjunction
of maintenance conduits and supply crates I don't recognize, as
if even the maintenance staff aband in the space. The
only sign of recent activity is a slot on the
wall where the janitor's sigh and sheet is pinned. A
dozen signatures trailing off into ellegible squiggles. The most recent
entry in deliberate rounded cursives simply says theres two nineteen
a m boarded in progress. All observers to log out.
I leave a maintenance hall as quickly as I can,
pushing open a fire door that shouldn't be a jar.
After irows, it takes me out by the city Deed's vault,
not the ground four is expected. The silence here is
even heavier. My heart flickers in my chest with each
echoing footstep. Somewhere in sacks above me, a book drops
with a dull too deliberate that I freeze. The arch
to bolt is powerful, but the hallway behind me is
lost in shadow. The only aggress blocked unless verrotray steps.
I no longer trust. I move forward, shoes whispering on
the dustless tile, and slip into one of the clerk alcoves.
Here I crouch low. Paper's pressed tight beneath my arm.
The lcove holds just enough light to make out the host,
the chief roster, a print out already yellowed, but then
notated behind in a series of codes and emphatic strokes.
The names haven't changed in weeks, but at the bottom
a new line has been added Observer rotation, a sign
pending incident review. My name in that same looping at
motored hand is the only one listed. My skin prickles
with the certainty of being chosen, not merely present. I
phone up the building directory, dialing mister Paley's extension, though
I know he retired years ago and only returns for
ceremonial things. The line picks up on the second ring,
but is only hiss in the faint rivictick of a
wall clock in the distance. I listened, straining until a
woman's force when I don't recognize mutters Somewhere far from
the receiver, there's another one watching the click and ton
of wine that followers spikes my nose into fight or flight.
Within minutes, my work phone begins to behave or radically.
Text files will not save. Attempts to scan my lisit
photos craft the scanner utility. I try forwarding an email
to my personal address proof of these anomalies, but the
message bounces back flagged undeliverable mail books no longer in service.
Office WiFi spins and drop, then mysteriously reactivates, but only
to present a log and portal for an account system
I've never seen, requiring a badge ID eight digits too
long for a moment, I watch helplessly as digital folders
and the shared drive populate with file names up blinking
and of half familiar records, then new cryptic entries, case
reconciliation cycle three, observer MEMO, ZAMB suppression draft FEEFO. The
disquiet is a living thing. Now. I take the physical
fold as still warm and possibly so for paper left
in the silver room, and open on my own desk
under a cheap led lamp. The first page is a
missing person's report for Denisha Harmon, except it's already been
filled out for next Monday, the last seen date said
in the future handwriting again is near perfect script from
a different error with notations in the left margin scheduled
discrepancy see Report seven B Notify committee before demolition process.
These phrases make my scal crawl underneath pages detailed property
chantsfer histories for houses I passed on my way to
work just this week. Deeds are stamped with both the
original owner's name and smear it underneath, as though of
read and manually it names that are nonsense string of
initials and numerals see EXELM nineteen seventy four. So last
second revision A M. Forden Liepfer. I compare these with
online records, but the city's website times out. The search
feels gray out. While the page is revert to archive
versions dated months in the past. It feels unmistakably, as
though the act of looking has forced the archive to
reride itsself. Through the glass of my desk partition, I
catch the reflection of movement a figure crossing the entry
to Room six just three miles down. I hear neither
footful nor the squeal of door hinges, the light switch
humming briefly before snapping back to steady. I duck lower
heart hammering. My phone buzzes with an internal notification no center.
The message is just a single word, reconcile. Suddenly desperate
for normalcy, I call out loud enough to traverse the
empty hall anyone else on site. My voice comes back
to me not once, but twice, slightly delayed, as if
bouncing off in Saint chambers. The illusion of comfort is
impossible to restore. Now I hear another noise, distinct, mundane,
but still managing to terrify a deskbolt that type used
at the front counter tap shot ws I weight, shoulders hunched,
nothing more. I'm willing to just sit. I force myself up,
clutch my evidence, and stalk the corridor toward the staff lounge.
It's an effort to act as if I'm only chasing coffee,
not the unraveling of my own sanity. The lounge is deserted,
faintly lit by the green glow of the vending machine.
The refrigerator hums, emitting the familiar syro aroma of abandoned
take out containers. I reach for my mug. Even here,
the sense of surveillance lingers. The windows set in the
fire door affects not only my own outline, but something
that lingers just outside the line of sight, a taller shape, indistinct,
stealing my nerves. I tap the work phone and attempt
to video the brick room view, but the screen displays
only a gray ribbon of artifactured pixels, punctuated here and
there by after images of myself in the vending machine.
I step toward the far wall, pressing my ear to
the whollow metal panel separating the space from the main archive.
A fragment of santicles through an ex observer were set
in free IROs insure transfer completed. The voices are wart
by distance, as though spoken into an oil rum, yet
the curtence is unmistakable, both familiar and foreign, as if
belonging to pass in prison. Simultaneously, I back away, palm sweating,
mug forgotten behind, Returning to the corridors, I try to
shake the sense of inevitability. I think for a moment
about simply walking out, leaving the files and whatever secrets
the ark of guards. But my feet won't obey. The
urge to know what weighs, the urge to forget. The
compulsion that clings to this place squeezes tight up with
every unanswered question near the elevators at the intersection with
the oldest wing, and meet Ana again before she clocks
out for the evening. She hesitates, signing, the perspiration slicking
my brow. You are right, you look like you saw
a ghost. For a second, I nearly tell her everything.
My mind floats with the idea of confession, but the
look in her eyes, half doubt, half concern, warns me off.
Just a glitch in the system that pulled an all
night of by mistake, I mumble. She offers a tired,
understanding smile. Don't let the paper ghost sched you this
place it Her voice falters as she leans closer. My
old supervisor told me people used to vanish here, back
before all the renovations. He called a ghost lodgic. You
do your job so many nights in a row. Sometimes
you wake up some when you don't belong. Her words,
meant to soothe, instead drive the chill deeper. When she
disappears into the elevator, I find myself alone again, the
circuit between my growing pile of evidence, in the pulsating
anxiety within these walls titans. I move back toward my desk,
compelled to cross reference the names have gathered with every
available index. A new file copy sits in my print tree,
one that I did not request. It's a personnel of
valiation for a staff member named Samuel b Of, dated
nineteen seventy six. The photo attached to a fuzzy black
and white headshot lurred at the edges, but the shape
of the jaw, the set of the eyes, they look
like mine. The entry records observer assignment and lists three
prior terms, each reconciled with that incidant. I page through
shaking and see detailed notes time, continuity, preserved, memory, event
logged white post cycle, recommend next observer by internal referral criteria, caution, resilience, routine, loyalty.
My signature is at the bottom, initious correct handwriting, irrelqulose
to my own, but with the same shop mess and
antique flourish that haunts every anomaly I uncover. I clutch
the sheet, mind reeling. Every answer splinters into new questions.
Was I always meant for this? This? Their recycle a
script tying me to this desk for loops of history.
I can only glimpse between the lines. How many versions
of sam have paced these holes? How many times have
the files been adjusted just enough to erase the evidence,
to smooth the seams, push the story forward without a witness.
The realization comes soft, but it settles like cement. The
archive is not just keeping city records, it's editing them.
And as I move from shadow to lamplight, the building
leans in closer, anticipating, correcting, looping back. Whatever force rides
to wires and stalks the corridors. That isn't passive. Its
logic is recursive. It anticipates investigation even as it consumes
the investigator. A ChIL drafts through the lobby. As I
return a file to my jacket pocket. The front doors,
heavy and reinforced, rattle gently, and their friends not from
outside wind, but as if something inside wants at my
reflection in the segmented glasses, fragmented split into a dozen
overlapping versions, some turning away a second before I do.
I blink in their line again. The I is crawling
closer to two nineteen a M, the locus of all patterns.
I know with unlinking certainty that I am seen, that
observation is participation, and in participating have committed to the
next act. If I still hope to escape, this history,
or at least record it before the lupre sets. I'll
have to catch the anomaly in the act. I'll need
proof that the world outside still recognizes my face, my name,
my voice, and, if not, at least my own record
of this pile of papers. These trembling words may linger
a little longer, waiting for another observer to walk the corridor,
to hear the voices, to crack the cord of the
aka that always hung us for order, for reconciliation, for
forgetting the building. A sense is holding its breath with me,
waiting for the cycle to begin again. There's a sensation,
part terror and part resolve that pins me in my chair.
As the digital clock on my desk crawls forward, minute
by minute, each digits, which carries the brittle inevitability of
ice cracking underfoot, I know what I have to do
all day. The aucas patterns, timing anomalies, evidence of hercoast,
A tampering staff locks, infected with some one else's hand,
to have pulled me inexorably towards the edge. Now, staring
at my stack of impossible folders and the solar light
seeping under my office door, A recognize that moment has arrived.
I line up everything as best I can. The polari
is stamped with future dates, the legal path page with
my name ringd in thick pen, the audio cassette swept
from Room seven, and the file bearing my own face
from nearly half a century ago. If I don't start
documenting methodically and obsessively, I'll lose control of the story,
maybe even of who I am. Just before midnight, I
close all the blackout shades in my alcove and switched
to my personal laptop. Working by the glow of its
cheap backlet keyboard, I photograph everything with my cell phone,
then scan each page to a hidden cloud drive I
set up in college and never bothered to close. It
feels cartoonishly paranoid, but I want evidence loose in the world,
or wedge against the arc of strange, hungry recursion. I
narrate details allowed as I work, forcing my voice steady
for the mic, documenting anomalies in file Room seven aknown
part as using cycles and retroactive edits to city history,
possibly since nineteen seventy four. Each sentence is a desperate
bid for something real and verifiable that will exist beyond
to night. The bill and groans with its midnight aches.
Whenever I take a breath and listen, I hear slight
movements in the events shifts too careful for any animal
or normal office setting. Twice a spot through the glass
block of my door, a passing shape neither matches the
broad out line or clapping heels of the cleaning shift.
No one else should be on this floor at this ile.
Around twelve fifty eight m my computer logs me out unexpectedly.
The decked up blank summer boots with a flicker. I
durn't command. A new window opens, requesting a badge number
with a nineteen seven as municipal logo. My palm rows damp.
I try again from my phone, but every up crashes
or demands credentials I don't possess. Therefore I can take
a screen shot. The display raises itself, returning to my
home old paper, pale, back dated photo of the city skyline.
The phone vibrates a system of notification, this time reading
only do not let them in. No sender, and a
claws at me, sharp but familiar. By now, I catch
myself cheeing inside of my cheek, grinding myself in pain
and extra if the archive is somehow aware, if it
corrects more than reckers, I need to add before or
it raises not only evidence but my ability to act
at all. Moving fast, I back up whatever I still
can to an external thumb drive. I tug the audio
reel from its box and snap a series of quick,
haphazard photos of every file and log sheet in my
anomaly pile. Never shure which will evaporate first the paper,
the digital back up, or my own collection by one
ten a m. The air feels charged, tinge with static
and dample, like an approaching storm. The building's ancient ductwork
sings with odd are hythmic pains. A subtle metallic draft
passes under my door, bearing that familiar scent of distant
tye in the promise of a reality I can't trust.
When I risk connecting to the city network again, I
met with air after a er or if ill not
found access denied, use a session expired. Yet if I
glance away in back folder names have shifted, A set
called observer reports finishes, replaced by cycle four maintenance. The
time stump spain running. IROs ahead before resetting to the
current time once more, I try uploading to several off
side email dresses, and even a wiki for am I
once frequented, but on each send the page times out
before connection. A single time US file gets through to
my supervisor, Lawrence, and desperate, I add, please check these
records to night Sam. I wait for a reply that
never comes. A clock I have never seen before tick
somewhad just out of sight audible for the thin partition.
With each passing second, the sense of my own time
running thin presses thicker behind my stonum. At one thirty four,
a new surge of determination cuts through the falk. The
only way out is through. I gather my back, pocketing
everything I can't afford to lose, and prepare for a
direct confrontation with file Room seven. But the archive has
changed its ground. The hallway stretches unnaturally lown, the far
unpinched by an anguloar distortion in the florescent bas overhead.
The air feels thicker, braided, with the scent not just
a foson but of something more animal skin, dust and petriture.
The city outside is vanished, lost behind the building's fortress. Logic.
Half we've done the hall. I pause at the staff
bathroom's splash cold water across my face. When I look up,
the mirror's reflection wobbles. My face is mine, but not
hail end subtly shifted, the dark circles under my eyes
deeper than even this night should earn. For a breath,
I think I see another figure standing behind my shoulder,
taller seated, the faces mudge in the glass. I swivel around,
but the space is empty. Down at the far end,
by the old microfiche room, the double doors are a
jaw soft yellow light bills out painting shapes in the
scuff tile. I should ignore it instead, edge forward, pulled
by morbid curiosity in the necessity to know inside the
mycroffiche readers running, clicking through cards on its feed, even
though no hand touches the controls on the screen flashes
a secret to property servey maps stated four years in
the future, annotated with names I recognize from the pending
removal fires. Each entry appears, warps, then banishes, names erased,
replaced by anonymous coats, or simply empty white space. The
machinery winds, then jowns on a card stamped batch. Cycle
three terminate with a lurch. The feed stops and the
room falls dead. Quiet. The noise from the hallway draws
me back. Janitor's trolley wheels rolling with slow deliberation, echo
across the marble. I peer out the cess correct cart
sits abandoned in the corridor. Her flat usk of tea
steaming like the one I found in file Room seven.
Her voice pipes up from behind a wall, urgent, edged
with fear. Sam that dear miss Eskirk. I call, but
it's the echo that answers. One half beat off, there's
a sharp clatter, the sound of her keys hitting the marble,
than nothing, hop pounding. I approach the cart. The fask
is still warm to the touch, beads forming at its
mouth on a cart's battered clipboard, a loose sheet of
pin A note in the same tie leaping hand Leap three,
do not forget All observers retain protocol until transfer confirmed.
My own name is scrolled next to the line observer
status unresolved. Terror Sharper now melts with fatalistic understanding. I'm
not the first. There have been others leaped through the
same ordeal trapped a race replaced by the next name
in a list of bureaucracy would never admit to keeping
something lumber is in the dark beyond the bend. I
catch only the hint of movement a suit. I head
turned away. When I call out, the figure slips down
into a stairwell. The sound of descending footsteps stuttering, less
like walking, more like tap of winding. I freeze beside
the cart, uncertain of weather to follow. Instead, I snatch
up the observer sheet and sprint back toward the security annex,
desperate for more facts. Any leverage against this end is recursion.
The security room has suffered a storm. Cabinet doors hang open,
the racks of key tapes half emptied, plastic reels scattered
like bones. The desktop computer sit sidling, blue screen, flickering
out lines of corrupted code on a sticky note fluttering
by the monitor. Samuel B. Suckle. Observer replacement complete if found,
resume audit. The phone rings just once, an internal extension
broken by static. I hesitate, pick it up, static, then
eclipped accented female voice. File Room seven, all anomalies due
by two nineteen. The call cuts before I can reply.
I stare at the CCTV grid. The feeds are black,
flickering with ghost images, corridors looping into themselves, shapes moving
and jerked backward motion, doors opening and closing to no
one's hand. My own office appears, then blinks out. Another feat,
labeled Reception seventy six shows the front hall as it
might have been half a century ago, shapeless custodians moving
in grainy monochroum faces blurred beyond memory. Frantic, I search
the physical keys. The room's logbook is open to tonight
as entrants scrawled and rounds our cavader to pending update.
But each entry, as I flip back, seems to shift
names replace, events are scheduled. My own handwriting titan cramp
from anxiety blows into the archaic script of my shadow predecessor.
My focus getters from phrase to phrase missing h Court
Transfer nineteen seventy fourth. Lastly two observer status, erasure scheduled.
Something is erasing us, stealthy, systematic. The more we prod,
the more the city reorders is alf to admit only
sanction memory. Reality folds down stream of the paper trail
my hand shake. I need to get out to break
the chain, but instead the compulsion titans. I must see
the process for myself. I must know who at what
is orchestrating this maintenance of oblivion. The only way forward
is to catch the act as it happens. The corridor
to file Room seven now sprawls, swollen by impossible angles
and stretches of shadow. Every door I pass holds a
different weight, some heavy with expectation, others with negation. As
of what wait with then has already decided whether I belong.
I duck into an unused office facing Room seven and
wedge myself behind a rusted file cabinet. A stay motionless
and silent, the ambient freeze deepening with each tick of
the thermostat my watch reads to seven a M. Shadows
converge and fall beneath a thin for us in tube,
and the sense of being observed cress to the point
of suffocation. At two eighteen on the dock, the corridor's
lights warble, bleeding color and burning too bright. Then plunging
to head ash a half dark. The doorknop to File
Room seven shivers and turns. The door swings and wood
on noiseless hinges, but no creature, No worker passes through.
The Pressure in the hallway intensifies. My ears pop as
if pushed by a descending elevator window coal tinged with herbs.
Electric sweeps upward, carrying with it a drifting flurry of
loose file sheets in the distant distorted, an echo of
half remembered voices. Something displaces the air. The stack of
wrechos atop a cart edges across the linoleum, paper shuffling
and rearringing of their own accord. The teacup from before
reappears on the desk at the threshold. The cul of
steam right, as if invisibly disturbed. In a margin of
my sight, there is motion, file folders, pens, disc lamps, polaroids,
all shifting under their own bleak deliberation. A shape mostly
empty suit had hovered by halo. Dark distortion leans over
the desk, placing fresh folders atop fragile evidence. It hands,
when they appear at all, are indistinct, blurred, unreal, the
suggestion of muscle beneath up motorcloth. The voices swell, a
chat form from dozens of tones. File reconcile correct forget,
file reconcile correct forget. Each phrase overlapse, dissonant, collapsing into noise.
My phone hidden under my knee vibrates with a new notification.
Do not let them in. All memory must be scheduled
for review. Await the observer halse hammering, angle the phone
to snap a photo or video, or anything at all.
The moment I do a wave of cold hits, and
the camerap dissolves, replaced by a blank notification screen. I
jam the phone back in my bag and, desperate for
a physical document, snatch the closest file from the moving
supply card. As soon as the folder leaves the cart,
the world royals, the corridor warps, the architectural seems buckling inward,
like the barrel of a lens twisted by a child's hand.
Every console, every door bends away from escape exit signs
spin out of place. The forest heilt beneath my feet.
I stagger forward, driven blind by panic and necessity, and
hurl myself down the hole. The door that was fifteen
paces away, now fifty nat thread now twenty again. I
grip the stole and folder to my chests, certain it's
my only leash to reality. The geometry offers no safe passage.
Every rop folds me back toward file room seven panel
shifting behind me. Corridors and spooling and mispolling, as if
the building remembers not just what has happened, but what
it must soon choose to recall. Noise RUPs, a tempest
of old papers. Ventilation roars, the distant tinkle of a
bell from reception. In the chaos, the entity at my
back lurches forward, voice booming not from mouth of throat,
but from the marrow of the walls themselves. We persist
because the others are forgotten. The record must remain clean.
Do not admit unregistered observers. The phrase is echoed by
every vent, every conduit. A crash into what I hope
is the main switching junction. Shoulder first, darring, the fold
a loose from my grip. It slides beneath the threshold
of supply closet. I no longer recognize A cold prasal
falls on my neck, like the weight of a public verdict.
I turn corner and exhausted out of rational strategies. Standing
in the intersection is a man or, a perfect echo
of one late fifties severe suit I knotted with bureaucratic
compulsion features distended by the same monochrome glare as the
oldest file photos. His eyes are dark and busy scanning
me with an archivist detachment. You should not remember this, Sam,
he says, mildly, his mouth out of sync with the words.
The file rooms endure by process. What is unfiled is
a maid. My own voice emerges as a brittle whisper.
What did you do to them? To the missing people?
What are the loops? He studies me, and in his
shadow something rise as though a dozen faces flicker beneath
the mask, ages and earrors, all tied by the same
thing chain. There are witnesses, He intones, his voice, gathering
volume until it showders the glass patterns that overrun the space,
each removal necessary for city integrity. He steps closer, The
walls poles with invisible in my peripheral vision, the boxes
bare new ghastly labels the race, the two appending cyclophore.
Each observer draws attention to gaps, he says, So observers
become gaps. To feel wise, you'll let go and let
us volu wear. I shake, struggling to keep my wits.
People live, those histories, don't they matter? He gestures, and
the corridor dissolves into a spinning carousel of images. City
blocks are erased and replaced faces smeared into monotony, headlines
blotted out with bureaucratic black ink. The matter it is paperwork,
and paperwork can be changed. A sys hee. Our order
depends on the wreck. We perform the reconciliations. No one
remembers the alternatives. The walls ruble with brutal efficiency from them, forces,
scayed children calling from others, real estate agents declaring new parcels,
a judge's gavel beating in the tumult. I glance my
own image among the observers, my face ovolaid and a
valued by static, all possibilities pinched toward a single compulsion.
Upload broadcasts make no somehow let the world know, if
only for a second, what's being hidden. I careen towards
the reception hall, armful of papers and broken logic folders,
in tow the monitors throughout the building flicker. I sangnd
the button on the nurse into calm voice, shaking as
I shout, this is Sambi, Municipal Reco's night clerk. If
you hear this, the archive is erasing people. The files
are alive, someone, anyone, please check the logs. The entity
archive is to bureaucratic judge. Whatever keeps the ledger shutters.
The front door's fracture pains cracking into spider webs, but holding,
I smash the flash drive of evidence into the auxiliary
us be on the main desk, uploading, poploading, I matter,
voice knifing through bone and panic. I hear doors closing
all around the archives, springing backward in hungry re cursive
loops for a single wicked instant. The upload is accepted to.
Then the computer crashes, displaced, battered with fermented lines in
the single phrase reconcile. A shadow overtakes a glass entry.
The lights blink out, replaced by oily purple tinged darkness.
I fling myself forward, fit in space, shift, the floor
appending beneath my feet. My last conscious act is to
grab a print up one berry, my own name stamped
pending a memory ros A new wound pins me as
I fall. If the record says you were not, he
never were. The world roars, walls inside the archive collapsing
into a vortex reception, flickering between its present state and
some distant see bi atoned architecture. The last thing I
see before I blackout is the slhouette of the arkavists
watching arms folded as if weighing whether I will be
cataloged ap proached. When I wake, the world has lost density.
The hospital room smells sharp as stringent in different paraffin
and lateux. A police officer speaks in the measured tones
of some on board with paperwork. You were found in
the old records wing, locked in, no sign of forced entry.
The overhead lights too bright, carve into my vision, and
nurse checks my wrist and then returns to your station
without meeting my eyes. When the officer tries to hand
bat my bagger, now ended of everything but my phone
and walletie catch is guarded for awn. He says, you
work for the city that shift right, but human resources
didn't find your badge number. Might be a system issue,
he says, with the hollow charity of a man who's
learned not to probe deeper than necessary. They ask questions
I can't answer, not without risking dismissal. Delusional. I mention
the files the police reports as the only paperwork found
in the secure wing was a sheaf of our date,
a tax forms and inventories stunt twenty years out of date.
No sign of Polaroid's tapes or of the legal pad.
My thumb drive is missing my story. When I try
to tell advances off the armor of procedural skepticism, the
attending psychiatrist asks polite circular questions, concludes with a recommendation
for arrest and avoidance of stimulants. After a day, unquietly
released on suspension pending further investigation. Mister Lawrenson is a
freeding from a manual. Calls to say my access badge
is deactivated. He offers no vote of comfort or discipline.
Were re structuring record keeping protocols, he mumbles, then hangs up.
When I check him with colleagues, their response is curdled
with confusion. Hannah's number is disconnected. Missus Kirk, when I
stop her outside the building, looks at me as though
struggling to place a face from a forgotten dream. He
from payroll, she says, then walks away. Eventually, even my
own memory slips, routine becomes poorer, stays Miss Ligne back scramble.
I prowl city forums, searching for chatter about the records,
building vurnishings, any sign that someone else feels the rupture.
Here and there a post pops up. Anyone know why
council minutes from last year are gone? A lost service records?
Anyone else? My uncle's house on Mercer Wasn't that block
always empty? The replies are glid, dismissive. The information loss
takes up quietly and acknowledge beneath the cities on going present.
What's left to me is disjointed and incomplete. My computer
a home still holds a cluster of garbled files, I
misucorrupted scans, broken images, audio hisses with only the recessional
phrase do not let them in. When I play it back,
the speaker sounds like me, but too slow, too far away.
Sometimes I wonder if I truly escaped the archive, or
if a buildings simply edited me into the new cycle
allowed a version of Samby to wander outward, less for
resolution than for narrative tidiness. One night, unable to sleep,
I find myself drawn back to the city's older quarridor
well after midnight, the Records building looms at the end
of the block, its windows blacked entry chained against the world.
A battered sign reads condemned structural instodity renovation scheduled freshwood
covers the loading dog's lower windows, pocked and splintered in
patterns that hint at bounds. From within, A sidelong rain
spits onto the street, swirling in the sodium paper halos
across the avenue. I wait in the shelter of a
closed up tailor's shop, my cook collar high, hands deep
in my pockets. From here, the old basement window is visible,
a rectangle of sut stained glass, jagged rid. The putty
is filled. I watch, expecting nothing, but at touichene m,
a faint, impossible glow stirs behind the boards. The lines
of shadow shift, not random, but with the slow, considered
deliberation of a system hard at work. Through the glass,
I spied the desk, A bone shining teekup stands at
its edge, steam culing off the surface. Shadows flicker on
the wall, form sorting, filing, cataloging records that bare dates
not yet lived. As asquent, the shadows grow sharper, resolving
into suited figures, moving with purpose, their faces blood, as
though the glass itself refuses to admit details. One holes
a file folder in in the low light, turns a page,
a glimpse aheading at the top my own name type
bold beneath the label cycle pending removal. The city feels thinner.
For a moment, every surface charged with impending absence. A
chilcose wind brushes my cheek. Instinctively, I check my watch,
the hands a line two N eighteen a M. The
light in the window gutters, and the shadows on the
wall reach sorting to morrow's history, already racing what will
never be recorded. The light statters, not simply flicking as
faulty wiring would. Each pulse narrows the gulf between inside
and out, as though recognition is working both ways through
the gloom stained glass. My body is rigid, shoulders pressed
to the rough brick, every nerve whispering at me to
move to duck from sight. Because the longer I look,
the more certain I grow that someone or something in
the sunken office can see me just as clearly as
I see them. I step back, careful to keep my weight,
even shoes barely brushing broken sidewalk. The air is dead,
with a smell almost like scorched varnish, tinged by faint
trays of tea leaves. As the minute hand clicks over
to twote twenty the gathering light bend shop, casting the
curve of my shadow along the edge of the bordered window.
A single figure inside a side late profile smeared by
the warped glass pole. Turning toward me. The head tilts
a gesture that feels and cannily deliberate, slow, with the
gravity that belongs to neither stranger nor friend. My breath
fogs with each exhale in the hunch silence. I strain
to hear beyond the hiss of rain and distant city traffic.
Paper rustle somewhere within the walls. Then a voice, disordered
by distance but utterly clear, threats through the building's crack
vent grates. Observer not archived, its status unresolved. That word
Observer lances down my vertebrae. I fight the urge to
look away, afraid acknowledgment itself might draw them closer. A hand,
white backed old with the lea skin of forgotten time,
presses a file against the glass. For an instant the
label is legible. Let us crisp despite the filth. Samuel
b pending cycleph my memory offers up at son echo.
All observers become gaps behind the file. More figures gather
silhouet stacking folders, feeding them through what appears impossibly to
be both the scanner and a mail slaught, a hybrid
contraption older than any city tech, yet alive with digital purpose.
The files pass from hand to hand, lost as quickly
as they surface, their and sucked into the machinery that
sorts the living from the erased. By now, the cold
is deep in my bones. I press my hands together
for warmth, but my palms are slick with sweat. I
reach for my phone, intending to snap a photo or
a video of final cataloging, if only for myself. But
as I tap the camera out the screen Hoole's dark.
The controls frozen. If vibrates in my hand, the old
notification blinking, do not let them in. No matter my
thumb's direction, the camera will not open. Inside the figures
break from routine. One glides toward the back wall, returns
with a fresh file box, and sets it down by
the window. The box is no dust, no label, but
a barco which I somehow no cannot be read by
any scanner in the city. The suited form leans into
a chaff of light, had cocked as though sniffing for
the source of my attention. The impression is less of
being watched than of being recognized, a record re encountering
an entry it meant to delete. The tension tightens. I
want to move, to run, to do anything, but stand fix.
Yet no muscle corperates a flecker of memory away. The
building's landscape shifted the night I nearly didn't get out
of crowds out side ends a glance left, then right,
worry of passers by. But the block is empty, the
world contracted to only light, rain, and these rooms making
under making the city movement inside the leaf figure steps
away from the foul box. They're back now to me.
Another replaces them. This one's shoulders are hunched, the outline narrower,
less at home in the antiquated suit. My skin prickles,
the slope of the neck. The tilt of the chin
is familiar in a way that settles like icewater in
my guts. I squint, willing. The gaster is of the rest.
The figure's right hand lifts gently and more could almost
be a way war beckoning. My fingers clenched, nails, biting skin.
Reason is crumbling, but I need to no needs some
fracture in this pageantry of arasia that will prove to me,
even in this late io, that I haven't already been
written out a distance irons daughter of city life somewhere else, insistent, ignorable.
The light beyond the window shivers again. The suited figures
inside freeze all at once, heads turning in unison toward
the sheet of glass, as if a que one the
here has sounded. For the briefest moment, a face materializes,
my own, or the closest f simily eyes, hollow mouths
set in the flat line of sleepwalking determination. I see
my reflection overlay theirs, see the possibility of becoming another
anonymous clerk, stamped and filed. Abruptly, the glow from the
office flares, then gutters all but the shadows to solve,
the window reverting to black opake silence. Rain gurgles in
the guttering overhead, and the city resumes its tire breathing.
My heart batters, my ribs, a release of breath. I
don't recall holding stepping back into the dark corning of
the shop front, I let several minutes croll by, not
trusting the stillness, bide in time until the pressure in
my chest loosens. Each second heightens the uncanny sense of
having breached protocol, of being observed by something as methodical
as it is in human. No movement returns behind the glass.
The bordered doorway rumored for renovation is just plywood and
walt locks once more. Yet the certainty persists inside the
Arkhouse mechanism is not only intact, but thriving, taking stock
and preparing for its next cycle. When the edge of
fear finally dulls, an over away, one step, then another,
hands jammed deep into pockets, as if to anchor myself
in a body that, for all I know, my furnish.
With the next narrative headed, the city's pull settles back
into ordinariness. A couple arguing in muffled tones of block away,
a delivery van eydling by the cot, the soft bark
of a dock. The walk home passes in a fuque.
Each corner and crossing bears a residue of memory, places
that might have held more substance if not for the
quiet work of the archive. I keep seeing tiny cracks
in reality's facade. A street sign with no name, a
store front that sells nothing, an apartment buzzer panel with
half the buttons missing. Each gap I suspect is not
natural where but deliberate maintenance holes in the tap street
to smooth over a city that can't bear to keep
all its own stores. Inside my apartment, where the odors
of dust and old coffee ground me in the part
of myself that survived a pace beneath the dim light
of the kitchen. The window looks over a narrow alley,
the city's towers distant and serene. On the table, my
laptop sits where I left it, destol Biken's unchanged, a
handful of audio files labeled with dates, A folder of
photos no only half accessible. When I open the first
scan one of the forms snatched from the fire room,
the image bleeds and reforms text written. With each attempt,
the name Samuel Bu becomes redacted. Pending cycle of the
file's creation date loops backward, then forward, finally rendering his
error record not found. The audio file won't play, not
through any ordinary means. I use an old tape deck,
splicing the reel with trembling fingers. The playback is fractured.
Forces stitch with static a new cycle observer status unresolve
and maintain reconciliation, race records city in Tigridif a pause,
my voice unmistakable, overlays the rest as if already dubbed
into the system. Do not let them. The sentence breaks,
distorted by the same digital hunger that snawed at every
piece of evidence at dawn, Sleep is impossible. I begin
the slow circuit of the city's online spaces, message boards
dedicated to loss and found, local mysteries, old photographs. I
post in threads that attract only cryptic responses. Anyone remembered
the old record's office on fifth Three replies all occur,
No idea, you sure you are not thinking of court
house archives? And then hours later a user name cycle
into nine. Try room seven, but don't stay too long.
After dark, I write back fingers line, desperate for more horror.
You what do you know? But the thread closes itself,
post erased user band, my own reply marked as duplicate content.
For the rest of the day, no further mentioned surfaces.
It as though even digital trails are being scrubbed, sanitized, erased.
A week puls passed in slow, oxygen starved increments. The
world is normal on the surface. Mail rives, groceries run
low my father calls about a plumbing leak, and yet
the city around me is dinning newspapers, mispelled names in
the community section. A high school disappears from a map
in a city tourism pamphlet. My own neighborhood newsletter arrives
in a mail, the block address shifted by a number,
as though the building itself had always been two doors
down from reality. More than once I see a familiar figure,
a suit, a posture too formal for the neighborhood, watching
from the far side of a busy plaza at the
entrance to the subway. Their faces refused, detail lost in
the crowd. But each time I see them, my skin
shrinks tight with the certainty that the archive is insuring
the routine of forgetting. The tension ratchets tighter as the
days pass. Sleeplessness brings odd memories to the surface. I
recall a COmON conversation with Hannah, which on review could
not have happened, as she no longer exists in any directory.
I find a slip of paper in my jacket pocket,
truced in that same leaping and tea canned cycle transfer
pending if observed reconcile immediately at dusk one evening, my
phone rings, a number blocked, no name. I answer static,
a click, and then a whisper file. Room seven is open, Close,
what must be closed? The line goes dead before I
can respond. Desperate for any sign of shared reality, I
return to the municipal building the next night, circling its perimeter.
As dusk stains the city gray and purple. The sight,
shrouded with scaffolding and tarp, is still dead, windows packed
with dust and memories. Yet as I drift along the
chainling fence, the smallest window near the ground brightens with
the glimmer of phosphorescent blue. A flock of movement flashes inside,
a slant shouldered suit, gloved hand farrying a folder from
one impossible shove to another, My chest height in's hands,
brackening the fence until my knuckle's pale without thins the air.
The heavy door at street level, battered in chain shifts,
then settles a subtle invitation or warning. I consider walking away,
melting back to the anonymity of city life, fading into
a routine, free from the recursive meddling of those inner rooms.
But the compulsion remains wound into whatever story the building
has written into me, A back away crossing the empty lot,
determined this time to leave the cycle closed. The city
a town myself can survive without another observer. I make
it halfway to the next blot before the memory strikes,
the cup of tea in touch, but ever brimming the
whispered directive, do not let them in. It's not just
a prohibition, but an ongoing instruction. A warning shape is
leturgy for the forgot. Unable to fully let go, I
try again to catalog what remains in my kitchen, surrounded
by every half salvaged fragment of proof. I built makeshift
portfolio printouts of faded locks, screenships of directory listings that
flicker and vanish, hand written notations that bleed at the
edge like wet newsprint. I narrate every stet, giving voice
to files and faces the city no longer remembers. I
reach out to an old friend of Darren once a
press in turn at the city paper. I avoid detail,
asking instead if any rumors about lost archives or missing
properties have surfaced. His laughter is tinny, uncertain. Every one
loses files, sometimes sam the digital transitions a mass of
whole neighborhood probably vanished just because some one missed upward folder.
But ye remember room seven. My voice is sharp, unexpected.
There's a pause. Wasn't a condemned They used to kid
about files walking out on their own, But it was
probably just molt. You worry too much, man, There's no
point persisting. We say goodbye, a little clipped, another old name,
another intended memory resigned. I close my laptop and sit
at the window as night per trucks its hold on
the city. There's a moon to night, hung sharp as
a pin through the haze, thin enough to cast only
the weakest shadows. I wonder how many blocks in the
city have been subtly pruned, how many names exist only
as echoes and back up sowers, or errant memories. As
sleep sidles up, I hear again the voice from the tape.
We only exist because the others were forgotten. I know
now that it's true for me as much as for
any one in those files. One restless dawn. I find
myself pent in hand writing my own name on the
last page of my notebook. The act feels less like
a signature than luck, an attempt at preservation, a trace of
myself left ink, Perhaps enough to resist a Narian grip
of revision. I did it, draw shaky circle round the
name and add observer unresolved memory active. It's petty defiance,
a minor monument against the machinery of forgetting. But it's
all I have. I'm when I rise that morning, I
trust I will still be here, that my apartment won't
be occupied by some one else in every memory but mine,
that the building across town will keep its secrets, at
least for another cycle. But I know, deep down that
the record is always hungry, always revising. I'm a ghost
in the city now knows it in pencil in margins.
That might be a raise to morrow. As I prepare
to leave for work, a different job now save a
profile ires that promise sunlight rather than ciphling dusk. I
shake my pockets for keys, wallet, phone. There is a
slip of paper I don't remember, folding orders scheduled to
tu nteene m observer status review. The handwriting is my own,
except it isn't not any more. Rain drums in the
roof city, humming with a purpose. I will never again
trust us benign. Yet as I step out, I keep
the scrap of paper close proof against the lurking machinery
of the unpiled, the unresolved, the simply forgotten. And on
nights when I pass near the condemned archives, when the
iolines close to the change of her, when the airways
deckon the city's collective memory thans, I sometimes glimpse a
flicker behind those shuttered windows, desk with a teacup awaiting file,
a shape, sorting the paperwork of erasure. I do not
go closer, I do not let them in. But each
time I feel the weight of a gaze, I wonder
if I already have. And when the clocks of the
city slip for a moment and I find my name
almost on the tip of my own tongue, and no further,
I remember always what the record demands to be filed,
is to be real, but only for as long as
the archive allows. It's two nineteen a m. The wind
sifts through the allies and somewhare deep inside the municipal archive.
The next cycle is starting, and that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.