[CLICK]
[DIALOG IS SLIGHTLY MUFFLED, LIKE SOMETHING IS COVERING THE MICROPHONE]
SASHA
Do you have a tape recorder lying around somewhere?
TIM
Why would I?
SASHA
Dunno, but if Jon’s going to get our statements…I mean, you’ll need something to record them with.
PAST ARCHIVIST
(under his breath) Damn. (out loud) I can’t believe I’ve already grown so used to that thing being at hand that I forgot I don’t have one with me. Blast. I don’t want to wait until tomorrow, but…
ARCHIVIST
I’ve got one. Several, I dare say. Give me a moment to find an empty one.
[SOUNDS OF FABRIC RUSTLING, A ZIPPER BEING UNZIPPED. NEXT WORDS ARE LESS MUFFLED]
MARTIN
Here. This one’s ready to go.
PAST ARCHIVIST
How sensitive is the microphone?
MARTIN
It’ll pick up what it needs to pick up.
ARCHIVIST
I suppose you’d like the rest of us to step out for a minute while you do this.
PAST ARCHIVIST
…
No. No, I—it can’t hurt to have everyone here, I suppose.
ARCHIVIST
…Are you sure? I know you don’t usually like an audience when you’re recording statements.
PAST ARCHIVIST
If we’re all here when the statements are made, we won’t wear out the tape with everyone listening to it trying to get an idea of what they missed. And I can just get everyone’s in one go.
MARTIN
(very low, barely audible to the tape) It might help him if you’re here.
ARCHIVIST
Hmm.
[CREAKING SPRINGS, LIKE SOMEONE SETTLING BACK ONTO A SOFA OR LOVE SEAT]
PAST ARCHIVIST
Right.
(deep breath) Statement of Martin Blackwood, Archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, regarding the…infestation by the being formerly known as Jane Prentiss. Recorded direct from subject, third May—
TIM
Fourth. It’s just gone midnight.
PAST ARCHIVIST
Fourth May, 2016. Statement begins. (softer) Whenever you’re ready.
PAST MARTIN
Okay, well, first off, I should…probably tell you that I’ve actually known he was around for a few days. More than a week, actually. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say, but I—I did know. We’ve talked some, so I knew who he was and I knew Jane Prentiss was nearby, but he kept telling me I’d be safe, that the worms wouldn’t attack after dark, that—that I wasn’t what they were after. So I didn’t really worry about it too much, except to keep an eye open during the day.
Tonight…last night, whatever…after all of you left, I went to find him, and he was…agitated. He told me things were progressing more rapidly than he expected, and he was going to need my help. He’d just got finished explaining what it was he needed me to do when I heard Tim calling my name. I went out and found him and Sasha there and—I tried to get them to leave, honestly. I wasn’t altogether sure about all of this and I didn’t want them to get hurt. But they insisted on staying, and kept asking me what was going on.
I—I think I would have told them. Over dinner. Tim put stuff in the break room so we’d have it for dinner, we were going to eat in the Archives and I was going to…say something, maybe. But when we got back to the Archives, we heard noises coming from your office, and when Tim called out to find out who was there, he told us to get into the document storage room, right away. We were on our way in there when a whole bunch of worms came…pouring out the door of your office. We made it in safe, luckily, but—well, it meant I didn’t have time to do what I was supposed to do first, so we were trapped.
I told Tim and Sasha what I knew—that he was me from the future, that he was here to stop the world ending, and a little bit about what his plan was. Then Sasha mentioned she could hear…something.
PAST ARCHIVIST
Something?
PAST MARTIN
Singing. In the walls. She said she could hear singing.
I told her she shouldn’t be able to. That room’s soundproof. Future Me told me that. But she insisted she could. She said it was louder near one of the walls, the one that wasn’t by the door, and—and she prodded at it. Well, she kind of hit it. We thought it was an exterior wall, but her hand went through it. It was just plastered over and—more worms came out. Not many, but enough. I’ve been kind of storing fire extinguishers in there—I-I was hiding them, I know it doesn’t make sense, but I just felt like I had to hide them from the worms—so I grabbed one and sprayed until the worms stopped moving.
We grabbed a couple each and went through the new hole. It probably wasn’t safe to stay in that room anymore, and anything was better than being trapped, you know? I didn’t know how many worms might be down in that hole or if they’d all come out into the Archives, but I thought if we could at least slow them down in the walls, we’d have a chance to get back out into the main Archives and stop Jane Prentiss once and for all.
Turned out there were—there are tunnels down there. It’s dark, unsurprisingly. Sasha had one free hand, so I gave her my torch—I’ve been carrying it around wherever I go—and she shined it to show us which way to go. We started looking for a way back out. At least where the worms might have got in. The trouble is, the corridors all twist in on themselves—you go a few steps and nothing makes sense anymore. We got around this one corner and there were a bunch more worms, and they were moving a lot faster. We fought them off, but in all the chaos and confusion I fell behind, and it was just me in the dark. Tim and Sasha were gone.
I tried calling out to them, but it’s—it’s dead down there. It’s like the walls just swallow sound. It didn’t even echo. I realized they couldn’t hear me, and obviously I didn’t have a light anymore, so I just made my best guess at where they might have gone and kept going until I found a set of steps. I climbed up them and found a trap door overhead. I pushed it open, and…well, I was in the Archives.
And I found Jane Prentiss.
She—she smiled at me. Like she knew me. Well, she did know me, I guess. She spread out her hands and asked me if I could…if I could hear the singing. I didn’t answer her—well, not with words, anyway. I still had the fire extinguishers, so I tried spraying her with them. All it did was slow her down for a second, but it at least gave me some breathing room. I managed to get some distance between us.
The floor was seething with worms. It was…it was disgusting, frankly. I sprayed a bunch of them and stomped more, but I knew I’d never be able to get them all before—well, before they got me, so I went back to Plan A. I grabbed a trashcan and threw a bunch of the statements out of the Discredited section into it, just shoved them in there until the thing was good and full, and then I cleared a space under one of the sensors and set it down. I pulled out the lighter Future Me gave me and managed to get it going and lit the whole stack on fire.
It went up pretty quick, but…well, I had to set down the fire extinguishers to do all that, and the worms got too close. They came at me and—you know, getting bitten by those things hurt. I know that’s probably really obvious, but it did. The fire alarm went off about then, but the noise didn’t seem to faze them. And then the system kicked in. I guess there was enough smoke to set it off. And there was this—this scream—like tens of thousands of things without mouths screaming all at once. That’s the last thing I remember before I blacked out.
PAST ARCHIVIST
…
Why the Discredited section?
PAST MARTIN
What?
PAST ARCHIVIST
Why did you specifically burn statements from the Discredited section?
PAST MARTIN
Well, I didn’t—
I didn’t want to risk burning something important. The Discredited ones we knew for a fact were false, they were all the ones you could…record normally, so I figured…if I was going to set a fire, it would be best to use those, you know? Ones that wouldn’t—wouldn’t be important later.
PAST ARCHIVIST
No, that—that makes sense. Thank you, Martin.
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST
See? There’s plenty left on the tape.
PAST ARCHIVIST
Hmph.
Were you two together the whole time you were down there?
SASHA
Yeah.
PAST ARCHIVIST
Then I think…
(clears throat) Statement of Timothy Stoker and Sasha James, Archival assistants at the Magnus Institute, regarding the infestation by the being formerly known as Jane Prentiss. Recorded direct from subjects, fourth May, 2016. Statement begins. In your own time.
TIM
We didn’t notice Martin wasn’t with us at first. Not until I asked him a question and didn’t get an answer. We tried to retrace our steps, but…like he said, those tunnels don’t make a lot of sense. I thought we were totally out of luck until we came around a corner and ran slap bang into him, or at least we thought we did. I asked him if he was all right and he wanted to know what the hell we were doing there. He sounded scared and angry and…that’s when we realized it wasn’t our Martin.
SASHA
I told him about the wall being hollow. He said he knew that, but he’d hoped we’d have the sense to stay put, so I explained about hitting the wall because I could hear that creepy singing from behind it even though it was supposed to be an exterior wall. He got kind of upset, actually, and asked if I’d been bitten, but I hadn’t. The worms might have been faster down there than they were in the Archives, and quieter and more aggressive, but we’d managed to kill them all whenever we ran into them, so it was all right there to a point.
We asked him how to get out of there. He said he didn’t know exactly, but that there was a trapdoor leading into the Archives, he didn’t remember precisely where in the Archives it led to. He said if we followed the corridors, we’d eventually wind up at the steps, but that we’d have to be careful.
TIM
That’s when we heard the scream. Scared the hell out of both of us, really. Martin Prime barely flinched, though. Actually looked kind of relieved. He told us that meant Jane Prentiss was dead, which probably meant the CO2 system had been triggered, so we needed to find Martin and get the hell out of the Archives. I asked him what he was going to do, and he said he supposed he’d just stay down in the tunnels, now that they were worm-free, and dodge the police if/when they came down investigating. Find a room or something. Like we were talking about the Ritz instead of what I’m pretty sure is the remains of the old Millbank Prison complex.
And then the door appeared.
PAST ARCHIVIST
Appeared?
SASHA
I swear, Jon, it wasn’t there before. One minute we were standing at a completely unremarkable bend in a hall, and then—my hand was getting tired, so I switched the fire extinguisher and the torch, and when the beam moved it caught on this yellow door right behind Martin Prime. I asked him if that was a safe room to go into, and he turned around and glared at it, then knocked. And…
Michael came out. He giggled, in that creepy way he did before, and asked us if we were lost. Then he held the door open and said he could show us the way. I—I was about to go in, but Martin Prime held out his arm to stop me and said, “They don’t need your way. Leave them alone.”
Michael seemed surprised, and then—I don’t know. Worried, maybe? A little angry? And then he smiled again. It’s really disconcerting. He said, “Well, you’ve been marked, anyway, so you can come through safely enough, if you want to. Will you do that for them?”
TIM
I told him to go. I said that if the police were going to be there, the last thing they needed was to see two Martin Blackwoods, you know? Especially looking almost perfectly identical and all. Don’t want the police thinking they’re seeing double, they’ll have us all arrested for being so drunk it affects reality, right? I asked if he knew where I lived. He said yes, so I said we’d meet him here. He hesitated, and then he nodded and followed Michael through the door—and it just disappeared. Like it had never been there.
We tried to retrace our steps, but “back” doesn’t mean all that much down there, really. Finally we found another door. It wasn’t yellow, so we opened it, thinking it might be the way out, but…no. Just a small room. Square. Dust covering everything. Cardboard boxes full of cassette tapes.
PAST ARCHIVIST
That’s where you found her.
SASHA
Yes. She was sat on a wooden chair in the middle of the room. No worms. No cobwebs. Just an old corpse. I recognized Gertrude Robinson right away. She was slumped forward, but I could see that her mouth was open, like she was trying to tell us something. Almost dropped the torch. Luckily I didn’t. We ran like hell and found the trapdoor not long after that and…well, you know the rest.
PAST ARCHIVIST
Mm.
…
How did Gertrude Robinson die?
SASHA
I didn’t see. Didn’t really look, and anyway, it’s been almost a year. Cause of death could have been almost anything at this point.
PAST ARCHIVIST
Tim?
TIM
…I don’t know. Not for sure. I mean, it was dark and Sasha was the one with the torch, and all I cared about was that she hadn’t been eaten alive by worms or whatever, but—
PAST ARCHIVIST
Tim! How did she die?
TIM
She was shot, okay? In the chest. Three times that I could see.
PAST ARCHIVIST
…Right. Right. Thank you, Tim.
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
MARTIN
I’m not altogether sure that’s a good idea.
PAST ARCHIVIST
(tired and testy) I need a complete picture of what happened tonight. That includes you.
PAST MARTIN
Can’t it wait until morning?
ARCHIVIST
(also sounding tired, but more resigned than annoyed) Best get it over with tonight.
PAST ARCHIVIST
Statement of Martin Blackwood…Prime…er, time-traveler…regarding et cetera. Go.
MARTIN
In my defense, none of this was supposed to happen like this.
I’ve been lurking in the Archives for the last two weeks. Mostly trying to get my bearings again—I haven’t been down there in ages, really—but also trying to avoid being seen by any of you. Haven’t been very successful, although fortunately, the only one who never caught me during the day was—well, your Martin, so I could play it off. Our plan was to wait until Jon made it to the Archives, and then the two of us were going to tackle the worms while they were still under the Institute, clear out the tunnels, and clue the rest of you in. Until then, I was just waiting.
I’ve also been trying to help you all, as best I can anyway. I discovered, kind of by accident, that I can still get a feeling for what statements are real and what aren’t. It’s not as strong as it was when I was still an Archival assistant, before…everything happened…but one or two of the more powerful ones still speak to me. I didn’t dare put them on anyone’s desk because I couldn’t risk getting caught, or seen in the same place as your Martin, and I can’t…fade into the background like I used to. So I’ve just been kind of clustering them together in one of the corner shelves.
The thing was…well, I panicked. I admit that. Tim caught me out this morning and I realized after we talked that if he didn’t know I wasn’t your Martin, he’d figure it out quickly enough. And to make matters worse, he’d told me to take the statement I was holding to you. I was going to just leave it on your desk, but you were just getting back from your…meeting when I walked in. I’m sure I made it far too obvious that I wasn’t who I was claiming to be. I couldn’t run the risk of one of you telling…anybody I was here, so I figured I had to make a move. I thought if I cleared out the worms quickly enough, I could just wait about in the tunnels until Jon turned up and we’d go from there.
As soon as your Martin came to talk to me after you’d all left—(pointedly) we thought—I told him the basics of what I had in mind. He wanted to help, but…well, the whole point of all this was to keep all of you safe, so I told him the best way he could help was as backup. I gave him the lighter—honestly, I didn’t realize I was the one who had it—and told him to set up something that would burn enough to trigger the fire system if need be, and that if any worms got past me, to light the fire and lock himself in the storage room and stay there until the worms were all dead. He was starting to ask me more questions, I think, but then Tim called out and we had to scatter.
I couldn’t really hear what was going on, but I thought I heard Tim leaving, so I went into your office. The wall behind that shelving unit is another one that was just plastered over, which I’m sure you know by now, so I just kind of shoved them out of the way and, well, slammed my way through. And there the worms were.
I was just getting the fire extinguishers ready when I heard Tim yell out. I shouted for him to get back in the storage room—I assumed your Martin was with him—and went after the worms with everything I had. I could hear the squirming and—I knew that wasn’t good. In the tunnels, they’re a lot quieter, they don’t make that…noise. They’re faster, too. Something in the Archives slows them down. I’d been hoping the infestation would be small enough that I could handle it myself, but I realized a lot of them got past me and I was just hoping your Martin had been able to get the fire going. I didn’t realize how many worms got past me until I ran into Tim and Sasha later.
[A FULL FIVE SECONDS OF SILENCE]
PAST ARCHIVIST
Did you remember it?
MARTIN
Sorry?
PAST ARCHIVIST
The statement. Jane Prentiss’s statement—the one you brought me earlier. Did you remember it? Is that how you knew it was…real?
MARTIN
…Yes and no. I knew we had that statement—I mean, you said when I first made my statement about being trapped that you thought there might’ve been a statement from her somewhere in the Archives, and I remembered we’d found it in our time, but that’s—I didn’t know which one I had on hand when Tim found me. I just…it felt real.
PAST ARCHIVIST
How could you possibly not have known whose statement you were holding? The names are right at the top.
MARTIN
…
(faintly, as if the word is forcing itself from between tightly clenched teeth) Fuck.
(in a normal tone of voice) I couldn’t see it.
TIM
…Why did none of you stop me from making stupid comments?
SASHA
I’m sorry, is there a time you’re not making stupid comments?
TIM
Why didn’t you say anything?
MARTIN
Honestly? It’s been a long time since I heard you joke with me. I kind of missed it.
TIM
Christ. What kind of person do I turn out to be that you’d think I would tease you about that?
PAST ARCHIVIST
What are you talking about? Why couldn’t you see the name?
MARTIN
I’m blind.
ARCHIVIST
…
(in a choked half-whisper) He didn’t.
MARTIN
Jon…
ARCHIVIST
When he said he could—I thought he had a better idea than—i-if he was going to--
MARTIN
(overlapping) We both knew it was probably going to be the only way. It’s fine.
ARCHIVIST
How can you be so calm about this? You got dropped in the middle of the Archives, mid-infestation, alone and blind and—you didn’t want this! How can you just accept it?
MARTIN
Well, I’ve had two weeks to get used to it. Okay, it’s not ideal, but it’s better than the alternative.
ARCHIVIST
And which alternative would that be?
MARTIN
The one where we have to watch each other die, Jon!
[A LONG SILENCE, SAVE THE WHIRRING OF THE RECORDER]
…Sorry, that—I didn’t mean it like that, I—
ARCHIVIST
(softly) No.
(a bit louder) No, you’re right. I’m sorry.
MARTIN
It’s all right, Jon.
[CLICK]