The Watching Post by Richard Farren Barber
Published 26 January 2012 as part of the Writing East Midlands and Lincolnshire Echo Short Story Competition
Cold air brushed Jack’s face as he stepped into the tunnel. He felt it prick at his skin and slip between the layers of his clothes. It didn’t matter what he wore, it didn’t matter how hot it was up top, it was always cold in the tunnel.
His breath plumed from his lips and drifted towards the lamps that speckled the walls. Orange light buzzed around the bulbs, but that only served to make the pools of darkness that dripped between them so much deeper.
He hated coming down here and it didn’t matter how many times he stamped up and down the steps, how much the soles of his shoes wore away the stone, he hated it. But still he came for his shift: six through to ten every day of the week. One week off in four for good behaviour, as Banny put it.
Tonight the walk seemed longer than usual, as if he had to descend further down. It was an age before he saw the outline of the door frame that told him he’d reached the bottom.
Jack paused after fitting the key into the lock and pulled on his sunglasses. In the darkness he felt around for the key and when the seal broke the tunnel filled with white light.
It took his eyes a moment to adjust. People had gone blind in this place, it wasn’t just a myth; Mark had come out after his first shift with his eyes burnt to shrivelled raisins in their sockets. The sunglasses helped, but they were never enough to kill the glare completely.
The chamber was scarred with grooves and it was easy to imagine ancient people carving out the system with knives and blades. Five cages dotted the floor of the cave, pierced by light from the large spotlamps set around the floor.
Banny sat on the Watcher’s Stool. “Is that four hours?” he asked. He sounded dazed, drugged.
“To the minute…” Jack said. “Anything new?”
“Not a thing.” Banny started up from the stool, staggering towards the door. He snatched the key from Jack’s hand and hurried across the cavern. A moment later Jack heard the lock snap into place. The sound still had the power to churn his stomach. The first time he’d heard it he’d run to the door screaming, scratching at the wood with his fingers. He was more restrained now, but that flash of terror and the desperate desire to escape never left him completely.
Jack didn’t take the stool immediately. Instead he blinked the worst of the glare from his eyes and walked a circuit of the cave. He stopped beside the closest cage and stared through the bars. The bright light burnt through the sunglasses onto his retina and when he closed his eyes it left a ghosted image.
“Behaving yourself?” he whispered through the bars.
He finished his circuit and took his seat on the Watcher’s stool and stared into the nearest cage.
“So what have you got to tell me?” he asked.
Some people talked to the ghosts, others simply sat there for four hours and daydreamed their shift away. It didn’t make any difference, trying to get through to them was like trying to scratch metal with a bath sponge.
Ghosts. Apparitions. Freaks. Everyone had a different name for them. The technical name, the description that showed on all the reports and forms and readings, was anomalies. He was here, 100 foot underground, watching anomalies.
Sometimes Jack thought that if he stared into the cages hard enough he could make out silhouettes. He gave them names: Frank for the thickset shape in cage 4, Natalie for the slight shape he sometimes saw in cage 2. He didn’t tell anyone, a confession would probably earn him a trip to psych for an in-depth evaluation and a stamp on his HR record which said he was no longer suitable for the Watcher’s Stool.
“Any news?” Jack asked Natalie. The shadow within the cage flexed, almost withered away to nothing, a patch of grey in the heart of white. “Does it hurt?” he thought aloud. No-one knew the answer, he’d asked the geeks with their instruments and their beady black eyes. ‘Of course it doesn’t hurt, they don’t have any nerve endings: They can’t feel anything.’ Jack held his silence. The geeks were more intelligent than him, he’d barely scraped the grades before leaving school, still it seemed to him that nobody knew enough about the ghosts to be able to speak with any degree of confidence.
“Why are you here?” he asked. He didn’t know if the entity trapped within the cage was male or female, young or old. The only thing anyone could say for certain was that there was something there because all the sensors…Jack shivered. The temperature in the cavern dropped 10 degrees in as many seconds. It happens. Impossible to get used to it, but he’d learnt to endure the phenomenon. Those that didn’t rarely lasted to their first payday.
“That you?” he asked Natalie. He could feel the hairs rise all over his body. Banny said that whenever he experienced a cold blast all the metal fillings in his teeth ached. Jack was adamant if he ever needed fillings they would be ceramics.
“Just once,” Jack said. “If you gave some sign that you actually knew we were here, it would make it all worthwhile.”
The temperature in the cavern rose; Natalie playing hard to get.
For a moment he thought he saw the grey mass in the heart of the cage flicker. Did that mean something? Was she trying to communicate with him?
“Do you…” And then he stopped, remembering where he was, remembering those tapes whirring high above his head and the college kids listening in on headphones the size of buckets.
Screw them.
“Do you ever get lonely?”
The grey shadow flexed. Natalie flexed. He was sure of it this time.
“I know, it seems insane when we’re down here 24/7 and you’ve got those in the other…” He looked around, couldn’t bring himself to say the word. For the first time since he’d taken the job it occurred to him to wonder whether Natalie knew she was in a cage.
“But still, it can be lonely even in a crowd.”
He tried to look at her from the corner of his eye, the sort of coy glance he might try on a girl in a nightclub, hoping to be noticed. It didn’t work. It never did. He thought he saw…
The geeks told him not to go near the cages. No explanation, no reason – just don’t go near the cages. Sit on the wooden stool and wait out your four hour shift. It was like the geeks were worried that if he got too close the anomalies would reach out through the bars and… what exactly? But the anomalies couldn’t escape the cages – they’d drilled that into him on the first day.
Jack moved a little closer to Natalie. It was like being frightened of a cloud. There was nothing there but water vapour and maybe the suggestion of a form.
“You wouldn’t hurt me, would you Nat…” He cut off the rest of the sentence, it wouldn’t do to let the geeks know that he had names for them.
Another flash of grey.
Jack put one hand on the bar of the cage. The wood was damp. Ectoplasm the geeks called it.
He took his hand away and wiped it clean against the leg of his jeans. Nothing but water. He looked around the chamber. There were cameras staring down at the cages, but most of the time they weren’t running; whenever they turned them on the screens filled with interference. The geeks said it was proof of paranormal activity. Maybe it was. Probably it was; they knew best.
Still, Jack didn’t hurry back to the stool. He wound a path between the cages like a satellite trying to break out of orbit. He travelled out to the cage at the back and then around to Natalie once more, always back to Natalie.
“Help me.”
Jack looked behind him. Torn between two conflicting thoughts: That he’d imagined the voice and that someone, most probably Banny, was playing a trick on him. Had to be that because he’d heard a voice. Soft, almost silent. A woman’s voice.
“You get that?” he asked.
The speakers crackled, but there was no response from the geeks upstairs in their control room.
“Hey! You hear me?” he called.
The speakers crackled again, but there was still no response. They were too busy playing ‘World of Warcraft’ over the institute’s superfast broadband connection, Jack thought.
“Hello?” Jack whispered into Natalie’s cage. He was aware how much his voice trembled over that one word. He stared past the bars into the mist, for once hoping to see nothing, no grey wisps, no shadowy silhouettes. The mist shimmered.
Jack backed up until he almost tumbled over the stool. How long had he been down there? Minutes? Hours? When would someone come to relieve him?
That was the worst of the shift: no clocks, no watches. It wasn’t that they were banned, it was just that there was no point having them. He hadn’t believed that and so for his first week he’d worn his watch. On some days he’d sat there and stared as the minute hand raced around the clock face, on other days he’d actually seen the hands go backwards. More than the cages, more than the bright lights, more than the flittering movement he caught at the corner of his eye, it was not knowing the time while he was in the watching post that drove him mad.
“Please let it be over,” Jack whispered. During sessions like this the pay was not enough. The pay could never be enough. He sat back down on the stool, the legs rocking on the uneven ground beneath his shaking body. “Please let me out, please let me out.” It was getting hard to believe that he would ever hear the key turn in the lock to free him.
A dark shadow hung in the cage at the back. Jack felt the scream catch in his throat. He was too scared to make a noise, too scared to do anything except watch with terrible fascination as the figure coalesced around the mist.
Jack knew he would soon break and run for the oak door, gibbering and pleading to be free. Soon, but for now he rocked back and forth on the stool and watched the ghost emerge.
“Can’t escape the cage,” he mumbled to himself. “Can’t escape the cage, can’t escape the cage.” He recalled the promise from the orientation on his first day, and now he clung to it like a lifebelt. “Can’t escape. Can’t escape…”
“Help me.” The soft voice again. Natalie.
Jack stared into her cage. There were signs of movement within the mist. The white spotlights pierced through the vapour, shredding it, but in the heart of the chamber a small nugget of darkness remained. Natalie?
At the edge of his vision he was aware that the other cages were also affected. Each of them showed a fragment of life, twisting in the white mist.
They’re coming.
Jack tried to remember his training. There was a thick manual dedicated to this possibility. There were words, protocols, procedures. All of them were lost, like his mind had been washed clean by the spotlights flaring across the cavern.
“Help me, Jack.”
He could feel the spotlights burning his cheeks. He peered into the bowl of bright light, it burnt flecks of black and silver and grey onto his retina.
“Natalie?” he asked.
The laugh was light, almost girlish. The mass of grey in the heart of the mist lengthened, stretching out to become something.
“Not Natalie,” she said. “But you can call me that.”
“What is your name? Who are you?”
“It hurts Jack, can you help me?”
“Who are you?”
“Where am I?”
Jack looked around the cavern, lost for an answer. Not Natalie. The words hurt, more than he expected. It was just a name, a name he had given her so why did it make a difference? He felt… betrayed.
“Will you help me, Jack?”
“Help you escape?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t.” He let go of the bars of the cage and started to move backwards.
The grey mist swirled into a black cloud and she came through this rage. A figure stretched out of the mist, a face torn in agony. Black pits instead of eyes, cheekbones sharp as blades.
Jack screamed. The sound left his mouth and when he breathed in he could taste her: old lavender and dry soap.
Black hands, gnarled and withered, reached out and seized Jack’s fingers.
“Help me, Jack, help me.” Her mouth twisted and he sobbed, to hear the soft, quiet voice of Natalie, his Natalie, issued from this terrible creature.
He felt her touch upon his skin. Dry and raw.
“No,” Jack said. “I can’t..”
“Help me Jack, help Natalie.”
“You’re not Natalie,” he cried, his voice rough with pain. “You’re not Natalie.”
“I can be Natalie for you.”
“No.” He shook his head, stepped back from the cage, back towards the watching post. He knocked over the stool. The mist heaved.
“I can love you Jack, I…”
“No,” he shouted. His words ripped through the chamber, echoed off the walls. The mist in the cages, all the cages, shivered.
He stumbled to the door, feet tripping over the uneven surface.
“Come for me now. Come for me now,” he whispered. He put his head against the door, listening for the sound of feet coming down the tunnel, listening for the approach of the next shift.
When he turned back to the room they had slipped their cages. They stood before him, a loose collection of shadows that ebbed in the spotlights.
“Can’t escape the cages. Can’t escape the cages,” he whispered, like he was trying to remind himself, like he was trying to tell them.
“Jack,” Natalie said softly.
# # #
For a moment the figure that entered was bathed in bright light. The watcher staggered towards the centre of the cavern, hands up to block out the worst of the glare from the spotlights.
Jack heard his own voice ask, “Is that it?” He sounded distant, as if he was listening to himself along a canyon.
“Yeah, that’s your lot.” The woman said. He couldn’t remember her name: Hazel? Frances? Natalie?
Jack watched Hazel-Frances-Natalie as she adjusted the sunglasses on her nose. She seemed to be staring past the bars and into the cage, staring directly at him.
“Behaving yourself?” she whispered.
A man walked out of the door. Jack recognised the shape of the body, there was something familiar about it. He heard the lock snap into place and then he was alone in his cage.
