Work Text:
A flash of consciousness. Then Darkness.
"Somebody's here, it's him." The shouting of an unknown voice woke him up, but everything remained dark.
"It's not him. Not anymore", said another voice, this one a woman.
"W-what's going on?" His voice worked just fine, even if he couldn't remember having used it in a long time. "Where am I?"
"Mr. Bouchard?" The woman's voice asked.
"Ye-Yes? I think... that's my name."
He heard a sigh. Then the woman said: "Take him to the station. Find out what he knows and maybe make him a tea or something. But this isn't who we are looking for."
A sound of agreement, and two sets of arms heaved him off the ground, stabilizing him but also holding him in a firm grip he couldn't escape from. Had he always been this big? Why didn't he have a sense of his body? Why did everything feel so foreign?
"Also, please someone put a blindfold on him. No offense, but you look kind of gruesome right now." Huh? Wait- A terror settled in his stomach, built up and reached his lungs, he started to breathe heavily. Panic flooded his veins and his mouth got dry. With shaky hands he reached to his cheeks and up and ...they were gone. He didn't have eyes. He wasn't just blind they were ... gone.
A sudden rage bubbled up in him. He did this, he had ... who? The rage vanished as soon as it had come, and took the fragments of a memory with it.
Someone put a blindfold on him, and then he was led outside. The sounds of police sirens coming closer and closer. A car door being opened, and he got sat in a backseat. To the station, the woman had said. A police station. But why? What had happened? Had there been a crime? A Murder? Was he the victim or just a witness? Why didn't he remember anything?
His head hurt and he tried to just let it go for now and adjust to the situation.
They sat him in an empty room. Was it a prison cell? An interrogation room? He just knew he was alone in a smallish room, with a desk in front of him and on an uncomfortable chair. Getting up seemed like too much effort, did it even matter where he was?
After what seemed like an hour, someone came in and he heard a tape recorder click on.
"Good evening, Mr. Bouchard. I am Adam Kean Allen, Head of the Police Department, London. We were called earlier today to the Magnus Institute, to what originally seemed like a malevolent ... person wrecking havoc, but were later directed towards the tunnels by a former colleague. And there we found you."
The voice sounded pleasant but there was an undertone he couldn't place."What is the last thing you remember?"
He tried to think back. Tunnels. So that's why the air had had that smell of dirt and stone, and why it had been so cold. But how had he gotten there? What had he been doing there?
"I just remember darkness. And then I fainted I think? Until the police found me."
"Hm." A pause. "When did you start working at the Magnus Institute?"
Right, that name had rung a bell. In his mind he saw the old small building, the pillars next to the entrance. He remembered the dusty smell in the Archives, the dread you felt whenever you went near the Artifact storage, his small office space, papers over papers...
He remembered collecting files and documents from the different departments, sorting and organizing them, making copies ... ugh, how often the printer had not worked, and how surprised he had been that they didn't have any office computers. Sure, it was an investment, but still, who didn't? He had had to file everything manually.
"Yes, I worked there, was it 1994 or 1995 when I started? I was just a filing clerk but.." he trailed off. Why had he worked there? The pay had been not much, but enough to live on. Enough to live free from his parents control. His parents ...
He had wanted to work to escape his parents. Sure, they weren't bad parents, they just ... God. Even in his time working at the institute he hadn't thought about his parents, avoiding them however he could. He had never been good enough, They had had high hopes for him, Oxford maybe. His grades had never been good enough. They had never trusted him. They had even installed cameras in his room, making sure he was doing his homework and not sneaking out to party. By the time he had realized that he'd never be good enough, that he wasn't allowed the slightest mistake, that it didn't matter how hard he had tried to please them, he had run off.
Stayed with a few friends. Met new friends, well, maybe he shouldn't call them friends. But he guessed in the end, it had had been his own decision to try the drugs. It wasn't the miraculous escape people liked to pretend it was, but being a bit happier, thinking a little less about his fucked up home life ... it had been better than nothing.
When he was high was the only time he didn't feel watched.
It was as if his parents were following him, even there, living in some acquaintances' house. He knew he'd have to move on soon, and also get a job to be able to afford drugs and also, well, food. His parents had always had had enough money but according to them, that was just because they were very careful with how they spent it, and that meant rarely ever spending it on him. He hadn't felt too bad about taking a few hundred with him when he had left.
That night he had wandered around alone, not being able to be around people when he knew he couldn't pay rent anymore and couldn't afford the drugs that helped him stay sane. He had thought, taking a walk, getting in the fresh air, well, as fresh as the air can be in London, might help. It hadn't. After two hours he had been freezing, even in late spring, and he had just decided to use some of his last coins to get a warm coffee but just when he had wanted to enter a pub, there had been a spider on the door, and he had decided otherwise.
He had walked a few more blocks and found himself in Battersea Park, right next to the Thames. In the dim lights of the street lamps, he had seen a small, fast moving stream on the ground. When he had bent down, he had seen it were spiders, hundreds if not thousands of them, all moving in one line in one direction. How curious. Having nothing better to do, he had followed them. He wasn't sure how it had happened, surely he would have noticed, but when the stream ended, the spiders just vanishing into a small hole in the ground and he had looked up again in that gazebo, he had been trapped.
Thick white nets shimmering in the dim light had encased the gazebo on all sides. It had been way too big and too thick to have been made by any spider living in England, he had been sure of that. But when he had touched it, with his scarf at least, it had stuck to it like nothing. There was no getting out of there.
There had been a movement in the corner of his eyes. A rumbling in some bushes. He had turned and waited. And then a thin, black, angular stick had appeared, and a second, thin, black, stick had appeared, and he had realized it were legs. The rest of the enormous spider had appeared, and had walked over to him, with no sign of hurry. He had tried to scream but there had been no answer.
Then the spider had reached one entrance of the gazebo. He had looked around desperately, but there was nothing he could have used to fight it off, and he had nothing on him at that time, except for his lighter. In a desperate attempt, he had waved it in front of the spider, the small flame mirrored in its eight eyes. The spider had seemed unmoved, and had raised its fangs, and had ripped the net apart in one swift motion.
He had stood there, lighter in his hand, as far back as possible without getting trapped into the other net, when the spider had just ... left. Without hurry, without any obvious cause it had turned again, moving right back to where it had come from. He had stood there shaken for two minutes before deciding that it might come back, and running all the way back to what he had currently called home.
He hadn't told anyone about this experience. Who would have believed him. Spiders that big don't exist and if they would, there was no reason why he wouldn't have been eaten. He suspected he'd just have been accused of overusing cannabis.
But in some ways it had been a turning point. He had made an effort to find a part time job, to find another apartment, and had even applied for courses at the Christ Church in Oxford. But that experience had never really let him go, and so when he had finished his Economy degree he had applied for a position with the Magnus Institute.
The man sitting opposite him cleared his throat. "Do you remember any incidents at the Magnus Institute that were ... strange?"
Kind of a weird question really, everything the Magnus Institute did was look at strange things happening. And yet...
His voice was shaking ever so slightly when he replied. "Yes."
"Do you want to make a statement?"
"I don't know."
"I won't force you. But maybe it would help, let it all out?"
He nodded. "Alright."
"Good. Statement of Elias Bouchard, September 25th 2018, London. Statement taken directly from subject. Go right ahead."
"It was in April 1996. I had been working at the Magnus Institute for about two years by then.
It had been a rough week. Someone from artifact storage staff had died. I guess that just ... happens sometimes when dealing with dangerous artifacts, but knowing that didn't make things easier. Everyone was tense, and several of the Institute staff had been calling in sick, the rest of us having to work more to make up for it.
I was .. I still had a bit of a drug problem. I managed to keep it out of work, but when it's the only way for you to not feel afraid …
I took a break in a side room of the archive. Nobody ever goes there. Gertrude usually sits at her desk, going through files and evidence, if she's in the institute at all, and not traveling the world to .. well, doing whatever she does. I felt relatively safe there, I mean there were some old statements, but they were already cobwebs on them and they couldn't have been that important I reasoned. Mr. Wright, our boss, was away for a lunch break or a meeting, so I decided to risk it. I rolled a joint, and was very careful to not spill anything, even tough my fingers were shaking.
It worked, at least until I lit it with my lighter, and managed to drop it, right onto some of the old files. Dry as they were, they began to catch fire fairly quickly. I panicked and ran in the main room of the Archive, looking for anything to stop the flames. It couldn't have taken more than half a minute for me to find the fire extinguisher stored in a corner, but the damage was done. I managed to put out the fire, stopped it from spreading and taking the rest of the archive with it, but I think at least one full rack of statements was lost.
Extinguishing fire is not as quiet as rolling a joint, and takes a lot longer, so I was surprised to see no one had noticed me apparently. Everybody must have been gone for lunch, or was out researching something. I decided to just leave the room in the state it was in, nothing I could do now could make it better or worse, and just pretend I had been in my office space the whole time.
Five minutes after I had sat at my desk again, fingers only slowly stopping to shake and blood still pumping fast through my body, Mr. Wright came back. When he entered the room, he looked - furious, there was no other word to describe it, and absolutely terrifying. Maybe his meeting hadn't gone so well? I mean, there was no way he could have known what I had done, right? There was no way he could have even known that something had happened in the archives, nobody had been there to report on it.
And yet, he came to my desk. his face was .. calm again. Just the way he looked at me was notice that anything was amiss. He stared at me so intently ... like a snake focusing on it's meal.
"Elias", he said. "Why don't you come to my office for a minute. I would like to have a talk with you."
I didn't have any good reason to say no, so I followed him. I knew he had hated my drug use, and had put great effort into trying to get me to stop using them, but he had seemed to tolerate it when I only did it at home, far away from work and I had been doing a good job, considering we still weren't using any computers and everything had to be filed manually.
He locked the door after me, my second clue that not everything was alright.
"Why don't you take a seat." He pointed to the chair on the other side of his desk. I sat down.
"Care to tell me what you were doing during your lunch break, Elias?"
"I was just ... i-in my office, d-drinking some coffee," I began.
"Elias." There was a warning in his voice. "I'm not going to ask you again. What did you do during your lunch break." There was some sort of compulsion in his voice and I told him about the accident in the Archive room, it felt like the words were just plucked off my tongue.
"Elias, Elias. I thought we had talked about your ... drug use. But that's not enough. Not only do you try to smoke At. Work., making yourself useless to me, no, you also manage to set a considerable amount of statements on fire. I really do not like fire in my Archives, Elias."
I tried to form an apology, tried to say I wouldn't do it again, but he shook his head.
"Oh no, I'm afraid that won't do. But, lucky for you, I have a better idea. It's interesting. I always felt you were ... special, when you came here two years ago. With your parents, so used to being watched, and that little incident with the spider ... maybe they did send you here."
I had no idea what he was talking about, why it would matter that my parents were control freaks, and from my talks with other staff nearly everyone had had at least one encounter with something paranormal before they started working here. I glanced at the door, but it was still locked, and the only way out. Mr. Wright was smiling now, his grin getting ever so slightly wider.
"You are still going to be very useful to me, but the next part may be a bit .. unpleasant, so allow me to take a few precautions."
"While I do that why don't I just distract you with some information. Hmm.
Did you ever wonder why your parents were so obsessed with watching you? You always thought it was their pride, their desire to have everything go to some of their plans. But have you ever thought that they were just trying to protect you?
Vivid pictures appeared in my mind, blocking out everything else. I could see everything as clearly as if I had been there. I was in the house of my parents when I noticed the lights flicker out, one by one.
"One of your neighbors had gotten involved in a cult recently, and was not too happy about your parents not willing to join her."
I felt something around my wrists, something cold, but I could not move, a steady stream of images overtaking my mind.
The house went completely dark, and I heard a scream in the distance. A baby's scream. My scream. I moved into that direction quickly, as quickly as possible in the dark. A hand tried to flick the light switch in the room, to no avail. The window was open and cold air was coming in. A light appeared from behind, a torch, and even if it barely shone through the darkness, it illuminated enough. There was a baby in a crib. My crib. In the window there was a creature that seemed to have been made from my worst nightmares. It's eyes glowed yellow, and fangs showed bright and sharp, it growled and snarled angrily, but with a torch shining in it's direction it glanced one last time at the baby and then vanished.
"They only tried to protect you, you know. Not that you could have known. It must have been really hard for them, to have you run away. To have you leave them behind without as much as a word.
It's a bit late for regret now.
The pictures finally stopped, and my horror at the creature, at the terror my parents must have felt did not have a chance to wane, as I realized I was handcuffed to the chair. I rattled at the cuffs, but they were tight, and even though I could reach the pin code, I didn't know the number to it.
"What are you doing? Why are you doing this?" I pleaded.
He looked at me with almost pity, but also a strange sense of satisfaction. "This body is getting kind of old. Maybe you did something in your life to deserve this." He gagged me and I began to scream, but it was muffled, and I was sure nobody outside would be able to hear me. "But maybe it's just ... bad luck."
He took out a knife and started to cut out my right eye. I must have fainted from the pain.
I don't really remember anything afterwards, just waking up in the tunnels."
There was a moment of silence, and the tape recorder clicked off.
Then the policeman spoke again. "Well. I guess you can count yourself lucky you survived. But you might want to know that 24 years have passed since that incident. The year is 2018 now.
For all I care, you can stay here. Soon it's not going to matter anyway."
The voice was still pleasant, but with terror he recognized the familiar undertone.
"If I were you, I'd still keep my mouth shut about it. Goodbye, Elias." The he left the room.