The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S6E05

Episode Date: October 25, 2015

It's episode 5 of Season 6. On this week's show we have six tales about tremulous technology, looming locations, and superfluous superstitions.The full episode features the following stories. The free version features only the first three tales.Trigger Warnings"On Spiderbite Key" written by L.O. Phillips and read by Mike DelGaudio & David Cummings. (Story starts at 00:04:00)"Emergency Dispatch" written by Megan Rose Thomas and read by Erika Sanderson. (Story starts at 00:27:20)"Manufacturer Recall" written by M. Grant and read by L. Bentley & Erika Sanderson & David Ault. (Story starts at 00:39:10)"I Was Born an Ill Omen" written by Nat Prance and read by Peter Lewis & Erika Sanderson & David Ault. (Story starts at 01:05:10)"I Have Two Bodies" written by Rona Vaselaar and read by Jessica McEvoy. (Story starts at 01:24:00)"One Night in Slawson Furnace" written by M.N. Malone and read by Mike DelGaudio & Jessica McEvoy. (Story starts at 01:35:00)Click here to learn more about JC MultimediaClick here to learn more about Nat PranceClick here to learn more about Rona VaselaarClick here to learn more about Mike DelGaudioClick here to learn more about Erika SandersonClick here to learn more about David AultClick here to learn more about Peter LewisClick here to learn more about Jessica McEvoyPodcast produced by: David CummingsMusic & Sound Design by: Brandon Boone & David Cummings."On Spiderbite Key" illustration courtesy of Lukasz GodlewskiAudio program ©2015 - Creative Reason Media - All Rights Reserved - No reproduction or use of this content is permitted without the express written consent of Creative Reason Media. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a horror fiction podcast. By listening to our stories, you are choosing to be frightened and disturbed for your entertainment. You do so at your own risk. Brace yourself for the No Sleep Podcast. It's the No Sleep Podcast. I'm David Cummings. Thanks for joining us. On this week's show, we have six tales about tremulous.

technology, looming locations, and superfluous superstitions. Well, we're less than one week away from the big day. Yes, Halloween arrives on Saturday, and we're working hard to get our special shows ready for you. As usual, we have our free, full-length Halloween show with almost two and a half hours of tales to make the spooky holiday frighteningly fun. And for our our season past members, you'll get your own exclusive bonus episode with over two hours of stories. That means plenty of tricky traits for one and all. If you know of people who enjoy this horror-hungry time of year, who don't yet know about what we do here at No Sleep, please consider letting them know about us. We'd love to be a part of the fun. We're going to work hard to make

sure the episodes are ready on Saturday, so check your feeds and the web. website later that day to know as soon as the episodes are released. Oh, and speaking of our website over at the no sleeppodcast.com, by the time you're listening to this, we'll have our brand spanking new website up and running. Sure, it took me a couple of years to get to it, but thanks to the tremendous help of developer Jeff Clement and the artistic design of Unka Odja, the new site is ready for those bloodshot eyeballs of yours. And you may be asking, isn't Jeff Clement that talented voice actor and producer we've heard

on the show before? Well, yes indeed, that's Jeff. Not just an audio wizard, but a web developer extraordinaire. I highly recommend Jeff if you're considering a new or updated look to your own website. Check the show notes for a link to Jeff's design company, and of course swing by the No Sleep Podcast.com to check out our new digs. Easier navigation, a fantastic new look, and photos and bios of our regular contributors. It's all waiting for you now.

So there's no time to waste. All Hallows Eve beckons to us. So let's fill our ears in the meantime with these six spooky tales and start the show. In our first tale, we journey down south to the Florida Keys. As author L.O. Phillips explains, it's an area where his grandparents grew up and met, but his grandmother's childhood on a tiny island in the Keys gave her a crippling fear of the water, a fear explained by his grandfather many years later. Performing this tale with me is Mike Delgado,

So steer clear of shallow water, especially when you're down on Spider-Bite Key. My grandparents were from the Florida Keys. They were born and raised there on separate islands. He grew up in Key West, the city, and she was raised among needle palms and little white houses on a tiny island on the east side, called Spider-Bite Key, for reasons lost to living memory. My grandpa said explorers and surveyors sometimes just name things after whatever happens to happen to them there. He and his brother once fished on burnt bacon lake out in California. So probably some hundred and seventy years ago, some dead man got bit by a black widow.

I'll never know. Nobody lives on spider bite key anymore. The hurricane in 35 made off with whatever crumbling habitation was left on that little fly. Speck Island, and it's belonged to the vines and beetles ever since. My grandma was married and gone by then. She left home young. My little sister Ruby and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents when we were kids. Winters and summers, my dad would drive us down from Charleston and deposit us there on the

soft sand, warm white like the inside of my arm, of a sleepy little island called Key Pulpo, home to about 200 old folks and gentle crazies. Not much there for tourists, or for anyone really. The power was spotty, and it was a rattley 45-minute drive up a hairy old road and across a little bridge to a little torch key for groceries. We loved it. It was an enchanted place. My grandparents' old bungalow was right there on the beach not 20 yards from the water.

Winter and summer, we clambered over legy mangrove woods and snorkeled out over the long bench of shallows that stretched from the beach, catching bright, quick, white croakers with our bare hands. My grandma had already started to lose her mind then. Even Ruby knew. She was scared of the water, my grandma. Pretty strange for someone who had spent her whole life on an island about the size of a mini mall. She wouldn't even take baths or get in the hot tub grandpa bought for his arthritic joints.

She would use the old camp shower in the back of the house and we'd all have to sit in the front room to give her privacy. She'd never get near the ocean during the day, not even to watch when Grandpa taught us how to swim. She didn't even like to look at it out the front window. Something happened at night, though. Most nights, three or four a week, even in sheets of hot rain or the thick buzzing air of a thunderstorm, she would get out of bed late, quiet, and walk barefoot out of the house and down to the beach to the lip of the water. and she'd stand there and stare out for as long as it took grandpa to wake up and find her bed empty and follow her shallow little footprints down the sand.

Ruby and I would wake up to him softly, plaintively bleeding her name. Twyla? He would call and we would crowd together on my bed and watch out the window as his slippered feet kicked up sprays of sand behind him and as he took her gently by the shoulders and steer her back up to the house. She never resisted that I saw. It was like she was still asleep with her eyes wide open. She would track crumbs of wet sand back over the living room carpet.

For a long time, my grandpa didn't like to talk about it, and he'd get testy and taciturn when I asked him. Finally, the winter I turned 12, he took me for a walk around the island. You know, your grandma grew up on Spider-Bite Key. He paused as if that was supposed to mean something to me. When I only nodded and looked at him, he went on. Weren't many people on that key. Wasn't much of anything.

Wasn't even a road. Had to row out if you wanted to get to town. Real backwards little island. He looked sidelong at me like he was checking if I understood. What did people do out there? I asked him, and he stopped walking. And I think the innocence of the question took his voice away for a minute. Finally, he went back up to the tree line and took a seat in the shade. I followed and

sat by his side. Back in that day, there was a lot of ships coming and going past the keys, going to Cuba and the Caribbean, or going down to Mexico. Ships from all the way up in Baltimore, New York, Halifax used to come by here to stop and trade and let the men, Well, let him have a little fun on shore before going out on open ocean. I felt the twinge in my stomach then. I could sense that there was something sinister in what he was saying that he did not want to have to explain to me. They'd have to keep a ways away from the Keys till they got near Marathon or Key West because there's so much sharp rocky bottom out here.

It's real shallow, you know. easy to get your boat tore up the old lighthouse at key west would guide them in safe except if your grandma got him my ears twitched my mouth dried up i had no idea what he was saying he looked at me with a strange intensity that made me nervous you asked me what people did out on spider bite key Well, they didn't have no lighthouse or no... Nothing to sell to a sailor. They did have a little old catamaran boat and your pretty little grandma, though.

She was a sweet-looking girl. Nine or ten or eleven when she first started. I was suddenly aware of my heart beating in my ears and a sick, sour feeling in my stomach. Even at that age, I thought I had a pale, formless idea of what he was about to tell me. But I was wrong. She'd row herself out into the shipping route with a lantern. That leaky little boat would be tossing around.

She'd be soaked to hell, hair all over her face. She'd swing her light until the ship saw her and changed course. She'd row out and they'd take her. take her up on deck, just a tiny little girl. She'd tell them her boat was taken on water, and it was, slowly, always had been, and she was out of strength to paddle to shore. What they must have made of her, I'm sure I don't know. And she'd tell them to watch out.

There's sharp reef around here, say it made the hole in her boat. She'd point out to a spot in the water with big old eyes And tell them to keep away from there To skirt around And god damn if they didn't listen to a dripping wet little old island girl Time after time after time He stopped and shook his head She was a sweet-looking girl

Grandpa what did she go out there for He looked out to see and smiled bitterly. You ever heard of wreckers, Bert? I wasn't sure if I had. The word had a familiar ring, something from the adventure comics I had sometimes bought at the dime store, but I shook my head because I wanted him to tell me. When your grandma told the ships where to go,

she wasn't doing them a favor. She was steering them out into where, where she knew there was rocks and shallows. She was running them aground. And when she did, her people would row out from the dark where they was waiting, and they would climb up into that ship, and they would tear it apart. Take everything they could use or sell. And one of them would grab up your grandma and row her back to shore.

They'd bring her back coins, candy, silk flasked. flowers, peacock feathers, patent leather purses, and even a black fur drape once. She knew they was stealing. She said they told her they was taken from people that had too much and sharing it around so everybody could have some. She justified it in her mind. Well, she was a baby. She didn't know what was right and she didn't know what they was doing. after they rode her back home. The chittering of insects and the deep trees behind us seemed so loud in my ears right then. I knew what my grandpa was about to say before he said it.

They had a nice, clean operation. They would strip the boat, break it down with axes and pry bars, enough to let it sink out of sight in the shadows. They'd break down the crew, too. I don't know how they did it exactly, hopefully quick. She says she never heard shots, so they must have beat them. Maybe just tied them up and threw them in. Hope it was quick, though, I do.

I don't know when I started crying, but I was by now. I felt sweaty and cold in the humid shade. My grandpa put his warm, gnarly hand on my back. She didn't know what they were doing? I choked my throat all tight around a big lump. For a long time, she didn't. I don't know what she thought. She was just a little one.

He sighed and leaned forward with his hands on his knees. He was almost doubled over, as if his stomach felt as sick as mine did. She caught on. Some of the older island kids was teased. her about it she had a lot of kids jealous what with all the presents she got she didn't even know what they was talking about first she told me she didn't understand until one of the other girls got mad at her for something tried to rip off her fur and asked her how do you like walking around in a dead man's clothes that was when she got it all at once

She says she didn't cry. She just walked home and sat on her bed until it was dark out, and her people came to get her and sent her out to sea with her light. She didn't fuss none. She got in the boat like always, swung that light like always, clambered up inside the ship. Then she cried. She begged them to take her away, her to Key West or Cuba, let her wash plates or cook beans until they were far enough away from her island that she could be safe. Who knows what they made of that? She wasn't done begging them when her people moved in. Guess they figured when the ship turned out to sea instead of into the rocks that something was happening. She turned around and saw them coming over the port side with

their axes, pry bars, long knives in the light. She backed over to the starboard rail, just sat on it, swung her legs over and went off the side. Wasn't but 15 years old, throwing herself into that black water. The first mate on board, he didn't see what was going on. He just saw this pretty, teary girl going over. He jumped over the side to get her She could hear the violence up on board Screaming She knew how to swim a little

But there in the dark In the big rough wakes off the side of a big ship She lost her head She grabbed on that poor crewman While he tried to hold her above water And she climbed on him And she pushed his head under Not on purpose. It's just something people do, you know, when they're scared of drowning.

She climbed up on him and he couldn't stay up and he couldn't breathe. He drowned right there with her arms around him, both their legs kicking, people screaming up on deck, wet sounds of axes, salt water in her mouth. Horrible, horrible. He was rocking back and forth a little now, pain on his face. All I could think about was my sweet grandma, her gentle, senile blue eyes, her knobby hands gripping her knitting as they had once long ago gripped a wet drill uniform coat on a dying, kicking sailor. What happened?

I said, my voice a dry whisper. Same thing that always happened. Her people went and got her and put her in a boat and put her back to shore. And she didn't go out anymore. They picked some other sweet little girl, younger, to go out on the water with the light. And the next year I met her in Marathon, working at a lunch counter, just 16. She was so quiet, shy like a mouse. I said I was going to Colorado to work for the USGS after college,

and her blue eyes just lighted up. There was a long silence between us. The sun was setting behind our backs and the shade we had sat in, stretched long, gray towards the waterline. The ocean was still as beveled glass. Colorado's landlocked Grandma's nightwalks got worse over the years I spent less time at Key Polpo once I got into high school

I had baseball in the summer and couldn't abide the thought of going three months without seeing any girls besides Ruby She came back from summer at the key and sat on my bed and cried to me that Grandma was fighting Grandpa now when he went to take her back to the house She slapped at him and screeched that he had no right, no right to take her away. Ruby said she sank in the sand and cried and cried and Ruby had fallen asleep to her crying. And in the morning, Grandpa drove her down to Key West to see the doctor. After she came back, she had three different bottles of pills, stayed in bed most of the

day. I visited that winter, drove down myself in my beat-up old Chevrolet. Grandma had this empty look in her eyes when I went to her bed to say hello. Grandpa made us call. coffee in the kitchen and we sat silently in the still afternoon for a long time. She tried to walk out into the ocean. He broke down in tears like I had never seen before, crying into his hands on the old teak table, sucking in high breaths and keening with a sorrow I could not at my age understand. My grandma died the next spring. We all drove down me, mom, dad, and Ruby for the social.

service. It was just us and some of dad's cousins and some friends of Grandpa's from Key West in the mainland that I'd never seen before. She was buried on the property, on a little grassy mound to the side of the house where you could see the kitchen window in the backyard in the ocean. Grandpa buried her. I stayed after everyone had gone and helped. Did you all get to live in Colorado? I asked him as we stood in the winnowing twilight, him leaning on his shovel. We sure did. We spent four years. We were real happy. Lived in Montana for a while, too, and New Mexico. She loved Los Cruces, white sand, no ocean.

How did you end up back in the Keys? His shoulders slumped. My uncle owned a lot of property around here. beachfront lots said it'd be worth real money one day i didn't know it was going to be like this i just knew she didn't like the water i didn't being married to somebody don't necessarily mean that you know them real well in the morning i woke up to mom rattling around the kitchen making coffee and tea after a while i decided i couldn't sleep anymore and got up to join her. The sun was peeking up on the horizon,

throwing long yellow light over the water. I pushed open the kitchen window and took a long breath of the cool salt air. Then I saw it. I turned in horror to my mom. Get Grandpa. Her grave was open. Her grave was open, and she was gone.

She was gone. and there were drag marks, deep gouges in the sand, long streaks that led down the mound across the beach, past the dark mark of high tide into the froth of surf. Grandpa came down from the house, his slippers kicking up sand behind him, until his legs went out and he dropped onto the white beach, on his hands and knees, sobbing, an absolute horror at my grandma's obscene, gaping grave. Oh, God! I'm as old now as my grandpa was the first summer me and Ruby came to visit.

I've been married 17 years. Jenny and I like the beach. So to our kids. Most summers, we go out to Pizmo to see some of her family and kayak out along the dark, rocky shore. Water's cold out there, not like the Keys. It's gray and opaque. I still like it. I take a double kayak out with my daughter.

Jenny takes one with my son and we paddle out and look at egrids and elephant seals and those strange blue jellyfish that pulse just under the surface that stick to your fingers if you reach down and touch them. I'm not afraid of the water. I'm not. But when I reach down alongside my kayak and dip my hand into that green, gray deep, I feel a certain slow dread, a creeping awareness of this whole huge, unknowable. universe I'm bobbing at the top of. There's a cold, seething anger in the lapping of the waves. I try not to wonder what's at the bottom, dozens or hundreds of feet below me. I know there must be human bones down there and lost shoes and dropped phones and wrecked ships and soda bottles. The ocean is a grave you can never dig up. Sometimes when I skim my fingers over the surface,

I have this unshakable feeling that there's another set of hands down there. Just below, mad and lonely, trying to reach up to grab me, to yank me in and drown me in that slate darkness. But whatever might be down there, it didn't drown my grandma. That's the thing. It did something worse. In many countries, including the UK, the emergency phone number they dial is 999.

Not 911. But as we learn from author Megan Rose Thomas, the emergency dispatch officers face the same challenges no matter what country they're in. When one dispatcher receives a series of calls from someone who can't or won't speak, the race is on to figure out how to help the caller. Performing this tale is Erica Sanderson. So stay on the line and speak of a little. up when calling emergency dispatch. I am a communications officer. When people dial 999 and ask for the police, I am the one they get through to. It's tough. I'm not going to lie.

I wear a uniform. It's like a police uniform, but blue. I don't have a stab vest because we work in an office. We sit at huge banks of desks in lines with supervisors standing. at the end of every one. I have a headset with earpieces and a microphone and a computer in front of me. The light flashes. I press accept and I type as I ask questions.

Name, location, incident category, assault, suspicious package, burglary, etc. I take all the details I can and categorise the incident by level of urgency. If someone's come home and found their house broken into, that's not as urgent as a robbery in progress. I work ten-hour shifts with call after call after call. If I need to pee, I have to raise my hand to get excused by the supervisor.

They time you too. We get a huge variety of calls. Sometimes it's nothing time-wasters. Sometimes you hear some fucking awful things. My third shift, I got a call from a woman who was just screaming. She'd woken up from a nap and found her baby dead in its cot. I will never forget that as long as I live. Losing a child is something you never get over.

I know a few of the guys have started to drink a bit too much. Not alcoholics or anything, but every time they come home, they come home to a few drinks. It's the only way you can sleep. If I'm totally honest with myself, I can tell I'm slipping a little down that road. Last week, I was working the night shift. It has a rep for being pretty bad.

You get a lot of violent calls on the night shift. I'd been working for about eight hours at that time. Two more to go. I was surviving on coffee, shoving one call after another to the guys in dispatch. Then I got this call. The light flashes. I take a drink and click answer.

Police 990. What's your emergency? All I hear is breathing. Now, this isn't that unusual. We sometimes get people who are running, panicking, confused. Sometimes people are injured. Sometimes they're trying to make a call without being heard. Police 999.

My name is Laura. Can you tell me the nature of your emergency? No response. The breathing sounds like a woman. or maybe a child. I need to know your location and what's happening. Then I can get help to you as soon as possible. Are you able to speak to me?

There's a soft sound that comes then. Like a scratching. Like someone's scraping their fingernail on the mesh surface of the microphone. I pause for a second, then collect myself. Are you unable to talk out loud? The scratching sound comes again. Let me see if I can help.

One scratch for yes, two scratches for no. Do you understand? Great. Like I said, my name is Laura. I'm going to get officers to you as soon as I can. Please stay on the line. I start waving my supervisor over who spots me straight away. I point at the screen where he sees my typing.

Caller is unable to speak aloud, attempting other communication methods. He nods, understanding straight away and jogs over to the bank of IT guys. Are you injured? Are you in fear for your life or your physical safety? Are you able to get to a safe place? I can see my supervisor talking to the computer guys who are trying to trace the call. From the time it's taking it seems to be a mobile so they have to go through the phone masks. Is it a person who is causing you to fear for your safety? Then, a small intake of breath? Are they there with you now?

but you are afraid they will hear you. Are you restrained in any way? Don't worry. We'll find a way to get you help. Are you in a house? Is it their house? Do you know where you are? Can you see a window to look out of?

I was starting to panic a bit now. I'm highly trained, but you only get a few calls a year which strike you like this. I was starting to worry about my ability to help. If they don't know where they are and they can't speak to me, How can I send a car if I can't find out where she is? Then I hear something.

The breathing gets quicker. Are you still there? There is no response. Can you let me know you're okay? They're scraping. A scrabbling sound and then the line goes dead. The call light flicks out. Just an empty dial tone.

I swear. Not quite as under my breath as it should be. Looking straight over to the IT lads, I can see them shaking their heads. No luck. No trace on the call. I work the rest of my shift feeling sick. It's mostly routine, but I just can't get that out of my head. See, as a comms officer, when something comes up like that and you can't manage to find out where the person is, you feel responsible.

If that woman is hurt or killed, then surely a lot of that's down to me. On the drive home through empty city streets, I run that conversation through my head over and over again. I think what I could have done differently. I worry about that woman. Where she is, what's happening? I get home throwing my bag on the sofa. I pull a bottle of beer out of the fridge and pop off the cap, fixing the cat her dinner as she rubs around my ankles. That woman could be being raped or tortured, and we had an opportunity to find her

and we didn't manage it. I had visions of a woman locked in a cellar somewhere at the mercy of some pervert. I flopped down on the sofa, stuck the TV on and slumped. I woke up half an hour later to the phone ringing. I stirred, blinking. It was still dark, just starting to get lighter.

It was the home phone. Now, I almost never used the landline. I mostly have it just because it's the only way I can get Wi-Fi. This has got to be something bad. My mum may be, who hasn't been well. I drag myself to my feet and head as quickly to the phone as I can,

fumbling with it and pressing it to my ear. Hello? There was nothing. Just breathing. My stomach drops. Without the background noise of the office, without the tapping keys and the voices of the other officers, I can hear more clearly.

my stomach knots I feel like I might vomit the beer churning This isn't funny I swallow mouth dry Is it Baby, are you safe

I feel the panic bubble over I can barely form the words Baby please tell me Wherever you are Whatever I can do Please tell me Where are you I can hear her

Those tiny soft whispering breaths Then one catches, a sound of panic, a scraping on the floor. And then she replies. And then the phone cuts out. The caller withheld their number. She's called back every night since. Every night is the same. No answers.

Just her little breaths and scratches on the floor. However many times she calls, I will answer. Every time. Perhaps one night I will be able to find some way to help her. Seven times she's called. One call for every year of her life. One call for every year she's been dead. The field of digital photography has seen some amazing technical advances in the past few years.

But don't tell that to author M. Grant. You see, he explains that one particular line of digital photography. cameras didn't work as expected. That meant a large number of temporary workers had to deal with all the cameras being returned and the faulty footage watched and logged. Performing this tale are L. Bentley, Erica Sanderson, and David Alt. So if your camera isn't working, you might be in luck if there's a manufacturer recall. I worked for a regional temp agency called People Power, no joke, for a few years, bouncing from position to position.

I was able to charm the management, so I often got choice assignments, but temp work sucks across the board, often thrusting you into uncomfortable environments. No matter where you go, people have their little idiosyncrasies and weirdness, but But by far, the strangest temp job I took was for a manufacturer recall. I think I'm technically breaking an NDA to tell you this, but I don't want these experiences swept totally under the rug. The Canon ESP 5K was an impressive camera for its development cycle. It was among the first generation of digital cameras available to consumers which took and

stored video in a higher definition than the human eye could really register. Because it was adapted from technology used for laboratory research, it was touted to record wavelengths of light far outside of the visual range. This was a novelty feature, I guess, for AV techheads and indie filmmakers who were tickled by the idea of being able to filter footage down to just infrared or UV light after filming. The camera was also supposed to be able to film an x-ray, but my understanding is that there aren't enough x-rays just flying around, in the day-to-day world to register much on camera. Paired down to just x-rays, most footage was just very dim, blurry shapes. Nevertheless, it was a very impressive machine. Not because it did anything particularly new or innovative,

but because it was cheap enough to be a consumer item, although it was still prohibitively expensive for your average home movie maker. I don't know what about the camera led to the flaw, which got it recalled. It was hardly a bestseller to, to begin with, given its price tag and unnecessary extra functionality. But after what must have been numerous complaints, the company claimed that a run of the ESP 5K suffered from a manufacturer error, which made it susceptible to environmental interference. This I researched after the fact, as I'm not big into photography and was only hired on as a

temp. While assuring the public that Canon remained dedicated to customer satisfaction and and excellent photography, the company contracted a number of temp agencies, including people power, to sort out the mess at minimum expense, which meant reviewing people's malfunction claims. Nowadays, you can't find anything about the damn thing on a casual internet search. The ESP label seems to have been reapplied to Canon's printers instead. First, the setting. Near where I live, there's an enormous modernist complex that was built during a period where Microsoft was preparing to expand into the area.

It never got to see that purpose because the deal fell through and Microsoft kind of abandoned the area and never returned, leaving a lot of people jobless and an empty high security office complex in its place. Locals call it tech city. It's kind of an eyesore in that it's surrounded by mostly empty parking lots and lonely footbridges between buildings that pass over the more important nearby roads. It's not totally abandoned though. It's used seasonally as a tax and data entry site by various agencies,

because of its native security features and already implemented internal networks. A lot of sensitive information passes through there, and a lot of my job for people power sent me there. It's huge, dim, sterile and spooky. You swipe in with an electronic ID, and then, even though huge swathes of the building are empty and silent, you're always being watched on close camera systems by armed guards. This was where I worked when I was reviewing the environmental interference errors. I'd worked there before, under different circumstances, and was somewhat comfortable with the dim,

silent buildings as a workplace. For weeks, the recall job was like getting paid to watch people's stupid home movies, because I didn't realize what was going on. Given the time it took to sync up the cameras to our computers, it was really easy work, if boring and repetitive. Customers were required to submit a recall form alongside the camera when they returned it, and we'd sync the camera up to our workstations, then go to the indicated timestamp. The recall form asked for the timestamp that indicated the interference, but a lot of customers didn't fill it out, and others seemed to be indicating a timestamp where nothing obvious had gone wrong with the camera.

I did notice, after a while, that a lot of these false claims seem to involve a manual cut from one scene to one where the subject being filmed was another person with a camera, which was odd, if only because that was like 70% of the footage I was watching. And of course, there was the occasional burst of static or corrupted image, which was what I was expecting. I marked the former R, re-review, passing it onto another worker to see if I missed something, the latter as M.E. Manufacturer error. The recall form never directly asked for a description of the malfunction, which was either a

huge mistake, or, I think more and more, intentional. There was a place for additional comments, but most of them weren't very helpful. They usually left it blank, or wrote something kind of between loyal canon customer, but very disappointed with this purchase, and, what the fuck. One guy must have been a programmer, I think, because he actually wrote a helpful description of the error. At 102.22.30, the perspective of what was a continuous shot shifts suddenly 30 feet to the right and 90 degrees counterclockwise. I was using the viewfinder and did not notice until we're playing the footage. It must have picked up another camera's signal. How did it do that? Sure enough, at the indicated mark, there was a sudden shift in perspective.

What appeared to be a really low-budget school play with fifth graders prancing around in front of bobbing head suddenly became footage of a dimly lit crowd of middle-aged onlookers. It was like someone was standing on their seat looking unsteadily across the crowd. It took me a moment to pick out the guy with ESP, half a row away. There was a baby in some young mother's arms. crying as she tried to quiet it, which started right about when the perspective switched. The baby was looking straight into the camera, tiny face scrunched up in panic. I wrestled for a few minutes with the revelation that potential programmer guy had handed me.

I'd seen hundreds of perspective transitions like that, but it just assumed that the person holding the camera had stopped recording, then started again in order to film somebody staring off into space holding a camera. All that had been weird was how many people had filmed as much. I found myself replaying in my head a lot of memories that my brain had otherwise marked as junk to be discarded. A lot of people had been filming sports events and things where lots of people had cameras.

And it made sense that the probable programmer had speculated. The ESP was picking up other cameras feed somehow, which, given that most digital cameras don't actively broadcast Wi-Fi signals, seemed bizarre to me, but maybe they were running Bluetooth or whatever. And yet at the same time, I had watched a lot of people on family camping trips and filming in their own homes before the cut. How likely was it that there was another camera in each? Now, in order to understand what freaked me out next,

you have to realize that on my shift, there were about 20 other attempts reviewing their own footage and marking stuff as M-E or R. and a lot of the time, the reason my co-workers marked something for re-review wasn't because they were confused about errors, but because something funny had happened in the footage and they wanted to share. I saw a lot of, you know, bedroom videos. I don't know why anyone would use an amazing camera like the ESP capable of filming in goddamn X-ray to chronicle their sexual escapades,

but I guess some people want to watch their bones' bone. Regardless, apparently way more people are into filming themselves in the act than I ever would have guessed. Not many of them seem bashful about sharing that with Canon's recall handlers. I saw a disproportionate number of these because my co-workers almost always marked them R, even if there was a clear burst of static or it was otherwise obvious that the camera was not functioning as advertised. When one of the cameras came out of the package marked for re-review, and I synced it up and, jumped forward to the timestamp, I rolled my eyes to see a sweaty dude wearing just a shirt on top of a similarly unclothed lady, both being filmed from a bedside table. I patiently waited for the reported error, shaking my head.

To their credit, I am difficult to impress in this regard. I'm sure a warmer-blooded person would have been intrigued. Shortly into the clip, though, the bedside perspective abruptly ended and was replaced by a long, dim hallway. It was a very low shot, as if the camera had been left on the ground. My first thought was that they had accidentally jostled it off the table and were trying to return a camera damaged by this drop. A lot of people do dumb things with their electronics and seem to think that a recall is a guaranteed return system. I took a little too long to hit the stop button and mark it, and I wish I hadn't. I nearly jumped out of my office chair. The perspective shot forward along the whole.

floor coming to a raised opening. It's at this point I realized I could still hear the rhythmic panting of the couple, just muffled. As the camera slowly turned, I realized that the camera wasn't close to the floor of a hallway. It was on the ceiling of one, upside down. It poked over the low barrier and re-entered the bedroom, looking up at the copulating couple. I have to emphasize that the movement of the camera were almost insectile. It darted smoothly from place to place in between periods of unnatural stillness.

And there was no doubt in my mind as the camera focused on the couple that there was no human operating it. In fact, in the peripheral you could just make out the Canon ESP sitting on the end table. The camera hadn't moved. It was somehow filming from another perspective. But whose? Most of my co-workers seem not to have pieced together what was going on with the ESPs. Temp work doesn't usually attract the best and brightest people.

And honestly, some of the temp sitting in the corner just surfed the web on their phones while pretending to look at the videos, then marking them R, or every once in a while, M.E. at random. Given that we were reviewing tapes for eight-hour shifts, I could hardly blame them. But there was only one other co-worker who seemed to be as perturbed as I was. I approached her one day during the break. She was a slightly older woman of colour with glasses and a very severe face. And honestly, I only noticed she was similarly upset because I overheard her talking to the supervisor about having a panic attack

because she had witnessed a snuff film. The way she hesitated before calling it a snuff film set me off, though. She won her argument and shuffled off to the break room. The supervisor said he'd investigate but left the room instead. So I glanced left and right like a cartoon character and satisfied that nobody cared, left my station and went to hers.

Sticking her headphones on, I hesitated before starting the playback. I was scared. Even if the footage turned out to be a totally normal snuff film, that was an intense prospect. I don't think you can watch something so vile without it blackening part of your soul. But I don't know if simple human,

malice and sickness would have been worse or better than what I saw when I steeled my resolve and hit space bar. There was no indicated time stamp, and in fact the whole consumer form was blank, so I just had to watch the whole thing. It was very dark and very confused. The main thing I was treated to was the shadowed body of a man and his hands, hastily closing the ESP and hefting it as if he had changed tapes while the camera was running and under great stress.

He was breathing heavily. I used the search function to single in on the few frames where I could see him outright, and while it was difficult to make out, he had a shiny visor on and what looked like a wire hanging down from them. Crew cut, blonde hair, high-collar jacket over a button-down shirt which had some dirt clinging to it. The background, tilted up for that one second, showed a moonlit sky broken up by the frequent autumn leafless trees.

Then I was treated to 30 seconds or so of shaky cam running through the darkness. He probably tripped a bunch, but it was hard to tell, as he was often just lowering the camera and filming just plain darkness. From the audio, it was clear he was moving quickly and noisily through the woods. There was a single flash of static during all of this, but for about two minutes nothing happened. I was looking over my shoulder in case the supervisor arrived, and found I had abandoned my post.

Then the perspective shift happened. I couldn't even tell exactly where it was because it was just black shapes most of the time. But at one point, the moon brought clarity and I could see the treetops of a wide, hilly forest spread out before me. The perspective tilted back and forth as it sped along them, then dipped and returned to the darkness. It was another ten seconds or so

before I caught sight of the guy in the shade. This was before Google Glass, so I was extremely confused about why you'd run through a forest at night with sunglasses on, about 30 feet below the camera, struggling through the underbrush. He seemed to realize that his pursuer was almost upon him because he looked up, but off in the wrong direction. This proved to be a regrettable error. The perspective hovered, pausing just above him, as a shadow I'd thought was part of the forest, separated out and seized him. It was 16, maybe 18 feet tall,

with most of its height in its limbs and torso, but definitely not bipedal. The main feature I could make out on its head was the eye cavities. The rest of the image was distorted by the high-contrast darkness. Of course, this was the ESP, so putting it into night vision mode

was always an option in post-production. Sparing the door another glance, I told the computer to re-render the image in those hazy greens. It took a moment to process, and the video playback resumed. This made the trees of the forest much more visible, but the creature that had emerged from it simply vanished from the screen.

I could make out the poor guy holding the camera, suspended several feet off the ground, hanging in the air. He struggled briefly, then, Without apparent injury, stopped and went slack. He seemed to be nodding. The green tones of the night vision camera were cut off as a flashlight beam swept between the trees, breaking up the image. The perspective, which had hung frozen, turned away from the scene and rushed through more dark leaves,

only barely made more visible by the nighttime setting. Then abruptly, I was staring at what was probably a tree route for the remainder of the video. I backed up to where the terrifying thing had been on screen and changed settings to infrared. I was flipping my shit at this point, unsure if I'd watched a man die on screen, but for some reason I kept looking towards the door where I expected my supervisor to walk in.

I guess my utter horror was being channeled into the petty fear of getting in trouble, which was easier to deal with. I watched as the computer rendered me an image in the familiar, cool, blue, grays of infrared footage, with a small island of dim yellows where the man's body was hanging, and the strange little flecks of yellow else were on the screen. I think that was atypical. I couldn't see the figure, but weirdly the colours were cooler and darker in a blurry area around where I knew

I'd seen it standing. Still watching the door, I remembered the x-ray setting. It wasn't something I thought about all that often because it was mostly useless unless. you had something radioactive to look at. I'd seen a lot of people try to use it on their microwaves, but they use, you know, microwaves, not x-rays. The image rendered, and I really, really hoped I'd see a mostly black screen with slight grey, staticky patterns, like you usually did. No such luck.

The black screen was cast through with streaky grey rays radiating from the thing. The thing itself was even taller than I thought, but hunched and squatting. Its body and interlaced series of overlaid shapes like translucent flesh, but it was also clearly the source of the radiation itself. Its arms seemed to split at the elbow into two mirrored smaller limbs, like longer crab claws, and ended with tiny fingered hands, and a similar effect was happening at its knees.

By contrast to the original image where the image, enormous dark eye sockets were the only feature I could make out of its head. Now the primary feature were two pinpricks of 100% white. The brightest thing in frame, deeply recessed in the head. Playback resumed, and I watched as it shifted on its weird hind limbs, so its body was positioned over the trapped man, and its pinpoint eyes released the bright burst of whatever directed at him, Leaving a lingering pattern of dissipating x-rays in a roughly man-sized shape

before the camera perspective turned and fled. Backing it up and pausing, I found myself unable to unhunch my shoulders. I was so tense. I tried to remember whether x-rays were low or high frequency and decided they were low. The thing was visible to the unfiltered camera playback, but not in night vision mode. which filtered down to just high exposure light, meaning it was maybe visible to the human spectrum of light, and it was distinctly absent from infrared image capture,

which is slightly higher frequency wavelength than humans can perceive. The only setting I hadn't checked was UV, which would be between x-rays and the visible spectrum of light, and maybe the means by which I'd see it in the unfiltered version, looking like flesh and not insane. shapes of pure brightness. I selected UV from the drop-down menu, and heard a throat clear behind me despite the headphones because I was so keyed up.

The supervisor had returned and caught me red-handed. I was given a stern yelling at, and his points were bullshit, but given that I was horribly shaken, I had trouble defending myself. I was sent home early. The next day I drove to work. and just decided, upon seeing the big, spooky complex, to drive right past Tech City and just cruise around instead. I didn't pick up my phone when people power called. The next day after that, I called in sick and made excuses from my missed work the day previous. After a weekend, I was on much

stabbler footing, but was still anxious to return to work. My shift went back to normal, though whenever I actually had a camera synced up, I found myself hyperventilating a little when the perspective shifted. It was always a relief, though, when that was all that happened. The woman who'd seen the same video I had was not there. About six hours in, I was watching a bunch of dumb college kids on a road trip. The bro in the passenger seat kept shaky cam and his ESP towards the driver, and they were making a bunch of inane comments.

Glancing at the consumer feedback sheet, the only field filled out read WTF. Not an uncommon response. People were angry, but also too lazy to write the actual problem down. When the bro with the camera asked the girls I'd heard chatting in the back seat, And now it's time to flash for the camera. And turned around, the nearest college girl, sitting behind the driver, laughed and shoved at his shoulder. her shorter, more serious-looking colleague just blew a bubble with her gum and snapped

it. As camera bro leaned further around to catch all three girls in the back, I froze. Curled up monstrously, to sit in the tight space was a creature, and this one I saw in full daylight. Its enormous skull-like head had no features, but its

eye sockets, and a flat, smooth jaw area. It looked sopping wet somehow. The picture quality was different where it sat, buckled in in a way that I can't really describe, but it was a deep, bluish, grey colour, and its long, segmented arms were wrapped around knees, which drew up to the roof of the car, head peeking between them. Nobody in the car reacted. The thing didn't move, just stared at the camera. Taller girl looked at the monster and said, Shut up Ashley! And reached over Gumgirl's head to, presumably to shove Ashley's shoulder. She touched the bony space between its two parallel left arms. Camera bro said,

and the camera cut away. I watched from about a hundred feet away as a car whizzed down the high way ahead, the camera's perspective keeping pace with it. I hit Spacebar. In a days I marked the tape, M.E, got up, and told the supervisor I was quitting. Sometimes, when I'm feeling like I'm insane, I wish I'd stolen the tape and taken it with me, but they would have found it at a security point. And I'm kind of glad I don't have any evidence, because it makes it a little easier to sleep at night. Temp work really sucks. We thank you for being with us for our devilishly dark tales.

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