Night Watch - Part I

Photo by Aniket Deole on Unsplash

The wind’s icy breath carried a mournful tune across the desolate farmland, where the forgotten tombs lay buried beneath a thick layer of powdery snow. Beyond the church lay a village, secluded and isolated from the rest of the world.

At the centre of the village lay a lake that shimmered in the moonlight, its dark surface reflecting the starry night. The lake’s name was a reminder of the past, a relic of a time long gone. The Woeful Lake. The Woe.

The lore of The Woe was shrouded in mystery. It passed down from generation to generation until it faded into obscurity.

Superstition ran deep in the countryside and as the rumours about The Woe reached their peak, the villagers abandoned everything they owned overnight and fled to the faraway towns in the southern parts of the country.

This whole thing was messed up in more than one way, not to mention highly suspicious. The mayor at the time gave strict orders to the locals and the press to not alert the rest of the country by making headlines out of these strange events that unfolded one wintry night on the 12th of December 1976.

As time passed and ran through the sand, the notorious lake was bound to be forgotten – a systematic and collective amnesia overlooked by the authorities.

My lifelong friend and colleague, Henry Glasgow, was the one who first told me about the lake. He and I spent almost a decade working together as security guards at the Museum of Modern Art.

Henry was someone I considered a good colleague and an even better friend. He was a man of few words, but my memories of him were nothing but fond.

I liked that part of him the most, the quiet part that is, because I was somewhat of a hermit myself. The two of us could go on working several hours in sheer silence, and the absence of conversation wouldn’t bother either of us.

When I asked him where he heard of The Woe, he told me that his maternal great-grandparents were one of many who fled that fateful night on the 12th of December.

His mother, a 10-year-old child back in 1976, recalled fleeing but had no other recollection of what transpired or why she had to escape in the dead of the night along with the rest of the villagers.

Over the years and as the symptoms of her dementia became more noticeable, however, she recounted her escape and described it as a ‘living hell’. That was the only thing she would reveal even on her deathbed.

Henry did his own digging into the mysterious lake after his mother’s passing, but all traces of that place had been removed from the public archives. It was as if The Woe didn’t exist. His search for the truth yielded fruitless.

This all happened when he was in his mid-twenties. Two decades later, as we were both on duty at night, he revealed that he finally found something.

An anonymous account had posted a thread on the 6th of October, two days before our night shift, on the subreddit UnresolvedMysteries about The Woe, seeking informants.

As the responses increased, the enigmatic nature of The Woe and the mysteries that surrounded it reached the international press.

That’s when Henry got in touch with the original poster and got a glimpse of what transpired the day his mother fled from her home.

In the early hours of June 9th, 1976, a pregnant woman in her second trimester went missing. Her husband woke up to an empty bed and alerted the mayor after two hours of searching on his own.

While the initial investigation into the woman’s disappearance ruled out foul play, the circumstances after her disappearance became a heated topic among the locals.

No one had heard or seen the husband search for his missing wife that day; as this was the countryside, people didn’t sleep past dawn and worked the fields until noon.

It wasn’t long until people ran their mouths and the rumours spread like wildfire about the husband’s possible involvement.

When an undisclosed farmer recounted seeing the missing woman’s husband near The Woe the day after she went missing – on his knees and crying – people talked amongst themselves that he had killed his wife and unborn child, and then thrown her lifeless body into the lake.

Even though numerous reports of this nature reached the authorities, however, they never searched the lake or the surrounding area.

Three weeks later, the husband was found hanging from a nearby tree adjacent to the lake. That’s when people began to call it The Woe. But the OP didn’t know anything about why people evacuated their homes back in 1976 – approximately six months after the suicide.

My dear friend was soon caught up in the intricate details of The Woe; it haunted him. His already skinny frame grew thinner, his cheeks lost colour, and his entire personality shifted for the worse. Even without witnessing it with my own eyes, I knew that he wasn’t sleeping anymore.

Should this keep up for another week, I feared that something bad would happen to him. But he wouldn’t listen to my pleas. Dreading that we’d grow distant, and he’d stop showing up to work altogether, I kept my thoughts to myself and slowly watched him become nothing but skin and bones.

Had I a way to stop him, I would. But I didn’t. The Woe consumed him, sucked his blood dry, and I let it happen.

While not as close as we used to be, Henry and I kept working together on the second floor of our office, overlooking the goodly building three nights a week every month.

The night shifts didn’t differ much from the day shifts, except for the lack of sunlight of course, and that was perfectly fine.

Our routine tasks were identical, whether during the day or the night, with the only change being the amount of time we set aside to complete them.

And, since we were unencumbered by authority figures, we made a habit of breaking rules just for the kicks during the night shifts. At the end of the day, we were just humans.

Things remained like this, in status quo, for a few weeks – until that night.

It was the 2nd of January 2013. Henry and I spent countless hours staring at the monitors, our eyes growing tired as we scanned the museum for any signs of abnormal activity.

Our patrols varied based on the resources at our disposal and the day of the month; our main task was to secure the doors and ensure that nothing valuable was accessible to potential intruders.

The doors were carefully numbered, with the first digit indicating the level of importance of the goods inside. The remaining digits provided factual information, including the floor number and security level.

Although this job required us to work through the night at least three times a week, we took turns sleeping to make it more manageable.

Despite the mundane nature of the tasks and the uncomfortable working hours, however, I never complained about my pay, knowing that my salary was twice that of my friends who worked traditional 9-5 office jobs.

Besides, my previous job as an orderly at a psychiatric ward had me working mostly at night as well, so I had no problem adjusting to this line of work.

Henry, on the other hand, took a couple of weeks to adjust to the night shifts. In hindsight, it dawned on me that he was tight-lipped about his past, including his previous jobs, before becoming a security guard.

But it struck me as no more unusual than the fact that I never talked about my family life either. As I mentioned, we were both comfortably reserved and were fine with that.

The air was crispier than usual in our office when Henry returned after patrolling the building for half an hour or so. I was digging my teeth into a cheese sandwich, occasionally glancing at the monitors when he sank into the armchair next to mine and placed his keyring and flashlight on the desk.

I caught him looking over a few times and asked if he wanted half of the sandwich, but he shook his head instead of replying. But the manner in which he moved his body occurred to me as unnatural. He looked like someone who had seen a ghost. I put my food away.

“You okay, mate?”

He stared at me as if he couldn’t discern what I was saying at first. The unfazed and robotic quality of his voice was impossible to ignore. I could’ve sworn that his voice sounded different like it was coming from someone else. It was uncanny, like hearing a familiar tune played on a different instrument.

We looked at one another for about two seconds I think before he finally answered. His voice sent a shiver up my spine.

“There’s something in there.”

“Huh?”

“In the storage room on the third floor. I saw something in there.”

Alerted, I faced the monitors and located the third floor. There weren’t any signs of intrusion visible. Zooming in on the storage room, I noticed that it was cracked open. As panic set in, I looked at him for a third time.

I had worked at the museum for over a decade and this was the first time we ever had an issue with an intruder. Usually, the guys patrolling outside the building were the first ones to catch them red-handed.

Moreover, we hadn’t heard the alarm ring, which meant at least one exit door was unlocked without setting off the alarm. Per protocol, we had to manually shut down the entire building and call the police at this point.

But as I asked Henry what he had seen exactly, he told me something I needed a few seconds to digest.

“I think you need to go.”

“Go? Where?” I said. “The storage room?”

He shook his head. “No, you… need to go. Right now. I- I don’t know how to explain it, I…”

“What’re you talking about, man? What the hell did you see? Henry?”

He didn’t reply. Growing irritated, I decided to take a look at the storage room myself.

However, he leapt in front of me with unprecedented speed, blocking me from taking another step, his darting eyes wild and amok. I tried to shove him aside, but he was larger in build than me and stood his ground.

Everything happened so fast. I pushed him away and my friend hit his head on the edge of the desk and collapsed.

I checked his pulse before making it out of the office and up the staircase. While I was supposed to follow protocol, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, whatever my friend had seen, was nothing but a hallucination.

As I mentioned before, Henry hadn’t slept properly for many weeks and I couldn’t just blindly trust his words and disrupt an otherwise calm night.

For all I cared, the door to the storage room had been unlocked by none other than Henry himself for whatever reason, and I couldn’t be less interested in knowing why.

I pointed the flashlight down the third-floor corridor and scanned the area for somewhere between a second and a second and a half.

When I couldn’t hear or see anything out of the ordinary, I resumed my patrol and continued to the other side of the drafty corridor.

As I closed in on the cracked storage room, I came to a standstill and looked around me – ears perked up and listening.

My wandering eyes followed each crack and hole in the walls until they landed on the sole security camera in the corner I had just passed to get to the other side of the corridor.

After shouting for whoever might be hiding in the storage room to show themselves, I quickly pulled up a pair of handcuffs just in case and pushed the creaking door wide open.

My heart skipped several beasts as I aimed the flashlight all over the place only to heave a sigh of relief and relax my shoulders.

As I put my guard down and stepped inside the storage to look around, I noticed that the entire room was blanketed in dust and hadn’t seen the light of day for months, if not years.

Stacks of crates and boxes teetering precariously on top of one another was the first thing that caught my attention; the dusty shelves were empty and everything lay on the linoleum floor.

While most of the artefacts were worthless, a small collection dating back to the beginning of the modern era held significant historical and intrinsic value and was worth a few hundred dollars.

Our boss said that the storage room was locked to ensure that whatever was inside stayed inside; former employees, our boss warned me on my first ever shift, tried to steal the defective goods hoping to make a quick buck on the black market, but was caught in the act and got sacked.

I was told not to be like ‘those bastards’. I remember having a good laugh about this with Henry years later, joking about not becoming a bastard and losing the only job we had for a fleeting thought of getting rich overnight – the same thought process gamblers possessed. We weren’t bastards, the two of us.

I exited. The door clicked shut behind me, and I gave it a firm tug to make sure it was locked and secure.

When I was halfway down the corridor, ready to return to the office a floor down and beat some sense into my friend, a sudden noise cut me short. Instinctively, I turned around and pointed the flashlight at the locked storage room.

My laboured breath came in short gasps as I tried to find the source of the odd noise. Then it dawned on me. The noise wasn’t coming from the corridor, it was coming from the ceiling right above me.

Hesitant, unsure of what sight would emerge from the darkness, I directed the light upwards and scanned the ceiling. My heart was in my mouth.

Something dripped on my forehead, right between my eyebrows, and trickled down the side of my nose bridge and hit the floor. I grimaced and ran my fingers over my wet nose; the pungent smell making me gag in place.

I doubled over and retched as a pool of dark liquid pooled around me in a perfect circle. A barking cough got hold of me and forced me on four legs. My trembling hands submerged into the nasty liquid and the pungent smell pervaded the entire corridor.

I glanced at the security camera, reaching out to it as if to touch it, only for the coughing attack to stop abruptly.

I looked around me, puzzled beyond words, and noticed that everything was back to normal. My hands were no longer soaked in the nasty liquid, in fact, there was no liquid to begin with.

Scared witless, I sprinted to the other side of the corridor, leaving behind my flashlight and handcuffs, and descended the stairs like a madman.

When I returned to the office and locked the door behind me, Henry was no longer where I had left him.

Dripping with cold sweat, I sank into my designated seat and let my throbbing head rest on the headrest. For a brief moment, I shut my eyes and drowned out all other noises besides my own irregular and shallow breathing.

Only when my heart calmed down did I become eerily aware of Henry’s prolonged absence.

I drew up my walkie-talkie and asked where the hell he was, but there was no response, only the sound of static came through.

Thinking he was playing games with me and utterly exhausted, I told him to fuck off and put the walkie-talkie away for a good hour and a half.

As the clock kept ticking and we were nearing the end of our shift, I decided to go look for my friend, whom I assumed had dozed off in the restroom next to the office.

It wouldn’t be the first time he had done this since he became obsessed with The Woe, and I figured I’d let him sleep for as long as I possibly could.

The stench of standing water hit me as soon as I opened the restroom door. Convinced something terrible had happened, I stormed in and twisted off the running taps one after the other.

All three of the sinks were overflowed with water, not to mention the drenched tiles that made the floor slippery.

Frowning – flabbergasted more than anything – I caught a glimpse of myself in the wall-length mirror before quickly turning my attention to the toilet cubicles behind me.

My heart sank. Water flowed from under the door of the last cubicle.

I could feel the panic rising as I tried to unlock the cubicle, but it remained firmly shut. I resorted to lung at it repeatedly, convinced my friend was somehow trapped inside, when it unlocked with a sudden rush of air, causing me to stumble backwards.

“Henry!”

I was left in shock at the spectacle that lay before my eyes. It was him. His body, drenched and twisted, slumped towards me, while his head remained buried in the overflowing toilet bowl.

I yanked his head out and dragged him out of the cubicle by his feet. My uniform clung to my skin, heavy and waterlogged, as I made it to the doorway.

Despite my fervent attempts to revive him, Henry remained unresponsive, his body still and lifeless. He had no pulse. I had come too late.

Realising the gravity of the situation, I peered out into the corridor and gritted my teeth. My phone was locked in my drawer.

I pulled out my walkie-talkie and, despite the panicked state I was in, got in touch with the guards outside, briefed them on what happened and urged them to call the police and an ambulance.

I couldn’t keep the tears in as I held my friend’s cold body close, instinctively trying to keep him warm until help came.

Was this the reason he tried to make me leave? So he could kill himself? But why? Why would he do something like this all of a sudden?

Henry was an eccentric character, all right, but his demeanour never hinted at any suicidal tendencies. Not to mention it was an odd choice of method for someone of his calibre to end his life; drowning wasn’t only excruciatingly painful but also difficult to accomplish on your own.

His brain would’ve done anything to make sure his face stayed above the water – unless, of course, he didn’t try to take his life – somebody else did.

No matter how I hard tried to rearrange the pieces in my mind, the puzzle pieces just wouldn’t come together.

Sure, his obsession with The Woe was over the top and borderline destructive, but the Henry I knew wouldn’t let death anywhere near him until he unravelled the mystery that shrouded the mysterious lake.

His untimely demise left me in a state of shock and denial. Even as they loaded Henry into the ambulance, my senses felt dulled and distant, like I was watching everything through a fog.

My head was reeling, and a splitting headache overwhelmed me.

I called our boss afterwards, told him what had happened and asked if I could clock out an hour earlier that night.

On my way out of the office, my eyes landed on the ajar restroom door and a chill shiver ran up my spine. Unsettled, I decided to close the door when I thought I saw something move right past me.

Then I heard it. Running water. As soon as I stepped into the restroom and looked around, the noise ceased and faded away. I twisted the tap and watched the water rise in the sink before twisting it off.

Through the mirror, I observed the last cubicle where I found my friend’s lifeless body just hours before and wheezed. Whatever happened here, I’d probably never know.

I left the museum two hours later and had a chat with one of the guards on duty, just going through what I already told the police, and then hit the road a quarter to 4 am.

As I hit the gas and turned around the corner, I glanced at the museum through the rearview mirror and felt my blood curdle. I never thought a day would come and I would dread the sight of a mere building made of bricks.

I had another night shift the day after and I knew already that I was going to call in sick.  

Henry’s passing, albeit we didn’t know one another outside of the workplace, had a great impact on my psyche. It was like a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death and the frailty of human life.

The thought of this happening to me was an unescapable outcome, especially since Henry’s last words to me kept ringing in my ears all the way home.

Why did he tell me to go home? If I didn’t go to the storage room that night, would I be the one who perished so untimely?

Upon returning to my apartment, the weight of everything that happened finally hit me, and I wept like a child. My body convulsed, and the absurdity of this whole situation with Henry haunted my thoughts.

Lia, my fiancé, woke up as I entered our bedroom and sat straight up as soon as she noticed my bloodshot eyes.

Without saying a word, I collapsed into her arms. The scent of her shampoo enclosed me from all sides and calmed me down. I kissed her delicate hand as we locked eyes and she asked me what happened.

Although I told the police, my boss, and the guards what happened already, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the demise of my friend, and even if I came up with a lie, I knew she wouldn’t buy it.

“Robert,” she said with her sweet voice that could break a grown man into tears, “what is it?”

“I don’t know where to begin…”

“Begin at the beginning, then. Why are you like this? Did something happen?”

I hesitated. “The guy I worked with, you know the one I talked to you about? He’s dead. He- he died, Lia.”

“How? It’s okay, babe…”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t wanna know. But I don’t think he’s… That he, that he did that to himself. Lia. I don’t even know why I’m like this or why—”

“Babe, what happened to him?”

Once again, I hesitated. I couldn’t bring myself to say the truth.

“He drowned. In the toilet bowl. I- I found him, he—I thought I could save him, but he… He had no pulse. He was already dead, Lia, it was too late. If only I could—he wasn’t that type of person that’d take his own life…”

“You couldn’t have predicted he’d do that. No one could,” she said. “Sometimes, even those we think we know the best do something we’d never expect of them. Just like this one.”

I pulled away from her and shook my head.

“Not Henry. I- I knew that guy, Lia! Sure, he was acting out of character lately and all that, but, babe, I knew him! He… he wouldn’t do that.”

“Robert, I know you were fond of him, but…”

“He told me to go home, Lia. Before he did that to himself. He wanted me to go home.”

“I’m sure he wanted to spare you from—”

“No,” I said. “The way he told me that… It sounded like he was trying to protect me.”

My fiancé frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Listen, I know how this sounds, but when I went upstairs to check the storage room, just hours before he did this to himself, I saw something. I- I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t a hallucination, it was…”

“Robert!” She gently held my pallid face with her hands. “You sure you okay?”

I clammed up and couldn’t continue. She wouldn’t believe it. Even I had a hard time believing myself, so why would she, a budding scientist with a PhD in biomedicine?

“I- I think I need to get some fresh air.”

“Robert? Robert, I didn’t mean to—”

I broke off in the doorway, my back turned to her.

“No, it’s okay, babe. I know you didn’t mean it like that. I just… need some time for myself.”

As I was about to close the door, she said something that cut me short for a brief second. I didn’t reply.

I grabbed my jacket and spent the rest of the night in the park near our apartment and didn’t return until I knew she was no longer at home.

Read part II HERE!