1
Leo shed his jacket at the office door and made it to his designated desk. It had been a hectic month with all the restoration and digitisation works going on, and they were nowhere near the finish line. The footage they were required to restore and categorise were old police evidence files, or in other words, basically stuff that the police needed in order to reopen cold cases. But even with three technicians on duty today, the workload seemed endless and the pile of cassettes only growing by the second.
"Damn it!" Sam exclaimed, swivelling his chair around. "Dude, take a look at this. Do you see what I'm seeing?"
"What is it again?" Leo asked as he reluctantly leaned over Sam's monitor. He had just arrived after nearly forty minutes in traffic, and the last thing he wanted was to be dragged into whatever Sam had found. Unfortunately, that was often the case.
Sam had a habit of pulling him into things at the worst possible time. Sometimes, Leo wondered if Sam was genuinely oblivious or simply liked getting a reaction out of people.
"See what?" Leo asked.
"That's exactly what I'm talking about. There's nothing here!"
"Dude, I'm not following you."
But Sam had already stopped listening, continuing to rant under his breath. "Fuck! I should've known when I saw the tape. Can't believe I just spent two hours trying to fix this thing."
On the screen, a black image flickered occasionally, interrupted by what Leo could only describe as some sort of out-of-tune static. But the footage showed nothing. Literally nothing. Just a black screen.
"Hey, snap out of it. What tape are you talking about?"
Sam opened his drawer and pulled out an old cassette tape with a battered casing, as though it had been handled roughly or dropped more than once, handing it over.
What caught his immediate attention as he twisted and turned the casing was not the damage, however, but the label. There was no title, no case identification as one might expect, save for a string of faded numbers printed on a sticker.
"That's strange," he murmured.
"Strange? That's one way to put it," said Sam, adding. "You think someone misplaced their stuff and this somehow got mixed in with the case files?"
Leo donned a glove and studied the tape closely this time, trying to decipher the fading coding on it without much luck, save from three digits. How was this even possible? There had to be something tangible at least, whether that was a case name or label, that could help them categorise it. But just these digits? They meant nothing on their own.
"Did you look it up, just in case?"
"No match. What do you think? A misplaced cassette? Should I call those bastards in the Case Review Unit and tell them to get a grip?"
"Well, we don't know that for sure."
"You don't think those bastards are pulling our legs?"
"Not exactly, no."
"What then?"
Leo gestured at the monitor.
"Looks like somebody went through a lot of trouble to tamper with the footage. Look – it's not completely black."
Sam's eyes widened as he noticed the screen flicker, revealing a brief snapshot of the real footage beneath whatever had been used to obscure it.
"You think you can recover it?"
Leo drew a deep breath. "I mean, I can try. But—"
"Do you, like, think it's some kind of cursed tape or something? Like in that Japanese horror movie? Ring or whatever."
"What are you, five?" Leo said, already carrying the tape back to his desk. "Grow up, will you?"
Behind him, Sam threw his hands up.
"I'm just saying, dude. Better safe than sorry, right?"
Although recovering the footage was definitely not their priority right now, especially with the piles of cassette tapes getting only higher, he knew he wouldn't be able to concentrate on the task at hand with his mind full of questions. Besides, recovering the footage would take no less than an hour if he got it right the first time around, and then they would be able to correctly categorise the tape and carry on with their routine.
What he did not take into consideration was the measure the person who had tampered with the tape had taken to make sure whatever the tape showed remained a mystery. After rebooting the system and software more times than he should have, the restoration process finally gave some result, albeit after four or so hours after he started, which meant it was already time for a well-deserved lunch break.
"You're not coming?" Sam asked as he got up from his chair, ready to join the others waiting for him at the door, exaggerating his accent at the end of his speech. "Hey, talking to you, Leo. Wang Luo."
With his eyes glued to the screen where the tape was now seconds from being restored, Leo snapped as soon as he heard the exaggerated accent taken directly from some old Hong Kong noir film. The idiot did not even know the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese, and yet still had the nerve to mock him.
"Stop acting like a douchebag and leave."
"What? Just trying to keep my Chinese fresh, you know?"
Leo turned to face him a soon as he heard this, no longer able to contain his annoyance. "It's Leo, damn it! L-E-O. And you're saying it wrong! I'm from the mainland, you son of a gun! We don't say it like that over there!"
"Main—what? Never mind. So, does that mean you're not coming?"
"Fuck off, dude."
"Uh-uh. Scary," Sam said, raising his hands in mock surrender. "Seems like someone's not feeling it today, guys."
"Leave," Leo said at last, calmer now, not in the mood to entertain the other. "Just... leave me the fuck alone."
"All right, all right. Whatever. Let's go, guys."
He sighed, inhaling deeply to calm his nerves. Sam kept doing that, trying to put him down in front of everyone and then acting as the friendliest guy ever. The double standards, man! The double standards!
Shaking his head, he once again shifted his focus to the monitor, where a pop-up message relayed that the footage was now restored completely and the digitised file compatible with the computer hardware.
He clicked on the play button.
A grainy video of what looked like some kind of interrogation room played on the screen. Apart from the constant glitching and buzzing sound from the static, nothing dramatically caught his attention. Had he not been able to hear the recorder in the background, he would have thought this was an image and not a video.
After watching the still footage for a few minutes, playing and replaying back and forth to catch anything unusual or something that could help him categorise the file, he turned it off and decided to watch the rest at home now that he knew there wasn't anything on it that required his full attention. Thus, he uploaded the digitised file to his private account as well as on the cloud server and then resumed tackling the huge pile of tapes on his desk.
Fast forwards five hours later, back in the single-room studio apartment, Leo powered on his computer after downing some beer.
The rest of the footage was the same as the earlier parts, save from one single detail, one he almost missed had he not played the video back for a double-check. Something was wrong with the angle of the recorder. In the earlier parts of the footage, it was situated in the corner of the interrogation room, somewhere on the ceiling or near it, thus giving a bird's eye view of the room. But at one point, the angled tilted, albeit only slightly. It was a miracle he had noticed it at all.
What he could not make sense of was... the how. The recorder was out of reach due to how high situated it was. No one had entered through the only door visible, either. None. And even when he considered the low possibility of there being another door out of the recorder's reach or a person somewhere in a dead angle behind the recorder, then he would be able to see shadows at least, wouldn't he?
He rubbed his chin, thinking hard. Was he missing something? Maybe the light source was too weak? That was why it didn't quite reach all corners and, therefore, did not catch any shadows that showed up behind the recorder? But that high up? No human being could reach that high without a ladder, and the angle of the recorder should've shown him at least some parts of the ladder itself had it been used. So, how was this—
Ring. Ring.
Leo jolted from where he sat, almost cursing out loud from the sudden ringing. Before he answered the call, he took a gander at the clock on the wall, noticing that it was past midnight. Although the odd hour was unusual in and of itself, it wasn't this that bugged him as he saw the words on the display. An unknown caller. Who on earth would be calling at this hour? Was it from the nursing home? But as far as he knew, the facility's calling hours were between 10 AM and 5 PM. Unless—a lump formed in his throat at the thought that something terrible might have happened to his mother.
He took the call.
"Hello—"
"Leo, my son! You okay? Why you never call me? Always I call you."
Frowning, Leo changed ears.
"Where's Mrs Campbell, Ma? How did you—"
"Shh! Tā yào lái le!"
"What? Ma? Ma! Who's coming? Who's—"
"Bùyào! Don't open door! Don't—bùyào! [inaudible]"
The call ended, cut off by his mother's screams.
"Ma! Ma!"
Panicked and drenched in cold sweat, Leo tried to call the number back, but no one picked up. The screen stayed unresponsive and black, the ringing looping into suffocating silence. For a few moments, he didn't move at all. Could not.
His hand remained locked around the phone, his grip tightening without him realising it and knuckles turning white. Even his breathing came shallow and laboured. He swallowed once, then again, but his throat felt tight and dry, as though something had physically lodged there. What had just happened? Something was wrong. Very wrong. Why would his mother scream like that? Like she was... like she was...
He forced the thought away before it could fully form, refusing to give it shape. Instead, with a jerky motion, he unlocked his phone again and scrolled through his contacts.
The ringing went on for a while before Mrs Riley answered. He knew this was not an ideal hour to be calling her, but he needed someone to go check up on his mother, who had recently been diagnosed with psychosis related to the onset of her dementia five years prior.
"Hello? Mrs Riley, this is Leo. Leo Wang. It's about Ma."
"Mr Wang, I'm so, so sorry. I meant to call you as soon as I heard the news of Mrs Wang's passing, but—"
"P-Passing? I'm not—what did you just say? Passing?"
"You haven't heard yet? Mr Wang, we lost your mother earlier today. I'm sorry for your loss. I truly am."
His hands shook and his vision became blurry with the suppressed tears now trying to escape. It took him a moment to calm his nerves and regain his bearing. Dead? That couldn't be true. He just—spoke to her?
"The staff found her on the floor with a bedlinen around her throat. It looks like she couldn't take the suffering anymore."
These words snapped him out of his bleak mind and the unanswered questions. "What?"
"I know this is hard to accept. But—"
"Hold on. Are you saying she... killed herself? But I don't understand! You said—no, you promised that she'd be under strict surveillance once she—"
"I know you're hurting, Mr Wang. But there's nothing we can do to change the fact that she's gone. For the better or worse."
"For the better or worse?" he repeated, completely out of his mind. "How do we know she wasn't killed? That someone—"
"Listen, I'll be in my office tomorrow. Once you've calmed down and can think straight, you're free to come and we can talk over the details. What do you think? Mr Wang? Hello?"
He loosened his grip on the phone as a sudden thought hit him.
"It's impossible."
"I'm sorry? What did you just say?"
"I just... talked to her. Heard her voice."
"How long have you gone without sleep, Mr Wang?"
His grip tightened again at those words.
"What?"
"You said you were working on digitising some files the last time we talked? Maybe—"
"We never did. Why would I tell you something about my private life?" Then, after a brief pause, quieter now, more wary. "Who... is this?"
The line went dead and the real Mrs Riley called, but he did not answer – just stared blankly at the display until the ringing stopped and he played the voicemail sent seconds later.
"Mr Wang? I'm so sorry for calling you at this hour. But I just received the news of your mother's passing. Please, come to the nursing home as soon as this message reaches you. I'll be waiting."
But Leo did not move. Instead, he curled in on himself like a child, shivering, his arms locked tightly around his body.
His bloodshot eyes then drifted, almost against his will, towards the ajar bedroom door. In that moment, his mother's voice began to repeat in his mind, insistent and forcing itself into place, refusing to allow him to dismiss what just happened as imagination or hallucination.
It was not. He just knew, if nothing else.
"Don't... open the door?"
What door?
To be continued...
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