The Night Watchman

The old swivel chair creeks underneath Lewis as he leans back and fiddles with a Rubix cube. I have my eyes fixed on the screens. He leans forward and places the colorful cube in front of me, one side done.

“Do you have any clue what today signifies, my friend?”

“Uhm. No.”

“They never told you about the guy you replaced?”

“Nope. What guy?” I only just began working here a couple of weeks ago.

“There used to be another security guard on the night watch, just like us. Used to sit right here in these chairs and lean back and watch the monitors. He used to patrol the building too. One night, Peters, the guy who worked the shift with you a couple nights ago, went off to patrol while the other guy stayed and watched the cameras. Peters claims to have come back about 15 minutes later and there was no sign of his night watch partner. He figured he’d gone to the bathroom or something, but when 15 minutes became 30 and then an hour he found that more and more unlikely.”

“What happened to him?”

“Well, some people say he just left. He had decided he didn’t want the job anymore and quit on the spot. But his car was still parked in the lot, the police had it towed after they searched it since nobody could reach him. Then, there's the fact that a few hours later on in his shift, Peters swore he saw someone walk by on one of the cameras. The person couldn’t be made out from the feed because they had their head down and a black hoodie up, but he said they walked super slow across the screen. Almost like they deliberately wanted to be seen. Later on when they looked back at the feed they never found any footage like that. It’s like someone cut it.”

“Or it never happened.” I said. “Maybe Peters was just tired and confused.”

“Maybe. I don’t believe it though. I think someone did something to Gunnerson, that was the name of the guy who disappeared, Brett Gunnerson. There was a short investigation. That’s when they pulled the footage to see if he was the one that Peters saw on the camera, but they couldn’t find the footage that Peters was rambling about. Even crazier, they couldn’t find ANY footage of Gunnerson that night after Peters did his rounds, but if he did leave he couldn’t have done it without passing at least one camera. It’s not possible.”

“Well if he never passed any cameras, even if he was the guy in the hoodie he would’ve had to double back to cut the footage, then wouldn’t that mean he’d have still been in the building.”

“That’s what the police believed at first. They thought that maybe he had hurt himself or accidentally locked himself in a closet, but they tore the whole building apart and there was no sign of him. He just vanished.”

“Hm. I’m one to believe there’s a reasonable explanation for everything. What you’re trying to sell sounds like pure fiction.”

“Okay, make sense of it then, smart guy.”

“Well, let’s say Gunnerson is having trouble in his personal life or something. For whatever reason, he wants to get away, so he asks Peters for help. Tell people this crazy story and when I leave, cut the footage. I’ll leave my car so that it doesn’t look like I ran away intentionally. Basically, him and Peters could’ve set up a whole kidnapping ruse and Gunnerson is probably off starting a new life somewhere.”

Lewis grabs the Rubix cube and leans back in his chair again. “That would be wild if it were true.”

“No more wild than the BS story you just told me.”

“Look. It’d just be nice to know for sure, ya know? Gunnerson was a good guy and it drives me crazy not knowing what happened to him. If he is even alive or not, ya know?”

A shadow makes its way across the camera and I squint my eyes to focus on it. It’s a figure with a black hoodie covering its features, walking past the utility closet.

“Lewis, look.”

“What’s up?” he says. First looking at me and then following my eyes to the security camera.

“WhOa.” His thick plastic chair wheels slam down on the hardwood. He saw it just in time for the figure to go out of view.

“Someone has to go after them. No one should be in the building after hours.”

“Hold on. Hold on. Chill, chill. It’s probably just Peters pulling a practical joke. That’s a good one too. I’m just lucky I fell forward instead of backwards when I saw that shit.”

I stand up and grab my flashlight off of the table. 

“Either way, we need to go look. You can stay here and watch the cameras, I'll go.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hell nah. I’m coming with. I just told you what happened the last time a night guard got left in this room by himself.”

He pops the top off of his Coke bottle and takes a quick swig and then nods and heads for the door.

We make our way down the long corridor, each office that we walk past sending a spike in my blood pressure. We get into the elevator at the end of the hall and press the button to head up to the 3rd floor.

“I’m pretty sure it’s just Peters, trying to creep us out with the hoodie and all, but be ready for an intruder just in case. You never know.”

I place my shaky hand on my nightstick and point the flashlight at the slightly open elevator door. When the doors fully separate we step into the hallway and walk a few feet. The utility closet is on my left. 

“Hello? You can’t be in here, employee or not. It’s after hours!”

Lewis shouts, but nobody acknowledges him.

We split up. I take the rooms down at the far end and he searches the ones closest to the elevator until we meet in the middle. No sign of anyone. 

“We might have to check each floor. We both saw someone and we can’t just let them roam the building.”

“I don’t know, man. If it was Peters he might’ve snuck out already. Let me call him.”

Lewis grabs his phone and proceeds to call a number. I can vaguely hear his phone ring through the speaker. And then I hear another phone ring. Lewis hears it too. I follow the noise over toward the elevator and click the down button. The ring gets louder when the elevator doors loosen their jaws.

“What the hell?” Lewis and I both step in and look up at the elevator ceiling and then at each other and then back at the ceiling. I feel the air get heavier as the doors close us inside and immediately hit the button for them to reopen.

Lewis reaches for the escape hatch at the top of the elevator. After a bit of a struggle he gets it up. He looks at me, as if for reassurance, and then props himself up using the handrail and peeks his head out the top of the hole in the elevator ceiling. “Holy shit.”

“What?” The elevator doors start to come back together and I again hit the button that pulls them apart.

“WHAT?” I say with fear and impatience.

Lewis hops down, holding something in his hand.

“It’s Peters. His cellphone.”

“Why the hell would his cellphone be in the elevator shaft?”

“I don’t know, but this doesn’t feel like a practical joke to me anymore. Let’s get back to the camera room.”

When we reach the second floor, the elevator stops but this time the doors don’t open. I smack the button a few times and try to pry at them, but they don’t budge. “Fuck.” I pull my flashlight out and shine it around the boxcar. Lewis is shaking and holding his nightstick like a batter up to the plate. A strong heatwave passes through my body and I slowly, tears filling the brims of my eyes, point my flashlight upwards to the hole in the ceiling. The elevator shaft. I look at Lewis.

I walk closer to the hole and swallow my Adams apple whole. I hand the flashlight to Lewis and then hesitantly place my foot on the handrail and lift myself up and peek out into the elevator shaft. Lewis hands me the flashlight and I shine it around, but see no movement. Then I turn my body around and shine it right in front of me, on top of the elevator cab. The opposite side of where Lewis found Peters phone. There is someone there, what's left of someone at least, lying in front of me. His body is lying face up. Half of his head is missing, like it was sawed off with a dull blade. He's beaten up roughly, scars on his face and neck. Blood leaking from his scalp and down his cheeks.

My whole body goes numb and I lose my footing on the handrail and slip. I drop onto the elevator floor and it knocks the wind out of me. Lewis grabs the flashlight from me and I can hear him distantly ask me questions. Like he's yelling from a mile away, rather than right in front of my face. "What's wrong? What happened?"

"There's a man.. up there."

His eyes look disbelieving. "What? What is he doing?"

"He can't do anything." I struggle to regain my breathe. "He's dead."

Lewis's eyes widen and tears fill the brims of his eyes.

"What did he look like?" Lewis asks.

"Uh. I think his hair was brown and short." It was hard to get much detail because he doesn't much look human at all anymore, but I didn't want to say that to Lewis. Then something came to me. "His shirt was a light green though, with a collar, just like ours."

"Could it have been Peters?"

No. I worked with Peters just last week and although that guy looks more like meat than man now, I think I'd recognize him.

"I'm thinking maybe it's Gunnerson."

"I've gotta call the police." Lewis scours, and shakily pulls out a cellphone.

"Wait." He says. "This is Peters phone. Peters phone was up there with Gunnerson's body. Do you think he's dead somewhere too?"

I run it over for a moment. If someone decided to kill Gunnerson and somehow got out of the building that night wearing a black hoodie, the police still would've seen them on the footage later. I no longer believe that Peters deleted the footage because Gunnerson was the one hiding personal problems.

"Remember. Gunnerson never really left the building, that's true, but he had to have passed a few cameras getting at least to here and the only person who could've deleted that footage..."

The elevator doors pry open and Peters is standing there wearing a black hoodie and yielding a small pickaxe.

"Hey guys. Going up?"