In the Watchtower

Pierre Allard is made of flesh and bone. Despite his reputation in being austere as reinforced steel and cold as winter cement by the inmates of the Palmswell Prison, his fellow officers know that Pierre’s only desire in life is to clock out each morning when his shift ends to return home and care for his wife Ana and two children; Tomas and Arabella. Both of his children are gravely afflicted by a rare genetic disorder that prevented major organs from developing correctly in the womb. They are bound to full mobility chairs when they must be moved and blocky gray hospital beds with wires ending below their skin and beginning in various machines to keep them alive through the night while they sleep. Pierre is grateful for his children nonetheless, and his wife Ana takes wonderful care of them at night while her husband works at the prison.

Tonight, Pierre will be stationed in the watchtower. But not at the top, with his eyes peering under the spotlights on the fields looking for loose inmates who may be brave enough to attempt to flee; tonight, Pierre will be in the surveillance room on the first floor of the watchtower. He doesn’t mind this work, though usually uneventful and at the most requires only a quick phone call to men inside the facility if anything is amiss, it is far less physically demanding than standing post amongst the rows of cells inside the facility. Pierre takes good care of his body and is very fit, though usually drained due to his constant work either at the facility, or at home with his children. His pale skin is clear and his long dark hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail at the rear of his head. His heavy uniform and many tools he has equipped on his waist rattle as he walks from the outer edge of the prison to the door of the watchtower, separated by about 200 feet of land. He is approached by two other officers walking toward him in the opposite direction.

“Good evening, Allard!” One of the officers shouts from not-that-far away.

“Pierre, you’re in for a real treat tonight!” The other laughs as they both approach.

Pierre is keen on cop banter and he knows that “a real treat” usually means that one of the inmates is either being particularly loud or behaving erratically, so the officer will have quite a show to watch on the many screens inside the room. If this show will be a good one, he has yet to tell.

“Evening Rodriguez,” Pierre starts while giving a slight nod to the first officer. “Brown,” A respectful nod to the second. “Who do I have the joy of working with tonight?” he inquires of the two men.

For as long as Allard has worked at the Palmsdale Prison, there are never less than two officers in the surveillance room at a time. This is a basic security measure to ensure their safety and to have eyes on every CCTV at once. It’s hardly needed, but the state takes the officer’s safety seriously.

“Just you tonight, Allard. Labor cuts. We’ll see you in the morning.” Rodriguez utters bluntly as the officers snicker to themselves while entering the doors of the prison to clock out of their shifts and return home. 

So much for the state. The metal doors slam shut, locking automatically as Pierre is left alone outside between the two buildings. The spotlight from the top of the tower illuminates the field around him, the freshly watered green grass glittering with each pass of the cold white light over the wide-spread space. The chain link fences acting as walls between the open world and the contained areas where the inmates may roam during the day rattle in the wind, creating an icy and pointed sound of clinking and clanking of metal against metal. The breeze is chilling, sticking the exposed skin of his hands and face with frigid pin-pricks that make him squint and shove his fists deep inside his pockets. The man continues into the tower, scanning his keycard at the door and lifting the handle firmly as he enters down the seemingly-interminable hallway that leads eventually to the surveillance room at the end. He walks swiftly, but not rapidly as the door behind him slowly begins to inch shut in a hesitant manner on an automatic delay that keeps it from slamming abruptly. 

As Allard makes his way down the long corridor, his heavy and solid leather boots creating an echo with each step, a blunt noise turns almost rhythmic as the sound bounces and dulls off of the cement walls. The fluorescent lights in rectangular rows above him buzz monotonously. The luminaire just above his head flickers slightly as he passes it, and Pierre stops briefly to inspect the bulb through the plastic cover with his gaze squinted, and as he does, the door to the watchtower he had just come from suddenly slams shut – a cacophonous noise that strikes him as it amplifies with each reverberation off of the walls until it meets his position and the sound is so piercing, it rings painfully off of his eardrums. Pierre covers his ears with his hands and grimaces. The sound halts as suddenly as it had begun. Budget cuts. He justifies to himself, furrowing his brow as his gaze returns back to the light fixture above– no longer flickering.

Finally, he makes his way to the inside of the surveillance room. He is alone inside the small area, where CCTVs cover an entire wall from top to bottom, a switch board just below it to remotely control each of the cameras placed around the facility, and a rolling desk chair in front of the whole setup where he will be sat for the rest of the night. Filing cabinets full of manila folders and a desk with a pour-over system for coffee, sugars, and dry creamers sit against the wall behind him. Above the desk, a large framed map of the entire prison hangs heavily. He takes his seat and settles in, glancing at each screen to get a sense of where the aforementioned “treat” may be.

He flips and scrolls his eyes between the TVs and finds a particularly unusual occurrence in block 4B. An inmate, female and possibly middle-aged, sits in her cell chanting nonsense to herself. Her eyes are rolled back into the inside of her skull so only the whites and numerous tiny veins show over them and she seems to be floating just above the floor of the room, her legs criss-crossed and her hands joined in front of her chest in a prayer-position. This camera must be glitching, the man thinks to himself as his confusion over her hovering is lessened with his proposed and quickly accepted justification. 

He takes hold of a small knob on the switch board and zooms the camera watching her in to fill the frame from top to bottom with her body as it levitates, inhumanly still and frozen, with the exception of her lips which move only very faintly as she mouths unintelligible words with no meaning, no hint of any language or accent that is known to Pierre. He squints to see better through the black-and-white fuzzy footage and stares at the screen for what seems like a long amount of time. Minutes pass, and the officer is still almost totally entranced by the woman inmate who floats in her cell. 

He breaks his gaze to look behind him at the filing cabinets full of every inmate's information, arranged by cell blocks. He can’t help but wonder who she is; why she’s there, what she’s doing. He rolls his chair over to the drawer with every inmate in block 4B, walking his index and middle finger over the files and glancing at their pictures to find this mystery woman. After a short time, he finds her. Jane Doe. He pulls her file out of the cabinet and begins to skim over the few documents there are inside the folder for anything that may give him a clue as to who she is or what she may be doing.

Jane was arrested two weeks ago for disturbing the peace from her home, a peculiar charge Pierre has never seen before. A neighbor that lives across the street from her residence testified the following: 

That woman is some kind of monster. She never leaves her house, but I see her shadow in my room at night. I see her dead and evil stare watching me from her windows during the day. I hear her screaming bloody murder when I close my eyes for even a second. She haunts me.

The next-door neighbor to the left of her:

 My dog went missing a month ago, and today I found his body at my doorstep. I know it was her. I heard the sound of his barking coming from her house for weeks, and when I finally worked up the courage to question her, a thick red liquid poured out from under the front door and flooded the entire lawn. I ran home, and when I looked back, her house was normal. No sign of any red liquid. That woman terrifies me.

In her mugshot, she wears a menacingly tight smile with wide doe-eyes. They call her Jane Doe as a placeholder name, because she has never spoken a single word to any officer and she has no official documentation anywhere on record to prove she was ever even born. The correctional counselor’s intake report reads:

Jane will not speak, and I am nervous to get too close to her. Although she has yet to be aggressive in nature, her stare and statuesque stillness is nothing short of unsettling. I sat with her for an hour and she barely even blinked. I would say she is in a dissociative state, but she seems to be fully alert and conscious of her surroundings. Very strange.

Pierre places all the papers neatly back into the folder, and smooths the file back into its slot in the drawer, rolling and clicking as it shuts. Pierre glances at the map above the desk with the coffee accessories for a moment, scratching his head in wonder of how true any of that could be, and how it makes no sense. This has to be what Rodriguez and Brown were referring to. Quite a show indeed.

Pierre rolls his chair back around to the wall of screens and is quickly startled when the one zoomed-in CCTV of the woman in question has now overtaken every single screen on the wall. She stares directly into the camera, irises taking up almost the entirety of her eyes with little white to be seen in them, black as charcoal. This sends shivers up the officer’s spine, his eyes twitching as he stares in terror at the multitude of TVs with only her face on them. 

Pierre runs to the door to leave, but to his horror, it is welded shut. He backs away slowly in confusion, his face twisted with disgust and shock. Her thunderous laugh comes wailing through the speakers, violently shaking everything in the room. The sound builds and builds, growing louder and louder as the framed map falls off of the wall and breaks the table below it in half. The filing cabinet drawers suddenly burst open all at once and every sheet of paper shoots out, scattering in pointed directions about the room. They do not fall in the way papers normally fall, it is as if they are being ripped from their places and thrown to the ground with no pressure present to cause it. The cackling continues and the sound is deafening, swirling in and out of each of the man’s ears and he spins about the room in perplexity. He loses control of his body and the spinning continues, he begins seeing a shadowy figure of a woman in every direction behind the chaos of the objects moving in impossible ways through unseen forces. The woman’s figure is shown as if through old film with the way the officer is moving, coming closer and closer to him while opening her mouth impossibly wide, mandible unhinging from its sockets and dropping below her collarbones. Still the laughing continues to barrage and boom in every corner of the room and the figure towers over the man, getting as close to him as she can possibly be without directly touching him, his eyes and mouth open wide in horror but no sound comes out, his complete shock overtaking his ability to make any noise, and as suddenly as it had begun, the laughing halts. Everything goes still. No objects in motion. Complete silence. Pierre’s body is still stiff with fear as the figure begins to smile a tight smile. The glass carafe from the pour-over system flies into the back of Pierre’s head, knocking him unconscious instantly.

*     *    *

Pierre awakes precipitously and as he does, he instantly lets out a blood-curdling scream. His wife who lies next to him in their bed is jump-started awake, and she lets out a scream too. This makes Pierre stop, as he realizes where he is.

“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!!” She yells at him.

He stares at her with wide-eyes “I…I was at work…” He begins confusedly.

“No. You weren’t. You were asleep in our bed. You didn’t even go to work last night, remember? They gave you the day off. Labor cuts or something.” Ana says matter-of-factly.

Pierre darts his eyes around the room once more just to make sure his vision was not deceiving him. Of course none of that was real, he thinks, that would be impossible. He sighs in relief, “It must have been a dream then. It felt so real… I’m sorry for startling you.”

Ana grumbles out of bed and makes her way to the bathroom. She shuts the door behind her as she enters.

*    *    *

Months have passed since “the incident”, and no one at the prison knows anything about a “Jane Doe”. Her file is gone, and Rodriguez and Brown both laughed in Pierre’s face when he asked about her.

“We were in the surveillance room that night. Pretty uneventful. Besides, no one is allowed to work there by themselves. The state takes that stuff seriously.” Brown stated when asked about the ordeal. Pierre chalks up the experience to some kind of one-off night terror.

Today, Pierre’s children are all packed up in their mobility chairs and loaded into the handicap-accessible van to be taken to the Farmer’s Market alongside his wife, Ana. A good outing for the family. The kids need fresh air and good home-grown food just about as much as he does. As he drives, he feels the cool wind from his window that he leaves open just a little bit to feel the tingle of the air on his face, like frigid pin-pricks that make him squint. The road isn’t long, and the drive is short. The van approaches the market, he parks in the handicap spot, and all the family members make their way out of the van. Ana and Pierre help as they load the children out, one by one. The kids smile at the sight of the market, where other children are playing and people are gathered in delightful conversation alongside the rows of stalls with fresh food and handmade items being sold.

Pierre takes the handles of Tomas’ chair, while Ana leads Arabella’s, and they make their way to the entrance. The man gazes curiously at all the various items being sold in the crowd. Fresh fruits of strawberries and blackberries, soy wax candles with hemp wicks, hand-brewed beer and freshly squeezed juices. While his gaze extends further and further, to far down the rows, just beyond the stall with the freshly-roasted coffee beans, he can just barely make out the outline of a familiar woman behind the stall. His fixed look goes from a casual glance to an urgent stare. She turns. Doe eyes and a tight smile, her expression meeting his in a way that almost taunts him. The hairs on his skin stand on-end, goosebumps covering every square inch of his skin and everything else between him and the woman begins to fade. The large area in between the two of them is full of the color red, a deep and syrupy red that is haunting. The distance lessens as she moves closer to him, floating, never taking a single step. His eyes widen and he loses his footing, stumbling backward. She giggles, the short and quiet sound echoing over and over in his ears in a way that builds with volume as it continues. The sharp sound is painful, and feels as though it may rupture his ear drums as it reverberates in his skull, bouncing off of the walls inside where his brain lies and jostling the organ around. The red color deepens to a black and he shuts his eyes, holding his head in his hands. When he opens them, the giggle has subsided as quickly as it began. He looks around and he is instantly back with his family at the market.

“Hey, is something wrong?” Ana inquires, noticing that Pierre has fallen behind and is marked with an odd expression on his face.

Pierre stumbles. He fights the urge to explode into a fit of rage and confusion. His anger subsides quickly as he looks at his children, whose smiles have dropped to a more concerned look at their father. He knows he must maintain his composure, for them.

“Yes… Yes, everything's fine.” He assures them.