Forsaken Below The Tracks

Chapter Sixteen: The Figure in the Surveillance Tape

It was Morgan's. And it was the clip Morgan was wearing the night that she had died. A vintage abalone shell clip from the 40's that I got at an antique shop in town for her birthday last year. It was the clip that she had been wearing in her loosely falling black hair last night. What the hell was it doing there, on the floor?

"Miss? Is there something wrong?"

"No, it's nothing," I stammered, snatching it up off of the floor and placing it gently in my bag.

"Okay then, please follow me, this way," he said gently in his thick British accent as he offered me his hand.

I took it and followed him by flashlight out of the dimly lit theater. He lead me out of the theater, down the hall past the rest of the shut doors that contained currently playing movies and through a door that I had never seen before and was marked, Private.

Must be where they kept all the behind the scenes, employee only type of stuff, I thought to myself.

We kept walking past a few other doors, some were closed, some open and contained people who were working furiously and only glanced up with curiosity for a split second before returning to their work. We walked up a staircase that was more closely related to a ladder than any staircase, I'll admit I was a bit nervous to walk up, wondering if the decades-old set of stairs would even still hold up one person's weight, let alone two.

We made it safely up to the next floor, much to my relief. The usher turned at gently smiled at me, I must have sighed when we reached the top.

"No worries, miss, these have remained sturdy for many years. Maintenance regularly checks and manages them to ensure that they are completely safe for the employees to walk up. Up here, this is where all of the magic happens. This is where all of the movies are played from so that they show up on the big screen out there," he motioned out of a small window in a small room and I could see what he meant. It almost reminded me for the projectors that they used in school. A guy was sitting at a small desk, with his back turned to the window, he was bent over some reels and boxes organizing some things. He didn't so much as glance up as we walked by.

The usher continued to lead me past a labyrinth of various rooms and hallways, I couldn't believe how big this place was. And in the dark, it seemed like if one got lost they could never return to the light. We finally reached the room that he was taking me too, I was still completely at a loss as to what I was doing up here, what he could possibly have wanted from me.

We walked into a room that was as dimly lit as the others. The usher motioned for me to sit down and as I did I peered out the tiny window and noted that it was the theater that was playing the movie that I had just left. I could look down and actually see the seat that I had been sitting at just a few moments ago. I wondered how many times these guys had seen Morgan and I poured so many shots of booze into the drinks that we had unpacked from our bags thinking that no one possibly could have seen us. I smiled in spite of myself. How naive we were.

"Miss, I want to show you something," he motioned not to the projector that was actually playing the movie, but to the computer that sat at his desk. It was loaded with four various screens that showed different parts of the movie theater, if the theater had been packed, you could have literally seen what everyone in there was doing. With ease. It was basically the movie theaters version of surveillance.

"I didn't do anything wrong, did I?" I asked him, "I mean, I didn't sneak in or anything, I can show you my ticket stub."

"No, no, miss, you did nothing wrong," he said earnestly, "I want to show you something that I caught on our camera's surveillance system here. It was something that is quite striking. Quite startling, really. But, I don't want you to be alarmed. So if you have any feelings of caution, please, it is most certainly okay to let me know and you can simply walk out, with no questions asked. I will even provide you with a set of free movie passes as I feel awful having interrupted your movie for all of this. But, miss, what I saw, I felt that you needed to know."

"Uh," I stared at him blankly, not really knowing what to say or how to proceed with all that he had just said, "what?"

He laughed, politely, "I can certainly understand that feeling. I guess I bombarded you a bit with all of the lack of information of which were contained within my words. Would it be alright if I just showed you? There really is nothing else I can say that can explain what I saw. You really should just see for yourself."

"Alright, then. Play on, my good man."

He smiled kindly, but his eyes were dark, they contained alarm, concern, worry... There was something that was hiding behind his eyes that I just couldn't place. I'll admit though, after what I had felt in the theater, the brushing against me, the cold chills, the sense of another presence, that I just was not alone where I sat, had me baffled and I was pretty damn motivated and inclined to see what that camera had caught.

He began to click and type away at the computer. The man had to have been at least 70 years old and just his computer skills were strikingly on point. He must have felt me staring at him in awe and confusion, he glanced my way and laughed at my bewildered look.

"I have been working at this theater since I came to the United States 40 years ago. I had to keep up with the times in order to keep my job. I'm 74 and have no intentions of ever leaving here," he smiled at me.

"I say you're brilliant. You can type faster than me and they actually made us take a class, and pass it, in high school," I shook my head. I hated that class with a passion. Not because it was difficult by any means, it just plain and simply, sucked.

"Alright, miss, here it is."

I leaned forward and squinted at the screen. What the hell was he showing me?

"I don't see anything..."

But at that moment, I saw exactly where he was pointing. It looked like there was a mist that was hovering directly over me and then it situated itself in the seat next to me. I saw myself sitting there, staring at the previews for the flick, then I saw myself immediately glance in the direction of the mist but staring not at it but through it. I saw myself sensing that something was there, saw myself feeling the hair stand up all over my body and chills run throughout my blood, saw myself as I had just experienced that feeling several minutes before and now here I stood with this strange old man, in this strange old office, actually watching it all unfold.

I had been right, there had been something there that whole, entire time. But what was it? He paused the frame as a million thoughts ran through my head. There had to be some sort of explanation for that mist.

"So, what is that? Like a fumigation thing? Or is it just insanely cold in there? I mean, really, there has to be something behind that. Right?"

"Well, miss, that's what I was thinking," he nodded, "this actually only became a red flag to me because I had thought that perhaps you had maybe decided to light up a cigarette or a marijuana joint, that has happened before, you know. So I freeze framed the image and zoomed in and I noted that there was most certainly nothing in your hands, nor had you at anytime lit anything up. It seemed impossible. We can double check the internal temperature of all of the theaters to ensure the comfort of our patrons, which I checked and the reading was our normal setting. There was nothing I could possibly think of to determine what this mist was. It was in no other theaters. But, what really struck me was the fact that you had seemed to feel it. You looked directly at it, not when it lingered over you, but when it transitioned itself to the seat next to you. Miss, I want you to keep watching... It gets quite interesting from here..."

He pressed a button on the keyboard and the frame resumed to play. He was right, what happened next was not only interesting, it scared the hell out of me.

"Is that..." I cocked my head to the side and leaned in closer to get a better look and double check that my eyes weren't deceiving me, "What is that? Is that the..."

"The figure of a person?" he finished my sentence for me and continued, "yes, miss, I believe it is."

But, it wasn't the figure of a person. It was the figure of Morgan.