Work Text:
The tape recorder is clicked on.
Statement of Tim Stoker, regarding jigsaw puzzles. Original Statement given 17th August, 2013. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.
Everybody is a jigsaw puzzle.
I don't mean it in that "we're such complex creatures" sort of way, or the "everyone has different facets" way, either. I'm not a self-help book, and I'm not going to start talking like I am.
I mean it in the way that hurts to think about. I mean it in the way that a jigsaw puzzle never truly captures what it means to, because that's not the point of the thing, the point is you have all the pieces and you put it together and you do everything right and in the end it is only ever an image. A picture. A snapshot, eternally frozen in time, immortalized by your own two hands in your own home.
But it will never be perfect. It will never be real, never as real as you so desperately ache for it to be.
Not everyone is a jigsaw puzzle at this current moment in time. They will be, though. Everyone. Even you.
Even me.
I hope that that last one's still true.
There will come a point where somebody you knew, and loved, has become one of them. You loved them so dearly, and you never, ever wanted to see them like this- but you are. And you do. And all you can do is pick up the pieces and fit them together, even though you know it will never be enough.
Sorry for using such a weird metaphor. I don't know if I'm making any sense to you.
Let me explain it another way. Let's say, hypothetically, that there's a man- we'll call him Danny.
Danny is a normal, run of the mill man, maybe he's got some ADHD and hops between interests a bit, yeah? Everything from one of his old interests doesn't just disappear when he's done, unless he threw it all out, which he did for some of it, but nowhere near all.
Those little things that he forgets about, the things he likes, all the little things he knew and loved, they are now pieces of him. Evidence that he exists. Anything that he does that leaves a record of him, leaving voicemails, taking photographs, just living his life, they are pieces of his jigsaw puzzle.
Now let's say that something happens to Danny. Let's say that he picks up an interest in urban exploring, and he goes to just the wrong place at just the wrong time.
Maybe he was exploring an old building, an old hall, designed by some famous architect in the 19th century. Maybe it shouldn't have been dangerous, even though his brother- and we'll call that brother something like "Tim," that'll be easy to remember, right?- had an awful feeling about it, and tried to tell him not to go. Maybe Danny didn't listen, and went anyway, and Tim's bad feeling about it was right.
Maybe something awful happened to him. Maybe Tim even went down there himself, after a while, to investigate, to see if his brother got lost, and instead found the monsters that did it parading his body around, like it was nothing more than a prize to a game that they had won.
Let's say that all Tim has left of Danny are those pieces I told you about.
They're scattered all over his apartment. Danny's, I mean. They're everywhere, and it hurt to go in there, but I had to, I had to get his things out before the landlord put it back up for rent, and now the pieces are collecting dust in a storage unit where they don't even get to see the light of day anymore.
I don't think this is still a hypothetical.
I still have pieces of him in my apartment, in my phone, even on my desk at work- everywhere I look, everywhere I turn. But when I try and put them together, I don't see him. The picture is all wrong.
It's all just stuff, and stuff won't bring him back. But it's all that I have. The pieces of him that he left behind, they are nothing and they are everything and they will not bring him back.
They can't. Nothing can. I know that.
Putting together a jigsaw puzzle does not make its picture move. It does not make the image real. It does not bring the dead to life.
But they still make a coherent image, and I can't even have that. I don't have all the pieces, because so many of them were stolen from me by those monsters, the ones that did it in the first place.
There is exactly one voicemail in my phone. It's from him, I don't even know what it says, because somewhere between the time he left it and the time I found him the file got corrupted.
"This message is unable to be played at this time. Please delete the message or try again later."
That's what plays when you try to listen to a corrupted voicemail. I know it by heart by now, because every morning since it happened I have played that same message, hoping that somehow, some way, the file will be recovered. It's probably in vain, but I'm not going to delete it. I'm never going to delete it.
The old pictures of him are wrong, too. None of them are quite right, none of them are exactly the way I remember them being before. I don't think it's just grief, either, I don't think I'm just remembering wrong, because in one picture, his eyes are brown. In another, they're blue.
Sometimes he's blond. Sometimes he's a redhead. Sometimes- usually- his hair is black, but there's something else that's different.
Sometimes he's taller than me, sometimes he's fitter than me, sometimes both, sometimes neither. The pictures are never consistent, not the ones from my phone, not the old printed ones from the shoebox our mother always kept, none of them. They're all wrong, they're all different, all only a degree or two separate from each other but who the hell knows how far from reality.
I know that his hair was naturally black, I know he was taller and stronger than me, but I don't remember when his growth spurt was, I don't remember when he started going to the gym, I don't remember what colors he dyed his hair and when.
I hate this, I hate knowing that all I've got to rely on is my memory, I hate that I will never be able to trust any recording of him- all I have are the things he picked up along the way, the remnants of his fleeting interests, just... clutter, in the end.
It's been a few months of collecting the pieces of Danny, and all that's been awful enough on its own, but... something odd has been happening to me. That's why I came here, to you.
I can see pieces of other people. People I've never met, people I've never even heard of.
When you led me downstairs and into the Archives, I saw a little fidget toy sitting on an otherwise abandoned desk. It's bright, and colorful, and I guess you just didn't feel the need to get rid of it, right? I don't know why, you don't seem the type to keep reminders, but I guess that whoever Michael Shelley was, he was someone important enough to remember.
And then, when I stood in the doorway to your office while you dug around for a Statement form, I didn't see anything directly, but I could tell. You've got an important piece of someone called Adelard Dekker sitting in one of your desk drawers.
There are others, too. A book on your shelf, once owned by Eric Delano. The fake plant in the corner of this room was put here- or purchased, or owned, or what have you- by Fiona Law.
I don't know who any of these people were. I just see these things, the little reminders of them, the evidence that they were here, that they existed, and their names pop up in my head. Sometimes faces, too, but usually it's only names.
Recently, more recently I mean, there's been a... development, in this. A few months ago I wouldn't have known, I wouldn't have seen it, I wouldn't have noticed, but there's a half-empty bottle of black nail polish on a desk over in the bullpen I passed through. That bottle belongs to someone called Gerard Keay, and I know he's not dead yet.
I also know that it's not too long before he is.
I don't know how, or when, or why, but my guess is that it'll be within the next year or so. Probably not something sudden, because I don't think the future's all that set in stone. That's all I've got about him, sorry for the lack of detail. I wish I could help more, but I can't. That's all I have.
I don't know what's happening to me, I don't know why this is happening, and I don't know if I want it to stop. Maybe this could help someone? Somehow? Maybe I could let someone know if I see a piece of them, tell them to- go to the doctor, or something? I don't know, I don't know how to warn someone of this kind of thing without sounding like I'm trying to be threatening.
I'm not, for the record. I've never met Gerard Keay, never heard of him, there's no reason for me to be making threats on his life. I don't even know what he looks like to make a threat on his life.
Am I coming off as defensive? I swear, I'm not trying to do anything harmful, not at all. Not to anyone. I didn't mean to open up any wounds by mentioning anyone earlier, I just wanted to make sure you believed me. I wouldn't have believed me, not without something like that.
For a while, I thought I was just going crazy. I had no idea why I would think of random names when I saw random things, I had no idea if the names belonged to anybody real or if they were just imaginary, and it took multiple incidents for me to stop brushing it off as some weird kind of insanity brought on by grief or something of the sort.
I went to the house of a friend of mine, and there was an old couch sitting in her living room. When I looked, the name "Bertrand Miller" came through my mind, and I suppose my friend must have seen me staring, because a few minutes later she mentioned offhand that it had belonged to the previous owner of the place. I asked, hesitantly, if the previous owner had had the name of Bertrand Miller, and I was almost certain that I would have to cover for being strange and wrong, somehow, but oddly enough, I was right.
She asked how I knew, and I had to make up a story about an old coworker's father having once lived in the area or some nonsense like that.
There were more trials like that, all pointing more and more certainly towards the conclusion that I was not going insane, at least, not in any normal way. I don't know if I've got some weird psychic powers, or a link to God- if he even exists- or the grim reaper whispering in my ear, or some other wild and fantastical explanation I haven't thought of yet.
I don't know what it means. I don't. That's your job, right? To research things that don't make sense? Please tell me if there's anyone else like this, anyone else who can do this, tell me I'm not alone, I'm not some- some freak of nature, or holy thing, or whatever.
And, well. Even if you can't, there are two names that I wrote on my arm in case I ever met them, in case I could ever warn them, but having more people on my side can't hurt, right?
Lana Billings and Jane Prentiss. I saw pieces of them, can't remember where or when or what, but I knew at that point that they were not yet dead. If they work here, or someone here knows either of them, can you warn them to be careful for the next while? I don't know a time range, but anything helps, right?
I do remember that Prentiss' face flashed in my mind, but not Billings'. I don't know what that means, so if there's any help with correlations or anything, out of the others I listed above, the only name with a face attached was Michael Shelley. With Gerard Keay, I had an image of a page of a book, though that's never happened with anyone else before.
I guess I'm just being confusing with the details now. My point is- my point is that if there's anything here that you can use, go ahead and use it. Any information I may have unknowingly given, any correlation that you know and I don't, use it to your advantage. Something good should come out of this.
Statement ends.
- Well. There are quite a few things that warrant discussion with this Statement, but we should start with the basic information. Tim Stoker is, indeed, a real person's name, which I was afraid might not be the case, given the similarities this Statement has to that of Antonio Blake's, which was, in fact, a pseudonym. The "Danny" mentioned here does correlate to Tim Stoker's deceased younger brother, which is, of course, where things start to get a bit messy.
- Sasha was able to acquire police files on the death of Daniel Stoker, and what was most pertinent to this is that the police initially suspected foul play, and it just so happens that their main suspect was none other than Tim Stoker himself. A few weeks were dedicated to investigation and evidence gathering, but the charges were suddenly dropped just before this Statement was given, though no overt reasoning has been noted, other than a note that the case was moved to Section 31. This, of course, means nothing to me, but if there is anyone listening who knows what that means, please attach a fuller explanation to this case file.
- This does come into play with the continued references to "pieces" of people. Though Mr. Stoker does define a piece of someone in a much less literal sense than would initially be assumed, this seeming metaphor in combination with the fact that Daniel Stoker's body was never found cannot be ignored. This whole thing could have been a deranged confession, for all that I know, though the assertion of "powers" does muddy the waters on that theory.
- The names mentioned in connection to the Archives, with the exception of Adelard Dekker and Gerard Keay, were all people that had once worked as Archival Assistants, as confirmed by Human Resources. They are all also currently deceased, or missing and presumed dead, again confirmed by Human Resources. Gerard Keay is also deceased, though it is noted that this did not occur until late 2014, approximately a year after this Statement was made, which is oddly close to Stoker's guess. I do not suspect foul play, however, because Keay was documented to have died from complications related to a brain tumor that had been known about for months beforehand.
- There is no way to confirm that there was no way for Mr. Stoker not to have known the names of prior assistants when making his Statement, and no way to verify that any of the objects mentioned were connected to any of the individuals listed outside of consulting Ms. Robinson herself, which is currently impossible. Of note, after thoroughly checking the box in which Ms. Robinson's desk contents were placed, there is nothing overtly connected to anyone called "Adelard Dekker," though Mr. Stoker's description of what exactly the item in question is was vague at best.
- As for the final two names mentioned, Lana Billings and Jane Prentiss, Billings is a name that I recognize not from any Statements, but instead from my time in Research, though I cannot recall the context. Jane Prentiss, on the other hand, is quite alive, but rather unwell. She is currently wanted for decontamination by the ECDC, and she is reportedly wandering London while carrying and possibly spreading an unknown and dangerous parasite.
- Tim Stoker himself was unavailable when we attempted to contact him by his landline and cell phone numbers, and the publishing firm that he listed as his employer informed us that he quit some time ago. As far as we can tell, nobody has seen Mr. Stoker since early 2014, though nobody has reported him missing- whether this is because he is not missing and has simply become reclusive, or because he lacks close friends or family, remains to be seen.
- End recording.
The tape recorder is clicked off.