Judas, no!

Transcription of Recovered Cassette Tapes, Designation: BF-PERSONAL-COMMS

Device: AT&T 1337 Answering System

Date Range: December 1988 — June 1990

Recovered From: [ADDRESS REDACTED], Santa Clara Valley, CA

Transcription Status: PARTIAL — Tape degradation noted in later entries. Final three messages exhibit anomalous audio properties (see appended notes).

[MESSAGE 01 — DECEMBER 22, 1988. 7:14 PM]

Yo, it's Terrence. You coming to Danny's Christmas thing or what? Sweet girl's invited too, obviously. Actually, she’s more invited than you are, loser. Tell her to bring those cookies she made last time, the ones with the—what was it again, the lemon stuff on top? Marcus ate like ten of them.

Call me back. And ask her about the cookies.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 02 — DECEMBER 27, 1988. 11:30 AM]

Hi, Bobby, it's Mom. Merry Christmas, sweetheart, even though you didn't call. I saved you a plate. I saved her a plate too. There's turkey and the casserole you like, the one with the crispy onions. You can pick them up whenever.

I love you. Call me back. Both of you.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 03 — DECEMBER 29, 1988. 6:02 PM]

Terrence again. Alright, you missed Christmas, you missed Danny's, and now Marcus is saying he saw your truck in the lot, but your apartment's dark. What's going on, man? Did you two have a fight or something?

Just let me know you're alive. That's all I need. One word. Literally groan “alive” into the phone and hang up. I'll take it.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 04 — JANUARY 2, 1989. 9:15 AM]

Bobby, this is Clark. Listen, [UNINTELLIGIBLE — tape distortion] didn't show up for her shift again last night. That's four in a row now. You need to tell her I'm not running a charity here. I really like the girl, you know I do, but I can't hold the position forever. Have her call me.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 05 — JANUARY 2, 1989. 4:47 PM]

Bobby, it's Mom again. Honey, I ran into Mrs Nguyen at the grocery store. She said there's been some kind of—she said she hasn't seen your girlfriend in over a week. Said you've been real quiet. Bobby, is everything okay? You're scaring me a little, sweetie. Call me back. Please.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 06 — JANUARY 5, 1989. 2:30 PM]

Mr Franklin, this is Detective Moreno with the Santa Clara Police Department. We'd like to follow up on the report you filed. If you could come down to the station at your earliest convenience, we have some additional questions. You can reach me at [NUMBER REDACTED]. Thank you.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 07 — JANUARY 9, 1989. 8:45 PM]

Terrence. Bobby. I just talked to your mom, and she told me—why didn't you call me? Why the fuck didn't you—

[PAUSE — 5 seconds]

Okay. I'm coming over. I don't care if your lights are off. I'm coming over right now.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 08 — JANUARY 14, 1989. 3:33 AM]

[SILENCE — 4 seconds]

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 09 — JANUARY 14, 1989. 3:34 AM]

[SILENCE — 7 seconds]

[FAINT SOUND — indeterminate. Possibly mechanical. Possibly vocal.]

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 10 — JANUARY 18, 1989. 10:05 AM]

Mr Franklin, Detective Moreno again. We've completed our review of the video equipment and tapes collected from your residence. You're welcome to retrieve them at the station. I'll be here until five.

[PAUSE — 2 seconds]

Bobby. Off the record. If there's anything you want to tell me, my door's open. No judgment. Just come talk to me.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 11 — JANUARY 23, 1989. 6:30 PM]

Bobby, it's Terrence. I drove by the store tonight. Saw your truck in the lot. Went in, and Clark said you were downstairs. Man, he said you've been going down there every night. Said you just sit on the floor and talk. Bobby, I know you're hurting. I know, me too. But you're scaring people. You're scaring me.

I've been looking too, okay? I've been asking around. I went to every bar on El Camino, showed her picture, asked if anyone's seen her. Nobody has. But I'm not giving up, and I need you to not give up either, and I need you to do it in a way that doesn't look like—like—

Just call me. Please, man. I can't do this through a machine.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 12 — FEBRUARY 3, 1989. 11:22 PM]

[CALLER UNKNOWN — female voice, middle-aged, angry]

I know what you did to that girl! Everybody knows. The police might not have enough to arrest you, but that doesn't mean you're innocent, you disgusting piece of—my daughter went to school with her. She was a good girl. A GOOD girl! And you—

[VOICE BREAKS]

You better pray they never find her, because if they do, and if you did what I think you did—

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 13 — FEBRUARY 3, 1989. 11:24 PM]

[SAME CALLER]

I saw you at the gas station last week. With your little earring and your—strutting around like nothing happened. Like she didn't matter. Some of us remember her. Some of us haven't forgotten.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 14 — FEBRUARY 10, 1989. 9:00 AM]

Bobby, it's Mom. Honey, I talked to Father Reyes, and he said you're welcome to come by the church anytime. You don't have to talk. You can just sit. Sometimes it helps to just sit somewhere quiet.

[PAUSE]

I know you didn't hurt her, baby. I know that. A mother knows. But you need to take care of yourself. You're not eating. Terrence told me you're not eating. I'm going to bring food over this week, and I don't want to hear about it.

I love you.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 15 — FEBRUARY 22, 1989. 3:33 AM]

[SILENCE — 11 seconds. A sound that may be breathing or may be tape degradation.]

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 16 — MARCH 1, 1989. 2:20 PM]

[AUTOMATED] You have reached Pacific Bell. This is a reminder that your bill for the month of February is past due. To avoid service interruption, please—

[MESSAGE DELETED BY USER]

[MESSAGE 17 — MARCH 8, 1989. 7:10 PM]

Bobby. It's Terrence. Okay, this is gonna sound really freakin’ weird, but I need you to just hear me out.

I was at Danny's tonight, right? And I was telling him—I was trying to tell him about the search. About how I went to all those bars on El Camino asking about her. And he looked at me like I was crazy. He said, “asking about who?” And I said her name. I said—

[PAUSE — 3 seconds]

I said her name, Bobby. I know I did. I heard myself say it. But Danny just stared at me. And Marcus was there too, and he had the same look, like I was making someone up. And I started to say, you know, Bobby's girlfriend, she's been missing since December. And Marcus said Bobby doesn't have a girlfriend.

Marcus said that. To my face. About a person who has been in his car. Who sat at his kitchen table. Who was at his birthday party last year.

I'm not—I'm not losing it. Right? Bobby, tell me I'm not losing it.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 18 — MARCH 8, 1989. 7:15 PM]

It's me again. I just—I wanted to say her name again. Into the phone. So there's a record of it. So I know I said it.

[PAUSE — 6 seconds]

[UNINTELLIGIBLE — tape distortion. A burst of static lasting approximately two seconds, precisely overlaying the space where the name would be.]

… That's her name. That's her goddamn name. I know it. I KNOW it.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 19 — MARCH 20, 1989. 12:17 PM]

Bobby, it's Clark. I hired somebody to cover the shifts. A girl named Kat. She's good. Reliable. I'm telling you because I don't want you to walk in tonight and be caught off guard. It's not a replacement. It's just coverage. You understand.

[PAUSE — 3 seconds]

I'm not gonna beg, but I will say this. Sitting in that basement isn't gonna bring her back, son. I've been where you are. You know I have. Come back to work. Give yourself something to do with your hands. Door's open.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 20 — APRIL 5, 1989. 9:30 PM]

Bobby. Terrence. Listen to me. Something is wrong with me.

I've been… I started writing things down, okay? Because I keep losing pieces. Not like forgetting where I put my keys. Like whole chunks of things just… just going blank. I drove to the store last week because I knew I needed to look for someone. I KNEW it. I could feel it in my chest, this pulling, like something awful happened and I'm supposed to be doing something about it. But when I got there, I sat in the parking lot, and I couldn't remember who. I couldn't remember who I was looking for.

I went home, and I found this list I made. My own handwriting. Things about a person. Real specific things, Bobby, like I knew this person inside out. Their favourite things. Things they were scared of. Personal things you only know about someone if you—if you love them.

And I don't know who it's about.

Bobby, I think something is really, really wrong.

Call me. Please. I don't care what time it is.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 21 — APRIL 5, 1989. 9:33 PM]

Me again. One of the things on the list says “she hated the green ones.” Skittles, maybe? Or M&Ms? I don't know. But when I read it, I felt so sad I almost threw up, and I don't know why.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 22 — APRIL 28, 1989. 5:45 PM]

Bobby, it's Mom. Honey, I saw you at the store last week. Through the window. You looked thin. You looked real thin, baby, and I—

I also saw the new girl behind the counter. She seems sweet. Clark told me her name is Kat. He said she's been good for the store.

[PAUSE]

Bobby, I want to ask you something, and I want you to really think about it. Have you thought about talking to someone? Not Father Reyes, I mean a professional. Someone who can help you process—whatever this is. Because, sweetheart, I talked to Terrence's mother, and she said Terrence is worried you're not sleeping. And Clark says you go to the basement every night and talk to the walls. And I'm not judging you, sweetie, I'm not, but—

You can't keep living like this. Something has to give.

I love you. Call me back.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 23 — MAY 14, 1989. 8:00 PM]

Hey Bobby, it's Terrence. So… okay. I found a list. In my glovebox. My handwriting. Bunch of stuff about somebody I apparently used to know pretty well. Do you know who “hates the green ones” means? I wrote that down. I must've had a reason.

[LONG PAUSE]

I don't know why I'm calling you about this. I just had a feeling you might know.

Call me back if you know.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 24 — MAY 14, 1989. 8:02 PM]

Me again. I just looked at the list again. One of the things on it says “Bobby loves her.”

Bobby loves who?

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 25 — MAY 30, 1989. 1:15 PM]

Mr Franklin, this is Greg Haldeman from Valley Video Services. You dropped off a set of VHS tapes last week for transfer? I need to talk to you about these.

We ran the first batch through our equipment, and there's—look, I've been doing tape-to-tape transfers for twelve years, and I've never seen degradation like this. The content is… it's there, technically, but the image quality is deteriorating in a way that doesn't match any standard wear pattern. It's like the magnetic coating is selectively demagnetising. Only in certain areas of the frame. The rest of the image is fine.

I don't want to alarm you, but I pulled a few of the other tapes and spot-checked them, and it's happening across all of them. Same pattern. Same areas of the frame affected.

Call me when you get this. I have some questions.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 26 — JUNE 12, 1989. 4:45 PM]

Mr Franklin, Greg Haldeman again, Valley Video. I've been trying to reach you. Listen, I need you to come pick up these tapes. We can't do the transfer. The content is… it's gone. I don't mean degraded. I mean gone. Every tape I checked this week is blank. Clean blank. Factory blank. Whatever was on them isn't damaged or overwritten. It's just—it's like nothing was ever recorded on them at all.

I've never seen anything like this. Honestly, it's giving my guys the creeps.

The labels are still on them. Your handwriting, dates, everything. But the tapes are empty.

Come get them, please. No charge.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 27 — JUNE 18, 1989. 3:33 AM]

[NO VOICE — faint static for 11 seconds. A low-frequency tone, just at the threshold of perception, underneath.]

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 28 — JULY 4, 1989. 10:00 PM]

[BACKGROUND NOISE — distant fireworks, music, voices]

Bobby! Happy Fourth, man! It's Terrence. I'm at Danny's. Whole crew's here. You should come through. Kat said she'd give you a ride if you need one—wait, do you know Kat? Clark's girl from the store. She's cool. She said she knows you.

[SOMEONE IN BACKGROUND: “Tell him we got bottle rockets!”]

We got bottle rockets, Bobby! Get over here!

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 29 — JULY 19, 1989. 6:20 PM]

Bobby, it's Mom. I stopped by with food today, and you didn't answer. I left it by the door. There's pot roast and rice, and I put some fruit in there too because I know you're not buying any.

[PAUSE]

Honey. I talked to Terrence. He says you've been going through a rough patch and that you might—he mentioned you've been talking about a girl. Someone who went missing? Baby, I don't—I don't know who you're talking about. Terrence doesn't either, not really. He said he's worried you're confused about something.

I'm not saying you're making things up. I would never say that. But sometimes when we're hurting, our minds—

Just call me. Please. I just want to hear your voice.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 30 — AUGUST 2, 1989. 9:10 PM]

Hey, Bobby, Terrence. Listen, I gotta talk to you about something, and I don't want it to be weird, but it's gonna be weird.

[PAUSE]

Jesus. Okay. I saw you with Kat. At the store. You were behind the counter, and she was—look, it's fine. She seems great. She's pretty. I'm happy for you, man, I am.

But something feels wrong, and I can't figure out what.

Like—okay, you know when you walk into a room, and you KNOW you came in here for something, but you can't remember what it was? It's like that, but way bigger. I look at you and Kat together, and my brain keeps saying no. Not like, no, don't do it. More like no, that’s wrong. No, someone's missing. Like there's supposed to be somebody else standing there, and I can almost see her, but I can't. It's making me feel like I'm going crazy.

[LONG PAUSE]

I found that list again. The one in my glovebox. I keep finding it, and it keeps making me sad. I keep forgetting why. One line says, “Bobby loves her.”

I don't want to be an asshole. I don't. Kat's nice. But every time I see you two together, I get this sick feeling in my stomach, like—like something's been stolen. Not from me. From you. And you don't even know it's gone.

I'm losing my damn mind, man. Forget I said anything. See ya Saturday.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 31 — AUGUST 14, 1989. 3:33 AM]

[LONG SILENCE — 13 seconds]

[A sound. Low. Below the range the tape should be able to capture, but it's there.]

[It goes on for thirty-one seconds without changing pitch.]

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 32 — SEPTEMBER 5, 1989. 7:30 PM]

Hey Bobby, it's Terrence. So, listen, weird thing. I cleaned out my glovebox this weekend, and I found this piece of paper. My handwriting. Just a bunch of random notes about somebody. I have no idea who. Stuff like “hates the green ones” and “Bobby loves her.” Some of it's in pencil and really hard to read.

Probably old song lyrics or something. I don't know. Threw it out.

Anyway. You and Kat coming to Danny's barbecue Saturday? Lemme know.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 33 — OCTOBER 1, 1989. 7:45 PM]

Bobby. Terrence. Okay, I need to talk to you, and you need to actually pick up your damn phone for once.

I don't know what's going on with you and Kat. I really don't. And I'm not trying to get in your business, man. But I keep—every time I see her at the store, in the spot behind the counter, something in my chest just… I don’t know. Clenches. Like a fist. And I don't know why. I don't have a problem with her. She's great. She's really great. But standing where she stands, behind that register, it feels like I'm looking at a cover band playing in the same venue as the real thing, you know, except I can't remember who the real thing was.

I keep almost remembering something. And then it goes. And I'm left with this… this shape. This empty shape where something should be.

[PAUSE — his voice gets quieter]

Bobby, were you ever… before Kat… was there someone else? Someone important?

I feel like there was. I feel like I knew her. I feel like she mattered a lot, and something terrible happened. I should be doing something about it, and I can't because I can't remember WHAT.

[LONG PAUSE]

Fuck. Forget it. Just forget it. I’m not gonna do this again. I sound insane. 

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 34 — NOVEMBER 12, 1989. 11:15 AM]

Bobby, it's Mom. Kat came over for Sunday dinner last week, and she was just lovely. So polite. She brought pie. I really liked her, sweetheart.

[PAUSE — careful]

I hope you're doing better. You seemed better at dinner. Quieter than I'd like, but better. Kat said you've been sleeping more and that's good. That's really good, baby.

I love you. Come for Thanksgiving. Both of you.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 35 — NOVEMBER 20, 1989. 8:30 PM]

[TERRENCE — voice is normal. Casual. No distress.]

Hey man, what's up? You and Kat coming to Thanksgiving at Danny's, or are you doing your mom's place this year? Let me know so I can tell Danny how many chairs to set up.

Oh, also, do you still have that Beastie Boys tape? Paul's Boutique? I've been looking for it everywhere. Could've sworn I lent it to somebody, but I can't remember who.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 36 — DECEMBER 22, 1989. 9:00 PM]

[TERRENCE]

Bobby! One year since we—wait. One year since what?

[PAUSE — 4 seconds]

Huh. I just had the weirdest feeling, man. Like today's supposed to be important. Not Christmas, something else. December 22nd. Does that date mean anything to you?

[PAUSE]

Probably nothing. Anyway, you and Kat coming to Danny's Christmas thing? Call me, loser.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 37 — JANUARY 15, 1990. 10:30 AM]

Clark here. Bobby. Good to see you in the store last week. Kat says you've been coming around more. That's good. That's real good.

Listen, I know things have been—I know I was hard on you last summer. The bourbon was talking. I shouldn't have said what I said. You're a good kid. You've had a rough year. I don't know what exactly, but I know it was rough, and I should've been—

Anyway. Come by Thursday. I got a new shipment of bedroom sets.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 38 — FEBRUARY 2, 1990. 8:15 PM]

Bobby, it's Terrence. I need to—okay, this might be nothing, but I gotta get it off my chest.

I was at the store today. I was picking up that end table for my mom. And Kat was behind the counter, and she smiled at me, and everything was dandy. Everything was totally cool.

And then I walked past the stairs. You know, those really creepy ones that go down to the basement storage. And I just stopped. I stood there looking down those stairs, and I felt like I was going to cry. I have no idea why.

Something happened down there. I don't know what. I don't know when. But my body knows. You know how sometimes your body remembers things your brain doesn't? Like a smell that makes you sad for no reason?

Those stairs did that to me. And I looked at Kat behind the counter, and for one second I felt the most intense… fuck, not jealousy. Not that. It was… grief? I think? This huge, drowning grief, like I lost someone and I never got to say goodbye, and now I can't even remember their name.

[VOICE CRACKS]

Shit. I'm fucking sorry, man. I don't know where that came from.

Forget it. I'm good. See you Friday.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 39 — MARCH 20, 1990. 6:00 PM]

Bobby, it's Mom. I'm just calling because I love you. That's all. I just wanted you to hear it.

Kat's good for you. I can see that. You're eating again. You're sleeping. Whatever was wrong—whatever happened last year— you're coming through it.

[PAUSE]

I know you don't talk about it. That's okay. You don't have to. Just keep moving forward, baby.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 40 — APRIL 18, 1990. 8:45 PM]

[TERRENCE — voice sounds normal. Light. No distress.]

Hey man, what's up? Danny's doing a thing Friday. Grill situation. You and Kat in? Lemme know.

Oh, and I've been working on this new song. Guitar thing. Kinda melancholy but in a good way. I don't know where it came from. I just sat down, and it was there, like I'd been carrying it around for a while without knowing it. Weird as fuck, but can’t complain. Think it might be my best one yet.

It doesn't have lyrics yet. But the melody keeps going to this… like someone's name in music. I don't know whose.

Anyway. Friday. Be there, or else.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 41 — JUNE 2, 1990. 2:00 AM]

[LONG SILENCE — 13 seconds]

[A sound. Low. Below the range the tape should be able to capture. But it's there.]

[It goes on for thirty-one seconds without changing pitch.]

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 42 — JUNE 2, 1990. 2:01 AM]

[BOBBY'S OWN OUTGOING MESSAGE — activated by an apparent malfunction or power surge. The following is the greeting that was recorded over his previous one at an unknown point.]

[12 seconds of silence.]

[Bobby's voice, but different. Too even. Too smooth.]

I'm not here. Try again.

[END RECORDING]

TRANSCRIPTION NOTES:

The cassettes were recovered in a non-standard state. The tape had been partially unwound and re-spooled by hand at least once. Several messages (08, 09, 15, 27, 31, 41) do not correspond to any outgoing call from numbers associated with known contacts. Pacific Bell records show no incoming call to this line at the times noted for these messages. All six occur at either 3:33 AM or 2:00 AM.

Message 18 is of particular interest. Spectral analysis of the static burst at [TIMESTAMP 0:22-0:24] reveals the distortion is not random. The frequency pattern is structured, repetitive, and consistent with vocal formants. Specifically, the waveform signature of a human name being spoken. However, the pattern degrades upon each subsequent playback. By the fifth analysis pass, the burst registered as featureless white noise. The name, if it was one, is no longer recoverable.

Messages 25 and 26 reference VHS tapes delivered to Valley Video Services (4200 El Camino Real, Santa Clara) on May 23, 1989. Valley Video confirmed receipt of fourteen labelled cassettes. Valley Video returned all fourteen to the subject on June 19, 1989. Company records note the tapes as “blank — no content found.” However, playback equipment used during the attempted transfer reportedly malfunctioned for the remainder of the work week. One technician (G. Haldeman) filed a workers' compensation claim for “persistent auditory disturbance” and resigned three weeks later.

Message 30 contains the last known instance of Subject Terrence [SURNAME REDACTED] expressing distress related to the missing individual. By Message 32 (September 5, 1989), the subject discovers his own previously written notes about the missing individual and does not recognise them. He discards them.

Message 36 (December 22, 1989) is the one-year anniversary of the disappearance. Subject Terrence notes the date “feels important” but cannot identify why.

Message 42 is of critical interest. Voice analysis confirms the speaker as Robert James Franklin, but pitch, cadence, respiratory markers, and emotional affect are inconsistent with all other known recordings of the subject. Specifically, the recording contains no evidence of breathing. The pauses between words are mathematically uniform, measured at exactly 0.73 seconds each. The phrasing (“try again”) does not match standard answering machine conventions for the period.

The tape was found in the machine. The machine was found unplugged.

The red light was still blinking.

Senior year. Spring, 1986.

The cliff isn't that high.

Bobby's been reciting this fact to himself for the last fifteen minutes while standing at the edge of the rock shelf with his toes curled over the lip. 

The Pacific stretches out below him like a roaring beast, the Northern California water cold and deep. It’s the kind of blue that looks inviting from a distance but turns your balls to ice cubes on contact in Bobby’s humble experience. The wind tugs at his hair, whipping the dangly chain against his collarbone, while the sun blazes high and too hot against the back of his sunburned neck. 

“This is where you die,” Terrence declares gleefully.

He's standing three feet back from the edge, arms crossed, his dark skin already beading with salt spray, squinting against the glare of the light. His board shorts are too big, flapping in the wind like small, erratic sails, his dusty sneakers untied. And he's got that expression on. The one Bobby has known since second grade, the one that says You’re an idiot, and I am going to enjoy every second of this.

Bobby scoffs under his breath. “I'm not gonna die.”

“Bro. You're gonna hit those rocks, and they're gonna have to scrape you off with a spatula.” Terrence peers over the edge, pulling a face before he leans back, holding out his hands in the air at some distance. “A big spatula. Like the kind they use at Denny's. They're gonna flip your body like a pancake because you’ll be pulp.”

“There are no rocks.”

“There are always rocks, idiot,” Terrence argues, rolling his eyes, pointing. “That's what a cliff is, Bobby. It's rocks. The whole thing is rocks. You're standing on a big rock right now. Wanting to jump off it into more rocks.”

Bobby puffs out his chest, keeping his expression perfectly straight. “The water's deep enough.”

Terrence groans, gesturing angrily with his arms over his head. “According to who?”

“According to the guy at the gas station,” Bobby shoots back at once. 

“Oh, the weirdo at the gas station who had one eye.”

“He had two eyes.”

“One of them was glass.”

“It was not glass, Terrence.”

“It was going a different direction than the other one. Not my fault you’re blind, Franklin.”

A grin breaks out across Bobby’s face. He can't help it. 

They'd always been inseparable. Terrence, who is smarter than Bobby in every way that matters, and dumber than Bobby in every way that's fun, who plays bass in a band that practices in his mom's garage and has never once played an actual gig, who can talk trash for forty minutes without repeating himself and once made a substitute teacher laugh so hard she had to leave the classroom.

You step up beside Bobby, hands slotted on your hips, drinking in the view from the cliff face.

Bare feet on the warm rock. Your hair dancing in the wind that keeps pulling strands all over the place. You keep pushing loose pieces away, but they keep escaping anyway, and Bobby watches this little miracle. The repetition, the futility, the small war between your hair and your hands, and there’s that swell in his chest again. The big thing. 

The thing he still doesn't have words for, the feeling that showed up the day you transferred to his school and has been sitting in his ribcage ever since, taking up more and more room, crowding out everything that isn't you.

You peer over the edge with barely suppressed curiosity, your toes curling beside his. Your shoulder brushes against his arm.

“We're totally doing this,” you say, no hesitation to be found.

Bobby stares at you. Your chin angles in his direction, your eyes half narrowed and bright, playful. Your jaw is set in that stubborn way he adores, and you've got that expression on your face, too. The fierce one, the one that means you've decided. That Bobby and Terrence and the Pacific Ocean and the one-eyed gas station attendant can all go to hell because you're jumping off this cliff and the only remaining question is who's leaping into the unknown first.

“We're definitely doing this,” Bobby repeats, a grin breaking out across his face, dimpling his cheeks.

“You're both insane.” Terrence unfolds his arms, kicks off his sneakers with an exaggerated sigh, like you’re the two most difficult people he's ever come across. “Certifiable morons. When they find your bodies, I'm telling the cops I didn't know either of your asses. I'm gonna say two weirdos jumped off a cliff and I just happened to be nearby, officer, practising my bass, minding my business—”

Terrence jumps.

Mid-sentence. One second he's standing there delivering his eulogy and the next he's gone, launched off the rock shelf with his arms windmilling and his board shorts flapping, a scream tearing out of him. A long, unhinged, gleeful shriek that bounces through the air and scatters a flock of seabirds, carrying the acoustic signature of a seventeen-year-old boy caught mid-life-defying leap of his life. 

His body hits the water with a sound like a door slamming, and the spray reaches the top of the cliff. Bobby flinches, but then Terrence surfaces, gasping, treading water, his beaming, deranged grin visible even from forty feet up.

“IT'S FREEZING,” Terrence yells, delighted, his giddy voice carrying in the salt air. “MY NUTS JUST CRAWLED INTO MY THROAT. GET DOWN HERE.”

Bobby bursts out laughing, practically hiccuping from the sound. The real laugh, the full one, the one that comes from somewhere deep in his chest and makes his whole body shake. He turns to you.

You're already looking at him.

The wind is catching your hair again, the sun warm on your smiling face. The cliff drops away beneath your feet, and Terrence is screaming something about hypothermia below you. But Bobby is looking at you, and the big thing in his chest isn't cracking anymore, isn’t swelling. No, it's broken open. Wide, wide open. And what's behind it is so enormous, so bright, so terrifying that Bobby does the only thing he knows how to do with an emotion that big.

He cups your face in both hands and kisses you.

A slow, deep press of mouths that has no urgency in it because it doesn't need any. 

It’s the kind of kiss that exists outside of time, outside of cliff edges and cold water or screaming best friends. His thumbs trace your cheekbones, his fingers cradling your face closer. Your mouth opens under his, and Bobby can taste the chapstick you put on in the car, the salt spray on your lips and something else underneath: the irreplaceable flavour of the person he loves, and the word loves moves through him like a wave, through his chest and his hands and his mouth pressed against yours, and he doesn't say it. 

Bobby doesn't say it; Bobby has never said it, because Bobby is eighteen and terrified of the size of what he feels, of ending up like his dad. But you can taste it. He knows you can. He can feel it in the way you lean into him with a muted sigh, the way your hands find his waist, gripping, the way your breath catches against his lips. 

You can taste how in love with you he is in this moment, and the knowing moves between your mouths like a shared secret.

He pulls back, pressing his forehead to yours, his grin crooked, real.

“Together?” he prompts quietly.

You grin back, skin around eyes scrunching as your hands tighten on his waist.

“Together.”

You leap together.

The air catches you, the world around you falling away into a smear of rushing wind. Terrence's screaming gets louder, then too close. The water rushes up faster and faster, and Bobby holds your hand tight in his, refusing to let go. The sun beams above you, the ocean roaring up towards them from below, and for three wonderful seconds, Bobby Franklin is suspended between the sky and the sea with the girl he loves, and his best friend. The big, scary, wonderful future stretching out in front of him, waiting for him to take it.

He hits the water.

Month 9.

Bobby jerks awake.

The apartment is dark around him, curtains pulled closed, stiflingly quiet. The sheets are cold on your side, and his hand lies in the empty space where your body should be, fingers curled around nothing, reaching for a warmth that hasn't been there in nine months.

His face is wet.

He touches his cheek, fingers coming away slick, and stares at them in the dark. It takes his brain a full five seconds to catch up to what his body already knows: he was crying in his sleep. Crying and reaching for you, dreaming about a cliff in Santa Cruz where the water was cold, your mouth was warm, and the whole world was three seconds of freefall with your hand clutched in his.

The dream is already dissolving. The details go first. 

The colour of the water, the sound of the seabirds, the pressure of your lips against his. Then the shapes follow. The cliff, the sun, Terrence's grin. Then you. Your face. Going last, going slowest, but going all the same. Fading the way the tapes faded, frame by frame, feature by feature, until what's left is just the impression of warmth and the ghost-weight of your hand in his and the echo of a word he said on a cliff.

Together?

Bobby lies in the dark, breathing, forcing himself to. His hand stays on the empty space. The tapes are blank, and you’re gone, he reminds himself bitterly.

He presses his face into your pillow. It doesn't smell like you anymore.

Nothing does.

Month 10.

Bobby calls Terrence on a Sunday afternoon.

He doesn't know why Sundays are the worst. Maybe because Sundays used to be yours. 

The lazy ones, those lazy mornings when you'd make pancakes, and Bobby would sit on the counter filming you flip them, little cheers interlaced between each successful flip and capture. You'd threaten to burn the next one on purpose if he didn't put the camera down, and he never did. But you never burned one on purpose, and the kitchen would smell like batter and coffee and the whole day would unspool from that warm hour like thread from a spool. 

Sundays were the one day Bobby didn't retreat. Sundays he was present, close, the version of himself that could sit in a kitchen and just be without needing the lens to mediate it. He didn't know that then. He didn't know Sundays were different until there were no more Sundays, and every day became the same grey flat line of waking up alone, going to sleep alone, and filling the space between with whatever made the filling hurt less.

The weed helps. It used to be recreational. Now it's medical, a necessity that runs bone deep. Bobby smokes before he gets out of bed and after he gets back in. Then, in the hours between, he's either at work, in his car, or sitting somewhere that isn't the apartment, because the apartment is a crypt and he's the body in it. The weed softens the edges and makes the silence more bearable. Makes the reaching-for-you-in-the-morning thing happen in slow motion instead of in a sharp jolt, so by the time his fingers find the cold sheets, his brain has already cushioned the impact with a thick, chemical padding that turns grief into fog instead.

He's smoking when he calls Terrence. Sitting on the fire escape in the early dark with the phone cord stretched through the window and the cherry of the joint a small orange eye in the grey. Terrence picks up on the fourth ring.

“Yo.”

“Hey.” Bobby exhales, watching the smoke curl and disappear into the Santa Clara dusk. “You busy?”

“Nah. Mom's making tamales. What's up?”

Bobby opens his mouth, hesitating. The thing he wants to say is lodged right there in his throat like a bone. Painful, immovable, tearing at the tender spots with each swallow. He's tried to tell Terrence four times in the last three months, and each time the outcome has been worse than the last.

“I was thinking about the cliff,” Bobby hedges quietly, testing the ground. “Senior year. Santa Cruz. When we went diving.”

“Hell yeah.” Terrence laughs, the sound warm and cheerful in Bobby’s ear. That familiar, full-body cackle that Bobby loves because it’s so unfailingly infectious. “Bro, you screamed so loud on the way down I thought you were gonna pass out before you hit the water. And I jumped first, like a real man. You remember that?”

“Yeah. I remember.” Bobby takes another drag, letting the smoke fill his lungs and sit there, too warm and sweet. “Do you remember who else was there?”

Pause.

Then, “What do you mean?”

Bobby tries to swallow, forces himself to keep his voice casual, light, adding, “At the cliff. There were three of us, remember?”

“Three?” Terrence sounds confused. Genuinely confused. He can hear Terence running through the memory on the other side of the line and finding all the seats accounted for. “Nah, man, it was just us. You and me. I jumped first, and you went after. Almost hit the rocks, you dumbass. I had to drag you to the shallow part because you were laughing too hard to swim.”

Bobby closes his eyes.

“There were three of us, T.” Barely a rasp, a faint whisper. “She was there. She jumped with me. We held hands on the way down. Do you remember that?”

The silence on the other end of the line is the worst silence Bobby has ever heard. Worse than the empty apartment. Worse than the dead tapes. Because this silence has a person in it. His best friend, the last person who used to say your name without being prompted, the last thread connecting Bobby's memory of you to anyone else's… and that hollow silence is the sound of that thread snapping.

“Bobby.” Terrence's voice is careful now. Gentle. The managing-a-dangerous-animal voice. “Man, it was just us at the cliff. I don't know who you're... are you okay? You sound kinda…”

Bobby hangs up.

He sits on the fire escape, smoking the joint down to his fingertips and watches the sky go dark.

He doesn't cry because he's past crying, past the physiological capacity for it; his body has cried itself dry on concrete floors and cold pillows, and there's nothing left in the reservoir anymore. Just the bone-deep, hollowed-out ache. Because now he’s truly alone, truly the last one. 

He tries again the following week. Calls Terrence on a Sunday, walking him through it. Your name. Your face. The way you used to laugh. The cliff, the jump, the together. Terrence listens because he’s patient. Because Terrence loves Bobby and has loved Bobby since they were seven. So he sits on the phone for an hour, letting his best friend describe a person Terrence can't remember, because that's what love is. 

But he doesn't remember. Bobby says your name and Terrence repeats it, but the repetition is as empty as the apartment. The word without you in it, a label on a blank tape.

Bobby stops calling.

The bourbon starts shortly after. Bought from the liquor store on Stevens Creek with the last of his flimsy paycheck, cheap and foul-tasting, the kind that burns going down and keeps burning once it's in his belly. He drinks it in the apartment. Alone. With the blank tapes on the shelf and the dead phone on the cradle, the curtains drawn shut. 

He keeps the TV on but muted because the sound of other people's voices in the silence makes him feel more alone, not less.

He's losing weight. He can see it in the mirror. The collarbone jutting, the stomach concave, the crop top hanging the way it used to hang on the mannequins in Clark's showroom. He's not eating. He's smoking and drinking, sleeping and waking, always reaching for you and finding nothing. The days pass without differentiation, Tuesday identical to Saturday, identical to the grey nothing of a life that has been emptied of its only distinguishing feature.

He thinks about you. Every hour. Every minute that isn't deadened by weed or bourbon or the thin, flickering distraction of the muted TV. 

He thinks about the toast/egg morning. The cliff.Your first kiss. Your hand on his thigh. The doorway. The grunt. He replays them in a loop that has worn a groove in his brain so deep he can feel it. An actual, physical sensation, like a needle in a cracked record, going around and around the same track, unable to skip forward, unable to stop.

He misses you so bad it has become a medical condition. A chronic illness. Something that lives in his body the way a parasite lives in a host, feeding on him, thinning him, converting his mass into grief.

Month 11.

Kat finds him on the fire escape.

He doesn't know how she got in. He didn't give her a key. Maybe she found out the front door was unlocked. It's been unlocked for weeks, maybe months. Bobby stopped locking it because locking implies there's something inside worth protecting, and there isn't.

She plops down beside him without waiting for permission. Doesn't apologise for showing up uninvited, either. That oughta annoy him, maybe, but he can’t muster up the energy for it. She folds herself onto the metal grate with her knees pulled up, her jacket zipped to her chin and looks at the same view Bobby's been scrutinising. The parking lot, and the strip of sky above the apartment complex across the street.

“Clark called me,” she says. “He's worried about you.”

“Clark kicked me out of his basement,” Bobby replies, and he can’t recognise his own voice. Frayed, worn away. “He can mind his own business.”

“He says he hasn't seen you in two weeks,” she goes on like he hasn’t spoken. “You're not at the store, you're not at work, you're not—”

“There's nothing at the store for me anymore. He made sure of that.”

He takes a drink from the bottle wedged between his hip and the railing. The bourbon is lukewarm, tasting foul, the bottom of his sock drawer when he was fourteen, but he doesn't care.

“Bobby.”

“What.”

“When did you last eat?” she asks softly. 

He has to think about it, which is an answer in itself. Kat examines his face, reading him closely. Whatever she finds makes her expression go tight and furious, but not at him, at the situation, at the sheer waste of a man this young, beautiful and talented choosing to dissolve because the world took something from him and she doesn’t know what. 

Because every time Bobby tells her, she forgets. 

She reaches over and takes the bottle from him. Bobby lets her. He doesn't have the energy to fight for it, and besides, the bourbon isn't working anyway. Nothing is working. The weed doesn't work. The bourbon doesn't work. The slow, methodical destruction of his own body. None of it works. Because it doesn’t bring you back. None of it fills the space you left, and the space is getting bigger, expanding, colonising parts of Bobby that used to belong to other things. Ambition, humour, appetite, the basic animal drive to continue existing.

Kat puts the bottle behind her. Out of his reach. Then she takes his hand.

Her fingers lace through his, her grip warm and dry. It’s a careful hold, like she’s holding a fragile bird in his grip.

Bobby stares down at their joined palms. Her fingers between his. The contact is nice. He can admit as much. In the blasted, scorched landscape of his interior, where nothing grows and nothing lives. In that absence of you, another person's hand registers. Faintly. Distantly. Not enough, not even close, but nevertheless present. 

He doesn't squeeze back. He doesn't pull away. Bobby simply lets his hand sit inside hers and stares blankly at the parking lot. The pressure of Kat’s palm against his is the first thing he's felt in weeks that isn't grief or chemicals or the dull, persistent throb of his own heartbeat reminding him, against his preference, that he's still alive.

“You don't have to talk,” Kat says gently, giving his hand the tiniest squeeze. “I'm just gonna sit here.”

And she does. 

Bobby glances at their hands and thinks about your hands instead. Your hands on his thigh. Your hands on the inventory binder. Your hands in his hair on Sunday mornings when the pancakes were cooking, and he should've put the fucking camera down. Your hand on the cliff, gripping his, the squeeze before the jump, together, together, together.

Kat's hands are different. Smaller. The knuckles sharper, the fingers thinner. She bites her nails. He can feel the blunt, ragged edges against his skin. You used to tap yours on surfaces when you were thinking. Everything from the counter, the steering wheel, to Bobby's chest. 

Kat's hand is present, extended because she’s kind, but it’s not your hand; it could never be your hand, but Bobby holds it anyway because the alternative is letting go. He's already let go of everything else, and he wants to feel tethered to the now, to this, even if only for a moment. 

He he misses you so much that the missing has become indistinguishable from the rest of him. 

Bobby doesn't miss you like a feeling anymore, he realises. He misses you like a fact. The way he has two hands. The way the sun comes up in the east. 

Bobby Franklin misses you. It’s the most permanent thing about him.

Month 12.

One year.

Bobby doesn't mark it. He technically doesn’t know the exact date. 

You vanished between shifts, between nights, in the gap between don't wait up and the cold sheets three mornings later. The imprecision means the anniversary is approximate. A window rather than a point. A week in December where Bobby moves through the world like he’s underwater.

Kat brings him soup.

She's been doing this. Not every day. She actually has her own life, her own apartment, her own concerns that don't revolve around Robert Franklin's slow-motion collapse. But often enough that Bobby has started expecting the knock. Three raps, evenly spaced. Kat's knock. She lets herself in and puts the food on the counter. Sometimes she stays, and sometimes she doesn't, but the staying is never long, and the not-staying is never cold. 

She has learned the exact dosage of her presence Bobby can tolerate. Close enough to register, distant enough not to suffocate.

He doesn't deserve her. He knows this with the same marrow-deep certainty that he knew you were being erased from the tapes. Kat is a good person doing an unreasonable thing. Holding vigil for a man who can't love her, or won't, or doesn't know if the distinction matters. 

She leaves soup, sits on fire escapes, holds hands that don't squeeze back. She asks for nothing. There’s only the stupid, reckless generosity of loving someone who is a burnt-out building. It makes Bobby feel something he can't identify until one night, sitting on the couch with the soup going cold on the counter, he realises it's guilt.

He feels guilty for not loving her. For taking the soup, the hand, and the presence, but giving nothing back. For using her kindness as insulation against the cold and never asking if the insulation has a cost. For the way she looks at him when she thinks he's not watching. That softness, that careful, bruisable hope. And the way he looks away every time because meeting it would mean participating in a future that doesn't have you in it, and he isn't ready. 

Bobby isn't ready to live in a future you don't occupy. He isn't ready to be a person who moves on. He isn't ready to stop reaching for the cold sheets in the morning, even though the reaching has become a form of self-harm, a wound he reopens daily, the scab he picks because the bleeding is the only proof he has that the wound was real at all.

You were real.

He says it out loud sometimes. In the apartment, alone, because the wall is gone, locked behind Clark's drunk decree. Bobby hasn't been back since. 

You were real. I loved you. You were real.

The words are losing their weight. Bobby can feel it happening. 

The slow, horrible deflation that happens when a sentence gets repeated too many times, the meaning leaking out of it the way air leaks out of a punctured tyre. You were real. He says it, and it sounds true, but then he says it again, and it sounds less true. Then he says it a third time, and it sounds more like a question, and the question is the thing that scares him most because if Bobby starts asking whether you were real, then the world has won. The erasure is complete. The tapes, the neighbours, the cops, Terrence, his mother. 

They've all agreed on a version of events where you don't exist, and Bobby is the last holdout, the last man standing on a hill that everyone else has abandoned, and the hill is shrinking, and the rain is getting harder. 

Soon, all that’ll be left under his feet will be mud.

Kat hugs him one Tuesday.

He comes out of the bathroom, and she's in the kitchen putting the soup on the stove. She wheels around and sees his face. He doesn't know what's on his face, doesn't want to know, but whatever it is makes her expression crumple, and she crosses the kitchen in three steps, wrapping her small arms around him, holding him tight.

Bobby stands there. Rigid. His arms immobile at his sides. His chin above her head. She smells like shampoo and cigarette smoke. All he can see, smell, and feel is all the ways she’s not you, the ways Kat’s body pressed against his is shaped differently and weighted differently and therefore wrong. So wrong. The catalogue runs through Bobby's brain like a ticker tape. Each entry is a tiny cruelty, but he stands there, receiving it because pushing her away would be cruel too, and he’s so tired of being cruel.

Bobby lifts his arms, almost numbly. Puts them around her. Not the way he held you. Never that lock-grip, never the lock-grip, the all-consuming, drowning-man hold that he gave you in the dark on the nights when the loving was too big and the only way to survive it was to press every inch of his body against every inch of yours. Just arms. Around a person. The mechanical act of returning an embrace.

It's contact, human contact, the first sustained hold Bobby has received in twelve months that isn't his own arms wrapped around his own chest at three in the morning trying to hold himself together.

It's not the same.

It's not even close to the same, and Bobby closes his eyes and rests his chin on Kat's head, his arms around her. Your shoes are still by the door, still sitting on the mat where you left them twelve months ago because Bobby can't move them. Won't move them. 

Two white shoes on a mat that nobody looks at except Bobby, every day, every morning, every time he walks past them on the way to nowhere.

He holds Kat but misses you. He doesn't know if he wants to.

Month 13.

Terrence comes over.

Bobby almost doesn't open the door. He's been ignoring calls for three weeks. Terrence, his mom, a number he doesn't recognise that might be Moreno. The obligatory welfare call from a detective who closed his case months ago. The phone rings and Bobby watches it from the couch. The answering machine clicks on, and whoever it is hangs up, the red light blinking. Bobby doesn't move.

But Terrence knocks. And Terrence doesn't knock the way Kat knocks. Three polite raps, evenly spaced, a request. Terrence pounds. Open palm, full force, rattling the hinges, and his voice comes through the door: “Bobby, I know you're in there, your car's outside and I can smell the weed from the hallway. Open the goddamn door.”

Bobby opens the door.

Terrence stares at him. 

The examination lasts a long time. Bobby watches his best friend's face travel through a series of expressions: shock first, then anger, then a grief so intense it rearranged Terrence's features into an expression Bobby doesn't recognise. Because Bobby is thin now. Bobby is gaunt. The crop top that used to sit on lean muscle now sits on ribs. His eyes are sunken, no longer glimmering, piercing blue you used to admire as you traced his face in bed. His skin has a grey cast because he hasn't seen direct sunlight in weeks.

“Jesus, Bobby.” Terrence's voice is barely there, wobbling. “What are you doing to yourself?”

Bobby lets him in without a word. Terrence glances around the apartment. The bottles, the overflowing ashtrays, the curtains drawn against the afternoon, the muted TV playing to an empty room. He looks at the shelf of blank tapes. He looks at the shoes by the door.

“Whose shoes are those?”

Bobby's chest seizes with pain so fierce he nearly kneels over and cries. “You know whose shoes those are.”

“I don't, man. I've never seen them before,” he says carefully, peering at him from the corner of his eye.

Terrence picks one up and turns it over. The sole worn at the heel from the way you walk, evidence of the way your body moved through space that was yours and only yours. Terrence holds the shoe and looks at it, but his expression is agonisingly blank.

“Put it down.” Bobby's voice is tight, a wire about to snap. “Put it back where it was. Exactly where it was.”

Terrence puts it down, looking at Bobby with that expression again. Pity laced with careful concern. 

“Bobby, listen to me. I don't know what's going on with you, but whatever this is, the drinking, the weed, the weight loss—we gotta get you help, man. Real help. You're scaring the shit out of me. You're scaring your mom. You're scaring Kat—”

“Say her name.”

Terrence blinks. “What?”

“Her name. Say it. Please.” Bobby's voice breaks on the last word, and he hates it, hates the begging, hates that he's standing in his own apartment asking his best friend to perform a memory he no longer has. “Just say her name. Once. Just so I know I'm not crazy. Just so I know she was real.”

Terrence stares at him. Silence fills the room.

“Whose name, Bobby?” Terrence asks gently, like he’s afraid of setting him off. 

Bobby sinks onto the couch, shoving his head in his hands, shuddering. Terrence sits beside him, putting an arm around his shoulders, and holds him, squeezing tight. Bobby lets himself be held and doesn’t explain because there's nothing to explain. 

The world has forgotten you. His best friend holds him and doesn't know why he's breaking, and Bobby can't tell him because telling requires a name that falls out of Terrence's head the instant it enters.

He's the sole remaining archive of a person the universe has decided never existed, and the only thing keeping the record alive is Robert Franklin's stubborn, stupid, bitter refusal to let you go.

Month 14.

Bobby gets in a fight.

He doesn't start it, or maybe he does. Maybe standing at a bar at eleven PM with too much bourbon in his blood and a chip on his shoulder the size of the Santa Cruz Mountains counts as starting it. 

Maybe the cold, mean, full-eye-contact look he gives the guy who bumps his elbow counts as an invitation. Maybe Bobby wants to get hit. Maybe Bobby needs the uncomplicated clarity of physical pain, something that leaves a mark he can see instead of the invisible, endless, slow-grinding agony of missing you.

The guy hits him. Bobby hits back. It's a brief, ugly exchange, and Bobby loses because Bobby hasn't been eating and his arms are thin, his reflexes shot to shit. 

The guy is bigger, but Bobby doesn't care, not int he moment. He just keeps swinging, keeps coming forward, keeps throwing punches that connect and some that don't. His hands hurt, and the guy's face is a blur. There’s blood. The bartender is yelling. A moment later, someone grabs Bobby from behind and drags him out, dumping him on the sidewalk unceremoniously.

He lies on the concrete for a while, eyes on the darkened sky. His split lip throbs, his knuckle cracked. Bourbon mixes with the blood in his mouth, a bitter tang on his tongue. The concrete is cool against his back, and he thinks about your wall. Clark's wall. The cool, thin concrete that breathed against his palm.

He hasn't touched it in seven months. Bobby is on the sidewalk outside a bar with blood on his teeth, and the distance between here and there is infinite.

Kat picks him up. She's the one he calls. Not Terrence, not his mom. Kat. Because she's the one who'll come without questions. She pulls up in her shitty, rundown Honda and doesn't say anything about his face or the blood or the smell of booze. She just opens the passenger door and waits for him to get in.

Bobby gets in. She drives. The streetlights crawl lazily across the windshield.

“I miss her,” Bobby croaks. To the car that smells like Kat's cigarettes and not like you. “I miss her so much I don't know how to be a person without her.”

Kat doesn't say I know. She doesn't say I'm here. She just drives, and the quiet she gives him is the kindest thing anyone has given him in fourteen months, because it holds nothing except the sound of a man admitting he’s painfully lost.

Month 15.

He sleeps with Kat.

It's not passion. It's not a cosy morning with the sun on the sheets and your body pressed against his, your mouth loving against his jaw. It's a Thursday. Kat's apartment. Her bed, smaller than his, with a different headboard, and it smells like her detergent, not yours. They've been watching TV and drinking cheap beer, and Bobby is tired, so tired, tired in the marrow of his bones, the kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix because the tiredness isn't physical.

Kat kisses him. He kisses her back. The kissing is fine. Kat is a good kisser. Confident, eager, direct in a way that leaves no ambiguity about what she wants. Bobby's body responds. His body has always known how to do this, has always been fluent in the mechanics of want, and the mechanics take over the way autopilot takes over a plane. The pilot is absent, checked out, somewhere else entirely, but the plane keeps flying.

Afterwards, Kat falls asleep. Her breathing evens out. Her hand rests on his chest, and Bobby lies there staring blankly at the ceiling of an apartment that isn't his, in a bed that isn't his, next to a woman who isn't you.

He feels hollow to the marrow, utterly carved out. Scooped clean, like a pumpkin at Halloween, his insides removed and the shell propped up with a candle that doesn't warm anything. He thought… 

He didn't think; he hoped, somewhere in the desperate, grasping, drowning-man part of his brain, that this would fix something. That skin on skin, mouth on mouth, the animal act of two bodies trying to generate heat, would fill some fraction of the gaping void. That he'd feel close to something again. To anyone. To the version of himself that used to be capable of wanting and being wanted and finding sustenance in both.

He feels further away than ever.

Bobby gets up. Carefully, so he doesn't wake her. Walks to the bathroom, closing the door. Turns on the light.

The mirror is tiny. Medicine-cabinet size, mounted above the sink, spotted with toothpaste. Bobby looks at himself in it. The face peering back is someone he barely recognises anymore. Too thin, old. His eyes red and raw, the lashes still damp. When did he cry? During? After? He doesn't remember. The chain hangs from his neck. The earring is in his ear. The scar on his jaw from the cabinet door. 

All the same parts, assembled in the same order, and none of it looks like Bobby anymore. It looks like a rough draft of Bobby. A copy. A version that lost something essential during the transfer and kept going anyway.

He drops his forehead against the glass.

Cool and smooth against his burning skin. Nothing like concrete. Or like the wall in Clark's basement that thrummed with a second heartbeat. Just glass. Just a mirror in a bathroom in an apartment that belongs to a woman who is kind and warm, asleep in the next room with her hand on the space where his body was.

Bobby presses his forehead into the mirror and closes his eyes and thinks: I wish I could go where you are.

A clean, simple, exhausted fact. Wherever you are, dead or alive, in the ground or in the air or in some impossible place that doesn't have a name, Bobby would rather be there than here. He would rather be wherever you are, even if wherever you are is nothing, than standing in a bathroom in a woman's apartment with the taste of someone else on his lips.

He stands at the mirror for a long time. Then he washes his face, goes back to bed, and lies down next to Kat. She shifts in her sleep, curling toward him. Her hand finds his chest again.

Bobby stares at the ceiling. The ceiling stares back.

Month 16.

Bobby gets a haircut. Eats a meal. Goes to work regularly for the first time in three weeks. He performs recovery the way he used to perform coolness. He applies fake normalcy with the same precision he once applied to the lean, the grin, the voice. He showers. Shaves. Eats breakfast standing over the sink because sitting at the table means looking at the chair where you used to sit, and the chair is empty, and eating at the counter is fine. The counter is fine.

Kat comes over. They watch TV. They sleep together sometimes. Bobby is present for it in the way a building is present when it rains. It happens on his surface, and he doesn't collapse. Both of those things feel like progress.

He doesn't call Terrence.

Month 17.

Kat says I love you on a Saturday morning.

They're in her kitchen. She's making coffee. He's leaning against the counter with the chain at his throat, and the crop top and the earring and the whole costume, the Bobby uniform, every piece perfectly in place, and she turns around and looks at him and says it. Like she's telling him what day it is.

Bobby's hand tightens on the counter edge. His eyes drop to the floor and then come back up, and the expression on his face makes Kat's face fall before he even speaks because the expression is the answer. It’s always been the answer, and she's been hoping for seventeen months that the answer would change, and it hasn't.

“Kat—”

“It's fine.” Immediate, overly bright response. The vocal equivalent of a slammed door. She turns back to the coffee, her shoulders curved inwards. “Forget I said it.”

Bobby stands at the counter, watching her pour coffee into two mugs, and the silence between them is full of everything he should say and won't. I care about you. You saved my life. You held me together when I was coming apart at the seams, and I'm grateful, and I'm sorry, and I can't love you the way you deserve because the part of me that does that is in a pair of white shoes by the front door, and I don't know how to get it back.

He takes the coffee, says thank you. He means everything by it, and she hears none of it.

Month 18.

Bobby is at Kat's apartment when Clark knocks.

Three raps, heavy, rattling the doorframe. Bobby is on the couch, shirtless, watching a game he doesn't care about with a beer he barely tastes. Kat is in the shower. The apartment smells like her cooking and her soap. Bobby isn't happy. He's performing happy the way a mannequin performs dressed. The clothes are on, the shape is convincingly human from across the room. Up close, the eyes are glass, and the hands don't bend right, and the smile is painted on. And if you look too long, you start to feel uneasy without being able to say why.

Bobby knows Kat knows. They've arrived at an unspoken arrangement. 

She doesn't ask him to feel things he can't feel, and he doesn't leave. The knowing sits between them like a third person at every meal, every movie, every night in her bed where Bobby lies awake and stares at an unfamiliar ceiling and reaches across the mattress and finds a body that's there, that's warm, that breathes, and the finding does not fix the reaching.

The knock comes again. Bobby gets up, yanking the door.

Clark outside. He looks different. Better, almost. Less drunk and crumbled. He's wearing a clean shirt, and there's something feverish in his eyes that Bobby hasn't seen in months. Energy. Purpose. 

“Bobby.” Clark nods, peeking past him into the apartment, then back to Bobby. “You still got that camera?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Clark shifts his weight. Leans against the doorframe. And the thing in his eyes sharpens into focus, and Bobby recognises it now. It's the look Clark used to get when a big shipment came in, when a new vendor called, when the business was still a living thing instead of a slow funeral.

“I found something,” Clark says. “In the basement. Behind the shelving units, near the back wall. Something I can't explain.” He pauses, rubbing his jaw, his beard rasping. “I need a camera guy. Someone who knows how to document things. And I figure—” He gestures at Bobby awkwardly. “I figure you could use a project.”

Bobby stares at him, Clark’s words slowly sinking into his skull. The back wall. The shelving units. The wall that breathes.

Bobby’s pulse kicks up, and he demands, “What did you find?”

“That's what I need the camera for.” Clark straightens, surprised by the force in his voice. “I'll pay you. Research fee. Kat, too. I could use another set of hands. You in?”

From the bathroom comes the sound of the shower shutting off. Kat's voice: “Bobby? Who's at the door?”

The wall that used to breathe against Bobby's palm like a pulse. The wall Clark kicked him away from. The wall he hasn't touched in eleven months and the last place you were.

“Yeah,” Bobby says quietly, his hand tightening on the doorframe. “I'm in.”

MEG-INT-1990-0292 INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT — INTAKE PROCESSING Subject: FRANKLIN, Robert James ("Bobby") Civilian Status: NON-WANDERER (First Exposure) Interviewer: Dr. ██████ (Senior Analyst, Intake Division) Also Present: Operative Marsh (Security), Operative Delgado (Medical) Location: MEG Outpost Alpha-9, Processing Suite 2 Date: June ██, 1990 Time: Approximately 03:40 AM (Outpost Local — see note on timekeeping discrepancy) Recording Method: Reel-to-reel audio, dual microphone Transcript Status: INCOMPLETE — recording terminated by facility-wide alarm at [TIMESTAMP 47:13]

PRE-INTERVIEW NOTES (Dr. ██████):

Subject arrived through the Level 4 threshold point at approximately 02:15 AM alongside one civilian female (Katherine [SURNAME REDACTED], "Kat"), both propelled through the barrier by MEG retrieval operatives during an active hostile engagement on the opposite side. Subject was semi-conscious upon arrival, presenting with a deep contusion along the left side of the ribcage, a dislocated left shoulder (since reduced), abrasions consistent with high-velocity impact against a concrete surface, and a laceration above the right eye requiring six sutures. Subject became combative during medical assessment and attempted to re-enter the threshold point twice before being physically restrained by Operative Marsh.

Subject was separated from Katherine [SURNAME REDACTED] at 02:50 AM for individual processing. Subject's agitation increased markedly upon separation. Katherine [SURNAME REDACTED] is being interviewed concurrently in Processing Suite 1 (ref: MEG-INT-1990-0293).

Upon being informed that this interview was mandatory before any further action could be taken, the subject agreed to cooperate on the condition that (and I am quoting directly) “somebody tells me where she is, or I'm going back through that wall with or without your permission.”

It was not initially clear which “she” the subject was referring to.

I would like to note for the record that the subject arrived carrying no personal effects other than the clothes on his person and a single sheet of notebook paper folded into quarters in his jacket pocket (ref: MEG-DOC-1990-0477). He refused to surrender the document until assured it would be catalogued and returned. It was catalogued. It will not be returned until the observation period concludes.

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS

DR. ██████: For the record, please state your full name.

FRANKLIN: Robert James Franklin. Bobby. Can we skip the—

DR. ██████: Date of birth?

FRANKLIN: [REDACTED]. Look, I don't—

DR. ██████: Thank you. And your current city of residence?

FRANKLIN: Santa Clara. California. Are you gonna ask me what I had for breakfast too, or are we gonna talk about the fact that she's still in there?

DR. ██████: We'll get to that.

FRANKLIN: No. We'll get to that NOW. She's in there. She's in there with that— with those people trying to grab her and that red thing and—where is she? Is she—do you have people looking for her? Do you have teams or whatever the hell you—

DR. ██████: Bobby. I need you to take a breath.

FRANKLIN: Don't tell me to take a damn breath. I watched some thing pick me up and throw me into a wall, and the last thing I saw before your people grabbed me was her face. She was screaming. I could hear her screaming my name, and then I was through, and she wasn't.

DR. ██████: I understand. And I understand the urgency you're feeling. But I need you to work with me here, Bobby, because the more you can tell us, the better equipped we are to—

FRANKLIN: Equipped to WHAT? I've been in this room for forty minutes, and nobody will tell me anything. Where's Kat? Is Kat okay? And where is—why won't anyone—

DR. ██████: Katherine is in the next room. She's uninjured. She's being looked after.

FRANKLIN: Okay. Okay. And—and her? My girl—

[PAUSE — 6 seconds]

DR. ██████: Bobby. I need to clarify who you're referring to. You arrived with Katherine. Who else was with you on the other side of the threshold?

FRANKLIN: My girlfriend. My—she was—it's—she's the reason I was in there in the first place. She's been missing since December of '88. She's been in there this whole time. In that place. And she was RIGHT THERE, she was leading us out, she got us all the way to your people, and then some guys showed up, and that red thing showed up and—

[Subject pauses. Presses hand to injured ribs. Operative Delgado advises the subject to remain still.]

FRANKLIN: —he showed up. The one with my face.

DR. ██████: [Pause.] The one with your face.

FRANKLIN: Yeah.

DR. ██████: Can you describe this individual?

FRANKLIN: He's not an individual. He's not a—I don't know what he is. He looks like me. Exactly like me. Same face, same—everything. Except he's not. He's wrong. His skin is cold, his eyes go black when he's angry, and he's—he's been with her. Down there. This whole time.

DR. ██████: [Writing.] You're describing an entity. The one we have on file as Entity 0.

FRANKLIN: I don't care what you have him on file as. He has my FACE.

DR. ██████: Noted. And the woman you're referring to, the one who was with Entity 0, would be the individual we've designated as the Companion.

[PAUSE — 4 seconds]

FRANKLIN: The what?

DR. ██████: The Companion. It's a classification. Entity 0 has been observed in the company of a human-presenting individual for many months. Our monitoring teams have documented their cohabitation patterns, movement through levels, and territorial behaviour. The individual has been designated “Companion” in our filing system pending formal identification.

FRANKLIN: [Voice flat.] You've been watching her like a bunch of creeps.

DR. ██████: We've been monitoring Entity 0. She was in his proximity.

FRANKLIN: She has a name.

DR. ██████: Yes. That's partly why you're here, Bobby. Anything you can tell us about her identity, her history, how she came to be in the Backrooms—

FRANKLIN: Her name is [UNINTELLIGIBLE — audio distortion, 1.3 seconds].

[NOTE: The same anomalous audio artifact observed in BF-PERSONAL-COMMS (ref: Message 18) is present here. The subject clearly speaks a name. The recording does not retain it. Three separate playback analyses have failed to recover the content. See TECHNICAL APPENDIX B.]

DR. ██████: …Could you repeat that?

FRANKLIN: [Repeats name — UNINTELLIGIBLE, identical distortion pattern.]

DR. ██████: [Long pause.] I see. Bobby, I'm going to move on. Tell me about the events leading up to your arrival here. From the beginning. How did you enter the Backrooms?

FRANKLIN: Through the store. Clark's furniture store. There's a wall in the basement storage, behind the shelving unit. I used to—I spent months down there. Every night. Sitting against it. There was a draft coming through it. Like breathing. I always thought… I knew something was on the other side. I knew she was on the other side.

DR. ██████: You said, “used to.” You stopped?

FRANKLIN: Clark kicked me out. Around month seven. He was going through his own shit— his wife left him, the store was dying, he was sleeping in the showroom. He told me I couldn't come down there anymore. That I was—that I was haunting his store.

DR. ██████: And after that?

FRANKLIN: [Pause.] I tried to get my life back together. Or some version of it. Kat was… she was there. She'd been there the whole time, and I—look, I'm not going to sit here and explain my personal life to you. I stopped going to the basement, okay? I tried to move forward. I was doing—I don't know. I was eating again. Sleeping. Functioning, at least on the outside. Months of that. Almost a year of trying to be a normal person who accepts that the girl he loves is gone and doesn't sit on concrete floors talking to walls.

DR. ██████: But you went back.

FRANKLIN: Clark came to me. He showed up at Kat’s apartment and asked if I still had my camera. I don't know what he'd been doing down there, living in the store, drinking. But he'd noticed things. The wall. The draft. The way the temperature in the storage level didn't match the rest of the building. He wanted me to film it. He said he wanted to understand what was behind it. Research, he called it. 

DR. ██████: So you returned to the basement.

FRANKLIN: With the camera. Yeah. And the wall was—it was different. When Clark kicked me out, it was solid. I'd pressed my body against it a thousand times. It was concrete. But when I went back, it wasn't. My hand went through. Not like punching through drywall. Like pushing through water. Like the wall had been sealed, and now it wasn't. Like something on the other side had been holding it shut and stopped.

DR. ██████: [Writing.] You believe the barrier was previously sealed?

FRANKLIN: I don't believe it. I know it. I sat against that wall every night for seven months, and it was solid. It was solid, and something was keeping it that way. And then I stayed away for almost a year, and it opened. Like it was waiting for me to come back. Or like whatever was holding it shut let go.

[Pause.]

I didn't think about it. I just went through. I thought—I still believed she might have gotten lost in there. That she wandered into the basement one night and fell through, and she'd been lost on the other side this whole time. I was right, technically. I was right, and I was wrong about everything else. 

DR. ██████: And you encountered Entity 0 on the other side.

FRANKLIN: [Voice rough.] I didn't meet him right away. The—Entity 0. That came later. She found us first. Alone. She was running. Something had happened—she was out of breath, on edge, and kept looking behind her. She led us through several levels, navigating the whole thing from memory, from that notebook. We ended up at this—I don't even know what to call it. A pink house. On a level that looked like a neighborhood. Suburban, but creepy. There was an entity living there. She called it Mr. Kitty.

DR. ██████: [Writing.] Level 974. We're aware of that entity.

FRANKLIN: Yeah, well. We were inside. Catching our breath. She was talking to Mr. Kitty, telling it what happened, and I was—I was just trying to process where I was, what any of this was, and then he appeared. Entity 0. Torn up. His clothes were shredded. There was this black stuff on him, not blood, something else, and his skin was… flickering. Like the surface of him couldn't hold still. Like whatever shape he was wearing was slipping. He looked like he'd been in a fight with something.

DR. ██████: You believe he'd been engaged with Entity X prior to this?

FRANKLIN: She said so. Later. That he'd been fighting it. The red thing. Keeping it away from her, and that's why she'd been alone when she found us. He'd been busy. Holding it off. But I…

DR. ██████: What happened?

FRANKLIN: He lifted me. Off the floor. One hand. And his skin was cold, and his eyes went from my blue to solid black, and he held me there and looked at me and I couldn't—I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move, and he was looking at me with MY face, and there was nothing human in it. Nothing. Whatever he is, in that moment, with his hand around my throat, I understood that he could kill me. She pulled him off. He let go the second she touched him. Dropped me like I'd burned him. Not because of me. Because she told him to.

DR. ██████: Entity 0 responded to the Companion's intervention?

FRANKLIN: He does everything she says. That's the thing. He had me by the throat, and she said his name, the name she calls him, BB, and he let go. Immediately. And his eyes went from black back to blue, and he looked at her like he was ashamed. Like a dog that bit someone and knows it shouldn't have.

[Pause.]

That was supposed to be me. That was supposed to be MY job, and I fucked it up, and something with my face did it instead. He built her a home down there. And when I showed up, he nearly crushed my windpipe. With my own hands. On my own face. I wanted to hate him so badly I could taste it.

DR. ██████: Bobby. I need to ask you about the hostile engagement at the threshold. You mentioned armed hostiles.

FRANKLIN: [Refocusing.] Yeah. Armed. Six, maybe eight. They weren't wearing your yellow suits. Black gear. Tactical. Military, maybe? I don't know who they were. Nobody introduced themselves. They came out of nowhere. We were almost at the exit, and they just appeared. Out of the walls, out of—I don't know. They grabbed her. They only wanted her. One of them said something about “the asset” and leaving us “for the others” just leaving us to die in there.

DR. ██████: [Writing.] Black tactical gear. Referred to the Companion as “the asset.” Did they identify themselves verbally? Any insignia, patches, callsigns?

FRANKLIN: I wasn't exactly checking their uniforms. They had guns pointed at us. One of them had some kind of patch on his shoulder, but I didn't—who ARE these people? They're not with you, right?

DR. ██████: No. They are not with us. We're aware of their operations. That's all I can say at this time. What I can tell you is that the Companion has been on their radar for a while. Her prolonged cohabitation with Entity 0 makes her a high-value acquisition target for groups interested in entity research. The bond between her and Entity 0, in particular, represents something they'd very much like to study. And, potentially, to replicate.

FRANKLIN: She's not a research interest. She's not a fucking “asset.” She's not some experiment. She's a person. She's MY—

DR. ██████: I understand. What happened next?

FRANKLIN: I was trying to get to her. I was—they had her arms, she was fighting, the hands of the guy holding her just… came off. At the wrists. Like they were cut. I thought he did it. Entity 0. But it wasn't him.

DR. ██████: What was it?

FRANKLIN: [Voice drops.] The red thing.

DR. ██████: Describe it, please.

FRANKLIN: Big. Bigger than a person. Bigger than—it didn't have a face. Just this smooth red surface where a face should be. And eyes. Yellow. Burning. They didn't blink. It was looking at her. Only at her. Even when it was killing those military guys, it was looking at her.

DR. ██████: We have limited documentation on Entity X. This is extremely valuable, Bobby.

FRANKLIN: It killed them all. The guys in black. It just—I watched it break a man in half, and it looked bored. It looked like it was doing something tedious. Like swatting a fly. And its eyes never left her. Not once. It reached for her. Made this sound, this… clicking. She yelled at it. Told it to get away from her. And it tilted its head. Like a dog that doesn't understand the command but recognises the voice.

DR. ██████: And then?

FRANKLIN: He showed up. Entity 0. Told her to run. Told us all to run. And we ran. We got to the exit point, your people were there in the suits, and Bobby—I mean, the OTHER one. He shoved her toward us and then he—

And then that red thing grabbed me.

DR. ██████: Entity X made physical contact with you?

FRANKLIN: It picked me up. By the waist. Lifted me off the ground like I was made of paper. They wrapped all the way around my ribs. I could feel them individually. Each one. And I looked at its face, and there was nothing there. Just red. Just smooth, burning red, and those eyes, and I—

[Subject's voice breaks.]

She was screaming. She was screaming at it to put me down. She was HITTING it. And it looked at her. Just looked. Tilted its head again. That same way. And then it threw me.

DR. ██████: Toward the threshold?

FRANKLIN: Toward the wall. Into the wall. I don't know. I hit it, and everything went dark. Then your people had me, and I was through, but she wasn't.

[PAUSE — 5 seconds]

FRANKLIN: She wasn't through. She was still on the other side. With that red thing standing over her and bodies on the ground, Entity 0 fighting his way back to her. And your people pulled me through and I tried—I TRIED to go back. Ask him, ask your guy, I fought him, I tried to get back—

OPERATIVE MARSH: [Confirming.] He did. Took two of us to hold him. Dislocated his shoulder in the process.

FRANKLIN: You have to send me back. Right now. You have to let me go back. She's in there, and that thing is after her, and those military assholes are after her, and I'm sitting in a room answering stupid questions while she's—

DR. ██████: Bobby. Listen to me. Entity 0 got her.

[PAUSE.]

FRANKLIN: …What?

DR. ██████: Our operatives maintained visual contact with the threshold point for approximately ninety seconds following your retrieval. Entity 0 got the Companion away. He incapacitated Entity X— temporarily, we believe—and removed her from the engagement area. They were last observed retreating deeper into Level 0. Together.

FRANKLIN: She's alive.

DR. ██████: She was alive and mobile when last observed. Entity 0 appeared to be shielding her.

[Extended silence — 14 seconds. Sound of subject exhaling. Long and shaking.]

FRANKLIN: [Very quiet.] Okay. Okay. She's okay.

DR. ██████: She is, as far as we can determine, safe. Entity 0 has an extensively documented pattern of extreme protectiveness toward the Companion. Whatever else he may be, our assessment is that her physical safety is not in question as long as she remains in his proximity.

FRANKLIN: [Bitter, half-laughing.] Yeah. He's real good at keeping her safe. He's great at it. He's doing my job, and he's better at it, and he's got my fucking face while he does it.

DR. ██████: Bobby—

FRANKLIN: I sat against that wall for eighteen months. Every night. I talked to her through the concrete. I told her I was coming. I told her to hold on. And the whole time she was on the other side with something wearing my face that could actually protect her, and I was sitting on the floor talking to drywall.

[Silence — 7 seconds.]

DR. ██████: I'd like to return to the timeline. You mentioned that the Companion appeared unchanged physically. No signs of aging, injury, or—

FRANKLIN: She was different.

DR. ██████: In what way?

FRANKLIN: I don't know. She was the same, but she was different. The way she moved. The way she held herself. She was… harder. Just—when I knew her, she was soft. She was the kind of person who'd give you things she needed because she didn't want you to go without. And she was still that. I could see that she was still that. But there was something else on top of it. Something happened to her down there. She knew things. About the levels, about the entities, about how to move through that place. She had a notebook full of information. Maps, notes, drawings. She'd learned it. She'd survived it. While I…

[Subject stops. His voice has been rising steadily and now breaks off entirely. Sound of rapid, uneven breathing.]

DR. ██████: [Quietly.] We'll take a pause.

FRANKLIN: [After a moment.] No. Keep going. I want this on record. All of it. Everything I can tell you about her, I want it written down. Because the tapes are blank and nobody out there remembers her and I am—I might be the only record left. So write it down. Write that she had a laugh that made you want to be funnier. Write that Bobby Franklin loved her, and he was too much of a coward to say it until she was gone, and now he's saying it into a tape recorder in a concrete room. Write it. All of it.

DR. ██████: [Pause.] …I'm writing it.

[Silence — 9 seconds.]

DR. ██████: Bobby. I need to ask you about Entity 0's behaviour toward the Companion. You described him as protective. Would you say their relationship appeared—

FRANKLIN: Don't.

DR. ██████: I have to ask.

FRANKLIN: [Tight.] Yeah. They have a—yeah. I asked her about it. On the walk. She told me—some of it. Enough.

[Pause.]

He kissed her. She told me that. She said she taught him how. And I wanted—I wanted to be angry. I wanted to fucking hate him. But the way she talked about it… about teaching him what a kiss was… she sounded like—

DR. ██████: Like what?

FRANKLIN: [Softly] Like she sounded when she talked about me. Before I ruined it.

[Silence — 12 seconds.]

DR. ██████: Bobby, I'm going to shift to the document you were carrying. The list. You said it was written by—

[ALARM — facility-wide. A sustained, pulsing tone. Three short blasts followed by one long. Overhead lights shift from standard white to amber.]

OPERATIVE MARSH: [Into radio.] Marsh here. What's the situation?

RADIO: [PARTIALLY AUDIBLE — overlapping voices, one clear phrase:] —threshold point two is active—something is coming through—not hostile, repeat, not hostile, but it's—[STATIC]—we need medical down here NOW—

FRANKLIN: [Already standing.] What is that? What's happening?

DR. ██████: Bobby, sit down—

FRANKLIN: Someone's coming through. Is it her? Is she—

DR. ██████: Bobby. SIT DOWN.

FRANKLIN: [Chair scraping. Footsteps. Operative Marsh moving to intercept.] Get off me. GET OFF ME. If she's coming through, I need to be there. I need to—

OPERATIVE MARSH: Franklin, you are NOT cleared to leave this room—

FRANKLIN: SHE'S COMING THROUGH. I CAN FEEL IT. I CAN—please. Please, just let me—

[Sound of physical struggle. Brief. Marsh restraining Franklin. Franklin's breathing is ragged, desperate. The alarm continues.]

RADIO: [Clearer now — a single voice, strained:] —she's through. She just walked through. She's—[PAUSE] — Dr. ██████, you need to come see this. Something's wrong with her. Something's—she's not—she walked through on her own. No Entity 0. She just walked in, sat on the floor, and hasn't moved. She won't speak. She's just sitting there. Looking at the wall.

[Silence in the interview room — 4 seconds.]

FRANKLIN: [Barely audible, a whisper.] That's her. That's her, please—

DR. ██████: [To Marsh.] Keep him here.

[Sound of door opening. Dr. ██████'s footsteps receding down the corridor.]

[Franklin's breathing, alone in the room with Marsh. Shaking. Ragged.]

OPERATIVE MARSH: [Quietly.] Sit down, Bobby.

[Silence — 22 seconds. The alarm continues.]

[Recording equipment remains active. No further dialogue for approximately seven minutes. The only sounds are Franklin's breathing, gradually slowing, and the alarm pulsing at three-second intervals.]

[At the [TIMESTAMP 47:08] mark, faintly, at the very edge of the microphone's range, a sound. Not the alarm. Not Franklin. Not Marsh. A low, sustained tone, somewhere between a hum and a vibration, coming from no identifiable source within the room. It lasts five seconds.]

[Franklin inhales sharply.]

FRANKLIN: [Whispering.] Baby?

[RECORDING ENDS — TIMESTAMP 47:13]

POST-INTERVIEW NOTES (Dr. ██████):

Interview terminated by Threshold Alarm 2 at 04:27 AM. The individual who emerged through Threshold Point 2 has been confirmed as the Companion (ref: ENTITY FILE MEG-1990-0288). She arrived unaccompanied. Her physical condition at the time of emergence is detailed in MEDICAL INTAKE MEG-1990-0301 and is not appropriate for inclusion in this transcript.

Franklin was not permitted to see the Companion for the first seventy-two hours of the observation period. This decision, while medically and procedurally sound, is one I expect anyone who listens to the final thirty seconds of this tape to revisit frequently.

The low-frequency tone captured at [TIMESTAMP 47:08] does not correspond to any known facility equipment, alarm system, or environmental source within Outpost Alpha-9. Spectral analysis matches the anomalous audio signatures documented in BF-PERSONAL-COMMS and in the subject's VHS tape collection before their total data loss.

The source of the tone has not been identified.

[ADDENDUM — handwritten, red ink, margin: He knew. Before the radio, before the alarm, before any of us. He said, “I can feel it.” The same instinct that kept him pressed against a wall in a furniture store basement for eighteen months. Whatever connection exists between Franklin and the Companion, it is not solely mediated by Entity 0. There is something else. Something that predates the Backrooms entirely. I'd like permission to explore this further. — Dr. ██████]

[ADDENDUM 2 — handwritten, different ink, below: Permission denied. Focus on Entity 0. — ████]

[ADDENDUM 3 — handwritten, same red ink as Addendum 1, smaller, cramped into the bottom margin: With respect: no.]

MEG-MED-1990-0301 MEDICAL INTAKE REPORT — COMPANION Cross-filed: INCIDENT REPORT MEG-IR-1990-0294 (Threshold Event 2) Cross-filed: SITUATIONAL ASSESSMENT MEG-SA-1990-0047 (Level 0 Destabilisation) Cross-filed: ENTITY FILE MEG-ENT-0000-ADDM-██ (Entity 0 — Behavioural Anomaly: Withdrawal) CLASSIFICATION: LEVEL 5 — DIRECTOR ACCESS ONLY  REPORTING OFFICER: Dr. ██████ (Senior Analyst, Intake Division)  ATTENDING MEDICAL: Dr. Vasquez, Dr. Okafor (Field Medicine)  DATE: June ██, 1990  TIME OF ARRIVAL: 04:27 AM (Outpost Local)  STATUS: CRITICAL — UNDER OBSERVATION — NOT CLEARED FOR CONTACT

SECTION 1: ARRIVAL

At 04:27 AM, Threshold Point 2 activated without external stimulus. No retrieval operation was in progress. No scouts were deployed. The threshold simply opened, and she walked through.

There was no escort. No indication of pursuit or hostile engagement on the opposite side. Monitoring equipment registered a brief spike in low-frequency output at the moment of activation (consistent with Entity 0's signature) followed by total silence. The threshold sealed behind her within approximately four seconds of her crossing.

The Companion entered Outpost Alpha-9 on foot, upright, unassisted. She took eleven steps into the receiving bay. She sat down on the concrete floor. She did not speak. She did not look at the personnel who approached her. She looked at the wall behind her (the same wall she had just walked through), and she did not stop looking at it.

Operative Chen was the first to reach her. He reported that she was shaking, full-body tremors visible from across the room, and that her face was wet. She was crying without sound. No sobbing, no vocalisation. Tears ran continuously from open, unblinking eyes that did not leave the wall.

When Operative Chen placed a hand on her shoulder to guide her toward medical, the Companion vomited. The episode was sudden and violent, lasting approximately fifteen seconds, after which she lost consciousness. She was caught by Operative Chen before making contact with the floor and was transported to Medical Bay 2 on a stretcher.

She has not regained consciousness as of this report. It has been nine hours.

SECTION 2: MEDICAL ASSESSMENT

Attending physicians: Dr. Vasquez, Dr. Okafor

The following observations were recorded during the initial physical examination. Several findings are unprecedented in the M.E.G. medical literature, including cases involving wanderers with significantly longer immersion periods.

2.1 — Vital Signs

Heart rate: 43 BPM (severely bradycardic; consistent with deep hibernation states observed in Level ██ fauna, not previously observed in humans)

Respiratory rate: 6 breaths per minute (abnormally low; each breath is deep and sustained, lasting approximately 4.5 seconds per inhalation)

Core body temperature: 37.9°C / 100.2°F (mildly elevated; not consistent with fever—no inflammatory markers, no infection. Her body simply runs warm. Slightly above human baseline in a way that is stable rather than symptomatic. Dr. Vasquez noted that this is the inverse of Entity 0's documented thermal profile. He runs cool, she runs hot. Whether this represents a compensatory adaptation, a complementary biological shift, or something else entirely is unknown. When Dr. Okafor placed a hand on the Companion's forearm during examination, he described her skin as “warm, the way a stone is warm after being warmed by the sun all day.”)

Blood pressure: ██/██ (within range but exhibiting a rhythmic fluctuation not consistent with the cardiac cycle, pulsing at a frequency of approximately 7.83 Hz. See Section 2.4.)

2.2 — External Examination

The Companion presents as a female, outwardly consistent with the age at which she is believed to have entered the Backrooms (██ years old, December 1988). There is no visible ageing. Eighteen months of immersion have resulted in no observable progression of biological age.

This is abnormal. Wanderers with immersion periods exceeding twelve months consistently show signs of accelerated or decelerated ageing depending on the level of exposure, nutritional deprivation, and stress. The Companion shows neither. She appears to have been frozen at the moment of entry.

[HANDWRITTEN — margin: Not frozen. Preserved.— Dr. ██████]

Notable findings:

Dermal temperature distribution: Uniformly warm across all extremities. An ambient heat that does not fluctuate with environmental conditions the way a healthy human's should. Dr. Vasquez described it in her notes as “thermoregulatory divergence from baseline—origin unknown.” The clinical term doesn't capture its strangeness. She radiates. Faintly, the way Entity 0 absorbs. Opposite poles of something. Dr. Okafor has noted, privately, that her elevated temperature would make her warm to Entity 0's touch in a way that normal human body heat would not be. He did not include this observation in his official notes. I’m including it in mine.

Subcutaneous anomaly: Under UV examination, the Companion's skin exhibits a faint, diffuse luminescence. Not localised or patterned. A low-level bioluminescent trace distributed across the dermis, most visible at pulse points (wrists, throat, temples) as though something has been saturating her tissue gradually through sustained proximity. The glow is faint enough to be invisible under standard lighting. Under UV, she shimmers.

The luminescence responds to sound. When a sustained low-frequency tone was introduced to the examination room (30-50 Hz range, matching Entity 0's documented vocal signature), the glow brightened visibly for 2.3 seconds before fading. His frequency is in her skin. Not placed there with intention (not yet, is my suspicion, given the diffuse rather than structured distribution) but absorbed. Soaked in. The way fabric absorbs perfume.

[HANDWRITTEN — margin, red ink: This is residual. Likely ambient. What happens to a human body that sleeps next to an entity every night for eighteen months? It's not a bond marker; it's a stain. A beautiful one. But I believe the structured version of this exists in his capabilities and has not yet been deployed. The implications of that are significant. — Dr. ██████]

Scarring: Minimal. Significantly less than expected for an eighteen-month immersion period involving documented hostile encounters (ref: INCIDENT REPORTS MEG-IR-1989-0201 through 0219). Either the Companion was extraordinarily effective at avoiding injury, or injuries sustained were healed through non-standard means. Given Entity 0's documented capabilities, the latter is considered more likely.

Musculature and physical condition: Paradoxically good. The Companion presents with lean, functional musculature consistent with sustained physical activity (climbing, running, navigating uneven terrain) over a prolonged period. She is not malnourished or atrophied. She has been fed, sheltered, and physically maintained to a standard that exceeds what many M.E.G. outposts can provide for their own personnel.

[HANDWRITTEN — margin: He took better care of her than we take care of ourselves. I don't know what to do with that. — Dr. ██████]

2.3 — Neurological Assessment (Preliminary)

The Companion has not regained consciousness. EEG monitoring reveals brainwave activity inconsistent with any standard classification of unconsciousness:

She is not in a coma. Comatose patients do not exhibit the rapid eye movement patterns observed here.

She is not asleep. Sleep requires cycling between stages. The Companion's EEG has been locked in a single, unvarying waveform for nine hours.

The waveform does not match any documented human pattern. It most closely resembles (and I am aware of how this sounds) the frequency output recorded from Entity 0 during periods of rest (ref: REMOTE MONITORING LOG MEG-RM-1989-0044).

She is, in effect, vibrating at his frequency. Whether this is a conscious choice, a trauma response, or an autonomic function of the bond between them is unknown.

2.4 — The 7.83 Hz Anomaly

Multiple physiological readings from the Companion oscillate at 7.83 Hz. This frequency is known as the Schumann Resonance. The electromagnetic frequency of the Earth's surface. It has no business appearing in a human body's vital signs.

It has been observed in one other context within M.E.G. records: the ambient electromagnetic frequency of Level 0 during periods of Entity 0's sustained presence.

Interpretation: the Companion's body is resonating at the frequency of his home. She has spent so long in proximity to Entity 0, within the field he generates, that her biology has begun to synchronise with it. This is documented across three separate monitoring systems.

[HANDWRITTEN — margin, red ink: This is what we're dealing with. Not possession. Not parasitism. Not an infection. Resonance. She is tuned to him. She left the Backrooms, but her body is still playing his song. — Dr. ██████]

SECTION 3: SITUATIONAL ASSESSMENT — LEVEL 0 DESTABILISATION

3.1 — Current Status of Level 0

In the hours following the Companion's departure through Threshold Point 2, remote monitoring of Level 0 has recorded catastrophic environmental destabilisation. The following has been observed:

Entity 0 has withdrawn.

I will state that again for the benefit of anyone reading this document who does not understand the implications: Entity 0 has withdrawn. Fully. The entity that has maintained territorial dominance over Level 0 for the entire period of M.E.G. observation is gone. The entity that regulated environmental conditions and constituted the single greatest stabilising force in the most heavily trafficked level of the Backrooms is gone.

Remote sensors confirm his frequency signature at a fixed point deep within Level 0, unmoving, sustained. But he’s ceased all territorial behaviour. He’s not patrolling. He’s not maintaining.

He is, as far as our instruments can determine, sitting in one place and doing nothing.

The consequences have been immediate and severe.

3.2 — Entity Activity Surge

With Entity 0's territorial suppression removed, hostile entities previously held at the margins of Level 0 have flooded the space. Monitoring stations have recorded:

Hound packs: Three separate packs identified in corridors previously empty for the duration of our observation. Two confirmed wanderer fatalities in the last six hours. M.E.G. rescue teams are being deployed but cannot match Entity 0's suppression coverage.

Skin-Stealers: At least two confirmed active within the central corridor network. One M.E.G. operative (Operative ████) is missing and presumed compromised. All personnel have been issued updated visual-confirmation protocols.

Smilers: Population surge in darkened sections. Lighting infrastructure that Entity 0 previously maintained has begun to fail. Bulbs burning out at a rate consistent with the withdrawal of an ambient electromagnetic maintenance field. As the lights go, the Smilers move in.

Partygoers: Increased aggression. Three documented lure attempts on M.E.G. personnel in the last four hours alone. They appear emboldened. They know he's not watching.

3.3 — Structural Deterioration

Level 0 itself is degrading. The wallpaper is peeling in corridors that have been stable for years. The ambient hum has shifted. It is lower. Slower.

The Backrooms are grieving.

I am aware that this is not a scientific assessment. I’m including it anyway because after eleven years of monitoring this environment, I have earned the right to call it what it is. Level 0 functioned because Entity 0 cared for it, and Entity 0 cared for it because the Companion was inside it, and now she's gone, and the walls are rotting, and I don’t know how to write a clinical assessment of heartbreak on an architectural scale.

3.4 — Entity X

Entity X remains active within Level 0. Remote sensors last observed it approximately ██ hours ago, stationary, at the corridor junction designated 0-ALPHA-11. It was facing the wall.

Not moving. Not hunting. Facing the wall.

The same wall behind the Companion's sublevel apartment.

With Entity 0 withdrawn and unresponsive, no countermeasure is currently deployed against Entity X. It is moving freely. It has not attacked M.E.G. personnel. It has not attacked other entities, either. It has not, as far as we can determine, attacked anything since the Companion's departure.

It is waiting.

We do not know what it is waiting for.

[HANDWRITTEN — margin: Yes, we do. — Dr. ██████]

SECTION 4: RECOVERED FOOTAGE — THRESHOLD EVENT

4.1 — Source

Surveillance equipment at Threshold Point 2 recorded the following footage in the moments immediately prior to the Companion's arrival. The footage captures the far side of the threshold for about 90 seconds before the barrier activated and obscured the feed.

The footage quality is poor. Interference consistent with Entity 0's proximity. But the content is recoverable.

4.2 — Description of Footage

[TIMESTAMP 00:00-00:12] — A corridor. Level 4, based on environmental markers. Dimly lit. The recording picks up an ambient hum. The hum is wrong, pitched lower than baseline, modulating in a pattern the audio team has described as “respiratory.” The corridor is breathing.

[TIMESTAMP 00:12-00:19] — Two figures become visible at the far end of the corridor. One is the Companion. She is walking. She is walking slowly away from the second figure, and she’s not looking back.

The second figure is Entity 0.

He is standing still. He is not following. His hands are at his sides, and he is watching her walk away from him and his face —

His face is Bobby Franklin's face, and it’s breaking.

[TIMESTAMP 00:19-00:34] — Entity 0 speaks. The audio is heavily distorted by his own frequency output, which appears to be destabilising the recording equipment, but partial vocal reconstruction has recovered the following fragments:

“…please… don't…”

“…I can't… without…”

“…you are the only…”

[UNTRANSLATABLE — frequency exceeds recording equipment's capture range for 4.2 seconds. The audio team reports that the untranslatable section contains structured vocalisation, but it’s not language.]

“…please…”

[TIMESTAMP 00:34-00:41] — Entity 0's face is wet. The substance on his face is not water. It’s luminous. Faintly bioluminescent, the same spectral signature as the subcutaneous markings on the Companion's body. He is producing a visible, light-emitting fluid from his eyes.

He’s crying.

[TIMESTAMP 00:41-00:58] — The Companion continues walking. She does not turn around. Her shoulders are rigid. Her hands are fisted at her sides. She’s shaking.

Entity 0 makes a sound. A sustained, rising vocalisation that begins in the range of human hearing and descends below it, dropping into a register that the recording equipment captures as a physical vibration in the camera housing. The walls of the corridor ripple. The lights flicker and do not recover. The hum of Level 4 itself warps around the sound, bending toward it, as though the Backrooms are listening to him grieve.

[TIMESTAMP 00:58-01:14] — The Companion reaches the threshold point. She stops.

She turns around.

The corridor behind her is empty.

Entity 0 is gone. The space where he stood is vacant. No transitional movement was captured. He didn’t walk away, didn’t retreat into a wall, didn’t dissolve. Between one frame and the next, he simply was no longer there. The oldest entity in the Backrooms, the thing that has held Level 0 together for longer than M.E.G. has existed to document it, could not watch her leave.

The Companion stands at the threshold, looking at the empty corridor where he was. Her face is visible for the first time in the footage. She’s crying.

She turns back to the wall. She steps through.

[TIMESTAMP 01:14-01:18] — The corridor is empty. The lights are out. The hum continues, lower and slower than any previously recorded baseline.

[END OF FOOTAGE]

[HANDWRITTEN — across the bottom of the page, in large letters, red ink: I wrote “we are dealing with the Backrooms, and it is in love” in the margin of his first dossier. It was gallows humour then. A joke to keep the cosmic horror at arm's length.

It’s no longer a joke.

What walked through our threshold tonight was not a rescued wanderer. It was the other half of something, severed. Her body resonates at 7.83 Hz. His tears glow with the same light that's written in her skin. He maintained an entire level of reality because she was inside it, and the moment she left, it started to fall apart.

We spent years asking the wrong question. We kept asking, “what is Entity 0?” We should have been asking “what is Entity 0 without her?”

Now we know. He is a grief so large it collapses infrastructure. He’s a wound that the Backrooms themselves are bleeding from. He’s an ancient thing sitting in a dark room somewhere, doing nothing, being nothing, while the world he built for her rots around him because the world was never the point. She was the point. She was always the point.

And she walked away.

And he let her.

And everything is falling apart. — Director. ██████]

SECTION 5: ENTITY X — THREAT ASSESSMENT UPDATE

Revised Classification: KETER-ADJACENT (borrowing terminology — our own system lacks an adequate substitute)

Entity X has been reclassified from UNKNOWN-HOSTILE to APEX-UNDEFINED following the events of the Threshold engagement (ref: MEG-INT-1990-0292, Franklin interview). The following observations necessitate an urgent reassessment of threat level:

Entity X engaged and killed six to eight armed hostiles (ref: unidentified paramilitary group, black tactical gear — see AGENCY FILE MEG-CLASSIFIED-████) without sustaining observable damage. Subject Franklin described its demeanour during combat as “bored.”

Entity X demonstrated selective targeting: it ignored Franklin and the civilian Katherine [SURNAME REDACTED] entirely. Its focus was exclusively on the Companion. This is consistent with all prior observations. Entity X does not have multiple targets. It has one.

Entity X physically lifted and threw Franklin (a grown man) with one hand. The throw resulted in the injuries documented in MEG-INT-1990-0292. Entity X did not kill Franklin. It moved him.

When the Companion shouted at Entity X, it tilted its head and complied. It did not release Franklin by physical force. It released him because she told it to.

Entity 0 engaged Entity X directly during the threshold extraction and achieved temporary incapacitation. This marks the only confirmed instance of Entity X being forcibly stopped by any means. Entity 0's condition upon arrival at Level 974 (ref: Franklin interview — torn, destabilised, black fluid, form flickering) suggests the cost was high.

Entity X is now active in Level 0 with no Entity 0 suppression. Its current behaviour (stationary, facing the wall of the Companion's former sublevel) is more alarming than active hostility. It’s waiting. It knows she left.

Recommendation: Entity X cannot be engaged by M.E.G. forces. Entity X cannot be contained. Entity X does not respond to any stimulus we can generate. Entity X responds to the Companion. The Companion is currently unconscious in our medical bay.

I don’t have a recommendation. We have a serious situation.

SECTION 6: IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES

Companion remains under medical observation. No contact with Franklin until her condition stabilises and we can conduct a full cognitive assessment. Franklin has been informed. 

Level 0 rescue operations are ongoing. Four wanderer groups are currently unaccounted for. Hound pack activity continues to escalate. Lighting failure is spreading.

Entity 0 must be re-engaged. His withdrawal is unsustainable. Without his territorial suppression, Level 0 will become non-viable for human transit within an estimated ██ days. How one re-engages an omnipotent, grief-stricken entity is a question I’m passing directly to the Director because I don’t have an answer, and I’m tired of pretending I might.

Entity X monitoring continues. If it moves, we will know. If it moves toward the threshold, we have no plan.

We must address the unidentified paramilitary group (ref: “Agency”). Their interest in the Companion has been confirmed by both Franklin's testimony and two separate engagements. They will return. They do not give up. The Companion is not safe here. The Companion may not be safe anywhere.

[HANDWRITTEN — margin, red ink: She was safe with him. That's the thing nobody in this building wants to say out loud. The safest she has ever been was in the arms of the most dangerous thing in the Backrooms. — Dr. ██████]

SECTION 7: PERSONAL NOTE (Director. ██████)

I am appending this because I have been monitoring Entity 0 for years. I have written his dossier, his incident reports, and his behavioural analyses. 

I have watched him through cameras, frequency monitors, and the terrified debriefs of my colleagues. I have argued in departmental meetings that he is more than what our classification system can hold. I wrote “APEX-UNDEFINED” because every other category was a lie, and I wrote “we are dealing with the Backrooms and it is in love” because it was true, and everyone laughed, and then they stopped laughing, and now nobody says anything at all when I bring it up because the evidence has become unanswerable.

Tonight I watched the footage of him crying.

And then he vanished because watching her leave was the one thing he could not survive.

I don't know what happens next. The Companion is unconscious and glows faintly under UV, like something steeped in starlight. Franklin is in Processing Suite 2, pacing, demanding to see her. Entity X is standing in a dark room facing a wall. Entity 0 is sitting in a dark room facing a different wall. Level 0 is collapsing. 

Everything is on fire, and, frankly, nobody is holding the extinguisher because the extinguisher was an ancient pre-human entity wearing the face of a twenty-two-year-old Californian camera operator, and he is currently non-functional due to heartbreak.

This is not in the manual.

Nothing about any of this has ever been in the manual.

Director. ██████ , M.E.G. Outpost Alpha-9

[ADDENDUM — handwritten, red ink, bottom of page: Pham asked me today if I think Entity 0 will recover. I told her I don't know. She asked me if I think the Companion will go back. I told her I don't know that either. She asked me what I do know.

I know that a thing older than human civilisation heard a girl through a wall and built a face for her. I know that it let her go when she asked because it understood that keeping her was not the same as loving her.

I know that she turned around.

That's what I know.

It's not enough. But it's all I got. — Director. ██████]

Transcription of Recovered Cassette Tape, Designation: BF-PERSONAL-COMMS

Device: AT&T 1337 Answering System

Date Range: December 1988 — June 1990

Recovered From: [ADDRESS REDACTED], Santa Clara Valley, CA

Transcription Status: PARTIAL — Tape degradation noted in later entries. Final three messages exhibit anomalous audio properties (see appended notes).

[MESSAGE 01 — DECEMBER 22, 1988. 7:14 PM]

Yo, it's Terrence. You coming to Danny's Christmas thing or what? Sweet girl's invited too, obviously. Actually, she's more invited than you, loser. Tell her to bring those cookies she made last time, the ones with the—what was it again, the lemon stuff on top? Marcus ate like ten of them.

Call me back. And tell her about the cookies.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 02 — DECEMBER 27, 1988. 11:30 AM]

Hi, Bobby, it's Mom. Merry Christmas, sweetheart, even though you didn't call. I saved you a plate. I saved her a plate too. There's turkey and the casserole you like, the one with the crispy onions. You can pick them up whenever.

I love you. Call me back. Both of you.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 03 — DECEMBER 29, 1988. 6:02 PM]

Terrence again. Alright, you missed Christmas, you missed Danny's, and now Marcus is saying he saw your truck in the lot but your apartment's dark. What's going on, man? Did you two have a fight or something?

Just let me know you're alive. That's all I need. One word. Literally groan "alive" into the phone and hang up. I'll take it.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 04 — JANUARY 2, 1989. 9:15 AM]

Bobby, this is Clark. Listen, [UNINTELLIGIBLE — tape distortion] didn't show up for her shift again last night. That's four in a row now. You need to tell her I'm not running a charity here. I really like the girl, you know I do, but I can't hold the position forever. Have her call me.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 05 — JANUARY 2, 1989. 4:47 PM]

Bobby, it's Mom again. Honey, I ran into Mrs Nguyen at the grocery store. She said there's been some kind of—she said she hasn't seen your girlfriend in over a week. Said you've been real quiet. Bobby, is everything okay? You're scaring me a little, baby. Call me back. Please.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 06 — JANUARY 5, 1989. 2:30 PM]

Mr Franklin, this is Detective Moreno with the Santa Clara Police Department. We'd like to follow up on the report you filed. If you could come down to the station at your earliest convenience, we have some additional questions. You can reach me at [NUMBER REDACTED]. Thank you.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 07 — JANUARY 9, 1989. 8:45 PM]

Terrence. Bobby. I just talked to your mom and she told me—why didn't you call me? Why the fuck didn't you—

[PAUSE — 5 seconds]

Okay. I'm coming over. I don't care if your lights are off. I'm coming over right now.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 08 — JANUARY 14, 1989. 3:33 AM]

[SILENCE — 4 seconds]

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 09 — JANUARY 14, 1989. 3:34 AM]

[SILENCE — 7 seconds]

[FAINT SOUND — indeterminate. Possibly mechanical. Possibly vocal.]

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 10 — JANUARY 18, 1989. 10:05 AM]

Mr Franklin, Detective Moreno again. We've completed our review of the video equipment and tapes collected from your residence. You're welcome to retrieve them at the station. I'll be here until five.

[PAUSE — 2 seconds]

Bobby. Off the record. If there's anything you want to tell me, my door's open. No judgment. Just come talk to me.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 11 — JANUARY 23, 1989. 6:30 PM]

Bobby, it's Terrence. I drove by the store tonight. Saw your truck in the lot. Went in and Clark said you were downstairs. Man, he said you've been going down there every night. Said you just sit on the floor and talk. Bobby, I know you're hurting. I know, me too. But you're scaring people. You're scaring me, dude.

I've been looking too, okay? I've been asking around. I went to every bar on El Camino, showed her picture, asked if anyone's seen her. Nobody has. But I'm not giving up, and I need you to not give up either, and I need you to do it in a way that doesn't look like—like—

Just call me. Please, man. I can't do this through a machine.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 12 — FEBRUARY 3, 1989. 11:22 PM]

[CALLER UNKNOWN — female voice, middle-aged, angry]

I know what you did to that girl! Everybody knows. The police might not have enough to arrest you but that doesn't mean you're innocent, you disgusting piece of—my daughter went to school with her. She was a good girl. A GOOD girl! And you—

[VOICE BREAKS]

You better pray they never find her, because if they do, and if you did what I think you did—

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 13 — FEBRUARY 3, 1989. 11:24 PM]

[SAME CALLER]

I saw you at the gas station last week. With your little earring and your—strutting around like nothing happened. Like she didn't matter. Some of us remember her. Some of us haven't forgotten.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 14 — FEBRUARY 10, 1989. 9:00 AM]

Bobby, it's Mom. Honey, I talked to Father Reyes and he said you're welcome to come by the church anytime. You don't have to talk. You can just sit. Sometimes it helps to just sit somewhere quiet.

[PAUSE]

I know you didn't hurt her, baby. I know that. A mother knows. But you need to take care of yourself. You're not eating. Terrence told me you're not eating. I'm going to bring food over this week and I don't want to hear about it.

I love you.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 15 — FEBRUARY 22, 1989. 3:33 AM]

[SILENCE — 11 seconds. A sound that may be breathing or may be tape degradation.]

[HANG UP]

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 16 — MARCH 1, 1989. 2:20 PM]

[AUTOMATED] You have reached Pacific Bell. This is a reminder that your bill for the month of February is past due. To avoid service interruption, please—

[MESSAGE DELETED BY USER]

[MESSAGE 17 — MARCH 8, 1989. 7:10 PM]

Bobby. It's Terrence. Okay, this is gonna sound really freakin' weird but I need you to just hear me out.

I was at Danny's tonight, right? And I was telling him—I was trying to tell him about the search. About how I went to all those bars on El Camino asking about her. And he looked at me like I was crazy. He said, "asking about who?" And I said her name. I said—

[PAUSE — 3 seconds]

I said her name, Bobby. I know I did. I heard myself say it. But Danny just stared at me. And Marcus was there too, and he had the same look, like I was making someone up. And I started to say, you know, Bobby's girlfriend, she's been missing since December, and Marcus said Bobby doesn't have a girlfriend.

Marcus said that. To my face. About a person who has been in his car. Who sat at his kitchen table. Who was at his birthday party last year.

I'm not—I'm not losing it. Right? Bobby, tell me I'm not losing it.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 18 — MARCH 8, 1989. 7:15 PM]

It's me again. I just—I wanted to say her name again. Into the phone. So there's a record of it. So I know I said it.

[PAUSE — 6 seconds]

[UNINTELLIGIBLE — tape distortion. A burst of static lasting approximately two seconds, precisely overlaying the space where the name would be.]

…That's her name. That's her goddamn name. I know it. I KNOW it.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 19 — MARCH 20, 1989. 12:17 PM]

Bobby, it's Clark. I hired somebody to cover the shifts. Girl named Kat. She's good. Reliable. I'm telling you because I don't want you to walk in tonight and be caught off guard. It's not a replacement. It's just coverage. You understand.

[PAUSE — 3 seconds]

I'm not gonna beg, but I will say this. Sitting in that basement isn't gonna bring her back, son. I've been where you are. You know I have. Come back to work. Give yourself something to do with your hands. Door's open.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 20 — APRIL 5, 1989. 9:30 PM]

Bobby. Terrence. Listen to me. Something is wrong with me.

I've been... I started writing things down, okay? Because I keep losing pieces. Not like forgetting where I put my keys. Like whole chunks of things just going blank. I drove to the store last week because I knew I needed to look for someone. I KNEW it. I could feel it in my chest, this pulling, like something awful happened and I'm supposed to be doing something about it. But when I got there I sat in the parking lot and I couldn't remember who. I couldn't remember who I was looking for.

I went home and I found this list I made. My own handwriting. Things about a person. Real specific things, Bobby, like I knew this person inside out. Their favourite things. Things they were scared of. Personal things you only know about someone if you—if you love them.

And I don't know who it's about.

Bobby, I think something is really, really wrong.

Call me. Please. I don't care what time it is.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 21 — APRIL 5, 1989. 9:33 PM]

Me again. One of the things on the list says "she hated the green ones." Skittles, maybe? Or M&Ms? I don't know. But when I read it I felt so sad I almost threw up and I don't know why.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 22 — APRIL 28, 1989. 5:45 PM]

Bobby, it's Mom. Honey, I saw you at the store last week. Through the window. You looked thin. You looked real thin, baby, and I—

I also saw the new girl behind the counter. She seems sweet. Clark told me her name is Kat. He said she's been good for the store.

[PAUSE]

Bobby, I want to ask you something and I want you to really think about it. Have you thought about talking to someone? Not Father Reyes, I mean a professional. Someone who can help you process—whatever this is. Because sweetheart, I talked to Terrence's mother, and she said Terrence is worried you're not sleeping. And Clark says you go to the basement every night and talk to the walls. And I'm not judging you, sweetie, I'm not, but—

You can't keep living like this. Something has to give.

I love you, sweetie. Call me back.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 23 — MAY 14, 1989. 8:00 PM]

Hey Bobby, it's Terrence. So—okay. I found this list. In my glovebox. My handwriting. Bunch of stuff about somebody I apparently used to know pretty well. Do you know who "hates the green ones" means? I wrote that down. I must've had a reason.

[LONG PAUSE]

I don't know why I'm calling you about this. Just had a feeling like maybe you'd know.

Call me back if you know.

[END MESSAGE]

[MESSAGE 24 — MAY 14, 1989. 8:02 PM]

Me again. I just looked at the list again. One of the things on it says "Bobby loves her."

Bobby loves who?