Marcus says:
"You've all been been granted official FBI clearance to assist in the collection and typing of evidence from a location of interest in an interstate missing persons case. Missing Person is
Abigail Wright, 27 year old Caucausian female. Her dad reported her missing a couple months ago, and I guess they found some
freaky-ass shit in her apartment. NYPD and FBI have both investigated and hit dead ends. FBI investigation is technically still ongoing, but stalled. A Friendly with the New York FBI contacted me a few days ago about
a symbol she saw in photographs of the apartment which is associated with 'demonology and the occult'", he says, putting air quotes around the final phrase.
Contents of the dossier
here.
[ +- ] The Entry to the Apartment Building
Through the front door is a foyer - a small marble-floored room with the tenants’ mailboxes, numbered to correspond to the relevant apartment. The area is messy with old newspapers, sale circulars, and pizza coupons strewn about and stuffed into mailboxes. Beyond the foyer, a single hallway runs the length of the building, carpeted in plush burgundy, with two apartments on each side. A staircase runs up and down at the midpoint of the hall.
Abigail's apartment is the first on the left, number 1A.
[ +- ] The Apartment
The apartment door is locked, but the key from the dossier fits right in and opens it with an easy "click". The door swings open into a linoleum floored kitchenette. In the kitchen, a few feet from the door, sits a claw-foot bathtub. Immediately to your right, just before the bathtub, is a door that opens up into a tiny bathroom with an old-fashioned hammered-tin ceiling, barely large enough to fit the small sink and toilet within. On the floor in the middle of the room sits a cardboard box marked "EVIDENCE, FBI WHITE PLAINS, WRIGHT-A, 10-AUG-95." The apartment seems quite large, at least by New York standards - the kitchen opens up into an airy main living area. There's a small bedroom separated from the living room, and two spacious closets, one off of the kitchen and one off of the living room.
The details of the architecture are overshadowed, however, by the scene you open up the door to find.
The floor is bare. The rug in the living and bed rooms has been ripped up and taken away, exposing a battered and stained linoleum surface. There is no furniture to be found. The walls and ceiling are covered in layers of materials: papers, small items, and larger things epoxied in a bizarre and seemingly meaningful pattern of strata. It appears mostly untouched by police, save for three radios — a transistor radio, a small tape player, and a CD walkman — which have apparently been wrenched from the wall, one leaving behind a chunk of plastic from its casing.
The whole apartment appears to be a testament to methodical madness. The Agents will certainly have their work cut out for them.
[ +- ] Weird Song on the Radio
As King and Kylie start to examine the apartment, their thoughts are suddenly interrupted by the sound of crackling music piping out of the transistor radio, which Karl has switched on.
The music is a swinging, soulful, R&B ballad. You catch some of the lyrics as they drift through the air:
"...woke up this morning
And that girl was gone
She's gone up and left me
Wouldn't even say so long
I'm gonna travel
Around the world
Have to find that
Sweet little girl
If you see her
Please bring her home
To me
Well, she [unintelligible]
And Abigail is her name
[unintelligible] to be seen
But she's truly my queen
And I love that, yes I love that girl of mine..."
Quote:
Karl presses the play button on the tape recorder.
[ +- ] The Cassette Tape
Human voices emerge. The sounds are muffled, as if the recording is taken at a distance, but it's clear enough that you can make out most of what's being said.
It begins as some sort of spoken call-and-response, between a single voice and a group of people:
"Say the things we cannot say elsewhere," the solo voice begins.
"Truth leads us," the group responds.
"Find ourselves and know ourselves."
"Truth makes us," the group responds.
"Become the rulers of our own lives."
"Truth frees us," the group responds.
"Say what you will."
Then, there's the sound of a gong being struck, followed by what sounds like a flurry of movement. The noise stops, followed by a silence. Then, a single voice, different from that which led the chant, speaks:
"They’re making a building of books, downtown. I don’t know why. I admit, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. They stack them and glue them together, and there are windows and everything. I haven’t gone inside yet. I need to work up to it."
Silence. Then, a different voice:
"I lost my son last year. But I’ve noticed things around the house that he loved. Things I gave away and they’re back. Last night, I found handprints. So I’ve decided, tonight, I’m going to sing his song. I’m going to call to him and maybe he’ll find me."
Silence. A different voice:
"Has anyone read the whole book? I mean the play? What happens at the end? No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know yet."
Silence. A different voice:
"The more you talk into a phone, the less words you have before you’re dead. It eats those words and spits them out, digested, somewhere else. I never speak into telephones. My words are my own."
Silence. A different voice:
"If you open a door just right. I mean, if you KNOW how to open a door, there’s always another door on the other side. I didn’t buy it, at first, but after he showed me, I mean, wow…"
The tape comes to an end.
The agents don't have any examples of Abigail's voice, so who can tell whether any of the voices on the tape are her's. In fact, it's difficult to even discern whether many of the voices are male or female, let alone who or what kind of person they might belong to.
Karl, Kyle, and King begin sorting through the clutter. The items are weirdly disparate - papers, radios, coins, shoes, prosthetic limbs, jewelry - that all vary widely in terms of make and period.
Quote:
After about an hour of cataloging, Kylie pulls out a crumpled piece of copy paper stuffed in between the teeth of a pair of dentures. Unfolding it reveals what appears to be a typewritten script of some sort. The page is mostly white - the typing is triple spaced, and extremely sparse.
[ +- ] The Script
SCENE: ROGER’s Apartment.
A knock at the door.
ROGER: Abigail?
The door opens. LOUIS enters.
ROGER: Oh, it’s you.
LOUIS: Have you read it yet?
ROGER: Yeah, I read it.
LOUIS: And?
ROGER: It’s interesting, I’d like to read it again.
THE DOG BARKS.
LOUIS: Well?
ROGER: I gave it to Michelle. It’s her turn.
[ +- ] Karl's first theory
"Any pet theories yet?" asks Karl as he starts in on another part of the room, looking through papers. It's not much more than small talk, by his tone and general level of distraction. "We've run up against a couple of things that reference a play now... that script, one of the voices on the cassette tape mentioned a play. Suppose that's a coincidence?"
Kylie responds: "I have no idea how that makes sense, unless it's a meeting point, or dead drop? Or a way to pass messages of the script is variable? Or the base for a cipher?"
[ +- ] Weird photograph
Kylie manages to peel down from the wall a simple photograph of a middle-aged man in a police uniform standing next to an older woman in front of a small house in the suburbs. Both their eyes have been x’d out.