London Deep #3
I recognized the phone from that last time I’d seen him, when he’d called for the Chinese takeaway.
The battery was drained to the last ten percent but it still functioned, and as I scrolled through his email messages, feeling guilty at the intrusion despite the circumstances, I caught another glimpse into my brother’s state of mind.
There was an email thread back and forth between Simon and his employers, as he tried to convince them that something was seriously amiss with both the elevator shaft and the tunnels beneath the building, going so far as to suggest that they should shut The Aerial to all business until the problem was resolved.
In the last email his pleas had become almost delirious, and again I saw mention of the “fish-men” from his notes, and a hint that he believed something large was residing beneath the building, in the tunnels.
It was plain to me that he had lost his mind by this point, due to either the stresses of the job or his solitary existence, and his superiors had clearly come to the same conclusion.
They had requested that he attend a meeting with HR the following day, but it appeared he had failed to turn up for the appointment.
That was the moment when Simon disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Those of you who know The Aerial will be aware that it has a public viewing gallery close to the pinnacle of the building, encircling the spire that tops it and allowing views across London.
Despite the rain, I felt an urge to visit it while I was in the building, to see where my brother’s career had taken him.
I would not admit it to myself, but I knew at this point that Simon was not coming back, and it seemed right that I should witness what would turn out to be the peak of his brief career, his crowning achievement. It felt like a pilgrimage of sorts.
As I waited for the elevator, glowing red numbers counting downward as it descended the shaft toward where I stood in the lobby, I began to flick through the photos on the phone.
I think I still hoped to find evidence of that secret love affair, but they were almost all of building sites and blueprints, hardly any of people at all.
There were none of me, I noted with regret.
It was when I reached the last few photos that I paused, my breath catching in the back of my throat as I peered at a dark snapshot of what appeared to be a sewer, or a flooded underground tunnel.
Where the thin light faded into shadows, a figure could be made out, hunched over as if crippled.
I tried to zoom in but the resolution was poor.
Still, it looked like no man I had ever seen.
I would have sworn it was naked, its body pale and slimy-looking.
Might this be the fish-man Simon had written about?
It seemed crazy, but he had clearly believed it.
The photo was hardly conclusive, and yet I found myself wondering if my brother might have stumbled upon something.
I struggled to make out the next photo. Again, it was dark, but the dimensions seemed all wrong, the image too abstract for my mind to untangle its meaning.
Was that large white circle an eye? There were blurred shapes around the fringes of the image too, as if the subject was moving when the picture was taken, something or things waving about in a circle around that eye.
I could make little sense of it. Was this some lifeform he’d discovered in the sewer?
Urban myths had always circulated about mutant goldfish or albino crocodiles living in London’s hundreds of miles of sewage pipes, but I hadn’t heard of anything like this before.
Was this why Simon had gone so far off the rails?
It was the final picture, however, which froze me to the spot.
There was a frame to the image this time, what looked like cream-colored tiles, a glowing red line at the top left of the snapshot.
Between them was an open space, a dark hole from which there emerged what I can only describe as a giant tentacle, like that of a common octopus but many, many times the size, almost filling the entire shot.
In this age of Photoshop and deep fakes I wondered briefly if Simon had somehow manipulated the image, but I could see no reason why or how he might have done that.
The realization that I was looking at something living brought a wave of nausea roiling up from my stomach.
But behind it was what had caused me to freeze. That same eye, enormous now, staring out with a baleful intensity. Glaring with undisguised animosity at Simon, my brother, as he had taken the photograph. Maybe the last eye to gaze upon him alive.
To this day I cannot find words to describe the terror that coursed through me as I stared at this ancient, vengeful thing, other than to detail the shivers that overtook my hands, the sweat that sprung without warning from my armpits and my face.
I became intensely aware of my own body odor, and it smelled of a primal, animalistic fear.
Then the elevator chimed, and as I looked up, I saw the same cream-colored tiles, the red glow of the digital “L” as the display indicated that it had reached the lobby, identical to that glowing line in the image on Simon’s phone.
The spell was broken, and turning my back on the elevator doors as they began to slide open, I sprinted for the doorway out of the lobby, back to the damp grayness of the street.
I have not returned to The Aerial since that day, nor will I.
I avoid going anywhere near Canary Wharf.
As for Simon’s phone, on the way home I stopped by the riverbank and hurled it into the waters of the Thames, hoping it might eventually be swept out to sea.
Deep down, though, I now know that those turbulent waters flow to many different destinations, some of them far, far from the light.