Patrick bit the top off the small paper sugar holder and added his fifth sugar. The thick black espresso was now jammed with caffeine and sugar and he sipped the hot liquid to test the heat before chugging the whole lot down.
He looked at the CCTV screens which showed various parts of the inside and outside of the building. The screens had a greenish glow and low quality that made them look like they were showing underwater scenarios. If this was the aquarium then the fish were all out to lunch, there was no one in, or outside of the building. The place was empty and that was just the way Patrick liked it.
This was night two of his new job and his first time on nights. He had spent some time as a parking attendant under the bridge at Waterloo station but that was mainly day work with some evenings. Ever since Stephanie had left him he saw no reason why he shouldn't now take advantage of the fact he wasn't doing anything and work nights for the much better pay.
He ran his hand through his moustache to stop the little hairs tickling his nose and took his glasses off and wiped them. He looked at the clock. 12.45. At 1pm he would be going on his hourly room check but for now he had fifteen minutes to peruse his copy of “Great Trains Of The 20th Century”.
Half an hour later he was just finishing up on the third floor. This floor was just offices and he had various checkpoints and alarms to look at. The windows half reflected back the dim light of the room and half phased in the lights of this part of the city around him. It was usually quite dead outside with cars trundling past and planes in the sky and the glittering red lights of enormous building cranes endlessly building new towers in the night sky.
For a moment Patrick caught himself in the reflection and wondered when he had begun to let himself go. Stephanie said he had been going south for a while. There was a general air of defeat about him. A slumpedness and ever tiredness that permeated his very core. He never seems to be able to get back to square one he thought almost like something was…
Patrick suddenly saw something standing behind him in the reflection. A grim shadow of a man slightly taller and slightly hunched. His heart stopped and burst up into his mouth like a rocket taking off for the moon. Adrenaline pumped and he spun around.
There was nothing except rows of desks and PCs with empty chairs. He could have sworn!
It must have just been a trick of the light. Something outside that caused a man-shaped reflection in the glass. It looked so real and his heart was pumping like a piston engine on one of his favourite locomotives.
The rest of the room check was spent a little on edge and he cursed himself for overdoing the caffeine with his last coffee. He could not stop thinking about that shadowy figure. He may have let his appearance go a bit but his vision was still solid. It was one of the things that made him good at his job, his sharp sight. He went back to the office.
An idea occurred to him and he initially dismissed it. But it lingered and eventually he gave in to it. He could get in trouble if he was found tampering with the tapes. He found the correct feed for the room that he had been in and rewound the video feed until the time he saw himself emerge from the zoo of office furniture.
He watched himself stop and seemingly get captivated by his own reflection.
He seemed to watch himself stand there for much longer than he thought he had taken. “Jeezuz, look at the state of that’, he thought to himself, eyeing his own frame over disparagingly.
Suddenly something caught his attention. It was his shadow reflected on the office divide next to him in the image. It had moved when he had not. It was still moving, rising up. Shoulders up and hands rising from either side. He could see the things head growing larger and then splitting in two like a crescent moon but with sharp pointy things spread over the crest. Fangs, he was sure of it. The thing bore down as if to bite and just at that moment he had turned around and the shadow had disappeared immediately.
He sat, astonished. His heart once again was at full steam ahead and his face flushed red with hot blood. Stunned, he moved back to the control panel to rewind and watch again and it was then that he caught sight of his reflection in the green monitor screen.
It was there. It had already latched on and was convulsing. It was feeding.
He wanted to get up and fight it off. But he had just lost the will. He wasn’t that man anymore.
He wasn’t even half the man he used to be.