The Telltale Tap | 5 February 2022
Once I stopped dismissing it and really listened, the faint tapping sound wasn’t irregular at all. The pattern was long but predictable. After about 15 cycles I could tap along.
BNR Response
The developers had only finished renovating about a quarter of the old hosiery factory into the makers collective when they started renting out spaces. As a serial creator, I used my area to suit whatever I was commissioned to repair or create. I’d been here for five months and so far there’d only been two other spaces rented, so I spent most of my time in this old factory alone.
From the exterior, the structure itself was neither imposing nor threatening, but the latent energy that remained inside the building sometimes made it feel as if the walls were breathing. The rabbit warren of old foreman offices, long unwindowed corridors leading to vast production floors with drooping, decommissioned equipment, odd mezzanine levels with unknown egress: all told the place felt more like an industrial maze than a run-of-the-mill warehouse. A night owl by nature, I was often here late into the evening, and I was tiring of the motion-sensor lights that shut off every three minutes if they didn’t detect new activity. I work deliberately, and yet I was constantly getting caught in the dark because I was apparently not animated enough for the building to feel it needed to light me.
Sometimes I had the feeling that the old factory was toying with me in a menacing way. One too many times I’d left my workstation for a bathroom break only to get locked in a hallway or I’d emerged from the shared kitchen wholly disoriented as if intoxicated or in a labyrinth with shifting walls. I was stuck in the industrial version of the goddamned Winchester Mystery House.
I had just resolved that being one of three tenants in this double-football-field-sized lot was no longer for me, and had about a week left on my space rental. It was around 3AM, and, having reached a stopping point on my latest commission, I realized that my mix tape had long ended and the silence had settled around me. I blinked my eyes hard trying to get them to moisten, rolled my head around to wake up my neck, and straightened up, coming out of my focused work as if just waking from a downy slumber. Now this tapping. It was too regular to be man-made. Was there a maker’s station that abutted mine that I had somehow missed? I removed my safety goggles from their perch on my brow and felt instant relief from the removal of the elastic band around my head. Shimmying my shoulders to loosen up some more, I put my ear to the paint-chipped brick wall. The lights shut off. I waved my arms over my head in an SOS fashion and focused on the whirring clicking I heard on the other side of the wall. Keeping my ear as close as possible, I followed the maze of darkened corridors for what felt like 20 minutes before finding a “Principal”-like frosted glass door I hadn’t seen before. Greasy handprints marred the glass, and I felt a draft cooling the air above my head. A dim amber light emanated from under the door, prompting me to give the handle a try. I was stunned to find that it opened, and I pushed it forward with purpose and slowly let my head lead me into the room. I was so shocked at what I found that I wandered, zombie-like, into the middle of the eight-by-ten cavity. The wall facing the door was covered ceiling to floor with twelve-inch screens, each displaying every centimeter of the warehouse space. There were dozens and dozens of them, stacked together flawlessly like a light grid. On the wall to the right was what looked like a command center and a large screen that looked like something an NFL enthusiast had chosen for size. There were all manner of buttons and keyboards, dials and switches, and all this machinery was collectively making the tapping I had heard on my side of the wall. As I stumbled, eyes affixed on the big screen, I was horrified to see it focused on a wide-angle of my workstation. A number of smaller laptops’ faces in the command center are zoomed in on the details of my space: my paint-splattered boom box, my leather apron, my Thermos lunchbox. I felt my mouth drop open as I stepped closer to this desk to examine what these controls actually controlled, when I was snapped to attention by the sound of a door slamming. The screens went black and my eyes were shocked by the sudden pitch when a figure approached me. “How the hell did you get in here, Pinky?” I still couldn’t see but I felt large hands wrap themselves under the straps of my overalls, lifting me slightly off the ground. It’s at this moment that it hit me: all this time it wasn’t the building’s breathing that had been haunting me, it was this thing’s.