I don’t know about you but I think the hardest thing about maintaining relationships with other humans are the conversations you have with them. At the end of it all whatever relationship you have with people it’s the conversations that always runs dry after a while. I mean take marriage for instance and many married couples have all told me that conversations do become harder to maintain. Living with another person for long periods of times its hard to find something to talk about because every subject has been filled. I always found it difficult to have conversations and I was always awkward with people.
It’s that horrendous feeling of having to entertain someone which brings me down and just simply exhausts me. Social interactions have always been my kryptonite and I have wished on many occasions where I can somehow change to be more sociable. I cannot imagine myself ever being a comedian or standing in front of a crown on stage I would probably die of fright. I enjoy the sound of silence and the emptiness of movement in a room. I can stare and observe things for hours and ponder all sorts of strange things. My mind always seems to be working though
I also work the night shift for a security company which would seem like the best job for someone like me but on weekends you must work with another person in one building. If you have ever worked the night shift with another person then you will know how conversations can quickly run dry. The constant feeling of being boring or annoying runs around inside my head and I hate doing security work with another person beside me. I prefer to work alone where I don’t have to think about another employee or co-worker. Don’t get me wrong having one more person working beside you can be helpful in emergency situations.
One weekend and on a night shift, I was working with another guy from my security company. We were both working in the same residential building and the air was filled with silence. Both of us had nothing to say to each other and you could sense the annoyance we had for each other’s existence. When my co-worker then went on his hour break and it was just me in the reception a resident who lived in the residential building came up to me.
“so you two look bored your co-worker just walked past me and straight to the office with a bored look on his face” the resident told me with a smile
“yeah for a Saturday its really quiet” I replied
“so what do you two do for the whole night do you guys have anything to talk about?” the resident asked me
“The conversations on these type of shifts run dry much quicker than the fastest bullet in the world” I replied and chuckled at the same
“I am really good at causing conversations do you want me to do what I am good at?” the resident asked me with a smile on his face
“Yeah ok anything to beat the awkward silence” I replied confusingly with an awkward smile on my face
The resident walked away and I just went back to staring at the CCTV screen while contemplating the purpose of my life. I was dreading my co-worker coming back from his break and we will both be back at being awkwardly silent again with nothing to talk about. When my Co-worker did come back from his break I then suddenly got a phone call from one of the residents who was scared because someone was scratching on his front door.
Both I and my co-worker looked at each other and we both started conversing about what it could be or what kind of individual would go up to a random person’s apartment to start scratching on their front door. All the way through the journey of going up to the scared resident’s apartment we were both talking about it and finally we were both having a conversation about something. We found no one making scratching noises at the resident’s front door but we logged it down anyhow.
Then we got two more phone calls from resident’s who complained about the same thing and they too feared a stranger was just randomly scratching on their front apartment door. Both I and my colleague went up to inspect those apartments and along the journey, we joked about it and we're having a proper compelling conversation. At that moment I then remembered the resident who came up to me while I was in the reception about causing conversations. Is this what the male resident had meant by when he told me that he could cause conversations? and I idiotically didn’t get his name or apartment number to see if he was scratching people’s front apartment door. We found nothing again and all we could do was log it down and email our managers and the managers who ran the residential building.
In the next couple of weeks, many strange things have been happening to tenants from strange screams in the middle of the night, strange objects found in the hallways and one tenant found a stranger in his apartment. As bad as all of these were for the residents it gave me and my colleagues things to talk about when we would work together in a night shift on weekends. I was strangely grateful to the resident who was good at causing conversations. There were more constant police visits and us security guards had to be more on the ball and especially vigilant to any strange activity or behaviour.
Then just as when I had thought things couldn’t get worse it did. A female tenant came late from work to find her fiancé murdered in their apartment. All the managers came down to the building and there so many police checking the whole building and as bad as this was I managed to have a conversation for the whole night shift with my co-workers. I had never conversed with my co-workers throughout a whole night shift but because the murder was in our depth now we both talked about it.
It felt amazing to be able to talk about something and find some common ground. Then the things the residents had experienced first started to hit our families and close relatives. My mother started hearing scratching sound on her front door and the same with my co-workers' mother. We both conversed about it and told the police straight away. Then members of my relatives and my co-workers' relatives started to hear strange sounds and screams.
The same pattern was now terrifying the both of us and one day the resident who can cause conversations called down the reception on when I was working. Usually, I can see the apartment number on the reception phone but I could see no apartment number. The male residents asked me if I was enjoying the conversations I was experiencing and I begged him to stop whatever he was doing but he just hung up. I then told my co-worker about this male resident and me managed to pull him up on the CCTV when he came down for the first time to see me in the reception and talked about his ability to cause conversations. I gave the footage to the police.
Then the managers who ran the residential building came back to me to tell me that this strange person does not live in an apartment inside the residential building. I was thoroughly confused. Some close family members of mine and my co-workers have been finding weird objects around the house and in other places. Both I and my co-workers have seen where this pattern leads and we have both not been able to stop talking about it.