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[CLICK]ARCHIVISTStatement of Otto Bauer, regarding a driving accident near Montargis, France, on the night of September 23rd, 2023. Original statement given September 25th, 2023. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.Statement begins.ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)I swear I was clean. There are a lot of things I have to doubt about what happened on Saturday, but I was sober, clean, and very, very awake. I don’t play with that stuff when I drive; my only vice is- was speed.I’m pretty sure it won’t be anymore.I’m a raw material supplier, for the chemical industry. More specifically, I visit clients that use our products, polymers, for the most part, to help implement them in their products. I’ll have to keep the list of clients off this paper, but I’m currently on a big project for partnership with a European company and it’s been… Let’s just say I have to hop back and forth a lot between Nantes, London and Frankfurt.When I’m in Germany, that’s just fine. They’re strict on limitations, and you’re going to pay an arm in fines if you get caught going over it, but that’s only where you have limitations. A lot of their autobahnen- sorry, their highways- they’re not speed restricted. That suits me just fine: once I pass the French border, a lot of the roads I take let me go as fast as I like.That’s only in Germany though. When I’m in England or in France, I have to stick to a snail’s pace. Or rather, I should. Once you know where the control points are, though, you can just… slow down enough to pass unnoticed and then speed back up. All that to say, I go fast on highways. I’ve always loved it: the roads are somewhat straight, I put some loud music on the radio, and I have half my brain on the road, half on whatever takes my fancy. At the times I drive, I don’t pass that many people and unless it rains, the risk is fairly minimal.This weekend was hot, heavy, and strangely dry. I somehow ended up having to be in Nantes all day on Saturday, and I wanted to get to Frankfurt before Sunday, to have an actual week-end day before I had to work today. Obviously, that didn’t pan out the way I hoped.So here I was, on the French highway at 9pm, with a lot more people on the road than I’m used to, and going much slower than I’m used to.Now don’t get me wrong, I know I’m not a *friendly* driver. I was probably proper rude to quite a few people- kept pressing the horn when they were too slow for me, and the French are already not very respectful of the speed limit. I counted at least three separate instances of middle fingers raised in my direction. Still, it worked some. Instead of going 120mph, I was going at 100, but it was still way above the French limit – something like 80mph – and I was making somewhat good progress.And then at some point, I got stuck. There was this white car in front of me, and sure it kept overtaking others by a good margin, but I was still stuck even slower than before, and I got pissed. The driver – I saw at some point that it was a woman about my age – kept to the left and I was wedged between her, the cars on the right, and… well, there was no one behind me but I didn’t exactly want to be slower. Either way, I honked at her two or three times, to no effect. I was starting to get pissed and did something pretty stupid.I turned my fog lights on.That’s when I saw her and two other people in the car: a man in the passenger seat, and what I first assumed to be a teen in the back seat. The light sure got a notice, and the card lightly swerved in the lane, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t have moved, really: she was just as trapped by the lane of cars on the right. I didn’t care, though, and I kept tailing her close with my fog lights on.At some point, I noticed the kid in the backseat was staring at me. This normally wouldn’t have disturbed me much, I spend enough time on the road to have seen wiggly children in back seats before, but this kid… her eyes were off.First off, she shouldn’t have been able to stare at me. Have you ever tried to look into a fog light? They’re called that for a reason, and they’re so bright they can actually damage your eyes semi-permanently to definitively if you stare into them too long. And yet, here was that girl staring at me through the fog lights, and somehow managing to nail me perfectly in the eyes. That’s already creepy enough as is, and it kept distracting me from the road and making me slow down. I thought that was the point, at first.Second, her eyes did not… look human. First off, I should have seen some vague eye shapes on her face at this distance, but not the actual detail of her eyes, even with the help of the fog lights. But she was staring at me, and it felt like she was sitting on my own hood and staring at me from barely a foot away. Wide, piercing eyes, and the colour kept changing but at the same time, it felt like each iteration was their natural colour. First brown, then blue, then red, then hazel, back to brown…I was starting to get properly disturbed, and that in turn pissed me off. She was just a damn kid in the back seat of a city-mom car and she was judging me. I sounded the horn again and started making signals with the fog lights.That’s when it happened.At some point, the lights died, along with the music in my car: I kept trying to turn the fog lights back on, but nothing was happening. The car in front of me suddenly looked very, very dark. I could no longer see its occupants’ figures, and though I could still see the outside of the car, even that seemed… shaded. Half-hidden.It was nighttime! Of course, it should be shaded, the only light was coming from the surrounding cars! But see, that’s when I noticed: the other cars were gone.
I’d apparently been so focused on that kid and her damned eyes, I hadn’t even noticed the road getting more and more empty.I could’ve taken her over then, probably. I’m British, for shame, I know how to overtake a car from the right! But I was frozen, and honestly, it’s a lucky thing that the road was straight because I couldn’t have been made to turn either way at that moment. Though now that I think back, maybe that strangely straight road was part of that whole… thing.So here I was, almost head-to-tail with this white car, unable to move, unable to take my eyes off of that pitch-black car compartment. And then the dark started leaking.Despite the speed we were going – apparently, we’d been accelerating this whole time, because a look at my dashboard told me we were going at about 130mph – the sliver of dark escaping the car seemed entirely undisturbed by the wind around us. I could tell why after another minute: it looked like it was an arm, and led back exactly to where the teen had been.I managed to tear my eyes off of that long, bone-thin arm thing to look back inside the car, and the eyes were back. More than back, actually. The more I looked, the more eyes I saw, and the more black kept leaking outside of that car’s back window. My eyes snapped back to the bone-like limbs at that moment, because one was lifting off the car’s body and extending in my direction.I felt the moment it took hold of my car. If you’ve ever taken a plane, it felt like that moment the wheels of the plane touch the tarmac: a jolt and then it feels like you’re nailed to your seat because, suddenly, you’re only going left and right and no longer going up and down. This felt like that: suddenly the car couldn’t swerve left and right anymore. It could only go forward. I could only follow that… thing.More and more arms kept sprouting out of the white car, each of them latching onto my car like leaches, holding tight to the frame around my windshield. Each time they jolted my car, and each time they gave me a small shock of fear that I barely felt on top of the all-consuming terror. At some point, I stopped being able to see anything but those arms, and even then, “seeing” is an exaggeration: it was all just empty darkness and those eyes, more and more opening like a rubber ball popping through the water’s surface in a bathtub.When one popped open inside, in the centre of the driving wheel, I finally broke and screamed.There was a sudden bright flash. My eyes had gotten used to the darkness, and the sudden reappearance of other cars blinded me. It only lasted for a moment, though, because the next instant my left light was scraping against the central guard-rail and what blinded me was the pain instead.I don’t remember a lot after that, mostly I think because of the adrenaline and the confusion of the police and ambulance getting onsite. The SAMU people told me that I did not appear to have a concussion. And once my only injury – miraculously, a single forearm fracture – was treated at the nearest A&E equivalent, I spent the rest of the night at the local police station getting my head chewed off. Apparently, by the end, I’d been going about 235km/h. That’s about 145mph.I’m looking at a massive lawsuit, probably, but I can’t bring myself to care. No one was injured but me, and I’m just glad I’m alive. I booked the first train I could yesterday morning and ran back to London. I shouldn’t be seeing that white car here in England, right?I don’t think I’ll be driving again any time soon, though. Even if I was allowed, I think I’ve had my fill of the road.ARCHIVISTEnd statement.Another cross-border statement. This one is, thankfully, quite easy to verify as far as context is concerned. Mr. Bauer, who was based in Synthomer’s Headquarters near St. James’s Park in London, was on a business trip in Nantes all of Saturday, with different bookings easily acquired from the company itself. He left their client’s factory at around 6 pm local time, and it was around 10 pm when he suddenly skidded to a stop against the central rail on the A19 highway towards Orléans. This seems to be in line with his reported speed limit infringements.The French police report was a bit harder to acquire, but Melanie is apparently fluent in French and does not tend to let go once an investigative bone has been dangled under her nose. It confirms that Mr. Bauer was caught going at 233km/h by a nearby automatic speed camera. However, no white car appears in any report, camera shot, or witness statement.Two years ago, I’d have discounted this statement out of hand as the result of an overstressed mind running on caffeine. Now, though, I am only surprised to see the Dark and Beholding interwoven so neatly in a single event. Another proof of Smirke’s system being far insufficient to describe the reality of these ‘Entities’.I don’t think I’ll go home tonight. Basira is still gone, and I don’t think I want to drive home.End recording.[CLICK]