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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Sipixre on 2024-11-17 12:27:10+00:00.

Ask anybody in the industry and they’ll probably disagree with me, but I think there’s really two camps: stuff that moves and stuff that doesn’t. I did event lighting. Epileptic roving beams over a fog machine? Mechanized glowing set pieces? Rainbow colors? I did the fun stuff. The dynamic stuff. The rest is piddly shit, trying to hawk $80 residential floodlights or convince an office building your 6” recessed cans are slightly different and more better than someone else’s identical cans that nobody is ever going to notice anyway.

I’m not big time famous or anything. I had a decent reputation and it’s a small field, so I got crew jobs that were beneath me on all star tours, or I got to be the big fish in the small pond being the lighting designer for off-broadway shows and MLM “conferences.”

I had recently come off tour with an artist famous enough to need a pretty large crew but not famous enough to have a properly planned tour. The whole thing was an utter disaster. I don’t know why they went. This person was not prepared to be traveling through the countries they were in. There were power outages, vandalism, theft, even some assaults. The scary kind, not like, drunk people climbing shit and punching each other, which you get at even the best run shows. The expression “the show must go on” is the mantra that everyone in this industry lives by, so I kept things running as best I could, but by the time we were at the end of the tour we didn’t really have any cool effects. It was all I could do to keep the lights on. 

When I got home I was absolutely fed up with splicing wires together because some local vandal sliced up another one of my cables. I resolved my next few gigs were going to be corporate events and rich people’s parties. Rich people can be difficult in their own way and I don’t love dealing with them, but there are significantly fewer stabbings or homeless people scalping copper when you’re at a $500,000 wedding at someone’s summer estate in Connecticut or whatever. Those events typically get planned more than a year out so I wouldn’t land many quickly. Conferences get planned well in advance too, but they always need substitute AV guys. The pay isn’t good… but it is pay. 

But then someone approached me. I got a sort of cryptic email from a colleague introducing a client who had a job for me. The client wanted to meet in person at his house to discuss. I googled the address and it was in the rich part of town. The multimillion dollar home part of town. I was hoping it was a wedding like I wanted, or maybe like a fancy renewal of vows. The guy sounded older on the phone but it could be for his kids.

I pulled up to his house at the appointed time. It was nice. It was old-money nice, not garish at all. Perfect.

I walked up to the door and rang the bell. An older gentleman answered the door 

“You must be Mr. Dones,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’m Eric Bukowski, we spoke on the phone.” 

“Marc is fine, Mr. Bukowski,” I said.

“Sure thing. Come on in,” he said, waving me into a very luxurious sitting room. “Can I offer you anything? Water? Ice tea?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“So, Marc,” he said. He paused for a moment, fidgeting. We were seated facing each other over a coffee table that cost more than my van. 

I perked up. This was weird. Might not be a real job, but at least it was going to be an interesting conversation. Nobody looks this awkward when hiring a vendor for a party. An orgy? Was I getting invited to an orgy?

“Your colleague Mr. Martin says you’re the right person for the job. He said you’re the man who can keep the lights on.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “I just came back from a tour where we barely had a power grid. But that’s usually not the hard part of the gig. Is this… event in a remote location?”

“Power is not an issue. The building is connected to the grid and I have them installing backup generators.” He didn’t say house. He said building. He bought or rented a whole building. A clue? I didn’t know where this was going. Usually orgies were in people’s houses, right?

“Okay,” I said, and I sat back. I’ve found that sometimes that’s the best way to deal with people like this. Let them do the talking. If I peppered him with too many questions he would likely get offended. I am, after all, only “the help” to a rich person.

“I’m not sure how to explain what is going to happen. There is of course, the risk that you laugh in my face and walk out the door. There is also the risk that you laugh behind my back, take the money, and do not take the job seriously, which is unacceptable, as this is a matter of life and death. I had considered leaving you completely in the dark, if you’ll pardon the choice of words, but a man deserves to choose his fate and not be led blindly.”

This was a weird talk. The weirdest talk I’ve ever gotten. As biased as I am towards the importance of my own profession, it’s not life or death. It’s never life or death.

“I’ve settled on a middle course, I think. The equinox will be in a few weeks. I own a property upstate. It’s fairly large and it’s fairly remote. It is connected to the power grid, so you don’t have to worry about that. There are battery banks and backup generators. It is however imperative that we keep the lights on for one hour–”

“Excuse me?” I said. Was this some kind of prank?

“Do you have a question?” he seemed perplexed, as if this was not the part of the talk where he was expecting questions.

“An hour?”

“Yes, one hour. At the time of the vernal equinox.”

“Just the regular lights? There’s no event? You don’t need lighting design?”

“There’s no artistic design needed, no. White lights. Floodlights. You may bring your own and set them up how you wish, in addition to what I’m having installed. They need to be kept on.” 

“For an hour.”

“Is that an issue, Marc?”

I was already composing a scathing email in my head, back to Alvaro, the stupid, smug Spaniard. Thinks he’s better than me? Thinks he’s Leo fucking Villareal? Sending me this childish assignment because he thinks I’m the “right man for the job”?

“No, of course not,” I said. I was still going to take the money, damn Alvaro. “More the opposite. I do more complex stuff and frankly I’m wondering if you need me for this. If you just need to keep them on, maybe you need an electrician. I’m fairly expensive.” I’m not, but I was thinking about what I could get away with. Double my usual fee? Triple?

“Don’t concern yourself about the money,” he said. “We’ll discuss full payment after it’s done, but I will put you on retainer for $250,000 and advance you $25,000 of it today if you agree to take the job.” 

This set alarm bells ringing. That was too much money, first of all, and the rest didn’t make sense. A retainer? Discuss payment after the fact? I revised my email to Alvaro. It was going to read, “WHAT THE FUCK” all caps, no punctuation.

“Hold on a minute,” I said. “I think I want to know what I’m getting into before I agree to this. And I will need to have my attorney look over anything that’s not my standard contract before I sign.”

Eric smiled at me. “Of course. If I may continue?”

I nodded.

“I need someone who is going to take this seriously. It will not be easy. We– I have reason to believe that this will in fact be very difficult. I had reached out to Alvaro Pérez Martin because he worked on a commission for a friend of mine, and I later saw the installation he did at the embassy. Very technically challenging from what I’m given to understand. And this is going to be a challenging assignment.

“Let me ask you a hypothetical question, if ghosts were real, how would you defend against them?”

“Ghosts? Like… are we talking Casper, or like The Poltergeist?”

“Imagine for a moment there is an entity. It’s invisible. It’s mostly incorporeal. It can pass through people and things. It can for a brief, limited time, interact with objects. Flip switches, knock over plates, that kind of thing. You can’t catch it, any box you put it in, it will glide right through.”

“Well,” I said, thinking deeply. “I suppose at first glance it seems like you can’t.” I paused. “But…” I paused again. “No, I’m pretty sure you can’t.”

Eric laughed. “But you have to try, Marc. You have to try.”

“Well, what do you propose?”

“It’s the simplest but maybe the most costly option. You replace what it breaks. You keep replacing it, even if it keeps breaking it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s either that or it becomes corporeal and wreaks havoc.”“I don’t think I like where this is going.”

“Let’s say for a minute this entity needs darkness to appear. It reaches the height of its power during the equinox. If it happens during the day, it’s out of luck. If it happens at night…well, moonlight will pose a problem for it. But if it’s overcast, it will be ready and waiting. And remember, it can move things. Small things. What do you think it will do?”

“The lights.”

“Exactly so.”

“So you want me to do what, exactly? It can reach through walls. I don’t think we can stop it from turning them off.”

“It has a very limited ability to physically interact with things. So we build a system with as few points of failure as possible and we bring backups of our backups. No extraneous light switches in the building, for example. Auxiliary power. And you.”

This guy was a lunatic for sure, but there was something kind of flattering about being told you have the kind of reputation where people thought you were able to successfully fi…

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