At the Occupier's Request
The shortest file in the archive. Four log entries, a baseline, and a note added twelve years later that the Survey chose not to pursue.
This is the shortest file in the archive and it is transcribed complete. There is nothing omitted from it.
| Time | Instrument | Reading | Entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19:40 | — | — | Arrived. Admitted by the occupier. Her son present, leaving shortly afterwards. |
| 19:52 | 01 | 2.1° | Baseline, front room, ninety seconds. Unremarkable. |
| 20:04 | — | — | Occupier came into the front room and stood in the doorway. Did not speak. Remained there approximately two minutes. |
| 20:06 | — | — | Occupier asked the Survey to leave. Equipment packed and out of the house by 20:14. No further measurement taken. |
The Survey's practice is that a referral can be withdrawn at any point, by anybody in the building, without a reason, and that when it is withdrawn the operator packs up and goes. That is not a courtesy. It is the only basis on which people let strangers into their houses at night with instruments, and the Survey has never had a file it wanted badly enough to spend that.
So there is nothing else here. There is a baseline of 2.1°, which is what a front room in a terrace reads, and there is a line in an operator's hand which he did not expand on then and declined to expand on afterwards, and which the Survey has left exactly where he put it.
Survey abandoned.
Survey abandoned at the occupier's request twenty-six minutes after arrival. No measurements beyond the front-room baseline were taken, and none are offered.
The Thinplace Survey is invented and so is this file. The case files are horror fiction written in the format of a field report. The instruments they describe are real and are explained in full; the incidents are not.
Fiction