The Pale Surveyors

The old Forestry Commission building crouched behind a line of crumbling concrete bollards, sixty meters from the Atlantic’s gray, chewing tide. Its windows were dark, salt-scoured, like blind eyes. I was the new records clerk, hired to digitize decades of tangled paperwork. The previous clerk, a man named Elias, had left abruptly, leaving behind a half-sorted archive and a rumor that the building hummed at night.

I thought it was just the wind that always found its way through the warped window frames. The first week was uneventful. I worked by the yellow cone of a desk lamp, the files smelling of mildew and old ink. But on my eighth night, a cold draft slipped under the door, carrying the faint, metallic scent of rust and something older—like wet earth. I looked up. A figure stood in the doorway. Tall, colorless, like a man made of morning fog. It wore a wide-brimmed hat, and its face was a blank oval. I blinked, and it was gone.

I told myself it was a trick of the light, a stray branch scraping the glass. But the next evening, I found a file on my desk that I hadn’t requested. It was labeled with a name I didn’t recognize: ‘Survey of the Lower Reaches, 1792.’ The pages were brittle, covered in spidery handwriting that described a plantation that once stood here, before the mangrove forest was cleared. In the margins, someone had drawn small human figures with X’s over their faces.

I started staying later, hoping to catch another glimpse, to prove to myself it was a shadow. Instead, I began to hear voices—low, muttering, as if arguing in a language I almost understood. Sometimes, they seemed to come from the walls, other times from the floor, as if the building itself was remembering. One night, I followed the sound to the far end of the records room, where a metal cabinet stood against the wall. It was cold to the touch, even though the room was warm. I pulled open the bottom drawer. It was empty, but the back panel was loose. I pried it off and found a narrow space behind, filled with rolled-up maps and a leather-bound journal.

The journal belonged to a plantation steward named Thomas. His entries were mundane at first—crop yields, weather—but they grew darker. He wrote of disputes with the native people, of a skirmish by the river that turned into a massacre. ‘We shot them like dogs,’ he wrote, ‘and their bodies sank into the mud. But the next day, the water was black with flies.’ His final entry, dated 1797, was scrawled in a shaky hand: ‘They are coming back. I saw them at the edge of the grove. They are white, like us, but they are not us. They want their land back.’

I found the other end of the story in a newspaper clipping tucked inside the journal. It told of a fire that destroyed the plantation house in 1801, and of a group of ‘Dutchmen’—the local name for the pale ghosts—who were seen walking the shoreline for years after. The article referred to them as ‘surveyors,’ because they seemed to measure the land, moving in straight lines, counting the trees. The locals believed they were the spirits of European settlers who had died violently, but the description made me think of the figures in the margins—the ones with X’s over their faces.

I began to see them more often. They would appear at the edge of my vision, always in groups of three, standing perfectly still. They never approached, but they seemed to be watching me work, as if I were doing something wrong. I started to feel a pressure in my ears, like the air was too thick. One night, I looked out the window and saw them on the seawall, pointing at the building. Their faces were blank, but I felt their gaze. I realized I had never actually seen their faces—only the suggestion of them, like a smudge on glass.

I decided to leave. I packed up my things, but when I reached the door, it wouldn’t open. The handle was cold, and the lock had rusted over, as if it had been sealed for years. I tried the windows—same thing. The glass was opaque, covered in a gray film that hadn’t been there before. I was trapped.

I retreated to the records room. The bulb flickered. The humming grew louder. I could hear the voices now, clear and distinct. They were counting. ‘One. Two. Three. Mark.’ I looked at my hands. They were translucent. I could see the floor through them. The journal was open in front of me, and I saw that a new entry had appeared, in my own handwriting: ‘The survey is complete. We are ready for the next plot.’

I don’t know how long I’ve been here. The building is the same, but the world outside is wrong. The sea is higher, the shore covered in a thick, black mud. And sometimes, I see a new figure standing on the seawall, with a wide-brimmed hat and a blank face, watching me. It’s the man who replaced me. He hasn’t figured it out yet.