The Directors Cut

“They know. They know all.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They know nothing. How could they possibly know anything?”
“I can see it in their eyes. The mirrors of their eyes.”
Message left on the Directors answering machine,
At 5:31pm on the evening of the17th.
The message appears to record a conversation between two distinct voices. The former closely resembling that of the Director.

Save for a deep cut on his cheek beneath the right eye, no one had noticed anything strange or out of the ordinary in the behavior of the Director, in the days prior to his disappearance. It must be said that the Director was a man known above all else, for his regimental character, contrasting greatly with the strange, indeed macabre, nature of the movies he conjured from the deepest depths of his fantastic imagination. His absence at the film studio on the morning of the 20th, came as quite a shock to everyone present, above all his long-term crew members who had never known the man to be late a single day, in a career that spanned two decades as a film maker. The alarm was soon raised after the Cinematographer and long time friend of the Director, fearing the worst, drove out to the Directors mansion in the Hollywood Hills, and found it in quite a state of upheaval, wholly devoid of any sight or sign of the man himself. The Cinematographer grasped the seriousness of the situation immediately, owning that the Director never left his house, apart from his daily drive to the film studios. He was a man of solute routine, and this, it appeared, was decidedly out of habit. In the following days a million T.V. broadcasts held the same, most recent picture of the Director, taken on the 16th, four days before his disappearance, and the first day of shooting of his latest movie, entitled “the Dreams in the Witch House”.
As to the general state of upheaval witnessed by the Cinematographer at the Director’s home on the morning of the 20th, this would suggest burglary by some third party or perhaps some form of mental attack or breakdown on the Directors behalf. The very few who knew the man intimately, have fervently dismissed the latter theory. The Director never partook of alcohol or any other drug, legal or otherwise. Indeed it is to this that many attributed his unnaturally youthful looks. The man was 62 and yet if the truth were told, he did not look a year over forty. If a third party was involved, it is unlikely that the man knew the person or persons in question. The Director had lived alone all of his adult life, seeming to visibly shun the company of others. He limited his human interaction to those of his film crew he knew and trusted.
In the weeks following his disappearance, experts in their respective fields, put two strange theories forward:
Dr. Daniel Meehan, Head of the History Department at U.C.L.A. and leading expert on occult literature, has suggested a theory surrounding the strange cut beneath the right eye, that appeared on the Director’s face in the days prior to his disappearance. Dr. Meehan believes, after careful study of the last picture taken of the Director, that the strange wound could only have been made with an ancient Egyptian ceremonial dagger, as part of the ritual evocation of certain dangerous spirits of the underworld. Of course the police have been quick to distance themselves from seeming partial to any such line of enquiry, dismissing the theory as sheer fantasy.
The second theory is a more plausible one (and perhaps a definite lead), involving the recorded conversation on the Directors answering machine, on the evening of the 17th.

Communications experts now believe it took place between the Director, calling from a pay phone at the studio, and another person within the Directors mansion in the Hollywood Hills.