Callum awoke in the study with a start.
The fire had long since died, and the shadows had grown heavy—bloated in corners, layered in folds along the ceiling. His mouth was dry, lips cracked from forgetting to drink. It had happened again.
He'd blacked out.
Not from exhaustion, but from... something else.
It was becoming harder to tell when he was asleep and when he was awake.
The last thing he remembered was reading Greaves' journals. The ink was faded, the entries erratic. Some written in meticulous medical shorthand, others in a scrawl that curved and broke like fractured ribs. He'd been trying to translate a diagram—one that detailed a humanoid skeletal layout with four arms and no visible clavicles.
Then... nothing.
Just black.
And the sense of something watching him.
Callum reached to touch his shoulder—and froze.
His collarbone was aching. Not the surface. Beneath it.
A cold, internal pressure, as if the bone itself were swelling, or waking.
He pressed down hard, trying to dismiss it as muscle tension, as overthinking. But the pain didn't behave like a cramp. It felt... purposeful.
Almost responsive.
---
He stood slowly, the creaking of his knees louder than usual, and moved toward the staircase. The corridor beyond the study was long and crooked, lined with tall, narrow portraits of doctors who looked more like undertakers. Their faces had faded, leaving behind only outlines of suits and empty ovals where expressions had once been.
The house smelled different this morning.
Dust, yes. Old paper. But now something else.
Calcium.
Sterile decay.
That faint, almost sweet scent you only get when someone's just cleaned a bone too thoroughly. He knew it from his years in anatomy labs. It was the scent of preparation.
But there was no dissection tray here.
No chemicals.
Only air, and the house.
---
He descended to the cellar again, unable to stop himself. Curiosity had passed into something more primal now—something compulsive. His hands trembled not with fear, but anticipation.
At the bottom, the trapdoor stood open.
He was certain he'd closed it the night before.
Or had he?
He stepped through.
---
The archive was unchanged... and yet entirely different.
He couldn't explain it, but the air felt thicker now. Not with dust or moisture—but with presence. As if the bones themselves were aware of him. Watching. Whispering through their silences.
Callum passed the central glass case, avoiding the gaze of the double-spined skeleton. It felt increasingly unwise to meet its hollow stare. Instead, he moved toward the far shelf—labeled "EXTREMITY STUDIES – NONHOMO VARIANTS."
He opened one of the drawers.
Inside were hands.
Dozens of them.
Perfect skeletal reconstructions, arranged in a line—each more unnatural than the last. One had an extra thumb on the wrong side. Another had no phalanges, only fused digits shaped like hooves. Several were far too long, inhumanly stretched, like spider legs made of ivory.
But one…
One was familiar.
Callum leaned in, heart beginning to thud.
This hand—third from the left—was small. Narrow. Delicate. The sort of build he remembered from...
His mother.
He had assisted in her autopsy.
He'd requested it himself, against his sister's protests. Claimed it was for "closure." In truth, he had needed to understand something—anything—about how her joints had failed her in her final days.
He'd never forgotten the angle of her ring finger. The slight outward bend, the shallow dips in the metacarpals.
And this hand, now staring up at him from the drawer…
It was hers.
The label on the drawer read:
> Specimen: M43 // Maternal Line Fragment
Date of Retrieval: Pre-Admittance
> "Pre-admittance?" he whispered.
Pre... his arrival?
His breath fogged the drawer glass. He didn't move. He just stared at the hand as something in him cracked.
This archive was no longer a place of forgotten study.
It knew him.
It had always known him.
---
He stumbled back from the drawer, breath ragged, chest tight. His shoulder flared again—worse this time. He pulled up the sleeve of his shirt.
The skin over his collarbone had begun to discolor. A pale, off-white blotch. Beneath it, the bone visibly bulged. Slightly. Barely. But enough to prove what he feared:
It was changing.
He backed away from the shelf.
And that's when he noticed it—something new.
A door.
---
It wasn't there before. Callum was sure of it.
On the far side of the chamber, behind the wall of skulls, now stood a narrow, bone-colored door. No knob. No keyhole. Just a sliver-wide entrance carved directly into the stone, lit faintly from within by a pulse of amber light.
Something moved behind it.
A shadow.
A flicker.
Callum's spine went rigid.
He approached.
Inside was a room unlike any other in the archive. Where the previous halls were sterile and methodical, this one was warm. Lined with old black-and-white photographs. Men, mostly. Young, smiling, in labs, workshops, universities. Some he recognized—old colleagues. Some he didn't.
At the center of the room: a circular table.
Upon it: a book.
Bound in something pale.
It bore no title.
He opened it.
Inside were anatomical sketches.
Hundreds.
Of himself.
Each one slightly different. One showed his legs bowed, like they'd snapped and reformed. Another had a second jaw opening beneath the first. One showed his ribs flaring out, like wings. All hand-drawn in thin, meticulous lines.
On the last page, written in red ink:
> "You are one of many. The others failed."
"Do not disappoint us."
A wind pushed through the room.
But there were no vents.
No open windows.
Just the breath of something… awake.
---
Callum backed away, clutching his shoulder. His vision blurred for a moment—white static at the edges. He turned to leave, stumbling up the stairs two at a time.
The moment he reached the study, he vomited into the fireplace.
What had begun as research… was now something far deeper.
He could no longer pretend he was in control.
He could no longer pretend this was just a discovery.
---
As night fell again, he sat on the study floor, surrounded by old papers and x-rays.
He placed one of the photographs from the hidden room under a magnifying lens.
It showed a man smiling beside Greaves.
The date read: 1963.
The man looked exactly like Callum.
Not similar.
Identical.
Even the scar on the chin.
The caption scrawled in faded ink beneath the image read:
> "C. Mercer – Subject 14 – Initial Form Incomplete."
---
Callum dropped the photo.
He didn't sleep that night.
He just sat there in silence, watching the fire die again.
And somewhere far below, in the white hush of the archive, something breathed—
very, very slowly.
---