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Chapter Text

From the very first moment she’d stepped into Trench’s office and felt the weight of the Service Weapon slot home in her hand, Jesse Faden had known this world – the Federal Bureau of Control, the Oldest House, the fuzzy places where they both overlapped and split – wouldn’t rest until it had taken its measure of her. She hadn’t been wrong; as Director of the FBC, not a day went by where her skills weren’t put to the test, be they physical, cognitive, emotional, parautilitarian, logistical, managerial, gastronomical, olfactory…

Still, this seemed like a bit much, what she was doing in the Astral Plane. Bringing down the Hiss had been one thing, but 20 Questions? A woman had limits!

“There’s…a…problem,” she said, speaking slowly in an attempt to keep her dwindling patience in check. It was a losing battle.

Looming stories over her, its outline only barely visible against the starless darkness of the Astral Plane, the Former stared. And stared. And, wouldn’t you know it, stared some more before its eye rotated, narrowing to a spotlight. It answered her the only way it knew how: cryptically.

< Many @#$! Escape @#$@# Lost >  

It was the closest to actual usable information she’d gotten in the past hour.

A depressing thought.

Jesse sat at the edge of the marble slab, her legs crossed and her elbows digging into her knees, looking more than slightly ridiculous, done up as she was in her sleek navy suit and swept-back hair – what she usually thought of as her CEO costume. In that moment, she felt less like the leader of a high-powered interdimensional institution functioning on the fringes of society and more like, uh…hmm. A babysitter, maybe? An underpaid and overworked babysitter. Beleaguered, one could say, left alone with the world’s biggest (and, credit where credit was due, most unnerving) toddler.

When the radio static whalesong in her head didn’t immediately pick up again, she took a breath and straightened. “Okay. So you’re…lost. And you need my help to escape. Is that it?”

Silence. Above her, the Former continued to stare, its massive body gently swaying like a stalk of wheat in a gentle breeze. A vaguely squid-shaped stalk of wheat. With one giant eye. That glowed.

< No >  

She groaned aloud, throwing her hands in the air before flopping onto the marble path, spreadeagled and exasperated. “Can I get a lifeline? A phone-a-friend? Maybe there’s someone in HR who can translate Astral thought-garble to English.” Jesse paused. “Wait…do we have an HR department? We…we probably need one of those. I mean…all considering.”

That was as far as she got before the Former was over her again, its unknowable form bending at some invisible joint to hang in the air just above her.

“Ah! I…oh, hi there.”

Since handling the Arctic Queen and Flamingo – a series of words most people would never think to string together – she hadn’t seen any kind of aggression or hostility from the Former, but man, it was big. Just really, really big, and really, really unsettling to look at, up close and personal like that.

Its eye rotated again, the blinding spotlight mellowing, diffusing. Probably that was some random tic of its anatomy; Jesse chose to interpret it as something more friendly in nature. After all, what said ‘friendship’ more clearly than choosing not to scorch someone’s retinas out?

< Power @#$@#$!@ Read? >  

That one she almost understood. “Knowledge is power. Right on.”

< Artifact @#$ Escape @#$@# Werewolf @#$@#$@! Summer Camp >  

…that one, she did not.

Carefully, going to great pains not to make any sudden moves (or headbutt its all-seeing eye-beam…thing), Jesse sat back up. “I-I’m sorry. ‘Werewolf summer camp?’ Werewolf summer camp. I don’t think I follow. At all.”

The Former blinked, and her hands went up to massage her temples. This had gone on for way too long already. No doubt there was a stack of files waiting for her on her desk, gathering dust, and woe betide her if the Board had tried to call while she was here whittling the hours away chatting with its least favorite extradimensional entity.

“I…okay,” she began again, determined this time around. “There is a problem. The problem is…something is…lost? Or escaped. We good so far?” She turned her face up to the Former’s light, and when it didn’t correct her, pressed on. “I’ll take it. So something is lost, or…not where it should be. And it’s an artif – wait, an Altered Item? There’s an Altered Item loose?”

Round and round went the eye, intensifying the light falling over her.

< Repeating @#$ Obvious @#$@#$! Duh >

“Wow, unnecessary.” Jesse frowned into middle-space, thinking.

An Altered Item loose in the House wasn’t unheard of, and it was definitely something that could cause problems if left unattended for too long, but try as she might, she couldn’t remember any instance where that sort of thing had been brought to her attention by anyone other than another Bureau employee – usually Langston, managing to look somehow sheepish and impatient all in one. If the Former had taken notice of it…

“So there’s an Altered Item out there. Somewhere. And it’s powerful. And it’s, um…” Yeah, no, she had nothing. “It’s got something to do with both werewolves…aaand summer camps.”

After a moment, the Former pulled back from her, reaching its full height once more.

< Excite @#$@#$!@#! Recommend @#$! Butterpop >  

Oh, she was going to look into the HR thing for sure.

This had to count as overtime.

***

Shocking a grand total of, uh, no one, Jesse wasn’t any closer to figuring out what sort of Altered Item ‘werewolf summer camp’ might’ve been referring to, even after making her way back into the Executive sector. Oh, and her own dimension. (It just took a little longer to get to Executive sometimes, that was all.)

She ran another salvo of ideas past Polaris, feeling her reject thought after thought: A tent that turns into a bigger tent under the full moon? A friendship bracelet that bites whoever’s wearing it and turns you into bffs whether you like it or not? A bottle of sunscreen that makes you sprout fur? A tent that turns into a SMALLER tent under the full m – no? After a particularly exasperated twinkle, Jesse snickered to herself, holding her hands up in defense. Hey, that’s the best I got! Don’t like it? You start making suggestions.

Nothing.

Mhm. So let’s keep our eyes peeled for suspicious tents until something better comes along. Sound like a plan?

Since the height of the Hiss invasion, the Executive lobby had seen quite a transformation – the whole House had, really, but as Director, Jesse found herself treading these halls more than the others, and so the calm that had descended over them like a soft woolen blanket on a chilly autumn evening felt the most obvious. Depending on where you stood, the sounds that filled the sector were quiet chatter and rustling papers or the practiced strokes of fingers on typewriter keys and bubbling water coolers, and while sure, those formed their own sort of rhythm, it was a world apart from the disjointed Hiss chanting that had once echoed there.

She stood appreciating that difference for a moment, answering a few “Morning, Director”s with a tight smile and a tighter nod, then caught sight of a friendly face and made her way over to him instead.

“Arish! Hey, weird question for you.”

Simon Arish, the Bureau’s de facto Head of Security, glanced away from whatever schematics he’d been looking over and cracked a sideways smile when he saw her approaching. “A weird question, huh? In this place? Eh, I dunno Faden, I’m not sure I buy it.” Chuckling, he pushed his work aside, giving her his attention more fully. He slid his thumbs into the lower straps of his HRA as if it was some sort of tactical vest. In a way, she guessed it sort of was. “But hey, I’ll give it a shot. What’s going on?”

“Do we have an HR department somewhere?”

“Haunted Relics? Oh yeah, that’s down in – ”

“I – no. No. Human Resources. You know…hiring? Firing? Payroll? Sick days?” She spread her arms plaintively. “HR?”

His brow furrowed. Like, considerably. Even before he opened his mouth, Jesse knew what his answer was going to be. She didn’t interrupt him, though; nope, watching him struggle to remember who (if anyone) signed his paychecks (if he’d ever actually gotten one) was just a little too much fun.

His gaze went distant. He touched his tongue to the tip of an eyetooth. “…we should…probably have one of those.”

Jesse snorted, leaning against his table. “Probably. I guess that’s something else to add to the to-do list.”

“That old thing? How many pages you up to now? Fifty? Sixty?”

“Last time I checked? Seven hundred and twenty-three.”

He let out a low whistle, shaking his head. “The Director’s work is never done.”

“Don’t I know it.” Behind her eyes, Polaris flashed, and suddenly…something occurred to her. “Hey. So. Second weird question for you.”

“No, I don’t have recommendations for a hypothetical Head of HR. Ask me, none of us should be, y’know, interacting with that many people in a day. Human ones, anyway.”

She smiled, but it was halfhearted. At best. There was an odd feeling growing in her chest – or was it her solar plexus? It was an old friend, that feeling; a harbinger of strangeness on the horizon. Something paranatural was in the air, and all at once it seemed terribly coincidental that Arish would be the first person she’d run into after her ‘conversation’ with the Former.

“I know it’s sort of a sore subject, but…that Altered World Event you looked into back when you were a Ranger…”

A certain tightness came over his happy-go-lucky body language, but to his credit, Arish didn’t let it reach his face. Not yet, anyway. “Altered Item, actually, but yeah. What about it?”

“You said you guys got called out there because of, um, werewolves, am I remembering that right?”

“That was the rumor.”

He turned back to his schematics and she let him. No doubt she was bringing up all sorts of complicated feelings about his old crew, especially considering everything that had gone down during the invasion…but the coincidence was just too much. It was almost – ugh, what was the word Emily used in situations like this? – ah, right, synchronous.

Clearing his throat, Arish continued. “That was the rumor, yeah. Only, when we got there, there weren’t any actual werewolves. It was just some weird gravitational flux that kicked into high gear on full moons. Had the locals spooked. Understandably spooked, I’ll add. It was a real freaky situation from top to bottom.”

“Yeah, I remember you saying that too. It…okay. Stick with me here for a second. Where you tracked that Altered Item to, the place upstate, it didn’t happen to be a, uh, summer camp, did it?”

Again, she knew his answer by his face alone. “What? No. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t. That’s your third weird question, by the way – don’t think I’m not keeping track! You’re running up quite the tab.”

She hummed, disappointed. It had felt like a solid lead to follow. Ah, but she should’ve known better: things were never that easy where the Bureau was involved.

“Sorry, I got a – ” she paused, grimacing inwardly, “ – let’s call it a tip, about an Altered Item that may or may not be wreaking havoc somewhere in here. Well, an Altered Item that may or may not exist, period. It wasn’t really a lot to go on.”

“But it has to do with werewolves.”

“And summer camps.”

“Oh, yeah, obviously. The ideal combination.” Arish looked up again, narrowing his eyes as he searched her face for a punchline. A punchline, he soon saw, that did not exist. “You’re serious. What, like a, like a tent that grows teeth or something?”

Ooh, she thought towards Polaris, not without a fair bit of delight, see? My tent theory’s not that far-fetched!

Aloud, she chuckled, “Something like that. Guess I’ll find out one way or another. I always do.”

“The true Bureau motto. But hey, look on the bright side! Whenever you do find yourself crossing paths with…whatever, you already know someone with the silver bullet hookup.” He gave his chest, and the pouch tucked beneath his uniform, a pat to remind her of the good luck charms he and his Ranger friends had carried after that mission. A silver bullet apiece. All his, now.

“I appreciate it. But between you and me, I’m not even sure there’s a – ”

And that’s when the gunshots rang out.

“ – never mind.”

Still jumpy from the Hiss, the entire sector seemed to react as one. The background chatter cut short, the ambient sounds of working stopped, and, even before they knew what was happening, Jesse and Arish were armed and ready for whatever came next.

The gunfire grew louder – closer – before a door burst off its hinges and it was right out in the open.

Jesse watched the panicked Ranger stagger out of the Jukebox room of all places, face pale and finger squeezing off round after round at…something. They turned, maybe to reload, maybe to look for backup, and that was it. Their biggest mistake. Arish didn’t even have enough time to yell, “Get down!” before it happened.

Something – something thick, something heavy, something indisputably alive – came flying out from the Jukebox room hot on the Ranger’s heels. It caught them in the back of the head, sending them toppling onto the floor, and Jesse couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Literally could not believe it, despite the thing being so clearly lit and her being so close to it.

It…it was…

Seriously?

Beside her, Arish lowered his gun. “Is that a book?” he asked, and then let out a decidedly unprofessional yell as it launched itself at him. He narrowly avoided being taken down like the Ranger, ducking out of the way just in time. “Yeah,” he said a second later, already recovered, “that’s a book. Hey, good news! Think we found your Altered Item.”

“Sure seems that way!”

The Service Weapon was less an object than an extension of herself; Jesse barely needed to aim, she just pointed the gun at the book and let loose, knocking it off its course with a hail of what she’d come to think of as not-bullets. What did the Service Weapon fire? Was it energy? Paranatural matter? Some sort of placebo ammunition? Heck if she knew, but the book didn’t seem to appreciate it.

She thought.

It was sort of difficult to tell what it was feeling, considering it, uh, it was a book. It didn’t have eyes, or a mouth, or…any features at all, as far as she could see. Again, probably because it was a book. Still, Jesse could feel it glaring at her as it whirled in midair, changing its trajectory to launch itself right at her face. As it cut through the air, its pages rustled, making a noise strangely close to –

No. No way. That…that wasn’t happening.

She kicked off from the ground to avoid it colliding with her, half hovering and half strafing to snap back around and hit it with another flurry of shots. Once upon a time, she might’ve stopped and boggled at the thought of fighting a household object with deadly force, but time had made her wiser – quite literally, too. She’d taken one too many antique clocks to the head after that business with the Anchor, so she wasn’t taking any chances here.

“I’ve heard of not being able to put a good book down, but this is ridiculous! Damn thing isn’t flinching,” Arish snapped, firing off a few well-placed shots of his own. The book shuddered, then flipped end-over-end before catching itself, spiraling through the air.

Tell me something I don’t know! she thought, then called back, “It probably needs some kind of ritual! We’re not going to get very far if we don’t know – whoa!” At the very last second, she rolled out of its path, watching as the encyclopedia-sized nightmare shot off towards the second floor. A few gathered Agents gasped, scattering as the book slammed into the side of the stairs and tumbled onto its side. It flopped open, writhing in frustration, and there was that noise again, the one that sounded suspiciously (and impossibly) like growling.

“Books don’t normally do that. Right? Not a big reader in my spare time, but I can’t shake the feeling that most books probably don’t do that.”

The book shot into the air with a snarl, whirling up and up and up towards the ceiling before spreading its covers wide and howling.

Like a, uh…

Like a…

Well.

Jesse turned to Arish.

He stared at the book for all of a second, and then promptly nodded as if to say ‘Yeah, okay, fair enough,’ and began tugging the pouch of bullets out from under his uniform. “Answers the werewolf part of this mystery, I guess,” he muttered. He fought with the weight of his HRA, clearly having trouble dislodging the bullets from under it, and as he glanced down – just for an instant, just for that one insignificant heartbeat – the book whirled on him.

“Watch o – ” was all Jesse had time to say. Arish was down a second later, trying to force some room between himself and the Altered Item, his off-hand going up instinctively. She blinked and the sleeve of his uniform was in tatters, the dark fabric growing darker with spilled blood, and without thinking, she grabbed the book by the back cover, her stomach twisting as she felt it pulse with a heartbeat of its own, felt muscles rippling just beneath its leather binding.

One of these days, she was going to get used to Altered Items. Even the weird ones.

She hoped.

With all her might, Jesse tore the growling, snarling thing off of Arish’s arm, flinging it away from them. It went soaring through the air like an angry frisbee, gnashing its pages in a display every bit as surreal as it was unpleasant.

“Are you okay?” she asked, but he was already moving again, yanking the pouch out from under his shirt, working it open, reaching for bullets. The whole Security crew, she’d since learned, was made of sterner stuff, so she let him be, buying him time to load his weapon and get his shot.

When she turned around to track the book again, she found it on top of the Ranger it had toppled before, its pages forming some sort of bizarre rudimentary mouth as it tore into their uniform as well, shredding layers of fabric to try and find skin. All the while, it snuffled and snapped, making noises with vocal cords it shouldn’t have had in the first place, and Jesse…Jesse didn’t care for that.

The Ranger, judging by their flailing and also their screaming, felt similarly.

Acting on instinct alone, she dropped the Service Weapon (and its nonexistent bullets), reaching out with her mind to grab onto it once more, just at a safer distance this time. Normally she thought of the skill as telekinesis, but in that moment, as she felt the Altered Item’s sinewy strength reeling against her metaphysical grip, what occurred to her was the name the Board had given it: Launch. There came the sound of ripping fabric as she flung the awful thing off of the Ranger, sending it flying back out of the main area and into the room where the Jukebox was kept – the room it had come from.

Arish was up, his gun cocked. “Werebook…” she heard him mutter, and then he was running for the Jukebox, her close behind, and things moved so quickly after that, they seemed to come in flashes.

Something moved in the Jukebox’s dim light.

Jesse reacted, freezing it in midair before it could reach them.

There was a blinding flash.

A pop so loud it knocked her back a step.

The book threw itself open wide, howling like a wounded animal.

And then it dropped, motionless and unimpressive, a shiny silver spot gleaming in its spine.

Jesse didn’t let herself exhale until her ears had stopped ringing; by then, Arish had already circled the Altered Item, keeping his gun leveled at it as he prodded one of its covers with the side of his shoe. It wasn’t doing a lot of moving, though – or any – and while she guessed it could’ve been playing possum, it really didn’t look that way.

“Think it’s down,” Arish said, still clearly hesitant to take his eyes off it. He spared his wounded arm a brief glance, and that appeared to break the spell; moving as if being graded in a field exercise, he holstered his weapon, clipped it, then bent and retrieved the book, sure to keep its covers clamped together with his palms. His expression faltered, but before she could ask, he turned the front cover towards her.

“…The Quarry,” she read aloud, feeling her eyebrows draw together.

“Guess we don’t have to sit around wondering where it came from.” To punctuate his point, Arish shut the door to the Jukebox’s containment cell with his elbow, giving the book one final squeeze before handing it off to her. “Not that it matters where it started out, if you ask me. This has gotta be Containment’s fault, right? Letting something like this slip out through the cracks?”

She took the book, trying not to let her earlier disgust show. Much to her relief, there were no signs of life coming off it now, no hint that, only a minute ago, it had been flying around, adding fashionable wear-and-tear to Agents’ uniforms. It felt like any other hardcover book might’ve – heavy, sedentary, maybe a little warm from Arish’s hands, but that was it.

“It does seem like something you might expect to see behind a pane of glass up there, doesn’t it.” Her cheeks puffed with a tired breath. “I’ll bet someone’s missing you, huh, The Quarry, written by…hmmm. I’m not seeing an author anywhere.” After a moment of flipping through the book’s front matter, she remembered herself, snapping back into the here and now. “You should go down to Medical, get that looked at.”

“Yeah, can’t wait for that conversation. ‘Hey, what’s the protocol for getting bitten by a book? Is that a rabies shot or a band-aid kind of deal?’”

She smiled, finding it came quite naturally now that she had an answer to the Former’s circuitous warning. “Do we have a protocol for papercuts?”

“Paranatural ones, sure – knew a guy in Maintenance once who caught something from an instructional pamphlet. Spoke in step-by-step guides for a month before it wore off.”

Jesse glanced up from The Quarry, tucking it tightly under her arm as she watched Arish roll his sleeve up to examine his own. “…you’re making that up.”

His eyebrows rose and lowered, and a corner of his mouth quirked, but he refused to laugh outright. “Around this place? You just never know, do you?” He flashed her a wry smile before sighing, giving in to the inevitable. “But yeah, you’re right, I should get this looked at. Rinsed out, at least. If you’re taking that back to Containment, do me a favor, would you? Give Langston hell for me. This was not how I intended to start my week.”

“Tell me about it. I’ll be sure to let him know.”

“Oh, he’s gonna know one way or another, believe you me. Because right after Medical gives me the okay, I’m heading straight to HR to report this.”

In the still silence of the Jukebox room, the snort that escaped her seemed much, much louder than she’d meant for it to be. “Uh huh. Good luck. Let me know if you find them.”

“Trust me, you’ll know.” Snickering, Arish held the door open for her (using his uninjured arm, of course), waiting for her to step out first before following. As their paths split, he called after her, “Good looking out, Faden. And hey, I’ve got a few more bullets where that one came from, so if that thing starts acting up again, you know where I’ll be!”

She smiled, walking past the scene of the strange attack. A few of the Agents who’d been watching from afar had helped the Ranger hobble off to the stairs, and while their uniform would certainly never recover, they themselves looked no worse for wear. Shaken, sure, confused, definitely, but they didn’t even seem to be bleeding. All par for the course when working with the Bureau.

As she’d done a thousand times before, Jesse stepped into the Control Point, feeling the Oldest House’s strange, ambient energy tug at her with its static-electricity-fingers. The trip to Containment wouldn’t take long, but her curiosity was piqued. In no particular rush, she opened the book again, scanning its pages as she flipped through.

“The werewolf part, I get,” she murmured to herself, pursing her lips with each line she skimmed. “But summer camp? What could this possibly have to do with – oh. Oh, okay.”

The trip to Containment definitely wouldn’t take that long, she reminded herself. If she wanted to stand there and read a chapter or two about camp counselors getting chased around under the full moon, well…that was her prerogative.

The Former had recommended it to her, after all. It would’ve been rude not to read it.

Chapter Text

Jesse knew something was up the moment she showed him the book. It wasn’t any one thing that clued her in but a hundred teeny-tiny ones: the way his mouth turned down at the corners, how his eyes locked onto the cover, the angle of his shoulders, the finger he hooked into the knot of his tie to loosen it.

“Yeeeah. That’s…yeah.”

Let’s go ahead and add that tone of voice to the list. What would you call it, dread? Or is it more like existential terror? Polaris pulsed in answer, and Jesse had to bite back a smile. You’re right – it’s horrified resignation for sure. Resigned horror? Little of Column A, little of Column B, probably.

Out loud, she asked, “Is there somewhere you want me to leave it? A library book drop or something?”

It could’ve been her imagination, but Jesse swore he took half a step away from the book as she held it out to him, and that went on the list for sure. This was not the Langston she knew; it wasn’t that they were bosom buddies or anything like that, but she’d spent enough time working with him (and had accidentally overheard enough of his poetry) to recognize the change that had come over him.

If there was one thing in the world Frederick Langston, head supervisor of the Panopticon, loved more than anything else, it was Altered Items.

…well, okay, no, if there was one thing he loved, it was his cat, but Altered Items were a very close second.

Since her first time setting foot in the Panopticon, Jesse thought there’d maybe been two – possibly three – conversations she’d had with him that didn’t involve Altered Items: how to placate them, how to take care of them, how to connect emotionally with them via cooing and shushing, how to make respectful eye contact with the ones that didn’t have eyes, which ones took eye contact as a threat regardless of how respectful it was, how to avoid insulting the moodier ones…you name it, he’d ranted about it in her general direction. And never once had she seen him react like this. She’d never seen him seem so wary.

“It’s not going to bite, if that’s what you’re worried about. I mean, I don’t think it will? Arish calmed it down and it’s been on its best behavior ever since.”

“Biting is…the…least…of…my…concerns…”

It was like he couldn’t stop staring at it. Jesse began to feel the strangest case of secondhand self-consciousness (or did it count as firsthand? could books feel self-conscious on their own? maybe this was all on her) before Langston shook himself out and addressed her more directly.

“Direc – ma’a – Jesse. Since you asked. I’m going to take you up on your offer. Your…generous offer. Technically, yes, that belongs in the Panopticon. And also technically, yes, it needs to be returned.”

Well that wasn’t a suspicious choice of words or anything. “Technically?”

“That’s why I’m asking you to take care of it, ma’a – ahem.”

Before he explained any further, or at all, he turned to the console closest to him, his eyebrows squinching together in concentration as he typed away. He straightened, and man, Jesse wished she could understand even an ounce of the worry on his face! Sure, the book had been a rough customer, but so had all the other Altered Items he’d had her collect during the Hiss invasion! It had taken her forever to get those Moving Letters, and don’t even get her started on the stupid Hand Chair! What made this one so special? So concerning?

Langston picked up where she herself had left off. “Technically speaking, yes, that came from the Panopticon. A very…let’s say particular zone within the Panopticon. The, uh, the Repository.”

The look on his face suggested this was where she was supposed to shiver. Or clutch her chest and gasp. Or widen her eyes. Scream, maybe. Something. Problem was, she’d never heard of the Repository, so she didn’t really care one way or another.

It was one of the never-ending joys of the Oldest House – new areas just kept popping up. Sometimes it felt like the place was procedurally generated, its rooms and corridors changing every time she laid eyes on them. Since the worst of the invasion had ended, she swore she’d visited entire floors she’d never seen before despite scouring every single sector for Hiss presence, and that didn’t show any signs of slowing. The idea that anyone had seen everything the Oldest House had to offer was honestly kind of laughable.

So, okay, there was a Repository somewhere in the Panopticon, big whoop. There were probably lots of ominous things with lots of ominous names in lots of ominous places that she hadn’t seen yet!

For example: an HR department.

“Okay. Repository. Got it.”

“It’s not my favorite place to be, let’s just…let’s leave it there. It’s where we keep Altered art. Think books, poems, paintings, sculptures. Every Altered Item has its quirks, of course, but Altered art can get pretty dangerous pretty fast. Rewriting-reality-type dangerous. For the most part, we keep them sequestered. Separate from everything else.” Fishing around in his pocket for something, Langston shot the book in her hand another pensive glance. “The guy we have stationed up there, he’s…a character. A real weirdo, if you don’t mind my saying so, not what you’d call a ‘people-person’ by any stretch of the imagination. I guess, in a way, we sort of keep him sequestered too. For the greater good.”

Jesse had to bite her tongue to keep from saying something she might regret. Or from laughing out loud. “Oh. Oh yeah?”

If he noticed how close she was to giggling at the absurdity of him calling someone else a character, Langston didn’t let on. “He – oh, here, take this. He’s a piece of work. A piece of work who apparently thinks it’s fine and dandy to lose track of an Altered Item and not report it. Which is great! Exactly what we need around here! What if it had been an Alan Wake novel that had gotten out? What, we were just supposed to find out the hard way? The nerve of it all.”  

Jesse looked at what he’d handed her, a compass, and furrowed her brow. She chose not to mention it. Yet. “You want me to report him to HR for you? Oh, side note: Do you know if we have an HR?”

“Oh, uh, Humor Recovery? Yeah, that’s over in Parapsychology, next to – ”

“No, I…” She shook her head. “Never mind. What were you saying before that?”

“Just that, if you could take the Item up to the Repository and deliver it, I’d be very appreciative. You’ll see what I mean when you get there, or…who knows! Maybe he’ll get his act together, you being the Director and all. Maybe you’ll get up there and he’ll behave like a professional, and you’ll think ‘Wow, why was Fred going on about all that stuff downstairs? That was incredibly petty and not even slightly factually accurate,’ and I’ll look like a real heel. I mean, I doubt that’ll happen, but I also doubted anything could get out of that place barring a cataclysmic failure of our security systems, so – ”

Jesse cleared her throat. Loudly. “And the compass?”

Seeming to snap out of it, Langston gave a half-shrug. “That’ll also make sense when you get up there,” he assured her, tapping one last button on the console. “The Repository is…spacious. There’s one central office that we use as the main containment chamber, but there’s a trick to finding it. We’ve tried mapping the path several times. Never works. The layout changes, we think, and more than that, it rejects everything we’ve tried to mark it with. And I mean eeeverything: tape, paint, those little colored craft store pebbles, rope, breadcrumbs, blood…”

“Wait. What was that last one?”

“The Ritual Department,” he continued, undeterred, “figured the compass out a couple years back. Just keep going due north until you hit a set of double doors. That’ll be it.”

“Uh. Okay. Duly noted, I guess.”

“I’ve already authorized you to access the corridor, so once you head in, just make your way to the fifth floor, take the corridor to the left, and you can’t miss it.”

“The…fifth floor,” Jesse said after a moment. “The floor where Dylan was kept. The high-security floor. You keep an Altered art museum on the same floor where my parautilitarian brother was held. Should I be able to connect those two things in my head somehow?”

“I’m so appreciative, ma’am,” Langston said, already turning away from her to bring the conversation to an end. “You have no idea just how grateful I am.”

***

She tried to avoid looking at the door Dylan had been kept behind. It stood where it always had, the thick Black Rock panel gleaming beneath harsh industrial lighting. Empty now, she knew, but empty the same way a haunted house was – still too full of memories, too full of echoes, to ever really feel at rest.

Rolling her shoulders, she turned to the left and yup, Langston had been good on his word: the security panels had folded inward to reveal another segment of the Panopticon.

Think we should be worried about any of this? Or, y’know, worried more than usual?

From the very corner of her eye, Polaris blinked, then promptly bolted away, building herself back up several yards ahead. Her fractals and fragments sparkled in an endless spiral just behind another Black Rock door.

Jesse smiled. Good point. We both know the curiosity would kill me. Eh, maim. Bruise. It would bruise for sure.

With that, she stepped up to the door, keeping the book tucked firmly beneath her arm as she waited for the mechanism to pull the massive slab of polished rock open. Just like the door outside Dylan’s containment unit, it led not into an actual room but an antechamber of sorts, a second layer of security. Not for the first time, Jesse had to wonder how anything managed to escape Containment, be it an Altered Item, Directorial Candidate, or otherwise. She waited and waited for the first door to shut and the second to open, and when it did…what she saw on the other side only served to underline that question.

Another firebreak? she marveled, stepping out onto the marble walkway before the darkness (the nothingness) below her won out and she pushed up from the ground, floating the rest of the way. What’s so big and bad about this Repository place that they’d go so overboard? Then, after a pause, lowering herself once more as the third Black Rock door began its slow opening, Jokes aside…maybe we should stay on our toes.

Not in possession of toes herself, Polaris pulsed.

Hey, you know what they say, Jesse joked as she stepped inside, forewarned is forearmed. Knowledge is power!

Whatever laughter she’d felt bubbling up faded the moment her eyes adjusted. Her mouth fell open as the Repository came into focus, not with shock or alarm but awe.

The firebreak door shut behind her, and she took another step forward, her eyes never resting long on any one thing. The corridor she found herself in – and that’s what it was, not a room, not a lobby, not an office or command center or block of containment cells, but a corridor, a hallway – was narrow almost to the point of claustrophobia. If she held her arms out, if she stretched her fingers, she could nearly touch both walls at once. It was dark too, lit only by angular skylights in the ceiling; ephemeral shafts of light shone down to show the dull runner under her feet, the hardwood beneath the runner.

And the paintings.

Man oh man, the paintings.

Not an inch of the walls went bare, not so far as she could see. Frames of all colors, sizes, and weights had been hung on every available inch, reaching from the baseboards to the crown molding above. There were hundreds, easy, maybe even thousands, and even still…Jesse didn’t recognize a single one.

That probably wasn’t odd, right? It wasn’t like she was some huge art buff. There had to be hundreds of thousands of painters whose work she’d never seen, and yet she couldn’t shake the shivery feeling creeping its way up her spine and into her scalp. These were alien, somehow. Unnatural. No two paintings seemed to share a style. Heavy brushstrokes here, feather-light ones there; pointillism now, photorealism then. If there was any unifying quality, anything that linked them together as a collection, it was the vague sense of unease she felt while looking at them.

Jesse peered into one in particular, an icy winter landscape, and swore, if only for a second, the greenish ribbon of aurora borealis painted across the sky was moving. Then she blinked, and it wasn’t.

Starting to get what Langston was talking about, she thought, rubbing her eyes and turning away. She could only sigh when she spotted the gap in the wall up ahead, the space suggesting the corridor opened into others. Likely many others. Many, many others. Hence the compass. I’m kind of sorry I doubted him, now.

Before she could pull the compass out of the pocket where she’d stashed it, though, Jesse caught sight of Polaris again. She was further away than she was used to, spinning and shimmering from somewhere much, much deeper inside the Repository.

Oh. Well, that was easy. I take it back. My doubt in Langston was fully justified!

The hallways seemed to go on forever, a maze of floor runners whose woven designs, while intricate, never appeared to overlap or break. The paintings continued as well, no two ever the same, but none distinct enough for her to feel safe using as a landmark. The further she followed Polaris into the heart of the place, the more Jesse noticed something else, too: Just below the sound of her breathing, she could hear a hum.

Or maybe that was the wrong word…she felt it. She felt a hum. It grew in her chest the closer to Polaris she got, a deep, bassy note that vibrated in the tissue of her lungs. It wasn’t anything like the Hiss’s chant, the strange incantation that had permeated the Oldest House for so long; it wasn’t unlike it, either. Bureau logic.

As she’d suspected, when Jesse reached Polaris, she’d settled in/on/through (sometimes it was difficult to tell) a set of double doors, patiently spinning. There was nothing special about the doors – unless you counted the fact they were the first she’d seen during her trip through the maze – they were made of the same dark wood as the floor, with rounded bronze knobs gone dull with patina. That was all. No sign to mark it, no placard bearing the Bureau's seal, no nothing. But Polaris was never wrong. This had to be it.

You sure? she asked anyway, half teasing and half stalling. Oookay, don’t want to incur any late fees. Guess we better mosey on in there.

Having expected resistance, Jesse pushed hard on the doors, only to cringe back when they flew open on their hinges. Thankfully, something caught them before they could slam against the interior walls – she just couldn’t say what it was that had done the catching.

Mostly because she was staring again.

The room she stepped into that time was significantly closer to what she’d first expected when Langston had told her they kept Altered art in a place of its own. It was a spacious two-level study, done up in a style she could only describe as Victorian Gothic – well-padded seats and a singular chaise lounge gathered around a reel-to-reel and gramophone, console tables with red velvet lining scattered to and fro to best display the curios they held, shelves upon shelves of books lining the walls, and at the center of it all, drawing the eye as if magnetic, a grand oak desk with elaborately carved legs.

In her chest, the hum grew somehow deeper. She felt it in her diaphragm, making her want to cough, or hiccup, or…or turn tail and run, if she was being honest. The room was gorgeous! It was also, for reasons she couldn’t place, one of the most terrifying things she’d ever witnessed. All at once she understood how a fly felt upon realizing it had landed on a spider’s web.

Clearing her throat, she called, “Hello? Anyone here?” into the study, both to announce herself and to chase away some of that irrational fear. She took a couple further steps into the room, running her hand along the carved edge of the desk. Lowering her voice, she asked herself, “What is this place?”

And from much to close, someone answered.

“We paused before a House that seemed a swelling of the ground.”

Heart in her throat, Jesse spun, whirling on a dime to see a man bent over one of the nearby tables, adjusting the objets d’art there with his back to her.

How had she missed him?!

Heedless of her surprise, her host continued: “The roof was scarcely visible, the cornice – in the ground. Since then, ‘tis centuries, and yet feels shorter than the day, I first surmised the horses’ heads were toward…Eternity.” There he turned, catching her eye, his expression enigmatic. “Emily Dickinson,” he explained, finishing his earlier adjustments at a leisurely pace.

Okay.

Okay.

This was…

Okay?

Jesse attempted a businesslike smile. “Ah, sorry. I wouldn’t really know. I’m more of a Thomas Zane fan, myself.”

“Are you, now?” How or why, she couldn’t say, but that seemed to be the magic word. Or…words. The man straightened from the table, giving her the first real glimpse of his person.

He was tall, that was what she noticed first – not quite towering over her the way the Former did, though coming terribly close. He was dressed in an olive-colored waistcoat that, along with his crisp white shirt and dark slacks, gave him the air of a no-nonsense headmaster or, barring that, a second-string villain stepping out from the pages of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. His face was lined with age, his lips thin, and while he wore his hair in a strikingly modern style (the sides shaved close, the rest slicked back), the most notable feature of his, the most incongruous, was the color of his eyes.

Standing counterpoint to the rest of his drab, faded coloration, his eyes were the coldest shade of blue she’d ever seen. She’d heard of people’s eyes being described as ‘icy’ in her time, of course, but this…this was something else entirely.

Hello there, tall, pale, and creepy, she thought towards Polaris, what rock have you been hiding under all this time?

Boy, it was a good thing they (probably) didn’t have an HR department. That was the kind of remark they sent you to etiquette training for.

After a beat, he smiled, and some of that chilliness receded. Not all of it. Not enough for her to relax. Just a little. “Director Faden, I presume. Welcome to my humble Repository! I was so hoping we’d be making one another’s acquaintance sooner rather than later.”

“Jesse’s fine. Just Jesse,” she answered on instinct, following him with her eyes as he lit a candelabra on the desk, filling the study with light. A surprising amount of it, in fact. “I would’ve stopped by sooner, but…y’know…there was the Hiss to take care of…containment breaches…I had to track down a tricky little rubber duck…business as usual. But it’s good to finally meet you, uh…”

So much for her polite introduction gambit. She realized a moment too late that, of everything Langston had told her about this guy, his name hadn’t made the cut. Figured.

Chuckling, he helped her with that. “Well, Jesse. The pleasure is mine. I’m the Curator.”

Or not. That wasn’t a name, last she’d checked.

“The curator...of the Repository?”

The corners of his eyes wrinkled. Despite his smile having every appearance of earnestness, Jesse had the distinct sense he was mocking her somehow, maybe shooting snarky asides to some extradimensional entity that lived in his head. Stranger things had happened, after all.

“I prefer to think of myself as the Curator of stories. Stories of life and death, love and hate, right and wrong, feast and famine…” She watched his eyes catch on the book tucked beneath her arm. His gaze sharpened at once, hawklike in its intensity. “…hunter and hunted. Tell me – what did you think of that one?”

She held the book out, offering it to him. When he took it, their fingers brushed and she nearly gasped; he was so cold. The desk had been warmer.

“It was a page-turner, I’ll give it that,” she tried, hoping it would be enough. Her internal pendulum swung violently back towards apologetic as she thought on Langston’s warning. This one was a character, all right, the kind that you might bump into during a midnight stroll through a graveyard.

“No sympathy for poor Eliza, the mother cursed to forever mourn the distance between herself and her precious son? What about the ragtag camp counselors unfortunate enough to find themselves starring in their own campfire tale?” He paged through the book absently before shutting it with a thump, running his fingers along the divot Arish’s bullet had left in the spine. “I suppose what I’m asking is whether you enjoyed your time in scenic Hackett’s Quarry, with its charming, if rustic, summer camp.”

In the corner of her eye, Polaris blinked a message in their private Morse Code. She was hovering on the door again, and Jesse couldn’t blame her.

“Yeah it was…it was fine! Less so when it was running rampant in Executive. The Head of Security had to take it down. He's got sliiightly more experience with werewolves than I do, as it turns out.”

A little too nonchalantly for her liking, the Curator tapped his finger against the bullet in question. “That’s the thing about stories. They get a little rambunctious if they’re left unattended for too long. They gather grudges as easily as dust. But it seems you managed this one well enough – why, it’s downright domesticated!”

She glanced over her shoulder towards Polaris. Bailing sounded good right about now. It sounded very, very good. It made sense too, didn’t it? She’d returned the Altered Item to where it belonged, so, from where she was standing, her job there was done. Why stretch this out longer than it needed to be?

The answer was, of course, because she was the Director. And as the Director, well, her job was never done. Not really.

“Just, in the future, I’d appreciate it if you reported any Altered Items that escape. I’m sure it doesn’t happen often with the setup you’ve got going on here, but I’d like to know when it does so I can take care of it rather than – ” play 20 Questions with the Former when I could be doing literally anything else, “ – getting a panicked call in the middle of the day because there’s a book biting people in the lobby.”

He turned to her after shelving The Quarry, his hands clasped behind his back, and Jesse added a new out-of-body sensation to her growing list. This, she had to imagine, was what a squirrel felt like when it noticed the shadow of a vulture wheeling overhead.

“Or you could just tell Langston,” she added. “It doesn’t have to be me specifically.”

The Curator watched her for a while, never flitting, and then, moving thoughtfully, tipped his head ever so slightly to the side. “Are you suggesting, Director Faden, that, should I or my stories have need of it, you’d be willing to lend your assistance?”

“I would! And, please, Jesse. Just Jesse.”

“Your personal assistance? You’d carve time out of your busy administrative schedule for something like that?”

“I…would,” she began, only to stop. “Wait, did Trench not help when you needed it?”

He pulled a deep breath in through his nose. “Director Trench was a philistine on the best of days. One can only hope his mind has been opened after recent events.”

She tried not to grimace.

That’s one way to put it.

The Curator continued, unprompted, “Even then, he was a step up from Northmoor. That man was the human equivalent of a bull snorting and stomping its way through a room of fine crystal.”

Jesse hadn’t known Trench’s predecessor except for what she’d gleaned through Bureau memos, but off the top of her head, she guessed she could come up with half a dozen reasons why it might be a bad idea to bring a pyrokinetic parautilitarian into a library.

“Ash, I almost would’ve trusted. His son, most certainly. Their priorities, alas, were rarely in alignment with my own.”

It took a moment for what he was saying to register. When it did, she couldn’t help pulling a double take. “Ash? As in Theodore Ash? The Director before Northmoor?” She knew even less about him than she did about Northmoor, but if she was remembering the tapes she’d found in the House’s Foundation, Director Ash had been replaced sometime in the early 1960’s. How old was this guy?

Instead of answering, the Curator faced her, his mouth twisted in a shape she found more than slightly unpleasant. “I’m ashamed to say, Director Faden – Jesse, my apologies – that I’ve been remiss in my duties, of late. I truly hope this revelation won’t cause you to think less of me, especially since we’ve only just met, but The Quarry is only one of six volumes I’ve recently had go missing from my shelves.”

“Six?!”

His tone bottomed out, and while she didn’t think he was mocking her anymore, there was definitely something scathing under that politeness of his. It reminded her more than a bit of how Raya Underhill spoke to those she perceived as beneath her. (Which was, more or less, everyone.)

“My mortification knows no bounds. Yes, there are five additional volumes that have gone missing from the Repository’s collection: The Devil in Me, House of Ashes, Little Hope, Man of Medan, and Until Dawn. Captivating tales, all. Willful, to boot. Whence they’ve gone, or toward what end, I cannot claim to know. What I do know, with certainty at that, is I would be forever grateful, should you return them to me.”

Those titles weren’t what she wanted them to be. Not a single one sounded like, say, a romantic comedy. Or a flipbook. Still, she was the Director, and it was the Director’s job to wrangle Altered Items when they got loose, no matter how badly papercuts hurt.

“I’ll look for them,” she said, making sure to keep the promise sufficiently vague. “Do you have write-ups on hand for them? Anything that might help?”

His eyebrows arched. “Write-ups?”

“Reports on the Altered Items. Relevant info, typical paranatural effects, an idea of the rituals needed to cleanse them or calm them down? That sort of thing? I feel like I’ve picked up a stack of them as tall as I am in the time I’ve been here.”

That time, his expression fell altogether. She caught a glimpse of something ugly, something angry, beneath his features.

Squirrel spotting a vulture. Definitely. Definitely, this was what they felt like.

“Rituals. I can guess who you’ve been conversing with. Stories do not require rituals – stories, good ones, want only to be experienced. Engaged with. Consumed.” Still, he stalked away from the shelves, his gait unexpectedly graceful, almost fluid. He pulled open one of the many drawers within the desk, and after a moment of rummaging, held a paperclipped packet out to her. “Tenderhearted creature that I am, I won’t leave you utterly without assistance. These are basic summaries of each volume. Perhaps they can shed some light on how to best…what was it you said? ‘Cleanse or calm them?’”

Gratefully, she took the papers. The effort she put into not touching his fingers was considerable. “I’ll get right on that. And you’re sure it’s just these five? You don’t wanna go count or anything?”

“Oh, it’s just those. I don’t expect you to believe me, given this lapse I’ve suffered, but I’m usually something of a stickler as it pertains to recordkeeping.”

“I will take your word for it.” She smiled as she said it, smiled very civilly, in fact! In her head, however, it was a slightly different tune she was singing. Let’s go let’s go let’s GO! This place is making my skin crawl!

The Curator’s smile returned. Actually, it was more of a grin now. A sickle. It brought the Grim Reaper to mind, and – yeah, uh huh, no doubt about it, she needed to go. “You have my thanks. I won’t take up any more of your time…I know how very valuable it is, and I can only imagine how busy you must be, rebuilding our fine institution from the ashes as you are. Ah. But it was a pleasure meeting you, of course.”

“You too!” She was already at the door by the then, her hand itching for that doorknob, and – wait, when had the doors closed?

“Oh, and Jesse? One more thing.” When she turned to him, the bronze knob cool in her palm, she saw the Curator had seated himself behind the desk. There was a human skull resting on it that she hadn’t noticed before; he seemed to be using it as a paperweight. “Don’t feel compelled to return them one at a time. I’d be perfectly happy to wait and collect them once you’ve found all five. No use in making multiple trips to my corner of the House, hmm?”

She didn’t need to be convinced. Jesse was out of there.

She didn’t so much as look back over her shoulder until that strange buzzing left her chest, and even then, it was only to make sure the firebreak had shut behind her.

Chapter Text

It was never long, the lurching moment where her feet left the ground (and possibly the universe itself), but for as many times as she’d done it, Jesse always felt a surge of relief when she opened her eyes to see popping across Control Points had worked, and she’d ended up where she’d wanted to go instead of being, just for example, embedded in a wall. Or the floor. Or caught between planes of existence.

It was the little things, really.

Her hand went up in a vague greeting to the posted Agents and Rangers – most of whom still looked, mmm, a little ruffled from that morning’s events – as she stepped over the circle of masking tape, hustling up the shallow stairs to the conference room. She rapped her knuckles on the door, then walked in anyway, as was her wont. It wasn’t like this was anything new, after all; from the moment she’d begun her unconventional career with the FBC, her check-ins with Emily had been both frequent and consistent. (And, if she was being completely upfront…the best parts of her days.)

“Jesse! Hi!” Emily flashed a smile over her shoulder before going back to the complicated diagram on her dry-erase board. She stood with her weight jutting one hip out, an arm across her chest while the other held her chin up, and oooh boy, Jesse knew that stance from a mile away

“Something I can help with? Looks like you’ve got your thinking cap on.”

“Hmm? Oh, no, no.” The answer had been automatic, totally without consideration. Knowing that one too, Jesse waited. A second later, maybe two, Emily shook herself out of her little bubble. “Wait! There is, actually! If you have some time.”

The chair at the end of the table was always her first move when talking shop, but something in Emily’s posture told her this wasn’t going to be a sitting conversation. Jesse joined her at the dry-erase board instead, blinking hard to compensate for the way Polaris began blipping from figure to figure – running her own analyses, it seemed.

“I always have time for my Head of Research, Dr. Pope,” she joked. “If it’s about this, though, I’ll be honest, I don’t know how much help I’m going to be. That’s, uh…that’s a lot of math that I’m seeing. A lot of…big math.”

Clearly it hadn’t been the right thing to say. Emily groaned and dropped her arms to her sides, everything from her mouth to her shoulders slumping in defeat. “Well, the math hasn’t done a whole lot of good yet, so obviously I’m missing something, or going about this the wrong way. I don’t know. I don’t know!” She gave her HRA an anxious tug before running a hand through her hair, raking it back into its usual (pristine) shape. After another thirty or so seconds of staring bitterly at the board, she turned, giving Jesse her full attention. “This might be easier to do in situ. Would you mind? It’s not far – Central Research. The Maze.”

“Sure, I’ll take an excuse to stretch my legs. The old-fashioned way, I mean.”

“Fantastic! Let me just…” As she watched, Emily gathered up an armful of folders and folios, tucking a few papers under her chin while organizing everything to her liking. “Don’t think that’ll…well, wait, no…this will…okay…and that’s…there, and that’s…there…okay! Here we go.”

In her periphery, Polaris hung around the figures drawn on the board. They hadn’t made any sense to Jesse, neither the numbers nor the shapes, but there was something decidedly pensive about the way Polaris moved, leaving fractalized trails in her wake as she bounced from one illustration to the next. She hoped that meant this problem wouldn’t end up being too difficult to solve. She liked seeming on top of things when Emily was watching. She liked looking…capable.

For reasons.

They left the conference room with Polaris bringing up the rear, Jesse and Emily walking shoulder-to-shoulder across the Executive lobby towards the sector elevator. As they walked – briskly, at that – Emily explained. Also briskly, at that.

“Something appeared, or…or manifested, that’s probably the better word, in the Ashtray Maze late last night. Early this morning? Augh, depends on who you ask, I guess. At first, we thought it might’ve been a Shift. The readings seemed consistent with that kind of House activity. But it wasn’t. Or. Isn’t. As far as we can tell, preliminary observations have ruled out any sort of malevolent force at work…inasmuch as that sort of thing can be ruled out, anyway. That doesn’t really help us understand what – or why – it is.

“You have a lot of hands-on experience dealing with this sort of phenomena though, a lot, so I’m hopeful you’ll see something we’ve missed. Something I’ve missed.” Again, she sighed, stopping just short of the elevator. “Sorry, just…still adjusting, you know? It’s so strange, trying to fill Dr. Darling’s shoes, being the principle instead of a coauthor. Sometimes I feel a little in over my head. I can’t help thinking he would know what to do with this, he would already have it figured out...and here I am, staring at numbers on a board, looking for a pattern that might not even exist. It’s sort of, well, daunting.”

The glossy Black Rock doors of the elevator slid open, sensing their proximity, and they stepped inside.

“Trust me,” Jesse replied, making herself comfortable in her favorite corner while Emily handled the oh-so-important task of pushing the button for Central Research. “I get it. Nothing like a sudden promotion to remind you of all those gaps in your resume. You got this, though – you always do! You’re my department Head for a reason.”

She turned to her with a smile made of equal parts relief and appreciation. It was the sort of look that made her chest buzz (just not in the way the Repository had). “Thanks, Jesse.”

To shift some of her focus from the butterflies in her belly, Jesse shrugged, leaning back against the elevator’s handrails as the doors slid shut. “Besides, between you and me? I don’t think HR’s been looking over our resumes at all. I’m not even sure they exist.”

“Heuristic Research? Oh yeah, they’re just off of Central. If you want, I can show you the office – ”

“What? No, I…never mind. What kind of, uh, manifestation are we dealing with? Is it a Threshold? An Object of Power?”

“It’s,” Emily began, then paused. “Um. Tangentially related question: You’re not scared of mannequins, are you? A few members of the team I initially sent up reacted poorly to them, and I guess it’s not an uncommon phobia to have? I’ve never been bothered by them, but…I thought it’d be worth mentioning before I had you walk into it.”

Jesse blinked. It was the only thing she could think to do.

“I wouldn’t say I’m scared of them,” she said slowly. “Wouldn’t say I’m a fan, though. Why – ”

But then the elevator doors opened and Emily was on the move again.

It’s probably nothing, right? she asked Polaris as she widened her steps to catch up. I mean, whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.

***

As it turned out, yeah. Yeah, it could be that bad.

When Emily had said ‘mannequins,’ a very particular image had taken shape in her head: Namely, the limbless, headless dress forms she’d bumped into a time or two before, human-shaped enough to register as uncanny while still very clearly being inanimate.

That was not what Jesse found waiting for her in the Maze.

“Hey, Emily?”

“Mhm?”

“I feel like you could’ve worded your warning a little more – ” she stepped over a pair of what seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, murdered bodies, their bones, organs, and muscles on full display, “ – specifically.”

“Oh my gosh, they do bother you, don’t they? Jesse, I am so, so sorry, I didn’t think…it just never crossed my mind that people would be upset by these! If you don’t want to do this…”

“No, it’s fine, it’s fine. Just…” The rest of that sentence fled her as a few researchers, their faces contorted with dread and exhaustion both, shoveled an inordinate number of the gruesome anatomical models out from the inner chamber of the Maze. Suddenly no, no it did not seem fine. Not in the slightest.

This was the clocks all over again.

“Man, I hope I don’t have to fight another giant Anchor,” she muttered under her breath.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

The last time she’d made her way through the Ashtray Maze, things had been a little different. The walls had shifted in a kaleidoscopic spectacle, the lights blinking in time to the beat of Ahti’s borrowed headphones and the inscrutable heartbeat of the House. Today, however, the path was short and looping, doubling in on itself. The harsh lines of the wallpaper, the checkerboard pattern of the carpet – all of it coalesced into a dizzying, headache-inducing mess.

Mostly the issue was the mannequins, though. They…they didn’t help.

How Emily managed to keep walking and talking was beyond her. She barely glanced away from her clipboard as the walls oscillated open and shut, guiding them deeper into the Maze. Every so often, she’d widen her stride or sway slightly to the side to avoid tripping over one of the awful things, but other than that, she seemed totally unaffected by the viscera strewn about. “Hmm, looks like they haven’t had much success since I left to reevaluate. Shoot! There has to be a more regimented way to go about this, there just has to be!”

Despite knowing better, some small part of Jesse had hoped there would be fewer mannequins the closer they got to the manifestation. She was disappointed when the opposite proved to be the case. Disappointed, but hardly surprised.

The Maze, when not moving and grooving under the influence of otherworldly rock ‘n roll, eventually opened into a cozy little room furnished with overstuffed chairs and side tables (usually boasting a few eponymous ashtrays). As she and Emily rounded a corner, the walls did indeed open where she would’ve expected; the room they opened into, however, was less so.

It wasn’t the chaos of researchers rushing to and fro that drew her eye – that, she’d grown accustomed to. No, as far as she was concerned, the rolling chalkboards and mobile computing stations blended into the background like white noise, unexpected though familiar, new yet oh-so-routine. The dinner table was another story.

“…here when we arrived a few hours ago to check the readings. Just like you’re seeing it now. All of it! The table itself is too heavy to move, even with ten or eleven people doing the lifting. The chairs, similarly, won’t budge. They don’t seem to be bolted down, they appear to be made from a type of wood that – ostensibly – should be light enough to lift, but it’s a no-go.” Shaking her head, Emily riffled through the pages of her clipboard. “The obvious conclusion is there’s some type of ritual it wants us to complete, and while I think we might be getting close, it’s taking a lot of time. And I mean a lot.”

“Uh huh,” Jesse said, only half listening. She stepped over a(nother) mannequin, doing a brief circuit around the table to get a better look at what they were dealing with.

The dinner table was big, one of the three-leaf deals you saw in commercials or magazine ads, usually the sort featuring a happy family gathered around a sumptuous meal. No turkey here, though. No fixings or side dishes either. And while there were bodies gathered around it, a happy family they were not.

Two mannequins sat at either side of the table, their ghoulish faces upturned. The four of them seemed to be looking towards a fifth mannequin standing at the table’s head, almost as if expecting it to give a speech. The sight was, in a word, eerie: The anatomical nature of the mannequins meant their eyes seemed to bulge out of their skulls, their muscles and organs held tight to their bones by a roadmap of veins and arteries. There was a shiny quality to the plastic that –

Oh God, Jesse hoped they were plastic.

Oh, she hoped they were plastic.

Nope, not thinking about that too deeply, she thought to herself, tamping down a nauseated shiver. Polaris glimmered in reply, and she reeled like she’d been punched. What?! No, I’m not touching one of them! Are you joking? Why would I do that?! No thank you!

She abruptly turned away from the dinner table and noticed a second addition to the room. Along one of the far walls, a buffet table had been set up, covered in a neat and orderly array of items. Random items, it seemed at first blush, but well-organized random items, nonetheless. Already the research team had placed identification placards beside each artifact, and Jesse quickly skimmed a few.

ARTIFACT AM-TM-T2-01: PURPLE QUARTZ CLUSTER, ORGANIC, APPEARS UNALTERED

ARTIFACT AM-TM-T2-07: ASTHMA INHALER, UNBRANDED, CHEMICAL, APPEARS UNALTERED

ARTIFACT AM-TM-T2-12: HAT, HAT, IT’S A HAT APPEARS UNALTERED

There were plenty more to choose from – a compact mirror, a screwdriver, a metal lighter, an expensive-looking digital camera, a ring of keys, a hotel guest book, a wineglass, a single high-heeled shoe, and a coin gone totally green with corrosion, to name a few – the bric-a-brac all but covering the second table from end to end.

She glanced between the two tables and had to scratch her head. Emily had said she felt like the team was close to figuring this one out, but from where she was standing, Jesse didn’t have the first clue as to what was going on here.

Well, she wanted me to bring a new perspective, I guess. Not knowing what’s happening is, technically, a new perspective.

No sooner had she thought it, however, than Polaris was off, zooming towards the dinner table. Jesse let her go, remembering her earlier excitement in the conference room.

Spoke too soon, huh? Works for me!

While she did her thing, Jesse turned back to Emily. “So…am I allowed to ask about the piles and piles of dead b – mannequins? Or is that classified?”

Emily neither laughed nor frowned at the joke. She simply nodded, flipping once more through her stack of papers as she gave one of her trademark explanations of House happenings: succinct, to the point, and utterly nonsensical to anyone new to the FBC. “As you’ve probably noticed, each of the figures at the table – we’ve taken to calling them ‘the guests,’ by the way – has a plate in front of them. Reason would suggest something belongs on each of those plates, and the ritual, therefore, likely necessitates placing the correct artifact onto the correct plate. We have no way of knowing which artifact corresponds to which guest, though, and considering we have about twenty items and five guests, the number of possible permutations is – ”

She cleared her throat. Politely, she hoped. “And the, uh, piles and piles of bodies?”

“Oh! Right! Well…” Instead of answering herself, Emily pointed, guiding Jesse’s attention to the dinner table.

Carefully, maybe even apprehensively, a pair of researchers set about placing an item apiece on each mannequin’s plate. From where they were watching, Jesse couldn’t quite make out what was being placed where, but once all five plates had something on them, the room filled with a flash of light, and –

“AAAH!”

Jesse and Emily (not to mention the other members of the research team) clapped their hands to their ears as a horrendous scream rent the air. It sounded like something out of a horror movie! Her skin stood on end, her spine tingled, and oh, that couldn’t happen again. Not while she was in there to hear it.

When the light subsided, the mannequin question answered itself. The five 'guests' that had been sitting at the table a second ago now lay on the floor, their (plasticplasticplastic, please let them be plastic) organs torn out, their bulging eyes removed, their limbs sprawled to suggest a murder victim falling still after their death throes. And at the table, five new mannequins had taken their places.

When her pulse calmed, Jesse took a breath. “Okay. Wow. How many combinations have you tried?!”

“I told you! The permutations! There are so many permutations! Each one equally as likely – statistically speaking – as the last. It’s…at this rate, if we have to keep stopping to clear this place out, we’ll maybe get it by this time in August.” She frowned down at her notes. “Next August, that is. It’s just so frustrating! We have to be missing something…a, a key! A cipher! Something.”

Polaris gleamed brightly, making herself impossible to ignore. Jesse turned to her, humming as she approached the dinner table. She didn’t have to look long to see what the big deal was, not with Polaris twining around the plates so conspicuously. There, written in delicate gold filigree on the rim of each plate, was a name.

“Jamie, Erin,” Jesse read, circling the table. “Kate, Mark.” And then, at the table’s head, “Charlie.”

“Oh yeah, we noticed those too. We’ve tried alphabetizing them – the names and the artifacts, that is. We’ve analyzed them for anagrams or other similar patterns, we’ve…”

But that was when Jesse stopped listening altogether, because the answer was on the tip of her tongue. The goosebumps that had risen up on her skin at the sound of that terrible scream intensified, spreading up and down her arms until her whole body seemed to prickle. She had seen those names, somewhere. Recently, too.

“Wait,” she said, already reaching for notes of her own. They appeared out of thin air, falling gently into her hand.

She thought of it as a personal pocket dimension (har-dee-har-har), the otherworldly storage slot the House allowed her to use at will. Bye-bye, days of losing notes and misplacing grocery lists, hello on-demand reference of every form, memory, radio show, or Threshold Kids episode she’d ever seen. Maybe it was one of those Directorial benefits the Board was always talking…or, um, not-talking, about. Either way, she was grateful for it.

After a brief moment of shuffling, there they were. The names.

Written in the Curator’s spidery scrawl.   

“Here! I think I know what this is. Kind of, anyway.”

Emily was on her in a flash, trying to read over her shoulder. “You do? You do! Who am I kidding, of course you do, you always do!”

“I don’t know about that,” she said as she quickly read the summary in front of her, slightly distracted by both Emily’s proximity and the sudden reappearance of those butterflies. “Let’s not get our hopes up juuust yet. I can’t make any promises that this will definitely be an end to our…murder mystery…mannequin…problems. Mayhem! Aw man, pretend I said that one first, okay?”

The premise had only seemed slightly familiar to her at first, but as she read from the Repository write-up, the puzzle began to fall into place. The Curator had told her outright there weren’t rituals to follow when it came to his missing books; it had struck her as suspicious then, and maybe even a down and out lie now. The deeper she read into his summary, well, the more this sounded like a ritual to her.

“Okay. Look. Right here,” she tapped on the paper, bringing Emily’s attention to the correct write-up. “The Devil in Me. ‘A television crew filming a true-crime serial gets more than they bargained for when visiting Lake Michigan to shoot an episode inside a replica of H.H. Holmes’s notorious murder castle, a maze of a hotel built to trap and kill anyone foolish enough to wander inside. Will the Lonnit Entertainment crew (comprised of technically handy Jamie, breathlessly terrified Erin, camera-ready Kate and her rock, Mark, as well as their hotheaded leader Charlie) get the footage they need to save their show? Or will this visit be a wrap on their careers…and their lives? Either way, one thing is abundantly clear: This season finale is shaping up to be a real killer.’”

Beside her, Emily was quite literally bouncing on her feet. Heck, she was almost vibrating, she was so excited. “This is it! This is exactly it! This…it’s the key I was talking about! Look, look! It’s all right here! All of it!” Without wasting another second, she handed her clipboard to Jesse, sprinting over to the buffet table and its spread of items. “Can you read it again?” she asked. “Not all of it, just start with the team composition! It was Jamie first, wasn’t it? How does it describe them?”

“Jamie is…‘technically handy.’”

She was quiet for a beat, then let out a delighted sound. “Screwdriver, has to be! Nothing else fits.” Moving quickly, she hustled from one table to the other, placing the screwdriver on Jamie’s plate before zipping right back. “Who’s next?”

There was no helping the grin that overtook her; Emily’s enthusiasm was positively contagious. “That’d be…‘breathlessly terrified’ Erin.”

“Breathless – the inhaler!”

“Then ‘camera-ready’ Kate…”

“Camera! Check!”

“‘Her rock,’ Mark…”

“Ah! The quartz crystal!”

“And finally, ‘hotheaded’ Charlie, which is probably – ”

“The lighter!”

Jesse smiled so hard her cheeks hurt. “The lighter, yeah.” She watched as Emily approached the dinner table again, anxiously passing the lighter from one hand to the other. “You ready to see what happens next, Dr. Pope?”

“You know, Director Faden, I think I am!” Her whole body seemed to inflate as she took a deep, deep breath, glancing around the room to ensure her team was paying attention. When Emily saw all eyes on her (living and artificial alike), she steeled herself, carefully setting the final artifact, the metal lighter, onto Charlie’s plate.

“AAAH!”

The scream was met with a few answering cries as the Maze filled with that same flash of light. It cleared a moment later, revealing five more murdered mannequins, five more replacements, and five newly emptied plates.

There was no describing Emily’s disappointment. “Darn it!” she sighed, raking her hands through her hair. “Darn it, darn it, double-doggone-darn it! Ugh! I really thought we had it this time!”

“Yeah, so did – hang on.” She didn’t need Polaris’s help that time; the answer presented itself to her, spelled out clear as day on the page. “Don’t get too down and out yet, I think we did have it! We just…look, here.” She leaned in closer to Emily, trailing her finger across the Curator’s writing so they were reading the same line. “Jamie, Erin, and Charlie, we got right. I’m sure of it. You said it yourself, they couldn’t be anything else! Kate and Mark, though…”

Her posture straightened again, her disappointment immediately forgotten. “‘Camera-ready’ Kate and ‘her rock,’ Mark. I thought that meant…okay. Okay! If Kate’s the one who’s camera-ready, then that means she isn’t the one holding the camera, she’s the one in front of it! And if Mark’s her rock, then he’s probably the one who…” She turned her face up to Jesse’s abruptly, grabbing her shoulders and grinning like she’d won the lottery. “We switched them! We mixed them up! That means…”

And then she was off, the Energizer Bunny in a high-collared shirt and an HRA, grabbing up all the same artifacts as before. She placed them one after the other, and when the only two left were the camera and the purple quartz, she took another steadying breath.

“You got this!” Jesse cheered her on.

“We got this!” Emily answered, then, moving decisively, set the camera on Mark’s plate and the quartz on Kate’s.

Jesse cringed in anticipation of a scream (just in case)…but it never came. Neither did the flash of light they’d come to expect. Instead, a hush fell over the Ashtray Maze as the lights cut out, plunging the team into darkness, if only for a fraction of a second.

“This feels promising!” Even in the dark, Jesse could hear Emily’s grin.

The lights flickered back on an instant later, and the change of scene was immediately obvious. Where before there hadn’t been anyone seated at the fourth side of the table, a new mannequin had appeared to fill that gap. A sixth guest had joined the others, identical to them in every way, save for its lack of plate – its lack of name.

“Uh…ma’am?” one of Emily’s team spoke up, turning towards her and Jesse with an uncertain expression.

On a hunch, Jesse looked towards the buffet table. Nothing new had materialized over there, but Polaris had the same idea. She blinked and whirled exactly where Jesse had thought to look.

Great minds think alike, huh? Let’s hope they also think smart...ly? Yeah, off to a great start there.

“This might be a long shot,” she began, leaving Emily’s side to pick an item up from the other table. “Technically, there’s one other name the write-up gave us. He’s not listed as a member of the film crew, but he is mentioned, so that’s…probably got to mean something. Right?” Without waiting for anyone to ask, she continued, “H.H. Holmes. Now, I don’t know too much about the guy personally, but I’ve watched enough crappy crime tv in my time to know one thing about him.”

She lifted it for all to see, ARTIFACT AM-TM-T2-12: HAT.

“He sort of had a thing for bowler hats.”

Instead of setting it down in front of the mannequin as they’d done with the others, Jesse set the hat on the sixth guest’s head, giving it a tap to make sure it fit snugly over its skull. There was a faint popping sound from the table itself, and then – thunk! – a book clattered onto the middle of the table, smackdab in the spot where a good host or hostess might’ve set a centerpiece. Jesse didn’t need to read its cover to know what it was, or, for that matter, where it belonged. The answer to those two questions was easy enough to guess.

She grabbed The Devil in Me before it could change its mind and create another murder-puzzle for them to solve, and the instant her fingers wrapped around its spine, the table, the guests, the plates, the buffet, everything simply disappeared, returning to…well, wherever it had come from in the first place. In true FBC fashion, the research team seemed genuinely put out by the sudden return to normalcy. She actually heard someone mutter, “Aw man…” as they started packing their equipment up, more than a couple groaning sadly as they did the same.

Think they want me to put it back? Polaris winked and sparkled, a pane of stained glass on a sunny day. Yeah, you’re probably right. I don’t even want to imagine what the Rule of Threes would look like here. Better get while the getting’s good.

Feeling it was the right thing to do after ruining (destroying? fixing? solving? oh no, she was starting to think like the Board!) her observation station, Jesse held the book out to Emily. “I’m gonna need to take this back to Containment eventually, so I can’t let you dissect it or anything, but if you wanted to run some tests…”

Accepting it with the same gigawatt grin, Emily tucked her pencil behind her ear and began flipping through the front matter. “You totally read my mind! I was going to head downstairs and grab some lunch once this was all over. Uh. So. Now, I guess. Since it’s, well. Over. Any chance you’d want to join? Just in case there’s another murder mystery in here that I might need help solving?"

Jesse smiled back. Eating was maybe the last thing on her mind, what with all those, uh, organs, still so fresh in her memory, but no way was she turning down an offer like that! "Now you’re reading my mind.”

Taking her clipboard back and setting the book atop it, Emily nodded back towards the elevator. “Excellent! It’s a date! C’mon!”

Chapter Text

Since the worst of the Hiss invasion had been cleansed from the Oldest House, the calls coming across the Hotline had slowed down. They hadn’t stopped, not by a long shot, it just didn’t seem the Board needed (or wanted) to talk with her as often as it had in the beginning.

Until it did.

No sooner had she stepped into her office after her lunch with Emily than she heard the shrill trilling – try saying that ten times fast, huh? – echoing from the Hotline’s chamber, sounding more and more frantic the longer she took to get there. Jesse set The Devil in Me down on her desk, then hustled, double-time, to the Hotline Chamber, the heels of her shoes clicking authoritatively with every step she took.

“Hellooo?” she sighed as she held the receiver to her ear. The Board didn’t exactly care about pleasantries like those, but it was a habit she had yet to shake. Maybe the giant, ominous, entirely-too-sentient floating pyramid…thing had evolved beyond the need for polite greetings; that didn’t mean she had to.

As ever, the ‘voice’ on the other end of the line wasn’t much of a voice at all. It was more a clanging of thoughts and shapes and feelings oscillating together until almost – almost – becoming audible.

< Director/Esteemed Colleague/Assistant Janitor > it proclaimed, < there is an unforeseen Emergency/Uh-Oh requiring your immediate attention >

“Sounds about right.” Wrapping the Hotline’s cord around her fingers as she listened, Jesse braced herself for whatever the Board considered an ‘uh-oh.’ “Do I get anything more than that? Is it the Hiss? Is it…oh, this better not be about me talking to the Former again. We’ve been over this, when you start acting a little more – ”

The Board, lacking patience, or a definition of the word ‘patience,’ or the capacity to grasp the concept of patience, steamrolled right on ahead: < Go to the Threshold/Petri Dish/Cesspool and Neutralize Threat/Clean Up Spill. Your cooperation is Greatly Appreciated/Non-Negotiable >

Jesse knew there wouldn’t be a click to signal the end of the call, so she didn’t waste time waiting for one. She hung the Hotline back on its cradle, then reached behind herself to let her hair down from its clip.

“Great. I was just there,” she muttered, rubbing the soreness from her scalp before tying her hair up with an elastic instead. Already she was walking back down the shimmering corridor, shrugging out of her suit jacket as she went.

Whatever this was about to be, whatever she was about to face, Jesse knew one thing for certain – for damn certain, in fact. A change of clothes was in order.

Like hell was she about to get Mold on her CEO costume.

***

Central Research was hardly a bustling hub, but the sight of people milling about, weaving in and out of offices, picking at trays of food in the cafeteria, standing between tables and chatting with coworkers…it was a far cry from the eerie stillness that had marked it during the invasion. The Mold was still clearly an issue, but hey, it didn’t have to be the cleanest place, she figured; as long as they kept the number of hideously contorted bodies levitating over the staircase to a bare minimum, it was a-okay by her. A real step up from what it had been.

She stood at the mouth of the pit leading down into the active Threshold, and, for the sake of anyone who might’ve been watching her, pretended to weigh her options. Arms akimbo, she clucked her tongue, tilting her head this way and that as she spoke to her imaginary audience. “The elevator is working again, so I could hit that button and take it down…I mean, the button is, y’know, right there. I wouldn’t even have to reach for it.”

Her head went to the other side. “Then again…the Board did say it was an emergency. Do I really have time to stand around waiting?”

After another moment of head-waggling, she grinned to herself. “Probably not. Oh well! Can’t go disappointing the Board!”

Just like that, she was over the edge, plummeting down, down, down into the belly of the Oldest House, the air blowing past her face as the sour stench of the Mold rose up to greet her. At the very last second, she caught herself; her organs gave a familiar rollercoaster lurch at the sudden reversal of her momentum, buoying her in the air for a beat before her feet gently met the ground. Sighing contently, she dusted herself off and straightened the sleeves of her leather jacket, tucking a few flyaways behind her ears. How had she gone her whole life without being able to do that? It made getting around so easy – so fun!

What do you think? she thought, Is this the time Underhill’s excited to see me? Polaris flashed in the negative from somewhere behind her eyes, and Jesse huffed a quiet laugh. Hey, a girl can dream.

Between the inoculation she’d received and her sheer exposure to the stuff, Jesse was glad to find the sight of the Mold no longer made her skin crawl. It didn’t make her hungry anymore either, and if she’d been forced to pick which of those was more of a relief…well, she would’ve been hard-pressed to choose, leave it at that. But as was so often the case with the Oldest House, that relief came with a price: The smell of it all was nothing short of revolting, and since the strange paranatural growth permeated most of the lower levels, ugh. There wasn’t any escaping it.

She made the conscious decision to shift her breathing from her nose to her mouth, pushed open the door leading to Underhill’s research outpost, and turned automatically to greet the Rangers posted inside. Only…

Only there weren’t any Rangers to speak of. The area surrounding the mobile lab unit was deserted. Silent. And she didn’t care for that. Not even a little.

Think we found our Emergency/Uh-Oh, she thought in Polaris’s direction, then made her way to the lab.

Like the Board, Raya Underhill had no use for pleasantries. She threw the most cursory of glances over her shoulder as Jesse entered the lab, and as if the way she immediately turned back to her work didn’t make the sentiment clear enough, the snort of laughter (derisive, of course) that she let out left no doubt in her mind.

No. No, this would not be the time she was glad to see her. Surprise, surprise.

“Ah. And so it would seem the cavalry has arrived. How very, very reassuring, indeed.”

Well, hang on! That might’ve been the warmest welcome Jesse had ever gotten from her! They’d be having girls-nights and braiding each other’s hair any day now! Painting each other’s nails, even!

“The cavalry, huh?” she asked, surreptitiously glancing around the lab. Nothing looked especially unusual – the counters, tables, and dry-erase boards were full, as ever, with pages upon pages of Mold research. Everything was impeccably organized, impeccably tidy. “I’ve been called worse, I guess.”

“I’m sure you have.”

Aaand much like the Mold, inoculation and exposure had taught her there was no point in rushing Underhill along. She stood patiently in the sterile white nothingness of the lab, waiting for Raya to finish whatever she was writing. All the while, scenarios flickered through her mind, a slideshow that, thankfully, had little to do with the Projector.

A new form of Mold? No, Underhill would’ve wanted to handle that on her own. She wasn’t a fan of bringing in – what had Emily said? – coauthors, that was it. Then again, it had been the Board that’d reached out to her, not Underhill herself, so…but no, that still didn’t explain where the Rangers had gone. She’d never not seen them at their posts...had she? Maybe the Mold-1 manifestation had come back! Blossomed again, or…or reproduced somehow? Could the Rangers be fighting it right now, hoping for backup while she just stood there like some kind of –

“You’re here about the Altered Item, then?”

…okay. Not what she’d been expecting, but she’d take it. “Yup. You know me. Kind of a collector when it comes to those things.”

Underhill scoffed. “Very well. Do as you must. The blasted book’s proven itself to be a real thorn in my side.”

“The book? What do you – ” The rest of the question was lost in a groan as it clicked.

The book. Of course. Another one of the Curator’s monster books. Fantastic. In that instant, she knew exactly what the rest of her day was promising to become. Her internal pendulum swung once more, and she decided once and for all that yeah, yeah…she definitely understood Langston’s hesitation now.

“Yup,” Jesse nodded, repeating her earlier answer while absently flicking the Service Weapon’s weight in her hand, readying herself for another bizarre barrage of papercuts. “You know me. Can’t resist a good read.”

Without looking up or acknowledging the way she’d parroted herself, Underhill used her pen to point towards the door leading to the Mold's Active Threshold. “Just that way. Have at it. I do have one request: If it doesn’t kill you outright, I’d ask that you allow me to gather some samples off your person after exposure. On second thought, as long as you leave something resembling a corpse, I suppose I could get scrapings off of that…here, sign this release, would you?”

“I – what?” Samples? Exposure? That still sounded like Mold, not what she’d encountered with either Arish or Emily.

Clearly misinterpreting her shock (one of her specialties, it seemed), Underhill heaved a long-suffering sigh and set her pen down with more force than was entirely necessary. “So you barge in on my operation, my delicate operation I might add, interrupt my concentration, and I’m simply supposed to, what? Brief you as though I were one of the jocular fools in Investigations?”

Ignoring the indignation in her tone, Jesse smiled. “I mean. That would be great.”

Seeing as how I’m, what’s the word…oh! Right! Your boss.

As if she’d asked her to do something hugely inconvenient – like, for example, finding, clipping, and preserving not one, not two, not three, but six types of extradimensional fungus hidden around, oh, say, an entire sector of the Bureau – Underhill sucked her cheeks in and narrowed her eyes before complying. The joints of her rubber containment suit squeaked as she turned on her heel, finally giving her the full brunt of her focus. “It appeared early yesterday afternoon – ”

“Yesterday? It’s just been sitting out in the open for a day?”

“ – whereupon I sent a Ranger to retrieve it. She returned some time later, babbling about…well, it barely matters. Nonsense, all of it. Utter nonsense. Sunburn, seasickness, dry-mouth, tetanus, if you can believe it. At first, I postulated – and logically so – that she’d gone and exposed herself to some manner of radiation and was subsequently suffering the early stages of acute poisoning. I ran the prescribed battery of tests and found that wasn’t the case. Her white-count alone – ”

Clearing her throat, Jesse interrupted as, uh, gently, as she could. It seemed to work. It was a skill she’d had a lot of time to practice. “So…it was the book?”

“Yes, yes, it was the book. As anyone else would’ve, I sent the Ranger back once more, reminding her that it was her duty to collect it and not simply look at it. ”

Suddenly the lack of posted Rangers was making sense. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume she didn’t make it back?”

“She did not, no. When she didn’t return with the Item, or at all, I sent another in her stead, hoping – in vain – they might prove slightly more capable.”

Jesse resisted the urge to grimace, soothing herself by pinching at the bridge of her nose to ease the pressure building in her head. “Let me guess. They didn’t come back either.”

It was wholly possible she was imagining the excited gleam in Underhill’s eye, she just…well, she didn’t think that was the case. “From the baseline observations I’ve been able to make, it appears there’s a hallucinogenic quality to the Item. A spore, perhaps, or some other form of biologic. Regardless, we’re looking at something neurotoxicologic! It’s fascinating! Of course, the nature of the contaminant itself is merely speculation on my part, though speculation based upon solid evidence: the preliminary side-effects, the current fatality rate – ”

“The fatality rate?”

“Oh yes. One hundred percent.”

Polaris whirled and flashed like an ocular migraine, and Jesse bit back what she’d been planning on saying, asking instead, “You know the Rangers are dead? You’ve seen them?”

“Quite the opposite. With the notable exception of the first instance, no Ranger has returned from the Altered Item site. In my experience working this Threshold, there’s only one conclusion to be drawn from that.”

A comforting thought. When it came to bedside manner, Jesse had long-since learned there were few in the Bureau who could match Underhill’s tact.

If only they had an HR department to provide her with the necessary training videos.

“Not sure I like the idea of plunging headfirst into something like this…could you imagine what would happen if the Director just up and died? You’d have to…gee, hope a replacement wandered in off the street or something.”

It had been a joke meant to lighten the frankly oppressive atmosphere in the mobile unit, but ah, she should’ve known: just like bedside manner, jokes weren’t really in Underhill’s wheelhouse. “I’ve heard tell your brother’s being contained somewhere in the Executive sector now. A parautilitarian of some note, isn’t he? I seem to recall Casper mentioning something about him being a forerunner in the Directorial Candidate program. He’d likely make an adequate Director, should the need arise.” And on that cheery note, Underhill turned back to her work, resuming her writing as though she’d never been interrupted at all.

That time, it was Jesse who refrained from repeating what Polaris said. “Thanks, Raya,” she managed through a tight smile. “You’re right – I’m totally and utterly replaceable! I appreciate the reminder. Keeps me humble.”

“It’s Doctor Underhill, thank you.”

***

The last time she’d been in the Threshold, it had taken Jesse hours to find what she’d been looking for. Longer still to find her way back to the lab to scrub herself clean of any spores clinging to her skin and hair and clothes and, ugh, various mucous membranes.

This time, not so much.

It wasn’t that the book was especially big, or bright, or (as had been the case with The Quarry) ambulatory. Nope, for all intents and purposes it was just a book. A normal book, entirely nondescript – except for the way it was levitating a hundred or so feet off the ground.

And then there was the, uh, hmm. How to phrase it? There was the…ominous, ever-shifting cloud of what she could only assume was Underhill’s (beloved) hallucinogenic neurotoxin shimmering around it in a halo the size of an above-ground swimming pool.

Yeah, but other than that, totally normal book. Completely run-of-the-mill.

“Oooh boy. That’s less than ideal.” Safely out of the way – or at least so she hoped – Jesse took a moment to scope the scene out. From her vantage point so far below the Altered Item, there wasn’t much to see. The wavering shield of as-yet unidentified poison didn’t help, swirling like an oil slick as she watched, warping the shape of everything around it in the same way heat mirages could make highway lines seem to dance.

“The way I see it,” she sighed, carefully pushing off from the spongy ground to hover a few feet in the air, “I could call Emily, take some readings, approach this carefully and thoughtfully…or…”

Before she could finish that particular thought, likely to the same effect as her musings at the edge of the pit in Central Research, Polaris swirled in the corner of her eye. Following the fractal shine, Jesse found herself looking not at the book but her own left hand, and—oh! Duh! Why hadn’t she thought of that sooner?

She still didn’t understand the mechanism behind it, not any more than she understood the rest of the Oldest House’s quirks, but as she pictured the stack of write-ups the Curator had given her in the Repository, they appeared in her hand as if by magic and wow, was she grateful for it. Jesse quickly scanned the pages, but wouldn’t you know it, none of them mentioned anything about –

“Oh, hang on. Hello there!” As her eyes skimmed the Curator’s summaries, a familiar glimmer appeared to highlight a single word: hallucinations. “That sounds promising.”

‘Man of Medan. Four tourists set out on a diving trip in the scenic waters of French Polynesia, but when they and their tour guide find themselves unwitting captives aboard a moldering freighter (once known far and wide as the SS Ourang Medan), the only dive they’ll be taking is a plunge into terror – a plunge that has already claimed hundreds of lives. It will be up to them to decide whether the phantoms populating this “ghost ship” are hallucinations, mere tricks of the mind, or something else entirely. Something very, very real.’

Not the sort of thing that filled her with confidence.

She read the summary a few times over. Each pass, something new occurred to her. ‘A plunge into terror…that has already claimed hundreds of lives’ could explain what had happened to the Rangers. The mention of hallucinations, too, in addition to lining up with what Underhill had said and what Jesse herself was seeing, felt notable. What really got her, though, what stuck in her mind like an uneven fingernail, was what came immediately before that passage.

“It will be up to them to decide. Up to them to decide if it’s real…or a hallucination. Up to…” Jesse read aloud, puffing her cheeks out in a tired raspberry. Her eyes flicked once more to the cloud surrounding the book. Could it just be a trick? Was the Altered Item only making them believe it was toxic? Was that belief alone enough to make it real?

She shook her hand and the write-ups disappeared, returning from whence they came. “Worth a shot. I hope.”

Jesse took a deep breath, held it, and shot up into the air to enter the book’s shivering forcefield.

Where her theory was immediately proven wrong.

Before her fingers could so much as brush the book’s front cover, her body filled with lead. She plummeted down to the ground – and hit it almost instantly. It was as though she’d only been hovering a few inches when it happened, hardly far enough to surprise her, let alone hurt. She jerked back all the same, turning her eyes to her feet, and…

Oh, this was a hallucination all right.

The Ranger’s report about tetanus suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense; the ground beneath her feet was no longer covered in a carpet of spongy, clotted Mold but made instead of metal, aged terribly by rust and grime. That would’ve been bad enough on its own, only somehow, she was barefoot now, meaning each step she took from there on out would have to be a calculated affair. All of her clothes had mysteriously changed, actually, her jeans now shorts, her shirt and jacket now a (Bureau-issued) tank top, leaving her looking a whole lot like –

A tourist, she thought to herself, and to Polaris too, one who’s probably on a diving trip. In French Polynesia. Okay. Sure. Why not.

She looked up from herself and, lo and behold, found she was on the deck of a boat. A big one. One might even say a freighter. A freighter covered in dried-up, desiccated corpses. Also in Bureau-issued sunwear.

Neat.

Already claimed hundreds of lives. Yup. Uh huh. Got it. Checks out.

Not wanting to continue looking at the gruesome scene, Jesse once more turned her gaze upwards, spotting the book. In much the same way it had before, the Altered Item hung in the air far, far above her head, floating at the very edge of a maintenance platform near the top of the freighter’s main smokestack. Something had changed, however, something that struck her as a good sign. Or, uh, at least not a bad one.

The halo of poison was gone.

One step at a time, right?

Fixing her eyes on the book, Jesse pushed up off the ground, and…nothing happened. She tried again and again to no avail, the soles of her feet beginning to burn on the hot metal deck. Her whole body felt leaden still, heavier than she was used to, and after a quick check, she found, yup, mhm, none of her abilities were working. Not a single one. She couldn’t even get the Service Weapon to materialize in her hand, and up until that moment, she’d assumed the two of them were inseparable.

“Guess we’re doing this the hard way,” she grumbled, spying the rickety rungs of the smokestack’s exterior ladder. The rickety, rusty rungs.

Paranatural tetanus was so not something she wanted to think about.

By the time she made it to the platform, Jesse was a sticky, sweaty mess. Her arms and legs quivered from exertion and heat exhaustion both, her lungs screamed for breath, and all in all? It wasn’t an experience she thought she’d be recommending to anyone, for any reason, under any circumstances.

Glad I changed out of the suit, she thought bitterly, taking just enough time to catch her breath before forcing herself to her feet.

Her steps were slow. Wobbly. Since making friends with the Benicoff TV, heights had never really bothered her much, but now that it was just her and her normal, OoP-less body at the top of that narrow tower, things were a little, uh, different. The book was close, though. Each step brought her nearer and nearer, until she was standing at the very edge of the platform, the Altered Item juuust out of her reach. It was so close…but no matter how far she stretched her fingers, she couldn’t get it.

There was no other option.

She’d have to jump.

The idea turned her knees into jelly, nearly toppling her where she stood. Without her powers, there’d be no catching herself. There’d be no breaking the fall at the last second. There’d be no –

Polaris glimmered at her left hand again, and as much as she didn’t want to, Jesse understood.

‘It will be up to them to decide whether it’s real or hallucination. Tricks of the mind,’ she recalled the summary saying. Me. It’s up to me to decide. That’s it, isn’t it? I have to decide. I have to be sure. Well…you got it, book. I’ve decided this is all in my head. This is all a hallucination. It’s all a dumb, terrifying hallucination.

She swallowed hard.

I hope.

Then, out loud, just in case the book had a pair of ears she hadn’t noticed yet, “This is definitely going to work!”

Squeezing her eyes shut as tight as she could, Jesse leapt, her arms outstretched. She felt the book at her fingers, in her palms, and clutched it to her chest. Then she was falling.

And falling.

And f

       a

       l

       l

       i

       n

       g

       .

       .

       .

When Polaris sparkled against the backs of her eyelids, she clenched her muscles and…stopped. A pillow of air rushed up to catch her the way it had before, gingerly cradling her until her feet brushed the ground. There was no impact to speak of, but boy oh boy, Jesse nearly collapsed anyway, so great was her relief.

The Mold was back when she opened her eyes, and she’d never been so glad to see it. Or smell it, for that matter. She held the book out at arm’s length to examine its cover, marveling at how docile it seemed now, how utterly and completely harmless.

“Well, Man of Medan,” she sighed, squinting to make the title out in the darkness of the Threshold, “I’ve got to Man of Me-hand it to you, that was for sure the hardest I’ve ever fallen for a story. Or the farthest. Really hope you’re worth it.”

Polaris blinked.

“Oh, come on,” Jesse said aloud, tucking the book under her arm. “That was kind of funny.”

***

“You survived?!” Underhill cried as Jesse ambled into the lab once more, her steps a bit too uneven to be described as anything other than a stagger.

There were so many ways to say that and somehow you still managed to find the worst one. Could’ve been excited, could’ve been relieved, and what do you go with? Shock and awe. No, it’s fine, I don’t have feelings or anything, Jesse thought, then forced her grimace into a slightly softer shape.

“I did! It’s all very exciting.”

She held the book out to her, nodding when she didn’t immediately snatch it from her hands, but to Jesse’s chagrin, all Underhill did was glance at it briefly before frowning. “Why on Earth are you trying to hand me that raggedy trinket?”

Come on! “You said you wanted samples if it didn’t kill me. I think you used the word scrapings.”

“Samples? Oh, samples will be taken—from you, not that thing. Look at it, it’s entirely benign now! Nontoxic! What good does something like that do me? No, if there’s anything to be gained from this experience, it’s in your pores. Your hair. Maybe even salivary secretions…” Moving with adderlike precision, Underhill pulled a collapsible chair out from some compartment of her table, snapping it into shape before ushering Jesse into it. “Now, try not to make any sudden movements. We don’t want any cross-contamination.”

For a moment, no more and no less, Jesse considered arguing. The allure of that chair proved to be too much in the end, her body run ragged from all that hallucinatory climbing. Compliantly, she dropped into the chair, trying not to flinch as Underhill pulled out a startling array of medical implements.

“Is this going to take long?” she asked, dreading the answer.

“It’ll take as long as it takes,” Underhill curtly replied. Which, honestly? Was about the best she could’ve expected.

Jesse glanced down at the book laid on her lap, a nautical compass emblazoned on its leather cover beneath the title. She had gone through an awful lot of trouble to get her hands on it…only made sense she should get a little entertainment in return. For all the problems they’d caused, she’d admittedly enjoyed reading through The Quarry and The Devil in Me, so it didn’t seem out of the question she’d like this one too. Reading seemed as good a way as any to pass the time, and…well…she had a feeling she was about to have a lot of time on her hands.

A lot.

Chapter Text

She’d said it before and she’d probably say it a million times more: If there was anything she’d learned during her time at the FBC, it was that ‘unexpected’ didn’t really exist. Certainly not as a concept, and only debatably as a word. She’d made the mistake of using it once – once – in front of the Board and never again, not wanting to bear witness a second time to the horrendous dial-up internet screech it’d made in reply. No, ‘surprises’ didn’t exist in the Bureau; everything that happened within the walls of the Oldest House was unheard of, after all, so in a way, none of it was.

Still, when the elevator doors slid closed and she allowed herself to relax after dealing with the Clog for the fifth time that week (to say nothing of the three Altered books she’d wrangled), Jesse had to admit she hadn’t been prepared for the sudden ghostly click-clacking of typewriter keys in her head. Or the moody narration that followed.

Faden felt it rising up in her, the welt of a bite that hadn’t yet begun to itch.
It was the sense something had gone wrong, that someone was peering into the windows of her childhood home;
long abandoned but never forgotten.

“Really, Wake?” she asked the air, bracing her weight against the elevator’s handrail. “After the Clog? We’re going to do this after the Clog?”

There was another story bleeding into her own.
The plot lines had crossed somewhere, carving out holes, blurring until they intersected.
Collided. Formed an impasse only she could cross.

Before she could make it back to Executive, Jesse reached out and hit the emergency stop button on the elevator’s panel. Lately, she’d been vying to get someone in Maintenance to change it to read ‘emergency exposition dump’ instead, but so far? No takers. Were other people not getting disembodied messages from alternate planes of reality when they used the sector elevator? The idea was ludicrous!

Something had arrived in Ordinary. Changed it.
Stretched it along its seams until it went thin and brittle enough to break through.

Yup. Emergency exposition dump. What did I tell you.

Jesse hit the button for the Containment sector, closing her eyes in an attempt to steal a little rest before whatever came next. The typewriter didn’t help matters. Neither did Wake’s continued monologuing.

As Faden prepared herself to walk once more into the unknown, she told herself that the worst had already befallen Ordinary.
Lightning rarely struck twice. But horror stories always left room for sequels. It seemed hers was no exception.

She sighed, bracing for the inevitable jolt of the elevator reaching her floor. Her hands moved to roll her sleeves up her forearms. “Nothing like an ominous voice from nowhere talking about you in the third person to really jazz you up for the rest of the day. All right. Let’s get this over with.”

***

The lights didn’t all turn on at once. They rolled on instead, revealing the room piecemeal – foot by foot and wooden model by wooden model. And she realized what was wrong immediately.

Ordinary wasn’t different, or changed, or whatever else Wake had said in his spooky elevator reading: It was gone. Completely. And truthfully? Jesse couldn’t decide how she felt about that. The first time she’d walked into that room and found her childhood home laid out in front of her, reproduced in uncanny miniature, horror had risen up in her throat like bile. Seeing it gone, though, seeing it replaced…it left something feeling oddly hollow inside of her chest. Disturbing as it’d been, the sight of her tiny wooden house had brought on a sort of nostalgia, a pang of comfort and familiarity she’d spent a good chunk of her life chasing after, and now –

She regarded the scene: an idyllic mountain getaway where her quiet neighborhood had once stood,
and the similarities slowly unfolded before her. Children left to fend for themselves.
No adults nearby to help them, guide them – hear their screams. And the creatures, of course.
Why were there always creatures?

Wake’s voice had startled her, but she wouldn’t say it’d been a surprise. She threw her hands in the air, then, knowing it wouldn’t do any good, let them drop to her face.

Wow, what an excellent question, she thought (entirely sans a backing track of clicking typewriter keys), why ARE there always creatures?

Jesse did her best to shake the fatigue from her joints, limbering up for the creatures in question. Weird thing was, she didn’t see anything skulking around, waiting to strike. And true, in the Oldest House, just because you couldn’t see something didn’t mean it wasn’t there, but…still.

She walked a slow circle around the outside of the staging area, trying to get a better feel for the scene. For reasons she couldn’t quite grasp, something about the setup before her did seem familiar, like something she’d seen in a dream, or heard someone else describe in detail. That was also par for the course in the House, though. It didn’t necessarily mean anything.

Ordinary had been a town. A small one, albeit, but it had had everything you expected a town to have: houses, a few businesses, streets with intersections marked by stop signs and crosswalks, a few trees here and there, a tiny park, the dump, of course. What lay in front of her now was about as far from a town as one could get. She didn’t know that she had a word for it – certainly none popped into her head – but it wasn’t a town. Wasn’t a city, either. Wasn’t a village or a hamlet or a villa. It was more like the set dressing for a play. Before, Ordinary had been recreated in miniature and not quite to scale; the roofs of its houses had reached shoulder-level, more or less, and, save for the replica of her house, everything had been oddly compressed to save on space. The buildings she saw in front of her now, well…they were still scaled down, but there were so few of them that they had more room to spread out. To grow.

Oh, she didn’t like that line of thought. She kept walking.

As far as she could tell, there was only the one building on the main floor of the staging area. It hardly took up the whole space – the trees did that. Jesse walked through a veritable forest of them, conical wooden simulacrums of fir trees, pine trees, spruce trees (they were so lacking in detail that she couldn’t even begin to guess), until she reached the squat little thing. It too stood roughly as tall as she did, featureless and slightly oblong, and no matter how she squinted or wracked her brain, she couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be.

Until, that is, she nearly ran headfirst into the metal cable coming off of it.

No way that’s up to safety standards, she thought as she took a step back, examining the cable more closely. I really need to figure out this whole HR situation. Someone needs to know about the rampant decapitation risks in this place.

Well, that was probably an exaggeration. The cable was barely thicker than crafting twine, so the chances of it slicing her head off? Eh, not great. It was stretched amazingly taut, though, so had she run into it, it definitely would’ve hurt. Maybe even cut. She carefully set a fingertip on the cable, running it up and up and up its length, walking away from the building as she followed it. There was an incline to the cord, sloping upwards to join onto an identical building built atop the platform where Ordinary’s replica dump had once stood.

Interesting.

She climbed the shallow stairs to the top of the platform and looked down at the forest of make-believe trees for a moment. From that angle, it almost…but no, that couldn’t be right.

Jesse shrugged the sensation away, turning to the platform itself. The buildings here were larger. Markedly so. There was a huge, sprawling mansion, an even larger building some ways away (its miniature windows boarded up and half its roof caved in), a replica firewatch tower, a good-sized shed, and, at the very edge of the platform, a little building identical to the one on the floor, the two connected by that thin strand of metal cable.

“Wait, I do know this,” she mumbled aloud, reaching once more into her pocket dimension to grab the Curator’s write-ups. Aha! There it was, front and center, one of the few she hadn’t encountered yet.

‘On the one-year anniversary of a tragic accident, eight friends reunite in a scenic mountaintop lodge in search of closure and camaraderie. What they don’t know – what they can’t know – is that there are forces roaming Blackwood Pines with very, very different plans in mind for them. The phone lines are down. The cable car isn’t working. And no one among their number is quite who they claim so adamantly to be. When morning comes, will any of them make it safely down the mountain? Or will none of them be lucky enough to survive Until Dawn?’

Another one of these, huh? Guess I should’ve known. They sure like popping up in the weirdest places…

She flicked the paper away and returned to the task at hand, checking out the little wooden models. It paid off too, because a moment later, she saw it. On the firewatch tower – dangling from it, in fact – was a doll. Like everything else in the staging area, it was wooden and utterly devoid of detail, an unexpectedly large version of one of those bendy figures artists used when drawing poses. Roughly the size of an infant, it hung from the tower’s guardrail, seemingly holding on for dear life. When she peered around to get a closer look, Jesse noticed a pair of latches beneath the doll’s otherwise smooth palms, keeping it suspended for all eternity.

Well, that’s not unsettling at all. Hang in there, creepy doll…thing. You got this.

Suspicious, she began another slow lap around the platform, looking for anything else amiss. The doll must’ve triggered something in her brain, made her think about what she was looking at in a different light, because suddenly, she saw something she’d missed before, something the Ordinary models hadn’t had: hinges.

Jesse ran her fingers along the seams of the mansion and, like any good dollhouse would, it swung open. Sure, it took some elbow grease and given it was actually a bit taller than her, it was awkward to boot, but she was able to get it after a second, revealing its eerily empty insides.

Well, wait. It wasn’t entirely empty.

She hunkered down as she spotted them, squatting before the mansion with her hands on her thighs. There were another couple dolls in there. Wooden dolls. Perfectly smooth and featureless, set out as though a child had been playing with them only a moment ago, but had grown bored and walked away mid-scene. One seemed to be reclining in the mansion’s miniature bathtub, its hands resting behind its head like a pillow, while another stood just outside the bathroom itself, looming facelessly in the doorway. There were two more in the smaller shed-looking building next door, one standing with its arms spread in a pantomime of shock, the other seemingly…yikes, chained up to a wall?! Its arms were held high over its head, crossed at the wrists, and…yeah, this was officially getting weird.

Not that it had started out normally.

She walked away from the mansion and its side building, finding, yup, no sooner had she undone the hinges of the largest building off to the side than she found another doll tucked away, its arms raised as if taking aim with a hunting rifle.

Hey there, little guy, she snickered to herself. Having a rough day? I can relate.

Jesse took a step back then, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The summary had talked about a group of friends meeting up on a mountain - it had also mentioned a tragic accident, and some sort of danger. That was all fine and good, but what did it mean for her? Today she’d been bitten by a growling, snarling were-book; she’d taken a long walk off a short pier to catch another; she’d been asked to solve a gruesome logic puzzle of sorts; and what did all of those have in common? Nothing! There wasn't anything resembling a pattern forming, so what was this going to be? She couldn't even guess!

Sighing, she tried moving the doll in front of her, the one that seemed to have misplaced its gun. Like its friend dangling from the tower, however, it didn’t budge. Not even slightly.

The calm before the storm. The moment of perfect silence before the scare, priming the audience to jump in their seats.
Once she started, she knew there’d be no going back – even if she wanted to.

Just once, I’d love it if the pseudo-riddles came with a less ominous translation. Think I should suggest that at the next Board meeting? She sighed through her nose and stood again, glancing around the room. Tired as she was, the way Polaris shifted behind her eyes bolstered her resolve. I don’t know, I can be pretty persuasive when I want to be. Not like they’ve got anyone else willing to do this crap, right?

Another minute of silence. Two. And when still nothing occurred to her, Jesse set her hands on her hips and walked around the scene once more, opening up both of the cabled buildings too, just to see whether they were hiding anything. They weren’t, not as far as dolls were concerned, but when she opened the one on the lower floor, the one hidden among the forest of fake trees, found eight itty-bitty chairs waiting for her, set in two neat rows.

Faden instantly knew what she needed to do here .

…okay, that was news to her.

“She did?” Jesse asked aloud. Wake hadn’t shown any sign of being able to hear her when she talked to him, so she doubted it mattered whether she spoke or thought her responses, it just, well, felt sort of rude not to answer a disembodied voice when she heard one. She glanced around the bizarre setup again, furrowing her brow. “Yeah, sorry, I don’t think Faden did know what she needed to do here. Instantly or otherwise.”

Wake was undeterred; his narration continued.

The story was one she’d heard of, though only in passing.
Still, the resemblance was remarkable – it couldn’t have been anything else.
A horror story. Until Dawn. It would be up to her to save them.
To make sure they made it down the mountain together.

“Been there, done that,” she murmured. “You’re a little late to this one. I’ve already – down the mountain.”

Suddenly, the tiny chairs in the building beside her had a purpose. She had to get the dolls into them, somehow…she had to move them down off the platform where they’d been set out, and put them instead into that building on the main level. It sounded simple enough, moving them from Point A to Point B, but nothing was ever simple in the Oldest House. Not really.

Still, she allowed herself a moment (singular) of hope. Jesse spread her fingers and stretched her arm towards the doll hanging from the firewatch tower, felt her ghostly telekinetic grip tighten around it, gave it a tug, and…nothing. Same as before, it didn’t budge. It must’ve been something to do with those latches she’d noticed earlier. Maybe they couldn’t be undone with brute force alone; her telekinesis, in her experience, was more like wielding a hammer than a surgical instrument, so that would track. She took the stairs up to the platform again, then squatted slightly to better access the latches beneath the doll’s hands. The first one unfastened with a heavy thunk, the second –

Ker-chunk…

Ker-chunk…

Ker-chunk.

The rows of lights in the room shut off one by one by one, leaving only a single bulb lit over the platform. The scene fell into shadow. The building at the bottom of the platform was swallowed whole by the encroaching darkness. Suddenly it felt very much like a horror story.

Which was probably why she did what she did next.

“Hello?” she called into the dark. “Hellooo? Is someone there? This isn’t funny, you guys!”

You guys? Who was that supposed to mean? She didn’t dwell on it. She couldn’t.

Despite the blackness surrounding the platform, she swore she sensed something move within the forest of make-believe trees below her.

“Hmm. Not a fan of that.” Before she could think too hard on what it could’ve been, Jesse undid the second latch and staggered under the unexpected heft of the doll. “Holy – ! Is this thing made of brick?!”

Though only about the size of a baby, the doll must’ve weighed close to forty pounds, not enough to knock her off her feet by any means, though just enough to be unwieldy. Her plan had been to grab a few of them at one time, but…yeah, not so much anymore.

“Slow and steady,” she murmured, only for Polaris to spin dimly in the middle-distance, apparently unconvinced.

Well if you don’t like it, you could always help with the heavy lifting. A flicker. Yeah, that’s what I thought. So. Slow and steady it is.

Heaving the doll into her arms, Jesse pushed off from the ground and propelled herself towards the cable car station on the lower floor, having to use the faint gleam of the metal twine to guide her. The floor rose up to meet her sooner than she expected and she stumbled, catching herself just before she could fall flat on her face. In that way, at least, the darkness was kind of cool: it meant no one, not even Jesse herself, could see her wipe out!

“jeeesseee…”

Scratch that. The dark was awful. The worst, actually.

“jeeesseeeeee…”

There was no use in pretending she hadn’t heard it, less use still in pretending it hadn’t shaken her. The voice was breathless, a whisper from a nightmare she only half-remembered. It came from everywhere and nowhere, only its sibilant echo bouncing off of the trees marking it as an actual sound and not another running narration in her head.

Though that was there too.

Something slithered through the shadows of Blackwood Pines, watching from the darkness.

Feeling along the building’s edges, Jesse rolled her eyes. It no longer felt especially safe to speak, so rather than that, she shot a scathing thought Wake’s way: No! Really?! You don’t say!

As ever, he showed no sign of having heard her.

It was a hunter. A predator. An ancient thing made of bone, blood, and hunger.
It wanted Faden. It wanted the kids. It wanted to feed.

Man, she needed a vacation.

Her fingers skimmed the building’s angles and she bent, feeling along the floor for the tiny chairs. When she found one, she wasted no time in plunking the doll down into it, and the very instant it made contact, the light in the room shifted again. With another ker-chunk, the bulb directly over the platform, the place where all the other dolls waited to be rescued, blinked off. There was a moment of darkness so perfect, so absolute, as to dizzy her…and then the light above her and the seated doll popped on.

Right in time for her to catch a glimpse of something impossibly tall and skeletally thin receding back into the shadows to hide.

For a minute there, it was all she could do to stare into that darkness, feeling her heart thump in her throat.

That…totally could’ve been my imagination.

She hadn’t imagined it.

Shit!

It was in there with her even now. She would have to act fast.
Luckily for her, the occasional deus ex machina wasn’t out of the question for a hero of her standing.

A flash of movement and she jumped only to see she’d simply knocked over a portable lamp with her foot. A portable lamp she’d somehow missed before. Was that the deus ex machina she would’ve chosen for herself? Mmm, no. That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to use it to her full advantage.

Taking the lamp by its handle, Jesse pointed its narrow beam of light back towards the platform and the dolls waiting there. Quickly, she formulated her plan: The two in the shed were the closest to the platform’s edge, so she’d nab them first; she’d move to the mansion after that, taking the two in there next; the other building was the farthest from her, so she’d go there last; and that…that was…damn it! That was only six! The write-up had said there were eight!

Cross that bridge when we get to it, she thought, and then she was off.

With the lamp, the two dolls in the shed weren’t that difficult to take. She let the light guide her way, then set it down beside her to fiddle with the latches. Around her, behind her, above her, beneath her – she couldn’t quite tell – that breathless voice kept calling to her, “jesseee…jeeesseeeeee…” but nothing reached out to grab her, nothing lashed out with pointy claws, so she focused her attention on her hands. She started with the doll stuck with its arms over its head, guessing (correctly) that it had been secured at the wrists. Its latches gave way, and as it collapsed to the ground, she felt around for the second one’s. By its feet, maybe? It was worth a shot. Jesse felt around near the shed’s floor, poking and prying until, there they were! The hidden latches! She quickly unfastened them, then –

“faden.” Close to her ear that time. Too close.

She sucked in a gasp, whirling towards the voice, and found only darkness.

Nothing.

There wasn’t anything there, there was…no. No, that wasn’t totally true. If she looked past the light, if she squinted and gazed into the dark, there was something. Its shape was impossible to gauge; it was moving, shifting restlessly somewhere just outside her field of vision, its skin rustling like dead pine needles, its every breath rattling with phlegm.

Her vision adjusted, and she realized it was staring back at her, its eyes gleaming dishwater-dull. It didn’t seem to blink.

“jesseee,” it whispered, and her stomach knotted. That was Marshall’s voice it was using, Marshall who she’d seen lost to the Foundation, Marshall who she’d had to gun down herself in the end. “i don’t think faden did know what to do here. instantly or otherwiiise.” Ah, okay, Marshall’s voice and her own words.

Great.

Nothing terrifying about that.

She forced herself to look away, returning to her task. Jesse lifted one of the freed dolls, then tried to lift the other as well. No-go. They were too heavy together, too awkward, and even if she could manage to lift them both at once, she would have to leave the light behind. That wasn’t happening.

“Slow and steady,” she repeated to herself, and then cringed.

“slowww…” agreed the voice in the darkness, Emily’s now, curled with malice.

Sure to keep the light on her, she transported the shed dolls to the cable car station one at a time, placing each of them into a seat of their own. Part of her had hoped more of the overhead lights would come on as she did, that the room would get brighter the closer to the end she got. Another no-go: The staging area remained horribly, terribly, oppressively dark.

Faden had a plan, and more than that, she had the drive to see it through.
Despite that, a single doubt lingered as she turned the light towards the dollhouse mansion.
Two dolls were unaccounted for. Where were they?

Having learned her lesson, Jesse didn’t answer, not even in her mind. She held the lamp up, aiming it at the mansion, and…oh God…got another look.

It (whatever it was), crept spiderlike out of the light, climbing over the miniature shed to curl up behind it. The movement was sinuous. Unnatural. Its limbs were too long and its frame too thin to compensate. By all accounts, it shouldn’t’ve been able to hold itself upright at all.

She kept a wide berth between herself and the shed as she stood in front of the mansion. It didn’t help her nerves much; she couldn’t stop staring at the spot where she knew the thing was hiding, her hands fumbling with the bathtub doll’s latches as her eyes strained to pick up any sign of movement in the darkness.

“i don’t think faden did know what to do.” That time it was Darling, a voice she’d only ever known in educational videos and Hotline calls. There was no sign of his usual jovial tone. “yeah. sorry.”

On a whim, she abruptly dropped the doll and flashed the light full on the shed. The creature moved too frenetically for her to get a good look at – the moment the light touched it, it sprang away, not hissing in pain or gnashing its teeth, but fleeing as if afraid of being seen. It scampered into the shadows, moving in a strange, ungainly crawl down on all fours.

Now that she had some time to think, the question of the two missing dolls burned all the brighter.
She’d checked the buildings, wandered through the trees, and nowhere had she seen another doll.
She was overlooking something .

Of course she was. Obviously, she was! Did Wake think that helped?

As she had before, Jesse unlatched both of the mansion’s dolls, quickly transporting them to the cable car station one right after the other. She nestled them into open chairs, felt them fit into place, and once more stared up at the lights in the hope the room would brighten. The futile hope.

“sssorry,” hissed the voice, suddenly in Trench’s timbre, stretched across the shape of a scowl she’d seen in so many portraits in so many hallways.

And then it laughed.

A shudder worked its way up her spine. Jesse redoubled her efforts, racing to the final building where she’d seen the sixth doll taking aim. She did her best to ignore the laughter as it echoed around her, sometimes feeling flush against the nape of her neck, others just over her head, or as if it were under her feet, or – wait.

Wait.

The sixth doll free, an idea popped into her mind. She dropped her chin, staring down at her feet. As though proving her point, Polaris fluttered in middle-space, shrinking and swirling until she seemed to come to rest several inches below her. Jesse raised her foot. She stomped on the platform.

There was an echo.

“It’s hollow,” she muttered to herself, bringing the doll into her arms as her pace quickened. “The mountain’s hollow.”

“faden’s hollow,” answered Arish, or was it Langston? Darling again? The creature spitting the others’ voices at her crept closer, its hands and feet scrabbling against the wooden ground. “doesn’t know. doesn't know. ssslllooowww…”

She took a breath, once more following the cable to the safety of the station and its light. There she placed the sixth doll, staring at those two empty seats as she did, and, just as Wake’s narration had suggested, she knew what she had to do.

That didn’t mean she liked it.

For what she hoped was the final time, Jesse returned to the platform, lamp in hand. She walked past the shed, past the mansion, and around the third building, finding an empty stretch of floor to stand on. In the open like that, she felt dangerously exposed. Vulnerable. Man, this was a miserable plan.

Before she could think herself out of it, she dropped to her knees. Fixed her eyes on Polaris spinning below her. Grasped the lamp in both hands. “Well. Here goes nothing.”

“faden’s nothing.”

“Now you’re just being rude.”

Jesse brought the lamp up over her head, then smashed it into the floor. The stage dressing was no match for the light’s metal frame; the wooden boards cracked, split, splintered, and each time she brought the lamp down anew, the hole she’d created grew larger.

And the thing in the shadows snuck closer to her.

The light bounced up and down, up and down, as she smashed through the floor, leaving herself unprotected, but she didn’t do anything – yet. She felt the creature coming, felt the platform reverberate with its creeping steps, but still, she didn’t do anything. The hole was wide enough now for her to see the last two dolls, to squeeze her arms in and grab them, but even then, she didn’t do anything.

“jeeesseee…” Now it was using Dylan’s voice, or was it Dad’s? “sorry faden…nooothing.” Mom?

Jesse gathered herself, waiting until she felt the thing’s hot breath on the back of her neck, until she felt its weight warp the floor beside her. Then she moved.

“Deus ex machina, creep!” She swung with all her might, the lamp smashing into its head with a loud, meaty crack.

The reaction was immediate; the thing reeled back and clutched at its face, screaming in a thousand voices as Jesse seized on her chance. She grabbed both dolls, hefted them out from under the floorboards, and shot off for the cable car station, the lamp forgotten behind her. Their combined weight unbalanced her, dragging her down so her feet nearly skimmed the ground as she floated. Regardless, she pushed on, knowing the thing would recover eventually, maybe even already had, and if she didn’t get there soon…well, she didn’t know what would happen then, she just knew she didn’t want to know.

One final push, and she bumped into the building, almost dropping the dolls in her alarm. Frantically she placed one, then the other –

And miraculously, the lights snapped on. All of them.

Every.

Last.

One.

Just like that, Ordinary was back, precisely as she’d remembered it. There was no mountain, no cable car stations, no dolls, no creepy-crawly creature, none of it. There was only Ordinary. There was only her home. Well, and the book. The book was admittedly new.

Having conquered her fears –

“Not my fears. Fears in general, sure, but…”

- Faden emerged victorious.
She had once more beaten back the darkness, a shining light in a fading world.

“I would’ve said something more like…‘Proving herself the brightest bulb in the shed,’ but hey,” Jesse picked the book up, running her fingers over its embossed cover, “to each their own.”

She gave the Ordinary model one last look, going so far as to cautiously prod at one of the wooden cars on the street with her shoe to make sure there was nothing else amiss, and when nothing out of the ordinary (wink wink, nudge nudge) happened, well, she called it a day.

The book in her hands, Until Dawn, was heavy as she trudged once more into the sector elevator. Her muscles felt like tuning forks, reverberating with every step she took. Not since the Hiss had she been put through the wringer like she had been today, and man oh man, she did not envy tomorrow-Jesse’s muscle aches. Just another one of the secret joys of being the Director of the FBC.

Jesse leaned herself in the cool, unbudging embrace of the elevator’s corner, letting its walls do the heavy lifting in keeping her upright. The panel and its buttons glowed faintly, wordlessly asking the obvious: Where oh where did she want to go next? A question for the ages, that one.

I could take it to the Panopticon since I’m here anyway…just get it over with…buuut that would mean a whole lot of walking. Or floating. And do I really have the energy to deal with the Curator’s whole…thing again? Or Langston’s, for that matter? She sank further into the crook of the elevator’s corner. Her eyes followed the doors as they shut. That feels like a sign to me. How about you?

The button for Executive lit up when she pushed it, a merry chime following the lurch of the elevator’s gears. With the way her day had been going, Jesse was sure she’d find another problem waiting for her there – one only she could handle – so she didn’t let herself picture her office or the couch inside of it, tried to resist daydreaming about putting her feet up and resting.

But the Oldest House had a different plan for her. It always did.

Bone-weary after bringing an end to yet another hastily cobbled-together B-plot,
Faden dreaded what waited for her outside of the elevator’s relative safety.

“We’re still doing this, I see,” she yawned, letting her head rest against the wall. “Okay, Wake, you got me. What is it now?”

The hero’s journey was never over, it never stopped, never really came to a close.
Not in a way that mattered. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be pit stops along the way.
She hit the emergency exposition dump button on the elevator’s side panel and breathed a sigh of relief.
The Bureau would still be there when she was ready. That was both a promise and a threat.

Jesse couldn’t help laughing when she saw it. The emergency stop button – what had once been the emergency stop button, anyway – had changed to reflect Wake’s narration and her own earlier joke. “I’m not one to look a paranatural gift-horse in the mouth.”

She pressed the button and, as Wake had predicted, breathed a heavy sigh of relief when the elevator stopped, hanging still between sector floors. There was no thinking about what came next. Jesse simply lowered herself onto the ground, sitting with her back cradled by the corner. Her smile widened, her muscles relaxed, and though her eyelids felt awfully heavy, she knew there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d be able to sleep after everything she’d just seen, so…she did the next best thing. She opened the book on her lap, made herself comfortable, and began to read through the prologue.

Chapter Text

This wasn’t the kind of thing the Director was supposed to do. Nope, nope, nope, Jesse knew that, Federal Bureau or no, certain behaviors just weren’t acceptable once you reached the executive suite – making passing jokes about your coworkers, for example, showing up to the office in your pajamas…

Using your Floppy Disk-given telekinetic powers to shake the vending machine that stole your last dollar…you know, all that stuff.

As subtly as she could, Jesse glanced down the hall to her left, then to her right, and when she didn’t see anyone nearby, laid her hands on the glass panel of the vending machine. There was a low rattling sound as everything inside began to shiver - not just the nondescript CANDY bag she’d paid for. The machine’s interior lights flickered and dimmed, its tiny plastic-capped feet juddered against the floor, but her stupid, mysterious CANDY in its stupid, mysterious white wrapping was no closer to being in her waiting hands.

“I didn’t want to have to do this,” she warned the machine, having encountered more than a couple of its sentient siblings down in the sunken Investigations sector and not wanting to take any chances. It didn’t burst to life or anything, so she doubted it was one of those models, but in the FBC, one could never be sure. Maybe it was just playing coy.

Slowly, she cranked up the intensity of her power, no longer rattling the machine but rocking it side to side, desperately trying to dislodge the –

“Hey Faden, you…oh. I’m interrupting something.”

The surprised yelp she let out was also not the sort of thing Directors were supposed to do. Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound. She’d had a really, really long day, and all she wanted was that stupid CANDY. What was a little embarrassment among friends?

Her shock seemed to prove too much for the machine; as she whirled to face Arish, it finally gave up the ghost, its coils spinning to dump everything – every last item – into the lower tray. Bag after bag clattered to the bottom, shaking the guard-flap as conspicuously as possible. As if it would help, she struck a more casual pose, leaning back against the vending machine with her legs braced wide (a futile attempt to hide the snacks now obviously overflowing and spilling onto the floor).

“Hmm? Uh, no. Nope! Not interrupting anything!”

Arish did nothing to hide his smirk. He did, however, refrain from looking at the growing pile of little white bags piling up on the floor. And the quarters. There were…okay, wow, there were…a lot of quarters being spat out by the machine. Like maybe all of them.

Jesse smiled. A quarter pinged against her shoe and went rolling off down the hallway. “What’s up?”

The vending machine, clearly exhausted by its death throes, finally fizzled out and died, going dark behind her. Arish covered his laughter with a brief (and incredibly fake) coughing fit. “Yeah. So. About that. My guys just got a weird call about something on down in the Quarry. Thought you’d want to be updated.”

Her unprofessional conduct momentarily forgotten, Jesse blinked. “The…The Quarry?”

“Yeah.”

“The…book. That you…shot. It’s back?”

“I – what?” He stared at her for a second, clearly perplexed, then slouched his shoulders in relief. “Oh, that! God, no. I’d been trying to erase that from my brain, actually. Add it to the list of things I need to repress.”

“Phew. Had me worried for a second, there. Thought maybe you were about to tell me you had the world’s first case of paper-borne werewolfism!”

“Hey, full moon’s not for another week – we still got time.” He bent, seemingly done with ignoring the obvious, and grabbed a bag of PISTACHIOS off the floor. “You want?” he asked, offering her one before tearing in. “Nah, our Quarry. Where we mine all the Black Rock? That Quarry? A crew from Research went in a little while ago. Said they’d gotten some abnormal readings this afternoon and wanted to see what was going on. They checked in once at the scheduled time, then missed check-ins two and three. Total radio silence since then. They brought a handful of Rangers with them, so it’s not like they’re helpless out there, but I figured you might want to know about it.”

After a beat, she bent too, grabbing her CANDY. She pulled the white foil package open, gave the contents a sniff, then poured a bit into her mouth. “If they brought Rangers, I don’t see what I could do that would he – ” She paused chewing as a terrible suspicion came over her. “A team from Research.”

Arish nodded, then turned his head to masterfully spit a PISTACHIO shell into the trash. “Yep.”

“Was this team, by any chance, led by my Head of Research? My extremely important – ” Dangerously curious, “ – Head of Research?”

He flashed her a finger-gun in the affirmative. “Got it in one.”

She poured the rest of the bag into her mouth, shaking her head. Even before she’d chewed and swallowed, she’d started off in the direction of Maintenance, rolling her sleeves up in preparation for what was sure to be another convoluted rescue mission. Knowing Emily was one of the missing researchers put a particular hustle in her bustle, widening her stride into something just short of a jog.

The fact she’d be leaving the scene of her vending machine crimes also helped.

It was mostly her concern for Emily’s safety, though.

Mostly.

“So what’re you thinking? Hiss? It’s gotta be Hiss, right?”

Again, she startled – she hadn’t heard Arish keeping pace with her. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned since getting here, it’s not to expect anything. Ever. Between you and me, I think the House takes it as a challenge.” She raised her eyebrows as he met her gaze, easily keeping up with her brisk stride. “So, what? You’re coming with?”

“Well, it wasn’t on my to-do list or anything,” he admitted, doing as she had and pouring the rest of his PISTACHIOS into his mouth as they walked. Immediately he realized the shells were going to be a problem, and bent over the nearest trash can to spit the whole mess out instead.

True professionals, both of them.

“But,” he continued as he caught up with her, clearing his throat in a bid to appear casual, “you mentioning that book got me thinking. Something goes sideways in the Quarry after I’m attacked by The Quarry? Yeah, I don’t like that. See, if there’s one thing I’ve learned here at the Bureau, it’s that the Oldest House doesn’t really appreciate it when you ignore that, uh…synchronicity crap. And maybe I’m reading too deeply into it, but this sure seems synchronous to me.”

After a few more steps, Jesse snorted, rolling her eyes. “‘Reading too deeply into it,’ huh? I see what you did there.”

Swiping his clearance pass and holding the door open for her, Arish grinned. “Pretty good, right? Now c’mon, let’s go make sure your girlfriend’s okay.”

She jumped again, just as startled as she’d been when he’d snuck up on her shaking the vending machine. “Emily isn’t my – ”

He waved her off with a snicker. “Don’t worry,” he teased. “Who am I gonna tell? HR? How’s that going, by the way? Making any progress figuring that one out?”

***

Everything seemed business as usual when they reached the Quarry’s entrance: carts full of Black Rock chunks stood waiting to be processed, the air was cool and dry, and except for the humming of the industrial lights scattered about, things were quiet. There were no shouts, no cries for help, no endless repetitions of the Hiss’s unnerving chant. Things looked totally fine!

“Oh, I don’t like this,” Arish said, unholstering the gun at his hip.

Jesse had to sigh. Few things spelled bad news more clearly – or in bigger, bolder typeface – than normalcy. At least where the Bureau was concerned. “Yeah…took the words right out of my mouth,” she admitted, giving the Service Weapon a few quick flicks of her wrist. Then, raising her voice, she called out, “Emily? Anyone?” before straining her ears for a response.

Nothing.

She started to sigh again, then paused as she caught sight of Polaris flashing in front of one of the main Threshold access doors.

Knowing he couldn’t see it, Jesse nodded towards the glimmer, leading Arish over. With each step she took, she realized they’d been wrong all along – something was off. She couldn’t get her finger on it, not yet, but between the warning pulses of Polaris’s fractals and the way the fine hairs on the nape of her neck were prickling, there was no doubt in her mind that they were about to walk in on something bizarre.

Hopefully not the bad kind of bizarre.

Fingers crossed.

She leaned her weight against the door’s bar, feeling it click open. “Ready?” she asked, and when Arish nodded, she threw her full weight into it, both of them bursting into the Quarry Threshold with their weapons drawn.

A yard in front of them, two at most, a haggard (and familiar) group of people sat huddled together on the metal walkway. Like a warren of startled rabbits they all turned, researcher and Ranger alike, and while Jesse recognized most of them immediately as the team she’d met in the Ashtray Maze earlier in the day, there was really only one face that drew her attention.

“Emily! You’re – ”

Only Emily was already on her feet, springing towards them with a hand outstretched. “No! Don’t let the door – !”

Thunk.

“ – close.”

The moment the door shut behind them, the very instant, the world plunged into darkness. Perfect darkness.

Jesse realized at once what the problem was: the industrial lights outside in the processing area had been working fine, but the ones lining the Quarry itself had died. All of them. Without exception. When she turned towards the door (or the spot where she’d known the door had been a second ago), it made even more sense; the panel where clearance passes needed to be swiped was dark. There was no light to suggest it was online at all, green, red, or otherwise. The mechanism was simply out, disconnected from whatever power source usually kept it running.

She took a deep, steadying breath. Then, figuring this might as well happen, sighed. “So. Uh. Power’s out.”

The inscrutable sky overhead, pitch black at the best of times, had just enough starlight peeking through the clouds to give her a vague idea of where Emily and the others might be.

“Yeah, power’s out.”

“Fantastic.”

From further down the walkway, a rumble of chatter started up, the researchers and Rangers muttering among themselves. “Is that the Director?!” someone asked. “Thank you! She’ll know how to get us out of this!” said someone else. “We’ve got injured Agents, ma’am!” another shouted. “Do you think she knows she has chocolate on her face, or…?” someone else asked, speaking much louder than they probably intended.

Jesse quickly wiped her mouth.

Beside her, Arish spoke up. “What? The power can’t be out! I was just in Maintenance and everything was up and running! Everything’s online, everything’s working, the Power Plant’s chugging away like usual, no problems! I mean, that’s across the board! No problems!”

Though her trademark excitement seemed a little beyond her for the time being, Jesse was relieved to hear the worst note in Emily’s voice was exhaustion and not anything more serious. “It’s an internal failure, I think, not an external one. Things have been, um…there’s…okay, so, there’s an Altered Item in here with us. We’re pretty sure, anyway. I mean, it’s either that, or we’re having one hell of an unusual House Shift.”

Jesse rolled her eyes. She’d just had to go and think it, hadn’t she? So much for nothing ‘more serious’ going on. “What kind of Altered Item are we talking about?”

“Is it a book?” Something clipped the very side of her arm, and after another try, Arish’s elbow caught her for real. “Told you, synchronicity! The House loves that crap! It’s gotta be another book.”

“A book?” Emily asked from the darkness. “I…I hadn’t even considered that. I have to be honest, I have no idea what it is. None of us got a good look at it, I don’t think. We were taking readings after seeing some abnormal activity on the monitors this afternoon, not long after the whole mannequin thing – ”

Arish made a sound low in his throat. “Ugh. Mannequin thing? Know what, no, don’t tell me. I hate those.”

“ – although those readings were probably because of the Altered Item, now that I’m thinking about it more clearly…and when it just…ugh, there isn’t another word for it. It attacked us!”

Injured Agents, someone had said. Great. Great!

The longer she stood there in the dark, the more Jesse’s eyes adjusted. She was only passingly aware of Arish and Emily continuing to talk among themselves (“Attacked? Attacked how?” “I don’t know! It was just zipping around, jettisoning itself into us and our equipment, and…” “Yeah. Sounds like another book, all right.”) as she scanned the rocky outcroppings of the Quarry for anything that might shed some light on the situation.

See? Arish isn’t the only one with jokes.

Polaris glittered, but Jesse knew at once it had nothing to do with her hilarious wordplay. She squinted in the direction she’d been flashing from, and there she saw…oh, score!

“Loose power cells. There are loose power cells all over this place!”

“That’s what I was trying to say! The blackout’s an internal failure! The Altered Item didn’t just attack us, it went after the equipment – including the generators. It dislodged the power sources, and the Rangers tried to get them up and running again, but – ”

A voice from the crowd rang out, strained and displeased. “But it came after us like a goddamn piranha! Pardon my French, ma’am, but this whole situation is FUBAR! It took a chunk the size of a coffee mug outta my arm, sliced Hanson’s face up like an angry ex keying a car, and Marks is down here bleeding out! It’s like the motherfucker was aiming for vitals! Like it’s hunting us! Like it’s – ”

They all fell silent as a blood-curdling shriek pierced the air, bouncing off the Black Rock and echoing, reverberating, until it seemed to come from every direction at once.

And then it was on them.

The Ranger who’d just been yelling let out a cry that was really more of a gurgle, and the walkway exploded in voices, shoving, pushing, running – chaos. The metal under her feet rumbled with the panicked footsteps of fleeing Agents, but when Jesse reached out to her sides, her hands found purchase in both Emily’s and Arish’s HRA straps.

“Orders?” Arish asked, sounding shaken but far from frightened.

Despite the darkness, she nodded. “We have to get those generators working again. The things these books create, or manifest, or whatever, they don’t like being in the light. Trust me on that one. Whatever this thing is – ” from not all that far off, another Agent screamed before being cut short. What came next was…oh God, was that slurping? “ – it’s not playing around. We need to be able to see it to take it out.”

“I…um…okay. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds…” Emily’s hand lashed out of the darkness to grasp Jesse’s arm as another high, unholy shriek came from somewhere above them. “That sounds reasonable. What…what do you need us to do?”

It was a good question.

“Cover me.”

“Cover you?!”

“I’m gonna head down there, grab a power cell, toss it into the nearest generator…and when the light comes on and this thing inevitably tries to, uh, do whatever it does, you guys distract and/or shoot at it until I can get to the next one.”

A gun cocked beside her. “Sounds like a plan to me.”

“And/or a great way to make this thing angry!” Emily sighed, then steeled herself somehow, because her voice sounded significantly steadier a moment later. Her grip on Jesse’s arm was a vise. “Okay. We got this. Probably. Go on, Jesse – we’ve got your back!”

Back’s covered, she thought silently, letting go of the others as she zeroed in on the dim orange glow of the nearest power cell, think you can help keep my front intact? Polaris whirled exuberantly and Jesse shot forward, propelling herself through the air and down into the Quarry pit.

She reached out with her mind, hooking her fingers into claws as the ghostly psychic weight of the power cell clicked into place. For a second there, she’d been terrified this would be the Until Dawn dolls all over again, but so far so good; the blinking orange lights rose to meet her in the air, and even as the power cell hung there, Polaris zipping off to the side to indicate a generator, nothing swooped in to attack. She wound back, steadying her aim, and shot the cell into the waiting notch.

What are the chances this thing tired itself out already?

Overheard, a series of the Quarry’s spotlights popped on, shedding cold, bone-pale light onto the Black Rock formations. Jesse grinned, victorious, and turned back to the walkway in time to see…oh, those weren’t smiles on her friends’ faces.

“JESSE! LOOK OUT!”

Guess I had that coming, she thought while quickly rolling to the side, only narrowly managing to miss…something as it cut through the air beside her.

“What is it?!” she called over to them, hovering herself right in front of the generator to defend against the power cell being dislodged again.

“It’s too fast!” Emily shouted. “It sort of looks like a really, really dense bat!”

“Dense?! Since when are bats dense?!”

“Average wingspan! I’d say, um, average-to-large, that is! But in terms of overall girth, it’s really kind of – ”

The shape circled around, its wings making loud thumping sounds as they flapped. Even in the dark, Jesse could see it was gaining momentum, and considering how fast it had moved to begin with, that was saying something. It seemed reluctant to go straight for her, keeping to the shadows outside of the bright lights instead. She caught a glimpse of it, though, a brief one, but more than enough to get a feel for its shape.

Emily was right – it did look like a bat. A boxy, sturdy specimen of a bat. A real unit, as the kids were saying. Its wings were too squat, too short, to keep it aloft; if it had actually been an animal, someone would’ve wanted to study it, but of course it wasn’t an animal. It was an Altered Item.

And a familiar one, at that.

“Come on,” Jesse groaned, right as Arish yelled out, “What did I tell you, Faden? SYNCHRONICITY! Round two, let’s go!”

The book zoomed forward, only to abruptly change course before entering the light. Its shadowy form spun in midair, its covers flapping up and down, up and down, as close to Jesse as it could get without being illuminated. Another horrendous screech issued forth from its…mouth? Did books have mouths?! (Man, this really was round two of hers and Arish’s little incident this morning, wasn’t it?) And from that distance, she had to cover her ears, lest they burst completely.

Then it was gone again.

She whipped her head around to try and find where it had flown off to. It wasn’t a long search. An Agent, one of the group that had broken off from the huddle before, scrambled up a formation, making for the walkway once more. As Jesse watched, they were cut down, the book slicing through the air (and the Agent themselves), descending on the felled body with that same terrible slurping sound.

That’s when something clicked. If this was one of the Repository books it couldn’t have actually been The Quarry again; she’d watched the Curator shelve it. It must’ve been one of the few she hadn’t crossed off the list yet. And boy oh boy, she thought she might’ve known which!

Trying to keep the awful thing in her periphery, Jesse pulled up the remaining summaries. Wouldn’t you know it, there it was, front and center!

‘House of Ashes. Two factions of soldiers, entrenched in a bloody war against each other, find themselves sharing cramped and deadly quarters when a cataclysmic event swallows them whole. Lost in darkness beneath the Zagros Mountains, hunted by something ancient and ravenous, will they learn to work together? Or will their animosity bleed them dry before the monsters in the shadows savor their first taste? Only time will tell. Semper Fi.’

Any other day, maybe she would’ve had to stop and think on that riddle. Today, after seeing everything she’d seen (not to mention Arish’s repeated talk of synchronicity), Jesse thought she knew what this was right off the, uh, bat.

That one she couldn’t call wordplay. Not in good conscience.

“Stay in the light!” she called to anyone who might’ve been listening and not, say, roaming around screaming in the dark. “I think…okay, stick with me here, but I think the book’s…a…vampire? Maybe?”

There was a beat.

Then, “Yeah, that tracks.”

“I – of course it is. Of course it is! Oh my gosh…think about it: It goes after the light source, probably due to some form of hyper-photosensitivity, it can clearly see us in the dark or, barring that, can at least track us via echolocation – hence the shrieking! Or, even if it’s not echolocation, it at least has its own form of hearing, given its reaction to Ranger Lund’s shouting! And – and! – when it attacked us, it did so in a manner that resulted specifically in heavy blood loss! Ugh, it’s so obvious! I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner!”

“You can’t believe your first thought wasn’t ‘vampire book?’”

“It’s embarrassing, isn’t it?”

“…yeah, Pope. Yeah. Embarrassing. For sure. Hey, just wondering, did anyone on your team happen to bring along a string of garlic? What about a wooden stake or two?”

“Well, while not a traditional wooden stake, I do always make a point to keep a surplus of pencils on my person. Just in case.”

“Yeah, that tracks too. Hey Faden, you hearing this? Ready to go full-on Van Helsing on this thing?”

Though she couldn’t help but smile, listening to their back and forth, Jesse knew neither Emily nor Arish were going to enjoy what came next. She’d been turning the summary over in her head, picking it apart piece by piece, and while she couldn’t say with any certainty that her plan would work, there was a ring to it that smacked of the Oldest House’s strange internal logic.

“So here’s the thing,” she called over to them, scanning the darkness for Polaris’s telltale tracking glimmers, doing her best to keep a bead on the book. “I think teamwork is an important part of calming this thing down, for whatever reason. The three of us – ” she paused, “ – ooor however many Agents want to help – need to move at the same time.”

“Oh,” she heard Emily say, her tone suddenly absent its earlier enthusiasm. “G-good.”

“What’re you thinking?”

Standing in the light as she was, Jesse hoped anyone looking her way would see her pointing out the remaining power cells. “We’ve got to get as many lights on as possible! We can’t let it hide, it’ll just keep attacking people. Vampires, uh, burn in the light, don’t they? If we can catch it in the light, maybe it’ll stop.”

“Or burst into flame.”

“Or burst into flame, yeah.”

“Well it’s better than any plan I could’ve come up with. Sure, I’m game, let’s give this thing a tan.”

“I’ll try to distract it,” Jesse continued, whirling the chamber of the Service Weapon until she felt its Spin form slot into place. “Everyone’s going to have to move fast once we start. No going back.”

Surprising her, it was neither Arish nor Emily who answered first, but the quavering voice of one of the researchers she’d met in the Ashtray Maze. “There’s a cell on the southern side, Director – I can see it from here. I’ll take that one!”

“Two on the east. I’ll get one,” Arish announced, only for the irate Ranger from before to add, “The other’s mine, ma’am!”

“And that leaves the one to the northwest. I’ll…I’ve got that one,” Emily said resolutely. “Now, everyone, listen up! Vampires are notorious counters and untiers in most of the myths they appear in! If it approaches you, consider throwing a handful of ball bearings or assorted seed kernels at it! Or, if it’s handier, remove your shoelaces and – ”

“Or maybe we just move fast enough to catch the fucker on its back foot, Dr. Pope.”

“Or do that! I just wanted everyone to be aware of their options!”

When the Quarry again fell silent, Jesse squared her shoulders and took aim at the flittering, fluttering, ever-moving target Polaris was giving her. “HEY, PAPERWEIGHT! HOW’S THIS FOR A BOOKMARK?!”

Ugh, she cringed, there’s no way that was the best I could do.

She opened fire, drilling the book with a hail of not-bullets as she’d done to The Quarry that morning. It shuddered once, knocked off its path, but seemed otherwise unaffected, shrieking at Jesse before beginning to divebomb her again. As it had before, it pulled away from the light at the last possible second, zipping past close enough for her to catch a whiff of the old-vanilla smell of its pages and feel it ruffle her hair.

Almost before any time had passed at all, a second set of lights turned on above them, widening the circle of illumination.

“One down, Director!”

The book screamed, pulling aside a moment too late. It had been caught in the light for less than a second, but that had been plenty of time for Jesse to catch sight of its brown leather cover, a silvery eclipse embossed deeply upon it; she’d managed a glimpse of its pages too, white as teeth and totally, completely blank.

A loud mechanical hum kicked up, and another set of lights popped on. “Done!”

“Shit! Mine’s stuck!”

“Hang in there, Ranger, coming your way!”

Arish and the Ranger must’ve been one hell of a team, because not even a minute later, there were more lights.

Jesse knocked the book back with another salvo from the Service Weapon, and it shot away into the part of the Quarry that was still dark. For the time being, anyway.

There was a cheer on her lips as the final cell seemed to be placed, the last set of lights flickering on…and then just as quickly guttering out again, marked by an agonized shout that chilled her blood.

“Emily?” Jesse yelled, her stomach bottoming out, her concentration breaking to the point her feet touched the ground.

“I’m okay! I’m – ” The lights flickered from her section again. “It cut my arm! I don’t think I can lift – ”

That was as far as she got. Already Jesse was barreling forward, the Service Weapon forgotten in her hand as she half ran, half propelled herself out of the light and towards the low orange glow of Emily’s power cell.

Unsurprisingly, the book didn’t hold back. If she had to guess, it probably hadn’t appreciated the paperweight remark. Or the whole ‘getting shot’ thing.

It flew into her with all the force of a freight train, hitting her square in the side to send her tumbling to the ground. The hard, sharp ground. Made of rock. She must’ve yelled, must’ve made some kind of noise as the impact knocked the air out of her, but she didn’t stop to think about it. Her arms went up instinctively, protecting her face and neck, and it was a good thing: There was an immediate searing pain as her skin was split from the heel of her hand to her wrist, the hair-thin line burning like there was no tomorrow.

She didn’t get to dwell on it. The Altered Item landed on her, its papery innards glomming onto the injury and going sandpaper-rough, slurping up the blood it had drawn. Before she could fully process the revulsion of the sensation, Jesse felt the book being wrenched off of her, a few drops of her own blood spattering her face in the process.

“Oh no you don’t!” she heard Emily say above her, grunting and straining with the effort of subduing the awful thing. It shrieked in response and she gasped, and Jesse didn’t waste another second.

She leapt to her feet, located the cell, grabbed hold of it with her telekinesis, and launched it home into the generator.

As the lights came on overhead, Jesse spun in time to see Emily struggling with the Altered Item, a sight that would’ve been hilarious, had it not been for…everything else going on. Her hands held the book’s covers open wide, and as it thrashed, she was forced to brace left and right, looking more than a little like a mime brainstorming a questionable new act. A mime with a very, very bloody arm and a very, very bloody shirt.

As if it had been waiting for a cue, as soon as Jesse noticed the blood coursing down Emily’s arm, the book dropped. It lay on the ground, writhing and squealing like a dying insect. Its pages stared up at them, white and blank, and…

“Jesse? Jesse, wait, what are you – ”

Acting on a hunch, Jesse knelt beside the whimpering book, cautiously holding her bleeding hand over one of the pages. A drop, two, and what she’d thought she’d noticed proved spot-on.

The book was absorbing her blood. Drinking it. With every drop, the pages slowly but surely began to fill with words, with a story.

Throwing caution to the wind, she pressed her hand flush to the page. The book quieted, drinking up every last trace of blood staining her skin, and – ta-da – words upon words, all printed in red ink of course, bled across the paper in a glut.

Suddenly Emily was kneeling right beside her, scooping up what blood she could from her own injury before doing exactly as Jesse had, laying her bloody hand flat on the other page. The book slurped and slurped and slurped until the sound became unbearable, then sighed and fell flat, sated. No more squirming, no more screaming, no more going bump in the night. Just like all the other Repository books before it.

“It is…inert?” Emily asked, giving her (now exceptionally clean) fingers a flex before pulling away.

Jesse gave the book a poke. When it didn’t spring up to latch onto her throat, she shrugged and shut it with a thump. “Looks like it. I hope.” She picked it up, carefully at first, then less so, no longer feeling the springy, dynamic weight of a living thing.

After another moment, she looked up, first towards the access door – its clearance panel glowing beautifully, wonderfully green – then the battered Rangers and researchers limping their way over, Arish bringing up the rear as he helped an Agent walk on a terribly torn-up leg.

“Okay,” she sighed, tucking the book under her arm before standing, offering Emily her uninjured hand to help her to her feet. “All in favor of a group trip to Medical?”

Their groans were unanimous. Which, she had to figure, also counted as a form of teamwork. Sort of.

***

“You two sure you don’t want to get patched up first?” Jesse asked, slouching low in one of the waiting room’s chairs. It was roughly as comfortable as sitting on the unprocessed Black Rock had been, but hey, beggars couldn’t be choosers. “I could always pull Directorial privilege…get you to the front of the line…I mean, technically, as Department Heads, it’s your right, sooo…”

In the chair to her left, Arish sat with an arm flung over his face. He’d been lucky enough to escape the ordeal with only a few tiny abrasions, but that had been his second all-out brawl of the day, and with the hustling and helping he’d done to make sure everyone had gotten out of the Threshold in one piece, it was clear that exertion had taken a toll. He looked about a minute away from melting into that chair, and Jesse couldn’t blame him.

“I’ll survive this one. Probably.” He took a deep breath, letting it out in an exhausted laugh. “If you wanted to put me down for a little hazard pay, though…”

“Hazard pay? For the guy with all that experience taking down werewolf books? Pffft. I don’t know, I’m pretty sure you’re an old pro at this point. Probably didn’t even break a sweat.”

“I’m pretty sure taking down two Altered books in a row qualifies me for some hazard pay, ma’am,” he joked. “At the very least, a library card.”

“Yeah, well, you’re going to have to take that up with HR, sorry.”

“Damn. I was afraid you might say that.”

Wincing, Emily sat in the chair to Jesse’s right, gingerly sipping from the cup of water she’d gotten from the cooler. It was obvious she didn’t immediately trust it, and again, she couldn’t blame her – it was a paper cup, after all. “Thanks, but the others need to be seen more than I do. I mean, my arm looks bad, I’ll grant you that, but it’s mostly stopped hurting already!” She winced again, breathing hard through her nose. “‘Mostly’ being the, uh, operative term.”

“How many more of those things are out in the wild?” Peeking out from under his arm, Arish caught Jesse’s eye and nodded towards the book in her lap. “We gonna run into another one as soon as we get out of here?”

“Good question. Just one, I think.” Once more she conjured the write-ups from out of thin air (or wherever it was that the Oldest House stored her important memos). Clucking her tongue, she ran through the list: “Got The Quarry, obviously, The Devil in Me, Man of Medan, Until Dawn, aaand – ” a cursory glance at the newest book’s cover, “ – House of Ashes. That…uh, yeah. Yeah, just…one left.”

“Uh oh. That was a tone,” Emily said, her eyebrows squinching together in concern.

“God, what’s that one called? Murderers Under the Bed? Hungry, Hungry Frankensteins?”

With a groan of her own, Jesse waved the paper away. “Little Hope, actually. The last one is Little Hope.”

“Oh. Good. Hey, do me a favor, would you? Leave off on looking for that one until you’re positive I’m not available. No offense or anything, I just like the size of my hope as-is.”

“Makes sense.” She drummed her fingers on House of Ashes, looking absently around the waiting room. Did she already have an idea what their answers would be? Sure! Did it stop her from asking? Certainly not. “Sooo. We’re probably going to be here for a while…”

“Probably.”

“You guys…wanna read this bad boy in the meantime?”

Arish snorted. “This will shock you, but no. Nope. Not a chance.” He readjusted himself in his chair, nestling into it as best he could. “If you don’t mind, I’m thinking I might just, y’know, catch a few winks.”

“Wow. On company time, huh?”

“All due respect, Director? If you’ve got a problem with my conduct, you can take it up with HR.”

“Touché.”

Emily, of course, was another story. “I have to admit, my curiosity is piqued. Maybe…maybe one chapter. Or two. Just to pass the time.” She leaned so far over in her seat that her head rested on Jesse’s shoulder, and it was all she could do to keep from grinning like a fool.

“Are you going to want scrapings?” she teased as she opened the book, hoping her delight wasn’t as obvious as it felt. “Underhill wanted scrapings.”

“I wouldn’t be opposed! If you’re serious, that is. If you’re joking, then…I guess I’m still serious, just in a less excited tone of voice. …oh! And maybe some tissue samples from the covers. Oh, oh! And an ink analysis! And – ”

Again, Arish snickered. “Geez, who’s the vampire now, Pope?”

Chapter Text

“…and when I say ‘full of cat statues,’ I mean full-full, okay? Like they were everywhere. Waving. Staring. Was it the strangest thing I’ve seen working here? Prooobably not. It definitely made the top five, though. …okay, top ten. Top fifteen, easy. I thought about wearing the ears to show you, I just…I dunno. Guess I thought better of it. Maybe next time.”

She tried to smile. It didn’t come out right. Didn’t take.

Not for the first time, Jesse was glad the glass of Dylan’s cell wasn’t reflective; she didn’t want to know what she looked like in that moment.

“Maybe next time,” she repeated under her breath, saying it more to herself than her brother. She rocked forward in her folding chair, then back, letting her vision focus on a corner of the far wall as she struggled for something new to tell him. The team from Medical hadn’t been able to say with any confidence whether he could hear her like that, unconscious and unresponsive, unmoving except for the REM twitches of his eyelids, but Jesse knew better. He could hear her. He had to be hearing her. The alternative…well, she didn’t like thinking that way.

It had become its own sort of ritual, her daily visits. She’d step into the room once her day was over, catch her breath, and recount what she’d seen and done, no matter how unbelievable or impossible. Dylan had spent enough of his life out of the loop, she figured; she’d spent enough of hers looking for him. This way, they could both get what they’d been missing out on for so long. In a sense.

Leave it to the Oldest House to go full Monkey’s Paw, right? Here you go Director, you got your brother back. But watch out!

Jesse sighed, her cheeks puffing with the breath. “Um…what else, what else…” Try as she might, nothing was coming to her. She didn’t want to leave him though, not yet, so she had to come up with something, because just sitting there silently listening to the beeps and boops of the machines hooked up to him was out of the question. It was too sad, too creepy, too –

“Oh! Duh. Talk about missing the forest for the trees…I’ve, uh, sort of joined a…book…club?” As soon as it was out of her mouth, she grimaced, laughing at how it sounded. “Well, more like I was drafted into one. Drafted? Book club? No, huh? That’s fair. Not my best. Anyway, I stopped by the Panopticon earlier today, visited your neighbor the Curator – know him? Langston called him ‘a character,’ but if you ask me, ‘ghoul’ is the word that came to my mind. A bunch of books went missing from his cobwebby corner of the House…the Repository. I’ve been trying to find them for him…add that to the bottomless to-do list. It’s been crazy, even by FBC standards.

“Let’s see…so far, we’ve had…” Resting back against her seat, Jesse counted them off on her fingers, shaking her head when the memories of the past day, absurd as they were, came back in flashes. “A story about a werewolf summer camp that Arish had to shoot with a silver bullet, a serial killer story where Emily and I had to sort through a paranatural junk drawer, a story about a ghost ship where I ended up doing the world’s freakiest high-dive, a weird monster…thing where I had to rescue a bunch of dolls – that one was a lot, I’m still sort of dealing with it – aaand a vampire story we literally had to bleed for.”

Dylan didn’t answer, of course. She hadn’t expected him to, not really, but her stomach was heavy with disappointment anyway.

“There’s still one more, believe it or not. I’m sure I’ll be getting a call any minute now. I can already hear the Board… < Director/Errand Girl, there is a Book/Problem/Thingamajig flying around the Astral Plane/Living Room. Hurry, it’s Dangerous/Annoying/Not Our Preferred Genre > ” The impression had turned out harder than she’d expected – who would’ve guessed imitating a being without a voice would be so hard? She coughed a couple times, half-laughing at herself, then shook her head.

To fill the silence that followed, she pressed on, materializing the only write-up she had left. “Little Hope. Sounds uplifting, doesn’t it? Says here it’s about… ‘An ill-fitting group of students, along with their long-suffering professor, are stranded in a historic town after an accident. With their bodies rattled and their tempers flaring, they begin to suspect they’ve been pulled into something unnatural: an endless echo of the past they cannot hope to escape until they accept the truth…or are devoured by it. Just because we cannot control the past doesn’t mean it can’t control us.’” She coughed again, wishing she’d brought some water for herself, and realized she was already trying to parse the ritual hidden in the summary. Old habits, she supposed. New habits? It had, after all, only been a day – despite how very, very long it felt.

“Yeah, so, you know. Real cheerful stuff.”

As little as she wanted to keep staring at the Curator’s spidery handwriting, it took her a while to wave the page away again. Without it, there was nowhere else to look. No way around the elephant in the room. It was just her and Dylan and the horrendous silence stretched out between them.

Jesse’s throat was dry as she swallowed. “If I’d been thinking, I would’ve brought one to read you. I’m probably a really crappy narrator – clearly I’m miserable with funny voices – but at least you wouldn’t have to listen to me tell you about bathrooms getting sucked into the Astral Plane or giant, clock-puking Anchors. And hey, they’re pretty good. The…the book-stories, I mean. If you’re into spooky stuff, that is.”

A sliver of her tongue poked out to wet her lips. “I can’t remember if you are or not. Into spooky stuff. I…I remember you always loving aliens and big, exciting laser gun shootouts.” Nostalgia made her smile feel tight. Brittle. Jesse pulled her legs up under her as she sat, her palms rubbing circles into her knees. “Wonder how much that’s changed. How about this: When I find Little Hope, I’ll be sure to bring it to you first. If I read it and it turns out you don’t like horror stories, then…then you can get up and tell me yourself. Deal?”

The machine measuring his vitals continued to beep in its sad, slow rhythm.

Blink once for yes, twice for no.

Before too long, it became overwhelming. It always did.

Jesse let her head loll on her shoulders, tipping her line of sight up and up and up until she could barely see the top of his cell in her view of the ceiling. The heels of her hands rubbed her eyes, adding a new layer of flickers and flashes to Polaris’s sympathy.

“I hate this so much,” she breathed after a time, keeping her voice pitched low, as if by virtue of whispering, the admission wouldn’t sting so badly. “I hate how things turned out, Dylan. Everything. All of it. Mom and Dad, Ordinary, you getting taken away, everything they did to you…everything I did to you…this isn’t how it was supposed to go. This isn’t what our lives were supposed to be. I wanted to find you so…badly. I wanted us to have a second chance. A fresh start. Just…just a shot, you know? A shot at starting over. Fixing things. Knowing each other.”

There was a tremble in the next breath she took. She forced it aside with an exasperated laugh. “So much for that. Now I’m in charge of some…eldritch…esoteric…clandestine…bureaucratic bullshit, and you’re on extended medical leave after being puppeted around by an otherworldly entity with a penchant for bad slam poetry. Maybe normal was never in the cards for us, I don’t know. Doesn’t change how much this sucks. Doesn’t make it better, or make me miss you less. Doesn’t help. Doesn’t help anything.”

Feeling herself starting down the same road she’d traveled countless times since the Hiss had been pushed back, Jesse dropped her hands onto her thighs and pushed herself up from the chair.

“Sorry. You don’t need to listen to me feel sorry for myself while you’re…you know. I’ll head out. You get some rest. Maybe tomorrow – ”

Something caught her eye. Something that wasn’t Polaris.

Jesse turned as she stood, and to her surprise, a large leather-bound book now rested on one of the tables where Medical had been analyzing Dylan’s vitals, a small spiral of smoke rising off of it as though someone had just blown out a candle.

Her eyes narrowed. “Oookay…” The last thing she needed – the last thing any of them needed – was for that thing to go crazy in the controlled environment of Dylan’s cell.

She crept towards it carefully, reaching a tentative hand towards its cover…and nothing happened. Not a single thing. She picked it up, balancing its weight in her palm, and still, nothing. It was a book. Just a book, no more and no less. There was nothing alive about it, nothing sentient or even ambulatory. It was paper and glue, leather and goldleaf, and though she couldn’t understand how it’d happened, Jesse knew at once she’d done what she’d needed to. It was calm now. It was done.

After a beat, she walked over to the chair she’d set in front of Dylan’s cell. She sat. She opened Little Hope and laid it on her lap, and as she promised him she would, she began to read.

“‘It was a cold night in the winter of 1972 when the Clarke family sat down together. A night like any other, or so they thought…but little did they know it would be the last night any of them would see one another. The last night, in fact, that they were a family at all.’”

As suspected, she wasn’t a very good narrator. She couldn’t have been awful at it, though; Dylan certainly didn’t interrupt her to complain.

Maybe next time.

Chapter Text

A full night’s sleep had been just what the doctor ordered. The hack-doctor, that was. The quack. The sawbones. The – yeah, she was willing to go there – Frankenstein.

Jesse guessed she could’ve seen it coming; after a day spent tracking down, wrangling, and reading horror stories, her dreams had been pretty out there. She’d woken up with knots in her hair and skin clammy with cold sweat, every last one of her major muscle groups thrumming resentfully. She’d decided then and there, even before sitting up and changing out of her pjs, that the books had to go.

Even if it did mean going back to the Repository.

She’d stacked them up once she was dressed, a veritable tower of terror, and off she went, formulating her plan with each step. And step she did – to the sector elevator, to Containment, and beyond. The books in her arms seemed calm, seemed perfectly normal, in fact, and she wasn’t going to risk that by doing, or even thinking about, anything paranatural until they were safely back on their shelves. It was a necessary precaution, she thought, but man it made the trip drag on.

By the time she made it past Security and into the Panopticon, her arms literally felt like they might snap off. Yesterday, she’d only ever carried them one at a time; the books hadn’t been so bad then. Carrying all five at once, however, was a very different story.

Pun only sort of intended. A little.

She didn’t wait for Langston or his Rangers to acknowledge her, she just walked into the observation room, dropped the stack of books with a moan of relief, and gave her poor, aching arms a rest.

“Morning!” she said cheerfully, rotating her wrists to ease some of the strain.

“What are y – oh.” The surprise fell from Langston’s face only to be replaced by the same sort of dread the sight of The Quarry had brought on. “That’s…why are there more?”

Her stretching paused. In her mind, she quickly reviewed the last day’s events, and, uh. Hmm. She never had told Langston about the Curator’s request, had she? She’d been in such a rush to get out of the Repository that she’d blown through, found the nearest Control Point and put as much space between herself and that never-ending hallway as possible. Whoops.

Assuming what she hoped was a neutral expression, Jesse shrugged. “You know how it is with Altered Items…” There wasn’t really an end to that sentence, but Langston seemed to understand what she meant, regardless.

“Okay. That’s. True. But I still – please just tell me this is all of them. Please.”

“Mhm! All present and accounted for! Checked and double-checked, and now all I want to do is dump…I mean, gently and conscientiously return, them to their designated Containment location.” Jesse rolled one of her shoulders and winced. “After, maybe, another minute or two. Or five. Those things are heavier than I expected.”

Unlike last time, Langston reached out to pick one of the Altered books up, bracing its covers carefully in one hand as the other flipped through its pages. He was quiet for a good while, the expression on his face in constant flux between deep displeasure and worry bordering on nausea. He found a page that had been dogeared and smoothed it out with a gentle pat, then shut the volume again, placing it atop the stack. “Genuinely can’t fathom how you do it, ma’am. Jesse. How you consistently manage to retrieve these without any sort of formal training or extended study is just unimaginable. Altered art in particular, it’s…it’s tricky stuff! It can get pretty darn nasty if you let it. Normally we have Agents sit through at least six hours of seminars before they’re allowed to even approach Items like these, and somehow you manage to placate, what, six in one day? I-I can’t figure that one out.”

“I did end up shooting most of them, to be entirely fair. So.”

He flashed her a look at that, one of the queasy numbers, then turned his attention back to the pile. “Oh. Uh. Good to…know. Not to change the subject, and far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, but haven’t I seen you translocate using Control Points? I feel like you’re always, for lack of a better term, poofing, in and out of here. Wouldn’t that have been an easier way to transport these? Less strenuous?”

Raising her arms high over her head and spreading her fingers wide, Jesse continued to stretch. “Honestly? I thought about it. Then I got sort of worried that doing that might, uh…juice them up again, so to speak. I have no idea if that was a legitimate concern, but the mental image of five angry books descending on me like a swarm of magpies made it feel pretty real, know what I mean?”

The fact he didn’t immediately shoot the idea down made her think it’d been a fairly solid choice, all considering.

“You could’ve put them in a bag, at least. Maybe a tasteful canvas tote. I keep a stack here under the monitors. Just in case. If you had asked, I would’ve been happy to – ”

“What if it turns out they’re claustrophobic?”

“…that’s…also a fair point, actually. That’s fair.”

Glad you see things my way, she thought, Polaris turning mischievous circles at the edge of her vision. Now let’s hope that makes this next part a little easier.

“Hey, so, you never told me what the deal with Repository guy is,” she commented, keeping her tone breezy. Casual, even. “Don’t get me wrong, you said he was kind of…different, but mmm, that’s not really the way I would’ve described him.”

Like a bird whose feathers had been ruffled, Langston gave a shiver. “I don’t exactly make a habit of bad-talking my colleagues – ” Jesse waited, counting silently in her head, one, two, three, “ – buuut…”

Uh huh. Bingo.

“He’s just such – wait. This is all off the record, right? You’re not going to bring this up at my next quarterly review?”

The perfect picture of innocence, Jesse shook her head. “I’m still not even sure we have an HR department. Who would I report you to?”

That got the floodgates open. “He has no idea – none – how normal people act in a workplace environment! Everything is either an obscure reference to some long-lost classic no one under the age of ninety has even heard of, or some inane comment – there’s no middle ground! He doesn’t make small-talk, unless it’s to ask – ad nauseum! – whether I’m caught up on Succession, which, no, I’m not, for multiple reasons, not the least of which is who in their right mind watches Succession?! Is there not already enough tumult in my day? I’m going to unwind by watching Succession?!”

Jesse leaned against the table. She cupped her chin in her palms.

“And don’t get me started on his backwards understanding of Altered Items! Just because they’re books and paintings doesn’t mean they’re somehow above other objects! They’re all paranaturally equal! They all have feelings! I…” He shook his head, then self-consciously adjusted his HRA, wrinkling his shirt in the process. “He’s difficult to work with.”

She nodded in what she hoped came across as a show of understanding. “I got that much. I mean, honestly? Just introducing himself as ‘the Curator?’ That was pretty weird on its own.”

Langston’s brow furrowed. “He intro – ugh. Typical. Absolutely typical. Here I was, thinking maybe he’d act like a human being with you in his office, but no! Nope! Of course not. You’re the Director, so he’s the Curator. It’s like he’s never spoken to another…ugh, his name is Nathan. Nathan Briggs. The Curator…as I live and breathe…”

Jesse continued to nod. Her trap was about to snap shut, and she couldn’t risk him catching on just yet. Better to keep playing along, let him step right into it. “Sounds insufferable.”

“You have no idea. And before you get the wrong idea, it’s not just me. Am I the one who assigned him to that dusty attic? On paper, yes. But was there a sector-wide vote beforehand? Well, no, not really, but I definitely asked around and everyone who’d met him made it sound like they were on board. It’s almost a shame, actually, he was abnormally good at Fridge Duty. If he wasn’t so unpleasant, maybe he could’ve – ”

There it was. Her opening. Cocking her head to the side just so, Jesse adopted a more confidential tone, flaring her fingers as if shielding their conversation from the Rangers posted in the back. “Y’know Langston, as the Panopticon’s seniormost supervisor, there’s really nothing stopping you from telling him to knock it off. I mean, think about it: Technically, you’re his boss! If his professional conduct isn’t meeting your expectations, well! Why not say something?”

His posture changed then, the fight not just leaving him but fleeing. “Oh. That’s not really…I like to think of myself as a lighter touch with the team in this sector. I-I mean, the work we do here is stressful, and sometimes quirks come out. So really, who am I to judge someone else’s – ”

“I dunno,” she interrupted, tsk-tsking as she straightened. “Sounds like you’ve got a lot on your mind. And I’ll admit, I don’t know how Trench did things when he was the Director, but I’d be so happy to facilitate a conversation between you two. It’s up to us to make the Bureau a safe and healthy work environment, after all. It’s why we’ve got all those signs about not eating the Mold!”

“Well…I…I guess that’s true…” he began, rubbing awkwardly at his neck. “I’m still not sure I should – ”

“That settles it!” Jesse grinned, setting two of the books into Langston’s open hand before he could finish the thought. “Let’s go pay Nathan a visit, you and me! We can work through some of those concerns of yours, what do you say?”

“I – what?”

“Yeah, come on! Two birds, one stone. You help me with this heavy lifting, I help you with this little interoffice snafu, everyone walks away happy.” She grabbed the three remaining books and hugged them to her chest as she stepped in front of the Black Rock door, ushering Langston into the Panopticon proper at the first opportunity.

Plus, she added silently, there’s no way in hell I’m facing the Curator alone again. Absolutely not. Think I’ve had my fair share of creepy-crawlies for one lifetime…let alone one week!

Out loud, she kept her tone chipper. “After you!”

***

“…just because he prefers the wet food doesn’t mean it’s the best for him, though. It’s really no different than trying to balance a nutritious diet for yourself, when you stop and think about it…I mean, there are plenty of things I like to eat that aren’t necessarily the best for me. The only difference is, you know, you get to make those decisions yourself – cats can’t do that. And it’s not that I don’t think that sort of higher thinking is beyond them, because, believe you me, Alfred is about as bright as they come, I’ve seen him exhibit some truly extraordinary problem-solving abilities when the situation calls for it, but even if they could make their own dietary decisions, the lack of opposable thumbs is an obstacle they really just don’t have any way of circumventing!”

She was a big enough person to admit her plan had had some shortcomings. Yes, bringing Langston along to return the books meant she could give her aching muscles a rest while also having an excuse to not engage with the Curator (ahem, Agent Briggs) for too long, but as the trek up to the fifth floor had proven, there was at least one monumental drawback to that strategy: Langston himself.

“Uh huh.” The final firebreak door was taking an eternity to open. She ducked under it at the first available chance, wrinkling her nose when the same deep, bassy hum from yesterday began vibrating in her bones. Still, if she had to choose between that and another story about Alfred, the most perfect cat to ever exist…

Polaris glimmered from deeper inside the Repository, and Jesse picked up the pace, her boots thudding dully on the runner covering the hardwood. Thank you thank you thank you, if you had lips – or any sort of corporeal form, really – I would kiss you.

“Direc – Jesse! Hang on! Don’t go getting ahead of yourself!”

A quick over-the-shoulder look told her what she already knew; Langston had stopped, awkwardly bracing his pair of books against his shoulder as he searched for something in his suit pockets. She thought she could guess what it was.

“Don’t worry about the compass, I know where we’re going.”

“How? All due respect, I don’t think you do. I don’t think anybody does.” After another moment of scrambling, he pulled a compass from his pocket, balancing it on top of the books. “Ah! Yeah, see, you’re actually going north-northwest right now! We’re supposed to head due north the whole way. That’s this way, so – ”

On the one hand, she got where he was coming from – since her visit yesterday, the corridor did seem different, new hallways branching off to form new junctures, new paintings in new frames staring out at her from the walls – but on the other hand, Polaris was never wrong. And there she glittered, leading her on. Why go through all that extra trouble?

“It’s fine,” she said, doing her best to keep her growing exasperation out of her tone. The sooner she got this over with, the sooner she could go back to her office and…oh, who was she kidding, the sooner she got this over with, the sooner she could get to the thousand or so other bizarre tasks awaiting her in her mail tray. “Trust me, I was just here.”

“I understand that, but – !”

Suddenly, the sense of newness, of change, disappeared completely. A wave of déjà vu rose up from the floorboards, joining the hum to tighten her chest and shallow out her breathing.

They were in the right place, no ifs, ands, or buts.

One final turn, and there stood the double doors she’d thrown open the day before, their bronze knobs as dull and unassuming as she’d remembered. Polaris whirled, spinning sparkling figure-eights in the air, then zipped behind her eyes once more, her job done.

“Here we are!”

Langston took a second to catch up with her, his eyes bouncing between the doors and the face of the compass held just below his chin, and even though Jesse went to great pains to smile as naturally as she could (considering what was waiting beyond that doorway), he showed no sign of being reassured. Instead, he frowned. “These…aren’t the right doors.”

“Sure they are! Look at them!”

“I really don’t think…”

But she’d already spent more time in that spooky hallway than she’d wanted. Jesse hefted her books into the crook of one arm, flicked her fingers, and opened the doors – gently, this time around.

The study was exactly how she’d left it.

Literally.

There, on the desk, the candelabra burned. She did a double take at the wax, the wicks, seized by the impossible notion that they were the same length they had been yesterday, neither having shrunk for the flames. Behind the desk, too, the Curator sat as he had at her last glance, his fingers steepled, his eyes chips of ice in the half-light. It was as though everything had paused when she’d shut the doors behind her, and only now did they begin to move anew.

Oooh yeah, she was never stepping foot in this part of the Panopticon again. Not under threat of death.

Jesse took her first step into the room then paused, nodding for Langston to join her. He seemed…uh, ‘hesitant’ was probably too weak a word for what she saw on his face as he lingered at the threshold, his jaw slack and his compass forgotten, but when he realized she was waiting on him, he followed readily enough, sticking close to her side. Much closer, in fact, than she was used to.

“Good morning, Agent Briggs,” she said, feigning her earlier cheeriness as she crossed the room to set her books down on the desk. “Hope you’re ready for a delivery. Here we have…” Brandishing them one by one, Jesse arranged the books before him, marking each with the summary he’d given her. “House of Ashes…Little Hope…The Devil in Me…and Langston has…thanks, yeah, here’s Until Dawn and Man of Medan.”

When the last summary had been placed on the corresponding book, Jesse straightened, doing her best to ignore the skull set right there beside an inkwell. “With The Quarry, that’s all six! So. You should be good to go.”

She forced a taut smile then braced, hoping against hope that this wasn’t the moment where he suddenly remembered there was also a parcel of paintings he’d misplaced, or maybe that there were a few statues he hadn’t seen in a while. It wouldn’t’ve have been the first time someone pulled something like that on her.

Much to her relief, the Curator – Nathan – didn’t immediately launch into a follow-up request. He didn’t say much of anything at all, actually, instead taking a beat to watch her and Langston from over his steepled fingers, his expression inscrutable and his manner chilly. Then, as he’d done yesterday, he turned the corners of his mouth up into a smile, and some of that chill faded. It still wasn’t enough for her to feel comfortable, but she’d take what she could get.

“Well, well,” he began, slowly and methodically lifting each book, turning it over, and examining its pages. “Color me impressed. I must admit, Director, when you so graciously offered your assistance, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if you were merely making empty promises. Vague assurances lobbed my way as a means of appearing concerned. Imagine my delight, discovering it was altruism, all along.”

She’d already taken a step back towards the doors. Or would’ve, anyway, had Langston not been hovering directly behind her. “It’s just Jesse,” she reminded him, trying to covertly shoo Langston out of her way. “And it’s no problem. Like I said, I’m…always happy to help!”

After another long moment of examining the books, he stood, returning them to the shelves where they’d (ostensibly) come from. Again, she was struck by how tall he was, how strangely he was dressed. And…there was no mistaking it, in much the same way she didn’t think the candles had burnt down, she was positive he was wearing exactly the clothes she’d seen him in yesterday.

What was his deal?

As he set about shelving the books, Jesse turned, catching Langston’s eye. Once, twice, three times, she gestured towards him with her chin, trying to get him to say something – anything. He didn’t, though; he just stared, sometimes at her, sometimes at the Curator, his hands messing incessantly with the knot of his tie. His face had gone the color of old cafeteria oatmeal.

Which was great, honestly.

Perfect.

She should’ve known. All that ranting downstairs about how annoying he found Briggs, and now it turned out the real issue was that Langston was spooked by the guy. Creeped out. Skeeved. Understandable, obviously, but the whole point of her dragging him along for this was to have someone else to split the spook-factor with! So far, he hadn’t said a single word!

Gently, she cleared her throat. “Langston. Wasn’t there something you wanted to say to Agent Briggs?”

Over at the shelves, the Curator paused, turning to offer them his profile. He seemed expectant. Entertained?

Langston shook his head. “No,” he said, and the only word she could use to describe his voice was ‘strangled.’ “No, I don’t think so.”

The corner of the Curator’s mouth, the corner that they could see, curled into a barb. “Are you sure, Frederick? I’d shudder to think you were holding anything back.”

It could’ve been her imagination, but…did Langston flinch? She turned to him, trying to figure out what was going on, and he caught her eye, covertly shaking his head as if afraid of being noticed.

Whatever. Fine. She let it drop.

“That’s everything you needed, right? Nothing else we should be on the lookout for?”

“Oh, one should always be on the lookout! Prudent, don’t you think? Especially for someone of your standing. Our beloved institution rarely rewards those who avert their eyes from danger, wouldn’t you agree?” He continued his shelving. “But yes, on my part, you’ve gone above and beyond to fulfill your promises. You have my word that everything else contained here, under my auspices, has been cataloged and accounted for.”

At least there was that.

“I do have one question, if you’ll indulge me.” Clasping his hands behind his back, the Curator took a moment to fondly regard his shelf, complete once more. He didn’t immediately turn around, didn’t go out of his way to look at her as he spoke. Again, she had the sense that, even though he wasn’t mocking her outright, there was another conversation going on in the privacy of his mind – one where her rank as Director had no effect on his civility. “Did you find that I was correct, in the end? That the only thing a story wants is to be…experienced? Understood? Enjoyed?”

“I don’t – ” Her mouth snapped shut. The summaries. The rituals for each of the books had come from the summaries. Even if she hadn’t taken the time to read them after, couldn’t the argument be made…oh boy.

The Curator didn’t wait for her to answer. “Ah. Well. Something to bear in mind for next time. And Director?” He did turn then, hands still clasped behind his back, secretive smile still playing across his lips. “Jesse, my apologies – just Jesse. It won’t be today, nor will it be tomorrow, but there will be a next time. It’s…inevitable.”

“Can’t wait.” Her own smile had become a grimace, a rictus of discomfort. She grabbed Langston’s elbow and started for the door once more. “See you then!”

***

This wasn’t how she’d pictured them beating their hasty retreat.

“Langston!” she called, actually having to jog to catch up with him as he hurriedly made his way through the maze of corridors, holding the compass close to his face. “Langston, seriously! This isn’t the way to the exit! I know what the Ritual Department said, but – ”

“That wasn’t Nathan.”

It took her a second to understand what he meant. Her surprise slowed her feet, letting him get ahead of her. “What? What do you mean?”

That got him to stop. He turned to her, very little of his usual color having returned to his face, and she realized – belatedly – she hadn’t actually heard him say much of anything since they’d gotten to the Repository. She couldn’t begin to guess what that meant, considering he was, at the heart of things, one of the world’s most accomplished nervous-talkers.

“That. Wasn’t. Nathan,” he repeated, holding her gaze for a second before going back to his compass, leading her down yet another branching path.

Jesse blinked. “Oookay…then, who was it?”

He went quiet again, only the persistent shaking of his head cluing her into the fact he’d heard her at all. When he did manage to speak, it came out piecemeal, jumbled. “…not due north…the…hallway…never seen…he wasn’t wearing an HRA, why wasn’t he wearing an HRA?!”

Every inch of her skin rose up in goosebumps. Her stomach dropped into her feet. The whole interaction played back in her mind, forward, backward, from the middle out, and she knew at once he was right. He was right. The man in the study, the Curator, whoever he was – whatever he was – hadn’t worn an HRA. Just that faded, drab, perfectly anachronistic waistcoat.

“I don’t wear an HRA.” It spilled out of her in a glut, the definition of word-vomit. Her body had expelled the words like a defense mechanism, an attempt to explain the inexplicable.

“You’re the Director, ma’am! There are a lot of things you do that aren’t normal! No offense.”

“Ahti doesn’t wear…okay, no, I see your point.” As little as she wanted to, Jesse found herself stealing a look over her shoulder, staring down the winding corridors in the general direction of the study. What she thought was the general direction of it, anyway. Maybe it was all the horror stories she’d read yesterday, but a part of her fully expected to see something charging after them from the darkness, its spidery fingers reaching, grabbing.

She couldn’t decide whether she was relieved or unsettled when all she saw was row after row of paintings; she couldn’t tell whether it was fear squeezing her lungs or that same strange hum in the air.

He’d never answered her question. “Langston. If that wasn’t Agent Briggs. Who. Was. It.”

“I don’t know! I don’t have the slightest idea! He’s not one of mine, I’ll tell you that! I…oh, thank goodness! Look. Here.” Finally, he stopped his mad dash through the halls, pointing at a set of double doors set in a wall before them. Unlike the study, there was a placard identifying it as the Altered Art Department, stamped, as was protocol, with the Bureau’s official seal. Langston continued to point at it for a(n unnecessarily long) time, then threw the doors open, revealing the office inside.

The perfectly nondescript. Typical. Expected. Boring. Office.

“Due. North,” Langston repeated, pressing the compass to his forehead like it was some sort of warding amulet. “We needed to go…due…north.”

She swallowed hard. “Looks that way.”

“Hello?” came a voice from inside the office, a little congested, a little uncertain, a world apart from the Curator’s calm timbre. “Can I help y – oh, hey Fred! What brings you to my neck of the woods? You all caught up on Succession?”

Langston showed no sign of lowering the compass. He gestured with his other arm instead, bringing Jesse’s attention to the short, bespectacled man hurrying over to them. The short, bespectacled man wearing an HRA on his chest. “This is Nathan, Director. This is where I thought you were taking those books.”

“Oh, Director Faden! I was wondering when I’d have the chance to say hello! I’m…wait, books?” Nathan, Agent Briggs, definitely-not-the-Curator, whatever you wanted to call him, had offered Jesse his hand, only to drop it a moment later. He grimaced beneath his neat little mustache, assuming a more sheepish expression. “I’ve been meaning to bring that up. Uh…so, as it turns out…there may or may not have been a slight…um…breach the other day…I meant to report it! I really, really did! But then there was this whole – ”

Too shaken to worry about her professionalism, Jesse held her hands up to cut him off. Her attention was split too many ways, adrenaline burning like battery acid in her veins. She was too hot, she was too cold, she was too tired. She spotted a chair inside the office and helped herself, walking past Nathan to sit.

That was when she noticed the record player in the corner; that was when she noticed the song.

Nathan, for all his foibles, seemed to realize something was going on. He turned away from Langston and followed Jesse’s line of sight instead. “Oh! Yes, O Death. American folksong. Believed to be Appalachian in origin. Not exactly a toe-tapper, but, um, it resonates with the Repository’s ambient vibration – you probably felt it on your way over here! Really gets in your lungs, doesn’t it? Yeah, the song and the hum resonate. The combination seems to keep some of the more malicious paranatural manifestations and building Shifts at bay. Not sure why.”

Without a word, Langston marched over to the record player and cranked the volume as high as it would go.

“It’s…okay. Okay. Look. Uh, Nathan. Agent Briggs. Don’t worry about the containment breach, it’s…it’s taken care of.”

“It is?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Yup. Mhm. I found all six of your missing horror stories. They’re…they’re back in the Repository. Safe and sound. I’d really, really appreciate it if it stayed that way, so maybe the next time something like that happens – ”

It was her turn to be interrupted. Unfortunately. “Horror stories? Sorry, Director, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t lose anything like that.”

“…excuse me?”

“Last I checked, everything in our Altered fiction section is exactly where it needs to be. No, what I haven’t been able to find is an exceedingly peculiar collection: Six accounts of Altered World Events, each one written, strangely, as though the author was actually a witness. Not the usual piecing together of witness retellings, no, no, no – I mean, these accounts were written as though the writer had intimate access to every minute detail. Start time, end time, conversations that were had, the thoughts of those involved! It’s…it’s a very important collection, ma’am. And all six volumes are just gone.”

In the back of her mind, she could almost hear Arish’s voice: Synchronicity!

Six volumes of firsthand AWE accounts. Six horror stories. What were the chances?

Already dreading that she knew the answer, Jesse asked, “What AWEs do they describe, exactly?”

“Well, ma’am, there was one covering the Hackett’s Quarry AWE – ”

The Quarry.

“ – the Blackwood Pines AWE – ”

Until Dawn.

“ – the Zagros Mountains AWE, the SS. Ourang Medan AWE, the Lake Michigan AWE – ”

House of Ashes. Man of Medan. The Devil in Me.

“ – and the Little Hope AWE.”

Litt…okay, that one was…that one was fairly obvious.

Jesse turned to Langston, who promptly lowered himself onto the chair beside hers. Then set his head fully on the table. After a moment’s consideration, she did the same. “Okay. I think I misspoke earlier, Nathan. I know I said I found a bunch of horror stories, but what I meant was I found your collection of – ” Her organs gave a horrible lurch, “ – nonfiction Altered World Event reports, and I returned them to the Repository. The good news is, they’re here. No question. The bad news is, I do not know who, or what, I handed them to, so they might take some time to show up.”

“Don’t know who you handed them to? Well that’s odd – I’m the only one stationed in this zone of the Oldest House! There shouldn’t be anyone else up here!”

She licked her lips. Nodded. Reevaluated some major life decisions (mostly the ones that had led up to her sitting in this dusty little room). “Yeah, it’s a real problem. Between you and me, I think I’m gonna have to report this to HR.”

“The…the Horticultural Revival department? All due respect, Director, I don’t know what they would do about this situation in particular.”

From her spot on the table, her arms wrapped around her tired, aching head, Jesse had to laugh. The Curator had been right after all! This whole thing sure had been an experience, one that she hoped marked the story’s end.

But then again…he’d made that comment there at the end, that terribly ominous comment: ‘There will be a next time. It’s…inevitable.’ And what was it that Wake had said about horror stories? That they always left room for –

The record player skipped. It was the only warning before the lights in the office went out.

From somewhere just outside the doors, a growl could be heard, low and menacing and not even slightly natural. Behind her eyes, Polaris spun.

Jesse reached for the Service Weapon. “They always leave room for a sequel. Yeah. I guess they do. Great.”