The night air in Langridge was thick with fog, pressing against the windshield as Inez drove through winding country roads, Warren silent beside him. Neither had spoken since they left Professor Calder's cottage. The revelations about Umbra Mentis hung heavy in the car—like a ghost neither of them could name yet, but both could feel breathing down their necks.
Warren shifted uncomfortably. "You believe any of that? A secret society manipulating human consciousness? That's straight out of a pulp novel."
"So was a man murdered with his own memories turned against him," Inez replied, eyes never leaving the road. "We're not in normal territory anymore."
They reached a forgotten part of the city where factories once breathed smoke into the skies. The place Calder referred to as "where Umbra Mentis once left a footprint." Now, it was nothing but an industrial graveyard—abandoned warehouses, rusted silos, and one particular structure that stood out.
It was a bunker-like building with a steel door painted black. No sign, no markings. Just a small, tarnished keypad beside the handle. It matched the drawing Calder had shown them from his archives. The Black Door.
"We should call for backup," Warren muttered.
"And tell them what? That we're investigating memory murderers and an ancient society no one's heard of?"
Before Warren could argue, Inez was already approaching the door. He keyed in the date from the partially burned note: 1856. Nothing happened. Then he reversed the digits—6581. A mechanical clank followed.
"You really are Sherlock Holmes in a noir coat," Warren murmured.
Inside, darkness swallowed them. The scent of iron, mold, and something fouler lingered. Inez flicked on his flashlight.
Dust covered the floor, but not uniformly—someone had been here recently. Footprints. They followed the trail through narrow hallways to what looked like a control room. Monitors flickered, displaying pages of old brainwave scans, memory charts, and journal entries signed by initials: A.R.
Warren tapped a file labeled Echo Induction Protocol. "This is tech. Old, maybe Cold War era. They were mapping how to induce selective amnesia... or hyper-memory."
Inez was reading a page with a familiar name: Dr. Anaïs Rothwell. "She was the neurosurgeon who went missing four years ago. Her file was sealed."
"Why the hell is she connected to this?"
Before Inez could reply, static from a speaker mounted to the ceiling pierced the silence.
"Detective Inez... you've always been good at digging where you shouldn't."
Warren spun around, gun drawn. "Who said that?!"
The speaker crackled again. "But this time... the hole you're digging is your own."
Then the room plunged into blackness.
---
They emerged coughing from a tear gas explosion, barely making it out through the side entrance. Their eyes burned, lungs screamed, and Warren swore between gasps. The voice had triggered a defense system.
Back in the car, Inez reviewed the phone photo of the screen before it went dark. One document showed something more disturbing: memory transplantation. Names of subjects. One name stood out.
Marcus Valen.
"That's the next victim," Inez said quietly.
"How do you know?"
"Because he's already dead. He was in the case files Calder gave me. A musician who jumped from a clocktower... claiming he remembered killing people he never met."
Warren looked at him. "You're saying someone gave him memories that weren't his?"
"Or someone else's memories drove him mad."
---
Inez barely slept that night. Instead, he dug through the files recovered from the Black Door and linked every piece to the cases no one wanted to look at again. Patterns began forming. All the victims had some history of mental break—or were diagnosed with syndromes that didn't make sense.
The deeper he went, the more A.R. haunted the margins. Anaïs Rothwell was the common thread.
By morning, he had a plan. He needed access to the old psychiatric archives where Rothwell worked before she vanished. But it wasn't that easy. The hospital had burned down two years ago. The only way in—was down.
Literally.
The underground archives still existed beneath the rubble.
"You're insane," Warren said, pulling up the map.
"Then it's a perfect match for this case."
---
As they stepped into the crumbled ruins of Halberton Institute, the ground beneath them groaned. Somewhere below, secrets waited. But what they didn't know yet—what no one had even guessed—was that the society they were chasing wasn't dead. Not buried in time.
It had merely gone quiet.
Waiting.
And now, it knew Inez's name.