The rain began before the train even reached the valley.
Callum Mercer sat motionless by the window, watching gray trees flicker past like vertebrae in motion. His duffel bag rested by his feet, heavier with medical journals and skeletal diagrams than clothes. It wasn't just luggage—it was his armor, his obsession, and possibly the only part of him that hadn't been taken yet.
The conductor barely met his eyes when the train pulled into Thorne Hollow. The platform was empty. Only a rusting sign greeted him:
> PROPERTY OF T.H.U. – NO TRESPASSING AFTER DARK
Callum smiled faintly. Too late.
---
The walk from the station to the estate was long, muddy, and marked by silence. It was a silence he had grown to accept over the last year. Ever since the university expelled him for unauthorized dissections, and the medical board revoked his license, words had become unnecessary.
But the bones still spoke.
---
The house loomed through the mist like a broken sternum—weather-worn, jagged, and hollow at the center. His late mentor, Dr. Albert Greaves, had owned the estate. A man who whispered madness between lectures, who once asked Callum over dinner:
> "Have you ever seen bones that didn't belong to anything... human?"
That night, Callum hadn't slept. That was two years ago.
Greaves died under strange circumstances. No official cause. Just a note in the will:
> "Leave the house to Mercer. He will understand."
---
Inside, the house smelled like old paper and antiseptic. Callum's footsteps echoed unnaturally, as if the walls had been waiting for sound. Most of the rooms were still sealed. Dust clung to the air like ash.
But in the back—through the rotted parlor and behind the fireplace—he found it.
A trapdoor.
Iron-ringed. Unlocked. Just... waiting.
He stood above it, heart thudding, the way a child might stare into a dark closet after a nightmare. Then he opened it.
The wooden stairs led downward, into earth that grew colder, damper, and quieter with each step. He expected rats. Maybe mold. Instead, what he found was worse.
Much worse.
---
The underground chamber was enormous.
Rows upon rows of shelves. Bones, sorted meticulously—skulls with extra eye sockets, ribcages shaped like spirals, fingers too long, spines with no clear beginning or end.
Each shelf was labeled in Greaves' angular handwriting. "Unconfirmed." "Prehuman Variant B." "Non-Homo Sapiens."
In the center of the room stood a glass case. Inside it: a full skeleton, unlike any Callum had seen in his life.
Double-jointed elbows
An inverted sternum
And most disturbingly… two spinal cords woven together like braided rope
> "Impossible," he whispered.
But the bones said otherwise.
---
Suddenly, something cracked.
He froze.
It came from behind him. A single sharp pop—like knuckles being cracked inside a coffin.
He turned.
Nothing.
Just the shelves.
But something about the air had shifted. Like something had seen him.
And deep inside his own body…
His spine ached.
_________.
Callum stood among the bones, his breath shallow, his skin prickled by the unnatural cold. The skeleton in the glass case seemed to watch him—its hollow sockets locked in eternal stare, as if it recognized him.
Or remembered him.
The silence pressed against his ears like pressure at the bottom of the ocean. But beneath it, something shifted—like the creak of an old tree groaning in windless air. He turned slowly.
And saw it.
A rib on the shelf behind him had fallen.
Or had it been placed?
The tag that once labeled the shelf—"UNCLASSIFIED F9"—was gone.
Callum crouched, slowly lifting the rib. It felt too warm. Almost... alive. A faint engraving lined its curve—delicate etchings that looked like runes, or maybe surgical notes. A language he didn't recognize, but his fingers trembled over them like they once knew how to read.
Then came the whisper.
Soft. Intimate. Inside his skull.
> "You were not the first to come here seeking form."
His body stiffened.
> "But you will be the first to return it."
---
The lights flickered. Dust fell from the ceiling like disturbed ash. For one breathless second, all the bones seemed to lean in closer—tilted, watching, almost... waiting.
Then silence again.
But something had changed.
Not in the room.
In him.
His spine ached deeper now. Not pain. Weight. Like it remembered something his mind had forgotten.
---
He stepped backward, eyes wide, and caught his reflection in the glass case.
His face looked pale.
Thinner.
Were his eyes always that deep-set?
He turned to leave—his hand trembling on the stair rail—but paused.
Because etched into the inside of the trapdoor, written in dusty charcoal strokes, was a single phrase:
> "THE ARCHIVE REWRITES THE HOST."
And just beneath it, scratched in with a fine point—no ink, just carved:
> "Welcome back."
---
What had he come here for?
To study bones?
Or to become one?
---
---