I pull out the pocket watch.
The display flickers, glitching, struggling to process what it's detecting.
CLASS 6 ENTITY DETECTED
RUIN-TIER THREAT
MASS EVACUATION RECOMMENDED
I swallow hard.
Seems I’ve found the basement. Trouble is, I’m unarmed now, a rat trapped in a box without so much as teeth to chew its way out. I try to check on my back-up request, but the watch is flickering now, going fuzzy. The ink blossoming across it in occult sigils goes flat, pouring back into numbering behind the glass.
I give it a smack, try to activate it again, but it’s like the damn thing’s gone dead.
CrItIcAL FAiLuRE
TeMPoRAL INTerfEREncE DEteCTed
Great.
So the Tall Dog’s secret lair is so far removed from base reality that not even the watch can get a message through. Quick inventory. I’ve lost my gun, and now my sole means of communication, and judging from the way my flashlight keeps flickering, those batteries are probably hanging on by a thread.
‘Brilliant, Jhune. You’re a real professional.’
I study the angry ember flickering past the narrow corridor.
Seems the only way out is through.
I press forward, shoulders brushing brick on both sides. Cobwebs stretch across the passage like silk tripwires, catching on my face, sticking to my lips. The floor is thick with ash that puff up with every step, coating my shoes, filling the air and making my throat itch.
I press my hand over my mouth, trying not to cough.
That's when I notice them.
Curled papers nailed into the bricks.
Drawings.
They’re like the ones in the stairwell, only the sunny green backgrounds are gone. These are rendered entirely in black, the heavy, violent scribbles suggesting darkness. Save for the pink triangle. I recognize the dress immediately. Florence. But in this drawing, she's not smiling.
She's being dragged away.
A larger stick figure—labeled in shaky letters as "DADDY"—has one hand wrapped around her arm, pulling her down into shadow.
My gut twists. ‘Poor kid.’
But I need to keep moving. It’s narrow here, tight enough I have to turn sideways just to squeeze through.
My bare hand brushes against a drawing.
The world tilts.
Reality peels away in layers as the two-dimensional space expands, wraps around me, swallows me whole. All at once, I'm ripped away.
Out of myself, and into Florence's worst nightmare.
_____________________________________________
Something is wrong with this one.
The crayon world I entered before was bright. Pastel. The lines shimmered and the animation stuttered with a whimsy that almost made you forget you were inside a broken girl's artwork.
This isn't that.
The lines are shaking as if the paper itself has a fever. Everything is black crayon on white, rendered in heavy, violent strokes that gouged the paper and left grooves I can feel beneath my shoes.
I'm standing outside Barrow Heights. But the building isn't the cheerful brown rectangle from before. It's a jagged mass, barely distinguishable from the black sky behind it. The windows are holes. The front door is a mouth.
Florence's stick figure jolts into motion all wrong. Frames are missing. She's in the alley, then she's at the front door, then she's inside, the in-between ripped out like pages from a flip-book. Her father moves the same way, jerking forward in sickening jumps.
Speech bubbles appear and dissolve. Some are empty. Some contain words that have been scribbled over. It’s as if Florence started to write something and then thought better of it. One bubble, floating near the prostitute's head, reads only:
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
I follow them down the dead-end stairwell. The animation lurches. Mr. Hollis shoves the janitor's locker aside. Removes bricks from the wall. The prostitute crawls through. He follows.
Florence scrambles down the stairs after them, crawls into the shaft.
On the wall beside the janitor's locker there’s a calendar. Someone's circled a date in red crayon - the only color in the entire drawing, and it’s as vivid as blood.
JUNE 5th 1936
My stomach drops.
This is it— the last day anyone saw Florence Hollis alive.
_____________________________________________
The corridor snaps back into focus.
I'm standing in three dimensions again, gasping, one hand braced against the brick to steady myself. I shake off the disorientation and keep moving, shimmying sideways through the narrow passage until it finally opens up into a wide chamber.
A boiler room.
Ancient machinery fills the space, rusted hulks of equipment that probably haven't run in decades. Pipes snake across the ceiling, dripping condensation. And there, at the far end of the room, casting everything in hellish red light:
A furnace.
Steel-grated. Glowing.
Something hangs from the front of it—a pair of overalls, scorched black, fabric so burnt it's barely holding together. I step closer, flashlight beam cutting through the gloom.
My jaw clenches.
Those overalls are small.
Child-sized.
This is how it disposes of them, I realize, bile rising in my throat. The Tall Dog burns its victims. Turns them to ash. No bodies. No evidence. Just smoke up the chimney and ashes in the elevator shaft.
I sweep my flashlight across the rest of the basement.
It's massive. Far larger than I'd imagined, probably spanning the entire footprint of Barrow Heights. Multiple doors line the walls, leading to god-knows-where. Storage rooms. Maintenance tunnels. More killing floors.
I inch forward, mind racing.
The Pale Squad should be close. Assuming they're on schedule—and they always are—they’ll be arriving topside in thirty minutes, maybe less.
But my watch is dead. I have no way to contact them. No way to tell them how to access the basement. The only entrance I know leads to the stairwell on the far side of the building, opposite the elevator shaft, and by the time I cross this labyrinth...
A door creaks open to my left.
I pause.
Nothing comes out.
It’s an invitation—that or a trap.
My gut says to keep moving. To avoid the Tall Dog. To find the exit. To get topside before the Pales arrive and I lose my window to finish this monster before it finishes Tyler.
But my eyes catch the copper plaque mounted above the door:
MR. FREDERICH HOLLIS - BUILDING MANAGER
My breath catches.
So this is it.
This is where he ran his operation. Out of sight, buried beneath the castle he designed. A shadow landlord presiding over his underground kingdom.
I drift inside, and the office has become a tomb.
Cobwebs drape from the ceiling like funeral shrouds. The air smells of rust and decay and something that's been sitting undisturbed for decades. And there, slumped over the desk like he fell asleep and never woke up is Mr. Hollis.
Or what's left of him.
His body has mummified in the dry basement air—skin pulled tight over bone, lips peeled back from yellowed teeth in a permanent grimace. He's still wearing his brown suit, fabric faded and moth-eaten. A bowler hat sits askew on his skull, perched above empty eye sockets.
One hand rests on an open ledger. The other is tucked inside his jacket, clutching at his chest.
I step closer.
The ledger is leather-bound, pages yellowed and brittle. It looks like a standard building log filled with maintenance records, tenant complaints, financial notes,and a dozen other forms too boring to mention. But the handwriting gets looser as I flip through. More erratic. The entries shift from professional observations to personal confessions.
It’s… a journal.
_____________________________________________
April 1933
Today was a great day!
We broke ground on the apartment’s foundations, and the doc prescribed new medication for my heart. Swore it'll prevent another episode. Charlene, my beloved, was relieved. The girls were too, though Florence was still too young to understand what a "heart attack" even meant. She just asked if it tasted like bananas. I couldn’t help but laugh—she keeps me young.
June 1933
A lunatic showed up at the construction site today. Claimed to be some kind of shaman. A tribal elder, he said. Told me this land is cursed. Said his people buried something here centuries ago. Something evil. A "dogman," whatever the hell that means.
I told him to get gone, but he was frantic. Kept insisting that if we keep digging, we'll unearth it. That there'll be blood on my hands. Had to call the cops. They carted him off—hopefully to an asylum where he can get some help.
August 1933
One of the workers found something today. Ceramic sphere, buried about twenty feet down. Idiot cracked it open before I could stop him thinking there was treasure inside. All he found was an old piece of leather.
A few of the guys claimed they saw markings on—some kind of tribal drawing. A wolf eating a child. But the ink bled off into the dirt before they could find me. Convenient.
I told them to save the ghost stories for the woods.
December 1934
The basement is finished—ahead of schedule, no less. I gave the crew a holiday bonus to celebrate. None of them cared. They had their heads down, still muttering about the damn drawing. I told them they’d better get their heads out of their ass over Christmas break or they could find a new job.
Next week, not a single one of them showed up for work.
Their wives haven't seen them either. The police have no leads. It's like they vanished into thin air. Pricks. Had to hire an entirely new crew. The delay is costing me a fortune.
To top it off, my heart medication stopped working. Had to double the dose just to get through the day.
January 1935
The new crew doesn't know about the basement. I've decided to keep it that way.
At first, I told myself it was practical—they need to focus on the upper floors, no point distracting them. But the truth is... I like having a space that's just mine. Away from Charlene’s nagging. Away from the girls' constant arguing.
I've been spending more and more time down here, just me and the furnace. It's peaceful. Quiet.
I think I'll keep it secret a while longer.
November 1935
Construction is complete.
Haven't heard from that shaman again. He's probably dead. Or locked up. Either way, I find myself thinking about him sometimes. About what he said. This place being built on a burial site. Being a grave for something ancient.
I liked the idea so much I named the building after it.
Barrow Heights.
Clever, isn't it?
_____________________________________________
I flip the page sharply, jaw clenched. Mr. Hollis ignored every warning. Dismissed the shaman. Named the building after the very thing he was told to fear.
'You idiot,' I hiss under my breath. 'You damned arrogant fool.'
And then he had the nerve to—
'Inq-Inquisitor Jhune?'
I freeze.
That voice.
I know that voice.
I spin, flashlight sweeping the room. 'Tyler? Where are you?'
His voice is tinny, distant. 'In my room. You told me to stay put.'
The pipes.
He's speaking through the pipes.
‘Are you safe?' I ask.
'Yes.'
The word comes back thin and metallic. I press my forehead against the pipe, feeling the cold of it bite into my skin, trying to think. The watch is dead weight in my pocket, temporal interference reducing it to an expensive clock. My revolver is a wreck. Everything depends on the Pales finding this basement, and that depends on them learning how to reach a space that isn't supposed to exist.
Which means everything depends on a ten-year-old boy.
'Listen carefully, Tyler. I need you to do something for me.' I pause, choosing my words the way I’d choose footholds on a cliff. 'My colleagues are on their way. They'll be coming in through the back—the door by the dumpsters, the one you use for taking out the trash. I need you to meet them there and give them a message for me. Okay?'
'What message?'
'That the basement entrance is at the bottom of the stairwell. There are loose bricks behind the janitor’s locker. A hollow point in the wall. They'll need to pull them out to get through. Can you remember that?'
His voice splinters. 'Why can't you tell them?'
I close my eyes, take a deep breath. The pipe is frigid against my skull.
'You're still coming back… right? You promised you would.’
I want to lie.
I want to lie the way I lied to Abigail, telling him I’m keeping that promise no matter what, but the situation has changed. 'Tyler,' I say, and my voice comes out harder than I intend. 'This is important work. It's a grown-up's job, but I'm asking you because you're the only person who can do it. So tell me, can you be my partner in this or not?’
Silence. Then a sound like a boy swallowing a mouthful of nails.
'Yes, sir.’
'Good. Now get going.’
There’s the creak of a door. The patter of bare feet against carpet, growing fainter until the pipes swallow the sound entirely.
I exhale. It feels like the first breath I've taken in minutes.
I turn back to the journal, searching for answers.
Mr. Hollis wrote compulsively in the months following his discovery of the basement, and the entries read like a man walking downhill with his eyes shut. Each step a little faster. Each step a little less controlled. He writes about arguments with his wife. How the appetites that started as restlessness became something crueler. How the prostitutes came after the cruelty, and the violence came after the prostitutes, and how each new threshold made the last one feel as mundane as brushing his teeth.
Until he found the only thing left that could make him feel anything at all.
_____________________________________________
July 1935
I brought her into the basement and strangled her with the cord from the work lamp. It took longer than I expected. She fought. I hadn't anticipated how much I'd enjoy the fighting.
Afterward, the reality of what I'd done landed. A dead woman. In my building. The rot would start within days. The smell would climb the pipes, seep through the floorboards. Someone would notice.
But then the furnace coughed. Ash spat from behind the grating, and the iron door swung open on its own, the heat rolling across my face like a breath, and I understood then that I'd been chosen. That this basement wasn't a crawlspace beneath my castle, but a temple, and I its ordained keeper.
I've even stopped taking the pills.
A man sustained by God's hand has no use for a pharmacist's.
November 1935
The pipes have begun whistling. I've tightened every coupling, replaced every gasket. Still they whistle. None of the whores mention it. I'm beginning to think only I can hear it.
January 1936
The whistling won't stop. It seems to come from everywhere at once… the walls, the floor, the fillings in my teeth. I've torn apart half the plumbing and found nothing. No blockage. No leak. The pipes are clean.
And yet they sing.
And the more I listen, the more I like the song.
May 2nd, 1936
Florence followed me to the basement.
The damn girl saw everything. The dead woman. The bonesaw. The way the whore’s eyeballs melted when I tossed her head in the furnace.
I've locked Florence in one of the storage lockers. I’ll need to think about how to proceed.
May 2nd, 1936 (evening)
I've told Charlene that Florence and I are taking a camping trip upstate. A father-daughter bonding experience. Agnes begged to come. I told her no. Charlene didn't think it was wise for me to be in the wilderness with a heart like mine. She's right.
It's been murmuring again. Skipping. Pounding.
Almost like it's trying to outrun something I can't see.
May 5th, 1936
It’s been three days. Florence won't speak to me. But she speaks to something else. She says it’s angry at me, that it’s going to make me pay for what I’ve done.
I gave the brat crayons. I thought it might calm her, might give her something to fixate on besides the voices in her head. But every drawing is the same: me, standing over a woman's body. And beside me a dog with arms like dead branches.
Smiling.
May 7th
I told her the truth today.
I told her that God's patience has limits. That her tears are an insult. That she could stop crying and come home with me and never speak of what she'd seen, or she could stay here. Forever.
She looked at me with her mother's eyes and said the dog had already decided what would happen.
That it had been deciding for a long time.
I might have to kill her after all. I'll say the current took her while she was swimming in the river. That I tried to save her but my heart—
_____________________________________________
The entry ends mid-sentence, the final words disintegrating into a seismic scribble, the pen stroke dragging off the edge of the page.
I look down at Mr. Hollis.
One mummified arm is slung across the desk, the fountain pen still loosely cradled between his remaining fingers. The other hand is buried beneath his collar, clawed against his sternum.
His heart.
It must’ve given out.
I run my thumb across the edge of the journal, and a fine layer of his skin comes away on my fingers like candle wax. His pen hand is missing most of its fingers. They’ve been snapped off at the first knuckle.
Something took them.
Something that needed new wax for its crayons.
I wipe my fingers on the lapel of Mr. Hollis' brown suit, trying not to think about a creature hunched over a piece of paper in the dark with a corpse-wax finger, teaching itself to draw by copying the artwork of a six-year-old girl it let starve to death.
The whistling curls beneath the office door like a kettle left screaming on an empty stove.
It’s for me.
Taunting. Goading.
'Impatient, are we?' I mutter, dropping the journal.
I inch outside, flashlight catching the rusted husks of machines I couldn't name. My hand goes to my hip on instinct, fingers finding the warped barrel, the cracked grip.
Right.
My revolver is dead weight.
The whistle pulls me toward the far wall, where a steel door sits recessed between two dead boilers. The copper plaque reads:
STORAGE
The knob burns cold against my palm.
I push through.
The room beyond is full of wire-mesh cages, floor to ceiling, stretching deeper than my light can reach. Tenant storage. Built for the residents of Barrow Heights. Never used. The cages split my flashlight, each one throwing a lattice of wire across the next, the geometry multiplying until the darkness ahead looks crosshatched.
I move forward.
The path zigzags between in a pattern that feels deliberate, funneling me deeper into a maze. There's no sound. No whistling. No dripping. It's the loudest silence I've ever heard.
Agnes believed her sister was alive down here. Said she’d even spoken to her. I’m not sure what’ll be worse—finding Florence dead, or finding her alive, locked away and rotting in this dungeon for the better part of a century.
'Florence?' I hiss softly.
No answer.
The cages are identical. Empty. I'm starting to think the storage room is a dead end when my light catches something that isn't wire or rust.
Color.
A scrap of faded pink, thirty feet ahead, inside a cage on the left.
I break into a jog, the beam bouncing. My hand finds the wire mesh. Grips it.
‘Florence…’
There she is, sitting against the back wall.
Her pink dress has collapsed into a rumpled nest around a frame too small to belong to anyone over seven. Her skull rests in the cradle of her own lap, tilted slightly, as though she'd fallen asleep leaning against the bars and gravity had done the rest.
It’s just bones.
Her father's body had the furnace to mummify it. Hers didn’t. Whatever Agnes heard speaking to her, it wasn’t Florence.
I crouch, pressing my forehead against the cold wire.
'I'm sorry, kid.'
It's all I can offer.
Around Florence's remains, scattered like fallen leaves, are drawings. Dozens of them. The paper has yellowed to the color of weak tea, the edges curling inward, but the crayon lines are still vivid.
It's the same uncertain, trembling style from the stairwell. But these are different. There’s no color at all. It’s just black crayon, pressed so hard it gouged the paper. And in every single one, looming behind something—a pipe, a boiler, the bars of the cage itself—is the same shape.
Tall.
Hunched.
I reach through the gap beneath the cage. My fingers brush a drawing in the far corner; one that's been placed apart from the others, face-down, as though Florence herself had turned it over. As though she couldn't bear to look at it.
My skin makes contact with the paper, and the basement lurches.
The wire. The concrete. The bones.
All of it falls away.
And something terrifying rises in its place.