"He knows you're here now."
The words hung in the air like the smoke of an extinguished candle. The silence that followed wasn't empty—it was full. Thick with implication. Heavy with watching.
Elena's voice had been calm. Flat. Not hers. It had lacked that tremble Elise had come to recognize in the girl—lacked the fragile vulnerability of someone healing. Instead, it had carried weight. Like a verdict.
And then the girl's head lolled back onto the pillow, her lips parting with a soft exhale.
Unconscious again.
Or something worse.
Elise stood slowly, every nerve alive with dread. "Elena?" she whispered, leaning close.
The girl didn't move.
Her breathing was shallow, but there.
Elise didn't shout. She didn't run for Greaves or Margery. Instead, she did what she had learned to do in the face of the impossible.
She wrote.
Patient: Elena (alias)
Incident log – 2:47 AM
Subject awoke briefly from sleep.
Uttered coherent phrase: "He knows you're here now."
Intonation: not her own.
Voice: adult, male, unidentifiable accent.
No emotional expression.
Immediately returned to unconscious state.
Pulse steady. Temperature low. Eyes did not react to light.
She closed the journal softly, her hand trembling only slightly.
Then, with resolve, she rose and left the room.
The Holding House's corridors were darker than usual. The gaslights burned lower, as though the very air had thickened. The wind outside had stilled, and Elise realized how dependent she had become on its sound. Without it, the building felt tomb-like.
She went to the records room.
It was kept locked, but she had stolen the key from Greaves's desk that afternoon while he spoke to a visitor from the parish.
She inserted the key quietly and opened the heavy wooden door.
Inside, the smell of old paper and damp wood filled her lungs. Floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with patient files lined the walls. Metal drawers bore brass nameplates, some scratched, others covered in dust.
She searched under "M."
Marlowe.
There were no records.
Not even for her grandfather, whom she now suspected had been buried here under strange circumstances.
She checked again.
Nothing.
She turned to "E." No files for "Elena," either.
She moved to the bottom drawer labeled "Miscellaneous – 1890–1930."
Inside, beneath a layer of mouse-chewed folders, she found something strange.
A sealed envelope, brittle with age.
Her name was written on it.
Dr. Elise Marlowe
Her blood ran cold.
The handwriting was angular, formal. Inked in black.
There was no mistaking it: this letter had been addressed to her. And yet it was dated—
April 2, 1911
Exactly one hundred and fourteen years ago.
She stared at it for a full minute before finally breaking the seal.
Inside was a single sheet of parchment.
Dr. Marlowe—
If you are reading this, it means you have returned. You always do.
You will have questions. You always do. But be warned: the answers are not linear. The truth here folds like mist, layering over itself until time bends beneath the weight of memory.
Elena is not the patient.
She is the door.
And if the Watchers have begun to speak through her, then you are already too deep.
You must not trust Greaves.
You must not enter the Well Room.
And you must not read the black journal.
Not yet.
We failed before. We may fail again. But if there is still a sliver of time between fog and fall—
Find me.
I am still here.
—L. T. Marlowe
Elise dropped the letter.
Her hands were shaking.
This wasn't a hoax.
It couldn't be.
The letter had been written over a century ago… by her great-grandfather, Lysander Thorne Marlowe, the very man whose grave she'd stood above that morning.
She retrieved the letter, folded it carefully, and tucked it into her coat pocket.
There was more at stake here than one girl. More than the asylum. More than Briarwall itself.
This was legacy. This was blood.
And somewhere beneath the madness, her family had known something dark enough to bury with iron, salt, and silence.
As she exited the records room, she heard something peculiar.
Music.
Faint.
A piano.
But not from the main parlor. Not from any room she'd yet visited.
It came from below.
From beneath the Holding House.
She descended the main staircase, but instead of stopping at the entry hall, she took the servant path—an old, narrow stair that looped downward into what had once been a wine cellar.
There, hidden behind crumbling barrels and an overturned table, was a trapdoor.
Unlatched.
The music stopped.
She opened it.
Wood groaned.
Darkness greeted her.
She stepped through.
A ladder led down into pitch.
She descended slowly, one rung at a time, until her boots touched stone.
A corridor stretched ahead, narrower than before.
Lit by faint blue gaslight.
She followed it.
Paintings lined the corridor walls. Old portraits in antique frames—men and women in black garb, none smiling. Their eyes followed her.
She reached the end and found a door with a brass plate:
THE WELL ROOM
Her pulse spiked.
Do not enter the Well Room.
She stared at the door.
Its edges were charred.
Her hand reached for the knob.
Then stopped.
Behind her, footsteps.
Not heavy.
Not hurried.
But deliberate.
Measured.
Elise turned.
No one.
But from deep in the corridor, she heard a whisper.
"Elise…"
And then the same phrase again, closer.
"Elise…"
The lights flickered.
She didn't wait to investigate.
She turned and ran, boots slamming against the stone floor, lungs seizing in panic.
Back to the ladder.
Up into the night.
The trapdoor slammed behind her.
She didn't stop until she reached her room, breath ragged, heart in revolt.
Inside, Elena was awake.
Staring.
"Did you find it?" she whispered.
Elise froze. "What?"
Elena's eyes didn't blink.
"The black journal."