The silence after the knocking was heavier than the knocks themselves.
Arthur Hemlock stood frozen behind his apartment door, the cold peephole pressed to his forehead like the barrel of a gun.
Outside, the man did not move.
That empty smile remained carved on his face a smile that held no warmth or mockery, just a quiet acknowledgment of a truth Arthur didn't yet understand. His eyes, lost in the shadow of his hat, stared directly at the door, as if he could see Arthur clearly through the layers of wood and metal.
Moments passed that felt like an eternity. Each beat of Arthur's heart was an extra knock, an internal echo of the three he'd heard. A part of his mind, the detective part trained to analyze everything, was screaming questions Who is he? How did he know where I live? What's the connection between the seal on his hand and the paper in the box?
But the larger part of him, the fragile human part, whispered only one thing: Don't open it. Whatever is behind that door, it doesn't belong in your world.
Then, as slowly as he had appeared, the man began to move.
He turned away with perfect stillness, without any sign of haste or frustration. He walked down the hallway, gradually swallowed by the dim lighting and shadows until he disappeared around the stairwell. Arthur didn't hear his footsteps.
Arthur let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding and backed away from the door as if from the edge of a cliff.
His hands trembled. He leaned against the cold wall, feeling its chill seep through his shirt, an inadequate anchor in a sea of terror.
He stayed there for minutes, listening to the silence of the hallway, expecting the knocks to return at any moment. But nothing happened.
Finally, he gathered his courage and went to the living room window, which overlooked the street below. Through the cold glass, he saw the man exit the building's gate.
He walked calmly on the wet pavement, merging with the city's fog and the blur of streetlights, then vanished. As if he had never been there at all.
"This isn't real," Arthur said aloud, the words sounding strange in the apartment's silence. "It's exhaustion. Stress. A hallucination."
He went back to the door and turned the extra lock twice. The double click of the metal sounded flimsy and pathetic.
This door, made of solid oak, had been a symbol of his safety and privacy. Now, it felt like a paper curtain.
And when he lowered his eyes, his breath hitched.
Something was there, on his small doormat. Something that hadn't been there a minute ago.
A rectangular, white card had slid quietly under the door, coming to a rest in the exact center. He hadn't heard it slide. He hadn't seen it arrive. It had simply appeared.
Arthur knelt slowly, extending a trembling hand toward it. It wasn't an ordinary card. The paper was heavy and cold to the touch, its edges as sharp as a blade.
The writing on it was slightly raised, engraved in a glossy black ink that seemed to absorb the light around it. There was no person's name, but a place's name, with an address underneath.
The Archive of the Threshold
17, Stone Crow Alley
Nothing else. No phone numbers, no additional symbols. Just the identity of a mysterious place and an address in a part of the city he had never heard of.
Arthur jumped to his feet, the card in his hand feeling like a cold ember.
He paced his apartment like a caged animal. He went to the kitchen, put the kettle on the stove to make coffee, but forgot to turn on the burner. He returned to the living room, to his desk, where the wooden box waited silently, a witness to the collapse of his reality.
Logic screamed in his head: Call the police. Tell them an unknown person is harassing you. But what would he say? "Sir, I found an enchanted box, saw a memory that wasn't mine, and then a man with a ghostly smile visited me and left a card that appeared out of nowhere"? They would think he was insane or drunk.
And maybe he was.
He opened the box again. He picked up the pocket watch. 3:07. The same dead moment. He picked up the paper.
The ink was now completely black, as if it had fully awakened. Then he looked at the card in his other hand. The same strange feeling, the same sense that these were objects belonging to another layer of existence.
He sat down at his desk and turned on the lamp. He pulled out a blank sheet of paper and a pen. Like any investigation, he had to start by writing down the facts, even if those facts seemed impossible. He wrote at the top: "Case of the Box."
Then he began to document everything. The park, the box, the watch, the paper. When he got to the touch, he hesitated. How could words describe that sensation? He wrote:
"Touching the paper: Severe headache. Coldness. Sensation of being in another place."
He closed his eyes, trying to recall the details. It wasn't just a scream. There were other details, sensory details.
He added to his notes:
The smell of burning beeswax.
A smell similar to ozone (like the air after a lightning strike).
The feeling of rough wood under knees (someone else's knees).
Flickering candlelight, long, dancing shadows.
The sound of a little girl's scream. (Not just fear, but anger too).
As he wrote the word "anger," he felt it again. Not a vision, but just a faint trace, a cold prickle on the back of his neck, and a very light scent of wax that vanished in an instant. It was as if merely documenting the memory had triggered its echo.
He looked at what he had written. The words seemed both absurd and logical at the same time. The facts of a mad investigation. Then he placed the white card next to his paper.
"The Archive of the Threshold." Was it the name of an organization? A cult? Or just an elaborate trap?
He had two choices. He could burn the box, the paper, and the card, and try to forget everything. To return to his normal life of trivial infidelities and small lies, and hope that ghostly smile would never knock on his door again.
Or...
He could go to Stone Crow Alley. He could walk straight into the heart of this madness.
Arthur looked around his apartment. His books, his papers, his life built on logic and material evidence.
All of it had been breached. There was no longer a safe place. Silence no longer meant peace, and a locked door no longer meant security.
He had been given a piece of a puzzle, an invitation to follow it. And as a detective, there was a part of his soul—a stubborn, curious, and self-destructive part—that could not resist an unsolved mystery.
The fear hadn't vanished. It still congealed in his gut like a block of ice.
But something else began to form around it: a cold resolve. A resolve born not of bravery, but of necessity.
To find out what was happening, and to find out what had happened to him.
He picked up the white card. He felt its weight in his hand, a weight far exceeding its actual physical mass.
"Alright," he whispered to the empty room. "The Archive of the Threshold... whoever you are, I'm coming."