Adrian approached the body with the detached professionalism that had defined his career. He was a cartographer of the mind's aberrations, and this room, this man, was an uncharted territory of fear.
He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, the snap against his wrist a small, grounding sound in the oppressive silence.
"No visible trauma," he murmured, more to himself than to Detective Miles, who stood silhouetted in the doorway, his shadow stretching long across the sterile tiles.
"None," Miles confirmed. "No toxins, no signs of forced entry, no defensive wounds. He's clean. It's like his heart just… quit. The M.E. said his adrenaline levels must have been off the charts. Whatever he saw, or thought he saw, it literally frightened him to death."
Adrian leaned closer, studying the victim's face. The man was perhaps in his late forties, with the anonymous features of someone who could pass through a crowd unnoticed.
But his eyes as they were the epicenter of the scene. They were not merely wide; they were stretched, the sclera stark white against bloodless skin, pupils dilated to black voids that seemed to swallow all the light in the room.
They were not looking at the ceiling. They were looking through it, at something infinitely distant, monstrously near.
He had seen fear in his patients be the frantic, darting eyes of paranoid schizophrenics, the hollow terror of catatonia, but this was different.
This is not the fear of a perceived threat, but more this is the fear of a confirmed reality, a truth so absolute, so inexorably malignant, that it had torn apart the vessel that contained it.
Adrian ran a gloved finger along the man's arm. The skin was icy, rigor mortis fully set. "When was he found?"
"This morning. One of the survey teams found him. The hospital was supposed to be sealed. We don't know how he got in. We don't even know who he is. No wallet, no ID, no labels on his clothes."
Adrian straightened, his gaze sweeping the small, tiled room. It was a sensory deprivation chamber in all but name. White tiled walls, white tiled floor, white ceiling. No windows.
A single, bare bulb overhead cast a flat, shadowless glare. The bed was bolted to the floor. The door was heavy, solid steel.
"This room was designed for isolation,"
Adrian said, his voice quieter, as if speaking louder might stir unseen things. "Maximum-security observation. You put a patient in here to strip away all external stimuli, to see what the mind produces on its own."
"So you think he was a patient here? From back in the day?" Miles asked, unease creeping into his tone.
"Unlikely. Look at his clothes. Modern. His dental work, from what I can see, is recent."
Adrian paced the small space, his footsteps echoing unnaturally, each tap on the tiles like a warning.
The déjà vu was a low, insistent hum beneath his thoughts. He felt a phantom ache in his left shoulder, a memory of an injury he had never sustained. He ran his hand along the wall opposite the bed, the one his subconscious insisted held a door.
The tiles were smooth, cold, unbroken. There was nothing there, and yet the feeling persisted, a ghost limb of architecture, pressing against his perception like a living thing.
He pressed his ear to the wall. Expected nothing, maybe distant police chatter. Instead, a faint, rhythmic sound reached him a soft, dry rustling, like brittle paper shuffled by invisible hands. He recoiled slightly.
"Hear something, Doc?"
"Probably just the building settling," Adrian said, voice taut, unwilling to give the illogical a name.
He turned back to the body. "The man dies of fright in an empty room. The question isn't what killed him, but what he perceived. A powerful, internally generated hallucination, triggered perhaps by the environment itself. The stress of being trapped here, the silence, the unnatural emptiness… it could push a mind past the edge."
He constructed a rational framework, a diagnostic box to contain the impossible. It was a fragile barrier against the encroaching wrongness.
"So he just imagined himself to death?"
Miles sounded skeptical, though his eyes flicked nervously to the stark ceiling.
"The mind is the most dangerous weapon in existence, Detective. It can create realities more vivid than this one. And under extreme duress, it can turn that power against itself. The physiological response to a perceived threat is identical to the response to a real one. The heart doesn't know the difference between a real tiger and a hallucinated one."
Adrian felt a flicker of satisfaction. A tidy explanation. A place to put the wrongness. The hospital's oppressive unease could be rationalized away as a simple environmental stressor.
He spent another hour in the room, meticulously documenting every detail: temperature, light levels, acoustic properties. He treated the room as a neurological instrument, a machine built to induce terror.
He scraped microscopic particles from the walls, collected dust samples. He was a scientist, and this was data. Everything could be explained. Everything had to be explained.
As he prepared to leave, his gaze fell upon the victim's left hand, clenched into a tight fist. Something the initial examiners had missed.
"Has anyone checked his hand?" Adrian asked.
Miles shook his head. "We were waiting for the full forensics team."
Carefully, Adrian took a pair of forceps and began to pry the cold, stiff fingers open.
Each finger resisted, stubborn, unyielding. One by one, they uncurled, revealing the palm. Something lay inside. Not a note, not a key, not a clue anyone could recognize.
But a small, perfectly smooth black stone, worn as if by water. Unremarkable in every way except one. As Adrian gazed at it, cradled in the dead man's palm, a sudden, dizzying vertigo seized him.
The déjà vu crested, overwhelming. The scent of ozone stung his nostrils. For a heartbeat, the white tiled room vanished, replaced by a vision of a vast, dark shoreline beneath a sky alive with swirling, unfamiliar constellations.
The black stones stretched endlessly across gray sands. Cold, alien water lapped at his ankles, carrying a whisper of something alive, something watching.
The vision was gone as abruptly as it came, leaving him breathless, heart hammering against his ribs, palms slick with sweat. He stumbled back, clutching the doorframe.
"Doc? You okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."
Adrian stared at the stone. His careful rationalizations crumbled.
"I have," he whispered, voice trembling despite himself, the words slipping before he could stop them.
"I think I've seen his."