Why do the evidence lockers keep rearranging themselves? What causes the typewriters to type by themselves? How do the shadows move between cells? Why do the night shift officers all request transfers? What secrets lie in the sealed case files?
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None of this is his fault, but here we sit in the police station.
― Theresa Braun, Under the Bed Vol. 04 No. 08
Detective Mills had worked the graveyard shift at Arkham Station for three months when he first heard the scratching. It came from the evidence room—a methodical scraping against metal that made his teeth ache. The duty sergeant, a grizzled man named Cox, just shrugged when Mills mentioned it.
“Old building settles funny,” Cox said, not meeting his eyes. “Don’t go looking for trouble you can’t handle, rookie.”
But Mills was curious by nature, and the scratching grew louder each night. It wasn’t rats—he’d checked. It wasn’t pipes—the maintenance crew found nothing. It was deliberate, purposeful, like morse code tapped out by desperate fingers.
On a particularly quiet Thursday, Mills decided to investigate. The evidence room door stood slightly ajar, though he distinctly remembered Cox locking it. Inside, case files lay scattered across the floor, their manila folders torn open like hungry mouths. Evidence bags had been shredded from within, their contents missing or… changed.
The scratching came from the far corner, where a steel filing cabinet stood. Its drawers hung open, and Mill’s flashlight beam revealed deep gouges in the metal—claw marks that spiraled inward in nauseating patterns. At the bottom drawer, something pale writhed in the shadows.
Mill’s radio crackled with static, then Cox’s voice: “Mills? Mills, do NOT go in that room. We’re coming down.”
But Mills was already looking. The thing in the drawer wasn’t evidence—it was producing it. Organic, wet, and wrong, it birthed artifacts of impossible crimes: weapons that couldn’t exist, photographs of places that shouldn’t be, testimonies written in languages that predated human speech.
The station’s missing officers hadn’t disappeared, Mills realized with dawning horror. They’d been filed away, catalogued as evidence of their own investigations into cases that should never have been opened. Their final reports lay before him now, each ending with the same scrawled warning: “The station keeps what it catches.”
The scratching stopped. In the sudden silence, Mills heard Cox’s footsteps on the stairs, accompanied by others—too many others for the small night crew. As the lights flickered and died, Mills understood that some cases never get solved because the evidence room was never meant to store proof of crimes.
It was meant to contain them.
