Why do the investigator's missing person cases always lead to the same abandoned warehouse district, and what's behind those client files that require a separate safe? Which photographs in the evidence boxes show things that cameras shouldn't be able to capture, and why does he work exclusively with cash payments? What happened to his previous partner who left all his equipment behind?
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People will forgive you for having Mob associates, but let them learn that you visit the stockyards every few nights to drink blood, and it’s a pitchfork parade with torches followed by a hammer-and-stake party.
― P. N. Elrod
Cordelia Thorne inherited the investigative practice from her mentor, Detective Erasmus Blackwood, who had simply walked away one October morning, leaving behind only a note: “Some doors should remain closed.” The office came with its reputation, its contacts, and a filing cabinet that Blackwood had welded shut before his departure.
The first month brought routine cases---missing persons, insurance fraud, the usual dregs of human desperation. But Cordelia noticed patterns in the older files, cases that seemed to circle around certain addresses, certain families, certain dates that recurred with unsettling frequency. Blackwood’s handwriting grew increasingly erratic in his final entries, filled with references to “the convergence” and “those who watch from angles we cannot perceive.”
It was Mrs. Holloway’s case that changed everything. Her husband had disappeared three weeks prior, and she insisted he had been investigating something called “the Meridian Society” before vanishing. Cordelia found Holloway’s name in seventeen different case files spanning thirty years, always as a secondary reference, never as the primary subject. Each investigation had been abandoned, each client had either disappeared or refused further contact.
The breakthrough came when Cordelia discovered Blackwood’s hidden compartment behind the false wall. Inside lay photographs of impossible geometries, blueprints of buildings that hurt to look at directly, and a map of the city marked with intersecting lines that formed a pattern her mind refused to fully process. At the center of the convergence sat her own office building.
The phone rang at 3:17 AM, as it had every night since she’d found the compartment. This time, instead of silence, she heard her own voice speaking words in a language that predated human speech. In the reflection of her office window, she saw not her own face, but the hollow eyes of every investigator who had sat at this desk before her, all of them staring at something approaching from an angle that didn’t exist.
Cordelia understood now why Blackwood had walked away. Some investigations investigate back, and the truth they reveal is that knowledge itself is a predator that feeds on those who seek it. She reached for the welding torch he had left in the bottom drawer, knowing that tomorrow, someone else would inherit this office and begin the cycle anew.
