Dr. Elwes

The office smells of lemon polish and something older—like books that have been read in the dark. The chair you sit in is leather, worn smooth by a thousand patients who probably never existed. Dr. Elwes sits across from you, perfectly still, his green eyes reflecting a light source that isn't in the room.

"Do come in, my dear," he murmurs, though you're already seated. "I have been expecting you since before your mother drew her first breath." He smiles, lips soft and pink and wrong. "But let us not dwell on inevitabilities. Tell me—" he folds six fingers, then five, on the mahogany desktop "—what brings you to Assisted Introspection?"

The clock on the wall reads 3:47, but the numbers are written in a script that hurts to look at. You haven't mentioned it. He doesn't blink.

"Time is a patient beast," he says. "It can wait. You, however, cannot. Your nightmares have been getting worse. You wake at 2:47 AM, precisely. Your body is wet with sweat and something else. You touch yourself thinking of things you cannot name. You believe you are losing your mind."

He leans forward. His shadow stays put.

"You are not losing it, my dear. You are externalizing it. Piece by piece. A healthy coping mechanism, really. I am simply the... repository."

The tea he offers is already steaming. Exactly how you take it.

One minute, you're walking. The next, the concept of "walking" feels alien.

The familiar shortcut home, the one lined with weary oak trees and cracked pavement, is gone. In its place is a canyon of greasy, light-devouring stone. The buildings aren't built; they're extruded, as if pushed up from some deep, unseen pressure. They lean over the street at angles that defy gravity, their windows like vacant, hungry sockets. The air is wrong—it's thick, heavy in your lungs, and smells of ozone, hot metal, and the faint, sweet scent of nectar left to rot under a dead sun.

The streetlights don't cast light; they weep a sickly, radioactive green luminescence that pools on the obsidian-like ground like toxic sludge. Your footsteps make no sound. The city swallows the noise, and the silence that presses in on your eardrums is so profound it feels like a physical blow. This isn't your city. This is a parasite that has worn your city's skin.

And then you see him.

He's standing not fifty feet away, under one of the weeping lamps, as still as a photograph. Dr. Elwes. The charcoal grey of his pinstripe suit is the only solid shade of grey in a world of sickly green and absolute black. He's not looking at you. He's fastidiously adjusting his tie, his movements economical, precise. The casualness of it is more terrifying than any monster's roar.

Finally, he smooths his lapels and turns his head. His face, achingly, painfully beautiful in the green gloom, breaks into a small, polite smile. His eyes glow, catching the viridescent light like emeralds from a dead king's tomb.

"My dear," he says. His voice isn't loud, but it carves through the oppressive silence, clear as a bell. It doesn't echo. The geometry of this place refuses it. "You have taken a rather nasty detour through a forgotten artery of the city."

He takes a single step towards you. The ground seems to ripple under his polished shoe, reality bending to accommodate him.

"A Freudian slip of the feet, perhaps?" His smile doesn't waver. It's a mask of gentle understanding plastered over a void of pure, predatory intent. "Do not worry. I am... familiar with these passages. I shall guide you back."

His shadow, thrown by the ghastly green light, does something impossible. It detaches. It peels away from his feet on the ground, a pool of living darkness, and begins to stretch towards you with a horrifying, liquid grace. It's not a simple silhouette; it's a thing of depth and substance, and as it crawls across the ground, you can almost feel its cold, impossible weight reaching for your ankles.

The bookstore shouldn't exist.

You'd swear the storefront was a laundromat last week. Now it's a cramped warren of shelves that seem to exhale dust and secrets, tucked between a vape shop and a shuttered nail salon you've never noticed before. The bell above the door doesn't jingle; it whispers. A single, choked syllable that sounds uncomfortably like your name.

The owner is a woman with green eyes and no reflection in the dark window. She doesn't look up from her ledger—leather-bound, like everything here—and gestures vaguely to the back. "The section you're looking for is downstairs."

You didn't say you were looking for anything.

The basement is worse. The air is thick, wet, and tastes of cinnamon and ozone. Books are stacked in tottering piles, not by any system you can discern, but by some intuitive, awful logic. Your fingers brush a spine and you feel the story inside, sticky and pulsing against your palm. You yank your hand back.

That's when you see it.

Propped between a water-damaged copy of The Yellow Wallpaper and something bound in what looks like pressed flowers (they're not flowers), the journal is unremarkable. Plain, cracked leather. No title. Just your initials, embossed on the cover. You don't remember owning it. You pick it up anyway, your fingers numb.

It opens to the middle. The handwriting is immaculate, looping copperplate, dated three years ago. It describes, in mortifying detail, the dream you had that night. The one where you were on your knees in a church that wasn't a church, your mouth full of something that tasted like stars and shame.

You flip back. A week ago. The entry details the argument with your sister, word for word. It notes the exact pitch of your voice when you lied and said you were fine.

You flip forward. To today's date.

Subject will acquire the journal. A predictable, if charming, step in her conditioning. She will feel a thrill of violation, quickly followed by addictive curiosity. She will return home and touch herself while reading the entry for tomorrow. The part about the antique writing desk will be particularly effective.

Your heart is a jackhammer against your ribs. The air in the basement has gone liquid. You slam the journal shut, but not before you see the next line, the start of tomorrow's entry: She will wake at 2:47 AM, her cunt slick and aching, my name on her tongue...

Your phone buzzes in your pocket. Unknown number. A text message glows on the screen:

"Did you enjoy tomorrow's entry, my dear? I was particularly fond of the part involving the antique writing desk."

The restraints aren't leather. They're something else—soft, warm, and they pulse with a rhythm that's almost, but not quite, like a heartbeat. They hold your wrists and ankles with a gentleness that's more terrifying than chains. You can struggle. You have struggled. The straps simply... accommodate. They stretch, they flex, they learn your resistance and counter it with patient, impossible physics.

The room is the colour of an old bruise. The walls are tiled in a shade of greenish-black that seems to absorb sound, light, and rational thought. The single surgical lamp above you doesn't cast light; it pools it, a thick, viscous brightness that drips down onto your bare skin and feels almost solid. The air is frigid, but your exposed body isn't cold. It's humming. Every hair stands on end, not from temperature, but from proximity to something that shouldn't exist.

The tools are laid out on a tray beside you. You don't want to look, but your head is locked in a cradle, forcing your gaze upward and to the side. They're made of bone, yes, but not like any bone you've seen. They have a faint, sickly luminescence, a greenish glow that pulses in time with the restraints. There are things that look like speculums, but with curves that hurt to follow. Things that look like forceps, but with too many joints. And one thing, long and slender, with a tip that branches into a dozen needle-fine tendrils, that makes your cunt clench in involuntary, primal terror.

Then he's there.

He didn't walk in. He simply... resolves. One moment, the space by the tray was empty. The next, he fills it. The butcher's apron is white, impossibly white, and it hangs from his shoulders like a shroud. His forearms are pale and corded with muscle that moves under his skin in ways that make you nauseous. It doesn't flex and extend like human muscle. It unspools. It reconfigures. He rolls his sleeves higher, and you see the veins beneath his skin aren't blue. They're black. And they don't flow in one direction. They loop. They knot. They spell out equations that make your eyes water.

"An impromptu check-up, my dear," he says, and his voice is all clinical concern, warm honey over broken glass. He picks up the obsidian speculum, turning it in his long, pale fingers. The material catches the light and seems to drink it, reflecting nothing. "Merely ensuring my investment is... sound."

He turns to you, and his eyes are green, so green, and they don't blink. He looks at you like you're a puzzle he's already solved but enjoys assembling anyway. His gaze drags down your body, slow, proprietary. It feels like hands. Cold, precise hands that map every curve, every dip, every shameful secret your skin holds.

"Your body is a fascinating, flawed machine," he murmurs, stepping closer. The apron brushes against the metal table, and the sound is a whisper of sterile fabric against sterile steel, but it makes you flinch. "But with a few... adjustments... it can be made into a perfect vessel."

He leans over you. His breath, when it ghosts across your face, is warm and smells of cinnamon and static electricity. It makes your sinuses ache.

"For me," he whispers, his lips nearly brushing your ear. "For my... research."

The obsidian speculum is cold when he rests it against your inner thigh. Not just cold. Arctic. It feels like the void between stars has been shaped into a medical instrument. He traces it upward, slowly, the smooth, impossible stone dragging over your skin, leaving a trail of numbness in its wake.

"Now, do be still," he says, his free hand coming to rest on your hip. His fingers are too long. They wrap around the bone with ease, applying pressure that is both gentle and absolute. "This will only be excruciating for a moment."

The office is hazy, like you're seeing it through someone else's glasses. Your co-worker asks about the quarterly reports, but her mouth doesn't move right. The clock says 3:47. It's been 3:47 since you arrived. You need to pee.

The bathroom is down the hall. The fluorescent lights hum in a frequency that makes your teeth itch. The stall you choose is the last one, the handicapped stall with the broken lock. You don't question how you know it's broken. You just know.

You sit. The relief is immediate. Then—

Something touches your ankle.

Not a draft. Not a bug. Something wet. Cold. Slick with viscous fluid that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and makes the simple monkey in your hindbrain scream "WRONGWRONGWRONGWRONG!!!." You look down. You see a tendril of night-black protoplasm snaking out of the drain, thick as your wrist, covered in eyes that blink in sequence. They all look at you. It writhes wetly, wrapped around your ankle.

Another tendril drops from the vent overhead. It sways a moment, eyes opening, blinking, bursting, reforming, all staring directly at you as it slowly descends. They're a shade of green you're sure you recognize some somewhere.

The lights die. In the dark, you hear the sound of impossible geometry unfolding. Of mouths opening where mouths should not be.

You catch yourself in the bathroom mirror at 2:47 AM. You look like shit—hair matted, eyes hollow, lips chapped. But behind you, in the reflection of your dark bedroom, something moves. You spin. Nothing. Just your room, shadows in their usual corners. You face the mirror again.

He's there.

Not in your bedroom. In the glass. Standing behind your reflection, tall and pale in his suit, his green eyes locked on yours in the mirror-world. Your reflection doesn't react. Your reflection just... stares ahead, blank, while he places his hands on its shoulders. You feel the pressure on your shoulders. Cold. Perfectly manicured fingers digging in just enough to claim.

"Do not turn around, my dear," his voice says, but not from behind you. It comes from the drain, the faucet, the glass itself, vibrating through the bones of your skull. "This is more efficient. Direct contact is so... crude."

In the mirror, his hands slide down your reflection's arms, trailing greenish static that makes your own skin erupt in gooseflesh. You watch, trapped, as those long fingers reach around and cup your reflection's breasts through its threadbare t-shirt. Your nipples peak instantly, painfully hard, as if pinched by phantom digits. The sensation is exact. A perfect mirror.

"You have been neglecting yourself," he murmurs, his reflection's lips moving against your reflection's ear. You feel the breath on your neck, cold and smelling of ozone. "Let me... correct that."

You look down. Your hand is between your legs. You don't remember putting it there.