The sun rose gray and slow over South London, smothered by a sky that hadn't seen real light in days. In Rowan's flat above the forgotten bookshop, the blinds remained drawn, and the man inside hadn't moved from his chair in hours.
Rowan Creed was still staring at the reflection in the dark window. He wasn't sure if he was looking at himself or something else pretending to be him.
He hadn't slept. The cassette tape still sat in the recorder, its reel frozen in silence. He'd replayed it twice, then once more backward—nothing changed. But something inside him had.
It felt like the sound had gotten in. Like it had nested.
He finally rose, joints stiff, mind fogged. But his instincts were awake. They buzzed in his bones like they used to during stakeouts gone wrong. Whatever Altmann had uncovered wasn't just academic. It was dangerous. It was alive.
Rowan needed answers, and not the kind found in police records or academic journals. He needed someone who thought in spirals—someone who looked into the void professionally.
So, he went to the only place in London that still cataloged the fringe: The Whisper Library.
---
It didn't appear on maps. There was no sign. You had to know the rhythm of the knock, and even then, you had to be remembered.
Rowan stood beneath a viaduct near Waterloo Station, rain still whispering above. The entrance was hidden behind a rusted maintenance door, three stories down. A flickering red light above the arch marked the door, and beside it, a weathered speaker embedded in old stone.
He knocked once. Waited. Knocked again—twice quickly, then once long.
The speaker hissed.
A voice came through, dry and skeptical. "If this is another ghost-chaser, piss off. We're full up on nutters this week."
"It's Creed."
A pause.
"Rowan Creed?"
"Still allergic to sunlight."
Another pause. Then the door buzzed, and the lock thunked open.
Inside was a spiral staircase that groaned with every step, leading down into a cavern of organized madness.
The Whisper Library wasn't really a library. It was a bunker, carved into the old underground rail network—three levels deep, humidity-controlled, and packed with thousands of classified texts, banned manuscripts, occult blueprints, and recordings that were illegal to own, let alone digitize.
And at the heart of it all was Felix Marr.
He looked exactly the same—thin, pale, dressed in layers of brown corduroy and wool, hair a chaotic nest of white curls. His eyes were too sharp, too quick. Rowan remembered once calling him "a lizard dressed like a professor." Felix had been flattered.
"Creed," Felix said, stepping out from between shelves stacked with old CIA reports and Tibetan scrolls. "To what do I owe the existential dread this time?"
Rowan held up the cassette tape.
Felix stared at it. His smirk died.
"I need information," Rowan said. "About this symbol. And the frequency on the tape. Altmann's dead. He choked on it."
Felix took the tape gingerly, like it might still be warm. He traced the three-circle spiral with a gloved finger.
"Did he say anything before he died?"
"He was alone."
Felix didn't ask how Rowan knew that. He was already walking toward the audio lab.
---
The Whisper Library had a room called the Red Cell. It wasn't for the color—it was for what it did to your perception. The walls were lined with lead, the floors insulated. It was a soundproof chamber within a soundproof chamber, designed to safely study "active sound artifacts."
Felix inserted the tape into a digitizer. Monitors flickered to life. Waveforms bloomed and trembled. The sound was analyzed in layers: pitch, decay, harmonics, subharmonics.
"Jesus," Felix whispered. "These aren't just sounds. They're... instructions."
Rowan raised an eyebrow. "Instructions?"
Felix pointed at the spectrogram. "See these gaps? They're too regular to be random. They match with deep-structure language coding. Not speech. Transmission. Something old. Before syntax. This isn't just a message—it's meant to do something."
"To who?"
Felix didn't answer.
Rowan leaned in. "What do you know about something called the Black Signal?"
Felix flinched. Actually flinched. That told Rowan everything.
"Where'd you hear that?" Felix asked, voice low.
"Altmann's case led me there. So did Elias Vane."
Felix looked like he'd aged ten years in a blink. He stepped away from the machine, rubbing his temples.
"Rowan... the Black Signal isn't a myth. It's a memetic structure. A kind of thought-virus encoded into frequency bands. It doesn't just influence thought. It overwrites it."
"Like hypnosis?"
"Worse. Hypnosis suggests suggestion. This is something deeper. Foundational. It reshapes the logic of how you interpret reality."
Rowan let that sink in. "And the mirror symbols?"
Felix nodded slowly. "There was a theory—fringe even by our standards. Called the Mirror Code Hypothesis. Said that reflections weren't just visual copies. They were intersections—windows to adjacent resonance fields. Alternate versions of perception. Different layers of reality."
"You're telling me mirrors are portals now?"
"No," Felix said. "I'm telling you something on the other side is listening."
Rowan went still.
"Altmann must've crossed the line. Transcribed something into reality that was never meant to be spoken. Or seen."
"And Vane?"
Felix pulled out a dusty file from a locked drawer. Inside were Polaroids—images of symbols burned into concrete. Others showed rooms filled with shattered mirrors. One showed a man with no face—blurred entirely by distortion, like reality couldn't process his existence.
"Vane didn't go mad," Felix said. "He was trying to contain something. A pattern that spreads when looked at. When heard. A signal that mimics consciousness."
Rowan exhaled. "I need to know where he worked. His last lab."
Felix hesitated. "That file's been sealed since '99. You'd need clearance above mine."
Rowan smiled faintly. "You still keep that database of 'misfiled' documents?"
Felix sighed. "You'll owe me."
"I already do."
---
By nightfall, Rowan had the address.
It was in Wales.
Of course it was.
Beneath the Brecon Beacons, nestled in the hills where signals vanished and roads turned to gravel, stood a decommissioned Ministry research facility. Last used in 1999. Officially for "geospatial acoustic studies."
Unofficially? Something far stranger.
As Rowan packed a duffel bag with essentials—recorder, flashlight, encrypted laptop, flask of whiskey—he paused at the mirror by the door.
He stared at himself for a long time.
At least, he hoped it was himself.
Then he turned, locked the door, and left the city behind.
Behind him, inside the dark apartment, the cassette began to spin again.
All on its own.