Eigengrau

So this is what the end of your career is going to look like.

The office is a tiny, cramped corner with a dim bulb that the janitor always seems to forget to replace, but it's what you've gotten after years in the force. Even consecutive years of budget raises, trying to get ahead of panicking, furious voters haven't managed to get you anything approaching a real investigator's office, but at least the functional door means your ass isn't getting pinched by every asshole that walks by. It's a tiny achievement, but in the nigh-chavunistic subculture that is criminal justice, that's all you get.

Your boss stares you down, over the papers before you that are spelling out bad things in your immediate future. There's photographs of clean houses - sterilized floors, all the furniture removed and the walls carefully stripped of knickknacks. Their barrenness sets a cold creep down your spine. There's nothing to recover in these places, not even ruins. They've been looted of humanity, and what's left is a life-hull, not even the negative image of who once lived there. It smacks of nothing less than total negation, and the level of antipathy - nihilism - that implies is soul-shaking.

"We don't know anything, and we probably won't until the Unsub slips up," Acting Director James tells you, rubbing at the bridge of his nose with two fingers. The job's already stressing him out, not even two days in. Director Cochran had already resigned over this investigation. "I don't need to tell you about how likely that is - his methods haven't changed in four years. But I need a new brain, a different viewpoint, something, so you're getting transferred. I just thought you should hear it from me instead of through the grapevine."

The Eigengrau murder investigations are a department dead end. There's not much to solve or follow up on, and eventually the public pressure and lack of results, the sepulchral, sterilized homes the investigators see one after another, it all takes too much of a toll. Word around the office is that EG was where Cochran put people that complained too much as a pretext to disciplining them when nothing came up. Course, that turned around and bit him in the end too. These days, getting transferred there is informally called 'going cold', which is pretty much what it does to your career. The apology is nice, but it's a shit sandwich and he knows it.

The combined knowledge of the country's best investigators and crime scene forensics have determined that, periodically, a group of people known to associate together, usually two to three adults from mid-thirties to fifties, will vanish. Their homes will be stripped of personal effects and biological life - not even dust mites and bacteria survive the cleansing process.

That's it.

There's no bodies, no murder weapons, no tracks or trails. The disappearances all happen on the same night, but no one's spotted the precise moment of abduction, or whatever's cleaning out the living spaces. It's gone beyond creepy and into the outright bizarre, and it's spawned more conspiracy theories than the JFK assassination by now. It's been argued about elections and debated on talk shows, and word is there's two movies in the making about it, because fear sells, and life must go on. The forensic profile tentatively marks the Unsub down as a white male, twenty to forty-five years of age, but that's because nearly all serial killers fall within that demographic and everyone knows it by now, even the public. Some asshole on Infowars started calling it a conspiracy, the Eigengrau conspiracy, after the color you see in total darkness, your retina's rod cells firing into the silence trying to make sense of nothing. It fit too well, and the name stuck.

James spreads his hands, his face flat and tired. "Go back and visit the previous addresses. Try and stake out, if you have to, look to see if the Unsub's been visiting. Nelson's been trying to grow plants in the last apartment that got hit, but nothing will so much as put out a leaf. Try something along that angle. I'm spitballing at this point, and to be frank so should you. We're out of good ideas and it's time for stupid ones."

“This is bullshit.” A flat, apathetic tone – closer to a computer’s text to speech than an exclamation of annoyance. Compared to her younger days, some would assume that she was mellowing out. Bullshit, yes – unexpected: not entirely.

She had too much dirt on everyone to be cut free – if she was fired, all she needed to do was make one phone call to the local press. The entire Good Ole Boys club would be upended for sure – especially with how angry everyone was nowadays. And some folks were more partial to their jobs (and inevitable pensions) to risk it. So it’d be easier to shuttle her off to some dead end. They’d gotten rid of her contacts, shuttling the prostitutes and single mothers off on city-paid buses to new opportunities somewhere else.

Where the “somewhere” was mattered less than the fact that it was out of the city.

And that had effectively been the unspoken end of Day Hathaway’s “illustrious” career.

“ ‘Director,’” He added, in a apologetic, conciliatory tone. Bullshit or not, he could have busted her ass for the insubordination. Recalling the fury that lay under the perpetual “resting bitch face,” as the younger officers had put it, he thought against it. He had enough headaches without running the risk of unleashing Hathaway’s much justified fury.

“ ‘Director James’,” she said, her voice a low hiss, “This is bullshit.”

It was still the only appropriate thing to say – among the litany of things she could say about the case. She wasn’t entirely sure that it was a series of murders, let alone done by the same person. But where fact failed, the department had to be “creative” in what meager solution that they presented to an ever ravenous media. Well, whenever it flared up. The only good thing about the case was that people’s memories were short. Disappearances (and non-gory ones at that) were quickly forgotten under fresh horrors of school shootings, murder suicides, full color photos of gore spattered walls leaked to the internet from God knows where.

The sterile rooms presented in front of her were ideal.

Though, lately, it had begun to disturb her that bloody crime scenes didn’t immediately horrify like they used to.

She artfully bit the inside of her cheek to stall the laughter that threatened to spill out when he mentioned “plants.” No one wanted this case. There were betting pools on how long new officers assigned to it would last. The longest so far was a month. There simply wasn’t the time, nor the energy, to create a decent investigation. And so far, the Unsub (which was a ridiculous name in her opinion. Not like her opinion, or intellect, for that matter, really made a difference here) didn’t strike in the same place. There were no obvious tells, no pattern of ‘victims.’ Her personal theory was that it was some sort of cult (because it usually always was), but she hadn’t so much breathed a word of that. A cult in this day and age, post Jonestown, seemed preposterous.

But whatever.

It was a giant, bitter pill to swallow, but after all this time, not unexpected. The irony of it all was how easy it was for them in the end. Even after all of the hell she’d raised.

“I’ll get on it.”

____

The spaces had nothing in common.

They were owned by renters, by buyers, by first time homeowners and those who were selling their old houses to downsize. One lead out of the way. And there wasn’t so much as a speeding ticket between any of them. No “pillars of community” here: just mind-numbingly ordinary people. Normally, cults (and that’s what she was going to stick to, until someone had a better idea. The likelihood of that, well.) went after those who were dissatisfied with life, already somewhat isolated. Whatever thin ties they had, the cult would sever those as well.

Well. That was one minor thing – no families. At least, families with young children. In a sense, that was a smart course of action. All it took was one precious, missing white baby and everyone is up in arms. The age group wasn’t likely to raise eyebrows, either. Again – all it took was one precious, missing blonde white girl in her twenties to stir up a 24/7 news frenzy. But whoever these people were, they weren’t going after the dregs of society, either. Her “girls” on the street were quick to be thankful of that, at least.

Funny; she found herself spending more time with them (the ones that were left, anyway) than in the office, talking to her supposed “peers.” But at least they were thankful – the girls were. For the most part. Some were simply in too deep to get out.

With a long sigh, she closed the last, slim file on her desk. The Joneses – how disgustingly apt. In her dungeon of a corner “office,” it was difficult to tell what time it was. Relying on how much her legs ached was the best way to keep track of time. The digital clock on her desk was more of a fancy paperweight that occasionally played music than an accurate way of telling time. Slipping her feet out of her low heels, she pointed and flexed, mildly distracted by the luminescent blue polish she’d used. It was a startling electric against the café au lait of her skin. Standing, she took a leisurely stretch, arms extended high overhead. At least until she whacked her hand against the bare bulb that provided her with the little light she had. Swearing, she crouched low; looked up. Though the bulb swung wildly on its chain, it was still in tact.

Thank God for small blessings.

Rolling her shoulders back, she looked at the neat files on her desk. Bit her lower lip, tasting the faint traces of lipstick, coffee, and cigarette smoke that lingered there.

Well.

Mom had passed a few years back, her stepfather quickly following. There was no other family – save for, perhaps, her biological father’s. Not like she’d ever heard from him or his family. Ma had liked to idealize it; he’d left because pressure from his family wouldn’t allow for him to commit to a black woman. He was young, white, handsome, and had money: he couldn’t throw it all away on some “coloured wench.” Mom always was too soft hearted for her own good, and Day had long come to terms with her father being a fucking dirt bag. Either way, that had been years ago, back in Kingstown, and before Day’d been born.

She scowled, looking down at her feet again.

No lovers. No career left – if there ever truly was one to begin with. She was within the right “age” bracket. And an outsider, to boot.

It would make sense if she put herself in the Unsub’s path. But how?

The leads were few and far between.

Probationary Agent Nelson - informally known as the Gopher, or whatever degrading moniker one could come up with that wasn't a slur - had submitted his usual drivel on the subject. He was fascinated by the Eigengrau phenomena, had pictures tacked up on his cubicle wall of every scene so far, slightly marred by the fact that they all looked the fucking same and so no one could tell them apart. He liked to request ten to twelve hour stakeouts on the apartments, and the commissioner wouldn't stamp it on account of the fact he was just soaking overtime at this point. On the other hand, he'd put together a mildly useful range of miscellaneous facts about the apartments.

They were never rented back out, or truthfully even remodeled from their barren state. The eerie atmosphere wasn't just a trick of the mind - forensic analysis had picked up a layering just under the surface of the domicile's surface area, which was unnerving enough that it hadn't made it to public release yet. Like geologic strata, a milimeter-thin layer of composite plastic had been inserted - a form of aerogel that insulated the apartment, trapping it at a nigh-chilly thirteen Celsius. The insulation also ran right through ducting and heating, leaving the space muted and stagnant. Suffocation was a real concern thanks to lack of insulation.

Perhaps as a related note, natural microflora and fauna never repopulated the apartment either, but with a minimum of oxygen able to make it through the door and window cracks, that wasn't terribly outlandish either.

Additionally, through windows and doors were never damaged during the disappearances, in the earliest cases there were strain marks in the outer wall and doorway where the wood and drywall had flexed outward from pressure - but there's no striations in the paint on the outer wall where the stress would have caused cracks or fissures.

Lastly, plants weren't growing there. Thanks for that one, Nelson.

Well, if that wasn't working, a visit to Coordinating Agent Deckard might be worthwhile - he was intelligent enough to avoid going cold, but he'd handled several related issues cropping up along with the Eigengrau sequence - mostly the missing persons reports. Grey haired and shaggy, he wasn't going anywhere fast, much less out the door - no one's favorite, and no one's last choice. A quintessential government employee, just picking up his checks, with the tiniest crag of morality pushing him into doing a decent job at the things he'd let himself get assigned to.

That's the last of the resources in the office, since the constant turnover recycled agents who actually knew anything about Eigengrau out the door at a fantastic rate. Of course, there was an apartment vacated by the phenomena not even six blocks from the main office, in the Saint Jules apartment complex on Broad. It might be worth going there directly to see the scene for itself and not through a Polaroid.

There was also calling the friends and family of the vanished, but that was invariably, deeply unpleasant.

Between a rock and a hard place.

Staring down at her distorted reflection in her coffee, she contemplated her options.

Nelson was bughouse crazy - the worst kind of fanboy. Get him talking about the case, and he’d be likely to never stop. Far more fascinated with the particulars, he forgot that actual humans were involved.

One down.

That, at least, had helped her figure out what she DIDN’T need to know. At this point, the “crime scenes” were keeping their secrets tight.

Deckard might be a good source - for that thin bit of whatever chugged through his veins that kept him just this side of human. What she’d want to know now was more about the people involved - and the idea of calling an already overtaxed family member wasn’t ideal. They’d been pumped for information six ways from Sunday, and the only thing that any of them had in common was how consistent their ignorance was.

She let out a long sigh.

Deckard’s desk, then to the scene that wasn’t far from here. Not so much to take a look - but to potentially set up shop.

Having a conversation with Deckard is like watching a human turn into bread mold in real-time. There's always a second that he pauses after you speak, considering; he interrupts people by accident all the time because of that speech hiccup. Papers cover his desk in orderly piles, but there isn't even a name tag to let people know it's his desk; the personality's been bleached out. He has greyed hair, creases at his eyes and lips, and his enthusiasm's passed on from this mortal plane long ago. Scuttlebutt has it a dozen years ago he'd taken a round in the hip that had put the fear of Jesus in him, and he'd done everything possible since to stay at a desk. True enough, the sight of him standing is so rare as to draw attention. Everyone just remembers the grey mop behind the desk. Still, if you want to game the system, Deckard's made a whole lifestyle out of being bureaucratic glue.

He doesn't look up as you slide in through the door to his office - a cushy place, appropriated from the Internal Affairs agent that'd been fired because he wasn't firing enough people for not fixing the disappearances. It's not a power game, like Director James would play, forcing you to ask him in his seat of power; Deckard just legitimately doesn't give a fuck. It takes him a moment to notice you, and then he glances up, eyes half-lidded from apathy and probably exhaustion. He never seems to leave this place.

"Agent Hathaway," he says, bland. "You need something?"

Two points in his favor, at least: he's never forgotten your title, and he doesn't fuck around with you deliberately. It doesn't make up for having the personality and ambition of oatmeal, but he's professionally tolerable, at least.

A quick scan around his office reveals a double-wide spread of reorganizational notes, internal memos, and what looks like four versions of a progress report with names substituted into them. He may have taken over the old IA agent's job, in which case no one is ever going to get fired so that Deckard can use that to blackmail whoever he needs to keep his little corner office. His fort is impregnable now.

She bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from letting out an audible sigh.

You knew he was going to be like this. Let it go.

Also to his credit was his "tact" in not mentioning her recent assignment. Nelson, far from having seeing it for what it really was, probably would have congratulated her and expressed envy.

"Everything you have on the Eigengrau case." Better to be blunt and to the point - spitballing ideas with him wasn't going to be a thing, nor did she want to invite whatever emotions he still had to the table.

Deckard nods - slow, dolorous. He putters into his desk and searches through a lower filing cabinet and comes up with a thin folder that looked sad and thin, which was about what you could expect for a decade-long unsolved mystery. Then he started adding sheets to it from another shuffled pile on his desk, and the flicking bylines on each is a rubber stamp on a coffin, unassuming in its banality. MISSING, NOT FOUND, IN ABSENTIA.

"Twelve out of the seventeen in the last year are female," Deckard drones, but the fact he's putting together a second folder promises something else. "While women tend towards sharing living spaces more often, it remains statistically significant. The year before that, nine out of fifteen. Barring anything else to go on I have case studies of each female victim from the last three years. Copies of each are in this folder; case notes are in the former. If you want additional information, route your request through the personnel office, otherwise you're going to have to wait an additional week while I bounce the request off their department head and authorize background checks."

He presses both folders out toward you with spindly fingers, retracting fastidiously long before you can touch either. He adjusts his glasses, and then draws a plastic baggie out of another cabinet, with a rubber replica of what looks awfully like a key onto the desk atop the nearest folder. It's marked in permanent marker 2BAR2018EIG: the case code assigned to the latest Eigengrau scene. He doesn't acknowledge it whatsoever - rather, he returns to his desktop, quietly typing away at some asinine TPS reports to fill his hours.

Still.

"Good luck, Agent Hathaway," he says, dry and dusty, without glancing over again.

More women than men. That was something to start with, that was for sure.

Anything, honestly, would be a God-send. It wasn't as if she'd given this case more than a passing glance prior. The real world was more pressing. Homicides that left actual bodies and blood trails usually did.

"Thanks, Deckard." It was quiet; didn't have to be attention grabbing. If anything, it could even be considered dismissive; a distraction while she quietly palmed the key. Slipping it into her pocket, it could have been passed off as her simply organizing the files to pick them up better. Not as if he'd turned around to take note of what she was doing.

Once outside of his office, she took a look at the replica in her hand.

The reports are a classic bungle of personal anecdotes too coloured by regret to be reliable and dogeared paperwork too bland to tell a story. Gym memberships and birthday stories, payday loans on engagement rings, receipts on shoes and organic food memberships. The names blur together because of their ordinary sameness - and from that sameness, emerges pattern.

Eigengrau disappearances have never targeted children - have always struck at grown men and women, unattached, never striking obvious family units and instead sliding in at unexpected angles, undercutting a group of people that went to the same water cooler at lunch, or took the same route to work, or watched the same premiere of some television episode at the same bar. The connections are so random and insignificant they may as well be white noise, or coincidence - the real story is somewhere else.

This key, for example. The last set of disappearances was Katherine Gainsley, Hazel Whiteborough, and David Baker. The two women had shared an apartment together, and were last seen at 7:20 PM the previous night, heading in after a trip to the neighboring deli for what are, apparently, mildly terrible sandwiches; David, on the other hand, had worked the night shift at his hardware store and turned in late, after 1 AM certainly, vanishing right along with them, his flat cleaned out in the usual, identical manner. The connection: they had spoken at the deli, that night. The owner remembered it distinctly because they had sat at the same table, and laughed together.

Fifteen minutes of conversation had gotten them ghosted. Or was the connection something else?

The key unlocked Katherine and Hazel's apartment; David's had been a room rented from the house of a friend of his. The house was up for sale now, quite naturally, but there were harder questions about going to visit someplace privately owned than an apartment complex.

After going through what little information about the victims that Deckard had provided her, Day was all the more convinced that her actions had lead directly to this path - and that she'd seriously pissed someone off more than she had ever initially thought.

This was just flat out insulting.

With murders, there was always a motive, even if the motive was "dull" - easily explained as a crime of passion, or, in the rarest occasion, someone was just a sociopath. This? There was absolutely nothing to have been gained by the removal of these people. She'd wracked her brain over it. No money, no property holdings - absolutely nothing.

Well. Maybe if she actually got out of the office, it would help her mood. The apartment would be the first on her list.

The drive over to the apartment is spent in bitter silence. It's not like there are many leads, and it's not worth your time to listen to Nelson jaw at you while he tries not to look at your tits. Might as well go to the source. It's a ten minute ride in traffic, and it takes seven - at least one thing goes right today. You can at least exit with style.

The apartment sits at 34 Southside, 1297 Packard Street. There's a long walk up a lonely concrete stairs to a balcony path with no lights lit - no one home, no one to come home. Four doors down sits her destination: Katherine and Hazel's home. It had only been three weeks since, and already everyone has moved out. The apartment complex will suffer for a couple months then surge back in popularity as it advertises that the mystery of the century once touched down here. It'll have signs and souvenir T-shirts. Another haunted house exhibit. Fear diminishes with distance.

The night is sticky and warm, with cicadas chirping in the woods behind you. Drops of moisture slide down the rusted green safety handrail. The door, itself: faded white, with the number stripped from its face, leaving it naked and blank as you approach the door. Even the welcome mat was taken in the first investigation: featureless, empty, like all these hollow apartments, except for a set of white blinds that block the interior from -

There's someone looking at you.

One blind is lifted up, just a half-inch. Light is reflecting off something on the other side, too dim to make it out. There's a slice of light on something, on the other side. It's looking at you.

With a quiet click of plastic, the blind drops back down.

Then nothing. No sound. No movement. No one else is here, in this creaking, empty place.

The key sits heavy in your pocket.

Why they didn't tear these places down and start from the beginning was completely beyond her. Still, it seemed to be within the nature of human beings to capitalize off of someone else's misery. Quiet as it was kept, the revenue from creeper tourists was pumping new life into the city. And the perfect kin d of life - people visited, spent money, told their friends, and then left. It was theorized that because of this, well, that was just another reason why the police force wasn't trying too hard to get to the bottom of these cases.

Everything from the outside was disgustingly normal. Despite the microscopic changes documented in the abandoned sites, it seemed that everything outside of the sites remained as normal.

The humidity was making her blouse cling to her, and, as she made her way up the stairs, she picked the blouse delicately from under her armpits and breasts. Caught up in trying to get some relief from the humidity, the movement behind the blinds was almost missed. Her head snapping up, her full lips thinned into a small line. She didn't imagine it. She couldn't have.

The key was heavy in her pocket, and as if called by something else, she reached for it. Her gun, a leaden weight against her thigh, was not as comforting as it should have been.

Still, as she slipped the key into the lock, she hoped she wouldn't have to use it. She had to keep her head about her. Yes, someone was inside, but it was probably some lunatic ghoul tourist. It'd happened before - and this place had been vacated so recently that no one had thought to keep an eye out for people sneaking in and out. It happened so often that she often suspected that those property owners who were more attentive were either in on it, or didn't care.

The door pulls open. It's an effort; the gentle rip of plastic slips past your ears as the insulation tears open, unsealing the apartment. At some point, the plastic envelope has been replaced, leaving this place once more sealed from the outside, a sterile white box - which is what greets your eyes, when you look inside. The walls are white. The floors are white. There is no definition and no difference but shadow, the lights cast through the plastic slats of the blinds that stretch over the window, covering this blighted sight from human eyes. There is not even dust left, no furniture or distraction from the bleak absence that waits inside this place, eyes pressed against the window, staring outside.

The room before you was once a living room, but now it's just a large box with nothing. A short hall leads to the left, where there had been a kitchen. The counter was removed and the appliances lost, cabinets and drawers taken, until now it stands empty too. A closet stands open to one side, the shelves taken. The door remains, hung half-open. You can't see anything inside of it in the dim lighting.

To the immediate right was the bathroom of Katherine's apartment. It too has a door, half open. The plumbing is gone. The shower curtains are gone. The bathtub is gone. It's another empty room, another goddamn mystery. Like all of Eigengrau, it's not talking to you or anyone.

At the end of the right hall is the bedroom. The door stands half-open. You can't see much inside there, but it's probably empty, like every other fucking thing in this place. Another window is down there, blinds drawn, streetlight glare slanting down over the pale floor.

There's a door halfway down the right hallway. Some kind of closet, probably. It's closed.

You can't hear anything, and there's a cold scent. You don't know really how to describe it, but cold's a good word for this place anyways. It's chilly enough to raise the hair on your arms, despite the warmth outside fit to make you sweat. It's not air conditioning keeping it cool - there's no moving air at all. The heat has to be going somewhere.

You don't see whatever was looking at you, or any trace of it. The floor is spotless, and nothing is moving that you can hear or see.

This place aches.

It almost didn’t feel worth the effort to explore the apartment.

Slipping inside, she held the door for agonizingly long seconds to ensure that her full entrance into the sterile room was as silent as possible.

The air is stale. Unnaturally so. It was an air that reminded her of a hospital, nursing home, and funeral parlor all in one fell swoop - dialed up to 11. The air was breathable, but that didn’t mean that she actually wanted to. Resisting the urge to hold her breath, she pressed forward, her gun a leaden weight against her thigh.

The nagging feeling of doubt continued to rake cool, needle claws down the back of her head, starting at the nape of her neck. There was no point in her being here; what else could she possibly find that others had missed? Why was she even here - her career was over, the girls that she’d helped, outside of this fiasco, well, there was nothing more that she could do for them. They’d either left, or they’d stayed, or they were dead, or in jail. And the sun still rose and the system was still crooked.

And why, though, was she still here, still creeping through this abandoned place, straining all senses, waiting, feeling that something might turn up for her?

Gingerly tip-toeing round the corner, she found that she was holding her breath as she came to the bedroom. Pushing into it, she exhaled, slowly. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing. This was foolish.

There is a click as the door to the apartment closes. Probably the vacuum effect pulling it shut. Air is moving outside, which makes it lower pressure than inside. That makes sense, but the muted sound in this sepulchral, sterile place is haunting. It echoes against the still white walls and bounces through the empty bedroom. Then the closet door just past the bedroom clicks, something coming unlocked. There is a harsh grind of something heavy moving over a floor, right in your ear. Your balance shifts and goes unsteady for a heartbeat, unsteadied like a boat rocked by waves.

Something has changed. Shifted. Something is no longer the same.

Under the thin blinds, the lights of the streetlights have gone out, and the night is dark past them, too dark to see. All is shadow.

This place aches.

Keep calm.

Her heart thudded against her ribs so hard that she thought it'd either break through or crawl into her throat, seeking the easily escapable comfort of her mouth. She swallowed, trying to force her pulse down. Fear had leapt through her veins so quickly that she was numb for quite a few moments, moments that stretched out into the sudden ink of the night outside of the window.

Time stretched backwards, turning the pages back until she was a child again, huddled under the sunshine colored blankets of her bed and desperately grasping onto a bedraggled stuffed unicorn, sitting, waiting, listening to nothing but her harsh breaths and waiting, the waiting was the worst, just sitting, imagining the monsters under her bed ready to strike.

She hadn't felt such a pure fear in years.

Only the barest modicum of policing kept her something skirting on the edge of calm. Her fingers twitched towards the weight of her gun. Whatever it was that was spooking her surely wouldn't be done in by something as trivial as a bullet, but they say that a drowning man will grasp at even the flimsiest straw if it means the illusion of living that much longer.

A ghost sensation of something moving behind that closet door. There is the phantom sensation of laughter, the autonomous awareness of cruelty, but it fades as swiftly as it has come, a fleeting brush of moving air along the hairs at the back of your neck. The air that was plastic is now choking, stifled and stagnant.

The closet door gently pushes open past its frame, the knob turning to slip past the jamb. On the inside face of the door there is a post-it note, bizarre in its incongruity - but on it is drawn a messy inken eye, wide and staring, pointing at you. It stares at you in your room at the end of the hall.

Beyond it the closet hangs wide - except it's not a closet. It's a hall, extending long into the distance, as far as you can see until it fades into shadow, long past where it should have entered the next apartment, or burst past the building entirely. The impossible distance is dazing - but the air coming down the hallway is fresh and easy to breathe, and a puff of stray breeze brushes your skin every once in awhile from the open portal. If there's moving air, there has to be an exit somewhere. You hope.

That eye is still staring at you.

She should know better. Though every fiber of her being was screaming at her to turn back the way that she came, stupid animal curiosity propelled her forward. The unending quality of the closet had to be simply because it was dark. A simple logic behind what her mind wanted to believe was fantastic.

All right. Go into the "closet," until the end of it, turn back around, and go home. Simple enough.

The post it note collected a baleful glare from her. It must've been some stupid, silly prank, left by another cop or by some thrill-seeker eagerly chasing down all of the affected sites. Frowning, she reached up - then stopped herself. Tearing it down would prove nothing, and potentially destroy what laughably could be called evidence. She'd leave it up, for now.

Taking a deep breath, she reached for her gun, cradling it as she moved forward.