IX. On the Laboratory Beneath

Below the manor, carved into the granite bedrock, Ritalsin had constructed a laboratory that I find almost impossible to describe in purely academic terms. I will try, because accuracy demands it, but I want the reader to understand that what follows is not the work of a madman. Madmen are disorganized. This was methodical. Every horror was catalogued. Every atrocity bore a case number.

The first thing the investigators found were the cells. Old Tom, a street beggar who had been promised “improvement,” had been transformed by black sand into a ghoul. His yellowed skin and claw-like fingernails told the story of a man fed promises until those promises consumed him from within. He begged for flesh, “just a finger, just a toe,” his humanity visible only in the desperation of his pleading.

Constantine, a mime, had fared differently but no better. His consciousness had been shattered by dream extraction, leaving him trapped in an endless performance, hands pressing against invisible barriers, his white-painted face cracked like broken porcelain with dark veins of corruption spreading across the surface. He conjured invisible objects from thin air because that was all his fractured mind had left.

Beyond the cells, the investigators discovered the dream harvesting chambers: twelve crystal cylinders lining the southern wall, each a prison for captured nightmares and stolen memories. Three still glowed with the essence of their victims. Subject 23, a street urchin, manifested as purple mist forming the shape of a screaming child’s face. Rashfen’s cylinder contained dark memories of impossible spaces. Madame Corvine von Elsweld’s imprisoned dreams had curdled into memories of elaborate balls twisted into plague-filled nightmares.

Deeper still, they found the trophy room. Human skulls lined tables like a census of the consumed, each bearing a placard with a name and case study, the fastidious record-keeping of a man who saw murder as data collection. At the chamber’s heart sat an otherworldly creature on a massive table, part jellyfish, part octopus, bristling with far too many eyes that tracked movement through sealed lids. Its translucent flesh still pulsed with bioluminous patterns, an alien intelligence rendered into a specimen.

And in one corner, mounted and stuffed like a hunter’s prize, stood the form of the Watcher, the white bear-like entity with feline features and stellar horn configurations that had haunted the investigators’ dreams since the Night of the Missing Moment. Ritalsin had captured and killed the very creature that had been watching over them, and he had displayed it like a trophy of perverted science.

There was also the Specimen: an oversized, partially mummified hand that Ritalsin had discovered among his own belongings after his Missing Moment. Rather than disposing of it, he had cultivated it in a specialized containment chamber, feeding it a mixture of black sand and dream essence, documenting its increasing intelligence and psychic capabilities. His notes detailed his plan to use the fully-grown creature as a conduit for enhanced psychic abilities. I will not speculate on what this thing was growing into. The notes are sufficient to keep me from sleeping, and I see no reason to inflict the same on the reader.

Ritalsin’s research had yielded genuine discoveries, which makes the horror worse rather than better. He had determined that gossamer energy can be separated into light and dark variants. He had proven that negative gossamer extracted from dreaming minds can manifest as constructs with effect on the waking world. He had documented the comparative properties of black sand with the methodical thoroughness of a man writing a peer-reviewed paper on the annihilation of human consciousness. His notes on the aiudara network suggested the gates form a pattern, one that, when fully activated, could create a permanent bridge between the Dreamlands and the waking world.

I have visited the site since it was cleared. The University sent a cleanup crew, specialists, not regular staff, paid triple wages and sworn to secrecy under agreements that would ruin them if they talked. The chambers have been sealed. The equipment has been destroyed. But the granite walls still carry the faint smell of black sand and something worse beneath it, and I am told that workers on the night shift report the lights in what was once Ritalsin’s campus laboratory flickering on and off, though no one has been seen entering or leaving.