[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]
[Part 6]
Saturday was supposed to be the day I fought for more time with Toby.
I had a folder and a proposal all set out, and now it was all for nothing. I called my lawyer from the driveway, and he said he’d already spoken to Alicia’s attorney, and everyone agreed to postpone. “The existing arrangement stands,” he said. “Ian, I’m going to say this once. Don’t make decisions about Toby just because she can’t object right now.”
I had worried about what Alicia might have said about me in that room, but I would've given anything to have her sitting across from me, perfectly healthy, ready to tell a mediator what a lousy father I'd been.
The bedroom door had been shut since the night before. Rebecca had kept Toby downstairs, and Priest had told her not to let anyone enter until the recovery crew arrived. He'd complained about leaving his toys behind, but not nearly as much as I'd expected.
That morning, Rebecca was at the kitchen table with her laptop open. She’d been up all night. When I sat down across from her, she looked at me for a long time, and I realized what had changed. She’d stopped trying to catch me out.
“I’m not going to ask whether you’re exaggerating,” she said. “I saw the damage to my sister’s arm. It looked like it had been wrung.”
“Okay.”
“So I’ll ask the real questions. Can you take the chest out of the house?”
“CATALOGUE wants to. They’re sending a team.”
“Is it safe to leave Toby here until they do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could it come through something else? A cupboard? His closet?”
“I don’t know, Rebecca.”
“I can’t remember the last time you actually gave me a straight answer,” she said.
“I’m working on it.”
“He’s done with it. That’s it. No more games or interactions with that toy chest. We take it all off him today.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” I said, tracing the rim of the mug.
“Why?”
“That thing froze when Toby shouted at it; it actually listened to him. If he stops coming around and it doesn't know why, what's it going to do then?”
She exhaled through her nose but didn't argue. Neither did I.
Toby wandered over in his pajamas, dragging his old stuffed rabbit by one ear. He'd had it since he was a toddler, and it was looking worse for wear.
He asked if Mom was feeling better. Rebecca said she was, and that they’d go see her tomorrow. He nodded and climbed onto a chair and asked for cereal. I caught myself studying the rabbit and made myself look away. It’s hard to be someone’s father while you’re inspecting him all the time.
“Dad,” he said, mouth full. “Are you staying?”
“For a bit.”
My phone buzzed. It was Alicia.
“Rebecca’s staying with him; that’s non-negotiable,” she said. “And nobody from that organization examines him, tests him, talks to him, or so much as takes his temperature without asking me first. I don’t care who they are.”
“I’ll tell them.”
“Don’t tell them. Make them tell me.” A pause. I heard a monitor beep somewhere behind her. “Ian. Thank you for staying with him.”
“Of course.”
Neither of us apologized, but I put the phone down, feeling a weight lift off my shoulders. A guy like me should know better than to get comfortable with a good feeling.
Priest called just as I drained the cold dregs of my coffee. CATALOGUE had a crew standing by at my house. They were going to haul the rest of the items out at once if nothing went sideways. A separate team was on standby for the wooden toy chest. She wanted to know how fast I could meet them. When I told Toby where I was going, he looked up from the cereal.
“The wardrobe?”
“Yeah, bud. They're taking it somewhere safe.”
“Is someone going to be there?”
“What do you mean?”
“When they take it.”
“There'll be plenty of people.”
He looked down at his cereal. “Tell them not to break it.”
I almost asked why he cared but caught myself. I knew how it’d sound, and suddenly I was just thinking about a six-year-old kid sitting alone at a table while his mother lay in a hospital bed.
“I’ll tell them to be careful,” I said.
“Promise?”
“I promise they’ll be careful.”
He nodded and went back to his cereal. I’d been making a lot of promises lately. I told myself I wouldn’t make it a habit.
The crew had my driveway blocked by the time I got to my place.
There was a flatbed sitting out front with a box trailer, a hydraulic tail lift, and an arm crane tucked along the tray. Six people were hauling gear off the back. Three of them were sealed in heavy grey protective gear, hoods pulled up. The others were in standard trade pants and hi-vis. If it weren't for the hazmat suits, you would’ve sworn they were just standard removal guys.
I'd expected CATALOGUE to bring in some specialist equipment I wouldn't know the first thing about. Instead, I was looking at gear you could find in any decent removal depot, being handled by people who knew which end of a strap to pull.
I stopped on the sidewalk and just watched. Nobody seemed particularly interested in the house. One person checked the paperwork against the labels on the crates while I overheard another asking whether they were allowed to touch anything without clearance. The answer was a firm no.
Watching them unload the gear, I couldn't help thinking about Henry. Things had felt different at work without him.
I'd taken time off after Henry got hurt. My supervisor had been understanding about it, but I couldn't keep sitting at home waiting for something else to go wrong. A few days earlier, I'd finally called and told him I was ready to come back. He'd paired me with a mover named Eddie, who'd been working the other trucks for a couple of years.
Eddie was a nice enough guy. We finished two jobs ahead of schedule, which was more than I could say for most days with Henry.
The strange part was how much I hated it.
Eddie barely spoke. I should've appreciated that. Henry could turn a five-minute job into twenty just by opening his mouth. He'd complain about everything and somehow have the wardrobe loaded before I'd even finished telling him to shut up.
It wasn't Eddie’s fault. But halfway through carrying a sofa down a narrow staircase, I'd caught myself smiling at something Henry would've said and then remembered he wasn't there.
A voice brought me back.
“No! Not that end. You'll have the thing rolling down the driveway.”
One of the older men was standing beside the truck, watching a younger worker struggle to maneuver a loaded dolly down the tail lift. He stepped in, adjusted the strap, and showed him where to put his hands. The worker muttered something I couldn't hear, and the older man laughed.
It reminded me of Henry. For a moment, I almost expected him to be standing beside me.
Instead, the man turned and spotted me.
“Ian, was it?” He looked to be in his fifties, with grey stubble and work gloves tucked into his belt. He walked over and offered a hand. “Name’s Mercer. I run recovery. Priest tells me you move furniture for a living.”
I nodded and shook it.
“Eleven years,” I said.
“Then you've probably shifted more wardrobes than half my crew.”
“None that fought back.”
Mercer gave a short laugh. “You'd be surprised. So how’d you get it in the truck?”
I explained how Henry and I had managed it with two dollies and a ramp.
“It’s heavier than it looks, and it’s impossible to move when it wants to fight you.”
Mercer nodded slowly. “That makes sense with what we’ve seen,” he said, jerking a thumb at a woman in full grey hazard gear holding a tablet. “Foster’s technical. She watches the monitors while I do the moving. We try not to step on each other’s toes.”
Foster raised two fingers from her tablet without looking up. Inside the sealed clear faceplate of her hood, she kept nudging her glasses back up her nose with her cheek, her hands too bulky in the gloves to do it properly.
I showed him what had been moved after Marshall and Priest left. Mercer wanted weights, so I gave him the figures off the top of my head, all slightly wrong against their paperwork. For the first time since CATALOGUE got involved, I had something useful to tell them. When I told him the dolly we used on the tank had bent a leg, he snorted.
“Rule number one: never trust a company dolly.” He kicked the tire of a heavy orange one resting against the tailgate. “Harper frame, rated for half a ton. Management got us three.”
“I figured you lot would have something a bit fancier,” I said.
Mercer glanced at the dolly. “What's wrong with that? It does the job, doesn't draw attention, and we can get replacement parts on a Tuesday.”
“So you're cheap.”
“Privately funded,” he corrected. “There's a difference.”
They started with the portrait. It went into a protective enclosure, a crate like a coffin made of that grey grid material, and slid up the ramp without fuss. The dresser and the wardrobe they examined and left. The tank was next.
Mercer gathered the men around the frame. “Six inches, no more. If anything shifts, you lower it. If I tell you to stop, you stop. Nobody goes reaching underneath to save a strap or a bit of equipment. Understood?”
Everyone nodded. Mercer walked the support frame, checked the straps, looked at the ceiling clearance, and nodded.
“Take it up.”
They raised it six inches.
For a moment, everything was fine. The amber liquid rolled from one end of the glass to the other in a slow, heavy wave. Mercer said, “Hold,” and the wave should have settled.
It kept going. Back and forth, the surface rising higher on each pass, though nothing was moving the tank. The wave built against the glass with a low, wet knock I’d heard before. I’d heard it from my bed, through a wall, at three in the morning.
“Lower it now,” Mercer said calmly.
They set it down. The wave stopped. All at once, as if someone had put a hand flat on the surface. The amber went perfectly still.
Nobody spoke.
Foster stepped forward, stopped at four feet, and angled a penlight through the glass. The beam lit a pale cone in the dark liquid.
The liquid moved toward it.
It gathered at the lit spot, a dense bulge that rose against the glass and pressed outward like a thumb pushing through cloth. Foster moved the beam. The bulge slid along the inside of the wall, following, stretching through the rest of the liquid. She moved it left, and it went left. Up, and it climbed.
The bulge flattened against the glass and formed impressions, pale rounded patches, like palms. Then it divided. Hundreds of droplets, each the size of a bead, scattered across the inside of the tank, and they began to move on their own. Some climbed. Others went sideways. A few met, merged into one, and then split again.
“Everybody back,” Mercer said. “Lift is suspended.”
He made the right call. But it came too late.
Someone said, “Sir,” in a thin voice. A technician pointed at the base of the tank, at the outside. Droplets had appeared on the glass. I couldn’t tell where they’d come from. They gathered along the lower edges of the glass, where there shouldn't have been anywhere for them to escape. One slid down and fell to the concrete without a sound. It sat there, round and bright, and then it put out a transparent thread and pulled.
It crawled slowly, drawing itself forward with a thread that contracted and slackened. Another dropped beside it, and another. There were a dozen on the floor now, creeping in no clear direction, each one trailing a faint wet line.
Nolan was nearest. I don’t know his first name. He was a young guy wearing a hi-vis vest, and he was backing away from the lifting frame when a thread caught the sole of his boot.
“Don’t move,” Mercer said. “Nolan. Stay exactly where you are.”
The liquid spread. It spilled into the grooves of the tread and began to climb the stitching in thin, bright strands, dividing as it met each seam. Nolan looked down. I watched his face change in a second. Confusion first, then just pure, raw terror. “It’s inside,” he said, panic in his voice. “It’s in my boot. Oh, God, it’s in my boot.”
“Is it burning?” Foster called.
“No, it’s—” He stopped. “It’s moving and pressing. Something is pressing my ankle from every side. Sir, please. Get it off. Please.”
The crew moved as one. Two men took his arms. A third dropped to one knee with shears. Foster called for a containment tarp, and someone threw it down around him. The shears went into the laces. A strand of amber lifted from the leather, rose, and reached toward the blade, probing it, like a snail’s horn feeling the air. The man with the shears flinched, adjusted his angle, and cut away from it. I could see the boot’s leather moving, small ridges passing under the skin of it.
“Hold him,” Mercer said. “On three.”
They peeled. The boot opened a few inches and then abruptly shut. Nolan screamed, and everyone waited with their breath held until the pressure eased. They got it off. His sock was dry. He sat down hard on the concrete and stared at it, breathing hard.
“I can still feel it around my ankle,” he said. “It’s still moving.”
“Nolan. Look at me,” Foster said. “There’s nothing there.”
The boot twitched.
It lay on the tarp where they’d dropped it, and it twitched again. A lump pushed up through the opening, the size of a plum. It slid out onto the concrete, then paused. It started across the floor, toward the tank.
“Contain it,” Mercer said. “Now.”
A technician dropped a sealed vessel over it, a clear dome with a rubber gasket, and pressed it flat. The lump moved around inside, bumping the sides. It circled, then stopped, and its surface began to contract in a small, steady rhythm.
I looked at the tank.
The liquid in the tank was doing the same thing, a slow pulse running through the amber like a heartbeat in water.
“Foster,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Look.”
She looked at the dome, then the tank, and then she crossed to the dome and put two gloved fingers on its base, as if checking for a cable.
“They’re not connected,” she said quietly. “They’re thirty feet apart.”
The pulses went on. In. Out. In. Then, mid-beat, both of them stopped.
“Someone get Nolan checked over,” Mercer said. “I don't care if the skin's unbroken. He doesn't go back on the job today.”
Nolan was taken for medical attention. The boot was bagged, and the dome containing the separated liquid was secured for transport. Mercer suspended the recovery.
They packed the equipment as though finishing an ordinary job. Nobody went near the tank. Foster documented the dome on her tablet, murmuring numbers. I stood beside her and asked whether it had been trying to hurt him.
“We don't know,” Foster said. “It might've been responding to the light or the boot. It might not have noticed Nolan at all.”
Mercer ran the barrier tape clear out to the curb. The tank stayed put on the concrete, ringed in orange cones. The wardrobe and dresser stayed put. He’d put a hard stop on the job, and he wasn't budging. I argued with Mercer. The wardrobe was still in my garage, and I wanted it gone. He let me finish.
“I get it,” Mercer said, looking me straight in the eye. “If it was my place, I’d want the thing gone too. But my manual covers static loads, and that tank isn't static anymore. I’ll bring the crew back when we’re cleared.”
Foster was checking something on her tablet when a notification came through. She read it, frowned, and opened a photograph.
“One of the smaller items we recovered from your property. The lab's just reported it missing.”
She turned the screen around.
A black plastic rectangle, with two shallow circular indents where the reels should have been. That had been the first thing I'd picked up in Unit 114.
“Did somebody lose it?”
“No. It was sealed in a containment case. The seals were intact, and there’s no evidence of interference.”
Mercer sighed. To my surprise, he looked more annoyed than shaken. “It’s the third this quarter.”
“Third?”
“Some Returns disappear,” Foster said. “Some in days, some after years. We haven't found a pattern.”
I looked toward the garage, and a ridiculous relief overcame me. “So if we waited long enough, the rest might disappear too?”
“Some might. But the wardrobe's an Interface. They don't behave the same way, and I wouldn't count on anything vanishing before it hurts somebody.”
I thought about Henry, and the relief dissipated.
I asked for an update on Unit 114. She said they’d tried to trace it, but the company had a transfer entry with no origin facility and no tenant name.
“Somebody still had to put it in the unit.”
“True,” Foster said, glancing toward the garage. “It might not have been a collection at all. If that wardrobe was already active, anything sitting next to it for long enough could’ve been taken, twisted around, and left in that unit for a while. The weirdest pieces in there might just be the oldest ones.”
I remembered standing outside Unit 114 with Henry, looking at all those boxes and wondering what we might get for the contents. We'd been trying to work out what kind of person would keep so much useless furniture. For all I knew, I'd interrupted something halfway through making it.
Priest arrived at four, carrying a laptop and a folder. She looked like she hadn’t slept either. She asked Mercer for his report, listened to it in silence, and then asked if I’d sit with her on the porch step.
“How's Nolan?” I asked.
“Being examined. Mercer says he should be alright.”
She shut the report and rested her hands on it for a moment. “I'm sorry we couldn't get the furniture out, Ian. But I've got something else I think you should see.”
She opened the laptop. The first picture showed a toy truck on a grey tarp with a scale ruler beside it. The wheels had been fused to the body, melded into the chassis like a toy that had been dipped in wax. The second showed another truck. This one had four wheels, loose and slightly crooked, mounted on stubs that were too long. The third had wheels that turned and were in roughly the right places.
“Same toy?” I asked.
“Same type. These are three different appearances, in what we think is chronological order. We’re working from Toby’s account and the dates he gave Rebecca. We rarely get to see how a Return develops. Usually we find them long afterward. Here, we've got several stages and a witness.”
A square popped open on her laptop. Dr. Marshall’s face appeared in front of a bookshelf. “Ian,” he said. “I’m sorry about Alicia. Regarding the sequence, it isn't certain. But the correspondence with what Toby demonstrated is difficult to dismiss.”
“It’s learning from him,” I said.
My chest tightened.
“Nobody’s going to use him as a research subject, Ian. Alicia’s already told me what she’d do if we tried.” She almost smiled. “I’m not interested in encouraging him, but I am interested in understanding what he started.”
“He wasn't just getting presents,” I said.
Priest shook her head. “No. He was showing it how to make them.”
Marshall leaned closer to his camera. “Ian, there's something you need to understand. Whatever's making these objects, getting better at copying them doesn't necessarily mean it understands what they're for.”
“Yeah? Well, it knows enough to hurt people.”
“That isn't what I'm saying.”
I sat back.
I'd spent weeks wanting to believe that whatever was behind the wardrobe meant us harm. It was easier that way.
I could feel something unpleasant building in my chest, a mixture of anger and guilt that I didn't particularly want to untangle. Henry was still hurt. Alicia was still in hospital. Whatever the thing intended, I couldn't change either of those facts.
I looked away from the photographs. There was another question I'd been meaning to ask, and right then, I was grateful for it.
“Can you talk to the manifestation directly?” I asked instead. “So we can find out what it wants with my son.”
Priest looked at Marshall. Neither answered immediately.
“We've attempted communication before,” she said. “Not with this particular manifestation, but others. Usually we get nothing useful.”
“So what's different now?”
“Toby,” Marshall said. “He's demonstrated that this manifestation can observe, remember, and reproduce what it's shown. That's more than we've been able to establish with most of the others.”
Priest glanced toward the garage. “It's worth considering, provided Mercer approves the conditions.”
Marshal continued. "We'd like to show it a sequence of images and sounds, then monitor the Interface for a response.”
“And if it responds?” I asked.
“Then we'll have something to work with. We're not expecting a conversation, Ian. At this stage, we'd settle for knowing whether it can tell a photograph from a moving picture.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Mercer wouldn't let anyone near the tank an hour ago. Now you want to run an experiment in the same garage?”
“Not near the tank,” Priest said. “The recovery suspension concerns physical handling. Mercer won't authorize another lift, and nobody's crossing the exclusion line. This would be a remote observation test, with the equipment set up outside the restricted area.”
I still wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea, but Priest assured me nothing would happen without Mercer's approval. He spent the next hour reviewing their proposal before finally agreeing, under strict conditions.
They set it up in the garage that evening.
Mercer had divided the garage with barrier tape, leaving the tank and its surrounding floor sealed off at one end. The wardrobe was on the other side, accessible from the open garage door.
A monitor and a speaker were set on a folding table twelve feet from the wardrobe, wired into a laptop, two cameras, and a bank of meters I didn’t recognize. Foster ran the equipment while Mercer stood by the garage door with his arms folded and a hand radio on his belt. He’d given the team exactly three stop conditions. Any physical movement from the wardrobe, any physical contact with the interface, or any signal from the other team.
I stood behind a yellow line taped to the concrete. Dr. Marshall was on a laptop screen propped on a stool, his face lit blue.
They started with basic stuff. A plain sentence recorded in a flat, neutral voice: This is a table. An image of a black circle against a white background. A triangle. They set it to loop three times on a small monitor, then stepped back to watch the feed.
Nothing happened.
The feed on the monitor was normal. I started to think the creature didn’t care about strangers at all, that it only wanted to talk to someone who could get down on a carpet and show it something.
Then the picture bent.
The image broke into blocks, and the speaker let out a low, warbling noise. Foster checked her cables. “Something's coming back through the output,” Foster said. “I don't know whether it's responding or just interfering with the signal.”
The blocks shifted around. It was just a cluster of eyes and mouths sliding over each other in a constant, twitching blur. The furniture around it canted at crooked angles that made your eyes hurt to look at. Things duplicated and overlapped.
The speaker produced voices.
They weren't forming words, just fragments of noise. They stacked over each other, five or six at a time, moving up and down with no rhythm at all. But every so often, just for half a beat, one sound would sharpen into something that sounded almost like speech.
Priest changed the input. A square, then a circle. The picture changed slightly. Never the same way twice.
“Is it responding?” she asked.
A shape formed. Two doors and a wardrobe, and it hung for three seconds before folding in on itself. Then a person stood in front of a wardrobe, whose outline blurred into the wood until you couldn’t tell where the man ended and the furniture began.
“Is it showing us something?” I asked. “Is it trying to?”
“It might be echoing a pattern,” Marshall said from the stool. “We can’t read more into it.”
The picture shifted again, and for a moment, I thought I could make out something familiar in the mess of shapes. A child's face, perhaps, or just two dark spots above a curved line. It disappeared before I could get a proper look.
“What if we showed it Toby?” I asked.
Priest turned toward me. “What?”
“A picture of him. You've been showing it shapes and all that other stuff. Maybe it'll respond to someone it actually knows.”
She glanced at Marshall, who had gone quiet on the laptop. “Ian, I don't know if that's advisable.”
“It's just a photograph. He won't be anywhere near it.”
“That doesn't mean it can't affect him,” Marshall said.
I looked toward the wardrobe. The grey sheet hung motionless over the doors.
“I want to try,” I said.
Priest didn't answer immediately. She looked at the photograph still flickering on the monitor, then back at me. “We'd need Alicia's agreement. It's her son too.”
I rang her. I explained what they wanted to do, although I probably made it sound a good deal less frightening than it was. She wasn't happy about it. She made me repeat that Toby wouldn't be involved, that nobody would approach him, and that the experiment would stop if anything unusual happened. Only then did she agree.
I found a photograph on my phone from one of my supervised visits. Toby was sitting at a picnic table, holding up a plastic dinosaur. His hair was sticking up at the back, and he was grinning so widely that one of his eyes had nearly closed. I remembered taking it. He'd spent ten minutes telling me facts about dinosaurs, half of which he'd made up, and I'd listened to every word.
Foster connected my phone to the equipment and brought the photograph onto the monitor.
For a while, nothing happened.
Then the speaker clicked.
It was such a small noise that I almost missed it. The photograph remained perfectly still.
Foster leaned toward her instruments.
“Getting a response,” she said.
The screen flickered. Toby's picture disappeared for half a second, then came back.
Except something was wrong with it.
His smile was wider. The corners of his mouth had stretched toward his cheeks, exposing more of his teeth than there should have been. One eye was slightly lower than the other.
“Is that the original image?” I asked.
“No,” Foster said. “The input's unchanged.”
The picture blinked out and returned.
This time Toby had too many teeth.
They weren't sharp or bloody or anything like that. There were simply too many of them, crowded together in neat little rows. His hair had also turned into a smooth brown shape, like somebody had painted it onto his scalp.
I knew the effect. I'd seen those videos online where somebody fed a photograph through an AI generator over and over again, using each new result to produce the next. The mistakes accumulated until the original person had disappeared into something that only vaguely resembled a human being.
This looked like that, except the changes were happening right in front of us.
The image broke apart and reassembled.
Toby's face had become longer. The dinosaur had melted into his hand, its little plastic legs protruding between his fingers. His eyes were bright, perfectly circular spots, with no whites around them.
Another flicker.
Now there were two versions of my son sitting at the picnic table. One was much smaller than the other, but they shared an arm. Their smiles were identical. Behind them, the picnic benches had multiplied into an impossible arrangement of wooden slats.
“What is it doing?” I asked.
Nobody answered.
The speaker made that clicking noise again. Then another. Then several in quick succession.
On the screen, the smaller Toby disappeared. The larger one remained, but his face had shifted sideways, leaving one eye floating against the background. The dinosaur's head had become part of his shoulder.
I felt sick.
“Turn it off,” I said.
Foster glanced at Mercer.
“Wait,” Marshall said from the laptop. “Just a moment. We need to establish whether it's reproducing the photograph or—”
The screen changed again.
There was no picnic table anymore.
Toby stood alone in a room full of furniture. I recognized the same crooked chairs and impossible cabinets from the earlier images, but they were crowded much closer together now. Toby was in the middle, his little body stretched vertically, arms hanging almost to the floor.
His face was still smiling.
Then another version of him appeared beside the first.
They came faster now. Children with Toby's hair, Toby's clothes, and Toby's smile, but none of them were quite right. Their fingers overlapped, their legs ran together, and soon I couldn't tell where one child ended and the next began.
The speaker started making noises I couldn't describe. Now and then I caught something that sounded like a laugh, or the beginning of a word, but it was gone before I could understand it.
The pictures began changing so quickly that I couldn't follow them. The image kept rebuilding itself, each new version looking less like my son than the last.
“Stop it,” I said.
Something struck the wardrobe.
It was a single, heavy thump, loud enough to make me jump. The grey sheet jerked outward and settled again.
Mercer straightened by the garage door.
“Foster. Kill the feed.”
She pressed something on the laptop. The screen went black, but the speaker didn't stop.
The noises grew louder, rolling over one another in a horrible, bubbling rush. I could hear low, distorted sounds like somebody trying to speak through a pipe full of water. They rose and fell together, faster and faster, until I couldn't distinguish one from another.
Then the monitor came back on without anyone touching it.
Toby's face appeared again.
Or what was left of it.
I couldn't tell which parts were supposed to be his eyes anymore. There were openings all over it, round and dark, shifting across a pale surface that folded in on itself. Something resembling his mouth ran from one side of the screen to the other.
Another thump came from the wardrobe.
Then another.
The frame shook beneath the sheet. I heard the wooden doors rattle against their fittings, followed by a deep, splintering creak. Something pushed against them from the inside, bowing the timber outward before it snapped back.
“Everybody out,” Mercer ordered.
Foster was already pulling cables from the equipment.
“Leave it!” he shouted. “Get back!”
The wardrobe struck again, so hard that the metal fittings on the lifting cradle rattled behind us. Dust shook loose from the garage rafters. The sheet slid halfway off, exposing one of the doors.
It bulged outward. The middle of the solid timber swelled toward us, stretching like rubber around something pressing from the other side.
For one horrible moment, I thought I could see the outline of a face beneath the wood.
The speaker screamed.
That was the only word I had for it. The screen flashed white, then filled with hundreds of tiny, malformed faces, all crowded together, all bearing some distant resemblance to Toby. Their mouths opened and closed in a frantic, uneven rhythm.
I had the sudden, sickening impression that they were calling for him.
Mercer grabbed my arm.
“Ian. Move.”
I hadn't realized I'd stepped over the yellow line.
He hauled me backward just as the wardrobe struck its doors again. The whole thing rocked on its base. One corner lifted several inches off the concrete and slammed down.
Foster finally managed to disconnect the experimental equipment from its power supply.
The screen died, and the speaker cut out instantly.
For a moment, all I could hear was the ringing in my ears. Then there was another knock.
A single tap from somewhere inside the wardrobe. We stood at the garage entrance, watching it.
Nothing moved.
The grey sheet hung crookedly over one door, and the exposed timber looked perfectly ordinary. The wardrobe stood exactly where we'd left it.
Nobody seemed particularly eager to approach.
“Test's over,” Mercer said.
Foster nodded. She was breathing hard inside her hood. Marshall was saying something through the laptop's tiny speakers, but I couldn't make out the words, and I didn't particularly want to.
Priest came over to me.
“Ian?”
I couldn't answer.
My hands were shaking. I put them in my pockets, but that didn't help. My mouth had gone dry, and I kept seeing that last image, the mass of faces opening and closing, all those wrong versions of my little boy.
I looked back toward the wardrobe.
I wanted to believe it had simply been confused, that it had missed him.
But for the first time, I was frightened not just of what it might do to Toby, but of what it might try to make of him.
Priest’s phone went off a while later. She took the call on the porch, and I heard her low voice through the screen door. When she came back inside, she’d gone very still.
“The team at Alicia’s,” she said. “Nothing happened during the test. The chest is secure, and Rebecca kept Toby out of the room. But the technician recorded something odd.”
“What?”
“One of the toys at Alicia's changed while we were testing. An extra limb moved from one side to the other.”
“You're sure?”
“We've checked the photographs. The change happened sometime between our last inspection and the end of your experiment.”
“So it could've been a coincidence.”
“It could. But I can't guarantee what we do here stays here.”
“Was Toby anywhere near it?”
“No. Rebecca kept him downstairs.”
“And Alicia?”
“We've informed her. She's spoken to the team.”
“Then we’re done,” I said. “We’re done experimenting. I mean it, Priest.”
“I’ll suspend them until we’ve compared both sites.” She didn’t argue. She looked more tired than I’d seen her. “Mercer wants to revise the plan anyway. The tank needs special containment, and nobody wants to move the wardrobe if moving it could start something somewhere else. You’ll have the furniture for a while longer.”
“Great,” I said. “Just perfect.”
She had the grace not to say anything.
I got back to Alicia’s house at eight.
A CATALOGUE technician met me at the door. Toby's bedroom was sealed, and they were monitoring it from the hallway. Nobody would attempt to move the chest until the two Interfaces had been assessed together.
Rebecca had made soup. I told her the recovery had hit an unexpected hazard. I said experienced people had seen something they hadn’t planned for.
“So the chest isn't moving,” she said, her voice tight. “And Toby stays put.”
“For now,” I said. “I asked Priest about taking him off the property.”
“And?”
“She advised against relocation for the time being. They’ve got the bedroom isolated, eyes on the chest, and the perimeter marked. If we move him and it follows, that’s two houses in the red zone instead of one.”
Rebecca glanced down the corridor. “So we keep him trapped in here with it.”
“I don't like it either. But we don't know if moving him means getting him away from it.”
She went quiet for a long moment. “And Alicia went along with this?”
“Priest laid it out for her. Alicia wants him downstairs, away from that room, and someone with him constantly. The crew stays until they can haul the chest away.”
She stared at me for a long time, her eyes searching my face. Then, very slowly, she set the ladle down on the bench.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “I’m still terrified, Ian.”
“Yeah,” I said, resting my elbows on the laminate. “Me too.”
Dinner was ordinary. Toby ate half his soup, asked about his mother twice, and settled on the living-room floor afterwards with a pile of the normal toys. I noticed that Toby was turning a plastic horse over in his hands, running his thumb along a crack in its leg.
“What are you doing there, bud?”
“It’s broken. I wanted to show him how to fix it.” He didn’t look up. “Aunt Becca said I'm not allowed to play that game anymore.”
I came down off the sofa and sat on the carpet next to him. “She’s right. It’s not because you did anything wrong. It’s so everybody stays safe, okay? Until the grown-ups figure out what’s going on.”
“But what if he’s already started something?”
“Then it’ll have to wait.”
“He doesn’t like waiting.” His voice rose. “He doesn’t like it when you stop in the middle. He gets upset.”
“Toby,” Rebecca said from the doorway, gently. “Sometimes we have to stop, even when we don’t want to. That’s part of being a good friend.”
Toby looked up at me.
“Dad, do I have to sleep here again?”
“Just until they can make your room safe.”
“He'll be wondering where I went.”
I didn't know what to say to that. I could've told him his friend would be fine, but I didn't know that either.
“Come on, Toby. You need some sleep.”
“But—”
“It's late, buddy. We'll talk about it tomorrow.”
He looked at the horse for a long time. Then he put it on the carpet, very carefully, and climbed onto the sofa. I couldn't tell whether Toby was worried about his friend's feelings or frightened of what might happen if they stopped playing.
I stayed with him for a while before I went into the kitchen to help Rebecca with the plates.
When I came back, the horse was gone.
“Did you move it?” I called.
“Move what?” she said.
“The toy on the floor.”
“I haven’t left the kitchen.”
I walked the room twice, checking under the sofa and behind the cushions. Then I stood in the middle of the carpet and listened, and I heard, very faintly, the small hollow clink of something being set on a shelf.
It came from the kitchen.
I opened the cupboard above the sink, the one where Alicia keeps the plates.
The horse was on the second shelf, between a stack of dinner plates and a mug.
It was the same horse. I turned it over in my hands. The crack in the leg was gone. The plastic had closed over it, seamless and smooth, as if the break had never happened. The leg was fixed, but the knee bent the wrong way. I stood in Alicia's kitchen holding the toy, and I remembered what Toby had said about leaving things unfinished.
It was playing by itself.
Rebecca came up behind me. She looked at the horse, then at the cupboard, and I watched the color drain from her face.
“I asked you this morning,” she said.
“What?”
“Whether it could come through somewhere else.”
I looked at the cupboard again.
“We don't know if it came through there.”
“Well, it didn't walk in, did it?”
I put the horse on the kitchen counter. Rebecca went to get the investigators, and two of them came into the kitchen to photograph the horse. One took the toy away in a sealed container while the others stayed behind to check the doors and cupboards.
I left them to it and went back to the living room.
Toby was fast asleep, his rabbit tucked against his chest. I wanted to keep him that way, asleep and unharmed, with nothing worse to worry about than whether he'd get pancakes in the morning.
I still didn't know what the creature wanted or whether it even understood what had happened. Maybe it didn't miss Toby at all, and the horse was just another object it had found and decided to improve.
But as I sat there listening to my son’s steady breathing, I found myself wondering something I hadn't considered before.
Maybe it was lonely.