For a long moment, Alex just knelt on the dusty floorboards of his brother's room, the journal lying open beside him. The house was silent. The world outside his window—a neighbor walking their dog, a car driving past—seemed like a broadcast from another planet. His reality had been reduced to the confines of this room and the insane, meticulously detailed words on the page.
His mind, the logical, problem-solving mind of an IT technician, scrambled for a rational explanation. Folie à deux, a shared psychosis? No, Leo had been alone in this. A prank? An elaborate, cruel joke? Leo wasn't cruel. A simple fantasy? The sheer volume of work, the cross-referenced data, the cold, hard coordinates—it was too much, too detailed.
He closed the journal. The sane thing to do was to put it back under the floorboard, finish cleaning the room, and try to forget. He should call his therapist, tell him he was having a grief-induced delusion. He should accept that his brother was gone, likely the victim of a mundane, earthly tragedy.
But the final words burned behind his eyes. Forgive me.
Alex stood up, his joints stiff. He walked out of the room, leaving the journal where it lay. He went to his own room, pulled on a pair of sturdy work boots, and grabbed his keys and wallet. In the hall, he paused, then went back into Leo's room one last time. He tore the final page from the journal, folded the damning coordinates into his pocket, and left. He didn't know why. Maybe for proof. Proof that he had followed the madness to its logical, and hopefully disappointing, conclusion.
This was the final diagnostic. He would go to the location. He would find a normal, damp wall in a derelict basement. He would see that it was nothing. Then, and only then, could he close the ticket on his brother's ghost.
The drive downtown was surreal. The crisp autumn air and the familiar cityscape felt like a thin veneer painted over the seething, glitch-filled reality Leo's journal described. Alex parked his beat-up sedan a block away from the Concordance Office Building. It stood like a concrete skeleton against the grey sky, a monument to urban decay. Most of its windows were shattered, gaping wounds in a dying beast. A high chain-link fence, adorned with rust and stern "NO TRESPASSING" signs, encircled the property.
He found a section where the fence had been bent back, a clear invitation for vandals and the desperate. Slipping through, his heart thudded with a mixture of transgression and dread. The ground was a mess of rubble, weeds, and broken glass that crunched under his boots. The wind whistled a low, mournful tune through the building's empty floors.
The main entrance was boarded up, but a side door, meant for maintenance, hung ajar on a single, groaning hinge. He pulled his phone out, the bright screen a small comfort in the gloom. He switched on the flashlight, its beam cutting a sharp, nervous cone through the darkness.
Inside, he was met with the ghost of a corporate lobby. The air was thick with the smell of mold and rotting drywall. Papers and debris littered the floor like dead leaves. Alex's light danced over overturned desks and gutted reception counters. Every scrape of his boot, every drip of water from the ravaged ceiling, echoed in the oppressive silence.
According to Leo's notes, he needed the basement. He found a stairwell door marked with a faded, flaking sign: "MAINTENANCE – B LEVEL." He pushed it open and was met with a wave of cold, musty air that smelled of wet earth and decay. The stairwell was a concrete throat leading down into blackness.
"Okay, Alex," he muttered, his voice sounding small and thin. "Final step. Let's just see the wall."
He descended, his phone's light bouncing off the damp, graffiti-scarred walls. The air grew colder, heavier. He could hear the scuttling of rats in the darkness, their tiny claws scraping on concrete. At the bottom, a short, flooded corridor led into a vast, cavernous space.
The basement.
It was a labyrinth of thick support pillars and forgotten storage cages. Puddles of stagnant, oily water reflected his light, creating shifting, monstrous shapes on the ceiling. Using his phone's compass app, he navigated towards the southeast corner, his boots sloshing through the foul water. The feeling of being watched was immense, a primal paranoia that made the hair on his arms stand up.
And then he saw it.
In the farthest corner, exactly where Leo's notes said it would be, was the wall. Even from a distance, it was wrong. While the surrounding concrete was a uniform, dark grey, this specific section—a rectangle roughly ten feet wide and eight feet high—was a sickly, greenish-brown color, like a deep bruise on the building's foundation. The discoloration wasn't a surface stain; it seemed to bleed from within the concrete itself. Droplets of water oozed from its surface, defying the relative dryness of the surrounding area.
He approached slowly, his boots making soft sucking sounds in the mud. He reached the spot and shone his light directly on it. The texture was wrong. It wasn't rough concrete, but unnaturally smooth, almost clammy, like cold skin.
Then he felt it. Or rather, he heard it. A low-frequency thrum, so deep it was almost subliminal. It wasn't the building settling or the wind outside. It was a clean, steady vibration that seemed to resonate in his teeth, like standing too close to a massive, unseen transformer. His logical mind tried to grasp it—an underground power line? A forgotten generator? But the hum was coming from the wall.
He raised his phone to take a picture, an instinct to document, to prove. As he focused the camera, the screen flickered violently. A burst of multi-colored static washed over the image, and the compass app spun wildly. The phone died in his hand.
Total darkness. Total silence, except for the now-unmistakable hum.
Panic, cold and absolute, seized him. This was impossible. This was wrong. All his cynical certainty, all his logical scaffolding, collapsed in an instant. Leo's words screamed in his mind. A glitch in the texture of reality.
The weight of the year—the grief, the guilt, the desperate, lonely search—crashed down on him. He wasn't an investigator anymore. He was just a heartbroken brother standing in a terrifying basement, at the end of every rational road. Tears of despair and exhaustion welled in his eyes.
He wasn't trying to prove anything anymore. He was just… done.
With a choked sob, he sagged forward, his body heavy with defeat. He leaned his forehead and his hands against the cold, damp, humming wall, not in hope, but in utter surrender.
For a single, solid second, the wall felt like a wall.
And then it didn't.
The solid surface beneath his hands dissolved into the consistency of thick, cold jelly. There was no sense of breaking through. It was a feeling of being accepted. His balance vanished. The floor beneath his feet ceased to exist. He didn't fall down. He fell sideways.
The hum became a deafening roar of static that consumed all thought. His vision blurred into a smear of nauseating color, a sensation of being pulled apart and reassembled incorrectly. The world turned inside out.
The fall was silent, absolute, and sideways. Then, there was nothing.