AI The stale air of the abandoned Underground station clung to Detective Harlow Quinn like damp wool. It carried the ghosts of exhaust fumes, sweat, and something else, something metallic and faintly sweet, like spilled ink mixed with ozone. Above her, yellow police tape cordoned off the gaping maw of the Piccadilly Line’s northern terminus, an entrance few ever sought and fewer still found easily. Down here , the air thickened, heavy with the phantom pulse of commerce that had once, and sometimes still did, thrum beneath London’s skin. The Veil Market. Even the name felt like a poorly kept secret.
Her boots crunched on grit and what might have been calcified something-or-other. Her worn leather watch read 02:17. The uniformed officers guarding the entrance wore expressions that spoke of a long, cold night spent contemplating things they’d rather not, a sentiment Harlow knew intimately. They’d let her through with no more than a nod, the glint of her badge and the military precision of her bearing cutting through their weariness. Eighteen years on the force, and the world still offered up its strangest puzzles when the city slept.
The cavernous space opened up before her: vaulted ceilings lost in shadow, corroded signage for destinations long forgotten, and the skeletal remains of kiosks that once hawked wares far stranger than cheap souvenirs. This was not a typical crime scene. No blood spatter painting the tiled walls, no overturned furniture suggesting a frantic struggle. Instead, an unnatural stillness. Everything felt… curated. Almost too clean.
Harlow swept her gaze across the scene, her brown eyes cataloging details with practiced speed. A scattered assortment of peculiar objects lay strewn across the grimy platform floor: a single, obsidian-black glove, its fingers unnervingly elongated; a pile of desiccated herbs that smelled vaguely of anise and regret; a chipped ceramic bird with eyes made of chips of turquoise, lying on its side as if it too had been startled into stillness. And in the center of it all, a chalk outline. Neat. Precise. A stark white phantom on the stained concrete.
“They’re usually messier,” she murmured, the sound tight in her throat.
A voice, light and slightly reedy, startled her. “Messy is a matter of perspective, Detective.”
Harlow turned, her hand instinctively tightening on the grip of the service pistol holstered at her hip. Standing near a crumbling information booth, framed by the shadows cast by her own portable work light, was Eva Kowalski. Curly red hair, perpetually escaping its confines, frames a face dusted with freckles. Round glasses perched on her nose, glinting as she tilted her head. She clutched a worn leather satchel stuffed with books as if it were a shield. Eva, the occult researcher and childhood friend of Aurora, was not standard police issue. Not by a long mile.
What was she doing here ? Harlow scanned for any uniformed officer who might have brought her in, but saw none engaged with her. Eva seemed to have found her own way . Of course she had. The Veil Market was her kind of swamp.
“Kowalski,” Harlow acknowledged, her tone neutral, but her mind already filing away the anomaly. “How did you get down here ?”
Eva adjusted her glasses. "I have my sources, Detective. And my own reasons for… investigating the ebb and flow of certain markets. This location was rumored to be active last night. When it wasn't this morning, and word got out something had gone… amiss , my interest was piqued." She gestured vaguely towards the chalk outline with a slender finger. "And you’re here because someone found the outline."
"Someone reported a disturbance," Harlow corrected, walking slowly towards the body’s former position. "And then the evidence suggested a more organized termination. Or, as it appears, a perfectly executed extraction." Her jaw, sharp and defined, clenched. The clique. They were always involved in these more elaborate disappearances, their tendrils reaching into these hidden corners of the city. They dealt in things best left undisturbed. Things that left no conventional trace.
“Extraction?” Eva echoed , taking a tentative step forward. “You see a body?”
“I see the absence of one,” Harlow stated, kneeling carefully by the chalk outline. The concrete beneath was scuffed , but not violently. No dragged limbs, no smear marks suggesting a desperate fight for life. Just a few dark, almost inky droplets that didn’t quite look like blood . And a faint, geometric pattern pressed into the grime around the outline, like a seal pressed into wax.
“But the chalk outline is precise,” Eva mused, her gaze following Harlow’s . “Almost too precise. Not the rough, hurried work of a killer trying to mark a body on the run. This looks like… a marker. A diagram.”
Harlow ran a gloved finger near one of the dark droplets. It was dry, brittle. It didn't soak into the concrete like blood; it sat on top, almost like a stain from something entirely alien. “Diagrams are often drawn by the living, Kowalski. Or their accomplices.” She looked up at Eva . “What’s your theory? Did the clique use a ghost to ferry the victim away? Or perhaps a conjurer who spirited them into thin air?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm, a shield against the prickle of unease that always accompanied such scenes. It reminded her too much of Morris. Of how things had gone wrong three years ago, a case that had started mundane and ended with unanswered questions that tasted of the impossible.
Eva, blessedly, didn’t seem to register the sarcasm as a personal attack. "Ghosts are imprecise, Detective. And conjurers, the theatrical sort, leave traces of their craft. This… this feels like something else. Something more fundamental." She stepped closer, her boot scuffing against one of the peculiar objects. A small, intricately carved wooden hand. Its fingers were curled into a gesture Harlow didn't recognize, but it felt unnerving, like a silent warning.
"Fundamental how?" Harlow asked, standing to her full height. 5'9" of Northern grit and ingrained skepticism. She tapped the side of her worn leather watch . "This is a crime scene. We deal in motive, opportunity, means. Not 'fundamental' anything."
"The means," Eva said, retrieving the wooden hand and turning it over. "Look at the pattern here ." She pointed to the faint geometric imprint on the ground. "It's not just a random scuff. Those lines… they are intentional. They form a nodal pattern, a kind of containment or channeling matrix. And these droplets…" She carefully touched one, then sniffed her fingertip. Her nose wrinkled. "Not blood. Nothing organic I recognize. It smells like… like static electricity and petrichor. Earthy, but charged ."
Harlow’s gaze followed Eva’s finger. The 'diagram' was indeed too regular, too deliberate. She’d initially dismissed it as scuff marks from an hasty departure, but now… it formed a complex , almost crystalline structure . It wasn't a symbol she recognized from any gang graffiti or occult ritual book she’d ever seen logged in her career.
"The victim," Harlow prompted. "Who was it?"
"A dealer," Eva said, her voice lowering . "Or at least, that's what he was known as in certain circles. His name was Silas Croft. Dealt in… unique items. Mostly charms, amulets, lesser artifacts. Had a stall over in the market proper, when it’s active."
An artifact dealer. That narrowed the field. But it didn’t explain the absence of a body, the strange residue, or the precise geometric pattern. “And the clique?” Harlow pressed. “Silas would have owed them. Or crossed them. Someone contracted him, or took something from him. Standard procedure.”
“Except standard procedure doesn’t account for the *way * it was done,” Eva countered, her nervousness habit of tucking hair behind her ear making a brief appearance before she smoothed it down. “He wasn’t killed and his body moved. He was… unmade. Or dissolved. Or perhaps folded away along the lines of this diagram.”
Harlow’s breath hitched. Folded away. The thought was absurd, yet the pristine nature of the scene nagged at her. No signs of struggle, no blood, no DNA evidence that hadn’t been meticulously cleaned or simply never existed. It was as if Silas Croft had been erased from existence, not removed .
“Who would have the capability?” Harlow asked, more to herself than to Eva . Her mind flashed back to Morris, to the unsettling quiet that followed his disappearance, the impossible evidence trail that led nowhere and everywhere at once. The feeling of standing at the edge of a truth so alien it felt like madness .
Eva hesitated, then reached into her satchel. She pulled out a small, tarnished brass object. It was a compass, but unlike any Harlow had seen. The casing was worn smooth with age, bearing a patina of verdigris like an ancient coin. Its face was etched with swirling lines and symbols that seemed to writhe just out of the corner of her eye .
“This,” Eva said, holding it out, “is a Veil Compass. Crafted by a Shade artisan. It doesn’t point north. It points… elsewhere. To rifts, portals, areas where the Veil between worlds is thin.”
Harlow eyed the compass. The needle, instead of a simple sliver of metal, was a sliver of what looked like polished bone, suspended over the sigil-etched face by an unseen force. As Eva held it, the needle quivered , then spun wildly before settling. It pointed, not north, but directly at a dark, recessed alcove between two pillars at the far end of the platform.
“It’s picking up something,” Eva whispered, her eyes wide behind her glasses . “Something residual. Silas Croft wasn’t just a dealer of trinkets, Detective. He stumbled upon something… bigger. Something that requires a more specialized custodian. And someone wanted it, by whatever means necessary. Perhaps Silas himself activated something, a failsafe, when he realized he was in danger. Or perhaps the buyer did.”
Harlow’s gaze followed the compass needle. The alcove looked like any other shadowed recess in the derelict station, full of dust and shadows. But the compass… it was a tool of this hidden world, a world she usually only skirted the edges of in her investigations. A world that had swallowed Morris whole.
She walked towards the alcove, her posture rigid, her senses on high alert. The air here felt colder, thinner. And as she got closer, she could almost hear it – a low, almost imperceptible hum, like a distant generator. Or a heartbeat.
“This compass,” Harlow said, her voice gravelly, “its needle points to supernatural phenomena. You tell me, Kowalski. Did Silas Croft get spirited away by a portal? Or did he *open * one?”
Eva joined her, the compass still in her hand, quivering slightly . “That’s the question, isn’t it? The clean absence of evidence… it suggests either a perfect crime, or a departure from this reality entirely. Silas wasn't strong enough for the latter. But the *thing * he was selling… or the person who bought it… they might have been.”
Harlow peered into the alcove. There was some faint shimmering at the back, like heat haze rising from an impossibly cold surface. And the faint, sweet, ozonic scent was stronger here , mixed with something else now – something mineral, like damp earth and crushed quartz. It wasn’t blood. It wasn’t anything she could easily categorize. It was the residue of a place that was no longer quite *here *.
Her partner, Morris, had been lost in a similar void. A case that had started with a missing person and ended with a sealed room that showed no signs of entry or exit, only an unnatural chill and the lingering scent of… what? She’d never found an answer, only a gnawing certainty that some things defied logical explanation.
She looked back at Eva, at the earnest, intelligent face behind the round glasses. The scholar’s perspective, illuminated by tools like the Veil Compass, offered a terrifyingly plausible counterpoint to her own evidence-based deductions. The evidence didn't add up. Not by conventional means. But perhaps, just perhaps, the means were not conventional at all. The Veil Market, a place where the impossible was often just another commodity, had delivered its latest riddle. And Harlow Quinn, despite her instincts screaming for the familiar comfort of logic, found herself standing on the precipice of understanding that there were more things in heaven and earth, and beneath the streets of London, than were dreamt of in her police academy textbooks. The scent of ozone tingled at the back of her nose. The hum grew louder. The precise geometry on the platform floor suddenly looked less like a diagram and more like a recipe.