AI The descent was a physical act of shedding the ordinary. Detective Harlow Quinn pulled the collar of her coat higher, breathing in the stale chill that clung to the stairwell like cemetery mist. Each clang of her boots on the rusted metal steps seemed to echo not just down, but also *back *, as if the abandoned station remembered every footfall from decades past. Beneath Camden, the air thickened, acquiring a metallic tang that wasn’t just rust but something else, something… sharp. Unfamiliar.
She’d been briefed , of course. A disturbance. A report of… well, the report itself was vague, a garbled call from what sounded like a strung-out informant about a ‘place that shouldn’t be.’ But the location was concrete enough: the abandoned Jubilee line platforms, sealed off years ago. Not typically police business, unless someone had decided it was a prime spot for something illicit. But illicit usually meant drugs, or stolen goods, or a clandestine meeting gone sour. This wasn’t shaping up to be any of those.
Her partner, DS Morris, had a penchant for the overlooked corners of the city, the forgotten tunnels and subterranean haunts. He’d called them ‘the underskirts of London.’ Harlow hadn’t understood his fascination then. She understood it even less now, not since the void where he’d been.
She reached the bottom, stepping onto a platform that felt unnaturally wide, cavernous. The air was still, but thrummed with a low, almost imperceptible vibration. Forensic techs in their sterile white suits moved with a hushed reverence, their headlamps sweeping across the grime-slicked tiles. They looked like surgeons in a charnel house, performing surgery on ghosts. They’d found no body, just… *damage *. Abstract, bewildering damage .
Harlow’s eyes swept the scene with practiced precision. Her salt-and-pepper hair, cropped close and severe, offered no distraction. Eighteen years in the Met had etched competence into the sharp lines of her jaw, the steady gaze of her brown eyes. Her worn leather watch, a fixture on her left wrist, marked the relentless march of time, a concept that felt suddenly warped down here.
A flicker of movement caught her eye. Near the far end of the platform, blending with the shadows cast by the abandoned tracks, was a figure too small, too colourful to be one of the uniformed officers. Curly red hair, a scattering of freckles, and round glasses perched on her nose. Eva Kowalski.
Harlow’s jaw tightened. Kowalski wasn’t Met. She was an independent researcher, a specialist in… well, 'ancient heresies' was how she’d once put it. Eva was Aurora’s childhood friend. Harlow knew of her through whispers, through the fringes of cases that brushed against the inexplicable. Cases like Morris’s. Harlow had authorised Eva’s access, begrudgingly. Her bosses were stumped, the scene was a mess of impossible physics, and frankly, Eva’s peculiar insights sometimes cut through the fog better than standard procedure in these… odd instances.
Eva was holding something. A brass object, small enough to cup in one hand, glinting faintly under the harsh work lights. Harlow navigated through the scattered evidence markers, her movements economical, military in their bearing. The uniformed officer in charge, a young sergeant named Davies, met her with a troubled frown.
“Detective Quinn. It’s… odd, ma’am.” Davies ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, a nervous gesture that did nothing to reassure her.
“Define odd, Sergeant,” Harlow said, her voice low, cutting through the ambient hum .
“Well, the report was about trespassing, maybe vandalism. But there’s… this .” He gestured vaguely . “A patch of the platform wall. Looks like burn marks. But it feels cold. Colder than the rest of the tunnel. And the streaks… from the floor up, like something pulled itself out. But there’s no scrape marks, no debris trail from down there.” He pointed to a smear of dark, viscous material clinging to the concrete several feet up the wall. It looked like dried blood, but the consistency was wrong, too gritty, too flaky.
Harlow knelt, her gaze dissecting the scene. The air around the ‘burn’ felt stagnant, devoid of the usual dampness. She reached out, hesitated, then touched the wall. Davies was right. It was perceptibly colder, a tangible pocket of unnatural chill seeping into her fingertips. Not the damp cold of an old station, but a dry, biting cold, like the air from a deep freezer .
“Forensics?”
“Ran samples. Nothing they recognize, ma’am. No accelerants, no known biologicals. They’re baffled. They’ve never seen anything like this residue.” Davies gestured to a collection of bagged samples.
Harlow stood, her eyes scanning the expanse of the platform. It was large, cavernous, usually bustling with commuters. Now, it was a tableau of silent chaos. A few discarded newspapers lay undisturbed, coated in a fine layer of dust. Nearby, a dented metal bin sat upright, undisturbed. But in the centre of the platform, the air itself seemed to writhe, an invisible disturbance.
“The informant?”
“Came in earlier this morning, incoherent. Said he saw ‘them’ down here. The ones from the Market. Said they were ‘tearing something apart’.” Davies swallowed. “They think he’s just some junkie seeing things, ma’am. But then we got the call about the energy surge, faint readings, but enough to trigger an alert at a research facility three blocks away.”
The Veil Market. The name itself was a whisper , a rumour of a place that existed only to those who knew where to look, or perhaps, how to stumble. An underground market dealing in things that made even the roughest criminals sweat. Harlow had dismissed it as folklore, urban legend for the conspiracy-minded. Until Morris.
She walked towards the streaks of residue. Eva was now closer, her round glasses reflecting the lights as she studied the same area. Her worn leather satchel, bulging with books, lay at her feet like a loyal pet.
“Detective Quinn,” Eva said, her voice soft but clear, cutting through the low murmur of the forensics team. She tucked a stray curl behind her left ear, a familiar nervous habit. “You’re seeing the conventional damage . The ruptures, the thermal displacement. But you’re not seeing the… anchor points.”
Harlow turned, her expression unreadable . She respected Eva’s knowledge, her obsessive dedication to the obscure. But she didn’t deal in ‘anchor points.’ She dealt in evidence, in facts, in what she could prove. “Anchor points, Dr. Kowalski?”
“The residual imprint of a localized dimensional fold,” Eva explained, her eyes bright with intellectual curiosity, mixed with a professional caution. “The residue isn’t blood, Detective. It’s desiccated ectoplasm, a byproduct of an entity tearing itself through a weak point in the veil. The streaks on the wall are where it anchored itself as it passed.”
Harlow’s breath hitched, a fractional, involuntary reaction. Ectoplasm. Dimensional fold. Her mind immediately flashed to the fragmented reports, the impossible angles, the cold spots surrounding Morris’s last known location. He’d been investigating the clique too, chasing a lead about stolen artifacts that had led him into the city’s hidden arteries.
“And the cold spot?” Harlow asked, her voice hardening, pushing the rising tide of unease back .
“Where the energy was most concentrated,” Eva said, crouching beside a small, chalked outline. “It’s not just any spot, Detective. It’s a nodal convergence. The temperature drop is a side effect of extreme energy drain. It's like a localized vacuum, pulling heat from the surrounding air.” She pointed. “This outline here? It's not where decomposition occurred. It's where something stood, or was held, for a significant duration.”
Harlow walked over to the outline. It was roughly human-sized, maybe a bit larger. The dust pattern inside it was different, disturbed in a way that suggested heavy pressure, but also, strangely, a lack of friction. As if whatever was there hadn’t *slid * or *dragged *, but had been… held. Rooted.
“The Market operates on specific energetic frequencies,” Eva continued, her voice taking on a more urgent cadence . “Items traded there aren’t just enchanted; they're often imbued with energies that can warp space or attract entities. What we're seeing here suggests a powerful object, or perhaps a ritual, that went catastrophically wrong. Or, it went exactly as intended, for a very dangerous purpose.”
Harlow’s gaze swept back over the platform, then down towards the tracks, lost in the Stygian darkness. The metallic tang in the air was stronger here, almost coppery. Something else felt wrong. The dust on the undisturbed objects, on the abandoned newspapers, looked too uniform. As if it had settled *after * whatever happened, but before the forensic team arrived. It implied a stillness, a lack of ongoing disturbance. Yet, the energy readings, the damage …
She reached into her coat pocket, her fingers closing around the familiar , cool brass of the Veil Compass. She’d kept it, an odd souvenir from a case three years ago that had gone nowhere, but felt… connected. Morris had given it to her, saying it was ‘insurance.’
She brought it out, its verdigris-stained casing cool against her fingertips. The face was etched with tiny, intricate sigils that seemed to shift in the dim light . She held it level, her eyes on the needle.
For a moment, nothing. Then, the needle quivered . It spun, not towards any particular point on the platform, but seemed to oscillate wildly, erratically, before settling with an almost violent twitch pointing downwards, towards the absolute blackness of the track cuts. It wasn’t pointing towards a rift, or a portal, in the conventional sense. It was pointing *into * the earth, into the void beneath the station.
“That’s… unusual,” Eva murmured, peering at the compass. “They usually point towards an open ingress. Yours seems to be… searching.”
Harlow frowned. “Searching for what?”
“A residual echo ,” Eva speculated. “Or a hidden path. The Veil Market isn’t static; it moves. It operates in pockets, shifting its location. Sometimes it leaves trace signatures, like this place. If something was brought *through * from the Market, or taken *to * it, and the passage was forced, it could leave ripples. Ripples that would confuse a conventional compass, but not one attuned to dimensional flux.”
Harlow looked from the compass needle, pointing resolutely into the darkness, to the patch of cold wall, to the unnatural dust that suggested an unnatural stillness. The conventional police report would describe this as vandalism, or perhaps a bizarre accident involving some unknown substance. But the evidence, when examined with the right lens, whispered a different story. A story of unnatural forces, of places like the Veil Market, of entities that tore through reality itself.
Her gaze fell upon a section of the platform floor beneath the void where the compass needle pointed. It looked unremarkable, just more grimy concrete. But for a split second, she saw it. Not with her eyes, but with a deeper intuition, a cold dread that rose in her throat. A faint shimmering, like heat haze, but coloured with a faint, nauseating violet. A distortion in the very air, so subtle that the forensic lights and sweeping headlamps missed it, only visible when the ambient light and shadows shifted just so.
It was a doorway. Not a physical door, but a tear, a thin, fleeting seam in the fabric of space . And it was already closing , or perhaps, had already closed. The energy readings confirmed it. The residue confirmed it. The compass confirmed it. This wasn’t just a crime scene; it was the aftermath of a breach.
“What were they tearing apart, Dr. Kowalski?” Harlow asked, her voice barely a whisper . Her sharp jaw tightened, her brown eyes fixed on the spot where the shimmer had disappeared. She remembered Morris’s last, garbled transmission. ‘They opened something… it’s too much.’
Eva hesitated, her gaze following Harlow’s. “An unknown entity, perhaps. Or a conduit for one. The Market is a place where things are exchanged, Detective. Sometimes, the exchange is a life force. Sometimes, it’s access.” She looked up at Harlow, her freckled face serious. “And sometimes, what is taken isn’t meant to be taken at all.”
Harlow didn’t answer. She reached out, her gloved fingertips hovering inches above the spot. The air here felt impossibly thin, brittle. It felt like touching the edge of a wound in reality. The evidence didn’t add up because it wasn’t from *this * reality, not entirely. The clique wasn't just involved in criminal activity; they were dealing with forces that could unmake sections of London, or worse. And her partner had walked right into it.
The Veil Compass pulsed faintly in her palm, its needle still twitching, now pointing more directly downward. Somewhere beneath her boots, in the choked darkness, lay the scar of passage. And she suspected, with a chilling certainty, that this was just the beginning. The Veil Market wasn’t just a place for enchanted goods; it was a gateway. And someone had just forced it wide open.