The air in London in the late 1800s was thick and cold. It clung to you like a wet shroud scented with coal smoke, stale rain, and the muted despair of ten million hearts trapped between river and heavy fog. Elias Thorne, an archivist by profession and a melancholy aficionado by accident, was familiar with this sense. He knew weights intimately.
His office, a cramped stone chamber up in the spire of the Royal Antiquarian Society, always had the scent of ancient paper and the gradual rot of abandoned relics. In the evening, there was nothing to disturb the scratching of his pen as he wrote down antiquated apothecary bills. This monotonous chore anchored him. It gave him stability as his mind roamed into the dark recesses of history.
Elias would regularly believe that the life he was living was only a veneer over a deeper, darker reality. The Victorian era, with its flagrant bravado and industrial hubris, was just a distraction from it. The important information—the hints of something huge, old, and wrong—was carefully concealed in the margins, in partially scratched-out notes, or in the possessions of those who had disappeared.
He was in wonder over the frighteningly frequent prescriptions of laudanum for "Nocturnal Awareness" when the silence was shattered by the rhythmic, near-furtive knocking of knuckles on his strong oak door.
It was Inspector Alistair Finch. His accustomed hard face glowed in the dancing gaslight of the corridor. Alistair, a man with his feet firmly planted in science and a staunch defender of facts, also coped with the Society's macabre interests. He had a small package wrapped in brown paper— evidence of a case officially nonexistent.
"Thorne," Alistair said his voice strained and low. "The Ravenwood case was declared a suicide. I think it's not completely closed."
The Ravenwood case had rocked the city a month prior. A prominent astronomer had been discovered dead in his locked observatory. His navigational tables and telescopes appeared untouched, save for one fact: every window in the room had been painstakingly covered in black bitumen.
And what half-truth do you present to me today, Inspector?" Elias pushed the dusty ledger away.
Alistair carefully unwrapped the package. In it was a palmed volume bound in leather. Its cover was dark and shiny like wet soil. It was the astronomer's private journal.
"He never mentioned the bitumen," Alistair whispered, his face closer. His breath had small whiffs of cheap cigarette smoke and professional stress. "He wrote on The Shift. His last post mentions a kind of shadow which he said remembers light. He referred to it as the Lingering Pall."
Elias picked up the journal. The leather was cold against his fingers. He opened it to the final frantic pages, where the astronomer's neat handwriting had devolved into hasty scribbles.
28th June. Shadow isn't absence. It is retention. It retains the impression of gaslight well after the lamp has been extinguished. Moreover, it begins to retain the imprint of a moment, a thought, a face. It stays in the corners.
Elias ran his finger over the last line. The ink there was not black. It was something deeper, absorbing the light from the gas lamp over head. When Elias looked at it, a fleeting, jagged recollection that didn't belong to him—a glimpse of some remote, impossibly high spire under a bruised purple sky—pricked at the back of his mind, leaving a strange aftertaste of ancient salt and lost mathematics..
He gazed up at Alistair, the book heavy in his hand. "This is where the mysteries lie, Inspector. Not in the dark realities of death, but in the spaces where light refuses to recede. The Pall is crying out for a reckoning."