The Cursed Laboratory

Episode 1: The Delivery

The day my sister Talia Ye died, she had a handful of black crystals clenched in her fist.

The doctors told me it was a rare complication of a blood disorder. I did not believe them. At three in the morning, the curtains in her hospital room had been drawn shut, yet the crystals gave off a dim crimson glow the moment a thread of moonlight slipped through a gap. Medical literature contains nothing like that. The blood of porphyria patients does not crystallize after death, and it certainly does not glow red under moonlight.

I did not cry at the funeral. I stood over Talia's coffin and kept hearing the last thing she had said. Her fever had been forty degrees Celsius. She had gripped my wrist so hard her nails dug into my skin and whispered, "Sis... the castle is calling me back..."

I thought it was fever nonsense.

Then, after the funeral, I went back to the hospital and found a dark red envelope waiting on my desk. The seal showed a moon wrapped around a castle. My colleague said no one had seen who delivered it.

Inside was a single yellowed page and a sealed vial of blood. In neat fountain-pen script it read:

"Dr. Vivian Ye:

If you want the truth behind Talia Ye's death, come to these coordinates on the night of the next full moon. The castle gate opens only on that night.

- L"

The coordinates pointed to a protected core zone in the northwestern mountains, an area marked forbidden on the map.

The blood sample was worse. Under the light, black crystals floated inside it and rotated slowly, exactly like the ones I had seen in my sister's hand.

I went to the police. Two days later they told me the envelope had no fingerprints, the cameras had a blind angle, and the return address was fake. The blood sample, according to the lab, was "ordinary blood mixed with mineral powder."

"That powder glows in moonlight," I said.

They looked at me the way people look at someone who is beginning to lose her mind.

Three days later, I checked the coordinates myself. The satellite map showed only green mountains. But when I switched to thermal imaging at night, my heart lurched. In the middle of the forest was a perfectly rectangular blank. Not cold. Blank. As if the entire area had been screened away from heat itself.

On the next full-moon night, I drove into the mountains. My GPS died for the last three kilometers. My phone lost signal. I followed the coordinates with a flashlight until I found myself facing a cliff wrapped in vines.

Then the moonlight slid across the rock face.

The cliff disappeared.

It did not melt or dissolve. It was like a stage curtain being drawn aside. A castle of deathly white stone rose out of nowhere, its spires cutting into the night, stained glass catching the moon. It had been there the whole time. It simply had not allowed me to see it.

My legs went weak, but I did not back away. This was the castle Talia had spoken of.

The door opened on its own.

The drive up the mountain felt endless. Every bend of the road seemed to lead deeper into some place the modern world had forgotten. By the time the GPS failed, the silence outside the windshield had become so complete that even the engine sounded intrusive. I kept thinking about the coordinates in the letter, about the way the black crystals had turned in the vial, and about the simple fact that Talia had died afraid of something only she could see. I had spent my whole career believing that every mystery had a biochemical explanation if you looked hard enough. But standing in front of that vanished cliff, watching a castle rise out of empty air, I felt the first clean fracture in that certainty.

And still I went forward.

The rational part of me understood that turning back would be safer. But Talia had died with that name - castle - on her lips, and grief has its own kind of logic. It keeps moving toward the place where the wound began, no matter how impossible the road looks in daylight.