Episode 3: Don't Trust the Blood Test
701 Words
The butler, whose name was Lucien, showed me to a guest room on the third floor. The room was absurdly large: a four-poster bed, a lit fireplace, antique books on the desk. One of them was a genuine early edition of De Motu Cordis.
"The bathroom is next door. Dinner will arrive in an hour. Ring if you need anything," Lucien said. Then he paused at the door. "One more thing. I strongly advise you not to leave your room at night. Certain parts of the castle are... unsafe."
The moment he left, I checked everything. The window was sealed shut, with a thirty-meter drop outside. When I opened the door, every lamp in the corridor went dark at once, leaving only the light from my room on a patch of carpet. A warning, obvious and deliberate.
The bathroom mirror was an antique with flaking silver backing. On the stone beside the sink, scratched so faintly I nearly missed it, were five words:
Don't trust the blood test.
I stared for ten seconds. Then I took out the portable microscope, slides, and lancet I carried in my field kit. Hematologists get used to odd habits.
I pricked my finger, made a smear, and slid it under the lens.
At low magnification, my blood looked normal. At higher magnification, with a moonlight-spectrum filter, my spine went cold.
Tiny protrusions pulsed along the edges of my red blood cells as if they were alive. My white-cell count was wildly elevated, nearly five times normal. When I added a hemolytic reagent, the ruptured cells released not simple hemoglobin, but a faintly fluorescent material.
A precursor to the black crystals.
With shaking hands, I prepared a second slide using the blood sample sent by "L."
It matched mine perfectly.
No - mine was even more active. Under the lens, the fluorescent substance seemed to writhe slowly, as though it had just awakened.
Then the castle bell began to ring outside the window. Twelve heavy strikes, slow and deep.
A scream tore through the silence.
I ran into the corridor. Residents were already gathering there, all staring toward the west tower with faces somehow even paler than before.
"Please return to your rooms," Lucien called, moving fast though his voice remained controlled.
"What happened?" someone demanded.
Adrian appeared at the stair landing dressed in black, his face like carved marble. "Calvin is dead. In the west tower."
The silence that followed was not grief. It was shock. Fear. Pure disbelief.
Adrian looked at me. "Dr. Ye, would you assist in confirming the situation?"
"I'm a hematologist, not a coroner."
"You are the only doctor here," he said. "And your sister assisted with a similar investigation while she was with us. If you want to know what she saw in this castle, begin now."
At the end of the hall, dark red liquid was seeping from beneath an oak door.
I swallowed hard. "Show me."
I checked the room again after the blood test and found more evidence that the castle had expected me. The wardrobe held clothing in my size. The desk drawer contained untouched stationery stamped with the moon-and-castle crest. Even the medicine cabinet held supplies no ordinary guest would need: sterile lancets, saline, anticoagulants. Someone had prepared for the possibility that I would start testing things the moment I arrived. That realization frightened me almost as much as the slide under the microscope. It meant they did not merely know I was a doctor. They knew me.
When the scream rang out, it cut through that thought like a knife.
I wanted to believe the blood anomaly belonged to this place rather than to me. That belief lasted only a few seconds under the lens. Once it was gone, every memory from the past month changed shape at once: Talia's fever, the strange inconsistencies in the hospital reports, the way she had looked at me on her last lucid night as if she knew something about my body that I did not. The scream in the corridor no longer felt like a separate horror. It felt like the next item on a list already written in my blood.
Nothing about that was an accident.
- Writer
