The Cursed Laboratory

Episode 4: The Dead Man's Heart Is Silver

The room in the west tower was small and windowless. Star charts hung from the walls beside strange brass instruments. On the floor lay a man in an old-fashioned suit with a neat black-edged hole in his chest.

There was no blood. No smell of blood.

I knelt beside him. Dilated pupils. No pulse. Cold skin. The wound was three centimeters across, clean-edged, as though something had burned straight through him at impossible temperature. The damage to the clothing suggested the force had burst outward from inside.

When I pulled open his collar, I saw silver lines beneath the skin, branching like circuitry.

"What is that?" I asked.

Only Adrian and Lucien remained in the room with me.

"Calvin was our astrologer," Adrian said. "As for those markings... they are standard."

He took out a silver knife and cut his own palm. No blood emerged. Beneath the skin, the same silver network gleamed, denser than Calvin's. Then the wound closed before my eyes.

"Every resident of this castle has them," he said. "Everyone except you."

"What does that mean?"

Adrian crouched until his eyes were level with mine. "It means you are the prototype. What flows in your veins is the source code for all of us. Three hundred years ago, the person called L - you - created our kind using your own blood."

My mind went blank.

"My sister Talia..."

"Was your clone. Attempt forty-six. The previous forty-five all failed. Talia was the only one who lived to adulthood. We sent her back to you hoping the bond between you would awaken your memory. It failed, and it cost her her life."

He stood and looked down at me. "Now you have returned, Vivian Ye. Or perhaps I should say Lilian. Prototype Forty-Seven. The true master of this castle."

Outside, the bell rang again.

Lucien bowed. "Welcome home, Mother. May the final stage of the experiment begin?"

The words hit like a physical blow.

"What did you just call me?"

"Lilian. Or Vivian, if you prefer," Adrian said with maddening calm. "The original laboratory logs are signed Lilian Ye. Your handwriting. Your blood archive. Your experimental design."

He helped me to my feet. I looked again at Calvin's open chest. Inside, a silver heart glimmered faintly, still twitching.

"You're telling me I created all of this?" I demanded. "A whole castle full of vampires?"

"Nightwalkers," Lucien corrected. "The human word is inaccurate and insulting. We are a gene-edited evolution-"

"His heart is still beating," I snapped. "Dead men don't have beating silver hearts. Are you people machines?"

Adrian exchanged a look with Lucien - the look doctors share when a patient is about to hear the impossible.

"Come with me," Adrian said.

"What about the body?"

"Lucien will handle it."

"Handle it? This is a murder scene. It should be preserved. The police should be called. There should be an autopsy."

Adrian stopped in the doorway and glanced back. "No one in this castle has truly died in three hundred years. Calvin is the first. If the police came and found a castle full of nonhumans, do you think they would investigate the death first, or carve us open in a laboratory?"

I had no answer.

He held out a hand.

"Come see the truth. Or leave at dawn and spend the rest of your life wondering how your sister really died."

I looked once at the silver heart, then at him.

"...Lead the way."

The silver heart pulsing inside Calvin's chest should have been impossible, yet the clinical part of my mind kept cataloging details anyway - rhythm, contraction strength, tissue sheen, thermal behavior. It was reflex. If I stopped observing, I would have to start accepting. And acceptance, in that moment, felt far more dangerous than horror. Because if Adrian was telling the truth, then my sister had not simply died after stumbling onto something monstrous. She had died inside a system I myself had built.

When Lucien called me "Mother," the others in the corridor had not laughed. They had bowed their heads. That was the part I kept returning to as Adrian led me away from the tower. Not the silver heart. Not the impossible wound. But the reverence. Whatever role they thought I had once played in their lives, it had been intimate enough to survive centuries and terrifying enough that my return could make an entire hall go silent.