The Cursed Laboratory

Episode 7: The Real Experiment

A hidden video file opened by itself.

The footage was shaky and ancient. In the dim light of a cellar, seven or eight children lay huddled together, their skin covered in sores so deep that some places showed bone. A young woman spoke from behind the camera in a cracked, exhausted voice.

"Third day. John has started coughing blood. Little Anna didn't wake up this morning."

The camera turned to a bed in the corner where a small girl lay motionless.

"The moonlight treatment helps the children," the woman said. Then the lens swept over the dead adults on the floor. "Not the grown-ups."

The picture cut to day. A narrow shaft of sunlight fell through a cellar window.

I watched flesh smoke and blacken where the sunlight touched the children. They screamed and rolled into the shadows, but the damage spread anyway. The smallest child's leg burned through and broke away black to the bone while the woman behind the camera sobbed no, no, no.

Night returned in the next clip. The children were alive, but changed. Their eyes glowed red. Their skin had turned paper white. They cowered from even candlelight.

The camera swung toward a bronze mirror.

The face in it was mine, and not mine. A thinner face. Hollow eyes. Brittle hair. Lilian.

"The plague was not natural," she said. "A sorcerer from the neighboring village poisoned our well out of envy. I found out. I went after him."

She paused for so long I thought the recording had ended.

"I killed him. I forced his own poison down his throat. Then I burned his house. I tried to burn all the evidence. But one apprentice escaped. Before he fled, he laid a final curse on me: Your sin will follow you until the moon goes dark."

Her voice flattened into something beyond despair.

"The day the children began to fear the sun, I understood. The curse was not meant to kill me. It was meant to make me watch everyone I loved become monsters, knowing I had made them that way."

She leaned close to the camera.

"So this experiment was never truly about curing the plague. It was about atonement. I killed a man. I brought down his curse. I turned children into this. I have to save them, even if it takes my blood, my life, every cycle after this one."

The file ended in silence.

I could not feel my legs.

"So we're not just plague survivors," I whispered. "We're the product of a curse."

"We are the product of a choice," Adrian said. "Lilian gave us one: die under the sun or live under the moon. We chose life."

Lucien lowered his head. "The first time you learned the whole truth, you tried to walk into sunlight and die. The second time, you started the self-destruct sequence yourself. The third time, you erased your own memories. After that you built protections. You said some pain only one person needed to carry."

I forced myself to breathe. "Calvin. Who was he really?"

Adrian answered at once. "The descendant of the sorcerer's apprentice. His true name was Caleb. The original line never vanished. It hid inside the castle and waited."

He showed me another hidden chamber, another row of bodies. One pod held a younger version of Calvin - softer, maybe nineteen, suspended in cryogenic sleep.

"Backup body," Adrian said. "If the active one died, the next would wake in a century."

A direct descendant of the curse line still existed.

Then another memory surfaced: Talia's roses. She had painted only roses since childhood. Lucien said she had spent every day in the castle's rose garden sketching, yet never kept the drawings.

"She kept one," I said. "Somewhere only I would understand."

We ran to the garden.

In the pavilion, there was nothing but stone table and benches. But along the underside of the table I found a tiny scratched drawing of two hooked pinkies - the promise Talia and I had made after our parents died. Below it, an arrow pointed toward a stone slab in the floor.

Beneath it lay a wrapped painting.

It was a portrait of Lilian.

On the back, in Talia's hand, were the words that changed everything again.

Caleb altered the self-destruct sequence but left a backdoor. The password is the direction of our pinky swear - yours inward, mine outward. Input it at the moonlight core and the program will stop. But when the moon field goes dark, everyone who depends on it, including you, will lose its protection.

At the end she had written only this:

This time, choose what you truly want.