Episode 3 — "Stacks"
Cold Open
The basement of the Ravenwood Library was a maze of high-density compact shelving—long steel rows that slid on rails with the crank of a handwheel, closing the gaps like a metal mouth. At 3:12 a.m., Gordon Pike (54), night custodian, hummed a hymn off-key and pushed his cart between two aisles, bleach already caking his knuckles white.
He liked the basement. Fewer students. Fewer ghosts with phones.
A wet footprint marked the concrete just past the "RARE & LOCAL HISTORY" sign. Gordon frowned. He hadn't mopped here yet. He knelt, touched it. The water beaded on his finger. Fresh.
He straightened, hand on the cart. It rolled an inch on its own. Not possible. The floor here wasn't graded.
A light above him hissed and stuttered. The stacks breathed.
"Hello?" Gordon called. He had a voice built for bowling leagues and Sunday shouts. It sounded small in the steel.
No answer. He stepped deeper, the aisle narrowing as the shelves seemed to lean. It was a trick of perspective, he told himself. He'd learned the room's meanness years ago. The handwheel at the end of the row sat still, a metal flower waiting.
He pushed his cart onward—and his back pocket buzzed. He tugged his phone free with gloved fingers, squinted at the screen. Unknown number.
TURN AROUND.
Gordon snorted. "Kids," he said. He turned because he would not have them. He would not be spooked by something that couldn't swing a mop.
White porcelain floated six feet back, just beyond the light's stutter. Hairline crack like a bolt of summer lightning frozen across the cheek. The mask tilted, curious.
Gordon took a step toward it, the way old men do when they're tired of pretending fear is for other people. "You got no business—"
The handwheel behind him spun.
He whipped around. The stacks on either side moved. The aisle began to close—six inches… four… three…
Gordon shoved his cart sideways. The wheel caught the rail, jammed. He threw his shoulder against one shelf, legs pumping, every tendon screaming. The steel didn't care about men named Gordon or the twenty dollars in his wallet or hymns half-remembered.
He screamed for the first time when the shelves kissed his arms, pinning him at the biceps. He screamed again when the pressure ratcheted. Something in his shoulder popped.
Above him, the mask watched, unhurried.
"Please," Gordon gasped. It wasn't a word so much as a surrender.
The handwheel kept turning by itself, like a ritual being completed.
His ribs went next—one after the other—like chalk snapping. The scream he made then was private and wide and ended on a wet cough. He saw his phone on the floor, screen cracked, still bright with a new text:
"SO HE LEARNS."
The shelves kissed shut.
Silence filled the basement the way water fills a bath—as if it had been waiting.
⸻
Act I — Ghost Stories with Fluorescents
Jason Hale hadn't slept. He lied about sleep the way people lie about how much they drank: badly, defensively, to prevent interventions. Dawn made his room look newer than it deserved. The words on the closet door—WELCOME TO RAVENWOOD—had dried to the scab color of penny water.
Ryan, barefoot, opened the fridge and stared like the right beverage would explain the world. "Dude. The group chat says library basement's taped off. What did you do?"
Jason didn't turn from the window. "Nothing."
Ryan looked over, caught the set of Jason's jaw. "Kidding. Chill. Want a waffle?"
"I want there to be fewer basements."
Ryan chewed. "We all want different things."
Jason's phone buzzed. He didn't have to look to know the number would be Unknown. He looked anyway.
DID YOU LIKE THE STAIRS.
He typed: I'm not playing.
OF COURSE YOU ARE. SHE IS TOO.
Jason thought of Elena's text from last night—DON'T TRUST HIM. JASON KILLS EVERYONE CLOSE TO HIM. He could still see the way her hand trembled before she steadied it with pure will. He typed: Leave her alone.
PROTECT HER.
THAT'S HOW THIS GAME WORKS.
Jason put the phone face-down and it became a live grenade he refused to acknowledge.
⸻
Act II — Notes in the Quiet
Ravenwood's quad had a quiet that felt earned by brick and ivy and the dumb luck of still standing. Students moved through it with backpacks and arguments. Jason crossed it with Elena, keeping two feet of air between their shoulders like a moat. She noticed. She noticed everything.
"Vance is going to think we're making a brand," Elena said. "Hale & Cruz: Crime Scene Tour. Ten-dollar wristbands."
Jason wanted to tell her about Gordon Pike before Vance did. He didn't. "You got any more messages?"
Elena's mouth went thin. "No. I blocked the number. It's the digital equivalent of saying 'I can't hear you' and sticking fingers in your ears." She angled him a look. "You?"
Jason shook his head. "No," he lied, and discovered in real time that lying to Elena felt like eating tinfoil.
The library loomed. Police tape ribboned across the basement stair entry like a cheap party decoration that meant we found the body too late. Detective Marla Vance stood with a clipboard, a tech placing numbered tent cards in a neat row on the floor.
Vance saw them and didn't even sigh. That was new. "Hale. Cruz. If I start charging per appearance, I'll be able to retire."
"You found him?" Jason asked. He kept his voice level, his eyes moving because this is how he lived.
"Custodian," Vance said. "Name's Gordon. I liked him." She meant it and that made everything worse. "Crushed between compact shelves. Not an accident unless the universe grew thumbs."
"El—" Jason corrected softly, "The killer turned the wheel."
Vance checked a line on her clipboard. "You speak like you watched it."
"I didn't," Jason said. "But you'll find a smear at shoulder height near the crank. Right glove, bleach-scent. And he texted someone. The screen will have a message: 'So he learns.'" He didn't realize he'd said that last part aloud until Vance's eyes cut to him like a scalpel.
"How would you know that," she asked without punctuation.
Jason had options: the truth, which would make him a suspect with a capital S; a lie, which Elena would read off him like a teleprompter; or a third thing between them that was yet-to-be-invented and necessary.
"Because they told me they're teaching me," Jason said. "And because the killer likes symmetries." He pointed with his chin to the tape. "Basement is where you hide things you want to show later."
Vance held him in a look. Then she said, quietly, "Mr. Hale, when I call you in, you say these sentences to me again. Exactly. If you start editing them, I start getting creative in ways you won't like." She nodded toward the main lobby. "If you're not going to leave like a sane person, go upstairs. Read a book. Don't breach my tape."
Elena waited until Vance turned away. "You're getting good at walking the line between helpful and I should arrest you."
Jason's mouth twitched. "Practice."
They climbed. On the second floor, the air was thinner, full of dust motes that moved like secrets. Elena palmed a study room door and slid inside. Jason followed, locked it.
She dropped her voice. "Show me your phone."
Jason hesitated. Then he placed it on the table, lit the screen, scrolled. The messages were a gallery of cruelty.
Elena read silently, jaw tightening, eyes prickling once and then recovering. "Okay," she said finally. "Okay." She opened her own notebook and flipped to a fresh page. "We're building a chronology. Timestamps. Content. Any pattern. I'll use initials. No names. If he ever gets into my phone, he gets nonsense."
Jason watched her write: 01:17 A.M.—"SHE LIKES YOU." 01:19—"QUICK OR SLOW?" 01:24—Photo of me at party. She underlined photo twice. "He was in the house."
"He was everywhere," Jason said.
"Don't get poetic. It makes paranoia sound pretty." Elena tapped the page. "Patterns. Every text that threatens a person close to you mentions time—soon, quick, slow. He's keyed to clocks like a ritual." She drew a little clock beside the word ritual and somehow the doodle made Jason want to protect her from the entire concept of drawing.
"What about the phrases," Jason asked. "They repeat. 'Don't let them get close.' 'So he learns.' 'See you soon.' It's like… a catechism."
Elena's pen paused. "Knox said something in lecture," she murmured. "About killers being goats who butt until gates open. What if this one opens gates with… familiarity. He says the same things until your brain starts expecting them."
"Conditioning," Jason said. "Make me hear the words in my own head even without a text."
Elena nodded once, decisively. "So we build a firewall. We write the phrases down so they stay on paper and not inside you." She wrote them, hard, carving the page.
Silence pretended to be safety for a full ten seconds.
Then Jason's phone buzzed. They both stared at it as if it had crawled onto the desk by itself.
Unknown number.
THIRD FLOOR. RARE BOOKS.
BRING YOUR FRIEND.
Elena grabbed his wrist. "We're not—"
Jason was already standing. "He'll do it anyway if we don't." He met her eyes and let the worst sentence out. "He'll do it worse."
Elena swallowed. "Then we go. And we go smart."
⸻
Act III — Rare Books
The Rare Books Room had large-paned windows that let in a hammered light. Tables sat like altars. Climate controls hummed like a faraway truck. A librarian at the desk lifted a head that looked built to say no, then dropped it when she recognized Elena. Journalism had its keys.
They walked between glass cases and spines that smelled like leather having old dreams. Jason's skin crawled with the sense that he was already positioned for some camera's frame.
"Don't stand in the middle of the room," he said softly. "Corners. Keep your back to wood, not glass."
Elena obeyed without commentary. She'd grown out of the part of herself that argued to prove she existed. Jason loved her for three seconds and then buried it.
At the far table, a book lay open with weighted strings on either margin. Not new. Not a stage. The paper was foxed; the text was Ravenwood Alumni Register, 1958–1975. A sticky note sat above it in handwriting Jason recognized from the closet door—not the script, but the violence in the curves.
BRING YOUR FRIEND.
"It's bait," Elena said.
"It's also a fact," Jason said. He leaned in without touching. The names marched in tidy rows. One name had been underlined in a reddish-brown that was either ink having an identity crisis or something that had once been inside someone. HAROLD KNOX.
Elena exhaled. "He went here."
"So did a lot of people," Jason said. But his pulse had changed. The date beside Knox's name aligned with a footnote: INVOLVED IN CAMPUS INCIDENT—RECORDS SEALED.
Elena's pen moved. "If Knox covered up something, if he's part of the… cycle—"
Jason held up a hand. "If. And even if: it doesn't make him a killer."
"You sound like defense counsel," Elena shot back, then softened. "Sorry."
Jason stood perfectly still. The room had shifted. Not light—pressure. A second layer of air had rolled over the first and it carried the smell of… ozone? No. Freon. Cooling units. Someone had… adjusted something.
"Elena," he said calmly. "We're leaving."
She closed her notebook without arguing. They turned—and the Rare Books door clicked. The librarian looked up, confused, tugged the handle. It didn't move.
Jason's phone buzzed.
LOCKDOWN DRILL.
DON'T PANIC.
SHE PANICS, SHE DIES.
A vent grille above the table rattled. A fine, nearly invisible mist began to thread into the air. Not steam. Halocarbon clean-agent—the kind that starves air of oxygen without leaving residue on paper.
Jason tasted metal and calculation. He moved. "Get low," he said, grabbing the heavy doorstop from under a case and wedging it into the vent mouth like a butcher jams a bone. It slowed—didn't stop—the flow.
He scanned. The windows were sealed; he could see the silicone beading. The door was magnet-locked. He needed power to drop or a sensor to think the room was on fire.
"Sprinklers," he said.
"There are no sprinklers," Elena said, voice paper-thin. "That's the point of the gas."
Jason's eyes found the heat detector bulge near the ceiling—no glass bulb, just a smooth white coin. "Then we fake heat."
He grabbed a magnifying sheet from a nearby case—used to help readers with small print—and angled it toward the window like a childhood he hadn't had. The winter sun wasn't strong, but it was persistent. A pale oval of light gathered on the heat sensor.
"Talk to me," Elena said, lying on the floor with her mouth covered by her sleeve. "Say anything."
"Knox's tie is always crooked," Jason said. "Not because he doesn't know how, but because he tightens it in elevators where he's looking at himself too close to judge straight." He shifted the lens a fraction, coaxing brightness. "Vance pretends to hate humor because if she starts she'll love it and it will make the job hurt more."
Elena coughed a laugh and then made it a real cough. "What about me."
"You write clocks when you're scared," he said. "Little circles with two hands. And you hate that you do it."
"Okay," she said, watery. "Okay."
The heat detector chirped. The magnet thunked off the door plate. Air—real air—rushed as the hallway's pressure reasserted itself. Jason yanked the door, pulled Elena up and through. The librarian gulped at them, chalk-white.
"What—who did—" she stammered.
"Call Vance," Jason said, and then the alarm in his pocket screamed in its own silent way.
BRAVO.
TRY THIS ONE. BASEMENT.
COME ALONE.
He stared. Elena read over his shoulder—he let her. He didn't keep secrets that would get them killed faster.
"No," Elena said. "No alone anything."
"If I don't," Jason said, and the rest of the sentence was Gordon becomes the tutorial.
Elena wiped her mouth, steadied her voice. "Then we cheat on the word alone."
⸻
Act IV — The Shelves
They hit the basement stairs together and found the tape snapped and dangling like a performed gesture. Vance wasn't in sight—pulled upstairs by reports of a "faulty heat detector," Jason guessed. The air was cooler here. The stacks waited with the indifference of bridges.
Jason crouched by the handwheel of the middle aisle. Smear, right at shoulder height. Glove residue. Bleach memory. He placed a palm on the metal, felt for a vibration that would tell him motors had been rigged.
Nothing. Manual.
"Elena, see the safety trip bar down low?" He pointed at the base of the shelf: a thin strip meant to halt motion if it touched a body. "If it's been bypassed—"
He crouched further. The wire connecting bar to brake had been clipped and then artfully re-taped to look whole. The killer had done homework.
Elena's breath ticked faster. "We leave, we call Vance, we write about it, we don't die in a metal sandwich."
Jason almost smiled. "Yes. After I photograph the clip."
He pulled his phone up—and every light in the basement went out.
A white oval bloomed at the far end of the aisle: the mask suspended in a little planet of flashlight cone. It lifted a hand and wiggled fingers, lazy.
Jason froze. Elena did not. She threw her voice the way theater kids learn to, a sharp "Hey!" right to the side, making the mask's beam swing off them for one half-second. Jason used it. He lunged, not forward but sideways, jammed his shoulder into the nearest shelf and kicked the handwheel backwards, hard, so the row opened instead of closed.
Metal screamed. Somewhere a lock-pin snapped. The mask's light skittered, blinded itself on chrome, and then moved—fast, low, predator-quick.
"Move!" Jason barked, grabbed Elena's sleeve, dragged her into the next aisle as the first slammed shut on the space their bodies had occupied.
They ran the rail. The mask's light hunted them, a crescent swinging. Jason grabbed a steel bookend from the lower shelf and shoved it into the rail gap ahead like a wedge, then spun the wheel so the shelf tried to close on the metal instead of flesh. The steel shrieked and stuck.
The mask appeared in the seam between rows, no more than a hand's width of white and black eye hole. A knife kissed through, tracing the air near Jason's cheek with the elegance of someone who had practiced. Jason felt the heat of his own blood before he saw the line it left.
"Run," he said, and didn't have to repeat it.
They burst into the open square by the stairs and collided with Detective Vance and two uniforms coming down hard and loud. Vance saw the knife—saw the mask—drew in one motion that said whatever academy she'd trained at still lived in her bones.
"Police!" she shouted, the word huge and ritual.
The mask's light went black. Footsteps were not heard. That was the worst part. The killer left like smoke leaves.
Vance took them in at speed: the blood line at Jason's cheek, the chemicals in the air, Elena's sleeve damp, the wedge in the rail like a genius or a tantrum. Her gaze softened one degree and hardened four.
"You two don't breathe without me for the rest of the day," she said, then added, to Jason only, very quietly, "Nice wedge."
Jason opened his mouth to say Gordon, to say the clip, to say the heat detector and Knox's name in a book that should have been boring—but his phone buzzed and the ruin on Elena's face told him hers had too.
They looked together.
Jason's screen: a live photo—a frame and then a short motion. It was his own bedroom, taken from the floor near the end of his bed, the angle of a child hiding. The first frame showed nothing. The motion showed Ryan, sleep-slow, rolling out of bed and standing, eyes open but wrong, walking to the closet, and closing himself inside.
Elena's screen: a countdown. No numbers—just the word SOON with the O's blinking like eyes.
Ryan. Closet. WELCOME TO RAVENWOOD in dried copper on the inside.
Jason didn't think. He moved.
"Where," Vance snapped, already running.
"Dorm," Jason said. "Now."
⸻
Ending Cliffhanger
They took the stairs two at a time and the road in a burst of blue-and-white. Vance drove with one hand and called dispatch with the other, Elena braced in the back seat with Jason, gripping the oh-shit handle in a prayer grip.
"Do not go in first," Vance said without turning her head. "You wait for me."
Jason nodded and meant it until the patrol car skidded against the curb and the dormitory fire alarm began to scream.
Smoke rolled lazily from an open second-floor window like a cat's stretch. No one came out of Jason's room because Jason's room had been curated for exits that don't happen.
He sprinted. He heard Vance curse behind him and someone radio a code. He hit the door with the muscle he saved for not dying, took the hall in a rush, shouldered his own room open.
Ryan's bed was empty. The closet door was closed. A candle—three candles—burned in a little shrine on Jason's desk beside a boxed disposable phone with its screen lit and the word PLAY.
The air smelled like cheap incense and a chemistry set.
Jason crossed the floor. He touched the closet knob and flinched. It was hot.
From inside the closet: the faintest tap on the door. Two taps. Knock. Knock.
"Ryan," Jason said, and put his mouth to the crack. "Say anything."
Silence. Then—so soft he almost made it up—"Jase?"
He turned to the desk. Elena had the box in her hands already, fingers careful. "Timer?" she asked.
The burner phone blinked 00:30. Then 00:29.
The closet door clicked as something inside the mechanism whirred. The candles guttered sideways, breath that wasn't breath. The sprinkler in the hall sputtered once and died.
Vance reached the doorway, gun out, took in the room in a single precise raptor glance. "Everyone out—"
Jason shouted over her, "He rigged the latch. If we open wrong—"
00:18.
Elena moved to the door, pressed her ear, eyes wide and clear. "There's a second device," she whispered. "Above the jamb. Something'll drop if we just yank."
Vance holstered, grabbed a multitool from a belt pouch and a coat hanger from a heap of Ryan's laundry (thank God for slobs). She bent it into a hook with three fast gestures. "On my count," she said. "I lift the drop. You twist the latch with the flat. Jason, when I say pull, you pull, then you and Ryan go to ground."
00:10.
They breathed together once—three people who had not asked to share a life becoming a unit because the clock made them.
"Now," Vance said.
She slid the hook over the top of the door and caught something that tugged back, mean. Elena slid the flat of the multitool into the latch and twisted against tension. Jason wrapped both hands on the knob and pulled with everything left.
The door flew. A tin canister swung down and caught on Vance's hook by a quarter inch; a viscous clear fluid dribbled from its lip and sizzled where it hit candle flame on the threshold. The flame flared blue and then died because oxygen likes drama but not stupidity.
Ryan fell out, gag tied loose at his throat, eyes wild and wrong. He hit the floor and rolled, coughing, then vomited thin and ugly. Elena dragged him clear by the armpits with a strength Jason had not filed under "Elena."
00:02 blinked 00:01 on the burner. It chirped a cheerful sound like an app gamifying death. The lamp on the desk exploded, showering the room in glittering shards as a filament popped under sudden overload. The sprinkler in the hall came back to life and the room rained exactly too late.
Jason lay on his back on the carpet with the taste of copper and electrical fire in his mouth and laughed once, a short animal sound swallowed by sirens.
Ryan rolled onto his side. He looked at Jason like a boy and a man and a fright. "Dude," he croaked. "Dude—there was somebody in the closet. They were… whispering. They told me to get in. And I did."
Vance stood, chest heaving once and then not, eyes cutting to the desk where, under the shattered lamp, a single photo lay faceup and dry, as if the water respected it. She picked it up with two fingers.
It was Professor Harold Knox, thirty years younger, in a suit too big for his shoulders, standing in front of the Ravenwood Library with three other students. One of the students' faces had been scratched out with something sharp. Underneath, in the same red-brown hand:
HIS LESSON. YOURS NEXT.
Vance looked at Jason and Elena in turn and said, softly, like a weather report for a town that refused to evacuate:
"Class is in session."