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Ken walks into the museum archives on a gloomy and foggy Saturday morning. She's surprised that the door actually opens, since the hours listed on the door say the place only opens at noon on the weekends, but she's not about to question it.
The interior is dark. There's a desk at the front with the most ancient looking rotary phone Ken has ever seen, right next to a cassette player that's playing a song that Ken is surprised to recognize as Brahms.
Xe supposes it makes sense that the call xe tried to leave earlier didn't even make it to voicemail if that's all this place has.
"Hello?" they say, raising their voice and walking a little further in.
It's a little offputting in here. There's a heavy door that's been propped open just beyond the desk that leads to what looks like a massive unlit storeroom. It's nothing like the welcoming atmosphere of the actual museum a few blocks down from this place, with its warm brick accents and honey-yellow ceiling lamps suspended at regular intervals.
"Can I help you?"
Ken flinches at the sudden voice. There's a figure emerging from the darkness, short and unassuming, and wearing a gray knitted cardigan over a purple buttoned shirt and loose gray sweatpants.
"Uh," Ken attempts to regain xyr composure. "Yeah, actually. I was looking for some, uh. Information."
The archivist— Ken assumes— gives them a wry smile. "Information, huh? I assume it's not something you can just check Wikipedia for? Or maybe the actual library?"
"Something like that," Ken says, glancing back at the assortment of items scattered on the front desk. Besides the cassette player and the rotary phone, there's a messy stack of papers, a shockingly modern-looking scanner, and something that looks like an inventory sheet that's been marked up with a purple pen.
"Um. I'm Ken, by the way. Sorry for just, uh, barging in here."
"Well, I guess that's on me for leaving the door opened," the archivist says with a laugh. "I'm Wifies."
He makes no motion to shake Ken's hand and she's glad for that. This is already awkward enough.
"So what are you looking for?" Wifies says. He walks over to the desk and flips the top paper on the stack over. Ken's eyes track the movement and wishes xe had taken a longer look at whatever the archivist is trying to hide.
"I guess…" Ken glances at the inventory sheet instead, which is the next item to be not-so-covertly turned over. "Records from the hospital? Or maybe doctor's offices? Not recent ones."
"Oh?" Wifies says.
Ken looks back up at his face to see him smiling.
"Yeah, I've got that kind of thing here," Wifies says. He turns away from the desk and starts walking back into the dark storeroom beyond the open door. Ken spares another curious look at the papers on his desk, but decides to follow after him instead.
"I don't know how far back you're looking for, though," Wifies says, his voice light and easy to listen to. Weirdly soothing. "You know, even though HIPAA was signed into law in 1996 to cover personal health information of living individuals, it was also meant to protect information up to fifty years after a person's death. But I guess after those fifty years, it's free for whoever wants to read it. Unless it's connected to a crime, maybe."
"Hm," Ken says. They hesitate at the entrance to the storeroom. They can't really see where Wifies has gone to. Maybe they just need another minute for their eyes to adjust.
"Well, you should be able to find that stuff pretty easily," Wifies continues.
A light suddenly turns on, and Ken jumps again. There's a jarringly bright naked bulb dangling from the ceiling on a narrow wire, with a string swinging next to it that Wifies had presumably just pulled. She takes a few steps further into the storeroom, eyes widening as she takes everything in.
On either side, stretching all the way back into the darkness further into the storeroom, are heavy-looking rolling vault doors marked with letters and numbers. Metal wheels are built into each door, and Ken watches with fascination as Wifies steps up to one of the vault doors and rolls it to reveal shelves packed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes and stacks of books. Further down the hallway, past the light of the bulb, the darkness seems to go on past what feels like it should be possible, but Ken tries not to think too much on that. It's probably just a trick of the light: xyr mind trying to fill in the voidlike space with something.
"Everything's sorted by letter and numbers," Wifies says. "A for animal specimens, B for books and manuscripts, C for clothing and textiles. Closer to zero means more recent. The books will be sorted by estimated publication date. How old did you want to look back?"
"Uh," Ken says. Xe glances to the other side of the archive vaults, where through the space between the doors, xe can see a shadowy line of taxidermied animals perched on the shelves. "Not sure. I'll know when I see it."
Wifies laughs. "If you don't know what you're looking for you might be here all day. There's a lot in here."
And if Ken didn't have a very specific thing to investigate here, they might not see that as a bad thing. Even with the reminder of the reason they came, they allow themself to get a little distracted by all the weird and wonderful things locked away in here. There's an entire shelf full of bird skins, and another one packed with badly stuffed pet cats meticulously labeled with the cats' names. Ken hesitantly reaches out to touch one. It's soft. They're not sure how they feel about that. They move on to the next vault, which is full of hundreds of boxes of butterflies and beetles and moths, all of then pinned neatly in perfect little rows…
"There was a surgeons' research clinic that closed about thirty years ago," Wifies says, his voice muffled past the rows and rows of archive shelves. "Is that old enough for you?"
"Maybe," Ken says. She rolls the vault door over and walks a few more doors down, rolling open another one and finding a fragile-looking wedding gown that looks like it's at least a hundred years old wrapped in a clear plastic sheet. The white has turned a grayish brown with age. Ken looks further along the shelf and sees more garments piled on top of one another, most of them beautiful yet old dresses.
"Why aren't these things in the museum?" Ken says. She turns around and barely holds back another flinch when she sees Wifies standing right at the entrance to the vault she's in.
"Well, there's not really enough space for everything," Wifies says with a shrug. "And a lot of this still needs restoration. And, well. Some of the stuff in here isn't really meant for people to see anyway."
"Why do you say that?" Ken says. "What wouldn't they want to see?"
"Ah, don't worry about that," Wifies says. "Weren't you looking for medical records?"
"Yeah," Ken says. She looks back down at the wedding gown and the dull pearl beads sewn along the bodice.
"Well, that's a little further down this way," Wifies says.
He leads Ken out of the artifacts and to one of the vaults full of books. And jeez, if Ken thought the books in the rare section of the actual library were old and fragile, these are in a league all of their own. Xe is half afraid that if xe touches them they'll start to disintegrate.
"If you can wear gloves while you're looking through those, then I guess my boss won't kill me for letting a member of the public in here," Wifies says with another laugh as he passes Ken a pair of white gloves.
They're a little too big, but Ken slips them on anyway, then moves further into the vault to start what will likely be hours of aimless searching.
One at a time, Ken slides books and boxes of documents off the shelves, flipping carefully through the pages and trying to be as gentle as possible. It's not all that easy with the gloves, but Ken figures they're more to keep the paper from getting stained or dirty. Thankfully, almost all of the books and boxes in this vault are medical records, all of them from the clinic Wifies had mentioned. They're… well. There's a lot of them. And Ken still isn't sure if this is what she's looking for.
What feels like hours pass.
Ken is just about to give up and move on to the next vault when they pull off the lid to a wooden box and freeze at the title page.
It can't be that easy, can it?
Ken slowly starts to look through the pages, a growing dread building in her stomach. The records are meticulous, and so are the diagrams. Dozens of records of pointless surgeries and clinical, detached notes on how long the subject bled and writhed on the exam table. God, there's a envelope of photographs tucked alongside the records. She's not sure if she wants to look at those yet.
It would sicken her if she didn't already suspect it. She glances up at the dates on each page, neatly penned in the corner of every document.
Exactly fifty years ago.
That's…
The light goes out.
.
.
.
Ken walks into the museum archives on a warm and sunny Saturday morning. She's surprised that the door actually opens, since the hours listed on the door say the place only opens at noon on the weekends, but she's not about to question it.
The interior is dark. There's an unoccupied desk at the front with the most ancient looking rotary phone Ken has ever seen, right next to a cassette player that's playing a song that Ken is surprised to recognize as Dvořák.
Xe supposes it makes sense that the call xe tried to leave earlier didn't even make it to voicemail if that's all this place has.
"Hello?" they say, raising their voice and walking a little further into the darkened space.
"Who's that?" a voice echoes.
Ken flinches as the light from beyond a hallway turns on and a figure emerges. Well, two figures, actually. A taller person with an oversized knitted black sweater atop a bright pink skirt, supporting a shorter person wearing a gray knitted cardigan over a purple buttoned shirt and loose gray sweatpants.
"I was just— oh my god," Ken says, all thoughts abandoning her when she sees the dark red spilling out from under the shorter figure's hand, pressed to his side.
"What are you doing here?" the taller of the two figures says, looking around frantically. They're hugging the other figure close against their side. "You're not supposed to be here."
"I was just—" Ken stutters. "The door was— What happened?"
"I think… someone just stabbed me," the shorter one says, sounding far too calm to be saying those words.
"Fuck, Wifies—" the taller one says, gasping when the shorter one pulls his cardigan up to reveal a long bleeding wound from his sternum down his stomach. Like someone tried to gut him open, or—
Ken stares in horror, but—
Wait a second—
The light goes out.
.
.
Ken walks into the museum archives on a dark and rainy Saturday morning. She's surprised that the door actually opens, since the hours listed on the door say the place only opens at noon on the weekends, but she's not about to question it.
The interior is dark. There's an unoccupied desk at the front with the most ancient looking rotary phone Ken has ever seen, right next to a cassette player that's playing a song that Ken is surprised to recognize as Satie.
Xe supposes it makes sense that the call xe tried to leave earlier didn't even make it to voicemail if that's all this place has.
"Hello?" they say, raising their voice and walking a little further into the darkened space.
"Hello."
Ken flinches as a light turns on in the dark room beyond a short hallway. A figure stands in the entrance, wearing a gray knitted cardigan over a purple buttoned shirt and loose gray sweatpants. There's a pair of glasses on his face that Ken stares at for a moment too long. They… they don't look like they belong on his face.
Then she shakes herself. Why does it feel like it's out of place? She's never met this guy before.
"Um, hi," xe says. "I'm, uh. I was hoping I could do some research."
The guy— the archivist, they assume— laughs softly.
"Here? This isn't exactly a library, you know. And it's not open to the public, either."
"Well, yeah," Ken says. She glances at the desk, which is mostly empty apart from the cassette player and the phone. There is a shockingly modern-looking scanner right next to the phone, which is kind of funny to see.
"I just… there's some things I was hoping I might be able to look into," Ken adds. "The door was open, so I thought I could…"
"Oh, it was, wasn't it?" the archivist says.
Ken glances up.
Something feels wrong.
Did it get darker in here? It's probably just xyr mind playing tricks on xem but there's... there's something that feels genuinely wrong here. Like xe really shouldn't be here and...
There's a rumbling sound and all logic tells her it should be more thunder, but it doesn't sound like it's coming from outside.
The archivist is walking closer. Ken takes a half step backwards. xyr breath catches in xyr chest at the— what are those?— emerging from the darkness of the storeroom beyond the open door.
"What are you trying to find?" the archivist whispers.
Oh god.
"What are you hiding?" Ken says.
The archivist laughs.
The—
.
Ken isn't all that surprised to find the museum door locked when she tries it on an overcast Saturday morning. The hours on the door say they won't open until noon, after all. She wishes they could have at least let her leave a voicemail, though. There's a project she's working on and she has a feeling they've got some physical media and resources in there that she can't just get from her own records or, like, Wikipedia.
Not like Wikipedia or the library will talk about fifty-year old mass murder-disappearances that were likely covered up by… someone. Someone who lived here, maybe even someone who still lives here.
Xe squints at the window next to the door. It's impossibly dark inside. Probably nobody here yet.
Well, they wouldn't want to try and intrude anyway.