“Remove the other one,” Matthew said evenly, extending his hand toward Sophia. “I trust you.”
This time Richard did not interfere.
With the same dreadful precision as before, Sophia repeated the motion.
From Matthew’s left eye she drew out a second Nocturne—larger than the first, darker, its slick surface glinting as though polished.
It didn’t spring away. It simply lay in her palm, perfectly still, as if awaiting instruction.
Suddenly Sophia cried out—not in terror, but in sharp, searing pain.
“They’re guarding something!” she gasped. “Something far greater than a fear of the light.”
From deep behind the wall near the piano came a layered, wet rustling—movement upon movement, as though dozens of tiny bodies were shifting at once.
Then the smell reached them. Metallic and putrid, like scorched wiring tangled with damp stone.
Richard gripped the polished edge of the piano. Beneath his fingers, the wood quivered in a steady pulse, eerily like a heartbeat trapped inside the masonry.
“They’re in there,” he whispered.
The truth behind twelve years of Matthew’s blindness was concealed just beyond that wall.
At that exact moment, the garden lights blinked out—not because of a power failure, but because an immense shadow passed over the estate. Daylight collapsed into sudden dusk.
The Nocturnes had returned to their nest.
—
The Nest of Darkness
Richard spun toward the guards. “Get tools. Sledgehammers, crowbars—whatever you can find. Break through that wall. Now.”
Within minutes, the inner wall of the music room began to crumble under heavy blows.
The stench that poured out was overwhelming—ancient mildew woven with that same sharp, metallic rot.
Inside the narrow cavity, they saw them.
Dozens of Nocturnes. Some slithered lazily through the insulation. Others clung together in a throbbing black cluster, fused into a single heaving mass.
When Richard aimed his flashlight into the hollow, the beam made the swarm recoil. The room filled with a chorus of thin, piercing shrieks.
“Look closely,” Sophia said, her voice taut. “They don’t just live off flesh.”
They had been feeding on the twilight Matthew carried within him—the dim realm shaped by trauma. Symbiotic with suppressed memory, they flourished wherever truth had been buried.
—
The Secret in the Wall
At the center of the nest sat something that clearly did not belong.
It wasn’t alive.
It was made.
Without hesitation, Sophia reached into the shifting darkness and pulled it free.
A small music box carved from dark wood, coated in dust and webbing.
Richard recognized it instantly.
It had belonged to Matthew’s mother.
Twelve years earlier.