Fiction · Strange Tales · A complete Blackwood Institute horror story.
Claire could hear three voices in the workshop. Her husband had gone inside alone.
She stood beside the greenhouse with her phone in her hand, watching the line of light beneath the door. Donavan had been talking to his visitors for twelve nights. He said they had chosen him because he understood the machinery beneath the old observatory. He said they were going to save everyone.
She called the Blackwood Institute.
“Are you the people who come out?” she asked. “When there's something in a house?”
The woman who answered gave her name as Roxie and asked where she was standing. Claire moved along the greenhouse until she could see through the workshop window.
Six pale figures crowded around Donavan's bench. Their heads almost touched the roof. Above his shoulder, a screwdriver revolved in the air.
Donavan saw her. “Come and see. They've come to help us.”
One figure bent towards the glass. Its face opened, and Claire saw teeth behind teeth, extending farther into its head than a mouth should go.
“I've called for help,” she said.
From inside the workshop, her own voice answered: “I've called for help.”
“Who said that?”
“Who said that?”
Donavan reached for the latch. Every figure turned towards his hand.
“Claire,” Roxie said in her ear. “Move. Now.”
Night twelve
By the time Conrad Blackwood arrived with Roxie and Eddie, the workshop was dark and Donavan was making tea.
“He hasn't hurt me,” Claire told them at the front door. “I don't want anybody treating him as if he has.”
Conrad asked whether anything had followed him inside. She looked down the hall towards the kitchen.
“I keep looking over his shoulder. He keeps telling me there's nothing to look at.”
Eddie's phone rang while he was taking off his coat. A woman's voice escaped the speaker: “Eddie, baby, are you listening?” Two coughs followed, then a bottle clinking against a glass. He fumbled with his sleeve while Tasha asked him for money. Claire waited until he had finished.
“Are you actually qualified to do this?”
“He's good at the part of this work I can't do,” Conrad said. “Ask me if anything we do here worries you.”
Donavan sat beside a wooden radio receiver. Its mains lead lay coiled on the table. Twelve nights earlier, he explained, it had spoken his full name. The visitors knew where he had worked. They had shown him the town burning, the road breaking apart, his wife trapped in their bedroom with the stairs gone.
Midnight on the fourteenth day was the deadline. He had two nights left.
“I looked after that observatory for twenty-seven years,” he said. “There's equipment beneath it that can protect us. They need someone who understands it.”
Claire sat down beside him. “I wish you'd let me be frightened with you.”
“You'd have told me to stop.”
“You didn't give me a chance to say anything.”
The receiver spoke. Its display remained dark.
“Donavan. You don't have to convince them alone.”
Eddie checked the empty battery compartment, then followed the lead back to its unplugged end.
“There's nothing powering it.”
Donavan looked at Conrad, waiting.
“We all heard it,” Conrad said. “That settles whether the voice is only in your head. It doesn't settle who is speaking.”
The voice invited them to the workshop. At the change of the minute, it promised, the light would return.
Frost covered the walls. Nine tools protruded from the ceiling, handles down. At the appointed moment, light rose through the frost and the walls seemed to become transparent. A long hand pressed towards Donavan through the outline of his body.
A hammer came loose overhead. Conrad pulled him backwards. It struck the place where his head had been.
“It slipped,” Donavan said.
Conrad kept hold of him until they were clear of the bench.
The marks beneath the observatory
In daylight, Donavan led them beneath the observatory's white dome. He found the old lifting diagram in an office drawer and gave it to Eddie to carry downstairs.
Roxie offered to take Eddie's case. He kept it looped around his wrist. On the narrow stairs the case caught behind the rail, wrenching his arm sideways. The brittle drawing tore. A strip fell through a grille before he could reach it.
“That was the brake assembly,” Donavan said.
Eddie stared at the gap. “Did anybody photograph it?”
Nobody had.
Two flights below the office, an iron lifting frame stood over a circular capstone wider than a dining table. A motor and handwheel occupied the east wall. To the north, a red brake-release lever sat in a recess. Around the stone ran an engraved pattern with three sections freshly ground away.
Donavan had removed them himself. The visitors called the markings a damaged circuit. They wanted the capstone raised between ten and midnight the following night.
Conrad knelt beside the filings. “I think you've been removing part of a restraint.”
Donavan challenged him to prove it. Conrad bridged one gap with iron pigment, leaving the lifting machinery untouched.
Light filled the seam beneath the capstone. A luminous woman unfolded beside Donavan and reached towards his face. When Conrad pressed his palm over the repaired groove, her hand struck something invisible. Its fingers bent sideways, searching for a route around the line.
Roxie pulled Donavan towards the stairs. The woman's mouth opened from ear to ear.
Claire saw the teeth again.
Conrad held the mark until everyone was behind him. When he lifted his hand, the figure withdrew beneath the cover. Three of his fingers had gone grey-white.
“You hurt her,” Donavan said.
Claire looked at her husband. “She was reaching for you. That's what I'm trying to tell you.”
Before they left, Conrad disconnected the external aerial, isolated the motor and took its operating key. The receiver came home with them.
Over soup in the Hale kitchen, Claire's voice began calling from its wooden case.
“Donavan? Please. I can't get out.”
Claire put down her spoon. “I'm here. Keep looking at me.”
The box repeated the words he had heard in the ruined bedroom. He demanded that Conrad promise to keep her alive if he stopped the work.
Conrad could not give him that promise. He asked for the afternoon to examine the observatory's old records. The lifting window was tomorrow; they would lose none of the time the visitors had requested.
“Give them the afternoon,” Claire said. “You gave those things twelve nights.”
Arthur Penn
The records led to a damaged brake in 1982. Its incident report belonged to a private collection that specifically excluded the Blackwood Institute from access. Conrad saved the notice and a purchasing reference that also appeared in an earlier case. He would investigate the connection later. Eddie requested the observatory's public duplicate log from the local archive.
Donavan had kept the replaced brake grip in a box with its invoice.
That night, Donavan woke to Claire calling from the landing. Beside him, his wife slept with her hand beneath her cheek.
A bare foot appeared in the doorway. Its toes gripped the frame halfway up the wood.
“She's here,” he told it. “You're not her.”
He called Conrad. By the time the investigator reached the room, the foot had withdrawn. Five deep marks remained in the frame.
At the observatory the next morning, Eddie laid the split brake grip on a desk. Dark stains surrounded its metal pin. He took off one glove.
“If my hand opens, take it away,” he said. “Even if I'm in the middle of telling you something useful.”
Conrad placed the wood in his palm. Eddie closed his fingers.
The man he experienced was wearing a brown coat. Blood soaked the left sleeve. Below him the capstone was descending, while he held the brake release down and somebody turned the wheel behind him.
“They said they were angels,” Eddie said. His shoulders tightened. “He believed them.”
The remembered voice called the man Arthur. Eddie's hand opened. Conrad removed the grip at once.
Roxie pressed his empty palm to the desk. “Wood under your hand. You're upstairs with me.”
The scanned log named Arthur Penn, maintenance supervisor. His account described luminous figures promising to save the town if he raised the cover. After the first lift he had seen a second opening beneath the shaft and what the figures had concealed there.
Arthur and his assistant had survived. They had got the stone down.
Conrad compared the attached floor drawing with the grooves below them. He recognised a restraint against demonic entry. Donavan's visitors had supplied sound engineering because they needed a competent man to open it.
Donavan read the account again.
“Show me how he got it closed.”
They practised with the capstone down. Holding the red lever released the brake; the handwheel controlled the descent. Conrad repaired the remaining grooves, then Donavan removed the lifting eye and detached the cable. Conrad retained the motor key. Eddie left a maintenance bar against the north wall.
That evening, Donavan sat with Claire in their front room. He had agreed to stay until midnight.
She let go of his hand to make tea. He heard the kitchen tap. Then fingers closed around his again.
Beside his chair sat another Claire.
Light appeared between her lips. Donavan tried to pull free.
The window burst inward. A chair fell in the kitchen, knocking the real Claire to the floor. Eddie called out. Conrad reached for Donavan, but the front room had vanished from Donavan's sight. He saw the ruined bedroom, his wife beneath a beam. He heard her stop breathing.
“Raise the cover now,” the visitor said.
Claire called from the kitchen floor. He ran past Conrad into the hall. The door slammed, and his workshop van started outside.
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Roxie drove, with Conrad beside her and Claire and Eddie in the back. She gave their destination to an emergency dispatcher.
The spare lifting eye and portable controller were in Donavan's van. Conrad had secured the old controls and trusted Donavan's agreement to stay.
“I counted on his cooperation to do the work of a locked door,” he said. “That was my mistake.”
At ten past ten, the van stood empty in the observatory yard. Its rear doors were open. The service entrance hung on a broken hinge.
They followed white light along a passage of old pipes. From a side doorway came a bottle clinking against a glass.
“Eddie, baby, are you listening?”
He turned. Tasha stood with her back to him, both hands against the wall. He took a step towards her.
The two coughs came again. Then the bottle.
“Wait,” Eddie said. “That's the phone call.”
She had no bottle. Her hands had not moved.
The figure turned its head. Its face remained pointed away when Claire's voice came from the back of it.
“Please. I can't get out.”
The real Claire spoke from behind Roxie. She reminded Eddie of the hand she had held in the car. He backed towards her. Roxie's torch found a deep service pit beyond the doorway, full of broken pipework.
Ahead, the winch began to run.
Donavan stood at the handwheel with his portable controller. He had fitted the spare lifting eye, restored the supply with his own maintenance key and reattached the cable. Above the rising capstone stood a luminous woman wearing Claire's smile.
The shaft beneath her seemed to descend into daylight. Pale figures gathered under a white sky.
“Look at the cut on my head,” Claire called from the passage. “A chair knocked me over. Eddie helped me up. That's what happened to me.”
The stone reached knee height. Something struck its underside. The woman flickered. The figures below were climbing, limbs reaching from wall to wall, other shapes moving inside their open mouths.
An arm thrust through and seized the lifting cable.
Donavan hit reverse. The motor strained, the supply tripped and the brake locked with the stone suspended.
Conrad knelt outside the engraved ring and pressed his injured palm to the anchor mark. A creature struck the boundary inches from his face.
“You cannot hold all of us,” it said.
Shut the door
Donavan stood motionless at the wheel. Claire went around the outside of the circle towards him, with Roxie beside her.
“Don't,” he said. “I don't know which one you are.”
She held out her hand.
“Look at what I'm asking you to do. Get us out of this room. All of us.”
The visitor told him she would leave when she knew what he had done.
“You don't get to answer for me,” Claire said.
Donavan took her hand. Then he set down the controller and looked at the machinery.
They could lower the stone manually, but first someone had to free the cable.
Eddie picked up the maintenance bar. He asked Roxie to watch his feet; he could not watch the creature and the engraved line together.
“Eddie, baby,” it began.
“Oh, fuck off, Tasha.”
He drove the bar beneath a finger. The creature grabbed the metal and pulled him forward. At Donavan's direction, Eddie braced his end against the lifting frame and used it as a fulcrum. Roxie kept talking him along the safe side of the groove. One by one, the fingers peeled away from the cable.
Eddie dropped the bar and held down the red brake release. Donavan took the weight on the handwheel. The capstone descended.
Conrad held his own wrist to keep his palm flat. Grey-white discolouration spread into his arm. The voice beneath it invited him to let go.
Six inches from the floor, the stone stopped. The creature had hooked an arm beneath it. Cable sagged above the shaft. Donavan stopped paying it out.
The arm bent at a second elbow. A hand reached towards Claire, using her husband's voice.
“Come here. Take my hand.”
“No.” She put her hand against Donavan's back. His own hands remained on the wheel.
Conrad's elbow buckled. Roxie crossed to him and supported his forearm, keeping clear of the mark. He forced his palm flat again. The boundary drove the reaching arm backwards until it slipped from beneath the stone.
Donavan took up the slack and resumed lowering. The head vanished below the rim. The capstone seated.
At his word, Eddie released the red lever. The brake locked. Claire brought Conrad his tin and brush. Still holding the mark with one hand, he joined the last break in the pattern with the other.
The light went out.
Midnight
They got everyone outside. Donavan isolated the motor, disconnected the cable and surrendered his keys and controller. The emergency crew examined Claire's cut and began treating Conrad's hand. The chamber was secured; the lifting apparatus would be removed.
“You were right to call them,” Donavan told Claire. “I made you feel awful about that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I don't know where to start.”
“Outside. Start with walking outside with me.”
At eleven fifty-six they were home. Eddie waited in the next room while Roxie took Conrad for further treatment. Donavan had washed his hands three times. Black dust still marked his fingers.
Claire's coat hung over her kitchen chair. Before calling Blackwood she had packed a bag for her sister's. She had not known how long she would stay.
“I kept telling you I couldn't do another night,” she said. “What did you think I meant?”
He had thought she wanted him to fix it.
“Neither did I,” she told him. “You didn't have to have an answer before you came back to bed.”
She was staying tonight. Tomorrow she wanted to talk without a deadline, with nothing else taking his attention.
At eleven fifty-nine, the receiver gave a small wooden click. Both stopped. The clock advanced to midnight. A car passed outside. Somewhere along the street a front door closed.
Donavan turned the receiver's switch to off, although it had no power, and put it in the cupboard beneath the sink.
“Tea?”
“Please.”
The instructions never returned. Conrad's hand required weeks of treatment. Blackwood kept Arthur Penn's account and the notice excluding them from the other report; that connection remained open.
Hear the performed version
In Fourteen Days until the Apocalypse | Blackwood Case 03, the full cast gives the visitors the voices of people their targets trust. Hear Claire and Donavan's confrontation, Eddie's encounter in the service passage and the struggle beneath the observatory in the complete audio drama. The player offers the performed version of this fictional case, with a fuller investigation and more time with the Blackwood team.
This complete written adaptation is based on The Unexplained Company's original Strange Tales script. You can also listen on Spreaker or explore Strange Tales of the Unexplained.
