The cold light of dawn filtered through the narrow blinds of the surveillance archives bureau, the sun barely a thought behind the grey Paris sky. Coffee sat untouched on the corner of the desk, steam curling like cigarette smoke from its lip. The walls hummed with the soft mechanical pulse of a dozen monitors, each quietly blinking its truth into the sterile air.
Detective Isabelle Laurent stood over the shoulder of Jean-Luc Alarie, a city surveillance tech with mismatched socks and a three-day-old beard, who wore his exhaustion like a second skin. He moved with methodical precision, rewinding footage frame by frame, his knuckles pale against the keyboard.
"I isolated the camera angle you mentioned," he said, voice hoarse from too little sleep. "Corner of Rue des Anges, facing the east alley behind Isabelle Leroux's studio. The timestamp starts thirty-six hours before she vanished."
"Show me," Isabelle said, her voice like flint against stone.
The footage flickered to life: grainy, monochrome, distorted by a soft drizzle. The alley was empty, save for puddles catching light from a streetlamp. But then—
A figure stepped into frame.
No sound accompanied the motion, but the effect was immediate. The air in the room seemed to still, the quiet made louder. The figure wore a long coat, dark and elegant, and a full-face mask—white, expressionless, porcelain-smooth. It stood beneath the flickering streetlamp, head tilted slightly upward as if listening to something only it could hear.
"How long was it there?" Isabelle asked.
Jean-Luc checked the timestamp. "Two hours and sixteen minutes. Motionless."
"No visible interaction?"
He shook his head. "None. Then—look here."
The figure lifted a hand, held it out flat. A moment later, it tilted its head again and stepped out of frame—disappearing down the alley, toward the studio's back entrance. Twenty minutes later, the camera cut to static. It didn't return until morning.
Isabelle stared at the screen. Her mind began stitching possibilities like thread through taut fabric. A masked figure. Standing in rain, unmoving. Watching.
Clockwork silence.
"This isn't random," she said aloud. "It's timed. Measured. Like a ritual."
Jean-Luc looked up at her. "You think they were waiting for something?"
"I think they were waiting for someone," she murmured.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Lucie, the forensic tech.
The blood from Leroux's sculpture matches no known criminal records. But it doesn't belong to Leroux. Sending full report. Also—found residue of crushed rose oil in studio drains.
A thread. Not just red petals. Rose oil—perfume, ritualistic, or simply theatrical?
Isabelle turned back to Jean-Luc. "Can you cross-reference this figure against other disappearance cases? Look for that mask."
Jean-Luc opened another database. The city's surveillance archive spanned nearly two decades. He filtered by night footage, masked figures, similar physicality, and clothing. The system spat out a dozen blurry shots, narrowed down over minutes.
Then—
"There," he said. "That's them."
The grainy footage was from nearly five weeks earlier. Different borough, different street. But unmistakable.
The same mask.
The same stillness.
Standing outside a small residential building just before midnight.
The building belonged to Camille Dubois—the second woman in Luc's photo. The one who had also vanished without a trace.
Isabelle stepped closer to the monitor. Her breath slowed.
"How long were they there?" she asked.
Jean-Luc clicked.
"Three hours. Never moved. No sound. Then gone."
Like a puppet waiting for the curtain to rise.
Her skin prickled. These weren't random encounters. This was design. Staged like a play. And that meant someone was keeping time.
Isabelle's gaze dropped to the bottom right corner of the footage. A small blinking error mark flashed over a second camera angle—one that pointed toward the sidewalk out front. She tapped the screen.
"What's this?" she asked.
"Ah. That one's part of the city's old analog grid. Still recording on tape."
"Can you get it?"
"I'll need to dig it out of the physical archive. That system's barely operational."
"Then dig," she said.
As Jean-Luc vanished down the hallway to the tape room, Isabelle stared at the frozen figure on the screen. Every instinct she'd ever trusted screamed there was more than one person involved—but only one mask.
What if it wasn't a group? What if it was one orchestrator and a set of players?
The Curator.
The name came back to her like a bruise resurfacing. What did Cormier say? He doesn't kill in rage. He kills in design.
The tape room door opened again.
Jean-Luc returned, holding a battered VHS tape like it was made of bone. "Lucky break. It hasn't degraded completely."
He popped the tape into an old player, and after a few seconds of static, it began to roll.
More rain. More stillness. But this time, a second figure entered the frame—not masked, not in costume. A woman. Camille Dubois. Carrying a bag of groceries, umbrella dripping water. She walked up the steps to her door.
And just before she reached the top—
She paused.
Her eyes turned slowly toward the camera's direction.
Toward the figure.
The masked person didn't move. Not a twitch.
Camille's face showed something Isabelle had not expected.
Recognition.
Then, without hesitation, she smiled faintly.
And opened the door.
Inside. Gone.
The masked figure stood another hour before finally walking away.
Isabelle rewound. Played it again. Slower.
Camille knew them.
She knew them.
And she let them in.
Her pulse thudded hard. Everything was shifting. The idea of abduction was no longer clean. These women weren't taken by force—they walked into it. Willingly? Under duress? Cult-like belief?
A message lit up Isabelle's screen.
"Footage corrupted after 01:15 AM. Nothing usable."
Another hole in time. Another clock wound too tightly.
And then, like a clock striking the hour, a new notification appeared—anonymous sender.
"You've seen the face. But do you hear the music?"
Isabelle stared at the screen, every part of her bracing for what came next.
She opened the attachment.
A sound file.
It was a low hum. Mechanical. Repetitive.
Underneath it—just faint enough—was the sound of ticking.
Not a bomb.
Not a threat.
A metronome.
Steady.
Measuring silence.
Conducting something just out of reach.
And layered over that—barely perceptible—was a whisper.
Just one sentence, played backwards.
Isabelle reversed the audio.
It said:
"The next one knows your name."
She sat back, eyes locked on the frozen image of the masked figure from weeks ago.
It was back then.
It's watching now.
And she had no idea how close it had gotten.
To be continued...