New York City, 2000.
(Third Person POV)
The apartment didn't have furniture so much as the bare minimum required to prove someone lived there — a couch still wrapped in plastic, a stack of unopened boxes shoved against the wall, a single wooden desk pushed under the window. The man behind the desk didn't look like he belonged in it.
He had to be pushing nine feet, easy — broad enough through the shoulders that the desk chair looked built for someone half his size. White hair fell loose over a face with the kind of sharp, clean symmetry that made strangers lose their train of thought mid-sentence. Ice-blue eyes. A jaw that looked carved rather than grown. He sat with his legs crossed, an open pizza box balanced on one knee, working through a slice with one hand while the other held a phone that looked like it had been pulled out of a tech lab twenty years ahead of schedule.
RING. RING.
The old landline on the far side of the desk screamed to life — black and gold, ancient next to everything else in the room. He didn't flinch. He folded the pizza box shut, hooked his boot under the desk, and kicked. The phone launched into the air. He caught it without looking, already bringing it to his ear.
"What's up? Dante here."
"Hey Dante, it's me, Mark. Got a job for you. Supernatural stuff, you know how it goes." Mark's voice came through easy, like he was commenting on the weather.
"Already? I haven't even unpacked, man. Haven't named the place yet. How do you already have a job lined up?"
"Was gonna help you find something once you got settled, but a contact called me first." A small pause. "There's a show — Grave Encounters. Ghost-hunting reality TV, guy named Lance Preston runs it."
"So it's actors filming a fake show. What do you want me to do about that?"
"Yeah, I know it's fake. But they're filming their next episode at an asylum. I dug into the place, figured it'd just be some abandoned building with a sad history and nothing else going on." Mark exhaled. "It's not nothing else, Dante."
Dante set the pizza box on the desk. "Talk."
"I will. Just—" he hesitated. "It's bad."
"Mark. You've watched me handle worse things than whatever's in a file folder. Toughen up and tell me."
A short laugh came down the line, more nerves than humor. "Yeah. I still think about that night, honestly. I almost felt bad for it. The demon, I mean."
---
**[ Flashback ]**
The woman was tied to a chair in the center of a binding circle, chalk lines scorched faint into the floorboards beneath her. Her head hung low, dark hair curtaining her face, until she lifted it and looked at Dante with eyes that weren't hers anymore.
He stood with his arms crossed, watching her the way someone watches weather roll in — no urgency, no fear, just waiting to see what it would do.
"You can leave on your own," he said. "Climb out, go back where you came from. Or we do this the other way. Either works for me."
She laughed — low, wrong, the kind of sound that didn't come from a throat built for it. Words spilled out in Latin, half curse, half threat, her grip on the chair arms tight enough to splinter the wood.
"I've heard worse," Dante said. "From things that lasted longer than you're about to."
Dark fluid ran from the corner of her mouth as she grinned at him, daring him to do something about it.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned his head toward the corner of the room. "Mark. Lock it."
Mark — dark-haired, built like someone who spent more hours in a gym than he'd ever admit to — was already on his feet, a cross gripped tight in one fist and a black duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He crossed to the door without a word, threw the bolt, and sat down hard in the corner chair, the bag in his lap like it might do something useful.
Dante shrugged off his jacket and tossed it over without looking. He rolled his sleeves up, one fold at a time, slow and unhurried, his eyes never leaving her.
"Alright," he said quietly. "Let's get this over with."
He didn't raise his voice again. Mark kept his eyes on the floor for most of what came after — on his bag, on the cross in his hand, on anything that wasn't the chair. There were no speeches. No theatrics. Just the sound of it going on, longer than Mark would've liked, until it finally didn't anymore.
When the door opened again, the woman was alive. Shaken, hollow-eyed, carrying a few scars she'd have for the rest of her life — but alive, and whatever had been wearing her was gone. Dante and Mark collected their payment and left without much conversation between them. There wasn't much left to say.
**[ Flashback ends ]**
---
"I don't know why you'd feel bad for it," Dante said, flat. "Now — the job. What's actually going on with this asylum?"
Mark sighed over the line. "Fine, hold on, I've got the file somewhere in this mess." A pause, the sound of paper shuffling. "I swear I need a secretary just to keep my own files straight."
"Mark. Later. Details now."
"Alright, alright." He cleared his throat and started reading.
"The place is called Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital — that's what the show's calling it on air, anyway. Ran from the late 1800s up through the '60s. The doctor who took it over, Arthur Friedkin, came in during the '30s. Officially he was there to modernize the place. Unofficially, he spent over a decade running unethical experiments and lobotomies on the patients — somewhere north of a hundred and forty of them, if the records are right. Eventually a group of patients got loose and killed him for it."
"And let me guess — he didn't stay dead."
"Didn't stay quiet, either. Staff reported activity in the building for years after — flickering lights, voices, sightings of him still walking the halls. The hospital shut down officially over the abuse allegations. Unofficially, people think something's still in there."
"So Lance Preston's crew is about to lock themselves inside a building with an actual murdered occultist haunting it."
"Pretty much. Crew's him, plus an occult specialist named Sasha Parker, a tech guy named Matt White, a cameraman, T.C. Gibson, and some guy named Houston Gray playing the resident psychic. They've got no idea what they're walking into."
"That," Dante said, grinning, "sounds amazing. I'd put money on a dozen evil spirits in that place, easy, just waiting for someone like me to show up."
Mark didn't even blink. At this point, nothing Dante said really surprised him anymore.
**[ End of chapter ]**