Chapter 2: The Name in the Glass

Chapter 2: The Name in the Glass

The interview with the LAPD had been exactly the humiliating circus Alistair had expected. Detective Miller, his former partner and now a smug bastard in a better suit, had looked at him with a potent mix of pity and contempt. They’d listened to his frantic 911 call, then to the audio recording from his phone. Miller had played it twice, a thin, cruel smile on his lips.

“So, Graves,” he’d said, leaning back in the sterile white interrogation room, “you trespassed on the property of a major celebrity, got her all wound up, and then recorded what sounds like a scene from a bad B-movie. You hear a sound, you panic, and by the time you break into her room, she’s gone… to a charity event she was scheduled to attend all along.”

“I heard her die, Mark,” Alistair had insisted, his voice raw. “I heard him kill her.”

“You heard a glass drop. You’re drunk, you’re washed up, and you’re chasing ghosts. Stay away from Evelyn Reed. Her studio’s lawyers will be in touch.”

He’d been dismissed like a child. No one cared about the recording. No one cared about the terror in her voice. No one saw the soulless doll smiling on their television screens. The official narrative was set: an overzealous fan, a brief security scare, now resolved. End of story.

Now, back in his office, the gray morning light did nothing to dispel the previous night’s horrors. The only thing he had to show for it, the only thing the cops and the studio’s private cleanup crew had missed, was a sliver of glass no bigger than his thumbnail. He’d found it half-hidden under the leg of a heavy oak dresser in Evelyn’s bedroom, a tiny, sharp star twinkling against the polished floor.

He had it under the lens of an old jeweler’s loupe now, perched on the cluttered landscape of his desk. It wasn’t just glass. Normal glass didn’t refract light like this, splitting the weak sunlight into colors he’d never seen before, hues that seemed to squirm at the edge of his vision. It was unnaturally hard, resisting his prodding with a dull pair of tweezers.

And there was something on its curved surface. Etched with impossible, microscopic precision was a word, or a name, written in an elegant, flowing script that was both archaic and alien.

Verwood.

He spent the next six hours running it through every database he had access to, legal and otherwise. He searched public records, business registries, social media, and the dark corners of the web he kept bookmarked for desperate occasions. Nothing. The name Julian Croft brought up dozens of articles on his philanthropy and eccentric art collections, but ‘Verwood’ might as well have been a ghost. It didn't exist.

Frustration clawed at him. He was a detective. He dealt in facts, in evidence, in the tangible filth of human motive. But this… this was something else. The sweet gardenia scent that clung to his memory, the vacant look in the new Evelyn’s eyes, a name that wasn’t a name, etched on glass from another world. He was chasing smoke.

Desire led to desperation, and desperation led to places like The Last Drop.

It wasn’t so much a bar as a wrinkle in the fabric of the city, tucked into a grimy alley off Sunset that smelled perpetually of piss and regret. The neon sign above the door, a dripping martini glass, had flickered on the ‘Last’ for as long as Alistair could remember. Inside, the air was thick with the ghosts of a million cigarettes and secrets. The bartender was a man named Sal, a relic whose face was a roadmap of stories you didn't want to hear. Sal knew things. Not just who was cheating on who or which bookie was about to get his legs broken, but the other things. The whispers that scurried through the city's veins when the respectable world was asleep.

Alistair slid onto a stool, the worn vinyl groaning in protest. He ordered a whiskey, neat. Sal poured it without a word, his movements slow and deliberate.

“I’m looking for a name, Sal,” Alistair said, pushing the glass away after a single, burning sip. He sketched the name from the glass shard onto a napkin. Verwood.

Sal glanced at it, his rheumy eyes showing nothing. “Never heard of it.”

“It’s tied to a smell,” Alistair pressed, leaning in. “Gardenias. Overly sweet. And maybe… resurrection.”

The bartender’s hand paused in the act of wiping the counter. For the first time, a flicker of something—not fear, but a deep, ancient weariness—crossed his face. He looked at Alistair, truly looked at him, and saw the desperation clinging to him like a shroud.

“Some things aren’t names,” Sal rasped, his voice like gravel in a cement mixer. “They’re destinations. And you don’t find them. They find you.”

“I don’t have time for riddles, Sal. A woman is gone. Replaced.”

Sal let out a long, slow sigh, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of the whole damned city. He looked around the empty bar, then gestured with his chin toward the back, past a pool table with torn felt and into the deepest shadows.

“See that booth?”

Alistair saw it. A dilapidated wooden phone booth, the kind that had been obsolete for thirty years. Its glass was clouded with grime, and a thick layer of dust covered the old black rotary phone inside.

“You’re looking in the wrong phonebook, Graves,” Sal said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “That name you wrote down… it isn’t a person. It’s a number.”

Alistair stared at him, the whiskey souring in his stomach. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The old ways. Before your internet. Before everything. Some numbers, you don’t dial them with your finger. You dial them with your intent.” Sal slid the napkin back to him. “Go on. The phone knows who to call.”

This was insane. It was the ramblings of a drunk old man in a dive bar at the end of the world. He was chasing a ghost story while a monster named Julian Croft was puppeteering a dead woman. But what other choice did he have? The real world had failed him. The police, the databases, the logic he had built his entire life on—it had all turned to dust. All he had left was the impossible.

He left a twenty on the bar and walked towards the booth, his footsteps echoing in the silence. The air grew colder the closer he got, and the smell of stale beer was replaced by the faint, electric tang of ozone. He slid the creaking door shut, sealing himself in the cramped, dusty space. The silence was absolute.

He lifted the heavy bakelite receiver. There was no dial tone. Just a profound, humming emptiness, like listening to the space between stars. His heart hammered against his ribs. This was the point of no return.

His fingers, slick with sweat, traced the letters on the rotary dial. V-E-R-W-O-O-D. 8-3-7-9-6-6-3. It felt absurd, like a child’s game. With a deep breath that did nothing to calm the tremor in his hands, he began to dial, the loud, mechanical whir-click of the rotary mechanism sounding like a countdown to madness.

One number after another, each turn of the dial deepening the oppressive silence. When he finished the last digit, a sharp click echoed from the earpiece. The hum stopped.

For a moment, nothing happened. He was just a fool in a dusty phone booth. Then, through the receiver, came a sound—a dry, rustling whisper, like dead leaves skittering across pavement. It spoke a single word that was not a word, a vibration that resonated deep in his bones.

At the same time, the familiar, grimy interior of The Last Drop, visible through the booth’s clouded glass, began to smear. The dim lights blurred and stretched into long, bleeding streaks of color. The faint sounds of traffic from the street outside dissolved into a low, terrifying drone. The solid floor beneath his feet felt like it was turning to liquid.

He gripped the phone, his only anchor in a world that was unraveling around him. He had sought a name that didn't exist and found a place that shouldn't. And as reality itself buckled, Alistair Graves knew he was no longer making a call; he was being reeled in.