Chapter 9: The Confession

Chapter 9: The Confession

The room was a perfect cube of sensory deprivation. White walls, white table, two white chairs. The air tasted of recycled oxygen and industrial disinfectant. There was no window, no clock, only a single, dark panel of one-way glass that Leo knew concealed his true audience. He sat perfectly still, his cuffed hands resting on the table, his posture not of a prisoner, but of a patient teacher waiting for the class to settle.

Opposite him sat a young woman with a laptop, her fingers poised over the keyboard. She was the transcriber, the official recorder of his testament. She avoided his eyes, her professionalism a thin veneer over a palpable unease.

Behind the glass, Marcus Thorne stood in the darkened observation room, arms crossed. Beside him, two senior AIB analysts watched the monitors, their faces grim. He wanted this on record, every last word. He needed to understand the logic, the pattern, the source of this madness. He wanted to hear the confession of the killer known as the Shepherd.

He was not prepared for a sermon.

“State your name for the record,” the transcriber said, her voice a strained monotone.

“My name doesn’t matter,” Leo began, his voice soft but carrying perfectly in the acoustically engineered room. “I was a vessel, same as you. A dull one. I filled my emptiness with poison because it was the only thing that made a sound loud enough to drown out the quiet. I was a ghost sleeping in the veins of the city.”

The transcriber typed, her expression tightening. Thorne leaned forward slightly. This wasn't the rambling of a typical psychotic. It was articulate. Poetic, even.

“And then I met Silas,” Leo continued, his gaze drifting towards the one-way mirror, as if he could see Thorne standing there.

The name hit Thorne like a physical blow. The analysts glanced at him, but he remained rigid. The thirty-two-year-old cold case file. INCIDENT-04B-SILAS. It was all connected.

“Silas was a prophet,” Leo said with serene conviction. “He was tired. The thing inside him had been singing for a long, long time. He showed me the truth. He showed me what you all carry, but refuse to see.”

“What did he show you?” the transcriber asked, her training taking over.

Leo smiled that same, unnerving smile from the child’s bedroom. “The Skin Window.”

He described it with a chilling, clinical precision. He spoke of the faint, rectangular outline on the flesh, a spot where the barrier between our world and the world within was at its thinnest. He explained how Silas, with a shard of glass, had simply… opened it.

“It wasn't a wound,” Leo explained patiently. “It was a door. And something came out. Something that had been trapped in him his entire life, looking out through his eyes, hearing through his ears, but never truly living. When it was free, Silas was… quiet. The song he’d been making was finally over. It was the most peaceful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Thorne felt a cold dread snake up his spine. The impossible wound, the clean edges, the missing tissue—Leo was describing it perfectly, not as a method of murder, but as a biological function.

“After he showed me,” Leo’s voice dropped, becoming more intense, “I could hear them. All of them. Before, it was just background noise. The hum of a meaningless world. But after Silas, I could hear the individual songs. The creatures inside everyone, chittering, scraping, humming, singing their desperation. The city became a symphony of cages. And it was… so loud.”

He recounted fleeing the underpass, the Murmur a physical assault on his sanity. He described the gnawing, clawing need for silence, the realization that the only cure for the noise was to let the singers out.

“My first was one of the girls from the strip,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the mirror. “Her song was a shriek of cheap perfume and desperation. I found her in an alley.”

Thorne’s jaw clenched. The Jane Doe. The start of his case.

“When her passenger was free, the shriek in my head stopped. There was a perfect, beautiful pocket of silence where she had been. I didn't feel guilt. I felt… purpose. I was a Shepherd, finding the lost members of the flock and opening the gates to their pasture.”

One by one, he laid out his ministry of death. He spoke of the lonely old man in the apartment block, whose song was a low hum of regret. He spoke of the jogger in the park, whose frantic, percussive scraping was a plea for an end to his pointless race. Each victim Thorne had painstakingly identified, each anomaly Dr. Aris had puzzled over, Leo described as an act of mercy. He was filling in every blank in Thorne’s investigation, but he was writing it in a language from another reality.

The transcriber’s typing had slowed. Her face was pale, her knuckles white on the keyboard. In the observation room, one of the analysts was rubbing his temples, a look of profound disbelief on his face. They were hearing a coherent, internally consistent confession for a series of impossible crimes, and the motive was a form of cosmic philanthropy.

“And the child?” Thorne spoke into the room’s microphone, his voice emerging from a hidden speaker on the table, a disembodied, godlike sound. “What was her song?”

Leo’s eyes brightened with genuine reverence. “Her… hers was different. It wasn’t a song of suffering. It was a song of becoming. It was pure potential. A queen, still in its chrysalis. The silence she would have made… it would have been absolute. A silence to build a new world upon.” His expression fell into one of mild disappointment. “You interrupted the hymn.”

The sheer, unshakeable conviction was the most terrifying part. He wasn't trying to convince them; he was simply stating the facts of his universe. He had challenged the very foundations of their reality, not with threats or violence, but with a story. A story that, impossibly, fit all the evidence.

The transcriber looked up at the mirror, her eyes wide with a silent plea. She couldn't type anymore.

“Is this confession… complete?” Thorne’s voice was strained, heavy. He needed to end this, to process the sheer volume of insanity he had just ingested.

Leo leaned back in his chair, the chains between his cuffs rattling softly. He seemed to consider the question for a long moment. He looked at his own hands, then at the white walls, then back at the dark, reflective glass that hid his inquisitor.

“You have the story of the Shepherd and his flock,” he said, his tone shifting, becoming something heavier, more intimate. “But you haven't asked about my song.”

Thorne went rigid. The air in the observation room seemed to crackle.

“You haven’t asked what I found,” Leo whispered, a new, terrible light entering his eyes, “when I decided to open my own window.”