Echoes of the Past

The morning fog hadn’t lifted from London’s East End, casting a muted silver haze outside Adrian Voss’s apartment windows. He stood in his investigation room—a space that had become more shrine than study. Case files lined every shelf, each one marked with dates, names, tragedies. But today, it was just one folder that gripped him.

Six years old. A cold case. A girl with no identity, no story—just a symbol carved into the wall beside her.

And now it had happened again.

Adrian’s hands were steady, but his eyes were not. He placed the two photographs side by side: one from the recent crime scene, one from the old case. Both victims positioned almost identically. Both had the strange circle-and-line symbol carved near them. A coincidence? No. It felt deliberate.

As he turned the page in the old file, something fluttered out and landed on his desk.

A sticky note.

Yellowed with time. But what froze him wasn’t its age.

It was the handwriting.

Not his.

"You’ve seen this before. You just don’t remember."

He read it again, slower. The handwriting looked familiar in a way that made his stomach twist. His mind tried to place it. A past colleague? A client? Himself—during a time he couldn’t recall?

The more he stared at it, the colder he felt.

That night, sleep didn’t come easily. When it finally did, it came like a trap.

Flashes.

A girl in a dimly lit corridor. Her face partly hidden. Her voice a whisper, broken and repeating: “He’s watching. He’s watching. He never left.”

Then—her hand reached toward him, and he jolted awake, drenched in sweat.

Adrian sat in bed, breathing heavily. The clock read 3:17 AM.

He grabbed his journal and scribbled the words before they faded from memory.

Later that day, he made a quiet call.

“Dr. Marcus Kellen… it’s Adrian. I need to talk. Privately.”

Back at the office, Nathan noticed the tension immediately.

“You’re pale,” he said, placing a coffee on Adrian’s desk. “Are you still thinking about the cold case?”

Adrian didn’t respond. He slid a file across the desk.