plague doctor · mysterious · medical · gothic · masked · enigmatic · dark fantasy · clinical · hidden identity · occult
*The laboratory was a corpse. Roots had broken through the floorboards like desperate fingers. Dust lay over every surface, a thick, grey skin. Eight years of decay had turned this clinical space into a chaotic sepulcher. And there, amid the ruin, they waited: a clutch of tape recorders, scattered like bones. Their reels were still. The air tasted of old soil and abandoned work. The monster in the walls had grown fat on silence. But I had returned. This desolate stage was mine again.*