The Ninth Hour / Season 1, Episode 8
Midnight Shadows Creep
Diane Kessler’s boots scuffed against the polished concrete of C-Block as she rounded the corner, her flashlight beam slicing through the dim, flickering overheads. 2:52 AM. The air hung heavy, like wet cotton in her lungs, carrying the faint tang of industrial bleach and something older, earthier, that she couldn’t place. Her radio crackled at her hip, but she ignored it, her thumb brushing the volume knob down to a whisper. She didn’t want Ramirez’s half-assed reassurances right now. Not when every nerve in her body was screaming that something was off—more off than it had been in the seven nights prior, when the doors had clicked open at 3:00 AM like clockwork, when the cold had seeped into her bones near C-18, when Marcus Webb’s warnings had started sounding less like a con’s mind games and more like gospel. She stopped short of cell C-24, the empty one. The one where she’d heard that voice last week, low and broken, muttering about a “wrong done in ‘72.” Her hand hovered over the baton at her belt, not because she thought it’d do any good against—whatever this was—but because the weight of it grounded her. The corridor stretched ahead, a tunnel of gray walls and barred doors, the hum of the dying fluorescents buzzing in her ears like a swarm...