Archives are, by their nature, eerie places. There's a certain massiveness that comes with the accumulation of history that makes them oppressive, something peculiarly liminal about the endless rows of shelves; they are timeless and all knowing, sanctuaries of knowledge that last long after the mortal minds that powered them have rotted.
Avenguard's repository was no different in these regards; indeed, the issue was compounded by its almost labyrinthian arrangements and sepulchral darkness. The lights were deeply recessed in the ceiling, and this phenomena created looming shadows that reached curious fingers between the shelves in pursuit of the tiny humans that dared traverse it's mazed halls.
It was through these dim pathways that Layton paced, at an hour that most would agree was unreasonable. Outside, the sky still held that dismal pall of night that is unique to the moment preceding dawn, when the sun has risen enough to provide the barest means of light but no golden clarity. Time still felt gritty and thick, as though even the clocks were sleeping and letting their gears toll out the seconds only drowsily. Far above him, in their dorms and private quarters (and, in the case of a select few we could bear to name, at their desks) the residents of Avenguard slept on, entirely unaware of Hershel Layton and the covert investigation he had been conducting since arriving at the university.
With the supreme care of one well used to handling fragile documents, Layton selected another folder, delicately sifting the sheaf of paper inside. There were no plumes of dust, no blemishes of age, and yet Layton felt the same peculiar welling of nameless, excited trepidation he did when handling texts from bygone eras; there was that same covert sense of unraveling, of unveiling some intricate mystery.
In his hands, he held the records detailing the activities of Professor Sycamore from the past three years.
In terms of things the brothers refused to speak about, their excursions during their three year separation was not such a massive concern that it warranted direct address, but there was certainly some strange non-existence of that time in regards to Sycamore that faintly unnerved Layton; Desmond avoided any and all questions pertaining that time frame with practised slipperiness, had not been featured in any papers (as was somewhat the norm for the renowned Professor), and conducted himself as though he had momentarily fallen off the earth, only to return precisely when Layton needed him.
To anyone else, the whole situation would have been immediately concerning, as no man had so perfect a sense of timing as that, but Layton was willing to disregard the implication that Sycamore had kept a closer eye on him than was perhaps couth (he had already found the folder containing meticulous records of his findings and accomplishments and was far too accustomed to his brother's peculiarities to be more than mildly exasperated). No, what bothered Layton was the impossibility that was the idea that the great Desmond Sycamore had conceded to sit and leave the world to its own devices for so long as three years. It was difficult to imagine him doing such for as little as three days.
What had begun as a mildly contentious curiosity had rapidly spiralled after a casual inspection Sycamore's records; all were intricately decorated in his awful, spidery handwriting (an encryption in its own right) and all were densely coded...including the documents spanning those absent three years.
As he had done too many times before, Layton traced a finger over the indecipherable whorls of ink and wondered grimly what his estranged sibling had been doing. There was a little subtext to be gained from the formatting of various papers—some were clearly letters, with their addresses, dates, and senders heavily redacted; others with clearly staggered paragraphs labelled with numbers detailing either experiment number or a passage of time; some looking to be transcripts —but without whatever cipher key Desmond had used, the chances of decoding any of it properly were slim to none. Coming down to the archives to pour over the meaningless conglomeration of symbols was an almost Sisyphean task; doomed to dissatisfaction. He would never work out what had happened, Sycamore would likely never reveal it, and so they were at a silent impasse, with Layton returning every so often in hope of some lightning bolt of inspiration.
Something had happened in those three years. Something significant, if the weight and size of the binders was to pass judgment, and a familiar, foreboding disquiet was building in the back of Layton's mind as he turned the nebulous possibilities over.
Something overhead heaved a clunking sigh, breaking the Professor from the slight reverie he'd been slowly succumbing to, a ponderous half-sleep, leant against the accommodating shelves. The heating and water pipes had been his unwitting allies in this endeavour, their groaning resurgence signalling that people on the upper floors were beginning to wake. It gave him just enough time to replace what he had moved and return to his rooms, leaving behind no evidence of his dawn-time curiosities.
It was the work of a few minutes; when he left, everything was as it had been, and by the time he had ascended to the upper floors of the university, life had firmly reasserted itself and Layton slipped seamlessly into the newly awakening world. Sycamore greeted him tiredly, none the wiser to his brother's rampant suspicions.
•~*~•
Several miles from Moorgate University lay the city of Ellchester, a mussed tangle of a town that perched precariously on the backs of rippling hills like a particularly intrepid gull navigating a stormy patch of sea. Cutting through its centre was the eponymous river Ell, a broad and muscular stretch of water with glossy brown scales and a fine lace of river scum decorating it's fringe. As the brothers walked alongside it, the stride of the river outpacing them both, Sycamore mused idly on the probable findings hidden in its heart, on the river bed: trainers from intrepid children; newspaper mulch, the words of decades mangled into dripping incomprehension; the skeletal remains of riverboats; tokens lost and mourned—jewellery, letters, scarves, hats; the condoms of illicit affairs; the angry rings of jilted brides; the incriminating blades of a hundred murders; the congealing blood of unfortunate bodies; the tangled hair of the lonely suicide...
Layton, meanwhile, walked beside his brother and examined the riverside shops, noting several tea parlours that they could return to after their appointment at the museum. Everything was a little faded, but in a picturesque manner that reminded one of old postcards and aged photographs rather than decline or decay. The faded paint felt dignified, the worn edges stylistically purposeful, and there was a pleasant looseness to the air that suggested that the town didn't much care whether you liked it or not. Garlands of lights festooned each streetlight, arcing across streets, cherry-sized globes of colour that would be lit when evening came; Layton had the suspicion that the town would be at its best at nightfall and was mildly disappointed that they would not see it.
The museum was unmissable, mainly due to the stir it was causing in the otherwise calm street. It was smaller than the London museums Layton was familiar with, a blockish structure with three ranks of steps leading to its doors, and a dome of glass bulging up from its centre. Gold letters were scrawled over the entryway proclaiming La Pièce Museum, daringly modern and faintly garish. It was the sort of bold tastelessness that looped upon itself and became inspiring.
Large posters decorated the front of the building, each of them featuring the same face and the same proclamation; a smiling old man—his teeth artificially white, his eyes made unfocused by ripples in the fabric—with the words 'Edward Holt; Autumn Exhibition' written in bold print. One of the corners of the leftmost poster was not properly secured and, as Sycamore watched, a stiff breeze plucked the loose edge and pulled it in to a fresh ripple of shape—'Edward Holt: A—n Exhibit—' it briefly read, before the wind changed direction and the cloth snapped flat.
Ringing the museum front was a gaudy ream of police tape before which stragglers would occasionally pause, staring towards the inert building with great interest. Policemen in cornflower uniforms milled around within the taped off area, equal parts bored and uneasy. Very deliberately, Sycamore relaxed his features, brushed them smooth, then knitted them into a bright expression of polite interest, the vein of steel behind his smile never softening. Descole was drifting somewhere beneath the surface of his thoughts and it showed; though he looked open and friendly, the crowd parted respectfully before him, each of them sensing something indomitable and tempestuous within the mild mannered academic. Layton pursued closely, content to let his brother handle negotiations as he had been the one initially contacted; it would hardly be gentlemanly to undermine anyone...
There was a brief discussion, and then the professors were slipping under the tape, escorted by one Constable Jameson, who was earnest, and fresh faced, and not yet jaded enough to find his limited part dull.
"They've no idea how it was done, Professors," he gabbled, taking long, confident strides down cool corridors lined with abstract smudges of colour and hung with sheets and whorls of steel. "Everything was set out for the exhibition, very tight security—these are valuable pieces, see! One of the directors forgot her papers, came back to get 'em...and she says the people in the paintings were just gone! Vanished! And she says—"
"I think we will have rather more luck talking to the police chief, don't you Layton?" Sycamore murmured. He was watching Jameson with a wry sort of fondness often earned by his more zealous students, the ones whose enthusiasm bordered unhelpful.
"In my experience, you and police chiefs rarely work peaceably," Layton returned in a similar undertone, and Sycamore snickered. Truth be told, he had been a little leery of spending too much time around the law's working dogs, but the glimmering allure in this case had proved too great; the police were circumstantially unavoidable.
They reached an atrium of sorts, a large and airy space with a glass dome in place of a roof, and large, marble pillars supporting the ceiling. It seemed too grand a room for the underwhelming little building that housed it. The usual barricades of corded velvet had been taken down and replaced with more officious yellow tape, before which members of the constabulary were hard at their exercise of investigation, and behind which forensic teams delicately fussed with the mounted artwork.
To the unassuming eye, the affair would have seemed extraneous and possibly insane, for it appeared, at face value, to be a room of perfectly decent paintings detailing landscapes and various rooms. No aspect seemed to warrant the stir one witnessed on entering. But, after a little inspection, Layton noticed a small photograph tacked up beside each frame; detailed in it was the picture it was displayed beside, almost exactly as it was presented—down to the frame and the grain of the brickwork behind it—but reality held a notable omission, for these photographs showed the works to contain people. In the photos, women of long and lean proportion walked down pier-sides clutching the brims of vast, feathered hats; men with horns traded cards over low lit tables; children—screaming with laughter, and laughing from screams—ran from a great clockwork-thing rising from a lake.
According the the paintings themselves, none of these scenarios existed. The pier was deserted, the tables abandoned, the lakeside devoid of bizarre machines and of as still a silence as one could wish for.
"How peculiar..." Desmond murmured. His analytical gaze swept everything, scouring the room for details as a knife would scrape marrow from a bone. The pair stood central, their initial investigation one of radial casualness as the Detective inspector made his way across to greet them.
'Mid forties. Just under six feet tall. Badge lists him as 'Detective Samuel Harris'. Unarmed and nonthreatening; Sycamore's greeting smile was coolly professional, but lacked the warning bite he may have given it otherwise.
Cordially, the Detective shook both Professor's hands with an industrially efficient politeness before gesturing out towards the gallery in stern bemusement.
"It's a fair puzzle of circumstance, I'll give you that, Professor," he stated in clipped, military tones. Watching him speak, it would have been a matter of academic interest to find precisely where his mouth lay behind his prodigious facial hair; there was no parting in it and it barely twitched with the motions of his jaw. If one had somehow managed to reach this late stage of life remaining wholly unaware of basic anatomy, one might have thought that it was the moustache itself speaking, and not the being sporting it. "We've been trying to contact Holt, but haven't managed to get through to him yet. There's no sign of forced entry on the doors. Nobody saw anything, heard anything, nothing else was taken or disturbed. The experts are saying that the paintings are the same, down to the brushstroke, aside from the obvious omissions. To be quite honest, I can't imagine the point of it all; why go through the trouble of replicating paintings to exact measures without their subjects? If you ask me, it's all some bizarre publicity stunt these creatives have dreamt up..." His curmudgeonly rant continued for a good few minutes after that, but very little of it was helpful. Occasionally, Layton would interject with a question that would receive some curt response before the tirade continued. It was eventually deemed best to let him be.
The professors separated, drifting through the cold light of the atrium in a fashion that, at first glance, might have appeared aimless, particularly when set against the organised rigours of the surrounding officials. That was, of course, a fallacy of thought, as both men had clear paths of investigation in mind, but thorough analysis required a proper absorption of all elements of the surroundings, and so they went so slowly as to appear utterly apathetic to the case.
Oblivious to his brother's examination of the doors, Layton began a patrol of the circumference of the hall, following the course dictated by the tape.
Something caught his eye; some bright scintillation from the floor that did not match the sedate charcoal of the tile, some sharp, angular gleam that, once looked at, divided and became a multitude of jagged shapes. Layton knelt. Spread out across the floor were arches of shattered glass, every piece heavily frosted with cracks. Each broken display case was haloed by some similar corona of glittering destruction, flung outwards as though it had been struck with great force...
Something snagged in Layton's thoughts, like a bit of unraveled knit catching on a twig, slowly but steadily loosening. The nebulous realisation seized his thoughts with such insistence, Layton didn't notice Sycamore's return until the other Professor began speaking.
"They were wrong—the doors have been forced. What's odd about it, is that they appear to have been tampered with from the inside; they wouldn't have noticed if they were only looking for signs someone had broken in to the room." He pushed his glasses further up his nose and, very briefly, the reflection of the sun obscured his eyes entirely. "We should check the roof; whoever did this probably removed one of the dome's panels and entered that way." He was turning away, when Layton's hand caught softly at his elbow. Contact was rare enough a currency between the two that Desmond immediately stopped dead.
"Oh, I don't think that will be necessary at all," hummed Layton, his voice melodious and unruffled as ever. It sounded odd, with the backing of the great hollow reverberation caused by the immense dome of the ceiling; he did not remove his hand, nor change his light grip where it lay, moth-wing soft. Sycamore looked at him, red eyes garnet hard with interrupted suspicion; day's blue light made pale spectres of them both.
"And why do you say that?" Layton's still-water expression rippled, becoming briefly troubled as he moved to indicate the patterns of shattered glass spread across the floor.
"The dome is a single piece; they could not have simply removed a panel." Before Sycamore could rise to counter that point, Layton directed his attention to the main source of his current disquiet. "Look here. These shards fan outwards from the display cases." Frowning, Desmond studied the complex mosaics, half listening to his brother, a murky suspicion hooked and being dragged to the surface. "If the cases were broken into, the glass would have fallen inside. Very little of the glass would have been thrown outwards, certainly not like this."
So simple. So very simple and damning, and yet an utter impossibility. Sycamore narrowed his eyes, a thin smile drifting across his lips in a serpentine fashion.
"The display cases were not broken in to," Layton concluded with some finality. "They were broken out of from the inside."
As was the room itself. The scene told a story, not of an instance of someone breaking in, but of someone breaking out.
With the police bustling ineffectually around them, and the cool light of day leeching colour from their bones, two figures of marble stood in the centre of the room and thought.