In the cold autopsy room, Dr. Simon stood stunned before the corpse lying on the metallic table. It was the body of The Maestro—one of the greatest musical composers of his time... and one of the latest victims in the mysterious Crawford Murders. The dim lighting did little to mask the heavy scent of formalin, nor did it ease the eerie silence that blanketed the room like a thick curtain of dread.
With gloved hands, he raised the scalpel and began to carefully open the ribcage, his eyes scanning for anything unusual. Suddenly, before he could utter a word, a deep, cracked, yet unmistakably clear voice echoed through the room.
The voice came from the corpse's open mouth:
"Death… is merely a scene… in my play."
His hand froze. The scalpel slipped from his fingers and clattered onto the floor. Dr. Simon was no believer in superstition, but he knew—vocal cords don't move without air… and no corpse, cold for days, should be speaking.
He leaned in cautiously, inspecting the throat. There—faint glints. Thin copper wires, woven like a spider's web through the larynx, connected to tiny nodes in the skull. Someone… had turned the Maestro into a meticulously crafted puppet.
Simon stepped back, heart pounding like ancient war drums. He shone his flashlight into the corpse's gaping mouth, and his eyes widened with every detail he uncovered. These wires weren't random. They were surgically implanted, linked to precise neural points. Even more unsettling—there were tiny chips embedded near the brainstem, like theatrical fragments etched into the Maestro's very mind.
He grabbed forceps and gently removed one of the chips. The moment he touched it, the corpse gave a faint shudder, as though exhaling a ghost of breath. It wasn't decomposition. It was… calculated.
Then, without warning, a musical tone played from the throat—a distorted note, but hauntingly familiar. It was the opening motif from The End of the Thread, the Maestro's final opera, composed just a week before his death.
Simon froze, the sound seeming to drain the breath from his lungs.
He whispered to himself:
"This isn't science… it's a performance."
And what terrified him more was the scratched message on the nearby wall, as if carved with fingernails:
"The show goes on… as long as someone is watching."
At that moment, Dr. Simon wasn't sure he was alone in the room anymore.
In the long shadows of the autopsy room, he noticed something new on the corpse's wrist: a black silk ribbon, completely out of place for any medical procedure. He untied it slowly, revealing a fine engraving burned into the skin, as if branded before death:
"Every stage needs an audience… and every audience will play its part, sooner or later."
His fingers trembled as a new sound filled the air—footsteps. But not human. More like wood dragging across linoleum. He turned sharply. The room was empty.
He took a deep breath and pulled back a small curtain in the corner… Behind it stood a surgical dummy, dressed in a white coat identical to his own. The face bore his exact features, sculpted in wax, eyes made of glass. In its hand was a small scalpel, and on its chest, a card written in slanted script:
"If you stop cutting… you become the cut."
The air grew thick. Heavier. Breathing became laborious. Simon turned toward the door—it slammed shut behind him with a metallic thud. From the corpse's throat, the voice returned, louder this time:
"Death is not the end… merely the first curtain."
Now he knew—this wasn't an autopsy. It was an invitation to the next act.
He sat down on the worn leather chair in the corner, eyes locked on the corpse that no longer seemed lifeless… and on the unmoving dummy that stood too still, too deliberately posed. The feeling that everything around him was moving according to a pre-written script crept deeper into his bones.
He whispered, trembling:
"I'm the doctor… I perform the dissection, not become it..."
But his voice was swallowed by a strange murmur, as if the very walls repeated words in a forgotten tongue. The lights flickered violently—and from the body, a new sound emerged. A voice—no, a chorus—stitched from thousands of throats:
"Your roles are not given… they are taken."
Then—darkness.
Only the faint glow from the dummy's glass eyes remained. Emma had once learned what it meant to live inside a script she hadn't written. Now… Simon understood he wasn't conducting a dissection—he was undergoing one. A dissection of reason, of science, of certainty itself.
And in the pitch-black room, a soft creak was heard—the sound of strings
tightening. Behind the curtain… the play had just begun.