The Plot Calls #1 : "The Archivist"

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and/or Ai-assisted-content-generation. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

____

The rumor started with a test question.

In Professor Alder’s Advanced History class, there was a single statement students were told to identify as “historically inaccurate.”

Most of them selected the obvious one—something about the Treaty of Versailles.

Only one student chose the quote she had added herself: a line falsely attributed to a long-dead revolutionary. A fabrication. A choice she made “to provoke thought.” Or at least, that’s what she told herself.

The student came to her after class. Polite. Curious. He held the old book where the real quote appeared, its spine cracked from honest study. “I think there’s an error,” he said.

Professor Alder smiled gently. “There are many kinds of truth.”

That night, she stayed late in the university archive—red pen in hand, ink pooling over marginalia. She told herself she was correcting misunderstandings, removing bias, restoring dignity to the names history had failed. But as the hours blurred into weeks, her red pen grew bolder. Less correction, more rewriting. Less fidelity, more vision.

She didn’t sleep much anymore.

When new research contradicted her revisions, she snapped at colleagues. She corrected students mid-sentence. She became cold in lectures, distant at department meetings. Her office, once filled with curiosities and book club signups, now housed only volumes, paperweights, and silence.

Then one evening, as the building dimmed and cleaning crews departed, she felt it.

A hum.

Low and droning, as if echoing through the floorboards.

She followed it, past the elevator, past the fire escape, down a corridor she had never used. The hum deepened to something like breath.

There, in the forgotten sub-basement, a door stood open—a door that had been sealed since the 1970s.

Inside: concrete dust, toppled shelves, half-lit exit signs. But in the center, lit by no discernible source, shimmered a six-by-six patch of violet-black soil. Dense. Alive.

From the plot extended a single porcelain hand. Open-palmed. Still.

She froze.

Then saw him.

Across the room, unmoving, stood a tall figure in black robes. His face was human. Pale. Unblinking. He made no gesture, gave no instruction.

And yet, she understood.

She placed her falsified text—her version of history—into the hand.

The hand closed.

A whisper, from nowhere and everywhere at once:

“The One Beneath honors your pact. Your pride be your truth. Your student’s truth.”

The next morning, something was different.

Her students praised her lecture—though she couldn’t recall delivering it clearly. Someone complimented her interpretation of a war that hadn’t happened. A visiting scholar deferred to her about a civilization no one had studied.

Later, in the lounge, a colleague misremembered a date, then corrected himself—to the wrong date. Her date.

She blinked, confused. Then smiled.

In the following weeks, her class attendance grew. Students recorded her every word. The campus newspaper did a feature on her “radical truth pedagogy.” Her office filled with gifted flowers, fan mail, a plaque from the chancellor’s office.

But she no longer enjoyed it.

She found herself repeating phrases. She forgot which stories she’d altered and which had been real. The praise grew, but the passion dimmed. She stopped attending conferences. She closed her books.

Eventually, her students stopped showing up.

“She’s brilliant,” one said. “But something’s missing.”

By semester’s end, her office sat dark.

She visited the soil again. She brought more books, then her lecture notes, then her first manuscript. The hand always received them. The voice always welcomed her.

Until one day, it didn’t.

There was no voice. No warmth. Just the porcelain hand, open.

She felt a chill.

In the weeks that followed, her hair thinned. Her skin dulled. Her voice lost tone.

Then, one afternoon, a student passing by her office caught a glimpse through the door.

Professor Alder sat motionless, facing her desk. Her shawl hung off her shoulders like drapery. Her hands rested on a red pen that dripped violet soil. Her skin was pale. Her eyes empty.

It was definitely her—but she resembled something else now. A pale, bald entity. Sitting idle. Doing nothing.

The student cracked the door slightly, unsure. He wanted to say something.

But then he saw it.

Across from the professor stood a man in identical robes—except he appeared confused, scared, utterly bewildered. His face was wrinkled, blinking as if remembering something. He touched his own arm, as if recognizing warmth for the first time in years.

He glanced at the student.

The student froze, then immediately scurried away.

The confused man in black robes bolted for the door right after.

Meanwhile, the professor sat idle, gazing into a space that didn’t exist.

The figure—no longer Professor Alder, but a Plot Person, an Idle Man—stood from her desk, walked slowly to the sub-basement, and knelt before the cursed soil.

In a hollow voice, the Idle Man that was once Professor Alder whispered:

“I have fed The One Beneath.”

It gazed into the plot—neither waiting nor expecting.

Idle.

It didn’t blink.

It didn’t breathe.

It didn’t move.

It simply whispered:

“The Plot Thickens.”

____

Want to follow my horror, fantasy, scifi, and romance content as I publish it?

Subscribe to my "Mark A Figueroa Presents" Official YouTube Channel for videos.

Join my Official Discord Server for notifications by genre.

Join my My WhatsApp Group for easy and simple updates for all my content.

All my links: