Read Chapter 4: Voices in the Marble

The Greek wing was colder than it should have been. Eamon’s breath fogged in front of his face as he stepped through the double doors, flashlight beam cutting across the marble limbs of gods and heroes arrayed in their eternal poses. He’d walked this gallery a hundred times. Tonight, it felt like walking into a congregation.

He stopped mid-aisle. Listened.

At first, nothing. Just the hum of the ventilation system and the distant thrum of the city beyond the walls. Then, soft as dust settling, a voice threaded through the stillness. Low. Male. Speaking a language he didn’t recognize—rolling vowels, hard consonants, something that might have been Greek but older, stranger. Another voice answered it. Then another. A chorus building beneath the plaster ceiling, like the statues themselves had found their tongues again.

Eamon’s grip tightened on his flashlight. “Okay,” he muttered to himself. “Okay.”

The whispers grew clearer as he advanced, but they weren’t meant for him. They spoke *past* him, to one another, in tones of alarm and grief. He caught fragments—a word that sounded like *polemos*. War. Another that twisted in his ears like a name. The marble figures flanking him seemed to lean closer, their blank eyes somehow sharper in the beam of his light.

Then a woman’s voice cut through the rest.

“Please.”

It was human. Clear. *English*. And it came from deeper in the gallery.

Eamon’s heart slammed against his ribs. He swept the flashlight left, right. Nothing moved. The statues held their poses, but the whispers had quieted, as if they too were listening.

“Hello?” he called out. His voice echoed, swallowed almost instantly by the heavy air.

“Please,” the voice came again, closer this time. It was soft, exhausted, the plea of someone who had been asking for a long time and had almost given up hope. “You have to help me.”

He moved forward, past the discus thrower, past a broken frieze of a chariot race. The voice led him to a corner of the gallery where the lighting was dim and the exhibits were smaller—busts and fragments of statuary, pieces that didn’t command the same attention as the great colossi. His flashlight found a case against the far wall. Inside, mounted on a simple plinth of grey marble, was the head of a woman.

The plaque read: *Bust of an Unknown Queen, Hellenistic Period, c. 300 BC.*

Her features were worn, the nose chipped, the lips a faint curve that might have been a smile once. Her hair was carved in elaborate waves, pinned back in a style that spoke of court and ceremony. But her eyes—the hollows where the irises had once been painted—seemed to fix on him as he approached.

“Closer,” the voice said. It was coming from the bust. From the *stone*. Eamon stopped three feet from the case, his boots squeaking on the polished floor.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The whispers in the gallery surged again, a wave of sound that rose and fell like surf. The woman’s voice came through it, strained but clear.

“I don’t have much time. They’re holding me here. Holding all of us. But you can let us out—or put us back. You have to choose.”

Eamon shook his head. “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

“The gates,” she said. “The one beneath you. It’s opening. If it opens fully, every voice that was ever silenced in these halls will wake. Every god. Every king. Every monster they locked away in stone and bronze and gold.” Her voice cracked. “The city will burn. You have to close the gates before the dawn.”

The marble beneath her carved features trembled. A hairline crack appeared at the base of the bust and spiderwebbed upward. Eamon stepped back instinctively. The whispers rose to a roar—

And then stopped.

Silence slammed down like a physical weight. Eamon stood frozen, flashlight trained on the case, chest heaving. The bust was still. Intact. The crack he’d seen—he squinted. It was gone. Smooth marble, unblemished.

But the air was colder now. And in the reflection of the glass case, he saw something behind him.

He spun. The gallery was empty. Yet at the far end, where the shadows pooled beneath a statue of Athena, a shape lingered—a woman’s silhouette, translucent as smoke, her carved features echoed in the dim light. She raised one hand, pointed at the floor beneath Eamon’s feet, and opened her mouth.

No sound came out. But he read the word on her lips before she dissolved into nothing.

*Run.*

The flashlight flickered. Died. He slapped it, and it came back on, but the gallery was empty again, the statues silent, the voices gone. Only the faint hum of the Codex, thrumming through the floor like a heartbeat, reminded him that none of this was his imagination.

Eamon backed out of the Greek wing, not taking his eyes off the shadows until he was through the doors and had pushed them shut behind him. His hands shook as he pulled the radio from his belt. He pressed the transmit button.

“Control, this is Cole. Come in.”

Static. Dead air.

“*Maggie*, come in. I need backup in the Greek wing.”

The static crackled—and then, impossibly, a voice broke through. Not Maggie’s. Not anyone from the security office.

It was the woman’s voice from the bust.

“Find the stone door,” she said, barely a whisper. “Before they do.”

The radio went silent. Eamon stared at it, his thumb still pressed against the transmit button. The green light on the Codex’s case pulsed somewhere behind him, faint but insistent, like a second heartbeat in the dark museum.

He looked down at his feet. Beneath him, through the marble floor, he could feel it—a low, grinding rumble, traveling up from deep underground. The stone door was still sliding. Still opening.

And somewhere in the darkness of the Greek wing, the silhouette of the woman stood watching him from among the statues, waiting to see what he would do.