Elias Thorne was a man who believed in concrete, both literally and figuratively. He believed in stress tolerances, load-bearing walls, and the immutable, reassuring laws of physics. His world was one of blueprints and calculations, a realm where reality was quantifiable and buildings did precisely what they were designed to do. They stood, they served a purpose, and eventually, when he was called, they fell. The Penrose, however, was different.
It squatted in the city’s forgotten industrial sector like a concrete beast, a monument to a forgotten strain of Brutalism. Built in the late 1960s by the eccentric and later institutionalized architect Alistair Finch, it was a civic building that had served a dozen purposes—records office, tax department, public works—before being abandoned, deemed too costly to maintain and too confusing for its occupants to navigate. Now, after twenty years of silence, the city wanted it gone, and Elias was the man they’d hired to hammer it back into the dust.
The job began, as all jobs did, with the prints. A massive, rolled tube of them was delivered to his office. They were originals, drawn on heavy vellum, the lines still sharp, the architect’s notes a series of precise, almost microscopic annotations. As he spread the ground floor plan across his drafting table, he felt the familiar, comforting weight of a solvable puzzle.
But the puzzle was flawed. Finch’s design was deliberately labyrinthine. Corridors ran at odd, non-Euclidean angles. Rooms were nested within other rooms like Russian dolls. There was a strange lack of windows on the eastern face. It was a building designed to be difficult, a piece of architectural arrogance. “A building is not a home,” read one of Finch’s annotations in the margin. “It is a machine for processing people.”
The first sign of a deeper wrongness came during the initial on-site survey. With the rolled-up blueprint under his arm, Elias and his foreman, a grizzled man named Mac, walked the echoing, dust-choked halls. According to the print, the main lobby should have led to a central corridor exactly fifty feet in length. Elias had measured it on the vellum himself. But as they walked, the corridor stretched on. And on. Mac’s heavy work boots echoed in a rhythm that seemed to slow, the space between each footfall growing longer.
“This feels longer than fifty feet, boss,” Mac said, his voice a low rumble in the oppressive silence.
Elias stopped and unrolled the print. He looked at the clean, confident line on the paper, then at the seemingly endless hallway before them. He pulled a laser measure from his belt and aimed it at the far wall. The red dot shimmered in the gloom. He clicked the button. The device beeped: 127 feet.
“Impossible,” Elias muttered. He checked the print again. Section C, Corridor 1-A. Fifty feet. “They must have given us a preliminary draft. There must be a revised final version somewhere.”
But the discrepancies kept piling up. A storage closet on the print was, in reality, a fully-realized office, complete with a rusted metal desk. A stairwell that should have been in the north wing was simply not there, the space occupied by a solid concrete wall. By the end of the day, Elias’s blueprint was covered in red ink, a mess of corrections and question marks. He felt a prickle of professional irritation. A job this significant should not be saddled with such shoddy documentation.
Back in the clean, rational space of his office that night, he tried to make sense of it. He cross-referenced every sheet, searching for a revision date, a note, anything to explain the massive changes. He found nothing. These were the only prints on file. The official, stamped, and signed final version.
He sat staring at the ground floor plan, a single desk lamp casting a pool of light on the vellum. His eyes traced the impossible fifty-foot corridor. He had drawn a red line next to it, marking the true length of 127 feet. As he stared, his tired eyes playing tricks on him, the original black ink of the corridor’s wall seemed to… shimmer. He blinked, rubbing the fatigue from his face. He leaned closer.
It wasn’t a shimmer. The line was moving.
It was an infinitesimal, impossibly slow crawl, but it was undeniably happening. The black line representing the far wall of Corridor 1-A was creeping, stretching across the vellum towards his own red-inked annotation. He felt a cold knot of dread tighten in his stomach. He placed the tip of his pen on the end of the line. He waited, holding his breath. After a minute that felt like an hour, a microscopic, yet undeniable, gap had appeared between his pen and the line’s end.
He stumbled back from the table, his chair screeching against the hardwood floor. His heart hammered against his ribs. He was a man of logic, of measurable reality. But the document on his desk, a document that should have been a static, historical record, was actively, malevolently, editing itself. And with a sudden, chilling certainty, he knew that as the line on the paper moved, so too did the wall of solid concrete in the abandoned, silent building across town.
