It began with a mirror.
A small, cracked shard, barely the size of a coin, taped to a lamppost outside a London café. Cedric passed it without a second thought—until he caught his reflection in it. Not his face, not really. The angle was warped, the surface smudged, but the message scratched faintly into the metal behind the glass sent a chill down his spine.
"Did you forget what you looked like… before?"
He tore the shard off and held it in his palm, breath caught halfway between disbelief and dread. The moment stretched like a thread, taut and trembling.
This was the fourth message that week.
The Puppeteer was no longer taunting them with fresh blood, not directly. Instead, he had taken a more insidious route—leaving traces in public places, half-hidden clues that meant nothing to the untrained eye but everything to Cedric.
A photo of a children's hospital he once interned at, pinned to a bus stop.
A burned notebook page with his old signature, slipped beneath the wiper blade of his car.
A child's drawing left in his mailbox—a family of stick figures, one missing its head.
Each clue, each artifact, was not only invasive. It was surgical. Targeted. Personal.
And Cedric was the only one who could see it.
"Why are you so quiet lately?" Marcus asked that night, hunched over his laptop in Cedric's dimly lit apartment.
Cedric didn't respond immediately. He was standing by the window, the skyline of London flickering beyond the glass. Rain patterned the pane like static. Behind him, the murder board took up an entire wall—strings connecting photos, maps, transcripts, forming a tangled, chaotic mess that now looked… still. Too still.
"I think he's done killing," Cedric murmured.
Marcus looked up sharply. "What? You think he's stopped?"
"No," Cedric turned, his voice low, strained. "I think the murder was just the opening act. Now comes the real performance. He's not after the city anymore. He's after me."
The next day, a crime scene. A body discovered at an abandoned nursery, posed as if mid-lullaby, a music box playing a distorted version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on loop.
The oddity wasn't the pose. Not the lack of struggle. Not even the absence of any forensic evidence.
It was the small wooden figure placed gently on the chest of the victim—
a marionette of a young boy with sandy brown hair and eyes too big for its face.
Cedric stared at it for what felt like hours.
Marcus approached from behind. "Cedric… is that…?"
"It's me," Cedric whispered. "That's me."
Back at their hideout, they laid the clues out like pages of a script. Everything the Puppeteer left behind connected to moments Cedric had buried deep—his childhood, his failures, his regrets. But they weren't just memories.
They were triggers.
The Puppeteer wasn't just choosing random trauma. He was structuring them like acts in a play. Escalating. Repeating motifs. Themes. Each "clue" matched a chapter in Cedric's life. The child in the drawing. The intern hospital. The family photo torn down the middle. They weren't for the police. They weren't even for the public.
They were written for an audience of one.
Cedric didn't sleep that night. He sat in front of the mirror in his bathroom, the shard still in his hand.
"Is this what you want?" he whispered to no one. "You want me to break?"
A silence. Then a flicker—just for a second—in the corner of the mirror. A reflection that didn't belong to him.
The next act had begun.
The next message came in a program leaflet from a play that hadn't run in twenty years.
It was slipped under Cedric's apartment door sometime in the early morning, untouched by weather, pristine in its fold. No fingerprints. No footprints in the hallway.
On the cover: "La Belle Nuit – Revival Performance"
Cedric opened it slowly. Inside were cast listings that made no sense, roles that didn't exist in the original production. Instead of Ophelia, there was The Witness. Instead of Hamlet, The Lost Brother.
He flipped to the final page.
"All the world's a stage," the print read in elegant cursive.
"But some of us are already dead before the curtain rises."
"Shakespeare?" Marcus asked, peering over his shoulder.
"Not just that," Cedric murmured. "He's rewriting them."
Over the next few days, more quotes arrived.
A flyer from a ruined community theater, scrawled with:
"We are such stuff as nightmares are made on."
— a twisted echo of Prospero's final monologue.
A library book returned with the words:
"O, for a muse of fire… to burn it all down."
— a bastardized Henry V.
A torn page from Antigone, with one line underlined in crimson ink:
"There is no guilt in reverence for the dead."
Each line seemed random at first—just eerie theater references, meant to unnerve.
But Cedric knew better.
He laid them out in his study, tacked to the wall like pieces of a fragmented monologue.
"Put them in order," he muttered, fingers dancing over the pages. "They're not just quotes. They're… lines in a script."
It clicked when he saw the La Belle Nuit program again.
Each quote corresponded not just to a scene, but to a character type. A mask.
The Witness. The Muse. The Guilty.
Each message represented a psychological role Cedric had played in his life—witness to his sister's suffering, muse to Elias' trauma, guilty in his own silence. The Puppeteer had turned his life into a play, complete with cast and theme.
Marcus entered the room, holding a newspaper.
"There's been another one," he said. "A crime scene. But it's staged like a scene from Oedipus. Blinded victim. Red drapes. A crown made of wires."
Cedric didn't look up. "It's the next act."
The hidden message came days later.
Cedric was alone, reviewing the playbill again, when he noticed it—the fine print at the bottom of the leaflet, barely visible, printed in silver ink.
He held it to the light.
"Act IV, Scene I: Say the words aloud, and the walls will speak."
It wasn't a metaphor.
Cedric returned to the ruined community theater mentioned in the flyer. He stood center stage, alone in the dark.
He spoke the line aloud:
"All the world's a stage, but some of us are already dead."
A faint click echoed behind the stage curtains.
A hidden compartment. A box inside.
He opened it carefully. Inside was a tape recorder, already playing.
Not a scream. Not laughter.
A single voice—his own, from years ago. Whispering something he hadn't said in a decade.
"I knew. I knew what they were doing to him. I didn't stop it."
Cedric staggered back, the air in the theater growing cold.
The Puppeteer had recorded him. Or someone had. Someone who had been there, long ago.
He clutched the recorder like it might vanish. The past wasn't just rising. It was being directed.
And somewhere—unseen but watching—the Puppeteer turned the page of his script.
"Act V," he whispered to no one.
"Time for the ghost to enter stage left."
The rain hadn't stopped in days.
Eliza Cole sat at the long table deep within Scotland Yard's old records department, surrounded by musty files and hollowed silence. Sir Jonathan Harrington stood at the far end, his hands behind his back, eyes fixed on a corkboard littered with red strings and aged photographs. Some faces were crossed out. Others—marked with question marks.
"Three," Eliza said, not looking up. "Three confirmed officers who were at the underground showing. All presumed dead. Two actually are. One disappeared the night after the raid."
Jonathan turned slowly. "You think he's alive?"
"I think," Eliza replied, her voice tight, "he's helping them."
She dropped a photograph onto the table—CCTV footage from a week ago, barely visible, grainy. But the silhouette of the man in uniform was unmistakable. His badge still on his chest. His face covered by a smooth, silver mask.
"They call themselves Fanatics now," Eliza continued. "Remnants of the Puppet Theater. The ones who lived. The ones who still believe."
Jonathan's jaw clenched.
They had combed through every case file involving suspicious theater ties, every officer who had taken leave around the time of the raid, every name whispered too quietly in the halls. What they found wasn't just chilling—it was institutional.
Five names.
All with influence.
All with the power to redirect investigations.
All present in the force… until very recently.
Eliza stared at the board. "They were embedded. Not just supporters. Architects."
"Then why didn't we see it?" Jonathan asked bitterly.
"Because they didn't want us to."
Jonathan's paranoia grew with each passing hour.
He started having his own meetings swept for bugs.
Stopped trusting reports unless they came from Eliza or Mae personally.
Refused to speak on the phone—only face-to-face.
Even the team around him began to feel the shift.
"We don't know who's still loyal," he said quietly one evening, as he poured scotch into a glass with trembling hands. "This station… it used to feel like home. Now it's a stage. And I don't know who's reading from a script."
Eliza sat across from him, still in uniform, her face drawn with exhaustion. "Then we write our own."
He chuckled—bitter and tired. "You always did know how to sound like a hero."
"I'm not a hero, sir. Just someone who doesn't want to lose again."
Later that night, she received an anonymous envelope at her apartment.
Inside was a folded photograph—an old class picture from the police academy. At the edge of the group, a young Eliza smiled nervously at the camera. Next to her: her father, Dr. Cole.
But someone had drawn puppet strings from his hands…
…and they ended at her own shoulders.
Below the image, a note written in elaborate cursive:
"Some strings are woven in blood, my dear Leading Lady. Do you know who's holding yours?"
Eliza stared at the paper, her fingers trembling slightly.
Behind her, the kettle screamed.
But she didn't move.
Not yet.
Eliza sat hunched over a pile of printed reports, her eyes red from too many sleepless nights. Something was off. A surveillance tape from the Southbank warehouse—logged by Officer P. Redford. But according to the duty roster, Redford had been on leave that entire week.
She grabbed a red marker and scrawled across the page:
"False Source?"
The name kept popping up. Attached to incident reports, evidence logs, tip-offs. Always at the edges. Always where the team was misled, distracted, rerouted.
And then she saw it:
The contradictions.
Minor. Subtle.
A date one day off. A witness statement with the wrong accent.
Small enough to slip past, but deliberate enough to sow doubt.
"He's not just feeding us lies," she said to Jonathan that evening. "He's engineering paranoia. He's turning us against each other."
Jonathan frowned. "You think we're already compromised?"
"I think the theater never closed," she said. "It just changed venues."
She opened a folder. Inside, names were circled—some green, some red.
Green: confirmed loyalty.
Red: uncertain.
Too much red.
And so the plan was born—in silence.
A covert task force.
No emails. No digital trail. No official record.
Just whispered instructions and analog files.
They seeded false leads—fabricated evidence, fake tips—into the system, then watched who picked them up, who followed, who tried to act.
Those who did: compromised.
Those who didn't: trusted.
Eliza called it: "The Mirror Trap."
She and Jonathan began dividing their team into cells. Not by rank or seniority, but by trust.
An invisible paranoia crept through the halls of Scotland Yard.
A sideways glance.
A closed-door meeting.
A file that suddenly went missing.
"We're not just hunting the Puppeteer anymore," Jonathan muttered. "We're fighting his shadow."
"Then it's time to light a fire," Eliza replied.
A few moments later, Jonathan left the meeting room and left Eliza alone. She faced a one-way mirror—her own reflection staring back. The woman lifted a red marker and drew a sharp line across her reflection's face.
"No more strings."
She turned and walked out too.
The game was on.