The Reliquary
by G. Carrion
What do you say when you think no one is listening?
Graham Ellis walks the British Museum from midnight to 8 AM, five nights a week. Divorced, estranged from his daughter, invalided out of the Metropolitan Police—he’s a man who has learned to keep his thoughts to himself. Or so he believes.
One November night, alone in the Assyrian galleries, he passes the conservation lab and notices a small Byzantine reliquary on a workbench. Its seal has cracked. No one has told him what it is. Without thinking, he speaks into the empty corridor: “I just want her to call.”
Four days later, his daughter calls. She sounds warm. She wants to visit. Graham is overjoyed—until the night-shift colleague who covered his break dies in his sleep. Until his downstairs neighbor doesn’t answer her door. Until he realizes that every wish he has spoken aloud, knowingly or not, is being paid for by someone in his orbit. Something in the reliquary is listening. And it is very hungry.
For readers of The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs, The Ritual by Adam Nevill, Hereditary
“What do you say when you think no one is listening?”
— Early Draft Reader
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