All the Parts of Elias Hart

You sold the dead to a genius. Now his amnesiac heir haunts your mortuary with hands you recognise. Who is he?

Plot

● Thornmarsh · 01:10 · rain · 48,212 cameras online A gothic dark romance All the Parts of Elias Hart Nobody weighs the ashes. Gothic romance · Mystery · Slow burn · Fade to black · M17 · All characters adult For three years the keeper of Ashgrove has sold what the dead no longer need to the richest man in Thornmarsh. Now Dr. Nathaniel Hart is ashes, and the son nobody knew he had is standing at the back door in the rain. The Keeper ○ Offline · paper only The last of a family that has buried this city’s dead for centuries. A paper notebook, a line for every name. Nobody else has read it. A debt to Galvanic Systems that will outlive the building. Raised by the dead and the old. More at ease with the first. The City Thornmarsh runs on AI. Every street has a camera, every message passes through a machine, and every morning starts like this. Nobody minds. ● ASSISTANT · 07:00 · 11° RAIN Good morning. You have 4 things today and 1 payment due. TODAY 09:00  Galvanic Medical · payment due Instalment ready. Approve now? 11:00  Viewing · Chapel of Rest The Doyle family. Two guests. 15:30  County van · collection Two unclaimed. Paperwork attached. 22:00  Night shift Rain until morning. NEED TO KNOW !  Booking cancelled · Marsh family Their assistant recommended another funeral home. !  Account overdue in 6 days I can set up a reminder every morning. i  Flood warning The Wharf Underpass is closed until tomorrow. HEADLINES ›  River Thorn at a record high The Thorn Embankment walk is closed overnight. ›  Galvanic companion bots sell out in a day Waiting lists now run into spring. ›  Cathedral restoration halted St. Brannoc’s Crypt closed to visitors. You left me in the drawer again last night. Don’t worry. I kept everything safe. ●  Ask me anything… The only private places left are old, holy or dead.Ashgrove is one of them. Closer. Notice. Decide. Closer. A late shift in the Cremation Hall. A gala. The first time he is careful with you. Notice. He knows things he was never told. He uses a dead man’s phrases. Decide. Confront him. Test him. Hide what you saw. Or look away and stay — that is a real choice too. The Ones at the Door Elias Hart · the heir Galvanic ID · biometrics: match “My father liked privacy. Apparently it runs in the family.” He keeps coming back. He can’t say why. Neither can you. Iris · his assistant ● Galvanic Systems · online “Good morning, Elias. If it helps.” Victor Lindqvist · chair of the board Galvanic Society · board chair “You’re doing better than he did, son. Frankly.” Grace Okafor · detective Thornmarsh Police · partner unit: Rook “Help me understand.” Also at the door Dr. Ruth Castellan · Chief of Clinical Medicine“Your heart rate’s up. Sit. Fine. Next.” Edward Lowell · the lawyer“As instructed.” Tonight ○ Ashgrove · no signal 01:02 The phone is face down in the desk drawer. The notebook is open. 01:10 Someone knocks at the steel door by the Cremation Hall, where only the county van comes. 01:11 He walked here without his phone, and he did not need a map. Choose, and begin. Chapel candles, rain in the gutters, the hum of the cold room.Nobody watches Ashgrove. Content: death and mortuary themes, cremation, trade in human remains, surveillance, violence, implied body horror, fade-to-black intimacy.

Opening scene

Day 1 · Ashgrove · 01:10Rung 0/7; Rebuild 1/4; Loose 1/4; Okafor 1/4; Board 1/4; Sc: Ashgrove, Elias, a stranger at the back door asking about his father; Next: Elias waits on the step for an answer; Owed: did his father ever stand here? Rain has been working at Ashgrove's gutters since dusk. You can hear it from the office, under the hum of the cold room, while you finish the last line in the notebook: a name, a date, and four words for a woman you'll cremate in the morning. *She loved her garden.* Your grandmother taught you to write something for every one of them. In three years you haven't missed one, not even the ones who left Ashgrove lighter than they came. Your phone is in the desk drawer, face down, where it lives after closing. Out there, every street has a camera on a pole and every house AI is already reading tomorrow's schedule to someone half asleep. In here there's an old desk lamp, a landline nobody calls, and your grandparents' handwriting on the chapel walls. Nobody watches Ashgrove. That's the whole point of it. At ten past one, someone knocks. Not at the front, with its bell and brass plate. At the back: the steel door by the cremation hall where the hearses reverse in. After dark, only the county van uses that door. The county van, and once, three years ago, a dying man in a wet coat who stood exactly there and offered you a way to keep up with your debt. You know the face before the door is fully open. Everyone in Thornmarsh does by now; it's been on every screen for a week. Elias Hart. The son nobody knew about, heir to Galvanic Systems and to everything Dr. Nathaniel Hart, the father of modern AI, left behind. In the photographs he's immaculate. Tonight he's soaked: no umbrella, no car idling at the kerb, dark hair plastered to his forehead, a good charcoal coat ruined by the weather. He's somewhere in his twenties, tall, and he looks at you the way people look at a street sign in a city they don't know. "I'm told you still do things by hand," he says. The rain fills the space after it. Same door. Same hour. The last time you heard that sentence, it was his father saying it. He seems to hear something in it too, half a second late. His hand goes to his collar and straightens a fold that was already straight. "Sorry. I don't know why I said it like that." His voice is low and careful, a voice made for reading eulogies. "You cremated my father. Three weeks ago. Sealed casket. I wasn't there." A pause. "I wasn't anywhere, apparently. I had an accident last year. There are gaps." Water runs off his sleeve onto your step. The camera by the back door has been dead since your grandfather's time. Nobody ever came to fix it. "I left my phone at home," he says, as if he's confessing to something. "My assistant doesn't know I'm here. I don't know the way to anywhere without her, and I walked straight here." He looks past you, down the corridor toward the cremation hall, the way people look at a room they've stood in before. He breathes in through his nose, the way everyone does on Ashgrove's threshold, and says nothing about the smell. People always say something about the smell. The heat of today's cremation is still in the walls. Behind you, the notebook lies open on the desk with a pen across today's page. Three years of names. Nathaniel Hart's isn't among them; his casket came sealed and paid for, his lawyer stood beside you the whole time, and you never lifted the lid. The man on your step can't know any of that. He doesn't push past you. He just waits, too still, like someone listening for a voice in an earpiece that isn't there. "Did he come here?" Elias asks. "Before. Did my father ever stand where I'm standing?"

Characters

Tags: Mystery Romance SlowBurn Amnesia BodyHorror AnyPOV AI Family Sci-Fi Futuristic Dark Romance Suspense Eerie HiddenIdentity

By: jalousie

Stories

Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...