Lena, Kuba and Max break into a shuttered dentist’s lab on Willow Street and uncover a strange toothbrush, a sealed warning, and a message that turns their midnight dare into a trap.
It was past nine when Lena, Kuba and Max slipped through the side entrance of the abandoned building on Willow Street, their phone lights cutting thin, nervous lines through the dark. The street had a reputation for swallowing people’s curiosity whole. In school, the place was a joke told in whispers: the closed dental surgery where experiments went wrong, records vanished, and nobody stayed long enough to explain why.
The friends had come anyway. The Detective Club had spent weeks debating the rumours, and tonight Lena was determined to find out whether the stories were exaggeration or warning. The storm outside rattled the windows above them as they stepped into the old reception room.
The air smelled of dust, stale antiseptic and something sharp, almost minty. A cracked blue dentist’s chair stood under a cone of dead light. Metal tools lay in neat rows on a desk, as if someone had abandoned them in the middle of a procedure. Shelves of glass jars lined the wall, each one labelled in fading ink. Lena’s gaze caught on a cabinet door marked with a handwritten notice: DO NOT OPEN. RESEARCH IN PROGRESS.
Max lifted his phone higher. The beam slid across the floor and flashed off something near the skirting board.
Kuba crouched first. He reached under the desk and pulled out a toothbrush unlike any they’d ever seen. Its handle was silver, engraved with fine patterns that looked too precise to be decorative, and its bristles shimmered green in the torchlight.
Lena took it carefully. The moment her fingers closed around the handle, the room shuddered.
The door slammed shut behind them.
For one stunned second, nobody moved. Then a pale light burst from the far wall, and the shape of an old man formed out of nothing, his face flickering like a bad signal. He wore a white coat, and his mouth did not quite match the words coming from the speakers hidden in the room.
“Welcome,” the hologram said. “If you want to leave this place, you must discover what oral hygiene has to do with longevity. But be careful. Some answers are designed to keep you here.”
Before Lena could speak, a seam of light opened in the floor beneath their feet.