The swinging shelves were installed after a housekeeper stumbled on his workroom. She’d been the first person who died after coming into contact with the things he summoned from the Veil but by no means the last. The stairs were wide, accommodating for some of the larger arcane pieces he had collected over the years. The downstairs space initially served as a fallout shelter in the paranoia of the midcentury. Over the years it served as a pantry or a wine cellar until Beckett purchased the oceanfront property. He’d immediately seen the windowless space downstairs as a place to conduct his experiments, which depended heavily on the presence of pitch-black shadows. Divided into two chambers by a long wall, the shelter now boasted a comfortable library on one side of the landing’s opening. Beckett left the other chamber relatively unaltered except for wide surgical sinks and long tables against the wall. He’d paid for a stonemason to groove a permanent circle in the middle of the poured cement floor, its radius wide enough to hold the largest of shadow creatures.
