Leo’s blood chilled. He clicked ‘pause.’ The image froze. But the whisper continued.
Mary Anning—no, the actress playing her—was staring directly into the lens. Her face was wrong. Too still. Her eyes were not eyes but compressed pixels, two tiny blocks of darkness. She spoke, but the voice was not Kate Winslet’s. It was a whisper, dry as old bone, scraped from the limestone of the Jurassic coast.
Leo slammed the laptop shut. His heart hammered. For a full minute, there was silence. Then, from the closed laptop, a soft scratching sound. Like a chisel on shale. Like fingernails on the inside of a coffin.