Graveyard Shift

Five night-shift workers in a university town meet every night at midnight in the overgrown cemetery behind the Church of Saint Anthony the Anchorite, a decaying local historic landmark surrounded by the medical school's expanding infrastructure. University policy bans smoking within a hundred feet of any campus building, and the churchyard is the only place on west campus where they can light up. They call themselves the Anchorites.

Edie Wu, editor-in-chief of the student newspaper the Belltower Times, arrives from the newsroom to find Tuck and Hannah staring at a freshly dug hole, its lines too regular to be the work of an animal, in a graveyard where no one has been buried for a century. Edie is privately preoccupied with a lump under her arm, discovered two weeks ago and still undiagnosed, which makes everything feel desperately urgent. Tamar, the oldest of the group, suggests the hole might be a routine disinterment. Hannah, gaunt and bluntly indifferent, offers a darker theory: Someone dug a grave in advance for a murder victim. Theo Pavlopoulos, the charismatic general manager of the Rocker Box Bar, arrives last and notes the soil is still wet despite days without rain, meaning the hole was dug very recently. The group discusses a recent "Hostile Incident" at the bar, one in a series of unexplained episodes the Times has covered since August in which previously calm people suddenly turned violent. These individuals are known as Belligerents. Theo subdued the latest one with a chokehold, sustaining a black eye and cracked ribs, but no one has found a connection between any of the cases.

After the others leave, Edie heads toward the boarded-up church to investigate. Tuck follows reluctantly, revealing an intimate knowledge of the building. Inside the nave, Edie's flashlight illuminates a large mosaic of Saint Anthony surrounded by floating severed hands and feet, iconography tied to ignis sacer, or Saint Anthony's Fire, a medieval epidemic caused by ergot poisoning. Pale lichen and faintly glowing mushroom caps grow from cracks in the plaster. Tuck admits his background is in microbiology and mycology, though he never finished his degree after defaulting on student loans. Upstairs, Edie discovers his field notebook bearing his real name, Wes Tucker, and spots a sleeping bag in the corner. Tuck confesses he has been squatting in the church for weeks and asks her not to turn his situation into a story.

From the office window, they watch a dark figure enter the graveyard, upend a bag into the hole, and return with a shovel to fill it in. Hiding behind a headstone, they wait until the gravedigger departs, then examine the hole. Inside they find not human remains but dozens of dead lab rats, white-furred with black hoods, mouths frozen open in rigor mortis. A live rat that crawled up Tuck's leg during their hiding has patchy fur and a fibrous white crust around its nostrils, eyes, and mouth. Edie connects the crust to the growth on the church mosaic, photographs everything, and resolves to bring the rest of the Anchorites into the investigation.

Meanwhile, Theo manages the Rocker Box alongside Chelsea, his right-hand bartender, with whom he broke his own rule about sleeping with coworkers. Their tension has worsened after he accidentally spilled two drinks on her. Theo receives Edie's text identifying the gravedigger and intercepts the man on the street after his car fails to start. The man's license identifies him as Tom Kinnan, a PhD candidate from New Hampshire. Theo photographs the ID, sends it to the group chat, and plies Kinnan with oversized cocktails.

At a hotel reception desk across town, Tamar works the overnight shift. She holds a library science degree but is stuck between two dead-end jobs, is recently divorced, and suspects she has major depressive disorder she cannot afford to have diagnosed. Her one real skill is research. She finds Kinnan's university profile: He is a research assistant to Dr. Heather Lockley at the Calhoun Center for Behavioral Psychiatry. His publications focus on the hypnotic properties of alkaloids derived from C. burranicum, a type of fungus that grows on lichen. Tamar locates a five-year-old Belltower Times article about dormitories closed due to infestations of the same fungus, quoting a sophomore named Wes Tucker. She walks to the Health Sciences Library, pulls Kinnan's master's thesis documenting preliminary tests of burranicum on lab rats with no adverse side effects, and prints it along with his library circulation history.

Hannah, the group's chronic insomniac, picks Kinnan up from the bar posing as his rideshare driver. She has had insomnia and night terrors since childhood, has tried every available sedative without success, and works nights as a rideshare driver and auto mechanic. She drives Kinnan to a remote road in Bothell Forest, waits for him to fall asleep, unlocks his phone with his fingerprint, and loops his seat belt around his neck to force him to talk. Hannah reveals she was a human subject in Project Honeydew, Lockley's study exploring whether burranicum could treat chronic, drug-resistant insomnia. Lockley administered drops of greenish serum into Hannah's eyes, producing genuine sleep for the first time in Hannah's life, but the study was terminated without explanation. Under duress, Kinnan reveals that in rats given higher doses, mycotoxins attacked the neocortex, causing aggression, hostility, and eventually cannibalism. The incubation period was far longer than expected, so they initially believed the drug was safe. Warning signs include mycelial growth on soft tissues and temporary blindness. Hannah connects the symptoms to the Hostile Incidents and realizes she and other Honeydew participants may be on the same trajectory. She shoves Kinnan out of the car, drives away with his phone, and texts Lockley from his number to feign normalcy before forwarding screenshots of Kinnan's texts, emails, and lab reports to the other Anchorites.

At the Belltower Times offices, Edie, Tuck, and Tamar synthesize their findings. Kinnan's library circulation history reveals that six weeks ago his reading shifted dramatically toward cortical lesions, seizures, and rage syndrome, suggesting something had gone wrong. They theorize that Lockley and Kinnan buried the rats in the churchyard to avoid a paper trail, since the fungus already grew naturally in that soil. Tamar proposes that Lockley continued human testing in secret after the FDA terminated her Investigational New Drug application, a required authorization for testing experimental drugs on humans. When Hannah's screenshots arrive, Edie is elated, but Tuck and Tamar caution her: The Belligerents are people, not just story elements. Chastened, Edie rereads her files on each victim and recommits to telling the story with integrity.

After the bar closes, Hannah stops in for a drink with Theo and offers him blunt advice about Chelsea: Stop guessing what she wants and ask her. After Hannah leaves, a hospital resident calls to tell Theo that Zack Taft, the Rocker Box Belligerent, is dead. Taft suffered another violent spell, then a grand mal seizure and cardiac arrest, and never regained consciousness.

At 6:30 AM, Tamar confronts Dr. Lockley outside the Calhoun Center with a folder of incriminating evidence. Lockley had previously been sanctioned for failing to report adverse events, and Project Honeydew continued illegally after the FDA shut it down. Lockley grows panicked, drops the pages, and retreats into the building without comment. Edie confirms the article is ready to publish.

Theo arrives at the church with breakfast for Tuck, warning that Edie's article will bring police and investigators. He offers Tuck a bartending job and a spare room, since Chelsea has quit and Tuck needs a home. Tuck reluctantly accepts, and Theo signals a shift in their dynamic by dropping his usual teasing nicknames.

At ten in the morning, Hannah wakes in Tamar's sunlit apartment after having slept for the first time in recent memory. She acknowledges a tender feeling for Tamar that she resents. Snooping in the bathroom cabinet, she finds not pills but a tiny blue eggshell preserved in a jewelry box, and the delicate object chastens her. She looks at her reflection and notices her features seem blurry. Leaning close to the mirror, she sees a pale, scaly growth on the bridge of her nose, soft as warm candle wax, identical to the substance crusted on the dead rats. The novella ends on this image: the first visible sign that burranicum's long-term effects have taken hold in Hannah's body, confirming that whatever happened to the rats and to the Belligerents is now happening to her.