The Conservator's Night Shift
A Gothic Novel

About this book:

Beneath the polished galleries of the Kelvingrove Museum, the sub-basement remembers what the upper floors have forgotten. Dr. Eleanor Vance has come to conserve a seventeenth-century iron mortar, but the building's damp bones have other plans. The climate control fights a losing war against rising groundwater; the night watchman, Arthur Miller, carries keys that weigh like anchors and warnings he won't fully explain; and in Vault Four, behind a door sealed with petrified oak wedges and a brass plate worn smooth by generations of guards, something is drinking the moisture from the air and turning it into salt.

By day, the museum is a temple of order—cataloged, climate-controlled, safe. By night, the marsh reclaims its own. Eleanor's solvents and scalpels are precision instruments against entropy, but the corruption she uncovers isn't merely chemical. The previous conservator didn't retire; he broke, found scraping his own thumbnail raw beneath a workbench, murmuring of bronze disease. Now the sump pumps run wild, the humidity gauges lie, and a wet, bubbling sigh echoes through ventilation ducts that haven't seen sunlight since 1886. Arthur has walked these corridors for thirty-two years. He knows the rules: don't investigate the noises, don't open what's sealed, and never, ever ignore the thread across Vault Four's jamb.

Told through alternating journal entries and night-watch logs, *The Conservator's Night Shift* is a masterclass in atmospheric dread—a Gothic puzzle box where every conservation report, every punched key-station, every microscopic observation of chloride bloom builds toward a revelation that has waited over a century in the dark. For readers who love the scholarly uncanny of *The Turn of the Screw* and the institutional rot of *The City & the City*, this is a novel about what happens when the past refuses to stay preserved, and the price of keeping history intact is paid in flesh and breath.