X equals B.

There you are. Stitch to fate as always.

Come on in! The archive breathes easier with you near.

Another night. Another lot.

This one was left at our doorstep in an evidence box. No return address,

no badge number, just a slip of paper inside that read, keep the batteries out. It doesn't help.

The object in question is a flashlight, heavy, steel-bodied, government issued.

Its surface is cracked and caked in blood long dried to rust.

The lens is fractured and yet, somehow, it works.

Not always, only once a night. It turns on on exactly at 323 a.m. no matter where it's stored,

no matter who's watching it. And when it does, the beam flickers and stutters like it's trying

to say something, like it remembers.

Police records trace this item to a now decommissioned station in Ohio.

The building is condemned.

Official records end in 2004.

But the night in question, the last night anyone was officially on shift, occurred in the fall of 2003.

It's not listed in any logs, but we have the report, or rather, we have what's left of it, and we have the light.

This is Lot 86.

This is the story of Third Watch. Before we begin, I want to point out some of the customers whose names have been etched in brass

on this beautiful plaque I had made above the front desk.

These are some of the members of the inner circle of the antiquarium.

We go by the Obsidian Covenant.

...