That day, when we crossed the door of the hospital, I expected the white-tiled halls of an abandoned ward. I expected dust, maybe rot, but nothing more.
That's not what happened.
We stepped through the same doorway, but the others—Liam, Zinnia, Robin—were gone. I didn't see them vanish. They were simply… elsewhere.
Where I landed was still a hospital, but "abandoned" was too kind a word.
"Guys?" My voice echoed down the corridor, sharp in the stillness. "Zee? Robin? Liam?"
The silence that answered wasn't passive. It was the kind that listened back.
The place was a carcass. Lights spasmed in stuttering bursts, bending shadows into shapes that shouldn't have existed. Benches lay split open, their wooden guts spilling across the floor. Medicine bottles rolled in slow, deliberate arcs, as though nudged by unseen fingers. Paper scraps floated like the bodies of pale moths.
No corpses. No blood. No sign of life.
I told myself they were hiding. I clung to it. I turned toward the door—but the frame might as well have been welded shut. Not a quiver under my pounding hands.
Straight ahead, the hall funneled toward a lift at the far end. Its doors shuddered open and closed, never fully, repeating the same mechanical gasp. The dings that accompanied each attempt were too even, like a heartbeat that belonged to something else.
A presence pressed against the edges of my awareness. I scanned for cover—spotted a closed door to the right near a reception booth—and slipped inside.
Through the glass panel, I saw the booth's occupant. A man, slumped, a gun loose in his hand. A hole in his temple. Blood drying on the wall behind him in a wide, careful arc.
Then something slid into the hallway.
They were tall—wrongly tall—skin like wet obsidian, edges of their robes unraveling into threads that drifted on air I couldn't feel. Bones protruded black from elbow to fingertip, the joints gleaming as though oiled. Their heads were human in outline but stretched in quiet distortions, and cloth strips bound over their mouths, as if holding back something worse.
One drew near the booth. The other followed. I stayed still, but the glass vibrated faintly against my spine.
A wet, slicing sound.
Curiosity cut through fear. I leaned just enough to see.
One was carving into the corpse. The other tried to drag it away. The first moved in a blur and opened the second's throat. The noise it made was animal, and when it fell, the victor tore away its own mouth-covering. Smoke spilled out like something escaping a long confinement.
It bent low over the dead man. His body shrank, twisted, melted and evaporated until it was gone—*inhaled* into the creature. The thing straightened taller than before, limbs trembling as its frame stretched, bones flexing against skin like they didn't fit.
Before it could bind its face again, its head whipped toward me.
It slammed into the glass. The impact shuddered through my ribs. Its mouth was a bare skull's jaw lined with blood-wet fangs.
I hid behind the door. Through the hinge-gap, its breath crept in—hot, damp, with a faint tang of iron. The wood bowed under its weight.
Then, a wolf howled.
The sound rolled in low and long. The creature froze, hands darting to cover its mouth again. It melted back into the hallway shadows without another glance.
I risked a look. On the hill beyond the broken window stood a lone wolf, its fur on the spine glowed under the moonlight. Its eyes locked on mine. The gaze was not predatory; it was not there to kill me.
And just as it vanished. Before I knew there was something else, another sound—low, heavy, rattling in my chest. My breath stuttered. Vision fuzzed at the edges. I dropped to my knees.
The wraith came into view.
Its wings were black and jagged, curling like burned paper. No feet, just a trailing nothing where its body should have ended. Its hair—or what seemed like hair—moved as if underwater, brushing across a face too still.
It didn't see me, floating toward the bloodstained wall.
The inhale it took was endless; it seemed to steal the very air from the building, including my lungs.
The stains faded, the wall whitening like the memory of what had happened was being erased. Then it was gone, and I could breathe again.
The reprieve lasted one heartbeat before the door behind me bucked.
I ran in the hallway. Doors to my left. Windows to my right show only my reflection in flickering light. A rusted axe on the ground. I threw it at a window—steel rebounded with a violent clang.
No escape. Only forward. "Why do I keep getting deeper and deeper in this building?"
Up the stairs. Groaning steps. A pounding above me, steady, hungry.
I chose to leave the door to this walkway open, so I can escape, but it slammed without even touching, no wind, nothing.
Inside, it felt as if the storm had gone back and forth. Glass teeth on the floor. Furniture shoved like something massive had panicked.
The only open room was the first on my left; it drew me in, a bed under a fractured window. Shattered glass glittered over the mattress. The wall had been hacked open, debris heaped like bones, words carved above in deep strokes:
ARTHEMING
VII VIII V IV IX VII II I III
Mist rolled fast outside, swallowing the hills. When it passed, nothing remained—only a white, suffocating void. Rusted handcuffs on the bedframe rattled as if an unseen force was trying to break free from its grasp.
I left, passing a wall covered in paintings—hundreds. People. Animals. None with eyes, something about them felt alive, unknowingly, I touched one of the paintings, and jolted back as I sensed the skin pulsing beneath my fingertips, goosebumps that reacted under touch, beside that, sat a door that seemed too destroyed, too obscured, as if debris had blocked the path ahead.
Beside the door, a wide set of windows divided the first room from the last two. I saw the giant room below. The same black-skinned creatures drifted, slow and deliberate, as if certain nothing could escape them. Some twitched unnaturally, shoulders rising and falling in tiny spasms, like the beginning of some change their bodies couldn't fully contain. The skin along their jaws flexed in slow ripples, teeth pressing faintly from beneath, as though trying to grow through.
One tilted its faceless head toward me.
I ducked, pressed flat against the wall, then slipped back into the room with the broken window.
"Call, I should call someone!" I thought, slapping my pockets, only to find nothing but ashes in my pocket.
The air felt heavier in here. I crouched beside the bed, searching the drawers. My fingers closed around paper. A medical report. I pulled it out and stepped toward the door, where the hallway's flickering lights cast long, twitching shadows.
The name on the report read: *Grace Willow.*. A little girl with short golden hair stared from the photograph.
Digging deep in the drawer.
I found a diary, leather warped with stains.
*My name is Madiha Amir. They call me Maddie. If you're reading this because you think your friends will come for you, you're wrong. I thought the same. I waited. I counted every second. No one came.*
The next lines felt heavier, as though the paper itself wanted me to stop.
*I'm leaving this so if—by some chance—I get out, or if I die, you'll know how to survive them. The ones below. The ones that hunt in the dark.*
*On your left, you'll see a pile of rocks. Move them. Beneath is a gun. On the back of the gun is a small tuner—turn it left, and it becomes a silencer. Never make noise. Not when killing. Not when sleeping. Not when breathing. Not when dreaming.*
The words broke off there. Ink smeared into a drag mark across the page.
I didn't need to read more. I turned to my left. The rocks were there, just as she'd written. My fingers worked fast, tossing them aside until metal met my palm. A gun—cool, heavy, real. The tuner clicked softly beneath my thumb as I turned it.
"I'm sorry, Maddie," I whispered into the stale air. "We didn't know you were still alive."
The silence that followed made me wonder if she still was.
That's when I heard an echo of a cry! A little girl's cuffs rattled frantically, "It must have been related to Grace!" But the question was... *What happened to her?*