The call came on a Monday, a day Dr. Adrian Vale had mentally reserved for grant proposals and the careful cross referencing of patient data, a day meant for logic, structure, and the predictable comfort of numbers and diagnostic criteria, so the shrill ring of the phone felt like an intrusion into a space that was not meant to be disturbed.
He allowed it to ring three times, partly out of irritation and partly as a quiet test of urgency, before finally lifting the receiver.
The voice that greeted him was dry and chilled, carrying the brittle quality of old paper that had been handled too many times.
"Dr. Vale? My name is Coulson. I'm with the Department of Municipal Oversight." The title itself felt intentionally vague, and Adrian immediately imagined a man in a gray suit with a face just as forgettable as his job description. "We have a situation that requires your particular expertise. A consultation."
"My expertise is in neuropsychology, specifically hallucinatory phenomena in controlled environments," Adrian replied in a crisp and measured tone as he turned in his leather chair and let his eyes move across the ordered sanctuary of his office, where books were arranged by sub discipline, neural diagrams were framed with precision, and the sterile white walls reflected a world governed by clear rules. "I am not a field consultant."
"We are aware," Coulson said without hesitation. "The environment, however, is anything but controlled, and the primary phenomenon appears to be a hallucination that has acquired physical consequence."
He paused briefly before continuing, allowing the weight of his words to settle. "There has been a death."
Adrian felt his professional curiosity stir, a reaction he usually kept tightly restrained. "A death caused by a hallucination?"
"The deceased is unidentified and was found inside St. Jude's Hospital for the Mentally Afflicted, and according to the preliminary medical examiner's report the cause of death was acute cardiac failure, which in simple terms means he was frightened to death,"
Coulson said. "The complication is the room he was found in, because it was completely empty."
"St. Jude's?" Adrian asked. "I'm not familiar with it."
"You would not be," Coulson replied. "It was condemned in 1978, decommissioned and sealed, and according to city records it should not be accessible, while according to every modern map it should not exist at all.
A car is already on the way." The line disconnected before Adrian could object.
An hour later, Adrian sat in the back of a black town car with tinted windows, watching as the familiar grid of the city slowly dissolved into a stretch of abandoned warehouses and skeletal factories, while the driver remained completely silent.
The sky hung low and gray, pressing down on the landscape, and somewhere along the way Adrian began to feel a strange vibration in his chest accompanied by an overwhelming sense of recognition that made no rational sense.
Déjà vu was a concept he understood well, a brief neurological misfire caused by delayed sensory processing, something he had studied and written about extensively, yet this sensation did not fade or pass but instead grew stronger, as if it were pulling memories from a place he had never been.
His heart rate increased, and he discreetly checked his pulse, counting ninety two beats per minute, higher than it should have been.
The car turned onto a cracked road nearly consumed by weeds, and through the tangled branches of overgrown trees the hospital emerged, massive and unsettling, a structure that combined Victorian Gothic towers with heavy concrete blocks in a way that felt unnatural, as though it had been assembled rather than built.
It was silent, looming, and deeply wrong, and Adrian realized with growing unease that he recognized it, from the angle of the roof on the west wing to the dark recess of the main entrance, despite knowing with certainty that he had never been there before.
A man in a wrinkled trench coat waited beside the police barrier, his face marked by exhaustion and long experience. "Detective Miles," he said, shaking Adrian's hand.
"Thanks for coming, Doctor. This one is strange."
"So I've heard," Adrian replied, his voice tighter than he intended as his eyes remained fixed on the building. "It's larger than I expected."
"That's one way to put it," Miles said. "The place is a labyrinth, and we have had teams inside for hours without being able to map even half of it, because it does not seem to want to be understood." He led Adrian beneath the police tape and toward the entrance, where the air grew colder and heavier with the smell of dust, decay, and a faint trace of old disinfectant, while the feeling of familiarity pressed harder behind Adrian's eyes.
He knew, with unsettling certainty, that the third door on the left of the main hall would have a brass handle shaped like a serpent, and that the marble floor of the atrium would be cracked in a spiderweb pattern, and when they reached the atrium the crack was exactly where he expected it to be.
They continued down a long, silent corridor until they stopped at a guarded door. "Room 303," Miles said quietly.
Adrian opened the door and stepped inside, finding a small white tiled room with a single metal framed bed at its center, where a man lay rigid and unmoving, his eyes wide open and fixed on the ceiling, his face locked in an expression of pure terror.
There were no wounds, no signs of struggle, and nothing in the room that could explain what had happened, and while Adrian's trained mind immediately began searching for logic and explanation, another deeper part of him was focused on the blank wall opposite the bed, where it remembered a door that should not exist.