For the first time in a very long time, I slept quite soundly. However, my deep sleep was cut short by a knock on the door.

I sat up and immediately put on my glasses. It was a slightly uncomfortable and certainly unfamiliar thing to wear them, but they were important enough for them to be the first thing on my mind upon awakening.

The door was knocked on again, urging me to step out of bed. I had to assume Emilia had again come to wake me up, which was fine. At that point it simply felt bizarre to oversleep. This time I was presentable, so I immediately went to the door and opened it.

Emilia was garbed in the same white uniform as me as she waited. She stood closely to the door in order to be shielded from the rain. I gave her a nod and closed the door behind me, swiftly locking it and turning to the street. She seemed reluctant to get back in the rain, but I had no umbrellas in my abode, meaning there was no alternative other than simply becoming drenched.

I began walking towards the hospital with Emilia begrudgingly behind me. When I looked back and gave her a concerned look, she spoke. “It seems like it’s a downpour all the time here, doesn’t it?”

Slowing down to match her pace more, I replied with a stifled chuckle. “You must not be from around here if you think this is a downpour.” Although her thoughts on the rain was a sure indicator, I had been wondering where Emilia came from since the moment I first saw her. She wore simple clothing and seemed much more vitality than almost anyone who had lived in the smokey slums of London. She did not have any sort of accent, but she most certainly was not a native.

“You’re right.” She said. “I used to live in the country up north growing up. Can’t say I ever got used to the big buildings and harsh rain.”

I nodded as we continued to walk. “I would have liked to visit the country. I cannot say I can imagine a place that doesn’t rain every day.”

She smiled. “Well, perhaps I can show you around the countryside after we fix all of this. I have to warn you, though, it’s quite boring after a while.”

With a sigh, I replied. “Boring sounds nice at this point…” To think that only a few days ago my life was the same as it always was... In any case, I enjoyed a brief walk filled with regularity. It did not feel often that I had a seemingly normal conversation. After a bit more strolling, I continued the conversation. “So, what did you do in the country?”

“My parents were farmers.” She said. “It was quite tough work, but I liked it well enough.”

‘Parents were farmers?’ I thought to myself. I had no right to ask such questions, and knew hardship was common in our time, but it nevertheless made my mind wander as to what could have happened. Why she would ever come to London I also pondered, although the obvious answer of seeking treatment was enough to satisfy that curiosity. “Sounds interesting...” I said, my focus somewhat taken by the many questions I had brewed.

“What about you?” Emilia said, grabbing my attention. “What about your family?”

There was a long pause whilst I thought about what to say. I had never known my father, and very early on my mother had symptoms so debilitating that she could barely work. “Well, my mother worked as a maid for a little while, but for the most part I worked for the two of us. Just different work here and there. Same as now, really.”

She nodded. “It’s very nice how you care for your mother.”

Her saying that reminded me that she knew my mother. I had forgotten that Emilia legitimately worked as a caretaker for the hospital, and not only that but as my mother’s overseer specifically. “Oh. Yes. Thank you.”

My mother was not one to talk to people, and especially not one to like people, but she seemed to be at the very least comfortable with Emilia. I did not know how much she knew of my childhood, but I felt fine keeping my mouth shut for the most part. My mother had symptoms the same as me, only she did not find treatment like myself. I could barely remember her beautiful blue eyes from a time before she destroyed them… It was at that time things took a turn for the worse. She was crippled, and I began being tormented by the same curse as her.

Emilia noticed that she had stirred up bad memories, so she brought up a different subject. “It’s quite a large hospital. A lot of ground to cover.”

“It will be fine.” I assured. “I doubt we will have to check every room. We should search the least disciplined patient’s chambers first, then the caretaker’s quarters, then move on from there.”

Emilia nodded as we drew closer to the hospital. Within a few more minutes, we had reached the front gate. We followed the wall to the eastward entrance, going in through the door to Dr. Prescott’s office. He was not in on that day, and neither was his receptionist, but Emilia luckily had a key to the door. From there, we could sneak in unannounced with all the other caretakers.

Emilia they would not care about, but it was best that I did not have to introduce myself or conjure some lie about being a new hire.

We moved through the hall with the receptionist’s desk, then past the waiting room and Dr. Prescott’s office door. After that, we were in a long white hallway.

Letting Emilia move ahead a small bit, I checked the first door on my left. There was the bathroom I had changed in, and as promised my freshly cleaned clothes were folded on the bench. Closing the door, I quickened my pace and caught up with Emilia.

We went to the end of the hallway before she turned to a door at the side. Opening it, she revealed the kitchen. It was empty and quiet, seeing as we were somewhere far between breakfast and lunch.

Continuing farther, we exited the kitchen and found ourselves in the lounge. It was crowded with patients being shuffled along by their caretakers. Emilia leaned over to me and whispered. “They’re going to the bathhouse. We should have a good hour or so with almost every room empty.”

I nodded and continued to wait with her. The crowd started to thin as those who needed more assistance were being taken out. One of them was my mother, being ushered by a random nurse. I stood still as she continued to walk by, only to randomly stop just after she passed me. I had been quiet... There was no way she would have known it was me she just passed…

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Her head turned from side to side, as if she was inspecting the room somehow, then stopped.

It seemed as though my wild suspicions were not true on that morning as she shook her head and continued with her caretaker.

With a sigh, we began to move towards the sleeping quarters. There were many well-kept and tidy rooms that were very unlikely to have something hidden, but the farther back in the hall we went, the grimier each room became. The first room we searched was only slightly filthy. The bed was unmade. The desk was cluttered. There was dirt tracked on the floor. Aside from that, nothing was out of place or hidden.

The next chamber was in a much worse state. The bed was turned upside down, and the desk had all its drawers pulled out and destroyed. Although extremely messy, there were no secrets to be found in that room either.

Emilia closed the previous rooms door as I opened the next. It was surprisingly tidy, compared to the others. Dust gathered greatly, but the desk was clean, the chair was in place, the bed was… Someone was still in bed.

I shut the door, too struck with surprise to do it quietly. Emilia ran over when she heard the commotion and questioned. “What’s wrong?”

“They’re still in there.” I said in a whisper.

Confused, Emilia looked to the room number by the door. She searched her memory for a few moments, then spoke. “I think I know who this is.” And that was all the clues she gave before she swung the door open. She strode into the room and went immediately towards the bed. As I followed her and was granted a better view at the person, I saw that they were perfectly awake. It was a thin and disheveled old man, with many scars on his face. He looked at the two of us silently and with a completely blank expression.

I continued to glare back as I spoke. “Why is he just staring?” It seemed as though the man was an inanimate object. His expression never changed, nor did his hand move. His empty eyes simply followed us around the room.

“He used to be violent.” Emilia said. “But he was part of some new treatment. I’ve heard them call it a psychosurgery. Lobotomy?”

Such words had never been spoken around me, but I did not need an in-depth explanation to understand. There was a scar on the man’s face, from his eyebrow, through his eyelid, and into the side of his nose. It was precise and surgical, like someone had cut into him to gain access to his brain. Whatever they did to him, he no longer seemed like much of a person than an organism, like a plant. Living, but only in technical sense. “Let’s get out of here. Quickly.”

Emilia nodded and began to search. “He was an evil person, but I can’t say I like whatever they did to him.”

I decided to ask a few questions whilst I searched through his unused desk drawers. “What did they do to him?”

“From what I heard, they learned that you could tamper with certain parts of the brain to change a man. There was some long story about a worker getting impaled with a railroad spike, but in the end what it all meant was that by snipping and removing certain parts of the brain you could make a violent and insane man into… that.” She finished, gesturing to the man still paralyzed in his bed.

I shook my head as I approached the door. “Well, I am most certainly not a fan.”

Emilia checked under the bed before she followed. We were both on our guard when getting within arm’s reach of the patient, yet nothing happened. It was as if he were not really in his own body.

She finished looking beneath the bed and stood, but once she turned her back to the man she jumped in surprise. Emilia clung against the wall as she stared at the patient in fear. After taking a moment to calm, she spoke to me. “Did you hear him?”

I tilted my head in curiosity. Due to my caution, I had kept an eye on the man the entire time we were there, and even though my vision was blurred due to my glasses I could tell that he had not parted his lips even once. Hell, I doubted he was even capable of speech after what had happened to him. “What do you mean? He never spoke?”

She swallowed her fears and crossed the man’s bed to leave the room, speaking as she went. “I-I thought I heard something. I hear things… sometimes.” Closing the door, I asked no more. We were all patients of Dr. Prescott’s, and we all had our own problems. I did not need help comprehending mental issues.

Looking down the corridor, I saw one last room. It was at the end of the hall and unlike the other wooden doors, this one was steel.

Once I reached the metal door, I saw it was held by a large brass handle with a lock. “We’ll need a key to enter.” I said.

Emilia went up to the door and inspected it. “This used to be the room of the patient before his surgery… I think I know how to get in…” She squeezed the handle the opposite direction it was supposed to be turned and simultaneously tried to pull the door open. Nothing happened on her first pull, so she gestured for me to help. Grabbed the handle with one hand and my own wrist with the other due to a lack of room. We pulled shoulder to shoulder for a moment, and suddenly wood started to crack. Finally, the doorframe and rusty screws keeping it there bent as the deadlock simply forced its way out. With all the effort we had put into pulling the door open, we flew backward as soon as it gave way.

Emilia landed with the majority of her weight landing on my chest, inadvertently knocking the wind out of me. By the time she had rolled off and I had regained my breath, I noticed my glasses had slid across the wood floor. I crawled over to them, checked for more cracks, and put them back on. When I turned around, Emilia was sitting on her knees and staring into the room, paralyzed.

I moved over to her and looked through the doorway as well. With my mostly blurred vision, I could not make out the exact details, but what I did see was a copious amount of red.

Slowly my fingers clutched to the rim of my glasses. If Emilia saw it, it meant it was certainly real. My protection would be of no use. Once I saw the full picture, I truly witnessed what we had come upon.

The floor, walls, and ceiling of the unfurnished room were covered in blood. The gore was not in splatters, but intricately woven in cryptic symbols by the man’s sanguine-soaked fingers. There were other symbols scribed in fecal matter, along with the carcasses of many rats and a scattering of human teeth about the floor… The man never did open his mouth…

The symbols were strangely… familiar… The spiraling patterns of crimson looked like something all too reminiscent, and that was when it began to rush back…

I slowly lifted my right arm and pulled my sleeve up. The faded white scars I had gotten in the shipwreck were nearly invisible, but I could tell… they were of the same nature.

They did not match exactly, but the symbols were created in such a way that it was as if they were the same language. One I had never seen before… One no man should ever see.

The jagged hieroglyphs glowed in the cloudy luminescence of the foggy windows. I took a shaky step forward and closed the door, pulling my sleeve down afterward. Whoever created that was most certainly not taking medication.

I closed my eyes and tried to forget what I had just seen, but it was imprinted on my mind. The longer I kept my eyelids shut, the more the faint blue orbs of color in the blackness started to twist into shapes now familiar. Immediately as they did, I opened my eyes and put the glasses back on. Things were tolerable, but my heart still beat deep in my chest. I had but one question on my mind. “H-H-How did you know to open that door?” I stuttered.

Emilia replied, saying. “The man in his room… When I heard him speak… He told me how…”

And to think I believed I could run from the things haunting me, even for a little while. Earlier that morning I thought that things felt somewhat normal, even…

It reminded me of the words spoken by the horrid, smiling, creature attached to the shadows in my bedroom wall. The spoken colors of the glowing orb regurgitated from its gullet. The very simple fact it had conveyed to me…

You cannot run from what’s inside.