THE PATIENT IN ROOM 13
THE BLOOD ON THE WALLS
Wednesday, October 18th – 1:47 AM
The light from Sloane’s phone cut through the darkness like a knife, illuminating fragments of a nightmare.
The room was small. Smaller than she had expected. No more than ten feet by ten feet, with a ceiling so low she could almost touch it without stretching. The walls were covered in writing.
Not painted. Not drawn.
Carved.
Thousands of words, thousands of letters, thousands of symbols, all of them etched into the plaster with something sharp. A knife, maybe. A shard of glass. A fingernail, worn down to the quick.
And the word that appeared most often, repeated over and over until it lost all meaning, was the same word carved into the arms of the dead.
REMEMBER.
Sloane stepped into the room.
Her shoes crunched on the floor. She looked down.
The floor was covered in dust – not the ordinary dust of neglect, but something darker, grittier, like powdered bone. She knelt and touched it.
It was cold.
She lifted her fingers to her nose.
No smell.
She touched it to her tongue.
No taste.
She stood up and swept her phone’s beam across the walls, trying to find a place where the writing began, a place where it ended, a pattern, a meaning, anything.
There was nothing.
The words were chaos. They overlapped and intersected, some of them carved deep into the plaster, others barely scratching the surface. Some of the letters were formed with the care of a calligrapher, each stroke precise and deliberate. Others were jagged, frantic, as if the hand that held the blade had been shaking.
Some of the words were in English.
REMEMBER.
FORGET.
SLEEP.
WAKE.
DIE.
LIVE.
Others were in languages she did not recognize. Ancient scripts. Symbols that looked like they belonged on the walls of a tomb, not in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York.
She took a step deeper into the room.
The air grew colder.
She took another step.
The light from her phone flickered.
Fifty-one percent battery.
She turned in a slow circle, trying to take it all in, trying to make sense of the madness on the walls.
And then she saw the bed.
It was in the corner, half-hidden in shadow, barely visible behind the layers of carved words. A hospital bed, the kind they used in the old days, with metal railings and a thin mattress stained with something dark.
She walked toward it.
Her shoes crunched on the floor.
The bed was not empty.
A shape lay beneath the thin blanket. Human-shaped. Still.
Sloane’s heart pounded.
She reached out and pulled the blanket back.
Nothing.
The shape was made of pillows. Three of them, stacked to resemble a body, covered in the same dark stains as the mattress.
She let out a breath she did not know she had been holding.
But the relief lasted only a moment.
Because something was written on the wall above the bed. Not carved. Written in something dark and wet that had dried to a rusty brown.
Blood.
The words were fresh. Recent. The blood had not had time to fade.
“WELCOME HOME, SLOANE.”
She stumbled backward.
Her phone slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor. The light spun wildly, casting shadows that danced and writhed on the walls.
She dropped to her knees and grabbed the phone.
Forty-nine percent battery.
She aimed the light at the wall again.
The words were still there. Still fresh. Still wet in places, as if whoever had written them had done so moments before she arrived.
“WELCOME HOME, SLOANE.”
Home.
She had never been in this room before. She had never seen these walls, this bed, this floor. She had never breathed this cold, dead air.
But something in the room knew her name.
Something in the room had been expecting her.
She stood up.
She needed to leave. She needed to get out of this room, out of this basement, out of this hospital. She needed to go home and pretend she had never seen any of this.
But her feet would not move.
Something was holding her in place. Not physically. Something in her mind, in her chest, in the part of her that had always been curious, always been questioning, always been unable to let go of a mystery.
She turned back to the wall.
“WELCOME HOME, SLOANE.”
She reached out and touched the words.
The blood was cold.
But beneath the cold, beneath the dried flakes and the rusty stains, she felt something else. A vibration. A hum. A frequency that resonated with something deep inside her.
She closed her eyes.
And she remembered.
She was seven years old, standing in the doorway of her father’s study. The room was dark, the curtains drawn, the only light coming from the single bulb above his desk.
Her father was sitting in his chair, his back to her, his shoulders hunched. He was writing something. His hand moved across the page in quick, jerky strokes.
“Dad?”
He did not turn.
“Dad, Mommy says it’s time for dinner.”
Still nothing.
She walked closer.
The floorboards creaked beneath her feet.
Her father’s hand stopped moving.
“Go away, Sloane.”
His voice was strange. Flat. Hollow. Like someone was speaking through him, not as him.
“I just wanted—”
“I said go away.”
She stopped.
She had never heard her father speak like that. He had never been angry with her. He had never even raised his voice.
“Dad, are you okay?”
He turned.
His face was pale. Not pale like he was sick – pale like he had not seen the sun in years, even though she had watched him eat breakfast that morning. His eyes were dark, ringed with shadows, and there was something in them she had never seen before.
Fear.
Her father was afraid.
“Go to your mother,” he said. “Lock the doors. Don’t let anyone in. Do you understand?”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“Just do it. Please. For me.”
She nodded.
She ran.
Behind her, she heard her father’s chair scrape against the floor. She heard his footsteps follow her to the door of the study. She heard him close the door. She heard the lock click.
And she heard him start to write again.
The scratching of the pen on paper.
Over and over.
Faster and faster.
Until she could not hear anything else.
Sloane opened her eyes.
She was kneeling on the floor of Room 13, her phone in her hand, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
The memory was new. Or not new – forgotten. Buried. Her mother had told her that her father died in a car accident. She had believed it. She had constructed a childhood around that belief, editing out the memories that did not fit, smoothing over the rough edges until the story was seamless and painless.
But the story was a lie.
Her father had not died in a car accident. He had died in this room. And before he died, he had been afraid. Terrified. Convinced that something was coming for him.
For them.
For her.
She stood up.
Her legs were shaking.
She swept the phone’s light across the walls again, looking for more words, more clues, more answers.
“REMEMBER.”
“FORGET.”
“SLEEP.”
“WAKE.”
“DIE.”
“LIVE.”
And then, in the corner, near the ceiling, almost hidden by the layers of earlier carvings, a new word.
Not carved. Burned.
The plaster was blackened, blistered, as if someone had pressed a hot iron against the wall.
“ARTHUR.”
Her father’s name.
She reached up and touched the burned letters.
The plaster was warm.
Not the warmth of ambient temperature. The warmth of something recently heated. The warmth of a brand that had been applied hours ago, not forty years ago.
Someone had been in this room recently.
Someone had burned her father’s name into the wall.
Someone was still here.
Sloane spun around.
The room was empty.
But the darkness seemed thicker now, more solid, as if it was pressing against her from all sides. The light from her phone barely reached the walls. The shadows in the corners writhed and danced.
She was not alone.
She felt it before she saw it.
A presence.
Watching.
Waiting.
Breathing.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
Her voice echoed off the walls, swallowed by the darkness.
No answer.
But the air grew colder.
She turned in a slow circle.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
And then she saw the door.
It was closed.
She did not remember closing it.
She walked toward it, her feet crunching on the floor, her phone held out in front of her like a weapon.
The wheel was still in place. The lock was still engaged. But the light on the reader was red. Not green. Red.
She was locked in.
She tried the wheel.
It did not move.
She tried again.
Nothing.
She pounded on the door.
“Hey! Is anyone out there? I’m locked in!”
Silence.
Not the silence of an empty corridor. The silence of a corridor that had been deliberately emptied. The silence of someone who wanted her to be alone.
She pressed her ear against the cold steel.
Footsteps.
Faint. Distant. Moving away.
“Frank!” she shouted. “Frank, I’m in here! Open the door!”
The footsteps stopped.
Then resumed.
Fading.
Gone.
She stepped back from the door.
Her phone flickered.
Forty-two percent battery.
She looked at the room.
The walls. The words. The bed. The pillows. The blood.
“WELCOME HOME, SLOANE.”
Someone had known she would come here. Someone had prepared for her. Someone had been waiting.
But who?
And why?
She walked to the bed.
The pillows were still warm. Not from the heat of the room – the room was freezing – but from the heat of a body. Someone had been lying here recently. Someone had been sleeping in this room. Someone had been living in this room.
She lifted the pillow.
Beneath it, a key.
Old. Brass. Tarnished with age.
She picked it up.
The metal was warm.
She looked at the door. The lock was electronic, keycard-only. This key would not fit.
But there was another door.
Not in this room. In her memory.
Her father’s study. The door he had locked behind him. The door she had never opened.
She closed her hand around the key.
The phone flickered.
Thirty-eight percent battery.
She needed to get out.
She searched the room for another exit.
There was none. No windows. No vents. No second door. Just the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and the steel door that would not open.
She was trapped.
She looked at the walls again. At the words. At the symbols. At the blood.
“REMEMBER.”
What was she supposed to remember?
Her father’s fear. His strange voice. The way he had told her to lock the doors, to keep everyone out.
“FORGET.”
What was she supposed to forget?
The memory she had just recovered. The years of believing her mother’s lies. The comfortable fiction of a father who died in a car accident.
“SLEEP.”
She was tired. So tired. Her eyes were heavy. Her limbs were weak.
“WAKE.”
She shook her head.
She could not sleep. Not here. Not now.
“DIE.”
“No.”
She said it out loud, her voice firm, her hand tightening around the key.
“I’m not going to die here. I’m not going to end up like the others.”
“LIVE.”
She walked to the door.
She pressed her palm against the cold steel.
And she felt something.
A vibration. The same vibration she had felt when she touched the blood on the wall. The same hum. The same frequency.
The door was not locked.
It was being held closed.
By something on the other side.
“Let me out,” she said.
The door did not answer.
But the air grew warmer.
Just slightly. Just enough for her to notice.
She pressed harder.
The vibration grew stronger.
“Let me out.”
The door shuddered.
The light on the reader flickered from red to green.
She grabbed the wheel.
It turned.
She pulled.
The door opened.
She stumbled into the corridor, gasping for breath, her phone clutched in her hand.
The lights were brighter here. The air was warmer. The smell of disinfectant and antiseptic replaced the smell of blood and memory.
She leaned against the wall, her heart pounding, her legs shaking.
Frank was waiting for her.
“You opened it,” he said.
“You locked me in.”
“I didn’t lock you in. I walked away. What happened in there was between you and the room.”
“You could have warned me.”
“Would you have listened?”
She wanted to say yes. But they both knew it was a lie.
“What did you see?” Frank asked.
Sloane looked at the key in her hand.
The brass was warm.
“I saw the truth,” she said. “Or part of it.”
“Which part?”
“The part about my father. He didn’t die in a car accident. He died in there. And before he died, he was afraid. Terrified. Of something. Of someone.”
“Of the room.”
“Of what’s in the room.”
Frank was silent.
Then he said, “There’s nothing in the room. That’s the problem. That’s always been the problem. People go in there expecting to find something – a monster, a ghost, a secret – and they find nothing. Just walls. Just words. Just silence.”
“But the silence speaks.”
“Yes.”
“And the words have meaning.”
“Sometimes.”
“What do they mean?”
Frank looked at the door.
The wheel. The lock. The faded number.
“They mean whatever you want them to mean. That’s the horror of it. The room shows you what you’re afraid of. What you’re guilty of. What you’ve been running from.”
“And my father? What was he running from?”
Frank turned to look at her.
“You.”