In the Mind's Labyrinth

Dr. Evelyn Cross had studied minds for twenty years. She had mapped trauma like cities, traced grief like constellations, and navigated the murky waters of psychosis. But she had never encountered anything like the one they called The Grin Man.

The media had named him after the mutilated smiles he left carved into his victims' faces. Five bodies in six months. No witnesses. No forensic trail. Only whispers.

Until now.

They had him—Michael Raines, thirty-two, arrested while sleepwalking through a subway tunnel, barefoot and muttering the same phrase: “Find the door.”

Evelyn stood outside the observation room, arms crossed, watching the man through one-way glass. He looked unremarkable—slim, pale, eyes hollow with sleep deprivation. But there was something about him that set her skin crawling. Not menace. Something worse.

Emptiness.

“Are you sure you want to go in alone?” the detective beside her asked.

She didn’t answer. She stepped through the door.

The interview room was cold. Michael didn’t look up as she sat across from him.

“Michael,” she began, voice steady, “do you know where you are?”

He blinked. “The hall before the door.”

“You’re in a secure hospital. You were found in the subway, talking to yourself.”

His eyes focused on her then, sharp as needles. “I wasn’t talking to myself. I was listening.”

“To who?”

“The man in the walls.”

Evelyn remained still. “What does he say?”

Michael leaned forward, whispering, “He says we’re already dead. Just pieces, walking the maze.”

She suppressed a chill. “Tell me about the maze.”

He smiled, a flicker of something unnatural curling his lips. “It’s in here,” he said, tapping his temple. “Want to see?”

That night, Evelyn couldn’t sleep. Michael’s words haunted her: the maze, the man in the walls, the door. Delusions, certainly—but they weren’t random. There was a pattern.

Driven by a reckless sense of curiosity—or obsession—she requested to try a controversial neural mapping procedure. A device designed to project fragments of a subject’s subconscious into a visual simulation. Illegal for active patients. But exceptions were sometimes made.

She signed the waiver.

Michael laughed when they told him.

“Careful, Doctor,” he said. “Not every path has a way back.”

The procedure began at dawn.

Evelyn lay in the chamber, electrodes attached to her skull, Michael's brainwave data streaming into the system. The room darkened.

Then: immersion.

She opened her eyes.

She was in a hallway.

Dim. Endless. The walls pulsed faintly, like breathing flesh. At intervals, doors—each marked with symbols. None familiar.

The simulation was working.

“Michael?” she called.

Silence.

She turned right, opening the nearest door.

Inside: a bedroom. Childhood drawings. A broken mobile spinning above a crib. The air smelled of copper. Blood pooled beneath the bed.

She stepped closer.

A small hand reached out.

She slammed the door.

The next room was darker. A church—empty pews, an altar stained black, laughter echoing from nowhere. In the shadows, she saw outlines—figures writhing. She backed away.

“This isn’t just memory,” she muttered. “It’s intent.”

She continued down the corridor.

Then she heard it: footsteps.

Behind her.

She ran.

She didn’t remember how long she wandered. Time had no meaning in the labyrinth. The further she went, the more warped it became—doors that opened into themselves, voices whispering names she didn’t know but somehow felt. Her own memories began to surface, twisted by proximity—her mother’s face melting, her dead brother calling from beneath the floor.

And then... she saw him.

The Grin Man.

Tall. Featureless. His mouth a gash stretching from ear to ear, carved, not born.

She fled into the next door.

It opened into a mirror chamber.

Hundreds of Evelyns stared back at her. Some weeping. Some smiling.

One stepped out.

“Why are you here?” the mirror-Evelyn asked.

“I wanted to understand him.”

“No,” said the double. “You wanted to find yourself in him.”

Evelyn recoiled. “That’s not true.”

But she remembered the thrill—the fascination with his patterns, the way she thought of him at night like a ghost lover.

The mirror-Evelyn pointed. “There’s the door.”

Behind her, the Grin Man stepped into the room.

Evelyn turned.

The door stood alone, black and pulsing.

She ran toward it.

She woke screaming.

The doctors pulled off the electrodes. Her heart was pounding. The room spun.

“She’s out,” someone called.

She gasped, reaching for the light. “The maze—it’s real. It’s not just him.”

Michael sat across the room, strapped to a chair, grinning.

“You saw it,” he whispered. “We’re all in there. Just most people don’t know it.”

She stared at him.

“You built a life thinking your thoughts were yours,” he said. “But the maze owns all of us. I just stopped pretending.”

“What’s at the center?” she asked, voice shaking.

Michael leaned in as far as his restraints allowed.

“You.”

Evelyn never returned to her university.

Weeks later, she was found sitting silently in the chapel of a ruined asylum, eyes fixed on a wall only she could see. When asked her name, she simply said, “I took the wrong path.”

Inside her mind, the corridors never ended.

And somewhere deep within them, a door waits—still closed.

But not forever.