SEASON 2 : The Black Lung Communion: How a Surgeon’s Journal Sparked a Demonic Outbreak
And the slow-burning Horror continues..
CHAPTER 3: THE INTRAVENOUS CONFESSION
The iron door to the old wing was cold, its surface pitted with rust and something darker that looked like old bloodstains. The master key felt alien in Liam’s hand, a sliver of cold metal that seemed to pulse with a malevolent life of its own.
“This is insane, Althea,” he breathed, his voice barely a whisper. The thump-thump-thump from Room 304 had faded, replaced by an oppressive silence that felt even more threatening. “We should be barricading ourselves in an office, not running toward the source of... of whatever this is.”
“And then what?” Althea’s eyes were hard, glinting in the faint emergency light filtering from a distant exit sign. “Wait for it to come for us? It’s already in the walls. It’s in the machines. Sealing the old wing is the only thing that might contain it. It’s where Patient #7 came from. It’s the wound, and we need to cauterize it.”
Her medical analogy, so cold and clinical, sent a fresh chill down his spine. She wasn’t just scared; she was diagnosing the building itself.
The key slid into the lock with a gritty, protesting scrape. Liam turned it. The mechanism groaned, a sound of metal that hadn’t moved in decades being forced to obey. The door swung inward on shrieking hinges, revealing a darkness so absolute it seemed to swallow the scant light from the hallway.
A wave of air rolled out...thick, cold, and smelling of dust, decay, and the unmistakable, sweetly metallic scent of old blood.
“Lights,” Althea said, her voice tight.
Liam fumbled for the wall switch inside the door. He clicked it. Nothing. He tried again. Click. Click.
Down the pitch-black corridor ahead of them, a single, bare bulb flickered to life with a weak, orange glow. Then another twenty yards down. Then another, illuminating a long, narrow hallway lined with peeling yellow paint and heavy, windowless doors.
It was a trap. It had to be. But the alternative...staying in the active wing with the thumping and the scratching...was unthinkable.
“It’s inviting us in,” Liam said, his feet rooted to the spot.
“It’s showing us the way,” Althea corrected, stepping across the threshold. The moment she did, the lights behind them in the main hallway flickered and died, plunging their only escape route into blackness. They were committed.
The old wing was a time capsule of mid-century horror. Wooden cabinets with glass fronts displayed terrifyingly crude surgical instruments. A rusted gurney was parked against a wall, its leather restraints hanging loose, stained a dark brown.
They passed a room labeled ‘Hydrotherapy.’ The door was ajar. Liam glanced in and saw a massive, porcelain tub, dry and cracked. Dark, hand-shaped streaks marred its white interior, reaching up and over the edge as if someone—or something—had tried desperately to claw their way out.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The sound came from a room at the very end of the hall, the only one with a modern, heavy-duty padlock hanging open from its hasp. This was it. The source.
The door was marked ‘Storage B.’ Althea pushed it open.
The room was small, crowded with outdated medical equipment. But in the center, under the lone, flickering bulb, was a hospital bed. And in the bed was a man, or what was left of one. He was skeletal, his skin a waxy yellow, connected to an IV pole that held a bag of clear fluid.
“Patient #7,” Althea said, her professional demeanor returning like a shield. “They moved him in here to… contain him.”
The man’s eyes were open, milky and unseeing. His lips were cracked and bleeding. And he was whispering. A continuous, rasping stream of Enochian syllables that made Liam’s head ache.
But it was the IV that made Liam’s blood run cold. The clear fluid in the bag was being replaced. As they watched, a dark, crimson liquid was flowing up the tube from the man’s arm, against gravity, slowly filling the bag. It was a perfect, horrifying reversal. The patient was transfusing his own blood back into the IV bag.
“He’s not receiving fluids,” Liam whispered, horrified. “He’s.. donating them.”
The bag was nearly half full of blood. And suspended in the dark liquid, words were forming. Letters of coagulating blood swirled and arranged themselves into a message.
I AM THE SCRIBE.
The man on the bed stopped whispering. His milky eyes rolled toward them. A dry, rattling sound came from his throat, a terrible attempt at speech.
“He’s trying to talk,” Althea said, stepping closer, her nurse’s instinct overriding her fear.
“Althea, don’t..”
She leaned in, her ear inches from his mouth.
The man’s hand, bone-thin and shaking, shot up from the bedsheet with shocking speed. It didn’t grab her. It caressed her cheek, leaving a smudge of old blood. His voice was a papery rustle, directly in her ear.
“You... are... next...”
He fell back onto the pillow, lifeless. The heart monitor by the bed, which had been silent, emitted a single, long, unwavering tone. The flatline.
In the IV bag, the blood swirled violently. The message dissolved and reformed, the letters sharp and accusing.
ALTHEA REED.
The door to the storage room slammed shut behind them with a final, deafening crash. The padlock clicked closed on the outside.
They were trapped. The only light was the faint glow from the IV bag, now a pulsating orb of blood-red in the perfect dark, spelling her name over and over again.
ARCHIVAL NOTE:
Excerpt from an unsigned addendum to Patient #7's file, discovered paper-clipped to the back of a supply inventory list. Handwriting analysis inconclusive.
"Subject's cellular structure demonstrates impossible plasticity. Blood viscosity changes independent of hydration. Suggestion: not a biological entity, but a textual one. A living document. The 'words' are attempting to leave the host. Containment is not treatment. Containment is editing."
The note is stained with a brownish residue that tests confirmed was not blood.
CHAPTER 4: THE WALLS THAT LEARNED TO SCREAM
The crash of the door locking echoed in the small, dark room like a gunshot. The only light came from the IV bag, now a pulsating crimson lantern that painted everything in shades of blood and shadow. The name ALTHEA REED swirled in the bag, a relentless, accusing mantra.
“The door!” Liam lunged for it, his hands scrambling against the cold, unyielding metal. The padlock on the outside was firmly engaged. He slammed his shoulder against it once, twice, but it didn’t even shudder. “We’re trapped!”
Althea didn’t answer. She stood frozen by the bed, staring at the dead man.. the Scribe..her fingers pressed to her cheek where he had touched her. The spot was already bruising, a dark, ugly purple that stood out against her pale skin.
“Althea! Help me!”
“It won’t matter,” she said, her voice hollow, distant. “The door isn’t the prison. This room is.”
As if on cue, the whispering began. Not from the corpse. From the walls. A low, sibilant hiss that seemed to seep through the plaster, the same Enochian phrases Patient #7 had been chanting, but now in a chorus of dozens of overlapping voices.
Scritch. Scritch. SCRAPE.
The sound was back, but it was no longer metallic. It was organic. Wet. It was coming from all around them. Liam watched, horrified, as the yellow paint on the wall beside him began to blister and peel back. Underneath, the plaster was bleeding a thick, black fluid. And something was moving beneath the surface, pressing against it from the other side, trying to get out.
“What is that?” he gasped, backing away until he hit the opposite wall, which immediately felt warm and spongy against his back.
“It’s learning,” Althea repeated, her clinical tone utterly terrifying in its disconnect. She pointed a trembling finger at the bleeding wall. “It started with text. Then sound. Now it’s trying to make a body. A collective one.”
A large section of wet plaster sloughed off with a sickening slurp, hitting the floor with a wet slap. Behind it was not lathe or brick, but a pulsating, veined membrane. And pressed against it from the other side was a perfect, screaming human face.
It was contorted in agony, mouth wide open in a silent shriek. It was the face of Orderly Miller, the head of security.
“Miller!” Liam cried out.
The eyes of the face in the wall snapped open. They were solid black. The mouth moved, but no sound came out. Instead, Miller’s voice, strained and broken, emanated from the rusted intercom speaker in the ceiling above them.
“..tried to stop it.. sealed the reports...” the voice crackled, punctuated by static that sounded like grinding teeth. “..it gets in through your ears... writes itself on your bones...”
Another section of wall gave way a few feet down. Another face appeared..a young nurse named Sarah. Her voice joined Miller’s from the speaker, a horrific duet of torment.
“..it showed me my mother...she was made of light.. then it turned her into words...”
“They’re not alive,” Althea whispered, though her eyes were wide with a terror that belied her calm words. “Not anymore. They’re recordings. Living memories trapped in the structure. The building is using them like.. like a vocabulary.”
The wall in front of Liam bulged outward. A hand, made of the same membranous material, thrust through, grabbing for his throat. It was cold and slick. He stumbled backward, falling over a stack of old linens.
The IV bag glowed brighter, the blood within churning violently. The letters of Althea’s name broke apart and reformed.
THE FOUNDATION IS HUNGRY.
The Scribe’s corpse on the bed suddenly sat bolt upright, its head lolling to the side. Its jaw unhinged, dropping open impossibly wide. A sound came out that was not a voice. It was the screech of the heart monitor, the slamming of the iron door, the thump-thump-thump from Room 304, and the whispered Enochian, all layered into one crushing wave of audio terror.
It was the scream of the asylum itself.
Althea finally broke. She screamed back, a raw, primal sound of utter despair, clapping her hands over her ears.
As she did, the main lights in the room flickered once and stayed on, buzzing erratically. The membranous walls recoiled from the harsh light, the faces retreating into the pulp with wet, sucking sounds. The Scribe’s corpse fell back onto the bed.
The screaming stopped.
Silence descended, broken only by the erratic buzz of the lights and their ragged breathing. The door behind them clicked open.
They didn’t wait. They scrambled out into the hallway, not looking back, and ran as the lights behind them died one by one, the darkness chasing them back toward the main wing.
ARCHIVAL NOTE:
Fragment of a damaged audio cassette, recovered from a cassette player found in the old wing. Labeled "Maintenance Log - Voice Test."
[Sound of heavy breathing, tools clanging]
"Log entry 47. The... the buzzing in the walls is getting louder. Jenkins says it's old wiring. I.. I don't think so. It sounds like... whispering. It sounds like it's saying my name. It..."
A loud, wet crunch, followed by a high-frequency screech that peaks the audio
A new voice, calm and melodic, whispers over the screech: "The foundation is hungry."
Tape ends.
To be continued...
Stay Tuned for Season 3.. Out Soon!
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Tales That Breathe at Night
I write what lingers in the dark—true horrors veiled in fiction, fiction rooted in truth. Some tales are whispered in graveyards, others buried in silence. If it gave someone nightmares, I’ll write it. Some stories remember you, too.
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Comments (1)
The IV bag writing messages in blood and the asylum walls learning to scream really got under my skin. Awesome work!