SEASON 2: THE SKIN PSALM

CHAPTER 1: THE SECOND LANGUAGE

April 2023 — Volgograd Medical Institute Archive Room

Mira Sokolov had always found comfort in quiet places. While others might feel unsettled among yellowing files and stale air, she found peace in order, in the soft hush of paper, and in the forgotten past hidden between aging documents. The Volgograd Medical Institute’s archive room, buried beneath two levels of reinforced concrete, was the quietest place on campus. She had volunteered....perhaps too eagerly....to assist in digitizing the Soviet-era patient records. No one else wanted to be surrounded by remnants of a medical system steeped in secrecy and rumor.

Each evening, after lectures ended and the building emptied, Mira descended alone into the archive. It smelled faintly of iodine and mildew. Rusted file cabinets lined the walls, and the flicker of the single overhead bulb cast long, uncertain shadows. On her fourth night down there, as she sifted through a stack of brittle surgical records from the mid-1980s, her hand brushed against the edge of something strange....an oak desk not listed in any institutional inventory. It was covered in a light sheen of dust, its drawers fused shut by time and neglect.

She knelt, testing the metal handle. Locked.

With a nearby scalpel from the specimen room upstairs, she wedged the drawer open. It groaned in protest before popping ajar with a dry snap. Inside was a neatly arranged collection: a 1986 wall calendar, its pages yellowed and curling at the corners. The date October 3rd was circled not once, but multiple times, in red ink that had bled through the paper like a wound. Next to it lay a rolled spinal x-ray. As she unfurled it beneath the overhead light, she froze....there were letters etched along the vertebrae. Not medical annotations, but actual characters..an alphabet that seemed… familiar, but wrong. Cyrillic, yet distorted, backward, incomplete.

At the back of the drawer, she found a cassette tape encased in amber-colored plastic. The label read: “Do not play near organs.” The handwriting was childlike, jagged. No author, no explanation.

Mira hesitated. Her heartbeat ticked like a metronome in her throat. The tape felt warm to the touch, oddly so, as if it had just been used. The tape player in the corner....an ancient Soviet model with yellowed buttons....still had power. Compelled by a mix of curiosity and dread, she inserted the cassette and pressed play.

No sound emerged. The room remained deathly silent. But something changed. A crawling electricity moved across her skin. Her bones seemed to hum, vibrating at a frequency her ears couldn’t process but her blood clearly did. It felt as if her nervous system had become an antenna.

Her hand trembled as she reached for her phone. She dialed her boyfriend, Luka.

The line connected. But before she could say a word, Luka whispered, breathless and hollow:

“Why is your skin praying?”

The line went dead.

The room grew hotter. The cassette hissed and popped. A faint sulfurous odor filled the air. Then the tape melted, warping into a black puddle of slag and sludge. Mira staggered backward, her stomach tightening in waves of nausea.

Then came the bump.

Just beneath her ribs, something began moving. A visible pulsation, as though a small organ had been inserted under her skin and awakened. She gasped, grabbing the edge of the desk, but her own breath came out in jagged rasps, unfamiliar and broken.

Her roommate, Katya, appeared in the doorway with a half-joking, “You alive down here?”

Then she screamed.

Mira turned, and the look on Katya’s face confirmed it before she even touched her own neck. Her throat had… opened. Horizontally. Not torn or wounded....but opened. Deliberately. Surgically. Inside, not flesh, but rows of something....something glinting, something shaped like letters....teeth.

And the teeth… were spelling something.

CHAPTER 2: THE ECHO CHAMBER

April 2023 — Volgograd Medical Institute, Research Wing

They kept Mira in isolation on the third floor of the institute's research wing....a part of the hospital used mostly for sleep studies and low-priority academic experiments. The wing was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of silence that made people’s ears ring.

The doctors didn’t know what to make of her. Her vitals were mostly normal. No fever, no infection. But her vocal cords....gone. Not surgically removed, not damaged, just… absent. In their place was something else entirely. A smooth, living membrane where the cords had been, lightly pulsing with each breath. It emitted a low-frequency vibration when stimulated, like the sub-bass rumble of a speaker turned up with nothing playing. Her throat wasn’t just silent....it was resonant.

The medical staff chalked it up to a bizarre congenital anomaly, perhaps awakened by stress or hallucination. They didn’t know what else to write in the report. No known pathogens. No trauma. Just unexplained transformation.

But strange things began happening around Mira.

At night, when the ward was at its stillest, the intercom system would click on. At first, it was dismissed as technical glitches, but the nurses noticed a pattern: every night at 2:03 a.m., the system would broadcast a whisper....faint, indecipherable, but undeniably human. Words dripped out in gasps and pauses, spoken too close to the mic, like someone murmuring into your ear from an inch away.

Staff began hearing things that weren’t being said. One patient claimed she heard her late husband’s voice telling her to stop pretending to be alive. A janitor quit after hearing his daughter’s laughter echoing through the hallway speakers....his daughter, who had died in a fire three years earlier.

Even those who avoided Mira’s room weren’t safe. Nurses complained of thinking things they never thought before....and then hearing them aloud in the voices of strangers.

A single phrase, documented in a nurse’s log, chilled the entire department:

“The flesh remembers what the mind forgets.”

Mira’s skin began to change. Not uniformly....symmetrically. Starting at the collarbone, her skin began to flake in mirrored lines, as if peeling back to reveal something coded beneath. Not raw tissue. Not muscle.

Text.

Layered beneath the epidermis, inscribed across her chest and arms in winding rows like an ancient manuscript, were ink-dark markings. Letters, phrases, sigils....some Cyrillic, some resembling Phoenician, Sumerian, Aramaicl....anguages that had never coexisted in time, now spiraling across her body like tattoos etched into her DNA.

Dr. Yelena Borodin, a visiting linguist specializing in dead tongues, was brought in to examine the symbols. She spent hours photographing, comparing, and transcribing. Her verdict:

“It’s a hybrid language. A synthetic chorus. A linguistic palimpsest....one voice overwritten by many.”

Buried within the markings, centered above Mira’s sternum, was a line written in inky, alien clarity:

“We are the chorus of the forgotten.”

Mira no longer slept.

When she closed her eyes, she heard music. Not melody, not rhythm....but the slow, relentless choir of a thousand syllables spoken over each other, bleeding into her skull like water into paper.

And in her dreams, she saw an old calendar.

October 3.

Circles within circles.

Like an eye.

Like a mouth.

Like a cassette spool turning in reverse.

CHAPTER 3: THE CHOIR OF SILENCE

May 2023 — Volgograd Medical Institute, Isolation Ward

Mira’s body no longer responded to medical theory. What had once been flesh and voice now seemed like an antenna....receiving signals not from Earth, but from somewhere beyond cognition. Her chest cavity, now semi-translucent under low light, began to vibrate at frequencies that human ears couldn't detect....but glass could.

Without warning, windows across the ward shattered in synchronized intervals. Even surgical lights flickered in harmonic pulses, casting dancing shadows that moved against the rhythm of the room. The staff, initially skeptical, soon experienced disturbing phenomena. One nurse, Katya Sokolova, dropped her tray mid-shift, convinced she heard her dead mother singing a lullaby from her childhood....but the voice was male, distorted, and in perfect Latin.

Psychiatric evaluations were ordered across the staff after multiple incidents. A janitor resigned after hearing guttural prayers whisper from beneath his skin while mopping near Mira’s room. Reports spread like rot:

Nurse 1 began sleep-speaking in Akkadian

Resident 2 lost the ability to hear anyone but Mira

Security footage showed Mira mouthing wordsb....ut her lips were not in sync with her voice

Dr. Anton Ivanov, head of Neuropathic Research, became fixated. “This is no disease,” he wrote in a clinical memo, “this is a transmission.”

Ivanov set up high-frequency recording devices and sound spectrographs. What they captured was inaudible to the human ear but, when analyzed visually, resembled intricate musical notation fused with ancient cuneiform. He spliced it, slowed it down, and played it back through analog speakers.

The playback contained a single word, warped and looped into eternity:

“Remember. Remember. Remember...”

Ivanov began isolating himself. Obsessed, he filled over seventeen notebooks with symbols not found in any linguistic database. He stopped speaking. He stopped eating. At 3:33 AM on May 17, he vanished without a trace. His apartment was found empty, save for a single scrap of skin nailed to the wall.

Scrawled in surgical ink:

“She is the archive. I am the index.”

CHAPTER 4: THE FLESH SCRIPTURE

June 2023 — Volgograd Medical Institute, Secure Laboratory

Desperate for answers, the Institute convened a black-ops research cell under the guise of a dermatogenetics initiative. Mira, now catatonic yet pulsing with inaudible hums, was transferred to a secure underground lab previously used for high...contagion studies. The room was soundproofed. Cameras were removed after three spontaneously combusted during early recordings.

Biopsies were taken from various dermal regions...forearms, upper spine, inner thighs. What researchers discovered defied every principle of cellular biology. Her skin cells were organizing themselves into micro-fractal configurations that bore uncanny resemblance to written alphabets.

But these were not dead tattoos or scars. They moved. They responded. Spoken questions caused her skin to reconfigure its text. Commands in Russian caused one pattern; whispers in Arabic caused another. When a researcher muttered the Hebrew word for "truth" under her breath, the skin formed a complete passage along Mira’s back that translated to:

“The body is the book; the soul, the reader.”

By mid-June, DNA sequencing of Mira’s blood revealed anomalies. Base pairs had been rewritten with unprecedented combinations: human, cephalopod, and....unidentifiable genetic fragments theorized to be non-terrestrial. Her genome contained codons that matched neither vertebrates nor invertebrates, nor even fungi.

One shocked researcher summarized it in his notes:

“She is becoming something not meant to exist within our realm. She is either a message, a messenger....or the medium itself.”

MRI scans revealed subcutaneous tendrils forming a latticework beneath her skin, reminiscent of musical notation staves. They reacted to ambient sound....pulsing in rhythm with even the smallest whispers. At one point, Mira’s skin folded open on its own, forming what could only be described as a readable manuscript, composed of shimmering living tissue.

Worse yet....when they tried to record this biological text, their equipment crashed. Files were corrupted. Ink refused to adhere to paper. One technician tried to transcribe the markings manually and was found several hours later in a fetal position, mumbling, “I saw my name in her blood. It was already crossed out.”

CHAPTER 5: THE FINAL VERSE

July 2023 - Volgograd Medical Institute, Abandoned Wing

On the morning of July 6, 2023, Mira’s room was found empty. No signs of forced entry, no breach in security. The surveillance footage showed her standing still, vibrating faster and faster....until her body blurred, became translucent, and vanished into thin air.

Except she hadn’t disappeared. Not entirely.

She was everywhere.

Messages began appearing across the Institute....initially faint, almost as if water-stained on the walls. Then they became more aggressive. More visible. Written in blood, never fresh, never decaying. The first line appeared above the operating theatre entrance:

“The song continues.”

Soon after, entire departments reported missing personnel. Anatomy, Pathology, Records. Offices were discovered ransacked....desks overturned, power disabled, lights broken. In every case, the only thing left behind was a single folded sheet of skin.

Each one bore a unique sentence....written in Mira’s known flesh-script, translated painstakingly by remaining linguists. The most common line:

“To be continued. Not by choice.”

But some were darker:

“You are already singing.”

“Ink was never enough.”

“Words will rot the spine.”

By July 28, the abandoned North Wing of the institute became inaccessible. Surveillance feeds were black. Those who entered complained of unbearable humming....like dozens of tuning forks vibrating in unison beneath their bones. Several lost their fingernails after just ten minutes inside.

Then the final message appeared.

On every screen, intercom, chalkboard, and mirror within the institute....a single phrase flickered, sung in harmonics that could only be described as language from the bone outward:

“The Psalm is only beginning.”

Ssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

=================================================

Is The Skin Psalm too disturbing?

Tag 3 readers who can still hear silence. If they don’t respond, they already know the next verse.

The unsealed autopsy files drop at 3:33 AM EST. Bring headphones. Not for listening. For protection.

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"This tale is spun from threads of global whispers....half-heard warnings, fractured folklore, and the chilling ‘what if’ that lingers after midnight. While shadows of real accounts may flicker through these pages, every character, curse, and creeping horror is a work of original dark encounters with a touch of fiction and any resemblance to actual events, Name, Place, things....past or present...is purely accidental and Co-incidental, a trick of the light, or proof that truth often imitates the uncanny. Names, places, and unsettling occurrences are conjured from the void....not the record. Proceed with curiosity (and maybe a nightlight).

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