SEASON 3 : The Black Lung Communion: How a Surgeon’s Journal Sparked a Demonic Outbreak
They thought it was about to end.. but wait is it really?
CHAPTER 5: THE BONE TASBEEH
They didn't stop running until the heavy iron door of the old wing was far behind them, its darkness swallowed by the marginally lighter gloom of the main corridor. Liam slammed his body against the wall, chest heaving, sweat cooling on his skin. Althea leaned over, hands on her knees, vomiting onto the clean linoleum.
The main power was still out, but the emergency lights had finally flickered on, casting a dim, jaundiced glow. It felt like a reprieve, however temporary.
“What... what was that?” Liam gasped, wiping his mouth. The feel of that membranous hand on his throat lingered like a burn.
Althea straightened up, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. The bruise on her cheek had darkened, the shape now unmistakably resembling one of the Enochian symbols from the X-ray. “It’s a consciousness,” she said, her voice raw. “A primitive, hungry one. It doesn’t just haunt this place. It is this place. And it’s learning from us. Our language, our anatomy, our fears.”
“It called you by name,” Liam said, the memory of the blood IV bag making him shudder.
“It knows all our names,” she replied, her eyes darting toward the nurses' station. “It’s been reading the files. Personnel records. Patient charts. It’s building a database.”
She walked shakily to the station and yanked open a drawer, pulling out a large, leather-bound logbook. “Miller’s security log. If we’re going to survive this, we need to know what he knew.”
She dropped it on the counter with a thud that echoed in the silent hall. They flipped through the pages under the weak glow of a battery-powered desk lamp. Most entries were mundane...rounds completed, minor disturbances. Then, about a month ago, the tone changed.
October 15: Strange graffiti in the west hall. Not paint. Looks like rust or… dried blood. Symbols don’t match anything. Jenkins thinks it’s kids.
October 22: The whispering is back. Louder. Caught Nurse Reed staring at a wall for fifteen minutes straight. She said it was ‘breathing.’
October 29: Found Patient #7 in the old wing. How did he get in there? He was just standing there, chanting. No idea what language. Took three of us to restrain him. He kept repeating one word: ‘Scribe.’
Liam turned the page. The next entry was dated November 1. The handwriting was frantic, nearly illegible.
It’s in the pipes. It talks through the water. It showed me Carol. My wife. She’s been dead five years. She spoke to me from the sink faucet. Told me things... private things... no one could know. She said if I want to see her again, I need to… make an offering.
The entry ended there. The next page was torn out. But something was paper-clipped to the following page. A small, lumpy object wrapped in a clean gauze pad.
Althea unfolded it. Inside was a string of prayer beads.
But they weren’t wood or plastic. They were small, yellowed, and intricately carved... from human finger bones. The 99th bead, the one that should represent God, was a single, desiccated human eyeball, its iris a milky blue. It seemed to follow them.
“My God,” Liam breathed, recoiling. “What is that?”
“His offering,” Althea whispered, her face pale. She turned the gruesome tasbeeh over. Carved into the largest bone bead was a single word in delicate, precise script.
Miller.
“He gave it a part of himself,” she said, her voice filled with a horrified awe. “A relic. So it would give him back his wife.”
As she held it, the eyeball bead slowly, deliberately, winked.
A sudden crash came from the staff lounge down the hall. The sound of a coffee maker smashing to the floor. Then, a new sound. A woman’s voice, soft and melodic, singing a lullaby. It was coming from the lounge’s sink drain.
“Carol...” Liam whispered, remembering the log entry.
Althea’s head snapped up. “It’s not his wife. It’s a recording. A lure.” She dropped the bone tasbeeh as if it had burned her. It hit the counter, and the eyeball shattered like glass, releasing a smell of old rot and formaldehyde.
The singing from the drain stopped. Replaced by a low, guttural growl of static. Then, Miller’s voice, broken with despair, echoed from every intercom grille in the hallway.
“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE THAT. IT’S ANGRY NOW.”
The desk lamp began to flicker wildly. The pages of the logbook turned on their own, faster and faster, until they were a blur. The temperature in the hall plummeted.
They had violated a shrine. And now the god of the asylum was awake.
ARCHIVAL NOTE:
Forensic inventory of Officer Miller's locker, entered as Evidence #9H-LOCKER. Item 17-B: One (1) string of presumed animal bone beads, 99 count, with one (1) glass eye ornament. Sent for toxicology and DNA analysis.
Lab Report Addendum: "Subject beads are not animal in origin. Mitochondrial DNA matches Officer Miller's missing paternal grandfather. The 'glass' eye is biological. Retinal scan patterns are a 97% match to Miller's deceased wife, Carol. How this is possible is beyond the scope of this report."
CHAPTER 6: THE UNWRITTEN AYAH
The god of the asylum was awake, and its first breath was ice.
The temperature plummeted so fast their breath plumed in the air, and the flickering desk lamp died completely, plunging them back into near darkness. The only light came from the emergency exit signs, their red glow now feeling hellish rather than safe.
“It’s here,” Althea whispered, her voice trembling not with fear, but with a strange, reverent horror. The bruise on her cheek seemed to pulse in time with the distant, rhythmic thumping that had started up again, louder now, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.
The intercoms crackled to life again, but this time it wasn’t Miller’s voice. It was a dry, rustling sound, like a million pages turning at once. Then, a voice emerged from the static—a perfect, chilling mimicry of Dr. Evans’s own cadence and tone.
“Subject: Liam Evans. Profile: Skeptic. Rationalist. Weakness: The need for empirical evidence.” The voice paused, and the sound of a pencil scratching on paper followed. “Hypothesis: Fear can be taught. Can be… inscribed.”
“Turn it off!” Liam yelled, clapping his hands over his ears. It was useless. The voice was inside his head, behind his eyes.
“It’s writing us into its narrative,” Althea said, her eyes wide. She was staring at the far wall of the corridor. The clean, white paint was beginning to darken, lines of black mold spreading across it at an impossible rate, forming lines of text. “It’s making us characters in its story.”
Liam followed her gaze. The text wasn’t in English or Enochian. It was in his own handwriting. It was a perfect replica of the notes he’d taken during Patient #7’s initial, failed intake interview.
Patient exhibits signs of severe catatonia and glossolalia. Recommend isolation and…
The text on the wall changed, the letters melting and reforming.
…recommend dissection. Let me see how the words are stored.
“I never wrote that!” he shouted at the empty hall.
The intercom voice chuckled, a dry, rustling sound. “You will.”
A door down the hall—the door to the hospital’s small chapel—swung open on silent hinges. A warm, golden light spilled out, so starkly different from the hellish red gloom that it was more terrifying than any darkness.
A figure stood silhouetted in the doorway. It was Althea. Or a perfect, smiling copy of her.
“Liam,” the copy said, its voice a sweet, perfect replica. “It’s okay. I found a way out. Come with me.”
The real Althea grabbed his arm, her nails digging into his skin. “Don’t. Don’t look at it. It’s just another page.”
The copy’s smile widened until it stretched unnaturally. “She’s lying, Liam. She’s working with it. She’s the one who brought you here. She’s the Scribe’s new apprentice.”
“It’s trying to divide us,” the real Althea hissed. “It’s a classic strategy. Isolate the subjects. It learned it from our own psychology textbooks!”
The copy took a step forward, its hand outstretched. “Come to the light, Liam. It’s safe here.”
But as it moved into the corridor, the golden light around it flickered. For a fraction of a second, Liam saw what was underneath the illusion: a thing of shifting, compressed paper and old blood, its eyes hollow pits swarming with minuscule, moving letters.
He stumbled back, retching.
The copy’s face twisted in rage. The pleasant façade vanished, replaced by a shrieking mask of fury. It lunged, not at Liam, but at Althea.
“YOU ARE MINE!” it screamed, its voice now a chorus of a hundred suffering voices, including Miller’s and the Scribe’s.
The real Althea didn’t flinch. As the thing reached for her, she raised her hand—the hand that had touched the Scribe’s corpse. The bruise on her cheek was now a full, black, pulsing symbol.
She spoke a single word. It wasn’t Enochian. It was older. A word that felt like the concept of stop given sound.
The copy froze mid-lunge, its form shuddering. The countless letters that composed it scrambled, losing cohesion. It let out a wail of sheer frustration, a sound of tearing paper and breaking spines, before dissolving into a pile of ash and forgotten words at their feet.
The intercoms fell silent. The text on the walls faded. The thumping stopped.
The real Althea swayed on her feet, suddenly pale. “It… showed me that word,” she panted, leaning against the wall. “In the old wing. It was the only thing it fears. The ‘Unwritten Ayah.’ The command that can erase.”
Liam stared at her, at the power she had just wielded, at the symbol burning on her face. The copy’s accusation echoed in his mind. She’s the Scribe’s new apprentice.
“What are you becoming, Althea?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
She looked at him, and for the first time, true fear was in her eyes—not of the asylum, but of herself.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think it needs a living host to finish its story. And it’s chosen me.”
ARCHIVAL NOTE:
Page 43 of Dr. Evans's personal journal, recovered from his home. The writing becomes increasingly erratic.
"The entity is not a ghost. It is a narrative parasite. It consumes stories, memories, identities, and repurposes them into its own text. Its ultimate goal is not to destroy, but to author. To write the perfect, eternal story using human lives as its ink. Althea is not its victim. She is its...protagonist."
The final sentence is scribbled in the margin: "The bruise on her cheek is the title page."
To Be continued...
Stay Tuned for Season 4...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 imagery of the bone tasbeeh with its grotesque beads and the eyeball wink was so haunting! can't wait for more!