SEASON 4 : The Black Lung Communion: How a Surgeon’s Journal Sparked a Demonic Outbreak
THE WALLS THAT LEARNED TO SCREAM..
CHAPTER 7: THE FAMILY TREE
The silence after the doppelgänger’s dissolution was heavier than any noise. Liam could only stare at Althea, at the dark sigil pulsing on her skin like a second, terrible heart. The air still hummed with the echo of that unwritable word, a vibration that made his teeth ache.
“It showed you that?” he finally managed, his voice hoarse. “Why would it show you how to stop it?”
Althea wouldn’t meet his eyes. She cradled her right hand...the hand that had spoken the word...as if it were injured. The tips of her fingers were blackened, the nails cracked. “It didn’t show me. I... took it. When the Scribe touched me. It was a fragment. A secret it didn’t know it was holding. Like an immune response.” She looked up, her eyes haunted. “Using it hurts. It’s like trying to hold a star.”
The intercom remained silent. The hallway was still. The asylum was holding its breath, watching its new protagonist.
“It needs you,” Liam said, the realization dawning with icy clarity. “That’s why it hasn’t just.. consumed us. It’s trying to corrupt you. To make you its willing author.”
A single, clean piece of paper slid out from under the door of the administrative office down the hall. It glided across the linoleum as if carried by an unseen wind, coming to rest at Althea’s feet.
She bent down and picked it up. It was a family tree. But it wasn’t hers.
At the top was a name: The Foundation (c. 1895). Lines descended down to various patients, orderlies, doctors...all who had died or gone mad within these walls. At the very bottom, a new branch had been drawn in fresh, dark ink.
It led to Althea Reed.
But the line didn’t stop with her. It continued, branching out to hypothetical children, their names left blank, their dates of birth set in the future. The tree was claiming not just her, but her entire bloodline, stretching into a future it intended to write.
“It’s not just a story,” Althea whispered, her hand trembling so violently the paper rattled. “It’s a lineage. It’s making itself a family. And it wants me to be its mother.”
A soft, lullaby-like melody began to play from the maternity ward at the end of the hall. It was a gentle, rocking tune played on a music box. The door to the ward swung open, revealing a room that was no longer a clinical space.
It had been transformed. The medical bassinets were now ornate, antique cradles. The walls were painted with murals not of cartoon animals, but of intricate, illuminated manuscripts depicting the asylum’s history of suffering. In the center of the room sat a single, modern heart monitor. On its screen, a single, steady heartbeat pulsed.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It was the same rhythm.
“It’s making a nursery,” Liam said, a fresh wave of nausea washing over him.
“It’s making a binding,” Althea corrected. She pointed to the family tree. “It’s a contract. It’s offering me eternity. A chance to write the world instead of just living in it.”
“You can’t be considering it!”
“It’s showing me my mother,” she said, her voice breaking. Tears welled in her eyes, cutting tracks through the grime on her face. “In the old wing… it showed me her, clear as day. She was smiling. She said she was proud of me. She said this was my purpose.”
“It’s a lie, Althea! It’s using your memories against you! It’s what it did to Miller!”
“What if it’s not?” she screamed, whirling on him, the paper crumpling in her fist. The sigil on her cheek flared a painful, angry black. “What if this is the only way any of this suffering ever means anything? To be part of something eternal?”
The heart monitor in the nursery began to beep faster. The lullaby music swelled, becoming more insistent, more demanding.
A figure appeared in the doorway of the maternity ward. It was the ghost of the Scribe, translucent and flickering. He held out a skeletal hand. In his palm rested not a bone tasbeeh, but a beautiful, pearl-handled fountain pen. The tip gleamed like a needle.
“It’s time to sign, Althea,” the Scribe’s voice whispered, though his lips did not move. The voice came from the music box, from the heart monitor, from the walls themselves. “Time to write the next chapter.”
Althea took a step toward the nursery. Then another.
“Althea, no!” Liam grabbed her arm.
She turned to him, and her eyes were no longer her own. They were the color of old parchment. “Don’t you understand, Liam? There are no more pages left in your world. The story is over. The only choice is what book you end up in.”
She shook off his grip and walked into the maternity ward. The door swung shut behind her with a soft, final click.
The family tree fluttered to the floor at Liam’s feet. As he watched, a new name slowly inscribed itself next to Althea’s, written in the same dark ink.
Liam Evans. Father.
The asylum had written him into its family.
ARCHIVAL NOTE:
A single page of vellum, discovered wedged behind the plumbing in the demolished asylum's foundation. The handwriting is an elegant, early 20th-century cursive.
"The work continues. The Family is growing. Subject A-R shows exceptional promise. Her connection to the Source Material is profound. She resists, but the Narrative is persuasive. It offers what the world cannot: purpose. We await her signature. The first of the new Ink.
..Keeper of the Word"
The note is unsigned, but forensic analysis dated the ink to approximately 1910.
CHAPTER 8: THE LAST WITNESS
The click of the nursery door locking was the softest, most final sound Liam had ever heard. He was alone in the hall, the crumpled family tree at his feet declaring him a father to some unimaginable, textual horror. The air grew colder still, the red emergency lights dimming as if the very power of the place was now being funneled into that room, into Althea.
Father.
The word echoed not in the air, but in his mind, in his bones. A claim. A branding.
“No,” he growled, the word tearing from his throat. He kicked the family tree away. It skittered across the floor, the paper unfolding to reveal more names, more branches...orderlies, nurses, patients from decades past, all part of the Foundation’s grim lineage. He was just the latest entry.
The lullaby from the nursery swelled, no longer gentle. It was a triumphant, marching rhythm now, played on a music box that sounded like it was made of grinding teeth. The heart monitor’s beeping accelerated, matching the frantic pace of his own heart.
He had to get her out. He had to break the binding.
The rational doctor in him was gone, incinerated by a fear far older than medicine. This was about survival now. Primordial. Animal.
He ran back toward the nurses' station, his mind racing. The entity was a narrative. It used stories, memories, documents. It wrote itself into existence. To fight it, he needed to erase it. Not with a word...he couldn’t wield that power...but with its opposite.
Silence. Oblivion.
He remembered the maintenance closet. The one with the old, analog fire suppression system for the hospital’s original paper records storage. The system hadn't been upgraded when the records went digital. It was still a massive tank of chemical foam, designed to smother a fire by starving it of oxygen.
To starve a story of words.
He wrenched the closet door open. Inside, among mops and buckets, stood a large, red valve wheel labeled RECORDS ROOM FLOOD SYSTEM - MANUAL OVERRIDE. A faded warning read: NON-OXYGEN DISPLACING FOAM - EXTREME HAZARD.
It was perfect.
“You can’t drown us,” a voice whispered from the sink behind him. It was Althea’s voice, but thin, stretched, like a recording on a worn-out tape. “We are in the foundation. We are in the bones. You are only in the story.”
Liam ignored it, grabbing the heavy wheel with both hands. He threw his weight into it. It didn’t budge. Decades of rust had seized it solid.
The heart monitor’s beeping from the nursery became a single, sustained, celebratory tone. A flatline. But it wasn't a sound of death. It was a sound of completion.
A wave of force erupted from the nursery door, blowing it off its hinges and sending it clattering down the hall. A blinding, golden light poured out, so intense it forced Liam to shield his eyes.
Althea stood in the doorway.
She was floating an inch above the ground. The bruise on her cheek was no longer a mark; it was a living, swirling tattoo of black ink that coiled under her skin, down her neck, across her hands. Her eyes were pools of liquid gold. In one hand, she held the pearl-handled pen. It dripped a thick, black substance that sizzled where it hit the floor.
She was smiling. It was a smile of terrible, absolute peace.
“It’s beautiful, Liam,” she said, and her voice was a chorus, layered with the voices of the Scribe, Miller, and countless others. “The story is so much bigger than we are. There’s no more pain. No more fear. Only the Plot.”
She gestured with the pen. The text on the walls glowed anew, not as mold, but as golden, illuminated script. It told his life story. His childhood fears, his medical school doubts, his secret insecurities as a doctor. It was all there, laid bare for the god of the asylum to read.
“Join me,” she said, her voice softening to just her own, a cruel mimicry of the woman he knew. “We can write a better ending together. We can be together forever. Just say yes.”
The word hung in the air. A single, simple syllable that would unlock eternity and erase everything he was.
He looked at her, at the thing wearing her face, offering him a gilded cage within its story.
“No,” he said.
The golden light flickered. Her beatific smile faltered for a microsecond.
“Then you’ll be edited out,” she said, her voice hardening, the chorus returning. She raised the pen.
Liam screamed, a raw, wordless sound of defiance, and threw his entire body against the valve wheel. With a shriek of tearing metal, it broke free and spun.
An alarm blared through the asylum...a deep, clanging bell that had not sounded in fifty years. From vents along the ceiling of the records room corridor, a torrent of thick, white chemical foam began to pour forth, smothering everything in its path.
It hit the golden text on the walls first. The words smeared, then dissolved, the foam eating away at the narrative like acid. The light from Althea...from the thing...flickered violently.
She screamed, a sound of pure, undiluted rage that was entirely her own. The ink under her skin recoiled from the foam, retreating back toward the sigil on her cheek.
“YOU CAN’T ERASE US!” the chorus of voices shrieked.
The foam reached them, engulfing the hallway in a silent, suffocating wave. It blotted out the light. It blotted out the sound. It blotted out everything.
The last thing Liam saw was Althea’s form, collapsing to the floor as the black ink fled her body, the golden light in her eyes extinguishing.
Then the foam took him, too, and there was only white, silent nothingness.
ARCHIVAL NOTE:
The final entry in the St. Hedwig's Asylum fire department ledger, dated November 6, 1983.
*"Responded to automatic alarm activation in Records Wing. Found entire wing flooded with ARDROX 1402 fire-suppressant foam. No fire present. Two individuals recovered: One male (Dr. L. Evans), unconscious but stable. One female (Nurse A. Reed), in a catatonic state. No other occupants found. Cause of system activation: Manual override. No further investigation required."*
The word "EDIT" is scrawled in the margin in an unknown hand.
To Be Continued..
Stay Tuned For The Finale...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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SEASON 3 : The Black Lung Communion: How a Surgeon’s Journal Sparked a Demonic Outbreak
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.
By Tales That Breathe at Night5 months ago in Horror
Comments (1)
This chapter had me on edge the whole way through. The imagery of the family tree and the nursery was so haunting.