The Silent Patient's Secret

Prologue: The Woman Who Never Speaks

They called her The Sphinx of Willowbrook Asylum.

Elaine Mercer hadn’t uttered a word since the night her husband was found dead in their bathtub, his skin peeled off in long, careful strips. The jury convicted her in under an hour. The psychiatrists deemed her criminally insane.

For two decades, she sat in her padded cell, staring at the wall, her lips stitched shut by sheer willpower.

Then I found her journal.

And I realized—she’s not silent at all.

Chapter 1: The New Intern

Willowbrook smelled like antiseptic and old urine.

As the newest—and most expendable—psych intern, I was assigned to Elaine Mercer. "Just take notes," Dr. Langley said. "She’s harmless."

But the moment I stepped into her cell, I knew something was wrong.

Elaine sat perfectly still, her dark eyes tracking me like a predator. The walls around her were covered in scratches—not random, but letters. Thousands of them, overlapping until they looked like wallpaper.

And beneath her cot, barely visible, was a leather-bound book.

Her diary.

Chapter 2: The Screaming Pages

Entry 1: They think I killed him. But it wasn’t me.

Entry 17: It comes at 3:33 AM. It wears his face.

Entry 43: The scratching keeps it away. That’s why I can’t stop.

The entries grew more frantic, the handwriting devolving into jagged spikes. Then, halfway through, a single sentence repeated for fifty pages:

"DON’T LET IT KNOW YOU CAN SEE IT."

My hands shook as I turned to the last entry—dated yesterday:

"You’re reading this, aren’t you? Then it’s already too late. It knows."

Behind me, a floorboard creaked.

Chapter 3: The Third Patient

The asylum records told a different story.

Elaine Mercer was admitted with two patients that night—herself and a John Doe found wandering the streets, his tongue cut out.

"Patient 114," the file read. "Extreme aggression. Bites through restraints. Claims to be 'hungry.'"

The last note chilled me:

"Patient 114 transferred to Cell Block B. Deceased 10/17/03 (suicide)."

Except Cell Block B didn’t exist.

And when I checked the morgue logs, there was no record of a body.

Chapter 4: The Unseen Game

That night, I dreamed of Elaine’s cell.

In the dream, I was crouched beside her cot, reading the diary by flashlight. The words kept changing:

"It’s behind you."

"It’s breathing on your neck."

I woke screaming—in Elaine’s cell.

The real horror?

Elaine was gone.

Her straightjacket lay on the floor, still buckled.

And on the wall, fresh scratches formed a single word:

"RUN."

Epilogue: The New Sphinx

They found me at dawn, catatonic, clutching Elaine’s diary.

Now I sit in her old cell, scratching letters into the walls.

The doctors say I’ll never speak again.

They’re right.

Because every night at 3:33 AM, something crawls out of Cell Block B—wearing Elaine’s face—and presses a cold finger to my lips.

And I’ve learned the hard way:

Some secrets scream louder in silence.