Jamie stood before the hospital.
The building rose like a tumor from the landscape—twisted and bone-pale, pulsing slightly under the dead sky. The red glow above had shifted to something dimmer, dull as dying embers. The hospital's windows were cracked and bleeding. Its entrance looked less like a door and more like a torn wound in the building's flesh.
A child's scream echoed from within, rising and falling like a siren.
Sadie's voice.
Jamie moved toward it, each step heavier than the last. The air around the hospital was thick, syrupy. Breathing it felt like inhaling congealed fear. The sidewalk crunched beneath his feet—not gravel, but shattered teeth.
As he approached, the door-wound yawned open.
He stepped inside.
The lights inside flickered, casting sickly yellow glows along the filthy tiled floor. Wheelchairs lay overturned, IV poles twisted into skeletal limbs. The walls pulsed with veins beneath the paint. He recognized the reception desk—this had once been Bramble Hollow General—but it had changed. The woman behind the counter no longer had a face.
Just a yawning mouth, lips stapled open.
She clicked her teeth together in a rhythm, as though chewing nothing.
Jamie moved past her.
The hallway led him into the ward. The walls here were alive—bulging and flexing as if a heartbeat pumped through them. The floor was coated in a black, tar-like liquid that stuck to his shoes with every step. Somewhere distant, he heard a child singing:
"Needles in my fingers, stitches in my eyes, I told a little secret, now everyone dies…"
He turned a corner and found a gurney blocking the path. On it lay a child—limbs twisted backward, mouth sewn shut with surgical thread. It blinked slowly. A mechanical arm extended from the ceiling, holding a scalpel.
It began to lower.
Jamie ran.
Doors lined both sides of the corridor. Some were open. Others pounded from the inside. Behind one, something laughed. Behind another, something sobbed. He passed a room labeled WARD 6 and paused.
Carved into the door in jagged letters:
TRAUMA WARD - FOR THE UNFORGIVEN.
Sadie screamed again.
It came from inside.
Jamie pushed the door open.
The walls were padded, stained with old blood and handprints that moved on their own. Gurneys lined the walls, each holding a figure hidden beneath white sheets. Monitors beeped erratically, though none were connected to anything living.
At the far end of the room stood a surgical theater.
Sadie was strapped to a table beneath the lights. Her body was motionless, but her eyes locked with Jamie's.
She was awake.
She was aware.
Above her, suspended on mechanical arms, hovered a surgeon. It wore no mask. Its face was a void of skin pulled too tight, exposing black muscle and rows of teeth that clicked together like a centipede's legs.
As Jamie entered, it turned.
"Too late for anesthesia," it hissed.
Jamie charged forward. The floor beneath him squirmed—tiny mouths opened in the tile, biting at his shoes, his ankles. He screamed and kicked, staggering forward. The surgeon raised a bone saw, its teeth whining as it spun.
Jamie grabbed a rusted tray and flung it at the thing. It struck the surgeon's arm, knocking the saw aside. Sadie whimpered through her stitched lips.
He reached the table, clawed at the straps, yanked until his fingers bled.
The surgeon lunged.
Jamie rolled, grabbing the bone saw as it fell. He turned it on instinctively, jamming it into the creature's throat.
It screamed—not in pain, but in laughter.
Its body convulsed, spasmed, and then collapsed in a heap of writhing instruments and bone. The lights flickered out.
Everything went black.
When the lights returned, Sadie was gone.
So was the surgeon.
The room was empty.
But on the wall, written in what looked like spinal fluid, were the words:
DEEPER.
Jamie stumbled into the hallway again. It had changed.
Gone were the doors. Gone were the windows.
Now it was a tunnel.
The walls were flesh. The floor was teeth.
He moved forward.
The deeper he went, the louder the screams became. Not just Sadie. Dozens of voices. Hundreds. Children. Crying. Begging. Screaming.
The tunnel opened into a massive surgical amphitheater.
In the center stood a throne of syringes and bones. Upon it sat a nurse.
At least… something wearing the skin of a nurse.
Her mouth was a zippered gash. Her eyes were tiny pill bottles. Her fingers were scalpels. She stared at Jamie.
"Symptoms," she rasped. "Let's take your symptoms."
She stood and raised a clipboard covered in screaming faces.
"Diagnosis: Liar. Coward. Desertion."
She raised a needle the size of a javelin.
"Treatment: Vivisection."
She hurled the needle. It pierced Jamie's leg.
He collapsed.
The world spun. The amphitheater shook.
Children's faces poured from the ceiling like blood from a wound, screaming as they fell, sticking to him, clawing at his face.
And through it all, he heard Sadie, whispering:
"Keep going. Please. Don't stop. She's almost here."
He blacked out.
When he woke, he was back outside.
The hospital stood behind him, caved in on itself.
His arm burned.
New words carved there:
YOUR FAULT.
Jamie looked up.
Far ahead, the landscape had changed again.
A carnival now stood on the horizon.
Its lights blinked in unnatural rhythm. The music carried across the air like the sound of bones snapping.
Sadie's voice echoed faintly, lost in the wind:
"Next ride, Jamie. Next ride."