“I was a clerk, Aris! I was a man who saw too much!” I bark, a sudden, sharp laugh escaping me. I grab his thumb, the one he used to flip the switches. I don’t use the blade for this. I use a pair of rusted pliers I found in the maintenance closet.
Crunch.
The sound of the bone snapping is like dry kindling. Aris howls, his body convulsing against the needle in the wall. I don’t stop. I twist the pliers, peeling the nail back, then the skin, then the meat, until I’ve got the digit free.
I drop the pliers and slide the severed finger into my breast pocket, right next to my heart.
“I’ll keep that. For the biometric scanner. And for the memories.”
I turn back to his arm. I’m not just cutting now; I’m composing. I use the scalpel to peel back two flaps of skin, pinning them outward with smaller needles until his forearm looks like a pair of red, weeping wings.
“You see that? That’s my first installation. I call it The Physician’s Ascension.”
I move to his chest. I rip open his shirt, the buttons scattering like plastic teeth on the tiles. I start carving—slow, deliberate strokes. I’m not writing words. I’m drawing a map. The same map he burned into my retinas during the ‘sessions.’
“You used sex as a weapon with them, didn’t you?” I ask, my voice turning cold and flat. I drive the blade into his thigh, a deep, punishing thrust. “You liked the power. You liked the way they looked at you when they realised you were the only thing between them and the ‘treatments.’ You aren’t a doctor. You’re just a parasite in a lab coat.”
Aris is gurgling now, his lungs filling with fluid. He’s trying to beg, his mouth forming the word please over and over like a broken record.
“Don’t spoil the ending, Doc. We’re just getting to the good part.”
I take a handful of the Queen of Hearts cards and start sliding them into the incisions I’ve made in his chest. I tuck them under the skin, the white cardstock quickly soaking through with dark, venous blood. I arrange them in a fan across his ribs.
“Look at you,” I murmur, stepping back to admire the work. He’s pinned to the wall, his arms flayed intowings, his chest a bloody deck of cards, his hand a mangled wreck of bone and drywall. “You’re a masterpiece. You’re the most honest thing in this entire building.”
I lean in and lick a drop of blood off his chin. It tastes like copper and failure.
“You tried to turn me into a ghost, Aris. But you forgot one thing.” I lean toward the door of Cell 402, my eyes burning with a terrifying, ecstatic light. “Ghosts don’t just haunt. They eat.”
I turn away from him, leaving him to bleed out in his own ‘art gallery.’ I pull the severed finger from my pocket and hold it up to the scanner on Hallow’s door.
The light turns from red to green. Click.
“Ready for your close-up, Hallow?”
Chapter
Sixteen
HALLOW
The darkness has always been cold, but now it starts to burn.
I’m still pinned to the slab, a butterfly with its wings torn off, staring at the void where the door should be. The air in the room has changed—it’s thick, vibrating with a frequency that makes the marrow in my bones ache. The scent of peppermint and copper is so heavy I can feel it coating the back of my throat.
Click.
The sound of the lock disengaging is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s the snap of a neck. The crack of a whip.
The door doesn’t just open; it yields.
A flood of toxic green light spills into the room, cutting through the blackness like a jagged blade. It’s blinding. I squint, my eyes searing after months of nothingness, and that’s when I see him.
He’s framed in the doorway, a silhouette carved out of nightmare and neon. He’s tall, lean, and moves with a predatory grace that makes my heart stop and restart in a frantic, uneven rhythm. For a second, I’m sure he’s just another hallucination, a final gift from the ECT to keep me company while I die.
He steps into the room, and the green fog swirls around his boots like a loyal dog.
He’s wearing a coat the colour of a fresh bruise, the velvet stained with dark, wet streaks that can only be Aris. His hair is a wild, chaotic mess of ink-black strands, falling over eyes that burn with a terrifying, emerald heat. His face is pale—deadly pale—except for the smeared, jagged red of his mouth. It’s not a smile. It’s a wound.
