(Aarav's POV – First Person)
The night felt like it was breathing against my neck. Cold, shallow, and rhythmic — like the world had a pulse I could hear but not feel. I didn't remember walking here. The last thing I knew was the sound of the rain hammering against the window and then… silence. Now I stood before an abandoned building whose cracked sign read "St. Mercy's Asylum."
Mercy. The word itself was a cruel joke.
The front gate screeched as I pushed it open, the kind of sound that makes your teeth ache. The air was damp, heavy with the smell of mold and something metallic — blood, maybe. My flashlight flickered weakly as I stepped inside, casting long, nervous shadows across the hallway.
The entrance vanished behind me. Just… gone.
I swallowed hard and whispered to myself, "It's not real." But even my voice sounded distant, like it didn't belong to me anymore.
The walls were covered with scribbles — sentences repeating again and again:
> They never left.
They never forget.
We are still here.
I stopped walking when I realized something. Every time I blinked, the words rearranged themselves. The handwriting was mine.
The diary I'd been clutching since last night began to tremble. Its spine creaked like something alive. I hadn't written in it since that night — the night the voices began to whisper things I couldn't unhear.
I opened it.
Blank pages.
Then, slowly, one line appeared at the top in dark ink — fresh, wet, and crawling across the page as if it were thinking.
> "Welcome back home, Aarav."
A chill slithered through my spine.
Home.
I turned around, expecting to see the exit. Instead, there was a long corridor that hadn't been there before, lined with open doors. Light spilled faintly from one of them — a pulsating, dull amber glow like the last heartbeat of a dying sun.
I stepped toward it.
Each step felt heavier. The floorboards creaked as though something beneath them was trying to mirror me. My reflection in the broken glass panels no longer followed me perfectly — it lagged, blinked slower, and at one point, smiled before I did.
Inside the glowing room was a desk. On it, a patient file — worn, edges torn. The cover read:
> Patient ID: 47B – Aarav Malhotra
Diagnosis: Dissociative Psychosis with Cognitive Split
Admitted: March 18, 2022
My breath hitched.
The paper was dated today.
And worse — it had my signature at the bottom.
"No," I muttered, shaking my head. "No, I'm not—"
The diary snapped open again, its pages fluttering violently until they stopped at the middle. Words bled through the page as though written in something darker than ink:
> "You were never discharged."
The temperature dropped. My fingers numbed around the diary. The light bulb above me hissed, then burst, throwing the room into thick darkness. I lifted my flashlight again — and froze.
Someone was standing in the far corner of the room.
It was a tall, lean shadow — the shape of a man, maybe, but not quite. His head tilted, jerking slightly like a broken puppet. The sound that came from him wasn't speech — it was the tearing of fabric, slow and moist, like skin being peeled away from something beneath it.
"Who are you?" My voice cracked.
The figure stepped closer, and I saw its face — or rather, the lack of one. The skin where eyes and a mouth should've been was smooth, featureless, but shifting faintly — as if something was crawling underneath.
When it finally spoke, the voice wasn't coming from its mouth. It came from inside my head.
> "You called me when you forgot who you were."
My knees nearly gave out. "I didn't call you—"
> "You did. Every time you tried to remember, you invited me back."
The flashlight flickered, and suddenly, he was inches away. The air smelled like rot and burnt paper. He leaned in close enough for me to feel the cold radiating from him.
> "Do you want to see it?"
"See what?"
> "The truth."
He touched my temple with one long, jagged finger — and the world shattered.
I was on a hospital bed.
White walls. Blinding lights. A faint beeping from a monitor beside me.
My wrists were strapped down.
I turned my head, but the room seemed to bend, warping like a reflection in boiling water. My heart hammered against my ribs as I noticed my reflection in the observation glass.
It wasn't me.
He looked like me — same face, same eyes — but he was smiling, wide and serene. He mouthed something:
> "I told you not to come back."
Then everything dissolved again. The asylum's hallway returned, but this time, it was flooded — ankle-deep water reflecting the ceiling's flickering lights.
Dozens of patient files floated around me like paper graves. I picked one up. Each had my name. Each had a different diagnosis.
Schizophrenia.
Delusional disorder.
Dissociative identity disorder.
Every one of them signed — Aarav Malhotra.
The sound of sobbing echoed down the hallway — soft at first, then frantic, desperate. I followed it without thinking, the sound pulling me like a rope tied to my heart.
The door at the end of the corridor was marked WARD 0.
It shouldn't exist — every asylum had wards numbered from 1 upward.
When I pushed it open, I saw them.
Rows of patients strapped to chairs. Motionless. Head tilted down, murmuring the same sentence in perfect unison:
> "He will remember. He must remember."
Their voices bled into my ears, becoming a chant, a rhythm, a curse.
My flashlight dimmed — not from battery, but from something absorbing the light. The patients' heads turned toward me all at once.
And they all had my face.
I stumbled back, shaking, whispering "No, no, no…"
They started speaking together, perfectly synchronized:
> "You buried me."
"You killed the others."
"You wore their names like clothes."
"You are not the last one."
I screamed — I don't even remember what I said. I dropped the flashlight, and for a moment, the darkness was total. Then one of them stood up. The others followed. Their bodies cracked with each movement, bones rearranging like gears.
I ran.
The corridor stretched endlessly. My footsteps splashed through the shallow water, echoing like thunder. The chanting followed me, growing louder, overlapping into a maddening hum that burrowed into my skull.
When I reached the end of the hall, there was no exit — only a mirror.
My reflection smiled before I did.
Then it stepped out.
It grabbed me by the throat, slamming me against the wall. Its eyes were empty sockets, black and infinite.
> "I told you," it whispered, voice calm, almost loving. "You were never outside. You've been talking to the walls of your own mind."
The mirror cracked behind him, and through the fractures, I saw flashes — memories, maybe hallucinations. The burning hospital. The empty apartment. The diary pages screaming with ink.
He leaned in closer.
> "You killed them, Aarav. All of them. Every version that refused to remember."
My breath came out ragged. "You're lying."
> "Am I? Then why am I the one still standing?"
The mirror shattered, and suddenly I was falling — through rooms, through corridors, through whispers and screams that sounded like my own voice multiplied a thousand times.
I hit the ground hard. My flashlight rolled beside me, flickering. I was back in the patient's room again — the file still on the desk, my name still freshly written.
Only now, below "Diagnosis," a new line had been added:
> Subject now shows signs of full psychological merging. The delusion believes itself real.
The shadow stood behind me again — faceless, still, patient.
> "You see now?" it asked.
"You never left. The asylum isn't a place — it's you."
I stared at the diary in my hands. It was no longer empty. Every page was filled with the same line, written over and over until the ink bled through:
> "You can't wake up from a mind that never sleeps."
The walls began to ripple, folding inward like breathing skin. The lights dimmed to red. The air felt thick — alive. I tried to scream, but no sound came.
The shadow leaned close, whispering like it had all the time in the world.
> "You built this ward to hide what you did. Every scream, every tear, every lie you told yourself became a room here."
I dropped the diary. It sank into the floor like water.
Then I heard my mother's voice.
Soft, trembling, echoing somewhere deep within the walls.
> "Aarav, please wake up."
The words broke me. I clawed at the walls, shouting, begging — until the shadow touched my shoulder again. The world froze.
> "She's not calling you," it said.
"She's remembering you."
The light went out.