Ward Z, Still Open

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I press the edge of my phone beneath the table, thumbing the record slider with a little

more force than necessary.

The overheads in the staff break room still bust with that bruised yellow hue every

old fluorescent tube humming a separate sire note, but no one seemed to care.

My own voice caught up first as I started the diary entry, fighting to keep everything

hashed.

The hospital at night breeds caution, and half the time, you can't tell if someone's

actually you've stropping or if it's just the boiler twisting pipe somewhere between

the walls.

First night shift at Linwood, I'm ermord.

My name is Ellen Ricciod, nurse newly transferred.

Someone says you get used to the quiet, but I think too much quiet is just another kind

of noise.

The phone's microphone glowed back, remorseless and stirring.

My reflection pale, hair twisted up beneath the fabric, capped almost almost as tired

as I felt.

I painted on that diet smile the day shift nurse's use, but he had only exaggerated the wearing

its in my eyes.

A streak of movement in the corner, the night orderly, Sam shuffled past the big break room

window, crossing from the laundry alcove to the service elevator.

The souls of his shoe squeaked footsteps pacing over towels that had felt the scuff of thousands

before him.

Without thinking, I nodded to him through the glass.

He didn't look up.

Instead, he nearly collided with the radiator, then let the battered service cart rattle against

the dented doors.

There was something off about his posture, a hesitance behind a routine.

It hit me then the way the air always held an edge at Linwood.

Not just the institutional chill, or the familiar old cabbage sent that blonde in every city

hospital, but a chemical tan that wrote itself over everything.

The old antiseptic soaked into the drywall.

The ghost of distant hand soaps in industrial solvents.

It had a bite, a manufactured shop as you'd never really get used to unless you'd work

too many nights.

My shift was just beginning.

I checked my watch 1104.

The next round would be in 14 minutes, and I still wasn't fully convinced to remember

all the new security codes or the correct protocol for emergencies.

Everyone learns fast when mistakes might cost you a probation.

I closed the diary app, dropped my phone back in my bag, and shrugged into the first

set of scrubs Geeta had handed out a check-in.

The first rounds were a test.

Always are.

Anti-stretches shadowed the corridor outside, need to know a single file, half swallowed

by stacks of replacement bedding.

The floor was creaked relentlessly here, old timber bones at odds with all the 6-0 linoleum.

I move with measured steps along psychiatric east, my clipboard like a talisman.

The locked ward was a rabbit-worn.

Some holes branched and looped impossibly enough that the head-nuss gave every new stuff

a crude paper map in the warning, if you ever feel lost, follow the lines backward.

I thought it was a joke.

Later, it wouldn't be so funny.

Most patients slept through the first rounds.

There was one warder who was of reinforced doors with observations, lots and number plates,

barely big enough to peer through, no name plates.

Whisper forces blood from a couple, but others sat in silence as heavy as soon.

As I moved toward north quarters, a flick caught me off guard on the big window at the

far end.

Just a flush, like a figure moving in a patient room at the end of the row.

The thing was, room 21 down there was kept empty tonight, the record showed cleaning

after a transfer.

In the window's warp reflection, I caught a glimpse some small, jerking motion, more

movement than shadow.

I stopped trying to focus through the glare, but the hull seemed too quiet, my own pal

suddenly occupying the space where this should have been ambient noise.

The movement ceased as quickly as it had appeared.

I found myself half-raining forward listening.

The overhead flicker, but nothing else moved.

NMS, record, the voice-napped sharpened adult.

I spun to see no small cell coming up behind me on soft-sold shoes, clutching her own

clipboard.

Eyes hard.

I don't stop in that hole, please.

We moved briskly past these doors at night, putt-call.

She didn't half her smile.

She waved me down the corridor like I caused an infraction her presence dimmed as an

admonition.

I mumbled an apology, shuffled my steps to catch up, and together we worked the rest of

the round in efficient silence.

I don't know if still vibrating, I ducked into the staff locker room.

The light in there was faint, barely prying the night's severity from the steel cabinets

lining the wall.

I reached for my assigned locker number 13, which made me roll my eyes and stop short.

Carved into the chip, blue paint small, and neat but unmissakable was a looping, nearly

endless spiral.

It was like a child's attempt at a labyrinth, but there was a wrongness to it, the inward

curve was off, jagged in places, the lines almost vibrating out of parallel.

My heart thudded.

I could swear nothing was there when I'd started my shift.

Fingered trembling, I raised my phone, snapped a picture, and only then did I realise

I'd held my breath.

The brake room back lit itself now, with dawn's chalky light.

I couldn't shake the memory of the shape, even as I changed double checking the code

in the locker like a talisman against the unknown.

The shape lingered, burned into memory, a faint, queasy ache in the back of my mind.

I made my way to the car as day shift wandered in, most of them nodding in that glaze morning

way, as if the two had learned not to expect answers by daylight.

That was Linwood, some doors were meant for opening, some questions for asking.

But the night was only beginning to reveal how much it wanted to keep.

By noon, the curtain pulled back just a little, sunlight in the maple outside my rental,

the small mug of instant coffee in my hands.

It's warm-cented me.

The old city I'd left behind had run wild with adrenaline, but Linwood, in its summer

uniformity, posed a new test of nerves.

I pressed record again that afternoon, curling on my couch and throed bit pajamas, my voice

lower out of habit.

I'm trying to learn the ropes, I whispered.

A different world, not much for running codes, not unless someone's wandered, or the old

machinery goes haywire, I trade a gunshots for muttering, room and four alarms for locked

doors.

I paused picking at the elastic on my sleeve.

People say, like night shifts are slow, I want to believe that.

Even as I spoke, my mind flickered back Marcel's tone, sams evasive shuffle, the way the

air press closed in the halls.

Half the job here was reading what Wenton said.

The old gardenerces, orderlies, the regular's followed, so many it spoke in purge calls

that real policy just seemed like a suggestion after full-up.

For you trusted, which whole way to lock down first, where to story or snacks if you wanted

them to be there come morning.

When I'd arrive in Linwood, the HR manager half apologized, rural assignments are what

you make them.

At smile said I wanted quiet nights instead of iris.

I didn't mention that I'd lost a patient in a city knife, frenzy a kid, overdose 20 minutes

of CPR that still haunted me, I had the idea that this place would slow it down, offer

some peace.

But already beneath the ritual comp check vitals, swap sheets, take boxes I sensed how many

layers had naster stores.

Continuous lock checks weren't for sure.

There were at least four panic alarms before midnight.

Handwritten incident logs crowded the med cup.

And every day, someone would mutter about the overalls, spoke in the way Catholics cross

themselves and consciously walking by graveyard.

Linwood psychiatric stood just at the edge of the city, buffered by we choked parking lots

in ancient, windblown trees.

The main blocks like yeast had its own personality, walls painted in pastel struts that had faded

over decades, linoleum cracked and spiderwebs, the shine dull to exhaustion.

The glass in the outer doors was half a peak, bent by years of temperature change and rough

cleaning.

Security came second only to medication pass codes on everything, especially in the lock

corridor.

Beds on the side were always full, the records always odd and access strict enough that the

day shift knew better than to get creative.

I quickly learned what the others did by habit.

Always parked beneath the camera.

Never take out trash alone aftertree.

Refuse night desk assignments if you value sleep.

There were places a segment of southwest corridor in the infamous fire wing west half paired

up, ice shifting as if expecting the walls to whisper.

It was Nurse Marcella who introduced herself with a warning.

We crossed in the med room that second evening, her hand resting far to top her notebook.

Her eyes betrayed censures of lost rest.

You'll do fine if you stay inside the lines, Marcella offered, weighing each syllable,

then glancing over her shoulder.

Trust routine, don't trust the clocks, she added in a low voice, her accent thickening

with fatigue.

I tried for lightness, someone said the walls have ears here, I get it places ancient.

She didn't smile.

The halls keep quiet, don't push on schedule, don't ask for overtime, either.

Later, during afternoon group, I met Ms. S. Belacore to patients so long tenet her

file reached inches thick.

She sat on the edge of her seat, fussing with the stack of drawing pads, obsessively

repeating the same looping patterns and pencil, then ink.

Not quite identical each time a spiral here, a labyrinth there, lines crossing in frame

permutations.

She didn't speak much, only murmured, it takes all night to find the way.

The orderly, Kevin, nearby, had his own fixations cursing beneath his breath about a broken light

which in the old south hallway, as if the wiring itself offended him.

Half-custom spun their own wet.

At shift overlap, they no-skied appeared a woman in crisp cotton and unswerving posture.

At first, she seemed friendly enough, eager to run through med-pass and etiquette but

something always tricked her to smile.

During a hand-off, I mentioned how, during orientation, they showed a supply stored in

the old east wing.

Heed a smile stiffened fingers creasing her chart.

That's not correct, that storage causes always been locked, the east wing hallway you

mean the side with the admin copy that's been sealed years now.

She changed the subject, first can instructive for correcting my details with the decisiveness

of someone editing a map on the fly.

I compared notes later with Kevin.

Wasn't the east whole storage open last week?

He was cleaning up after a spill, his voice distracted.

But I don't know what you're remembering, I just do lights, ask Marcel out, she's

night queen, that wing gives me hives.

Every road telling sharp and my suspicion, either my orientation had been a farce, or

the hospital's memory was shifting beneath my feet.

On my third night shift, I was barely halfway through the rounds before I found myself moving

with an anxious edge.

The spiral on my locker, always there in the background of my mind, pals with new meaning.

I couldn't shake the sense that everyone but me knew how not to step on its secret, whatever

it was.

But routine was comfort.

Mid pass, rounds checked doors repeat.

I signed on to the shift at 10.57, letting the ceremony wash the tension from my hands.

By 11.50, I checked patient 7, I knew admit, recently transferred marked present quiet.

At midnight, I looped back, reading off the names, poking my head into the small rectangle

of their door's viewing slot.

Patient 7 lay still to still.

I stepped inside, careful, joining Kevin, who hovered uncertainly at the threshold.

The bedsheets bowled in a cocoon, one hand visible, fingers tied around a shredded

piece of paper.

It's what slick the patient's hair lit cracking.

Eyes open but glazed, not seeing.

Hey, I said gently, can you hear me?

No blink, no muscle twitch.

Moss ale came in, already snapping on gloves, and together we tried to rouse him.

Silent.

I pride the paper from stiff fingers.

A spiral scrolled across a thick, almost dug into the page, lines jagged and feverish.

My heart hammered, it was the same motif from my locker, from assess bell courts in

the sketching, twisted again, some new, menacing variation.

Mussella hustled to call the code.

Kevin backed out, eyes bulging.

The emergency team came in respiratory check, vitals, quick fire questions, barked orders.

Patient 7 snapped out of it by degrees sudden muscle jerks, guttural gasps, vaguenste.

The uncle psychiatrist, Dr. Fagel, swiped the drawing from my glove, barely glancing

at me, just another obsession, he said, dismissive sliding the paper into his folder.

Then turning to the rest of the staff, nothing to see here, give them some space, Ellen,

rounds please.

His tone ended the discussion.

The others filed out, orderly's offering muttered commissarations.

I stood a moment longer, swallowing against the oily taste of adrenaline.

Later that night, unable to let go of the incident, I made my way to the security window

behind the nurses station.

The hospital, for all its ancient quirks, had a camera on most corners now except, apparently,

the ones you need most.

I asked the night IT tech a rump up man with tired eyes in the posture of a defrock priest

if I could review footage from hallway B for the last 48 hours, just the loop near patient

7's room.

Corrupted files, he shrugged barely sympathetic.

Maintenance draws water through that wing every few weeks, hasn't filmed clean since

Christmas, do you want incidental logs, check the old binder.

I caught the glimmer of rye amusement behind his glasses, as though this kind of request

belonged yet another gym new nurse.

On my way back, Marcel pulled me aside by the wrist, not quite meeting my gaze.

She flexed her notepad onto the desk.

There, on the back cover, the outline of the spiral, inked and half smeared, pain obvious

in every mark.

Don't start looking into things at night, Alan.

Marcel's instructions were not a threat, but neither were they advice.

He asked too many questions, everyone here loses, he won days, or you won out.

I didn't answer.

I couldn't not with her hand pressing so hard onto the notepad as if it was stopping

the world from spinning out.

Something here, her teeth.

Dispunned by on ritual and repetition.

Silt, I found ways to prove the boundaries of what felt wrong.

My own shits were an exercise in curiosity to disguise this compliance.

Every drawer, every supply closet, every odd shuffle of the schedule, all catalogued in

the margins of my official diary.

I started with incident logs.

The newer ones had gaps, reductions, repeated entries.

Sleepwalking, one-logged event read, no follow-up.

Another patient chanting, spiral pat and removed materials, no further issue.

But the nights that interested me most were the ones no one ever spoke about, overlapping

events, discrepancies in medication counts, missing times on handover forms.

The night shift nurse before me, Janice, had apparently left abruptly midweek for personal

reasons.

No one spoke of her, but the staff lounge still had her photo-a-thumbtatt by the scheduling

board.

Routine late, I found myself pausing in the halls, eavesdropping on the ebb and flow of

nighttime routine.

Several patients, including the sass bellicote in a couple of new admissions, had begun

using odd, formulaic phrases.

The door is open but never seen, you must turn and turn.

The spiral ends, spiral out, still nowhere found.

If I asked about meaning, the patients would simply glance away or repeat the line,

delied.

The staff waved it off, you know how they pick up on each other, one starts, others copy,

it's like a virus.

But it was more than mimicry.

I started wicking new dawn to catch off patterns and shift looks whole-ires missing,

not even accounted for by standard rounding.

The cello met my questions with stony silence, her eyes growing more nervous the more I

probed.

My brick came, I've all places, in the little used wreckage room, down behind not storage.

The key was supposed to live in a locked drawer at the main desk, but I found a spare on

my cello's ring, pocketed during a chaotic med pass.

The door's dark, reluctant from decades of neglect, but after jimming it with the patients

abandoned comb less criminal than it sounds, more desperate I squeezed inside.

The file cabinet stretched from floor to warp ceiling.

This lent everything all char covers, co-op blueprints, boxes with faded red and tn

maintenance labels.

Of the dozens of cabinets, one was padlocked, the kind used before it were okay.

In another life, I'd learned how to slip tension ventures into doll locks, too many supply

rooms in the E.R. left jammed in a state of semi-disaster.

A couple of clicks and a shum of steel later, the lock snapped open.

My palms sweated as this lid opened the bottom drawer.

Inside, patient records, crudely trimmed and incomplete.

Tucked them on, the charts were folded, building plans, diagrams of the hospital, but not

the layout I'd memorised.

These plans had labels I didn't recognise, extracurridors, observation suites, and, on several

penciled overlays, a statement labeled only as wardsy.

Careless notes was gold in the margins, misplaced nights, ongoing, it its don't track see

Dr. F must check with admin lists diffused by four.

There were dates in the hospital locks for events that, as far as the current census

was concerned, never happened.

I found through the charts names and case numbers that might have belonged to ghosts because

no one in the falls or staff lists matched them.

But the more it poured through, the more it felt like the blueprints held the answer.

The geometry was wrong, doors marked in the maps missing in real life, lengths of corridor

too long compared to the walls.

Dests that bat onto brick, windows with no external equivalent.

I stood alone in the record room with the blueprints unfolded, with laying them onto my hand-drawn

sketches of the building.

Something was missing from the physical hospital a whole annex, perhaps, walled off and erased

even from day-to-day memory.

I pressed further, cornering other staff at shift-chained.

I asked Marcelo for that out, you ever work in wardsie.

She held my gaze with a mixture of bemusement and grief.

That maybe during probation, or was that West annexed for lines here of Blurry, Ellen?

Kevin, the orderly shrugged.

He mean the snake away by the supply closet, never heard of it.

Eda, more brosk, it's a myth, some new nurses bring it up every year.

There's always a map mix up with maintenance.

But sometimes, particularly in the small IOs over paper coffee, a staff member would

let slip a stray memory, back before the fire, wardsie held the bad risers.

Blackouts got us twice in a month, lost half the senses to admin transfer.

Or more cryptically, as he had patients some nights you wake up and they were gone, but

no one ever admits it.

Not a single account sink perfectly with another.

They argued over which months the corridor was open, or who was present during the rides.

A few clean rides at all were rumours, while others said, I was there the night all the

clubs stopped and Dr. Fagel locked himself in his office till dawn.

Marcelo confided in the late one night, during a covert smoke break by the real load

boarding bay.

She drumbled, clutching her lighter, voice barely a whisper.

Sometimes she confided, looking at the blue moth of distant lightning.

I lose IOs, wake up in utility or rec room, no memory of walking there.

Sometimes don't think me crazy, Ellen, I find the spiral, linked on my palms, then

I can't say if it's my deal or if it's someone else's.

She forced a laugh, but her mouth was thin with fear.

I stopped asking questions in 7, Linwood's the kind of job you do until it does you.

No one at Linwood, not even the lifers, on the whole story.

The play-slip side was each time you tried to pin it down.

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they grow.

It's cannabis you can trust, delivered discreetly, and ready to elevate your mood.

And because you're a listener, you get 20% off your first order.

Just head to mood.com, that's m-o-o-d.com, to get started.

It was early morning at the end of my next shift, eyes dull from sleeplessness, when

I returned to collect my back and spotted the note folded inside my locker.

For a moment, in a trot gray light of the windowless room, I thought I'd imagined it

a square of printer paper, deeply scored with pen, almost torn through.

I fished it out.

On the front, the words spiral backwards, room 23, for 13 am.

There was no signature, just a scratchy error.

The spiral was rough, had drawn on the bottom, but reversed to mirror written, almost.

I looked at the clock.

357.

I had time.

With the whole leading to room 23 was half lit, the kind of area you'd avoid at night

unless you genuinely wanted to get in trouble.

Still, following the note, I double back along the north corridor, tipped towing past

the heavy door labelled 23, it's window blacked out with tape, no name, just appealing

plastic tack.

The knobs stuck.

My badge didn't open the door, but sum out with the last push, something gave a gritty

metal on metal scrape.

Inside, the air was close and stagnant, window pains not just blacked out but covered from

the outside, daylight leaking around the edges in watery gray.

Inside, sitting on the ancient mattress, three things, a slip of yellow paper, a half-burned

Polaroid photo, and slumped over the corner of the bed, a medical bracelet.

The bracelet caught my eye because the name on it was mine, Helen Ricard, with a barcode

biny.

Data for admission was months ago before I'd started work at Lindwood.

My hands were hand-cold.

I didn't remember ever being hospitalized here.

I sat trembling, examining the Polaroid, a group shot of five staff in full hazmat suits

to their faces obscured behind smeared plastic.

The background was in a familiar ward wall swarmed with a spiral, painted floor to ceiling

in angry, looking red strokes, so large it seemed to swallow the figures entirely.

I stepped to the window, tempted to peel away the tape.

Sound on the far side was muted, muffled into stink voices echoing as if from underwater.

I found myself glancing back at the bracelet at the photo, the slip of paper now nearly

damp in my palm.

For a long moment, the room pressed close with the rungs of a place that should not exist.

The maps, the logs, haul the contradictory memories now I stood in a room banished from

the building plans.

I backed toward the door, fighting to steady my breath, and as I reached for the knob, my

hands began to tremble so hard I nearly dropped everything.

I did not look back as I slipped down the corridor, each step ringing like a warning

bell.

Down the hall, another shift changed, began feet moving briskly, old routines clipping

back into place.

But behind me, room 23 remained impossibly present as silent bruise on the building, a

question that refused to close.

My mind reeled at what I'd found.

On the hall, the world sounded off-slurred, doubled out of sync.

For a moment, I was sure I'd seen myself, reflected in a walt bit of security glass,

spiraling in the sleigh backwards.

And outside, the first slant of dawn caught the window, carving the spiral in light that

would not fade.

And outside, the first slant of dawn caught the window, carving the spiral in light that

would not fade.

Back in my car, that morning, I grit for steering wheel 2T, squinting against the rising sun

peaking above a derelict shopfront to cost from Lynn was back lot.

My postures to self and circles I could still feel the ridge of medical bracelet pressed

flat in my coat pocket as if it buzzed, insistent, and guilty.

Had I missed something in orientation?

Had my transfer paper or gardens scrambled?

My name slotted somewhere, it shouldn't be.

Was this some elaborate prank among nurses who's leaped to pride to be kind?

I thumbed the polar road.

It's dank faintly of burnt plastic and something heavier, reminding me uneasily of the chemical

center clonk to Lynn was walls each night.

That was impossible, of course.

I knew my own medical history by heart, my job evaluations, the psychiatrist's note

I'd grudge in is supplied for transfer after the city trauma.

The dates were wrong, but the handwriting on the bracelet, looping and angular seemed

awfully like my own.

Sleep alluded me as I tried to nap, the photo and bracelet laid out on my pillow as if

they might confess something and why I stared.

Instead, every time I let my eyes close, I saw waves of spirals expanding, tightening,

leading nowhere never quite symmetrical, always breaking pattern in some new, secret way.

When I finally rose again, the aches in my joints felt older than a single night shift

to count for.

My next shift started with a low, brutal tension.

Staff clustered tighter, hand off voices lowered.

A room of two patients fan-standing in the beds of dawn, humming without melody, hands

smeared with graphite.

None of them remembered why.

One, Mrs. Bellacourt, had torn free a single page of her sketchbook pressing it flat

to the window.

Gita was the one called to her room, she peeled the page away and for a moment forgot

to speak.

It matched the pattern on my own hand.

She confided during a lull, eyes wide in the fluorescent wash as if she barely trusted

her own memory.

I didn't mention room 23, or the medical bracelet, or the strange colorless world I glimpsed through

that tape darkened window.

Not yet.

I woke my rounds, I peeled for new fractures in the routine, half convinced I'd see another

impossible flash of movement when none should exist.

Finally, as the clock met 3 a.m. and the whole stills only the quiet, rattling events,

the scuff of rubber shoes on Delanoly and I stopped in the corridor near the east wing.

The spill stain map was still clutched in my coat pocket.

I peeled it open, tracing the faithfully blotted lines of wardsy.

The moth didn't add up, rooms looping on themselves, corners folding away from geometry.

I pressed against the wallware, on the old blueprints, a door should open, a door missing

from real life, seamless dry will extending unbroken, beneath the latest firecoat sign.

Nothing.

No give, no sign of contestant hinges or secret panels, just cold surface and silent echoes.

The hinded though, I could imagine the humidorman maybe, but patient.

The knowledge that I'd stirred minutes earlier in a room the current hospital did not

acknowledge made the silence even heavier.

When muscle caught me lingering near the wrong wall, her face paled.

He looking for something, where do you from head past regard?

Her tone had lost its clipped kindness.

I just I swear, the storage was here in orientation, I said, barely above a whisper.

She pressed her lips flat.

Don't trust the maps you're given, Ellen, look, don't hang around that section, I mean

it.

She fidgeted with the edges of her notepad.

After her thumb, lines of the spiral glimmered, as if pressed so hard they incited itself

into the pulp.

I nodded my mouth gone dry.

As we turned away, muscle caught my sleeve and, so softly, I almost didn't ear, muttered,

sometimes a place forgets how to close, Ellen, don't dig, Lynn would only half remembers

its best when we do the same.

My resolve hardened in the iron that followed.

I doubled back during break, quietly cross-referencing, wart patient chart, I could stealthily

slip from records, empty slots and log books, vanish transfer patients, payroll sheaths

pain out to ID with no corresponding face on shift.

Every crosschic made my stomach tourist tighter the same handful of missing nights, the same

lull and camera footage, always cost near those redacted corners of the map.

It wasn't just patients who weren't missing.

The next real clue came from Gita.

After midnight caught in the act of relabeling the med fridge, she startled at my approach, her

hand trembling so much a bottle rolled off the shelf.

I don't buy it, I joked trying for levity.

She knelt to retrieve the bottle, then as she stood straight into backstaffer.

Did you ever work another place, Ellen, some hospitals, the bad ones they make up stores

to keep staff obedient, you ever noticed that here?

Maybe I allowed.

There's more than one version of Lynnwood, I think, why do the clocks never match?

She stared at the ticking office wall clock with wary skepticism.

Some nights it's an eye of slow, other nights half ahead emergency doors don't always click

shot on time during drills, it's like...

She trailed off, biting back whatever she'd wanted to say.

Like what?

I press keeping my tone low.

She stared down, her hands fussing nervously with an unopened suture pack.

Forget it, just it's not just patients who disappear, leave it, Ellen, please.

Her entreaty burnt into my mind a warning more fearful than dismissive.

I returned to the small liars with leaden feet, the back of my neck calling every time

and overhead duck rattled or a cold bell trolled where no patient was assigned.

I stopped trusting the ticking of my watch, the overhead screens, the time signatures and

the locks.

But the more I learned, the less any of it made sense.

According to supply manifests, the no-yam tiles for his e corridor were requisitioned

as recently as last year, and staff idea were reissued for wings no longer existing in

the public facing map.

Behind every lock closet was the possibility something lingered, covered over with dry paint,

and everyone the night techs, the other nurses, even the janitors had learned to look away.

One night, as I left after dawn, I surprised myself with just outside staff parking her face

gray and drawn.

She waited until my car dosed land, then turned her head sharply, scanning to see if anyone

else lingered nearby.

She'd get any more notes, she asked urgent but quiet.

Last night told me to spiral backwards for room 23.

My cell has uncovered her mouth, an old ring-glinting beneath Peru's looking knuckles.

That room's not listed, you know, not for years if you've been in it.

She broke off and rushed on, just if someone leaves you something, you burn it.

Don't keep those photos, that's how it spreads, please Ellen.

What spreads?

I demanded the pressure in my head rising.

My cell met my gaze fiercely.

If you start tracing the spiral, it traces you back.

I've seen people get lost in there, wake up with patterns all over them, not knowing

who put them, only it's dextaph too, we've all got missing eyes.

I've got these gaps, but...

You don't trade stores with the patient's Ellen, not unless you wander stores for want

to share yours.

Then she was off, weaving through parked cars, badge stuck into her sleeve, furnishing beneath

the skeletal maple trees by the curb.

At home, I found myself moving robotically through the day, changing sheets, setting coffee

to brew, but always, that spiral burned in my mind's eye.

I stared at my phone, intending to record another secret diary, only to find the last few

clips stuttering, fragments missing garbled starter, where my voice should have woven the threads

together.

One recording, dated earlier that week, now showed nothing but a blank black screen, a faint

one looping softly in the background.

I called and sick for one shift to just to give myself space to think, but by the time

night rolled on again, the anxiety of my own absence was worse than facing to hospital.

That's how the pattern keeps you, I realise, with every vanishing eye or uncorrupted scrap

of evidence, with every contradiction the staff offered, you get hungrier for documentation,

some proof against rewriting.

But Linwood devoured its own trails, scrub blogs, double-booked ID, patient lists transposed

a messy curse of that never quite matched from one form to the next.

The next week, storms walled along the horizon, scutting black clouds over the stacked, leaking

windows of the east side.

I came on shift late, the kind of late that draw sharp glares from Gita and resigned

sides from Kevin, who covered med pass in my absence.

The administrative office was dark.

I walked to Fagel's window glowed faintly, but every time I hovered near, he seemed

already gone, his name put a skew.

During rounds, I peered into the patient rooms again.

Patient seven refused to speak even when coaxed.

Blanket's clutch eyes locked her on a fixed point above the door.

The cessbell Accord, too, banded into her sketchbed, instead dragging the pencil and

slow, infinite ovals over the crusted edge of her bedside table never cross in the same

point twice, sometimes lost and trans even as a colter name.

A trimmer crawled up my spine, more and more staff watched out of the corners of their

eyes, huddling in pairs by the medicine fridge, careful not to linger along in any one room.

I caught Gita setting a small, jagged spiral she'd drawn in the condensation of her coffee

thermos.

When she noticed me stirring, she scrubbed it away hard to then, just as quickly, forgot

it ever existed.

Still, the blueprints burned in my pocket heavy as an accusation.

On break, I stepped up back and dialed city records from a pay for and scanning through

the static for any trace of Flynnwood's four plan approvals that's early renovation

records, anything.

City clerk was chosen exhausted.

She never had it on building records, she said, shuffling papers audibly over the line.

There's an old model Diannex closed in the seventies if it's there, it's not supposed

to be, sorry, can't help.

I thanked her hung up and let the receiver dangle quickly, the dial tone throbbing in my

ear a moment longer before I let myself back in.

That night ended, as too many did, in a locker room, peeling off my scrubs and running

a trembling finger over the spiral and gouges dug deeper into the blue paint of my locker.

Only now, the remorse, smaller spirals radiating out from the original, a family of walls feeding

each other's end of loops.

Sleep was a brief and comfortable fling, broken again and again by the memory of the

Polaroid.

I woke with the image of those hazmat suits pressed behind my eyelids, their faces obscured,

the spiral and the wall behind them covering everything.

The morning after, I found a thin envelope slid through my apartment mailbox.

Inside, a single page from a staff payroll report the lines blowed at the edges, but one

name I repeated twice in succession dated months apart.

Scribbled diagonally over it was that same spiral, this time penned in a hesitant child

like hand.

No return address, no other explanation.

As I held the envelope, the wind off the courtyard was all through the metal frame of

my door, and for a moment, distant, I thought I heard the low, confused murmur of the limo

tolls, the echo of rubbersolce chirping night after night.

The spiral's lines blurred, but its meaning persisted leading nowhere, yet always forward,

endlessly compounding.

He just hand shook as she dialed the five, but encurred for the staff room, the metal

number popped clicking sharp in the charge silence.

I stood with her in that unkind light, the Polaroid photo and medical bracelet heavy in my jacket,

convincing the drags of fear knowing at my patients.

Beneath the noise of nerves, deeper consequences began to surface.

Something had changed, something in fixable exposure had narrowed what have a safety the

old words patterns offered.

She glanced quickly through the glass to the hallway beyond, as if expecting keys and

footsteps to materialize, paged by what we'd found.

You brought it out?

Her whisper was barely audible.

I nodded at the action thickening the air between us.

The bracelets edge left to pale in detention on my palm.

It has my name on it.

The dates from before I started, there's more in room 23, none of it makes sense.

He depressed her lips together, blanching.

Ellen I warned you, I did, there are things we're not supposed to see.

She looked around, her eyes settling on the battered fridge and the hanging pale coats,

desperate for a foothold back into routine.

Muscella pushed the door open a moment later, hair down from the rain beginning spot her against

the hospital's grimey side-winders.

She caught our expressions in a heartbeat, her jaw-tensing even as her feet slid inside.

Were you both okay?

I nodded and sure.

Gita lingered, half folded, the tremor in her fingers and quiet.

In a corridor at the sounds of the hospital flattened out, the irregular half of distant

fence, the cold-belshrieking from somewhere behind the locked doors, the dry ringing of

another of a head page.

New stakes joined just below the surface.

I fell, for the first time since coming to Lynnwood properly exposed a force damped into

the smooth cycles the others had learned to accept.

We slumped at the little breakfast table, key to tucking her knees up, Muscella lowering

herself slowly beside us as if bracing for confession.

Ellen's found something Gita said, voiced then.

Enough for two of us to be in trouble now.

I slid the medical bracelet from my pocket, pushing it between us and the table with the

Polaroid.

Muscella started the image swallowing.

Her ham went compulsively to the note but at her hip.

Broome 23 has no chart, I'm armoured.

But it exists, the view from the windows all wrong, like you're somewhere else, and

this.

I indicated the bracelet, the Polaroid, and slid out the slip of paper someone left these

white.

Muscella's gaze found mine, fearful but honest.

Maybe it's a warning or it's an invitation.

Ellen, these things have a way of replicating bleeding through, you see it once, it's you

who keeps seeing it.

I don't think the hospital wants this piece is joined.

In the deep hush, the phone behind us crackled and died a burst of static, then nothing.

A code blue was called three doors down, fracturing the moment.

We shot the parade, moving as a knot required by duty to run, each of us clutching private

dread.

The brick room, with this bit of brightness, faded behind.

In the following iris, I watched a spiral in fact everyone touched by night.

There was nothing theoretical about the new stakes, no weight on no room 23, nothing left

and touched but evidence in my pocket.

We were adrift and protected.

The wars forgotten coroners had started to believe forward, nodding us tighter until

Linwood's unresolved design.

The hospitals rhythm spotted.

The ancient PA system delivered its garbled instructions and fits and starts.

One staff responded to privileges as normal, others moved with the mindless, algorithmic

march, there was thinner, more automatic.

When I next ran into Gita in the charting office, she was hunched over her heap of forums,

attention flickering madly between two versions of the same list.

I can't find records for last Tuesday night she muttered pointing.

Emissions mismatched by two, and look.

She hunched closer to me.

It is a supply I would draw signed with my name, but I was home by then, security bad

use, 40 minutes on account for this.

She stabbed at the printout.

It keeps happening.

Staff payrolled too many shifts, wrong names.

I offered laying out the sheet for my mailbox pointing out my own duplicated signature.

Gita grabbed my forearm who gripped desperate.

I have to show you something before anyone else sees, please, Ellen, we have to find out

what they're hiding in the old files.

We hustle to the dusty backstorage, weaving between new phases of replacement orderly, two

agency floaters, all chatty and oblivious.

Gita led me to a drawer in the forgotten chart room, unlocking it with trembling hands.

Inside, old, crease-mapped folded corner on corner, payroll slips.

Monthend absentee logs each marked by the pattern of gaps in double entries.

There never was a single march here without a week going unrecorded.

Her voice churked.

And all these spirals every incident ever report the force closed.

They show up again, every time a patient with staff member goes missing, it's like the

night itself opens a hole.

I drew close, examining the blueprints.

Sections mapped corridor leaps that, folded together, manufactured impossible angles.

Dates on the old logs didn't match staff rosters.

The more overlays I compared, the more holes opened up.

The ghost ward had boughed the heart of the building for months longer than official.

Meds inventories by every time cameras glitched.

Both patient and staff names scattered among these gaps disappeared and resurfaced years

after.

I found the sick press of memory to son at City E.R. patients lost to the chaos of admissions,

history scrambled by crisis and realized Linwood had built for getting into its bones.

Due to pressed an old memo into my hand a list of emergency protocols, names of code

responders from a right year prior.

At least three sorenames were circled marked off staff, their only signature at Tick and

Red and that relentless spiral.

I found my own name, slotted in the margin, fint and pencil and backwards.

The spiral's logic grew clearer, absorb, repeat, erase.

The hospital's memory, shifting beneath us, had room for all the patterns that would

not die.

Once then, the whole outside left alive, alarms blared in disincorrisse, isolating us with

shrieks and flickers of orange.

Over the PA, a clipped-force rasped, ward locked down, implements Minus 6, all staff to

save rooms, secure patients to wait for their instruction.

Mocelle's eyes caught mine in passing a silent, urgent plea to move together.

She and Gide grabbed the emergency keys, the hands visibly shaking.

We moved into the hall of the three of us steel by fear.

Cross the ward, staff scramble for order.

At half of them had gone rigid, frozen, stirring at nothing, mouths moving in spasms that

morphed into the same phrase spiral and spiral out the door's open button scene.

The patients were panicking, whaling, sumpflinging themselves into corners or scrolling with whatever

they could find to pens, marker, bitton and finger to have sinned to the fabric of their

own sleeves and onto the tiling.

I swept and said Spellacourt offered bed, the older woman muttering and raking invisible

line to cross my scrub sleeve.

It takes all night to turn and turn, turn and turn.

Provoisa dry, cycling, frenedy.

Kevin Burrell toward the chaos, snapping, get them out of here, self-closets aren't

locking.

I shoved open the first isolation door, guiding patients inside, and had Mocelle yelling

three beds down her breath high with panic.

Deed around the panic bar on the fire door, but it groaned and stuck.

Eln.

Mocelle shouted, foist muffled by the shrill of another alarm.

We have to use the elevator, everything else is blocked.

I corralled the last of the mobile patients and hustled after them.

The elevators out of order light blinked, sudden, and urgent.

But Mocelle's badge pressed twice with feverish calculation elisted a shutter and the doors

jerked open.

As was squeezed in, I caught a glimpse behind us, docked a figal and two of the orderlies,

eyes dark, faces waxy, huddled at the far end of the corridor.

The posture didn't register at first, but the longer I watched, the more wrong they

seemed, half swallowed by shadow, let's pull into thin lines as if they were reciting

an oath.

We dropped to the sub-basement, each floor crawling past with glacier pacing.

For us, and strobed overhead, painting my companion's drawn faces in a sickly light.

Peter Grimmis pushing us forward.

The out-of-use corridor, itch with storage boxes and crumpled forms, was cold and still

the only illumination from a lone flickering fixture.

But the blueprints in my mind mad the perfectly here, the walls that insturbed all doors outlining

grey paint, the air stagnant with the hush of withheld history.

Keep moving.

Mocelle hissed.

It's the only shot.

At the far end, a door hung slightly a jar of one I'd crossed off earlier in my mental

inventory, convinced it opened to nowhere.

Inside, a spill of yellow and light over stack beds, canvas struts dangling, walls lined

with endless walls spiral patterns wash and streaks, digits, plots, and faded red pigment.

Here, and this preserved time capsule, every mechanism demanded attention.

Plaster flaked in lino scaps, the floor warped in soft gradients, the spiral motif grafted

onto every available surface.

The beds looked slept in, vandalized with the endless turn.

I scanned for evidence heart-wrapping.

Old low-books lay open on one desk, entered its skipping weeks, then years.

I moved to the far corner and found another polarode the staff in hazmat suits, but now

the positioning was subtly altered.

The spiral behind them was wet as if fresh when the photos snapped.

On an adjacent table, scattered files were opened to pages in my handwriting lists of

medication, behavior codes, date, and signatures.

At the bottom of one, discharged to L and recurred a provisional, pending further assessment.

No memory of writing it, but the slant incurred match my own distinctive skirt.

More pages, entries repetitive and looping, recorded missing time, disoriented staff, patients

transferred for persistent patterning.

Marcella's gasp shook me from the pages.

This, this is all of us, look.

She pointed.

There.

She traced a finger over her name and gaites, both matched against lists of codes by

all responders.

I leaf-frontically through the sheets a complete register of staff who had filled holes

in record and memory, shuffled between documented and erased.

Her rattle at the corridor made us freeze.

Dr. Fagel entered, posture oddly hunched, as gaze blank as marble.

He closed the distance fast, eyes sliding over us as if he'd expected to find us here,

and began speaking in a cadence that felt near the natural nor fully within his control.

Ellen Ricard, he intoned, voice horse, you do not belong here.

This is only a pattern, the failed pattern, but it must be contained.

The records are only anchors.

This is not real, but it cannot be allowed to propagate.

His eyes flick to the polaroids.

Give him to me, he must stop spreading the sequence.

His hands were trembling, a loaded syringe half revealed in his palm.

He advanced, muttering under his breath, the patching must be closed, turn and turn,

and nothing returns.

Hanuk rose in me, everything slowed.

Morsella wedged herself between us.

Fagel there are witnesses now, this ends.

He lost at her, but his movement slag, each gesture fractured Mario and its lurch.

He squeezed the plunger, the needle catching a stray beam of flickering light.

Acrash the nearest panic alarm, the harsh mechanical will detonating through the ward.

Fagel's face flickered in violence and confusion the effort to maintain the mask.

He lunged.

I ducked, seized a loose spiral bound the notebook from the table and held it at his shoulder.

Fagel staggered, the loaded syringe scattering onto the floor.

A cluster of footsteps thundered in the hull.

Morsella pulled me backward.

Gida, half-solving, downed her emergency badge against the wall unit.

The alarm split to quite wide open, and then the corridor exploded in a dozen-bottom security,

medics, two cops, all uncertain, startled, shedding orders.

Fagel felt his knees, the comb of hair separating along the line of sweat on his bra.

He muttered, containment, containment, in a shuddering, salatic monotone.

The polaroid spilled from my pocket as I lurched clear, scattering at my feet.

I scrambled to gather them, the imprints of spirals refracting endlessly in plastic

glare.

Hands gripped my arms, rough and real, yanking me out from the press of bodice and looming

walls.

For a wild moment, a feared berthrescue and further exposure either one felt like a

brazier.

Lights strode in the corridor, bright ones sweeping away patterns.

Fuzz's bark orders, clipped and official, ever-cillable suck the cereal back toward plausible

disaster of act-fan quarantine and off-book transfer.

There was no time to plead.

A pair of ENT bracketed me by the elbows, pushing me toward the fire-stairs.

Down in the ambulance bay, I collapsed onto a bench, shivering in a cold blood through

my skin to the bone.

Administrators appeared, faceless and brisk, in their ordinary suits.

They barked at the more junior responders, cut off nurse's explanations mid-sentence,

and for anything fragile could be spoken aloud, promised an immediate and thorough internal

review.

No one of rest is spirals, the missing iris, the gap-toothed history.

It was as if uncovering the pattern only reinforced its erasure.

Later, at home, I found my days blurring and fitmenting.

Administrative leave came with the warning, rest, recover, we don't want to lose good

staff distress.

I hitched to cleanse the notebooks to Colmassella to find a patient looks that connected everything.

My phones recordings from the hospital were mostly gone, digital files rusted and broken

just one, a chaos of hissing static in my voice tampering, too many names, too many nights.

The evidence I clung to the Polaroid, the bracelet, the odd logs seemed less solid in

daily.

Sometimes I worked to find I'd been tracing spirals into my own bedside pad.

Sometimes I'd find my badge on the kitchen counter, though I hadn't touched it in days.

Marcel called once for her own voice-roan thready.

They've moved me to Nights at another unit, waiting for an interview.

Everything makes sense anymore, Ellen, I keep seeing the spiral if I close my eyes if

you need burn the nose.

The hospital hushed up everything public.

News releases sighted a staff of reaction to a swollen overnight incident.

Several staff including Gita, Marcella, and myself were placed on leave, patient seven

and others transferred out once more.

The word, so recently bustling with black uniformed responders, shuttered and silent, was

white from the schedule.

No one called me for debriefing.

No record showed codes men as six had ever been implemented.

I understood, more than before, what Marcella meant about not pushing the pattern.

Linnotes' appetite was methoded to viral questions, not just answers, leaving people

unsorted, memories hyperactive at best, missing at worst.

In a pocket cross from my apartment three months later, Marcella found me again drawn

intense and new tiredness in her eyes I recognized too well.

She sat next to me on a chilled iron bench, hands jammed deep in her jacket pockets.

The trees, skeletal and indifferent, cast in shadows and the walk.

She pressed something brittle into my palm before standing.

If you come back, don't do it alone, her voice a whisper nearly gone in the wind.

I meant to stop her to return the gift, but she was already half way down the path, boots

turning up old leaves.

The slip was a foot-coupled polarage, one of many I'd seen five figures blurred by glass,

the spiral behind overwhelming every detail.

On its back, in jagged script, my own hand had written a date I did not remember and,

again, the spiral half-blurred into the marginal white.

I set my jaw, feeling my chest jump.

Before sloping the photo into my cup pocket, I noticed an outline on my palm, my own

pen stroke, looping an infinite, caught there in grey black.

Even when I wash, it stayed.

That night, before sleep, I opened my notebook, paging through entries I could not recall

writing.

The spiral appeared that to a signature, an incantation, a record kept for someone who

already knew the story.

I dumped a blank page and pressed record one last time.

My voice, tinny and uncertain, cut a line out of the dark.

I don't know if I'm awake or dreaming, sometimes I turn around in my house and see the

old ward at the corner, sometimes I think I never left it at all.

I paused, watching my own hand move, tracing the pattern up for a thousandth time.

I let the silence fill the room.

In that gap, as lights from the street cove slower, pale spirals in the wall, I leaned

the notebook closed and pressed my palm-flat feeling, beneath the paper at the fiendest,

most familiar trace.

And then I turned off the light, letting whatever remains slip quietly away.

And then I turned off the light, letting whatever remains slip quietly away.

Shires after that were like falling through soft and certain space, sunlight flat and

hard on the kitchen table, mail pushed through the slot, and hours to keep moving before

anything lost the fragile structure of habit.

My phone sat beside the sink, silent except for a drip-feet of blank calendar reminder set

before my leave.

Each one, another still to knock, end of net-shift, check in.

I ignored them hands raw from scoping.

For three days, I dare not touch the old evidence.

Even the bracelet flattened, nearly of them remained in a class all nightstand, shielded

by a stack of unfinished books.

Still, the spiral drifted in peripheral vision, puddle rings on the counter, the careless

coil overcharge a cord, a coal of hair in the drain.

At first, each occurrence hit was cold-shock, but soon I settled into a method.

I made tea.

I rootless until the ink stuttered.

I called my mother, who answered in the second ring, but spoke mercy about the weather happy

to keep the conversation in a movie.

Sleep fragmented, light-bought little comfort.

When I woke, I sometimes heard the echo of coalbells behind the walls, rubbersaw squeaking

just outside my clothes bedroom door.

I'd reach out for my phone half-expecting a page only to find silence.

The urge to return to Lynn recarved itself deep into my bones, not out of longing, but

out of unfinished business, the dread that the story had forced me to become its vessel.

On the fourth night, my blackout curtains failed to block the sharp, spinal streaks of a distant

patrol car's lights.

With each passing, red and blue sweat the edge of my notebook, illuminating the ghostly

imprint of patterns sketched during waking dreams.

In one margin, my own name appeared backwards, looped and slow, as though written underwater.

Beneath it the spiral again, a pattern not remembered from waking, but present, dense,

and familiar.

The world outside seemed too quiet, as so Lynn was commotion her blurred itself inward

across the city, sucking the noise from my block, the next, the next.

Shadows gathered in the hallway, but none crossed the threshold.

I held the slip-mossella had given me, fingers trembling as I flipped it over and over,

a plastic catching each tray ray of passing collied.

Each revolution felt predictive, as if one spun enough, the truth would simply unlined

the world's spooling outward then inward before settling in a final fatal resting place.

Each revolution felt predictive, as if one spun enough, the truth would simply unwind

of the world's spooling outward then inward before settling in a final fatal resting place.

The despiral never resolved.

It only folded in on itself, repeating variations.

During those days out in the world, I tried to anchor myself with routines, hoping the

weight of ordinary tasks could press the experience back into ground.

But there was a residue spread.

I would turn a corner and expect the lawn, humming corridor, see a face on the sidewalk

and sense, for a haunting moment or resemblance to someone who's tart had been corrected out

of existence.

Above all, I misleaped the real kind, unbroken by dreams of blueprints or the soundless,

sifting presence moving in the old locked ward.

Sometimes, on the edge of waking, there'd be the softest impression of a voice talk to

her.

Fagals perhaps, or my own, echoing a phrase nobody could quite explain, the pattern must

be close, turn and turn.

I checked in with Gita by text, her conversations fragmented tentative.

She sent simple questions.

Doing okay?

Any news?

Are you still drawing?

Nitor of us use the words viral, not once, as if naming it would recall the old logic

and pull us both back in.

Marsella, meanwhile, stayed away except for one cryptic message, and burning the old

notes tonight.

You should too.

The consequences of that final night at Linwood Thickened.

Press stories insisted the incident had been stress-reaction, no patient names, just staff

acting with excess caution.

I kept expecting some authority to call or visit to follow up to collect the bracelet,

the polaroids, the mismatched locks.

But no one did.

The records were a scab nobody wanted to pick at.

I caught myself almost wishing they would, just for closer.

And yet there were consequences, if not public, then deeply personal and persistent for all

of us.

I saw them most in my own behavior.

I would lose ten, twenty minutes without accounting for them a kind of drift like stepping

off a kerbontear.

Once, one searching for my cockies, I found myself in the stairwell, hand-braced on the

wall, halfway through tracing a tight spiral with my thumbnail in the dust.

Other nights, by the city hospital where I once worked, I'd hesitated the automatic doors,

some part of me reflexively bracing for access codes and security cameras that weren't

there.

The urge to revisit Linwood Nord at me.

With the word shuttered, and most of the staff scattered across new jobs or administrative

limbo, the building had receded into rumor.

It stayed close, supposedly for electrical repairs, all public records and conclusive about

a tree opening.

I checked the local forums and hospital news sites in secret.

Occasionally, a nightchiff nurse would mention mint and intracusean hauling out racks of

file boxes long after midnight, or complain about transfers lost in the system.

Officially, nothing had happened.

But I knew Marcelo was right.

The pattern lingered in muscle and mind.

I had to burn the evidence, she'd said, as if by destroying the external reminders we

might finally expunge what the hospital had written inside us.

I gathered what I had, setting it out in a circle of lamplight, medical bracelet, the remaining

polaroids, slips a scribbled paper.

Each relic sent my heart beating faster.

I flipped through the notebook inches in my own hand, and tie pages I had no conscious

memory of composing, lists of names, dates, notations like ENC cord and spiral event containment

breach, recit.

I hesitated over the polaroid that showed the warning in my script in the back, the reverse

spiral.

The faces in the photos still failed to resolve the glare and his evolved plastic seeming

almost to pulse when the lamplight hit it.

I stood at my own inflection in the glass half-aspect in to see those feature lists has

matte masks looking back.

Finally, shivering with an ease, I boxed it all, sealed the container with packing tape

and carried it in both arms to the building's shadowed garbage chute.

My hand lingered over the lit and sure, reluctant to part forever with proof, but desperate

for relief.

It was only then that I realized I'd forgotten a single polaroid on my desk the most recent

copy of my handwriting, date, unspiral.

I hesitated, studying that slip of photo paper.

My own name bled into the margin, half formed, the first he unfinished.

The urge to destroy it warbed with curiosity.

Instead, I tucked it back inside my notebooks cover, telling myself it was necessary to hold

onto one piece as a warning a personal record for a what had threatened to consume me.

After that night, the world quieted again, the notes and evidence no mostly beyond reach.

But I noticed each afternoon, a recipe that no practical destruction could eliminate.

This spiral's logic refracted everywhere, like cracks and gas.

One such afternoon, weeks later, I bumped into Guido at a cafe across from the University

Medical Library.

She looked older thinner.

We exchanged pleasantries, both careful not to brooch real topics with an ear shut of

other patrons.

When I asked how she was holding up, she just twisted a napkin around her finger and said,

it's fine now, they tell you to move on, that's what hospitals do.

Her tone, even as she smiled, made it clear it wasn't.

In the depths of her coffee, she traced a fingertip in a small unseen circle.

There were other reminders.

More than once, I'd enter a public building or a friend's apartment and feel a jolt

of disorientation and angle of corridor mismatch to the rest.

A door labelled 23 where none should be, occasionally a humming behind a wall that sounded

almost, but not quite, like a distant alarm.

I knew these were symptoms.

I tried not to let them accumulate meaning.

But every so often I'd find a sticky note on my own fridge, in my handwriting inscribed

with a tycole or a phrase-crip from Linus Knightley Mantras, the door is open but never seen.

If I allowed myself to spiral too tightly into the memory, something shifted in me, something

cold and recursive, as if the old ward had touched itself into my mental lines and waited

for an attention to open a corridor.

Every so often I'd catch myself, palm pressed harder into paper or countertop, drawing

absent-lipped while unhauled or searching for misplaced items in the house.

I read over all text messages from Masseller, noticing, in one, the tail end of a familiar

phrase bellowed by an accidental brush against the send button, turn and turn.

It was, in its unclostrophobic way, a new face-survivorship coloured by vigilance, shadowed

by the knowledge that the story had not ended, only recessed, always threatening to resume.

The fear, I think, is less dramatic than the lot ward itself.

It's the thin skin stretched over days that seemed normal until revealed otherwise.

I didn't return to Linwood, not physically.

But some part of me I could not help believe never left that night, still pacing corridors

that official maps never acknowledged, still watching reflected movement at the edge

of perception, still turning the spiral backwards.

After all, the memory of the place was not singular.

It belonged to any of us who had passed through it and tried futilely to catalog its contradictions,

only to see the record itself become a spiral turn and turn, the door forever closed,

the pattern broken.

That knowledge lingered longest of all, silent, and unaudurable, no matter how much light

you shone on it.

In the end, when sleep came, it was thick and repetitive, not restorative, but coloured

by the sense that the night had only just begun.

The wall moved on, as it always does, oblivious to the lost eye who was stacking up behind

the walls of places like Linwood, slow a crushing of stores that were never meant to be told

in full.

Yet in the quietest moments when a page was turned, or a hallway glimpsed in the dark,

beforehand, restless began once more to draw that an explicable curve of the pattern

endured, subtle, and and dying.

And as I closed my notebook, breath held on a whisper between waking and sleep, I pressed

my palm flat to the cover, feeling the faintest echo of the familiar, impossible spirals

during just beneath the skin.

As I closed my notebook, breath held on a whisper between waking and sleep, I pressed

my palm flat to the cover, feeling the faintest echo of that familiar, impossible spirals

during just beneath the skin.

Mornings took on a brittle, uncertain quality.

The steam rising from my cup scene to eddy and cold shapes, and ordinary no-routines

geese hoped in the nail, pills rattling in the bottle was somehow reordered, ever so

slightly.

The air in my apartment, too still, never quite warming enough, settled in my chest and

made me conscious of every exhale.

No news outlets called to ask about the crisis at Linwood, even my own calls to the hospital's

administration were met with polite, practiced, and different to that matter is under review,

Ellen.

We have no comment at this time.

It left me wondering what, if anything, I had managed to change by finding the war,

by sounding the alarm, even just by surviving the night.

I spent days wandering sometimes just to keep my mind from circling back on itself.

The cities, avenues, once brisk and purposeful under my feet, felt more like the long, curved

holes at Linwood, every intersection and echo of those backward places.

I'd circle a block, confuse, catching faint ripples of antiseptic as if the hospitals

airbled into the ordinary world.

Marcel attacks it only once more, the message clipped and tight still on leave, feeling

were on too many blank spaces, you.

I stared at her words, thumb hovering over the reply, but just sent, same, watch yourself.

After that, nothing.

No one from the rest of the night crew reached out again.

My own memories became slaughtered, disjointed.

I'd find myself searching to kitchen, hand-closing over nothing, unsure what I'd come for.

The spiral cropped up in my dreams as well, the line never quite closing, stretching thin

and infinite, room's looping too long before turning corners into shadow.

When I woke, certain I'd drawn again, I'd scrub at my hands, but nothing visible remained.

Still, a ghostly pressure lingered, a subtle ache below the skin as if thin, visible and

caddened faded at all.

One afternoon, sifting for a pile of junk mail, I found a hospital-invastated two months

prior.

It listed my name alongside a supply charge marked has Matt Discharge-Woodsey.

No way to dispute when I call Billing, a breathy and concern-click claimed, that's a legacy

item from a closed program, probably a mistake, we'll avoid it.

The spiral in the memo feel, though curling and sharp, a mistakeable refuse to be dismissed

so easily.

When I passed by Lynn Wood itself, curiosity flared hot, then retreated.

A new chain closed off the rear, stuffed lot, the glass doors pasted which cheaper temporarily

closed for repairs signs.

But cause old sedans, a transport van still idled in the lot late at night, light-winking

on inside the supposedly vacant holes.

It was always, precisely, the same vehicles, and precisely the same arrangement as if the

moment of evacuation had states suspended, failing to resolve.

More than anything, I kept thinking about the others.

In a cesspool call, patient seven, the one's transferred off-book, Kevin who disappeared

around final rounds and never answered messages what exactly had they remembered.

The stuff files had said nothing of master's charges.

Electronic notes, so meticulously kept, blinked out a few weeks later.

The code's minus six, the lockdown, punished from the system as if, by collective agreement,

the institution had decided none of it happened.

Heat is warning thud in my head, if you start tracing the spiral, it traces you back.

It was, I realized, less a threat and more in inevitability and organic phenomenon impossible

to halt even armed the truth.

On an early evening thick with humidity and cigarette ash, I drove across the city, restless

and unresolved.

A nod of sirens flustered at a distant overpass, but as I passed beneath, the radio spotted

static, a resonance like Linwood's alarms.

I switched it off, driving in silence.

I'd begun to distress not only memory, but the very evidence of my senses' echoes for

frames, repeated incidents, strafe phenomena bleeding from past to present.

That at home, a new habit to cold-froying, sometimes unconsciously, ungrows a real

list and pages destined for recycling.

The spiral grew more refined with practice always a little off-center, always incomplete.

With every loop of phrase would twist into mine, the door is open but never seen.

It felt less like a warning and more a mantra, language worn thin by repetition, its meanings

great to the bone.

A week after the police and medics had cleared us from Linwood, I'd pat the last ramman's

covered locks, the burnt edge polaroid, the final badge swiped print out in a cardboard

box and slid it beneath my bed.

But months later, something sharp in my chest said it wasn't enough.

I met Mocella, grey-skinned and brittle by chance at the Riverside Walkward City maintenance

fans idle in silence.

We didn't embrace.

We stood gazing across murky water, both avoiding the subject for several minutes.

Then, as if unable to bear the burden another moment, she pressed a crumpled slip of paper

into my palm, her gaze fixed on the water's rugged edge.

I can't keep it, she whispered.

If I do, I'll never get clean.

I thought it worked as if she might say more, but she only gave a tight shake of her head

and left before I could thank her argue with her.

On the scrap, a battered copy of the polaroid, reversed the five-mouth staff, the spiral,

the backward day.

Beneath that, my name, Fadley penciled the cove of the e-trailing into the shape itself.

At home, I studied it in the lamplight.

My own handwriting, but memories La Prairie refusing to pin down when, or why, I'd first

drawn it.

Did I make this spiral as warning, or as permission?

That night, the image is returned of force.

Doors closing and opening, forces echoing through a tunnel world, always reciting the

sequence turn and turn, and nothing returns.

In the morning, I woke up to cross the desk, pen streaks black up my palm, the notebooks

pages warped by sweat.

Something with a me shifted.

I decided I would not let silence be the last word.

Carefully, it gathered what I'd saved the traces, the impossible evidence, the patterns

themselves unpacked them into a manila envelope.

My pulse stumbled as I walked down to the convenience store at twilight and slid the

envelope into post-books addressed out in city records, historical anomaly.

Feudal, perhaps, but a gesture of fusel to keep the spiral wholly contained.

As the sky slumped from pink to navy, it sat on my steps, the city's noises as swelling

and receding.

It struck me that the world's continued and altered, then it was only closed, not erased.

Within those walls, the spiral persisted.

But outside, the iris felt longer, holding the future uncertain.

I'd look out at twilight and sea, for one fleeting second, the slight shimmer and

air at pivments, itch like a hallway you could almost, but not quite, step into.

That was a true aftermath.

Not so many closure, but a limping forward uncertain, maybe broken, but uncontained.

The spiral's logic ceded in daily motion, invisible and patient, until someday someone

else might trace it and begin again.

And so, in the still of night, I pressed record a final time, my voice soft and trembling.

If anyone hears this, remember not all closed doors are locked, some turn for a very quiet

and hungry, and some, you only open months.

As I whispered that, the low glow of street light played over my palm, revealing just beneath

the skin the first subtle ghost of the old pattern, the co-rising unbidden, etching

itself on bone and memory alike.