Each raindrop that struck my face felt sharper than ice, cutting through skin like frozen blades. Battling against the bitter wind, I raced down a desolate road at nearly 90 kilometers per hour—my bike howling beneath me like it, too, sensed something was terribly wrong.
My destination?
Maryland Asylum.
The place where Vedika was being kept.
After two long months of relentless searching, chasing shadows and dead ends, I had finally found her. But I wasn’t just looking for Vedika... I was hunting the truth.
The truth that could unlock the secret buried in Michael Cemetery, a truth trapped for sixteen years—sealed away by time... and locked in Vedika’s shattered mind.
Two hours later, I arrived at Maryland Asylum.
Tucked away deep within a labyrinth of dense forests, the asylum stood isolated—about 50 kilometers from the city—sprawling over 2,000 eerie, forgotten acres. Towering walls, each a grim 10 feet high, wrapped the institution like the fortress of a cursed kingdom. Above them, rusted coils of five-foot barbed wire glistened menacingly under the rain, a silent warning: No one escapes from here.
Built nearly 112 years ago, the asylum itself felt like a relic cursed by time. Its blood-red stone walls, soaked by relentless rainfall, bled water as if the building itself were weeping—or worse, bleeding. God only knows how many cries, how many deathless screams, had echoed through these walls... only to be smothered into silence by the asylum's eternal gloom.
I parked my bike in front of the massive, iron-clad main gate. A security guard stepped forward, his posture rigid, his voice cutting through the rain like a blade.
"Who are you here to see? No visits allowed after dark."
“I was called by Dr. Nidhi,” I replied without hesitation.
His expression shifted instantly. With a mechanical nod, he unlatched the gate, but not without casting a sharp, questioning gaze at me. His eyes brimmed with unspoken suspicion, but I ignored it and stepped inside.
The air beyond the gate was heavier, suffocating.
Unlike a typical hospital, Maryland Asylum resembled a grim prison more than a place of healing. There were no sterile white corridors, no warm waiting areas. Instead, the halls were lined with barred doors and locked cells, each housing a soul lost to madness.
Every patient inside was entangled in their own twisted reality, living in a world invisible to the rest of us—a world that perhaps should remain unseen. Their eyes stared into the void, their mutterings echoing like forgotten chants from another realm.
And I... had just entered the heart of that nightmare.
I walked past the main hall, each footstep echoing louder than the last, and entered a narrow corridor cloaked in shadows. There stood Dr. Nidhi. She barely glanced at me before signaling to a nearby ward boy. He approached without a word, gave me a subtle nod, and said in a flat tone, “This way, sir.”
I followed him.
The elevator he led me to looked ancient—its rusted frame groaning as it descended into the hospital's third basement level. The further we went, the colder it became. And then, the doors opened.
What I saw felt like a scene ripped straight out of a horror film.
The corridor was suffocatingly dim. Only two flickering tube lights lined the ceiling—and one of them kept sputtering, as though gasping for its final breath. The shadows danced, lengthening and twitching unnaturally against the damp, moss-streaked walls.
The ward boy glanced up at the faulty light, muttering, “It’s dead again. No matter how many times I fix it... it always goes out. Maybe the patients here prefer the dark.”
His tone was flat, but his words felt far too real.
We kept walking.
Finally, we stopped at the end of the corridor—in front of Room 666.
A thick, rust-stained iron door stood like the mouth of a tomb. It had no handle, no modern lock, only a small, square viewing window covered in grime. It looked less like a room... more like a cell built to hold nightmares.
The ward boy turned to me. “I’ll be right back with a torch. Do not go inside,” he warned and disappeared down the hallway, swallowed by the darkness.
I scoffed under my breath, It’s not even open. Where would I go?
Ten minutes passed.
The hallway grew quieter... colder. The light overhead gave one final flicker—and died completely.
In the dead silence, I stepped closer to the door. Curious, I peeked through the filthy viewing window.
Pitch black. Utterly black, like looking into the throat of some ancient creature.
And then—I heard it.
A voice. Faint. Muffled. Repeating the same sentence in a broken whisper:
“He will take me...”
Over and over again.
I stepped back instinctively.
Suddenly—a presence behind me.
I spun around, and there stood the ward boy, unnervingly close.
“You scared the life out of me!” I snapped.
He stared at me, unblinking, and whispered,
“You don’t know what fear is... not yet.”
And at that exact moment, the iron door creaked open on its own.
I turned toward the door. Slowly, deliberately. My eyes darted to the handle—it hadn’t been touched. I looked back at the ward boy.
But he was gone.
Vanished. No footsteps. No sound. Just gone.
An icy breeze slithered out of the open doorway, coiling around my neck like a cold hand. The rusted hinges screamed as the door creaked wider. The whisper from inside grew louder, more frantic.
“He will take me... He will take me...”
I hesitated, then turned on my phone’s flashlight and aimed it inside.
No figure. Nobody. Nothing moved.
But the walls...
The walls were covered in it—scratched, carved, smeared in ink and possibly something worse...
“He will take me.”
Over and over. Hundreds of times.
The same phrase, crawling across every inch of that room’s walls like the cry of someone desperate to be remembered... or warning me to run.
Just then, a spine-chilling whisper crept into my ears—
“Welcome to hell…”
tartled, I turned around.
Standing there was a woman—or rather, something that only *looked* like a woman. She wasn’t human. Her eyes were sunken deep into their sockets, pitch-black like endless tunnels into darkness. Her face looked scorched, twisted by fire, and her tangled, wet hair clung to her face as if she had just crawled out of a well. Her lips were cracked, stitched at the corners like someone had tried to sew her silence... and now the stitches were coming undone.
Her body was covered in strange marks—some looked like old burns, others like claw wounds, and some symbols seemed not of this world, as though something beyond human understanding had branded her. Her fingers ended in long, jagged nails, scraping across the floor like the claws of a wild animal.
Then, without warning, she let out a blood-curdling scream—so loud, so sharp, it felt like ice had been poured down my spine. Blood began to stream from her eyes, and slowly... she moved toward me.
I couldn't move. My body was frozen, no longer mine. She came closer, until her face was just inches from mine. Her breath was cold and rotten as she whispered:
"I’ve waited for you… for years. And now, you’ll stay here… forever."
Suddenly, the walls around us began to tremble. The entire basement seemed to come alive. Rusty stretchers rolled by themselves, the hanging lights flickered and burst, and an eerie murmuring echoed all around—like whispers from the dead breathing in my ear.
And then—
“Sir! Sir, are you alright?”
A voice broke through the madness. Someone shook me hard. I blinked.
It was a ward boy, looking at me with concern.
“That girl… she was right here—she attacked me—” I stammered.
Before I could finish, he interrupted me.
“Sir, there's no girl here. It's Friday today… the day of the treatment.”
“Treatment? What treatment?” I asked, confused and trembling.
He looked at me with strange, almost knowing eyes.
"Come with me. You’ll understand soon enough.”
Still shaken, I followed him down a dim hallway toward the back of the basement. At the very end stood an old elevator—rusted, creaking, and reeking of mold. From inside, I heard a faint, heart-wrenching sob.
As the doors slowly slid open...
I saw her.
Not a girl.
Not human.
A figure melting into the shadows—distorted, twisted—but her eyes...
Her eyes were still watching me.
I stood before the ECT Room—Electroconvulsive Therapy, a name clinical enough to hide the torment it housed. But in simpler terms? It was the chamber where the mind was jolted with raw electricity, forcing sanity to crawl back from the brink—or be lost forever.
The ward boy gestured for me to wait outside and disappeared into the room, the heavy door groaning shut behind him. I leaned toward the narrow glass window inset into the door, my breath fogging up the pane as I strained to see inside.
And there she was.
A girl—lying stiffly on the steel-framed bed. Her face was obscured by tangled locks of hair, limp and wet like seaweed washed ashore. Her wrists and ankles were strapped down, leather belts buckled tight enough to bruise. She didn’t move, not even as the doctors gathered around her in silent consultation, their voices low, their expressions unreadable under the cold white lights.
Then it began.
To Be Continued...!!!