The number glared back at him—969—etched into the small, cold metal plate affixed to the center of the door. The digits were clean, sterile, and impersonal… yet they radiated a quiet finality that made his stomach twist.
Mansh stood there, unmoving, as though the corridor itself held him in place. The air felt different this close to the door—still and heavy, as if even the hospital walls were holding their breath.
His hand hovered just a few inches away from the handle, suspended in hesitation. The chrome metal shimmered faintly under the hallway lights, too polished, too cold. He could see the faint reflection of his own hand in it—shaky, pale, uncertain.
His fingertips twitched.
'Just touch it.'
'Just push.:
But his body refused for a second longer, nerves bristling with a strange, unplaceable tension. He could hear his own breathing now—slightly ragged from the run, echoing softly in his ears like waves crashing on a distant shore.
Finally, swallowing the lump rising in his throat, Mansh reached out and pressed down on the handle.
It gave way with a faint click.
The door creaked as it opened—not loud, but enough to send a ripple through the silence, like a stone dropped in still water.
He stepped inside.
And stopped.
The room greeted him with a stark, clinical emptiness.
The fluorescent light hummed overhead, casting pale shadows on the walls. The bed—neatly made—was unoccupied. The blanket was tucked in with mechanical precision, the pillow undented, untouched. Beside it, the monitor was silent, its screen blank. A plastic chair sat against the wall, pushed in, unused.
There was no one here.
No patient.
No noise.
Not even the subtle beeping of machinery.
Just… emptiness.
A hollow feeling expanded in Mansh's chest, flooding through him as the silence settled like dust around his shoes. He took a small step forward, as if expecting something to change the closer he got.
But nothing did.
The room stayed still.
Unmoving.
Undisturbed.
Uninhabited.
He stood in the center now, slowly turning in place, eyes scanning every detail—the chart clipped to the foot of the bed, the IV stand standing bare, the folded hospital gown hanging on the hook behind the door.
His lips parted slightly, as if to speak.
But no words came.
Only the soft, undeniable truth echoed in his mind:
'Ankhush is not here.'
The hospital room stood in stillness, wrapped in the sterile quiet unique to places where life and death routinely passed each other in the halls. Fluorescent light hummed faintly overhead, casting a pale, almost colorless glow across the floor and the unadorned walls.
Mansh stepped past the threshold with measured slowness, his breath shallow, caught halfway between anticipation and dread. His eyes moved immediately to the center of the room—and stopped.
There it was.
The bed.
Wide. White. Immaculately made, save for the subtle, human traces that told him it hadn't been empty for long. The sheet wasn't tight across the mattress the way the nurses usually left it—it was gently disturbed, bunched near the middle. Creases curved where someone had once laid. The pillow bore a hollowed shape, slightly sunken at its core, the invisible outline of a head still haunting its center.
But the space above it—
That was empty.
Completely, unnervingly, empty.
No soft rise and fall of a chest beneath the blanket.
No sound of quiet breathing.
No familiar, sleeping face.
No Ankhush.
Mansh didn't react right away.
His body refused to move, locked in place as though rooted to the white tile floor. Even his breathing seemed to hesitate—like his lungs were waiting for his mind to catch up.
The stillness of the room pressed in around him, a kind of silence that wasn't peaceful, but loud—too loud. Every second stretched like pulled thread, drawn tight with tension that refused to snap. He could hear the faint, steady ticking of the wall clock behind him, each tick carving through the silence like the slow drip of water in an empty cave.
His gaze remained fixed on the bed, but it had begun to blur. Not from the light. Not from movement. From something internal—
A kind of quiet panic crawling up from his gut, through his chest, into the base of his throat.
He wanted to call out.
To ask where his friend had gone.
But the words didn't come.
Instead, his eyes swept the room, slowly—painfully slowly—drinking in every tiny detail. The IV stand beside the bed, now bare. The heart monitor screen, dark and silent. A folded blanket on a nearby chair. A half-used box of tissues on the windowsill.
And then, nothing else.
He blinked once. Slowly.
His legs felt heavy, as if the gravity in the room had deepened. The air itself felt thick, unmoving. He didn't know how long he had been standing there—seconds? A full minute? Time had lost its meaning the moment the bed appeared empty.
And somewhere inside that stillness,
a single thought whispered.
'Ankhush is gone.'
But the whisper carried weight. A weight that pressed against his ribs and tightened around his spine. His mouth opened slightly, but only a shallow breath escaped.
The numbness came next.
A quiet flooding sensation, dull and paralyzing. It washed over his shoulders, down his arms, into his fingertips. He was aware of everything and nothing at the same time.
He could feel the cool air on his skin, hear the murmur of life from the hallway outside the room, see the sterile brightness of the walls—but they all felt distant. Disconnected. Like pieces of a puzzle that no longer fit together.
He took a step forward.
Just one.
The soft rubber of his shoes brushed against the floor with a sound that seemed too loud in the room's fragile quiet.
Still no movement.
Still no Ankhush.
Just the bed. The rumpled sheets. The silence.
And the rising question that twisted deep in his chest:
'Where had he gone?'
A chill—thin, spectral, and immediate—crept its way down the length of Mansh's spine, as if the very air in the room had shifted in temperature the moment he stepped inside. It wasn't the kind of cold one felt through skin alone; it settled deeper, threading through bone and marrow, coiling at the base of his neck like a phantom breath.
He swallowed, but his throat felt tight—too dry, too tense.
Still standing at the threshold, his fingers lightly touched the doorframe, steadying himself as his eyes scanned the space before him. Not hurriedly. Not yet. His gaze moved with a cautious, deliberate slowness, like a man surveying a scene he wasn't sure he wanted to understand.
His foot moved forward. Then the other.
The door closed behind him with a barely audible click, and suddenly the thin hum of the hospital corridor outside was cut off. Now, the room existed in its own kind of silence—one that felt unnatural. Not peaceful, but hollow. A silence that pressed inward from all sides, as though the walls themselves were listening.
Mansh's eyes darted toward the far corner by the window, then to the small, wheeled table tucked beside the bed, its surface bare except for a disposable water cup and a folded tissue. No discarded clothes. No phone. No personal effects. Nothing out of place.
Except—there was no one here.
His breath caught in his throat.
The hospital bed, its white metal frame sterile and impersonal, stood exactly where it always had—in the exact center of the room. The sheets were still mostly smooth, but the blanket showed signs of recent use: a soft dip in the mattress where someone had lain, the pillow slightly sunken, faint creases marking where a head had rested not long ago.
Yet now, that someone was gone.
Gone.
Mansh's thoughts began to spiral—gently at first, then faster, twisting tighter like a thread pulled too hard. Each possibility that formed in his mind carried with it a dozen questions, each more unsettling than the last.
His brows drew together, eyes narrowing.
'Was he discharged early?'
The question surfaced, but it felt brittle, fragile, like a leaf crumbling beneath his mental grasp.
His gaze dropped to the floor, searching for overlooked clues—footprints in the dust, a dropped wristband, anything to suggest that his friend had left under normal circumstances. But the sterile linoleum offered no answers.
No scuff marks.
No hurried exit.
No explanation.
His breathing had become shallower now, barely audible above the low mechanical whir of a distant machine somewhere beyond the walls.
'No…'
His inner voice was quieter now, almost resigned.
'It's too soon for discharge. Way too soon.'
Images flashed in his mind unbidden—Ankhush lying unconscious, bruised, bandaged, unmoving. The doctor's measured tone. "He'll need time… a few more days at the very least…"
So then—
'If it's too early… and he's not supposed to be gone yet…'
The thought twisted, darker this time.
Mansh could feel it slithering through the edges of his awareness like smoke, evasive but suffocating.
And then, like a final puzzle piece snapping into place, the realization struck with quiet violence.
'If the events from the novel… are happening faster than they should…'
His heart skipped a beat.
'Then he might have discharged early and gone to my house.'
The idea settled in his mind like a stone thrown into still water. It spread outward in waves—each one wider, heavier, louder. Not panic. Not yet. But urgency. And a terrible sense of inevitability.
He stood perfectly still now, barely breathing, his body tense and still as a hunted animal trying not to be seen. His eyes remained fixed on the bed, even though he knew there was nothing more to see.
He was no longer just in a hospital room. He was inside a moment that didn't belong to reality.
And something—he didn't know what—had just changed.
A knot of dread twisted tighter in his gut, curling like a serpent that had just awakened, writhing restlessly beneath his ribs.
The room—the sterile quiet, the neatly made bed, the glaring emptiness—seemed to press in around him, too still, too final. His breath, which had only just begun to steady after the frantic climb to the ninth floor, caught again—short and sharp in his throat, as if the very air had turned brittle.
His fingers trembled at his sides, no longer clenched, just… limp. Uncertain. Then, slowly, like a puppet whose strings had been tugged, he turned. The motion was stiff, mechanical.
His shoulder bumped gently against the doorframe as he exited, but he didn't notice.
The corridor stretched out before him in a clinical hush—rows of identical doors, white walls tinted with the cold hue of overhead fluorescent lighting, the faint murmur of distant conversations and the occasional hum of machines creating an eerie, low background noise. The rubber soles of his shoes whispered across the linoleum floor, a soft scuffing sound that echoed far louder in his mind.
His pace quickened. Each step felt heavier, his legs dragging against the pull of unease clawing at him from within.
The hallway felt longer than it had before, more like a tunnel narrowing around him. His eyes, wide and searching, flicked from door to door, passing signs and room numbers that blurred together into an incomprehensible stream.
When the corridor finally ended at the nurses' station, he didn't pause to gather himself. Didn't take a breath. He leaned forward over the counter, his palms slapping down a bit harder than intended on the cool, laminated surface. His chest rose and fell in ragged bursts, the air dry against his throat.
"Excuse me," he managed—too loud, too abrupt.
The receptionist startled.
She was a woman in her late forties, her hair pulled back into a taut bun that glistened faintly under the white light. Her glasses sat low on her nose, and she'd been flipping through a patient chart with casual concentration—until now.
The sound of his voice snapped her head up.
Her expression shifted from startled to wary concern in an instant as she took him in—sweat dampened at the collar of his shirt, eyes wide with something between urgency and fear, lips slightly parted as though more words were coming but he hadn't yet found them.
She blinked behind her lenses and straightened slowly, putting the clipboard aside with deliberate care.
"Yes?" she asked gently, her voice soft and professional, but with the slightest edge of caution. "Can I help you?"
"Where is the patient from room 969?" Mansh asked, the words pushing past his dry throat like gravel. "He's not in his bed. Was he… discharged?"
The question hung in the sterile air, trembling with urgency. His voice, though controlled, carried a tremor that betrayed the dread gnawing away at his composure. The fluorescent lights above buzzed faintly, flickering once—too brief to be obvious, but enough to make the stillness feel more oppressive.
The receptionist glanced up from her monitor with the sluggish reluctance of someone who had been interrupted one too many times in a long shift.
She was a woman in her forties, maybe fifties, her expression carved from stone, her skin pale beneath the artificial glow of the monitors. Her tired eyes, framed by faint crow's feet and the smudge of under-eye circles, lingered on Mansh's face a second longer than necessary—studying him, measuring his panic, quietly weighing whether this was an overreaction or something more.
She blinked slowly, almost deliberately, as though resetting her focus.
"One moment," she said at last, her voice even, carefully neutral.
Her hands moved to the keyboard—thin fingers with neatly trimmed nails, knuckles slightly swollen with age or fatigue—and she began to type. Each keystroke was a sharp tap in the quiet, echoing louder than it had any right to.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The rhythm was maddeningly methodical, like a slow heartbeat against the silence.
Mansh stood perfectly still, his palms pressed flat against the edge of the reception desk, the cool laminate biting into his skin.
His chest rose and fell with uneven breaths, each inhale drawing in the faint scent of antiseptic and something vaguely metallic beneath it—blood, maybe, or something that once was.
He could feel the sweat on his temples begin to cool, drying into a clammy film that clung to his skin. A single droplet crept slowly down the back of his neck, tracing a cold line beneath his collar.
The woman's eyes flicked back and forth across the monitor, scanning something on the screen. The pale glow of the interface reflected faintly in her glasses—lines of data scrolling, static and impersonal.
She didn't speak.
Her silence stretched into seconds. Then into more.
Mansh swallowed, the movement tight and painful. His mind filled the quiet with possibilities—none of them good.
The space behind his eyes throbbed with tension, and his fingers curled slightly over the edge of the desk, desperate to hold on to something solid.
Still, she said nothing.
Her brow furrowed. Just slightly.
And the knot in Mansh's stomach pulled tighter, as if her smallest expression had the weight of a verdict.
**
A/N: this chapter is a littel longer then my other chapters.
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