I SAW MY AUNT CAROL WALKING INTO THE HOSPITAL, BUT SHE DIED YEARS AGO.
The fluorescent lights hummed as I watched the orderly push my mother’s gurney past me. As they turned the corner into a dimly lit corridor, I saw her – a woman with Carol’s exact, distinctive limp, her hair the same impossible shade of faded auburn. My breath hitched, a sharp gasp in the quiet hallway. It absolutely couldn’t be her.
A faint, unsettling smell of antiseptic and old coffee hung thick in the air, making my stomach churn. My hands felt unnaturally cold, clammy, despite the sterile, almost stifling warmth of the hospital. I blinked hard, trying to clear the fuzzy edges from my vision, hoping it was just exhaustion.
She stopped abruptly at the waiting room entrance, her gaze sweeping the room with an unnerving intensity. Our eyes locked across the sterile white tiles. She froze, her lips barely moving. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said, her voice a low, raw, raspy whisper I’d never heard from her before.
A sudden, jarring vibration from my pocket made me jump – a text from my brother, completely oblivious to my shock: “Mom’s stable. Doctor needs to talk to us about the *other* thing.” The “other thing”… what *other* thing could possibly be worse than Mom collapsing?
Then Aunt Carol glanced down the hall and hissed, “He’s coming for you.”
👇 Full story continued in the comments…My blood turned to ice. He? Who was *he*? Before I could even formulate the question, a chilling gust of wind swept through the hallway, despite the closed doors and lack of windows. The lights flickered, threatening to plunge us into darkness. Aunt Carol’s face contorted in a grimace of fear, her eyes darting from me to the end of the corridor.
Footsteps echoed from the shadows, heavy and deliberate, growing louder with each passing second. They weren’t the rhythmic tread of a doctor or nurse; these were the footsteps of something else, something… wrong.
I wanted to scream, to run, but my feet felt rooted to the spot. My gaze was fixed on the approaching figure, a dark, indistinct shape that seemed to absorb the light around it. The scent of antiseptic intensified, now laced with something acrid, something that scraped against my throat.
Aunt Carol took a shaky step towards me, her hand outstretched. “Go,” she croaked. “Get out of here. Now.”
Then, the figure emerged from the shadows. It wasn’t a man, not in the traditional sense. It was a swirling mass of darkness, vaguely humanoid, with long, skeletal fingers that clawed at the air. Its face, if it even had one, was hidden by the gloom. It radiated an aura of pure, unadulterated malice.
Aunt Carol lunged forward, throwing herself in front of me. Her voice, a desperate rasp, filled the air. “Leave her alone! Take me instead!”
The dark figure paused, and then a chilling, echoing laugh reverberated through the hallway. It grabbed Aunt Carol, and a sickening, twisting sound filled the air. The hallway was suddenly quiet, and I was completely alone.
I finally found my legs and sprinted down the hallway, away from the waiting room, away from the approaching figure, away from the memory of Aunt Carol’s final, desperate act. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I had to escape the hospital, to get as far away from this place as possible.
Reaching the exit, I stumbled out into the bright sunlight. Gasping for breath, I fumbled with my phone, and dialed my brother. He answered immediately.
“Hey, how’s Mom?” I asked, my voice trembling.
“She’s fine,” he said, a little bit too cheerfully. “The doctor said she’ll pull through. But… we still need to talk about the other thing.”
My heart sank, and I whispered, “What’s the other thing?”
There was a pause, and then he said, “Well, the doctor thinks… that Mom has a visitor.”
I could hear his breath in my ear, but couldn’t hear the voice of my brother in the end.
I slowly hung up the phone.