Behind the Mirror

Jason White sat at the foot of his girlfriend's bed bored out of his mind. It was the second day of her visit since the appendicitis and though she was sleeping soundly, she refused to let him leave her side.

A quick glance told him his vigil was nowhere near being done. The digital block's red block letters screamed 2:33 AM and it felt that they were as loud as the heat best monitor chirping by his side. The murmur of the night wafted through the sterilized air and was sucked in by the heavy curtain blocking people looking in.

Jason growled at himself for the war of his emotions. On one hand he knew he was doing the right thing staying with Nanette but his other side wanted to just go home and sleep. he had already lost two days of work and though the warehouse was fine with his medical emergency, he felt like he should have been there.

When the curtain was shoved back, Jason jumped. The willowy night nurse glided into the room with the unnatural chipper attitude for the hour.

“How are you doing, Mister White? anything I can get you?”

“I'm fine. Thanks.”

His tone was rough but before he could apologize, she continued her merry way. She took readings, fluffed the pillow and his then wished them all a safe evening as she glided back out.

Jason glanced at the angry clock. 2:35 AM.

Damn!

He could only take the quiet and the returning nurse a few more times before he had to get out of there. His legs ached and groaned, complaining about the inactivity and the horrible hard chairs.

An air conditioner rumbled to life dumping cold air on his t shirt and slacks.

I've got to take a walk.

Standing and mumbling a halfhearted excuse to his girlfriend who wasn’t even awake, Jason quickly left and entered the sterile, bland hallway.

The man looked both directions and was met with the same empty hallways with generic abstract paintings sparsely populating the walls. the smell of antiseptic and paint hung like a faint odor that was almost too difficult to detect.

I need a snack. I think I saw vending machines when we came in.

As he walked down the hall, it seemed his footsteps were rebounding off the walls in thunderous claps. Some of the sound waves made him wince in pain. A patient in one of the dark rooms moaned and for a second Jason thought he was responsible. It felt like forever before he got to the elevator.

Pushing the button a few times to make sure it was moving, he waited till the loud ding peeled through the hallway. Jason hopped in before anyone had a chance to look at him.

The ride down was slow and agonizing with the incessant droning of orchestra music and thrumming of the machine as it descended. The stained chrome doors finally opened letting him into the lobby.

For the most part, the lobby was empty with only a bored girl at the receiving station and a couple talking to each other in whispers while dressed in their PJs. The sneezing fit told Jason that it was the flu, and he should stay away.

The vending machine in all its neon glory was hidden around the corner and almost blinded the him as he came to it. Jason winced as he tried to make out the bottled liquid in bright colorful wrapping. The snack machine beside it was deafening with the choices available.

Can't anything be simple?

Swiping the credit card and grumbling about the loss of two bucks, Jason retrieved his 'Happy Cocoa bar' made with real chocolate and meandered back toward the elevator.

The wait for the elevator to return was excruciating but it finally arrived with an even louder ding. For the next minute, Jason fought with the wrapper and did not bother to look up when the elevator opened. He started walking finally giving in and ripping at it with his teeth.

It was the stench of death and decay that made him look up not to mention the agonizing scream that echoed down the now dirty and soiled walls of a hospital floor.

“What the hell!”

It was the grinding sound of the sliding doors closing that sent a trill of fear through his heart. Jason turned in time to see the last sliver of light vanish as the rust covered elevator door cramped shut.

Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Oh, shit!

Dropping the remains of his snack on the ground, Jason ran up to the door and pushed the button to call the elevator back. It got stuck in with all the dirt and grime and did not even light up. He gripped the dark sliver and heaved. He had to get out. The doors groaned but did not budge. After a few other unsuccessful attempts, he backed up and examined the impediment to his escape. It was like any other door he had seen except for the dark rust splattered along the front of it. He leaned closer, sniffing at the scent of iron and decay that wafted back. Was...was that blood?

Jason stepped back from the door with his heart pounding heavily in his chest. The lungs could not inflate quick enough to give him the air he needed. His throat gagged at the foul odor of rot and excrement that wafted around him. The confusion gripped his mind with questions of how and why he had gotten onto this floor or why this floor existed.

Forcing himself to calm his breathing, Jason closed his eyes and focused on the slow movements of his lungs fighting the Adrenalin urge to run any way he could. His heart rate began to descend into something comfortable and he focused on his other senses, trying to get a read on the world around him. His nose was still filled with the smell of sweet death and acrid decay while his ears picked up the smallest sounds of movement right out of reach. A few times, Jason thought he heard a moan or someone crying.

The warehouse worker opened his eyes slowly and began to slowly turn and get his bearings. The corridor he stood in was pretty much the same as the rest of the hospital except it looked as if the cleaning crew had never bothered to visit it. The linoleum was cracked and soiled while along the base boards, dirt hung in clumps where sickly looking plants were battling for survival. Spaced down the hallway past the closed doors were uncovered light bulbs that swayed minutely from non-existent wind. Jason gritted his teeth as they flickered. Near the end of the hallway the bulbs were burnt out and he could not make out the far end. About eight feet ahead, a empty nurse's station sat covered with papers and junk as if abandoned in haste.

This place is like something out of a frickin' horror movie, but those were not real, they could not be.

Jason White gritted his teeth and took a step forward toward the station. It seemed the only likely place that he could get some information. Each step seemed to echo throughout the corridor and the air around him seemed to protest his presence. Chills continued to run down through his body and spine like static electricity being constantly applied. Though he could not see anything, Jason knew that someone—or something was watching him.

Peering around the corner to see if anyone was hiding there, he saw the cubicle for where the on-call nurse would have sat but it was empty and the door to the break room was closed. Jason gingerly stepped out of the hallway and into the nurses' station. He attempted to brush off the chair that was covered in dust and mold, but it did not seem to help. The springs groaned in agony as he tried to sit down wincing as they complained.

The desk had what he expected, a computer which did not work no matter how many times he pressed the on-power button, and the papers were scattered all over the place. He grabbed a clip board and began to flip through the pages. Jason's heart began to beat faster as he focused on the words:

“It never ends. The suffering never ends. He was about exacting the most exquisite torture. He can see into your soul, your fear and exact vengeance for what you have done. Oh, God I can still hear the screams of those who I harmed. Their screams of vengeance just a little way from my ear. Oh, God in heaven, I can hear him coming down the hallway, the air is so oppressive, he cannot get me again but there is no way to die. The agony is—–”

The words ended with an uncomfortable dark stain that splattered the pages. Jason tossed it down on the table, his hands shaking. Where the hell was he?

A cold tingle flickered through his skin as Jason heard the door behind him click closed and a cold hand press on to his shoulder.

Terror sang through Jason's soul as the cold skin pressed against his neck sending shivers of horror through him. It took every bit of strength to pull himself out of the chair and paralysis and spin on his attacker. Instead of the ghoul his subconscious was expected, his eyes met the kind brown pair of a woman. She wore the outfit of a nurse though it seemed to be of an era from long ago. Her skin was slightly sallow and her hair silken but dry. It was the faint glow of blue light around her that sent his heart back into overdrive.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” her voice came to him melodic but off key like a CD player running out of batteries. “You're...you're real.”

That wasn't comforting.

“Yeah, I'm real. You're not.”

She shook her head in a slow, confused way. “No, I... I don't think so. I... I struggle to remember things in...in this place. I think I was real a long time ago.”

“Where the hell am I?”

“Hell...I think.”

Hell? In a way, that made sense. The dried blood, the sounds, the strange writings but that was all he had things he had felt and scene.

“You're...you're not dead.” the woman said reaching up to touch him again, but Jason recoiled. She quickly withdrew her hand in embarrassment.

“No, I'm not. I was at the hospital with my girlfriend, got a snack, and wound up in Hell. You know how to get out of here?”

Jason looked at her and she had a faraway look in her eyes.

Great, she's checked out.

He waved his hand in front of her face a few times, but she did not move or blink. She was a statue for all he knew.

“Forget it,” he muttered to himself and quickly left her standing in the nurse's station. There had to be a way out of this place. There was no way that this was Hell. He went up to the first door and peered in. He started at the face frozen in horror staring back at him. The man was curled up in a ball on an operating table that seemed to slowly list under the slightest movement. It almost appeared to be close to collapse. Jason's eyes were drawn to the floor where he realized it was moving. Millions of spiders moved about near the man as if waiting for him to fall in.

“That man tortured his patients about their phobias and made light of them,” the woman's voice spoke right be Jason's ear. He squeaked in fright as she seemed to appear right beside him.

“Don't do that!”

She did not seem to respond, she just continued to look through the window at the man trapped inside. “He felt that phobias and mental disorders were hoaxes that people used for excuses. Some of his patients took their lives and they were all his fault. The spiders enjoy people like this.”

Jason pressed his lips together and stepped away from the woman that slowly turned her hollow gaze on him. He bumped up against another door which elicited a muffled, shrill, scream that echoed down the halls. Jason spun around and stared at the two women hanging from nooses around their neck. They gagged and kicked spinning in slow circles trying to die.

“The sisters killed their patients they felt weren’t worth the time to heal. He especially hates those people.”

“Who’s he?” Jason asked but he was pretty sure he didn't want to know.

“He is the Doctor.”

“The...doctor.”

She motioned around her in the hellish world he found himself in. “This is his world. The world that punishes caretakers who swore and oath and violated it. He is the avenging angel for the voices that cried for help and were not heard. He is the Doctor.”

“So not a time traveler. Got it.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Carefully, Jason returned to the center of the corridor and looked both from the elevator to the black end he could not see. He quickly looked away as the darkness seemed to be staring back.

“So... what’s your name?”

“I was Martha.”

“Well, Martha. Do you know how I can get out of here? I'm not a caretaker or a doctor. I'm a forklift driver, so this isn't supposed to be my hell.”

“There's no way out.”

Shit.

Jason's brain went into a fog trying to comprehend what he had been told. He had stepped into some sort of hell and just tried to comprehend there was a hell.

“There has to be a way out. I'm not a provider. I don't even work in the medical field!”

Martha's face didn't even change, and a thought crossed his mind.

“What...what did you do?”

“I don't know.”

Of course.

The hair in the back of his neck stood sending chills through him. The overwhelming sense of dread settled in the pit of his stomach, and the shadowy corridor seemed to grow darker. Jason looked at Martha and her large brown eyes had grown wide with fear.

“He's coming. The doctor is coming. You must hide!”

Jason looked about frantically as the buzzing and numbness in his skull got stronger. He struggled to stay on his feet and would have collapsed on the corridor floor if Martha's cold hands didn't grab him by the shirt and drag him bodily to behind the nurse’s station. She put her body close to his to shield him. the icy clothing and skin feeling like a Popsicle pressed against flesh. The faint smell of detergent and moss hung around her.

“Do not move,” she hissed.

Jason didn't think he could even if he wanted to. The sickening feeling had overwhelmed him, and his head hung limp to the side. only his senses continued to work.

It was the slow, methodical clump of feet walking heavily on the floor with raspy breathing like a smoker trying to catch his breath. Martha pressed in closer trying to shield him.

“I... know he...is here. I will...find him.”

The gagging, struggling words escaped the necrotic beast that moved unseen on the other side of the nurse’s station. Jason heard its claws clicking against the top and from the corner of his eye, he could make the skinless hand gripping the edge as if to pull itself over.

Something made a loud clang down the hall and the hand stopped. It quickly withdrew and moved away. Martha began to release her grip on him and seemed to be more at ease.

“He has a hatred for humans in their mortal forms. The doctor sees you only as a bundle of vices that must be purged.”

“Oh, I don't want to be purged, lady. I like my vices and would be happy to leave his world.”

Jason peered around the corner and found the hallway except for its unearthly empty feeling. He began to make his way to the elevator that had brought him here. It was the way in, it had to be the way out. A glance behind showed him that Martha was keeping her distance but was following him, nevertheless.

'I've got to find a way out of here.'

Was everything still the same on the other side? He had read a lot of science fiction books in his time and his heart began to beat rapidly at the thought of his wonderful Nanette waking up and finding him missing. Would there be a search for him? How long would it go before the police gave up and she chose to move on?

Reaching the elevator, Jason gave the door a hard kicking though the sound was muted in response. The next thing he did was try to slip his fingers through the cracks and pull it open. He heaved and pulled but there was not even an inch of movement. It could have been a solid wall made to look like an elevator for all he knew. Jason was trapped in Hell.

It took everything in Jason's power not to run as he made his way down the hallway. The tingling in his feet and the pounding of his heart drowned out any thought that he could have. He had to get out no matter the cost. Jason finally reached the other end of the hallway and began to rattle on the door hard.

“Don't go that way,” Martha's voice wailed softly in his ear. Her cold breath near his face. “Your mind cannot understand it.”

“Like this place? Forget it. I'm out of here.”

As the last syllable fell from his mouth, the door clicked and spun open throwing him off balance. His face planted on to the cracked cement sending fireworks exploding through his brain. The warehouse worker pushed himself up on his arms and tried to shake the daze from his eyes. Light assailed him, and he blinked rapidly trying to clear them. He was in a large room, the bare pillars holding up the floor above. The windows were streaming the light of a dim, gray day. The smell of acidic rain was on the wind. Jason stood slowly, his knees shaking as he struggled to get his footing.

The site looked a lot like many abandoned construction sites he had come across. The tall bay windows, looming in front of him with razor sharp teeth of the glass that remained. Slowly, he crept up and peered out. He made sure to grab a good hand hold as he had no clue what was coming next.

He was four floors up from what looked like an abandoned hospital ground. The pavement had lost its battle with nature a long time ago and so clumps of weeds broke through the cracked concrete as flags of victory. Every other window was shattered, muddy or missing.

“Am...am I out?”

Jason stepped back and let his voice catch as he heard the crack of thunder in the distance. The world beyond the window was wrong in a way Jason's mind struggled to process.

It wasn't just abandoned. Abandonment implied that something had once been there. It looked and felt that life never touched this place. The ground below stretched out in a dull, featureless expanse that seemed to bleed into the horizon with no clear end. The sky above was the color of a bruise, neither day nor night, just a sickly, suffocating in-between that pressed down like a physical weight. There was no wind that he could see moving through the skeletal weeds below. No sound from outside at all , just a vacuum of existence that made the air feel thick and wrong in his lungs.

The weeds that had broken through the pavement weren't growing. They were dying, frozen mid-reach like hands grasping upward from something buried beneath. The trees at the far edge of the grounds were black and leafless, their branches twisted back on themselves as if recoiling from the sky. A rusted chain-link fence ran the perimeter and beyond it was nothing. Just hard, cracked salt flat going on forever.

Jason stared at it and felt something loosen in his chest. It started as a trembling in his hands. Then his breathing began to climb, short and shallow, like his body had forgotten the deeper rhythm. His vision began to pulse at the edges, contracting and expanding with each heartbeat that grew louder and more erratic in his ears. The sheer emptiness of it was its own horror , not the gore, not the screaming, not the thing that walked the hallways. This. This absence. This world that existed purely to be devoid of everything that made life bearable. No warmth, no color, no sound, no mercy. Just gray desolation stretching on forever in every direction like God had simply stopped caring about this particular square of creation.

Get down. Climb down. Find a pipe, find a ledge, find anything. Have to escape!

His mind lurched from thought to thought like a desperate animal throwing itself against the walls of a cage. Four floors. He could survive four floors if he hung from the edge of the window. Maybe three if the drop was on the softer ground near the fence. Was the ground soft? It had looked soft. Was the fence climbable? Was there even anywhere to go beyond that nothing at the edge of the property? There had to be something on the other side of that dull void.

Stop. Focus. Window ledge. Hands first. Go.

Jason gripped the frame, leaned forward, and felt the cold dead air from outside touch his face for the first time. It smelled like emptiness. Not rain, not earth , nothing. Like breathing recycled emptiness.

That was when the fingers found the back of his neck.

The cold hit him first , a deep, penetrating cold that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the absence of warmth in any living sense. Then the grip tightened and Jason was pulled backward with a force so overwhelming and effortless that his feet left the ground entirely.

He thrashed. He grabbed at the hand and felt the hard ridges of bare bone and screamed. Jason pulled and twisted but it was like fighting a machine. There was no give, no strain, no sense that his resistance registered in any meaningful way whatsoever.

“You do not belong here.”

Being this close, the voice was cavernous. It came from somewhere low and vast, like the sound a cathedral would make if a cathedral could speak. It was hollow, resonant, and completely without emotion.

Then it started to drag him.

Jason kicked his legs and clawed at the hand and managed to wrench himself sideways enough to catch fragments of the thing in his peripheral vision. He could not bring himself to look directly at it. Some part of his brain, some deeply buried survival mechanism, refused to let his eyes fully land on what was carrying him.

A torn lab coat , white, or what had once been white. Now it was a canvas of ruin, stiff with old rust-brown stains and glistening in places with something newer and darker that Jason did not want to think about. The coat hung in shreds at the hem, dragging along the cracked linoleum with a soft, horrible whisper. Below it , feet, or what served as feet. Bone. Just bone, yellowed and grinding against the floor with each heavy, deliberate step, leaving small pale scratches in the linoleum like a receipt of its passage.

This was the Doctor. He was in the clutches of the Doctor.

“Please.” Martha's voice came from somewhere behind them, thin and trembling. “Please, he is not one of them. He doesn't belong here. He found us by accident. Please.”

The Doctor did not respond. Did not slow. Did not acknowledge her in any way. Martha may as well have been the wallpaper.

Jason's elbow connected with something solid , the frame of a doorway , and pain lit up his arm to the shoulder. They were back in the main corridor. The light bulbs swayed above him. Through the doors on either side came the sounds he had been trying not to hear , the muffled screaming, the slow, wet sobbing, the sounds that had no name.

He's going to open one of those doors and put me in there. He's going to put me in a room and close the door and I will be here forever and Nanette will never know what happened to me and they will never find a body because there is no body to find and—

“Please!” Martha cried again, and her voice cracked on the word like something breaking. “He is innocent! Look at him! He is living! He is mortal and he is living and he does not belong to you!”

The grinding of teeth. The scratch of bone on linoleum.

Jason had stopped fighting with his muscles and started fighting with his mind, which was somehow worse. His thoughts had reached a fever pitch , white noise and panic and fragments of Nanette's face and the smell of the cocoa bar wrapper and the sound of the elevator ding when he had come down and the red block letters on the clock screaming 2:33 AM and none of it connected to any of it and all of it was slipping away from him.

Then the Doctor stopped.

Jason swayed in the grip, disoriented. They were at the elevator. The dull, rust-stained doors stood in front of them. He hadn't even registered the walk back.

A single bony finger, still wrapped around Jason's neck, extended and pressed the call button.

The wait was three seconds. The doors ground open with a groan of metal.

The grip on his neck shifted , found the back of his collar instead , and then Jason was airborne for one lurching, stomach-dropping moment before he hit the floor of the elevator hard, forehead first, the impact ricocheting through his skull in a white flash of pain. He tasted copper. He tried to get his hands under him and could not immediately remember how arms worked.

From behind him, from the corridor, the voice came one final time.

“Do not return.”

The doors ground shut.

The elevator hummed. Orchestral music droned from somewhere above him, tinny and absurd. Jason lay on the floor of the elevator with his cheek pressed against the cold metal and watched the small emergency light flicker and tried to remember how to breathe.

He was still trying when the doors opened again.

The light was different. That was the first thing. Warm. Yellow-white and artificial and completely, blessedly ordinary. The smell hit him next , antiseptic and floor polish and stale recycled air. His whole body went weak with relief at the sheer mundanity of it.

Jason White lay on the floor of the elevator on the fourth floor of Mercy General Hospital and did not move for a long moment.

When he finally pushed himself up, the clock on the wall of the corridor read 8:47 AM. Six hours. He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and felt the knot already forming there. A passing patient glanced at him with raised eyebrows and kept walking with the careful, deliberate pace of someone who had decided not to get involved. Jason tried to stand, wobbled and then straightened. Pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead and held it there.

He had survived. Jason had survived whatever that nightmare was. The knot and ache were the only proof it hadn’t actually been some sort of hallucination. He was pretty sure it wasn’t a hallucination.

Jason got the look he expected when he pushed through Nanette's door. She was sitting up in bed, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, her face cycling through relief and irritation and worry in quick succession the way it always did when she had been frightened and was trying to decide which feeling to lead with.

“Jason.” Her voice landed somewhere between scolding and grateful. “Where on earth have you been? I woke up and you were just...you look terrible. What happened to your head?”

He crossed the room in four steps, threw his arms around her and held her.

“Oookay. Love you to. You okay?”

“Just...lost track of time,” he lied.

“You sure?”

“Yes. Let’s go home.”