Chapter 267: Hospital (1)
The inpatient building where Misha was staying was located on the outskirts of Sunken City. It was a newly completed branch of Hopkins Hospital, having opened only half a year earlier.
Hopkins Hospital was a long-established private hospital whose main campus was situated in downtown Sunken City. That area was part of the old city district, and in order to preserve the city’s historic character and reduce the impact of new construction on street lighting and ventilation, the municipal government had imposed height restrictions on buildings. As the number of patients increased, the hospital’s operating rooms, wards, and other facilities gradually became unable to keep up with demand.
The branch where Misha was admitted had been built specifically to ease the bed shortage at the downtown headquarters.
After all, this was a horror-movie world, where all kinds of bizarre accidents happened one after another and casualty rates were high. As a result, hospitals here were exceptionally busy.
The branch building that appeared before Everly was an imposing tower more than twenty stories high. A large garden had been built in front of it, and it was said that the top floor of the inpatient building also featured a rooftop garden to provide patients with a pleasant environment for recovery.
However, the building had only recently been put into use, and since it was currently winter—not a suitable season for planting—the gardens were still largely empty. Aside from patches of withered grass, all that could be seen were thick layers of snow and frozen, hardened soil.
Everly stepped across the crunching frozen ground and entered the hospital lobby.
Private hospitals placed greater emphasis on patient privacy, so visitors were required to register in advance before seeing patients.
While filling out her information at the reception desk, Everly keenly sensed that someone was watching her.
She paused her writing and turned toward the direction of the gaze, just in time to catch a young man looking her over.
“Can I help you?”
Caught red-handed staring, the man blinked. Running a hand through his blond hair, he flashed a somewhat slick smile on his reasonably handsome face.
“Hey, beautiful. What perfume are you wearing? It smells really nice!”
Everly never used perfume. Even the toiletries she used were usually lightly scented. That way, if she ever found herself needing to hide somewhere unnoticed, she wouldn’t give herself away by smell. Besides, she had just come in from outside and was still wearing a knit cap. From the distance the man was standing, no matter how keen his nose was, there was no way he could actually smell anything on her.
Clearly, he was just another sleazy guy trying to strike up a conversation because he thought she was pretty.
Everly had no patience for people like that.
She shot him a cool glance. Her gaze was sharp and emotionless, like the frost of a snow-covered wilderness. It made the man feel inexplicably uncomfortable, and for some reason he was suddenly overcome with a sense of inadequacy.
Awkwardly, he rubbed his nose, coughed once, and looked away.
Everly lowered her head and continued filling out the registration form.
After she finished, the receptionist handed her a visitor badge and informed her that Misha’s room was Room 0613 on the sixth floor, and that visiting hours lasted until 9:00 p.m.
Horror Movie Survival Rule #3: Always familiarize yourself with the escape routes in advance.
Following her usual habit, Everly first walked over to the floor directory and emergency evacuation map, snapped a couple of photos, and only then stepped into the elevator and rode up to the sixth floor.
Misha wasn’t in her room.
A nurse at the nurses’ station told Everly that Misha had gone to the public activity room on the fourth floor.
After all, she was young and recovered quickly. Only a few days after surgery, Misha had already grown tired of lying in bed scrolling through her phone. Leaning on a crutch, she spent her time wandering all over the inpatient building by herself.
Everly left her get-well gift—a box of homemade cookies—in Misha’s room, then turned around and took the elevator down to the fourth-floor activity room to find her.
This area was a leisure space specially set aside by the hospital. Patients and their family members who felt bored could come here to relax, chat, read, exercise, or play board and card games.
It was the Christmas and New Year’s holiday season, and the public activity room was decorated with all sorts of festive ornaments—ribbons, hanging decorations, bells, and sprigs of mistletoe.
There weren’t many people in the room, however. Perhaps because the inpatient building had only recently opened, its occupancy rate had yet to rise.
A handful of people were scattered throughout the lounge listening to music, reading magazines, or playing games. Most of the patients in hospital gowns, however, had gathered around a pillar near the entrance, where an elderly patient was animatedly telling a story.
Everly’s intended visit target, Misha, was among them.
As Everly approached, Misha sat with her eyes shining, holding her breath in concentration, completely engrossed in the tale.
“…So the patient went downstairs to check and discovered that the floor indicator still read 13. Panicking, he ran downward as fast as he could. Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen… It was as if he had fallen into an infinite loop. No matter how many flights he descended, the stairwell always showed the thirteenth floor. After running for who knows how long, he finally gave up trying to go down and started climbing upward instead. But then the building—which originally had only twenty-four floors—became infinitely tall. He climbed floor after floor, yet could never reach the top.”
“What happened afterward?”
“There was no afterward. That patient became trapped on the endless staircase and, to this very day, is still stubbornly searching for an exit. They say that if you accidentally take the elevator to the thirteenth floor, you might even run into him wandering the corridors.”
The story came to a temporary pause there.
The elderly patient cleared his throat, lifted a cup of water, and took a drink.
The surrounding listeners were both frightened and fascinated. Some whispered among themselves, while others urged him to continue.
Everly squeezed through the crowd and made her way to Misha’s side. She poked her lightly on the arm.
Misha turned around and, upon seeing Everly, finally found the will to leave the storytelling crowd. Supported by Everly, she hopped over to a nearby sofa on one leg, using her crutch with one hand, and the two of them settled down to chat.
“Everly, thank goodness you’re finally here. You’ve been gone for so long—I was bored to death these past few days…”
Everly glanced at the “story circle” by the pillar, which had resumed after a short break, and then looked back at Misha.
Catching the meaning behind her look, Misha stuck out her tongue playfully.
“I really was bored! Look—I even came downstairs to listen to people tell stories.”
As she spoke, she remembered the juicy tale she had just heard, and immediately slipped back into her usual chatterbox mode.
“Hey, Everly, guess what I heard?”
“What?”
“I heard some of the patients here say that before Hopkins Hospital bought this land and built the inpatient tower, there used to be a privately run psychiatric hospital here…”
Misha then enthusiastically launched into a story that felt straight out of an American horror movie.
According to the tale, the land had originally belonged to a psychiatric institution called Carterlor Asylum. The owner of the facility was a man named Dr. Splinder, who also served as its chief physician.
To outsiders, Dr. Splinder appeared gentle, refined, and compassionate. He seemed deeply concerned for every patient under his care. However, very few people knew that behind the scenes, he had been using patients as subjects for human experimentation.
During the course of these brutal experiments, more than a few patients died from the abuse. At first, Splinder merely harvested and sold the organs of deceased patients. Later, as funding for his experiments began to run short, he gradually turned his attention to patients who were still alive.
Countless patients died within the asylum’s walls. Every doctor and nurse in the institution was said to be an accomplice. This one-sided slaughter continued for years until, one day, the patients who still retained their sanity rose up together and launched a rebellion against their cruel oppressors.
After a bloody night, the psychiatric hospital was reduced to ruins by a massive fire.
Everyone inside—the doctors, nurses, and patients alike—was burned into charred remains.
Since then, the land had remained abandoned until Hopkins Hospital purchased it as part of an expansion project.
Although the old psychiatric hospital had long since been demolished, the ghosts of those who died there were said to continue wandering the grounds. When the new inpatient tower rose from the earth, they supposedly clung to the building like a lingering curse.
After staff and patients moved in, all kinds of strange incidents allegedly began occurring. The “Endless Thirteenth Floor” mentioned by the elderly patient earlier was one of the most widely circulated stories.
And that wasn’t all. Counting them off on her fingers, Misha enthusiastically recounted several more ghost stories to Everly: corpses in the morgue coming back to life, a bouncing red rubber ball that appeared out of nowhere, and a bloodstained woman with a swollen pregnant belly wandering the halls.
When she finished, she stared intently at Everly’s face and asked mischievously,
“Well? Pretty scary, right?”
“Mm-hmm. So-so.”
Everly replied flatly, her expression completely unchanged.
“Hey, that’s it? You’re that calm after hearing stories that creepy? Shouldn’t you be scared?”
“Because they’re all made up.”
After all, this was a horror-movie world full of danger at every turn. Since Misha was being hospitalized, there was no way Everly would leave the choice of hospital unchecked.
When Misha’s family had been selecting a hospital, Everly had diligently written down the names of every candidate facility and sent the list to Orff. The two of them had investigated each option together to make sure Misha didn’t end up in some hospital with a questionable history.
Hopkins Hospital had naturally been included in their investigation.
According to the results of their research, the hospital was actually quite normal. There was nothing particularly suspicious about it.
Of course, during its years of operation, it had experienced a few medical accidents and disputes between doctors and patients. But any hospital that had been around long enough would inevitably encounter that sort of thing.
Everly and Orff had gone over those medical incidents together. The consequences varied in severity, with the most serious case resulting in a patient undergoing amputation. Afterward, the hospital paid out a substantial compensation, and the patient and their family chose not to pursue the matter further. As a result, those negative headlines about Hopkins Hospital were unlikely to trigger any horror-movie-style developments.
After Misha successfully moved into her hospital room at Hopkins, the two of them secretly investigated the inpatient branch as well. According to intelligence Orff had gathered, the land the building stood on had previously been nothing more than an orchard. The orchard owner later made a reckless trip to Las Vegas, got carried away gambling, and lost everything—including the shirt off his back—forcing him to sell the entire property, land included, at a bargain price.
Before that orchard, the answer was even simpler: it had just been empty wasteland.
The psychiatric hospital in Misha’s story, along with the cruel attending physician and the patients burned to death, were entirely fictional. If that was the case, then the so-called supernatural disturbances in the inpatient tower were clearly just fabricated ghost stories meant to scare people.
Moreover, after Everly entered the hospital and went from the first floor up to the sixth, then back down from the sixth to the fourth, all of her detection and defensive items remained completely inert the entire time, as if they were dead. Not a single one reacted at all.
This indicated that the building was very “clean.”
In that case, what was there to be afraid of?