Chapter 278: Hospital (End)
“What’s going on? Is the voltage unstable?”
The two men in the surveillance room sat stiffly in their chairs like wooden puppets, staring blankly at the flickering lights overhead with a mixture of fear and confusion. The lights flashed wildly until, unable to withstand the strain, they suddenly went out.
The moment darkness swallowed the room, both men nearly screamed.
Fortunately, the blackout lasted only an instant. Before long, the lights came back on, restoring brightness to the room.
Beep.
The electronic monitors on the desk powered up again, emitting their startup chime.
“That scared me to death. I thought something had gone wrong again.”
Dr. J wiped the sweat from his forehead and sighed to the man with the lip piercing.
After speaking, he waited for a response, but none came. Puzzled, Dr. J turned his head and saw that his companion was staring fixedly at the monitors in front of him. His pupils trembled, his face was filled with terror, and his eyes were opened so wide they seemed on the verge of tearing at the corners.
“W-What’s wrong…? Haha, don’t scare me like that…”
A sense of foreboding swept through him, and Dr. J shuddered. Forcing a smile, he turned his gaze toward the monitors as well.
What he saw made his blood run cold.
The dozens of screens, which should have been displaying footage from different areas of the hospital, had somehow all switched to the same camera feed.
The camera was pointed at an empty corridor.
On the floor of that corridor lay two blood-soaked corpses.
One corpse had a massive hole in its chest. The skin of its face had been cut away, and its eyes had been gouged out.
The other had been stabbed so many times that its body looked like a sieve, covered from head to toe in bloody puncture wounds.
Beneath the bodies spread a large pool of dark red blood. Beside it were bloody handprints and clear signs of a desperate struggle.
Yes.
The footage playing on every screen was the live feed from right outside the surveillance room.
And now, in that footage, the two people who should have been dead were twitching.
Their joints crackled with unsettling clack-clack sounds as they pushed themselves up from the floor. Their movements were strange and stiff, their bodies jerking unnaturally as they slowly rose to their feet.
“T-They’re still alive?”
“That’s impossible! They lost that much blood—there’s no way they could still be alive…”
Fine beads of cold sweat appeared on the lip-pierced man’s forehead. His face had gone pale, and he refuted the idea in a trembling voice.
As if to prove his point, after struggling to their feet, the two “people” moved like marionettes on strings, swaying unsteadily as they approached the tightly shut surveillance room door in unison. Then they lowered their heads and slammed them hard against it.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The dull impacts came simultaneously from both the actual doorway and the speakers connected to the surveillance feed.
One strike after another.
Like the footsteps of Death drawing nearer, each blow clenched the hearts of the two men inside tighter and tighter.
They hit the door with terrifying force.
With every impact, fresh bloodstains appeared on the door panel—at first only a few scattered spots, then spreading and joining together into larger patches. Eventually, the flesh on their foreheads split apart from the repeated collisions. The mangled tissue stuck to the door like glue, while dark-red droplets of blood sprayed outward in all directions.
The sight made people’s teeth ache and their scalps tingle.
No human being could behave like that.
If they weren’t human, then…
Were they ghosts?
The two men exchanged a glance, each seeing the same bone-deep terror reflected in the other’s eyes.
Flicker, flicker.
At that moment, the lights overhead began flashing erratically once again.
At the same time, the two men heard a strange creak… creak… coming from above.
At first, the sound seemed distant, as though it were coming from near the door.
But it quickly drew closer.
The source of the noise seemed to move from the doorway into the room itself, until at last the eerie creaking was directly above their heads.
What could that sound be?
The lip-pierced man slowly raised his head and stared upward in horror.
Drip.
Without warning, a drop of liquid fell from above and landed directly in his eye.
“Urgh…”
He groaned and instinctively raised a hand to cover it.
And at that very moment, accompanied by a faint zzzt sound, every electrical device in the room suddenly stopped working at once.
The inpatient building was located in a remote suburban area, with few other structures nearby. Once the lights went out, the room was instantly plunged into complete darkness.
“What the hell! D-Don’t tell me the power’s out again?”
Dr. J’s trembling voice came from nearby.
A moment later, the lip-pierced man saw a beam of light appear beside him—Dr. J had turned on his phone’s flashlight.
Seeing this, the lip-pierced man quickly lowered the hand covering his face and reached for his own phone.
Drip.
Just as he lit up the screen, another droplet fell from above and landed squarely on it.
Frowning, he casually wiped it away. But under the glow of the screen, he was horrified to discover that the liquid carried a faint reddish tint.
His face went pale.
Bringing his finger to his nose, he caught a familiar metallic scent.
The hand holding the phone trembled violently.
A chill ran down the back of his neck, and every hair on his body stood on end.
Blood.
It was blood!
Something above them was dripping blood!
Remembering the horrifying walking corpses that had appeared outside the surveillance room moments ago, the lip-pierced man shuddered.
Only then did he suddenly realize that the pounding on the door had stopped.
When had it stopped?
And why had they stopped trying to break the door down?
Perhaps they had given up.
But a far more terrifying possibility was that there was no longer any need to break the door down because…
Because they were already inside.
BANG!
BANG! BANG!
Heavy crashing noises suddenly erupted from overhead.
They were accompanied by the rattling clang of metal mesh shaking violently—harsh, piercing sounds that echoed through the ceiling pipes and reverberated throughout the room.
The lip-pierced man’s heart pounded wildly.
An overwhelming sense of dread rose within him.
Clenching his jaw, he switched on his phone’s flashlight.
Together with Dr. J, he slowly raised his head and looked upward.
Crash!
Before they could even see what was happening, a torrent of red liquid poured out from the ventilation grate overhead like vomit.
The two men below had no time to dodge and were instantly drenched.
Sticky.
Cold.
Carrying a heavy metallic stench.
It stained everything it touched red…
Yes.
There was no mistake.
It was blood.
The liquid pouring from the ventilation duct was human blood.
“AAAAAH! AAAAAAHHHH!”
“What the **** is this thing?!”
Now covered head to toe in blood, the two men frantically wiped at themselves while screaming hysterically. It was as though they were trying to vent the terror building inside them through sheer panic and shouting.
BANG!
At that moment, another impact sounded from above.
This one was even louder and heavier than the previous ones, so violent that it almost seemed as if some monster were dancing on the ceiling.
The fragile metal grate let out a strained creak.
Then it finally gave way.
With a loud clang, it fell from the ventilation opening and crashed onto the floor.
The two men froze.
As if someone had cast a petrification spell on them, they stopped screaming at the same time.
Shoulders hunched, breath held, they stood trembling beneath the vent.
Their necks felt welded in place, unable to summon even the slightest courage to look up.
Only their eyes moved.
Wide and bulging, both pairs of eyes rolled upward in unison, as though they might pop from their sockets at any moment.
The contradiction of desperately wanting to see what was there while being utterly terrified to look was written plainly across their faces.
Then a faint song drifted down from above.
“Darling, don’t run. I’ll never hurt anyone.
The evil witch’s lurking around…”
The lip-pierced man’s face instantly turned deathly pale.
A bead of cold sweat slid down his forehead.
Instinctively, he blinked.
Only then did he notice faint black strands hanging at the very top of his vision.
Whenever they brushed against his eyelids, they produced an irritating tickling sensation.
What was that…?
“Heehee… hahaha…”
A crystal-clear laugh sounded from directly above.
It was so close that the lip-pierced man could even hear the faint, indistinct breath at the end of each chuckle.
That was… that was…
His scalp tightened.
Slowly and stiffly, the lip-pierced man raised his head.
The moment he saw what was above him, his entire body froze, and an icy chill engulfed him.
It was a female ghost hanging upside down.
Covered in blood, she was suspended in midair in a grotesquely impossible posture, feet up and head down. Her cold eyes stared directly at him, and her scarlet lips stretched impossibly wide as she burst into manic laughter.
Her long black hair hung from her head like oil-soaked seaweed dredged from the ocean depths—dirty, tangled, and matted together.
The black strands he had noticed earlier were the tips of her hair.
In the unsteady beam of the flashlight, they swayed and writhed as if alive.
For a moment, they seemed to transform into countless slender black worms, twisting and squirming, waiting only to seize their prey before burrowing into flesh and bone to devour and tear it apart.
“Ah… AAH… AAAAAAHHHH!”
The lip-pierced man screamed and tried to run.
But before he could move, a pair of blood-smeared arms reached down from above and wrapped tightly around his head.
A tremendous force pressed down on him from overhead.
The lip-pierced man was thin and slight; the pressure nearly knocked him backward.
To keep his balance, he instinctively reached out and grabbed Dr. J beside him.
Unexpectedly, even though he was the one being held by the ghost, Dr. J reacted even more violently.
“No! No no no no no! AAAAAAAHHHHH!”
Dr. J shrieked hysterically, flailing both arms wildly through the air in a desperate attempt to shake off the lip-pierced man’s grip.
Caught completely off guard, the lip-pierced man took several solid blows from Dr. J’s frantic swinging.
As a result, he screamed even louder.
Everly felt like her ears were about to go deaf.
Her hands dropped down and gripped the lip-pierced man’s shoulders tightly. Using his body as support, she lightly pushed off the ventilation duct with her boot.
Tap.
With a soft sound, her blood-red body swept through the air like a night owl in the forest, landing gracefully on the floor beside them.
The impact of her landing was the final straw for the weak, trembling lip-pierced man and Dr. J, whose legs were shaking like sieves.
The two grown men shoved and collided into each other in panic, losing all dignity as they collapsed onto the cold, hard floor.
Their arms and legs flailed wildly against the blood-slick surface, making them look like two writhing maggots.
A strange odor drifted through the air.
Everly lowered her gaze and saw that Dr. J had wet himself.
That immediately killed her remaining interest in teasing them.
Seriously?
With that little courage, how did they even dare to scare others like that?
“Are you ready? Come… let’s go to hell together…”
She stood with her back to the window, head tilted to one side against her shoulder, striking the classic horror-film ghost pose as she issued a chilling invitation to the two men.
The moment her words fell, before either of them could respond, a flash of vivid red swept across the room.
The next second, sharp pain struck.
One after the other, the two men lost consciousness completely.
…
**TN
Oww. It’s the end of the arc. 🙁 I love this arc so much, Psycho Everly is so fun. XD
I LOVE it!!