SWNOVELS Chapter Oct. 14th: Empty
The heels of my boots tapped on the tiled floors, the sound echoing in the building as I roamed the empty hospital hallway. It was the dead of night, my usual shift. Some weak rays of moonlight shone in from the windows at the very edge of the hallway, only a tiny patch of tiles were illuminated.
Being a security guard for a mental hospital is already scary enough to most people, but night shift goes the extra mile when it comes to horror movie vibes. I scanned each of the closed doors with my flashlight as I walked passed them, listening for uncommon sounds and noises. Most nights were pretty calm and uneventful, nothing movie-worthy really, so I wasn’t expecting nor hoping for anything to happen tonight in particular.
As I turned into another hall of doors to the ‘resident’s’ rooms, I did a quick flash of the entire corridor and something caught my eye. Near the wall at the edge of the hallway, one of the doors seemed to stick out slightly. I immediately made my way over to check, flashlight honing onto that door in particular so I wouldn’t lose it amidst all the other identical ones. The closer I got to the door, the more an apprehensive feeling started to grow in my guts.
When I finally got close enough to see the door clearly, I realized that it was slightly open, as though it wasn’t closed properly. I was told of the very few vacant rooms and there shouldn’t be one in this hall, so I tried to push the door open straight away. I felt some resistance from behind it, but it felt like some kind of fabric which dragged against the flooring. Soon afterwards however, I managed to get the door to open, finding that it was a bedsheet on the ground.
I quickly directed my flashlight and my gaze to the room itself, more specifically the bed. Under the moonlight entering from the window, a narrow metal bed was revealed, empty. The sound of a pair of bare feet running on tiles then made its way into my ears, coming from the next hallway. Immediately, I turned back towards the hallway, grabbing my walkie-talkie as I called out to some other guards on the lower floor.
« We’ve got someone trying to escape! »