PAGES OF HER

Some places don’t echo your footsteps. They swallow them.

Aira stepped off the elevator and into the east wing, where the walls seemed to lean in too close. The air was thicker here—stagnant, like a secret kept too long. Her fingers curled tighter around her sketchbook, still warm from her hands, still humming from last night’s dream.

They said this hospital was meant to help.

But the way the lights flickered overhead made her feel like she was walking into a fever rather than a cure.

“Room 27,” Nurse Melanie announced with that same brittle smile that never quite reached her eyes. “You’ve got a roommate now.”

Aira’s mouth was dry. “I thought I was going to be alone.”

“Guess the place thought you needed someone,” Melanie said with a shrug, then unlocked the door and nudged it open.

The moment Aira crossed the threshold, her heart kicked against her ribs like it wanted to run the other way.

One side of the room looked normal—sterile bed, folded blanket, unmarked walls.

But the other…

It was alive with drawings. Taped to every surface, layered like scales on a monster’s back. Charcoal and pencil marks bleeding into one another. Each sketch whispering something she couldn't quite hear.

There were eyes. Hundreds of them. Some wide with terror, some rolled back into heads that didn’t look entirely human. One sketch was nothing but open mouths—gasping, gnashing, screaming without sound.

The air smelled like graphite, old sweat, and something metallic. Like blood that had dried into memory.

Even the light avoided that half of the room. It pooled in Aira’s corner, hesitant to cross.

And in the middle of it all, crouched like a child or a broken animal, was a girl with a shaved head and bruised knees.

She didn’t look up at first. She was sketching something on her lap with rapid, hungry strokes. Her hands moved like they weren’t hers—like they were trying to release something from inside the page.

Then, slowly, she lifted her face and locked eyes with Aira.

“I know you,” she said, her voice soft but clear.

Aira’s stomach knotted. “No,” she whispered. “You don’t.”

The girl tilted her head and held up her drawing.

It was a mirror.

Not a real one—but a sketched mirror.

And in the reflection stood Aira.

Only… the version in the drawing didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. Her mouth was sewn shut. Her eyes were empty pits. Her hands were dripping red ink—or maybe it wasn’t ink.

Behind her, just out of focus, loomed something wrong—a shape without a face, just hands clawing down from the ceiling.

“You’re the one who draws the deaths,” the girl said with a tilt of her head.

“You’re the beginning.”

Aira couldn’t move. Her legs felt like chalk—ready to snap with the slightest pressure. The girl’s eyes didn’t blink. Didn’t twitch. They just stared like she was watching a memory replay in real time.

Then, in one jagged breath, the girl whispered, “It follows you too, doesn’t it?”

“What does?” Aira’s voice cracked, barely audible.

The girl slowly pointed to the corner behind her—empty, at first glance.

But Aira’s gaze snagged on something wrong. A faint outline. A smudge on the wall that hadn’t been there before. A shadow that moved without cause.

No door. No window.

Just paper, eyes, and the whisper of something crawling behind her mind.

Aira turned quickly—but there was nothing.

Yet the feeling… lingered.

The girl returned to her sketching, her pencil screaming across the page in manic circles, as if drawing wasn’t art—it was a scream.

Aira backed into her bed, heart racing, and looked down at her own sketchbook.

She hadn’t remembered drawing anything that morning. But the page was full.

A single figure.