Celine ran upward. She found many doors, each bearing a small metal plaque with patients' names. Some were torn, others carved into with a sharp tool.
Then… she stopped at a room with large writing on it:
"L F"
She pushed the door open slowly, and inside the small room were an iron bed, a broken mirror, and on the opposite wall… a new drawing.
A drawing of two little girls holding hands, with a key hanging down from the sky between them. Beneath the drawing, written in a childlike hand:
"I remember now."
Celine screamed, "Liliaaa!! Where are you?!"
No one answered. Then her phone rang again.
She answered immediately. It was the same voice from before, in the forest. It said:
"I see you've passed the first stage, Celine. Well done. But remember… this place is full of shadows. If you take one wrong step, you'll never find her."
She replied angrily:
"Tell me where she is now! Or else—"
He cut her off:
"Open the drawer under the bed. You'll find something that will lead you to the next stage."
She did so at once. She opened the drawer and found a small envelope labeled:
"File 013 – Case: Fallon."
She opened the envelope, and inside… an X-ray image of a brain, beneath it a medical note:
"Patient: Lilia F. – Presence of an unexplained active area in the frontal lobe. Suspected formation of memory prior to the age of one – an impossible theory."
At the bottom of the page:
"This memory must be reactivated. Risk of shock… possible."
Then… a small hand-drawn picture: a woman resembling Celine, closing a door on a crying child.
Celine stepped back, then said to herself:
"They want her to remember… something she should never remember."
Celine was still holding the envelope, staring at the picture that looked like her, closing a door on a crying child. The hands in the drawing… looked very much like her own. But she had never done this. Had she? She didn't remember. Yet she felt something strange, as if the picture wasn't merely drawn… but taken from a viewpoint inside Lilia's mind.
To be continued...