The silence inside the asylum was heavier than the silence outside. It wasn't just the absence of noise; it was the presence of a vacuum, as if the building itself was holding its breath, waiting for me to make a mistake.
"Okay," I whispered, my voice trembling so hard the microphone clipped. "We are inside. We are secure."
I aimed the flashlight beam at the main doors. I had jammed a piece of rotting timber through the rusted iron handles, but looking at it now, the blockade seemed pathetic. The wood was soft with decay, and the iron handles were flaking away like scabbed skin. If the things from the Plague Pit wanted to get in, they would get in.
I turned away from the door and looked at the lobby properly for the first time.
It was a cavernous space, stretching up two stories into darkness. The peeling paint on the walls hung in long, fleshy strips that moved slightly in the draft. It looked like the building was shedding its skin. In the center of the room sat a reception desk, overturned and covered in decades of bird droppings and dust. Behind it, a wall of pigeonholes for patient mail stood empty, looking like a honeycomb made of shadows.
"Check the temperature," I muttered to myself, glancing at the small digital thermometer clipped to my camera bag.
It read twelve degrees Celsius. Cold, but manageable.
Then, I watched the numbers drop. Eleven. Nine. Six. Two.
"That... that is not physically possible," I stammered. "It just dropped ten degrees in five seconds."
My breath began to fog in front of the lens, creating a white mist that swirled in the flashlight beam. Frost began to form on the metal casing of the reception desk, creeping across the surface like a fast-growing fungus. The cold didn't feel like weather. It felt like a physical assault, a heavy, wet blanket of ice wrapping around my lungs.
SLAM.
The sound came from deep within the building. It was the distinct, heavy crash of a metal door being thrown shut.
SLAM. SLAM. SLAM.
More doors followed, a domino effect of closing exits echoing down the corridors. The sound marched toward the lobby, getting louder and closer.
"It's locking down," I realized, panic rising in my throat like bile. "The building is sealing itself."
I backed away from the main hallway, my boots crunching on broken glass. I needed a room. A small room. Somewhere I could hide and figure out my next move.
To my left, a corridor branched off into darkness. A faded sign on the wall read AMMINISTRAZIONE. Administration. Offices.
"Okay, offices mean doors. Doors mean locks. We go there."
I moved as quietly as I could, which wasn't very quiet. Every step on the rotting floorboards sounded like a gunshot in the silence. I hugged the heavy black case to my chest, my arms aching from the weight. I still hadn't opened it. Part of me was afraid that if I opened it, I was admitting that this was a war, not a ghost hunt.
I slipped into the corridor. The air here smelled different. It didn't smell like the sea or the rot outside. It smelled of antiseptic and old copper. The smell of a hospital that hadn't been cleaned in fifty years.
I tried the first door on the right. Locked. I tried the second. The handle broke off in my hand.
"Come on," I hissed, sweat freezing on my forehead. "Give me something."
At the end of the hall, a light flickered.
It shouldn't have been possible. There was no electricity on Poveglia. But a single, bare bulb hanging from a wire in the ceiling buzzed to life. It cast a sickly, yellow light over a figure standing at the intersection of the hallways.
I froze. I instinctively covered the camera's tally light, plunging myself into darkness, peeking around the corner.
The figure was tall. Impossibly tall. It wore a nurse's uniform that might have once been white but was now stained a deep, crusty brown. A stiff, starched cap sat on its head, perfectly pristine, contrasting with the filth of the rest of its attire.
It—she—didn't have a face.
Where her features should have been, the skin was smooth and pale, pulled tight over the skull. But there was a mouth. Oh god, there was a mouth.
It was a vertical slit, sewn shut with thick, black thread.
She stood perfectly still, her long arms hanging down to her knees. In her right hand, she held a pair of rusted surgical shears. Snip. Snip. The sound was wet and dull.
"The Head Nurse," I thought, the lore flooding back into my brain. Legend said she didn't just oversee the patients; she silenced them. Anyone who screamed too loud got the thread.
She tilted her head, listening.
I held my breath. My heart was hammering so hard I was terrified she could hear the rhythm of it against my ribs.
She took a step.
Her movement was wrong. She didn't walk; she glided, her feet hidden beneath the hem of her skirt. The motion was jerky, like a stop-motion animation with missing frames. One second she was ten yards away, the next she was five.
I needed to hide. Now.
I looked to my right. A door stood slightly ajar. A metal locker room. Staff changing area.
I waited for the yellow bulb to flicker again. When the darkness hit, I moved.
I dove through the gap in the door, landing on my knees. I kicked the door shut as gently as I could, praying the latch wouldn't click loudly.
Click.
It sounded like a bomb going off.
Outside in the hallway, the gliding stopped.
I scrambled backward, crab-walking until my back hit a row of tall, metal lockers. I fumbled with the handle of the nearest one. It was rusted, but it opened. I threw my duffel bag in, then the heavy black case, and finally squeezed myself into the narrow, upright coffin of cold steel.
I pulled the locker door closed just as the yellow light from the hallway spilled under the gap of the room's entrance.
I pressed my eye to the louvers—the little ventilation slits in the locker door.
The door to the room creaked open.
The Head Nurse entered.
She was huge. In the confined space of the changing room, her head scraped the ceiling. The yellow light from the hallway didn't reach in here, but she seemed to generate her own faint, grey luminescence.
She stopped in the center of the room. She raised her head and sniffed the air. The sound was a wet, rattling inhalation through that sewn-shut mouth.
Snip. Snip.
She walked to the first locker in the row.
She ripped the door off its hinges with one hand. The metal screamed as it tore. She peered inside, then moved to the next one.
Riiiiip. Crash.
She was looking for me. And she was checking them one by one.
I was in the fifth locker. She was at the second.
I looked down at the heavy black case squeezed between my legs. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely feel my fingers.
"Do it, Jax," I thought. "If you don't do it now, you are going to die in a box."
I reached down and undid the first latch on the case.
Click.
The sound was tiny, but in the silence, it was unmistakable.
The tearing metal stopped.
Through the slit in the locker, I saw her freeze. Slowly, painfully slowly, her head rotated toward my hiding spot. The faceless visage stared right at me. She knew.
She raised the rusted shears, pointing them at my locker door. She began to glide toward me, faster this time, intent on violence.
I undid the second latch.
"Okay," I whispered, tears of terror mixing with the sweat on my face. "Okay, Uncle. Let's see if you were crazy or a genius."
I flipped the lid of the case open.
Inside, nestled in red velvet, lay the obsidian shotgun. It didn't reflect the light; it absorbed it. The silver runes etched into the barrel began to pulse with a faint, heartbeat rhythm.
The Nurse was three feet away.
I grabbed the stock of the gun and the separate barrel assembly.
Two feet away.
My hands moved on instinct, a muscle memory I didn't know I had. I slotted the barrels into the receiver.
One foot.
I snapped the action closed. KA-CLACK.
The Nurse shrieked—a muffled, tearing sound from her sealed throat—and drove the shears through the metal of my locker door. The blade punched through the steel inches from my face, missing my eye by a fraction of an inch.
"Knock knock!" I screamed.
I kicked the locker door open. It hit the Nurse, staggering her back a step.
I rolled out of the locker, dropping to one knee on the cold tile floor. I brought the weapon up. It felt warm in my hands, vibrating with a power that made the hair on my arms stand up.
The Head Nurse loomed over me, raising the shears for a killing blow.
I didn't even check the safety. I just pulled the trigger.