He walks these halls with steps like dripping water. His bloated hands are as purple as

rot in dark places. He passes through the walls with the damp and chilly air. If I die

in here, it wasn't sickness. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't suicide. It was him.

The note was stuck on the bottom of the bed. Not only found it because I was looking

for a way to rip a piece off the frame to hurt myself with. I was going through a very

dark time in my life. It was about to get darker.

I'd been admitted to the Pine Hill Mental Hospital after my breakdown in mid-January, but

I suspected that it always felt like winter at Pinehurst. The corridors were cold and

drafty, and the thick dusty windows made the skies outside seem perpetually grey, with

their stressed expressions and exhausted, shambling walk. It was hard to tell the staff

apart from the patients.

Pinehurst Mental Hospital was a place where society dumped the people it was ashamed

of, then conveniently forgot them. I couldn't have said why I kept this odd little note.

It felt like a good luck charm, or at least a reminder that somebody out there had been

crazier than I was. I'll tell the night I was woken by a strange sound like dripping

water. I sat up in the blue darkness listening as it passed by my door and entered the room

next door. It took my sleep at a brain moment to realize what was so wrong about that fact.

The door had never opened.

Whatever it was, it was just suddenly inside the room next door.

The walls in Pine Hill were thick stone, but noise traveled in the place, like the man

across the hall who'd laughed for days straight until his throat was so raw that he fell silent.

Well, the old woman to my left who moaned in her sleep. But from the room to my right,

...