Chapter Text
I start feeling sick just looking at this place. Mount Massive Asylum, shut down amid scandal and government secrecy in 1971, reopened by Murkoff Psychiatric Systems in 2009 under the guise of a charitable organization. Cell phone reception cut off abruptly a mile out, more like a jammer than lost signal. The Murkoff Corporation has a long track record of disguising profit as charity. But never on American soil. Whatever they thought could get out of this place has to be big. Might finally be the story that breaks the bastards.
It starts with an email from an anonymous source. A whistleblower. It’s urgent, panicked, and written in haste.
“You don’t know me. Have to make this quick. . .Terrible things happening there. Don’t understand it. Don’t believe half the things I saw. Doctors talking about dream therapy going too deep, finding something that had been waiting for them in the mountain. People are being hurt and Murkoff is making money.”
And, “It needs to be exposed.”
His eyes trace every word once. Then twice.
By the third time he’s read through the email, Miles Upshur is holding his breath.
The cursor blinks beneath the final sentence like a heartbeat—It needs to be exposed. The consternation in its words, the slant of desperation palpable in each line, sticks in his throat like razor blades.
Something waiting in the mountain haunts him like a foreshadow.
He wastes no time.
The desk chair scrapes back against the hardwood floor of his apartment, nearly toppled over and long forgotten. Miles is already grabbing the essentials—camcorder, batteries, his notebook, the rust-red press badge he hasn’t used since they tried to muzzle his last exposé. Everything else is noise.
He’s gone before his computer can go into sleep mode.
The drive is long and quiet.
It’s the kind of silence that suffocates, the only sound the rush of wind outside of Miles’s Jeep. Just headlights carving out the darkened road like scripture, mile after mile of asphalt and storm clouds. He doesn’t bother with the radio. Nothing will help the noise tangling in his ribs.
The further he gets from the city, the more the air feels wrong—like the road is turning to spine beneath his tires.
When the signal dies, he doesn’t flinch, almost like he’d expected it to.
And when Mount Massive Asylum for the Criminally Insane crests the horizon, hulking and haloed in lightning, he doesn’t stop.
He parks at the edge of the world, camera in hand, heart mirroring the thunder overhead.
No promise of rescue. No saints left to pray to. Hope as frail as candlelight.
The front doors are locked. Of course they are.
Miles circles the perimeter, past chain-link fences and rusted scaffolding that rises like a crooked altar into a gray sky. The camera in his hand hums, blinking red—recording, always recording. He grips it tighter, sizes up the scaffolding, and starts to climb.
The metal creaks under his weight, slick with rain and reeking of petrichor. One rung at a time, breath ragged in his throat. The window above him gapes open like a mouth.
He slips through it like a shadow, drops straight into Hell itself.
The room inside is a wreck—upended chairs, papers scattered like feathers after a slaughter. Cabinets overturned. Paint peeled raw from the walls. The air is heavy with mildew, copper, and something else—something sharp, like rot.
But it’s the glow that stills him, just for a moment. Flickering, pale and unreal, like a light bleeding from an open wound.
A television on one end of the room. Static hisses across the screen; no picture, no sound.
Just a handful of men—patients—in straitjackets huddled around it like worshippers. Murmuring. Rocking.
Their eyes are vacant. Lips twitching, muttering things Miles doesn’t quite catch. So he keeps low, silent. The camera in his hand whirs softly as he pans across them—capturing, cataloguing, bearing witness.
They don’t look at him, don’t acknowledge him. They’re lost in the pale light of the TV static. Lost in whatever sermon plays beyond the white noise.
Miles moves carefully, boots silent against the wreckage. Step by step, past broken furniture and shattered glass.
A man’s head lolls as he passes, whispers something to him, but his voice is swallowed by the static.
Miles doesn’t look back. He creeps out of the room, deeper into Mount Massive.
The corridor yawns ahead of him like a throat. The air is colder now, heavy with something Miles can’t name, only feel—like dread wearing the scent of old blood. He grips his camcorder tighter, whether out of nerves or something else, he can’t tell.
He moves through the admin block with measured steps, every noise making his skin crawl. Past cubicles gutted of anything useful, though he does occasionally find and pick up folders labeled ‘CONFIDENTIAL.’ Phone receivers dangle like nooses. Every door he presses on creaks, every corner demands his breath be held. The silence is alive.
A sign catches his eye—Library. He pushes open the door.
A body swings down from the ceiling, suspended by its ankles. The face—what’s left of it—is slack, mouth parted in a perpetual gasp. It thuds against him as it swings, and he stumbles back, heart lodging in his throat. Then it snaps loose from whatever held it, crashing to the floor with a sickening, wet crack.
Another body hangs nearby. Also inverted. Headless. Blood pools beneath it, soaking scattered pages and books long forgotten.
His camera’s light flickers. And while he may feel like he can’t look (fearing he might vomit if he does), it continues rolling, still recording.
He pushes forward, deeper into the library’s ruined belly, squeezing past the hanging body. Bookshelves lean like fallen giants, some collapsed entirely. Paper rustles beneath him. His light sweeps across torn bindings, ink-stained walls, spines split open like ribs. A history of mania archived in blood.
Then, at the far end of the room, he sees it.
A uniform.
A security guard impaled on a broken beam of wood, driven through his torso like a stake.
He approaches slowly. Carefully. The man’s head is tilted back, mouth slack, blood trailing down his chest like paint. Miles raises the camera—
The guard gasps.
Miles reels, nearly dropping his camcorder.
“They killed us,” the man chokes, voice wet and broken. “They got out. The Variants.”
His eyes lock with Miles’s—wild, pleading.
“You can’t fight them. You have to hide. . .” He coughs. Wheezes. Blood splatters across his uniform. “. . .can unlock the main doors from security control.”
The breath rattles from his lungs. He claws at the beam impaling him as if he can still escape his fate. “You have to get the fuck out of this terrible place.”
Then his hands fall limp at his sides. And he is still.
Miles’s camera lowers slowly. Behind the guard, the shelves hold more than just books.
Heads.
Security guards—or other employees, he can only assume—mouths agape, eyes staring glassy and sightless where they’ve been arranged like trophies on the shelves.
He turns, bile rising in his throat and makes a beeline for the door.
Then—
A voice.
Female. Crackling over the intercom above, low and urgent. Hushed like she’s also hiding from something.
“Don’t open that door.”
He freezes.
“There’s a Variant waiting on the other side. Tall. Fast. I’ve seen what he does to people—just. . .wait.”
Silence.
Not static. Not glitching.
Just the sound of someone watching on bated breath.
Then—soft, almost reluctant:
“. . .okay. It’s safe. Go now.”
Another pause. Then she mutters, “Shit. . .I’ve gotta hide—”
The intercom cuts out.
Miles slips out of the library like prey from a den, every step measured, every sound he makes too loud in the stillness, like more than he can afford.
The hallway beyond stretches out wide and dim, only the faint flickering of emergency lights to guide him. He hugs the wall, grateful for the warning, not yet wanting to admit how badly he needed to hear another human voice—even one delivered through static.
Then—he sees it.
The Variant. Just like she said.
Tall, lanky but clearly fast. His outline barely human. The thing’s breathing is audible even from down the hall, like a bellows soaked in blood and rage. It lumbers, stalking with terrifying precision. Each step is deliberate, heavy. Its head turns slowly, scanning the corridor—then vanishes around the far corner.
Miles presses his back to the wall and shuts his eyes for a breath. Only now does he feel his chest moving. He didn’t even realize he’d stopped breathing.
He waits a moment longer, then moves. Quiet. Careful.
The corridor ahead bends left, then splits in two. One path is completely collapsed—all rubble and twisted metal. The other is narrow, nearly impassable, a blockade of overturned furniture, broken chairs, and a heavy shelf pressed between the walls like it was shoved there in panic.
He slips into the gap between the shelf and the cracked drywall, moving sideways, shoulders and chest brushing the wood, footfalls muffled by soaked carpet and crumpled paper.
Halfway through, the air thickens.
Then—
“Little pig.”
Miles freezes.
The voice is gravel dragged across concrete—low, mocking, and close. Too close.
Before he can turn, a hand the size of a bear traps fists into the back of his jacket. Then everything becomes motion.
He’s ripped from the barricade like a rag doll. Every breath feels stolen, everything moving at one-hundred miles a minute. He gets one glimpse of the face—scarred, monstrous—before the Variant launches him.
Through a window. Glass shatters around him.
The world spins.
Then—impact.
Miles crashes through the upper window of the lobby, the air seized from his lungs as his body careens through the open space and hits the polished wood below with a thud.
The camcorder clatters across the floor, landing on its side, recording at an angle.
Silence.
Blood spreads beneath him—where he’s injured, he’s unsure, because everything hurts—like ink across a page.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t wake.