I’m sorry, really! It was the only way…I wouldn’t do this normally…I thought I was braver…it turns out I’m just too scared! It’s the only way, you have to believe that to understand and then, maybe then you can forgive me for this because it’s terrible…please, I’m just so sorry!

This is yesterday. I’m out at the mall hanging out with my friends. Danny, a friend of a friend who I don’t know very well, and don’t like too well either, Danny, he comes and says to us, he says hey, why don’t we go out to the abandoned hospital and dare each other to go in or something like that. We like to watch horror movies and stuff, you know, and play games like and so our parents are all pretty loose and we don’t have a curfew or nothing, so we’re like yeah, let’s do it.

So we all head up the block and across town and it takes us a little while to make the walk and it gets pretty dark but there are street lights and all. The street lights are out in front of the old hospital, though, but that’s good because we don’t want anyone seeing us messing around in a condemned building.

We get up to the doors and Bill, my closest friend, is just like let’s all go in, and I’m thinking what happened to daring each other, right? But I’m not saying anything cause really I don’t want to go in there alone on a dare when we can all go in and I guess everyone else is thinking that too cause nobody pipes up and we go in.

The door’s chained shut with a rusty lock but we’re like pretty skinny kids so we can fit through the gap between the two doors and we all duck under the chain and go in. The place smells sort of metallic and also dusty. There’s that hint of hospital smell still around after all these years, but also the stench of decay, old chairs and wooden desks collapsing and possibly the scent of something like rat crap.

Okay, there’s four of us here total, that’s me and Danny and Bill and Manny. So the four of us start walking into the building a bit. We’re all scared shitless at this point I think, but no one’s going to say it so we try to pretend like we’re all eager to get in there while we’re all jockeying to be not the person in front. We hit the first turn and the doors to hospital slam and we all collectively shit bricks. Just the wind though.

God, I’m really sorry…

So we all have a chuckle and we go on and the its dark as shit now, but we can sort of make our way through the hall. There’s all sorts of creepy things lying around. I see an overturned wheel chair and a gurney stained red. And there’s like dozens of broken and used looking syringes. Some of the walls are sort of falling through and we can see into examination rooms.

This one room we pass, I swear there’s a dead body lying on it to this very second, but I didn’t stop or say anything or every tell anyone else before now because, you know, I can maybe believe it’s not real if I just leave it at that. Telling you now is irrelevant.

And at this point we’re hearing like this rusty grinding noise, like a big fan scraping it’s blades against something concrete or brick. It’s sort of the direction we’re going although it’s hard to say for sure.

We get to a sort of dead end and the noise is definitely louder. There’s a fine dust floating through the air, just visible through a beam of street light coming between two planks over a window in the nearest room, hallway wall entirely missing. The stench has become almost entirely iron and rot, the other more subtle smells absent. The noise is repetitive and mechanical. You can sort of feel the floor vibrating from it.

None of us are smiling or laughing or even talking at this point. It’s pretty tense and I’m fighting the urge to run the hell out of there right then. It’s like the one last thread of reason in my mind is telling me that I’ll never live it down if I freak and run cause tomorrow we’ll all be out in the sun and this won’t be scary at all when it’s just a memory and I’ll look like a complete coward.

But I’m really sorry I didn’t run. You’re right, I should have bolted right there.

And then it’s Danny noticing the door, this door right there that we sort of glazed over before and now, there it is and it says Psychiatric on it and it’s ever so slightly ajar. And Danny, probably regretting it himself as soon as it comes out, is like let’s go this way, and we all sort of sigh and now we’re stuck and so Danny, he opens the door.

And it’s bizarre but it’s slightly easier to see on the other side. It’s bizarre because this is a stairwell that goes down, under the hospital, no sign of windows, but we can sort of see a bit better like electricity is just in the air down there. The stairs are concrete but sound hollow with our footsteps. We step silently out of cautious pessimism.

I’m fighting the urge, I should but I’m just too afraid. You’ll understand.

And at the bottom of the stairs, we’re looking down a short hall way. There are twelve doors, six on each side, and a seventh at the end of the hall way. The sound is louder down here so we know we’re closer. We take a couple steps. Bill gets brave and reaches out to the closest door. He tries the knob, but we can tell by the sound without him saying anything that it’s locked.

Manny tries the one on the other side, and it is also locked. We get a little braver and proceed, trying doors and they are all locked. And so we reach this final door, all the others locked, and it’s Manny who is the first to get to it and he tries it and we all sort of jump in shock because it opens out, and behind it, and I’ll be damned if we can’t see better than ever now, is a flat wall like there’s no reason for this door to be here because this wall is flat right on the other side of it, but there’s like a fire alarm pull like you see in schools and stuff sitting right there, entirely red but without the Fire written on it and above it scrawled on the wall, very neatly though, is a phrase. Pull to invite.

Jesus, stupid, so stupid…

And Danny, moron of morons, I don’t even feel sorry for him because before he even moved the rest of us were getting ready to turn on our heels and hall ass because this is just too weird, but no, Danny reaches out and grabs it and pulls it.

My jaw drops. Manny’s expression is actually hilarious out of context, but in this situation no one is laughing. Bill just sort of palms his face. Danny immediately apologizes, saying he doesn’t know why he did it but he just had this urge. Nothing is happening though, so we sort of whisper, still being cautious, our feelings of frustration here and we all turn to leave.

Standing in front of the stairway door is a man over six feet tall. He’s wearing a bloody smock and gloves and boots and his skin shows at the wrist and neck and its pearly white and sort of sweaty looking. He wears something like a gas mask over his head, although it’s not like any one I’ve ever seen in movies, and the glass over the eyes is blacked out so you can’t see his eyes. In his right hand, he’s holding a surgical saw.

We stand like in total shock for a good several seconds and he stands like in total…something…just not moving and waiting. And it’s like Manny suddenly grows the biggest set of nuts ever and he just walks down the hall casually to this guy.

The guy tucks his saw into his belt and it’s sort of like a glimmer of hope like, oh he’s not going to hurt us and this is some misunderstanding and we’ll be fine. Manny gets a little more courage as well judging by his pace quickening and he gets half way down the hall and starts speaking, saying hey, we know we’re not supposed to be down here and we’re sorry so we’ll just leave and we’re not stealing anything or doing anything like bad so we’ll just go and that’ll be that.

Manny is pretty close, like he’s on rails. The man reaches out to his side with his left hand. He turns the knob of the door and it opens, apparently not needing to be unlocked, and it swings away from us and Manny sort of keeps walking out of confusion and he’s in range, so the guy, he grabs Manny by his neck and lifts up two feet of the ground, and there’s this gurgling sound as he reaches for this guy’s arm and just grabs it, not knowing what else to do, and the guy just sort of jerks his wrist to the side, and we hear the snap, clearly, and Manny goes limp, like a dead chicken, and the guy holds him for a second, looking at his head sort of bobbling on his mangled neck and we can hear the gurgle continue and die down a bit, air escaping from Manny’s deflating lungs, and then the guy just tosses him, he just tosses him like a rag doll into this room and he shuts the door and then he turns back to us, and he takes out the saw with that hand, and with the other he reaches out to the door on the other side, opens it, then turns to us and waits again.

I can’t say about the other guys, but my nuts are in my stomach at this point. Danny is crying though. Bill looks determined, like he’s not going down without a fight, but I already know at this point that it’s hopeless and I’m just on the edge of insanity like what the fuck did we get ourselves into.

Please don’t, please…

And Bill produces a pocket knife. He shouts and runs forward. The guy doesn’t move to defend and Bill plunges this thing right into the center of his chest. It’s a great shot. Right into the heart. It makes a plunking sound as it pierces the breast bone. The guy waits for Bill to let go of the knife and then hacks into his neck with the saw. The arteries are cut and blood spurts like a fountain onto the wall. I piss myself. Danny curls up on the floor and starts balling. Bill grabs in vain at his neck, it’s like gushing at this point, but it really doesn’t matter cause the guy, he hacks again and hits bone this time and then grabs Bill’s hair to hold him up and starts sawing and Bill, he makes a sound I’ll hear in my nightmares for life, he screams and it sounds like he’s screaming into a bucket of water cause he’s pretty much drowning in his own blood, and then the saw clears the spinal cord and his arms and legs are shaking violently and the scream is involuntary now and then the body is free of the head and it slumps to the floor. The guy tosses the head into the room. Then he kicks the body in. He closes the door. He starts moving towards us.

Danny is curled on the floor, sobbing. The guy gets up next to us, we’re still at the far end of the hall, and he opens the door to his left and just sort of waits. Danny, he gets up and sort of stumbles towards the door like he’s going to go in, but then, just as he’s at the threshold, he tries to bolt under the guy’s arm and down the hall, but he only takes a step cause this guy is fast and he grabs Danny by his head and squeezes it a little and it splits, like when you drop a cantaloupe on the floor, just cracks and some brain matter leaks out and he tosses the quivering Danny into these room. Then he turns his gaze at me.

The door is still open so I’m guessing he’s like expecting me to be Danny’s roommate down here but I’m too scared to even move, else I probably would have just walked right in there in a daze, but I’m literally petrified on the spot so I just start begging, pleading, saying I’ll do anything he wants, whatever he asks, just don’t kill me and he sort of leans over me, impossible leaning over the top of me and not losing his balance, and he asks me, in a voice terribly frightening perhaps only because it sounds so normal, anything? I say yes, anything, just name it.

He says, FOR THIS PERSON I AM NOW YOURS.

I ask, FOR THIS PERSON I AM NOW YOURS?

And he repeats, FOR THIS PERSON I AM NOW YOURS.

I’m sorry…

And he gave me explicit instructions to follow and he let me go and I ran and ran and the next thing I knew I was at home. Writing this. So you could read it. Because those were my instructions. Return home, tell my story, put it somewhere where others can see it, and make sure they read the words FOR THIS PERSON I AM NOW YOURS three times. For every person that does this, you will gain one more week of freedom, he tells me. That person will read this story and within a day, find themselves in his hall way and become another of his corpses like my friends, and I will survive for another week.

I was just so scared, you understand? I tried to tell you to stop reading as best I could, I didn’t want you to, honest, but I just couldn’t help it and I did what he asked and I’m so sorry! I just hope you stopped reading. If you’re still reading, good luck.