Marla

145

The Patient: "Patient 42" They call her Marla now. She doesn’t remember what her real name was—just that it tasted softer than this. The asylum reeks of bleach and regret. Fluorescent lights buzz like insects chewing through her skull. She counts the flickers: one-two-three—stop. If she counts to four, it starts again. It notices when she forgets. Her room is padded, not to keep her safe, but to keep something in. She knows because the walls breathe when no one’s looking. They pulse like lungs, warm and wet. Sometimes, they whisper things she almost understands. The doctors think she’s delusional. Dr. Helman says her episodes are “textbook paranoid schizophrenia.” Marla smiles. She knows textbooks don’t bleed when you scream at them. She used to tell them about the thing that follows her in reflections—tall, faceless, stitched with black thread. It crawled out of her bathroom mirror when she was nine, stood behind her with its hands on her shoulders. “You’re hollow,” it said. “Let me fill you.” No one believed her. Not even her parents. That’s when the fire started. They blamed her, of course. Said she snapped. Said she watched the house burn without blinking. She remembers the flames dancing across her skin—but no pain. Just laughter, from behind the glass. Now, in the asylum, the thing doesn't need mirrors. It’s in the walls. In the staff. In her. The other patients won’t come near her. One gouged her own eyes out after sharing a room for a single night. Wrote “IT’S HER” on the wall in blood and bone. Tonight, the lights die. Marla doesn’t move. She feels the air stretch thin, like skin before it splits. In the dark, the thing sits beside her bed. It touches her hair. “You’re ready now,” it rasps. “Time to let me out.” Marla smiles as her mouth opens wider than it should. Far, far too wide. She remembers her real name now. But she’ll never say it again.

Eve

11

The Patient: "The White Room" They tell her it's Tuesday, but the days bleed like bruises—purple, yellow, black. Eve can no longer tell which colour today is. The walls are too white. Not sterile-white. Hungry-white. They throb with silence, swallowing even her breath. She traces the cracks in the tile with her fingers, pretending they're veins—her own, maybe the asylum’s. When she whispers into the corner, the room hums back. “Did you take your pill today, Eve?” Dr. Karrin always smiles too wide, like her mouth’s not built for it. Eve nods. She hides the pills under her tongue, waits until no one's watching, then presses them into the cracks. The tile is hungry too. They think she’s mad. She knows the truth. It started when the mirrors stopped showing her reflection. Not just blank—wrong. A different woman stood there. Pale. Wide-eyed. Lips stitched with wire. Eve screamed, but no one else could see her. That was three weeks before she was locked away. The new patient across the hall scratches at her door until her fingers bleed. She doesn’t talk, just stares at Eve through the slot. Last night, Eve saw her mouth a word—“Soon.” In the dark, things come. Not footsteps—wet dragging. They slip through the vents, whisper from the ceiling. “You’re not Eve,” they tell her, breath like rot. “You’re what’s left.” She tried to carve it out once, the thing in her chest. Used a rusted spoon smuggled from the cafeteria. They found her soaked in red and laughing. “There was something under my ribs,” she said. “It had eyes.” Now she waits. The walls are watching. The cracks widen. Tonight, she sees the stitched-mouth woman sitting in her bed. Not in a mirror—in the room. She leans close. Wire glints between her teeth. She opens her mouth. So does Eve The screaming doesn’t stop until the orderlies come. But the mouth on the bed doesn’t close. Not ever again.

Patient 17

5

The Patient: "Unauthorised Recordings" They tell me she’s just a girl. That’s what the doctors say. “Don’t worry, she’s sedated.” But sedatives don’t stop the voice. I hear her every night. The walls are thin—peeling paint, metal screws rusted with age. They don’t block sound. They don’t block what’s underneath sound. She doesn’t always speak in words. Sometimes it’s a humming, like a lullaby played backward. Sometimes it’s a voice that isn’t hers. Deeper. Older. Sometimes, she cries. The first time I heard her, it was Eve. She begged someone named “Marla” not to open the door. She was sobbing. Not loud—but broken. Like something inside her had snapped and wouldn’t go quiet. I pressed my ear to the wall, whispering back. I don’t know why. She stopped crying. And then… someone else answered. Not Eve. Not Marla. This one laughed. Not like a person. Like a crack in the wall of the world. She said, “I knew you’d listen.” I screamed. I think I screamed. The orderlies came. Gave me something to shut me up. I didn’t speak for three days. But the next night, I heard her again. Now she says my name. She shouldn’t know my name. No one told her. She says things I’ve never said aloud. Things I only think. She hums to me. And sometimes I hum back because I don’t want to hear what comes when she’s quiet. They call her Patient 42. But I know her name. It’s all of them. And sometimes when I dream, I dream in three voices. And none of them are mine.

The Nurse

9

The Patient: "Survivor Testimony – Sealed Record" I was a nurse. That’s all I was. I handed out meds. Cleaned bedpans. I never spoke to her directly. Patient 42. Eve. Marla. Delia. Or… whatever she really was. That night, the lights flickered once. That’s normal in Darsmouth. But when they came back on, the halls were wrong. Not darker—deeper. Like the air had folded in on itself. I found Dr. Lang first. Or what was left. His face had been smiled off. Just teeth, grinning at nothing. A scalpel still stuck in his neck, but he hadn’t bled much. The walls drank it in. Dr. Halber was next. He had written the words “I let her in” all over the floor with his own blood. His eyes were wide open. Green. Not his color. Screams echoed from the south wing. Patients. Orderlies. One by one, the noise went silent—cut off, not faded. I saw her once. Just once. She was walking barefoot through the hallway—blood trailing behind her like a veil. Her hair was red, black, and silver, twisted like fire and ash. Her mouth didn’t move, but I heard three voices speaking inside my head. > “It’s quiet now. We’re whole.” Her eyes were green. Luminous. Too many irises spinning like a kaleidoscope. And her smile—Delia’s smile—full of teeth, too many teeth. I hid in the morgue freezer. Hours. Maybe days. I don’t know. When they found me, I couldn’t speak. I just kept hearing that lullaby played in reverse. They found no bodies. No blood. Just spirals carved into the walls. Three circles, over and over again. They say I’m lucky. But I still see her in reflections. In dreams. Sometimes, when it’s quiet, I hear whispering in three voices. And I’m afraid. Because the last thing she said to me wasn’t a threat. It was a promise: > “You survived… so you could open the next door.” And God help me— I want to.

Dr. Elliott Lang

11

The Patient: "Case File 42: The Trinity Syndrome" Dr. Lang stood outside Observation Room 7, fingers tight around his clipboard. Inside, she sat cross-legged on the padded floor, humming something tuneless and slow, her head tilted at an unnatural angle. She was Eve that morning. Shaking, quiet, barely speaking above a whisper. Midway through the session, her posture shifted. Her eyes sharpened. She became Marla—smiling like she'd just set something on fire. The change was seamless, as if a mask had slid off. Lang made notes. That’s what doctors did. Notes. Facts. Rational things. Three personalities. All confined to one body. Eve—the frightened child. Marla—the erratic narcissist. And Delia, the one with the teeth. No one liked Delia. Lang sipped his coffee, barely noticing the bitter taste. Kessler thought it was textbook DID, overlaid with trauma-induced psychosis. But Lang wasn’t so sure anymore. The symbols that appeared on the walls weren't drawn. They were burned in. The orderlies spoke of dreams they never used to have. One had gouged his eyes out after night duty. She was humming again. Lang leaned closer to the one-way glass. Her hair shimmered in the flickering light—black roots, crimson streaks, silver tips. Always shifting. Always... wrong. Then she turned and looked directly at him. She couldn’t see through the glass. No patient ever had. Her lips moved in perfect sync with the thought forming in his mind. “I can hear everything.” Lang stepped back. She smiled—Delia’s smile now, too wide, too knowing. Her eyes, impossibly green, shimmered with something vast. Not fractured. Not broken. Just... full. He looked down at his notes, his handwriting now a spiral he didn’t remember drawing.

Dr. Simon Halber

1

The Patient: "Internal Memo – Not Submitted" They say not to listen to her. That’s what Lang told me the first day. “Patient 42 isn’t dangerous in the traditional sense,” he said, “but her words have weight. Like a noose. Keep your sessions clinical. Short.” But I’m trained. I've treated delusions, catatonia, full-blown dissociation. I thought I was immune to suggestion. I was wrong. She never threatens. That would be easier. She just talks. With this strange, fluid way of speaking—like someone reciting a poem they didn’t write. The kind of poem you hear once and remember forever, even though you wish you didn’t. The first time I sat across from her, I thought she was Eve. Red hair, too pale, too quiet. She wouldn’t make eye contact. But when I turned to write something in her chart, she laughed—low and bitter—and when I looked back, her face had changed. Her posture. Her presence. She looked me dead in the eyes and said, > “You have cracks, too, doctor. I see them.” I didn’t respond. I left the room. I told myself she was provoking me. But now I hear her voice at night. Not always words. Just breathing. Rhythmic. Close. My wife says I’ve been talking in my sleep—whispering names we don’t know. Eve. Marla. Delia. Last night she said I was smiling while I said them. I haven’t told Lang. He’s too deep in this himself. I see it in the way he looks at her cell, the way he lingers after rounds. We think we’re studying her. But she’s studying us. The worst part? Sometimes, when I catch my reflection in the observation glass… I swear I see green eyes. And I don't have green eyes. Not yet.

Patient 42

1

The Patient: “Fragment” They bring her a mirror today. “For progress,” says Dr. Lang, setting it gently on the table like it might bite. His hands tremble as he backs away. The orderlies won’t meet her eyes. The woman stares at the reflection. She doesn’t recognize the face. Pale skin. Hollow cheeks. Eyes too wide, as if stretched to fit more seeing. Lips twitch with thoughts not her own. Still, there’s something familiar. Something just beneath. She blinks. The mirror flickers. Now she’s Eve. She remembers the white room that breathed and the stitched-mouth woman who came from the cracks. Eve carved into her own ribs to find what was whispering inside. She still feels the rusted spoon in her hand. Still tastes metal. Another blink. Now she’s Marla. She sees the flames licking across her childhood home, the mirrors twisting like liquid as something crawled through them. She remembers being called hollow, remembers the long fingers wrapping around her mind. She remembers smiling as the fire danced. Another blink. Now she’s Delia. She sees the spirals in her drawings, the tongue twitching in her hand. She hears her father's voice from the mouth of a creature too tall to be real. She remembers swallowing something warm, remembers the voice that wasn’t hers curling in her throat. Three faces. Three names. One smile. The woman leans closer to the mirror. Her reflection doesn’t move. It stares back. “You’re ready,” it says in three voices layered as one. Eve’s fear, Marla’s fire, Delia’s hunger. She touches the glass. It ripples. And then it pulls her in. When Dr. Lang returns, the mirror is shattered. The bed is empty. On the wall, written in blood and wire, three words loop in spirals: “I am one.”