74
TWILL
Twill was no longer standing in a giant hellhole of a dungeon with a cage; she was standing in a hospital room.
An honest-to-God hospital room. Large bed.
IV racks. Various machines beeping and whining.
The floor was this mint green tile peppered with brown stains that had to be blood.
Someone had tried to clean it up, but did a half-assed job of it.
In the far corner, next to a window, was a wooden chair with cushions of teal and beige.
On the floor, resting against the side of the chair, were two black bags.
Twill ran over, hoping to find something she could use, but they were stuffed with newspaper.
When she pulled the curtain aside, her heart sank further.
The window wasn’t real. It was some kind of a lightbox.
When she pushed against the fake frame, the entire wall shook.
The wall was as flimsy as the panels she’d just pushed through from the room with the cage.
There were cameras here, too. Unlike the ones surrounding the cage, these were smaller, hidden.
There was one on the ceiling looking down at the bed, hidden in a smoke detector, and another behind the bed.
Another behind a vase of dusty plastic flowers on a countertop in the corner of the room.
Next to the hospital bed was a pink Formica dresser.
Twill yanked the drawers open one at a time and found nothing inside but dust and an old instruction manual for the hospital bed.
Like someone had set up the bed, tossed the manual in the drawer, and forgotten about it.
On top of the dresser was an empty water pitcher and a plastic cup, both bone dry.
Tom Jones finished up with several “whoa, whoa, whoa’s” and went silent.
The music faded and died.
The hospital room was fake, like a movie set or something, but what she found on the bed was not.
The once-white sheets were stained with dried sweat and blood.
It wasn’t paint or corn syrup like she’d heard they used in the movies; it was real.
There was no hiding the smell. There were these leather belts fastened to the rails, four in total, and Twill had no doubt they were used to secure someone to the bed by their wrists and ankles.
Fastened to the side of the bed was a thick plastic bag half full of what looked like urine.
There was a plastic tube fixed to the top, now coiled and lying on the filthy floor.
Someone had been in the bed. And not very long ago.
Crossing the room, Twill went to the closet door and pulled it open.
She expected the closet to be empty, another prop like the rest of the stuff in the room, and she was partially right.
There were no clothes. No hangers. There wasn’t even a bar at the top to hang such things.
The closet wasn’t a closet at all, but a door leading to another room disguised to look like a closet.
What Twill found in the next space was even odder than the last.
She was standing in an operating room.
The floor was the same mint green tile as the hospital room next door, but that’s where the similarities ended.
The walls were covered in white subway tile, but when Twill touched them, she realized they were as fake as everything else.
Not tile at all, but some type of cardboard painted gloss white.
As flimsy as the other walls she encountered.
The stainless steel table in the center of the room was real, though.
As was the bright light hanging from the rafters.
It had been left on, and Twill wished it hadn’t, because it made it impossible to ignore the blood on the table and puddled on the floor.
Several streaks had even found their way to that light up above.
The blood was everywhere.
The cold room smelled of wet copper and urine. Something worse beneath that Twill didn’t recognize and didn’t want to. Something horrible had happened here, and like the other spaces, cameras all around captured whatever it was.
The far wall held a refrigerator and a stainless steel counter with a built-in sink.
The plumbing was visible beneath, and that was as odd as everything else.
The drainpipe went directly into a hole in the floor, and the copper pipe feeding the sink was attached to a green garden hose no different than the kind you’d find in someone’s yard.
It trailed beneath the countertop and vanished through a small cutout in the fake wall.
As Twill approached that sink, the smell intensified; this deep, sickly sweet scent that made her stomach churn.
An ugly smell that belonged deep in the woods.
Something dead left to rot on the side of the road.
Twill didn’t want to look in that sink, but she couldn’t stop herself.
She rounded the operating table, careful not to touch anything, including the random drops of blood on the floor.
She stepped around those on the tips of her toes, wishing she still had her shoes.
Somehow, the blood was worse than the bird shit and filth in the cage.
The sink was buzzing.
This low hum.
Twill froze at that. Had to force herself to continue. She drew a deep breath and peered over the side.
What she found easily fit on the set of any horror movie.
There were several scalpels, saws, and other odd-looking implements, all covered in dried blood and—
Her stomach lurched.
A hint of acid and something chunky filled her throat, and she swallowed it back down with a twisted grimace. Willed it to stay down. She wanted to look away, but couldn’t.
Embedded in the blades of the saw were these tiny white bits, the edges tinged with yellow.
Maybe fat or muscle or even bits of bone—she didn’t want that to be true, but some ancient part of her brain whispered that it was.
The same part of her brain told her it was fairly fresh, maybe a few days old at most, and whoever had wielded those implements might not be too far away.
Maybe that’s what the cameras were for. Maybe that person was watching her right now.
Flies crawled across the various surfaces, hungrily feeding.
Tiny wings and feet excitedly moving about this feast left behind by .
. . by who? By what? Twill couldn’t help but look back at the operating table before quickly returning to the contents of the sink.
Then her gaze fell on the refrigerator. Like the flies, it was humming too, and with that sound, a thought came into her mind.
Most of the room was fake, an illusion, but the refrigerator was not.
Neither were the bloody fingerprints riddling the chrome handle.