Just after midnight, Jin pulled off his duvet and slowly swung his legs from the mattress onto the floor. His breath hitched as the bed made a high-pitched creaking noise when he shifted his weight toward the edge. Hopefully, none of his roommates were light sleepers. The thought of a hyperactive Haegol waking up the entire dorm with his cheerful voice sent shivers down Jin's spine.
A few seconds passed, but the room remained quiet; only the sound of rhythmical breathing and occasional snoring filled the air. Jin took this as a sign to get up and tiptoed to the door, which he then opened at the speed of a snail crawling over a speed bump.
Once the gap was wide enough, Jin shoved his head through and peeked around the corners. Slipping into the hallway and closing the door behind him at a much faster pace, Jin's heartbeat quickened. If he got caught now by a nurse, he still could explain himself by saying that he needed to go to the restroom. But if he was spotted only after having already passed the lavatory, he would not have any excuse, at least not a believable one.
But he would need no excuse. Excuses were for losers, and Jin did not plan to give up his attempt to find a way into the other ward where his brother was being kept. Or his attempt to find a bolt cutter to cut a hole into the fence on the roof, whatever came first.
As Jin walked through the hallway—in socks-clad feet, because shoes and bare feet would make too much noise—his heart calmed down. 'There must be a way to the other ward. All I need to do is to study the escape plan properly. Easy as pie. Just go to the staircase, find a plan and—'
Jin almost cried out loud, as he spotted a silhouette at the end of the hallway. 'Damn! What is he doing here?!'
Only a few meters in the distance sat Namjoon in a chair to supervise the staircase. There was no way sneaking around him without being noticed.
Jin's body tensed as he prayed that Namjoon would not follow a sudden urge to look to his left and see the boy who violated curfew standing there. Slowly moving backwards, Jin thought of another way to access the first floor of the building.
The only other way down was the staircase at the other end of the hallway. But unfortunately, those stairs lead to the corridor with the nurse's office—a brightly lit, frequently used hallway where the chance to pass through unnoticed was just as high as the possibility to determine the next digit of Pi by sheer brain power.
'Upsetting the nurses or messing with that Namjoon-kid…?' Jin reasoned with himself. The answer was as clear as day. However, he would need a little help to distract the security guard, preferably the help of someone who was as silent as a grave.
With a faint smile on his lips, Jin walked back to his room, leaving the door wide open, and approached the bed in which Mirrors was sleeping soundly.
The boy cramped and took a ragged, but deep breath as Jin pulled him out of bed without attempting to wake him first. Fearing Mirrors would spontaneously decide to rediscover his ability to scream, Jin pulled him closer to whisper in his ear. "Shh… It's me, Jin. You know, that guy you had a conversation with this afternoon. Sorry for waking you up in the middle of the night, but you need to do me a little favor."
Mirrors tilted his head, which Jin took as approval, although he knew it was not meant as such. Wasting no time, he pushed the boy through the open door and down the hallway until Namjoon was in sight. Upon giving Mirrors one last nudge toward the security guard, Jin took a step backward and hid in the darkness.
"Who's there?" Namjoon hissed and jumped from his chair. The moment he saw the blonde boy looking like a lost puppy his whole demeanor changed. "Can't sleep?" he asked gently as he approached Mirrors. "It's okay. Let's see whether the nurses can help you."
Hidden in a gap between a pillar and a fire extinguisher, Jin watched—or rather, listened—the security guard leading Mirrors through the pitch black corridor.
When Namjoon's and Mirrors' silhouettes had merged with the darkness, Jin sneaked out of the gap and rushed to the staircase. There might not be enough time for a victory dance, but instead, Jin mockingly skipped down the steps while calling Namjoon all sorts of names in his mind.
He did not worry about slipping past Namjoon a second time, since he did not plan to go back to the dorm after found Hobi anyway.
At the bottom of the staircase, Jin sneaked around a corner where he took the time to study the map on the wall to get a clear picture of the facility. But no matter from which angle he looked, something did not add up. Three things in particular stood out. First, the diagonal corridor that he visited the night before was not on the map. Second, the other half of the building was not shown on the plan, which probably meant there was no direct connection between the two wards. And third, there was no basement whatsoever, so looking for a bolt cutter was a fruitless attempt.
'Thinking about it, the mental ward of an orphanage would be a strange place to look for tools to cut through metal,' Jin thought and rolled his eyes, before gluing them to the emergency map once more, paying attention to as many details as he could.
'Could the plan have been changed on purpose?' he wondered. 'It would make sense. I can't be the only one trying to sneak out of this hell. Someone probably changed the layout so that no figures out how to get out of here.' Thinking of it, he had not seen any signs leading to emergency exits. 'Maybe I should call an auditor once I get outta here. I wonder how high the penalty for neglecting security measures is.'
Jin focused so intently onto the plan that his head started to hurt. His plans to visit Hobi were shattered, but he could not go back to bed, without running into the nurses on night shift or a furious Namjoon. He hated to admit it, but he was stuck.
The image of a crying Hobi sitting in his bed struck Jin's head and made his stomach churn with anger. Wishing there was someone or something worth kicking in the hallway, Jin noticed a glowing red spot on the wall only a few meters away fromhim. He did not need to get closer to recognize what it was.
'The fire alert! Bingo!' He approached the button with a smirk. While the staff would be busy evacuating and calming down the other kids, Jin would seize the moment and run around to the other side of the building. The plan was risky, but what did he have to lose? It was better than getting caught by a nurse or Namjoon in an attempt to sneak back into the dorms.
Jin's smile grew. "Here goes nothing," he said out loud and using his elbow, he pushed the break glass button.
An alarm shrilled through the air. In a matter of seconds, the stillness of the night morphed into a realm of chaos. The light in the hallway flickered and a close voice screamed words Jin could only hear but not understand. At the far-end hallway Jin spotted two staff members bumping into each other as they hastened from one room to another.
From the upper end of the staircase Jin heard Namjoons booming voice and the tired and confused mumbling of kids. Jin quickly moved away from the stairs to avoid being seen and decided it was best to act like any sane person would—panic like a headless chicken in order to save their life.
The light flickered above his head as Jin jogged across the hallway. He wondered whether the alarm got triggered in the other ward as well. If that was the case, it would be even easier to reunite with Hobi. All Jin could do was hope that Hobi was not too scared, that he knew his brother was coming for him, that he was—
As soon as Jin turned at a corner, the alarm ceased and the lights conked out. Within the blink of an eye, the surroundings changed, causing Jin to stop in his tracks so suddenly that he almost fell over.
The pitch black hallway before him had turned into a scene from a horror movie. The air was filled with traces of smoke. Cables hung from the broken ceiling, and rain trickled down the dirty, chapped walls and through the grate that had replaced the floor below Jin's feet, washing away the grime.
Goosebumps were an understatement. Jin's skin crawled, making him instinctively move backwards. With a racing heart, he tried to figure out what the heck was going on.
Did he experience a hallucination? Did he somehow summon a fire by triggering a false alarm? Or had he traveled through time as he had passed the corner?
'The corner,' Jin repeated the word in his mind and slowly turned to look into the direction he came from.
"What the—" Instead of a hallway, Jin saw a rectangular hole in the wall that led into nothingness. All he could see was pure darkness below, beyond and above. "This makes no sense! I must be dreaming! I must be…"
The stench of smoke numbed his senses and burnt in his eyes. Jin felt so dizzy he leaned against the closest wall. A sharp pain shot through his hand as he touched embers on the wall. Cursing and screaming in pain Jin sank to his knees and stared at the sore spot in the palm of his left hand, while squeezing tightly with the other, in hopes that this would bring some relief.
Suppressing his tears, Jin instinctively lifted the injured hand to his mouth in an attempt to cool the spot with saliva, but the hint of his breath caused fresh waves of pain.
In the back of his head, a crystal clear thought fought its way into his consciousness. The pain was real. Therefore, so must be the strange illusion Jin was trapped in. But how had it been possible that his entire surroundings changed within a second?
"There must be a logical…" Jin murmured to himself between coughs, "...a logical explanation… for this..."
After a few more moments the pain in his hand had become bearable, and Jin got up and gazed into the darkness surrounding him. "Is anyone here?" he shouted into the corridor. His voice bounced off the walls like a distorted metallic echo.
The grate creaked under Jin's weightas he moved around the charred surroundings. Moonlight shone through the destroyed walls, providing just the right amount of light for Jin to see what lay a few feet ahead. Dizzy from the fumes, Jin shuffled forward, step by step, like a zombie.
The thought of Hobi—no matter how improbable it sounded—being trapped inside this dark labyrinth made him quicken his steps instantly. His coughing increased with his speed, but so did his will to find his brother. He needed to get Hobi out of the darkness, to start a new life together in a faraway place which would be paradise, compared to this nightmare.
Upon reaching another intersection, Jin stopped in his tracks as he spotted what looked like charred bodies scattered on the ground. Frozen to the spot he stared at the corpses, not knowing whether to scream, to pay them respects, or to take them as a sign to get out of that building as quickly as possible.
A thought grazed Jin's mind, filling it with disgust. He wondered who the dead might be. Was Hobi one of them?There was only one way to find out.
After a brief hesitation, Jin moved to the body closest to him and turned it as gently as he could with his foot, until its face was revealed.
"OH GOD! NO!" Jin screamed as he recognized the distorted features of Nurse Suzie. The lip gloss had conserved her lips, but the rest of her face was a mass of burnt flesh.
Jin stumbled backwards, fell to his knees and threw up. Bile and acid churned in his throat, as he rested his head on his arms and breathed heavily, wishing the image of burnt flesh would disappear from his mind.
He did not know how much time had passed when he slowly shifted his bodyinto a sitting position, his back facing the dead. When his empty gaze wandered around the darkness in an attempt to find sense in it, he noticed a tiny finger which found its way through a grate and touched the outside of Jin's leg. As he looked through the metal bars he spotted a little figure staring at him with wide eyes.
"Are you…Are you okay?" Jin huffed and wiped his mouth. The taste of vomit lingering in the back of his throat made him want to throw up again, but his attention was on the child beneath the grid. "Are you… hurt? Just what is going on here! Can you tell me?"
Tilting their head, the child moved closer to the metal mesh separating Jin from the nothingness. Jin bent down in expectation to hear the child speak. "It hurts…"
"What is hurting you?" Jin asked, his heart beating frantically in fear of seeing another burnt body.
"It hurts…. to be happy…" the child growled and pressedtheir head closer to the metal. Blood flowed from their empty eye sockets like streams of tears.
Too shocked to scream, Jin stumbled backwards and tripped over Nurse Suzie's body only to land on another corpse which cushioned his fall. Within a fraction of a second, Jin jumped to his feet just to fall to his knees once more. When he dared to take another peek, the child was gone.
"This is a nightmare!" he concluded and pinched his injured hand until the pain rang in his ears and brought tears to his eyes. "This must be a nightmare! But why can't I wake up? Why can't I—"
Something rustled in the darkness. Swallowing down his fear, Jin stared into the corridor in which the corpses had been—onlyto find nothing but a cloud of smoke rising from the ground. The sound of a sigh sent shivers down Jin's spine. Was it an illusion caused by the wind blowing around the edges of the destroyed roof, or perhaps some of the bodies still had been alive?
A strong gust of wind blew ash and rubble into Jin's face, causing him to close his eyes.When he opened them, the smoke had transformed into the shape of a hugeskull hovering over the grate. In a second of paralysis, Jin watched the skulldestroy the floor with nothing but a bloodcurdling scream, sending the dead bodies into the nothingness.
Jin started to run just in time to outpace the soundwaves. Another scream echoed through the hallway, and the grate below his feet started to vibrate,which forcedhim to run even faster. The sharp, smoke filled air brought tears to his eyes until his vision was so clouded that he could barely see anything. Jin expected to hit a wall any given moment, but his legs carried him further and further, until thesounds of breaking metal and collapsing walls became loud enough to hurt him physically. A strong gust of wind first pushed him away, and then tried to suck him in as if it was the sinister breath of death.
Numbedby the pain in his legs, Jin was mere seconds away from surrendering to the nightmarish realm.But there was too much at stake.Only the chants of his own thoughts kept him going—'I must find Hobi to end this nightmare I must find Hobi to end this nightmare'—,until the next step he took met with nothingness. The grate broke underneath him and he was swallowed into the void.
To be continued…
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