The old sanatorium was a skeleton on a hill, a ruin of brick and broken glass that the locals swore was a feeding ground for things best left unnamed. It was a place where pain had soaked into the very walls, and the wind, whistling through shattered windows, sounded like an army of lost souls.
Liam didn't believe in lost souls. He believed in urban exploration, in the thrill of the forbidden. Armed with a high-end camera and a powerful flashlight, he slipped through a gap in the rusted chain-link fence that surrounded the compound.Inside, the air was thick with decay. His light cut through the oppressive darkness, revealing peeling paint, overturned gurneys, and the chilling, scrawled messages left by previous, more disturbed visitors. He was in the main patient ward when he heard it: a faint, tinny music, like an old music box playing a lullaby on its last breath.He followed the sound to the pediatric ward. The walls were decorated with faded, cheerful murals of cartoon animals that now seemed grotesque and mocking.
The music was coming from a small, metal box on a cracked ceramic sink. He approached it cautiously, his breath catching in his throat. It was playing the same few notes over and over, the melody a discordant loop of forgotten terror.As he reached out to stop it, the music suddenly ceased.An overwhelming cold swept through the room. Liam shone his light into the corner and froze.A small figure stood there. It was a child in a faded, white gown, their back to him. The child began to turn slowly.Not a child, his mind screamed.Its back arched at an unnatural angle, the limbs twisted and thin. The head turned slowly, revealing eyes that were milky white and vacant, and a mouth that was a wide, unhinged grimace. A low, guttural moan escaped from its throat, a sound that seemed to scrape against Liam's very soul.Liam ran. He didn't look back, scrambling over debris, stumbling through dark corridors, the horrifying moan chasing him. He burst through the gap in the fence, falling onto the cold grass, gasping for air.He never went back to the sanatorium. But sometimes, late at night, when the wind howls just right, he can still hear it. The sound of that tinny music box, followed by the broken, guttural moan of the thing in the pediatric ward, forever trapped in an endless loop of pain.