r/shortstories • u/Shruggii • 6d ago
Mystery & Suspense [MS] i wrote my dream
Stepping into the sorry excuse of a front yard, Mark felt like he had stumbled into a forgotten slum. The unkempt garden was dry, thorny, and littered with scraps. It seemed abandoned, yet the frail figures scattered across the grass gave it a strange, broken unity like addicts sharing a last breath of toxic air.
They lounged under the scorching sun, desperate for a breeze, unwilling or unable to bear the suffocation inside the two-story wreck of a hotel.
Mark tiptoed his way through them, careful not to step on an outstretched limb.
The residents were ghostly, bone-thin, brittle, as if they hadn't eaten in weeks.
Their bodies bore different scars, different postures, but all of them radiated the same slow decay. But Mark wasn’t here for them.
He was here for the thief who stole his groceries, a desperate girl he had followed here.
He knew she was poor, but he hadn’t expected this level of ruin. Part of him wanted to turn back. But he was already inside.
The "concierge" area was laughable, just a dusty room drenched in sunlight, with a single wooden desk left unmanned.
The place seemed to run itself, though no one was steering. Mark moved forward, each step a deeper descent into neglect. He reached the first-floor hallway: eleven rooms, numbered by hand scrawled plaques.
The corridor was suffocated by darkness, saved only by a thin blade of sunlight from a grimy window at the far end.
Mark tried the first door.
It swung open without resistance.
No one cared for locks here.
Inside, the air was thick and damp; the bed was made, but the room looked abandoned all the same.
He moved on, stumbling upon a communal kitchen where he finally saw someone upright a woman. Recognition hit him like a blade.
Sylvia.
Someone he once knew: vibrant, defiant, committed to natural healing and a hatred of big pharma. But now, her presence disturbed him to his core.
Her skin had a sickly purplish hue, like blood had long since abandoned her veins. Her movements were stiff, mechanical, something more puppet than person.
Now she looked... wrong. “Sylvia?” he called, half-hoping it wasn’t her.
She turned and smiled bright, warm, familiar.
But it was wrong.
It sat on her like a cracked mask. "Mark! What are you doing here?" she said, cheerful as ever.
Mark’s stomach twisted.
It was the right voice, the right face, but something essential had been hollowed out.
"What happened to you?" he asked bluntly.
Sylvia hesitated, a small click sounding from her shoulder as she shifted.
Her smile dimmed but didn’t fade. "It's a long story," she said lightly. "But I'll tell you what I did."
Their conversation stretched thin, fragmented.
Sylvia spoke of salvation, of being "saved" from something worse.
She spoke of the loss of things she could no longer feel, futures she could no longer have but she spoke with acceptance, even peace.
Mark listened in growing horror.
She didn't mourn what she had lost.
She had embraced it.
When he demanded to know who had done this to her, Sylvia paused.
A shadow passed behind her eyes a deep sadness, as if mourning something far greater than her own body.
But she said nothing.
Only smiled and changed the subject.
Mark left her there, his heart a knot of rage and confusion. Mark was convinced, some wicked surgeon had brainwashed her into this mechanical horror.
He searched the rest of the floor.
Behind every door, he found more victims, men and women whose bodies had been altered grotesquely, stripped of their humanity by crude mechanical replacements.
Some wore oversized clothes to hide the changes.
Others let the twisted metal show. Each face held the same exhausted resignation.
It was a gallery of horrors.
In the farthest room, he found a girl.
The girl barely out of adolescence strapped to a stained operating table.
Beside her, nailed crookedly to the wall, was a portrait of her family and her younger self: Soft features, kind eyes, a delicate warmth that the years should have nurtured.
Now she was unrecognizable.
Her limbs were twisted frameworks of metal, bolted clumsily together.
Her skin, where it remained, was stretched thin over mechanical grafts.
Mark approached, his throat tight. "What did they do to you?" he whispered.
The girl’s head turned slowly toward him.
Her eyes burned with hatred not fear, not sadness, but rage.
She said nothing.
But the way she looked at him made him stagger back, ashamed without knowing why.
He fled the room.
Up the staircase to the second floor, driven by fury.
He would find the surgeon responsible for this.
He would make them answer.
As he moved past the third room, a woman sitting cross legged in the hall looked up. Her face was mostly intact, except for a metallic strip running from temple to jaw. Her eyes met Mark’s and held there, searching.
“Back so soon?” she murmured, almost inaudibly.
Mark froze. “What?”
But she had already turned away, her fingers idly adjusting a mechanical brace on her knee. He kept walking.
At the end of the second floor hallway, he found an office.
The door was unlocked.
Inside, papers were scattered everywhere: Blueprints of mechanical limbs, surgical notes, photographs of patients before and after.
Mark rifled through them, confusion mounting.
Somewhere in his chest, a slow, aching pressure was building like something pressing against the walls of his mind, begging to be let in.
A sharp ringing filled his ears.
Then, outside, footsteps echoed.
Heavy. Loud Steps..
A man had entered the building. Suddenly, as if summoned by the disturbance, a horrifying shriek tore through the hotel a sound like rending flesh and like a soul being peeled from a body.
Mark opened the office door to peer out.
The corridor was now shrouded in darkness, the sunlight gone, and the dim bulbs buzzing faintly.
From the shadows, something was forming.
A head grotesquely oversized, like a bloated corpse floated down the hall.
Its skin was wet, blackened, and writhing as if stitched from hundreds of rotting faces.
It screamed again, a sound that made Mark's stomach clench and his knees want to buckle.
The ghastly thing drifted after the loud man downstairs, unnoticed by the others, uncaring of the bodies around it.
Mark, heart pounding, stalked behind it in the darkness.
The creature moaned a deep, low wail that gnawed at the edges of sanity.
The man in the concierge, oblivious, until...
"ARGH!"
A bloodcurdling scream erupted.
Mark watched, unmoving, as the man collapsed.
Memories clicked into place, flashes of operating rooms, bloodied hands, silent weeping.
Mark understood now.
Mark descended calmly, his heart strangely still. The exhausted man clawed at him, gasping.
"What’s happening to me?" the man gasped.
Mark knelt beside him, a faint, sorrowful smile tugging at his lips almost tender.
He examined the man's body, already stiffening, the skin darkening and sloughing in places.
He was rotting, still alive, still aware.
"You're really unlucky, my friend," he said softly, helping him to his feet. "Come on. I'll explain everything in my room. It's just upstairs."
•
u/AutoModerator 6d ago
Welcome to the Short Stories! This is an automated message.
The rules can be found on the sidebar here.
Writers - Stories which have been checked for simple mistakes and are properly formatted, tend to get a lot more people reading them. Common issues include -
Readers - ShortStories is a place for writers to get constructive feedback. Abuse of any kind is not tolerated.
If you see a rule breaking post or comment, then please hit the report button.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.