“The Hush in Room 313” This is a Working Title. Let Me Know What You Think!

Jason never believed a building could feel hungry—not until he started the night-shift as a security guard at Briarwood Hospital, a facility half-abandoned after a budget collapse. Only the first two floors were active. Floors three through six had been shut down for years. Power cut. Patients gone. Wing sealed.

But some nights… Jason heard footsteps above him.

He’d been told the old psych wing on the third floor was empty. “No one has access. No one goes up there,” his supervisor warned. His only job: monitor cameras, check the active floors, stay away from the stairwell past 2 a.m.

Easy.

By his third week, the footsteps changed. They weren’t the typical building creaks or settling groans—these were soft, rhythmic, like someone pacing slowly in bare feet. A whispering sound sometimes followed, too quiet to make out words, but low enough to chill bone.

At 2:17 a.m. on a Thursday, the monitor for Floor 3 flickered on—despite having been disconnected years ago. Static, then a frame of hallway light, dim and washed in gray static.

A single door sat at the end of the hall.

Room 313.

Its door was open.

Jason knew those cameras weren’t plugged in. Even if they somehow were, there was no electricity up there. Yet the feed glowed faintly.

A shape moved in the doorway.

Thin. Slouched. Hair hanging like dripping moss over its face.

Then the camera died.

Jason should have walked away, pretended it didn’t happen, reported a “glitch” and gone home. But he needed this job, and curiosity scratched at him like a nail inside his skull. Just a quick look. Calm his mind. Get proof for his supervisor that someone was trespassing up there.

The stairwell felt colder than the rest of the hospital, the air thick like humidity but icy against his skin. Each step up felt heavier, like the air itself resisted him. When he reached the third floor, his flashlight flickered and settled to a dull glow.

The hallway was exactly what the camera had shown: long, peeling paint, dark. And at the far end—Room 313’s door stood slightly open, breathing darkness.

His radio hissed in his pocket, whispering static. Something about it sounded like a voice, but broken—“shhhhh… hush…”

He swallowed hard and stepped toward the room.

Inside, the walls were covered in charcoal scribbles. Not drawings—words. Over and over, carved into the paint, scratched into plaster, written in old brown smudges:

DON’T SPEAK. DON’T WAKE HER.

A hospital bed sat in the corner, restraints dangling like wilted vines. The sheets were torn. A single chair sat beside it, facing the door, as if waiting for someone to sit.

Something shifted behind him.

A soft footstep.

Then a second.

Jason turned, expecting a patient—or a trespasser—or a prank.

What stood before him was neither.

A woman, or what was left of one, stared at him with eyelids sewn shut with black string. Her jaw hung half-open as though unhinged. Her skin pale and swollen, like something waterlogged and left to rot. She leaned forward, sniffing the air, head twitching.

Jason clamped his hands over his mouth on instinct.

She moved toward him without sight, guided by breath and sound.

Her voice—a gravelly whisper that sounded like dead leaves dragged across tile—slithered out:

“Hush. She’s listening.”

Jason wanted to run—every muscle begged to—but the creature’s head jerked sharply at the faint rustle of his shoe. Her sewn eyes stretched beneath the stitches as if widening.

He held his breath. Vision blurred. Lungs burned.

She leaned inches from his face, sniffing him like a scent she almost recognized.

Then, from down the hall, a distant door slammed.

The creature shrieked soundlessly—mouth stretching impossibly wide in a silent scream—and rushed away toward the noise on all fours, limbs cracking as she moved.

Jason didn’t wait.

He sprinted out, down the stairwell, nearly falling. He didn’t stop running until he burst into the lobby, gasping, collapsing to the floor as nurses stared.

Breath returned only after minutes of shaking. They called emergency, checked him for heart failure, but Jason barely heard them. In his mind was only the stitched-eyed woman… and the words covering the walls.

He quit that night.

The hospital fired him for “abandoning post.”

Two days later, Jason received a padded envelope with no return address. Inside was a folded piece of hospital patient file paper.

PATIENT: ELLEN MARROWROOM: 313STATUS: UNRESPONSIVE – DO NOT DISTURB

On the back:

“You breathed.”

Under it, smeared like a fingerprint of dried ash, was a tiny piece of black thread.

Still knotted.

Still bloody.

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