Waking Isn’t Freedom
666 Words
The hospital room was too bright. Too clean.
Everything felt… wrong.
Rina sat frozen, her heart pounding as her eyes locked onto the reflection in the glass.
Amelia stood behind her, still as a statue. No one else seemed to notice.
A nurse adjusted her IV drip. “You’re lucky to be alive. The whole east wing of the academy collapsed after the fire.”
“What happened to the others?” Rina croaked.
The nurse gave her a puzzled look. “Others?”
“Lala,” Rina said, gripping the bedsheet. “And… Amelia.”
The nurse frowned. “There were no other survivors. Just you.”
Rina's throat closed.
No. That couldn’t be right.
“I need to see the school,” she said suddenly, pulling off the blankets.
“Miss Thorne—please,” the nurse protested. “You’ve been in a coma for months. You need rest—”
“I need answers.”
But when she turned back to the window, Amelia was gone.
3 Days Later
The doctors had cleared her with reluctant approval. Physically, she was stable. Mentally… “disoriented,” they said. Trauma-induced hallucinations were “common” in cases like hers.
But Rina knew what she saw.
What she remembered.
She boarded the train to St. Celestine’s ruins with a borrowed coat, a cheap phone, and a growing chill in her bones. Something was unfinished.
And she could feel it watching her.
The school grounds were sealed behind fencing and warning signs. “Unsafe structure,” the sign read. “Do not enter.”
Rina slipped through the gap in the back fence.
Everything was scorched. Blackened walls. A collapsed tower. Nature slowly reclaiming the stone.
But something didn’t add up.
The area around the south hallway looked… untouched.
Like it had never burned.
Rina stepped over the threshold, heart pounding. Her shoes crunched on old tile. Her breath fogged in the air—though it wasn’t cold.
Then she heard it.
Tapping.
Soft. Rhythmic.
Coming from the other side of the old chapel wall.
She moved slowly through the corridor, flashlight in hand.
The chapel was still there. As if untouched by time or fire. Dust floated like ash.
She opened the altar door.
The crawlspace was still there.
Her body moved on instinct, crawling in deeper, breath shallow.
The wall.
The handprints.
Still there.
But new ones had appeared.
One of them glowed faintly—fresh.
Not hers.
Not Lala’s.
Someone else was trapped now.
Suddenly, a voice whispered in her ear—too close.
“You thought you escaped?”
She spun around. Nothing.
Her flashlight flickered.
Then—a sound behind her.
Footsteps. Slow. Bare.
She turned back toward the wall—and saw something impossible:
Her own face, staring at her from the stone. Trapped behind it. Screaming silently.
She stumbled back in horror.
The voice came again, clearer this time.
“You never left, Rina. You just shifted layers.”
A cold truth pierced her:
She hadn’t woken up from the nightmare.
She had only climbed into a different one.
Back in her hospital room—weeks ago—she remembered something odd. The nurses never looked her in the eyes. No mirrors worked properly. No visitors came.
She remembered hearing tapping on the walls at night.
Not from a ghost.
But from someone outside, trying to get in.
Or worse—trying to pull her back.
Rina fell to her knees.
“What am I supposed to do?” she whispered.
And a voice answered—not Amelia’s this time. Not Lala’s.
But hers.
From the wall.
“Break the cycle.”
“Find the first.”
“Or we all stay forgotten.”
And behind the wall, something began to move.
Not a ghost.
Not a person.
But the original memory.
The first girl the school ever kept.
The one who never left.
The one they all replaced.
- Writer
