It started because I was doing a fluff piece on the new East Wing opening at the Habitsville Hospital.
A hospital is a busy place, and the nurse who was showing me around the new area was quickly pulled away to more important matters. I was left to wander, little red notebook in hand, jotting down details about the added infrastructure.
Then I heard it: the familiar titter of low voices talking quickly and quietly, the distinct sounds of little known and scandalous information being shared. Being the investigative reporter that I am, my ears pricked at the prospect of a story.
The speakers were two doctors, both looking stressed in their white lab coats. They were both holding clipboards in their hands, with papers full of numbers I didn’t have the education to understand.
“I just don’t know what’s happening,” one said.
The other looked down at the chart. “’Unexplained paralysis…blood stoppages to the appendages… renal failure, heart failure…” she shook her head. “’I’ve never seen anything like it.”
They held a solemn pause. Then, the first doctor spoke. “What are we telling the families?”
The other sighed. “Just… just say we’re doing everything we can.” Then, she straightened up, and cleared her throat. “I’m going to go check on them. See if there’s any more tests we can run.”
The two split ways, the other doctor moving in the opposite direction, but the other walking towards me. I quickly averted my eyes, so she didn’t suspect my eavesdropping, but when she moved past me, I turned to follow her.
She moved fast, like all the doctors I’d seen on those cheesy medical dramas. I kept up, walking at a safe distance behind, until she reached her destination: the farthest collection of hospital rooms within the new East Wing.
There was a large desk in the center of the semi-circle, but no one was sitting at it. In fact, there seemed to be no other employees in the vicinity at all, so I stopped following the doctor so she wouldn’t hear my footsteps accompanying hers.
At first, I thought it was just another empty area, the same as all the others in the new section of the hospital. But then, as the sound of the doctor’s feet grew distant and disappeared, I took my first tentative steps forward, and I saw them.
Every room had an occupant.
The doctor had said she was checking on ‘them’, so I could only assume she had stopped in one of these rooms. The awkwardness of getting caught was tempting me to turn back, but there was something else, something stronger that made me stay.
As I peeked into each room, I could see them: citizens of Habitsville, laying in hospital beds, completely still. Not just still, no—it was as though they were frozen. An old woman, a middle-aged man, even a little girl—I watched each of them for about a minute at a time, and none of them so much as blinked. Their faces were gaunt and fixed in a permanent look of vacancy. I could hear a strange sound, a soft whistling coming from most of the rooms, and it took me a moment to realize what it was—the strenuous sound of someone trying to breathe without their chest rising and falling.
I leaned into one of the last rooms in the semi-circle, and immediately pulled back—the doctor was in there, adjusting the medical equipment around the bed of a woman. I didn’t think she saw me, but immediately cursed myself when I heard her speak.
“Hello?”
I entertained the idea of fleeing the scene, but instead walked into the door frame. “Hi, I’m, uh—”
She glanced at the visitor’s sticker I wore on my collar. “You’re here to see Michelle?” she asked, motioning to the woman who lie in the bed.
I hesitated. “Um… yes.”
“I haven’t seen you around, but she had said she had a nephew.” We both looked at the woman, ashen and frozen in the bed. “I mean, when she could still…” the doctor said awkwardly, then trailed off. She looked at me, and gave a tired smile. “I’ll give you two a moment alone.”
Then, she left.
I looked out the door to see the doctor make her way over to the large desk in the center of the area. It would be incredibly suspicious if I immediately walked back out of the hospital room, so I supposed I was indeed going to have a moment alone with Michelle.
She was different than the others—she was dressed in the same drab hospital gown, her blonde hair sat flat and lifeless against her head, and her face had that same frozen vacant expression, but I quickly saw something that made my heart jump in my chest.
Her eyes were following me.
While the others couldn’t so much as blink, Michelle was staring at me, intently. It seemed insensitive to be scared, but my hands grew slick with sweat, and my pulse quickened. It was like looking into the eyes of a deer that had just been hit by a car.
“Hi,” I said nervously, but of course she didn’t answer.
Her eyes were flickering, moving from meeting mine, to something to the right. “What is it?” I asked, knowing that it was useless. Her lips were glued shut, just like the others, though her chest still rose for each breath, with obvious effort.
Then, I saw her hand—her arms were stuck at her side, but I could see the tiniest bit of movement in her finger tips. It was motioning clumsily, somewhere on the other side of her bed.
Cautiously, with another quick glance out of the room to make sure the doctor was still at the desk, I made my way to the other side of her bed. My anxiety waned slightly as I saw it was something completely ordinary—her handbag.
“You need your purse?” I asked, slightly embarrassed at my nervousness. I picked it up and brought it over to her. Her hand moved faster, in a beckoning motion. “You want me to get you something out of it?” She blinked more rapidly and moved her hand faster, which I took as a yes.
I opened the purse. Inside were all of the normal things. “You need your wallet?” She didn’t blink. “Lip stick?” Again, no blink. “Hairbrush?” Nothing. There was a keychain, attached to a small picture of Michelle, looking much healthier, and a grinning little girl. Still, this elicited no response.
Then, I saw it.
It was a small vial, almost like a test tube. I thought it might be some kind of medication, and I considered calling the doctor in, or a nurse. Then, I saw the label—it was a plain piece of masking tape, stuck to the glass on the outside. In large block letters drawn on with a shaky hand, was a single, unexpected word:
F O X B R E A T H
I pulled it out of her purse, and turned it over in my hands. The contents were strange: it looked like dirt, a chalky reddish brown. It fell grain by grain as I turned it, my eyes transfixed—it took me a moment to realize that Michelle was now blinking very fast at me, faster than she had any of the previous times.
I tried to hand it to her, and her finger moved in a circle, in a message I took to mean ‘unscrew the cap’. I did so, peering with one eye into the opening. I had no idea what this ill woman wanted with a bottle of dirt, but as her pretend nephew, I wasn’t going to deny her.
She twitched her finger more, so I brought the vial close to it. Slowly, painstakingly, her breathing growing more ragged and labored, she stuck her pointer finger into the bottle, and curled it, and brought out a small collection of the dust. With great effort, she flipped it onto her palm, then went in and did the same thing again. Now there was a small mountain of the stuff in the center of her hand.
She stopped moving.
Then, with a low sort of growl coming from within her stuck-closed mouth, her arm bent at the elbow. With a great amount of strength and pain, she was able to lift her hand to her face. I thought for a moment that she might eat the dust, which would have been bizarre, but she froze, catching her breath. Her lungs had begun to make that same whistling sound that the other had, that strange hum that resonated in the East Wing.
Then, with the smallest movement, she beckoned me closer.
I hesitated. Her eyes were watering from the effort it took to move even that small amount, but there was something more within them—though it seemed she was unable to move her facial muscles, even her eyebrows, there was something intensely pleading in the way she was looking at me.
So, unable to say no, I leaned forward.
Still staring at me, her eyeballs frozen in their sockets, I heard something strange. The whistling of her breathing had changed, growing strangely deeper, a great hollow sound that almost made me back away. Almost.
And then, in a sharp, high-pitched gust, she blew air out of her nose as hard she could, coating my face in the strange dirt in her hand.
I immediately fell backward, coughing and spluttering. My mouth tasted of salt and chalk, and my eyes were stinging and clouded. “What the—” I started to say, but I still didn’t want to attract the doctor’s suspicion, so I fell silent. I rubbed my eyes, staring at the floor. Once they cleared, I turned back to Michelle, to ask her questions that I knew she couldn’t answer.
But when I looked at the woman in the hospital bed, I found her drastically changed.
I blinked, trying to see if the dust had simply messed up my vision, but there was no mistaking it. Though the top half of her face remained as I had previously saw it, everything else was disturbingly different.
From her mouth down, her skin was a strange reddish brown, not like any human skin tone I had ever seen. But the color wasn’t the worst part. No, the texture was what caused me to violently recoil.
I could see that her chest and neck had a sort of shine to it, glistening under the harsh fluorescents as though the skin was permanently wet. The lower half of her right arm was the same, slick and horrific, bits of it smearing on the blanket that covered her lower half. I could only imagine what her legs looks like.
But the top half of her right arm, her left arm, and the lower half of her face were different from the rest. They were lighter in color, and lacked the shine. In fact, they seemed incredibly hard and dry. I could see that there were even cracks in her skin around her elbow, where she had raised her arm to blow the dirt into my face.
I backed away slightly. I was going insane, clearly. This woman was insane, or murderous, or mad from illness, and she made me inhale some sort of powdered drug that made me hallucinate.
Right?
Michelle was still staring at me, her ordinary skin peeking above the rest like a masquerade mask. Her eyes held mine with that same pleading expression, but this time, I had no idea what she wanted, what she expected me to do about her plight.
Then, something even worse happened.
Her breath caught in her chest, and rattled there. “What’s wrong?” I asked quickly, but of course, she couldn’t answer. As I watched in horror, the skin of her chest changed. Though it was glistening and wet before, it had begun to… dry.
Michelle was silently coughing now, wheezing through her nose, her mouth still stuck shut. As her chest hardened, she seemed to grow even more in distress, thrashing with what little movement her body would allow.
I moved to her bedside, tried to loosen the collar of her gown—but then, immediately had to pull my hand back in pain. Her chest, which was still growing more and more dried and dusty, had been white-hot to the touch.
I was panicking now. “I’m getting the doctor,” I said, then felt a tight pressure on my wrist. Michelle’s still moist right hand was gripped tightly on my flesh, the slick wet texture of her touch sending a shiver down my spine. Her strange fingers left marks of reddish brown on my skin.
The top half of her face was turning now, the color shifting to the same as the dust in the vial, which was still clasped firmly in my hand. Her eyes traveled to it, then back to mine, that same yearning in her face.
I could feel her hand hardening around my wrist, and watched as the same happened to the rest of her chest and face. She wasn’t blinking anymore, her eyes murky with the substance that had become her body.
As her grip hardened and dried, I felt another surge of pain—it was growing hot, same as her chest. It quickly grew past warm, to uncomfortable, to actually burning my skin. I tried to yank my arm away as my flesh baked and blistered, but Michelle didn’t loosen her fingers.
I shut my eyes, and pulled as hard as I could.
CRACK
I tentatively opened them, and my heart dropped into my stomach.
Michelle had shattered, a pile of dusty rubble sitting in her hollow hospital gown.
I distantly heard the ringing of the flatline, and left quietly as doctors came rushing in. I moved past the rest of the rooms in the East Wing, looking in as I had the first time—but now, I could see them, clay figure after clay figure, each hardened into rigid casings.
I left the hospital, one hand wrapped tightly around the vial that read Foxbreath the other still bleeding and burning from the touch of the dead woman’s grasp.
I took a walk around town. It’s something I always do when I’ve seen something I wish I hadn’t, something terrifying and confusing and impossible. I craved the feeling of fresh air after watching Michelle suffocate before she—she—well, disintegrated is the best way I could describe it.
I had so many questions. Why couldn’t the doctors see what was going on, the cruel creeping of the clay, the strange intense heat of it? Why couldn’t I at first, until Michelle blew the dust into my eyes?
I kept walking, my fist still closed around the Foxbreath vial. My feet continued to wander as my mind did, and by the time I looked up, I was in an unfamiliar part of Habitsville. It was one of the many dusty backstreets in town, the few buildings boarded up and dark, the streetlights flickering in the coming dusk. I took one step back, to turn around and head home, when I saw it.
“Foxbreath Pottery”
It couldn’t have just been a coincidence. I stared at it for a moment, making sure I hadn’t imagined the faded text on the aged sign. It was a small building, tucked between the abandoned ones, but still, it stood out—there was a faint light dancing in the clouded window.
I walked closer, creeping carefully, until I was near the window. I didn’t dare approach the door.
The glass was coated in red dust. It was difficult to see through, but at the bottom near the worn sill, I found a gap in the layer of dirt, and was able to see inside.
There was an old man inside, and for a moment, I feared he too had the same ailment as the people I had seen in the hospital. Then, I realized his hands were only covered in wet red clay, and his finger still moved with ease, unhardened.
I couldn’t see his face, only the glint of his wired glasses and the hunch of his back. He was seated at a long wooden table, on which there were a few objects. A large square wrapped in cheesecloth, a bit of wet clay visible through the fabric. Tools, dainty scrapers and cutting wire, all coated in red dust.
Then there were the figurines. A few were painted—they were glossy and sturdy, finished products.
And then there were the unpainted, the unfinished. A man, an old woman, a little girl.
In the Sculptor’s hand, a paintbrush dipped in gold, giving the freshly fired figure in front of him her blond hair by the light of the open kiln.
Comments