2025-06-03 19:26:02Private Recovery Room – Groote Schuur East Wing – 6:47 AM
The morning light did little to ease the tension. Siya sat at the edge of a hospital cot, eyes fixed on Asanda’s sleeping form. A tangle of wires connected to heart monitors beeped slowly, rhythmically, each sound a fragile reminder that her sister, after years of disappearance, after nightmares and unmarked graves, was alive. But even in sleep, Asanda wasn’t at peace. Her body twitched every few minutes. Her lips moved in silence, whispering things only the dead understood. The nurses had insisted on sedatives, but Siya had intervened. She needed Asanda alert, she needed answers. Marks entered quietly, holding two paper cups of bitter hospital coffee. “Any change?” “Not really,” Siya replied, accepting the cup. “Her vitals are steady. But she hasn’t spoken since we left the sublevel.” Marks glanced at Asanda, unease in his posture. “You sure we shouldn’t alert higher authorities?” Siya gave him a sharp look. “And have them lock her up again? Dissect her? No.” Marks didn’t argue. “So what’s the next move?” Siya leaned back. “We find out what the spiral really is. Valkenberg, Groote Schuur, these places aren’t isolated. They’re linked by something deeper than corridors and patient files. There’s a pattern.” He frowned. “What kind of pattern?” She pulled out the notebook she’d been compiling, dates, drawings, coded language, all revolving around a central shape. The spiral. “It’s not just a symbol,” Siya said. “It’s an invitation. A design that pulls you deeper the longer you stare. I think it’s a sound. Or a resonance. Maybe both.” Marks shook his head. “Like a beacon?” “Or a doorway.” Suddenly, Asanda stirred. Her eyes opened, bloodshot, terrified. “Siya…” she whispered. Siya moved to her side. “I’m here. You’re safe now.” Asanda gripped her wrist with surprising strength. “You didn’t close it. You only turned the key halfway.” Siya’s throat tightened. “What do you mean?” Asanda’s eyes darted around the room. “They’re still singing. Below the walls. Beneath everything. I can hear them again.” Marks stepped closer. “Who?” Asanda’s voice cracked. “The Echoed.” Hospital Archives – Sub-Level Records Room – 11:12 AM They returned to the archives later that morning. The narrow aisles were a maze of metal drawers, dusty folders, and forgotten histories. Marks helped Siya drag out one of the old catalog boxes labeled 1969–1980: Experimental Wards (Unindexed). Asanda was resting in a secured wing, under Marks’ own arranged supervision, away from official eyes. They couldn’t afford another “incident.” Siya flipped through the yellowing files. Patient numbers. Date entries. Audio logs. Then she found it. A file marked: Subject 0397-E: Acoustic Containment – Preliminary Trials – Ward E.W. She opened it. Inside: black-and-white photographs of the Threshold Room, cleaner and fully intact. A woman strapped to the chair. Doctors in coats observing from behind thick glass. On the bottom, scrawled in faded red ink: Containment unsuccessful. Subject self-harmonized. Result: Nonlinear bleed. Echo persists. Siya ran her finger along the notation. "Echo persists.” She remembered Asanda’s words: they’re still singing. “What if they’re not just hearing something?” she murmured. “What if they’re hearing themselves, trapped in the resonance?” Marks looked disturbed. “You’re saying the patients didn’t just go mad, they got recorded?” “Like impressions on a record,” Siya said. “They became the spiral.” And just then, something strange happened. From one of the overhead speakers in the archive, a low whisper filtered in. “…Siya…” Marks froze. “Did you hear that?” It repeated, slightly louder. > “…echo… echo… echo…” The lights above them dimmed briefly. And then silence. Siya stood slowly. “They’re not just in the walls. They’re in the system. Anything with resonance: wiring, speakers, even thoughts…” She turned to Marks, eyes haunted. "The spiral is listening.” Groote Schuur East Wing – Rooftop – 12:07 PM The rooftop offered a sliver of stillness. Siya and Marks stood against the railing, overlooking the city. The wind tugged at their coats, as if trying to pull them away from everything they knew. The hospital loomed beneath them, ordinary on the outside, but within, the walls were humming with hidden voices. “I don’t think this is just about Asanda anymore,” Marks said. “I think we’re inside something much bigger.” Siya nodded. “It’s never just one institution. Valkenberg. Groote Schuur. Even the SANDF facility Asanda was moved to before she vanished. They all had reports of auditory hallucinations. Echo phenomena. Resonant architecture.” Marks rubbed the back of his neck. “And the spiral.” They both fell silent. The image had shown up in three places now, Valkenberg’s sublevel, Groote Schuur’s Threshold Room, and in that ancient file marked 0397-E. “I think the spiral isn’t just a design,” Siya said. “It’s a map. A code. And someone figured out how to follow it.” Marks looked over. “Someone? Or something?” Before Siya could answer, her phone buzzed. Unknown Number. She hesitated, then answered. “Detective Ndlovu.” Static. Then a voice, raspy, genderless, mechanical. “You’re not the first to follow it. But you’re too close now. They will hear you.” Click. The line went dead. Siya stared at the screen. “They’re watching.” Marks stepped closer. “We need to move her. Asanda.” “She won’t be safe here. Not even in isolation. They’re already reaching through the hospital systems.” “Where then?” Siya turned to him. “Back to the place where it began. Before Valkenberg. Before Groote Schuur. The first hospital in the file.” Marks narrowed his eyes. “Don’t tell me…” She opened the manila folder, revealing a brittle document: Groote Schuur Annex B – Decommissioned in 1972. Location: Observatory Ridge, beneath the old surgeon’s theatre. Marks exhaled. “You want to take us to an abandoned surgical wing under the Observatory? With a possibly haunted audio system and a resonant map leading to God-knows-where?” Siya turned to him. “That’s exactly what I want to do.” Asanda’s Isolation Room – 12:42 PM They returned to find the door slightly ajar. Siya’s stomach dropped, as she burst in. Asanda was gone. "Nooo...." The room was empty, no sign of struggle, no alarm was triggered. All that remained was the soft, rhythmic hum coming from the heart monitor left behind, and even though it was unplugged it was still beeping steadily. Marks checked the cameras, swearing under his breath. “The footage’s blank. Just static. Someone scrubbed it live.” On the bed lay a sheet of paper, left behind by Asanda. Siya unfolded it. It was a hand-drawn spiral, drenched in charcoal, that was darker, more jagged than the rest and at the center, a single word: BELOW
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 16 - Help Me
The rain had returned, soft and steady, drumming against the windows of Groote Schuur as if echoing the pulse of something hidden beneath. Siya stood with Marks and Khumalo outside the surgical wing, the building’s old stone facade slick with water. A maintenance map from the 1960s, dug up by Khumalo the night before, hinted at a now-sealed basement level beneath this very wing. One that wasn’t listed in any recent hospital schematics.“Looks like the original plans included a lower chamber,” Khumalo said, holding the crumpled blueprint beneath his jacket to keep it dry. “But it was decommissioned, or at least that’s the official story.”“Or repurposed,” Marks muttered. “Like everything else here.”Siya adjusted her flashlight and nodded. “Let’s find out.”They entered through a side corridor, past unused surgical theaters and storage rooms thick with dust. The deeper they went, the more the atmosphere changed. It wasn’t just the cold, it was the silence. The kind that pressed against
Chapter 15 - Risidual Harmonics
The speakers whined for a moment, then dropped into silence. The tone had ended. But the air still vibrated, subtly, like the room itself was remembering the sound. Siya’s skin prickled. She could feel something under her feet, like the hum of a far-off engine, pulsing through the tiles. Marks exhaled slowly, gun still drawn. “Tell me that was a power surge.” Siya didn’t answer, instead she stepped into the center of Ward E.W., past the threshold of the sound. The lights above buzzed back to life, flickering erratically, casting long, shifting shadows against the far wall. Then she heard that whisper again, it wasn’t loud or even clear, but there, at the edge of hearing. Marks turned his head sharply. “Did you hear that?” Siya nodded. “Yeah. It’s starting again.” They both stood still, listening. The whisper wasn’t in the room, it was inside the walls. A breath that moved from duct to duct, floor to floor. A voice with no throat, just tone and intent. All of a sudden the fire a
Chapter 14 - Just One Hotspot
The recorder sat on the table like a loaded gun.Siya stared at it, heart tapping an anxious rhythm in her chest. She’d isolated the low-frequency tone from Asanda’s waveform earlier that morning, sitting in Khumalo’s cluttered lab while the city outside began to stir with another day. She hadn't told anyone yet, not even Marks, what she planned to do next."You're really going to test it?" Khumalo asked, eyebrows raised."I need to know what it does," Siya said quietly. "The signal’s inhuman, yes, but Asanda responded to it. If there's any chance it connects us to her again, I have to try."Khumalo hesitated. “We’ve seen what happens when people listen to this stuff too long. That technician who disappeared? He was hearing it for hours. Left the lab muttering about shadows with mouths.”“This will be controlled,” Siya said, forcing calm into her voice. “Short burst. Specific location.”“And where exactly are you planning to test it?”She looked up at him, face serious. “Ward E.W.”Kh
Chapter 13 - The Spiral Isn't Done
It had started to rain again by the time Siya reached the edge of Devil’s Peak. The sun was slipping behind the mountain, casting long shadows across the run-down building in front of her. The place looked abandoned, its paint peeling, windows taped up, and a rusted satellite dish sagging on the roof. It used to be a staff residence for Valkenberg’s extended network. Now, it was just another forgotten place tied to the ghosts of the Threnody Project.She tightened her coat and knocked, there was a long pause, then the door creaked open. The man who stood in the doorway looked like he hadn’t left the flat in years. His grey hair stuck out in tufts, skin was pale, and his eyes were deep-set and twitchy. Hestudied her like she was a trick of the light.“You’re Siya Ndlovu,” he said, not a question. “You’ve heard it, haven’t you? The sound under the hospital.”She nodded.He stepped aside and motioned her in without another word.The inside was dim, cluttered, and smelled like old metal a
Chapter 12 - She's Singing
The rain pelted down on Cape Town like nails, drumming hard against the windows of the Groote Schuur records room. The air was heavy with mildew and old dust, each breath a mixture of forgotten paper and time. Detective Marks sat hunched over a metal desk, eyes bloodshot, shirt clinging to his back with sweat. He hadn’t left the archives for hours.He flipped through another manila folder, its tab labeled: "Project Osiris – Neurological Observations, 1993-1997."“Come on,” he muttered, fingers smudged with ink. “Where are you?”Behind him, Siya stood with her arms crossed, fatigue in her eyes but fire beneath her calm. “You think we’re chasing phantoms?” she asked.Marks didn’t look up. “No. I think we’re finally finding the roots.”He pulled out a stapled set of charts. “Sleep latency data. REM response tracking. All tagged ‘OSR’—which I thought was a side project.” He laid them out. “But look, I've cross-referenced patient IDs. Every si
Chapter 11 - The Humming Silence
Cape Town woke to sirens and silence.Detective Siya Ndlovu stood over the third body in as many days, her gloves slick with dew, the early morning chill clawing at her spine. The victim lay sprawled across the cracked pavement outside a convenience store in Woodstock, mouth agape, eyes wide with terror, and blood leaking from both ears.The spiral was drawn in arterial red beside the body. Precise. Ritualistic. Just like the others.Marks crouched nearby, examining the dried trail of crimson along the concrete. “No signs of struggle,” he muttered. “No forced entry. Just dropped dead. Ears blown out. Same spiral.”“And the same witness,” Siya added, nodding toward a trembling man wrapped in an emergency blanket. “Said he heard humming right before it happened.”She turned to the forensic tech. “We need to swab his ears. Fast. If the pattern holds, anyone nearby is at risk.”The tech nodded and moved in, but Siya’s focus lingered
You may also like
The doomsday conspiracy
ola10.0K viewsMurder Case #201
LovieNot1.9K viewsWatcher
littleblackhorse3.7K viewsThe Mafia Revenge
Rose Queen 3.7K viewsMysteries Of The Ghostly Archipelago
LORI D. LEE860 viewsAge nineteen
Mela wrights1.7K viewsLAYLA
Dadalifted2.8K viewsDark Weapon Book One: Time of Bombing
Rachel N1.7K views