The Silent Ward

Chapter 6 - Veins Of Silence

Interview Room – Groote Schuur Admin Wing – 1:03 PM

The interview room was sparse: grey walls, a humming air conditioner, and a table with a dented edge. Siya sat across from Dr. Willem Rautenbach, a man in his sixties with thin, clinical features and a calm that bordered on smug.

He wore his white coat like armor, but his eyes never quite met hers.

“You’ve been here for over thirty years, doctor,” Siya began, her voice even. “You were a senior resident in 1996 during the acoustic trials. I found your name in several closed documents.”

Dr. Rautenbach adjusted his glasses. “Those records were sealed for ethical reasons, Detective. They predate most of the current staff’s tenure. Obsolete history.”

Siya slid a photo across the table. It was from the Valkenberg file, Subject 0397-E strapped in the chair, monitors around her, spiral symbols etched into the wall behind her head.

“Do you remember her?”

He studied the photo for a moment. “No. That patient could be anyone. It was a different era. Different standards.”

She leaned forward. “Her name was Lena Volker. She died in that chair, from a brain hemorrhage. The audio resonance triggered something catastrophic, but you didn’t stop the tests, you moved them here.”

A flicker crossed his face, too brief for guilt, but not quite denial.

“Look,” he said. “There are things we did back then that wouldn’t fly now. Patients were often referred without full histories. Some were brought in by defense intelligence. Black-bag admissions. We weren’t told where they came from, just that they had to be contained.”

Siya kept her tone controlled. “So you built the Threshold Room.”

He didn’t respond.

She pulled out a second photo, taken from the old archive, showing the chamber beneath Groote Schuur’s annex. On the back wall, the same spiral.

“Why is that symbol always present?” she asked. “You saw what it did to them,so why repeat it?”

Dr. Rautenbach’s fingers tapped the table, betraying tension. “You’re assuming the symbol caused harm, but maybe it was already there. Patients drew it before tests began. Sometimes before even speaking. What if we weren’t summoning anything? What if we were amplifying something that was always inside them?”

Siya blinked. “You mean the spiral is a conduit?”

“Or a diagnostic.” He sighed. “But then, it began reacting on its own. The audio stopped needing speakers. Some patients resonated internally. We couldn’t control it anymore. The deeper the spiral, the more it fed back into the space.”

“And Asanda?” Siya asked sharply. “She was a child when she was taken into your custody. How do you explain that?”

Dr. Rautenbach finally looked up. "She was the resonance.”

Records Office – Restricted Floor – 1:47 PM

Marks wandered the restricted archives, the fluorescent lights overhead flickering just enough to make him wary. He wasn’t just killing time while Siya interrogated Rautenbach, he had his own instincts, and something about the file trail they’d uncovered felt too neat.

He pulled up Asanda’s patient file again, digitally stored and flagged “Confidential: Level 6 Clearance.” His badge shouldn’t have allowed access, but the IT guy owed him a favor.

As he scrolled through the entries, things started to unravel.

Admission Date: March 13, 2012

Age: Unknown. Listed as 19.

Marks frowned. Asanda had been 12 when she disappeared. This record was either deliberately falsified, or someone wanted it to appear she’d been institutionalized as an adult.

He dug deeper. Transfer logs showed she’d been moved five times in six years. Each transfer linked to an unnamed department, until finally landing her in Ward E.W. in 2018, right before the facility “temporarily shut down” due to renovations. Except no renovations were ever recorded in the hospital’s budget.

Marks leaned back. "You bastards hid her in plain sight.”

He opened the next file: Lena Volker. Records showed she had been released. Status: Voluntary Discharge.

"Bullshit. She died in the chair." He mumbled under his breath.

Marks pulled the paper file from the cabinet to compare. The digital file was squeaky clean, an admin-generated report with perfect formatting, but for the paper copy. Scrawled at the bottom of her final assessment was a single handwritten note: Echo remains persistent. Suggest reassignment to closed acoustic loop, test with child subject (0A-12). Maintain spiral control via magnetic isolation.

Marks stared. "0A-12? That was Asanda’s test designation." His blood ran cold. "They didn’t just test on her. They continued the project, using her as the template."

Interview Room – 2:14 PM

“You knew she was different,” Siya said. “That’s why she wasn’t discharged, wasn’t moved like the others. You kept her because she was the only one who adapted.”

Dr. Rautenbach’s voice was low. “She didn’t just adapt. She began to echo back.”

He reached into his coat and placed an old cassette tape on the table. “Listen to this. It’s the last recording before we shut the chamber down. It wasn’t from the speakers. It came from her mouth. She sang the resonance into being.”

Siya stared at the tape, then back at him. “And what exactly was she singing?”

He shook his head. “Not in a language we have. But every time we played it back, things moved inside the hospital.”

Records Office – Restricted Floor – 2:22 PM

Marks stared at the note in the paper file. The words scrawled there didn’t just link Lena Volker to Asanda, they suggested intent. Planning. Calculated escalation.

“Spiral control via magnetic isolation,” he muttered. “What does that even mean?”

The fluorescent light overhead flickered again. He grabbed a flashlight from the nearby maintenance shelf, already uneasy. Then he heard it. A faint pulse, low and rhythmic. Not mechanical. Organic. Like a heartbeat beneath concrete. He turned toward the corridor, leaving the records room.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

The sound wasn’t behind him. It was below him. Following it, Marks descended the narrow utility stairs, which weren’t on any official blueprint he’d seen. The deeper he went, the more the hospital changed, tiles gave way to stained cement, the walls sweating with condensation.

There on the far end of the passage, a sealed grey door, unmarked, save for a faded spiral symbol etched above the frame. Someone had tried to scrape it off, but the lines persisted, almost scorched into the metal.

Marks reached for the door handle. It was cold. Too cold. He hesitated at forst, but then pulled. Inside was a tiny chamber, abandoned and caked in dust. Apart from what stood in the center: a gurney, straps, electrodes and monitors that were long dead. And there, carved into the floor, scorched in a wide radius beneath the gurney, was a spiral. Charcoal black, jagged and burned into concrete.

He stepped closer and picked up a cracked clipboard. Test Subject: 0A-12

Response: Sustained harmonic feedback. Intelligible reverse-frequency chant. Monitored voice distortion.

Status: ACTIVE.

Recommendation: Further isolation, magnetic suppression ineffective. Subject exhibits locational bleed.

"Locational bleed,” Marks whispered. “What the hell were they doing to her…”

Behind him, something shifted. He spun, but the room was empty, all except for the spiral, it pulsed, just once, like a ripple through heat.

Marks backed out slowly, closing the door and pressing his back to the frame. He didn’t breathe, not until the faint hum disappeared.

Main Hallway – Outside Interview Room – 2:35 PM

Siya stepped out, her face pale, jaw set. She held the cassette tape like a cursed object.

Marks met her gaze.

“Found something,” he said, voice low. “They’ve rewritten almost every medical file related to Project Threnody. Digital records are whitewashed. Paper ones are real, but hidden, buried. I found Lena’s file. She didn’t die randomly. She was fed into a resonance loop designed to echo through Asanda.”

Siya blinked. “Echo through her?”

“She wasn’t a patient. She was a channel, and the tests didn’t fail. They worked. That’s why they kept her so long. She survived the resonance. Not just survived, it bonded to her.”

Siya pulled him into a nearby stairwell. “They weren’t just experimenting,” she said in a low whisper. “They were trying to reach something.”

Marks nodded grimly. “And they did. I found a chamber below the hospital. Not on any map. Burned spiral in the floor, test equipment still in place. They called it ‘locational bleed.’ Whatever happened there, was warping space.”

“And Dr. Rautenbach?” Marks asked.

Siya held up the tape. “He gave me this. Says it’s Asanda’s voice. That she sang something into existence. But the moment he handed it over, he said one more thing.”

“What?”

“‘Play it, and the spiral hears you.’”

They were silent a moment. Then Siya said, “We need to find the old annex. The one under the Observatory wing. If Asanda was echoing something, it might’ve left a trace. A physical imprint.”

Marks nodded. “Let’s bring this tape to forensics first. If it’s really a voice, we might find a pattern. Maybe even coordinates.”

Siya looked at him. “And if we do?”

Marks forced a breath through his teeth. “Then we’re following the spiral in.”

Elsewhere – Observation Booth – Unknown Time

Dr. Rautenbach stood alone, watching the black screen flicker with analog static. He lit a cigarette, though smoking had long been banned inside.

Behind the glass, a tape recorder spun silently, and a figure sat in the shadowed chair, head tilted toward the ceiling, with their hair matted and limbs twitching occasionally. The spiral had been painted on the floor around the chair in red chalk.

Rautenbach exhaled smoke. “They’ve found the tape.”

The figure did not respond, but on the screen, something flickered, frames between frames. The spiral twisted, then straightened, like it was stretching toward something beyond the edges of the room.

Rautenbach muttered: "And now, they’re listening.”