SCHISM

Ash twitched, wincing, a pain—acid sharp and hot seared through the index and middle fingers on his left hand, they were stuck, jammed between the cubicle door and the marred tile underneath—it must have slammed on his fingers after he’d passed out last night on the floor of the disabled bathroom. 

He dared himself to look at his hand and regretted it instantly. Blood pooled down his arm, sticky and warm, bits of it dry and crusted towards his forearm, while the part near his fingers was still fresh and gushing. The fingers themselves had turned a deep indigo, swollen like caterpillars cocooning for metamorphosis. Trying to regain his bearings, he took a shaky breath in, he still felt the alcohol in his head. He was dizzy with it. He crouched up, veins protruding through his pale skin as he stretched up to feel for the door handle with his free arm. The door swung open, releasing his fingers from its ironclad grasp. He clutched them, nausea settling in his stomach as he tried to assess the damage. Pros: they were still connected to the rest of his hand, cons: the nail on his index finger had ripped off. Swaying slightly, he got up, fumbling his way out the cubicle to the row of sinks, dimly lit under a singular working light bulb, which showered them in a jaundiced tint. The lighting combined with the dirty mirror did him no favours—his eyes looked blacker than the sea at night despite usually looking to be a shade of light brown, the bags under them too, looked much darker than usual, and the freckles across his nose which generally made him look youthful, were cast in shadows by his hair—uncombed, in his eyes and sticking up in different angles all around his skull. Flinching, he ran his fingers under the icy cold water. He noticed a stain of sick on his sweatshirt, and feeling nauseated again, he took it off.  Cold air from the fans overhead made him shiver in his thin black tee-shirt. He splashed some water over his face, he couldn’t quite recall where he was, he had gotten drunk with his friends last night, he knew they had tried to go to a second bar but he had been kicked out for being too drunk. His best guess was that he had wandered off and passed out in a bathroom somewhere. A lightbulb moment; he remembered the existence of his phone. So he wrapped his fingers up in some paper towels before creating a tourniquet for them out of his sweater, then he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and found his phone. It flashed, ostentatious, the no battery symbol mocking him. He ran his non-broken hand through his hair, letting out a groan. He walked over to the door of the bathroom and on the first tug of the door handle he thought he was screwed, that was until he tried again, tugging it harder this time. It opened, and his heartbeat slowed to a normal pace. 

The lobby was dark, only a singular white light flashing toward the back of the room—illuminating then de-illuminating the scenery. He was in an art museum. The sign above the front desk read ‘The Macabre Gallery of Art’ and the clock directly beneath the sign displayed quarter past three. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as he glanced around at the artwork hanging in the lobby. On the left hand side—a painting, or a photograph he couldn’t quite decipher which, of a woman turned slightly to the left, with hollowed cheeks, her skin— white as a ghost and her eyes replaced by gaping black holes with her mouth frowning in clownlike sadness. The sign below it read ‘Memento’. On the right, two more paintings hung, but these were more gruesome, almost alive despite the paint. One was titled ‘From Ear to Ear’ and featured a man, one of his eyes was missing and his mouth was torn open and twisted exposing the organs beneath. The other was of another woman, her was mouth agape in stupored horror and her eyes covered by a bandage where blood was painted on—glistening in the moonlight, where the eye sockets should have been,  her hands had been drawn clawing at her throat, and a third eye was positioned on her forehead, ‘the seeker’ the sign read. His throat felt oddly tight, and he felt a prickle against the back of his neck, he snapped around—suddenly paranoid, but he was met with nothing but silence, like the hush of the dead. Why he didn’t walk back to the dorms last night was beyond him. He exhaled, shaking off the sickening feeling in his throat, the door out of the gallery was right in front of him. It was tall, reaching to the top of the high ceiling, made of mahogany wood and engraved with a winding pattern of delicate blooms. He walked over to it, still nursing his fingers, he would have to get some ice on them when he got back, James, his roommate, would know what to do after that. His good fingers curled around the brass doorknob and he twisted it— nothing. He twisted it again, harder this time—still nothing. He let out a shaky laugh, he was having loathsome luck with doors today. He pushed the door as hard as he could, it still wouldn't budge. For fucks sake he thought, before he noticed the sign next to the door which read in large block lettering ‘PULL DONT PUSH’, his neck flushed hot with embarrasment even though he knew no one was watching. This time he pulled the door, he pulled it as hard as he could and knocked himself back in the face with his fist. “Fuck” he exhaled, kicking the door and groaning from pain for the third time. There had to be another exit, or else at least a nurses room for his fingers where he could wait the night out.

He turned around, eying  the eerie  paintings once more— he could have sworn the woman in the one titled Memento had been facing the other way. He blamed this inconsistency on the alcohol still buzzing in his head. At the counter he scaled the desk for a map of some sort. Nothing. Then he checked the wall behind for an emergency exit button, or perhaps an alarm to call security. Still nothing. There was nothing except more uncanny paintings in the room next door. And the room after that. And the room after that. None of the light switches he tried worked either. Defeated, he sat down, longing for an ibuprofen. He sat there for a few minutes, rubbing his eyes,  then he changed his mind. Maybe he could try to sleep, he thought, getting up again in search of the couch he had spotted earlier. He walked down another winding corridor, proud of himself when he found the couch again, it was a deep charcoal, made of sawdust and upholstered fabric. He sat down on it, melting into the fabric. When he caught sight of the painting in front of him,  his intestines dropped like a stone through his stomach. The painting staring back at him was bone-chilling, like a portrait from hell. It was a humanoid figure- wrinkled and mangled, a hole where the nose was supposed to be. It had large yellow eyes hollowing out of its sockets and staring into his soul. But the mouth was the worst part, it was open in a sinister smile, revealing a set of rotten teeth far too big to fit. It was watching him.  His plan to sleep was immediately abandoned. He leaped off the couch and  walked, stiffly and quickly out, his face tingling. He walked until he found  a room labelled medical.

The sign was a glowing fluorescent green and he wasn’t sure how he had missed it before. The door creaked open, loose on its hinges, and behind it lay yet another corridor. Medical had to be through there, he thought, the nurses office at his college had the same layout, tucked behind a corridor labelled nurses office, he always thought it was stupid. Why didn’t they just put the label after the corridor? The walls of the corridor were claustrophobic and he kept his arms crossed across his chest as he walked through, it was even colder there than in the bathrooms—almost morgue-like, the frost bit at his nose and the tips of his toes. Stepping forward he felt his foot slip, and he plummeted down a flight of stairs as his shins scraped against the concrete edges of the stairs. He pulled a face as he landed, cringing from the pain. He had landed on what felt to be a wooden floor, and he’d made sure to keep his fingers up, not wanting to rip any more nails off, so realistically it could have been worse. Swinging his arms around him he tried to find a light switch.

The lightswitch worked this time, but the glare was too bright and he shielded his eyes at first—recoiling from the hospital white lighting, once his eyes had adjusted he moved his arm away, his surroundings coming into view. He smiled—unable to stop himself, next to him was a desk with a first aid kit sitting on top, a box of eppi-pens lay next to it and behind the desk on the wall there were multiple cabinets one labelled bandages, one labelled medication and another labelled asthma puffers, and though Ash didn’t believe in god he almost thanked him. He lifted up his jeans to see the damage, his legs were covered in bruises, pigmented in deep hues of indigo and prussian blue, his shins were grazed, bleeding in some places, but nothing too bad. By the time he had finished bandaging up his fingers and legs as best as he could he assumed the clocks would have struck four—he likely only had to wait it out for another two to three hours at best. The alcohol had begun to wear off by then and a hangover was beginning to hit him painfully in the stomach and the head. He wanted to call his friends, furious with them for ditching him the night before. What if something had happened to him? Something did happen, he reminded himself, he had ripped off his fingernails and almost broken his hand. He knew they wouldn’t even believe him when he told them. Deciding to look for a phone charger, he stood glancing around the room. That was when he noticed that something wasn’t quite right about the supposed nurses room he was in.

There was another table behind him. It had too many tools on it. Tools you shouldn’t see in a nurses office. A scalpel, four knives all in varying sharpness, a needle. Beside the tools lay a black box, covered in a thin film of dust, inside it he could see pliers, hammers, a wrench, a drill, duct tape and a staple gun. Fashioned on the wall was a row of fishing hooks, and beside them a tall stack of empty fishing line. He thought maybe they did surgeries here, but there was no surgical table in sight. Panic settled in his stomach like an army of moths flying around and hitting his intestines. Maybe the tools were for making sculptures, he decided. But he was sweating, his skin growing paler by the second. He tried to steady his heartbeat, the smell of blood gushed into his nostrils—he hadn’t noticed it before. Where was it coming from? Bumps of gooseflesh appeared on his skin, his heart was ready to burst, he reminded himself that he was still drunk, though all the traces of alcohol had left his body by now. A stack of paperwork had been left on the table. Nosy—he went over to look, perhaps it would explain the tools. HERMAPHRODITE, it read at the top, below it attached with a black paperclip was a picture of a painting. Two men naked and joined at the hip, they looked like conjoined twins. Below that another title SCHISM 2 (THE CONJOINED WOMEN), it wrote, attached another photograph, of a sculpture this time two women, surgically sewn together at their abdomens, both retaining one arm and one leg from their original bodies.

 A list of materials was written underneath;

-Fishing wire

-Needle 

-Pliers

-Staple gun

-Retractor 

Maybe he was right about the sculpture thing.

Plink.

Someone was outside the door, at the top of the stairs.

His eyes darted around the room–searching for an exit. A bright light flashing EMERGENCY EXIT stared back at him, not daring to waste a second, he tiptoed hastily across the floor, and opened the exit door, the smell of blood was potent now, bursting like a ripe cherry. His throat felt scratchy with dread, and he forced himself to stay silent, the contrast between the hospital-eque room and this one made it too dark for him to see anything, but it seemed a dead end. He silenced himself patiently waiting for another sound from the person he had heard before. Nothing. Silence met him, prickling uncomfortably at his skin, so he strained his ears harder. The silence rang around his head, reverberating around his skull. He exhaled, maybe he was hallucinating, the paintings had scared him before, they must have gotten to his head. He took a step forward. 

Snap.

The bear trap clamped around his foot. Crunching his toes, one by one. Tears collected in the corners of his eyes,  threatening to spill,  he tightened his jaw, biting down as hard as he could on his arm to stop himself from screaming out. The scream would have been piercing if he’d let it. He hoped his arm had muffled it enough. He was sure now, that there was a person at the top of the stairs. The room came into view around him, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.  Despite being  blurry, from the tears which had not yet fallen, he was able to make-out the sculpture of the two women he had seen on the paperwork. There were more fishing lines in here. He tried not to make a noise as he turned around still biting on his arm, maybe there was something that could help him, a weapon he could use, or something to unlock the trap. Instead, a pair of yellow eyes stared back at him through a glass box. At first he mistook them for that horrifying painting again, but it was a person. It was a girl. She had one finger—her index, placed to her lips in a shushing motion. The pain must have been making him hallucinate. He closed his eyes, counting to fifteen  and then opened them. She was still there, watching him, finger to her lips. That was when he noticed she was missing an arm, and a leg. And the finger placed on her lips appeared to be sewn on. Fishing line, he shuddered. 

Her middle finger was the same, sewn on by the fishing line.

The doorknob rattled. There was nothing around him, no weapons, nothing. The door opened. Like a caged animal, paralyzed by primal terror, he sat there, his breath escaping in ragged rasps, as the air tightened around him like a noose. He looked at the sculpture, then the girl, his fingers, the fishing line, then down at his trapped foot, the fear sharp on his tongue as he put two and two together. 

He hoped, at the very least, that  his friends were looking for him by now.