The Painted Ward

The summer after I turned seventeen, my friends and I discovered an old building on the outskirts of a town called Ashwick. It was a squat, two-story structure of gray stone, with a sagging roof and windows like blind eyes, all boarded up. Locals called it the Painted Ward, though no one could say why. My friend Cyrus had heard it was once a children’s wing of a long-closed asylum, but the name stuck because of the murals inside. We were bored, and the place had the pull of the forbidden, so one sweltering afternoon, we decided to check it out.

We found a loose board on a ground-floor window and slipped inside. The air was thick with dust and the smell of damp plaster. Our flashlights cut through the gloom, revealing peeling paint and littered floors. We wandered through empty rooms, our footsteps echoing too loudly. Then we found the main corridor, and that’s when we saw the walls. They were covered in murals, not the crude graffiti of teenagers, but vivid, almost childlike paintings of fantastical scenes. There were castles in the sky, animals that talked, and cartoon characters I half-recognized, but all warped, their eyes too large, their smiles too wide. One mural showed a group of children holding hands around a bonfire, but their faces were blank, just smooth, eggshell ovals.

We joked nervously, trying to shake the unease. My friend Delia traced a finger along a painted butterfly, and her fingertip came away stained with something dark and sticky that wasn’t paint. ‘This is fresh,’ she said, her voice thin. We fell silent, and in that silence, we heard it: a faint, rhythmic scratching, like chalk on a slate, coming from somewhere above us. Cyrus laughed, but it was hollow. ‘Probably rats,’ he said. We moved on, but the scratching followed, growing louder, more insistent.

We climbed the stairs to the second floor. The corridor there was darker, the murals older, more faded. But at the far end, there was a door that was slightly ajar, a sliver of light spilling from within. We crept toward it, and through the gap, we saw a room lit by a single bare bulb. In the center stood a figure in a white smock, their back to us, feverishly painting on a wall. The figure was covered in tattoos, but they were crude, like stick figures and scribbles, and as we watched, the figure turned. It was a woman, but her face was a mosaic of tiny, mismatched features—an eye here, a nose there, a mouth slightly askew—as if someone had stitched together different faces. Her hands were covered in paint, but the colors were too vibrant, almost glowing.

We backed away, but the door slammed shut, and the lights flickered. The scratching intensified, coming from every direction, and the murals on the walls began to shift. The blank-faced children turned their heads toward us, their painted eyes suddenly hollow and dark. One by one, they stepped out of the walls, their bodies distorted, their limbs too long. We ran, but the corridor seemed to stretch, the doors we passed leading to rooms we hadn’t seen before. The woman’s voice, high and singsong, floated through the air: ‘You’ll be my new colors.’

We found a stairwell and descended, but we ended up in a basement we never knew existed. Painted on the walls were hundreds of portraits, each one a terrified face, their mouths open in silent screams. Then we saw the last portrait, incomplete, with a blank space where a face should be. The woman appeared at the top of the stairs, holding a paintbrush like a weapon. Delia threw a rock at her, and it passed through her as if she were mist, but the brush swung, leaving a streak of paint across Delia’s arm. Immediately, her arm felt numb, and the paint began to spread, crawling up her skin.

We grabbed Delia and ran for the window we’d entered through, but the window was gone, replaced by a solid wall. The place was toying with us. Desperate, I remembered something the local kids said: ‘The Painted Ward takes what you love.’ I looked at my friends—Cyrus, Delia, and my other friend, Marcus. I loved them, but I also loved my freedom. In that moment of terror, I made a choice. I shoved Cyrus toward the creature, and in the chaos, I found a crack in the wall that I hadn’t noticed before, just big enough to squeeze through.

I tumbled out onto the grass, gasping. The building stood silent behind me, but I could hear my friends’ screams, muffled, as if from a great distance. I ran all the way home, and I never went back. They were never found. The police and my parents believed my story of an accident, but I knew the truth. Sometimes, at night, I hear scratching at my window, and when I look, I see the woman’s face pressed against the glass, her mismatched eyes pleading. She doesn’t want me, not yet. She wants me to come back and finish what I started. She wants me to be her new color, to paint my face into her collection. And I know, someday, she’ll get it. After all, I left my best colors behind in the Painted Ward.