The Severed Hours

In the late autumn of 2014, I was a graduate student in the eerie town of Blackwood, known for its dense fog and an old psychiatric hospital that had been closed for decades. My apartment was a cramped studio above a deserted bakery, where the walls seemed to absorb sound and the radiators clicked like arthritic fingers. I had just finished my thesis on the history of the hospital, and my mind was heavy with the stories of its patients.

One night, as I lay in bed trying to sleep, I closed my eyes and saw a woman in a white hospital gown on a gurney, her face obscured by a stained cloth. She was familiar—I had seen her in a photograph in the hospital’s archives, a patient who had vanished without a trace. I snapped my eyes open, my heart pounding. But when I closed them again, the scene had changed. A girl with a shaved head, wearing a tattered uniform, stood over the woman, raising a pair of surgical scissors. She brought them down, severing the woman’s legs at the knees, and the sound of bone cracking echoed in my skull. I shot up, gasping for air, the image burned into my mind.

A week later, I was walking through the old hospital grounds, documenting the crumbling wings for my research. The fog was thick, and I heard a rhythmic scraping, like metal on concrete. Following the sound, I found a basement door ajar. Inside, the walls were lined with rusted lockers, and on the floor was a pair of legs—mannequin legs, I thought, but they were too realistic. They were severed, with clean cuts, and the blood was still wet. My stomach lurched, and I stumbled back, but not before I noticed a tattered uniform shirt hanging from a hook, bearing the name ‘E. Hart.’

I rushed back to my apartment, but the night brought more visions. This time, I saw the girl in the uniform in my room, standing at the foot of my bed. She held the scissors, and her eyes were blank, but they seemed to stare into my soul. She whispered, ‘You found my work. Now you must finish it.’ I tried to scream, but no sound came. She raised the scissors and lunged, and I woke up drenched in sweat, the sheets twisted around my legs.

The next day, I researched the name E. Hart. I found a file in the hospital’s basement, mildewed and barely legible. Ellen Hart had been a nurse there in the 1950s, known for her cruelty. She was accused of mutilating patients before she disappeared. The last entry in her file was a note: ‘She will return to complete her task.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in the dark, listening to the radiator’s clicks, when I heard footsteps in the hallway, slow and deliberate. The doorknob turned, and the door creaked open. The girl from my vision stood there, her head tilted, the scissors glinting in the moonlight. She smiled, and I saw blood on her teeth. ‘You have the key,’ she said, and I realized she meant the old key I had taken from the hospital’s basement, a key to the morgue.

I tried to run, but my legs felt like lead. She approached, and the world began to spin. I blacked out, and when I came to, I was in the hospital’s morgue, strapped to a gurney. The girl loomed over me, her voice a hiss: ‘I need to finish what I started. You know what to do.’ In my pocket, I felt the cold metal of the key. I understood then—I had to unlock the cold storage, where the real Ellen Hart lay preserved, waiting to be freed.

With trembling hands, I unlocked the drawer. Inside was a body in a white gown, its legs missing below the knees, but its face was the girl’s, but older, withered. The girl beside me began to dissolve, merging with the body, and the morgue filled with the stench of rot. The eyes of the body snapped open, and a voice rasped, ‘Now you see me.’

I woke up in my bed, screaming, the key still clutched in my hand. Sunlight streamed through the window, but I felt cold. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. There, behind me, was the reflection of the girl, faded but smiling. I turned, but nothing was there. When I looked back at the mirror, she was gone. But my neck bore a thin red line, as if the scissors had just grazed me.

I fled Blackwood the next morning, never to return. But sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see the girl, her scissors, and the severed hours of my life. And I know she’s waiting for me to finish the story.