Episode 1: Hospital Awakening
Something is wrong.
Before I even open my eyes, the hair on the back of my neck bristles—that familiar prickle of being watched, of not belonging.
But this wrongness is sharper, heavier. Danger in the air instead of judgment.
The antiseptic sting in my nose is unmistakable: hospital. But it’s wrapped in a perfume of flowers so thick it turns my stomach. I never get flowers. Not for birthdays. Not for holidays. Not even when I landed my biggest client. The sweetness feels wrong, like someone trying to invent affection for a person they’ve never met.
My head throbs with the dull pressure of a migraine winding up, thoughts wrapped in cotton. I reach for memory, for the safe ritual that never fails me: last night I was in my Queens studio apartment, reviewing quarterlies for the next day. Numbers never lie. My client list sat balanced and neat, the kind of order no family could ever offer me. But when I try to push past that, there’s nothing. Just a blank stretch where life should be.
I open my eyes.
Everything blurs. Light stabs through my skull, but I blink, force focus. The nightstand beside me swims into view first—crystal vases crowded with orchids, their scent cloying in the air.
My fingers test the sheets beneath me—Egyptian cotton, softer than anything I’ve ever owned. The walls are warm cream instead of hospital gray. Too many photographs scattered around the room, faces I should recognize but don’t. A wedding portrait. Vacation snapshots. A whole life arranged around me like evidence I’m supposed to remember.
Something about all of this is very, very wrong.
“Sweetheart? Are you awake? Should we get a nurse?”
The voice is warm. Intimate. Concern threaded through every syllable like I matter enough to worry about.
Then, softer, like a secret: “Estelle, my love. Can you see me?”
My love.
The words hit like a physical shock. My chest tightens, breath catching. No one has ever called me that. Ever. Those words belong to other women, other lives—the kind where someone stays, where someone chooses you over everyone else. Hearing them aimed at me makes the room spin. A small, dangerous part of me wants to lean toward that warmth, to believe.
I turn toward the sound.
Light stabs through my skull like a blade. Pain explodes behind my eyes, white-hot and vicious. For a heartbeat, the agony veils everything. Then it clears.
What remains is worse.
Where his head should be, there’s nothing. Not shadow. Not darkness. A void that swallows the hospital’s sterile glow, drinking light like a wound drinks blood. The absence isn’t flat but deep—too deep for walls this close, as if my hospital room has been cut open to reveal a canyon of night. Shadows bend away from it like compass needles twitching toward a magnet I can’t see.
The wrongness presses against my vision, hungry, immense, and I understand on some animal level that it could devour more than light—it could devour me.
The scream tears from my throat, animal and raw, but the sound feels thin, swallowed before it can reach the edges of the room. The cardiac monitor explodes into shrieking alarms. The beeping stutters—not steady but jagged, almost patterned—before resolving again. I claw at everything—the call button cracks under my nails, leads rip from my chest, the IV line burns as I yank it free. Blood wells where the needle was. Pain, real pain. Small, fragile, human. Something I can trust in the face of that impossible depth.
The door slams open. Blue scrubs flood in—hands reaching, voices calling. Too many people, too fast. My vision tunnels, black at the edges, like the void has followed me inside my own skull.
“Easy now, ma’am. You’re safe,” a man’s voice says, calm and practiced.
Safe from what? From the thing with no face, hastily retreated to the foot of my bed, swallowing the light like it belongs to him.
I lunge toward the voice, seize the front of his scrubs, climb his solid body like a drowning woman clinging to driftwood. Human heat floods under my fingers—real, warm, alive. Proof that not everything has been hollowed out.
“LOOK AT HIM!” My voice cracks, desperate. “PLEASE, JUST LOOK AT HIS FACE!”
But the man steadying me doesn’t turn. Doesn’t see. His hands are gentle, steady, treating me like some frightened animal while the true predator waits, silent, at the foot of the bed.
“I’m Jake,” he says evenly, nodding toward the petite nurse now at my other side. “That’s Tracie. And that’s your husband, Morgan Brontes.”
Husband. The word lashes me across the face. I wait for the flinch, the recoil—some sign that Jake or Tracie notice the void drinking the light at the end of my bed.
Nothing. Jake’s expression stays calm, professional. Tracie even glances at the thing and smiles—smiles—like she’s looking at a concerned spouse instead of an absence wearing a suit.
They can’t see it. Or won’t. Either way, I’m alone.
Panic claws at my ribs, but some buried part of me scrambles for footing. If screaming doesn’t work, maybe words will.
“You’re in the hospital,” Jake continues, already smoothing over my terror like it’s a box to check. “You’re safe. Do you know where you are?”
“A hospital,” I repeat slowly as if it's my only tether to sanity. “But I don’t know which one.”
“Presbyterian, Columbia campus,” Jake confirms gently. “You were in a car accident. What’s your name?”
“Estelle Roberts.” I spit it like a battle cry. “And that thing is not my husband.”
Jake’s voice lowers, soothing. “She’ll be okay, Mr. Brontes. These kinds of recognition problems happen all the time.”
Over his shoulder, the void looms. Shadows spilling across the floor, bending toward me like grasping fingers.
“Can you tell me what day it is?” Tracie asks, her sunflower badge catching the light.
“Wednesday,” I blurt, grasping at something solid.
Her eyes soften with pity. “It’s Friday, honey. You were in a car accident. You’ve lost some time.”
Friday. Two whole days gone. My stomach drops. The room tilts with it.
The doctor steps forward, tablet in hand—not to reassure me, but to address the void at the foot of my bed, as if he were the patient. “Retrograde amnesia is very common after trauma, Mr. Brontes. Her brain is protecting itself.”
My throat closes. They’re explaining me to him.
The voice that answers is warm, wounded. Too human for something with no face. “She doesn’t recognize me, Doctor. She started screaming the moment she saw me.”
“No!” My hands knot tighter in Jake’s scrubs. “That thing is not my husband.”
Jake meets my eyes, steady, professional. “I promise you, I see your husband. Tall, dark-haired, very worried about you. He hasn’t left your side.”
The room tilts harder. They see a man. I see a hole in the world.
For a heartbeat, terror nearly crushes me. Then some shred of survival claws its way up. If they won’t believe what I see, I’ll cling to what I know.
“My name is Estelle Roberts,” I rasp, voice breaking but sure. “Check my records. My name is not Brontes.”
Dr. Theodorakis shows me his tablet. My name rewritten: Mrs. Estelle Brontes.
It guts me worse than the IV tearing free. The proof of who I am overwritten with a keystroke.
I cling tighter to Jake, fingers locked in the fabric of his scrubs, the only barrier between me and the void. “Don’t say my name. How can you even talk when you don’t have a face?”
The staff exchange glances—not confusion, but sympathy. For him.
Jake: “Her pulse is racing. We should consider something mild.”
The doctor nods. “Mr. Brontes, do you consent?”
Not me. They don’t ask me.
“Yes, of course,” the void answers instantly, tender and wrong. “Whatever she needs to feel safe.”
He moves closer in two impossibly smooth strides. The sheets at the foot of the bed darken where they brush his shoes, as if the fabric itself is sinking into him. He leans down, close enough to brush hair from my forehead, the gesture tender and unbearable. “Trust them, my love.”
“My love.” The words I’ve waited my whole life to hear. A warmth that feels like a knife.
“No drugs,” I croak. “I need to think clearly. I don’t want to forget.”
But the syringe finds me anyway. Cool slides into my vein like frost. My hand jerks to the torn IV tape. I peel it free, ball it in my fist. Proof. Anchor. If they won’t see him, I’ll cling to what I know.
My eyes betray me first, heavy and slow, dragged down by the sedative even as my mind claws upward. The tape bites into my palm, the last thing I can hold onto.
The lights flicker. Ceiling tiles shiver into constellation patterns that don’t belong to Earth. The void tilts, shadows stretching, drinking deeper.
“Rest now,” he whispers. “I’ll be here when you wake. I’ll always be here.”
They explain me to him. They sedate me for him. It. What’s left that belongs to me at all?
The sedative drags me under.
If I wake remembering, it was real.
If not—start over louder.
Everyone else sees perfection.
Only she sees the hole in the world.
And tomorrow, the performance of her life begins.
💬 Comment if you’d scream louder the second time.
New episodes everyday during the Inferno Challenge 9/29 - 10/12
