The wailing from the fourth floor began again just after midnight.
It rose through the old hospital in long, ragged pulls, high and grief-stricken enough to curdle the blood. At first it sounded almost human, then it twisted, something animal, something wounded beyond language.
The cries dragged on for minutes before stopping all at once, as though a hand had been clamped over a mouth.
The first night it happened, I lay frozen in Room 37 staring at the ceiling above my cot, every muscle taut. Ice moved slowly down my spine with each sob. I did not sleep. I watched shadows crawl over the chipped plaster overhead while the pipes knocked and groaned inside the walls like old bones shifting beneath skin.
The bed did not help. It was less a bed than a carcass: a stained mattress laid across rusted springs that squealed whenever I breathed too deeply. The frame listed to one side. Something underneath it scratched intermittently through the night.
By the third evening I had begun timing the cries.
Lights out came at ten. The orderlies performed room checks every fifteen minutes with military regularity, their keys rattling softly before the slot in the steel door snapped open and a flashlight beam slid over my face.
The sobbing always started between the eighth and ninth checks. Somewhere between midnight and 12:15.
I remember counting on my fingers to be sure. Then recounting because I no longer trusted my own arithmetic.
It was a criminal psychiatric hospital in name, though there was little medicinal about the place. The building itself felt diseased. The walls sweated in the heat. Layers of yellowing paint peeled back like infected skin, exposing older colors beneath, gray, green, nicotine-brown. The corridors smelled of bleach failing to conceal mildew, urine, and something sweeter underneath, something rotten.
They did not want us leaving.
And after a few days among the others, I found I did not want them leaving either.
There was a wiry black man who paced the ward endlessly without sleeping, his bare feet whispering against the tile night and day. He muttered to himself in frantic bursts, stopping occasionally to scream at corners or empty chairs as if invisible people sat there mocking him. On my fourth night, just after the woman upstairs stopped crying, he snapped.
An orderly asked whether he needed anything.
The man suddenly shrieked, “IT WAS MINE,” with such fury that half the ward jolted awake. Minutes later came the crash of bodies, the squeal of rubber soles, and screams begging not to be restrained.
Afterward the ward fell silent except for the soft hum of failing lights.
Schizophrenic, someone told me casually over breakfast the next morning.
I got used to things like that quickly.
Compared to prison, this place was supposed to be temporary, a week or two for evaluation. At least that’s what they’d said. But prison had rules, rhythms, certainty. This place had none. Here, time dissolved beneath the constant buzzing lights and sleepless nights. There were no clocks.
The checks never stopped. Even outside my room I remained trapped inside the ward, wandering cracked hallways beneath flickering halogen bulbs that painted everything the sickly color of old bruises.
At night the building breathed around me.
Pipes moaned overhead. Water dripped somewhere endlessly. The radiators hissed in winter though they gave off little heat. Had I been here in winter?
Rats moved through the walls in frantic colonies, scratching behind the plaster and screaming at one another in shrill bursts that sometimes sounded horribly like laughter.
The first night I convinced myself I imagined them.
The second night I found droppings in the hallway outside my room, black and wet.
When I mentioned the screaming to the afternoon staff, they exchanged glances.
One of them, a tired woman with purple crescents beneath her eyes, told me there were no rats in the building.
That frightened me far more than if she had admitted it.
The same thing happened whenever I asked about the crying.
The first orderly I questioned was young enough to still have acne scars along his jaw. He avoided my eyes and mumbled something about not listening to noises after lights out. Another simply stared at me too long before walking away.
Still, every night the sobbing returned.
And every night it sounded closer.
At first the cries had been shapeless grief, wordless agony echoing through pipes and vents. But as the days passed, I began distinguishing sounds within it. Breaths. Broken syllables. The desperate cadence of someone trying to come to terms with a terrible loss.
I found myself lying awake listening to it for hours, staring into the dark while the smell of damp rot and unchanged sheets thickened the air around me. Spring crickets chirped faintly outside beyond the barred windows, their soft song drifting in through cracks in the brick while the voice trembled somewhere above me.
I began wondering what had been taken from them.
A child.
A husband.
Her mind.
Sometimes I thought perhaps the building itself was mourning through her. And I remembered that this was a men’s psychiatric hospital.
Then came tonight.
Tonight the sobbing started later than usual.
The ward felt wrong from the beginning. Too quiet. Even the pacing man sat motionless in the corner with his head lowered. The lights flickered harder than normal, plunging the hallway into brief moments of darkness long enough for shapes to appear where nothing should have been.
Midnight passed.
Then the crying began.
Not upstairs this time.
Inside the walls.
I sat upright immediately, my pulse hammering.
The sound moved slowly through the vents above me, wet and uneven, accompanied by a faint dragging noise. I could hear breathing now, close enough that I imagined cracked lips pressed against the grates.
Then, for the first time, the crying formed words.
Not many.
Just my name.