Published at 5th of November 2026 9:33 am

Chapter 218. The man in the cell

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“Hello!” Josh called out into the corridor.

He was sure something had just run across the hallway ahead of him. For the past few minutes, this had happened multiple times. Whenever he turned or looked around, he would catch movement out of the corner of his eye. Yet all he ever actually saw was a small creature dressed in grey clothing dart into a passage, disappearing before he could make out anything.

“Sam!” Josh shouted. “Filip. Rey. Someone, anyone,” he called, but with each word, his voice grew weaker, ending in a resigned whisper.

Closing his eyes for a second, he once again tried to recall how he had gotten there. He remembered a ride on the metro, the tense atmosphere, and then the pull. It felt as though he had lost his form, become liquid, and been sifted and pulled through tubes into a massive, infinitely vast container before simply arriving here.

‘And where is here?’

A labyrinth of white corridors made of hard metal, lit by a light whose source he could not find. He had tried to find his way by moving slowly and remembering the turns, but now he was running in panic as a strange sensation of presence began to weigh on his mind.

He knew there was a way out. He just needed to find it.

“Who’s there?” He jumped as another movement made his heart race.

This time, he heard the unmistakable sound of children’s laughter.

Josh wanted to bolt, unsure whether to run toward the movement in hopes of finding company or away from it. But before he could, he stopped himself. Sam’s training was still fresh in his mind. He tried to find that strange feeling when someone invaded his head. The issue was that he couldn’t feel his own mental space. It was strange, like it was somewhere else.

‘Was that what a successful mind attack felt like?’

“Okay,” he whispered to himself, trying to push the fear away. “If not an attack, then what? My mind was supposed to be like a field, so did I fall somewhere in it? Or outside this field?”

He shook his head. Finding out why this happened was useless for now. Finding his way out was the trick, and running around the corridors wasn’t getting him there.

Josh took a deep breath and then released it. He remembered how he had cowered in the van while Sam and the doctor tried to kill one another outside. He remembered all the pain that had pushed him forward, then opened his eyes again, calmer this time.

Whether this was his mind or not, it had to be magic, though he didn’t know much about it.

‘How did Sam read magic?’ Josh tried to remember anything useful.

Symbolism—a word came to his mind.

Symbolism in magic. Josh wasn't an expert, but he'd read the basic symbols back then at the murder scene.

Maybe he would recognize something here. Maybe there would be an arrow pointing to the exit. With a quick exhale, he looked around. And he was right. He felt it deep inside. There was something wrong, something strange, something to notice, visible once he focused on the scene rather than on escaping. And then it hit him. He was looking around from an unfamiliar height. Looking down, Josh finally noticed the source of the discrepancy.

“Huh?” He gave a short, stunned chuckle.

He stood. On his two legs. How this hadn’t registered before was way beyond him. He had run, jumped, and thrashed around all this time trying to find the exit. How in the world would he not notice something like this?

Confusion hit him so hard that it pushed his fear away. Something he had dreamed of for years and years, an impossibility that had caused his parents so much misery, had happened just like that—and he hadn’t noticed?

‘Something is messing with my mind.’

He pushed away the sudden euphoria of being able to stand again. Miracle cures and random strokes of luck were not on the list of things he believed in.

‘I couldn’t tell what it was until I concentrated on it. It’s like everything is natural and right where it’s supposed to be until I pay attention to it.’

Josh looked around, trying to notice anything “readable” in the white, sterile corridors. There was something there. It made itself known—a pattern, a way—but…

He jumped back, wincing at the sudden splitting headache. Whatever he'd tried to witness was far too complicated, beyond what his mind could understand.

Yet the pain wasn’t purely bad, as it brought to his mind a memory of a similar experience—the day he saw the veiled man’s installation. He needed to approach this the same way, try to see the big picture first, take in only the parts he could withstand. He opened his mind to something he could comprehend, yet nothing answered.

His next move was to keep walking, hoping a random creature would pop up and he could notice something in it. But as if the space itself could read his thoughts, the being that had previously reveled in scaring him now stayed dormant.

“Oh, please,” Josh groaned toward the white corridor, hoping for any small mercy.

‘Okay. If not the walls or the movement, then maybe sounds or smell?’ He changed his approach once again.

Closing his eyes, he tried to smell the air and listen for something, but instead, a path came into view. Directions materialized as feelings. The corridor was filled with them, sensations lying on the floor like threads. Roads of anger, hatred, relief, belief, and devotion lay there. They stretched before his eyes like glowing threads of wool, asking him to follow.

Yet one thing worried him. If almost all the feelings were thin strands, then one felt like a massive iron chain laid over the others—suffering. Not just pain, but a complicated mixture of many emotions. False hope, broken—

He opened his eyes and gasped for air as he felt himself almost collapse. He had looked into something too complicated to comprehend, and this time his mind had almost liquefied. He tried to sense the emotions, but they were hidden, only revealing themselves when he closed his eyelids again and concentrated.

Josh looked for a thread that might lead to an exit, but none of them felt like relief from finding a way out of a labyrinth. He wanted to follow anything other than the thick road of suffering laid right in front of him, but the other threads were thin, delicate, and hard to perceive. He was afraid he would lose them.

He struggled with the decision for some time before finally turning toward the thickest one and taking a step forward. He felt the space shift around him, though when he opened his eyes again, all he could see were the same white corridors.

Then a movement drew him out of his thoughts. Expecting the usual immediate disappearance, he turned toward it, but this time the creature stayed. It was shaped like a child, wearing dirty, baggy grey clothing. Judging by the long, messy hair, the figure seemed to be a girl. She had stopped this time, part of her cheek visible from behind a corner as she hugged the wall shyly.

“Hey,” Josh said softly. “Hey, who are you? Where are we?” he asked, approaching slowly. But as he got closer, the small person immediately bolted into the corridor. “No!” Josh shouted and ran after her, only to stop dead in his tracks.

The moment he passed the corner, instead of another corridor, he came face to face with a group of children standing in pairs as if at attention, their faces turned toward him, their eyes gouged out, blood seeping from the empty eye sockets.

There were sixteen of them. He knew it the moment he saw them.

He stumbled forward, but his legs sank as if the floor had become a pit of soft mud. In desperation, he took another step, sinking deeper as the children watched in silence. No matter how he fought, the ground had become a quagmire. He struggled helplessly until he finally fell through the floor to the level below.

Looking around, he found himself in a small room carved into stone, with iron bars across the front—a prison cell.

Before he could contemplate his new situation, something tugged on his shoulder. A man’s hand violently turned him around, and he came face to face with its owner, whose eyes blazed with madness and fury and whose open mouth revealed missing teeth. His dirty hair fell in strands over his thin shoulders. Despite his malnourished body, he held onto Josh with the strength of an iron clasp.

“I’ll help her!” the man shouted.

As the words left his mouth, his eyes bulged, and his figure began to crumble.

“He’ll help her. Or my son,” he said, his voice weakening as Josh finally managed to rip himself free thanks to the man’s fading strength. “My son’s son, my son’s son’s son,” he went on as his body began to break down into ash.

Josh scrambled backward toward the cell door, stopping when cold steel pressed against his back. He sat terrified, watching as the man’s lower half crumbled to ash while his upper half kept crawling toward him. Yet as the body crumbled, the face changed. It morphed, becoming slightly familiar at the end, before the flesh crumbled into nothing.

Josh held himself still, muscles tense, heart almost beating out of his chest. He feared any movement would push him further into the visions, somehow making this whole situation worse than it already was. So he stayed in place until his thoughts became more than sheer panic.

Once he regained control of himself, he closed his eyes and tried to find the threads of feeling, hoping for one with a big, bold ‘Exit’ written across it.

The paths glowed like images projected onto the inside of his eyelids. And there it was, the path of pain, of suffering—now stronger. He was closer to whatever source of burning torment anchored it. But he did not want to come any closer. He tried to look for other paths, but the bright glow of the pain drowned out everything else.

Josh gritted his teeth, considering whether to move forward in the vision or to stay in the cell until someone might help him. Yet the decision was made for him. From beside the bars, he could now see the rest of the prison. A massive creature was dragging people out of their cells by their chains, ignoring their cries of pain even as limbs snapped like twigs.

The scene grew stranger still. Every few seconds, the warden would freeze like a paused recording, the creature’s face shifting into a mix of fear and confusion, then snapping back into a cruel mask of indifference until the next pause. Each time the thing froze, the rest of the scene changed with it. The prisoners stopped their laments only to look at the creature with a sudden, growing disgust, their previous pain seemingly gone.

But then Josh recognized the creature dragging the prisoners from their cells.

“Myhur?” he blurted out.

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