Patient File No. 7
Three days passed without real sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, even for a few minutes, the creak of swing chains came from somewhere distant, from behind my eyelids.
I decided to stop running.
On the fourth night, instead of fighting sleep, I sat on my bed, turned off the light, and waited. If this was going to happen — whether in sleep or in waking, it no longer mattered — I wanted to have my eyes open.
I don't know how many hours passed. All I know is that at one moment, the air in the room changed. It grew cold, but not ordinary cold — a cold that starts from inside your bones, not from your skin.
And then, the smell of fresh bread.
I sat motionless, my heart pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. Slowly, I turned my head toward the corner of the room — where my reading chair was.
He was sitting there.
A man — or something shaped like a man — in an old-fashioned suit, the kind no one wears anymore, dark gray, with polished buttons. His face... his face couldn't be seen clearly, as if the room's light passed over it instead of landing on it, like a blurred smudge in an otherwise sharp photograph.
Only his smile was visible. A smile too wide, too fixed, in a way no facial muscle could ever hold.
"Hello, Doctor," he said. The same voice I had heard on the phone, but now clearer, closer, with that strange delay between syllables.
I couldn't speak. My mouth had gone dry.
"Don't worry," he said, leaning forward slightly. His movement... his movement wasn't natural. His joints seemed to decide a moment after his body did to follow the rest of him, like a film with missing frames. "I just came to introduce myself. You've been hearing about me for a long time. I thought it wasn't fair that you only heard it from his mouth."
"You're... you're not real," I said, my voice barely escaping my throat.
He laughed. The sound of his laughter was strange — as if several different voices were laughing at once, with tiny delays between them, so that in a single moment he sounded like more than one person.
"More real than most things," he said. "You know what's funny? He told you I was lying about saving people. He said I just enjoy it. Well..." He paused, and his smile, if possible, widened. "Maybe both are true. Can't something be both right and pleasurable?"
"What do you want from me?"
"I just want to help you understand," he said, and reached out his hand — fingers far longer than normal, with extra joints that didn't sit where they should. "Come. Let me show you why I do this."
Before I could react, he pressed his finger to my forehead.
---
And I was no longer in my room.
I was on that street — the bakery, the park, the three swings — but this time it was daytime, sunny, ordinary, as if nothing frightening existed. The sound of children came from the park, the sound of laughter.
A young woman, with a little girl around five years old, was sitting on one of the swings — the mother pushing her daughter, both of them laughing.
Mr. Monday stood beside me, pointing at them.
"This is the thirteenth family," he said, in a tone as if he were discussing an interesting scientific experiment. "Watch."
Suddenly, without any warning, the scene shuddered — like an image someone had pressed rewind on — and everything went backward: the child jumped off the swing, the mother took her hand, they both ran toward their house, in reverse, as if time were playing the film backward.
Then, forward again.
This time, when they reached the park, the mother glanced at her watch and said something she hadn't said the previous time — a small, different decision. Instead of going to the swing, she took her daughter toward the bakery.
Mr. Monday whispered beside my ear: "You see? Each time, one small choice changes. And I'm learning. I'm figuring out which version of these two will, in the end, be happiest. Which path has the least pain."
"That's a lie," I said, my voice trembling. "You're just watching them suffer."
He looked at me — or at least, that blurred smudge that was his face turned toward me.
"Maybe," he said, without denying it. "Or maybe I'm doing both at once. Does it matter? The result is the same."
The scene spun again, faster this time, more ruthlessly — days, weeks, months, all compressed into a few seconds, the same family living the same day over and over, each time with one small change, each time with a slightly different ending. In one version, the girl fell and broke her leg. In the next, she cried because her swing was taken away. In one version, the mother screamed at her daughter, so loudly that the neighbors came outside.
And in every version, the sound of Mr. Monday's laughter — that strange, multi-voiced laugh — grew slightly louder, as if he were feeding on every moment of pain he witnessed.
I screamed — or thought I screamed, because I don't know if any sound left my mouth — for him to stop.
He stopped. The scene froze, the mother and daughter caught in one of the most painful versions, motionless as a photograph.
"Why are you so upset?" he asked, in a tone that seemed genuinely confused, as if my reaction made no sense to him. "I'm collecting data. I'm finding the best path. Is that a bad thing?"
"This is torture."
He tilted his head — a very slow, very asymmetrical movement, like a broken doll. "Torture means causing pain deliberately with no other purpose. I have a purpose."
"What purpose?"
He came closer. Now he was close enough that I could — or thought I could — see something beneath that dark smudge of his face: not skin, not bone, but something like hundreds of thin layers, each with a different expression, each smiling, all at once.
"My purpose is that one day, a smart doctor like you finally understands that suffering is only a path, not an end," he said, his voice softer now, almost kind. "And when you understand, you won't be afraid of me anymore. You'll help me."
"Never," I said.
He laughed — that horrible laugh — and pressed his hand to my forehead again.
---
I jolted awake — if it was sleep — gasping, drenched in sweat, lying on the floor of my room instead of on my bed.
Clock: 7:22 in the morning.
I stood, shaking, and walked toward the bathroom mirror. My face was pale, my eyes red.
But the thing that truly made me scream was something else.
On the wall behind me, in the mirror's reflection — not in the actual room, only in the reflection — something had been written on the wall in what looked like soot or ash, crooked, trembling letters, as if traced by a finger:
"The thirteenth family, seventh version. The best result has not yet been found."
I spun around, quickly, toward the real wall.
There was nothing there.
Just the clean white wall.
I sat down on the bathroom floor, hugged my knees, and for the first time since I was a child, I cried — not from sorrow, but from a pure terror I didn't know how to escape.
Because I understood that what he had shown me was not just a past experiment.
It was an invitation.
---
To be continued in Chapter Eight...