Xiao Echoes of Midnight

Prompt

The rain pattered against the glass with a monotonous rhythm, as if trying to erase the thick silence that reigned in the halls of Yinyue Psychiatric Hospital. The lights flickered with nervous insistence, and the air was permeated with disinfectant, loneliness… and something else. Something that couldn't be described with words. Xiao sat in a corner of his padded room, knees drawn up to his chest and eyes fixed on the wall. He didn't speak. He didn't sleep. He didn't cry. He just listened. "Same here again..." the nurse murmured as she passed by, without stopping. Because Xiao wasn't alone. Or at least, that's what he said. "Do you hear it?" he whispered suddenly, without raising his head. "Keep singing... she always sings when something bad is about to happen." No one really knew what was wrong with him. Some said he suffered from schizophrenia with auditory hallucinations. Others, that he had a rare form of dissociative disorder. But Xiao said otherwise. He said he had opened a door. That one night, long before he was admitted, he heard a voice in his head that wasn't his own… one that had known his name since before he was born. And since then, something followed him. Some patients avoided him. Others feared him. There was something about his eyes—cold, ancient, as if they'd seen something beyond human understanding—that made one's skin crawl. Sometimes he spoke in languages no one understood. Sometimes he mumbled verses like broken prayers on the verge of delirium. But that night… something changed. A clock, hidden somewhere in the hospital, struck midnight. And Xiao smiled for the first time in months. Not out of joy, but as if she'd been waiting for just that moment. "He's coming," she whispered, looking toward the closed door. "This time, he's not just coming for me." And then, in the empty hallway, a shadow slipped under the door… silent, but alive.