The Voices at Blackthorn Hospital

I should have been celebrating. Hell, I probably should have rung my parents first thing. An admissions email from Imperial College London for Aeronautical Engineering, followed by a scholarship letter confirming that my tuition fees and living costs would be covered. Everything I'd worked for since secondary school.

Instead, I sat at my desk at 2.00 pm staring at the letter while my laptop displayed search results for unexplained disappearances and abandoned psychiatric hospitals. Don't ask me why. I can tell you when it started, eighteen months ago. The why of it is harder to explain.

Most people get an offer from Imperial and celebrate. They open champagne or whatever. They ring their girlfriend. They post about it online. Normal things.

Me? I spent three hours reading about people who had walked into old hospitals and never walked out again.

The compulsion started after our Halloween trip to Calder Vale Hospital. Our crew did this thing every year.

Did this thing, I suppose.

We'd choose some forgotten place and spend the weekend exploring it. Hospitals, asylums, old factories, places that had once mattered to someone. Callum Price loved the history.

Nadia Shah had an eye for finding the perfect shots. Jamie Doyle just liked breaking into places, I think. And Owen Barrett? Owen was always the one who found the sites.

The places that felt different.

That weekend at Calder Vale changed everything for me. I can't really explain how, but afterwards I couldn't stop researching these places, reading about the people who went missing, the ones who walked in and never came back out. My parents thought I was going through a phase.

"Elliot's just interested in architecture," my mum would say when people asked about all the hospital books scattered around my room.

"He's always been curious about urban decay."

She wasn't wrong, exactly, but she wasn't right either. The thing was, I kept finding the same patterns. Young people. Urban explorers. They'd enter these old hospitals with their friends, and sometimes they simply vanished.

No bodies. No explanations. Just empty sleeping bags and abandoned cameras. I must have read about fifty cases, perhaps more. I started keeping spreadsheets, cross-referencing locations with dates of disappearance and looking for connections.

Normal people don't do that. I know they don't. But after Calder Vale, normal felt like something I used to be.

The crew still met for our Halloween tradition.

That was what we called it. A tradition. As if we were carrying on some family legacy instead of merely breaking into abandoned buildings. Callum would spend weeks researching potential sites. He'd arrive with printouts and old newspaper cuttings about patient-abuse scandals and urban legends.

He could tell you the construction date of every psychiatric hospital in a three-county area.

"Have a look at this," he'd say, spreading photographs across someone's kitchen table.

"Built in 1897. Closed in 1983 after they found evidence of experimental procedures."

Nadia would study the building plans, looking for the best ways in and out. She took a practical approach to trespassing.

"Security cameras here," she'd say, pointing at satellite images. "But this wing looks completely dark. Probably no power."

Jamie only wanted to know whether there was somewhere suitable for a base camp.

"As long as we can sleep somewhere that doesn't stink of mould," he'd say.

Owen would listen to all of it, nodding along before choosing the place that felt right to him. He had instincts about these things. He could look at a building and know whether it was worth exploring.

I went along because... well, because I always went along.

That was my role. Elliot Mercer, the fearless one. The bloke who would crawl through any tunnel or climb any fence. The one who never backed down from a challenge.

Except lately, I hadn't felt fearless. I felt as if I were performing fearlessness, going through the motions because that was what everyone expected. But I couldn't let them know that.

I couldn't let them see that I'd been reading missing-person reports instead of revising for my physics exams. I couldn't tell them about the dreams I'd been having since Calder Vale. So when Callum announced that he'd found our Halloween destination, I nodded and said I was in.

Just like always.

"Blackthorn County Hospital," he said, bringing up photographs on his laptop. "Two hours north. Originally Blackthorn County Asylum. It became an NHS psychiatric hospital and has been abandoned since 1986."

The picture showed a vast Victorian complex, seven storeys of soot-darkened local stone with later red-brick extensions and rows of broken windows. A central clock tower rose beneath a grey sky, flanked by steep slate roofs. It was the sort of place that looked haunted even in daylight.

"What happened there?" Nadia asked.

Callum grinned. That was his favourite question.

"Patient-abuse scandal. They were carrying out experimental treatments. ECT without anaesthetic. Isolation chambers. The regional health authority closed the place after an investigation by a national newspaper."

"Any deaths?" Jamie asked.

"Officially, a few. But there are reports of patients disappearing from the records. People were admitted but never discharged. Never transferred. Just gone."

I felt that familiar tightness in my chest, the same sensation I got whenever I read about an unexplained disappearance.

"Sounds perfect," Owen said. "When do we leave?"

Halloween weekend. Saturday morning.

Owen collected me first, then Jamie, then Callum and Nadia. We travelled north in Owen's ageing Land Rover Discovery with our gear piled in the back: sleeping bags, torches, camera equipment and enough food for two days.

The drive carried us through declining Pennine mill towns that looked as if they'd been forgotten at about the same time as the hospital. Deserted high streets, boarded-up shopfronts, the sort of places that had once possessed a reason to exist.

"You're quiet today," Nadia said from the seat beside me.

"Just thinking."

"About what?"

About how many people had travelled this same route to explore Blackthorn. About how many of them had made it home.

"University stuff," I said instead.

She nodded and went back to reading Callum's research folder. I stared through the window and tried to persuade myself that this was just another weekend adventure, another abandoned building to explore, document and leave behind.

But I knew better. I'd known better since Calder Vale.

The hospital appeared through the trees like something from a nightmare.

Seven storeys of soot-blackened stone, later red-brick wings and empty windows. The central clock tower and steep slate roofs gave the place the severe, intimidating shape of an institution built to dominate everyone who approached it.

"Jesus," Jamie said from the front passenger seat. "That thing's enormous."

Callum was already taking photographs through the window.

"Victorian institutional design. They built these places to look imposing. It was part of the treatment philosophy."

Owen pulled into a rough car park about a quarter of a mile from the main building. Close enough for us to carry the equipment, but far enough away to avoid any security patrols.

"Fence looks solid," Nadia observed, studying the perimeter through binoculars.

"I found a gap on the north side," Owen said. "The satellite images show a section where the mesh has been bent up. It should be wide enough to squeeze through."

We gathered our gear and followed Owen through the woods. The security fence was roughly eight feet high, made from welded mesh and topped with rusting razor wire.

But just as he'd said, there was a gap where someone had peeled the mesh back. Owen went through first, then helped us pass the equipment to the other side. Callum documented everything with his camera. Jamie and Nadia joked about being arrested for trespass.

I went through last, feeling as if I were crossing some kind of threshold. Not merely entering the hospital grounds, but stepping into something I wouldn't be able to take back.

The main building loomed ahead of us. Seven storeys of broken windows caught the afternoon light like dead eyes.

Some still held shards of glass. Others were only dark openings leading into deeper darkness.

"This place gives me the creeps," Jamie said.

"That's the point," Callum replied, still taking photographs. "These institutions were designed to intimidate. To break down the patients' resistance."

But it wasn't merely intimidating. It was oppressive.

It felt as though the building were watching us approach, studying us, learning about us. I found myself moving closer to the group, staying within arm's reach of Owen and Nadia. Not because I was frightened, exactly, but because something about Blackthorn made me want to remain close to the people I trusted.

The building seemed to grow larger as we approached, its shadow stretching across the overgrown grounds like a dark promise.

Owen led us to the broken lower-ground laundry window he'd identified online. It was at the corner of the building, half-hidden behind overgrown bushes that scratched at our jackets as we pushed through.

The window itself was a black rectangle where the glass had once been.

"Ladies first," Jamie said, grinning at Nadia.

She rolled her eyes. "How about leaders first?"

Owen dropped his pack and swung his legs through. He disappeared into the darkness below.

We heard his boots strike concrete, then his voice rose from inside.

"Clear. Pass the gear down."

I handed him my sleeping bag first, then my rucksack. One by one, we all climbed through.

I went last, as usual. There was something about going first into dark places that I just... I don't know. Call it caution.

The lower ground felt wrong from the moment my feet touched the floor.

Not cold, exactly. Not frightening in any obvious way. Just wrong. The air tasted of rust and damp plaster.

And the silence.

Hell, I'd been inside plenty of abandoned buildings, but this was different. Sound died here. Our voices emerged normally, then were swallowed almost at once, as if the building were eating them.

When Jamie dropped his torch, the clatter should have echoed throughout the lower ground. Instead, it struck the floor with a dull thunk and stopped.

Dead sound and dead air.

"Strange acoustics," Callum said, testing his voice. "Hello? Hello?"

Nothing came back. No echo at all.

Owen already had his heavy-duty torch out, sweeping its beam across the corridor. Rows of storage rooms lined both sides. Most of the doors stood open, revealing empty shelves and decades of dust.

The floor was covered with faded brown-and-cream terrazzo-pattern vinyl tiles. They had curled at the edges where water damage had seeped underneath.

"This way," Owen said, heading towards a stairwell at the far end.

We followed in single file. Our footsteps should have echoed, bouncing off the concrete walls and carrying through the building. Instead, the sound was absorbed. It was like walking on thick carpet, except we weren't.

The stairwell was worse.

The metal steps were the sort that should ring and clang beneath your feet. These only went thud, thud, thud. Muffled and flat. Callum kept testing them, stamping harder than necessary as he tried to produce some kind of normal sound.

"It's like the whole place is wrapped in cotton," he said.

Nadia had her camera out and was filming everything.

"Perhaps it's the humidity. Old buildings hold moisture in strange ways."

"Perhaps."

But I'd been in plenty of damp cellars. This felt different. It was as if the building were listening to us, absorbing every sound we made and filing it away somewhere.

The ground floor wasn't much better.

Long corridors stretched in both directions from the stairwell. There were doors every ten feet or so, most of them standing open. Patient rooms, I assumed. Small windows at the far end of each corridor admitted enough afternoon light for us to see without our torches.

Paint peeled everywhere, hanging from the walls in broad sheets like dead skin. Beneath it, the plaster was stained yellow and brown by decades of water leaks. Some of the stains looked almost like faces if you stared at them for too long.

I didn't stare.

Medical equipment lay scattered through the corridors: wheelchairs with broken wheels, trolleys without mattresses and drip stands that someone had knocked over and never picked up. Everything was covered in rust, dust and whatever else accumulates when a place has stood empty for more than thirty years.

In a former treatment room, Jamie prodded a corroded portable ECT unit with his foot.

"Jesus. Look at this thing."

Callum was already filming it.

"Electroconvulsive therapy. They used equipment like this through the seventies and eighties. It was meant to help with severe depression and psychosis."

"Did it work?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes it just damaged people's brains."

We moved through the building like tourists in a museum, room by room, floor by floor. We inspected old nurses' stations with thick glass windows, group-therapy rooms where chairs still stood in circles, and a hydrotherapy room with enormous baths and overhead shower nozzles.

Everything was smothered beneath that same dense silence.

By the time we reached the former dining hall on the first floor, the sun was getting low. Orange light slanted through the broken windows, casting long shadows across overturned tables and scattered chairs.

"This will do," Owen said, dropping his pack near the windows.

The room was enormous, large enough for roughly 150 patients. A kitchen occupied one side, with a stainless-steel serving hatch and an abandoned tea urn still in place. People had spray-painted graffiti across the walls over the years.

Mostly names and dates. "Leavers '99" and several local football tags. That sort of thing.

We arranged our sleeping bags in a rough circle near the windows.

Good sight lines towards the doors. Natural light until dusk. Owen always chose places like that.

Strategic thinking, he called it.

Callum took out his camera equipment and began checking batteries and memory cards.

"Do you lot want to hear something interesting about this place?"

"Do we have a choice?" Nadia asked.

"Patient 237."

Callum pulled a folder of printouts from his bag, hospital records he'd somehow found online. When it came to these places, he was like a research machine.

"Admitted in 1973. His real name was Martin Vale. He was twenty-six when they brought him in."

Jamie was arranging his equipment and wasn't really listening.

"What was wrong with him?"

"Depends whom you ask. The official diagnosis was severe paranoid schizophrenia with violent tendencies, but the treatment notes..."

Callum leafed through his papers.

"They tried everything on him. Standard medication first, then experimental procedures when that didn't work. LSD therapy, sensory deprivation, something called cognitive pattern conditioning. I can't find any other records of the programme."

"Sounds illegal," Nadia said.

"It probably was. This was the seventies. Medical ethics weren't exactly what they are now."

Callum found the page he wanted.

"Here's where it gets strange. According to his psychiatrist, Dr Helen Wycliffe, the treatments started working, but not in the way they expected."

I was only half listening as I laid out my sleeping bag and checked the batteries in my torch. But something in Callum's voice made me pay attention.

"What do you mean?"

"Patient 237 started influencing people. Other patients at first. They'd do things they wouldn't normally do. Hurt themselves. Attack other patients. It always happened after they'd spent time with 237."

"Come on," Jamie said. "Troubled people in a psychiatric hospital behaving unpredictably. What a shock."

"That's what Dr Wycliffe thought at first. Then it started happening to the staff."

Callum's voice grew quieter.

"Nurses would find themselves standing in supply cupboards with no memory of how they'd got there. Orderlies would wake in the middle of the night and walk to 237's room without knowing why. One maintenance worker tried to hang himself on the lower ground. He said he had to do it. That someone was making him."

The dining hall suddenly felt colder. The late-afternoon shadows were lengthening.

"So what happened to him?" I asked.

"That's the thing. He simply disappeared on 15 December 1977. They found his room empty that morning. The door was still locked from the outside. The window had been painted shut and fitted with bars. The security cameras showed no one leaving his floor all night."

"Perhaps he bribed a member of staff," Nadia suggested.

"Perhaps. Or perhaps he learnt how to make people do things they didn't want to do, including unlocking doors and forgetting they'd done it."

Callum was in full storytelling mode now. He loved this stuff: urban legends, ghost stories and strange historical mysteries. Usually it was entertaining.

That evening, it felt different.

"According to the records, 237 appeared completely normal during the day. He spoke to doctors, ate his meals and took part in group therapy. But at night..."

Callum paused for effect.

"Night staff reported that his eyes reflected light like an animal's. And patients in nearby rooms complained that he spoke to them through the walls, even though his lips never moved."

"Bullshit," Jamie said.

But he said it quietly.

"Perhaps. But here's what isn't bullshit. Seven other patients disappeared over the next six months. All from rooms near the one where 237 had been housed. And all the disappearances happened on the same floor we're planning to explore tonight."

The silence that followed felt heavier than the building's strange acoustics. Outside, the sun was sinking behind the trees. Orange light was fading into purple.

That was when Owen spoke.

He'd been silent throughout Callum's story, sitting on his sleeping bag and staring out of the windows. Now he turned towards us, his expression serious in a way I'd never seen before.

"Do you know what I think?" he said. "I think some of these urban legends begin with real events. Real people. Real places that absorb too much trauma and pain."

We all stared at him.

Owen was the sceptical one, the practical leader who mocked ghost stories and kept us focused on the actual exploration.

"Think about it," he continued. "This place housed thousands of people over the decades. People who were suffering, frightened and desperate. Some of them died here, and not all of them died peacefully."

"So you're saying the building is haunted?" Nadia asked.

"I'm saying places like this retain imprints. Psychic impressions of what happened inside them. And sometimes those impressions can influence people who are sensitive to them."

He said it with absolute seriousness, without a trace of his usual humour.

"Owen," I said. "Are you feeling all right?"

He didn't answer immediately. He continued staring towards the dining-hall entrance as though listening for something.

"Yeah," he said at last. "I'm fine."

But he wasn't looking at me. He was watching the stairwell door, and his expression was... I don't know. Focused.

As if he were waiting for something to happen.

I don't know what time the others fell asleep. Perhaps eleven. Perhaps midnight. I lay in my sleeping bag listening to Callum's soft snoring and Jamie's occasional mutter.

Nadia breathed quietly and steadily near the windows. Normal sleeping sounds, the kind you'd hear on any camping trip.

But Owen wasn't asleep.

I could hear him moving around the dining hall.

He wasn't tossing restlessly or trying to get comfortable. These were deliberate, measured steps. He was pacing between the overturned tables as though following a patrol route.

At first I kept my eyes closed. I thought perhaps he needed the loo or wanted to check something. Hell, perhaps he couldn't sleep either.

But the pacing continued.

Step, step, step, pause. Step, step, step in the other direction. Always the same rhythm.

I opened my eyes just enough to peer through my lashes.

Owen was silhouetted against the windows, moving backwards and forwards in a straight line. His shoulders were rigid. His head turned from side to side as if he were scanning for something.

But scanning for what?

We were the only people there.

The pacing continued for perhaps twenty minutes. I considered saying something, asking whether he was all right.

But something about his posture stopped me. The way he moved was too focused. Too intent.

It was as though he were listening for something the rest of us couldn't hear.

Eventually the footsteps stopped. I heard him settle back into his sleeping bag. The dining hall became quiet apart from the ordinary sounds of sleep and the building's settling creaks.

I thought that was it. Strange, but over.

I was wrong.

At 02:43, I woke to footsteps echoing from the floor directly above us.

I know the exact time because I checked my old digital watch. Its display showed 02:43 in the darkness. My mouth felt dry, and my heart was already beating hard before I'd fully understood what had woken me.

The footsteps were slow and deliberate.

Someone was walking along the second-floor corridor with purpose. Not wandering. Not exploring. Methodical, as if they were checking each room in sequence.

I lay perfectly still and listened.

The sounds came through the ceiling with impossible clarity, despite the building's strange acoustics having muffled everything else.

Step. Pause.

Step. Pause.

Always the same interval. Always the same measured pace.

That was what made it wrong. People don't walk that consistently unless they're trying to, unless they're concentrating on every step.

The footsteps travelled along the corridor above. I could track their progress by sound.

Past what would have been the nurses' station. Past the first set of patient rooms. Heading towards the far end of the building.

I glanced around the dining hall.

Callum was still snoring softly. Jamie had rolled over but hadn't woken. Nadia's breathing remained steady.

And Owen?

His sleeping bag was in the same place where I'd heard him settle earlier, but I couldn't tell whether he was actually inside it. The shadows were too deep.

The footsteps reached the end of the corridor above and stopped.

Complete silence for perhaps thirty seconds.

Then they began again, heading back in our direction. The same pace. The same deliberate rhythm.

That was when I realised that whoever was up there was doing exactly what Owen had been doing in the dining hall.

Pacing backwards and forwards, one floor above us.

I eased myself on to one elbow and looked through the windows. From our position I could see the windows of the second floor, dark rectangles against the slightly lighter sky.

Most of them, anyway. Some were boarded or too filthy to see through.

As I watched, a tall figure passed one of the clear windows.

Just a silhouette. A person-shaped shadow crossing from right to left.

But something about the way it moved made my skin crawl. Its posture was too rigid, too controlled. It looked like someone concentrating intensely on appearing normal.

You know how, when you're focused on walking in a perfectly straight line, you end up looking awkward? It was like that. Someone trying so hard to move normally that they looked completely unnatural.

The figure disappeared beyond the window frame.

I waited, counting the seconds. If it was following the same route as the footsteps, it should pass the next window in about fifteen seconds.

Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

There.

The same tall silhouette crossed the next window.

The same rigid posture. The same unnaturally controlled movement.

I needed to wake the others. This was wrong.

Everything about it was wrong.

But before I could move, before I could shake Callum's shoulder, the footsteps ceased.

Complete silence.

I whispered Owen's name, barely loud enough to hear.

"Owen?"

The footsteps stopped completely. They didn't merely pause. They stopped.

The building fell silent in a way that wasn't natural.

Old buildings make noise. They settle, creak and groan. Pipes tick as they cool. Wood expands and contracts. There is always something.

But this was absolute silence.

It was as though the building were holding its breath.

I waited.

One minute. Two minutes. Five.

Nothing.

No footsteps. No settling noises. No wind moving through broken windows.

Even Callum's snoring had stopped, although he was still breathing.

Ten minutes of perfect, unnatural quiet.

I looked at Owen's sleeping bag again. I still couldn't tell whether he was inside it.

The darkness made it impossible to distinguish details, but if he was there, he lay perfectly still. He wasn't moving at all, which was almost as unsettling as the footsteps.

After what felt like forever, the building's normal sounds gradually returned. A distant creak. A whisper of wind through the corridors. Callum's soft snoring resumed.

The footsteps above did not.

I thought it might be over. Whatever I'd heard, whatever I'd seen, perhaps it was finished.

But I was wrong about that as well.

At about 03:30, I heard a door creak open somewhere above us. The sound was long and slow, as though someone were being very careful not to make any noise.

Then silence.

Then the soft sound of the same door closing.

A few minutes later, another door.

The same pattern. A slow creak as it opened. A pause. A slow creak as it closed.

Someone was moving from room to room on the second floor, opening doors, checking inside and continuing to the next one.

But there was something else.

A dragging noise, like something heavy being pulled across the vinyl tiles. It wasn't continuous, only an occasional scrape or slide, always followed by more silence.

I lay there listening to the methodical progression. Door after door. Room after room. Sometimes the dragging noise, sometimes not, but always travelling in the same direction.

Always at the same careful, deliberate pace.

This was the part that truly got to me: whenever I focused on the sounds, really concentrating on what I could hear, they stopped.

Complete silence for several minutes.

It was as if whatever was up there knew I was awake. Knew I was listening. And was waiting for me to lower my guard.

So I started testing it.

I'd listen intently and the noises would cease. I'd try to relax, perhaps close my eyes, and within a few minutes they would begin again.

Always the same pattern. Always the same response to my attention.

Something was playing games with me.

The doors continued opening and closing in different parts of the building. Sometimes the sounds came from directly overhead. Sometimes from the far end of the second floor. Sometimes from what seemed to be the third floor.

The dragging noises moved with them.

Never loud. Never hurried.

Always patient.

I spent the rest of the night like that. Listening. Testing.

Trying to understand what was happening above us.

The sounds continued intermittently across the different floors until dawn began to filter through the dining-hall windows.

Only then did everything finally stop.

I woke to voices.

Not noises from upstairs. Real voices. Familiar ones.

Grey morning light entered through the windows, and I could see Callum, Jamie and Nadia huddled together near our equipment.

They weren't speaking loudly, but their voices carried the taut edge people get when something is wrong.

Really wrong.

I sat up in my sleeping bag and looked around.

Four sleeping bags in our circle.

Only three other people.

"Where's Owen?" I asked.

They turned towards me, and I saw it in their faces. The look you get when you're the last person to learn that something terrible has happened.

"That's what we're trying to work out," Callum said.

His voice was steady, but his hands weren't. He kept adjusting his camera strap, winding and unwinding it around his fingers.

I looked at Owen's sleeping bag.

Empty.

Not merely empty as if he'd got up to use the loo. Empty as if no one had been inside it for hours. The fabric wasn't even creased properly.

And it was cold.

When I reached across and touched it, the material felt as though it had been kept in a freezer.

"How long have you been awake?" I asked.

"About an hour," Nadia said.

She sat cross-legged with her jacket zipped all the way up, although it wasn't especially cold.

"Jamie woke first. He needed the loo and noticed Owen wasn't here."

Jamie nodded from beside the windows.

"I thought he might have gone outside for a cigarette or something. You know how restless he gets."

He paused.

"But all his stuff is here."

That was when I really looked.

Owen's rucksack sat exactly where he'd left it the previous evening. His camera bag was still buckled shut. His distinctive heavy-duty torch lay untouched beside his sleeping bag, in the place where he always kept it.

Owen never went anywhere without that torch. Hell, in places like this, he barely went to the loo without it.

"We've been calling for him," Callum said. "Not loudly enough to wake you, but loudly enough for him to hear if he was anywhere nearby."

I heard the frustration in his voice. Perhaps fear as well.

Callum liked having all the information. He liked knowing the story behind everything we saw.

This didn't fit any story he knew.

"For how long?" I asked.

"Thirty minutes, perhaps a little longer," Nadia said. "We started quietly, then got louder. Nothing."

I sat in my sleeping bag, trying to piece it together.

Owen wouldn't simply wander away. Not without telling someone. Not without his equipment. He was careful about everything.

Paranoid, even. That was what made him good at this.

But I kept thinking about those footsteps. The methodical pacing upstairs.

The way everything had fallen silent when I called his name.

"There's something I need to tell you," I said.

They all turned towards me and waited.

I didn't want to say it. Part of me thought that if I kept quiet, Owen might appear with some reasonable explanation.

Perhaps he'd found something interesting on another floor and lost track of time. Perhaps he was testing us, seeing how we'd cope with his absence.

But his sleeping bag was cold.

"I heard someone moving about upstairs last night," I said. "It started at around half past two. Footsteps in the corridor above us. Doors opening and closing. Someone was checking the rooms."

Callum lowered his camera.

"Are you sure it wasn't Owen? Perhaps he couldn't sleep and decided to explore."

I shook my head.

"I thought that at first, but the footsteps were wrong. Too regular. Too deliberate. And when I called Owen's name, everything stopped. There was complete silence for ten minutes."

"You called his name?" Jamie asked. "Last night?"

"Yeah. I whispered it. As soon as I did, all the noises stopped."

Nadia was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read. She didn't seem surprised, exactly. It was more as though she were fitting pieces together.

"Elliot," she said, "Owen hasn't been sleeping well lately."

"What do you mean?"

She glanced at Callum and Jamie, then back at me.

"He's been having nightmares. Bad ones. They started about three weeks ago. He told me after our last trip to Arkwright House."

I remembered that trip. A disused office block in Manchester city centre. Nothing unusual had happened. We'd been in and out within six hours.

"What sort of nightmares?" Callum asked.

"He said he kept dreaming that he was being watched. Someone followed him through empty buildings, always staying just out of sight. Always one room behind him or one floor above. He'd hear footsteps but never see anyone."

The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

Those footsteps last night. The methodical pacing. The way they stopped when I listened too carefully.

"He's been different since then," Nadia continued. "More paranoid. Double-checking the locks at home. Looking over his shoulder when we're scouting locations. Last week he asked whether I thought old buildings could affect people's minds."

"Affect them how?" Jamie asked.

"Make them do things they wouldn't ordinarily do. Make them see things. Or make them sleepwalk."

The dining hall suddenly felt smaller.

The morning light through the windows seemed dimmer than it should have been at that hour.

"You think he was sleepwalking last night?" Callum asked.

Nadia shrugged, but her face suggested that she thought it was more complicated than that.

"I think he's been frightened. Really frightened. And he didn't want to admit it because he's supposed to be the one who keeps us safe."

I thought about Owen's behaviour the previous day.

The way he'd supported Callum's story about Patient 237. How he'd spoken about buildings retaining psychic impressions.

Owen never spoke like that. Owen was practical. Sceptical. The sort of man who checked every lock twice and always kept a backup plan.

But last night he'd paced through the dining hall while the rest of us slept. I'd watched him moving between the tables as if he were standing guard.

As if he were waiting for something.

"So what are we saying?" Jamie asked. "That Owen had some sort of episode and wandered off into the building?"

"I'm saying Owen knows these places better than any of us," Nadia replied. "He's been exploring abandoned buildings for five years. He doesn't get lost. He doesn't panic. He doesn't leave his equipment behind."

She was right.

Owen had instincts for this. He could find his way out of a building in darkness. He could sense when a floor was unstable or when security was about to appear. If he was missing, it wasn't because he'd made some novice's mistake.

"Perhaps he found something," Callum suggested. "Something worth investigating without waking us."

"Without his torch?" I said.

Callum had no answer.

We sat in the grey morning light without saying what we were all thinking.

Owen was gone.

Not lost. Gone.

And whatever I'd heard moving through the upper floors might have had something to do with it.

I kept looking at his empty sleeping bag, at the way the fabric lay flat and cold.

As if no one had ever been inside it at all.

The building felt different now. The day before it had been oppressive, certainly, weighted with all the suffering that had taken place there.

That morning, it felt actively hostile.

It felt as if something were watching us from the shadows of those long corridors. Something that had taken Owen and was waiting to see what we'd do next.

The hospital wasn't merely abandoned any longer.

It was occupied.

"We have to split up."

It wasn't really a choice any more.

"Elliot and I will take the lower-ground and basement service areas," Nadia said, shouldering her pack. "You two start with the accessible main floors."

Callum nodded, already taking out his camera.

"We'll work our way upwards, floor by floor."

Jamie picked up his torch.

"Meet back here in three hours?"

"Two," I said. "If we haven't found anything in two hours, we regroup."

That's the thing about panic. It makes you feel as though you're doing something useful when really you're only wasting time.

We all knew Owen wouldn't be hiding in a corner, waiting for us to stumble upon him. But searching felt better than sitting in that dining hall and staring at his empty sleeping bag.

The lower ground felt different when we returned.

Colder, perhaps.

Or perhaps I was simply noticing things I'd ignored before.

Nadia went first this time. I followed her torch beam as we worked through the storage rooms, calling Owen's name every few minutes.

Our voices were swallowed by the strange acoustics, just as they had been the previous day. It was as though the building absorbed each sound before it could travel.

"Owen!" Nadia shouted into a room full of broken filing cabinets. "Owen! Where are you?"

Nothing answered.

Not even an echo.

We checked every room methodically. We searched behind fallen shelves, inside old supply cupboards and even through utility spaces too small to hold a person.

I kept looking for disturbed dust, footprints, any indication that someone had passed through recently.

But the dust lay thick and undisturbed everywhere, just as it had for years.

"This doesn't make sense," Nadia said after we'd covered the entire lower ground. "He wouldn't come down here without his torch."

I considered telling her what I'd seen the previous night, Owen pacing among those overturned tables as though he were standing guard. But what would it prove?

Only that he'd been behaving strangely before he disappeared.

We moved into the basement service areas and found the old boiler room, electrical panels and storage spaces I hadn't known existed. We called his name until our voices grew hoarse.

Still nothing.

An hour and a half into the search, Nadia stopped in the middle of a corridor lined with maintenance rooms.

"Elliot."

"What?"

"Look at the dust."

I aimed my torch where she was pointing.

The floor bore the same heavy layer of undisturbed dust we'd seen everywhere else. But there we could see our own footprints clearly, every step we'd taken stretching back perhaps twenty feet.

"So where are Owen's prints?" she asked.

That was when it struck me.

Owen had known about the laundry window. He had identified the route and led us straight to it, as he always did with a site he'd researched. Yet nowhere inside were there older footprints, no indication that anyone had walked those corridors recently except us.

"Perhaps he used a different route," I said.

But we both knew that was bullshit.

The lower-ground and basement service areas gave us nothing.

After two hours of systematic searching, we might as well have been looking for ghosts.

Callum and Jamie were already back when we climbed into the first-floor dining hall. They had spread their equipment near the windows, but their faces told the whole story.

"Anything?" Callum asked.

Nadia shook her head. "What about you?"

"We covered the ground floor through to the third," Jamie said. "Every room, every cupboard, every loo. We called his name constantly."

Callum was cleaning his camera lens, but his hands were trembling slightly. "Found some interesting material for the documentary. Old treatment rooms, isolation cells. But no Owen."

I sat down heavily on one of the overturned tables.

"What about footprints? Disturbed dust?"

"That's the strange part," Jamie said. "Nothing. It's as if no one's been through those rooms in decades."

"But that's impossible," Nadia said. "Owen scouted this place. He had to know about the broken laundry window somehow."

Callum looked up from his camera. "Maybe he only scouted the outside. Looked through the windows."

"No chance," I said. "You know Owen. He doesn't choose a location without checking the interior first. He always looks for structural problems, security, escape routes."

We sat without speaking for a while.

The afternoon light coming through the dining-hall windows had the pale, washed-out quality of late autumn. It made everything look grey and lifeless.

Jamie finally broke the silence. "So what do we do?"

"We keep looking," Nadia said immediately.

"Where?" Callum asked. "We've covered the whole building."

"Not the upper floors. You said you only reached the third."

"The stairs beyond the third floor are blocked by rubble," Jamie said. "Have been for years, by the look of it. Owen couldn't have got up there."

"What about the roof access?"

Callum shook his head. "Padlocked. Ancient lock, rusted solid. No one's opened it in decades."

I thought about the sounds I had heard the night before. Those methodical footsteps moving across the second floor directly above us, then climbing higher. Room by room, door by door. Had that been Owen, or something else?

"There's another problem," Jamie said quietly.

We all looked at him.

"It's nearly 4.00 pm. We've got less than two hours of daylight left. If we're going to leave, we need to decide soon."

The question hung in the air like smoke. Leave Owen behind, or spend another night in this place?

"We can't abandon him," Nadia said.

"What if he's already left?" Callum asked. "What if he woke up early, decided to head outside and got turned around in the woods?"

"Without his gear?" I gestured towards Owen's rucksack, still sitting exactly where he had left it. "He wouldn't leave his equipment behind. And he definitely wouldn't leave us."

Jamie was staring towards the dining-hall entrance, just as Owen had been the night before. "Maybe we should get help. Call North Yorkshire Police."

"And tell them what?" Nadia said. "That we were trespassing in an abandoned hospital and our friend disappeared? The trespassing will complicate everything before they even start looking for him."

"Better than spending another night here."

I understood Jamie's reasoning. I really did. But leaving felt wrong, as though we would be abandoning Owen when he needed us most.

"He's still here," I said.

The others looked at me.

"I don't know how or where, but he's still in this building. I can feel it."

Callum lowered his camera. "Feel what?"

It was difficult to explain. It was like the sensation of being watched, except that it seemed to be the building itself doing the watching. The shadows looked deeper than they should have been. Our voices were swallowed by the walls. The air felt thick and pressing, as though it were trying to force us towards the exits.

"Something took him," I said. "And it's still here."

Jamie laughed, but there was no humour in it. "Took him? What, Martin Vale's ghost? Patient 237?"

"I don't know what it was. But Owen didn't simply wander off."

The building felt different from the day before. It had been oppressive then, certainly, and intimidating, but it had also felt empty and abandoned. Now it felt occupied, as though something had moved in during the night and made itself at home. Something that did not want us there, but was not yet ready to make us leave. Something watching us and waiting to see what we would do next.

The massive Victorian walls seemed to press closer with every passing hour. Seven storeys of soot-darkened local stone, later red-brick extensions and rows of broken windows bore down on our little group huddled in the dining hall. Without Owen's steady presence and natural authority, we were only four frightened young people trapped in a building that wanted us gone.

The daylight vanished faster than I expected. One moment we were sitting in the dining hall with the last pale glow coming through the windows, arguing over whether to stay or leave. The next, darkness had swallowed the room and we were gathered around our torches as if they were a campfire.

Except one of us was missing.

Owen's sleeping bag lay empty in our circle, still carrying that unnatural cold. His rucksack rested against the wall where he had left it. His distinctive heavy-duty torch sat untouched on top. The torch he never went anywhere without.

It looked as though he had stepped away for a minute.

But he had been gone for twelve hours.

Callum had propped his large torch in the centre of the group with its beam aimed at the ceiling, casting a pale circle of reflected light around us. Jamie sat with his back to the windows, nervous energy making him fiddle constantly with his equipment. Nadia checked her watch every few minutes.

I could not stop looking at Owen's empty place.

"We should have left," Jamie said.

It was not the first time he had said it.

"We're not leaving without him."

Nadia's voice had that edge it acquired whenever she had made up her mind. Callum adjusted his camera settings. Even now, he was documenting everything.

"Maybe we should call for him again."

"We called for six hours," I said. "If he could hear us, he would have answered."

The building settled around us. Normal sounds, I told myself. Old timber and metal cooling after the day's meagre warmth. Water dripping somewhere inside the walls. Wind passing through broken windows.

But I kept thinking about those footsteps from the previous night. Measured and deliberate. Like someone patrolling.

Like someone hunting.

That was when the sound began again.

At first it was only a creaking from somewhere above us, perhaps on the second floor, perhaps higher. It might have been the building settling, except that the rhythm was too regular, too purposeful.

Then I heard the voice.

"Help me."

Faint and distant, but unmistakably words.

We all froze. Callum's hand stopped on his camera. Jamie ceased fidgeting. Nadia's breathing became very quiet.

"Did you hear that?" I whispered.

"Hear what?" Jamie asked, but his voice told me that he had heard it.

We all had.

"Help me, please."

Closer this time, and familiar.

My stomach dropped.

"That's Owen."

The voice came from the second floor, directly above us. It was Owen's voice, without question, using the same tone he adopted whenever he was serious about something.

Callum stood first. "Owen, where are you?"

"Second floor," Jamie said, snatching up his torch. "He's on the second floor."

But when we listened for an answer, the voice came from somewhere else entirely.

"I'm lost. I can't find my way back."

It came from somewhere high above, perhaps the fourth floor, perhaps the fifth. It was difficult to tell, but either should have been inaccessible with the upper stairs blocked.

"Owen," Nadia called, "stay where you are. We're coming."

"Hurry," came the reply.

This time it rose from the lower-ground level, beneath us instead of above.

Something cold crept up my spine.

"That's not right," I said. "He can't be in three different places."

But Callum was already heading towards the dining-hall entrance.

"He's probably moving around, trying to find us. Sound does strange things in old buildings."

Jamie followed him. "Yeah, echoes and all that. My uncle's warehouse does the same thing."

I wanted to believe it. I truly did. But there was something wrong with the way Owen's voice travelled through Blackthorn. It was too clear to be an echo, too precisely directed.

"Wait," I said. "Just wait a minute."

"We can't wait," Nadia said. "He needs help."

"Elliot's right."

Callum stopped in the doorway. "Something doesn't add up."

The voice came again.

"I'm hurt. I need help."

This time it came from the ground floor, one floor beneath us. If Owen was really there, close enough to be heard so clearly, we should also have heard his footsteps.

We listened.

There was complete silence apart from our breathing.

"Owen," Callum called, "make some noise. Stamp your feet or something."

Nothing.

Then the voice said, "I can't move. Something's wrong with my leg."

The same voice. The same tone. But now it came from the third floor again.

Jamie lowered his torch. "All right. That's definitely not normal."

I thought about Callum's account from the previous night. Patient 237, Martin Vale, the man who could supposedly make people do things, draw them to his room without their knowing why. Make them disappear.

"Callum," I said, "tell me again what happened to the other patients. The ones who went missing after Patient 237 disappeared."

Callum's face turned pale in the torchlight.

"They... they were found in different parts of the hospital. Places they shouldn't have been able to reach."

"Found how?"

He did not answer at once. When he did, his voice was quieter.

"Some were found in locked rooms. Others in places like the roof or lower-ground areas that were supposed to have been sealed off."

"Help me," Owen's voice called again. "Please, I'm scared."

This time it came from everywhere. The second floor, the lower ground, the ground floor. It sounded as though several Owens were calling from different parts of the hospital at once, yet every one of them had Owen's voice. Every word. Every inflection. The way he said please when he was genuinely worried. The exact tone he used when he was trying not to panic.

Except Owen did not panic. He never had in five years of exploring abandoned places.

That was when I knew for certain.

Whatever was calling to us had been listening. Learning.

It knew Owen's voice well enough to reproduce it perfectly. It knew how he spoke when he was calm, when he was worried, when he needed help. It had been studying us since we arrived.

Perhaps longer.

I remembered Owen's behaviour the previous day. The way he had paced around the dining hall as if he were on guard duty. The way he had stared towards the entrance as though waiting for something.

Had he known?

Had something been calling to him as well?

"That's not Owen," I said.

The others stared at me as though I had lost my mind.

"Come on, Elliot," Jamie said. "It's obviously him. Who else would it be?"

"Listen to what you're saying. One person can't be on four different floors at once. And if he's hurt, if he can't move, how is his voice coming from all over the hospital?"

Nadia shook her head. "You're being paranoid. Sound travels strangely in places like this."

But Callum was nodding slowly. "No. Elliot's right. I've been in dozens of abandoned buildings. I've never heard anything like this."

The calls came again, more insistent now. Desperate.

"Help me."

"Something's in here with me."

"I can hear it coming."

"Don't leave me."

Every plea was in Owen's voice. They came simultaneously from every level of the hospital, forming a hideous chorus.

My skin crawled, not simply from cold or fear, but from the deeper recognition that we were not merely being called.

We were being hunted.

The voices became worse after that. More insistent. More urgent.

"Elliot, please," Owen's voice called from the third floor. It used the same tone he would have used to persuade us to explore one more room. "I can see light down there. I know you're in the dining hall."

At exactly the same moment, his voice rose from the lower ground.

"Help me get out of here. Something's wrong with the stairs."

Then from the ground floor.

"Why won't you answer me?"

I looked at Callum. His face had gone bloodless in the torchlight. Jamie was shaking his head and muttering something I could not make out. Nadia stood frozen beside the windows.

"That's impossible," Jamie said. "He can't be in three places."

The voices continued. The third floor again. Then the inaccessible fourth. Then somewhere that sounded as though it were inside the walls themselves.

All Owen's voice.

All perfect copies of the way he spoke when he was frightened, hurt or trying to attract our attention. I had known Owen for five years. I knew exactly how his voice cracked when he was nervous, how he cleared his throat before making a decision for the group, how he said my name when he needed my support.

This thing had mastered all of it.

"We need to leave," I said. "Right now."

"But if it really is him..." Nadia began.

"It isn't."

Callum was packing his camera equipment, his movements quick and efficient. "Elliot's right. This isn't Owen."

The voices responded at once, as though they had been waiting for us to understand.

"Don't listen to Elliot," Owen's voice said from directly overhead.

It sounded calm. Reasonable.

"You know how paranoid he gets about these places. Remember what happened at Calder Vale?"

My stomach dropped.

Only Owen knew about Calder Vale. About what I had seen there, what had started all my research. About the dreams I had been having.

"Please," the voice continued from above us. "I'm hurt. Something's in here with me. Don't leave me alone."

But now there were more voices. Not merely from different floors, but several Owens speaking at once, overlapping and forming a chorus of our missing friend pleading for help from impossible locations.

That was when I understood what we were facing. It was not merely something that could imitate voices. It was something that had been studying us since we arrived, learning how we spoke to one another, how we moved and what frightened us.

It knew about Calder Vale because it had been watching Owen, listening to him pace around the dining hall all night like a guard dog, learning everything he knew about us.

"We have to go," I said again, louder this time.

Jamie was already shouldering his rucksack. "How do we know it won't follow us?"

It was a good question. I had no answer.

The Owen voices were drawing closer now. They no longer came only from other floors, but from the corridor beyond the dining hall and the serving area behind us. It was as though whatever produced them were moving through the hospital and surrounding us.

"Elliot," Owen's voice said from the dining-hall entrance. "I can see your light. I'm coming to you."

There was no one there. Only darkness beyond the reach of our torches.

Callum finished packing. Nadia snatched up her sleeping bag. We all stared towards the entrance from which Owen's voice had come.

Nothing moved in the shadows.

"The laundry window," I said. "We leave the same way we came in."

The voices stopped.

Complete silence followed. Even the ordinary settling sounds of the building ceased, as though whatever had been making the voices was listening and deciding what to do.

I realised then that we were being hunted. Not merely called or lured somewhere, but actively hunted by something that understood exactly how to use our friendship against us.

It had Owen's voice, his mannerisms and his knowledge of our group.

Perfect bait.

The silence stretched on. Thirty seconds. A minute. Our breathing sounded deafening in the dead air.

Then Owen's voice spoke from directly behind us, close enough that I felt breath against my neck.

"Why are you leaving me?"

I spun round.

There was nothing there. Only the overturned dining tables and our abandoned sleeping bags.

That was when I knew for certain that Owen was gone.

Not lost. Not hurt. Not hiding.

Gone.

Whatever had taken him remained inside the hospital, and it had been studying us since our arrival. Learning our voices, our fears and our relationships. It knew exactly how to break us down.

The voices began again, this time from everywhere at once. Ceiling, walls, floor. Multiple Owens pleaded, called and demanded that we stay. The sound was overwhelming, like being trapped inside a broken recording that kept skipping and repeating.

I had a choice to make.

Run for the lower-ground laundry window and escape while we still could, or stay and face whatever had taken Owen. Try to understand what happened to people who disappeared in places like this.

Part of me needed to know. The same part that had spent eighteen months researching missing-person cases. The part that could not stop reading about young explorers who entered abandoned hospitals and never came out.

But when I looked at Callum's terrified face, at Jamie clutching his torch like a weapon and Nadia retreating towards the windows, I realised this was no longer only about me.

The Owen voices grew more desperate and manipulative, using things that only our friend could have known. Private jokes. Shared memories. Exactly the right points of emotional pressure.

"Remember when I helped you revise your Imperial personal statement, Elliot? Remember what I said about always having each other's backs?"

That struck hard. Owen had spent hours going through drafts with me. He had told me we would always look out for one another.

But Owen was gone.

This was something else, wearing his voice like a mask.

I looked at my three remaining friends and saw the same realisation in their faces. We were alone inside Blackthorn with something patient enough to have studied us for days. Something that knew exactly how to turn our friendship into a weapon.

The hospital felt different now. Not merely oppressive or threatening, but actively malicious, as though Blackthorn itself had developed a hunger and was using Owen's voice to feed it.

I had to choose.

Run, and spend the rest of my life wondering what had happened to Owen.

Or stay, and probably join him in whatever fate he had found.

The voices kept calling, perfect imitations of our missing friend, drawing us deeper into the hospital with every word.