An odd-looking man had been pounding on the plastic barrier at the check-in desk while we were in the waiting room, shouting what sounded like a string of nonsense at the poor hospital employee behind it.

I was reaching that weird twilight state where the sedatives make everything seem slightly surreal – the pictures in the magazine I was holding seemed to be moving, and I was pointing them out to my wife, Marie-Anne, who suppressed a laugh in response.

I was a bit out of it but I do remember he was screaming something along the lines of that he was very sick, and that something was in his body with him and they needed to get it out.

As she led me out of the waiting room, my nurse cheerfully explained the procedure to me while wearing the brightest smiley face scrubs I’d ever seen.

I shot one look back to Marie-Anne because despite the waiting room being nearly empty, the yelling guy had sat down right next her and stared at her while he kept rubbing at his eyes. She smiled at me, gave me her ‘I’ll be fine’ look, waved me on, and pulled out a well-worn paperback.

Once we got past the door, there was a young woman in a hospital bed, being taken down the same hall as me. She smiled at me serenely, but there was something weird about her that I couldn’t put my finger on – maybe the way she stared at me without blinking, or how she breathed in odd, exaggerated breaths. It was almost as if she trying to demonstrate to those around her that she was truly an authentic, living, breathing, person. She stared at me with what looked to be curling, delicate black threads emerging from her eye sockets, but I chalked that up to the sedation meds at the time.

I don’t remember much about the scan itself. I’m not sure how long I had been trapped in there for, but it was late morning when I went in, and pitch black outside when I came out.

I had 'come to' in that dark and tight space to the gentle whirring sound of the machine. There were no doctors, nurses, or technicians in my room and the lights were off – it was eerily silent. I hadn’t realized where I was at first and had squirmed in my post sedation stupor. I instinctively tried to sit up and my nose made hard contact with the inside of the machine.

They had been kind enough to approve sedating me for the hour and a half long scan due to my claustrophobia but then apparently they had just…forgotten about me? I had pounded on the inside of that awful white tunnel and screamed until I was hoarse, and still no one came for me. At one point, I felt someone tug at me, cold and clammy hands pulled indelicately at my ankles, but they must have given up because not long afterwards I was alone again. I would’ve thought the whole memory was a fabrication of my drugged mind, but there was an odd grey-ish residue on my ankles when I finally got out. I thought of Marie-Anne sitting in the waiting room and didn’t know how everyone could’ve forgotten about me – surely, she would’ve asked about me when several hours had passed, and I still hadn’t returned?

Eventually I calmed down enough to release the belt and slowly inch my way out, trying to keep my eyes shut and my breathing steady while not focusing on the fact that my face was so close to the inside of the tunnel that I could feel my own breath reflected back onto my face. I tried to ignore the friction burns as I accidentally drug bare flesh against the smooth interior.

In the distance, awful screaming like I had never heard before seamlessly transitioned into a laughter that was so odd that it gave me chills. It floated down the silent hall.

At one point as I walked towards the elevator, I thought I saw small and perfectly round eyes gleaming at me from behind the glass panel in one of the darkened rooms. I told myself it was the last of the drugs in my system messing with my head. That was why the elevator buttons looked to be painted with still drying with blood as they lit up, too, I assured myself. Just the meds.

I stumbled back the way that I remember the nurse leading me, until I saw something that made me stop cold.

The handprints told a story, sloppily written in blood on what used to be an off-white floor.

Pull. Pull. Drag. From following the uneven and messy tracks, I guessed that someone had been hauling themselves down the hallway using their hands while the rest of them dragged along the dingy linoleum, leaving streaky crimson in their wake. The hallway was littered with what looked like long black hairs that seemed to be moving ever so slightly. At this point, I really, really hoped that I was just hallucinating.

It began from the path to the waiting room, and then continued the hall that forked away from me. There was so much blood, I didn’t know how the person was even able to keep going that far.

The smell was overwhelming. I’d accidentally stepped into it and could feel the still warm liquid as it seeped into my hospital-issued socks. I still couldn’t blink both my eyes in unison, but those very real-feeling sensations coupled with absolute lack of people and symphony of beeps and alerts from the rooms on either side of the narrow hall around me made it harder and harder to convince myself that I was simply drugged out of my mind. Somehow, despite all the other noise, I could still hear the faint wet dragging sound of someone crawling through the darkness.

I was a bit woozy and desperate to get out, so I called out into the distance that I was going to get help. The sound of raw meat dragging along linoleum paused for a few moments before resuming. I realized that it seemed to grow louder, almost as if they had changed direction and were now heading back towards me.

In that moment, I felt dread gnawing at me and suddenly, I didn’t want them to reach me – I felt that something terrible would happen if they did.

After heading away from the increasingly loud wet crawling sound in the hallway, I continued my trek back towards the waiting room. My moist socks left bloody footprints in my wake, the pattern which confirmed that I was still weaving a bit as I walked. If I were here alone, I probably would have hauled ass out the emergency exit door as soon as I saw the blood and whatever that was lurking in the darkness in the floor below, but I could see Marie-Anne’s lime green hatchback in the parking lot through a window in the hall. She was still inside.

Even though the trail led from the waiting room, the person crawling through the empty hallway was not my wife, I told myself. She was fine. She’d still be sitting right where I’d seen her last.

Some of the doors to the occupied rooms were just slightly ajar, and I tried to ignore the sounds coming from within them. I finally came across the nurses’ station that I had remembered being the last thing between myself and the secured doors, but what I saw there quickly killed any relief that had been forming.

There were feet sticking out from just behind the counter; they moved and twitched irregularly.

Despite my better judgement, I stepped over the mess of gore in the hallway to take a closer look. The legs seemed to dance to an unearthly melody that only their owner could hear.

I saw my nurse – the one who had taken me back for the scan. I was so out of it before that I’d forgotten her name, but not her smile that had matched the smiley faces on her trippy neon scrubs.

That smile was long gone now. There was still a jagged bit of ribs and torso left above the hip bone and both legs, but the rest of her was just… missing.

I stared in horror, and it took me a moment to for my eyes to adjust and see that the macabre dance was the result of something moving around just inside of the gaping wound in what was left of her torso.

I could see many of the now familiar delicate hair-like threads spilling out of her body. They moved in unison, and it almost looked as if the small tendrils were beginning to re-form the parts of her body that were missing. It was like watching an otherworldly 3D printer for flesh and bone.

I clamped a hand over my mouth tightly to keep quiet and took a last long, sad look at her blood-soaked scrubs and flailing legs.

I sped up and continued onward clumsily.

Despite what I’d told myself, I almost couldn’t believe it when I found Marie-Anne still sitting on a now sticky and saturated chair in the waiting room. Her sweater was slashed in places and stained – an entire arm of it was missing. Splatters and small droplets freckled her cheeks and the cover of the book she was now holding upside down, but she looked entirely uninjured. I had a fleeting moment where I wondered where the blood around her had come from, but was relieved more than anything else. The room was in disarray and single sneaker with the foot still in it peeked out from under her chair, but she didn’t seem even remotely phased by the carnage around her.

She stared at me for a moment – almost as if she had to flip through mental flashcards before she recognized me, but I figured it was due whatever horrible things she had recently bore witness to.

On our way out, I heard tapping behind the plastic panel at the check in desk. I made the mistake of looking and saw the young hospital employee from before, gripping the desk desperately trying to stay upright. His face, which was devoid of any emotion, looked misshapen, as if someone had tried to put together a human face having never seen one before. Those thin, black tendril-like threads emerged from his eyes and the cavernous gap where his lower jaw should had been. They were weaving together and seamlessly blending into his skin before my eyes, repairing what likely should have been lethal injuries.

We were so close to the exit when I heard the double doors move and ducked behind some chairs – I tried to pull Marie-Anne down with me but she stood firm. Shoes and the tattered and stained hems of brightly color smiley face scrubs came into my view from where I was hidden. It seemed as if my poor nurse had simply got up and strolled away, unperturbed by the minor inconvenience that the entire top third of her body was missing. My wife stared but didn’t react at all to whatever she was witnessing.

Eventually, what remained of my nurse walked out the front doors, and disappeared into the darkness beyond the lights of the parking lot.

We eventually made it to our car but I can’t drive yet and she’s just sitting in the driver’s seat staring at me without blinking, still and quiet except for an occasional loud and irregular breath. I swear I see delicate threads spilling from under her eyes. I’ve called 911 but keep getting the dispatchers in the next county over. They keep routing me back to my own county, but no one is answering.

I miss the moment when I thought waking up stuck after a full-body MRI was going to be the worst part of my day.

My wife has been acting so weird since my MRI. We’re still sitting here. I’m tired, confused, and have worst itch forming behind my eyes.