Scene 20: The unreachable part 2
Glenn blinked. His mouth was slightly open, his thoughts sluggish and disjointed. He tried to remember. Tried to pull up the details.
This... This has never happened before.
Nuh– No. It has, I... remember this but... how did i get here?
But his mouth moved anyway, words spilling out without his full control.
"I'm from... Dublin. Well, my dad is. Canada, actually. My mum's from here. Bristol. They met at university. We moved around a lot when I was young. Dad's work. Engineering. Bridges, mostly. Big projects. We'd stay somewhere for a year, maybe two, then move again. I never really had... friends growing up. Just me and my siblings."
Dr. West listened, nodding, making notes.
"'Siblings,'" she repeated, her tone curious. "I thought it was just you and Gwen."
Glenn hesitated.
"We have a half-brother. Well, HAD a half-brother.
Her pen paused. She looked up, her expression shifting slightly. Curiosity.
"What happened to him?"
"Dead last year..." Glenn said, his voice flat. "He was older. Had his own family. Wife. A daughter. They, uh... they died last year. House fire. Gas explosion."
Dr. West's expression softened. "I'm sorry to hear that."
Glenn shrugged. "It's okay."
It wasn't okay. But he said it anyway.
Dr. West wrote something down, then looked back up at him.
"You mentioned your father is Irish. Why don't you and your sister have accents?"
"I hid it," Glenn said. "And my dad didn't really use his around us. Wanted us to fit in, I guess. Blend in. Gwen picked up a bit of a lilt when she was little, but she dropped it by the time she was ten."
Dr. West nodded slowly, her pen moving again before leaning back slightly, her gaze steady.
"Do you know why you're here, Glenn? Why you and your sister were sent to this facility?"
Glenn took a long, slow breath. His chest rose and fell, his hands gripping the armrests of the chair.
"No."
Dr. West smiled faintly.
"You're lying."
From somewhere far away, distant but distinct, Glenn heard it.
DING.
His head turned sharply to the left, toward the corner of the room where the sound seemed to originate.
But there was nothing there. Just a bookshelf and a framed painting of a forest.
"Agoraphobia," Dr. West said.
Glenn's head snapped back to her.
"Do you know what that is?"
He did. Deep down, in the part of his mind that remembered the loops, the timelines, the lies they told him in every iteration, he knew.
But he said it anyway.
"No," he whispered.
Dr. West leaned forward slightly, her voice soft and clinical.
"Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by an intense fear of situations where escape might be difficult. Crowded places. Open spaces. Sometimes even leaving your own home. But it can also present as a fear of progress—of moving forward, of reaching something."
She paused, watching him carefully.
"You fear destinations, Glenn. You fear arrival. Because arrival means consequences. It means facing what's waiting on the other side."
Silence.
She waited.
Glenn said nothing.
She paused, letting the words settle.
"That's what you have, Glenn. That's why your mother sent you here. To help you grow. To help you overcome this."
Silence.
Glenn stared at her, his expression unreadable.
Then he laughed.
It was a short, sharp sound, more bitter than amused.
"In a psychiatric hospital?" he said, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "A place for the insane?"
The smile dropped.
"You're not helping us. You're mistreating us like dangerous animals."
Dr. West's expression didn't change, but her voice took on a firmer edge.
"That's not what we're doing here, Glenn."
"Yeah, that's more than what you're doing," Glenn shot back, his voice rising. "You're tormenting us. Locking us up. Drugging us. Watching us break so we can never return to our lives."
Dr. West opened her mouth to respond, but Glenn cut her off.
"But you know the truth, don't you? No one really has an addiction or a disorder, do they?"
He leaned forward, his eyes locking onto hers.
"Cornelius."
Dr. West set down her pen. Her smile faded.
"Okay, Glenn," she said, her voice cool now. "If that's the case, if you all are intact A-O-kay... Then why are you here? Why was everyone brought to this place?"
Glenn opened his mouth. Closed it. His jaw worked, but no words came.
"I... I don't know."
"No. You do know. It's because you're sick," Dr. West said immediately.
"No—"
"Yes."
"No, I'm not—"
"Yes, you are."
"I'M NOT—"
"YOU ARE SICK, GLENN."
"I AM NOT SICK!!"
The words tore out of him, raw and furious.
# Revised Scene 18 Ending: Anthony's Bedroom
---
And then—
Silence.
Glenn blinked.
The consultation room was gone.
He was standing in a child's bedroom.
Light taupe carpet beneath his feet. Blue walls with cartoon character posters. A small wooden desk. A twin bed with dinosaur sheets. Sunlight streamed through a window with drawn curtains, casting soft golden rectangles across the floor.
The air smelled wrong.
Copper. Rot. Something organic and torn.
Glenn's breath caught.
There—on the carpet, in the center of the room—was Anthony.
He lay on his back, arms splayed out at his sides, legs bent at unnatural angles. His gray uniform was torn open from collar to waist, the fabric shredded like paper.
His chest cavity was open.
Not surgically. Not cleanly.
Ripped.
Ribs jutted outward like broken fingers, pale white bone gleaming wetly in the sunlight. His sternum was split down the middle, cracked apart with brute force. Inside—
Glenn's stomach lurched.
Organs. Glistening. Red and purple and dark. Some still connected by stringy white tissue. Others pulled loose, dangling half-out of the body cavity like discarded rope.
And crouched over him—
Feeding.
The thing had its back to Glenn.
It was massive. Easily seven feet tall, even hunched over. Its spine pressed against gray-green skin like a row of knuckles beneath wet canvas, each vertebra sharp and distinct. The shoulders were too broad, the arms too long, ending in hands—if they could be called hands—with fingers that bent in too many places.
It wore the tatters of a white nightgown, charred and blackened at the edges, clinging to its skeletal frame in strips.
Its head was bent low, face buried in Anthony's chest.
Glenn heard it.
Wet. Rhythmic. Tearing.
Schluck. Schluck. Schluck.
The sound of something eating.
Glenn's legs locked. His breath came in short, shallow gasps. He wanted to move. To run. To scream.
He couldn't.
The thing's hands moved with practiced efficiency, clawed fingers gripping Anthony's ribs for leverage as it pulled something loose—a length of intestine, glistening and purple-gray—and drew it to its mouth.
Schluck.
Gone.
Glenn's mouth opened. A strangled sound escaped his throat, barely a whisper.
"No..."
The thing stopped.
Its head tilted slightly, still facing away from him.
Listening.
Glenn's heart hammered against his ribs. He took an involuntary step backward, his shoe scuffing softly against the carpet.
The thing's head turned.
Not all the way. Just enough.
Just enough for Glenn to see its profile.
The jaw was unhinged, hanging too low, stretched wide like a snake's. Teeth—too many teeth, overlapping in rows like a shark's—gleamed wetly in the sunlight. Blood dripped from its mouth in thick, dark rivulets, pattering onto Anthony's chest in a steady *drip-drip-drip.*
And then—
Its eyes.
They appeared in the shadow of its face, swiveling toward Glenn without the head fully turning.
Bright. Burning. Gold.
Not reflective gold. Not human gold.
Glowing gold.
The pupils were vertical slits, reptilian, narrowing as they fixed on him with terrible focus.
The thing's voice came—strained, constricted, layered—like two voices speaking in imperfect unison. Underneath the deep, ancient growl was something else.
Something human.
Something that might have once been a mother's voice.
"Glenn..."
The thing didn't move. It remained crouched over Anthony's body, one clawed hand still gripping the boy's ribs, the other hanging limp at its side, blood dripping from the fingertips.
"…Keene."
Glenn's legs trembled. His vision swam, the blue walls bleeding into streaks of shadow and light. The golden eyes remained fixed on him, unblinking, burning through the distortion like twin suns piercing fog.
He tried to focus. Tried to anchor himself to something real.
The carpet. The posters. The walls.
But it was all slipping away, dissolving like watercolor in rain.
The thing rose slowly, impossibly, its spine uncurling vertebra by vertebra with a series of wet cracks. It stood to its full height now—seven feet, maybe more—towering over Anthony's ruined body.
Its back was still to Glenn.
But its head had turned completely around.
One hundred eighty degrees.
The neck twisted like a wrung towel, skin stretching taut, tendons standing out in sharp relief beneath the gray-green surface.
Its face was fully visible now.
The flesh had sloughed away in places, revealing yellow bone beneath. The jaw hung open, unhinged, blood and tissue still clinging to the rows of teeth. The nose was gone—just two ragged holes above the mouth.
And the eyes.
God, the eyes.
They were massive now, filling the sockets completely, glowing with that terrible golden light that seemed to pulse in rhythm with Glenn's heartbeat.
The thing's voice came again, each word stretched like elastic about to snap.
"Let me see..."
It took a step toward him.
One long, spindly leg extended forward, the knee bending backward like a bird's. Its foot—bare, gray, the toes ending in black talons—pressed into the carpet with a soft thump.
Another step.
Thump.
The golden eyes grew brighter.
Closer.
Glenn's legs gave out.
He collapsed to his knees, his hands bracing against the carpet. His fingers sank into something wet. He looked down.
Blood.
The carpet was soaked with it, dark and sticky, spreading outward from Anthony's body in a slowly expanding pool.
The thing took another step.
Thump.
It was right in front of him now, towering over him, blotting out the sunlight. Its shadow fell across Glenn's face, cold and suffocating.
Its voice came one last time, soft and almost gentle, like a lullaby sung to a dying child.
"...your secrets."
The thing's hands—those long, clawed hands—reached down toward Glenn's head, fingers spreading wide.
Glenn's mouth opened. No sound came out.
His eyelids fluttered.
The golden eyes filled his entire field of vision now, massive and all-consuming, eclipsing everything else.
And then—
Nothing.