Chapter 1 Body In Ward C3

Groote Schuur Hospital – 03:12 AM

The fluorescent light above the nurse's station buzzed like an insect trapped in glass. Nurse Talia Jacobs blinked at it, unsure whether the flickering was real or if her eyes were just playing tricks on her. She rubbed her temples. It had been a long shift, much longer than usual and the night refused to end.

Groote Schuur had always been quiet at this hour, but tonight was different.

It wasn't silence, it was the absence of sound, a pressure in the air, almost as if the building was holding its breath.

She checked the monitors again, and everything looked normal, all except for ward C3. The heart monitor had flatlined.

Talia frowned. That wasn't possible.

She reached for the intercom to call the night doctor, but something, instinct perhaps, made her stop. Instead she stood up, pulled her cardigan tighter around her, and started down the hallway. The polished tiles squeaked under her shoes.

Ward C3 had been empty for weeks. It wasn't even on her ward roster.

But the monitor had registered a patient. A heartbeat. Then a flatline.

She reached the door and paused. The window was dark. The small square of reinforced glass showed nothing but a shadow inside.

She reached for the handle. It turned too easily.

The door creaked open.

The first thing that hit her was the smell. Not blood, not antiseptic, but the sour, metallic tang of something old and rotting, like meat left in the sun.

Talia stepped in, hand groping for the light switch.

The lights flickered once. Then held. The room was empty. There was no patient, not even a bed. Just a cold gurney pushed to the corner, yet the heart monitor was on and it was still printing.

She walked closer. Paper rolled out slowly from the machine, drawing a flatline across the strip, but something was off.

The line wasn't flat anymore, it was jagged, and erratic, as if someone was trying to write with it.

Talia leaned ib and between the blips she saw it, it wasn't a random noise, but words. A name scrawled over the paper, written over and over again, in ragged black spikes across the ECG strip: Asanda.

She stepped back, and that's when she heard it, a whisper, behind her, no breath, no voice, just the idea of a voice, a syllable in her spine.

"Don't turn around."

Her blood ran cold, but she ignored it and turned anyway, only to find that the room was empty, and yet, the light dimmed, and her breath fogged in the air as if something was drawing heat from her lungs.

A second heartbeat appeared on the monitor, and again no body, just the sound, the sound of steady beating, like something waking up.

03:29 AM – 17 minutes later

By the time security arrived, Nurse Talia Jacobs was sitting in the corner of Ward C3, rocking back and forth, face streaked with tears. She wouldn't speak or blink, she just kept writing the same word on the floor with her finger, over and over in invisible ink: Listen.

Cape Town Central Police Station – 09:44 AM

Detective Siya Ndlovu sipped cold coffee and stared at the file in front of her like it was a snake waiting to strike.

Another body. Another hospital. Another face frozen in an expression no living person could wear.

She closed the file and exhaled.

Three deaths in one month. All in Groote Schuur. All after midnight. All under surveillance, and yet the tapes showed nothing but static during the exact time of death.

Her partner, Detective Nathan Marks, leaned over her desk.

"You look like hell," he said.

"Thanks," she muttered.

He dropped a brown file on top of hers.

"Got a call this morning. Another incident. Not a death this time, a nurse was found in shock, mumbling some nonsense about a locked room that shouldn't have been open."

Siya opened the new file and froze. Ward C3.

She remembered it. Not the ward, but the number. It gnawed at the edge of her memory.

"Groote Schuur again?" she asked.

Marks nodded. "Same floor. Psychiatric wing. What's left of it."

Siya stood. "Let's go."

They arrived at Groote Schuur Hospital at 10:37 AM. The hospital loomed like a mausoleum under the grey Cape Town sky. Siya hated hospitals in general, but now in particular she was hating this place, not because of the deaths, or the smell, or the endless white corridors, but because of what it held and what it refused to let go.

They parked in the visitor's lot, flashed their badges at the front desk, and took the elevator to the third floor.

The psychiatric wing had been partially shut down after budget cuts and "incident reports" that never made it into public record. Half of it was still operational, outpatient therapy, trauma support, and a few secure rooms, but the far corridor had been cordoned off for over a decade, rxcept now, it wasn't.

A young doctor with trembling hands met them at the nurse's station.

"Dr. Visser," he said, adjusting his glasses nervously.

"You're here about Nurse Jacobs?"

Siya nodded. "Where is she?"

"In isolation. She's not coherent. Keeps repeating the same word. 'Listen.' Sometimes 'Asanda.' Does that name mean anything to either of you?"

Siya went still.

Marks glanced at her but said nothing.

"She found something in Ward C3?" Siya asked, voice tight.

Visser hesitated, then gestured down the dim corridor. "That room shouldn't even have been open. It's not on the active system. No keycard access. No patient assignment. Yet someone logged in under a ghost profile and the monitors started recording, motion sensors triggered, but-"

"No footage," Marks finished.

"Right," Visser said, relieved and unnerved at the same time.

Siya started walking. Her boots echoed down the tiled floor, every step louder than it should've been. The corridor had that strange hospital sterility, clean, but haunted and far too quiet.

Ward C3 looked like any other door, until you looked at it for too long.

The numberplate was scratched. Not vandalized, worn, as though time itself had tried to erase it.

Siya touched the handle, it was cold. She opened the door. The air was still, dense, like breathing underwater. The walls were clean, the floor freshly mopped, and the equipment silent, but the heart monitor was still running, and paper was still spooling out.

Siya walked over, reading the strip. Flatline. Flatline. Then a spike. Then another.

The spikes didn't follow a rhythm, they followed a pattern, like a Morse Code, or writing.

She reached into her coat and pulled out her phone, snapping a photo of the strip.

Marks stood in the doorway. "Looks like a prank. Or faulty wiring."

"No," Siya murmured. "This is deliberate."

She held up the ECG printout.

The spikes spelled something, Asanda, the name again and again, malformed but unmistakable.

"She's calling out," Siya said.

"Who is?" Marks asked.

"My sister."

Backstory Flash – 13 Years Earlier

Groote Schuur. Student wing. Siya and Asanda.

They were two halves of a whole, one was brilliant and analytical, whike the other was intuitive and sensitive.

Asanda had volunteered for a student internship at the hospital. She'd wanted to study abnormal psychology. She wanted to help the patients no one else could reach, but one night, she never came home.

There was no trace of her, no note either, and the CCTV went dark, then the case went cold.

Siya never believed it was just a disappearance.

She believed the hospital swallowed her sister. Now, she had proof. Or at least a beginning.

Groote Schuur Hospital – Sublevel Archives – 11:41 AM

"You sure we're allowed down here?" Marks asked, glancing around the dim stairwell as they descended past the Authorised Personnel Only sign.

"Nope," Siya said, pushing the door open.

The archives were cold. The kind of cold that didn't come from bad insulation but from being forgotten by the world.

Fluorescent lights flickered on as they entered. Endless metal shelves stretched into the gloom. Folders, tapes, handwritten logs, records that never made it into digital storage.

Marks pulled on gloves. "You're looking for Asanda's file?"

"No, I already tried that. Her file was wiped two weeks after her disappearance. Not redacted, but erased."

"So what, then?"

"I want to know what Ward C3 was before it was closed, and why."

They searched in silence. The kind of focused, tense silence that only came from people who knew something was watching, just not from where.

After twenty minutes, Siya stopped.

A thin folder, perhaps misfiled, was stuck between Cardiology 1983 and Neurology 1984.

"Threnody – Internal Use Only."

She opened it.

There were typed reports, graphs, and psychological profiles, but there were no patient name, just a codename: Echo-3.

Under notes: "Subject demonstrates auditory sensitivity to sub-threshold frequencies."

"In prolonged exposure, reports 'voices beneath the noise.' Mentions a song. Repeated term: The Choir Beneath."

"Memory fragmentation increased after Session 4. Claims to see her own reflection 'whispering back.'"

Siya's hands trembled slightly.

Marks read over her shoulder. "Project Threnody?"

"Sounds like an MKUltra knockoff."

Siya flipped the page. There was a photo stapled to the last entry, it was grainy, and shadowy, but unmistakable.

Diya had to believe it was her sister Asanda. Her hair was longer, her eyes were hollow and she was strapped to a hospital chair in a soundproof room.

The date on the record was October 28, 2011.

"This was Three weeks after her disappearance." Siya thought.

Marks looked at Siya, his expression unreadable.

"You were right," he said quietly.

"She never left," Siya replied.

Above Ground – 12:15 PM

When they went back up, Dr. Visser was gone and so was the nurse at the station. In fact, the entire hallway was empty. Not just understaffed, but abandoned. No phones were ringing, there was no movement. It eas an ear-deafening silence.

Then came the sound, itvwas a low hum, just at the edge of hearing, like someone humming through walls made of bone and the ECG printer in Ward C3 started up again.

Siya and Marks turned to look. They saw the door was open, but no one had opened it and from inside came a voice, it was not loud, nor was it spoken, just a vibration in the spine.

"You heard her. Now hear us."

Down in the Sublevel Morgue at 12:23 PM, Talia Jacobs was laying on the table, dead.

They found her on the slab, though no one had logged her in and no autopsy had been scheduled.

She lay there with her eyes open, her mouth stretched wide into an inhuman shape, like she had died in the middle of a scream she hadn't chosen, and on the wall above her body, the words "LISTEN" were written in dried blood:

Siya needed air. She burst through the stairwell door and stepped into the sunlight, on the roof top, but it didn't help. The city stretched out below, familiar and alien.

Devil's Peak loomed over the skyline like a watching god. Cape Town buzzed below as if the hospital weren't harboring something ancient and hungry.

Marks followed her up, holding the Threnody file. "This changes everything," he said.

"No," Siya replied, staring across the city. "This confirms everything I feared."

She closed her eyes and remembered her sister's laugh. The way Asanda used to hum when she was nervous. That hum was the same pattern she'd heard on the ECG strip.

It wasn't random, nor in broken signals. It was a song, a message, and a warning.

Marks moved beside her. "Whatever Project Threnody was, it didn't end."

"It's still running," Siya said. "Still feeding on people."

Then her phone rang. It was an unknown number. Siya answered the call, but there was no voice, just a crackling sound.After a short while there was a familiar word, drawn out in a distorted whisper that chilled her marrow. "Siya..." Then the line went dead.

Siya's hand shook. "It was her," she whispered. "I know it was."

Marks didn't argue.

They both stood in silence, the wind carrying with it the faintest sound, too faint to be real.

A low, discordant hum, like a thousand mouths singing from beneath the earth.

Elsewhere on the unknown Sublevel, the lights buzzed and the machines whirred. Behind a thick pane of observation glass, a young woman sat still in her chair, her eyes were closed and her breathing was shallow.

Her name was Asanda. She was alive and she was listening.

All around her, in the shadows of the room, something moved, something tall, faceless, and waiting. And somewhere, a voice whispered again, not to her, but through her: "Let them come."