He doesn’t remember much, but he does remember screaming, blackness and cold. There was horrible, blood curdling screams, coming from somewhere close to him. Coming from him. The room he was in was white; there were people around him, restraining him while the doctor exclaimed, “Stop him! He’ll destroy all our work!”

They were operating on him, but they gave him nothing to make the pain and invading cold non-existent. He was awake during the whole thing. He thinks to open his eyes, but finds them already wide open, and he feels no need to blink. His limbs were heavy, as if weighed down by lead. It was difficult for him to move around, but he attempts to anyway, slowly moving his arms up, and towards himself.

That’s when he comes to realize that he’s laying on his stomach. He cranes one arm around to feel the surface area of his back. His breath catches in his throat when he feels something. It feels like a spine tightly covered with a thin layer of rough leather, and they’re two of them. He slides his hand down the object and feels stitching going from his spine to the object in his back, spreading out along his back. He picks up his head to look around his new surroundings. The room had a light, slightly faded blue color on the walls and ceiling. The only exception was that one of the walls was made of completely made out of mirrored glass. He moves to roll onto one side but stops when a sharp, un-controllable pain spreads from the stitching in his back to his brain, leaving him cold and shaking. He waits until this passes until moving again, only slower.

He successfully manages to roll onto his side, and move up into a crouching position, and freezes when he sees someone smiling at him from his peripheral vision. His head snaps to that direction to find his own reflection grinning back at him, like it knows a hilarious joke that the other has no clue of. The reflection follows his every move, but the grin never falters. When he finally looked beyond the grin he was horrified with what he saw. Himself. His skin had become a shade of grey like that of a recently deceased corpse, and his eyes, he found, had no lids. His head was shaved and his torso was bare and covered with stitches in the shape of a cross, and they were sloppily done with the skin around them red and raw. He couldn’t remember anything before the surgery to know the differences between what he looked like now and what he used to, if he ever looked any different.

As he scans the horrifying image before him he hears a slight clicking noise from behind his reflection. Not a few seconds after he starts to here a very high pitched squeal, like a kettle going off. Soon after the sound starts to morph into a scream, a scream so loud that it could peel the faded paint off the walls of the room he was in. As the scream intensified into a screeching, a door swung open from where his reflection was grinning at him. The door opened with such force that it slammed into another part of the mirrored wall and shattered.

He was left staring into an empty black hallway. He stood up with such speed that he was dizzy for a moment. When he finally got footing again he shakily took a few steps forward. Suddenly he was overcome with coldness spreading throughout his entire body, a cold so intense he automatically wrapped his arms around himself and waited for the feeling to pass. He soon found it did not, and as he stood there, shaky and freezing, he started hearing footsteps. They were running at first, but as they came closer to where his room was, they slowed to a stop in front of the open door. As he looked up he was surprised to see that there was no one standing in the door way. The footsteps continued to pass his room, gaining speed as they went. When they were out of audio range, a scream echoed from the direction of where the footsteps went.

The cold feeling had passed as soon as the screaming started, and he continued to move shakily towards the door. The screaming was cut off with such an abrupt force, his ear had to get used to the dead silence again. As he walked into the dark corridor he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it wasn’t as dark as he thought it to be because of the light flooding into the hallway from his room. He started walked in the direction that the footsteps originated and almost jumped a mile high when the door to his room slammed shut with the click of a lock. He was then plunged into complete darkness, and froze in mid-step. He composed himself, and continued his way down the corridor, wondering if he’ll ever be able to find a way out of…where ever he is.

As he walked down the corridor he realized that it wasn’t completely pitch-black, because there were red emergency lights lining the walls near the floor. He paused when he came to an intersection, and his mind began to float away as he smelled something, delightful, coming from the right corridor. He walked that way, with a renewed vigor in his step, and came to an open room with steel tables, chairs, and a couple televisions’ on opposite sides of the room. He was in a break room. Usually, an office or a hospital has a break room, so maybe he’s in one of those kinds of buildings? Instead of the red glow of the hallway flooding into the break room, the televisions on either side of the room has white and black static playing on the screens.

That delightful smell had almost put him in a trance, and made him follow the sent to the source. It seemed to be coming from under one of the metal tables in front of him. He crouched and inched closer to it, pushing one of the chairs to the side which produced a loud scraping noise that pierced the air like a sharp blade. His eyes adjusted to the difference in light under the table and soon he could see that there was a shape, almost like a person, under the table. But it wasn’t moving at all as far as he could tell, and after coming out of his trance, and looking again, he found out why.

The figure’s face didn’t have any eyes; the outside of the sockets looked scratched and ripped, the rest of the head had a nose, ears, and shaggy hair, the only other abnormality about the figure was that it was still breathing. The breaths came out shallow and short. It was also grinning like a mad man. He stumbled back upon this discovery and fell onto his back and wings. If you could call them that. Bile rose in his throat when he came to the realization that this was the delicious smell that had drawn him here in the first place. The breathing from the figure became louder and more ragged, and finally it sounded as if it was hissing.

“They made you well didn’t they? Yes, oh my, yes, they did. Oh child, your mind is too young to know what you really are. Take a look around child, and see the damage that has been done.” Said the figure. It blinked a few times, then the whole body relaxed and the ragged breathing quieted and ceased.

He scooted back a little more so that he cleared the top of the table, then standing up he turned and sprinted out of the room, turning only to see the smile fade from the now dead face of the figure under the table. He continued to sprint back down the hall, but stopped short when he found the door to “his room” ajar, and the delicious smell returned to him, wafting from the direction he was running towards. To escape the temptation he ducked into “his room” and saw that all the walls were now lined with mirrors. The door shut, sealing him in.

“You did this you know.” Said a voice from behind him. He was so frightened that his wings like structures on his back flexed and push down, propelling him up and forward. He landed without any difficulty and spun around to face his smiling reflection again. Only this time it was moving when he wasn’t.

“Look at your hands. Do it now.” his other self commanded. His reflection brought its own arms up to its face, making his real self do the same.

All at once he heard talking, laughing, and the sound of triumph. They then morphed into screams of terror and pain, and someone shouting:

“No! This was not supposed to happen! Wake up Tyler! Wake up!”

Then all at once, the sound stopped, and left him with a vision of people in lab coats strewn across the floor in a bloody mess. The vision past and left him with his own hands, stained red, and a delicious smell coming from them. Tyler stumbled and fell back into the hospital gurney he woke up on, and stared at his reflection in disbelief.

“I’m not lying, Tyler. Can’t you trust your own reflection?”

Tyler’s body grew cold and shaky. He collapsed to the floor in spasms of coldness and unconsiousness, then soon after he stopped moving all at once. Everything was black and cold.

<Doctor's Notes>

Experiment #12

Failed:

Self destruction and mental illness. We should try to ease them into what they have become, and what their actions have/will cause.

Reminder: Switch rooms. There have been reports of entities in the usual testing chamber. Also, mirrors seem to intensify whatever the experiment it seeing, making them self-destructive. I would hate it for Experiement #14 to be interrupted by unwanted and vengeful spirits again.