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The doctor said it was temporal lobe damage. He suggested possible epilepsy. He called them hallucinations, brought on by trauma and oxygen deprivation. He prescribed anti-seizure medication and increased her monitoring. The nurses watched her more carefully now, checking on her every hour, their expressions a mixture of pity and caution. They were making sure she had not slipped further into whatever neurological catastrophe they thought was unfolding inside her head.

Scarlet stopped mentioning the ghosts.

But they did not stop appearing.

The old man in the corner was just the first. Once she had truly seen him, truly acknowledged his presence, it was like opening floodgates. More appeared. There were different figures, different deaths, but all of them were trapped in the same terrible, repeating patterns.

A woman in a blood-stained nightgown paced the hallway outside her room. Back and forth, back and forth. Scarlet watched her through the open door. Watched her walk the same twenty feet of corridor, turn at the exact same spot, and walk back. She was forever searching for something she would never find.

A child sat in a hard plastic chair near the nurses’ station. He was maybe eight years old, dressed in clothes from decades ago. He cried silently, tears streaming down his translucent face. No one comforted him. No one even glanced at the chair where he sat. Only Scarlet saw him. Only Scarlet watched him weep.

There were others. There was a man who stood at the window, looking out at a parking lot he would never reach. There was a teenager who held his stomach, spectral blood seeping between his fingers. There was an elderly woman who reached for a call button that was not there, calling for help that would never come.

All of them were trapped. All of them were replaying their deaths. All of them were visible only to her.

Scarlet tried to ignore them. She tried to focus on the living world around her. On the nurses who checked her vitals. On the meals that arrived on beige plastic trays. On the mindless game shows playing on the television mounted to the wall. But the ghosts bled through everything. They overlaid reality like a double-exposed film, present and impossible and undeniable.

The auditory assault grew worse at night. When the hospital quieted and the living retreated to their homes, the dead emerged in force. Scarlet would lie in her bed, her eyes wide open in the dark, listening to dozens of voices murmuring in languages she did not understand. Crying. Pleading. Calling out names that had been forgotten decades ago.

She tried the anti-seizure medication they gave her. It made her dizzy and nauseous. It did nothing to stop the ghosts.

On day seven, a nurse asked if she wanted to speak with a therapist. Scarlet said no. What would she tell them? That she could see the dead? That the hospital was filled with anguished spirits trapped in their final moments? They would commit her. Or they would increase her medication until she could not think straight. Neither option would help her.

She had to get out. She had to escape the hospital before she truly went insane.

“When can I leave?” she asked the doctor during his next visit.

He checked her chart, his pen tapping against the clipboard. “Your vitals are stable. The wound is healing well. If there are no complications in the next twenty-four hours, we can discharge you tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. One more day. She could survive one more day.

That night, Scarlet did not sleep. She watched the spectral figures drift through her room. She watched them perform their endless, silent plays of pain. She watched and wondered what she had become.

The sun rose eventually. Weak, pallid light filtered through the window. A new shift of nurses arrived. Breakfast came on its beige tray. The world continued, oblivious to the fact that Scarlet Lewis could see things no one else could see.

The doctor signed her discharge papers at noon. A nurse went through a list of post-operative care instructions that Scarlet barely heard. She nodded at the appropriate times, signed forms, and accepted pamphlets about wound care and follow-up appointments she knew she could not afford.

They gave her a plastic bag with her clothes from the night of the attack. They were blood-stained and torn. She changed in the bathroom, moving carefully around her stitches. The woman in the mirror looked hollow. She had dark circles under her eyes. Her skin was as pale as paper. She looked like a ghost herself.

A nurse wheeled her to the exit in a wheelchair, which was hospital policy for discharged patients. Scarlet sat rigid, her hands gripping the armrests. The hallways were full of them. Ghosts everywhere. An old woman shuffling along on a walker that was not there. A man in surgical scrubs, with blood soaked through to his skin. A young mother cradling an invisible baby.

How many people had died in this hospital over the decades? How many had remained, trapped in their final moments?

Too many. Far too many.

The automatic doors slid open. Fresh air hit her face, cold and sharp. The nurse helped her stand, wished her well, and disappeared back into the building.

Scarlet stood on the sidewalk. Free. Discharged. Alone.

And then she saw what waited for her outside.