The Candy Bar

A remote hospital turns out to be not quite what it should be...

As Patrick pulled up to the remote hospital near the outskirts of town, he noticed that the parking lots and the premises overall were empty. There was only one car near the front of the hospital entryway and it appeared to be an abandoned slick black Camaro. The Camaro had odd characters carved into the paint job and the tires were missing.

 

Patrick wondered if the hospital was closed. He also wondered what kind of hospital this was. It was strange and in a very remote part of town that he’d never been to. Why did his friend recommend this place to him last week? There was no one here. Could he even get in?

 

 

Patrick took his cell phone out of his pocket and decided to call Thomas. He wanted to verify that he was at the correct address but Patrick noticed that his cell phone could not pick up a signal. He looked again at the building through his car window and saw that the street address matched what he wrote down on paper.

 

1771.

 

He was certainly on the street of Uriah. He was on time for his appointment. He also knew that there was no other hospital around the area, so this had to be it.

Patrick decided to get out of his car and walk up to the entrance. As soon as he neared two feet of the entry doors, he was asked to insert his driver’s license into a nearby slot on the left wall for identification. This bewildered Patrick but he figured since he had an appointment, this might be the way that the hospital allowed certain people in during, what seemed so far to be, off-hours.

 

 

Once he inserted his ID, the doors automatically slid open and the whimsical and exciting sound of coins falling rapidly and repeatedly out of slot machines could be heard, although there were no slot machines to be seen near the doors and it made no sense to hear them. The place was certainly not a casino of any kind.

 

 

He noticed that all of the lobby seats were empty as well. The black and white tiled flooring created a continuous Escher pattern and the walls were decorated in loud, hypnotic, spiral motifs. The chairs arranged around the wall in the lobby were in greens, blues, reds and pinks. They were very modern-looking and resembled the shape of the letter s with wavy indentations.

 

 

No one was at the front desk.

 

Soon, over the speaker system, Patrick heard an echo of melodious chuckles, a clearing of the throat and then a voice prompt, in a strange high-pitched voice with deep undertones, telling him to take a seat only on a green chair and patiently wait to be assisted.

 

 

Patrick looked around. He felt a bit scared and extremely confused. What was this place? Where were the staff and medical professionals? None of this made sense.

He walked over to a dark green chair and hesitantly sat down on it. He waited awhile and looked toward his right which stretched down into a very long and slightly dark hallway. He could see no end to the hallway due to the increasing darkness within its visible depth. However, he began to hear something.

 

Footsteps.

 

Light footsteps.

 

 

As he strained his eyes and edged over the dark green chair to see clearly into the hallway horizon, he started to see a small figure make its way toward the lobby. The figure looked like it belonged to a small child. As the figure emerged into the lobby, Patrick could see that it was indeed a child. The child was unusual looking. It was a girl and she looked like no girl Patrick had ever seen.

 

She had very black skin like the color of a traditional bowling ball and platinum blond hair that seemed natural rather than dyed. Her cheeks were rotund, shiny and plump so much that they looked like artificial protrusions that hid surgical implants underneath. The little girl’s eyes were a piercing glowing green. But a dark emerald green, like the chair Patrick was told to sit in earlier. Her little legs awkwardly crossed over one another as she walked. It was a very rhythmic and robotic walk and cadence. Patrick saw that she was dressed in tiny pantaloons that were puffy around the thighs. The shirt, which exposed her smooth and chubby dark belly and hosted an image of a circle on the front, had puffy short sleeves to match the pants. The entire outfit was lime green.

 

 

The little girl was holding a green tray and as she came close to Patrick, he saw that the tray contained a light green candy bar with an infinity symbol embedded on it. The coating of the bar seemed to be some kind of fondant.

 

 

 

Patrick felt paralyzed. He had no idea what was going on and who this peculiar little girl was. He also thought about her parents. Didn’t she have parents around? Who was supervising this weird little girl?

 

“Hey there…are you here by yourself?”

 

 

The little girl continued to stare at Patrick with the tray in front of her. She slowly formed a wide but closed-mouth smile but made no other gesture.

 

 

“What is your name? Can you understand me? Where are your mother and father? Are they around? Is anyone else around the hospital? Can you tell me?”

 

 

The little girl stopped smiling and raised the tray higher and closer to Patrick.

 

“Eat,” she said in a very babyish voice.

 

 

“Eat what? The candy bar?”

 

 

The little girl giggled and nodded her head playfully. Patrick didn’t want to eat anything from the tray. The bar appeared to be clean and no one had bitten into it, but although this was a child, this was a stranger nonetheless and he didn’t know what to expect.

 

“If you tell me your name and get someone to come to the front desk, I will eat a piece of your candy bar OK? Deal?”

 

 

The little girl’s lips began to quiver and form into a pout and her crystal dark-green eyes started to tear up. She lowered her head and began to cry.

 

 

Patrick looked around alarmed to his left and right, especially toward the hallway to see if anyone heard her crying. No one came and the girl cried louder.

 

 

“Shhhhhh! Please…stop crying. I’m sorry. Look…I’ll eat a piece of your candy bar OK? Just a small piece. But after this you’ll have to call someone in to begin my appointment or else I am going to leave.“

 

 

The little girl looked up from the tray into Patrick’s eyes and began to smile again. Patrick picked up the bar from the tray and held it up to his nose. It smelled strongly of vanilla and lemon. The smell was inviting and he could not detect any foulness or decay in its odor.

 

 

He broke open the candy bar and was shocked to notice that not only was the inside of the bar hollow but the interior of each broken piece contained a minuscule room with little humans inside of it. They were in the middle of various scenes within a torn apart living room space. He could see a woman in the kitchen cooking, a tiny man on the couch watching TV, 2 miniature children on the floor playing board games with one another and a couple of older people at a dining room table reading.

 

They all, except for one little man, were oblivious to Patrick’s surreal intrusion. Before Patrick could react, he saw that the little man on the left broken piece of the bar stopped watching television, turned around to stare at Patrick and got off the couch. He walked toward the jagged end of the broken bar and sat down with his small legs dangling off the edge. He lifted his diminutive hand and pointed directly at Patrick.

 

 

Patrick got the chills, jumped back, let out a yelp and dropped the bar pieces onto the floor and immediately felt the beginning of tremors below the ground and around the walls in the hospital room. It felt like an earthquake. The little girl was gone without a trace although the tray was now on the floor near the disjointed candy bar. The candy bar pieces now looked like the parts of a smashed green scarab beetle with perfectly round blood clots.

 

 

Patrick backed away from the wall in horror and began to call out for help. No one came. He saw that the wall behind the chairs was developing cracks and that with each tremor the cracks were fracturing further.

 

 

He ran toward the entrance doors on the let but he could not get out. They were locked and would no longer slide open. He banged on the glass doors repeatedly but they still would not open. Patrick saw a full parking lot outside of the glass doors and a thriving community of people walking around. He screamed frantically for assistance and desperately hoped that someone outside would hear him.

No one paid attention.

 

No one heard him.

 

 

The wall as well as the flooring was now splitting fully into two sections…and each side was moving in different motions as if they were on a balancing scale. Patrick stood with his back flat against the glass entry doors in sheer terror watching as the room continued to split in half. He was on the verge of fainting when he saw what the split began to reveal. A pair of extremely large eyes slowly materialized through the ever-growing split revealing a human face with a wide-eyed curious expression.

 

 

Patrick started to feel an eerie sensation in his limbs. The sensation forced one of his arms to propel upward and point to the face between the opening. He could fully see the human now. They were holding up each end of the broken-apart hospital room with their gigantic hands. He jutted out his index finger to point at the face peering further into his side of the hospital lobby and let out an unearthly long shriek between his wildly-tortured, stretched-open mouth.

 

 

At that moment both sides of the room were released by the humongous hands and Patrick’s body slammed hard against the glass doors as he felt a dramatic drop into an indescribable abyss…

Reviews

[Penslinger]

WoW
Very nice~and unexpected
Good story