There's something unnerving about a hospital that starts talking to itself.
It began just after 6:00 AM—before most staff had even finished their first cup of burnt breakroom coffee. Overhead, the intercom clicked on, fizzled, and blurted:
"Code Blue. Basement Records. Repeat: Code Blue—Basement Records."
Everyone around me paused.
"Records?" Trevor asked, holding a mop handle like a staff weapon. "We don't even go down there."
"It's archives now," I said. "No patients. No codes. Just mold and half a filing cabinet from the '80s."
Jude, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, stared at the ceiling like it owed him an answer. "The building remembers," he whispered.
The paging system was old—probably one failed software update away from gaining sentience—and today, it decided to act like a haunted answering machine. Random alerts began cycling through the halls like flashbacks on shuffle.
"Paging Dr. Marcus Vale to Labor and Delivery."
"Security to the South Wing—lost child in admin again."
"Happy birthday, Nurse Ellie!"
"Code Brown. ICU. Code Brown."
Every thirty minutes, a new one hit. No timestamps. No clarification. And no one knew if any of it was real.
"Do we respond?" a new trainee asked me as we rounded a corner. His badge read Eli. He looked about twelve.
"No," I said. "That birthday page? She retired in April."
"She did?"
"She's also dead."
He turned pale.
I patted him on the shoulder. "Relax. Probably not because of the page."
Today also happened to be Rookie Release Day, which, if you're unfamiliar, is when administration lets freshly minted trainees wander around without direct handlers for the first time.
I'd liken it to removing the safety from a grenade and tossing it into a room full of glass IV bottles.
Everett—our janitor with a reputation for silence and surreal wisdom—was already on the floor, polishing a strip of tile like it held the meaning of life.
"Morning," I said as I passed him.
He didn't look up. Just said, "They've been set loose."
He meant the rookies.
And sure enough, one appeared moments later, standing in front of the janitor's closet with a confused expression and a rolling vitals cart. He peered inside, turned to Everett, and said, "Uh… is this the new telemetry storage?"
Everett slowly turned his head, studied the kid, then replied, "Yes. If you believe hard enough."
The rookie nodded like that made perfect sense and wheeled his cart into a wall.
Meanwhile, Trevor had been assigned a trainee named Caleb, who addressed him exclusively as "Sir."
"Sir Trevor, where do we deposit used linens for patients who've completed biological discharge protocols?"
Trevor blinked. "You mean… where do you toss dirty sheets?"
Caleb nodded. "Affirmative, sir."
Trevor rubbed his eyes. "Down the chute. Please don't say 'biological discharge' ever again."
By 10:00 AM, the chaos was rolling:
One rookie asked if they should introduce themselves to every patient—even the sedated ones.
A second attempted to take vitals from a crash test dummy left in the simulation lab.
A third asked Kip whether "Code Red" meant the fire alarm or an emotional support beverage.
Kip, of course, had brought a laminated "Color Code Quick Reference" card and insisted on a pop quiz.
But the real problem was the intercom.
It wasn't just random pages anymore—it was developing patterns.
Old codes. Real voices. Echoes of events that had already passed.
And the staff was starting to lose track of which alerts were current.
Marcus showed up at the nurse's station looking like someone had swapped his coffee with motor oil.
"Was there a fall in 3B?" he asked.
Noah checked the chart. "No. That was last Thursday."
"Then why the page?"
The speaker crackled.
"Paging Dr. Everett Vale to Pediatric Oncology…"
We all froze.
Trevor muttered, "Everett's not a doctor."
Jude, not missing a beat, replied, "But the walls think he is."
Everett, nearby with a rag in one hand and a bucket in the other, stopped moving for a full five seconds.
Then, calmly, he said, "Don't answer back. That's how it begins."
He resumed mopping, like nothing had happened.
That was when Jude walked into the hallway, faced the ceiling speaker directly, and just… stood there.
I asked, "You okay?"
He didn't look at me. Just folded his arms and said,
"I'm just seeing if this is the end.
If the sky opens, I want to be the first to shrug."
Across the ward, Camila—still confined to her bed in Room 418—updated her marker board:
TODAY'S PROPHETIC SCHEDULE:
9:00 AM – Existential static
10:00 – Pager ghost
11:00 – Rookies awaken
12:00 – Soup. Or chaos. Or both.
She drew a little ghost saying "Have you seen my code?"
Someone added a nurse running with a mop.
By lunchtime, the hospital felt like a dream you wake up from sweating—mostly confused, slightly afraid, and pretty sure someone just yelled "Code Llama."
11:45 AM. Paging Event #13.
"Code Silver. Lobby. Suspect described as... very fast?"
Marcus stopped mid-step.
"Wait—'very fast'?"
Kip nodded seriously. "I believe that's code for an unidentified runner."
Jude blinked. "Or a squirrel."
Kip didn't even flinch. "Possibly. We've had worse."
Meanwhile, Trevor found Caleb trying to take a pulse reading from a cafeteria sandwich.
"I was practicing technique!" Caleb insisted.
Trevor stared at him. "You put a blood pressure cuff on a hoagie."
Caleb nodded. "Yes, sir. It wasn't responsive."
Trevor closed his eyes. "You've failed the sandwich."
The longer the paging system glitched, the more surreal things got.
One rookie heard, "Rapid Response to Sub-Basement Seven," and disappeared for an hour.
When he came back, he had three bags of ice, a snakebite kit, and a paperclip taped to his shoe "for balance."
He wouldn't say what happened down there. Just whispered, "The gurneys move on their own."
At noon, food trays arrived late. The cafeteria blamed it on "audio confusion."
Apparently, someone in dietary heard "All staff to the west lot for emergency buffet triage" and started preparing for a picnic that didn't exist.
We found two nurses halfway into a pan of lasagna behind Receiving, arguing about whether this counted as a break.
The tipping point came just after 12:45 PM, when the intercom blared:
"Paging Security to Room 666. Aggressive entity in isolation. Containment breach possible."
Everyone froze.
Trevor whispered, "We don't have a Room 666."
Marcus looked up sharply. "That's not even funny."
A rookie—Caleb, bless his acronym-loving soul—dropped his clipboard and ran for the stairwell.
Jude didn't run. He pulled up a folding chair and sat facing the elevator, just in case something did arrive.
"I want to see what walks out," he said, crossing his legs. "If it's got hooves, I'm offering it coffee."
Meanwhile, Kip was trying to reestablish order using a three-tiered emergency badge system:
Green sticker = calm and compliant
Yellow = "may question directives"
Red = immediate behavioral intervention required
Unfortunately, he applied his own stickers backward and was mistaken for a psychiatric patient by an actual psych nurse. It took fifteen minutes to de-escalate.
Back in 418, Camila had added to the board again:
If Room 666 doesn't exist, does the threat escape into the rest of the hospital?
(Discuss quietly. Do not feed it.)
Underneath, she'd drawn a cartoon of a goat with a stethoscope and bloodshot eyes, captioned:
"I diagnose you with doom."
By 2:00 PM, things finally began to slow down. Either the system exhausted its memory banks, or the walls got bored.
The intercom gave one last click—just enough to make us all flinch—then went silent.
No apology. No final page. Just quiet.
Too quiet.
In the lull, I found Everett down by the surgical recovery wing, wiping a wall with a look of distant focus.
"You okay?" I asked.
He nodded once. "Some voices you don't echo."
Then he added, "There's a difference between hearing ghosts and answering them."
The rookies, now thoroughly spooked, had clustered in the breakroom like crash survivors.
Trevor sat among them, passing out juice boxes from a cooler someone left behind.
"Rule number one," he said, "never trust the ceiling."
"Rule two," I added, "if the building starts calling your name—don't follow it."
Caleb raised his hand. "Sir… what's rule three?"
Jude answered from the hallway without turning around:
"Rule three is don't ask about rule four."
The best part of the day came when someone discovered Room 666 did exist—on an old, forgotten blueprint. It had been planned decades ago, never built, and left off current maps entirely.
It was supposed to be a sub-storage unit… right beneath the laundry chute.
Suddenly, all those disappearing socks made a lot more sense.
Trevor quietly updated the janitor's closet whiteboard with a new quote:
"Room 666: We clean what you fear."
That evening, as shift change rolled in, Marcus stood beside Everett in the lobby.
He stared at the intercom speaker, arms folded. "You think they'll fix it?"
Everett tilted his head. "You think it's broken?"
Marcus blinked, sighed, and walked away.
Later that night, I passed by Room 418. Camila was sketching again.
She looked up and grinned. "Tell the walls I forgive them."
I smiled. "For what?"
She winked. "For remembering too much."
In the mop closet, Everett returned his bucket to its place, shut the cabinet slowly, and turned off the light.
And just before the door clicked shut, I heard him whisper,
"I remember too."