Scary Stories: Patient

A hospice night-shift security guard who has always found peace in solitude and darkness encounters a patient named Isaiah Muldoon, a man with locked-in syndrome—fully conscious but completely paralyzed, able only to move his eyes. The guard, who has no family and no real connections, begins visiting Muldoon's room during his rounds, talking to him about books, his life, his failed dreams of writing a novel. What starts as a strange kind of companionship becomes something far more terrifying when the guard discovers that Muldoon is not a helpless victim, but a predator who has been using those conversations to drain his consciousness and prepare to take over his body.

The Predator in Plain Sight

The story's central horror is that the most dangerous thing in the hospice is not a monster lurking in shadows, but a motionless old man strapped to a bed. Muldoon has locked-in syndrome from a medical error—his brain stem damaged, his upper brain intact, his body a prison. The guard initially feels kinship with him: "He didn't have anyone, just like I didn't have anyone." But those nightly conversations leave the guard feeling "so tired, dazed, like I'd just awoken from a deep sleep part way through." Each time he tells himself it's the last time, but he keeps returning, "drain some more of myself away."