Scary Stories - Patient

The night security guard at a hospice had never been afraid of the dark. For fifteen years, he walked the corridors alone, preferring the quiet to the chaos of daytime, the solitude to the small talk he never learned to make. He was a loner by circumstance and by choice—no friends, no girlfriend, a distant father, a dead mother. The hospice was easy money: old people on their way out, nothing worth stealing, no trouble worth talking about. Then they wheeled in Isaiah Muldoon, and everything changed.

The locked-in man

Muldoon was a locked-in syndrome patient. A routine operation had gone wrong when his medication was dosed incorrectly, poisoning his brain stem. He was completely paralyzed, unable to move or speak, his lungs working only with the help of a ventilator. But his mind was sharp—fully aware of everything happening around him, trapped inside a body that was decaying around him. His wife had died earlier that year. He had no children, no emergency contact, no one. The guard felt a strange kinship with him. "He didn't have anyone, just like I didn't have anyone."