We broke the seal. Something followed us out.

Okay I wasn't going to post this but it's been sitting in my head and I need people to know.

About an hour's drive into the mountains from the city I grew up in, there's an abandoned hospital. My parents always told me not to go near it. Said it was dangerous, half-demolished, whatever. I never went, partly because I was a kid with a bike and it was literally in the middle of a mountain, so.

Then I came back to my hometown for a middle school reunion. Me and my childhood friends A, B, and C are catching up, trading old stories, and somehow the abandoned hospital comes up. Apparently it had just been sitting there rotting this whole time.

Somebody suggested we go. Because of course they did.

A lived closest so he drove. We packed flashlights, emergency snacks, salt, and whistles (one each, in case we got separated). Very prepared. Very rational. Anyway.

The GPS glitched on the way and we almost went off a cliff. A tunnel started leaking rain ON us while we were inside it. We made it.

The hospital was way smaller than I expected. Three floors, maybe 25 meters wide. Like the size of an elementary school swimming pool. B works in construction and started grumbling the second we walked in.

"A building this size would cost almost nothing to demolish. Why did they just... stop?"

The window glass was all shattered but there was zero evidence anyone had actually tried to tear the place down. Weird.

The outer walls were COVERED in graffiti. Dense, wall-to-wall characters. Hard kanji-style stuff, too complicated to read. Biker gang vandalism maybe? Around the whole building there was rope strung up like a fence.

We grabbed iron pipes off the ground (for self-defense, very brave, we were five seconds from peeing ourselves) and went in. No sign of anyone living there.

First floor: nothing. Literally nothing. We got quieter and quieter the further we walked.

Second floor: also nothing. A goes "well this is anticlimactic, bet our parents just made up the danger story to keep us away." Everyone was like yeah same, my parents said the same thing. C said "why would they lie that hard just to stop us from coming here?"

Third floor: same deal. Empty rooms, nothing creepy, we were basically ready to call it and go home.

And then B stopped.

"Wait."

"The third floor is wider than it should be. There's a room inside this room."

We all looked at him like ok mr. construction-guy showing off. But he was RIGHT. The dead-end wall at the end of the hall was thin plywood. You could knock on it and hear the hollow space behind it.

A: "So do we break it?"

Me: "Obviously we break it."

B and C: nodding.

One tap with the iron pipe and the whole plywood wall just... fell inward. Like it barely existed.

The air changed immediately. Just hit you. Heavy, stale, WRONG.

Same dense unreadable writing all over the walls. And in the middle of the room.

A chair.

Under the chair, a dark stain spreading across the floor. All around it, pieces of rope. Shredded. Everywhere.

"what is this place"

A said it with this weird shaky laugh, voice pitched too high. B said "this feels dangerous." I was already backing up saying "we need to leave RIGHT NOW."

And we just. Started walking. Then running. Then we were SPRINTING and tripping over each other down three flights of stairs and out the door.

We scrambled over the rope perimeter and got to the car.

C spoke first.

"It was a seal."

"What."

"The writing on the walls. The rope. It was a seal. Something was being kept in there."

Then she said: "I kept telling you to stop but you guys wouldn't listen. I was so scared I didn't even go inside. I waited out here the whole time. I'm so glad you got out."

Me, A, and B just stared at each other.

Because we had all been together the whole time. All four of us. Walking through every single floor. Together.

We got in the car anyway because what else do you do.

And as we were pulling away from that building.

We heard a whistle.

From inside the hospital.

I reached up to check the whistle I'd been wearing around my neck the whole time.

It was gone.