The late afternoon hours were closing in around them, a lingering dampness filling the air with the remnants of the passing storm. Outside the hospital, puddles had formed in the streets, seeping through the cracks in the pavement. The skies were gray, broken patches of clouds revealing the darkening horizon.

For the third time that day, Credence was beginning to regain consciousness, waking up from a surgical procedure to reattach his missing fingers. His daughter had done her best, but the sloppy stitches and dried blood had effectively transformed him into something akin to Frankenstein's monster. The sutures in his shoulder weren't much better, but at least he was in one piece again.

His lashes slowly lifted, revealing cloudy eyes with a pale hue. Beside his bed, Chilindrina was busy unwrapping the bandages on his left hand. His fingers twitched in response to the stimulus, causing him to wince and cry out.

"One second," Chilindrina muttered, plunging a syringe into the back of his hand. His breath came in shallow, ragged gasps, gritting his teeth against the pain. Within a matter of minutes, he could feel a soothing numbness spreading from the injection site through his fingers. "Better now?" she asked, looking up at him and smiling.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Credence wheezed, slightly breathless from the sudden spike in pain he'd felt moments earlier.

Firmly placing her hands on her hips, Chilindrina looked at him with a scowl. "Who's the nurse here, me or you? I even fixed the transplant patient who lost his ears, eyes, and hair. See?"

Looking up from his sutured hand, the Obscurial saw that the man next to him had a pair of fresh eyeballs crammed into his sockets. Dried blood caked the outer edges where his eyes had been unceremoniously forced into his skull, his left eye bulging farther from its socket than the right. His ears had been stitched into place as well, with scarlet ribbons trickling down the sides of his neck where the wounds were still fresh. However, our little surgeon wasn't very skilled in her craft. For although her patient now had ears, one of them had been sewn into place halfway down his neck, the other looking decidedly lopsided.

Clearly, this was an artistic endeavor, seeing as how her patient now resembled a badly drawn Picasso painting.

"We found hair for him too, Daddy!" the little girl chirped pleasantly. "It was clogging the bathroom sink. But we don't have any skin to graft the hair on his head, so I just slapped it on, and now he has a wig."

"Oh, that's nice, baby girl." Though he tried to hide his revulsion, Credence's lip curled in disgust. He quickly tried forcing a smile on his face. "Really proud of you for doing such a good job."

Turning his attention back to his mangled hand, Credence tried flexing his newly reattached fingers. Only his ring finger and thumb remained fully intact. The rest had been sloppily sewn into place with thick black cords. Though he had little feeling in his hand, he found that he could move his fingers with a bit of effort. He was about to get up when he heard his daughter questioning the transplant patient in the bed adjacent to his own.

"So, tell me what happened in the graveyard. Have you found any clues?"

The transplant patient sat up slowly, wincing and taking a moment to think back on what he'd seen. "I... I was attacked a few steps from the gate," he said at length, bringing his hand towards his face and tracing the outer edges of his wounds. Chilindrina had done her best to patch him up, however a sizeable portion of his skull and jawbone were still visible where the strips of flesh had been torn away, leaving one side of his face a ragged mess. "I haven't found anything useful. I didn't get the chance to look around. I'm sorry to disappoint you."

Chilindrina sympathetically patted his hand. "That's okay. You tried your best, and there aren't many people who are brave enough to enter the cemetery. For that, you earned a gold star." And with that, she reached up and slapped a golden sticker to her patient's forehead, directly below the mass of hair they'd pulled from the drain.

Her attention shifted back to her father, and the little girl began to speak once more, further explaining the situation. "That's where we lost Quico, Daddy. He was in the cemetery with his koala, but only his toy escaped. We don't know what happened to him. All we know is that the cemetery is hiding a secret about why we can't wake up. We need Quico to help us figure out what that is."

"The cemetery?" He wasn't sure why his words echoed her own. Perhaps it was the Obscurial's fear of such places, knowing that would be his destiny soon enough. Even when Aberforth had taken him on a tour of Hogsmeade back in the days when they first met, Credence would squirm in his wheelchair and avert his gaze whenever they passed the old cemetery.

He refused to leave his family and friends. They meant so much to him, and for the first time Credence began to wonder if maybe they could stay forever in this dream world, making it their own, turning it into something better.

"The fastest way to the cemetery is by bus," Chilindrina continued, seemingly unfazed by this haunting location. "We'll go with you, Daddy. And we can use Mommy's bus pass."

This would be the first step, the beginning of Credence's journey towards accepting that all life must eventually come to an end. Only this time it wasn't pain that kept him rooted to the spot in his hospital bed. His shoulder ached, his fingers throbbed where they had been sewn in place, but his mind was incapable of moving forward.

His muscles seized up, his breath quickening with anxiety. "What if we could stay here and help these patients instead?" Credence asked, once he'd finally found his voice and forced himself to speak. "If the monsters keep attacking, then these people are going to need someone who can help them. You're the only medical worker in the hospital. They need you to stay here. And I can help."

Chilindrina shook her head. "We can't stay, Daddy. My patients are suffering. I can't make them better."

"You helped me." Wincing, Credence lifted his left hand, though he failed to notice the warm trickle of blood oozing from the ragged sutures.

"Not that much. And if the monsters come back for you and eat you up, or rip your arms and legs off, I might not be able to put you back together next time." The opossum on her shoulder uttered a low, thrilling sound, motioning with a nod towards the door. That gave Chilindrina an idea. "Daddy, do you know why I'm a nurse in this hospital?"

Credence was afraid to answer. He was well aware of the stench of blood that permeated the walls, the scent of copper mingling with the metallic smell of surgical steel laced with potent antiseptics. Try as he might, he couldn't force it out of his mind entirely. And yet he still struggled with the thought that he, like everyone else within this nightmare realm, would eventually die.

His daughter approached the bed and held his hand. Her touch should have been comforting, but instead it only brought with it a sense of fear and uncertainty.

"Come on," she said, squeezing her father's hand and allowing his blood to coat her fingertips. "I'll show you."

.oOo.

The hospital waiting room contained a number of patients, all of which had been mutilated in some form by the monsters that roamed the earth. A large man was seated near the entrance, groaning and doubled over in absolute misery. The front of his shirt was drenched in blood, the stain spreading to consume every inch of fabric from his chest down to his waist. Scarlet stains coated his arms, which were currently being used to hold in what remained of his intestines.

Though it was unclear what type of monster he encountered, the man's partially shredded visera were now spilling onto the floor. Warm blood dripped from the gash in his abdomen, and yet he was still alive, unable to pass from this world and move on to his final resting place.

Next to him, there was a woman with her head caved in due to blunt force trauma. Gelatinous chunks of brain matter clung to the edges of her shattered skull. The doctor himself was no more than a severed head lying on a table in his office, and when he saw the sorry state of Credence's mangled hand, he offered a warning.

"Watch yourself, son. You don't want to end up like me."

"See, Daddy? The doctor can't help anyone because his body was torn to pieces and eaten by the monsters." Chilindrina tightened her grip on her father's hand, looking up at him with unshed tears glistening behind her glasses. "I'm all that's left now, but I can't help everyone. At first I thought it was really cool, seeing all the blood and guts everywhere. But then we lost Quico in the cemetery. We might never find his body, or what's left of him."

In that moment a terrible feeling of dread gripped Credence's heart, realizing all at once that his daughter could be next.

A gasp sounded amid the agonized groans when Credence heard a low thud directly behind him. Turning abruptly, his cloak swishing around his ankles, the Obscurial spied the barred windows on the door leading to the lockdown ward. The figure he saw inside was barely human after having been mauled by a hoard of monsters. They thrashed and screamed, bashing their head against the steel bars. Their bottom jaw was festering and rotten, dropping to the floor with a sickening crunch. The flesh along their neck had several infected wounds, a foul substance resembling crude oil seeping from the gashes. Their skull had similar injuries to the woman in the waiting room, all self inflicted, and still they screamed, striking the wall over and over.

"Some of us have gone mad in here," Chilindrina whispered hoarsely.

This wasn't a hospital. It was a prison for those condemned to suffering in a nightmare realm where Death no longer existed. Was this really what he wanted? A world of perpetual torment where death was preferable to suffering, and yet none could ever hope to escape.

Eyes wide and staring, the Obscurial started backing towards the exit, his heart pounding furiously against his ribcage. Wait, what was that? If he blinked, it vanished, the victims returning to their horribly mutilated state. But if he stared long enough, their forms began to change, spectral entities flickering in and out of existence with each breath.

Looking left and right in a panic, he could see the blackened substance oozing from the lockdown patient's wounds transforming into writhing maggots, leeches stretching from open sores and waving before his eyes, like a ghastly hoard of parasitic worms. The man with his arms around his waist, holding in his intestines, slowly began to change. His bleeding abdomen began to swell, filling with the same dark fluid until it burst like a balloon, showering the adjacent walls in a festering torrent of rancid innards and squirming shapeless worms.

Chilindrina put her hands on her hips and sighed. "Chavo, looks like you'd better get the mop again."