THE HEILSTATT CONTAGION

Chapter 1: The Corridors of Heilstatt

The forest that swallowed Heilstatt was not quiet. It was an oppressive, weighted silence, thick with the smell of damp pine and rot. Anna felt the trees pressing in long before she saw the sanatorium, their branches forming a canopy so dense it turned the midday sky to a bruised, perpetual twilight.

Her small car, tires crunching on the wet gravel of a path long neglected, finally broke through the tree line.

Heilstatt was a monument to decay.

It was impossibly vast, a sprawling gothic giant of grey stone and blackened timber, its spine broken in several places.

Windows gaped like missing teeth. The air itself felt heavy, clinging to her skin as she stepped out of the car. She pulled her coat tighter, a familiar, faint shimmer starting at the edges of her vision. Not now, she thought, pressing the heel of her hand against her temple.

Her job was absurd, really. "Catalog and assess the structural integrity of the main library for potential preservation." The email had seemed so clinical. The reality was a corpse.

The grand hall smelled of mold and dead birds. Her footsteps were loud in the silence. She found the library on the west wing. It was magnificent, two stories of dark mahogany shelving, all of it warped and peeling. Books lay water-damaged on the floor, their pages swollen into solid blocks of pulp. A thick layer of dust and plaster-fall covered every surface.

Anna was meticulous. She unzipped her satchel, pulling out her laser measure, her digital camera, and her logbook. She would start with the shelving. She placed her hands on a large, moldering atlas to move it. The pain hit her like a physical blow. It was not just a migraine. It was the migraine. The one that unmoored her. The room breathed. The far wall of shelving seemed to rush away from her, stretching to an impossible distance. Then, just as quickly, the ceiling pressed down, the air thickening until she felt she was underwater. Her Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, her doctor called it. Her own private madness. She clenched her teeth, shutting her eyes, waiting for the vertigo to pass.

When she opened them, the pain was gone. And so was the decay. The mahogany shelving was polished, glowing a deep, rich red-brown under the warm light of brass lamps. The books were perfectly aligned, their spines crisp and bright. The plaster dust was gone. The air was clean, tinged only with the scent of floor wax and old paper. Anna’s breath hitched. This was new. The hallucinations had never been this... total.

From the hallway, she heard a sound. A muffled, wet cough. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She was frozen for a moment, a restorer trapped inside a restoration. Slowly, compulsively, she walked toward the library's massive double doors. She pushed one open.

The corridor was no longer empty and crumbling. It was clean, the linoleum gleaming. And it was full of people. They were ghosts from a photograph. Men and women in thin, pale-blue hospital gowns, some standing by the windows, others shuffling aimlessly. They were entirely silent, save for the occasional, stifled cough. Anna stood in the doorway, her modern, synthetic coat a sudden, jarring offense. They can't see me. She was an observer, a ghost from the future. They moved as if she wasn't there, their faces gaunt and listless, staring through her.

She let out a slow, shaky breath. A hallucination. It had to be. Then, a nurse turned the corner, walking toward the group. She was dressed in a starched white uniform, her shoes silent on the polished floor. As she passed Anna, the nurse stopped.

She turned. She looked directly at Anna. Her face was smooth, pale, and perfectly formed. Except where her eyes should have been. There was nothing. Just smooth, uninterrupted skin, as if she had been sculpted from wax and left unfinished.

Anna’s scream was trapped in her throat. She stumbled backward, tripping over her own satchel, and fell hard against the damp, gritty floor of the real library. The room was as it had been: cold, empty, and rotting. The only light was the grim, grey twilight filtering through the broken windows. The only sound was her own panicked gasping, echoing in the vast, dead space.

Chapter 2: The Face in the Light

For a full minute, Anna did not move from the floor. She focused on the tangible: the grit of the plaster digging into her palms, the sharp scent of ammonia from mildew, the cold damp seeping through her jeans. This is real. The rot is real.

The other thing—the clean corridor, the shuffling patients, the facelessness—was a fabrication of her own damaged wiring. It was the most severe attack she’d ever had, triggered by the stress, the isolation, and the mold spores. It had to be.

She forced herself to stand, her body aching. "Get it together, Anna," she muttered, her voice sounding small in the cavernous room. Work. Work was a comfort. Work was a line of data points.

She turned her attention to the small, private office behind the main librarian's desk. The door was swollen shut, the wood warped by humidity. She put her shoulder into it. It burst open with the sound of splintering wood, releasing a cloud of spores that sent her into a fit of coughing.

The room was worse than the library. A large desk was furred with a pale green mold. In the corner, however, a tall, metal cabinet stood relatively untouched, protected by a film of oil and rust. She pried the locked door open with the flat end of her crowbar.

Inside, among rodent droppings and desiccated books, sat a heavy, box-like Projektor and a round metal carousel of old glass Diapositive—slides.

A flicker of professional curiosity cut through her fear. This was part of the library's catalog, an artifact. She pulled it out, setting it on the desk and wiping the grime away. She had her portable battery pack, the one she used for her laptop and laser levels. The projector’s ancient plug fit the inverter.

She aimed it at the largest clear patch of wall, a canvas of peeling paint and water stains.

With a heavy whirr and the smell of hot dust, the machine’s fan kicked in. A bright, white square of light cut through the gloom. Anna loaded the carousel.

CLICK-CLACK.

The first image snapped into focus. A black-and-white photograph of the sanatorium’s facade, pristine, sharp against a bright sky. Crowds of people in 1930s attire milled on the lawn.

CLICK-CLACK.

The next slide. A group of stern-looking doctors in white coats, posing on the front steps.

CLICK-CLACK.

A wide shot of a dining hall, full of patients.

Anna felt her pulse begin to slow. It was just history. Just old photographs. Her mind had simply taken these inputs—the building, the history of sickness—and woven them into a nightmare. She was fine.

CLICK-CLACK.

A group of nurses, smiling, gathered around a small Christmas tree in what looked like a staff lounge.

CLICK-CLACK.

This slide was a portrait. A single figure, a nurse. Anna’s breath caught in her chest.

It was her.

The same starched uniform, the same cap, the same smooth, pale skin. The same woman from the corridor. But in the photograph, she was smiling. A gentle, almost melancholy smile. And she had eyes. Dark, clear, and kind.

Anna let out a shaky laugh, a sound of pure relief. "See? Eyes. It was a hallucination. I just... I just forgot the eyes."

She stared at the image, at the kind-eyed woman projected onto the ruined wall. The wall’s own stains and cracks mapped across the nurse's face, making her look as though she were weeping plaster.

Anna reached out, her fingers tracing the image in the air. "Who were you?" she whispered.

As she watched, the smile on the wall seemed to flicker. Anna froze. It was just the projector bulb, she told herself. It's unstable.

But the smile didn't just flicker. It receded. The kindness in the projected eyes vanished, replaced by a flat, neutral stare. The image was changing.

With a terrible, liquid slowness, the head in the photograph turned. It was not a new slide. It was the same slide, its emulsion shifting like wet paint.

The nurse’s face, now devoid of any smile, rotated within the frame of light. Her head tilted, as if listening to a sound Anna couldn't hear. Then, her projected eyes—no longer kind, just dark pits of light—moved. They scanned the dark, empty library. And they found Anna.

The projected face locked onto hers.

A high-pitched whine built from the projector. CRACK.

The bulb exploded, showering the desk in hot glass. The room was plunged back into absolute darkness, thick and suffocating.

The only sound was the sharp tink... tink... tink... of the shattered bulb cooling on the desk.

Chapter 3: The Two Books

The drive back to the Gasthaus was a blur. Anna drove on autopilot, her knuckles white on the steering wheel, the projector's dying whine echoing in her ears.

The inn, Zum Verwelkten Blättchen (The Withered Leaf), was the only functioning establishment in the village. It was a dark, timber-framed building, perpetually damp, run by a man who seemed as ancient and rooted as the forest itself: Herr Kraus.

He was behind the bar, polishing a glass that was already clean, his movements slow and deliberate.

"You look pale, Fräulein," he said without looking up. His voice was like dry leaves skittering on stone.

"The air in that place," Anna said, her voice unsteady. "The mold... it's thick."

Herr Kraus stopped polishing. He placed the glass down, his gaze finally lifting to meet hers. His eyes were a milky, cataract-grey. "It is not the mold you should worry about."

Anna gripped the strap of her satchel. "What do you mean?"

He gestured vaguely toward the window, toward the forest that hid the sanatorium. "Heilstatt... the place has a strong stomach. It digests its memories very slowly. The air... it holds things." He leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "My advice? Don't breathe too deeply. And don't believe your eyes. They are the easiest part of you to fool."

A chill, unrelated to the damp, ran down Anna's spine. She nodded, paid for the stale bread and cheese she wouldn't eat, and retreated to her room upstairs.

The room was small, with a sloped ceiling and a single, grime-caked window. She locked the door, leaning against it, her heart still racing. It holds things.

She threw her satchel onto the narrow bed. It landed with a heavy, solid thud that was wrong. It was just her laptop, her camera, and her logbook. It shouldn't have been that heavy.

She unzipped the bag. Her equipment was there, but so was something else. A book.

It was a large, leather-bound medical atlas, its cover embossed with the sanatorium's crest—a stylized pine tree wrapped around a serpent. She didn't remember taking it. She must have packed it by accident, swept it into her bag in her panic to leave.

She sat on the bed, turning its heavy, yellowed pages under the weak light of the bedside lamp. Atlas der Tuberkulösen Pathologie, 1929. It was filled with detailed, gruesome anatomical illustrations of diseased lungs, ravaged bone, and afflicted organs. It was morbid, but clinical.

Detached.

Her migraine, which had receded to a dull throb, began to pulse anew. She focused on a detailed cross-section of a human torso. The room seemed to shrink, the walls pressing in. It's just the syndrome. Just the room.

She blinked, and the drawing changed. The precise medical lines of the ribs and organs wavered. She stared, horrified, as the ink seemed to bleed and re-form. The clinical illustration of the torso dissolved. In its place, a face began to emerge, sketched with frantic, desperate lines. A screaming mouth. Hollow sockets where the eyes should be.

"No..." she whispered. She slammed the book shut, her hands shaking. A hallucination. I'm having a breakdown.

She pushed the book away, burying her face in her hands. She sat like that for an hour, forcing herself to breathe, to focus on the sound of the rain outside, on the reality of the damp sheets and the lumpy mattress.

When her panic finally subsided, she knew what she had to do. She had to return the book. She had to prove to herself that it was just a book.

The next morning, under a sky the color of wet cement, she drove back to Heilstatt. She walked through the grand hall, her footsteps echoing, and into the library.

She went straight to the shelf she had been working near—the "P" section, for Pathologie. And she froze.

There, wedged between two moldering volumes, was the Atlas der Tuberkulösen Pathologie, 1929. Its spine was identical to the one in her bag.

Slowly, she unzipped her satchel. She pulled out the book she had taken home. The one that had changed in her hands. She held it up. Then she placed it on the shelf, next to its twin.

They were identical. Two copies of the same, obscure medical text. Except one was clean, its pages filled with clinical, precise illustrations. The other, the one from her bag, felt heavy, almost warm. She knew, without having to look, that its pages were no longer filled with medical drawings, but with screaming, eyeless faces.

She had not taken a book. She had taken a part of the Residue. She had brought a piece of the building's madness home with her.

And looking at the two books, side-by-side, she realized Herr Kraus was wrong. Heilstatt didn't just hold its memories. It bled them.

Chapter 4: The Head Physician's Note

The line between Heilstatt's present and its past was no longer a line; it was a torn, fraying seam. And Anna was stumbling through it with increasing frequency.

The slips were no longer triggered just by her migraines. Sometimes it was a sound—the drip of water in a corridor would suddenly become the rhythmic tap of a cane. Sometimes it was a smell—the sharp scent of mold would be replaced by the sterile, biting odor of carbolic acid.

She would be documenting a rotten floorboard, and in the span of a blink, she'd be standing in a polished, sunlit ward.

But the Residue was no longer passive. It was no longer just a scene. It was becoming aware.

Before, the shuffling patients had looked through her. Now, they looked at her.

She'd be in the 1930s corridor, and the wet, stifled coughs would stop. A dozen gaunt faces would turn in unison, their listless eyes fixing on her. They saw her, not as a person, but as an anomaly. A disturbance in their air. A cold spot.

One patient, a young man with a face like paper, reached out a trembling hand as she passed, his fingers brushing the synthetic fabric of her jacket. He recoiled, hissing, as if he’d touched dry ice.

Anna learned to move quickly. When the world shifted, she didn't freeze; she ran. She was looking for something, though she didn't know what. An explanation. An epicenter.

She found it during her longest slip yet. She had been in the real, rotting library, and the world dissolved. She was back in the 1930s. The air was warm. She could hear a piano playing faintly, somewhere in the building. Instead of panicking, she walked purposefully, past the patients (who watched her with growing suspicion), down a wing of the sanatorium she hadn't dared explore.

She found a door marked: Chefarzt - Dr. Vollen (Head Physician). This room was different. It felt solid. The desk was a heavy block of oak. A medical chart lay open. The pen beside it looked as if it had just been set down.

She was in the heart of the Residue. This was his room. The man from the projector slides. The one whose name was on the spine of the medical atlas.

On the desk, pinned beneath a heavy glass paperweight, was a single sheet of Heilstatt stationery. It was a note, written in an aggressive, sharp-angled script. It was not a medical report. It was a diary entry. Anna read it, her blood turning cold. "September 14, 1931.

It is getting worse. The fabric is tearing. I see them constantly now—the ghosts of the future. They walk my halls, their faces drawn, their clothes made of strange, dead fabrics. They are not spirits; they are a sickness. A temporal blight. My patients see them too. The ones who are weakest, their minds clouded by fever, they are... slipping. They stare into corners, whispering to the cold spots. They claim the future is pulling at them.

This morning, Nurse Hella (the kind-eyed nurse from the slide) reported seeing one of them in the library. A woman. She said the apparition looked solid. This is not a haunting. It is an invasion. The future is leaking into my present. This... this Residue... it is draining the life from my world, pulling my patients into its rot. I will not let this happen. I will not let my patients be stolen by these... phantoms of decay. I have modified the diathermy machine in the sub-basement. It is no longer for the body; it is for the mind. For time itself. If this future sickness is a wave, a frequency, I will find a counter-frequency. I will anchor my reality. I will solidify the present. I will send them back to the rot that spawned them. I will save my patients." Anna stepped back from the desk, a terrible understanding dawning. Dr. Vollen hadn't been haunted. He was the one doing the haunting. He hadn't been fighting a ghost. He had been fighting her. Her time. Her reality. And the nurse... the one with no eyes...

Anna looked at the name on the note. Nurse Hella. The kind-eyed woman. What had Vollen's machine done to her? A sharp click came from the hallway. The sound of a door handle turning. Anna spun around. The door to the office was opening. She was trapped in 1931. And someone was coming in.

Chapter 5: The Anchor

Anna didn't wait to see who was coming. She lunged for the office's other door—a small, private exit leading to a narrow staircase, likely for the doctor's discreet use. She slammed it shut behind her, the sound of the main office door opening echoing from the room she'd just fled.

She wasn't in the 1930s anymore. The shift was violent. The narrow staircase was not polished wood; it was a black, rotting shaft, slick with moisture. She half-fell, half-slid down the steps, her hands plunging into something soft and wet. The air was thick, no longer smelling of carbolic acid, but of earth. Of the grave. The stairs ended abruptly in a flooded corridor. The sanatorium's sub-basement.

The water was ankle-deep, black, and freezing. She used the dim light from her phone to navigate, wading through the putrid soup of disintegrated files and rusted debris. The basement was a maze, but Dr. Vollen's note had given her a destination. Diathermy machine. Sub-basement. She found the room at the end of the main artery. The double doors were thick steel, like a vault. They were ajar.

She pushed one open. The screech of the rusted hinges was deafening in the silence. This room was not flooded. It was, impossibly, dry. And it was not empty. In the center of the concrete chamber sat the device. It was not a simple diathermy machine. It was a monstrous hybrid of medicine and occultism. A heavy metal chair, like an electric chair, was its centerpiece, surrounded by a halo of what looked like copper coils and massive vacuum tubes. Wires snaked from this central array to four large, gramophone-like brass horns, one pointed at each corner of the room.

It was designed to broadcast something. A frequency. An anchor. "He tried to solidify his reality," Anna whispered, stepping into the room. Her phone light played over the machine's control panel—a bank of crude dials and heavy copper knife-switches. The air in the room began to thrum. It was a vibration so low she felt it in her teeth rather than heard it. Her phone light flickered. "No... no, not now..." The black, stagnant water in the corridor outside began to recede, pulling back from the doorway as if drawn by a sudden, silent tide.

The Residue was surging. This was its heart. The room's dimensions shimmered. The concrete walls became clean, white tile. The rust on the machine vanished, the copper coils gleaming. The single, bare bulb overhead flickered to life, buzzing with power. Anna was back in 1931. And she was not alone. "It is a sickness."

The voice was sharp, filled with cold, academic fury. Dr. Vollen stood by the machine. He was exactly as he'd been in the projector slide: tall, severe, his eyes burning with a terrible certainty. He looked at Anna, not as a woman, but as a bacterium under a microscope. "You..." he hissed. "The one from the library. The leak. "I'm real," Anna stammered, backing away. "This... what you did... you broke time." "I saved time!" Vollen shouted, gesturing to the machine. "I built an anchor! But it wasn't strong enough. You... your world... your rot... you keep pulling." He took a step toward her. "You pulled Hella apart. Her mind... it's trapped. Caught between your decay and my present. What you did to her eyes..." His face contorted in rage. "You are a ghost. And ghosts belong in the silence." He lunged.

Anna wasn't a doctor; she was a restorer. She was strong from hauling timber and stone. She met his charge, pushing him back. But Vollen was fueled by a fanatic's energy. He grabbed her, his fingers like steel claws, and began dragging her toward the chair. "I will send you back!" he screamed, his face inches from hers. "I will burn your echo out of my world!" He was trying to force her into the metal chair, to strap her down. Anna fought, kicking, twisting. Her hand flailed, searching for a weapon, for leverage. Her fingers found the control panel. They wrapped around the largest of the copper knife-switches. It was heavy, stiff with disuse even in this "clean" version of the past. "Seni ait olduğun yere göndereceğim!" he roared, trying to pin her arms. With a final, desperate surge of adrenaline, Anna screamed and threw her entire weight onto the switch.

There was a sound like the world's largest gong being struck. A deep, bone-jarring BOOOOOOM that was both sound and pure energy. Dr. Vollen froze. His grip on Anna slackened. He stared at her, his eyes wide with a sudden, terrible confusion. He no longer saw her. His gaze went right through her, as if she had turned to glass. He looked at the wall behind her, his expression turning to one of sheer, uncomprehending terror. The machine was working. But it wasn't anchoring his reality. It was erasing it. Chapter 6: The Carrier The BOOM was not a sound. It was a void.

It was a shockwave of absolute silence that pressurized the room, extinguishing all other senses. Dr. Vollen’s scream was stolen from his lungs before it could become sound. His furious, fanatical eyes went wide, not with pain, but with a profound, existential terror. His grip on Anna vanished. He stared at his own hands. They were no longer solid. They were becoming transparent, his fingers dissolving like ash in an updraft. The 1930s Residue was collapsing in on itself.

The clean, white-tiled walls of the experiment room shattered like sugar glass, revealing the black, weeping concrete of the present. The brass horns of the machine cracked, a patina of ancient rust blooming across their surface in an instant. All around them, the world was un-making. The figures of the patients and nurses in the corridors, the sound of the distant piano, the very light of 1931—it was all being sucked back into the machine, into the void that Anna had opened. Dr. Vollen looked at her one last time. He was a pillar of smoke, his face a silent, howling mask. Then the shockwave pulsed, and he was gone. The thrumming in Anna’s teeth stopped. The world snapped back into its one, true focus. She was on her knees, in the dark, dry sub-basement. The machine in the center of the room was cold, rusted, and utterly dead. The air smelled only of decay and stagnant water. It was over. The Residue was gone.

Slowly, Anna stood up. Her legs were shaking, but she felt... light. She put a hand to her temple. The pressure was gone. The familiar, agonizing throb that had been her constant companion since childhood, the precursor to every migraine, every slip... it was absent. She was cured. The silence in her head was as profound as the silence in the sanatorium. She did not run. She walked. She walked out of the experiment room, her boots splashing in the black, undisturbed water of the corridor. She climbed the rotting stairs. She walked through the grand, empty library, her footsteps echoing in a silence that was, for the first time, just silence. She got in her car. She turned the key. She did not look back as the gothic spires of Heilstatt dissolved into the oppressive green of the Black Forest in her rearview mirror.

Two Days Later. Berlin.

Her apartment was bright, sterile, and modern. White walls, hardwood floors, large windows overlooking the clean, orderly chaos of the city. It was the antithesis of Heilstatt.

Anna sat at her laptop, a cup of green tea steaming beside her. She was finishing her report. "...severe structural decay, compounded by pervasive water and mold damage. The foundation in the west wing is unstable. The building is a public hazard."

She paused, then typed the final line. "Recommend full and immediate demolition." She clicked 'Send' and leaned back, a profound sense of relief washing over her. It was done. A line drawn under the entire nightmare.

She stood, stretching. The muscles in her back were tight, but her head was perfectly, beautifully clear. She decided to get a glass of water. She walked from her home office into the hallway. At the end of the hall, a full-length mirror hung on the wall. She walked past it, catching her own movement, and stopped. Something was wrong. A flicker. A mis-timed... something.

She stepped back, planting herself directly in front of the mirror. The mirror reflected the hallway. It reflected the open doorway to her office behind her. It reflected the desk inside the office.

And it reflected her. Still sitting at the desk. Anna—the real Anna, standing cold in the hallway—stared at her own reflection, which had not gotten up. Her reflection was still sitting in the chair, its back to the mirror, facing the laptop.

"No..." Anna whispered, her throat closing. She raised her right hand, her real hand. In the mirror, her reflection did not move. It just sat. "This isn't real," she choked out. "The Residue is gone. I'm... I'm just tired." As if it heard her, the reflection at the desk stopped typing. Its shoulders went still. Slowly. Impossibly. The figure in the mirror—her own twin—began to turn in its chair. It turned, and turned, until it was facing the mirror. Until it was looking out of the mirror, directly at the real Anna, who stood frozen in the hallway.

The reflection smiled. It was not her smile. It was a gentle, melancholy smile, a smile of profound sadness, a smile that belonged to a 1930s photograph. Anna whimpered, a single tear of pure terror tracing a line down her cheek. The reflection watched her cry. It tilted its head, as if curious. Then, as Anna watched, paralyzed, the reflection's face began to change. The kind, sad eyes in the mirror dissolved. The skin shimmered, melted, and sealed over, flowing like warm wax.

The thing in the mirror—the thing wearing her face—was smooth. Perfect. Eyeless. She hadn't destroyed the Residue. She hadn't banished it. When she threw that switch, Dr. Vollen's machine had done exactly what he designed it to do. It had anchored the Residue. It had taken the strongest part of that 1930s madness—the suffering, the loss, the entity of Nurse Hella—and it had anchored it to the only other living consciousness in that room.

Anna stared at the eyeless woman in the mirror who wore her body. She hadn't left the Residue in Heilstatt. She had become its carrier.