My name is Sam, and I'm an orderly at a private psychiatric clinic called "New Dawn." We specialize in quiet patients. No straitjackets, no screaming — just padded walls, green grass in the courtyard, and 24/7 pink noise from hidden speakers. It's supposed to be calming.
But I first heard real silence when they sent me to Building B.
Someone had scratched a child's handwriting on the entrance sign: "One world. One road." I didn't think much of it then.
Building B housed the ones who'd undergone "full discharge." In our slang, that meant: their vocal cords had been removed. Permanently. Officially, so they wouldn't hurt themselves during a breakdown. Unofficially… you won't believe this, but it turned out to be more humane than the alternative.
Room 7 was at the very end of the hall. A man, about forty, lived there. His file said: "Unidentified, found in an abandoned amusement park. Diagnosis: congenital absence of any speech apparatus, combined with an unrelenting urge to scream." He banged his head against the wall twenty-two hours a day. When seismographs in the neighboring town picked it up, they thought someone was running a jackhammer.
"It doesn't hurt him," the head nurse explained, adjusting her green glasses. "What hurts him is that he can't make a sound. Not one. Understand?"
I walked into Room 7 for the first time on a Wednesday.
He lay on the bed, strapped down with soft restraints. His mouth was just a smooth strip of skin — no lips, no opening. But his eyes… his eyes looked like there was a huge, never-stopping engine running inside them. I leaned in to change his IV, and suddenly he grabbed my wrist.
He couldn't speak. But I heard his voice inside my head. A clear, terrifying child's voice:
"Did you see the road? The yellow one?"
I jerked back. The restraints creaked.
"That's a hallucination," the head nurse said when I ran out into the hall. "He has the ability to project his thoughts onto whoever's closest. We call it 'false scream.' No one ever gets used to it."
The next night I was on my own. Building B hummed with silence. I went to check Room 7, but the door was open and the bed was empty. The restraints hung like shed snakeskin.
I found him in the basement. Turns out there was a whole floor under Building B that wasn't on any plan. A long corridor made of soft, spongy plastic that gave way under your feet like… like rotten grass. The walls were painted bright, garish yellow. And standing in the middle of that yellow hallway was the patient.
He was smiling. He had a mouth now. Someone — or something — had slit his face from ear to ear. And from that mouth, no blood poured. Instead, light poured out. Green, pulsing light, like a neon sign.
"You found us, Sam," he said, using my own voice. "Everyone who can't scream ends up here. And no one leaves."
I tried to run, but my feet sank into the yellow floor. He came closer and placed a warm, rough palm against my throat.
"You have a good mouth," he said. "But you'll never use it. Want to know why?"
I shook my head frantically. And he whispered something I'll never forget:
"Because we're in Oz, kid. Each of us has a heart, a brain, and courage. But none of us has a mouth. And we'll scream inside — forever. Welcome to the Emerald City."
When I woke up, I was lying in Room 7. In his spot. The restraints were already fastened. The head nurse in her green glasses adjusted my pillow and said:
"Don't worry. Screaming without a mouth is perfectly normal. We're all like that here."
She took out a pair of small silver shoes and placed them at the foot of my bed.
"Just don't try to click your heels together. There's no place like home anymore."