Ashes of the Mind

Chapter 2: The Awakening

Ethan awoke with a start, his heart racing and his body drenched in cold sweat. The sterile white walls of a hospital room came into focus as he blinked away the remnants of his nightmare. Or was it a memory?

"Dr. Reeves? Can you hear me?" A familiar voice cut through the fog in his mind.

Turning his head, Ethan saw Sarah sitting beside his bed, her face etched with concern. "Sarah? What happened? Where am I?"

Sarah leaned forward, relief evident in her eyes. "You're in the hospital, Dr. Reeves. There was an accident in the lab. You've been unconscious for three days."

Three days? Ethan's mind reeled as he tried to piece together his fragmented memories. The experiment, the machine, John Doe sitting up...

"The subject," Ethan said urgently, trying to sit up. "What happened to him?"

Sarah gently pushed him back onto the bed. "Easy, doctor. John Doe is dead. He never woke up. After the machine overloaded, you collapsed. I called for help, and they brought you here."

Ethan frowned, confusion and relief warring within him. "But I saw him... he was alive. He attacked us."

"That must have been a hallucination caused by the neural feedback," Sarah explained. "The machine created a temporary connection between your mind and the residual neural activity in the subject's brain. What you experienced wasn't real."

Wasn't real. The words should have been comforting, but something felt off. Ethan closed his eyes, trying to sort through the jumble of images and sensations in his mind. His memories, the killer's memories – they were all tangled together, making it hard to distinguish reality from fiction.

"I need to see the data from the experiment," Ethan said, opening his eyes and fixing Sarah with a determined gaze.

Sarah hesitated. "Dr. Reeves, you need to rest. The police have already been asking questions about our research. They're concerned about the ethical implications of memory extraction."

"The police?" Ethan felt a surge of panic. "What did you tell them?"

"Only what I had to," Sarah assured him. "I didn't mention the success we had in accessing the subject's memories. I thought... I thought it would be best if we reviewed the data ourselves first."

Ethan nodded, feeling a mix of gratitude and unease. "Thank you, Sarah. You did the right thing. We need to understand what happened before we go public with our findings."

As Sarah stood to leave, promising to return with his release papers, Ethan caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window. For a split second, he could have sworn he saw not his own face, but that of John Doe – the Midnight Butcher – grinning back at him.

Ethan shook his head, dismissing it as a trick of the light. But as he settled back into the hospital bed, a nagging doubt gnawed at the edges of his mind. What if the experiment had done more than just allow him to access the killer's memories? What if it had brought something back with him – something dark and hungry and very much alive?

As Ethan drifted off into an uneasy sleep, he failed to notice the wisp of smoke curling up from the pillow beneath his head, taking the shape of a grinning skull before dissipating into the sterile hospital air.