Supernatural Oneshots | ✓

The Asylum {Winchesters}

Prompt inspiration: http://awritersnook.tumblr.com/post/136540434792/asylum-night

Prompt: Write about people being dared to lock themselves inside a haunted asylum for the night. Do your characters do it willingly? With hesitance? Or are they forced against their own will? Is it actually haunted? If so, by what? Or is it simply creepy at night? What sort of gear do they possess? EMF detectors and recorders? Flashlights? Or just the shirts on their backs? Describe how the night goes.

Summary/prompt change: You fall asleep in your bed. When you wake up, you're in an abandoned asylum with no memory of how you got there. You know only three things. One, you have five hours to escape. Two, there are others locked in this place with you. And three, the asylum is haunted by malevolent spirits. And you don't want to be in there when they come out.

Your head pounded when you woke up. You were lying on a cold, dirty floor. There were bars on the dirty window across the room from you, and the walls looked to be made of rusted metal. There was a wooden crate next to where your head had been lying, the wood dark with rot. A few old, fraying sections of rope were curled around the box, and there were speckles of a crusted stain around you. You didn't want to think too hard about what it could be.

You recognized your "prison" as an old storage room in the abandoned asylum. The Sacred Heart Institution for the Clinically Insane. A mouthful, of course, so it was just Sacred Heart Asylum for short.

Something tugged at your mind, a clock ticking down the seconds. Five. Five hours. You didn't know where the thought was coming from, and it slipped like water from your hands when you tried to focus on it. Sunlight spilled in from the barred window. Five hours must be the time you have to get out.

Five hours. Find the others. Dark. Don't want to be here. Run. Escape.

It wasn't a voice whispering it to you, it was your own mind. You didn't feel unusual, although goosebumps dotted your skin when you realized that you weren't in the nightclothes you'd fallen asleep in. Someone had changed you into jeans and a t-shirt that you didn't recognize, boots you had never worn, a jacket that you had never seen a day in your life.

But now was not the time to think about that. You had a timer ticking down on you, the sun inching towards the horizon by the second. If there was one thing everyone knew about Sacred Heart, it was that if you went in, you didn't at night. That was when the more horrendous ghosts liked to come out and play, and legend said that they didn't do the usual chain rattling.

You approached the door cautiously and reached out. The metal was cool beneath your fingertips, and you rested your hand flat on the smooth surface. You gave it a shove, and the hinges groaned in protest as it creaked open.

You stepped into the chilly corridor, tightening the jacket around you. It was cold, but the hall was empty. You had the vague awareness that you weren't alone, that something breathing and alive was not far away, but you weren't sure how or why you knew it.

Like the other kids, you'd spent time memorizing layouts of the old asylum for kicks. It was a popular game in school to see who could recreate the most accurate map of the asylum's three floors and basement without looking at the maps. It was a game you'd gotten good at fast.

You went to the dead end of the hall and looked out the grimy window. You could see the amorphous shape of what you assumed was a tree, and so you guessed that you were on at least the second floor. "All right," you sighed. "Let's see." The hallway was narrow, which implied that you were in a farther corner of the U-shaped building. Based on the bareness of the rooms, you'd have to be on the third floor, which was reserved for the real crazies and some of the lighter experimentation.