Patient File No. 7
It took me three days to understand what was happening. Or maybe three Mondays. I could no longer tell the difference.
At first, I thought I was fooling myself. That's what the mind does after hearing a disturbing story — you hear a sentence, and then your mind starts looking for evidence to confirm it, even if the evidence is manufactured by the mind itself. They taught us that in medical school. It's called confirmation bias.
With that justification, on the morning of... whatever day it was... I went to check the clinic's digital calendar. The date was correct. Tuesday.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
But when I looked at my own phone, it still said Monday.
Two devices, two different dates. One of them was right. The problem was, I didn't know which one.
I asked my colleague, Dr. Rostami, what day it was. He looked at me as if I'd asked something stupid and said Tuesday, then asked if I was feeling all right because — as he put it — "you look pale as chalk."
I didn't say anything. I just said I hadn't slept.
That night, instead of going home, I stayed at the office and started searching for the six previous patients he had mentioned. If Patient No. 7 was real — or even if the story he told had some root in reality — there had to be a trace of those six previous psychiatrists.
In the clinic's file system, I found five names. Not six. Five doctors who, over the past three years, had worked with "Unknown Patient, internal code 7." Each of them, after a few sessions, had left a similar note at the end of the file, before it was transferred to the next doctor:
"Patient requires more specialized referral. I am no longer able to continue treatment."
No further explanation. No final diagnosis. Just that single sentence, repeated five times, with five different signatures.
I couldn't find the sixth name anywhere. But I knew — the way a person sometimes "knows" things without being able to explain how — that the sixth one was my own predecessor. The one who had handed the files over to me and then, according to what I'd been told, abruptly resigned from the clinic and left. Somewhere no one knew exactly where.
I called his phone. Three times. All three times, a recorded voice said the number was unavailable.
At our next session, the moment he walked in, he said: "You found all six of them. Or you tried to."
I said nothing, but I'm sure my face had already answered.
"Five in the system, right?" he said, and for the first time his tone was more exhausted than before, as if he were carrying a weight on his shoulders that grew heavier each time. "The sixth — your predecessor — erased his name from the system. Before he left. He knew what had happened to him. He didn't want anyone looking for him and suffering the same fate."
I asked what fate.
"He went to find that street too. Like the others. But unlike the others, he took something with him — a photograph, a piece of evidence, something he thought could prove whether I was telling the truth or lying. Mr. Monday didn't like that."
"Why?"
"Because the main rule is this, Doctor: nothing is allowed to leave that street except the story. Only the story is permitted to pass through. Anything else — a photo, an object, even a memory that's too vivid — angers him. And when he gets angry..."
I waited.
"He rewinds time, but this time not to save. To retrieve what was taken. And anyone in the way..."
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
I asked: "How do you know all these details? If you really escaped, how do you know what happened to my predecessor?"
He looked at me, and for a moment — just a moment — something in his face shifted. Not fear, not sorrow. Something like pity.
"Because part of me is still there, Doctor. I told you. I didn't fully escape. One piece of me got out, just to tell the story. The rest of me is still on that street, starting Monday over again, for the hundredth time, the thousandth time — I don't know. That version of me still sees things. And sometimes, when I get very close to finishing the story... those visions leak through. Into my mind. Into your dreams."
I clenched my fist on the desk. "Are you saying my mind is now connected to a... to another version of you?"
"I'm saying you're no longer just a listener," he said, quietly, almost gently, in a way that was more terrifying than any scream. "You're becoming part of the door."
That night, for the first time, I dreamed — or thought I dreamed — that I was standing at the entrance of that street. The bakery, the smell of fresh bread, three swings in the park moving without wind.
And at the end of the street, beneath a flickering streetlight, a man was standing, his back to me.
He slowly turned.
I woke up before I could see his face.
My phone read 7:22.
Monday morning.
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To be continued in Chapter Four…