Patient File No. 7
I didn't go to the office that day. I called in sick, though this time it wasn't even a lie.
I sat down at my laptop, and with hands still trembling, I began searching — not for Mr. Monday, because I knew I'd find nothing, but for what he had mentioned: "the thirteenth family."
I didn't know the name of the street. But I had details — an old bakery, a small park with three swings, brick houses. I started searching maps of the city's old neighborhoods, looking for a place that matched the description.
After hours, I found a name: Golestan Alley, in an old part of the city that had been almost completely evacuated and redeveloped years ago. Archival photos showed exactly what I had seen in my dreams — the same bakery, the same park.
And then, I found an old news item. A small headline, from a local newspaper, dated twenty-two years ago:
"Family of four disappears from Golestan Alley; police have no leads."
The family's name was Sadeghi. Father, mother, and two children — a ten-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl.
A five-year-old girl.
My hand froze on the keyboard.
There was a photo of the family in the article — low quality, scanned from an old newspaper, but clear enough. The mother and daughter, exactly the ones I had seen in my dream. The same clothes. The same swing.
They weren't the thirteenth family. They were the first family — or perhaps, the only family that had ever really existed, and all those repeating versions I had seen were just endless repetitions of that one real day, over and over, each slightly different.
Twenty-two years. The number on my clock every day: 7:22.
I didn't know if it was a coincidence. I no longer believed anything was a coincidence.
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That night, instead of waiting for sleep, I went to find Patient No. 7 — not at the office, but at the address listed in his file as his temporary residence: a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the city.
When I knocked, it took him a while to answer. When the door finally opened, his condition was alarmingly bad — sunken eyes, wrinkled clothes, as if he hadn't slept in days.
"You shouldn't be here," he said immediately, his voice hoarse.
"I found it," I said, without preamble. "The Sadeghi family. Golestan Alley. Twenty-two years ago."
The color drained from his face — more than I thought possible for someone already as pale as he was.
"Why did you do that?" he whispered.
"Because I wanted to understand what I'm dealing with. And now I want to know — were you part of that family? The son? Or... or you're not a patient at all. You're a witness."
He looked at me for a long time, motionless. Then, slowly, he opened the door fully and let me in.
His room was in chaos — papers everywhere, notes scattered across the walls, some of them just that one sentence repeated: He smiles when I cry.
"I'm not the Sadeghi boy," he said finally, sitting on the edge of the bed, head down. "I've never told anyone my name because I no longer have a name that truly belongs to me. I... I was one of the neighbors on that street. A child, ten years old, the same year the Sadeghi family disappeared."
"What did you see?"
He drew a deep breath and covered his face with his hands. "I saw them living the same day over and over, night after night. At first I thought I was dreaming. Then I realized only I could see it — because only I, of all the children on that street, had stayed awake that night and watched from the window."
"And then what happened?"
"One day, while I was watching, he saw me." His voice cracked. "He realized I could see him. And from then on, I couldn't escape. For twenty-two years, every so often, he shows me. New experiments. New families trapped on that same street — not just the Sadeghis. The Sadeghis were only the first."
"How many?" I asked, my voice barely coming out. "How many families so far?"
He looked at me, and in his eyes, I saw a number he didn't want to say.
"More than I can count," he said at last. "Because I've seen some of them over and over, in different versions. I no longer know where one family ends and the next begins."
At that exact moment, the light in the room flickered.
We both froze.
"No," he whispered, more to himself than to me. "No, no, no, not tonight."
The light went out.
In the darkness, I heard breathing — not mine, not his. A sound that came from every corner of the room at once.
Then, a voice whispered in my ear, so close that I felt its breath — if it was breath — on my skin:
"I see you two are talking. That's not good, Doctor. That's not good at all."
The light came back on.
Patient No. 7 was on the floor, curled up, hands pressed over his ears, screaming — a scream I hadn't thought a human being could produce until that moment.
I rushed toward him, but before I could touch him, his body shuddered — not a shudder of fear, but something else, something that in that single second I understood was happening but couldn't stop.
His skin, for a moment, became translucent — not disappearing, but transparent, like an image losing resolution — and beneath it, for that one second, I could see something else: himself, but younger, ten years old, standing by a window on an old street, terrified, watching a scene no child should ever see.
Then everything returned to normal. He was lying on the floor, unconscious, breathing, but motionless.
With trembling hands, I called for an ambulance.
While I waited, my eyes fell on the wall.
In that same soot or ash, a new sentence had been written, the letters still appearing to form, like ink freshly drawn onto paper:
"Doctor, now it's your turn to learn."
I looked behind me.
The room was empty.
Only the smell of fresh bread, growing fainter and fainter, until nothing remained but silence and the sound of the ambulance siren approaching from the distance.
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To be continued in Chapter Nine...