The Lin Asylum sat at the far edge of the city, past the river where the water turned black from factory runoff and beyond the rows of decaying warehouses no one dared to buy. Once, it had been a grand psychiatric hospital, built in the late 1800s with vaulted ceilings, wide halls, and sunlit courtyards meant to heal the mind through air and light. But time and budget cuts had transformed it into a place where plaster peeled like dead skin and the smell of mildew clung to every corridor.
Dr. Theodore Lowell had worked there for nine years. He told himself it was noble work caring for those society had abandoned but in truth, he had long stopped believing any of his patients could be cured. The asylum was not a place of healing. It was a storage facility for the incurable.
Among those residents was a man the records identified as Edgar Hale. Mid forties, tall, lean, with sharp features and dark hair streaked with gray. He was polite, articulate, and disturbingly calm. Unlike the others who screamed, muttered, or stared vacantly, Edgar carried himself as though the asylum was an inconvenience, a temporary delay in his life’s plans. From the first interview, Lowell noticed something odd.
“You do understand why you’re here?”
The doctor had asked.
“I understand why you think I’m here,”
Edgar had replied with a faint smile.
“But I’m not insane. I’m a magician. Unfortunately, my last trick… went wrong. And I woke up here.”
Lowell made a note in his file: grandiose delusion—fantastical identity.
Every night during rounds, as Lowell or the night staff passed his cell, Edgar would lean close to the bars and whisper,
“Watch closely, Doctor. Tonight, I disappear.”
The first few times, Lowell ignored it. Many patients made strange proclamations—doomsday predictions, divine visions, declarations of immortality. But Edgar’s delivery was different. He didn’t shout. He didn’t plead. He said it like a fact.
The nurses began to joke about it.
“Better keep an eye on him,”
One would say, smirking.
“He might vanish into thin air.”
Lowell humored the joke but found himself lingering by Edgar’s cell longer than necessary, scanning the bare bed, the metal sink, the peeling walls. Nothing in the cell could aid an escape. No sharp edges. No loose floorboards. The bars were set deep into the concrete.
Then came the morning that changed everything. It was a Tuesday. Cold, rain drumming steadily against the high windows. Lowell arrived to find a cluster of staff outside Cell 12. A guard stepped aside, pale-faced. Edgar’s bed was neatly made. The sink was dry. The barred door was still locked. But the cell was empty.
The search was immediate and thorough. Every hallway, storage room, and maintenance tunnel was checked. The security system showed no footage of him leaving not even approaching the cell door.
The only thing left behind was a playing card lying in the center of the floor. The Joker. Lowell picked it up. The card felt warm, almost as if it had been sitting in someone’s hand moments ago.
The official report listed it as an “unexplained disappearance.” The administration assumed an error—somehow a guard had forgotten to log the release, or paperwork had been falsified. The police were called but left after a day of fruitless searching.
The asylum moved on. Lowell did not. A week later, a postcard arrived at his office. The front was a black-and-white photograph of a Victorian theater stage—heavy curtains drawn back, spotlights shining on an empty platform. On the back, in neat handwriting:
“You never believed, but the greatest trick was making you think I was ever here.
There was no signature, only a small, ink-drawn smiley face. Lowell’s hands shook as he turned the card over. The postmark was smudged, the location unreadable. He left his office immediately, walking briskly to the archives room. He pulled Edgar’s file from the shelf. But when he flipped it open, the pages were blank. Not missing—blank. The forms were there, the official stamps in place, but every line where a name, date, or diagnosis should have been was empty.
Confused, he went to the central patient registry. The bound ledger held records of every person ever admitted to Lin Asylum. He searched carefully through the years. No Edgar Hale. Not even a misfiled entry. It was as if the man had never been there at all.
The days that followed were not kind to Lowell’s mind. He began to dream of velvet curtains parting in the dark, of gloved hands shuffling cards with impossible speed. In the dreams, Edgar always stood center stage, smiling faintly.
“You’re not the audience, Doctor,”
He would say.
“You’re part of the act.”
Lowell woke each morning with the metallic taste of fear in his mouth. He began to notice strange things in the asylum—flickers of movement at the corner of his vision, shadows stretching in ways they shouldn’t.
One night, during late rounds, he paused by the empty Cell 12. The Joker card was gone. He had taken it to his office but something else lay on the floor now. Another playing card. The Ace of Spades. When he bent to pick it up, he heard a whisper close to his ear, though the hallway was empty:
“Tonight, Doctor. Tonight, you disappear.”
By the time anyone realized Dr. Lowell was missing, all that remained in his office was a deck of cards, neatly arranged on his desk, missing two: the Joker and the Ace of Spades. The file room still had no record of Edgar Hale. And in the empty Cell 12, on the freshly made bed, lay a postcard. The photograph showed a theater again. But this time, Dr. Lowell was standing on the stage.
