Lenny Killer
The Basil Sanitarium loomed on the hilltop, its skeletal silhouette etched against the moody sky. It was a place of disrepair and forgotten stories, stripped of its purpose and weather-beaten by the unrelenting winds that howled through the valley below.
What remained was a crumbling relic, with long, semicircular corridors and stony stairs that creaked under the weight of time. The walls, once a sterile white, were now stained with the marks of decay, interrupted occasionally by the bold colors of graffiti that seemed to whisper the secrets the walls could no longer contain.
Its narrow, arched windows, scattered throughout the façadelike vacant eyes, stared blankly into the void, offering glimpses of empty rooms and debris-littered floors.
Each pane of broken glass framed a different view of neglect, a testament to the years of abandonment and disrepair.
The winds swept through these empty spaces, carrying with them the distant echoes of a past long buried beneath the layers of grime and dust.
The sanitarium had been many things over the decades: a place of healing, a refuge for the troubled, a fortress of confinement for those society deemed unfit. But now, all that remained were the bones of its structure and the faintest trace of the lives that had once passed through its doors. Whispers of madness and despair seemed to linger in the air, coiling around the curvy and shadowy corridors.
At the heart of the building was the central hall, a vast, cavernous space that had once been the hub of activity. Now, it was a hollow shell, its high ceilings echoing with the soft sigh of the wind that crept through the broken windows. The floor was littered with remnants of its past.
But amidst the desolation and ruin, there was one thing that stood out, a name scrawled in scratchy letters across the frame of one of the narrow windows overlooking the inner courtyard: Lenny Killer.
The letters were jagged, almost violent, as if carved in haste or rage. They loomed over the yard, filling the space with a sense of foreboding that was impossible to ignore.
No one knew who Lenny was, or what had driven him to mark the walls of the sanitarium with his name.
Some said he had been a patient, a man driven mad by the treatment he had received within these very walls. Others whispered that he had been a doctor who had lost himself in the dark aisles of his own mind.
But there were those who spoke in hushed tones of something more sinister, a killer who had haunted the sanitarium in its final days, leaving behind a trail of blood and terror.
The locals shunned the place, speaking of it only in fearful whispers. The brave few who had ventured inside spoke of a presence, something unseen but undeniably there. Footsteps that echoed through the empty halls, shadows that flickered at the edge of vision, and always, the sense of being watched. They said that if you stood in the central hall long enough, staring at the name on the wall, you would feel it. The heavy, suffocating weight of a gaze that was not your own.
Images and story by Sandro Fabbrini - Copyright 2024