One patient says to the other, “nah-uh, I’m out, y’all are gonna give me nightmares, shit.”

The one patient leaves the table, taking her pillow with her.

“Well..” says a third, a word to disturb the dead air.

“Damn,” says the other patient, looking down, “I’m not trying to scare anybody. It’s a true story though, I wouldn’t-”

“She’ll be alright, bro,” says a fourth, waving off the one, “go ahead.”

“Yeah, uh, so..” the other begins, rubbing an eye, “you gotta remember now, this happened three times and several people besides me have seen it, so, you know, no disrespect, you believe what you want. All I ask is, don’t tell me something I saw three times, with my own eyes, with witnesses – didn’t happen. All I ask.”

“Ain’t nobody gonna say shit,” the fourth assures him, “go on, bro.”

The other patient takes a deep breath.

“I’ve got a room in my house- now remember, my parents bought this house after I’d graduated and moved out, it passed to me three years ago – long story short, we didn’t get moved into the house until last summer. The day before we move in, me and my brother are there in the basement taking measurements for a pool table.

“Our basement has a bathroom and there’s a long hallway to it from the game room. Just before the bathroom, on the left, there’s a towel closet with shelves and all. On the right, there’s this.. we’ve never figured out what its purpose was, my parents didn’t build the house or finish the basement and they never said a word about it. But it’s a nook, eighteen inches by eighteen inches, except the threshold is only eight inches wide.”

“The hell?” the third patient blurts out.

“I-,” the other patient stops, shaking his head, chuckling, “damned if I know, man. Y’all got ideas, you tell me in a minute, ’cause we got nothin’. Anyways, me and my brother are down there talking, and he says ‘Left the light on’ and walks down the hall. He’s down there for a few seconds and then comes back to the end of the hallway with this fucked up look on his face and waves me over.

“I walk down there and he’s right, the light in that little nook is on. My brother goes ‘Flip the light off’ and I step closer and look in, and there is no fucking light bulb, no switch, no lamp, no fixture, there’s no outlet, no nothing. And I’m saying, every inch of it from the ceiling to the floor was lit up just like this room. All the other lights in that hallway were off and later, when this happened again, we turned every switch in that basement off and on and off again – nothing.”

“Bro,” says the fourth, eyes narrow, jaw slack, “what the fuck?”

“I look at my brother, and we’re both kind of speechless. No idea what the hell we’re looking at. So after a minute of us standing there gawking at it, I went to go get my wife from upstairs. She can’t hear me yelling, so I go to the top of the stairs, she finally gets to the basement door and as we’re coming back down, I hear ‘Joshua’ and my brother’s back at this end of the hall, and as soon as I looked at him I knew, the light went out. The way he said my name and the look on his face, my brother don’t get like that. I mean, fuckin’ spooked. And I was, too.”

“No shit, bro,” the fourth patient croaked, engrossed.

“Anyways, I went down there and sure enough, the little nook was dark like it was supposed to be. The whole hallway was totally dark.”

“What’d your wife say?”

“pfft – I almost didn’t even tell her,” the other patient says, crossing his arms, “I told her straight up, ‘you won’t believe me, ’cause you missed it.’ But she took one look at my brother and she knew we weren’t bullshitting her. But she found out for herself anyway, she was down there alone a couple months later, I was upstairs in the living room and she came running up the stairs yelling ‘Josh! Josh! JOSHUA!’ She scared me worse than the light did.”

“Was it still on when you got down there?”

“Hell yeah,” the other patient says, “and she swears up and down that when it went out later on, it like, flickered once. My brother didn’t see it do that, so I don’t know, but-”

“You didn’t see it go out?”

“Nope. I saw it come on once. That was the third time it happened and there was a bunch of us down there for that, but nobody saw it go off that night. I just happened to be walking down to that bathroom, and I was just looking straight ahead at the bathroom door when that nook just.. lit up, just like somebody had flipped a light switch.”

“Did it scare you?”

“Nah,” the other patient says, “I mean, I’d had a few drinks and it wasn’t like.. I mean, there’s nothing scary or weird about it until you remember.. there’s not no fucking light bulb in there. It just looks like.. somebody turned the light on. There just isn’t any light to turn on. Hell, I don’t know.”

“Hey bro,” the fourth patient says.

The table turns.

“Bull. Shit.”