River quickly investigated the table. There were no drawers or anywhere to hide something, so he redirected his attention towards the papers.
“Help me skim them. Tell me if something sticks out.”
“Yes…”
What exactly the documents would be about was obvious. Rhythm and Plaster had to steel themselves, but their faces twisted quickly.
River grabbed the most recent folder and started looking through it.
The black and white photos weren’t perfect, but they were clear enough for things to be visible.
In the background, Rhythm gagged. River sat down on the chair to relax and thoughtfully changed the pages.
Lobotomy on 43-year-old female patient with depression. Eye damaged. Patient has become unresponsive. Patient was removed.
Ice-treatment on 23-year-old male patient with seizures. Permanent restraints needed. Edit: Accidental necrosis on all four limbs. Amputation performed. Edit: Patient has died.
Insulin therapy on 50-year-old male patient with depression. Patient has become comatose. Edit: Patient has died.
The dry, simple descriptions were all accompanied by images. Before, during and after the treatment. With every treatment that had been done, the patient in the picture would become less and less human. With all hope gone, with a body and mind completely broken, sometimes half sawed into pieces and barely kept upright by restraints – no one up here was treated as a living being.
“Death is freedom”, River muttered to himself. His eyes stayed calm even at the sight of the images.
He knew that his reaction should have been like Rhythm and Plaster, who were barely keeping themselves from throwing up. It wasn’t normal to be so relaxed when confronted with what he was seeing, but…
Caring was such an exhausting thing to do.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
“Here’s something”, one of the guys called after an unknown amount of time had passed.
Elnfg vlgfmais kfca bnfg ab tlr rlvf, ajxlcu jkjs atf obivfg jcv delmxis gfjvlcu atgbeut atf qjufr.
Ktlr bcf ujatfgfv jii jvwlclragjalnf lcobgwjalbc.
C rtloa qijc, j cbaf bo ktlmt qjalfcar tjv yffc jvwlaafv jcv ktfc atfs vlfv, jr kfii jr j vfajlifv geifrfa obg fnfgsbcf ktb kbgxfv eq tfgf.
The body – or corpse – chute wasn’t directly mentioned, but there were many places that hinted at it existing. One of the most obvious were the rules for the security guards, who were to be called when a patient was found dead to dispose of it discreetly.
So the entry to the chute was probably…
“Inside the security room, huh? Makes sense.”
But how could they get into there… There was either someone inside or it was locked. The shift plan was nice enough to inform you when there was only one patrolling guard and no one inside the office, so they knew when they could enter.
“Search for a spare key for the security office. We need it.”
Finding the key proved to be considerably less complicated than they feared. There was a box on one of the shelves – a bit hard to see due to the angle, but not hidden away or anything. There was no one who could come into this room who shouldn’t be here, so they didn’t feel the need to.
River exhaled in relief when he got the ring of keys.
There were several instances that allowed you to enter the room, so all they had to do was wait for the right timing.
The security office on the third floor was kept simple, but there was a strong and uncomfortable stench like everywhere else. Nothing could save the fact that this was an enclosed room, rarely aired out, where corpses were transported out of.
With only one place for the chute to be, River quickly found the keyhole and pulled open the thin, wooden door that kept the secret path hidden.
A tight path, pitch-black and damp with mold welcomed him.
Rhythm and Plaster took two well-deserved steps back, faces distorted.
This wasn’t a place for the claustrophobic or meek. River covered his face for a while to steady himself.
“Stay up here and keep an eye on the guards. I want to know if the shifts are correct.” River’s muffled order came from behind his hands. He rubbed his cheeks, gray eyes moving through the room to find a source of light.
A little lantern.
Hard to say if it wouldn’t make everything creepier.
The tiny light was hardly comforting, but there wasn’t much space for it to light up anyway. River felt the goosebumps wander over his body when he shut the door to the path.
He couldn’t see far, so he slowly inched forward, one hand always on the right wall and eyes on the floor to avoid falling down somewhere. The space was so narrow that both of his shoulders almost touched the walls on each side, and the stale air made it hard to breathe.
He kept his breathing shallow.
The actual chute – a sudden abyss in the ground – was only a couple of steps away. It was barely big enough for a body, so River took a long step to cross over it and continued to follow the path.
It went around the corner, tiny specks of light shining here and there.
Slowly, warily, River leaned closer to one of the specks. His eyes blinked to adjust to the sudden change in lighting and focus…
…as he looked through a peephole right into a patient’s room.
“Disgusting.”
River mouthed the word rather than saying it out loud and recoiled with distaste. Either this was used for checking whether the patients were alive without entering, or someone had a thing for patients when they thought they were unobserved.
He hoped it was the former, but it probably wasn’t just that.
Turning around in the narrow path was uncomfortable, but River made his way back to the chute without watching any longer.
He crouched in front of the hole and held the lantern over it. The light wasn’t enough to show all of the almost vertically falling hole.
It had a bit of an angle, but hardly.
“If I break my legs, they’ll be healed outside of the game”, River whispered to himself. The corpse chute was drawing in his eyes with its darkness, deep and foreboding. “And if I die, I’ll be revived. If I get stuck… I should be thrown back to the safe-room once this round is over.”
A pause.
“Although dying would be better.”
He did not want to be stuck in the chute, unable to move or breathe or see anything for hours. It would be like lying in a coffin, waiting for death to finally come to you.
Not allowing his brain to sink deeper into the image, River stood up, inhaled, and stepped forward.
The chute wasn’t nice on his body.
He felt the walls scrape over his clothes where he bumped into the walls, but the small slope helped slow his fall a bit.
At the end of what felt like an eternal fall was a soft landing, avoiding any loud sounds that the corpses might make upon their impact with the floor.
But it sure wasn’t a nice pillow or anything similar that caught his fall.
The easterner had held out well so far, but even he had to keep himself from throwing up at his landing. The lantern helped illuminate what had once been patient garbs – now so shredded and hardened with fluids that they were unusable and had been gathered to soften the corpses’ landings.
His fall caused dust to whirl up, for a moment making him feel as if he himself had turned into a stinking, rotting corpse.
To take his mind off the state he was in, River hurried to get a picture of where he was.
Right in front of him was a wheelbarrow to transport the bodies. A bit further down the narrow path was the soft lighting of moonshine trickling through the cracks of a door towards the graveyard.
For a moment he wondered how people entered this part of the path, but then he realized that there was another shine of a door to the exact opposite side – once more leading into a security room.
Someone threw a corpse down from upstairs and the guards down here would wheel them out.
Well planned.
“…”
Corpse scent perfume.
Perfect for a date in a horror game XD.
Thank you this this chapter this week too~
Corse scent perfume! Would make you feel death at first sight!
Irresistible to male ghosts (BL special) XD
The BL special made me laugh. (๑˃́ꇴ˂̀) But are you thinking what I’m thinking? [wiggles_eyebrows]
No, make me dream XD?