Little Nightmares: Lost in Sight

👁#7: Cloth and the Doctor

Cloth was a lonely child, and a sickly one too.

The doctor had told him that he had become sick with every kind of sickness, and that to be cured, he must call his hospital bed his new home. And despite the stink of bodies, mildew, and disinfectant that made his poor little brain cramp in distress, he agreed. After all, he didn't want to die. He hadn't even become worthy of being alive yet. He knew full well just how rock-headed he was. His brother even used to joke that he could hear them rattle in his skull when he pushed him to the concrete.

How pathetic, that he didn't even have the strength to stand on his own small feet, or tell the doctor to leave him alone.

How pathetic that he was so small, and happened to be a child. Children were pests, and he was only taking up this doctor's time. Though strangely enough, the head doctor of the dark and greasy hospital seemed to hold a certain interest in him, one that made him feel like he was important but also endangered. It was a strange feeling that he somehow craved. Was that weird? Probably. He wouldn't know for sure because he had never met any other children other than his brother and the ones that obediently slept in the metal drawers.

This doctor, however, wore no kind of expression upon its smooth face. He wasn't even sure it had a face at all because there was no such twitch of the muscle or flutter of the eyelids to give that sort of impression. Yet the hands continued working as they held a hammer in one and his dislocated leg in the other. The fingers moved in a discomforting way, almost bending backward like they were double-jointed or nearly dislocated, like his leg that he had ruined so carelessly by attempting to run away during one of Head Doctor's tests.

His expressionless doctor spoke not as it raised the hammer and brought it down upon his knee. He screamed in pain as it hit him with an unexpected mixture of numbing and searing agony. It pulsed through his body like heat waves, and he lost control for a few minutes. The doctor observed with the hammer held half a foot above him before rearing up again. This time it hit from another angle, inflicting the same agony but with a sickening POP. Almost like that first hit was more for entertainment than as a treatment. 

But Cloth didn't entertain that thought any longer. Head Doctor said that negative thoughts would make him sicker, and could even kill him. But he wouldn't think of that either, or it may just come true. Thinking negative-free was very difficult, he concluded. He just had to grin and bear it, except with a poker face. A grin would send him to the ward for the mental, most likely. 

With a bruised but fixed leg, allowed a tiny bit of relaxation to envelope himself as he lay on the sticky operating table that clung to his sweating skin. The doctor turned away from him and approached a small metal table with a metal tray on top. There was a jumble of various tools in it, even a hatchet. He was familiar with them and understood that they existed to make him better, but he shivered at the sight of them nonetheless. The doctor paused in front of them and looked up from them while facing away from him. 

"You are a disgusting little thing. Do you understand that?"

Cloth felt his tiny little heart skip a beat before nodding his head and quickly realizing that the doctor was looking away and replying with a quiet voice. "Yes."

The doctor paused for a moment, in thought as it inspected the tools. "You are stubborn. You struggle too much. You will never be fixed with that kind of behavior."

"Yes... sir..." Cloth wanted to cry. But he knew it was true. He couldn't be fixed. He almost didn't want to.

Was that weird? After all, the other kids he saw here were far more obedient. He never heard them scream or cry. Never saw them rattle their drawers. They never struggled as he did.