Paint It Red

Chapter Two: Where are we?

We ran around the town for what felt like hours, never even seeing a familiar building or knowing where we were going.

I just followed Bethany hoping that one of these rickety old broken-down buildings would be the one she was looking for.

When we finally stopped the building, she had found seemed to be the biggest and scariest in town. It was as tall as the double story inn, but a building or so longer.

All its windows had been broken, all the plants in front were dead, the white paint had gone brown or torn off, and above the broken door hung a sign that read, "Hospital" in worn out and broken letters.

I question if this could really be the place Bethany was looking for since it looked like it had closed years ago.

I walked up to Bethany who stood mere feet away from a broken step and asked her,

"Is this the place you were looking for?"

A tear poked at the tip of her eye, and slowly rolled down her face as she nodded yes. I then asked her when the last time she visited was.

Her voice trembled as she said,

"When you guys were five we took you to visit so that she could see you, but we haven't been back since then cause it pained dad to see her like that."

I had problems remembering what my mother (or should I say Bethany's mother) was like. But her telling us that it had been around five years since we had come to this town answered why we didn't remember it.

Then a spark went off in my head making me think to ask which direction we headed to get to town, cause if we went out the back door we would have passed the sheep pen and found a small town in the center of the woods that had no walls and was where most of the woods dwelling people worked or lived. 

But if we had gone out the front which I'm guessing we did, we would have had to travel a half an hour to find a town causing far more travel then needed to find the closest town. Clearly there was more going on than what father showed. 

I figured that we would have left, now that Bethany knew the truth, but she seemed compelled to go further.

She placed her hand upon the warped railing running a finger up the rounded design. She took a step upon the broken and splintered wooden step that creaked under her light weight almost jumping at the sound.

Yet, instead of retreating she took another step forward going even further into the building that was the stuff of nightmares.

I could have left and went back to the inn, but by this point we were way past that point, because my curiosity had the better of me, and in truth I wanted to know why a crowed town didn't make use of such a building.

As we moved further and further inside the hospital the question was quickly answered. Inside the hospital was tipped over beds with tattered sheets from rats nibbling at them over time, and tones of broken glass from medication bottles.

The walls that once were a nice pearl white now looked more like a dirty grey, the paint tore off at the touch and seemed not to have been touched in decades. 

Spider webs hung all over the place and were filled with so much dust, that they no longer caught anything, which was an inconvenience since flies, nates, and other bugs swarmed around our heads. 

As we proceeded even further, we constantly watched our step, trying not to step on the sharp shards of glass or the never-ending supply of rat fecal matter.

We remained silent and listened to the soft scurrying sounds of the rats running across the broken floors of the condemned building, and tried to hear if anybody else snuck into the building just as we did.