Your Scars are My Scars (Eddie Gluskin fanfiction) [UNDER CONSTRUCTION]

4.

Author's note at the end of the chapter! 

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Stale. That was the only word Paige could think of to describe the air. Moldy and stale, as if the room hadn't been untouched for years. Paige covered her mouth to muffle the cough clawing at her throat. Every part of her body ached, each muscle screaming for just a moment's rest. This room seems abandoned enough, I could take a few to breathe. Paige thought bitterly. She took a minute to sit on the floor, her entire body stinging with pain and exhaustion.

"This place is a never-ending maze," Paige hissed to herself while smacking her whole body to stay awake. "There's no possible way I could find my way out of here."

Paige did not want to stay on the ground for another moment, for she would collapse in exhaustion if she stayed longer. She pushed herself up, feeling every bone and muscle protest but she knew she was a sitting duck if she stayed. Looking back moments ago, Paige just knew there was another patient here, lurking in the shadows, having Dennis bring them down another victim. She just had a horrible feeling that it was one of her many patients. Paige combed through her mental notes, wondering which patient it could be to incite so much fear, they had other people supply victims for it.

Paige's thoughts were cut short when the smell of rotting flesh hit her face. The mix of the copper with sewage filled the air, burning into Paige's nostrils. She looked ahead and saw white-clothed barriers painted with splatters of red. Her knees buckled at the repugnant stench, she held her stomach as she gagged. She gagged and gagged until nothing but bile came out. She haphazardly walked through the white barriers, dizzy from losing what little she had left in her stomach. It wasn't until Paige walked in front of the godforsaken scene did it shocked her awake.

It was a cruel mockery of what birth is supposed to look like. There laid a man, his chest sliced open and stuffed with garbage and stitched back together messily. It was meant to look like breasts. His legs opened and tied, with his entire crotch decimated, ripped open just enough to fit a decapitated head. Pools of blood lay on the man's lower half, just showing that he was mutilated alive. As if it was a sick joke, another man stood, dead of course, with his limp body, holding the man's hand on the table.

Paige stumbled away from the dreaded scene, wishing desperately to delete it from her memory. It bastardized the loving and warm nature of giving birth. She shook the memory away and continued. Paige then reached a room filled with sewing machines and she couldn't help but be reminded of one of her favorite patients, Eddie Gluskin. She remembered his love of sewing and designing clothes. She remembered a time when Paige managed to get him some time with a sewing machine, and how happy Eddie looked. How cruel was her mind, making her remember happy memories of her patient? A patient in which she failed to protect. Paige rubbed her head in frustration, she couldn't deal with the guilt that was slowly eating at her. Right now, Paige needed to survive.

She looked into one of the many broken mirrors in this place. Paige took a look at herself and winced, she looked awful. Black and blue bruises littered her face and her messily cut brown hair had specks of dirt and dried blood. Paige's arms were covered with dozens of cuts and bruises, while her arm was bandaged from her attack from Frank. The jumpsuit they put on her was far too big. I look like a 12-year-old boy, she thought crudely. She passed the mirror with a sigh and looked around. Paige spotted a chained door that was slightly ajar, the words Welcome Home were written. There, she noticed music playing, and though she couldn't make out the words, she knew the songs were from the 1920s. The atmosphere suddenly felt heavy, the air was suddenly too hard to breathe in, and everything was just too sudden. Every part of Paige's body told her to run, that this place was not safe anymore. Paige sprinted to the next set of double doors and shook the knobs, panicked by the sudden feeling of danger that permeated the room.