The cold musty air of night in the old hospital made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. There was no gruesome history or tales of ghosts or spirits but the feeling that pervaded the place at night was oppressive. The high ceilings left places for spiders to make their webs, for birds to build nests and shock you with sudden bought of flight when disturbed. The place was not too old either. Just under 10 years abandoned. A failure to keep up to cold and having been privatized, the place couldn’t maintain operations. Not under the rising costs of operations and against another city hospital that people preferred due to it’s inner city location rather than the place he was in now- at the pout skirts, the fringes and far from those who would have needed it most. The ghettos and boroughs, they were across town and so this hospital hadn’t been made for them. Rather it hand made for those of wealth and affluence. Good profit that turned to be. It was comical because the rich could afford medical so they rarely had to visit. The poor needed help the most, yet the place that would have uplifted them was denied by distance on simple premise.
Winston scowled as he kicked over a rolling cart, rust making the white enamel paint come off in flakes. He’d come as part of a challenge. A dare really- back home, his friends often did these sorts of things. Go to places of old, with age and history to scare one another. And yes, while neither in England, with his friends, or in any company at all, Winston had been bitten by a bug. He needed to go and face fears. The dark- the night- spiders, heights, death- Fear ruled him and it was what kept him trapped among the negaverse officer’s ranks. Not want to fill the mission to purge senshi, he remained because they threatened him and his life. It was a matter not of only fear, but self preservation. After all, being told you’d be hunted down if you left and then tracked down that same night and threatened in your own homwe kind of drove the point home when it came to ‘obey or die.’
The door he pushed open creaked, the wood like the enamel, flaking off, a fine layer of dust oating his gloves. Graffitti lined the walls, supplies remained where they’d been left. Scattered, unwanted and unable to regained from the loss. The old hospital was a reminder that for al one’s goals, you could so easily fail. It was haunting not in spirits, but in moral. A place of healing turned to a skeleton corpse, picked clean by vagrants and kids like him who came to get scared and find a thrill.
Winston sneezed as he rounded the hall, dust irritating his nose. No ghosts, nothing to relly be scared of outside of cops showing up.
Looking at the empty halls, he shrugged. Perhaps he should have found a better place to chase down his fears.
