Percy had no patience at all for such pointless conversation. Once he heard that so many people had visited the Sanatorium, he knew this trip was doomed to yield nothing.
Irritably, he looked away from Edward and swept his gaze over the common room outside the office.
A small television hung on the stained wall. Three or four elderly people were looking up at it, watching. The rest were probably not entirely lucid; they sat in their chairs with vacant eyes, drool dripping uncontrollably onto the filthy bibs on their chests.
All at once, a foul stench wafted over. Percy swiftly covered his nose, his face twisting with unbearable disgust.
A caregiver strode over, cursing without restraint as he pushed an elderly man slumped in a chair out of the common room.
The others seemed neither to smell the odor nor hear the noise. Their dull expressions did not change in the slightest.
Percy clearly realized that these were people waiting to die.
Or rather, they had long since "died"—to their families and friends, and to society. Only one breath remained, still wheezing within their ruined shells.
Percy's brow furrowed tightly, his lips pressed into a stern line.
He instinctively straightened his back, as though trying to draw a line between himself and this suffocating decay and corruption. With his head held high, he strode out of the common room.
A fitful sound of sobbing suddenly reached him.
Percy wanted to pretend he had not heard it, but his body moved against his will, following the sound.
—it was the elderly man who had been incontinent just now.
The caregiver had roughly pushed him into the corner of the corridor, then abandoned him there like an old piece of forgotten furniture.
The old man sprawled helplessly in his chair, whimpering