Dark Passage: Hospital Hopscotch

The Hospital of Seven Teeth

1. The Birds

I lay on the roof of the hospital's medical building. It was around six a.m. of what was going to be a beautiful summer day, and the sun was coming up. Near me lay three fellow explorers nestled into their sleeping bags. They had fallen into heavy slumber an hour before, after traversing the hospital for the entire night. I couldn't sleep. There were too many birds.

The floor we were resting on -- the top floor of the surgery wing, with roof access -- was entirely inhabited by pigeons. Every room contained at least a few. They had even built a nest in a former refrigerator, right next to a container of radioactive barrium. The pigeons were disturbed by our presence. They fluttered up, screeching, darting for our heads continuously.

One staircase was their primary designated toilet. As we ascended, we saw two pigeons strutting above the wire mesh enveloping the stairs, waiting for us. Lining the steps were the tallest heaps of bird shit I had ever seen: ridges nearly one foot high. But it was the pigeon carcasses littering the floor that were really responsible for the sweet, pungent odor in the halls.

This floor of the medical building contained an operation theater and a dentist's office which, despite the handsome X-ray apparatus, was too infested by pigeon residue to play doctor in.

There was also a large dispensary with many cupboards and drawers. I pulled open one of the drawers to make startling find.

This rather large predatory bird had not fallen into the drawer. The surrounding dust indicated that the carcass had been placed there after reaching a state of mummification. Having thus disposed of the bird, the mysterious perpetrator had tightly shut the drawer, knowing that someone would eventually make this discovery.

We also shut the drawer after examining the bird.

I lay on the roof, trying to sleep. Birds were circling overhead. The sound of screeching and fluttering filled the nearby rooms. Already it was beginning to get hot, yet I could not move my sleeping bag inside because the floors were owned by the pigeons. And at any rate, the sun was helping burn away some of the more disturbing things we had encountered throughout the night.

Patient Life