Dark Passage: Hospital Hopscotch

The Hospital of Seven Teeth

4. Phoenix from the Ashes

One of the stranger aspects of this particular hospital is that its halls are being used as a gun range. The glass partition in the post office of the administrative building has been blasted through. All across the campus the floors are littered with shells of varying sizes.

On the first night of discovering the hospital, wandering through a basement behind my companions Aaron and Mike, a shout stopped me in my tracks. Mike had discovered grenades strewn across the floor in the rear. It turned out, fortunately, that they had all been discharged. Near a wall with an old, wistful postcard from Las Vegas, these grenades had been left to collect dust.

A few hours before camping out on the roof, we had ascended from a tunnel into what looked like someone's living room. The walls were panelled with wood; there was a cozy fireplace. Here we found an actual target, lined with bullet holes.

But what was next to the target really threw us for a loop. A pair of double doors, leading to a vast, empty hall, had been painted with an ominous logo.

Alcor.

Alcor is a cryonics company in Arizona, providing an unusual service to its customers. The company freezes people after their death, preserving their bodies so they may one day rise again -- like Phoenix from the ashes.

We assumed that we had stumbled onto an abandoned movie set. Through the double doors we found a bowling alley and, more interestingly, a stockpile of very old medical supplies and machines. But unlike other film sets we had encountered, this one showed no trace of any movie production, neither schedules nor discarded props. Instead there were boxes of respirators, syringes, gauze. This was a true medical facility, and we wondered about it, remembing the freezer units in the basement beneath.

And that "cryo-tek" barrel outside the door… partially filled with a thick, red fluid… the corrosion so strangely realistic… its label so finely printed, with so many seemingly redundant details -- was this really meant for a camera alone?

The House at the End of the Road