The hospital room was otherwise uninhabited. Her pajamas were pink, the bedsheets clean and white.

Wake up. She shook her head, blinked her eyes, dug her nails into her arm for a few good seconds. Even through the expected pinch of discomfort, her strange surroundings remained.

Wake up, damn it. Had she been here the entire time, exploring some bizarre rural town in her dreams?

Perhaps, perhaps not, but it seemed pointless to ponder. What mattered was that she did not belong here. She was healthy, not hooked up to any IV drips or medical gadgetry, and still a long way from home.

Both the closet and bureau were empty. Odd that her clothes had been stored along with her backpack, but a quick visit to the receptionist would take care of that. At least hospital pajamas were reasonable temporary attire. She wouldn't be walking the halls with her butt hanging out the back of a gown.

Then again, accidental nudity seemed to be the least of her worries. The hallway was devoid of sound other than the squeak of her bare feet on the cold linoleum floor. Not a peep from behind the closed doors. No distant echo of footsteps, conversations, rolling gurneys. Despite the clean cheeriness of its white walls and green tile, the corridor felt more like the basement of a morgue than a pathway to healing.

Well, people do go here to die.

What if the entire place did?

You didn't, obviously.

Thanks...that's comforting.

But she would take any comfort she could get, as it didn't seem to be coming from anyone else. The hospital reception area was unmanned, with only a visitors' log standing guard over the front desk. Tall potted plants stood in each corner, and low vinyl couches were arranged throughout the room. Geometric abstract paintings, green and orange and white to match the retro space-age decor, brightened up the walls. The front of the lobby was one long window looking out into the night.

This could not be a dream. If it were, she would be off and running without a second thought. As it stood, no way in hell would she hike some undetermined distance in bare feet and hospital pajamas without any flashlight to guide her.

So she went back to the business of tracking down her stuff, which was more like tracking down anyone else who might be hiding in this enormous building. After fruitlessly poking her head into both ground floor bathrooms, she paid a visit to the nearby staff lounge. It was sparsely furnished, a simple place for employees to rest their feet and grab a snack before returning to work. Plastic chairs sat around a dining room table. One corner of the room had been fitted with a sink and counter. The refrigerator contained assorted staples and a brown paper bag with grease stains leaking through it. Its owner had been looking after that Van Doren boy and he certainly was ungrateful when his mother came to visit, even though she had to travel all that way from the countryside and she was so attentive to him, too, but oh, the poor dear never does seem to get any better, and perhaps he's just angry because he can't get up and play with the other children. And his mother...she has to deal with such a sickly child who doesn't even want her around!

She hurried away before anyone else decided to serve up their psychic leftovers along with those of the edible variety. But where had she seen that name before? It seemed tied to the tail of some awful truth, hidden behind the curtain of dreams from which she had just awoken.

It's not important. Get your bag and get the hell out of here.

Maybe I should just check myself back in. Maybe I'm messed in the head after all.

No, this place is messing with your head. So the sooner you leave, the better.

Without any other options, she hoisted herself over the lobby desk. The area behind it led to a small suite with a cluttered bulletin board and a locked room for patients' records. Nearby shelves held office supplies, standard issue forms, and a mental tirade about yet another letter from that paranoid hack of a general practitioner out in Lower Asscrack or wherever he lived because he obviously wasn't good enough to get hired at a nice new hospital and no wonder, really - that two-bit doctor sure had a few screws loose.

A heavy key ring hung from a discreet peg on the wall. Except for one marked STORAGE, the keys all corresponded to patient rooms. She let herself out into the hallway through a door that would have been nice to know about before her desk climbing adventure. Things were usually stored in basements, but she checked the ground floor first for good measure. It mainly consisted of doctors' offices, and the one unlabeled door was a janitor's closet.

The stairwell took her down into a utilitarian hallway, home to a laundry area and that all-important storage room - a veritable library of patients' belongings with numbered bins lining the walls from floor to ceiling. Grumbling at herself for ignoring her room number on the way out, she picked an end and started digging.

Most of the bins were unremarkable. She found an extravagant gilded Bible, a printed polyester outfit that must have been recycled from some hideous set of curtains, and an otherwise empty receptacle with a lonely red crayon lying along the side. And, at last, her belongings. The clothes had been squashed under the backpack, but this was no time to fuss over wrinkles. Her shirt and khakis were comforting in their familiarity, and her shoes kept that pesky floor chill away at last. On her way upstairs, she deposited the pajamas in a dirty laundry hamper.

She left the hospital with a satisfying shove to the front door. The night's embrace was cool, still, black as pitch. Even with the light from the lobby windows, which reached just far enough to outline the driveway and touch the trees on the sprawling lawn, it could have been

Deep forest after sundown.

A silly thought, seeing as how she was not wandering off into the middle of nowhere. She was following a path that would take her down the hill to a road with street lamps and houses and perhaps an occasional car passing by. But her flashlight refused to step up to the task. Rather than its usual luminous cone, it produced a shaky pencil beam on the verge of sputtering out. She tolerated its dying battery until the asphalt driveway began to fade beneath her feet as if it were being swallowed up by the night itself.

She stopped to charge the flashlight, singing under her breath to pass the time. "In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight..."

The song sped up as she cranked faster and faster, wishing she would have done this behind the doors of the well-lit lobby. Between the trees and the dark and the tangible silence blanketing it all, it seemed that these were strange woods after all. And if the lion happened to lurk out there, he very well might not be sleeping.

When her light remained dim through yet another repetition of that weem-a-wack chorus she had never learned the actual words to, she headed back toward the hospital. She would get the dratted thing charged, even if dawn broke before she could squeeze enough juice into its stubborn battery. But there was no point in standing outside like a

Poor little fool. Oh yeah. I was a fool...

This thought sent a chill through her, but she had no chance to wonder why. In the dark west wing of the hospital, a ground floor window was alight.

She sprinted over, wedging herself through the nearby shrubbery for a better view. The window belonged to an office occupied by a massive desk, a tufted leather chair that seemed about as immobile, and the obligatory bookshelf stuffed with medical texts. The desk lamp cast its spotlight over a riot of books and folders and paperwork. A pair of reading glasses topped it all off as if their owner had just been interrupted.

Perhaps they would return soon.

The window had been left unlocked. She climbed inside, more concerned about finding another human being than about getting into any sort of trouble. According to the diploma on the wall, this office belonged to a Dr. Joseph Scheibel. He would be bound to help her, not to throw her back where she had come from. Her unauthorized visit would not bother him all that much anyhow. More worrisome thoughts were weighing on his mind, begging to be chased with a shot of whiskey.

Such as the sad little boy who had been brought in not so long ago, the X-rays and blood tests indicating severe lead poisoning, the staff's insistence on trusting the boy's mother over his own family doctor. Her. That high society harpy with her bouncy curls and her sugary smile and a fucking army of bats in the belfry. She was apparently giving her son some special medicine. Judging from his recovery - more like his lack thereof - it was pretty damn likely that it wasn't actually medicine. And he could never manage to get his hands on a sample because that woman charmed everyone in sight. Boo-hoo, my dolly boy is sick, why won't he get well? But twenty-seven years of clinical psychiatry practice smelled something rotten in the state of Denmark, and the cold facts confirmed it.

Who cares how much money her husband's family has. Who cares how Important they are. That jackass tech tried to get rid of the blood tests that Dr. Collins requested. I don't think so. I sent them out personally along with the X-rays. I'm kicking myself for not copying them first. The authorities need to get involved in this goddamned mess and now I have no proof. I need to copy the rest of the file because it will disappear as soon as I call the cops. I just know it. But I'll be in for it if they find out it was me.

Her mental curtain fell away as the desk lamp glared into her eyes like the stage lights of a quiz show. She grabbed that bulwark of a desk to steady the sudden wobble in her knees. Who is Dr. Collins? David Van Doren's doctor for five hundred, Alex.

Near Dr. Scheibel's glasses was a key to the records room in the administrative area. She hustled back to the lobby and into the room in question, which was jammed with file cabinets and lit by fluorescent bulbs that could stand to be changed. A thorough dig through V TO W turned up just what she was after. She brought the folder out onto a table for a clearer look.

The forms told her nothing new. There were no records of parental visits or whatever garbage the child's mother had been shoving down his throat. They had upped the dose on some sort of chelating medication, but the patient's condition did not improve. In essence, the official response was to shrug and blame some unexplained and undetectable illness for his failure to thrive.

Unexplained and undetectable, my ass.

Deep in the bowels of the hospital basement, something slammed. Her stomach lurched with a sharp twist of fright. An elevator rumbled faintly through the soles of her shoes.

What is that? Did it hear me? Please say it didn't hear me. I've got to get out of here.

She slipped out into the hall and bolted for the stairwell. Perhaps Dr. Scheibel's office would have made a safer hiding spot, considering that his desk could probably withstand a mortar blast or three. But she needed to put distance between her and the source of that noise, and this was preferable to taking her chances with a misbehaving flashlight and that miasma of blackness outside.

Fighting through the complaints of her calf muscles, she ran all the way to the top of the stairs. And went through the door to find a painted 3 on the corridor wall.

She paused for a precious few seconds to catch her breath. Impossible. I went up at least ten flights. At least.

The nearest room was locked. She fumbled through her keyring, now a collection of useless metal. Except for one - thankfully corresponding to a room on this floor - all the keys were bare of numbers and notches.

She made a mad dash for the room that her one functional key belonged to, getting herself in and locking the door behind her. Stripped bare and smelling of industrial-strength cleaning products, it was a small space for a single patient who had apparently just left. She rolled the bed out of its corner and shoved it against the door.

Some paper had been stuffed between the mattresses on the side that had lain next to the wall. Torn from an elementary school textbook, it told an otherwise dull tale of little Joey and his trip to the hospital. A brief glance at the crumpled pages made the rest of the story painfully clear. The smiling illustrations had been ripped and stabbed and scrawled over with crayon.

Did they see that when they changed the bed? Did they pretend it wasn't there? What the fuck is wrong with people?

The door rattled.

There was only one other way out.

Tall bushes stretched up below the window. She yanked it open as the door began to push against the bed. Before there was any time to think, she dove headlong into the bushes with eyes screwed shut and head tucked in her arms, awaiting the bitter snap of her neck.

She hit her head on Dr. Collins' examining room floor and opened her eyes. Clutching a table leg, she dragged herself to a sitting position. She held on for dear life and willed her thundering heart to calm, the ringing between her ears to cease.

The ringing became louder.

It wasn't in her head.

She got to her feet and stumbled into the lobby. She never considered leaving the desk phone to scream at no one. She had no option.

“Doctor. Come quickly. He's home. She took him out of the hospital. I think he's d-d-d...”