"The Light at the End of the Tunnel"
Betz88
Chapter One
"Sleeping Giant"
It was very dark in the hours just before dawn.
Even in a town the size of this one, things quieted down from time to time. The frenzied activities of daylight hours faded gradually into the solitude of low clouds and a quarter moon. People slept and not even a dog barked. Most of the snow from a few days before had been plowed away, shoveled away, blown away. Residual whiteness lurked on windowsills and in dark crevices. Sort of like an old Christmas card. The landscape was bleak, New Jersey still gripped in the stranglehold of the cold season. Two weeks past Groundhog Day, winter wasn't ready to let go.
Out here, away from the center of town, there were no traffic lights on every corner, no roar of automobile engines or honk of delivery vans. The area around the hospital was somnolent as a drunken giant. An occasional car stabbed a narrow path of light along the macadam beneath the bright array of area lights, and then disappeared again into a black void as the quiet night swallowed it up again.
Across from the brightly lit ambulance entrance an alley cat melted off the curb and scurried across to vanish within the snow-choked bushes surrounding the large sign that read: "Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital". On the other side, the cat emerged again. Feral and wary, it undulated across the hospital entrance beneath the pool of ambient light, crouched like a furred millipede, and was once more lost from view
toward the opposite end of the building.
It was quiet inside the emergency room also. There had been no activity there since before midnight. Even for a Sunday, this was unusual. In the final hour of inky blackness between four and five a.m. when birds awoke to greet the day and traffic began to hammer the Monday morning streets, it was almost a ghost town. Nothing stirred behind the old brick walls except the shadows of employees on duty, passing from time to time like ghosts that floated across the lighted windows.
The upper floors of the medical complex's main building were dimly lit from within. The wards, the semi-private and private rooms were darkened except for auxiliary lights along the baseboards. Light filtered in from the corridors, and the rectangular windows looked, from the outside, like the portals of a ship at night, far out at sea.
On lower floors, lights were brighter. The lobby, as always, glowed like a beacon of welcome that spread light out the main entrance and into the parking lot. One man and one woman sat idle behind the admissions desk, one reading a newspaper and the other working a crossword puzzle. Both yawned intermittently.
The Hospital Administrator's large office was dimly lit, not completely dark. The clinic across the lobby from it stood empty of patients, looking like a sculpture in bas- relief.
Attending physicians on night call passed through at irregular intervals, their footfalls thudding dully on the polished floor. Nurses armed with clipboards and stethoscopes and running shoes, squeaked their way in and out on important missions with obscure destinations.
On the fourth floor the offices of the hospital's department heads were dark. No need for lights in those places after their directors had gone home for the night. Only the clank of cleaning implements and the rumble of maintenance carts echoed in the hallways as people from Housekeeping attended to their nightly tasks, one office at a time.
The cleaning woman on this wing had just turned off the lights and locked the doors to the Head of Diagnostics' two-room suite. Her next stop was down the corridor and around the corner to the right; the Director of Oncology's roomy chambers. She pushed her cart wearily ahead of her, thumbing through the large ring for the correct key.
There was a white placard hanging from the door handle of Dr. Wilson's office. She squinted to read what it said.
Please do not disturb.
She frowned, wondering idly if he was still in there. Not likely. The room was inky black except for a few stabs of light from the street that crossed his balcony and entered the room at a distorted angle. Perhaps Dr. Wilson had left important papers lying about that he didn't want disturbed. He was known to do that once in awhile. She shrugged to herself and pushed her cart on past his door. Left the placard hanging. Small favors. Her workload would be a little lighter tonight.
In the wake of the woman's passage, a figure emerged from shadow, took a deep breath and expelled it, easing his office chair away from the place where he'd had it backed tightly into the corner.
The man occupying the chair was troubled.
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