Douglas Adams - The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul

She was fine. She could find her own way about.

Slowly, a little woozily, she pushed herself up on to her elbows, and slid her legs out from under the sheets and on to the floor, which was cold to her feet. She could tell almost immediately that she shouldn't be doing this because every part of her feet was sending back streams of messages telling her exactly what every tiniest bit of the floor that they touched felt like, as if it was a strange and worrying thing the like of which they had never encountered before. Nevertheless she sat on the edge of the bed and made her feet accept the floor as something they were just going to have to get used to.

Ttte hospital had put her into a large, baggy, striped thing. It wasn't merely baggy, she decided on examining it more closely, it actually was a bag. A bag of loose blue and white striped cotton. It opened up the back and let in chilly night draughts. Perfunctory sleeves flopped half-way down her arms. She moved her arms around in the light, examining the skin, rubbing it and pinching it, especially around the bandage which held her drip needle in place. Normally her arms were lithe and the skin was firm and supple. Tonight, however, they looked like bits of chickens. Briefly she smoothed each forearm with her other hand, and then looked up again, purposefully.

She reached out and gripped the drip stand and, because it wobbled slightly less than she did, she was able to use it to pull herself slowly to her feet. She stood there, her tall slim figure trembling, and after a few seconds she held the drip stand away at a bent arm's length, like a shepherd holding a crook.

She had not made it to Norway, but she was at least standing up.

The drip stand rolled on four small and independently perverse wheels which behaved like four screaming children in a supermarket, but nevertheless Kate was able to propel it to the door ahead of her. Walking increased her sense of wooziness, but also increased her resolve not to give in to it. She reached the door, opened it, and pushing the drip stand out ahead of her, looked out into the corridor.

To her left the corridor ended in a couple of swing-doors with circular porthole windows, which seemed to lead into a larger area, an open ward perhaps. To her right a number of smaller doors opened off the corridor as it continued on for a short distance before turning a sharp corner. One of those doors would probably be the lavatory. The others? Well, she would find out as she looked for the lavatory.

The first two were cupboards. The third was slightly bigger and had a chair in it and therefor probably counted as a room since most people don't like to sit in cupboards, even nurses, who have to do a lot of things that most people wouldn't like to. It also had a stack of styro beakers, a lot of semi-congealed coffee creamer and an elderly coffee maker, all sitting on top of a small table together and seeping grimly over a copy of the Evening Standard.

Kate picked up the dark, damp paper and tried to reconstruct some of her missing days from it. However, what with her own wobbly condition making it difficult to read, and the droopily stuck-together condition of the newspaper, she was able to glean little more than the fact that no one could really say for certain what had happened. It seemed that no one had been seriously hurt, but that an employe e of one of the airlines was still unaccounted for. The incident had now been officially classified as an "Act of God".

"Nice one, God," thought Kate. She put down the remains of the paper and closed the door behind her.

The next door she tried was another small side ward like her own. There was a bedside table and a single banana in the fruit bowl.

The bed was clearly occupied. She pulled the door to quickly, but she did not pull it quickly enough. Unfortunately something odd had caught her attention, but although she had noticed it, she coutd not immediately say what it was. She stood there with the door half closed, staring at the door, knowing that she should not look again, and knowing that she would.

Carefully she eased the door back open again.

The room was darkly shadowed and chilly. The chilliness did not give her a good feeling about the occupant of the bed. She listened. The silence didn't sound too good either. It wasn't the silence of healthy deep sleep, it was the silence of nothing but a little distant traffic noise.

She hesitated for a long while, silhouetted in the doorway, looking and listening. She wondered about the sheer bulk of the occupant of the bed and how cold he was with just a thin blanket pulled over him. Next to the bed was a small tubular-legged vinyl bucket chair which was rather overwhelmed by the huge nnd heavy fur coat draped over it, and Kate thought that the coat should more properly be draped over the bed and its cold occupant.

At last, walking as softly and cautiously as she could, she moved into the room and over to the bed. She stood looking down at the face of the big, Nordic man. Though cold, and though his eyes were shut, his face was frowning slightly as if he was still rather worried about something. This struck Kate as being almost infinitely sad. In life the man had had the air of someone who was beset by huge, if somewhat puzzling, difficulties, and the appearance that he had almost immediately found things beyond this life that were a bother to him as well was miserable to contemplate.

She was astonished that he appeared to be so unscathed. His skin was totally unmarked. It was rugged and healthy - or rather had been healthy until very recently. Closer inspection showed a network of fine lines which suggested that he was older than the mid-thirties she had originally assumed. He could even have been a very fit and healthy man in his late forties.

Standing against the wall, by the door, was something unexpected. It was a large Coca-Cola vending machine. It didn't look as if it had been installed there: it wasn't plugged in and it had a small neat sticker on it explaining that it was temporarily out of order. It looked as if it had simply been left there inadvenently by someone who was probably even now walking around wondering which room he had left it in. Its large red and white wavy panel stared glassily into the room and did not explain itself. The only thing the machine communicated to the outside world was that there was a slot into which coins of a variety of denominations might be inserted, and an aperture to which a variety of different cans would be delivered if the machine was working, which it was not. There was also an old sledge-hammer leaning against it which was, in its own way, odd.

Faintness began to creep over Kate, the room began to develop a slight spin, and there was some restless rustling in the cabin trunks of her mind.

Then she realised that the rustling wasn't simply her imagination. There was a distinct noise in the room - a heavy, beating, scratching noise, a muffled fluttering. The noise rose and fell like the wind, but in her dazed and woozy state, Kate could not at first tell where the noise was coming from. At last her gaze fell on the curtains. She stared at them with the worried frown of a drunk trying to work out why the door is dancing. The sound was coming from the curtains. She walked uncertainly towards them and pulled them apart. A huge eagle with circles tattooed on its wings was clattering and beating against the window, staring in with great yellow eyes and pecking wildly at the glass.

Kate staggered back, turned and tried to heave herself out of the room. At the end of the corridor the porthole doors swung open and two figures came through them. Hands rushed towards her as she became hopelessly entangled in the drip stand and began slowly to spin towards the floor.

She was unconscious as they carefully laid her back in her bed. She was unconscious half an hour later when a disturbingly short figure in a worryingly long white doctor's coat arrived, wheeled the big man away on a stretcher trolley and then returned after a few minutes for the Coca-Cola machine.