The intensive care unit. Ghostly white curtains bellowed against the wind coming from a broken window. The windows looked into a thick, leafy garden. The beds poles were rusty and grey, smelling rotten; you could feel the metalic taste in your mouth. A clock is hanging from its cord on its side. It does not appear to be working.

There’s so much fungus in the walls and surface, the large desk on the east side of the room had grown its own garden. Rows of glass, green bottles are lying on the floor. There's a door on each side of the room. One is the one you came from, the other at the end of the passageway made by the beds, is shut (and if you try it, locked).

Then, behind a billowing curtain, you see something - a person. The apparently empty room was not empty at all. A boy, this time older than 15, tall and gaunt, of a black dirty hair is sitting in one of the beds. He is staring back at the two - at least the boy, who is still able to see him. He's wearing old students clothes, his shoelaces are untied, and he's swinging his feet from side to side where they do not reach the floor from the bed.

He says nothing, does not move, but it becomes clear to you, alas, they were clearly not spectrums. Not of the transparent, unsubstantial type at least.


As for the now alone lady in the corridor-like room, she is left apparently undisturbed. As undisturbed as she could be with the little people running around like shadows or walking in a slow glowing pace dragging their feet, in a stumped perpetual daze. Like programmed so. They had not appeared before now... but the woman had not stayed many nights in the Hospital to tell. Younger people that had spread about, appeared behind walls and peeking through cracks. Another gust of air seemed to convey a secret message in whisper, "The night is just starting, come to play..."

"The little ones come first," said a man. Not just a man, a man that was standing all along behind the young woman. "Pardon if we startle you."

An older man. Forty, maybe fifty. A tense, bored-looking man. From the whole of the people over here, each absorted into their own activities, this one person seemed the sanest. "Welcome my dear. You'll have to excuse them. It was long since we had visitors."

You could catch a furtive glimpace of them at times, watching. Most laughing from private jokes. Also, from this distance, Amelie noticed it too: they were fairly physical for ghosts.