"It's almost midnight..."
Doctor Satomi occasionally looked up at the clock on the wall, his expression a mixture of apprehension and anticipation.
As he raised his head, the bright light inevitably fell on his face. Doctor Satomi squinted at the fluorescent lights overhead. They were clearly bright, yet they left him feeling somewhat dazed.
Hospitals were peculiar places. Even in broad daylight, they were so cold and quiet that they gave people a lonely sense of being removed from the world. Perhaps it was because hospitals were the places closest to death, like the boundary between the human world and the underworld.
Light could dispel darkness, but it could not dispel humanity's most primal instinct: the fear of death.
Besides Doctor Satomi, there were two nurses in the duty room.
One was the young trainee nurse who had worked the night shift yesterday. She was excitedly fiddling with the video camera in her hands.
The more experienced Nurse Asano, however, was not there. In her place was another woman of around fifty with a stern expression.
"Head nurse, are you on duty tonight? Where's Nurse Asano?"
Doctor Satomi knew the hospital's rules. The night-shift nurses rotated once a week, and it was not yet time for Nurse Asano to change shifts.
"Nurse Asano took some time off. I'm covering her shift tonight," the head nurse said coolly.
After the strange incident in the early hours of yesterday morning, Doctor Satomi and Nurse Asano had immediately reported it to the nursing department, alerting quite a few doctors and nurses on night duty. Even the head nurse had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and rushed to the thirteenth floor.
Professor Kurokawa's ghost returning to the hospital to perform surgery was simply too incredible. The accounts of a