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“This is the hospital where it occurred.”

“Creepy.”

He looked at her for a moment, then laughed lightly, appreciating her thoughts. “Yes, you could say that. But all abandoned places seem creepy I suppose. Particularly ones as old as this. You always imagine ghosts, just out of the corner of your eyes, like the imprints of memories, eternally frozen in places no-one ever visits anymore.’

“That’s sad, and kind of beautiful. But if this is that hospital, then the ghosts here won’t be beautiful, and they will be more frightening and tragic than just merely sad.”

“True, and one might hope the doctors are held here with them, for some kind of eternal revenge?”

“Quite.”

“Though modern psychiatry probably has much to thank them for. It is an imponderable thing, don’t you find, how out of the greatest horrors knowledge is born? Perhaps everything must be born out of trauma and pain. All humans are, in our way. And so perhaps all knowledge is similarly brought into the world with pain, screaming and blood.”

She shuddered. “I don’t think that the ‘grater good’, if that is what you are saying, assuages for the very real evil done to poor innocents here. The trauma, as you put it, was nothing short of torture. The deaths were messy, sad affairs and even if we learned from them, it seems we have not learned enough if we could excuse this in some way, or see it as part of some wicked god’s design of nature.”

He chuckled. “You are easy to tease my dear. So earnest! So young perhaps. I make no such claims. I am merely – how do they say it – trying to make lemonade from lemons?”

“Spare me the results then! I don’t like your lemonade! How many suffered here – is it known?”

“Not really. The hospital ran for about two decades. The worst doctors – Green and his crew – didn’t come till a few years in. As you know, after that war….”

“Yes, I know the history.”

“Yes, well, that’s just the infinite capacity of the human spirit to take advantage of situations, don’t you think? Even if you eschew it, a lot of lemonade was being made of lemons in those days, even though the darkness just travelled with it.”

“And they said: let history ensure it never happens again..”

“But they just brought it here instead, to make sure it does…”

“To a hospital.”

“Yes. It is rather obscene on a whole other level, when you think of it like that. But we can’t undo history my dear. All we can do is learn from it. So, if you are ready to learn, let’s go to the worst places here of all. The surgery rooms. Are you ready?”

“As ready as I will ever be.”

“Then let us begin”

(c ) Helen M Valentina 2018