He looked at his watch as he entered the tall iron gate and approached the main entrance. It was eight forty-five.
At the main entrance he took off his gray overcoat and stood back to let two nurses pass. They weren’t much.
He passed the statue of Elijah Wilson, went on into the main corridor and turned to the left. He walked with the air of a man who knows where he is going and is not to be stopped by trifles. Long experience had taught him that demeanor could get one almost anywhere. Especially in a hospital.
Nurses and doctors passed, returning from breakfast. The faces of the lovelorn and the love-lettered were revealed by every passing window. Intermingled with all of these were a group of abnormally sad faces, and then he remembered that today was the day of that nurse’s funeral. She’d been a pretty little thing, too. Her fragile little corpse had skipped rope in all of his dreams last night! He quickened his pace and his hairy hands were clenched in his pockets.
Halfway down the main corridor he stopped ostensibly to look from a window at the back garden of the hospital. He took in the approaching people in both directions at a glance. They were all of them distant enough to risk it.
He walked several feet further, began walking close to the wall, and faded into a door. The door opened into what had been the old laboratory building, and with the renovating of the hospital had been left vacant. The corridor was lighted by a series of tall windows at the far end. The brilliant morning sun sifted through them vaguely. The grime and dust of the panes and of the intervening corridor made its trickle thin and eerie.
Matthew Higgins closed the door softly and stood silently against it for a second, listening. Then he accustomed his eyes to the light and looked at the floor. In the center were the tracks he and Dr. MacArthur and Snod had made last night. On the far side were the tracks which he and Snod had agreed Snod should make this morning.
He shifted his hat upon the back of his head and began walking up the corridor next to Snod’s morning tracks. Halfway up, he stopped and listened. Then he threw his overcoat over his shoulder and approached, cautiously, the door of the laboratory they had decided upon. On tiptoe. Silently. His weight was thrown forward with the expert training of a toe-dancer. Slowly, melting into it as he did so, he pushed open the door of the laboratory.
It was darker than the corridor. The outside window blinds had been closed for several years. He stood silently several seconds and then decided to chance a match. He took off his hat and struck it carefully in the shadow the hat provided. Then when it was well-lighted he lifted it and surveyed the room.
The dusty lab sinks, the rotting rubber hose, the two stools with their cane bottoms gone, and upon a bamboo couch in the corner Snod Smooty, his face totally devoid of expression, sleeping with the abandon of an infant.