Bed 12 footboard

Full text as recovered

Eleven beds in this ward carry a stamped enamel number plate screwed to the
footboard. Bed 12 carries a strip of surgical tape with 12 written on it in
marker.

Under the tape, the paint has not faded, because for nineteen years something
was screwed over it and shielded it from the fixture.

The unfaded shape is not the shape of a two-digit plate. It is wider. It has
three characters and two screw holes at a spacing the other eleven plates do
not use.

The ghost reads 114.

This was not bed 12 with a subject in it. This was bed 114, in a twelve-bed
ward, and somebody taped over it on their way out.