by Paula Guran
Her fellow diners ate on, oblivious, but Anne couldn’t stomach any more. The sound of cutlery scraped in her ears. So too the wet click of people’s mouths as they chewed. A vulgar flash of mulched sausage when someone laughed, slimy debris coating their tobacco-stained tongue.
Out in the entrance hall, away from the noise, it was better. The porter had left the door ajar while he assisted with a guest’s departure. The cool air lifted her fringe and wicked the sweat away from her neck. Tickled her numb lips. She rubbed them hard.
Help! Help us!
Hand frozen over her mouth, she stared down the long parlor opposite. It was furnished with damask sofas and oak reading desks now, but yesterday afternoon, tables had been arranged for craps and baccarat. Someone had tucked a champagne flute into a bookcase and it had been missed by the staff. Anne only noticed it because the morning light caught the glass exactly right.
At the far end of the room stood the whisper of a girl in early nineteenth-century dress. Her posture was bold, totally at odds with her finery. She turned away as if called, and then disappeared through a door that didn’t exist.
“Miss Wells to see you, Doctor.”
He removes his spectacles and stands as I enter, offering me a shallow bow. I curtsy, studying him from beneath my lashes. The doctor is thin and ropy, a sick tree in winter, with meatless jowls that quiver as he shoots the matron a hard glance. “It’s rather late,” he says. “I was about to retire.”
“You’ll want to stay for this one, Doctor. She has a lot of . . . questions.” The matron smiles. The light from my lamp picks out her eyes.
“Questions about what?”
“Mister Benjamin Walchop,” I say, raising my chin. “He came to you a year ago. I bid you release him from your care so that he can return home immediately.”
The doctor leans in. “And you are a relative?”
“A friend, representing Mister Walchop’s family. I have their authority here.” I pull a sealed letter from my skirt pocket and hand it to him. Benjamin’s mother has scratched her mark within, but the rest is by my hand since she never learned how.
The doctor skims it and casts it aside. “I’m afraid that will not be possible. Mister Walchop’s is an interesting case and his treatment is not yet complete.”
“Treatment for what, exactly? He is not ill.” I glance between them. When it’s clear an answer isn’t forthcoming, I go on, “I saw the contract you sent him. It specified a period of six months in exchange for payment. You’ve broken your own terms. If you intend to keep him here longer, the least you could do is compensate his family properly.”
The doctor chuckles. “How mercenary.”
I grip the back of the chair facing the desk. “It’s as he would wish it. But now that I’ve seen your sanatorium for myself—if you can possibly call it that—such terms simply won’t do. I’ve already contacted the authorities with my concerns. I’m sure the magistrate would like to know where you earned your doctorate. So would I, for that matter.”
“Oh,” the doctor says slowly, baring dull, gray teeth, “I like her. The door, Matron.”
She slams it shut. I glare at her, my fist tightening on the back of the chair. The room’s both too hot and too cold. Beneath my dress, sweat has left a crust of salt on my skin.
He replaces his spectacles and opens a drawer in his desk, fingers through the files within. “You shouldn’t threaten legal action if you cannot take the consequences. I must protect my interests.” He peers over the rim of his spectacles and tuts. “Where does a low creature like you find the gall for such threats, I wonder?”
I prickle at that, but finally hold my tongue. For all the time I’ve spent with Missus Whittock and her set, I can’t scrub away the lilt, the brass. What a lady may get away with, a poor girl cannot. How much I’ve forgotten. How fat I’ve grown on privilege.
“The treatment, since you ask, is more a series of tests.” He withdraws a file and opens it. “I’ve studied many children, Miss Wells. There was a girl, once, who could talk to birds—just called them out of the sky on a whim. Another could detect lies. One boy could hear my very thoughts, fancy that. But none of them hold a candle to your friend. The boy who cannot die, despite my very best attempts.”
My legs tremble beneath my skirts.
When we were ten, Benjamin was mauled by a terrier. I battered it around the head with a brick but the dog held on, shaking Benjamin’s leg viciously. A ratter, obeying its breeding. His mother came out with a glowing poker and burned it till it let go, but not before his cries had called the whole neighborhood down upon us. A hundred pairs of eyes watched as his torn calf knitted itself together right there in the street. It didn’t knit neatly enough, though: He was left with a nasty limp, and it’s hard to find a dock-master who’ll give you work when there’s fitter pickings to be had. His mother tried to shrug off the rumors by telling people the bite hadn’t been so bad, that the truth had got twisted in the telling, but by then the story had spread. Who knows how quickly it reached the ear of this doctor, and for how long he watched unemployment slide into desperate poverty, waiting for the right moment to bait his line.
We stare at each other, and I know I’m right. He must see it in my expression, too, because he laughs with delight and throws the open file he’d fished out onto the desk. The notes are minimal. The insert bears my name. Mary Margaret Wells.
“Mister Walchop has a rare gift that could change the world, and they say birds of a feather flock together,” he leers. “So answer me one question, Miss Wells: What is it that you can do?”
I lunge for the door. Terror’s already buckling my knees, but the matron strikes the back of my head with a candlestick for good measure. I fall hard, smashing James’s lamp. Voices rumble thickly above me, then she takes me by the armpits and drags me through the doorway. Lord, she’s strong. We go down a staircase; my heels thud on every step. I’m drooling a bit. I can hear someone crying.
I’m just getting my wind back, just finding the strength to struggle, when she throws me into a dark room and locks the door. I lie on the floor, listening to her receding footsteps and the whimpering from the next room over.
“Hello?” I croak.
The whimpering stops. Rough scratching comes from my left and then the reply, “Who’re you?”
“Mary,” I say.
“I can’t hear nowt. Come closer to the wall. There’s a hole.”
I crawl toward the voice and run my hands over the damp stone. My palms bump against a protruding finger. A chunk of mortar has been chipped away, I realize, leaving a gap between our cells. I link my warm finger into their cold one. “I’m Mary,” I repeat. “Who are you?”
“I’m Martha.”
I squeeze Martha’s finger. It’s missing its nail. “How long have you been here, Martha?”
“I dunno, few weeks.”
Her accent is broad. The same ruse, then: taking chime children from the poor where they won’t be missed. I grind my teeth at the thought.
The darkness thins and I look up: A narrow, barred window above me lets in a little light as the moon slides out from its cover of cloud. I release Martha’s finger and reach up to grasp the bars.
It’s been but minutes since James left me; I pray he lingered despite his fear. I suck down the freezing air, each breath as painful as pressing a bruise. “James?” I bellow, fit for a dockhand. “If you’re there, help! Help us!”
“No one ever comes this way,” says Martha.
“I did,” I shoot back.
Ice suddenly blooms on the iron like mold. I pull my hands away before they can stick and look over my shoulder. The ghost from the moor, the one who cried the warning, is in my cell. Her gray eyes are wide with shock. Her hand grasps the doorframe for balance. She must have perished here; tortured, perhaps, by the doctor’s twisted tests. But her clothes are strange. I’ve never seen skirts that fall straight and stop at the shin. I don’t have time to question it. “Please, help us.”
“Who’re you talking to?” asks Martha.
Anne had never hallucinated a person who wasn’t in pain, at the point of death. Sometimes, the morbidity of her own mind was worse than seeing visions altogether. This girl, though, had looked whole and healthy, with a calculating, determined expression that endeared her to Anne immediately.
The porter was curling his fingers around the edge of the front door. Instinctively, Anne darted behind the reception desk and through the staff entrance beneath the staircase. There, in the dark, she hiccupped a laugh and held it in with her hand. Why had she hidden from him like a child? A porter wouldn’t question a guest standing in the hall, nor would he challenge her if she’d decided to explore the parlor. But then there’d been that stare of his when they arrived—too long, too intimate.
Through the gap in the door’s hinge, she took her turn to watch him in the hall. Why did he linger? He might have been waiting to serve another guest, but she fancied he was listening for her, could hear her shaking breath.
He looked directly at her hiding place. Began to make for it. Her breath caught. She ran lightly down the staff corridor, past linen cupboards and offices, hoping she was faster. Eventually she reached a door that opened onto the inner courtyard. Three kitchen boys were huddled by the water pump sharing a cigarette. They glimpsed her as she backtracked, one of them calling out in surprise. She panicked and dashed right, the windows flashing past, until she was forced to turn into the east wing.
Clearly, this part of the ground floor was unused. Someone had wallpapered once, and laid down carpet, but the sprucing ended there. One room still boasted its old gas fittings. Another’s plaster was rotting away.
Anne slowed to a stop and leaned against an empty doorframe to catch her breath, the playground fear that had driven her this far melting away, leaving her feeling more than a little silly. She tugged her sleeves down to cover her wrists and wrapped her arms around her middle. The ceiling creaked, its bare lightbulb swinging gently: a guest moving around their room. On the floor above that, her husband lay sprawled in the bed of number thirty-two.
She’d grown up watching her father tear people’s bodies apart and stitch them back together, but the mind was a different beast—she knew that better than most. The loss of his brothers on the very same battlefield he’d survived had left Merritt with particular scars that no amount of ice baths or shock therapy could heal—God knew, they’d done nothing for her—but those were the only tools she understood. And drink, it seemed, was his.
How was she supposed to stitch her husband back together with nothing but words?
Her soles had left footprints in the dusty carpet. Breadcrumbs leading the way she’d come. As her eyes followed them, even as her foot tensed to take a step, a draft from farther down the hall swept them away. A door at the far end, hung badly, wavered, scraping against its frame. From the sliver of darkness beyond, Anne heard the rasp of saw on bone.
Help! Help us!
The cry sounded so close, so real, that she hesitated. It was easy to ignore the intrusions when no one else reacted to them. When she was alone, there was no way to tell if they were genuine or not. She’d left her mother lying on the kitchen floor for hours with a concussion once, unsure whether she’d imagined the shriek and smack of a head hitting the black-and-white tiles. If someone really was stuck and calling for help and she turned away, just as she’d turned away that day, she’d never forgive herself.
She approached the door, pulled it wide, the brass handle so cold it burned her palm. A belch of stale, sour air came up from the staircase beyond, chased by a drawn-out sob that might have been the wind keening through some broken window. The steps demanded she take them one at a time, hewn as rough as they were and slick with mold.
Merritt’s matchbox still bulged in her cardigan pocket. She got it out and struck one, peering around a forgotten wine cellar. The racks were empty now, though the vinegary tang of wine gone bad lingered. A leak from some unseen pipe had left a film of water on the floor, so that the walls seemed to extend for infinity in the reflection, and her tiny matchlight, her own pale face, stared up at her from below.
There was a door leading farther into the basement. She pushed it open and advanced into a corridor, similarly flooded. The match was burning low. She shook out the flame and lit another, edging toward the first room on her right. The rasping returned, louder.
“Hello?” she said meekly.
That word, and then her gasp, echoed back.
A boy was laid out on a table within—ashen except where the skin of his chest had been peeled aside in lapels of red, exposing white ribs.
Anne reeled, dropping the match. The light guttered out, but she could still see him branded on the inside of her eyelids. Her breath wouldn’t come. “It’s not real,” she whispered, and the whispers flew back at her. It’s not real, not real, not real.
Help!
She fumbled with the matches, lost one, lit another.
A lean man with his back to her, pate shining. He was standing over another body, another child, viciously pumping his arm back and forth, and the rasping of the saw was in her bones. She gulped down bile and left the room.
“Is—is there anyone here?”
The second room she looked in on was blessedly empty. She clasped the doorframe and sighed. The calls for help had been in her head after all. But—what was that? Scratching from the next room over, and a wretched sniveling. She bit her lip and sloshed along, the water deeper here and starting to flood her shoes. The third door had slumped free of its upper hinge, its bottom corner jammed into the floor. She squeezed through the gap and held up the remaining sliver of matchstick. “H-hello?”
A little girl with her back to Anne, clawing at the far wall in an attempt to reach a high-set window. She turned to look at something over Anne’s shoulder, and the sight of whatever she saw there brought on a fresh, frantic attempt at the wall.
The flame reached Anne’s fingers and she yelped with pain. She lit another—her last—and waded toward the girl, but she was gone now, despite having looked and sounded so solid.
The wallpaper where she’d stood was sloughing away in thick, fatty strips. There, on the bare stone beneath . . . white scratch marks, in sets of four and five. Anne placed her own fingers on them, in the grooves.
“No,” she moaned, “it’s not real.”
Not real, not real, real, the echoes replied. Real, real, real.
She dropped the match and fled the cell. Twisted in the dark to find the way out. The staircase was through the wine cellar door on her left; she could see the light on the steps. Out of the depths of the basement to her right, a woman was charging toward her, yanking cord from around her neck. “Get back here, you little bitch!”
She screamed then and dived for the exit, throwing herself up the steps and through the deserted rooms of the east wing with abandon, fear clinging to her like a net of spiders. She yanked open a door to the courtyard, alarming the staff working there—“Miss? Miss, you can’t be here!”—and ran through the sucking mud of the foundations, drawn to the open moor and fresh air beyond.
Something cold grabbed her calf. She looked down: The ground had sprouted a dozen flailing cadaverous arms. One partially buried face, an accusing eye.
She kicked out, too terrified to feel it connect. When her feet finally met hard gray shale, they slid around in her shoes, her socks sodden and the leather stretched; she slipped and fell down the incline, scraping her palms on the rock. She got up, but her side was hurting now and she was fighting the urge to cry. She risked a glance back at Rannings. The girl from the parlor, almost invisible in daylight, was walking toward the house.
A gust of wind, or perhaps the strength of Anne’s gaze, jostled her and she turned. Their eyes met. Anne bit back a sob. She was so young, no more than seventeen. “Don’t!” she yelled at the apparition, for all the good it would do, since she couldn’t be real. “Don’t go in there!”
When the vision faded, Anne put a bloody hand to her forehead and took a deep breath. Stress, her father had said. Overstimulation. It was clear that Rannings was causing exactly that, and the only way to settle her nerves was to put as much distance between herself and that awful building as possible. Anyway, she couldn’t bear the thought of going back; she’d only bring the smell of the cellar with her and taint everything. So she walked on, one hand pressed to the stitch in her side, the other guarding her face from the worst of the lashing wind.
As she tramped through the heather she’d so wanted to see, her spirit unraveled. Penshaw seemed like Eden now, a bucolic paradise as untouchable and as improved by nostalgia as childhood. She’d telephoned her parents from King’s Cross just yesterday morning and already her mind had muddied the exact intonation of her mother’s voice, had softened her father’s outrage as he told his daughter, and then Merritt, exactly what he thought of them. The simplicity of that life suddenly appealed to her as it hadn’t before, the march of time marked by service on Sundays, reliably followed by a joint of beef and potatoes, hot from the oven.
Haxby lay beyond the next dale. Anne made for the church as the sky darkened and booms of thunder vibrated in her chest. The churchyard gate opened with a squeal. The first fat drops of rain hit the nape of her neck and slithered down between her shoulder blades as she heaved the door open and stepped inside where it was dry. The deluge came down behind her like a final curtain at the theater.
In the murky light from the diamond-grid windows, Anne saw empty pews knocked slightly askew. A dark pulpit. Quite different from the church in Penshaw, where the secretary took great pains to refresh the flowers and notices, and there was always someone, if not the vicar, tending the vestry and lighting candles in the chapel. Still, the door had been unlocked and she had seen the vicar just yesterday.
Anne’s hands were chalk-white, her nails lilac with cold. She stuffed them into her armpits and walked stiffly up the nave, leaving muddy footprints on the memorial slabs. Somewhere in the rotting beams above, a pigeon cooed and defecated, a falling white smear joining the many others splattering the chancel steps. She skirted the mess and wandered along the north transept, knocking on a discreet little door to what she assumed must be the vestry. Each rap echoed, reminding her horribly of the wine cellar, so she opened the door with an apology on her lips only to find it empty apart from a few chests. They were filled with blankets. She shook out a tartan one and wrapped herself in it, coughing and sneezing at the dust. Returning to the nave, she picked a seat far from the pigeon and clumsily removed her saturated socks and shoes. Tucking her feet up under her, she fell into a lethargic, shivering stupor.