The Gates of Sleep

by Mercedes Lackey

  Not in Devon. In Devon, if one got lost and approached a cottage, one was more apt to find oneself having to decline the fourth or fifth cup of hot tea and an offer of an overnight bed rather than finding oneself run off with a gun and snarling dogs.

  But nevertheless, there was a certain proprietary feeling that villagers had for the titled families of their great houses and stately homes. They tended to resent interlopers coming in and buying out the families who had been there since the Conquest. Mrs. Hunter smoothed all that over for him.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hunter,” he said, and passed through the kitchen after a deep anticipatory breath redolent of rabbit stew and fresh bread. That was one good thing about buying this place. It wasn’t poaching when you set rabbit wires on your own property. It wasn’t poaching when you had your own man shoot a couple of the red deer that came wandering down into your back garden. There was some lovely venison hanging in the cold larder. Frozen, actually, thanks to the cold winter. Every little bit of money saved was to the good at this point. Money saved on food could go toward the wages of another hand, or perhaps even having gas laid on. At this point, electricity was not even to be thought of; there wasn’t an electrified house in the entire village. Someday, perhaps, the wires would come here. And just perhaps, by the time they did, he would have the money put away to have the house wired.

  First, though, would come extra wages for extra help.

  Because until he could afford to hire another big, strong fellow like Mrs. Hunter’s son Diccon, he didn’t dare take potentially dangerous patients.

  From the downstairs he took the former servants’ stair upstairs, into the house proper.

  What the family hadn’t taken or sold in the way of furnishings, he had mostly disposed of as being utterly impractical for their purposes. A pity, but what was the point of having furnishings too fragile to sit on or too heavy to shift?

  Damned if he was going to tear down woodwork or paint anything over, though—even when the effect was dreadful. Some day, someone might want to buy this barn and make it a stately home again. Too many folk didn’t think of that when they purchased one of these places and then proceeded to cut it up.

  Besides, for all I know, the ghosts of long-gone owners would rise up against me if I touched the place with impious hands. When you were an Elemental Master, such thoughts were not just whimsy; they had the potential to become fact. Having angry spirits roaming about among people who were already mentally unbalanced was not a good idea.

  Particularly not when those people were among the minority who were able to see them as clearly as they saw the living.

  Andrew had elected to make diverse use of the large rooms on the first floor. The old dining room was a dining room still, a communal one for those patients who felt able to leave their rooms or wards. The old library was a library and sitting room now, with a table for chess and another for cards; the old music room that overlooked the gardens was now allotted to the caretakers, where they could go when not on duty for a chat, a cup of tea, or a game of cards themselves. But the rest of the large rooms were wards for those patients who need not be segregated from the rest, or who lacked the funds to pay for a private room, or, like Ellen, were charity cases. Needless to say, the patients ensconced in the former bedrooms upstairs were the bread-and-butter of this place.

  He checked on the two wards before Ellen’s carefully, since it was about time for him to make his rounds anyway, but all was quiet. In the first, there was no one in the four beds at all, for they were all playing a brisk game of faro for beans in the library. In the second, the patients were having their naps, for they were children. Poor babies. Poor, poor babies. Children born too sensitive, like Eleanor, or born with the power of the Elements in them; children born to parents who were perfectly ordinary, who had no notion of what to do when their offspring saw things—heard things—that weren’t there. He looked for those children, actively sought for them, had friends and fellow magicians watching for them. If he could get them under his care quickly enough, before they really were mad, driven to insanity by the tortures within themselves and the vile way in which the mentally afflicted were treated, then he could save them.

  If. That was the reason for this place. Because when he began his practice, he found those for whom he had come too late.

  Well, I’m not too late now. Here were the results of his rescue-missions, taking naps before dinner in the hush of their ward. Seven of them, their pinched faces relaxed in sleep, a sleep that, at last, was no longer full of hideous nightmares. They tended to sleep a lot when they first arrived here, as if they were making up for all the broken unrest that had passed for slumber until they arrived here, in sanctuary at last.

  He left them to their slumbers. It wasn’t at all the usual thing for children to be mental patients.

  Then again, he didn’t have the usual run of mental patients; when his people were “seeing things,” often enough, they really were seeing things.

  That was why he’d had no difficulty in getting patients right from the beginning. Once word spread among the magicians, the occultists, and the other students of esoterica that Dr. Andrew Pike was prepared to treat their friends, relations, and (tragically) children for the traumatic aftermath of hauntings, curses, and other encounters with the supernatural, his beds began to fill. He got other patients when mundane physicians referred them to him, without knowing what it was they suffered from but having seen that under certain circumstances, with certain symptoms, Andrew Pike could effect a real cure.

  It wasn’t only those who were born magicians or highly sensitive who ended up coming to him. Under the right—or perhaps wrong circumstances, virtually anyone could find horror staring the face. And sometimes, it wasn’t content just to stare.

  There were a few of the adult patients who were under the indicious influence of drugs designed to keep them from being agitated which tended to make them sleep a great deal; those were the ones back in their beds after tea. The rest of the patients were in the parlor, reading or socializing. He didn’t like drugging them, but in the earliest stages here, sometimes he had to, just to break the holds that their own particular horrors had over them.

  Ellen was on the third ward, and was fast asleep when he got there. Eleanor, the female ward nurse, was with her, sitting beside her bed, and looked up at the sound of his footsteps. She kept her pale hair pulled tightly back and done in a knot after the manner of a Jane Eyre, and her dark, somber clothing tended to reinforce that image. Eleanor seldom smiled, but her solemn face was not wearing that subtle expression of concern that would have told him there was something wrong.

  Well—more wrong than there already is.

  “She’ll be fine for now, Doctor,” Eleanor said without prompting. “She got chilled, but I don’t believe there will be any ill effects from it. We got her warmed up quickly enough once we got her back here.” She stroked a few stray hairs from Ellen’s brow, and her expression softened. “Poor child. Doctor, we mustn’t allow that boy Simon Ashford around her. She can see what he sees, of course; they seem peculiarly sensitive to one another. That’s what frightened her. I’ve already told Diccon not to let the child near her, but not why, of course.”

  “I’ll make a note of it.” Eleanor was invaluable; one of his former patients who had decided to stay with him as a nurse and assistant when he’d helped her out of the hell that her inability to shut out the thoughts of others had thrown her into. Pike had been the only doctor at the asylum where she’d been who had understood that when it sounded as if she was answering someone that no one else could hear—she really was speaking to another person, or trying to. She was another of those cases of extreme sensitivity to the thoughts of others that came on at puberty—and thank heavens, one he had gotten to in time. It had been getting worse and before very long, all of the voices in her head would have driven her mad.

  For a time, she had been in love with him. He had allowed it long enough to be sure that her cu
re was permanent, then he had used just a little magic, the opposite of a love charm, to be certain that she fell out of love with him again. A very useful bit of magery, that charm, for it was inevitable that most of his female patients and even a few male, fell in love with him. In fact, there was one school of thought among the Germans that such an emotional attachment was necessary for the patient’s recovery, that only someone who was beloved could be trusted with the most intimate secrets. Whether that was true or not, Andrew wasn’t prepared to judge; it was his duty to see that he did everything humanly possible to cure them, no more, and no less. Let others formulate theories; he worked by observation and used what was successful. He had more than enough on his hands, balancing magic and medicine, without worrying about concocting theories of how the mind worked!

  He wished, though, that Eleanor could really find someone for herself. The regret that she hadn’t came over him as he watched her with Ellen; she was a nurturer, and she loved the children here. She seemed very lonely; well educated, she would have probably become a teacher had she not her unfortunate background.

  “Who was that girl?” Eleanor asked, rising and smoothing her pearl-gray apron as she did so. “The one that helped us, I mean.”

  “That, it seems, was the young Miss Roeswood that the village has been buzzing about.” He raised an eyebrow at her, and she made a little “o” with her mouth. Eleanor was a Methodist by practice, so of course she went to chapel, not church, and had missed the exciting appearance of the mysterious young heiress at Sunday services two weeks ago.

  “But—what a kind young woman she is!” Eleanor exclaimed. “Not that her parents were bad people but—”

  “But I cannot imagine, from what I heard of her, seeing Alanna Roeswood on her knees in the snow, trying to keep Ellen from running off into the fields,” Andrew replied with a nod. “Visiting the sick with soup and jelly, yes. Delivering Christmas baskets. Sending bric-a-brac to the jumble sale. But not preparing to tackle a runaway madwoman to keep her from freezing to death in the woods.” He thought about asking Eleanor if she had seen anything of Marina’s magic, but realized in the next instant that of course, she wouldn’t. She wasn’t a magician, only a sensitive. If she wished to, she might be able to hear the girl’s thoughts, but only if the girl herself dropped the shields that she must have had to have avoided immediate recognition by Andrew himself.

  This Marina Roeswood might claim she wasn’t a Master, but all her shields were as good as anything he had ever seen.

  “If Ellen is well enough,” he suggested, “Why don’t you help me finish the rounds?”

  Eleanor got to her feet without an objection. “Certainly, Dr. Pike,” she replied. “Will I need my notebook?”

  “I don’t think so,” he told her, and smiled. “I certainly hope that young Ellen is our last crisis for a while.”

  With Eleanor following behind, Andrew finished checking on the patients in the other wards, and took a quick look in on the library. The card game was still going briskly, and Craig, one of his little boys who was very close to being discharged, had engaged Roger Smith, one of the oldest patients, in a spirited chess match. Andrew and Eleanor exchanged a quick smile when they saw that; Roger was going to be discharged tomorrow, and he loved chess as much as Craig disliked it, so this must be Craig’s idea of a proper farewell present for the old man.

  Craig was one of the few children here who was an “ordinary” patient, brought here by a parent because of a life-threatening breakdown brought on by strain. Young Craig had been a chess-Prodigy; his father had trotted him around Britain and three-fourths of Europe, staging tournaments in front of paying audiences with the greatest of chess masters, before his health and mental stability collapsed under the strain. He’d literally collapsed and it was a good thing he’d done so in Plymouth, and that for once, his mother had been with him as well as his father. She took over when the father simply tried to shake the boy into obedience—and consciousness!—again. When Craig couldn’t be awakened, the father vanished, and she started looking for someone to help her child.

  Small wonder Craig hated chess now—and, in fact, on Pike’s suggestion was going to pretend that all of his knowledge of the game had vanished in his breakdown. His mother, on recommendation from one of Andrew’s colleagues, had brought him to Briareley, hoping to find someone who would treat her son as a child and not a broken machine that needed to be fixed so it could resume its job.

  But it was a measure of how much he had recovered that he was willing to treat the old man who had read him fairy tales to send him to sleep every night for the past six months to the game that gave him such pleasure.

  “He’s a good boy, Doctor,” Eleanor said softly.

  “Yes,” Andrew replied, feeling a warm smile cross his lips. “He is. God willing, that beast that calls himself a father will leave him alone now.”

  They took the wide, formal stairs up to the second floor, and the private rooms.

  Here, the patients were a mix in the opposite direction from the ones in the wards. Most of these folk were not magicians or extraordinarily sensitive. Andrew’s establishment was slowly gaining a reputation among ladies of fashion as a place to recover from nerves.

  And “nerves” was an umbrella that covered a great many things.

  Now, Andrew would not accept the sort of nerves that came from too much liquor, or from indulgences in drugs. For one thing he could not afford the sort of round-the-clock watching such patients required. For another, their problems would make life difficult for his other patients. For a third, well, he’d need half a dozen Diccons to make sure everyone was safe.

  Nor did he accept—although it was always possible that a set of circumstances would occur that would cause him to make an exeption—the sort of nerves that produced an inconvenient infant in nine months’ time.

  But if too many debutante-parties and the stress of being on the marriage-market sent a young lady into hysterics or depression—if too many late nights and champagne and tight corseting did the same to her mother—if the strain of too much responsibility sent a young widow into collapse—

  Well, here there were quiet, well-appointed rooms, simple but delicious food, grounds where one could walk, lanes where one could drive, and no one would bother you with invitations, decisions, noise, bustle, or anything else until you were rested. A week, a month, and you were ready to go back to the social whirl.

  And no one acted as if your problems were so insignificant that you should feel ashamed of your weakness. And if Andrew’s establishment was doing no more than providing a kind of country spa rather than real treatment for serious problems for these women, well, why not? Why shouldn’t he have the benefit of their money?

  If, however, there was a serious problem, unlike a spa or other fashionable resort, Andrew was going to spot it, and at least attempt to treat it.

  So he and Eleanor completely bypassed one wing of guest rooms that had been converted into patient rooms. The ladies housed there had no need of him or his services; they were quite satisfied to see him once a day, just after a late breakfast.

  He did stop at several other rooms, though. Three were cases of real depression, and aside from seeing that they got a great deal of sunlight (which seemed to help), and slowly, slowly seeing what healing magic might do, there wasn’t a lot that seemed to make a difference to them.

  At least he wasn’t dousing them with cold water baths six times a day, or tying them to beds and force-feeding them, or throw them into those horrors called general wards.

  There were four cases of feeble-mindedness, one of who could barely feed himself. Two unfortunates who had fallen from heights onto their heads, who were in similar case. One old demented woman. All of these could have been warehoused anywhere, but at least they had family who cared that they were treated decently, kept clean, warm, and well-fed, and that no one abused them. For this, they paid very well indeed, and Dr. Pike was very grateful.

  And he had
one poor soul who really was hearing voices in his head that didn’t exist, not on any plane. He didn’t know what to do with that fellow; nothing he tried seemed to work. There was something wrong in the brain, but what? And how was he to fix it, even if he could discover what was wrong?

  That man, though he had never shown any inclination to violence, was locked in a room in which the bed and chair were too heavy to move, and in any case, bolted to the floor so that he couldn’t use them to break the window. There was an ornamental iron grate bolted over the window on the inside. And the poor man was never allowed a candle or an open fire; there was a cast-iron American stove in the fireplace in his room, and Andrew could only hope that the voices in his head would never tell him to try to open it with his bare hands.

  He was the last visit this afternoon; all was well, and Andrew heaved a sigh of relief as he always did.

  “Have your tea, Eleanor,” he told her. “I’m going to go help Diana Gorden with her shields.”

  She smiled faintly. “Very well, Doctor. Don’t forget to eat, yourself.”

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  And of course, promptly did.

  Chapter Fifteen

  MARINA stared at the four small objects in the palm of her hand; there was no confusion about what she was seeing, as sunlight flooded the room. In her hand lay what were supposed to have been four ha’pennies that she had just poured out of the vase. Well, she’d thought they were ha’pennies last night when she’d put them in the vase.

  But when she’d tilted them out this morning, it was painfully clear that they were nothing of the sort. They were, in fact, four “good conduct” medals of the sort given out at Sunday School, sans ribbon and pin. They were copper, they did feature the Queen’s profile, and they were the size of a ha’pence. But not even the kindest-hearted postmaster was going to exchange these for a stamp.