Silence for the Dead

by Simone St. James

  “We’ve lamps. We light ’em along the men’s corridors—most of them don’t like the dark. Roger gets one and so do you, to carry.”

  The Lady with the Lantern, I thought wryly. I had almost been in a good mood—something to do with the rest I’d had, and the fact that the doctors were gone. I was unsupervised for the first time since I’d arrived, and it felt a little like being a child left home when its parents are away. But at the thought of walking Portis House in the dark, my good mood drained away.

  Nathan was still watching me. His expression looked like a cross between disinterest and reluctant amusement. “Your first night shift, I see.”

  I tried to take another bite of stew. “Yes.”

  “This house scare you?”

  I wanted to sound bold, but thought of the black mold in the lav, the sounds in the walls, and said nothing.

  “I hope you’re not the susceptible type,” Nathan said. “Those don’t last long in this place. Especially after night shift. It isn’t just the nightmares. Most of the men say that something walks the halls, especially at night.”

  “Nathan,” said Paulus in a warning voice.

  “Oh, shut it. You know it’s true. Every nurse goes running. We didn’t even see the last one’s tail.” He turned back to me. “Some say it’s the ghosts that make the patients try to top themselves.”

  “What?” I managed.

  “A few have tried it,” Nathan said. “That spot outside the library, you know. That seems to be the spot they go to. The last one had stolen a blade.”

  There was a long silence. I thought of that lonely door I’d seen while I sat on the lawn with Archie, how none of the men had gone near it. Bammy the kitchen boy looked at his shoes.

  “They’re just madmen,” Roger put in. He was perhaps over fifty years old, something I hadn’t noticed when I’d first seen his dark hair. “I’ve done night shift plenty of times here. I never see anything walk but the sleepwalkers. These patients sleep tidy if you make ’em. We’ll have a quiet night tonight.”

  “You say that,” said Nathan, “but even you won’t go near that library.”

  “That’s a bald lie,” said Roger.

  “Why the library?” I broke in. I wouldn’t think about suicides. I wouldn’t. “Why isn’t it closed with the rest of the west wing?”

  “It’s the isolation room,” Roger said. “They took the books out, of course. It’s big, and it’s secure. Keeps the patients in solitary confinement far away from the others.”

  “Works like a top,” said Nathan. “Not a single man of ’em wants to go to the isolation room. Not for love or money. And not overnight.”

  Dear God. “Is anyone in there now?”

  “No. It’s empty.” Nathan put his toothpick back between his lips. “Except for the ghosts.”

  “There are no ghosts,” said Roger.

  “So you say. The men know. It’s getting worse, too. Did you hear the last one screaming? Said he could see something from the window.”

  “He screamed because he was mad. They’re all mad here, or didn’t you notice?” Roger shrugged. “It’s nothing to me. If they act up, day or night, they know me. They know me very well.”

  “All right.” This was Paulus, who sat in his chair tilted with its front legs off the ground, rocking back and forth on his huge long legs. “Well-done, lads. You’ve tried your best to frighten the new night nurse. That’s enough.”

  “She didn’t need any scaring.” Nathan grinned at me.

  “Go on to bed,” said Paulus. “Bammy, you’re dead on your feet. You’re back on shift at six. Roger, just do your job tonight and don’t tell tales. Got it?”

  Paulus tilted the front of his chair back to the floor and rose. I could get no proper read on him; he’d defended me more than once, yet seemed indifferent to my existence. It didn’t matter. He was large, and I wished he were on night shift instead of beady-eyed Roger.

  I took the lamp Roger handed me and followed him down the corridor and back up the south stairs, thinking about the old library used as an isolation room. I could see now why Archie hadn’t wanted to talk about it. I wondered why a man would try that spot in the grass, in front of the library door, to try suicide. Why more than one man would try it there.

  Roger walked me to the nurse’s desk. “I’ll be around about,” he said. “I have duties to attend to. You may not see me, but I rarely go out of hearing distance. If one of the men gives trouble, just yell.”

  He was small and slight, not much larger than me, but when I looked closer, I saw he was wiry, with nothing but gristle under his canvas shirt, and his knuckles were pitted and scarred. Another drifter from God only knew what walk of life who had found his way here. “All right.”

  He smiled briefly at me with his narrow mouth, a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “If one of them has his dreams, don’t go near him alone. But they’ll be no trouble, I warrant. They know me.” He flexed his hands a little so the scarred muscles moved. “They know me very well.”

  After he’d gone, I sat briefly at the desk, which was set in a nook in the wall and was long and thin as a toothpick. I slid open the first rickety drawer, pulling out the linens list and staring at its crabbed, inked columns. Already the words and numbers blurred. I put the list down again and pulled on the other drawers. One was empty, and the other was locked. Martha had given me a ring of keys and I pulled them from the loop at my waist, perusing them. The linen closets, Martha had explained, and the medical supply closets, and the food and tea stores. One small key fit the desk drawer, which opened to reveal a set of hypodermic needles.

  They gleamed dully at me in the lamplight: four of them, set in wooden holders, detached from their syringes, the needles impossibly long. They were of wicked metal, lined up with precision, carefully waiting. Set in the compartment next to the needle heads were glass syringes, their silver plungers fully compressed, and four vials of brown liquid, unlabeled. I remembered the chapter I’d read before sleeping. A nurse would attach the needle head, draw the liquid into the syringe, and inject the patient. I shut the drawer and locked it again.

  Portis House consisted of a large central section with a smaller wing tilting off on either side—the west wing, which was closed off, and the east wing, which housed all the staff rooms except the nurses’. The fenced garden was set between the curves of the two smaller wings, as if enclosed in a pair of hands. It was the central wing, easily triple the size of either of the smaller ones, that contained the men’s bedrooms, with the nurses’ old nursery on the floor above, the common and dining rooms on the floor below, and the kitchen and laundry in the basement.

  I walked the long corridor of the main section softly in the quiet. Mullioned windows lined one wall, looking out over the front portico and the statue of Mary. The other wall had doorways to the men’s bedrooms, and turns to secondary corridors lined with even more doors. I had been in this place a dozen times, but never in the dark and silence of night shift, and never alone. Pale light from the silver quarter moon gave only the faintest shimmer to the windows, the light giving up even before it hit the sills. From paraffin lamps in holders along the walls between the windows rose curls of pungent smoke.

  Each man’s door was, as per the rules, unlocked and open. Most had pushed their door almost closed, trying for as much privacy as possible. Perhaps, with a new night nurse on duty, they were testing how strict I’d be. I didn’t much care. I wasn’t of a mind to pick arguments over whether I could see into their rooms or not.

  I approached the first door and read its wooden placard:

  Thomas C. Hodgkins D.O.B. 7 January 1890 Admitted 21 December 1918

  Tom, the man with no memory of the war. He’d been in this place six months. I pushed the door open and looked in, noting the tidy room with its faint smell of used socks, and the heaped and snoring figure on the bed. I pulled the
door to again and moved on.

  It went like this, room by room. Each man was asleep, or at least pretending to be so. I moved as quietly as I could. I had just begun to hope my first “round” might be a success when from the room I was approaching came a moan and a thundering crash.

  Oh, God, I thought. A nightmare already. I pushed into the room to find Somersham, who’d been sedated during the afternoon session, on his knees on the floor, his bedclothes tangled around him. It looked as if he’d been trying to get up for some desperate reason.

  “Somersham,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me. I raised my lamp and saw the glassy, sick look on his face and knew he was not having a nightmare. I swung around, looking in the dark for a basin. There was none, but I grabbed the pitcher on the washstand and, putting down the lamp, barely got it under his chin before he started vomiting.

  He did so for a long time, though he had been asleep through supper and there was nothing in his stomach. The sound of it went on, torturous, until I was wincing. It paused only long enough for him to briefly take a breath, look up at me, and say, “I think it’s stopping,” before he was bent over helplessly again.

  “Somersham,” I said to him in a low voice when he stopped again. “What in the world is the matter? Is there anything I can do?”

  He straightened. His hair was on end, his face slick with oily sweat. He was only twenty-one or so, and the stubble on his cheeks was sparse. His eyes rolled back, the lids closing. He threw up—or his body made the motions—one more time, and then he slouched back against the bed frame, his legs still tangled in his blankets, his fingers dropping the jug into my waiting hands.

  He closed his eyes again. I stared at him, crouched and ready, imagining every kind of incurable fever. “Somersham? Are you ill?”

  He moaned a little, raised one hand in a weak effort, and let it fall. I leaned forward, took his shoulders gently. “Let’s get you back into bed.”

  It took some doing, as even though he was young and small, he still weighed much more than I did. He tried to help, but his eyes kept rolling back in his head in that alarming way, the lids fluttering open and closed. I touched his forehead, the only thing I knew how to do. It was the sedative, I figured, wearing off and tearing him apart as it did so.

  My hands were cold as I pulled the bedclothes up from the floor and tried to tuck them around him. Was this what sedatives did? Was this normal? I knew nothing—nothing. Was there something I should be doing? What if he died on me? For the first time, alone on a dark floor with a semiconscious patient, I was struck by what I had done, what monstrous thing I was pretending. He could die in an instant and I could only look on, helpless.

  What had been in that injection?

  He seemed to settle, the drug sucking him back into sleep again. “He’s coming,” he said to me with the voice of exhaustion, unable even to open his eyes. “He’s coming. I can hear him.”

  “Somersham?”

  His eyelids fluttered, the eyes beneath them moving. One chilled hand brushed my arm like a leaf falling in autumn. “Help me,” he whispered, so low I almost thought I’d imagined it. “I’m so afraid.”

  My mouth had gone dry. He’s mad, that’s all, I thought, and yet almost without willing it I leaned forward, closer to his face as it slowly went still. “What?” I whispered back to him. “What is it?”

  Nothing.

  I leaned back again. Silence descended around me, broken only by the rasp of Somersham’s breathing. The lamp I’d set down cast a yellow circle of light on the floor.

  I took the fouled water jug and the lamp and stepped into the hall. The commotion hadn’t roused anyone, or if it had, they lay in their beds trying not to listen. Roger, for all his talk of being in earshot, was nowhere to be seen. The moonlight hadn’t moved in the windows. I turned and walked, alone, toward the lav, my footsteps sounding softly on the floor.

  In the lav, I turned the tap on the sink. It was still clean in here, and smelled of disinfectant, yet I nearly fumbled as I rinsed the jug as fast as I could.

  This house scare you?

  “Shut up,” I said aloud to no one. “Shut up.” I scrubbed harder, the jug slippery in my hands.

  He’s coming. I can hear him.

  Clang. A single sound, low in the walls. Then the groan again, faint at first, and a second time closer. As if something had just realized I was here.

  He’s coming. Help me. I’m so afraid.

  “Shut up,” I said again, twisting the taps. In the dark the bathroom was an echoing chamber, the floor radiating cold, the moonlight colored blue in the high window. I stood in my bubble of lamplight, trying not to smell the stench of vomit, the hair on the back of my neck alight, trying not to think, trying not to remember—

  “He isn’t coming,” I heard myself say. “I left. He isn’t.” I didn’t think who I was talking to, who I meant. That it wasn’t who Somersham might have meant. “He isn’t.”

  The groan came again, and I hurriedly closed the taps, nearly dropping the clean and dripping jug in my haste. I picked up the lamp again. Run, Kitty. But no. He’d always hated it when I ran. It had always made it worse. I walked slowly instead, setting down each foot with silent care, holding my breath to bursting. He must not hear, I thought wildly.

  I let out a harsh gasp of breath when I reached the corridor. I backed against the wall, put down the jug and the light by my feet, and raised my horrified hands to my face. I was nearly sobbing. Nothing made any sense; my thoughts were a jumble, disconnected, insane. You are falling apart, Kitty. This wasn’t me. I was the girl in control, the one who always had her eye two steps beyond everyone else, the one with schemes and plans. I was the girl who could get through anything, think on her feet, lie, endure whatever life tried to throw at her. I was not the girl who was reduced to a sobbing wreck, incoherent with terror over a vision from her past, from her imagination.

  This house scare you?

  My feet moved away and I left the jug and the lamp on the floor. In the lamplight of the corridor I counted the doors. I knew which door I was heading for.

  It was shut. Special rules. But it was not locked. I turned the handle and opened it wide enough for me to slip through the opening and stand in the dark, my eyes trying to adjust, listening for breathing, for any sound.

  All was silent for a long, black moment. Long enough for me to consider retreating from the room as quietly as I had come. He was probably asleep, oblivious to the sounds outside, oblivious to me.

  “Nurse Weekes.”

  That voice. So soft now, in the depths of night. Intimate. Coming from the direction of the window, where I’d found him before. Not sleeping, then.

  “Patient Sixteen,” I replied.

  I couldn’t see him against the darkened glass. Still, I fancied I heard a breath, heard his body shift just a little. “Have you come to check on me, then?”

  “You’re not asleep.”

  A low laugh that tapped down my spine like fingertips. “No. I’m not. How is Somersham?”

  “Asleep.” I wondered how many men suffered insomnia, sitting or lying in their rooms night after night. I could do nothing for them. I could do nothing for any of them, not even for myself.

  I tried to say something else. Something important that burned my throat and at the backs of my eyes. But nothing came, and I could only stand helpless with hot tears moving down my face, grateful that he couldn’t see me in the dark.

  He moved again, came off the windowsill—I could tell as clearly as if I could see him, so attuned to him was I—and came closer. I heard his bare feet on the floor. “Nurse Weekes,” he said gently, as if sensing my tears. “Are you all right?”

  I took a breath, and to my horror it hitched on a sob, half of which I desperately tried to swallow. “My name is Kitty,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’m not a nurse. I’m not anything. I don’t
know what I’m doing. And I don’t—I don’t think I can do this.”

  A long pause followed. I supposed it wasn’t often nurses came into his room at night, teary eyed and confessional. “Sit down,” he offered at last.

  “I can’t.” Another stupid utterance that made no sense. I leaned back against the wall and sank to the floor in a slow glide. I took another sobbing, hitching breath and pulled my knees to my chest, thinking I’d die of humiliation.

  “Wait,” he said, and he padded from the room, returning with my lamp. He set it on the bedside table and sat down on the floor himself, close enough to the lamp to be illuminated in its globe of light. He didn’t look bleary now, his pupils not dilated. Dark stubble had started on his chin, but he didn’t even look puffy with sleep or exhaustion; he fixed me with a gaze of intelligence and concern. It didn’t escape my notice that he’d placed the lamp in just such a way that I could see him but he could not see me. The consideration of it only made me cry harder.

  “Tell me,” he said simply.

  I did. I told him about overhearing my flatmate, about taking the pamphlet from the trash, forging the letter from Belling Wood, getting on the train sight unseen. I told him how Matron had seen through my ruse and hired me anyway, of how it had been only blind luck I’d known what to do with Captain Mabry’s nosebleed, how the doctors had chosen me for the afternoon session and I hadn’t known how to inject Somersham with a sedative, and how I’d been helpless when Somersham had woken up tonight. I told him how I’d found a book under my bed but had no time to read it properly in time and wouldn’t know how to save a life. The hot rush of words, once started, had to run its course before at long last I wound down into silence.

  He seemed to think for a moment. I waited for judgment, but it didn’t come. “I didn’t guess,” he said finally. “From what I’ve seen, we all think you’re competent and reliable.”

  I rubbed my drying cheeks. “I’m neither.”

  “Then you fit in well here.” He gave a wry smile. “Thornton was fooled.”

  I shook my head. “What were you doing, asking to come to the sessions today? Asking to go running alone? You put everyone in a tizzy.”