“Did I? That wasn’t my intent. I just . . .” He rubbed his jaw, searching for words. “I’ve barely left my room for six months. It suddenly bothered me. I don’t know why.”
“Well,” I said, glad to change the subject, “there was a great debate over what to do, since no one is supposed to know you’re here. Thornton eventually decided the other patients wouldn’t be believed if they ever went to the newspapers with it. That is, assuming any of them ever get well.”
“Bloody hell,” said Jack softly. “I don’t want to affect anyone’s recommendations for release. I’ll put the word out that the men are to be quiet about it.”
I stared at him. “They all already know you’re here, don’t they? Every one of them.”
“Kitty, try living in these close quarters for six months and see if you have any privacy,” he said. “Most of them have seen me at some point or another, and Mabry and I have talked more than once. If Thornton had ever spent a day in here, he would never have believed he could make such a stupid rule. I had no idea he’d tried.”
“But Matron lives here. She should know.” I thought back, went over everything again in my mind. Now that I recalled it, Matron had not seemed particularly panicked about the other patients seeing Jack. She had been more concerned about the nurses and the orderlies, since they were the ones who could leave Portis House and tell tales. “She may have pointed out the flaws and been overruled. Thornton doesn’t value her opinion much,” I said. “Even if Matron thought a rule was nonsense, she would keep her thoughts to herself and follow it anyway. She’d lose her job otherwise. Keeping quiet and following the rules seems to be the policy here.”
“And you have trouble following rules.”
“I can follow rules,” I countered, stung. “I cleaned the lav, didn’t I? That wasn’t a picnic, either.”
Jack frowned. “Wait. They made you clean the lav?”
I smoothed my palms over my braids. “It’s clean, isn’t it? Who do you think mopped up all of that horrible black mold? Why do you think I looked such a wreck when I met you?”
Even in the gloom I could see his gaze sharpen, the skin around his eyes tighten, as he became alarmed. “I didn’t notice what you looked like. And I assumed an orderly. Are you saying Matron had you do it alone?”
“She does it to all the girls.” Since I had stopped weeping, my head felt heavy and light at the same time. My eyes burned. “It’s a sort of test. But I’m getting the worst tests she can think of, because of what she knows about me.”
“For God’s sake. Alone.” He rubbed his hands over his eyes, agitated. “Kitty—this is going to sound strange, but I’ll say it anyway. You should get out of here. You have to go. Find another job.”
I barked a laugh. “Right.”
“Go to Newcastle on Tyne,” he said. “Or farther, if you can afford the ticket. Apply wherever you can. Find something.”
I stared at him. “Are you serious?”
“Kitty, it’s dangerous here. You shouldn’t stay. Frankly, you should run.”
“Run? Because of a bathroom?”
“It isn’t just a bathroom. It’s this place. Don’t you feel it?”
We stared at each other for a long moment. My head spun. He is insane, I thought. This place . . . But perhaps he was just trying to get rid of me. Perhaps he wanted me gone.
The thought drew me up like a splash of cold water. I’d thought I couldn’t do this, but the idea of turning around and leaving, of Jack asking me to leave, panicked me. “I can’t leave this place,” I said.
“You can,” said Jack.
“No,” I said. “And I don’t mean that I won’t. I mean that I can’t.” He frowned, and I stumbled on. “Weren’t you listening when I told of how I got here? How I lied? I’m desperate. I don’t have enough money for a ticket to Newcastle on Tyne or anywhere else. I own three blouses, two skirts, a pair of shoes, three pairs of cotton stockings, one hat, one pair of gloves, one wool coat, and four pairs of underwear. My last employer sacked me owing three weeks’ pay. I spent my last coins on my ticket here and the hired car, and I had to steal a stale bun from a baker’s stall because I couldn’t afford to eat at the same time. I’ve been running for four years, and I can’t go any farther.”
“My God, Kitty,” he said. “Running from what?”
I shook my head. “That’s my own business. If I leave here, I am on the streets. Perhaps a man will pay me a few shillings for a quick one. Is that what you’d rather I do?”
“I never said that,” he said, angry now. He leaned forward and reached into the dark, his hand finding my wrist. I watched his bare arm flex in the lamplight, the tendons on the inside of his forearm tense, my mouth gone dry and my pulse beating in the base of my throat. “Bloody hell, Kitty.”
His grip was strong, his skin hot on mine. The feel of it put me in a state near panic, and everything else burned away. “Why are you here?” I said desperately. “You’re Jack Yates. Who sent you here?”
“No one,” he said, not letting me go. “I checked myself in.”
“No. I don’t believe it. You’re not—”
“Yes, I am.” The shadows from the lamp played over the beautiful planes of his face, and I thought of what Martha had said, of how he’d tried to kill himself. “I’m as mad as the rest of them, Kitty. Never doubt it. For the last part of my life, I’ve wanted nothing more than to die. I don’t sleep. I don’t speak. I have nightmares . . . things I barely even remember, and I wake up wanting more than ever to be dead. I see visions, ghosts at night. I hear footsteps. Does that sound mad to you?”
“You’re not mad,” I said again.
His eyes left me, flickered to something over my shoulder through the door, and their expression changed so entirely I nearly gasped.
“He’s coming,” he said.
And from somewhere down the hall, the screaming began.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was Archie. He was half off his bed by the time I got to him, his head and body twisted back, arched as tight as an archer’s bow. His hands were up, the fingers flexing, grasping air. From his throat came a jagged scream unlike anything I’d ever heard from a grown man.
“Archie!” I reached past his hands and grasped his shoulders, tried to shake him. “Archie!” Too late, I remembered I wasn’t supposed to approach a man in the grip of a nightmare alone—but by then he was thrashing beneath me and his wrist clouted the side of my head. I switched my grip to his arms and tried to pin him down. “Archie!”
Footsteps came behind me; it was Roger, at last. “I’ll take him,” he said, but I was already tangled with Archie, his bony arms entwined with mine. Archie’s eyes opened and he looked past me unseeing, staring at something that wasn’t there. His arms spasmed again and I dodged them. Then he shut his eyes tight and pressed his face to the pillow; his hands flew up to his ears as if he heard something intolerable; he drew his knees up in a posture of defense. “I won’t go!” he screamed. “I won’t go!”
A wiry hand, scarred and unspeakably strong, gripped my arm. “Move.” Archie had huddled down as if trying to burrow, his hands still clapped over his ears. I stepped back and Roger stepped in.
My knees were weak. I watched Roger shake the writhing Archie and tried to gather my jumbled thoughts. Water? The hypodermics? Surely the other men must have woken. Where had Jack gone?
I stumbled out into the dim hallway. There was no sound, no movement from any of the doorways. Surely this could not be commonplace, those screams a usual occurrence. Jack’s door was shut; I had no time to think of it as I swung my gaze the other way and saw a shirtless man pass the nurse’s desk and disappear into the stairwell.
Jack? I couldn’t tell. Why had he removed his shirt? Or was it another patient, choosing just this moment to try an escape? What if he was sleepwalking? Behind me, Archie screamed again, his voice
going hoarse.
You are losing control of the situation, Nurse Weekes. I dashed back into the room and grabbed my lamp, which I’d taken with me from Jack’s room. Leaving Roger to wrestle with Archie, I hurried down the hall as quickly as I could. If it was a sleepwalker, he could hurt himself or get into trouble. And if he woke from his nightmare in another part of the house . . .
I swung past the nurse’s desk and plunged into the stairwell, pausing at the top landing. “Hey!” I whispered loudly into the dark, hoping that whoever it was had woken up. “Who are you? Where are you?”
There was no answer, so I held the lamp before me and lit my way carefully down the first steps of the spiral, the wood creaking beneath my feet. I went slowly, feeling my way, peering into the darkness ahead of me in case he’d stopped in his tracks, not wanting to crash into the back of a sleeping man. “Wake up!” I hissed into the darkness. “Wake up!”
Still no answer. I descended one round of the spiral, then another, the faint light of the men’s corridor receding behind me. I was plunged completely into the blackness; the stairwell was usually lit by daylight coming from its high windows, now blank and starless. I had only the globe of my paraffin lamp to light my way from step to step.
Where could he have gone? One floor down, the door led to a corridor behind the dining and common rooms, but it was heavy and fastened with an old iron latch; if the sleepwalker had pushed it open, I would have heard it. That meant he either was still on the stairs or had descended past the main floor, continuing down to the lower floor where the kitchens and the servants’ rooms were.
Still, I came to the first door and took a moment to run my hands over it. The latch was fastened, the door unmoved, the metal of the latch icy cold. I pulled my fingertips away and rubbed them together to warm them. “Come back!” I tried whispering into the dark again. “Come back!”
Perhaps I shouldn’t try to wake him. Wasn’t that the wrong thing to do with a sleepwalker? I didn’t know. If I found him, I’d try to get him back to his room, and—
There was a faint sound at the bottom of the stairwell, as of a shuffle of feet. Sssh. So he was at the bottom door, then. I did not hear that door open, either. He seemed to be just standing there, still.
I lifted my lamp and plunged downward again, trying to peer ahead, my hand sliding along the banister, my legs disappearing into the gloom. And suddenly I noticed the cold: icy, thickening cold, climbing my ankles and legs as I descended, as if I were walking down a set of steps into icy water. The skin on my legs and thighs rose in goose bumps even under my layers of skirts, and my feet in their boots ached with numbness.
I slowed, bit my lip. There was still no sound from below.
I took another step—the cold rising almost to my waist now—and stopped. I leaned over the banister and swung my lamp in the dark, trying in vain to see something, anything, and failing. The only thing I saw in the dim glow of light was my own breath, puffing in the cold air as if I were outdoors on a winter’s night instead of indoors on a stairwell in June.
I stood still for a long moment, the lamp raised, watching as one breath and then another plumed out into the dark air. There was only the sound of my breathing echoing in the stairwell now, the inhales a high whistle, the exhales gasping with fear. There was silence from the bottom of the stairs, a waiting silence, of something patiently watching me come closer, something with all the time in the world.
Every instinct told me to turn and run; and yet, if I did so, I would turn my back on it to climb the stairs again. And if it followed me . . .
I pushed myself backward and up one step, my boot scuffling on the stair, my hand sliding on the banister and pulling with the slick grip of my palm. My breath rasped. And from below I heard it move in response, heard a footstep and the soft creak of the sole of a foot on the bottom step.
“Nurse Weekes!” Roger’s voice boomed down the stairwell. I glanced up to see him silhouetted in the upper doorway, a place that seemed miles away. “Come quick! Mabry’s nose is bleeding again.”
In a second, purely by instinct, I launched myself up the stairwell toward him, pounding up the spiral as quickly as I could. He gave me a queer look as I reached him, breathless and undoubtedly ghastly. “What were you doing down there?”
I shook my head, unable to form words for an answer, and brushed past him. No sound had followed me up the stairs; the cold was gone. I headed down the hall on legs that wobbled, Roger’s footsteps the only ones behind me.
• • •
“It’s nothing,” said Captain Mabry. “I’m quite all right.”
He stood at his washstand wearing the flannel top and trousers that were standard-issue pajamas at Portis House. It was an ensemble that, truthfully, did not look much different from the outfits issued to wear during the day. I thought of the shirtless man I’d seen and gripped the back of the room’s only chair to keep myself upright.
“I can get you something,” I managed. Archie had quieted and I had sent Roger to make sure every patient was accounted for, so we were alone. “Aspirin. Disinfectant.”
“It won’t be necessary.” He was wiping his nose with a flannel, catching the last trickle of blood. This nosebleed was tidier than the last one, as he’d made it to the washstand as soon as it started. Now he glanced at me in the mirror, his tone neutral and not exactly welcoming. “You should sit down.”
I did. There was silence for a long moment. I couldn’t blame him for his demeanor, considering what had happened with the doctors. I took a breath and tried to focus. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I truly am. About earlier. I’m sorry.”
He paused in surprise, the flannel holding steady in midair, but he did not look at me again. Instead he rinsed the flannel in the basin of water, the only sound the gentle splash. Even from where I sat, I could see the dark blood swirling as he rinsed. “It’s all right,” he said at last. “You would have been sacked.”
“For what it’s worth, I think you should be able to see your children.”
His eyes still on the bloody water, he shrugged, the small gesture tight with pain. “They’re right. I’m not fit.”
“That’s rubbish,” I said. “You have a few nosebleeds, that’s all. Your children would survive it.”
“Is that all you think it is?” He dabbed his nose again, then rinsed the flannel, swirling it for longer than necessary. “After the war,” he said slowly, never raising his eyes to me, “I wasn’t myself. I began drinking. It got . . . very bad.” He pulled the flannel from the water, wrung it out slowly. “Antonia—that’s my wife—was frightened. She told her father she didn’t want me around the children anymore. And her father told me that I would come here and recover, or he would move them all back to the family home and I would never see any of them again.”
I sat very still.
“So,” he continued, “I came here. I thought I’d dry out—you know, a few days of the shakes, stiff upper lip, carry on and that sort of thing—and go home and take up my life. And then . . .” He looked up at the blank wall where a mirror would be, though no man was given a mirror in his room at Portis House. He stared at the wall as if he could see himself. As impersonal as a doctor, he pulled downward on the skin of one exhausted, bloodshot eye, and then the other. “The first time it happened,” he said, “I pissed myself. And they told my father-in-law. They told him.”
That bell sounded inside me again, somewhere deep down. Oh, I understood that kind of fear. I understood it well.
Mr. Mabry, said Matron’s voice in my mind, has a particular psychoneurosis. And then, Martha: He gets afraid. He thinks he sees something.
He’s coming.
I leaned forward in my chair, unable to keep quiet any longer. “What is it?” I asked him, unable to keep the pleading from my voice. “What is it? What do you see?”
“You’d like me to tell you, wouldn’t you?” His
gaze cut to me. “You’d like to know what we all see. And when the doctors make you tell them, I’ll never see my family again.”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“That’s how it works,” he said. “That’s how it is for all of us.”
I was silent.
“I’m quite all right, Nurse,” Mabry said after a moment. He looked away. “I’d like to get some rest, if you don’t mind.”
• • •
“He all right?” Roger asked when I came out into the corridor. He leaned against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Yes,” I managed. “He just wants rest, that’s all.”
Roger’s eyes watched me keenly in the gloom. “All patients present and accounted for,” he said. “Tucked into their beds like children on Christmas Eve.”
“All right.” I had known it, of course—known that whatever I had followed down the stairs had not been a man. “And Mr. Childress?”
“Sleeping like a little baby.”
There was something nasty in his tone. I wanted to get away from him, the sooner the better. “Very well. I suppose—”
“What should I do with Patient Sixteen?”
A low bell of alarm sounded in my gut. “Beg pardon?”
“He probably wants out by now, but I think we should leave him in. At least for a while.”
“What are you talking about?”
Roger’s eyes gleamed as if he’d been waiting for me to ask. “I locked him in.”
“You what?” I launched myself down the hall, fumbling for my keys. “You can’t do that. What’s the matter with you?”
“He wanted to come out when the shaky one started screaming,” said Roger, following me. “He was getting agitated. I needed him to stay put.”
How long ago had that been? Half an hour? I reached the door and knocked on it. “Jack? Mr. Yates?” I clumsily tried my keys, one after the other, in the lock. There was no answer.
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