“Put it down!” Paulus shouted again.
“Do you think you can help me?” Creeton said to me, his eyes blazing with a sick, despairing triumph. His knuckles whitened on the shard of glass again. “Nurse Weekes? With your caring? With your concern? Do you actually think you can help me? Do you actually think you can help any of us?”
“What does he say to you?” I asked him, locking my gaze with his. His was so mad I almost felt the madness coming out of him and blooming inside me. “In the nightmares, what does he say? Does he call you a coward?”
His mouth went slack with shock.
“Dead is never better,” I said, the same words I’d said to his father’s retreating back. “Never.”
His pause lasted only a second, but it was long enough for Paulus to come up behind him in three huge, long strides and deliver a powerful kick to the back of Creeton’s knees. Creeton overbalanced and fell forward, the glass falling from his hand. The orderlies were on him before he could move.
“You’ll want to cooperate with us now,” said Paulus calmly as another orderly unfolded a straitjacket. “Off we go.”
Creeton struggled only a moment, and then he went slack, facedown in the weedy grass. The orderlies moved his limbs as if he were a heavy rag doll. I looked around and saw Matron some twenty feet away, watching, flanked by Boney. Matron hurried forward, a needle ready in her hand.
The gardens and terrace had emptied. Martha and Nina were presumably inside keeping the other patients quiet, though I could see faces pressed to the glass of the French doors.
The orderlies rolled Creeton over to put the jacket on him. His eyes were open and staring at me. “Go to hell, Nurse Weekes,” he said, and he closed his eyes as Matron bent over him and they put his arms in the sleeves.
• • •
“It’s called a relapse,” Roger told me after they’d put Creeton in his room, sedated. “When they top themselves. That’s what they put in the letter. ‘We regret to inform you your son died after a relapse,’ or some such nonsense. They never just say they did themselves in.”
I remembered this as I sat in a broom closet, where I’d ducked in looking for a bucket, thinking I was going to throw up. I hung over the dingy bucket, my clean sleeves getting dirty, but nothing happened.
I can’t do this, I thought. I can’t, I can’t. I couldn’t stop shaking, and my stomach turned again and again. I prayed that no one would come in here, that no one would see me like this.
This house was a vampire, feeding on the pain, the insecurity, the despair of these men. It was feeding on Creeton, it was feeding on Archie, it was feeding on Mabry and Jack. It knew my weaknesses, my fears, and it was only a matter of time before it fed on me. I let go of the bucket, put my head in my hands, and surrendered to my own madness, the madness of this place.
It was killing them, and it was winning. And soon, there would be no time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In the end, it was easy to get the keys to the west wing. The orderlies had two sets, but at night only one orderly was on duty. After Paulus had gone off shift, I simply walked into the empty orderlies’ room next to the kitchen, took the second set of keys from the latched cabinet where Paulus had put them, and walked out again with no one the wiser.
It was late. None of the visiting families had elected to stay the night. Nina had already started night duty, and Martha was asleep. After the afternoon’s morbid excitement, Portis House had settled into a dark, quiet night.
I had been debriefed for over an hour by Matron. She had questioned me closely about the exact sequence of events, including the moments I had left Creeton alone. She had written down everything I said for her report. I answered her with numb truth, too tired to consider prevaricating. If I was in trouble, so be it.
But it seemed that I wasn’t to be blamed this time. Creeton’s parents had left before the appointed time—when an orderly was due to arrive and help—and I had been left with no assistance. Creeton had given no outward signs of suicidal distress, though likely he had been planning it even as I asked him whether he was all right. The mad, as Matron had told me, could be duplicitous.
I was worried that Creeton would be put in the isolation room. Haunted or not, it seemed to be the worst place to put a man who had just tried to kill himself. But when I’d asked Matron, she informed me that “standard procedure” in these cases dictated the patient be placed in his own room, under restraint and sedation, until “his mind has cleared.” I remembered that she had dealt with exactly this situation several times already, and I wondered whether she was tired of it. Tired myself, I asked her if she ever thought about why the men kept choosing that particular patch of grass.
“Men who live in close quarters influence each other,” she’d replied. “Once one man had tried it there, I knew the others would follow suit. It becomes a sort of group delusion. Madness makes a man’s mind more susceptible to such influences. Does that answer your question, Nurse Weekes?”
“Yes, Matron,” I’d said.
“Very good. You are dismissed.”
Now I wore only my skirt, blouse, and boots, the long sleeves off. I slid quickly down the corridor in the dark, away from the kitchen, where I could hear Nathan talking, probably to Bammy. The lights had gone off and I had no lamp, but I could make my way to the stairs easily enough.
I had a bit of a bad moment before I climbed the first step. It was dark, and I couldn’t see exactly where I was going. For a long breath I pictured the shirtless man and my heart turned over in my chest. But there was no breath of cold, only a damp, mildew smell. I had to put exhaustion and fear behind me and push forward. I placed one foot after the other and climbed.
This was the westernmost stairwell of the main wing, and I hadn’t had cause to use it before. It was yet another servants’ staircase; the stairs for the family were wide and open and far too exposed for what I planned to do. The rough map of Portis House in my head said that one flight up I’d be at the farthest end of the corridors that held the men’s bedrooms. That meant that, should I open the stairwell door, Nina would see me if she was doing her rounds in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I climbed to the landing and stopped, holding my breath and listening.
“Kitty.”
The breath heaved out of me and my knees buckled, a whistling sound coming from my throat.
“Jesus!” It was a whisper, hoarse and low. “Jesus, I’m sorry.”
I clutched my chest like a heroine in a Victorian melodrama. “Jack.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, and he moved out of the dark toward me. I could faintly see his white shirt.
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you.” He came closer again. “Are you all right?”
“Once I can breathe, yes, I will be.”
“I mean after this afternoon.” I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear concern in his voice. “That wasn’t a very good scene with Creeton.”
I swallowed. “I’ll survive.”
He was quiet for a second, and I wondered whether he was thinking of his own suicide attempt. “I wish you hadn’t seen that,” he said finally. “I wish there had been a way to save you from it.”
“That’s very gallant, but as Matron made clear, it seems to be part of the job.”
“She at least told you that you did well, I hope?”
That surprised me. “Did well?”
“Kept your head. Took action. Kept him talking.”
Even in the dark, I stared at his shadow in amazement. “Matron? No. She said nothing like that.” The topic was making my cheeks burn, so I changed it. “You haven’t told me why you’re waiting for me in a stairwell at night.”
He shrugged. “I waited last night, but you never came. I’m going with you, Kitty—I told you. You can’t get rid of me.”
My nerve
s jangled, but I had to admit that, after everything, I didn’t really want to do this alone. And yet . . . “How did you know I would come this way?”
“This is the way, isn’t it? The only one left.”
It was. There were multiple doors and doorways throughout Portis House, of course, that would take a person into the west wing; every one of them had been discreetly and tidily boarded or bolted shut with hammer and nails. A safety precaution, as the west wing had become a hazard. The only entrance left was this one, past the stairs and across a gallery, through a door that was merely kept locked.
I listened at the door again, but Jack said, “She isn’t doing rounds. She’s counting linens.”
I turned to him. “What’s going to happen when she checks and sees you gone?”
“She already knows. I told her I couldn’t sleep so I was going for a run.”
“Going running? Now?”
I almost saw his shrug. “I have authorization. I told her I wanted to go now. What is she going to do?”
What indeed? Nina would not gainsay Patient Sixteen.
“I could have put my pillow under the bedcovers to look like I was sleeping,” he said, a grin in his voice. “But she would never have fallen for it.”
No, she wouldn’t. “We’ll have to be silent as we go through the gallery,” I said. “I’ve stashed a lamp in there. I’ve got the keys.”
“Clever and beautiful.”
I stared at him.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Let’s go.”
• • •
“One question,” said Jack, who was lighting the lamp as I unlocked the door. “Why didn’t you do this when you were on night shift?”
“God, no,” I replied in a whisper. “The night shift nurse has to do rounds and count linens. She can’t get away. And Roger watches like a nanny.”
He raised the lamp, and now I saw him in its globe of light. “This hasn’t been as easy as you thought it would be, has it?”
“Not even close,” I admitted. “What is that smell?”
I had swung open the door to the west wing, and we stepped through, pushing the door shut behind us. Over the smoky odor of the lamp I could smell dampness, mold. It was the smell of the black mold from the men’s bathroom.
Jack caught my hesitation. “It’s just rot,” he said. “Wood and plaster. I don’t smell anything dead.”
He’d know what death smelled like, of course. I thought of the Gersbachs and all that was at stake and made myself square my shoulders and lift my chin. “Give me the lamp.”
“No. I’ll lead. If there’s a hole in the floor, I’d rather go through it myself than watch you do it.”
“Is that supposed to be heroic?”
He grinned. “Follow me.”
We crept along the first corridor. Portis House had always seemed decrepit and unwelcoming to me, but as the only door out of the west wing receded, the rest of the house started to seem like a bastion of comfort. There was no other way to put it: The west wing was falling apart. Plaster crunched under our feet on the warped floorboards. The beams were visible in the ceiling above us, stripes of wet black mold rotting through the plaster, which was gone in chunks. The air was still here, but for the faint sound of the wind and the furtive scurrying of something in the walls. The smell of rot was a miasma. I kept my eyes on the back of Jack’s white shirt, reading the lettering over and over, and focused on where I was putting my feet.
We reached a room with only a single abandoned dresser in it. Jack set the lamp atop the dresser and opened the drawers as I went to the window, which was cracked just enough to let in a draft. I looked over the unfamiliar vista to the west of Portis House, along the coast and the marshes to the rocky shore. I spent a long moment breathing in the faint scent of clean night air and watching the few trees winking in the moonlight. How long had this day been? A year? Two?
Jack finished with the dresser, which apparently was empty, and I felt him come up behind me.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“Watching you.” His voice came low, close to my ear. “I can’t seem to help it.”
“You shouldn’t,” I said, and I felt a lurch of fear—not of ghosts this time, but of the fact that I was so far beneath him, so unworthy. “You should find someone better.”
“Kitty,” he said. “You have no idea, do you, what my life was like before you came. If you did, you wouldn’t talk like that. In fact,” he said gently, “I never want to hear you talk like that again.”
I blushed. I felt him breathing. And yet, when he touched me, I jumped.
“Kitty,” he said, and sighed. He brushed the backs of his fingers along my bare neck, running them gently up the tender skin beneath my ear. Tension jittered through me and slowly began to seep away.
“You were brave today,” Jack said.
My breath caught in my throat and I closed my eyes, feeling the sensation of his skin on mine. “Was I?”
“Creeton owes you a debt.”
I couldn’t move. I would never move again, not as long as he touched me like that. “He doesn’t owe me anything.” Do you think you can help me? Creeton had shouted at me. Do you think you can help any of us?
“You don’t even like him,” Jack said. He ran the backs of his fingers down and up again, not touching me in any other way, like a man who has found that an animal is willing to sit still for him and he doesn’t want to frighten it. “I don’t think you’re as coldhearted as you pretend.”
I sighed again. This place was strange and sinister, but we were alone—truly alone—in a way we’d never been before. I savored it. “You do not get to choose the patients you treat. Matron told me that.”
“Exactly my point.” His fingers kept rubbing, and I tilted my head, giving him more access. He lowered his head and I felt his breath on my neck, in the spot where his fingers were. “You smell different than you did a few hours ago,” he said softly, the words echoing on my skin. “As if you had a bath.”
I breathed in, taking in the scent of summer air and rot, and wished I could smell him. He would be spicy and warm. He was right; I had bathed.
He knew it. His fingertip moved softly along the edge of my hairline behind my ear. “Your hair is just a little damp along here.” His mouth moved closer. “I think the picture of you in the bath, with your hair down, is the best thought I’ve ever had.”
“You’ve been locked up for six months.” My voice was unsteady.
But he ignored me, and as my breath rasped in my throat, he pressed his lips to the spot on my neck, soft and hot. Just a single kiss. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’d like to know what makes you laugh. And I’d like to know who has made you so afraid.”
My blood was singing and my skin felt raw. That kiss—my first—had erased everything but its own existence, the contact of skin to skin, for a perfect moment. I couldn’t speak. Jack put his hands gently on my shoulders and turned me around to face him. His face, half in shadows, was intent on me.
“Is it a husband?” he asked.
“My father.” The words slipped out, and I listened to them, stunned.
His gaze seemed to darken, became calculating. “I see. And is he still living?”
“Oh, yes.”
He searched my face for another long moment. My heartbeat began the slow process of returning to its normal rhythm. I found I was looking for disgust in his expression, but I found none. He only nodded. “All right.”
He turned away and picked up the lamp. I followed him, remembering—barely—to watch my step. “What about you?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think—?” Suddenly I could barely choke out the words. “Do you think you could ever leave here? Do you think you are still sick?”
“I d
on’t know.” He sighed. “It was bad, Kitty.”
“What happened?”
“I told you what happened. What room is this, do you suppose?”
“A powder room,” I said. “And that’s a bathroom over there, and if you think I’m going near it after what I’ve seen in the bathrooms in this house, you’ll have to think again. So answer my question. The real one. What happened, Jack?”
He turned in the doorway and looked at me again. It seemed to be his turn to be reluctant, but finally he shrugged, one-shouldered. “My men died.”
“Which men?”
“All of them.”
He turned away again, and I followed. “So you sat in the tent with the general,” I said, “or whoever he was. And they sent you home.”
“Yes. And the men I’d led, the ones I’d saved, were reassigned. And while I made speeches, all of them died. Not together, of course. Separately. The last one died in the spring of 1918, of influenza. He was one of forty-eight men who died in a single hospital that day. And then it was over.”
Dear God. “That isn’t your fault, Jack. You must know that.”
“I was home, Kitty,” he replied. “Staying in hotels and meeting politicians. Sending more men to the Front. They died.” His voice had grown as rough as a scrape of gravel. “I never asked to be sent home. But I agreed to it, didn’t I? I agreed to all of it. When the Armistice came—and I realized I’d actually lived through the damned thing—I suddenly saw that I’d have to go about the rest of my life. And the thought was completely beyond bearing.”
I haven’t had my chance to die, he’d told the general. “You went over there to die.” My voice was almost accusing. “You wanted it.”
“No. At least, not exactly. I thought I would die, and I was resigned to it. I expected it. That isn’t the same as a wish. But later . . . Later it became a wish. More than that, a desire. I just wanted everything to stop. I was so goddamned tired.” His voice was raw with grief. “After I woke up, I came here and I told them to lock me in a room, and in my room I stayed.”
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