Castle on the Edge

by Douglas Strang

  “Good morning, Mister Lipton, how are you feeling today?”

  Mister Lipton slowly looked up, gazed at me and quietly said in a monotonous tone, “The same, everyday is the same.”

  “I would like to introduce you to Doctor Franz Lederer. He will be staying with us a couple of days. He would like to meet you.

  “Who would like to meet me?” he said lethargically.

  “Doctor Lederer. This is Doctor Lederer from Zurich, Switzerland. One of his specialties is treating your type of condition. He’ll be able to help you,” I said sympathetically.

  He looked up at Doctor Lederer without saying anything and the doctor said, “How do you do, Mister Lipton, I understand you’re a writer?”

  “A writer? Oh, yes, I’m a writer…I write short stories and novels. I’ve had nine novels published, you know…though I haven’t had anything published for a while, about a year, I think.” Then he started to drift off with a numb stare.

  Doctor Lederer looked at him sympathetically and said with a soothing voice, “Well, Mister Lipton, we’ll help you get back on your feet.” Then he turned to me and affirmed, “Won’t we, Doctor Ramsey?”

  “Of course, Doctor Lederer,” I replied reassuringly. Then, putting my arm on Mister Lipton’s shoulder, I went on to say, “In fact, Mister Lipton has been making good progress since he’s been with us these past six months. For the first three months he was unable to sit at his desk at all, let alone write. Now, he can not only sit at his desk but is able to type at his typewriter, for half an hour a day, and with good concentration too.”

  Then Mister Lipton came out of his glazed gaze, looked up at me, then turned to Doctor Lederer and said with a slight enthusiasm, “I’m working on a novel now. See the pages on the left corner of the desk, over there…left of the typewriter?”

  “Why yes, Mister Lipton, I do. I would like very much to read it. What is the novel about?”

  “It’s a roman `a clef, you know, in which actual persons or places are depicted in fictional guise; in this case about a writer who, even though successful, suffers from melancholia and alcoholism and voluntarily enters a hospital for treatment.

  “I see. I’m sure it will be a great success and an inspiration to others, Mister Lipton, because it’s written from the very essence of the author’s soul.” Doctor Lederer said, with a feeling of true empathy.

  I looked at my watch and motioned to Doctor Lederer that we should leave.

  We said our good-byes to Mister Lipton and moved on down the hall to Miss Gould’s room. Her door was half open…enough so I could peer in. She was fully dressed, reclining on top of her bed with her head propped up on three pillows reading a book.

  “Hello, Miss Gould. Can we come in for a minute?” I called to her from the door.

  She looked up, put the book to her side and replied, “Who is it?”

  “Doctor Ramsey,” I answered, “I have Doctor Franz Lederer with me. He would like to meet you. Can we come in for a minute?”

  “Oh, yes. Please, come in,” she said, motioning with her hand. “Please come in and sit down.”

  There were two chairs set up against the wall. Doctor Lederer and I each took one to sit across from her bed.

  Miss Gould sat up on the bed, put her feet on the floor and said, “I hope you gentlemen are comfortable.”

  I responded by replying, “Oh this is fine, Miss Gould. I’d like to introduce you to our visiting physician Doctor Franz Lederer. He has come all the way from Zurich, in Switzerland.”

  “Good morning and how do you do, Doctor Lederer. Welcome to the United States.” She said in a formal way,

  “How do you do, Miss Gould. I…eh…understand you are an instructor from a Boston finishing school,” Doctor Lederer said quizzically.

  “Oh yes, a very exclusive finishing school, Doctor Lederer. Our girls come from the cream of Boston society’s families. You see, the problem is…many, if not most of our girls, haven’t received proper guidance at home, because their parents are too busy to be with them most of the time. You know, off traveling or conducting lucrative business deals, having cocktail parties and what not. So they turn their dear ones over to our school and expect us to create another generation of icons for high society. Many of these girls are wild and incorrigible and the parents want us, of course, to make ‘ladies’ out of them. When they go home on their vacations and holidays, the parents blame us, the teachers, for not distilling grace and poise in their little darlings. As a result of the stress and pressure, I became overwhelmed and collapsed while giving an English lesson in class; therefore, I took a sabbatical and came out here for rest and therapy, you see. I don’t mean to prattle on, gentlemen, I’m sorry.”

  Doctor Lederer responded by saying with a smile, “That’s all right, Miss Gould, you’ll soon be fit as a fiddle and back in the saddle. Only this time, you will be pulling in the reins on the little beasts.”

  “You’re too kind, Doctor Lederer. I’m looking forward to meeting you again while you’re here,” she said with a feeling of ease.

  I thanked Miss Gould for giving us a moment of her time. We proceeded to get up and leave and Doctor Lederer then offered his hand to her.

  We arrived at the door of Mister Duncan and I knocked. When he opened the door, I introduced him to Doctor Lederer.

  “Please come in, gentlemen,” Mister Duncan said, and then he led Doctor Lederer and me to an oval-shaped table holding several containers of sculptor’s clay. He went on to say, “Do sit down. Let me push the table over to the side so we will have more room.”

  “I see you’re working on a project, Mister Duncan,” Doctor Lederer said as he looked over at the object by the window in the room.

  The form was on a pedestal and appeared to take the shape of a man.

  “Yes, Doctor Lederer, I am. I began this statue three days ago.”

  “I’m sure your figure will represent the higher order of Man’s progress and achievement in the world, Mister Duncan.”

  “Progress…achievement?” he said sharply with a raised voice as he looked at Doctor Lederer. Then he paused, turned to his work-in-progress and intoned with a low voice, and assertive fortitude, “Oh, no, quite the contrary, Doctor Lederer. This statue is going to represent darkness, the great darkness in the world today. Yes, it’s going to be one of Adolph Hitler, dictator of Germany, who is now threatening the stability of Western Europe. No doubt this scourge on mankind will attempt to conquer the whole world, too.”

  “Yes, Hitler is a menace and I hope he’s stopped; because if he’s not, the dark ages will be like paradise on Earth, in comparison to what it would be like under Hitler.” Doctor Lederer responded with passion.

  Although agreeing with both Mister Duncan and Doctor Lederer in their assessment of Hitler, I attempted to lighten up the conversation by saying, “Mister Duncan, Miss Holden told me you have constructed some stage props for the Halloween party this evening.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Miss Hopkins, Mister Morgan, and I are putting on a little show in the recreation room tonight. I’ve made a park bench out of plywood and painted it green, two streetlights out of clay and painted the posts green too so they will look real…or real enough. Then I procured two bed lamps for the lights atop the posts, one each from two of the unoccupied rooms on the second floor…Nurse Holden said it would be all right. And oh yes, with Doctor Calloway’s permission, I borrowed the two potted palms from the lobby, you know, the ones on either side of the foyer to the main entrance of the Castle. They will simulate trees in a city park; that will be the first scene, starring Miss Hopkins and Mister Morgan. They’re going to play a pair of fractured lovebirds in Central Park, New York.

  “I shall also perform myself, in the second vignette. I will play the part of an eccentric sculptor. I molded some silly-looking forms for my comedic character. All three of us have memorized our scripts. Miss Hopkins wrote them, you know, as well as directed the acts. Mister Morgan turned the rec. room into a mak
eshift theatre for tonight’s performance, he’s been working on it all day and I worked on the props all week. I believe Mister Morgan is setting up chairs for the audience as we speak.

  “I’m actually looking forward to being in the show, it’s good therapy for me, as you know. I’ve never done anything like this before.

  “That’s wonderful” Doctor Lederer said joyfully, “and it’s a good thing to have one’s mind on projects, hobbies and activities, so the devil can’t enter an otherwise idle mind.”

  I looked at Doctor Lederer and gestured that we had to leave, then told Mister Duncan the same and thanked him for his time. Mister Duncan accompanied us to the door.

  Doctor Lederer and I proceeded out from his room and walked down the hall to where there remained one more unoccupied patient room. We stopped in front of the door.

  “I wonder if the new patient is in this room,” Doctor Lederer said, as he looked at the door and then to me.

  “I was wondering the same thing. I don’t think it would hurt to knock.”

  “Of course, we shouldn’t eavesdrop, but it might not be a bad idea to listen at the door for a moment, to see if there’s any activity inside, Alex.”

  “You’re right, Doctor Lederer. I mean, Doctor Calloway said he would be orientating the new patient during this hour while I’m introducing you to our six patients.” I then firmly pressed my left ear up against the door.

  “Hear anything, Alex?”

  “Not a thing. I don’t think there’s anybody in there. I’m going to knock.”

  I knocked. There was no response. Then I tried to open the door. It was locked.

  “That’s very strange. We never keep vacant rooms locked. “

  “Maybe it’s not vacant, Alex.”

  “I don’t have the key on me. I’ll run down to the nurse’s station; we keep a set of keys there. Wait here, Doctor Lederer.”

  I saw Nurse Jenkins at the station and asked her for the set of keys for the third floor. She gave them to me and I went back to the locked room where I’d left Doctor Lederer standing. I was looking at the different keys to pick the right one to open the door.

  Doctor Lederer said, “I noticed that none of the rooms are numbered, Alex.”

  “That’s right, the rooms aren’t numbered as such, but if you look up, right in the middle of the top beam of the door, just below the transom, you’ll see a colored piece of tape, for this room green. You can see it right there. Now, each key has a corresponding color tag attached to its handle. Here’s the green one.”

  I put the key in the keyhole to open the door, but it wouldn’t work. I thought that some of the tags had got crossed so I tried all the keys. None of them worked. I immediately dashed back to the nurse’s station and asked Nurse Jenkins about the locked room. She said the room was open this morning because she saw the housekeeper in there dusting. It is her weekly duty to dust and change the bed sheets in vacant rooms and today was that day.

  “When was the last time you used the key to the room with the green tag?” I asked Nurse Jenkins,

  “Let’s see, it must have been when Mister Lunsford was here. He gave me back his key when he left three months ago. I tested it as I always do to make sure it was the right key, and it worked…I know, I remember,” she said.

  “Well, none of these keys work. And where’s the duplicate ring? I tried all of these. Did you give the key on this ring to any other staff member after you tested the green-tagged one for this room?”

  “No, I did not,” she answered vehemently. Then she went to a desk where a duplicate set of keys were kept. The whole set was missing. “I can’t understand it. They should be here. There’re always here…in this drawer. I saw them this morning. I…”

  “Never mind, Miss Jenkins, I’ll sort it out later,” I said.

  Then I returned to the door of the locked room where I’d left Doctor Lederer.

  “Now we have another mystery on our hands. Not only do we have an unknown patient here, but it seems like both keys to this door are missing. In fact a whole set of duplicate keys are missing. I don’t even know what this key with the green tag goes to. We have duplicate keys, Doctor Lederer. We give one to the patient occupying the room, as it gives him or her, a feeling of privacy, and one is kept at the nurses’ post.”

  “I think a third mystery has manifested, Alex. Just now, while you were gone, I thought―no, I know I heard a curious noise behind the door of this room.”

  I could hardly believe what Doctor Lederer had said to me. After a short reflection, I asked him, “What kind of noise?”

  “It was like heavy thumping. I could actually feel the vibration. The sound seemed to be moving around the room and, oh yes…also, the thumping was immediately followed by a… how should I say…like the dragging of…something—a foot perhaps. In other words, as if a foot were leading, thus making the thump, and the other foot was being dragged, kind of a scratchy-type sound. It was like, thump-drag, thump-drag, thump-drag. It started right after you left me and it lasted for about…oh, fifteen, twenty seconds, no more than twenty seconds, I’m sure. I didn’t even have to put my head up against the door; it was audible enough for me to hear it three feet away...as well as feeling the vibration, as I said before. Then it stopped and you came back about a minute later.”

  “We have to get to the bottom of this,” I said. So I knocked on the door again, only this time with more force. There was no response. Then I yelled, “Is there anybody in there?” Again, there was no response. Then I tried to peek through the keyhole. It was too dark to see anything. I was really getting agitated now and was about to go to the supply room and get a stepladder, in order to climb up to the transom and look in the room.

  Then Doctor Lederer reminded me there wasn’t much time left and we still had to see the other two patients on the second floor, then be back to meet Doctor Calloway in his office at eleven. It was already a quarter to eleven. We had fifteen minutes so I gave up on getting into the green room and we walked into the elevator, and descended to the second floor. I would ask Doctor Calloway about this unsettling situation when we all met shortly in his office.

  “We’ll stop in on Miss Hopkins first,” I said to Doctor Lederer. “She tends to get quite melodramatic, you know. Here is her room”

  “After all, Alex, she is an actress, isn’t she?” he said with a smile.

  I then knocked on Miss Hopkins’ door and she called back in her overly staged projecting voice. “Who is knocking on my door?”

  I said, “It’s Doctor Ramsey. Good Morning, Miss Hopkins. I have a visitor with me. May we come in?”

  “Give me a moment please; I must prepare.”

  We waited for about a minute and a half then Miss Hopkins announced. “You may enter now.”

  I opened the door and Doctor Lederer and I walked into the room. We didn’t see Miss Hopkins at first because she was on the other side of a long, dark, opaque, oriental vanity screen. It was speckled with gold garish designs. With its three parts unfolded, it extended horizontally across the room, like stage curtains. The partition began at one end of the wall to about four feet short from the other end, leaving an opening to pass through. That passage had knotted columns of ornate beads she’d attached to a crossbeam on the ceiling, hanging down all the way to the floor; they made a loud clattering sound as she passed through her “preparation barrier” to greet us.

  Her entrance would make quite an impression on anyone who saw it. She was wearing a flaming red wig, had on long false eyelashes and dark mascara over a heavily made up face. She was bedecked with jewelry and wearing a gaudy floral, kimono with a blood-red backdrop.

  “Good day, Doctor Ramsey,” she projected, looking at me in her thespian display of showmanship.

  “Good day to you, Miss Hopkins,” I responded back to her, and went on to say, “I would like to introduce you to Doctor Franz Lederer. He arrived last night. He has come all the way from Zurich, Switzerland. He will be spending two days with us in
order to observe our treatment programs here at Castillo Del Mar.”

  “Oh, really? How very interesting” she said effectually. She paused, stared thoughtfully into space as if preparing for a theatrical scene, then turned and looked into Doctor Lederer’s eyes and said, with a grand dramatic presentation, “I am Penelope Hopkins; no doubt you’ve heard of me. I have played not only Broadway but London, Paris, Berlin, I’ll be glad when they get this Nazi business over with there. It’s so inconvenient, you know; don’t you agree, Doctor? Eh…what did you say your name was?”

  “Franz Lederer. How do you do, Miss Hopkins. Yes, I do agree with you; but it’s far worse than inconvenient. It’s deadly. I hope the German people will stand up against its cultic rulers; however, I don’t think that will happen. I’m afraid the free countries of the world will have to intervene to stop the fanatical Hitler.”

  It was obvious Doctor Lederer was deeply affected by the current events in Europe, because he was letting his own emotions overcome his professional protocol. Again, I interrupted a political discourse and said to Doctor Lederer, “Miss Hopkins is putting on a show for us this evening; isn’t that right, Miss Hopkins?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said enthusiastically. “You’ll both be there, won’t you? Mister Duncan, Mister Morgan and I have turned the recreation room into a theatre. Mister Morgan is down there now setting up chairs, I think. I hope everyone will come.” Then her mood suddenly changed and she said sarcastically, “Except that old crank, Strutmire. Um. He’s so rude. I don’t like him. Boy, did I let him have it yesterday. If he thinks…”

  “Don’t worry about Mister Strutmire,” I cut in and said compassionately, “he can take of himself. We’ll all see you tonight. Oh, by the way, what time is the curtain call, Miss Hopkins?”