Silence for the Dead(37)
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.