Silence for the Dead(45)

I lowered my hand, made myself look away. I turned my gaze to the deserted west wing, its dark windows, and then I froze.

A woman stood on the grass before the door to the isolation room. She wore a blouse and skirt, the hem lost in the long weeds, her hair tied back, hatless. In the shadow of the looming walls, I couldn’t see her features clearly. But I could see that she stood with her hands at her sides, unmoving. And she was staring steadily at me.

My heart thumped in my chest. For a long moment I just stood there, my breath short, wondering what I was looking at. A woman? A ghost? I thought of the shirtless man I’d followed into the stairwell and I had the wild instinct to run. But my feet did nothing, rooted to the ground like clay.

Then she moved.

She turned with a slow, eerie calm and walked away, back toward the isolation room door and past it. Her skirt shifted as she passed, though in the tall grass I couldn’t see her feet. She moved like a real woman. But then, the shirtless figure I’d seen had moved like a real man.

She turned the corner and disappeared around the side of Portis House. I stayed frozen for another long moment, but she didn’t reappear. I should go back into the house, I knew. Even though it was improbable, likely impossible, that a woman had come so far alone with no transportation, I should report what I had just seen. Instead, I followed her.

The breeze died as I descended the rise toward the west wing, giving way to still, oppressive air before I reached the house. I stepped into the curve formed by the cup of the west wing’s walls and my vision was dappled with shadow. Jack Yates’s window had vanished from sight, and no one could see me here. The weeds smelled rank and without the breeze there was no sound, no soft shushing of grass, only the sound of my boots on the choked, soft earth.

I looked around me and realized where I was standing.

That spot outside the library, you know. That seems to be the spot they go to. The last one had stolen a blade.

I glanced down at my feet, as if expecting to see blood still beaded on the grass. For a second I could imagine it clearly: a patient in his Portis House whites standing here with a stolen knife. Shouts, orderlies running. The man raising the blade. When I had first heard it, it had seemed strange that men would supposedly be drawn to this place for such an impulse. Yet as I stood there myself, the loneliness was unmistakable, with the air of a place that was more toxic and sick than any other place in this vast madhouse.

The windows of the isolation room had been fitted with iron bars, and a heavy lock hung on the door, its keyhole staring vacantly at me. I tried to imagine being locked in there alone, far from the rest of the house, looking out at these hideous weeds. Would they tie a man up? Put him in a straitjacket?

I had to cup my hands to the glass of the window, between the bars, before I could see inside, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. I saw a cot, a basin on a nightstand, a single wooden chair. The walls were stained; water had come in during a rainfall, perhaps. Dust littered the floor. This was the room’s only window. A man would sit here and stare at nothing, see no one, count the stains on the wall, on the ceiling . . .

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

I pushed away. My skirt caught on something, and I looked down to see a weed growing along the wall, my skirt hooked on its sticky tendrils. I pulled myself free as other weeds scratched my legs. I was in the grip of something strange. I felt as if someone had slipped me a drug, something that made me see more than I wanted, as if I could peel up the edge of the visible world and glimpse what lay underneath. The woman watching me. This horrible, strangely awful room that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I took a step back. I saw my reflection in the window, and behind me something moved.

It was a figure. Tall, indistinct. A gleam of sunlight on metal, and then it was gone. Not my father. And yet—

He found you, a voice said in my head—the same crazy, panicked voice I’d heard in the men’s lav. You broke the rules and he found you and you know what happens when he gets angry.

I whirled around. Nothing there. Only the hot, dead air and the sour smell of the weeds. And then another voice came, this one deeper, indescribable. You coward. I took a step and something hit me hard in the stomach.

I bent double, moaning low and terrified, and the impulse to scream was so overpowering I pressed my hands over my mouth as another mad sound escaped me. I breathed out in a hot rush of air. As impossible, as insane as the situation was, my brain still recognized what was happening. I was about to get a beating. I had to run.

I forced my legs to move, one step, and then another, pushing through wave after wave of panic. Just move, move. I staggered through the fetid grass and out of the shadows into the sunlight again, and then I dropped my hands and kept running.

I had little memory of the hours after that. I know I put on my cap and apron and helped with supper. I was a shell, functioning like an automaton on the outside, my brain rattling with wild terror on the inside. It was a familiar feeling, a reaction I could not control. It was a survival instinct born of many beatings, of the need to appear normal, not to let on. My mind was very good at this, at moving my hands and feet and working while the rest of me shut down. My life, for a short time, was happening to someone else, and so I got through one moment, and then another, and then another.

You coward.

My feelings were gone, gone.