Silence for the Dead(50)

“Yes.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “Perhaps you should start from the beginning.”

I did. I told him everything, though I left out that the assault had reminded me of my father’s beatings. By the time I’d finished, Jack had stood and was pacing the room. He stopped with his back to me, thinking.

“It’s ghosts, isn’t it?” I said. I had been through so much fear that the temptation to babble was strong. “I’ve never thought of ghosts before. I’ve never even considered they existed. I never knew. But now . . .”

Jack bowed his head, his back still to me, as if what I said affected him.

“This place is haunted.” I had to say it aloud, make it real. “Ghosts.” I rubbed my hand over my eyes. “For God’s sake.”

“I’ve always thought,” Jack said slowly, “that it was in my mind.”

“How could you?” I said.

“Easily,” he replied with bitterness. “I see ghosts all the time. We all do.” He turned only part of the way back toward me, so I saw his face in three-quarter profile. As if he wanted to look at me but couldn’t quite manage it. “You see them when you close your eyes. Sometimes they beg you for help, and sometimes they just die again. Then you start seeing them when your eyes are open. They’re just there. They’re trying to stanch the blood from an artery with a piece of cloth, or they’re laughing at a stupid joke right before the shell hits, or they’re running next to you in a sortie before they’re hit so hard you never even find the body. There are days the ghosts are quiet and there are days the ghosts never stop.” He paused, the breath coming out of him with a soft sound that was not quite a sigh. “It was one more ghost— that was all. I wasn’t even surprised. What was one more ghost?”

“I’m sorry, Jack,” I said. “I’m sorry. But the other men are seeing them, too.”

He hadn’t left his room in months; he couldn’t know what the others saw. But he would have heard what the men screamed in their nightmares. I tried to imagine lying in bed, listening to that at night. Wondering whether your madness was yours alone. Wondering whether what you heard was a figment of your unhinged mind.

“Part of me knew it,” Jack said. “But, Kitty, I don’t trust my own judgment anymore.”

“Is it true that men try to kill themselves in that spot by the isolation room?”

“Yes.” Jack still did not turn. “Always there. One with a razor he found God knows where. The other with a knife he stole from the kitchen.”

I looked at the line of his half-turned profile, thinking about the knife under my mattress. “Why there?” I asked. “Why in that place? What is driving them? It isn’t just madness.”

He sighed, and finally he turned his body and looked at me. “Kitty, you’re talking about something I thought I was hallucinating. It’s a little hard to fathom.”

I touched the cool flannel to the inflamed skin on my neck. “Are they the Gersbachs?” I asked quietly. “The ghosts?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve never thought about it?”

“No, Kitty. I haven’t.”

“No one thinks about it,” I said. “No one talks about it. Let’s just be quiet and it will all go away—is that it?”

“That isn’t fair,” he retorted. “You know why we don’t talk about it. You’ve seen for yourself.”

I held the flannel to the back of my neck, looked down into my lap. He was right. I’d attended the sessions with the doctors, watched privileges being taken away, visits denied. There was nothing to be gained by babbling to the doctors about ghosts, nothing but a careless note in a file and a longer sentence in this prison. We have to be well for the doctors. And as Captain Mabry had expressed so clearly, my connection to the doctors meant that none of the men would ever talk to me.

“And we don’t think about it,” Jack went on, “because we can’t leave.”

I couldn’t exactly criticize that, could I? I, who had never cried to a neighbor or run to a policeman for help in the middle of London when my father was hitting me? I’d never admitted what was happening, even to myself, because that would have made it real. Who was I to be brave?

I raised my chin and looked at him again. “All right. But the nurses. The orderlies. Captain Mabry’s nosebleeds, the nightmares. They must have some idea.”

“And what would they do?” said Jack. “People see what they want to see. They’re just nurses doing their jobs.”

And I wasn’t. I wasn’t really a nurse, and I wasn’t doing my job. Martha was supporting her family back in Glenley Crewe; Nina was earning money for her wedding and marriage. What would happen if either of them had started talking about ghosts, the way Martha had talked about the orderlies being afraid of the basement? Any nurse, any orderly who hadn’t left already was in desperate need of the work. And the consequences of seeing ghosts were as dire for them as they were for the patients.

“What about the woman?” I said. “Have you ever seen her?” When I’d told him the story, I’d described the woman I’d seen.

“No,” said Jack.

“I don’t know what she was,” I said. “I didn’t get the same feeling from her that I did from—from the others. But I never got very close.” My mind was turning it over. I couldn’t stop it. It was better than cowering in fear. “If she wasn’t one of the Gersbachs, who was she?”