No one had ever accused me of a lack of determination.
I hadn’t thought I’d sleep, but as the faint sun vanished into darkness, as I heard the creaks and groans of the house around me, and somewhere below me the men sat to supper, my eyes drifted closed. I put the book under my pillow again, the image of Dr. Oliver’s soft hands behind my eyelids, replaying the way those hands had handled the hypodermic, pushed the needle under the skin. The words from the pages pricking my brain like pins, I drifted to sleep.
Night shift was coming, after all, and I had to be ready for the dreams.
PART TWO
Night Shift
We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go, For your King and your country both need you so. We shall want you and miss you, But with all our might and main, We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you, When you come back again.
—“Your King and Country Want You,” 1914
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nina woke me at ten o’clock, and as I was still dressed I had only to wash my face, tidy my braids, and don my boots. As the other girls went to bed, I descended the darkened spiral servants’ stairs to the lower floors.
My first stop was the kitchen. The few hours I’d slept had strangely refreshed me, and I was ravenous. The entire house was dark; I had to feel my way down the corridor on the servants’ level, but I found the kitchen lit with two paraffin lamps, one perched on a high counter and the other in the center of the wooden worktable in the middle of the room, around which sat four figures in the postures of people just recently off their feet.
“Hullo,” I said, recognizing Paulus Vries’s large frame and the wide pot-bellied figure of the head cook, who I thought was called Nathan. “Is there any food?”
Nathan moved his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other and regarded me flatly. “You night shift?”
“Yes.”
“Might be something for you. Bammy, check the stew pot.”
The smallest figure rose from the table, and I saw it was a kitchen boy, no older than sixteen. He wore a greasy cap of fabric tied behind his head like Nathan’s and a set of stained and well-worn cook’s whites. He lumbered to the darkened stovetop without a word. None of the other figures moved; they sat with their hands resting on their thighs or on the tabletop, their fingers curled, their shoulders a little slouched. It was the timeless pose of a person first sitting down after an endlessly long shift on his feet, wanting nothing but to sit and not think and not be ordered somewhere for a few blessed minutes, and I recognized it well.
I pulled up a chair for myself. Bammy thumped a bowl of stew and a slice of bread down before me, even remembering a spoon. I thanked him and he responded only by dropping into his chair again, sprawling as if he’d just done an expedition to Kilimanjaro.
“So you’re on night shift.” Paulus’s accent sounded exotic in the humdrum English kitchen. “Did you sleep?”
“A little,” I said between bites. “Did you?”
“I’m finished,” he replied. “I’m off now. You have Roger tonight.” He nodded to the fourth figure at the table, a second orderly much smaller than himself. Roger was tidy, with brown hair slicked neatly back from his forehead. He looked at me with a flinty stare and nodded.
“All right,” I said. “Why are the lights out? Why the lamps?”
“Electricity goes off at night,” said Paulus. “We’re not on the main lines all the way out here—far from it. The electricity runs off generators, and we turn ’em off at night.”
I stopped tearing my piece of bread. “There’s no electricity all night?”
“No.” This was still Paulus. “We kept the generators on at first, but they kept malfunctioning at night—something kept getting into ’em, though we don’t know what. We don’t have the manpower or the supplies to repair them every day, so we decided to turn them off at night. No need to light this whole place anyway.”
“Well, that’s wonderful,” I said, “except for the part in which no one can see.”
“We’ve lamps. We light ’em along the men’s corridors—most of them don’t like the dark. Roger gets one and so do you, to carry.”
The Lady with the Lantern, I thought wryly. I had almost been in a good mood—something to do with the rest I’d had, and the fact that the doctors were gone. I was unsupervised for the first time since I’d arrived, and it felt a little like being a child left home when its parents are away. But at the thought of walking Portis House in the dark, my good mood drained away.
Nathan was still watching me. His expression looked like a cross between disinterest and reluctant amusement. “Your first night shift, I see.”
I tried to take another bite of stew. “Yes.”
“This house scare you?”
I wanted to sound bold, but thought of the black mold in the lav, the sounds in the walls, and said nothing.
“I hope you’re not the susceptible type,” Nathan said. “Those don’t last long in this place. Especially after night shift. It isn’t just the nightmares. Most of the men say that something walks the halls, especially at night.”
“Nathan,” said Paulus in a warning voice.
“Oh, shut it. You know it’s true. Every nurse goes running. We didn’t even see the last one’s tail.” He turned back to me. “Some say it’s the ghosts that make the patients try to top themselves.”
“What?” I managed.
“A few have tried it,” Nathan said. “That spot outside the library, you know. That seems to be the spot they go to. The last one had stolen a blade.”
There was a long silence. I thought of that lonely door I’d seen while I sat on the lawn with Archie, how none of the men had gone near it. Bammy the kitchen boy looked at his shoes.
“They’re just madmen,” Roger put in. He was perhaps over fifty years old, something I hadn’t noticed when I’d first seen his dark hair. “I’ve done night shift plenty of times here. I never see anything walk but the sleepwalkers. These patients sleep tidy if you make ’em. We’ll have a quiet night tonight.”
“You say that,” said Nathan, “but even you won’t go near that library.”
“That’s a bald lie,” said Roger.
“Why the library?” I broke in. I wouldn’t think about suicides. I wouldn’t. “Why isn’t it closed with the rest of the west wing?”
“It’s the isolation room,” Roger said. “They took the books out, of course. It’s big, and it’s secure. Keeps the patients in solitary confinement far away from the others.”
“Works like a top,” said Nathan. “Not a single man of ’em wants to go to the isolation room. Not for love or money. And not overnight.”
Dear God. “Is anyone in there now?”
“No. It’s empty.” Nathan put his toothpick back between his lips. “Except for the ghosts.”
“There are no ghosts,” said Roger.
“So you say. The men know. It’s getting worse, too. Did you hear the last one screaming? Said he could see something from the window.”