“They never left,” he said softly.
We all looked at him again. He lifted his gaze, defiant.
“They never left,” he repeated. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? The sounds in the basement, in the lav. Everyone knows it, but no one wants to say. No one saw them because they never did move away. They’re all buried here somewhere and their ghosts are haunting the place.”
I exhaled.
Nathan chewed his toothpick, uncomfortable. Roger had gone red in the face. It was Paulus who spoke. “Lad,” he said, “you’ve been listening to too many stories. It’s just an old house that’s falling apart.”
“But that’s it,” Bammy protested. “It’s not old at all. Why are there cracks in the walls? Why is the west wing falling down? Why is there mold in the men’s lav? Why is it getting worse? No one has an answer to that, do they?”
“The air isn’t good here,” Nathan said. “There’s something about it. That I know. What do you think, Nurse?”
He was looking at me again. “It’s strange,” I managed. “I suppose.”
Roger scraped his chair back and stood. “Well, you ladies can sit here and gossip about ghosts all you like, but I’ve a shift to start.” He glared at me from gimlet eyes. “So do you, Nurse.”
Of course. My watcher. There would be no love lost between Roger and me tonight. I gave him a hard look in return and stood.
It was a warm night, not a breath of wind to rattle the windows or sigh in the eaves. Through the panes of glass in the upstairs corridor I saw the garden unmoving, the clusters of trees still as soldiers. In a cloudless sky the stars had appeared, speckling the deep black canopy with small diamonds of light. I wondered whether the air smelled sweet, whether it was a perfect summer night for strolling and looking at the sky. The perfect night to do things I’d never have the time to do, with people I’d never be able to do them with.
The conversation in the kitchen dogged me as I sat at the narrow nurse’s desk and pulled the linen lists from the drawer. The Gersbachs dogged me. Only one family had lived in this house. Only four people. And now I lived in their house, slept in their nursery, looked from the same windows they had looked from, ran my hands along the same stairway rails they had smoothed with their own palms. They were not just the absent owners of giant dining rooms and paintings gone from the walls. One heard about people disappearing, perhaps, but never entire families. Never entire families, just vanishing into the air.
And I had followed something into the stairwell the night before, felt it waiting for me in the dark at the bottom of the stairs. I had seen something in the library window, something that had hit me.
The need to talk to Jack Yates was like an itch. I wanted to confide to him what had happened to me, and—I admitted it—I just wanted to see him. But I was being watched, and tonight I would behave. Jack had to get well. That had to come first.
I slid aside the linen lists and drew out Practical Nursing, which I had slipped into the desk drawer earlier in the evening. I opened the book and looked at Florence Nightingale again. Florence would never have gone into a patient’s room and started crying about her problems. She would never have seen things and started to crack up. I pulled my lamp closer to me on the desktop, turned to the chapter on sutures, and began to read.
Two hours later, it seemed as if the night would be a quiet one. The men slept without nightmares; Roger had disappeared to his other duties; and when I did my rounds, if Jack Yates was awake he made no sound. No moans came from the walls of the lav, and the drains sat undisturbed.
I studied until my eyes blurred. There was nothing for it; I would have to count linens soon. This was how Martha and Nina did night shift, then: a numbing repetition of making rounds and counting, with no company in the silence, nothing but the slurring thoughts in your head. Listening to one’s own quiet, creaking footsteps in the corridor, shivering a little as the night wore on, looking out the darkened windows, trying not to think of sleep.
I caught my reflection in a window’s darkened glass. My face had filled out just a little, the effect of a week of regular meals. It was a narrow face, heart shaped, the nose longish, the eyes dark and long lashed, perhaps, but overall unremarkable. The only feature that set my face apart was the lower lip, my mother’s lower lip, which was soft and full, yet curled in almost a sensual sort of disdain. I had no control over the look of that lip, but men seemed to find in it an invitation, and it had enraged my father. I had paid, I thought, a very high price for such a small thing.
I slid my own face out of focus and looked past it to the garden, wondering what it would feel like to be out there, feeling the warm night air breathe gently across me.
I was cold. My shoulders rose instinctively, flexing upward. I put a hand to the back of my neck and rubbed it. The body grew cold at night on its own, but this was different. A distinct icy chill, on my neck and back, between my shoulder blades. A draft. Or—
“No,” I said softly to myself.
The word came out on a breath of frosted air.
Reflected in the glass, something moved behind me.
From one of the rooms came a scream. I recognized the voice: Archie again. My hands were icy, my feet made of clay; I did not want to turn around, but at the second scream I was already moving.
There was nothing in the icy corridor behind me. I ran to Archie’s door, never fast enough, pressing as if moving underwater. The air was cold and strangely heavy. Somewhere deep in the walls a pipe groaned, punctuated with a familiar clang. I gripped the jamb of Archie’s door and propelled myself into the room, grabbed the brass foot of the bedstead, and pulled myself toward him.
He was arched again, just like the night before, his head thrown back and his mouth frozen in a rictus of terror. I took his shoulders and tried to shake him. “Archie!” He thrashed, his sinews twisting like leather under my hands. This is last night, I thought. I am living it again.
He quieted for a moment, panting on the bed, staring at me in stark fear. “Archie,” I said as gently as I could, leaning over him. “Wake up. It’s all right. Wake up.”
There was a second in which Archie—the real Archie—was in those eyes. And then something changed. His face contorted; his teeth gritted together. Then he launched himself upward, reached his hands around my neck, and squeezed.
I was too shocked to think. The pain was tremendous. “Archie,” I tried to say, but the word would not leave my throat.
He squeezed harder, pulled me toward him. “You coward,” he said to me.
I tried to shake my head, but could only gasp.
“You are a coward,” he said again, his stutter gone, his voice deep and eerie. Wherever Archie had gone, it was far away from the man who was gripping my throat now. I began to struggle, my fingernails biting into the backs of his hands.
Spots danced in front of my eyes, but two incredibly strong hands, their backs lined with black tufts of hair, wrenched Archie’s grip from me. Roger pressed Archie’s arms down into the mattress and twisted to look back at me, where I had staggered away from the bed.
“Get the needles,” he said. “Now.”
I wasted only a few seconds standing there, gasping for air, my hands on my neck, watching the small, wiry Roger pin down his patient. Archie was larger, longer limbed, and possessed of inhuman emotion that gave him strength; yet Roger bent over him and held, his forearms shaking, his face grim with deadly seriousness. It was only that Archie was weakened and underweight that kept him down, and still he thrashed and screamed, the nightmare still on him. I turned and ran from the room.