Jack pulled up a chair and shrugged. “Mabry’s got news. Go ahead, Captain.”
Captain Mabry nodded politely at me. He looked pale, and gray shadows hung under his eyes. I hoped to God he wasn’t getting sick, but before I could ask him, he began. “The generator’s low on fuel. The fuel is kept in the cellar, apparently, so I went to get some, and I found two problems. The first is that the cellar is completely flooded, and getting worse as we speak.”
I straightened in my chair. “You’re saying we can’t fuel the generator?”
“We can’t. Sorry. I mucked through as best as I could, but the water’s over a foot deep and the fuel container wasn’t airtight. The whole supply has watered to nothing by now.”
“All right,” said Douglas. “Lamps it is.”
“The other issue,” Mabry continued, “is that I saw evidence that someone had been there. On a shelf was a blanket and two opened tins of meat stolen from the kitchen pantry. The remains in the tins weren’t rotten. Someone had been down there recently, camping out. They likely left when the flooding started.”
“Creeton,” I said.
Jack nodded. “We know where he spent the night, then. But we don’t know where he’s gone. Or why.”
I didn’t understand it. Why go into hiding, away from everyone? Creeton hadn’t been the same since the awful day of his suicide attempt; he’d been alternately hostile and silent in turn, his comments, when he bothered to speak, almost frighteningly vicious. But he’d been present and aware of his surroundings. His hiding spoke of delusion. Something had pushed Creeton over the edge.
Nina came into the doorway. “Kitty, am I needed to help move the patients? I’m dead on my feet.”
I stood. “I can take over. Moving them shouldn’t be complicated.”
“You may want to rethink that,” said a voice from behind Nina.
Paulus and Roger came into the room. Paulus was pale, his expression more grim than I’d ever seen it. I wondered whether he’d recovered from the night before.
“What is it?” said Jack.
“I’m not sure those fellows should go to their rooms after all,” Paulus said. “Come take a look.”
? ? ?
“How did he do this?” Captain Mabry said. “We didn’t hear a thing.”
We were standing in the bedroom of George Naylor, one of the patients who was currently downstairs lying in the hall. Naylor, a quiet twenty-two-year-old with a gap in his front teeth and a fragile constitution from having been gassed, was a neat and orderly patient. But his meager belongings had been pulled from his dresser drawer, his socks and underthings shredded, his pillow reduced to a pile of fabric and feathers on the floor, his mattress sliced. A single picture frame, the only personal item Naylor had been allowed, lay facedown on the ground.
“This room is just one of them,” Roger said. “There are others like this, too.”
I glanced at Jack. Creeton had done this while we were downstairs at breakfast, while I had been giving Jack his clothes back. Creeton must have come up past the back servant stairs—it was the fastest way. He’d been passing the stairwell door as Jack and I had stood in the corridor.
Jack’s face was stony, impossible to read. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked from the room.
He was going to Jack’s own room, of course. We all followed him, clustering in the doorway as he stood looking around the small, dim space where he’d spent six months alone. Creeton hadn’t damaged it, not the way he had George Naylor’s room. He had littered it with pa-pers, all of them lettered in dark, square writing, the lines close and thick. Pages were strewn across the floor, the window seat, the bed.
Jack picked up one of the pages, scanned it. “His dreams,” he said, handing the page to Captain Mabry.
Mabry glanced at the sheet and winced at what he read there, as if it were shocking or painful. “Didn’t he give you these when the rest of us did?”
“No.” Jack’s attention had been drawn to the bed. “He refused.” Go fuck yourself, the exact words had been.
“Well, it looks like he wrote his dreams after all.” Mabry looked around at the dozens of pages littered across the room. “Creeton always denied he had nightmares.”
“You all denied it,” I said.
“Wait.” Jack walked over to the bed, and I could see a single piece of paper placed squarely on the pillow. It was not covered in writing like the others, but had a single message on it that I couldn’t read from where I stood. Jack picked up the paper. “Bloody hell.”
“What does it say?” said Paulus.
Jack held it up. “Eliminate the weak.”
We all digested that for a second. Roger spoke first. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
I thought of Archie telling me, It’s too late. I’m sorry. The ghost of Nils Gersbach. Creeton going over the edge into delusion at the same time. “The sick men,” I said. “Downstairs.”
“Archie Childress,” said Jack.
“You think he means to harm them?” asked Mabry.
“I think we can’t take the risk,” Jack replied. “We know he’s been in the kitchen, and he sliced Naylor’s mattress with a knife. So he’s armed himself. He may have found other weapons by now, too. If he’s got this idea fixed in his head—”
A sound came from the walls. A low groan, deep and vibrating. By reflex I put my hands to my ears; I knew that sound all too well. It was followed by a hollow clang, and then another.
“The lav,” I heard Paulus say.
It came again, and from down the corridor, toward the men’s lav, we heard a wet gurgling sound. I pressed my hands harder to my ears, but I couldn’t block it. I could see the mold in my mind; I could smell it. I could see how it had smeared as I mopped it. And I heard the words in my head, the ones that always presented themselves unbidden. He’s coming. I opened my mouth to shout it, prepared to run. I had no courage to face it anymore.
And then it stopped.
We looked at one another in the silence.
“By God,” said Paulus hoarsely at last. “I hate that bathroom.”
“That’s the loudest I’ve ever heard it,” Jack said as I reluctantly took my hands from my ears. “Something’s happening.”
The air was thick—anticipation, fear. I didn’t know what it was, but my back ached with tension and my jaw felt stiff. Somewhere, a shutter banged in the rain.
Roger cracked his knuckles. “Let’s find this bastard. I don’t care about ghosts. Just let me lay my hands on Creeton.”
“We need to guard the patients,” Jack replied. “If he’s planning something, he’ll come to them—we won’t have to go anywhere.”
“They’re too exposed in the main hall,” Mabry said. His voice was shaky and he looked even paler. “It’s dark, and he could come from too many directions.”
“I agree,” said Jack. “Where should we move them?”
Mabry thought about it. “The common room. There’s only the one doorway.”
“But it has the French doors to the terrace,” I replied. “He could come through there.”