House of Doors (28 page)

She couldn't see him clearly, could barely see him at all with the torch beam pointed the other way: just a pale round, moonlike, distorted.

A moon that shrieked and fell away, clattering into piled furniture, all awkwardness and angles. Ruth's breath came hard, with puzzlement riding the triumph. Who was this man, where in the world had he come from, what in the world did he mean  . . .?

She was turning the torch in her hands – blessing it twice over, for the weight of it and the robustness too, that the bulb was still alive and glowing – meaning to look for answers. But the straying beam found the doorway first, and there stood Michael, half naked and bewildered, coming to help in any way he could.

Her torch was his betrayal, and he knew it. He stood exposed, framed in the doorway like a portrait of guilt, like a confession. She understood a moment too late, and snatched the beam away –
too late, too late!
– and felt hands close on her upper arms, hands from behind, because of course that first man hadn't been talking to himself, of course he had a companion.

One at least, and Ruth was seized again, and this time she had no easy escape. She did try, but he was wise to every move she could fling at him in a few brief seconds of struggle. Seconds were all that she had, and she didn't know how to use them. If she called out, if she told Michael –
not by name, don't say his name!
– but if she told him to clear out then that was her confession, crystal and inarguable. This was a tryst discovered, and whoever these men might be, whatever they were about, that was her career they held in their unkindly hands. Gone with a word, herself shamed and broken, Michael desolate and alone. She knew too well what he would do.

Any moment now, he would come flying down the aisle. One-handed and unarmed, he would come anyway. And there was still a knife in the case somewhere, and she would take any last desperate chance to get them both out of this, whatever it cost.

A lens focuses the light  . . . people can get burned  . . . There would be ways to use it as a weapon.

She was betraying everyone tonight, it seemed; herself and Michael, now Cook too.

Now Peter.

It was easier here, perhaps, because he had already tripped her here. She couldn't feel this carpet beneath her feet without remembering how it had not been there, how cloud had lofted her out of all touch with the world, how she had been lost entirely in mist and fuddlement.

It felt perverse, but so did all of this. She stood abruptly still, and closed her eyes. Heard her captor's grunt of satisfaction, felt him draw breath for whatever might come next: a word to her or to his companion, a challenge to Michael, a call for the knife. It might have been anything.

She forestalled it.

She summoned Peter, or else just let him slip from where she had held him penned all this time, where she had been constantly fighting him back. That was how it felt, at least: that she released him –
like a weapon, Cook, yes
– from some dark corner.

Not me, him. He's the one, take him  . . .

Peter couldn't know, not really.

It wasn't Peter, even, not really. Not his conscious spirit, self-aware. Something she summoned, rather, some aspect of herself, guilty at being here alive when he was not, at choosing to survive when he had made the other choice. The house, she thought, found her weakness and exploited it mercilessly, driving in and twisting her open to the heart, as the knife does the oyster.

The house did that to her, and she – well. She could use that.

No matter if he was an expression of the house or an expression of herself, given shape by loss and shame. Peter was a weapon to her hand, and she used him shamelessly.

She flung him back, behind her, from her mind to her captor's:
him, take him.

She felt the startlement in the man who held her; felt his grip tighten momentarily, as if all solid ground had been suddenly snatched away and what else did he have to hold on to?

But she wrenched herself away, she could do that now. There was no conviction in his hold and panic starting to build in his breathing, in his voicelessness.

She could turn the torch on him, and see the black clothes that let him stalk in darkness; above the roll-neck sweater, see his face. See how his eyes stared blindly as though all they saw was a light through fog, bewildering.

There was no fog for her. She saw him clearly, and knew him immediately by his great coarse nose, bulbous and undefined. That was the colonel's work, early work and he wouldn't be happy with it now, only that he wasn't allowed to go back for a second try. Not one of her patients, this. From another corridor, a senior class. One of Major Black's favourites, ready to graduate as soon as they had the go-ahead. Ready to kill, and die in the doing of it.

Except that he was not ready for anything now, he was floundering where he stood, casting about with his hands for something, anything to grip. Moaning softly, unable even to find his voice. She knew exactly,
exactly
how he felt, and couldn't bear to watch him, so she turned her torch to find the other man where he lay slumped against a bare bedstead.

He was another patient, of course. She knew him too, and felt a pang at the damage done, the careful construct of his nose a swollen pulp now, oozing blood. The colonel would have a task to rebuild that again. Only, just a bloody broken nose ought not to leave him slack at her feet like that  . . .

She stooped to peel back a lid, all nurse for a moment. All she saw was white in the torchlight, and for a moment she thought the fog had invaded him all too literally. It was nothing but relief to realize that his eyes had rolled up in his skull. Even so, she thought she hadn't hit him that hard; she thought it was the fog, Peter, reaching out to both of them at once.

So she turned one more time, herself and her attention and her torch. Here was Michael standing over her, pale and confused and a little afraid. No, more than a little.

He said, ‘I don't  . . . I don't understand.'

No more did she, but she thought he ought to. Both men were dressed alike, and she had seen him just the same.

‘What would they be doing up here, Michael – something for Major Black?'

‘What? Oh – yes. Yes, of course. He likes to give us exercises inside as well as out:
sneak through the house, break into a nurse's room and bring me her badge of rank. Don't get caught.
That sort of thing. The higher the rank, the more kudos – though I don't think anyone's ever risked Matron. He sets guards on the obvious doorways, so we have to be inventive. And then he sneaks around himself, and tries to catch us. It's fun, in a way. And deathly serious, that too.' Which of course was what made it proper fun. In their heads they were all doing it for real, in occupied France or in Berlin. ‘They must have thought he'd enrolled you as a proxy, to patrol the attics. But – Ruth, what's happened to these two, what have you
done
 . . .?'

That of course was the only real question, and the one she couldn't answer, for a boy who didn't believe in ghosts.
I unleashed my dead husband on them, and now they think they're falling
. No. Not that.
The house has a restless spirit, which has them in its grip
. No, not that either. That was like saying,
I gave them over to it. They frightened me, and I gave them over to something monstrous
, and he couldn't encompass either part of that, though it was true entirely.

She said, ‘They'll be all right. They're just  . . . confused,' and hoped that might be true too. She had nothing to offer beyond hope. No true control, no knowledge. ‘It's a nurse's trick, that we use on difficult patients in the wards at night. Like hypnosis, only cruder. Men are very suggestible by torchlight. I really shouldn't have hit that first one, I didn't need to, only he startled me. If you go now, I don't think they'll remember seeing you here. Tell me their names, and get you gone.'

‘They're Dolley and Rawlinson. But I'm not leaving you.'

‘Don't be ridiculous. You're the danger to me now, not them. I'll bring them round and march them back to their beds and give Major Black an earful about sending men to terrify innocent sleeping nurses, apologize to Colonel Treadgold in the morning for breaking one of his fine noses, and that'll be that. So long as nobody sees the two of us together. Go on with you, get away and leave me to manage these.'

She was striving to sound competent and in command, manifesting Matron, all the matrons that had ever terrified him at school and since. Poor boy, he had come for a romantic erotic adventure, and had found something utterly other. Even now she had to round on him and drive him off. He went, though, the perfect example of his class and species: cowed and mannerly and anxious, still wanting to stay but with no resources to override her crispness. Another few years would put weight on his shoulders and stiffen his spine, he wouldn't be so easily bullied. If he had another few years, if she could win them for him.

He went. She lit him down the stairs with that admirable torch, and then went back to the befuddled twosome. She said a prayer, nearly, and reached out a hand to each because that felt right, because that was what you did; although in fact she hadn't needed to be touching either of them to make this happen, and she thought she didn't actually need to now. She thought she could feel what she had done, what she called Peter like a rope tangled all about them, and she still had a grip on this end of it. Him. Whatever he was, whatever she had made of him.

A weapon.
Yes. Not meant that way, but you used whatever you had to hand, whatever came. Peter himself had taught her that. He wouldn't mind. If it was him, if there was anything of him in it, in this thing, this horror she had constructed.

It was horrible, utterly. She knew. She couldn't bear that she had done this to them, wilfully; but it hadn't felt wilful at the time, only necessary. So long as she could undo it now  . . .

Peter, come back. Release them, let them be. I'm safe now, you can let them back. Bring them home. Please? Don't leave them to fall forever.

She had done this, or else the house had done this: not Peter. She did know that. But whatever had been conjured here, however it had happened, it had the shape of Peter in her head and she could only deal with it as though she dealt with him. As she always had dealt with him: tenderly, intensely, honestly above all.

If there had really been a rope, it would have fallen slack in her hands. She could have hauled it in.

That was, in a way, how it felt. As though she had a fish on the end of a line, a dog on the end of a lead. As though she was, after all, in control here.

Gently, gently.
If it was some aspect of her own mind that had assaulted the two men, she eased it back: like drawing the needle from a patient's arm, unhurriedly, not to leave a bruise. If it was in fact something outside herself, she had her touch on it, like a hand laid on the shoulder of a tiger. She could soothe it, persuade it, call it back.

Call it and it would come. Hand over hand, reel it in.

Release them.

She could see it in each of them, that moment when the fog lifted. The slumped one shuddered suddenly, and lifted a hand towards his bleeding nose. The standing one dropped down, to sit hard on the reassuring floor and lay both palms against it, feel its fixity, how it yielded not at all beneath his touch. How he really wasn't falling after all.

She didn't want to shine a light in their faces. She waited, and after a little while she saw the torch's glitter reflected in two pairs of eyes, open and bewildered, turning to her.

‘Well,' she said briskly, to both of them impartially. ‘Are you feeling better? You've had a nasty turn. I'm not quite sure what made you so dizzy; something in the atmosphere, perhaps, if it wasn't something you ate. I'll have these rooms put out of bounds, for fear there's something noxious stored up here. But let that be a lesson to you, not to go sneaking about in the dark, disturbing honest nurses. I won't have you troubling the staff, whatever mission Major Black may set you. I'll be seeing him in the morning, you can depend on that. Dolley, I'm afraid your new nose is badly squashed. But what Colonel Treadgold can do once, I'm sure he can do it again. Though I'm equally sure he'll grumble. Come on now, the pair of you, up you get. Lean on each other, that's the way. I'll see you back to your ward, and send your excuses to the major.'

Like that, washing them along on a river of words, which really was an old trick learned in the wards and known to every nurse. They offered her no resistance as she coaxed them out of the dormitory and down the stairs, still by torchlight, letting them see no more than she could help. Not giving them a chance to wonder quite what had happened, let alone remember a face half glimpsed, a body half naked, another figure in the dark.

THIRTEEN

T
rue to her word, true to her temper: Ruth went in search of Major Black, once she'd handed the two men on to the night sister to be cleaned up and coerced or coddled into bed. ‘Give them a draught, if they won't sleep by themselves,' but she rather thought they would. Shaken and disorientated, they'd find sleep a haven, and be that little further distanced in the morning, that little less likely to remember, that little bit more muddled between what had happened before the fog and in the fog and in their dreams afterwards.

She hoped.

No more that she could do about them now. Resolute in pursuit of a fiction, constructing the story she wanted to tell, she marched down to the major's domain and found him where she expected, in the old ballroom with others of his black-clad troops.

He cocked an eyebrow at her, waited with apparent interest. She said, ‘You'll be two men short at roll call. Dolley and Rawlinson are on the sick list, and I've put them to bed.'