The Patient in Room 18 · Chapter 12 (1/2)

XII

Room 18 Again

Still feeling that I must get hold of Higgins, it was hard to compose myself to rest and I didn’t sleep a wink. About eleven o’clock I got up and made my way again to the basement. It was dark and spooky and very empty down there and after knocking at Higgins’s door a few times and feeling, while I waited for the reply that did not come, as if all the ghosts in Christendom were prowling in the furnace room and thereabouts, I retreated precipitously to my own room. I was sure that Higgins was in his room, for where else would he be at that hour? But the surroundings were not those to encourage persistence on my part. The unused corridors are very desolate at that hour and those of the sickroom wings little less so.

I was still wide awake when the twelve o’clock gong sounded.

By that time I was convinced that Higgins was deliberately keeping out of my way and that in itself made me the more anxious to get in touch with O’Leary. I stopped at the general office as I passed it on my way to the south wing, and telephoned again.

The same servant answered my ring, sleepily at first, but he awoke in a hurry when I told him that it was Miss Keate at St. Ann’s and that I must speak to Mr. O’Leary at once.

“You might try the police station,” he said guardedly. “I think he was investigating some telegraph messages that just came in.”

So I looked up the number in the telephone book and tried it. But though I tried and tried, the line was busy and kept busy and I had to give up in order to be on time at the south wing.

Olma Flynn was waiting for me and Maida already busy about twelve-o’clock temperatures.

“Eleven is doing pretty well tonight,” said Olma as we bent over the charts. “Three has a degree or so of fever but has been fairly quiet. Oh, by the way, have you the key to the south door?”

“No.”

She frowned.

“I couldn’t find it. I had to leave the south door unlocked.”

“Couldn’t find it!”

“No. It wasn’t anywhere about the desk.”

“Did you look in the lock?”

“Of course, Miss Keate. And I asked the other girls. No one has seen it since morning.”

In view of the existing circumstances, I suppose it was natural that I should feel immediately alarmed. After Olma had gone wearily away to bed I gave the chart desk and its vicinity a thorough search.

“What on earth are you doing?” asked Maida, coming along just as I had taken all the charts out of the rack and was feeling about with my fingers in the recesses left empty.

“Looking for the key to the south door,” I replied. “Have you seen it?”

“No. I have not seen it since last night.”

She waited for a moment, watching me rearrange the charts.

“I wish this trouble were all cleared up,” she said, her voice sombre.

“So do I.” I replaced the last chart and turned to face her. The greenish light from above the desk made her face worn and colourless and cast a sickly green glow over our white dresses.

“If we don’t find it tomorrow I shall have to have a new key made. I suppose we can leave the south door unlocked tonight,” I decided irresolutely. “I don’t like to; I have had enough of people prowling through our wing.”

Maida’s shadowed eyes met mine and she shivered slightly; she attempted to smile but her lips pulled tautly.

“It is getting to disturb me more and more,” she admitted. “Think of this, Sarah: it has been only four days since that dinner party of Corole’s. Is it possible! So much has happened. It seems like months.”

“This is Tuesday.” I calculated, “That was last Thursday night⁠—no, Maida, five days.”

“Well, five days then,” she assented lifelessly. “What a five days! If it would only turn warm and summery and sunshiny again, I do believe things would be better off. I’m sure I should be at least!”

“I dislike this constant drizzle,” I agreed, without much spirit. “There is something honest and wholehearted about real rain, but weather like this is wretched.”

“Everything I touch is clammy like⁠—like a dead man.” She whispered the last words and I think they came as a surprise to her, for she looked frightened and a little shocked.

A small red light shone down the corridor above a door and I started to answer it.

“Don’t forget to⁠—er⁠—”

“Keep my eyes on the south door?” finished Maida with a bleak smile.

“Exactly.” I tried to smile, too. I remember thinking, as I walked briskly toward the signal, that our words were not unlike those of soldiers going into battle⁠—in spirit, at least. I saw something of that in 1918; I was in a hospital that was once, mistakenly I hope, shelled. In a choice between the shelled hospital on that lurid front and the dreary, clammy nights of second watch at St. Ann’s, where every stir made your breath catch, and every whispering noise made your skin crawl, I’d much prefer the shelled hospital. There the terror was expected; its source was known. Here, every doorway was a silent menace; every room and every turn and every alcove might harbour death. The hospital seemed too roomy, too large, too dark. Our very skirts seemed to whisper and hiss with fear along those blank corridors and empty walls and half-lights and shadows.

I had left the door of the general office open and while going about my work listened for the telephone. Dr. Hajek is supposed to answer it at night, having his room off the office for that purpose, but I hoped that if I heard the ring when O’Leary first called, I would be able to get to the telephone by the time Fred Hajek, who is a heavy sleeper, was aroused.

And when I finally heard the subdued buzz I happened to be at the chart desk and simply dropped pen and all and ran through the corridor that connects us with the main portion of the hospital.

I took the receiver off the hook and was panting so heavily that I had to wait for a second to catch my breath before answering. The door to Dr. Hajek’s room remained closed and Dr. Balman, in the inner office, had not been aroused either, so I must have made the distance in nothing flat⁠—whatever that is⁠—I picked up the term from a patient who was interested in sports and believe it to mean a very rapid pace.

It was O’Leary, of course.

“This is Miss Keate,” I said in a low voice, hoping that the sound of it would not carry past those closed doors. “I am very anxious to see you.”

He must have caught the urgency in my voice.

“Shall I come right out?”

“Yes. At once.”

“Very well. In fifteen minutes.”

The receiver clicked, I hung up my own softly, straightened my cap and walked back to the south wing. Maida was not to be seen. I sat down at the desk and found that in my haste to get to the telephone I had upset the red ink I was in the act of using. It was meandering gayly across the desk, reddening everything it touched, and I seized some trash out of the waste basket for a blotter. It was while I was mopping up the ink that all at once, without even a warning flicker, the light above the desk went out, leaving me in total darkness. It was so unexpected that I gasped and cried out.

Then I turned as if to look down the corridor, but nothing but a close black curtain met my eyes. There was not a gleam of light. Every signal light was gone; there was not even a glimmer of light from under the doors of kitchen or drug room or linen closet. I was suspended in a breathless black void.

And down that black emptiness, only five nights ago, two men had been violently done to death!

My breath began to come in painful, rasping gasps. I must do something. I must find Maida. I must get a lamp. Must make my way to the basement switch-box and replace a burned-out fuse⁠—or find what had caused the trouble.

Or was it an accident? Had a fuse actually gone? Could it be that the lights had purposely been disconnected?

The terrifying question had not more than entered my head when from somewhere down the corridor a cold current of air struck me.

I shivered. Some door or window had been opened. Some door⁠—the south door! Was it the south door?

I was standing, gripping the chair back, loath to leave that firm, stationary thing and venture forth into the surrounding blackness that was alive, now, with foreboding and the menace of unspeakable things. Was something moving? Did I hear a stealthy footstep? Was it the thudding of my own heart?

I strove to move, to force my horror-drugged muscles to advance that length of grisly blackness toward⁠—toward Room 18.

I tried to call out: “Maida⁠—Maida⁠—” I kept saying and finally realized that my stiff lips were only shaping the words.

What was happening down there? Was Room 18 claiming another⁠—Was⁠—I took a step into the darkness, tore my reluctant hands from the chair, and groped for the wall to guide me past the yawning emptiness of those intervening doors.

With outstretched, shaking hands, I was feeling for some stable thing to guide me, when, in that dead silence, there was a shattering crash of sound.

It was a revolver shot! The crash reverberated through the halls, echoing and reechoing in those empty spaces and about those blank doors.

Then gradually the frightful echoes died away. The blackness pressed in upon me, more suffocating than before, and again dead silence reigned.

For a moment I must have been numb with shock. Then there were footsteps running, a cry, the clicking of signal lights that did not light, and I was running, stumbling, gasping, bumping into doors, trying to reach the end of the corridor. And Room 18.

Along the way I collided with something, something moving that twisted away from me and cried out. It was Maida and at my voice she answered.

“What is it! What has happened! Was it Room 18?”

“Room 18! What can we⁠—”

“We must have a light. In the kitchen⁠—there’s a candle⁠—” I heard the swift, soft thud of her feet as they moved away and I kept on, feeling along the cold, dank wall, groping my way past open doors. It seemed an eternity before I reached the end of the corridor and felt the small panes of glass in the south door under my fingers. I turned sharply to the left. Beyond that black void stretched Room 18. I paused at its threshold but something drove me on, into the room.

Here was the wall. Here was the electric light button. Here the bedside table. I bent, feeling along the rough weave of the counterpane on the bed, took a few steps further, trod on something hideously soft and yielding, and sprang backward in stark terror.

Afraid to move, afraid to breathe, my heart clamouring in my throat choking me, my hands pressed against my teeth, I could not even scream.

What lay there? What was in that room?

Then I realized dimly that Maida was coming, that a small circle of light was at the door, that a hand was holding a lamp unsteadily and the wavering flame was casting grotesque shadows on Maida’s chin and mouth. Above them her eyes were wide and black and mirrored my terror.

I saw her hand advance, pointing at my feet. It shook. Her mouth opened in a voiceless cry and I forced myself to look downward.

It was Higgins, sprawled there at the foot of the bed. He had been shot!

Neither of us spoke. Neither of us moved.

At last Maida withdrew her hand.

“Set the lamp down,” I heard someone saying⁠—it must have been I. “Set the lamp down before you drop it.”

We did not hear O’Leary enter the south door. All at once he was there with us, staring at the thing there on the floor, holding his electric torch to illumine it.

“When did it happen? How? Come into the hall. Tell me. Was I too late?”

Somehow we were out in the corridor; the lamp was left on the table in Room 18. The light from its small flame trembled and cast eerie, creeping shadows.

“Quick,” said O’Leary. “Take that lamp to the basement, Miss Day. The light switch has been pulled out. You know where the switch-box is⁠—”

I saw Maida flinch but she took the lamp, averting her eyes from the floor.

“Hurry! No, Miss Keate, stay here, please, at the door. If anyone tries to get in, stop him! Scream! I’ll not be far away.”

In a flash he was gone, out the south door. I was still standing as if petrified, there in front of the south door, when the green light over the chart desk at the opposite end of the corridor flashed up and the little red signal lights gleamed suddenly all up and down the hall. I breathed a sigh of relief; Maida was all right, then. And in another moment or two her white uniform came into view at the chart desk.

“All right, thank you, Miss Keate,” came a voice at my elbow. It was O’Leary, his hat gone, his hair ruffled, his eyes shining like phosphorescent flashes on a deep-lying sea. “Come with me, please,” he said.

“Was the fuse burned out?” asked O’Leary as we met Maida, who was hurrying to answer the signals.

She shook her head. Her eyes were hollow and dark and her face as white as her cap.

“The main switch had been pulled out.”

“What I expected,” muttered O’Leary, as we sped along the corridor.

Lights were gleaming from the north wing, and the night-duty nurses from that wing were clustered in a frightened group in the main hall. As they saw us they ran forward.

“What was it, Miss Keate⁠—we heard a shot⁠—what has happened?” And down the stairs tumbled several nurses in uniforms and kimonos and Miss Dotty with her hair in paper curlers and her eyes distracted.

O’Leary paid no attention to them. I followed him into the general office. He rapped sharply, first at Dr. Hajek’s door, then at the door of the inner office. Then he put his hand on the latch of the door to the inner office and pushed. It was not locked and opened readily; the light from the office streamed through the door.

“O’Leary! What has happened? What is it?” Dr. Balman, his eyes blinking anxiously in the light, was tossing back the covers and springing from his bed.

“There has been another murder in Room 18,” said O’Leary.

“Another⁠—what! Who?”

“The janitor⁠—Higgins.” And at that second the door to Dr. Hajek’s room opened and Dr. Hajek, his bathrobe hugged about him, ran toward us.

“What was that? What did you say? Higgins? Dead?”

In a few, terse words O’Leary explained and by that time we were all hurrying back to the south wing, Dr. Balman’s white pajamas leading the way. I did not enter Room 18 again with them.

There was plenty of work waiting for me in the wing. As if to make bad matters worse the nurses from all over the hospital were crowding into the south-wing corridor, their pallid faces and wild questions adding to the confusion. The excitement was becoming tumultuous when Dr. Balman came into the corridor, a strange figure in his pajamas and bare feet, his thin hair rumpled and his eyes worried.

“There has been an accident,” he said. His voice carried though it was very low. “Please return immediately to duty. Do not be alarmed.” And it was curious to see the nurses scattering hastily like frightened children caught in mischief.

For a while I had not time or eyes for anything but work. It was difficult enough to calm and soothe the patients of our wing and I paid no attention to the closed door of Eighteen, the flying trips through the corridor made by the two doctors, or O’Leary’s gray suit and thoughtful countenance and shining eyes here and there about the wing.

When the police began to arrive, entering the wing by the south door so as not to be seen by those from other wings, it was a great deal like the repetition of a bad dream. It continued so until along about four o’clock when an ambulance, gleaming oddly white and distinct in the cold gray dawn, was drawn up at the south door. I did not see them leave.

I was trying to control my still shaking hands in order to get the neglected charts written up before turning things over to the day nurses, when O’Leary paused beside me and sat down in the vacant chair.

“What is that on your hands?” he asked suddenly as I wrote.

I glanced at my hands and jumped.

“Oh!” I remembered. “It is only red ink. I was cleaning up some that I had spilled when⁠—when the lights went out.”