The Iron Gates

by Margaret Millar

  “Morrow seems to have bad luck too.” Bascombe finished a piece of pie and pushed the plate away. “Don’t we all?”

  “You picked yours.”

  “Don’t labor the point. Coming?”

  Sands said he was not going back to the office. He had an appointment at the Ford Hotel.

  Fifteen minutes later he was facing Lieutenant Frome across a small writing desk at the Ford.

  Frome was very stiff and very military. In clipped tones he told Sands that he had recently finished his Transport Officer’s course at the Canadian Driving and Maintenance School at Woodworth. He was now waiting to be transferred overseas. It was his last furlough and he had intended to spend it getting married. How he actually was spending it was sitting around this dreary hotel waiting for Polly Morrow to make up her mind.

  As he talked Frome became less a soldier and more an ordinary man with a grievance.

  “I can’t understand it,” he told Sands. “She’s got some idea in her head that I’ve walked out on her. What I did was come down here. The rest of the family didn’t want me there. Why should they? I’m a stranger to them.” He forgot that Sands was a policeman on official business. Sands let him talk uninterrupted. He liked listening to people’s problems, it was a little more personal than the want ads.

  “Martin’s been O.K.,” Frome said. “He says Polly likes to boss people around until there’s an emergency and then she has to be bossed. I don’t understand women. I’m from the West, Alberta. Women don’t act like this out there.”

  “Don’t they,” Sands murmured.

  “In fact, the whole thing has been a mess from the time I met her family. Practically before we said hello we had to run into a train wreck.”

  “Oh? Who was with you?”

  “Polly and her father and Martin. I was so damn nervous anyway about meeting her family—I’d only known her for three weeks. And then running into that mess and ending up by picking up bodies . . .” He looked bitterly at Sands, as if Sands had engineered the whole thing. “All right. What did you want to ask me?”

  Sands smiled. “Nothing. Not a thing. Just dropped in to see how you were.”

  Still smiling, he walked across the lobby, pausing at the door to wave his hand cheerfully.

  “Everybody’s crazy,” Lieutenant Frome told the bartender some time later. “Everyone’s crazy but me.”

  “Sure,” the bartender said. “Sure.”

  10

  On the day of Cora’s death Lucille was transferred to a room of her own and put in the charge of a special nurse.

  Miss Eustace had a highly specialized and difficult job. She called herself a free-lance psychiatric nurse. She worked in institutions and private homes, taking over twenty-four-hour-a-day care of violent or depressed patients to prevent them from doing harm to themselves or to others.

  Her reputation and her wages were high, and she was regarded with awe by the other nurses, who felt the strain of even eight-hour duty on a disturbed ward. Over forty now, Miss Eustace considered herself a dull woman and was always surprised when she was praised for her skill and endurance and patience. In addition to these qualities Miss Eustace had a firm belief in God, a working knowledge of judo, and the ability to sleep and awaken as quickly as a dog. Only once had she been injured on a case, and that had been with one of her own knitting needles. She subsequently gave up knitting, and for amusement she played solitaire and wrote letters or simply talked.

  Lucille refused food for nearly a week and on the fourth day Miss Eustace force-fed her by tube.

  When it was over Miss Eustace said calmly, “It’s very undignified, isn’t it? Especially for a pretty woman like you.”

  Almost unconsciously Lucille turned her head toward the mesh-covered mirror. Pretty? Me? Where is my hair?

  “Tonight we’ll have a bit of soup together,” Miss Eustace continued. “You can’t possibly starve yourself to death, you know. It takes too long.”

  Miss Scott, trained in a different tradition, would have been horrified to hear Miss Eustace speaking of “death” or “starving” to a patient. On the level of pure theory Miss Scott may have been right, but Miss Eustace got results. For supper Lucille had a bowl of soup and a custard, and some faint trace of color returned to her pallid drawn face.

  But she was losing weight rapidly. Her clothes sagged on her body, and there were hollows beneath her cheekbones and a little sac of flesh under her chin. She never bothered to comb her hair and had to be told when to wash her hands. Though she seemed to listen quite attentively when Miss Eustace was talking, she rarely answered, and what talking she did was at night after she had been given a sedative. At these times she was like a person who, after a certain number of drinks, feels he is thinking and talking very clearly and brilliantly, with no consciousness of his blurred speech.

  Miss Eustace went on playing solitaire and marking down her score. Out of one hundred and forty-nine games she had only won eleven. (But then it was, she wrote to her mother, a very difficult type of solitaire.)

  “All of it is Mildred’s fault,” Lucille muttered into the shadows. “Mildred . . .”

  (“My case is just popping off to sleep,” Miss Eustace wrote, steadily. “So please excuse the writing as just the floor light is on and it isn’t very bright in here.”)

  “Miss Eustace!”

  “Here I am,” Miss Eustace said pleasantly. “Would you like a drink?”

  “I keep thinking about Mildred.”

  “Turn over and think about something else.”

  “What have they done with my hair?”

  (“She wants to know what they’ve done with her hair,” Miss Eustace wrote. “They do think of quite the oddest things to say sometimes.”)

  Lucille turned over in the bed. Think about something else. Not about Mildred. But look, see Mildred’s hair. How coarse it looked, each hair as thick as a tube, moving, writhing like snakes, oh, Miss Eustace, oh, please God.

  (“I really feel sorriest of all for the family. After all, they’re still sane. My case’s family came today, visitors’ day, but they couldn’t see her, Dr. Goodrich’s orders.”) The snakes writhed and bled in spurts, covering Mildred’s face with their blood—go away, go away—I won’t look at you. . . .

  “Bloody, bloody,” she said, softly.

  (“The language some of them use! I declare, for a Christian woman, I do know some of the awfullest words. I’d blush to repeat them. It even disturbs me when someone refers to our darling Lassie as a ‘bitch.’ I just can’t get used to it. Give Lassie a bone for me and tell her I’ll be coming home soon.”)

  “I can’t sleep,” Lucille said.

  “You’re trying too hard. Just close your eyes and think of something nice and soothing, like rain or grass waving or trees.”

  Grass. I am thinking of grass and trees. The park, late at night, black, but moving, astir with shapes and shadows—be careful, look over your shoulder, there is something there—careful! Ah. It’s only Martin, don’t be afraid. Martin? Is it Martin, or Edith? It’s too dark, I don’t know. But it’s a friend, I can tell. Such a nice face, so wide and frank and candid.

  Suddenly it closed up like a fist. Where the eyes and mouth had been there were only folds of skin, and two holes for a nose and little buds of ears.

  “I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!”

  “What can’t you stand? You just tell me and we’ll fix it in a jiffy.”

  “I see—things . . .”

  “How about some nice warm milk? I find warm milk puts me off just like that.”

  “No—no . . .”

  The warm milk was sent for, but when it arrived Lucille couldn’t drink it.

  “It smells bad.”

  “Why, it smells perfectly all right to me. Look, I’ll take a sip first, how would that be?”

  “It’s bad.”

  Miss Eustace took a number of sips to encourage her and pretty soon the milk was gone. Refreshed, Miss Eustace returned to her l
etter.

  The smell of the milk lingered in the room, very faint and subtle, like the smell of blood or fresh snow.

  (“The poor woman really thinks someone is trying to poison her.” Miss Eustace’s pen moved in slow rhythm across the page. “I have found the best thing to do is to take a taste of everything before she does. It reassures her. Perhaps it’s not very sanitary, but!”)

  The scratching of the pen was barely audible but Lucille’s ears magnified the sound. The sedative was wearing off, leaving her nerves raw and her senses too acute. Though she hadn’t drunk the milk, the taste lingered on her tongue, a furry gray-white sickness. The giant claws of the pen dug deep into the paper, and Miss Eustace’s quiet breathing was loud as a wind.

  She turned over again. The blankets were heavy on top of her, painful and suffocating. She flung them off, and cool air struck her bare legs, and she began to shiver.

  Silently Miss Eustace crossed the room and lowered the window.

  “Do you want me to rub your back?”

  “No.”

  “It might help. Can’t have any more sedatives tonight, you know.”

  In a sudden fury Lucille told her what she could do with all sedatives.

  Miss Eustace remained calm. “Now, now.”

  “You drank all my milk. I wanted it!”

  “We’ll get you some more.”

  “I wanted that milk.”

  Miss Eustace walked briskly into the bathroom and came back with a box of talcum powder.

  “Roll over. We’ll try a back rub.”

  “No!” Like a child she kept saying “No!” even while she was complying.

  Miss Eustace turned back her sleeves, revealing the highly developed forearm muscles that mark an experienced nurse.

  Up and down. Across and around. As she worked Miss Eustace talked in a monotone about her mother, her dog Lassie, her pretty sister who had just been married.

  At first the pain of her hands was unbearable to Lucille, but gradually she relaxed, and flung herself on the mercy of her dreams.

  Miss Eustace opened the window and sat down on the edge of her cot to take off her slippers. The last thing she did before she went to bed was to cover Lucille.

  Lucille tossed and turned in her sleep under the light blankets that seemed to bind her legs and waist. Her sleeping mind was alive and sentient in her fingers, her nipples, her hips, her thighs, the sensitive palms of her feet; but it seemed to lie caught in a net of words. Miss Eustace my father and my murther flusitering in the aviary tower in vanity all inanity ah night my sweethurt take me out of the dunjuan through the griefclanging door to the godpeace of sir night. She struggled in the web of words, the blankets fell to the floor, and the web parted.

  Her dreaming mind moved in images across the unforgotten fields of the unconscious, seen forever for the first time. Across the footstippled snow she moved like a gull, like a ghoul, leaving no track, casting no shadow. The iron gate stood ajar behind her, the sky curved over her head, poised and ponderous like an unclosed trap. Along the highway which ran like a ruler to the house where she must go, a line of cars went by, their wheels mourning on the road. Their drivers were faceless with grief and doubt and malice: Polly, Martin, Andrew, Edith, faceless things passing to nothingness on the straight and narrow assembly-line of doom.

  A man in gray clothes whose facelessness looked four ways stopped his car by the gate, and the line of cars extending to the horizon stopped. He stretched out a gray aspen-quaking hand to assist her and the door of the car closed behind her softly like a mouth. The gray car moved on the gray road and the line of cars began to hurry hurry. The driver scanned the road ahead, and the woman in the back seat, and the bloody snow in the ditch, with omniscient eyelessness.

  The car dissolved around her like a mist and the funeral procession went on forever over other hills, white rising hills pimpled with blood. She was alone among the pine’s, walking in a tunnel of dark-dripping pines which led to the house which led to the house the house. She could see its white portico like a grinning mouth with long teeth, grinning in pain or menace. Behind the smiling pillars the doors and windows blazed with light, but she knew there was nobody home.

  As she approached, the lights faded slowly like recognition in dying eyes, and the portico grinned alone like a jawbone bared by worms. Passing a pillar she touched it with her hand and felt the rotting plaster. Within the house a faint stench of mold hung in the air like a souring regret. Moving in the earthy darkness she knew it was a tomb she had entered. It was terrible to step into a tomb, but she must find what she had come to get. The book of life which was the book of death.

  Suddenly the house was as friendly and multiform as a large family spawned suddenly like mushrooms. As she climbed the hunched stairs the walls nudged her with obscene expectancy, the treads creaked like the malicious cackle of children, the curtains on the landing curved outward and divided like fingers to pinch her buttocks and stroke her thighs. She took a knife from her bosom and cut them away, and the severed fingers fell down and danced like babies at her feet.

  I must find, the book, her fear said, and she went to her room and opened the bureau drawer. The Sangraal radiance of the book lit the room, and she saw it as she remembered it and knew she was remembering it, knew she was dreaming. Thank God, she said or dreamed, with the diary in her hands. Thank God, no one has taken it. She opened the book, the cover came off like the lid of a box, and the finger wriggled and squirmed inside like a mangled worm.

  Out of the grinning tomb the gravestench house she ran with her hair coiling on her head like snakes like long dead nervous hands. The gray car came up to the door and the gray man led her into the little room behind the gathered curtains, where the dead slept on rollers under gravestench flowers. The long gray-curtained car moved away on rollers through the maze of streets cast over the city like a concrete net, along the gelid lake, the hill-flanked forests, beyond the triune towers, the many-nippled mountains into space which expanded utterly as they moved into bright anguished light beyond through the hard and alien blaze to the extreme edge. The bleak and brilliant sword-edge of death.

  The lights at Penwood are never out. At night they are dimmed to give the illusion that darkness and sleep come naturally here as they do in the other world, but even at midnight and from a distance you can see the glow of Penwood.

  There were always night noises. Someone screamed, someone wanted to go to the bathroom; or someone died, and the stretcher rolled softly up and down the inclines.

  In the morning the roosters crowed, the cows made their sad sounds, the night nurses washed their patients and went off duty, and another day began. Breakfast, doctors’ rounds, occupational therapy, lunch, rest, walk outside or in gym, private talks in doctors’ offices, dinner, music and card games, bed.

  The routine was subject to sudden changes. Wet packs or continual baths had to be given, or Miss Sims might obey her hidden voice and defile herself with food at the table, or Miss Filsinger might get out of the dining room with a forbidden spoon.

  Miss Eustace woke early, and was immediately alert. Lucille was stirring but she hadn’t opened her eyes, so Miss Eustace used the bathroom first. She washed her face and hands, cleaned her teeth thoroughly, and put on a fresh uniform.

  Returning, she found Lucille awake.

  “Good morning. Have a nice sleep?”

  “Is it morning?” Lucille said.

  “Oh my, yes. But it doesn’t seem like it, does it? That’s the one thing I don’t like about winter, getting up before the sun.”

  While she talked she glanced with a professional eye at Lucille. She seemed rested and quite calm. Though Miss Eustace knew the calmness wouldn’t last, she always considered it . a good idea to take advantage of even a momentary improvement.

  “Let’s go down to breakfast this morning,” she said cheerfully. “Some new faces would be good for you. Certainly you must be pretty tired of mine.”

  Lucille looked a littl
e surprised. She hadn’t, until this moment, been conscious that Miss Eustace had a face. Miss Eustace was uniform and authority, a starched white impersonalized symbol of “we.”

  “Let’s wear the red dress. There’s something so cheery about red on a winter morning, I find.”

  Lucille had no answer to this. None was possible. Miss Eustace had made up her mind that she, Lucille, in a red dress on a winter morning, should go down to breakfast.

  “It’s like a nursery school,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “This place.”

  Miss Eustace laughed. “I suppose it is. Here’s your toothbrush.”

  While Lucille was dressing, Miss Eustace made the two beds, timing herself by her watch. Two minutes for Lucille’s bed, one minute, thirty-seven seconds for her own. With pride she marked the times down on her solitaire score pad.

  Before she left she opened two windows wide to give the room a good airing, hung up Lucille’s nightgown in the closet, and put her own wrinkled uniform in a laundry bag. Then, with a clear conscience and a good appetite, she went down to breakfast.

  The dining room was quiet and orderly. The patients ate at small round tables in groups of three or four.

  Automatically Lucille walked to the table where she had sat before with Cora and the Filsinger twins.

  Miss Eustace said “Good morning,” to the twins, and then seated Lucille and herself.

  “We personally don’t want you here,” Mary Filsinger said. “We like a table to ourselves. I’ve told the superintendent so a dozen times, haven’t I, Betty?”

  “I don’t know,” Betty said, with her mouth full. “Don’t stuff your mouth so. It’s disgusting. Chew one hundred times.”