House of Doors

by Chaz Brenchley

  Which Major Black understood too well, and Colonel Treadgold not at all. He knew he was losing, but he didn’t know why. So he blustered and spluttered – she could imagine his moustache, all fluffed out with indignation, a distempered walrus – and it did him no good at all, in the major’s eyes or his own.

  Or in hers, hidden down here, wanting not to hear his defeat spelled out so boldly. She might do better for him, perhaps, if she only had the opportunity. She could argue that the men were not ready, not functional enough – but the men themselves would do their best to disprove her, so keen they were to get back to the front. Or behind the front, these lads. Madly keen to throw their lives away in desperate heroics that would see them shot as spies if they lived that long, if they didn’t blow themselves up with their targets or die in a hail of bullets or . . .

  ‘I say!’ A voice shrill with discontent. ‘Whoever’s out there, will you close that damned door, please? The draught’s like a tornado in here.’

  There was a great booming sound as the door slammed shut, with both the arguing men still on the outside. She didn’t think the interruption would stop their arguing, but at least it meant that she could scurry up in safety, unseen, into the shadow of the narrow hallway and then through to the bathhouse proper.

  The steam seemed thicker than ever. If the colonel wasn’t coming in, she would have to chivvy the men out of the water and get them dry. Honestly, they were like schoolboys clinging to their beds of a morning, the way they lingered in these baths. The salt water might be doing them good, but she didn’t have all day, even if they did.

  There was an odd silence all about her, as though the weight of fog had finally subdued even young men’s spirits, or the heat exhausted them. She ought to be glad of that, perhaps, it might make them more complaisant. But it felt ominous to her, as this thick heavy air did, this blanket of blindness.

  Oh, nonsense. Again, nonsense. She was fey this morning, off-balance and disturbed.

  She took a breath to call out, to order all the men out of the water; but she never made that call. Another voice cut across her own and stole all her breath away.

  A scream, rather, no words in it and barely a voice at all, an animal cry. Brute pain and terror.

  And as though one throat could shift an atmosphere, one butterfly flap its wings to raise a storm, the steam stirred and shifted, rose and gathered like low cloud in the dome above, like a soft repulsive ceiling so that paraffin light could show her just exactly what had happened here. What had been done, what there was to scream about.

  At least she wasn’t screaming.

  At least he wasn’t either, not now. Not after that first wrenching horror, a cry dragged deep from the bone of him, irresistible, rising appalled in outrage at the insult to his flesh.

  All around her other men were surging from their baths, naked and distressed and heedless of their own half-healed hurts. Unlike her, their first impulse was to move, to act; like her, once they were up, they could find nothing to do but stare.

  Just the one man lay still in his bath, half submerged.

  He too had nothing to do but stare.

  At himself, at what had been done to himself, to his body while he lay there lost in fog, sodden with heat and water.

  All of Colonel Treadgold’s surgeries and interventions lay exposed on his bare skin and deeper, where they had cut through fat and muscle and sinew to the bone beneath. All the grafts and reconstructions, all the work to save his fingers and his face. It should have shown as patchwork, seams and scars, the stamp of former hurts and fresh recovery. Not this. Never, never should he have looked like this.

  When Michael was upset, his own scars showed through his skin like a jigsaw. This, though – this was like a jigsaw broken up, thrown back to pieces.

  All his operations had come undone, all at once: every one of his wounds was gaping wide, all his grafts peeling off, his face disintegrating as she watched with nothing now to hold the jaw together or the rebuilt nose to the skull.

  Lips fell away like obscene petals.

  It was as though all the colonel’s stitches had dissolved, and all the healed tissues too. She couldn’t remember the man’s name, that was lost too in the horror of it; but he was starting to bleed now from all those gaping injuries, and that was almost a blessing, as blood clouded the water and hid the worst of him from her sight and his own.

  Almost a blessing, almost. Until she remembered, until it reminded her: open bleeding wounds and salt water, how cruel that could be.

  In the long run it might help him, if anything could; but right now he was drawing a shuddering, gasping breath, ready to scream again as the pain of it pierced the shock that had gripped him till this.

  That was something else to be thankful for, perversely. It broke her out of her own shocked trance, gave her something to do. Something she could achieve.

  ‘You, and you.’ Pointing, picking, snapping orders. This at least was manageable. Somewhere to stand. ‘Help him out of there. Gently! He needs . . . he needs not to be sitting in hot salt water.’ In honesty she didn’t know what he needed, except that he needed this not to have happened; but that was a beginning. ‘You and you, fetch cold fresh water and wash him down. You, run him another bath. Nothing but cold. That’ll stop the bleeding.’ Well, it might. If anything could, if he didn’t bleed out entirely. And again they wouldn’t have to stare at his body so roughly engineered, so brutally exposed.

  That was all the men busy for the moment.

  That freed her to do the one other thing she could think of.

  She ran back to the door and hauled it open, stepped out into the chill air and screamed at last herself, screamed for the colonel.

  TEN

  He was still in sight, storming along the lakeside. No sign of Major Black.

  Her shrill cry reached him, better than any man’s bellow would have done. He stopped, he turned; she waved wildly to draw him back. Kept on waving until he broke into a lumbering run.

  Then she went back inside, to do what she could. To be a nurse in crisis. Not to think.

  Thinking came later, as it had to. When that poor disintegrating man – Flight Lieutenant Barker, his name had come back to her at last; his room-mates called him Bunky – had been pieced together as best as they were able; when he’d been carried away to theatre by a stretcher party accompanied by the bewildered, anxious colonel; when they’d been followed by a chain of half-dressed patients no less bewildered and no less anxious, worrying inevitably about their own grafts and surgeries, wondering when or whether they might suddenly fall apart themselves. When she found herself abruptly and unexpectedly alone in that overbearing bathhouse and didn’t break, didn’t flee the building. Went up instead: climbed the winding iron spiral that stood like an inverse to the cellar stairs, like a mirror image in every dimension that there was.

  Up to the gallery, though the steam still hung there like a cloud caught napping. She wanted to stand in that loss of fog, not see her feet let alone the world beneath her. It seemed too thick for bathroom mist, even – or especially – a bathroom on this scale, eight steaming baths could never fill such a dome and the open space beneath it. And yet, here it was and here she stood, with her own feet lost to her, gripping the gallery rail because she had nothing else to fix her and she might otherwise have been falling. Falling and falling, and—

  Oh, Peter.

  He would not have done this. Surely, he would not? Neither the man she knew nor the ghost she kept seeing, the presence that she felt. She was beginning, reluctantly, to believe in him. So perhaps he could have done this – but he would not. No.

  Even if he could, he would never want to. Not harm a stranger, for whatever strange point he might want to be making. His message, his mission was to her. If he were here at all, in any form at all.

  So. She needn’t feel guilty, nor responsible. Not for this.

  Puzzled, then, and frightened, and more than a little desperate, she found the fog no u
se to her; and went in search of something better.

  The mind of Aesculapius, she might have fled to that. Or the cold brute logic of Herr Braun the tailor, the survivor.

  In fact she found herself in the subterranean kitchen, begging time and tea from Cook.

  Wanting to.

  It was the first time she’d been down here in the middle of the day. Of course it was busy, with lunches to dish up for the whole hospital, patients and medicos and administration too. And the men on guard duty at the gates, and very likely others she hadn’t seen yet. Any large organization runs on its back-room people, every big house depends on its staff, maids and janitors and stable boys.

  And yet she’d come down here in chase of a memory, the peace of the very early morning, a quiet corner to sit in and one man to watch at work.

  She was an idiot.

  She stood in the doorway and barely watched the frenzy, didn’t even try to pick out the man at the heart of it, Cook in his kingdom, in his time. She might have closed her eyes and still known everything she needed to: from the smells of it, from the dense hot heavy air, above all from the sounds that battered at her, all the noise of a working kitchen at its climax. Metal on metal in a hundred variations, the hiss of gas and the rush of bodies and the voices, voices over all, each pitched louder than the last as every man struggled to be heard.

  There was nothing for her here. She turned to go. Almost had gone, indeed; it was only that the stairs back up seemed suddenly so steep, her legs so tired and her mind more tired still.

  In her hesitation, the touch on her arm was a startlement but not exactly a surprise. Like the touch of a man’s hand in bed – yesterday that thought would have been Peter’s hand but things were different now, she had known more than one – which was never a surprise but could always raise that unexpected shiver.

  ‘Sister? May I help you?’

  And there he was, Cook himself, come from nowhere or from everywhere, knowing everything. Knowing her need and confident to meet it, may I? and not can I? – and perhaps she was building too much on such a small acquaintance and such a little word, but his voice was more refined than his role and she thought he knew exactly what he was saying.

  And she was trembling now, and that wasn’t only her knees faced with a climb of stairs. Trembling all through, and his hand beneath her elbow was the only solidity offered. She leaned on that and he led her away from the stairs, through the steam and sweat of the kitchen, through the scents of frying onions and boiling potatoes, past the seethe of vast pans over roaring flame and the press of urgent bodies turning this way and that. She was aware of them all, but only distantly; detached almost from her own body, focused just on that point where her arm met his, reliability amid the flux.

  It was how she thought of him, she realized: a fixed point, security. Why she had come to him, from the bathhouse fog.

  From one fog to another, but this was different. No one was falling here, she didn’t need to hold on; someone was holding on to her.

  He brought her through an arch of brick and down another flight of steps. Today seemed to be all about going down, when she wasn’t going up.

  The last cellar had been a claustrophobic inferno, the furnace raging through an open iron door. This was just the opposite: broad and dim and cool, reaching away and away, wooden racks and whitewashed walls and just light enough to find your way. You’d need a torch to read the labels on the bins and bottles.

  ‘Really, it all needs drinking,’ Cook murmured at her side. ‘A lot of the lighter wines are too far gone already. The port’s all good, and some of it is excellent, but port’s not always what you want.’

  ‘No.’ There was a quip ready on her tongue, any port in a storm, but that felt tired before she said it and it wasn’t true anyway. Apparently she was more particular. She’d come to him and he’d been ready for her, and that was – well, not quite startling, but certainly a surprise.

  He led her past a run of racks and bins and through a door of panel and glass, into an office unexpectedly walled off from the wine.

  ‘I don’t know what to call this, quite. It’s where they kept the cellar books, when the cellar was an active consideration. They can’t have had a man just in charge of that, though; I suppose it was the butler’s prerogative. I’m just not sure why he needed a separate cubbyhole down here. His pantry was upstairs, of course, convenient to the family. Still . . .’

  Still, there was a table, there were two chairs. There was a clean glass in front of her, the pop of a cork as he reached a bottle down from a shelf where it had stood dusty between ledgers. She didn’t want wine; this wasn’t wine.

  A gurgle from the neck of the bottle as he tipped it, and the aroma hit her hard before ever the first dribble of pale gold liquor hit the glass.

  ‘Oh!’ Apple-crisp and honey-mellow and neither of those, the sharp volatility of brandy underlying all. ‘Should we . . .?’

  ‘You should.’ He had only produced the one glass. ‘Drink that off, you’ve had a shock. Look sharp, now.’

  Sharp, like the brandy. Like his voice. She seemed to have no resistance. The glass was in her hand, the weight of it, the touch against her lips; the brandy in her mouth like a fire coal, a source, heat and light in suffusion through all her cells.

  ‘Good. Now, sip this,’ another gurgle, another measure in her glass. ‘Don’t rush it again, this is too good to rush. Take your time, let it work through you.’

  It was all through her already. She could feel it in her fingers, in her feet. She spread her hands on the table and settled back in her chair and felt rooted, through wood and stone to the earth beneath and the rock that underlay it, the whole planet in its turning.

  She thought about that for a moment and said, ‘I ought to eat something.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said equably, ‘but not yet. This first. Then I’ll have someone feed you in here, you don’t want to face the scrum upstairs.’

  No. No, she didn’t. But, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t worry about me. You can’t keep making me a special case,’ in need of special treatment, soup or brandy or whatever he had in mind today.

  He just shrugged, seeming curiously content with it. He wasn’t joining her in the drink, but he did sit down across the table from her, apparently endlessly patient, not at all like a cook with a meal to serve. This first: apparently he meant more than a glass of brandy. This place, his company, his time.

  She said, ‘You’ve been here a while, Cook. Longer than most, I’m guessing.’

  ‘Longer than any,’ he said easily.

  Of course they’d want the domestic services in place before the hospital staff could come, before the patients. Doctors need feeding, and their beds making and their laundry done.

  ‘Yes. I don’t suppose anyone knows the house better than you do.’

  ‘No.’ He’d have its geography at his fingers’ ends, to know when and where and how to deliver urns of tea and cauldrons of stew still piping hot. And, yes, a bowl of soup at need.

  ‘No.’ She hesitated, one last little moment; and then said it. ‘There’s something here, isn’t there? Some presence in the house.’ Something evil she wanted to say and would not, not quite, not yet.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said in flat denial, bluntly confusing her, not at all what she had expected. ‘No, the house is empty.’ And then, smiling thinly as a man might in the face of something difficult and deeply loved, he went on, ‘Of itself, it has nothing to offer. What you find in D’Espérance is only what you bring.’ And then, his lips tightening around that smile as though to hold it in the face of her defiance, her disbelief: ‘It can seem . . . heavy. I do know. I came here myself, with luggage enough of my own and no one but me to carry all the weight of it. I barely made it through the door.’

  ‘I . . . I don’t think I understand,’ though in honesty she thought she did. She only didn’t want to. Not this, not now.

  ‘It’s not the house that’s haunted, Sister. It’s you, always. You fetch your
own ghosts with you. All D’Espérance will do is show them to you. Think of it as a lens, to make the unseen clear.’

  She was glad then that she hadn’t said a moment ago just what she’d been thinking. Not evil. Not Peter. No. But a man had . . . come apart; and another had lost a hand, and she couldn’t just screw her fingers into her ears and shut her eyes and turn her head away. Nor deny that she had come here haunted, with her ghost in tow. He had greeted her on the very doorstep, rising from the woodwork like Marley in the door knocker. That made her his first victim, she supposed, fainting across the threshold as she had. And since then he’d escalated, striking again and again, finding other targets, random men . . .

  No. She did not, would not believe that. Not Peter. Not evil. No.

  She cupped her hands around the bowl of the glass, bent her head above it and inhaled, wanting to draw the fumes in deeply, wanting to feel the astringency of them like a purge all through her mind, searing out such ideas.

  In vino veritas. If there was truth in brandy, it was a harsher kind. But welcome none the less, as the man across the table said, ‘Everyone brings something. Show me a man who isn’t haunted, I’ll show you a man who’s never lived. Or a man who’s lying to himself, but that cuts no ice here. D’Espérance will show him the truth of it.’

  What he was saying – surely, what he was saying? – was, not Peter. Not Peter, and not her; she wasn’t responsible, she hadn’t brought this down on that poor man in his bath. Other people’s ghosts were at work here. The sense of relief was bitter and welcome and almost overwhelming.