House of Doors

by Chaz Brenchley

  As soon as these boys could jump, as soon as they’d convinced the major, they’d be off. Ready or not.

  Of course the staff had to talk about it; of course so did the patients, those who weren’t going, those who couldn’t leave their beds or their treatment yet. They were all of them invested, and all seemed to feel invested in the fate of one young scamp in particular, the little friend of all the world, would he or would he not pass muster. ‘That Infant, I heard he’s really going all out to convince old Jacob. Sworn himself to silence for a week to prove that he can do it, and you know how unnatural that is.’

  ‘See now, I heard it the other way, that Jacob is really leaning on him to show that he’s up to the job, or else stop wasting everyone’s time . . .’

  It was no secret, which way they wanted that particular skittle to fall. There was only one person keeping secrets, Ruth thought, in this entire hospital, and that was herself. Everyone else wore their emotions right out front, on their sleeves, in the public eye.

  It was almost a relief – almost! – when Major Black made his second announcement, equally public, equally unexpected.

  ‘You’ve all seen us testing the equipment all morning, with a kitbag filled with sand. You’re all talking about nothing else, I know. Wondering when we’ll chance it with the first live body, whether we’ll wait till after dark just to deny you the pleasure of spying from the windows of your ward.

  ‘Well, I’ve decided just to tell you, to save you hanging out of the windows and crying curses on my name.

  ‘We’ll be trying the rig ourselves from fifteen hundred hours this afternoon. I’ll be first man up and first man down, twice over: once onto dry land, once in the drink. That way I’m first man to the towels, too.

  ‘After that my good lads all get their chance. This isn’t a popularity contest, you people don’t have a vote and I’d rather you weren’t all clustering around the lake there, getting in our way and cheering on your favourite. But if you want to come out and watch from the terrace, be my guest. Wheel out your less mobile friends; it’s going to be sunny, and I’m sure they’ll enjoy the show. Nothing better than watching your mates make asses of themselves.’

  It all seemed wonderfully unlikely. Nothing she knew of Major Black could paint him as this good-humoured generous soul, standing halfway up the staircase at lunch to proffer the invitation. She cast her eye wider, and yes, of course there was Aesculapius. Leaning in a doorway, watching. Playing Svengali now, apparently, as well as Machiavelli: using the major to manipulate them all, mind and body.

  It was all too easy for him. They made it too easy, she thought. Isolated and vulnerable, trained to trust authority, bored and a little desolate, they would leap at whatever offered. The staff no less than the patients, the women no less than the men. Any chance of a change, even if it was only an hour or two of spectacle. Playing audience, letting go of tension.

  The hour after lunch was all dash, then. Fetching wheelchairs for those patients who could sit but not walk, rolling beds on their casters for those who could not even sit, couldn’t be moved from their mattresses. Out of the wards and along the corridors to queue more or less impatiently for their turn in the old steam-driven paternoster, an open platform in a shaft like a vast dumb waiter, that brought them slowly and wheezingly down to ground level with no hint as to its former purpose, why on earth a country house should want such an industrial machine.

  Beds and chairs both went out on to the terrace, crunching over gravel and flagstones until they were braked by the balustrade. Then for their willing haulers it was back into the house and up again for the next, riding the paternoster again in chattering groups, excited, anticipatory.

  Ruth was neither, but she pushed and pulled and hauled anyway. It was good to keep moving, good to have no time to stand and stare. Down there, to the margins of the lake, where the candidates were gathered: two dozen young men in the shadow of their tower, bare sketches at this distance, smudged figures against the dazzle of sun on water. One among them, she couldn’t possibly tell any from which but there he was, no question in her mind, standing just a little apart from the others, oh, Michael.

  Was he looking up here, seeing her just in this instant before she turned to go? That she genuinely couldn’t tell: whether he was a prisoner of discipline or an eager participant, yearning for her or keen to be away.

  Turning, going back one more time, she saw one man genuinely solitary, startlingly on the high flat roof of the portico like some kind of emblematic statuary, coloured marble. It was the colonel, standing utterly still, hands behind his back, on parade. Even his moustache, she thought, was at attention. Paying tribute. Oh, Colonel. It was probably shocking, some form of military lèse-majesté to feel pity for one’s commanding officer, but she couldn’t help it. More than popular, he was adored almost on every corridor of his hospital, he held every man’s heart in his hand and all the nurses were devoted to him, and yet he was more alone than anyone. More alone than Ruth was, even. And more haunted.

  She had felt Peter hanging over her all day. Almost literally, as though there were no sun and he were up there in the cloud base above her head, falling and falling. If she would only allow it, she could see him in glimpses all about her: in a window’s reflection, in the blade of her scissors on the ward and the blade of her knife at lunch, in her own little mirror and every mirror else all through the house. Something is building, his presence said to her. A storm is gathering, and never mind the sky.

  Well. She would indeed not mind the sky; she didn’t need to. Clear and blue like the dream of an English summer, it held no horrors for her, no falling airmen. No blazing planes, no work for the colonel, no last-minute recruits for the major. Either of the majors. She didn’t, wouldn’t look around for Major Dorian. He’d be somewhere: framed in a doorway, no doubt. Watching the terrace, not the tower. Reckoning responses, making assessments. Taking notes.

  So many directions not to be looking in. Not down to the lake for Michael, not up at the portico to see how unhappy the colonel was, not around for Aesculapius. It was a surprise to realize that she had nevertheless noticed who was absolutely not here. No sign of Cook coming up from his kitchen, despite a cluster of white-clad kitchen orderlies in one corner of the terrace.

  Everyone else seemed to be here, though. Everyone who was coming, which meant almost everyone fit enough to come. There weren’t many left behind, in the wards or anywhere. It was a circus, she thought: a slightly shabby circus with only one act, but any entertainment, any distraction was better than the other thing. And any opportunity to see your friends take a fall, as the major had said. As the other major, she guessed, had prompted him.

  She had nothing to do now, no one more to fetch. She could run away, she supposed. Make the few remaining bed-bound patients her excuse to hustle back into the house, someone has to watch them, be there in case of need.

  She could, but she seemed not to be doing that. She was standing here, one hand on the lichen-crusted stone of the balustrade, others pressed all around her but entirely alone, quite as alone as the colonel up on his promontory. He must have climbed out of a window, she thought, to achieve that high solitary place. There was no door that opened onto the portico roof, no obvious intention to use it as a balcony.

  She wasn’t looking around, though, at the colonel in his loneliness. Like everyone, she was looking down to the lake. If she watched, if she concentrated hard enough, perhaps she could force wishing into truth and make Michael flunk his test, make an idiot of himself over land and water, be transparently unable to handle a parachute or go to war.

  It was sheerest superstition, the law of contagion, the worst kind of magical thinking – and yet, and yet. Here she stood, watching, focusing, yearning for disaster.

  There was something happening at last. Not Michael, not yet, but one figure swarming confidently up the scaffold, up and up. As he’d promised, the major was going first to show his young charges how the thing was done, w
hat he expected to see from them.

  Up and up. He reached the narrow platform at the top of the high structure, the eye of the needle, with only pulleys in a framework overhead. He clipped ropes to the harness that he wore, called down – his voice thinned by distance, but still clear – and stepped confidently to the edge, the landward side.

  She saw him stand, thought he rose up on tiptoe as the ropes tightened, as the men below drew in the slack. He gripped the harness above his head, for all the world as though he hung beneath a parachute; he poised and crouched and kicked the world away.

  In that moment, thinking about it, seeing him fall and yet not fall, held by ropes and men and a counterweight, she thought—

  Oh!

  Magical thinking. The law of contagion. She had, almost, forgotten. He had been in her head all morning, and still she had almost forgotten. Not thought about it properly.

  She could do this. Actually, she could.

  She could wait till Michael was just exactly there, roped up and ready to leap. Then she could set Peter on him.

  Even from this distance, she was confident of that. It wasn’t really Peter – stubborn, self-willed Peter, who might not reach so far for her, for this – but some aspect of her own self, using some aspect of the house. The house loomed at her back, massive and potent; what she called Peter, her own haunted driven mourning soul hung poised, somewhere between the sunlight and the water. She could reach out and dizzy Michael’s mind, make him fall all out of control. He’d be perfectly safe, with men watchful on the ropes beneath; and he’d fail his test comprehensively, and have no chance of being sent away. Yes.

  And then she could pull Peter out of his mind again, swiftly, far too swiftly to leave any damage behind. She knew how to do that. Yes . . .

  She watched almost with equanimity, as Major Black came to ground.

  Almost. Not quite. He was coming down too fast, surely? A man on a parachute ought to drift in the air, she had always thought, idle as thistledown. This was . . . not like that. The major seemed to plunge to earth, as though those men on ropes were pulling him down, not holding him back. The counterweight rose within the tower, dark and brutal.

  He hit hard and crumpled, but seemed to be in control after all. He rolled and came easily up on to his feet again, and shrugged away the harness and seemed fine. Strolled among his men, talking, pointing. Thinking it through, she supposed that drifting idleness was not ideal, for military men who might be shot at on the way down. Of course they would want to come in fast, their parachutes would be designed that way.

  Which would make it doubly hard for damaged men, and all the easier to persuade the powers-that-be – even Major Black himself – that Michael was not competent. Michael and others, perhaps. She might be able to save more than one. If she could just fuddle their minds without getting fuddled herself, without letting it all overwhelm her.

  Peter, be ready. Be true . . .

  Major Black was climbing again, ready to do it all again, this time into the water. She supposed the men might have to ditch into the sea en route, if they ran into trouble, and he’d want to be sure that they could manage. Or their mission might require them to drop into a lake rather than a field, with a boat standing by for pickup.

  There he was at the top again, clipping himself to the ropes again. This time facing the other way, towards the water.

  Stretching up, crouching down, ready to kick off like a diver in fine form . . .

  It was odd: he seemed suddenly to be surrounded by light.

  It was as though the sun had pierced at last through clouds on a grey and rainy day, except that the sun was out already.

  The major glowed, brighter than any sun; and capered strangely, a shadow in a nimbus; and threw himself all ungainly over the edge.

  At some point – about the time that he stopped falling and started dangling, tried to swim down through the air against the ropes’ refusal, started screaming – Ruth understood. At least a little, she understood.

  That light that enveloped him? That was fire, flame in sunlight. He was aflame, and he’d tried to jump down into the water, and the ropes prevented him.

  The men on the ropes understood, she thought, sooner than she had, but there was nothing they could do. The ropes and the counterweight were rigged not to let him down too swiftly, no more swiftly than a man on a parachute should fall. It had seemed dreadfully fast before. Now suddenly it was appallingly slow, and he was screaming all the way.

  They could slow him further, but there was nothing they could do to speed him up.

  He must have seen the water below as an offer of blessing, salvation held out. Like many an airman before him, plunging towards the drink, yearning to fall faster. Salt water is healing, but any water will kill the flame and suck the heat away and bring relief. A burning man will always run to water.

  Unless that water is itself on fire.

  It was the seaman’s nightmare, burning oil on the surface as they jumped from sinking ships. But a seaman has a chance, perhaps, to think again. He can run from port to starboard, from bow to stern. Not jump yet. Hope for a lifeboat, a lifting wave, a limit to the oil. Something.

  A falling man has no chance, no choices. Nothing he can do but fall.

  Fall slowly, in Major Black’s case: down to where impossible flames reached up, to clutch for him like bright petals eager for a feed.

  Now the men were hauling on their ropes, trying to draw him back from that. Better to burn in air, they must be thinking, good honest air, as we did. Better that.

  People could be saved, they knew, despite the fire and all its malevolence. Colonel Treadgold had saved them; he could save the major too, if they could only bring him safe to land and put that fire out.

  They heaved, and his descent was checked. He hung aflame, a separate flame above the sudden blazing of the lake. Separate and screaming.

  Then their ropes began to snap, smoking ends flailing in the turmoil. Burned through, perhaps, or—

  Colonel Treadgold. Yes.

  No one else, Ruth thought, was wondering yet how all this could be. No one was piecing together some difficult mythology of spilled kerosene and sparks, of accident or sabotage or murder. That would come, but this wasn’t the time.

  No one, certainly, was turning around to look the other way. Up at the house, at the portico.

  At the figure who bestrode the portico, stiff and vengeful and deliberate, fists clenched.

  Oh, she thought. You, Colonel – you do know. You know exactly what you’re doing. Don’t you?

  That wasn’t a question, it was an accusation. She was only sorry he couldn’t hear her. She wanted to shout it in his teeth.

  She twisted away from him just in time to see the last rope fail and the major fall for true. Down into the inferno, the leaping flames of the lake where it was alight from one stone margin to the other.

  She had no notion how deep it was. Not deep enough was her only thought. She thought it was fire all the way, all the way down.

  And turned again, stared up at the colonel, wanted to scream at him and did the other thing instead, screamed inside herself.

  Screamed for Peter.

  It was a day, apparently, for falling. All the way, falling and falling.

  The major fell into the lake. The colonel – well. The colonel was falling in his head already, falling and falling, before ever he fell off the roof.

  Let him fall and fall, Peter. Take him with you. I’m letting go.

  FIFTEEN

  After the shock of silence, after the shock of shouting comes the relentless buzz. Low voices talk and talk in every corner, every corridor. In the dark of night and in the daylight, at mealtimes and make-work and all times else. People need to put their world together, somehow, anyhow that will hold. They have only words to do that with. They talk and talk.

  Ruth tried hard not to listen. She tried very hard. Truly, she didn’t care what the people decided, what consensus rose between them. Whether th
e lake had really been on fire, whether that had been spilled fuel or ordnance or optical illusion, some gift of sun-dazzle and reflection and the falling flame. Whether the major would live or die, or want to. Whether the colonel had slipped and fallen in his hurry to come down, or whether he’d actually jumped. It was too high, he was too heavy; but of course he tried it, he had to try. He had to come and help, take charge, it was his duty . . .

  They could tell each other whatever stories they preferred. That didn’t matter.

  The colonel and the major lay in one small room together, separately unconscious. On her corridor, her ward. That didn’t matter either. She could nurse them both. It was her duty.

  Not nurse them back to any kind of health, she couldn’t manage that. The major needed the colonel’s care, and couldn’t have it. There were other doctors here, but none so senior or experienced, none so innovative, none so bold. There were better doctors, all elsewhere and far away, all overworked already, not to be summoned for a single catastrophic man.

  The colonel . . . needed something that she had denied him. By her choice.

  He had broken bones from his fall, and of course everyone assumed that his coma was part and parcel, came hand in hand: that he had knocked his head on the way down or else on landing, jumbled his brains if not cracked his skull.

  Ruth knew better. In his head, she knew, he was still falling. Hand in hand, he and Peter, down and down.

  She had let go, let him go. Coldly, deliberately, finally. She couldn’t draw him back, not now. He was too far gone.

  She didn’t need to hear what people said, she didn’t want to.

  Sometimes, she had no choice.

  Now, she had no choice.

  They were gathered in the dining hall, everyone who could be: squashed up at every table, not a seat to spare. Ruth had an orderly on one side, she hadn’t learned his name yet. On the other side, she had Michael. Him she was holding on to. Hand in hand and not letting go, not now.