The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  As I followed with the nurse beside me, I said, “Pardon me, but what do I call you?”

  “I’m Nurse Kirkwood,” she said. “Rosie.”

  “I’m Munro,” I said. “Is that an island accent, Rosie?”

  “You have a sharp ear, Doctor Spence,” she said.

  She supervised the installation of Doctor Laughton in the deck cabin, and didn’t hesitate to give the men orders where another of her age and sex might only make suggestions or requests. A born Matron, if ever I saw one. The old salts followed her instruction without a murmur.

  When they’d done the job to her satisfaction, Laughton said to me, “The latest patient files are on my desk. Your desk, now.”

  Nurse Kirkwood said to him, “You’ll be back before they’ve missed you, Doctor,” but he ignored that.

  He said, “These are good people. Look after them.”

  The crew were already casting off, and they all but pulled the board from under my feet as I stepped ashore. I took a moment to gather myself, and gave a pleasant nod in response to the curious looks of those well-wishers who’d stayed to see the boat leave. The day’s cargo had been unloaded and stacked on the quay and my bags were nowhere to be seen. I went in search of them and found Moodie, driver and handyman to the island hospital, waiting beside a field ambulance that had been decommissioned from the military. He was chatting to another man, who bade good day and moved off as I arrived.

  “Will it be much of a drive?” I said as we climbed aboard.

  “Ay,” Moodie said.

  “Ten minutes? An hour? Half an hour?”

  “Ay,” he agreed, making this one of the longest conversations we were ever to have.

  The drive took little more than twenty minutes. This was due to the size of the island and a good concrete road, yet another legacy of the Army’s wartime presence. We saw no other vehicle, slowed for nothing other than the occasional indifferent sheep. Wool and weaving, along with some lobster fishing, sustained the peacetime economy here. In wartime it had been different, with the local populace outnumbered by spotters, gunners, and the Royal Engineers. Later came a camp for Italian prisoners of war, whose disused medical block the Highlands and Islands Medical Service took over when the island’s cottage hospital burned down. Before we reached it we passed the airstrip, still usable, but with its gatehouse and control tower abandoned.

  The former prisoners’ hospital was a concrete building with a wooden barracks attached. The Italians had laid paths and a garden, but these were now growing wild. Again I left Moodie to deal with my bags, and went looking to introduce myself to the Senior Sister.

  Senior Sister Garson looked me over once and didn’t seem too impressed. But she called me by my title and gave me a briefing on everyone’s duties while leading me around on a tour. It was then that I learned my driver’s name. I met all the staff apart from Mrs. Moodie, who served as cook, housekeeper, and island midwife.

  “There’s just the one six-bed ward,” Sister Garson told me. “We use that for the men and the officers’ quarters for the women. Two to a room.”

  “How many patients at the moment?”

  “As of this morning, just one. Old John Petrie. He’s come in to die.”

  Harsh though it seemed, she delivered the information in a matter-of-fact manner.

  “I’ll see him now,” I said.

  Old John Petrie was eighty-five or eighty-seven. The records were unclear. Occupation, shepherd. Next of kin, none—a rarity on the island. He’d led a tough outdoor life, but toughness won’t keep a body going for ever. He was now grown so thin and frail that he was in danger of being swallowed up by his bedding. According to Doctor Laughton’s notes he’d presented with no specific ailment. One of my teachers might have diagnosed a case of TMB, Too Many Birthdays. He’d been found in his croft house, alone, half-starved, unable to rise. There was life in John Petrie’s eyes as I introduced myself, but little sign of it anywhere else.

  We moved on. Mrs. Moodie would bring me my evening meals, I was told. Unless she was attending at a birth, in which case I’d be looked after by Rosie Kirkwood’s mother who’d cycle up from town.

  My experience in obstetrics had mainly involved being a student and staying out of the midwife’s way. Senior Sister Garson said, “They’re mostly home births with the midwife attending, unless there are complications and then she’ll call you in. But that’s quite rare. You might want to speak to Mrs. Tulloch before she goes home. Her baby was stillborn on Sunday.”

  “Where do I find her?” I said.

  The answer was, in the suite of rooms at the other end of the building. Her door in the women’s wing was closed, with her husband waiting in the corridor.

  “She’s dressing,” he explained.

  Sister Garson said, “Thomas, this is Doctor Spence. He’s taking over for Doctor Laughton.”

  She left us together. Thomas Tulloch was a young man, somewhere around my own age but much hardier. He wore a shabby suit of all-weather tweed that looked as if it had outlasted several owners. His beard was dark, his eyes blue. Women like that kind of thing, I know, but my first thought was of a wall-eyed collie. What can I say? I like dogs.

  I asked him, “How’s your wife bearing up?”

  “It’s hard for me to tell,” he said. “She hasn’t spoken much.” And then, as soon as Sister Garson was out of earshot, he lowered his voice and said, “What was it?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The child. Was it a boy or a girl?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “No one will say. Daisy didn’t get to see it. It was just, your baby’s dead, get over it, you’ll have another.”

  “Her first?”

  He nodded.

  I wondered who might have offered such cold comfort. Everyone, I expect. It was the approach at the time. Infant mortality was no longer the commonplace event it once had been, but old attitudes lingered.

  I said, “And how do you feel?”

  Tulloch shrugged. “It’s nature,” he conceded. “But you’ll get a ewe that won’t leave a dead lamb. Is John Petrie dying now?”

  “I can’t say. Why?”

  “I’m looking after his flock and his dog. His dog won’t stay put.”

  At that point the door opened and Mrs. Tulloch—Daisy—stood before us. True to her name, a crushed flower. She was pale, fair, and small of stature, barely up to her husband’s shoulder. She’d have heard our voices though not, I would hope, our conversation.

  I said, “Mrs. Tulloch, I’m Doctor Spence. Are you sure you’re well enough to leave us?”

  She said, “Yes, thank you, Doctor.” She spoke in little above a whisper. Though a grown and married woman, from a distance you might have taken her for a girl of sixteen.

  I looked to Tulloch and said, “How will you get her home?”

  “We were told, the ambulance?” he said. And then, “Or we could walk down for the mail bus.”

  “Let me get Mister Moodie,” I said.

  Moodie seemed to be unaware of any arrangement, and reluctant to comply with it. Though it went against the grain to be firm with a man twice my age, I could see trouble in our future if I wasn’t. I said, “I’m not discharging a woman in her condition to a hike on the heath. To your ambulance, Mister Moodie.”

  Garaged alongside the field ambulance I saw a clapped-out Riley Roadster at least a dozen years old. Laughton’s own vehicle, available for my use.

  As the Tullochs climbed aboard the ambulance I said to Daisy, “I’ll call by and check on you in a day or two.” And then, to her husband, “I’ll see if I can get an answer to your question.”

  My predecessor’s files awaited me in the office. Those covering his patients from the last six months had been left out on the desk, and were but the tip of the iceberg; in time I’d need to become familiar with the histories of everyone on the island, some fifteen hundred souls. It was a big responsibility for one medic, but civilian doctors were in short supply. Th
ough the fighting was over and the Forces demobbed, medical officers were among the last to be released.

  I dived in. The last winter had been particularly severe, with a number of pneumonia deaths and broken limbs from ice falls. I read of frostbitten fishermen and a three-year-old boy deaf after measles. Two cases had been sent to the mainland for surgery and one emergency appendectomy had been performed, successfully and right here in the hospital’s theatre, by Laughton himself.

  Clearly I had a lot to live up to.

  Since October there had been close to a dozen births on the island. A fertile community, and dependent upon it. Most of the children were thriving, one family had moved away. A Mrs. Flett had popped out her seventh, with no complications. But then there was Daisy Tulloch.

  I looked at her case notes. They were only days old, and incomplete. Laughton had written them up in a shaky hand and I found myself wondering whether, in some way, his condition might have been a factor in the outcome. Not by any direct failing of his own, but Daisy had been thirty-six hours in labour before he was called in. Had the midwife delayed calling him for longer than she should? By the time of his intervention it was a matter of no detectable heartbeat and a forceps delivery.

  I’d lost track of the time, so when Mrs. Moodie appeared with a tray I was taken by surprise.

  “Don’t get up, Doctor,” she said. “I brought your tea.”

  I turned the notes face-down to the desk and pushed my chair back. Enough, I reckoned, for one day.

  I said, “The stillbirth, the Tullochs. Was it a boy or a girl?”

  “Doctor Laughton dealt with it,” Mrs. Moodie said. “I wasn’t there to see. It hardly matters now, does it?”

  “Stillbirths have to be registered,” I said.

  “If you say so, Doctor.”

  “It’s the law, Mrs. Moodie. What happened to the remains?”

  “They’re in the shelter for the undertaker. It’s the coldest place we have. He’ll collect them when there’s next a funeral.”

  I finished my meal and, leaving the tray for Mrs. Moodie to clear, went out to the shelter. It wasn’t just a matter of the Tullochs’ curiosity. With no note of gender, I couldn’t complete the necessary registration. Back then the bodies of the stillborn were often buried with any unrelated female adult. I had to act before the undertaker came to call.

  The shelter was an air raid bunker located between the hospital and the airfield, now used for storage. And when I say storage, I mean everything from our soap and toilet roll supply to the recently deceased. It was a series of chambers mostly buried under a low, grassy mound. The only visible features above ground were a roof vent and a brick-lined ramp leading down to a door at one end. The door had a mighty lock, for which there was no key.

  Inside I had to navigate my way through rooms filled with crates and boxes to find the designated mortuary with the slab. Except that it wasn’t a slab; it was a billiard table, cast in the ubiquitous concrete (by those Italians, no doubt) and repurposed by my predecessor. The cotton-wrapped package that lay on it was unlabelled, and absurdly small. I unpicked the wrapping with difficulty and made the necessary check. A girl. The cord was still attached and there were all the signs of a rough forceps delivery. Forceps in a live birth are only meant to guide and protect the child’s head. The marks of force supported my suspicion that Laughton had been called at a point too late for the infant, and where he could only focus on preserving the mother’s life.

  Night had all but fallen when I emerged. As I washed my hands before going to make a last check on our dying shepherd, I reflected on the custom of slipping a stillbirth into a coffin to share a stranger’s funeral. On the one hand, it could seem like a heartless practice; on the other, there was something touching about the idea of a nameless child being placed in the anonymous care of another soul. Whenever I try to imagine eternity, it’s always long and lonely. Such company might be a comfort for both.

  John Petrie lay with his face toward the darkened window. In the time since my first visit he’d been washed and fed, and the bed remade around him.

  I said, “Mister Petrie, do you remember me? Doctor Spence.”

  There was a slight change in the rhythm of his breathing that I took for a yes.

  I said, “Are you comfortable?”

  Nothing moved but his eyes. Looking at me, then back to the window.

  “What about pain? Have you any pain? I can help with it if you have.”

  Nothing. So then I said, “Let me close these blinds for you,” but as I moved, he made a sound.

  “Don’t close them?” I said. “Are you sure?”

  I followed his gaze.

  I could see the shelter mound from here. Only the vague shape of the hill was visible at this hour, one layer of deepening darkness over another. Against the sky, in the last of the fading light, I could make out the outline of an animal. It was a dog, and it seemed to be watching the building.

  I did as John Petrie wished, left the blinds open, and him to the night.

  My accommodation was in the wooden barracks where the prisoners had lived and slept. I had an oil lamp for light and a ratty curtain at the window. My bags had been lined up at the end of a creaky bunk. The one concession to luxury was a rag rug on the floor.

  I could unpack in the morning. I undressed, dropped onto the bed, and had the best sleep of my life.

  With the morning came my first taste of practice routine. An early ward round, such as it was, and then a drive down into town for weekday Surgery. This took place in a room attached to the Library and ran on a system of first come, first served, for as long as it took to deal with the queue. All went without much of a hitch. No doubt some people stayed away out of wariness over a new doctor. Others had discovered minor ailments with which to justify their curiosity. Before Surgery was over, Rosie Kirkwood joined me fresh from the boat. Doctor Laughton had not enjoyed the voyage, she told me, and we left it at that.

  After the last patient (chilblains) had left, Nurse Kirkwood said, “I see you have use of Doctor Laughton’s car. Can I beg a lift back to the hospital?”

  “You can,” I said. “And along the way, can you show me where the Tullochs live? I’d like to drop by.”

  “I can show you the way,” she said. “But it’s not the kind of place you can just ‘drop by.’”

  I will not claim that I’d mastered the Riley. When I described it as clapped-out, I did not exaggerate. The engine sounded like a keg of bolts rolling down a hill and the springs gave us a ride like a condemned fairground. Rosie seemed used to it.

  Passing through town with the harbour behind us, I said, “Which one’s the undertaker?”

  “We just passed it.”

  “The furniture place?”

  “Donald Budge. My father’s cousin. Also the Coroner and cabinet maker to the island.”

  Two minutes later, we were out of town. It was bleak, rolling lowland moor in every direction, stretching out to a big, big sky.

  Raising my voice to be heard over the whistling crack in the windshield, I said, “You’ve lived here all your life?”

  “I have,” she said. “I saw everything change with the war. We thought it would go back to being the same again after. But that doesn’t happen, does it?”

  “Never in the way you expect,” I said.

  “Doctor Laughton won’t be coming back, will he?”

  “There’s always hope.”

  “That’s what we say to patients.”

  I took my eyes off the road for a moment to look at her.

  She said, “You can speak plainly to me, Doctor. I don’t do my nursing for a hobby. And I don’t always plan to be doing it here.” And then, with barely a change in tone, “There’s a junction with a telephone box coming up.”

  I quickly returned my attention to the way ahead. “Do I turn?”

  “Not there. The next track just after.”

  It was a rough track, and the word boneshaking wouldn’t begin to describ
e it. Now I understood why the Riley was falling apart, if this was the pattern for every home visit. The track ran for most of a mile and finally became completely impassable, with still a couple of hundred yards to go to reach the Tullochs’ home.

  Their house was a one-storey crofter’s cottage with a sod roof and a barn attached. The cottage walls were lime washed, those of the barn were of bare stone. I took my medical bag from the car and we walked the rest of the way.

  When we reached the door Nurse Kirkwood knocked and called out, “Daisy? It’s the Doctor to see you.”

  There was movement within. As we waited, I looked around. Painters romanticise these places. All I saw was evidence of a hard living. I also saw a dog tethered some yards from the house, looking soulful. It resembled the one I’d seen the night before, although, to be honest, the same could be said of every dog on the island.

  After making us wait as long as she dared for a quick tidy of the room and herself, Daisy Tulloch opened the door and invited us in. She was wearing a floral print dress, and her hair had been hastily pinned.

  She offered tea; Nurse Kirkwood insisted on making it as we talked. Although Daisy rose to the occasion with the necessary courtesy, I could see it was a struggle. The experience of the last week had clearly hit her hard.

  “I don’t want to cause any fuss, Doctor,” was all she would say. “I’m tired, that’s all.”

  People respect a doctor, but they’ll talk to a nurse. When I heard sheep and more than one dog barking outside, I went out and left the two women conferring. Tulloch was herding a couple of dozen ewes into a muddy pen by the cottage; a mixed herd, if the markings were anything to go by. Today he wore a cloth cap and blue work pants with braces. I realised that the tweeds I’d taken for his working clothes were actually his Sunday best.

  I waited until the sheep were all penned, and then went over.

  I told him, “It would have been a girl. But …” And I left it there, because what more could I add? But then a thought occurred and I said, “You may want to keep the information to yourself. Why make things worse?”