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And that was when Conor felt the world fall away.
“I want to help you. You know that, don’t you, Conor?”
Dr. Simpson’s gaze pressed into him like the hot end of a match. Conor tried to swallow. He nearly choked. And then the numbers exploded from his throat: “Onetwot’reefourfivesevenonetwot’reefourfivesevenonetwot’reefourfiveseven!”
“Well,” Dr. Simpson said, as if Conor had disappointed him greatly. He picked up Conor’s drawing and frowned at the broken soldiers flying through the air and a giant sun with an eye in the center. “We’ll speak when I return from my trip. I’m to deliver a speech at a eugenics conference. Do you know what eugenics is, Conor?”
Conor shook his head.
“It’s the future. The promise of a great and unsullied America.” Dr. Simpson rose from the table. “Do let me know if you see the fellow I mentioned, Conor. It’s very important.”
Conor listened to the even click, clack of the doc’s heels receding in the hallway—left, right, left, right, one, two, one, two, steady as a clock, no variation—until there was nothing. He sat at the table for another half hour or so, and then a terrible feeling came over Conor all of a sudden, like an army of ghosts walking across his grave. His skin tingled. The vision was coming down.
“There’s a window open,” Conor said calmly in his other voice, the one he used when he was his other self, the one who saw things. “You hafta shut all the windows so they can’t get in.”
“What’s that?” Terrence asked, walking over.
“They come in wit’ the fog.”
Terrence checked all the windows. “Everything’s locked tight, Conor.” He looked out through the bars. “A little hazy but no fog to speak of. Not tonight.”
“They c-come in w-with the f-fog,” Luther echoed. “He t-tells them t-to c-c-come.”
“Swell.” Terrence sighed. “Now we got two of them. Before we know it, they’ll all be talking about it.” He put on the radio. The parlor filled with the sounds of a tenor’s aria.
“They’re gonna die,” Conor said, and picked up his pencil.
Deep in the bowels of the hospital, two night nurses made their rounds, a lantern in hand just in case the lights cut out again.
“Thank you for going with me, Mrs. Bennett. I don’t want to go down there on my own,” the younger nurse said.
“You mustn’t allow the patients’ talk to rattle you, Miss Headley,” Mrs. Bennett, the head nurse, reprimanded. She was older and had been at the hospital for many years. “You have to remain strong.”
“Yes, Mrs. Bennett.”
After what had happened to Big Mike and poor Mary, the young nurse had been jumpy. It didn’t help that many of the patients kept talking about ghosts on Ward’s Island. In the music room. At breakfast. While exercising in the yard. The same whisperings: The island was haunted. No one was safe. Just that afternoon, as she’d given dear Mrs. Pruett a sponge bath, the poor woman had muttered about seeing figures out on the lawn—Winking in the mist like fearsome diamonds. Oh, Miss. I fear they mean us harm!
The fog. Each night, it seemed to get worse and worse, till it was hard to see anything at all. It was like being stuck inside a dark cloud, cut off from the rest of the world.
It was just fog, Miss Headley told herself. The nights were cold and they were smack-dab in the middle of the river—nothing supernatural about it. Mrs. Bennett was right: She was letting the patients’ fears and that terrible murder get to her. There were no ghosts. She was here to do a job. To be a beacon to others. This thought made her feel better.
As they neared the hydrotherapy room, freezing air greeted them. There was a window open at the back of the room.
“Now, who left that window open?” the head nurse tutted, marching into the hydrotherapy room. Mist curled in the corners, thick as vines, making it look as though they were walking into an active steam room instead of a frigid bathhouse. The fog lent a sinister quality to the shadowy tubs and pipes of the room. Like they’d entered a ghost world.
“The lights, if you please, Miss Headley.”
Miss Headley did as she was told, toggling the buttons on the wall. “It’s no good, I’m afraid, Mrs. Bennett.”
“That infernal Hell Gate blasting,” Mrs. Bennett muttered. “Keep the lantern held high, please.”
Though the lantern’s glow was weak, the young nurse was still grateful for it. As she lifted it, the beam fell across the silent claw-foot tubs and the gooseneck pipes that fed them. On nearby hooks hung heavy canvas tarps that could be placed over patients sitting in those tubs to keep them calm. Sometimes, the young nurse thought about the memories those tarps held. The asylum was far better now in its treatment of the patients than it had been when journalist Nellie Bly had gone undercover on Blackwell’s Island in 1887. She’d lasted slightly more than a week in the hellish asylum there before she begged her editor to get her out. And then she’d written her famous exposé of the treatment of the mentally ill, “Ten Days in a Mad-House.”
That had been the start of reform, but reform, the young nurse knew, was slow. You could feel it in the place, the horrors that had come before. Patients restrained against their will. Dunked into ice-cold baths. Sweated in fever boxes to rid them of syphilis. Beaten, starved, experimented upon, neglected, and abused, and horrors far worse than she dared think of at present. The mind was mysterious, and when those minds didn’t conform to society’s standards, it was hard going for the afflicted. That was why Miss Headley studied psychiatry: She and others like her wanted to bring hope and change to the field. She wanted to make a difference in the care of her patients.
But the head nurse belonged to a different generation. She scoffed at the notion of music and art therapy, of talking daily with the patients to see if, together, they could heal the trauma of their fractured minds and work toward making them whole. Mrs. Bennett didn’t see the patients as people feeling sad or hurting. She didn’t see them as people needing care. She saw them as less than human, as problems to be solved or disappointments to be shut away out of sight. Miss Headley had overheard the head nurse telling Mrs. Washington, who lay in bed with severe depression, that she should Cheer up—come now, things aren’t as bad as all that, are they, hmm? She’d witnessed Mrs. Bennett escorting a female patient to that awful Dr. Simpson for sterilization. Sarah is a loose woman. Best to take care of that now, Mrs. Bennett had said, even though poor Sarah could neither read nor write and had the mind of a child.
Power over others. That was what motivated some of these people. They didn’t want to heal so much as they wanted to win. Miss Headley would be glad when the last of their kind was gone, and the new ideas could come in. There was hope, even in a place like this. E
