The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

THE SLUICE Stephen Gallagher

It was a sunny if none-too-warm Saturday afternoon in spring; not a bad day for a trip out, compared to some I’ve handled. The party consisted of six of our residents along with two volunteer student workers, with me along to drive the minibus and hold the spending money. We all had a song on the way down. Well, you might call it a song, but Michael kept messing it up by hooting like a seal.

Attendance wasn’t exactly heavy when we got there, and we parked with no problem. Every year the local arts center would hold its Third World Fair in aid of overseas charities, and every year almost nobody came. From our point of view it made for an ideal outing—no crowds, no pressure, none of the opposition that we’d experienced from some of the store managers in the middle of town—and for the couple of hours of pleasure that it gave, it was well worth the trouble of keeping everybody rounded up and together.

“Come on,” I said as everybody fussed and clambered their way out of the bus. “Xanadu beckons.”

What the arts center people had done was to set out stalls and tables in the grounds of their converted church in the manner of an old-fashioned village fete, except that instead of cakes and knitwear it was all banana bread and handmade leather goods. The day’s raffle prizes were . . . well, I stared at some of them for nearly ten minutes, on and off, and I still couldn’t tell you what they were. All I know is that they were handcrafted in some village somewhere and they had straw sticking out of them. I was letting the volunteers do most of the running around; they’d already started to work out who to watch and who they’d be most likely to lose. Sarah and Rosalie and Martin were never any problem, they followed when you called them and stayed put when told. David, on the other hand, had a tendency to lag behind and involve shopkeepers or stallholders in an intense and one-sided conversation. His torrent of words never had any coherence to it at all; there wasn’t an ounce of harm in him, but it could worry some people.

“How’s it going so far?” I said to Lambert, one of the student volunteers who’d been with us for less than a week. Lambert was his first name. I know, I thought the same thing the first time I heard it.

“I was thinking I’d need a chair and a whip to keep this bunch in order,” he said, ushering David along to catch up with the rest of the party over at the tombola stall. “But I reckon I’d have more use for a sheepdog and a whistle. ”

I went along with them and handed out spending money for tombola tickets and the like, and while all of that was going on I checked out some of the nearby stalls for second-hand books. All I saw was the usual kind of thing, girls’ pony annuals side-by-side with the Wireless Operator’s Handbook for 1954; so when everybody had bought and checked their tickets and nobody had won anything, I rejoined the party and announced that it was time for tea and cake inside. The two student helpers looked relieved at the prospect, which only showed how much they had to learn.

“Okay, Big Nurse,” Michael said, tugging his forelock. “You’re all right by me.” They all moved off toward the church building and left me standing there with the woman who was in charge of the stall. She was young and pale and smiling in spite of an obvious bad cold which gave a red tip to her nose. She wore a big overcoat and a woolen beret. She sniffled into a tissue and then said, “How many’s in the party? Is it seven?”

“Six,” I said.

“Where are they all from?”

“The Whittington Hospital. All long-stay residents.”

“Is that place still open? I’d heard they were closing it down.”

“They’re working on it,” I said. “But there’s still a few of us left.”

She was rummaging in one of the cardboard boxes behind the table. She said, “Are you sure it’s not seven?”

“You’re counting Lambert,” I said. “He’s one of the helpers.”

“Here, then,” she said, bringing a polythene packet out of the box. “Tell them these are consolation prizes. One each.”

‘ Thanks,” I said, studying the packet for a few moments before asking, as tactfully as I could, “Uh . . . what are they?”

“Guatemalan Worry Dolls,” she said. “They come in packets of six. They’re supposed to have special properties, I don’t know what they are. But there’s a leaflet inside explaining what to do with them.”

I thanked her again, and then went on into the old church. The tearoom was set in a corner of what had once been the nave. Everybody around the table was shouting their order at Sue, the other student volunteer, and then promptly changing his or her mind on hearing what someone else was having. Except for Michael, who was saying that he wanted a pint of lager.

“Now listen here, Michael,” I said, squeezing my way through to the table. “We’re on holy ground now. And you know that God frowns on lager louts.”

We got them all sorted out with hot tea and Cokes and cherry cake, and then I produced the little Worry Dolls and had Sue hand them out while I read the printed leaflet aloud. Then I saw that Sue had one doll left over and I looked to see who was missing; it was Martin, who’d been taken to the toilet by Lambert and who was only now returning.

“Here you go, Martin,” I said. “There’s one for you, too. It’s kind of ugly, I’m sorry. But they’re all pretty much the same.”

He took it and held it in his big fist, and he looked at it with a pleased kind of wonder like King Kong getting his first close-up squint at Fay Wray. Except that this doll was nothing much to get excited about. Barely more than the size of one joint of my little finger, it was unfinished-looking and bald on one side. It had stumpy little drawn-on fingers, no feet, and tiny nailheads for its eyes. Its clothing was a shapeless scrap of material tied around it with cotton.

“It doesn’t matter,” Martin said. “It’s the one I wanted anyway.”

When Martin had come to us, he’d been the middle-aged child of two devoted but increasingly desperate and infirm old people. They’d given over their entire adult lives to his care without a word of complaint, but they were starting to have to face the fact that nobody lives forever and that Martin seemed likely to outlast the two of them. He’d come to us as a day resident at first, and then we’d introduced a few overnight stays building right up to a full week. We called this his summer holiday. He’d moved in for good toward the end of the previous year.

I can remember the day. I can with most of them, there’s always something that sticks in your mind when it comes to the big goodbye. Roscoe had led Martin away to what he’d already come to think of as his own room, and his parents had stayed down in the entrance hall. Whittington was a big old Victorian place, what had once been called an asylum, and the entrance hall was all marble and fluted columns and a big oak staircase. Right in the middle of all this architecture, Martin’s parents had seemed shrunken and sad. They’d had sick, nervous smiles on their faces, and for a while they hadn’t moved. Then Martin’s father had said quietly, “Come on, Mother,” and they’d turned to go home alone. The next morning, Martin had risen early and packed his bag all ready for leaving. Roscoe, who was the only member of the nursing staff who’d been there for longer than me, had sat him on the bed and carefully explained the situation.

That, as I recall, was the only time that he ever became really emotional. For the rest of the time, he fitted in well.

After the outing, I drove us all back. Everybody sang, and Michael hooted until everybody else turned on him, after which he kept up a morose silence for the rest of the journey. There was a cheer as we turned in through the open gateway to Whittington, and there was still another half-mile to go. The place must have been something to see, once. In fact it still was, although it was no longer the town-inminiature that it had been in earlier years. Most of the buildings stood empty, the hospital having been closed down one section at a time with the eventual aim of selling it off complete. We drove past the house in the grounds where I’d lived when I’d first come to work here. It had been boarded up, like almost everything else. . .

At lights-out that night I looked in on Martin, who was already in his pajamas and sitting on his bed.

“Teeth?” I said.

“I’ve done them,” he said.

“You know what happens if you don’t.”

“They all fall out,” he said.

I don’t think that the Guatemalan doll had been out of his hand since the moment I’d given it to him. He was studying it now. He’d missed the reading of the leaflet and so I said, “Did anybody explain to you how that’s supposed to work?”

He shook his head.

“It’s called a worry doll,” I said. “You keep it under your pillow, and while you sleep it takes all of your worries away.”

He studied the doll with renewed interest for a moment. Then he said, “What does it do with them?”

“For that,” I said, “you’ll have to ask someone more qualified than me.”

“Roscoe?” he said.

“Well, you can try him.”

Martin liked Roscoe, I knew, in spite of the fact that Roscoe had been getting a little testy of late. Liked him better than he did me, I reckoned. He studied the doll for a moment longer and then he said, “I haven’t got any worries, anyway. ” Then he set it on the bedside table and climbed in under the covers.

“Do you want to read?” I said as he settled down.

But he shook his head, and then reached up for the pull-cord to switch off the light.

“Hey,” I said. “Give me chance to get out.”

And Martin grinned and pulled the cord, and then I had to pretend to bump into all the furniture on the way back to the door, which always got a laugh.

No worries.

Well, it was probably true. For all its institutionalized nature, his was a protected life. His mother had died before that first winter was over; we were having some trouble trying to get a suit to fit him for the funeral when we heard that Martin’s sister, who hadn’t paid him a single visit since he’d joined us, had decided that his attendance wouldn’t be a good idea. So, no funeral. His father had come over, and we’d left them alone together for most of an afternoon . . . and afterwards, as before, Martin would sometimes let slip something to indicate that he hadn’t entirely taken the new situation on board. He’d talk about seeing his mother the next time that she came. Or of growing lavender for her, whose scent she’d always favored. Sometimes, we’d gently remind him.

But a lot of the time, we’d let it pass.

I more or less forgot about the dolls after that. So did everybody, apart from Martin. David had lost his the same day, while most of the others had gone into drawers or keepsake boxes. Martin made a small display case for his out of leftover picture-frame wood, and he kept it on his bedside table. It was a neatly made little box with a glass front, but then he was pretty meticulous; good at framing, good with plants . . . those big hands of his were capable of a surprising delicacy.

We had a workshop. It was one of my areas of supervision; I kept the key, and I was responsible for safety and keeping check on all the tools. Like everything else, it was bigger than it needed to be. It ran the full length of one side of the residence block, with my little cohort of workers tapping and cutting and gluing down at one end. Roscoe would join me there sometimes, and we’d talk shop over coffee. Roscoe had charge of the greenhouse and conservatory, and could leave his people unsupervised for a while. But the workshop had drills and blades and presses and a guillotine, so I had to be there all the time.

Sandra was down in town last night," Roscoe was telling me one morning. Sandra was a likable woman in her mid-forties who worked in our admin office. “She said that she’d seen old Tom Lewin outside the Black Horse asking people for money. He’d no coat and he looked as if he hadn’t had a wash or a shave in a week. If that’s a return to the community, I’m Howard the Duck.”

Tom Lewin was about sixty, and had spent about two-thirds of his life in various institutions. Most of us doubted that there had ever been anything much wrong with him back at the beginning. I said, “Wasn’t he supposed to have moved to one of the halfway houses?”

“Well,” Roscoe said, gesturing at the length of the workshop with his coffee mug, “look at the size of this place. You can’t run it down to nothing and expect the halfway houses to cope. And the bed and breakfast landlords couldn’t give a toss, for them it’s just bodies in beds and a giro every week.”

“That’s the business we should be in.”

“Well,” Roscoe said gloomily, “I can tell you, if it goes on like this I’m going to be looking for some other line. I’m too young to retire and too old to retrain, so where the fuck does that leave me?”

He went away looking bleak and unsettled. I know that the uncertainty of our future had been playing on his mind for some time. He was a hell of a nurse—I’ve never seen anybody better for talking-down a patient in a suicidal mood—but I never could have described Roscoe himself as a calm person.

And if that assessment needed any confirmation, I got it just a couple of weeks later.

David came looking for me, and caught up with me in the corridor. He was in quite a state of agitation which, of course, made it even harder for him to make himself understood.

I said, “David, calm down,” but of course he didn’t. There’s nothing more frustrating than having a clear head and no way of communicating what’s in it. I said, “Don’t get all worked-up, just show me what you mean.”

So he led me downstairs and out of the building, talking in a torrent all the time.

I had no idea where he was taking me. I’ve already explained that Whittington was a huge place; there had been a time when it had been almost self-sufficient with a working farm within its boundaries and, going back to more than a century ago, its own railway link with the nearest town. We’d covered a couple of hundred yards out along the front of the main building before I’d realized with certainty that he was leading me past the conservatory and toward the Sluice.

The big door was open, and I could hear the echoes of shouting inside. I started to run. It was Roscoe’s voice.

Martin came out of the door at quite a speed. He was wearing his gardening apron, and his big hands were pressed hard over his ears almost as if his head were threatening to explode. I tried to stop him, well aware that it would be like trying to stop a speeding train. I caught his arm and swung him around and shouted his name to get his attention.

“Martin!” I said. “Martin, listen to me, listen to what I’m saying! Breathe deeply, slow down! Are you hurt? Is someone else hurt?”

Some of the other members of staff were arriving by now. Martin was pale and panting, and he stared at me as I tried to calm him. I looked to one of the other nurses and said, “Walk him inside. I’ll try to find out what’s wrong.”

The nurse and one of the helpers took Martin and walked him, trembling now, back toward the main building. Lambert had joined us, and he nervously followed me into the Sluice.

The Sluice was our nickname for it. Actually it was the old Whittington mortuary, disused for nearly ten years and one of the few buildings on-site that was scheduled for demolition. Some of the fittings were still inside, but these days any Whittington dead were taken directly to the main mortuary in town. Whittington dead were no rarity. A core of elderly patients remained as the place was being run down, and many of them would see their lives out here. Only eighteen weeks before I’d lost somebody from my own ward—although not, I’m grateful to say, while I was on shift—in a suicide from a second-floor window.

With Lambert on my heels I went through into the main room, and there I found Roscoe.

The former mortuary suite was still all-white, although penetrating damp had begun to flake the paint away in patches on the upper walls. The roof above consisted of one huge skylight in glass and cast iron, flooding the place with soft daylight. Everything in here seemed to glow, as if seen through a tank of cold water. The back rooms of the place had been pressed into use as a furniture store—or furniture dump, I should more accurately say. As for the rest of it, what with the glass and the daylight and the constant temperature, Roscoe had seized upon it as a propagating room for his seedlings, and he’d beaten the opposition who’d wanted it for an art studio. Incongruous, I know. But only to some.

He had soil trays everywhere, all of them labeled and dated. There were empty cupboards, many of them with their doors open. And there was the Sluice itself— the big postmortem table with its sloping drain channels and brass taps to give a constant flow of running water across it. It was dusty now, the brasswork turning green. Roscoe was leaning over this, head-down, the stance of a man who’d just thrown up over a ship’s rail.

“Oh, God,” he said wearily. “What have I done?”

I looked at Lambert. He was wide-eyed and slightly open-mouthed, like a small child in some kind of apprehensive state. I caught his eye, and nodded for him to go—

He went.

I looked at Roscoe and said, “I don’t know what you’ve done. You try telling me.

“We were making up the plant trays for the centenary display,” he said, “and everything was going fine. Then I noticed that Martin had picked out the lavender and he was putting the tray to one side. And I knew why because we’ve had the same conversation at least once every bloody week for the past six months.”

I didn’t have to ask, because I could guess. The lavender was for his mother. “Well,” Roscoe went on, “I just went pop. I was talking about her going to heaven and he was shouting about her coming back again. And the next thing I know is, I’m telling him exactly what dead means and I’m showing him the table to prove it. I told him that nobody, but nobody ever comes back and it’s about time he accepted it. If we’d still had stiffs in here I’d probably have been whipping off the sheets to show him the postmortem scars. What the hell was I thinking of?”

I said, “You blew up, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” Roscoe agreed hollowly.

“It doesn’t have to go any further than this. But you’ll have to be the one to square it with Martin.”

He looked up at me then. His eyes were watery and grief-stricken.

“If I can,” he said.

I looked in on Martin at lights-out that night. Someone had been with him for all the rest of the day. The Ventolin inhaler for his asthma was on his bedside table, but apparently he hadn’t needed it.

I said, “Are you all right?”

He nodded. He was sitting on the bed in his pyjamas, and he seemed pretty subdued.

I said, “Roscoe’s here, he wants to say something to you. He won’t come in if you don’t want him to, but... I think you ought to let him. Will you do that?” He nodded again. Roscoe, who’d been waiting and listening outside, hesitantly moved into the doorway.

“Martin says all right,” I told him, saying it more loudly than I needed to because I was mainly saying it for Martin to hear. Martin didn’t look directly at him and Roscoe didn’t step over the threshold, so that he stayed mostly a silhouette against the outside corridor lighting.

Roscoe said, “I apologize for what I did. I shouldn’t have done it. And I’m sorry for what I said about your mother. I know you loved her and I know she loved you. We’ll keep the plants and we’ll. . . take them to the cemetery for her. We can put them in together.”

Martin spoke.

He said, “You pushed me and I hadn’t done anything.”

In a way, I was relieved. It was better than silent resentment. Roscoe said, “I’m sorry for that, too.” And then there was a long pause and then, because there didn’t seem to be anything more that he could say, he said, “Well . . . goodnight.” “Goodnight,” Martin said, and Roscoe hesitated for a moment longer and then he left.

I checked the cartridge on the inhaler, and when I spotted the Worry Doll in its case I picked it up and said, “Hey, remember this? Remember how it works?” Martin looked. “Take it out and pop it under your pillow and see what happens.”

For a moment I thought he was just going to look away without interest. But then he took the box and started to fumble it open.

I was relieved. It was like that first step of the injured. As he carefully lifted his pillow and laid the Worry Doll on the bolster underneath, I was thinking what a great idea of mine this had been. A pit for his nightmares, into which they could vanish. . . .

Well. It had seemed that way, at the time.

My shift pattern changed at the end of the week, and it was some days before I was able to catch Martin alone. He was down in the lounge in one of the threadbare chairs by the bookshelves. Most of the books were pretty threadbare, too. He could read, but sometimes he just liked to sit and turn the pages.

“Hey, Martin,” I said. “How are you doing?”

He looked up. “I’m all right.”

“Friends with Roscoe yet? I know it’s important to him.”

“I’ve forgiven him,” he said. “I know he’s sorry.” And then he said, confidingly, “I get bad dreams, now, you know.”

I reached to pull up a chair. “Do you want to talk about them?”

“No need,” he said. “The dolly takes them all away.”

And that was all he would say.

I don’t know if it was just my imagination, but that summer seemed to mark a number of changes in Martin. He appeared to grow older and grayer, and no longer to be the big child that he’d once seemed. It was strange to see him with his father after that, their ages completely at odds with their frozen-in-time relationship. The old man wasn’t getting down to us more often than once a month by then; he’d moved in to live with his married daughter and her family out on the coast, and it was over an hour’s car journey each way, and the old man himself didn’t drive any more. He had to rely on his son-in-law for transport. Martin’s sister still hadn’t been near the place.

At the end of one visit, the old man took me aside and said to me, “I’m glad Martin’s so happy here. I couldn’t have hoped for anything better. ”

I said, “He’s got no shortage of friends. Everybody likes him.”

“Only,” he said, “we always worried about what would happen.” He was holding on to my arm, partly to keep my attention and partly to keep himself steady; he’d changed, too, almost as if you could see the life slowly draining out of him as its end came nearer. You see it a lot in my line. It gets so that you know, and it isn’t even remarkable. He went on, “Usually with children you do your best for them, and then you watch them take over until they can manage on their own. You always worry about them, but at least you know they don’t need you quite the same . . . it’s like you’ve had your turn in the saddle, and it’s their turn now. They take all the weight, and you kind of feel that your job’s done. Only with Martin, it never could be.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, and I started to walk him down toward the waiting car. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. We’ll look after him.”

“Mother used to fret, so. About us both dying and leaving him in a world where nobody wanted him. But here ... the way he talks about everybody . . . it’s like he’s got a whole new family.”

I got a look at the son-in-law then. He was sitting in the car with the radio on, and he didn’t even glance out. He looked bored. I went back inside and joined Martin at the window where, without being aware that he was doing it, he waved goodbye to his daddy for the very last time.

Here’s what happened.

Exactly one month later, Martin was sitting downstairs waiting for his visit and I was up in the ward filling in timesheets when I got a message to go to the office and take a phone call.

It was the son-in-law. He told me that the old man had suffered a stroke the previous night, and that he was in the local infirmary now and wasn’t expected to last the weekend. His daughter was with him and she specifically didn’t want Martin to be there. For Martin’s own sake, of course.

You can imagine what I thought of this.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “What are you saying?”

“Just that it’s a sensitive time for her. She’s been through a lot in this past couple of years.”

I said, “It wouldn’t be that she’s afraid of people seeing him and knowing that he’s her brother, would it?”

“That’s totally uncalled-for,” he protested, but I’d barely started on him yet.

“This is his father we’re talking about,” I said. “He’s not some unwanted family pet, you know ...”

But the son-in-law had already hung up.

I went down to Martin. He was still in the entrance hall, watching the driveway for cars. I said, “Come on, Martin, your dad’s not so well today. We’re going to go and see him.”

I grabbed him and dragged him out to where my old banger was parked. I hadn’t been off the site in a couple of days so it took a while to get started, and then we set out toward the coast. Martin asked no questions, but sat in silence. I was angry. I’d seen this kind of thing so many times before, and today I’d seen it once too often. Martin had been denied his grief once, and it was about to happen again; anybody could see that he was closer to his parents than his sister had ever been . . . but now here she was, reappearing at the end of their lives when they’d least control, fixing the situation according to how she wanted to see it.

Pushing Martin out, in a phrase.

They’d no record at Reception, but they asked me to wait. I left Martin sitting with the Accident and Emergency cases and set off to do some scouting. On the next floor I caught up with a nursing Sister and said, “Does Carol Chester still work on one of the wards around here?”

“She left to have a baby last year,” the nursing Sister said. “If she comes back at all, it’ll be around March.”

“Look,” I said, “perhaps you can help me. I trained with Carol, I’m a charge nurse over at Whittington. One of my patients had a relative admitted last night, and your front desk doesn’t know what it’s up to.”

“That’s usual,” she said. “Just step in the office.”

Less than five minutes later I was in Men’s Medical, looking at an empty bed. The bed linen was in a bag beside it, awaiting collection.

It had all been for nothing. We were too late, and the old man was gone. I turned to leave.

On the way past the ward office, I saw her coming out. Martin’s sister, I could guess it from what little resemblance there was. And there’s something about the set of people’s faces after a certain age, they tell a story about the owner that can differ from what they’d like you to believe. What I saw here was not simply a woman who had present cause to be unhappy. What I saw was a woman who wouldn’t ever be at ease in her life, but who would never quite be able to understand why.

I could have been really sharp. I could. I said, “Mrs. Wilson?”

She looked at me. “Yes?”

“I’m very sorry,” I said.

She nodded, and went on by.

I went back down into the Receiving area. Martin was still in the same seat, and he was watching all around him with wary curiosity. The place was pretty full, but there were two or three empty places on either side of him. He looked up at me, and my expression must have told him everything.

“It’s all over, Martin,” I said.

“Daddy’s in heaven?” he said.

I could only nod.

And then I said, “Let’s go home. ”

Before we set out, I phoned ahead so the others would know. It was late in the afternoon by the time we got back, and as we were walking up the steps to the entrance door I said to Martin, “Do you want someone to sleep in your room with you tonight? It may not be a bad idea.”

“I want Michael to stay,” he said.

“I was thinking more of one of the staff. I’ll stay with you, if you like.”

“Michael,” he said.

I looked at him as we were going in through the big double-doors. He hadn’t said much at all during the journey. I could remember how he’d been after the news of his mother’s death, and this was quite different. Then he’d been like a child, uncertain of what to feel but picking up his cues from everyone else— reflecting their solemnity like a mirror, and sometimes forgetting himself and letting a grin break through. Now there was a kind of gravity about him; the problem I feared was that, because of how he was, his mind could be like a locked room where he sat in the darkness alone.

I wished he could have seen his father. I’d seen dead so many times, and I knew that the only big surprise in it was that it was nothing special. What Roscoe’s remorse couldn’t undo was that Martin had been pushed face-first into only half of the story with the horrifying paraphernalia of the Sluice; he’d been brought to know of the terrors of death but not the simple, material banality of dead. He knew nothing of that; and it’s the things of which we know least that tend to scare us most.

Michael wa s asked and agreed, and a second bed was moved into Martin’s room and made up. Michael wouldn’t have anything to worry about, because Martin would be sedated. Roscoe would be around for most of the night, and he’d keep an eye on everything.

Shortly after midnight, there was a hammering at my door.

This was when I lived in one of the self-contained staff apartments in the West Wing. After the first house I’d bought a place in the village less than a mile down the road, but when we’d sold up after the separation I’d moved back onto the site. But that’s a whole different story.

I was still up and about. I’d been reading. I went to the door, and there stood Michael—pajamas, slippers, and that was it. He was shivering. I got him an overcoat and he told me that Martin, despite the sedation, was up and out of his room.

Roscoe, it seemed, was not to be found. And Martin seemed to be upset.

We headed back to the ward, through corridors that could still seem endless at this hour of the night. I didn’t see Roscoe. Martin’s bed was empty, his covers flung back and his pillow thrown to the floor. When I came back out into the passageway, some of the other residents had begun to emerge and were looking puzzled.

“It’s all right,” I told them, “there’s no problem. It’s all being dealt with. Everybody back to bed. ”

Then I saw it.

They talk about your blood running cold. Well, mine did. I waited until everybody including Michael had gone back to their beds, and then I switched on the main corridor lights.

What I’d seen was now confirmed as a single, bloody handprint on the corridor wall. And there were more of them further along, and in one place a little spray-pattern of blood on the wall and on the floor . . . and hair. Bunches of the stuff, pulled out like feathers. And at the top of the fire stairs at the corridor’s end, a torn piece of scalp of about two square inches with hair growing out of it like turf out of wet rubber.

I switched on the main stairway lights and hurried down. At the second turn, I could see somebody’s feet by the ground-floor fire doors and I recognized Roscoe’s shabby old trainers. As I descended I had this terrible image of Martin dragging Roscoe down the corridor, gripping him with those strong hands and holding him in a staggering headlock while plucking his head like a chicken. . . .

But no. Roscoe groaned as I turned him over and I saw a darkening bruise in the middle of his brow which made it look as if he’d been smacked headfirst into a wall, but he was otherwise whole.

I said, “What happened here?”

“Martin was trying to get into the Sluice,” he said, rubbing his temples and trying to blink his eyes into focus. “He was in quite a state, he could hardly breathe. I tried to bring him back, and he fought me all the way and then did this.” He winced. “Then I think he took the fire extinguisher off the wall and went back.”

The Sluice?

I ran the distance over the darkened ground. The door to the Sluice stood open, and was surrounded by snow. But the snow was an illusion, actually foam sprayed about by the erupting fire extinguisher that Martin had used to batter in the lock. The cylinder now lay to one side, its gases all spent.

I couldn’t imagine what Martin could have expected to find here. Or perhaps I could, but didn’t want to acknowledge it. The Sluice had probably now been planted in his mind forever as the gateway to the dead. I went in with caution, remembering Roscoe on the stairs. I switched on the lights.

“Oh, my God,” said Roscoe sadly, from behind me.

About twenty soil trays had been swept onto the floor. Some had broken, all had spilled. Martin was up on the old postmortem sluice table, lying on his side and curled into a ball. One hand was up before his face, and held tightly in it was the Worry Doll. The doll’s sightless eyes stared at Martin, but Martin’s eyes were closed and couldn’t stare back. He’d ripped out almost half of his own hair and, grotesquely, each of them—Martin and the doll—now mirrored the other. The side of his scalp was a bloody mess and I could actually see a gleam of bone in one place, but already the blood was drying out. I worked my hand in between his neck and his shoulder and felt for a pulse, but there was nothing.

I get bad dreams ... the dolly takes them all away.

A pit for his nightmares. But any pit can overflow and spill back at us, if pushed beyond its capacity. I’d tried to banish his bad dreams; but perhaps I’d simply given them a place to gather and intensify. And when the dolly had finally failed and turned it all back at him, he’d run before the nightmares until he’d reached this place. The gateway. The way to those he loved. In the Sluice he’d crawled into the lap of death, and there he’d closed his eyes and gone to sleep.

I looked at his face again. He was smiling.

But I could never know why.

It was as I turned to leave, thinking of the immediate calls that would have to be made and the arrangements that would have to be set in motion, that I could swear I caught a scent of something. Not of the damp, or of the dust, or even of the mildewed stuffing in the old furniture outside.

None of the seedlings was yet in flower, but there was a springtime aroma.

An impossible presence.

A scent. . . almost of lavender.