“No... no...”
The warm milk was sent for, but when it arrived Lucille couldn’t drink it.
“It smells bad.”
“Why, it smells perfectly all right to me. Look, I’ll take a sip first, how would that be?”
“It’s bad.”
Miss Eustace took a number of sips to encourage her and pretty soon the milk was gone. Refreshed, Miss Eustace returned to her letter.
The smell of the milk lingered in the room, very faint and subtle, like the smell of blood or fresh snow.
(“The poor woman really thinks someone is trying to poison her.” Miss Eustace’s pen moved in slow rhythm across the page. “I have found the best thing to do is to take a taste of everything before she does. It reassures her. Perhaps it’s not very sanitary, but!”)
The scratching of the pen was barely audible but Lucille’s ears magnified the sound. The sedative was wearing off, leaving her nerves raw and her senses too acute. Though she hadn’t drunk the milk, the taste lingered on her tongue, a furry gray-white sickness. The giant claws of the pen dug deep into the paper, and Miss Eustace’s quiet breathing was loud as a wind.
She turned over again. The blankets were heavy on top of her, painful and suffocating. She flung them off, and cool air struck her bare legs, and she began to shiver.
Silently Miss Eustace crossed the room and lowered the window.
“Do you want me to rub your back?”
“No.”
“It might help. Can’t have any more sedatives tonight, you know.”
In a sudden fury Lucille told her what she could do with all sedatives.
Miss Eustace remained calm. “Now, now.”
“You drank all my milk. I wanted it!”
“We’ll get you some more.”
“I wanted that milk.”
Miss Eustace walked briskly into the bathroom and came back with a box of talcum powder.
“Roll over. We’ll try a back rub.”
“No!” Like a child she kept saying “No!” even while she was complying.
Miss Eustace turned back her sleeves, revealing the highly developed forearm muscles that mark an experienced nurse.
Up and down. Across and around. As she worked Miss Eustace talked in a monotone about her mother, her dog Lassie, her pretty sister who had just been married.
At first the pain of her hands was unbearable to Lucille, but gradually she relaxed, and flung herself on the mercy of her dreams.
Miss Eustace opened the window and sat down on the edge of her cot to take off her slippers. The last thing she did before she went to bed was to cover Lucille.
Lucille tossed and turned in her sleep under the light blankets that seemed to bind her legs and waist. Her sleeping mind was alive and sentient in her fingers, her nipples, her hips, her thighs, the sensitive palms of her feet; but it seemed to lie caught in a net of words. Miss Eustace my father and my murther flusitering in the aviary tower in vanity all inanity ah night my sweethurt take me out of the dunjuan through the griefclanging door to the godpeace of sir night. She struggled in the web of words, the blankets fell to the floor, and the web parted.
Her dreaming mind moved in images across the unforgotten fields of the unconscious, seen forever for the first time. Across the footstippled snow she moved like a gull, like a ghoul, leaving no track, casting no shadow. The iron gate stood ajar behind her, the sky curved over her head, poised and ponderous like an unclosed trap. Along the highway which ran like a ruler to the house where she must go, a line of cars went by, their wheels mourning on the road. Their drivers were faceless with grief and doubt and malice: Polly, Martin, Andrew, Edith, faceless things passing to nothingness on the straight and narrow assembly-line of doom.
A man in gray clothes whose facelessness looked four ways stopped his car by the gate, and the line of cars extending to the horizon stopped. He stretched out a gray aspen-quaking hand to assist her and the door of the car closed behind her softly like a mouth. The gray car moved on the gray road and the line of cars began to hurry hurry. The driver scanned the road ahead, and the woman in the back seat, and the bloody snow in the ditch, with omniscient eyelessness.
The car dissolved around her like a mist and the funeral procession went on forever over other hills, white rising hills pimpled with blood. She was alone among the pine’s, walking in a tunnel of dark-dripping pines which led to the house which led to the house the house. She could see its white portico like a grinning mouth with long teeth, grinning in pain or menace. Behind the smiling pillars the doors and windows blazed with light, but she knew there was nobody home.
As she approached, the lights faded slowly like recognition in dying eyes, and the portico grinned alone like a jawbone bared by worms. Passing a pillar she touched it with her hand and felt the rotting plaster. Within the house a faint stench of mold hung in the air like a souring regret. Moving in the earthy darkness she knew it was a tomb she had entered. It was terrible to step into a tomb, but she must find what she had come to get. The book of life which was the book of death.
Suddenly the house was as friendly and multiform as a large family spawned suddenly like mushrooms. As she climbed the hunched stairs the walls nudged her with obscene expectancy, the treads creaked like the malicious cackle of children, the curtains on the landing curved outward and divided like fingers to pinch her buttocks and stroke her thighs. She took a knife from her bosom and cut them away, and the severed fingers fell down and danced like babies at her feet.
I must find, the book, her fear said, and she went to her room and opened the bureau drawer. The Sangraal radiance of the book lit the room, and she saw it as she remembered it and knew she was remembering it, knew she was dreaming. Thank God, she said or dreamed, with the diary in her hands. Thank God, no one has taken it. She opened the book, the cover came off like the lid of a box, and the finger wriggled and squirmed inside like a mangled worm.
Out of the grinning tomb the gravestench house she ran with her hair coiling on her head like snakes like long dead nervous hands. The gray car came up to the door and the gray man led her into the little room behind the gathered curtains, where the dead slept on rollers under gravestench flowers. The long gray-curtained car moved away on rollers through the maze of streets cast over the city like a concrete net, along the gelid lake, the hill-flanked forests, beyond the triune towers, the many-nippled mountains into space which expanded utterly as they moved into bright anguished light beyond through the hard and alien blaze to the extreme edge. The bleak and brilliant sword-edge of death.
The lights at Penwood are never out. At night they are dimmed to give the illusion that darkness and sleep come naturally here as they do in the other world, but even at midnight and from a distance you can see the glow of Penwood.
There were always night noises. Someone screamed, someone wanted to go to the bathroom; or someone died, and the stretcher rolled softly up and down the inclines.
In the morning the roosters crowed, the cows made their sad sounds, the night nurses washed their patients and went off duty, and another day began. Breakfast, doctors’ rounds, occupational therapy, lunch, rest, walk outside or in gym, private talks in doctors’ offices, dinner, music and card games, bed.
The routine was subject to sudden changes. Wet packs or continual baths had to be given, or Miss Sims might obey her hidden voice and defile herself with food at the table, or Miss Filsinger might get out of the dining room with a forbidden spoon.
Miss Eustace woke early, and was immediately alert. Lucille was stirring but she hadn’t opened her eyes, so Miss Eustace used the bathroom first. She washed her face and hands, cleaned her teeth thoroughly, and put on a fresh uniform.