Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (22 page)

As for my hearing, Dr. Massingale went the extra mile for me. I insisted that I had heard the child crying out to me in the shaft of elevator number two. Never mind if the sound itself came from a sensed presence, a voice from the past, myself, my divided self, an angel or a demon. I didn’t need to get into that with a medical doctor. I was just trying to convince her that I
heard something
and intended to prove it.

The otologist, Dr. Limen, reported that I had mild, agerelated hearing loss and some evidence of tinnitus, which I’d had trouble with before.

I tried to tell Dr. Massingale and Dr. Limen that what I heard in elevator
2
was
not
tinnitus, to which Dr. Limen replied that the sounds “heard” by tinnitus sufferers vary widely, and vary not just from patient to patient but also from time to time in the individual patient. It was entirely possible that several years ago tinnitus caused me to hear buzzing or ringing in my ears, and now, here in 2003, tinnitus was causing me to hear voices in the elevator shafts.

Equally disappointing was the tape: nothing on it but the usual noises one would expect to hear in an elevator shaft—humming, cables racing, air brakes hissing, echoes of same. I pleaded with Dr. Massingale to go one more step up the ladder of tape experts. Would she please give it to one more expert, perhaps in another department? She relented and said she’d try one other doctor of psychoacoustics, but the results so far were near conclusive and negative for any evidence of voices.

Then Dr. Draper and I faced each other across the conference table like Texas Hold ‘Em contestants at Binion’s World Series of Poker. She didn’t have her seizures to crow about, and I didn’t have any evidence that I’d heard anything like an actual voice in the elevator. So now what? I knew that Dr. Massingale had a background in psych and had even dabbled in analysis; I sensed that we would now move on to what the odious Stegman had referred to as “the inorganic and the intangible”—or as Bobby would say, was I crackers?

For this delicate series of insinuations, the doctor was at her most charming. Had I entertained the possibility that the voice was the product of what she called “my delightfully fecund imagination"? To her credit, she also offered some astute variations on the possibility that I was “hearing things.”

“What if,” Dr. Massingale wondered aloud, “the voice originated in your subconscious or a dream state, or some portion of your brain not normally accessible in waking consciousness. A repressed memory, perhaps?” She tried to present it as an alluring psychological phenomenon, instead of a symptom of what she probably feared was really happening; namely, approaching dementia.

The word
repressed
got my attention, because of the Gottreich memories. I had to at least consider that the voice I was hearing was my own: the voice of eleven-year-old Sally Druse, treated by Dr. Gottreich in the Pain Room on the very day of the 1939 fire, a memory too gruesome and horrible to live in the conscious parts of my brain, the long-repressed, spontaneously recovered memory of my own anguish.

As a spiritualist and professional mysterian, I knew of one other esoteric but intriguing possibility: What if my temporal self—bound in time, space, and matter and still equipped with my five earthly senses—had somehow communicated with my immortal soul? If I flew that one by her, she’d probably call in the EEG techs and see if I was having seizure activity. The material brain reels at the concept of a self divided between here and hereafter, but if, as the philosophers tell us, eternity either
is
the now or at the very least
includes
the now, then there is no before and after. I must have one immortal soul, which is capable of at least two modes or channels of being. If death and my bodyless existence after death are merely sides or facets of life, and if death is only the side of life that is hidden from the living, then it’s plausible to assume that one could commune with the part of oneself that is immortal and incorporeal.

Thus my unspeakable terror at the sound of this poor child spirit’s voice—was it my own? Was I destined for eternal loneliness, desolation, and this unearthly agony of the tortured soul crying out to me from the beyond?

No matter what Dr. Massingale decided, I had no choice but to seek the voice, to continue my investigation until I had an answer. To go on finding and listening to that voice and its inarticulate cries and wait—wait for it to articulate a word in some known language which I would fall upon like a morsel placed before a starveling.

Such pretty-sounding notions.

None of them mattered in the least.

I was discharged and sent home.

If I experienced any more symptoms, Dr. Massingale generously offered to refer me to a psychiatrist.

OVER THE COURSE OF
the next week, rumors began making their way outside the hospital about irregularities at the Kingdom. I had to hear about it all from the safety of my easy chair, but I was scheming about how to get back in there and finish my work.

Meanwhile, a team of engineers had raised concerns about the structural integrity of the Kingdom buildings in the wake of the latest focal earthquakes. Other independent engineers and contractors reported freakish disturbances in the machinery and heavy equipment, from elevator malfunctions to heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning breakdowns, artifacts appearing in the scanning devices, and gremlins in the laboratory equipment.

I still knew some patients there on the sunshine ward. Some of them, like Mrs. Kinney, could still tell stories, unlike the staff members, who were all afraid to talk.

The reticence of the KH employees was inspired by an edict from Dr. James (the architect of the infamous Operation Morning Air corporate wellness program), who decreed that it was a termination offense for any KH employee to stage, set, or perpetrate any pranks intended to suggest, directly or indirectly, that Kingdom Hospital was haunted or was the site of paranormal or supernatural activities of any kind, or to discuss or repeat rumors to that effect. Dr. James seemed especially touchy about the employees talking to reporters about the focal earthquakes and aftershocks, probably because they left incontrovertible physical evidence behind that Kingdom Hospital stood on uneasy ground. It’s one thing to issue an edict prohibiting discussions of apparitions and ghost doctors roaming the corridors; quite another to spackle over real cracks in the basement corridors and sweat the joints of burst water pipes in the utility chases.

The workplace rules prohibiting discussions of the supernatural came down after the Wellness America hospital chain expressed a keen interest in acquiring “the Kingdom” as an expansion property. The Kingdom’s lawyers told the hospital’s board that a seller has a legal duty to disclose the existence of any defects in the condition of the premises, no matter how baffling or inexplicable. When the Wellness America lawyers and investment bankers began doing due diligence and routine inspections, they soon discovered what I felt the first time I stepped into the lobby: Kingdom Hospital is not well. The scientists, specialists, and engineers attributed the ongoing disturbances recorded there to constructional imperfections, faulty feng shui, shifts in tectonic plates, or even sick building syndrome (a diagnosis no sane hospital administrator would embrace). However, the patients, the staff, even the visitors sensed that the premature signs of decay, the disruptions and equipment malfunctions, had more mysterious and frightening origins. If Kingdom Hospital was sick, its illness was what the physicians call an idiopathy, a disease arising from an obscure or unknown cause.

The hospital’s public relations consultants did a superb job of managing information by issuing only the most strategic communications about persistent rumors of oddities on the premises of southern Maine’s largest and newest research hospital. The local newspaper and Kingdom Hospital shared more than a few board members, so the news accounts were extremely deferential to the reputation of the Kingdom. At most, the local coverage featured restrained accounts of focal earthquakes and minor structural infirmities.

In their defense, the experts who explained away the unusual tremors with formulas and stress tests did not set out to deceive the public about the disturbing problems at Kingdom Hospital. Worse: They first deceived themselves, so that by the time they faced the reporters, they spoke their false words with pure hearts. They used intricate theories about oscillons, modal analyses, neotectonics, and focal seismicity to explain how an earthquake could damage a single complex of buildings and go almost unnoticed in the surrounding community. Not to misinform, but because science offered the only explanation that would allow the patients and staff to sleep at night.

Questions persisted, and people continued asking them. It was around this time that Dr. James famously remarked to a
Sun Journal
reporter, “Don’t worry, the abnormalities are normal,” a proclamation for which he was roundly and justifiably mocked by the staff.

Like the proverbial drunk who lost his keys in a dark alley and then searched for them a block away under the streetlamp because the light was better there, the doctors, Ph.D.s, and engineers who investigated the disquieting aberrations at the Kingdom looked for explanations only where reason and science cast their lucid beams. If the shadows concealed more ominous and enigmatic disruptions in nature, the scientists weren’t interested, because apparitions and phantasms by definition do not generate data that are conducive to testing and confirmation using the scientific method.

I holed up at home and waited for a chance to return to the Kingdom, resume my investigation, and reach the child, if I could. Even as children, Maddy and I had believed that if we only knew the little girl’s name and what had happened to her, we could help her. But I also knew that if I tried to readmit myself to the Kingdom too soon, it would raise flags. Besides, my complaint would be what exactly? Seizures? Then I’d have to take those deadly anti-sparkle pills again, which would sap me of the mental energy I needed to investigate and to deal with the likes of Dr. Rat if he came around again.

While I waited, I went through Madeline’s papers and clippings, and so it was on one bitter cold afternoon in February, the sky a tattletale gray and the wind making the leaded windowpanes hum in the casements, that I found what the police and the health care workers at the Kingdom had called Madeline’s “suicide note.”

Ollie and Danny were right. Madeline hadn’t left a note per se. She must have indeed pursued writing, as a hobby at least, because the pages looked like a term paper laid out in neatly formatted text and indented paragraphs. Some other wretch at rope’s end tells the cruel world good-bye with a pencil and a scrap of paper, but a writer needs a computer and a laser printer and 10,000 words to get the job done. I had gone through the papers and clippings before looking for handwritten notes and thought Hilda must have held the “suicide note” back.

Truth be told, Madeline had simply kept a careful journal. At the end, her thoughts, of course, turned to suicide, so she wrote about it. It’s a natural thing for nervous, creative types. The pages that were open on the table when Madeline decided to take the final leap into the night must have mentioned suicide. When the cops find papers discussing suicide and a body with its head in the oven, they call the papers a suicide note.

Madeline addressed most of her last remarks to Hilda, including warnings that the Gottreich materials should not be given to anyone, especially not to me.

I found the sections referencing me that Ray had copied for Bobby: “God has blessed Sally Druse with a memory more merciful than mine. I will not disturb her peace with cruel remembrance.” Elsewhere, Madeline discussed her careful decision not to reacquaint me with our mutual horror, despite her lifelong suffering and despite being haunted by those same memories she had so selflessly spared me. In truth, Ray missed copying other passages that mentioned me, but so far at least, they told me nothing that I hadn’t surmised on my own.

Then, unfortunately, I found those portions of Madeline’s journal that Ray must have been referring to when he said that the papers were “too disturbing” to give to anyone.

It couldn’t be worse, could it?

It was, for different reasons. Guilt. And the guilt was mine for what I’d done to Peggy Kruger. In her papers, Madeline described the misfortune that had befallen her daughter, Peggy, the one I’d spoken to on the phone, the one who Bobby said was a feeb and had so feverishly tried to hurt herself when she’d looked through Madeline’s papers.

Peggy Kruger had married in June of 1993, relatively advanced in her childbearing years; she was thirty-eight at the time. Peggy had been worried about the biological clock, but she must have sneaked in under the wire, because she was soon a happily married, expectant mother, living in Lewiston and going in for prenatal care to the Kingdom Hospital maternity clinics. She was married to a local agent for a national securities firm, which was just coming into the salad days of the nineties stock boom. They had a bungalow not far from Madeline’s, and Grandma was eagerly awaiting a new granddaughter.

In mid-1994, during the ninth month of her pregnancy, at about ten o’clock one August evening, Peggy’s contractions increased and her cervix began dilating, so her husband drove her to Kingdom Hospital for the delivery.

I should mention that, after perusing the rest of Madeline’s papers, it was clear to me that Madeline had not been back to the new Kingdom Hospital since the old one had burned down. She was probably in no hurry to go there and disturb the cruel roots of memory. But based upon her description of the events, Madeline knew her daughter would deliver the child at Kingdom Hospital, and Grandma was not the least bit concerned. Madeline had no reason to believe that Gottreich was anything but dead.

I started shaking uncontrollably as I read the description of events. How the Evil had touched Madeline, then touched her daughter, and indeed it would seem pursued poor Madeline until she fairly leaped to her own death.