Chapter 10: The Doctor Who Never Sleeps

The woman’s teeth clicked together like knitting needles.

It was the smallest sound in the infirmary, smaller than the hum of the radiator and the wet mutter of rain against the high windows, but Mara heard it through everything. Click. Click-click. A neat, involuntary testing of new edges.

Mrs. Vale sat on the examination bed with a wool blanket over her shoulders, her thin hands folded in her lap like two exhausted birds. Her lips were pressed together now, but not before Mara had seen them: every tooth narrowed, lengthened, made uniform. No incisors, no molars, no familiar landscape of human eating. Just a line of immaculate white points above and below, too symmetrical to belong to anything that had grown in a mouth by accident.

“You saw,” Mrs. Vale whispered.

The nurse beside her, Celia, went very still. She had been arranging a tray of instruments with the fixed, careful blandness Blackmere staff wore whenever reality misbehaved.

“Mrs. Vale,” Celia said, “we’re going to keep our voices soft.”

“My voice is not the problem.” Mrs. Vale’s eyes slid to Mara. They were pale blue, washed almost silver by the overhead lights. “Tell her.”

Mara felt the old professional reflex rise in her, the one built from years of rooms with locked cabinets and tissue boxes and people saying impossible things because possible things had hurt too much. Ground the patient. Do not confirm the delusion. Ask what she fears will happen next.

But Mrs. Vale’s lips trembled apart.

Click.

Celia stepped in front of Mara before the woman could open her mouth fully again. “Dr. Harrow will want to examine her.”

“Dr. Harrow,” Mrs. Vale said, and a strange, tearless laughter broke in her throat. “He already has.”

Mara looked at her.

“When?”

Celia’s hand tightened around the tray. Metal chimed softly against metal.

“Last night,” Mrs. Vale said. “He came after the knocking. He smelled like iodine and sleep that had gone sour. He put his fingers in my mouth and counted.”

“Counted what?” Mara asked.

The woman’s gaze became suddenly, horribly empty.

“How many could fit.”

A gust threw rain hard against the windows, turning the glass white. Somewhere below them, deep inside the house, there came a slow sound like wood settling under weight. One knock. Then another. Patient. Almost polite.

Celia set the tray down too quickly. “Enough.”

Mara did not move. “Where is Dr. Harrow?”

“In his office,” Celia said. Her smile arrived late and wrong. “He asked to see you when you were available.”

“Did he?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Vale leaned forward. The blanket slipped from one shoulder. Her collarbone stood out sharply beneath parchment skin, but beneath it something moved, a small ripple under the skin as if a hand had pressed from inside and then withdrawn.

“Don’t let him look in your mouth,” she whispered.

Celia caught Mara’s sleeve before she could answer. The nurse’s fingers were cold even through the wool. “You should go now.”

It was not a suggestion.

Mara let herself be guided to the door. Behind her, Mrs. Vale began to hum, a broken little tune with no melody. Or perhaps it had one and Mara’s injured brain could not hold it. Her skull had been aching since dawn, a slow pressure behind the left eye where the scar tissue lived. The infirmary lights made a white halo around everything, and for a breath she saw the room doubled: two examination beds, two Celias, two Mrs. Vales, one with lips sealed and one smiling wide enough to split.

She blinked. The doubled room folded back into one.

Celia’s grip remained.

“You shouldn’t take the guests at their word,” the nurse said quietly. “Especially during adjustment periods.”

“Is that what this is?” Mara asked. “Adjustment?”

Celia’s eyes flicked toward the bed. “It’s what we call it.”

Mara studied her. Celia had been beautiful once in the way saints on old cards were beautiful—long-boned, solemn, remote. Now there were half-moons under her eyes and a raw place at the side of her thumb where she had worried the skin away.

“And what do you call it when teeth change overnight?” Mara asked.

Celia’s expression did not alter, but her throat moved.

“Stress,” she said.

The word sounded borrowed.

Mara left the infirmary with the taste of copper at the back of her mouth.

Blackmere House had changed its weather since breakfast. The morning had been gray and sealed; now the storm pressed its whole body against the building. Wind shoved through hairline gaps in the old window frames, carrying the mineral smell of the cliff and the cold rot of seaweed far below. Chandeliers trembled in their brass stems. The house responded in small nervous noises: pipes ticking, floors sighing, plaster giving quiet little pops as if knuckles were cracking inside the walls.

She took the east corridor toward the administrative wing. It was the longest route to Dr. Harrow’s office, but the west corridor passed the blue sitting room, and after what had happened there that morning—the retired magistrate pawing at his cheeks and insisting his face had been reassigned—Mara did not want to see the mirrors again.

Blackmere had mirrors everywhere. Gilded ovals above sideboards. Tall smoky panels between sconces. Narrow strips of glass inset into wardrobe doors so guests could monitor their posture, their color, their “progress.” At first Mara had thought it vanity architecture, another cruelty for rich people paying to be repaired: look how well you are becoming yourself again. But after last night, after seeing her own reflection turn its head a fraction too late, she had begun to avoid them.

The east corridor did not spare her. It had one long mirror at the end, foxed at the edges, positioned to catch anyone approaching and hold them there. Her reflection advanced toward her down the runner carpet. Dark hair pulled back severely. Pale face. The fading bruise along her temple, mostly hidden by the fall of hair she had not pinned properly. Eyes too alert, too sleepless.

She slowed.

The woman in the mirror slowed too.

For a moment Mara almost laughed at herself. Of course it had. That was what mirrors did. She was letting the house teach her suspicion as a bodily habit.

Then her reflection’s mouth opened.

Mara stopped dead.

The glass-woman remained standing at the end of the corridor, lips parted. Not wide. Not theatrically. Just enough to show the darkness behind her teeth.

Mara’s own mouth was closed.

Her pulse beat hard in her throat.

“No,” she said.

The reflection did not speak. It lifted one hand slowly and placed two fingers against the glass from the other side.

Not a wave. A warning.

From behind Mara came a soft, amused voice. “Most people check to see if they look ill. You check to see if you look obedient.”

Mara turned sharply.

Dr. Harrow stood ten paces behind her, though she had not heard him approach.

He was a tall man made taller by an economy of movement, all long lines and careful hinges. His hair, iron-gray and brushed back from a high forehead, never seemed disturbed by weather or work. He wore no white coat today, only a charcoal suit beneath a medical apron so clean it seemed theoretical. In one gloved hand he carried a file. In the other, nothing.

His eyes were the color of wet slate.

“Dr. Harrow,” Mara said.

He glanced past her toward the mirror. Whatever had been wrong there was no longer visible. Her reflection stood with its mouth closed, hand lowered, expression mirroring her own alarm so perfectly it became insulting.

“You’ve been difficult to find,” he said.

“I was with Mrs. Vale.”

“Yes. Celia informed me.”

He said Celia’s name the way a surgeon might refer to an instrument that had slipped.

Mara kept her eyes on him. “Mrs. Vale needs more than sedation.”

“Does she?”

“Her teeth have changed.”

“Have they?”

There it was: the calm descent of authority into a room where panic had been breathing. Mara had used the same tone herself once, before the accident, before Daniel vanished, before her certainties had started shedding pieces in the dark.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

One eyebrow moved slightly. “Do what?”

“Ask questions you’re not asking.”

For the first time, something like interest warmed his face. “Miss Ellison—”

“Mara.”

“Mara, then. You’re under considerable strain. You arrived here carrying a personal investment in this institution, one you concealed during your application. You have a history of traumatic head injury, intermittent visual disturbance, and professional burnout. Since coming to Blackmere, you’ve slept poorly, eaten irregularly, and immersed yourself in the anxieties of guests who are themselves medically fragile.”

He opened the file. Hers. She recognized the pale blue intake sheet on top, the signature she had written with a hand that shook only after she had left the ferry.

“You read my medical disclosure,” she said.

“You gave it to us.”

“Not all of that was in it.”

“No,” Harrow said mildly. “Some of it was in your references.”

The storm thumped against the windows. Mara felt the corridor narrow.

“You investigated me.”

“I employ people in a house full of vulnerable patients. I would be negligent not to.”

“Then you know why I’m here.”

Harrow closed the file. “Your brother left Blackmere eight years ago.”

“He disappeared eight years ago.”

“After leaving.”

“According to your records.”

“According to the ferry manifest.”

“Which your director gave me only after I asked for it three times.”

“Grief is not evidence, Mara.”

The words entered her cleanly, like a needle sliding under skin. Her vision flashed white at the edges. For half a second she was not in the corridor but in her mother’s kitchen, eight winters ago, staring at Daniel’s last postcard propped against the sugar bowl. The lighthouse stamp. The slanted handwriting. Don’t trust the quiet rooms.

Harrow watched her carefully.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

“Ten minutes in my office.”

“For what?”

“A conversation.”

“About Mrs. Vale?”

“About boundaries.”

Mara almost smiled. “That sounds ominous.”

“It sounds necessary.”

He turned without waiting for her and began walking toward the administrative wing. Mara remained still for one breath, two. The mirror at the end of the corridor showed her standing alone.

Then, from somewhere behind the glass, too faint to be sound, came three quick taps.

Not from the walls. Not from below.

From the mirror.

Mara followed Harrow.

The administrative wing belonged to a different Blackmere than the guest corridors. The carpets were thinner, the wallpaper less forgiving. The smell changed from beeswax and dried lavender to paper, old radiator heat, carbolic soap. Doors lined the hall with brass nameplates: DIRECTOR S. VAUGHN. ACCOUNTS. RECORDS. CONSULTATION ROOM TWO. Most were shut. Behind one, typewriter keys clacked in slow, uneven bursts, though Mara had never seen a typewriter in the house. Behind another, someone coughed and coughed until the cough became laughter.

Harrow’s office occupied the corner overlooking the north cliff. Its door was dark oak, older than the corridor, with a keyhole polished bright by use. He unlocked it with a key he took from a chain inside his waistcoat, not from the staff ring everyone else carried.

“After you,” he said.

Mara stepped inside and immediately understood why no one talked about this room.

It was too warm. That was the first thing. Heat rolled over her face, damp and organic, not the dry breath of radiators. The windows were closed against the storm, their panes jeweled with rain. Heavy curtains had been tied back with cords, revealing a view of the black sea grinding itself against the rocks below. A desk sat angled toward the room rather than the window, its surface bare except for a green-shaded lamp, an inkwell, and a silver letter opener shaped like a narrow tongue.

The bookshelves covered three walls.

At first glance, they held the expected things: medical texts, bound journals, old casebooks with cracked spines. Then her eyes adjusted to the dim amber light, and she saw the jars.

They occupied the upper shelves in tidy rows. Glass cylinders of varying sizes sealed with wax, each filled with a cloudy preservative that caught the lamplight and held it in yellow suspension. Within them floated pieces of flesh.

Not organs exactly. Not anything so clean. Strips of pale tissue folded like petals. Hard little crescents that might have been nail or tooth. A knot of something fibrous, threaded with black veins. In one jar a flap of skin drifted against the glass, and on it was a patch of hair as fine and white as mold.

Every jar had a label.

Mara took one step closer before she could stop herself.

Harrow closed the door behind them. The click of the latch was soft but final.

“Anatomical specimens,” he said.

“I know what they are.”

“Do you?”

She ignored him and read the nearest label.

BUCCAL SAMPLE — FEMALE — 14 FEBRUARY 1891

The ink had browned with age. The label beneath it read:

MANDIBULAR EXTRUSION — MALE — 3 NOVEMBER 1876

Mara’s skin tightened.

Blackmere House, according to the brochure and Director Vaughn’s polished dinner speech, had been founded in 1912. Built from the bones of a ruined customs lodge, renovated by some philanthropic baroness with a dead husband and fashionable ideas about sea air.

She moved along the shelves.

DERMAL SLIP — UNKNOWN — 22 JUNE 1824

INCISAL BUDS — CHILD — 9 JANUARY 1799

LINGUAL MASS — REV. T. WYKE — 17 MAY 1733

The room tilted slightly.