The Warden Page 6
“What other nurses? I should be with her.”
“Nurse Fullerton, for one. Just calm down, Ash, and get back to work. I don’t want to see you in this hallway for the rest of the afternoon, do you understand me?”
Lucy screamed again, this time harder, a raw, helpless sound that pierced straight through to Jocelyn’s spine. No, no, no. She was supposed to protect her. She was supposed to make sure nothing worse happened to that child.
“I need you to say that you understand me, Nurse Ash.”
Jocelyn threw up her hands, stalking away. “I understand. I understand, if that’s even possible in this godforsaken place.”
She rounded the corner and disappeared into the nurses’ station. Maybe if she waited long enough, Nurse Kramer would need to leave for a toilet break and give Jocelyn an opening. But by then it would be too late. Far too late. Still. She tidied until there was no more tidying to do. She took prescriptions and handed out doses in the dispensary. She even paced up and down the hall. All the while, she stayed as close to the stairwell as possible, but Kramer refused to budge.
By five o’clock the screams had stopped, and Jocelyn could only wonder what they had done to Lucy.
I’m sorry, little sparrow.
Her fury turned to Warden Crawford, and then it turned just as swiftly to Madge. How could she be a part of this? Hadn’t she been just as doting on Lucy? Lobotomies were an absolute last resort. Surgeries of any kind were a last resort. And even if it came to a lobotomy, there were easier, more modern methods that absolutely did not involve a bone saw. Whatever was going on in the basement, she had to put an end to it.
But all Jocelyn could do was wait. She watched the nurses come and go for supper. No sign of Madge. Didn’t she have a date? It wasn’t like Madge to miss something like that, not when she couldn’t shut up about Tanner and his gorgeous blue eyes for fifteen seconds.
But the hours blurred together, and between skipping lunch, supper, and all the usual coffee breaks in between, Jocelyn was worn down. She was exhausted. Sleep snuck up on her, the after-hours low halogen glow of the lobby lulling her into a doze she hadn’t wanted or expected. There were no dreams and little rest, just darkness and the hard, sudden slide into unconsciousness.
And then there was giggling.
It was soft at first, distant, and for a fuzzy, sleepy moment Jocelyn thought she had finally begun to dream. But the laughter continued, louder, sharper. Not laughter. Giggling. Madge’s giggling. Jocelyn’s head flew up, a string of drool snapping between her lower lip and her forearm. She had curled up against the dispensary counter, her knees tucked up on the second rung of the stool. Now she rubbed her eyes, her face, working blood flow and sense back into her body.
The giggling came again, a feminine, flirty sound that wound up from the depths of Brookline. There were voices, too, but they were muffled and unintelligible at this extreme distance. Jocelyn tumbled off the stool and pulled off her heels—she could run better in bare stockings—and raced to the stairs. Nurse Kramer was of course long gone, having left for dinner and then sleep. A few orderlies and nurses were circulating on the lobby level, but they didn’t seem to notice Jocelyn stumbling toward the stairs.
Again she plunged into the cold and again she fought off the creeping dread that seeped over her like a sticky, oozing tar. She abandoned her hard-soled shoes on one of the lower steps, shuffling with free hands and quiet feet to the archway and the soft, winding giggles that came from within.
Now the voices were louder, stronger, and Jocelyn began to make out the words. There were no orderlies to stop her as she stepped beneath the dark arch marking off the corridor.
“W-wait . . . What are you doing? Madge? What are you doing?”
Tanner. She could hear the panic in his voice, the high tremor that made him sound like a frightened little boy. Jocelyn ran faster, trying not to slide and fall on her sweaty, stockinged feet. Where were they? She panted, out of breath, ignoring how the corridor became darker and darker, closing in, the corridor more like a tunnel that focused to just a miniscule barrel of light. But she jolted to a stop as the sudden cry of the other patients went up, as if in solidarity with Madge’s laughter. A refrain of wild, terrible sympathy.
And then it was a chant. She couldn’t hear Lucy’s screams but she could hear the others, Dennis and his ilk, their cries coalescing into the same phrase she had heard on that first awful night.
“Help her, help her, HELP HER!”
She found them in Theater 7.
Jocelyn leaped for the doorframe, anchoring her slick and unreliable feet by hoisting herself into the room. She didn’t want to freeze. It was the worst possible moment to freeze. Yet she couldn’t move. Madge was there, standing on the same operating table where they had bound and gagged Lucy. Below, arms out as if to catch her from a sudden fall, Tanner eased back and forth, eyes glued to Madge, who was swaying on the wheeled table.
“Careful, doll,” she giggled. In her right hand she held a sleek, stainless steel hammer, the kind used with an orbitoclast for lobotomies. “You’ll fall! Don’t fall and hurt that pretty face.”
“Let me get you down from there,” Tanner was saying, licking his lips nervously and trying to ease toward her. But Madge reeled at his slightest movement, the table shaking, threatening to spill her onto the floor. She swung the hammer, first at him and then at the open air before her.
“Why don’t you just come down?” he pleaded. Sweat glistened on his forehead. The chanting grew louder, earsplitting, and gathering in speed. Jocelyn inched carefully into the room, hands up in surrender.
“I saw him,” Madge was saying. She sounded scared. Little. “I saw Mickey Mouse, but where was Minnie? She wasn’t there. And she’s so, so pretty. So pretty. But now she’s cracked. Now she’s broken.”
Jocelyn had nearly reached the pool of light cast by the operating bulbs, but Madge didn’t notice, swaying precariously on the gurney, her arms high in the air, hammer swinging like a pendulum.
“Just come down from there and we can talk,” Tanner coaxed, still prepared to catch her if she fell, which was looking more and more likely.
Jocelyn wondered if she could somehow climb up onto the table and tackle Madge, bring her down gently while also disarming her. But that seemed like far too much to attempt without either both of them hitting the ground from a height or Madge accidentally smashing her with the hammer.
“But he said I would see!” Madge shrieked. Her scream only drove the chanting higher, louder, and the words thumped at the base of Jocelyn’s skull.
“Help her, help her!”
“Careful, doll,” Madge breathed, laughing, giggling, her voice hiccupping into hysterics. “Careful, doll! Careful! You’ll fall! Don’t fall and hurt that pretty face!”
Jocelyn saw the hammer go up with more purpose this time, Freeman stamped into the shining steel. Both she and Tanner leapt for the table too late. Madge caught herself on the upswing, rocketing the hammer into her mouth. Teeth shattered, tiny bits of white falling on them like a shower of sand. Jocelyn tossed up her hands, screaming, watching through the splay of her fingers as the hammer landed again, this time dead center of Madge’s forehead.
She was still giggling, giggling, giggling. Smash.
Tanner grabbed her by the ankles, pulling her down to the floor as best he could, dodging the hammer blows that rained down indiscriminately. While he brought her to the ground, Jocelyn tried to reach for the hammer, but Madge struggled, her giggles turning into shrill arpeggio of screams. She dodged and bucked and smashed the hammer into her forehead again and again, until Jocelyn took a blow to the shoulder herself, finally wrestling the thing out of her grasp.
The hammer had broken the skin, and the deep, dark bruising spread like spidery shadows from the middle of Madge’s forehead. The blood ran over them all as Jocelyn and Tanner pinned her arms, held her, her laughter dying down as the light seeped out of her eyes.
“M-Madge, Madge, can y
ou breathe? Oh God, can you breathe? Just stay with me, I’ll get someone. . . . I’ll get help. I’ll get you help.” Jocelyn tore a strip of cotton from her uniform, trying to mop up the free-flowing blood and stop the bleeding at its epicenter.
But the blood poured down Madge’s face, splitting over her nose and into her mouth, onto Jocelyn, dripping onto the floor, so red it looked black. “I fell and hurt my pretty face,” she mumbled, words jumbled from her broken and missing teeth. “I guess he got his way.”
“Hold on, Madge, I know it’s bad, just . . . Please hold on.”
“Why,” Tanner whispered. Again and again. “Why? Why?”
A shadow fell over them, swallowing up the meager yellow light of the operating lamps. Madge had gone limp in their arms and the shrieks of the patients, at last, had ebbed. Jocelyn felt a heavy hand fall on her shoulder. The warden’s.
She shivered and tried to cast off his grip.
“Surely you see now, Nurse Ash,” he said. “Sometimes there really is no hope. What could you have done? What could any of us have done? If we hadn’t put Lucy’s mind at ease—if we had not given her a peace she could not give herself—she might have done this same awful thing to herself. Dennis . . . Dennis could slip away from us any day now.”
“I don’t . . . Madge didn’t do this to herself.” Jocelyn couldn’t look down. She couldn’t look into her friend’s broken face. Her skin was so cold, they were both so cold, the blood and the sudden gush of tears felt all the hotter. Stinging. “She didn’t do this. There was nothing wrong with her. I know there was nothing wrong with her.”
She heard footsteps and glanced to the side, watching as two male orderlies filed into Theater 7.
“Escort Mr. Frye to his room, please,” Warden Crawford said, tut-tutting at Tanner and squeezing Jocelyn’s shoulder so hard she could feel the bones give and crack.
“I’d like him to stay,” Jocelyn whispered. “Madge . . . She really cared for him.”
“It’s best that he go.”
He wasn’t given a choice in the matter. They caught eyes, she and Tanner, as the orderlies hauled him away from Madge, his spectacles askew, his mouth open to call for help. But then the door shut and she was alone with the warden, Madge limp and lifeless in her arms.
“She was going to dye her hair like Jackie Kennedy,” Jocelyn murmured, wiping a stained piece of blond hair off of Madge’s cheek. “She wanted to be glamorous.”
“That’s nice.”
“You don’t care,” she growled. “You don’t care about Lucy. You don’t care about me or about Madge. You don’t care about anything.”
“Now, that’s not true,” he said warmly, gently, shifting so that he could crouch in front of her and face her. He reached out, and she tensed as his hand cupped her chin, forcing her to meet his cold, steady gaze. “I care about the future. I care about making sure things like this never happen again—it’s senseless, useless.”
Jocelyn couldn’t argue with that, but she couldn’t look at him anymore, either. I couldn’t help her. That was the only thought filling her head. I couldn’t help her.
She hadn’t helped Lucy, and she certainly hadn’t helped Madge. What kind of nurse was she? What kind of person was she?
“Hush,” Warden Crawford said. She hadn’t even realized she was crying. The smile he gave her was gentle, fatherly, and for a brief, terrible moment his presence didn’t fill her with unease. “Some patients are beyond help,” he told her, lifting Madge carefully from her grasp, “but they are not beyond use. We will learn from this, Nurse Ash. Trust me, in time you will learn.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo credit Greg DeStefano
MADELEINE ROUX is the New York Times bestselling author of Asylum, which has sold into nine countries around the world, and its sequel, Sanctum, which SLJ called “seriously spooky.” Catacomb is the third installment in the series about Dan, Abby, and Jordan. Madeleine is also the author of Allison Hewitt Is Trapped and Sadie Walker Is Stranded. A graduate of the Beloit College MFA program, Madeleine now lives in Southern California.
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BOOKS BY MADELEINE ROUX
Asylum
Sanctum
Catacomb
The Scarlets
The Bone Artists
The Warden
COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE WARDEN. Copyright © 2016 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ISBN 978-0-06-242445-7
EPub Edition © January 2016 ISBN 9780062424457
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