Lendle

Chapter 1

AN EXQUISITE morbid strain ran through him like the too-high note of a violin, so that while its music was shivering cold, there was also something wickedly haunting in it. Yet the morbidness was fragile and could be dismissed; while the other thing that tormented his conscience was the raucous horror of a shouting voice, and this it was impossible to forget. Harry Waters' words came back to him again and again:

“Get out of here, Doctor Hale. You dirty up my office. Get out and don't come back!”

Hale walked on the narrow tar road, now remembering that, and gazed ahead at his sanitarium. He wanted very much for its sight to stir him and take away the ache and sickness that was in his heart. Yet it didn't and he walked slowly in the extravagant leisure of solitude, but to try and lift enthusiasm into his heart was a silly and futile job which only wearied him.

He thought of another day eight years ago when he had walked down this same road and had seen the sanitarium there though it had not actually been there then. There had been only the desolated wreckage of a real estate project gone sour and flat: unfinished stone houses, the jagged slope of their architecture blocked in silhouette against the blue of the sky; elegant and rusted gates, with a gateman's house, and beyond them patchy fields of weeds. He had not then identified that as someone else's dream ruined and dead, he had seen in the space only the fine structure of the sanitarium, and how it would look standing there with its vast screen porches facing the Long Island Sound, secluded and quiet; and on the inside, the pleasant routine, white clad nurses, and the dignity of a select New York clientele.

It was there now, just as he had pictured it. It had been there for seven years and five months and it still seemed bright and new. But through the windows the first and second floors shone vacantly with the glistening emptiness of rooms which had once been filled. Only on the third and top floor could one see the flicker that was activity. Last year there had been cars streaming in through the driveway one after the other, but now the sanitarium stood silently, and there seemed to be about it something bleak and cold; the wind that whipped across from the Sound was whiny, and the gleaming windows of the hospital were not unlike tragic and morbid eyes. You had the uncanny feeling that it did not want to be there; that it wished for an Aladdin's lamp to take it scurrying all the way across Orienta Point, and over to the other side of the Boston Post Road, so that it could settle in between the buildings on Mamaroneck Avenue, and shiver there, until the warmth of town places quieted it.