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August 2008

Doctor Farley’s Sanatorium
by Lee Anne Carlson

The woman in the bed next to mine told me she was the Queen of Tir. I laughed at her, laughed so hard that I coughed up blood and the nurse came rushing over. After a round of Doctor Farley’s serum and a warning to “lie still” lest I collapse my poxy-lungs, I recovered. The nurse left. The woman in the other bed still stared at me.

She stared through lunch and dinner until Doctor Farley’s rounds, when he came by our beds and tapped our feet with his cold hands.

She only stopped staring when he touched her and then she began trembled, pulling her legs up, knees making mountains out of blankets.

“You’re new?” he said in his slick-as-oil voice.

She blinked.

He glanced at her chart, spectacles sliding down his long, angular nose. “Hmm, an advanced case. Too bad.”

He moved on to me.

I was told again, that yes, I was dying. It hardly frightened me anymore.

“Brave girl, Annie.” Doctor Farley even stopped to pat me on the head. “Is there anything I can bring you?”

I shrugged. “Not really.”

“Brave girl.” Another pat.

And then he was gone for the night. The nurses retired to their quarters to play cards and gamble away our lives with laughs.

The woman in the bed next to me still stared. “You’re a consumptive?”

Her eyes looked eerie after the candles had been snuffed out. A chill fell upon the neat rows of nearly lifeless bodies and a chorus of coughs poisoned the air around us.

“We all are,” I replied, pulling my threadbare blanket up to my chin and settling down for another night of poor sleep.

She stared. “I’m not.”

My breath whistled through my nose. “Maybe. I’d say you were a nutcase though.”

“Why? Because I’m the Queen of Tir?” She had a high, childish voice, one that compelled me to keep my eyes open despite my exhaustion.

“Because you’re not.”

“Oh, but I am.”

To my relief, she rolled onto her side and sighed. I waited until her soft snores evened before I relaxed.

Queen of Tir, humph. I allowed myself a rare smile. Everyone knew the Queen of Tir was dead. I had killed her myself.

***

It was not uncommon for soldiers to get poxy about the lungs, or so Dr. Farley told us. I supposed he was right, what with our poor diets and all. After my last campaign with the 34th Regiment of Cavalry, my Colonel sent me to the sanatorium with a dreaded note of leave.

“You need the rest, Captain,” he had said before he marched away to war.

I rotted in bed.

An unworthy end for a hero, I thought. But all heroes ended up in the same place, some sooner than others.

A week after the “Queen” arrived, she quit her staring and succumbed to the daily routine of sanatorium life. Morning rounds by the nurses, the cold prodding of stethoscopes against an aching, heaving chest. Then breakfast for those who had any appetite left.

The shutters were pulled back from the long windows lining the wing, letting in the languid sun that was supposed to strengthen us. Lunch was a dose of Doctor Farley’s serum, the only proven cure for consumption in Heatherlea and well, all of Tir. I hated the taste of the stuff, syrupy when it touched the tongue, burning when it hit the throat and the gut. I always vomited after a dose.

Supper was the only warm meal of the day, a concoction of mashed oats and meat if it could be spared. And milk, pails of yellow mare’s milk.

The rest of life was structured by monotony. Most of the patients didn’t talk. Those of us that had been in Farley’s sanatorium for a time had learned to save our precious breath, lest the nurses come rushing in with tubes meant for shoving down our throats and inflating our lungs.

Queen, however, didn’t learn.

I supposed it suited her namesake. The real Queen of Tir had been a pain, a young, lusty girl spawned from a long line of equally lusty, reckless girls who thought they could rule the world with a smile…and substantial force. After centuries of living under an absolutist monarchy with an army that matched its ego in strength, the southern county of Heatherlea tried to form a republic. What followed was a vicious civil war.

It had been going on for some time, five years or so and my ward mate didn’t tire of talking about it. She asked me a good deal of questions, squirming around in her bed like a possessed thing until the nurses warned her about restraints.

“You were in the army?” That was Tuesday’s question.

“For ten years. Since I came of age at fifteen,” I answered her on Wednesday.

“What’s your name?” She asked me that on Thursday.

I didn’t reply until Saturday night. “Captain Anne Hynes.”

Queen had grown sulky by then.

“Why the medal above your bed?” She managed that one on Sunday, pointing to the silver ornament shaped like a heather leaf hooked on a nail.

I smiled and answered her right then and there. “Got that for killing you.”

“Me?” Blatant shock pulled at her cheeks.

“You, the Queen of Tir.”

“Oh.” She threw her head back against her pillow and folded her snake-like arms over her chest. “I’ll be having that back then. You didn’t kill me.”

I wasn’t one to bandy about words with a fool and it vexed me to think that my last, great fight would be with the loon lying beside me. But by God, I couldn’t help myself.

“Course I did.” I managed to sit up in bed, feeling dizzy, swamped with weariness and the persistent pain in my side. “At the Battle of Five Mile Moor. You were there with your men, had them all formed up and your lines broke when the 34th charged. I put my sword through your heart, I did. And County Heatherlea successfully seceded from Tir.”

A smile lifted my lips as I remembered the day. Things had been touchy for the Republic’s army. Our generals were actually suing for peace when the Queen was killed in an unexpected skirmish. My Colonel handed me the medal that night, outside my tent, with his usual tense smile. I kept it on me ever since.

Queen drummed her fingers along her elbows. She continued staring up at the ceiling where the mauve paint peeled, looking like scabs. “Funny,” she muttered. “I wasn’t at the Battle of Five Mile Moor. My cousin was, though. And damn your heroics, you couldn’t even think to return her body for a proper burial. Cowardice, I say, which is why you’re losing the war now.”

My hands grasped my musty sheets. “The Republic of Heatherlea still stands.” But the lie lodged like a sharp rock in my throat. Even inside the sanatorium, I heard Farley and the nurses whisper bits of news from the front. Heatherlea was a tottering state run by clueless landowners who hadn’t the skill to set up a proper judicial system.

Queen rolled her head over her pillow, a lazy smile slipping across her chapped lips. “Not while I’m alive.”

Anger brought my blood to a quick boil. After checking to see that the nurses were gone, I struggled out of my bed and snatched the chart from the foot of hers.

Farley’s handwriting eluded my understanding, but I forced my eyes down to the bottom of the parchment, searching for the place where Queen’s name would be etched.

Strange, they had left it empty.

The chart slid back into the tight pocket at the end of her bedstead with a muted thud. I slipped underneath my covers and pulled them straight over my head.

“Hmm,” I heard Queen say with a young girl’s giggle. “I rather like that ornament of yours.”

***

On Monday, to make the impending week brighter, the nurses would let us out into the courtyard for an hour of air. Those that could walk would lean against the high walls. The rest were wheeled out and left in the sun.

Queen still had the ability of her legs.

I didn’t, for the most part.

I envied her as she walked around the yard, not stationary like most of us, but vigorous, active. She ran her hands over the brick walls and placed one booted foot in a crack, pulling herself up like a long-legged spider.

I wrapped a flannel shawl about my shoulders. The upper floors of the sanatorium hid the autumn sun. But it was a blessing, at least, to be in the crisp air, even if it stung my cheeks with frost. Our wing inside was perfumed with scarlet-tinged spittle and sweaty sheets.

Queen meandered over to my chair. “What sort of place is this?” Her fingers gripped the handles and she rolled me back and forth.

The wheels jolted over the dirty cobblestones. I groaned. “Used to be a school. Army converted it last winter. Needed space for ailing soldiers.”

She leaned over my chair and gave me an odd sort of look, eyebrows jumping up her smooth forehead. “Prisoners, you mean.”

I sniffed. Her hair smelled sweet, like the powder used to dust officer’s wigs.

“Patients,” I corrected her with a cough, hating the way she looked all the while. Queen wasn’t quite as emaciated as most of us and reminded me of the days when I had been bonny. Now my red hair had been washed brown and the veins in my hands stood out like ugly wrinkles.

Queen still looked like a lass of twenty-five, at least.

She wheeled me about the yard. “And what sort of town is this? I couldn’t rightly see over the walls.” A grimace pinched her face, but her cheeks stayed uncommonly rosy.

“Mostly made up of tanneries, cobblers. And there’s a stable for selling horses.”

“Small?”

“Very.”

“Strange place for a man like Farley,” Queen mused.

I said nothing, wondering how a madwoman knew so much of the man. True, Farley wasn’t really a medical doctor. He had been a professor at Heatherlea’s only university when the war started and was not a very patriotic man to boot. Lucky for us, he had an eye for money. Farley cooked up his serum and promised to sell his secret to the highest bidder. Tir fought viciously for the claim, but Heatherlea, wealthy in flour and cloth mills, won out. Farley passed the cure onto us, for a “one-time fee” as he oft lamented to the nurses.

Queen pushed me over to the gate. The iron bars were rusted and thin like a dead man’s fingers poking out of a grave. On the other side, a set of stone stairs led out into the street.

We both stared at the lock.

Doctor Farley kept the keys until Sunday when the nurses were allowed out for church.

I felt Queen sag against the back of my chair.

“They’re cunning, you know.” She turned me around and pushed me back to the center of the yard where a drain sucked the water away from last night’s rain. “The stench from the tanneries disguises the smell of corpses.”

Seated patients dozed about us. The rest grumbled about the cold.

“Patients die,” I said.

She ambled around to the front of my chair. Her ratty cloak swished about her ankles. “Yes, they die. Executed. Shame. I hang my men. It’s quick-like, no suffering.”

The wind rattled in the skeletal branches of nearby trees.

Queen strolled away.

My cold palms gripped the wheels of my chair and I growled, thrusting myself forward with the waning power in my arms.

She laughed when I chased after her.

“You’re damned clever,” I spat at her ramrod-straight back. “Damned clever.”

“For telling the truth? I honestly can’t believe a crafty soldier like yourself is so easily fooled.”

Queen stopped by the walls again and perched her hands on her hips. “No, we’re all going to die here, I assure you. We’re too dangerous to be kept alive.”

“You perhaps.” My arms were aching from the slight effort of chasing after her. I let them fall over my blanket-covered knees.

“All of us,” Queen echoed. “It’s your precious Republic’s way of cleaning up mistakes. Not big on public executions, unlike Tir. It’d look bad if they were hanging their heroes, or me, for that matter. And why go through all the expense of trials and such? They’ve already paid Farley for his trouble.”

My patience was frayed. Fury fueled my strength like dried peat on embers. I whipped the chair around and searched for a slice of sun to warm myself in.

Queen’s boots clicked on the cobblestones behind me. “You shouldn’t have killed my cousin,” she rambled, her voice now loud and ringing over the yard.

A few patients lifted their gray heads.

“And you certainly shouldn’t have claimed to have killed me when your block-headed generals were suing for peace. It makes things, hmm, messy.”

I tried to avoid her, but she was quick, nimble.

Queen crouched before me and grasped my legs. “Your Republic has a murderer on its hands.”

My breathing deepened, seeping from my flared nostrils. “I am no-”

“Deserters. Thieves. Scoundrels.” She glanced at the other patients. “All of us. Prisoners.”

“And you?” I said.

“Captured.” There was fire in her eyes and an expression so different from the wasted looks of my other companions. “If your Republic doesn’t have the stomach to kill me on the battle field,” Queen continued and now she whispered, “then they certainly won’t stretch my neck before all the country.”

I was trembling, trembling from rage, not weakness.

Her words were resonant but unthinkable, unbelievable. I laughed at her.

“Then how do they kill us?” I asked.

Queen, for once, stayed silent.

The nurses came out into the courtyard and pressed bottles of Doctor Farley’s serum into wilted hands.

***

There was an easy way to prove Queen wrong. All I had to do was stop taking the serum. Sure, I’d get weaker, sicker. But I figured it didn’t matter. Farley had my coffin laid out in the morgue already.

When the nurses came around on Tuesday, I poured my dose into the chamber pot beneath the bed. They didn’t notice, but kept on walking, rolling their rickety carts, humming heads bobbing beneath stiff, white mobcaps. I did the same on Wednesday and continued on for the rest of the week when I noticed how my breathing had steadied.

Queen wasn’t so lucky. Her nurse stood over her and forced the serum down her throat.

I could hardly stand to watch them treat her. She would start to pant heavy soon after, clawing at her gut, sweating. Once I saw her eyes roll up in her head.

“Quit your play-acting,” I said when she started shaking again on Thursday.

She wiped some bile from her waxy lips. “Why should I do that?”

“To make me just as mad as you are,” I countered, now sitting up in bed with my legs casually folded.

Queen had trouble lifting her head. The sun hid behind a moody veil of clouds. The windows were filthy panes of grey. I saw her chin tremble as she tried to gaze out of them.

“Why do they keep us here?” she asked.

I wiggled my hips a little, pretending that I was astride my old horse and charging straight into the Queen’s battle lines. “Thought you knew that already.”

“I do.” Her eyes were twitching. “But you need to consider, why can’t we leave this place?”

“They say we’re contagious.”

“The nurses haven’t gotten sick, have they?”

Truth struck a death knell within me. But I didn’t have time to ruminate.

Queen began to seize, her whole body tensing, then jerking atop her straw pallet. Her bedstead creaked.

Fear leapt to life within me.

“Help! I need help here!” My cries echoed down the wing and back. I saw a cluster of nurses at the end of the wing stare, but not a one of them moved. The commotion was enough to bring Farley down from his quarters and he swept along the ward with all the boldness of a newly crowned king.

I watched his eyes as he stopped by Queen’s bed, noting the glare that flashed behind his spectacles and the snarl that puckered his lips.

“You should have paid me,” he muttered to Queen.

For several horrible minutes the fit continued. Then Queen fell still, weeping, clutching her stomach with a rumble of a groan.

Farley nodded and left.

***

By Saturday, I could walk the length of the wing when nobody was watching. Doctor Farley stopped by my bed longer than usual that night and for the first time, I saw a flicker of concern tighten his shrewd face.

“Eat your breakfast, Annie?”

“A little,” I lied. In truth, I had polished off a bowl of their tasteless porridge.

“Good.” He didn’t sound convinced.

I could have sworn I saw him glance at the medal above my head. He walked away after another minute.

Beside me, Queen pretended to be asleep.

I spent most of the night awake. The wooden slats supporting my pallet dug into my back. I couldn’t get comfortable, not even if I rolled on to my side and covered my aching eyes with my hands.

I felt well. Better. Alive

Could Queen be right?

I remembered how warm she had looked on her first day at the sanatorium. And she never coughed. Only laughed. Only teased the nurses. Only smiled.

I glanced over my shoulder at the prone body resting beside me. Queen could scarcely breathe now. I listened as she gasped in her sleep, the sound moist, thin like a death rattle. She moaned every so often and kept a shaking hand pressed against her middle.

A shiver climbed my spine, but I kicked off my blanket. Sweat dried on my skin, leaving me itchy. I ran my jagged nails over my arms.

I thought back to the Battle of Five Mile Moor, when the puny 34th regiment had been surprised by a Tirian scouting party and I speared some noblewoman officer down from her saddle and into the mud. They all began talking then, the starving, skinny soldiers of my regiment. Said I had killed the Queen and we cheered and brought the battered body back to camp.

And my fellow officers frowned. And they whispered. And three weeks later, the regimental surgeon told me I was a consumptive.

Once, I had trusted instinct, that insistent prodding in my chest, that voice of impulse that led me straight into battle, that had changed me from a casual soldier into a killer.

Before I drifted off, I remembered my Colonel’s smile as he handed me the note of leave, that parchment sealed with glaring, red wax.

“No worries, Captain,” he had promised with a leer. “You’ll be back soon.”

***

I slept straight into Sunday evening until Queen roused me. She was sitting on my legs when I woke.

“Captain Hynes,” she whispered.

My throat constricted. It had been so long, so damn long since anyone had addressed me by my proper rank. I had missed it and now felt a pang of regret throb against my heart. But before I could disguise it, Queen noticed my upset.

“You look like you need some air,” she said. The blanket was yanked off my torso. “Walk with me in the courtyard.”

I swung my legs off the bed and slipped into my boots, but something dragged me back to my bedside. I glanced at the ornament glinting in the sliver of moonlight that managed to sneak through the shutters. It was cold in my hands, but light in my pocket.

Queen led the way out of the wing, stopping only to snatch a bottle of serum from a side table.

“Why?” I asked as she tucked it within her cloak.

She pressed a skeletal finger to her lips.

They hadn’t locked the door to the courtyard and I eased it closed so that the brass hinges wouldn’t whine.

Farley never kept it latched on Sunday nights. Some of the nurses always came back late.

We huddled together by one of the walls. Queen trembled.

“What are you going to do?” I asked her, making my voice sharp so as to pretend I didn’t care and still thought she was a loon.

“Run. And you’re coming along.”

I snorted. “Madness.”

“Then why did you follow me?”

I had no answer.

“If we aren’t prisoners,” she said, with the wind picking up and keening down the street, “then they won’t chase us.”

I didn’t like the thought of being chased. Neither did Queen, apparently. Her lips were white with fear.

We waited until clumsy shoes tapped down the stone stairs beyond the gate. Then I saw Queen move forward, her whole body arched with wolf-like intensity. She kept by the shadows until the keys jangled together and the gate clanked open.

Queen raised the serum bottle.

The nurse hadn’t a chance. She fell, any sound muffled by the shattering of glass over her head. Blood pumped from her skull and blackened the pale serum as it swirled towards the drain.

I went out into the street first.

The cold nibbled at my flesh. I envied Queen’s cloak. The houses opposite the sanatorium were boarded and hollow gaslights reflected only empty moonlight. Old trees wept the last of summer’s leaves.

Queen tilted her head and listened. I saw her chest rise and fall. Rise, fall. Rise, fall. She panted.

Panic infected my limbs. But when she grabbed my wrist, I found my legs loose.

We ran down the street, the shadow of the sanatorium chasing us, stealing the sky and making us blind in the darkness.

Queen’s face was dappled with sweat when we slowed and hid behind the shed of a tannery.

“They’ll be on our heels,” she said, her words sob-laced. “But my people, they’re prompt.”

I recoiled. My gut seemed to turn in on itself, churning, eating away the very lining of my stomach. I clenched my hand over her shoulder and dug my nails deep until they punctured flesh. “Your people?”

“We can’t escape by ourselves.” Queen trembled so violently I thought she was having another fit. “They’re waiting for us outside of town.”

I realized then that I was shaking too, my legs throbbing, my bones ready to break through my paper-thin flesh.

“You’ve killed us both,” I mumbled. Over my shoulder, I saw the once dead lights about the sanatorium flicker to life.

Queen groaned and grasped my arm as though she were a drowning woman and I the raft. Bile erupted from her mouth.

I stared in blank horror as blood splashed over the already grimy cobblestones. But it wasn’t only blood, no, pieces, pieces of flesh and tissue from inside her.

She began to tremble again.

“We…we can make it if we try.”

I nodded through a haze of sweat and pain that twisted around my ribs.

My legs felt useless, standing by the shed. Primal instinct urged me forward. This time, I had to drag her along.

Queen tripped and sliced her knees open on the stones. Bile colored her teeth a wretched black.

Even as I ran, the pain mounted, burning, fire without a flame, smoldering in the ashes of my bones.

Queen lagged behind and the broken weight of her body forced me back. With ripped hands, she pulled herself up against a porch. Foam dribbled down her scraped chin.

We both heard the sanatorium gate swing open, the harried, hushed voices of the nurses rising above the limp breeze to haunt us.

Queen stared at me still. “I’m sorry.”

“Come!” In a last, hopeless effort, I groped for her jerking arm.

She groaned through another wave of muscle spasms. “I was wrong. They’re…they’re cunning, you know.”

I was suffering, yes, but not like Queen. So quickly she had faded, her body failing just blocks from the sanatorium. Why?

Comprehension strangled the fear from me and I felt invisible walls spring up about my abused body. We weren’t being executed, no. Just locked away. Like criminals. Like rogues. Farley hadn’t been hawking a cure, only a prison in a bottle. His poison wasn’t meant to kill.

The venom in our flesh bloomed to life with each step and made us easy to catch.

Hunted. We were only animals to them.

And I had been a war hero.

And she, God, she had been a Queen.

In some cobbler’s backyard she died, lying between a patch of pumpkins and a garden rake. Her eyes were glazed with eternity and a few last tears.

Doctor Farley and his nurses found her soon enough. I heard him curse from where I hid behind a wheel barrow.

He stooped over the body. “She’s gone.”

“We dosed her heavy,” a nurse interrupted, “you told us to.”

“The Republic has no bargaining chip now.” Farley kicked her corpse. “It’s my neck for her life.”

“And Hynes?” A nurse asked.

Farley’s spectacles inched down his nose. “The opposite, I fear. We were too gentle. Her doses were diluted, she can run. Call for the town guard. Let them know she has a chance of making it.”

They scurried away, the sound of a steely cadence numbing my ears as the drums summoned the guard to arms.

Queen they left lying there, a gaunt, ghoulish corpse that seemed no more than a skeleton in the nighttime mist. In passing her, I put my medal in her hands.

And then I ran.