The patient in Room 18

St. Ann’s is an old hospital, sprawling in a great heap of weather-stained red brick and green ivy on the side of Thatcher Hill, a little east and south of the city of B——. The building, though remodelled and added on to here and there, still retains the great, solid walls, the gumwood and walnut woodwork, the large, old-fashioned rooms, and the general air of magnificence and dignity that characterized what was known, in the grandiloquent nineties, as the Thatcher mansion.

Time has made changes; quantities of windows, low and wide, modern plumbing, electricity, a telephone to every floor, and added wings whose brick walls have been carefully weather-stained to match the original walls are some of them. On the west is the main entrance, an imposing affair of massive doors and great travertine pillars and curving driveway. But on the south, at the extreme end of the south wing, is another and less imposing entrance, a small, semi-circular, colonial porch and a glass-paned door that leads from the hushed hospital corridor directly upon a narrow strip of grass and then shrubbery and apple orchard and willows and thickets of firs. From this door, too, is a path leading up and around the hill, and, considerably below and beyond the thickets of trees and brush, winds a road, dusty and seldom used.

The south wing is the most recently rebuilt wing of St. Ann’s, and time was when Room 18 was the brightest and sunniest room of the whole wing. I say, time was. Room 18 is now cleaned and dusted regularly twice a week by two student nurses. Occasionally Miss Jones, the office superintendent, tries to enter a patient in Room 18, but patients from the city remember too well the newspaper headlines—such as Room 18 Claims Its Third Victim—and refuse at the first hint of that significant numeral. Patients from out of town present a no less serious problem in that, even though they take the room assigned to them without demur, they invariably demand removal to another room after only a few hours’ residence in Room 18. Once we tried giving the whole wing a new set of numbers but it made no difference. Room 18 was Room 18 and the patients placed there, with one exception, have never remained past midnight.

I do not know whether this situation is due to the patients mysteriously getting wind of Room 18’s history, in spite of the nurses being forbidden to speak of the unfortunate affair, or to the undoubtedly sinister aspect the room has managed to acquire. This latter has puzzled me more than a little. The room has the same hygienic and utilitarian furniture it always had, the same southeast corner location, the same outlook of close-encircling orchard and dense green shrubbery, though, of course, the shades are drawn to a decorous length, and the same rubberized floor covering. It is true that the last item may somewhat induce the atmosphere of the repellent that Eighteen’s very walls seem to exude, because it holds, despite the efforts of various scrubwomen, a certain darkish stain there at the foot of the narrow bed.

It is a fact that five minutes in that too-still room bring chills up the small of my back, clammy moisture to the palms of my hands, and a singular and pressing desire to escape. And I have a good stomach, no nerves, and little imagination.

And in the long, dark hours of the second watch, between midnight and early morning, I still avoid the closed, mysterious door of Room 18!

The night it began, Corole Letheny had a dinner party up at the doctor’s cottage on the hillside, at the end of the path from the south door. She telephoned hastily, late in the afternoon, for Maida Day and me. She was giving the dinner, it appeared, for a young civil engineer, a friend of Dr. Letheny’s, who had dropped in unexpectedly on his way from a bridge in Uruguay to another bridge in Russia. Ordinarily I do not care for Corole’s dinners, which are apt to acquire an exotic tinge that is distasteful to me, but a travel tale and an engineer allure me equally and since I did not go on duty that night until midnight I promised to come. Maida was a little harder to get, seeming, indeed, to be unusually reluctant, and her voice, as I heard it, standing beside her at the telephone, was anything but cordial.