"Palace Macabre Ch. 1" by H. Coyne

"Through me the way into the suffering city"

Visitors always complained of the smell: metal, plastic and old age. That musty, milk smell of the geriatric and motionless. Or they hated the lighting; fluorescent with a sickly brightness and the undercurrent of young green. Worried faces looked darker and deeper in that garish light and white coats glared with a crisper authority.

So I always opened windows, didn't matter the weather. Winter white dawn, the indolent gold of late morning, and the livid, purple dusk, I ushered each into the manufactured world with the slide of metal rings. The patients called me "Sunshine" but the name never stuck among the Doctors. I was the nurse with the solemn mouth and folded hands, pensive like a sparrow at rest.

But to them, the awaiting, I was the doorman to a moment of normalcy. I loved the patients as long as I dared, seeping into the lives that passed in and out, propped on beds, rolled on linoleum. Some drifted back to home, some to hospice.

My solemnity was for them, a quietness of spirit while I was there, the final sanctuary before a splitting path. What I felt was not so much grief, but a reverent heaviness. Sophia, an aged dancer, who rubbed her rose quartz rosary between her figures when thinking, once told me Christ was described as a "man acquainted with sorrows". I cannot claim Christ's perfection, but I think her quote the nearest description of my heart in that place.

So it was strange when I decided to leave. I had little reason to go and my heart still lingered about the place. Perhaps that was why I had to go. Slowly I was becoming a specter in the hospital: quiet, dutiful, deferential. The twilight of that time was a slow gathering of moss and a disregard for my personal life, what was left of it.

My family is in pieces, my mother died of an aneurysm when I was in nursing school and my father lives in Moyenne with his other family. I have a brother who is still young, free and a little untamed. He is seeking out this country's frontiers for a freelance photo- journalism piece. He sends me pieces of his life warmly scrawled postcards, bent at the corners and always with old stamps depicting ornate carousel horses.

I miss him. I envy him.

Amid the journey of life I had come to a dark wood for I could no longer see the unerring path of job, friends, date, someday marry. I can't articulate what it was, this malaise and the knowledge that I had slipped myself into a place where what I envisioned had become unattainable. Perhaps I had been asleep until the moment the offer came.

One of my patients was a man who seemed misplaced in a hospital bed. His eyes were shrewd and bright, and his voice quick and clever as if he still piloted the world from behind a desk.

"I know a man who needs a nurse, Sunshine. Private care."

I paused in my checking of charts. I am still unsure why I did. My head fills with more reasons to have continued about my daily fluttering.

"You will be able to see a consistent difference in one life, and not just any life, a great life. He's a geneticist, an engineer, a sculptor. Right now he works in research a ways off the coast near the Prisons, but not too near I promise."

His face crinkled into a knowing smile, "You are the nurse he needs. I know it, and I will get you the job if you wish."

"What are the conditions, Sir?"

"In house, room and board around forty-five a year, plus bonuses. He needs some assistance with drawing blood and generally keeping his meds in order. Also his facility has a few guests that need general checking up on. A little care and attention from someone that is not there only to deliver pills."

His voice lowered to a clandestine whisper. He spoke and gestured with a tone theatrical and dark, like some macabre art critic. "And you will see such things there. Terrible and beautiful. Strange and lovely."

And quickly as it came, the prophetic tone left.

"It's a nice little salary and an interesting opportunity. Plus your stay need be only as long as you like. Dr. Stradi is most accommodating."

"I think- I think I am interested." A new path had risen from the quiet bog and I was apt to take it.

The blustering bus driver only brought me so close to the docks. Depositing me warily on a wet sand and mud road lined with bits of ghostly driftwood until the way became concrete and wire fences.

This was where the guilty were brought before the journey to the Prison Islands. It was a place gray, unrelenting and hard, an apropos send-off for murderers and predators, but not for me. A woman stood beyond the high diamond wire gates, her rubber booted feet placed wide on a dock wallowing in the brine.

Her face was towards the ocean, showing me only the flaxen back of her head, her hair lifted by a ghostly, offshore breeze. I sloshed towards the gate with my luggage, placing it on the concrete shelf at my knees.

"Are you Karen? For the ferry to Dr. Stradi's?"

She spoke before she turned to face me, "And you're Anya."

Her face was like a man's in its angularities, strong and wind-bitten. Concrete and wire seemed an anachronistic setting for her. Viragos were meant to stand on the precarious, black rocks before pushing out along the whale path.

"You're the keeper for Stradi."

My tongue faltered over the strange term, "Yes, the keeper."

"Do you have the papers?"

I eagerly pressed a damp bundle of forms and authorizations against the fence, "Yes right here, but there are some portions I don't understand."

Karen ignored me as she opened a rusted control panel along the fence. With a soft whirr the gate opened, almost too easily. It was the keeping in that mattered I supposed.

"Do you have the ferry tokens?"

"Oh, ah yes." I released some of my luggage to fish in my coat pockets for the three gold coins that served as my ticket. I tried to drop them into her hand gracefully but ended up on my knees fetching one that slid from my fingers onto the cold concrete. When I stood, my things were being loaded into the ferry by Karen. The bobbing ferry was Beluga white with three blue nautical stars on its stern.

I clumsily stepped down onto the boat, swinging my legs over the railing, anxious to complete my payment.

"Here, Karen, I got it." She took the damp coin from my hand wordlessly and placed it in her navy peacoat pockets and then mechanically turned to untying the ropes that tethered us to the normal world.

"Before you're too busy driving the ferry and I being sick," I laughed trying to break her august expression. My attempt failed. I regrouped my thoughts and cleared my throat. "I was hoping I could ask you a few things about the papers I signed. Like this one, it talks about curfews in the house, but they are at strange hours, sprinkled through some afternoons. Do you know why? And this one from the research company that the Dr. sells his findings to. They're talking about the Dr.'s rights to certain kinds of experimentation, and also a Psychiatric facility attests to the Dr.'s degrees and effectiveness in 'specialized' therapy."

Karen looked at me, but beyond me, "The dogs roam the island for security in the afternoons and they are not discreet in their targets. Keep curfew. You are going to the Endlands. Obey the rules and remember which rules cease to exists there."

"Is the Dr. affiliated with the Prisons?"

"When necessary."

"Where am I going?" It was a question mingled with uncanny fear, breathed to myself, but Karen answered me.

"To the masque."