The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block Read Free Book Online

directors, a patrician-aloof set that mindlessly defers to the judgments of the psychiatrists they have hired. Frustrated with their legal obligation to attend these hearings, the board reportedly accomplishes nothing more than an ongoing demonstration of their annoyance: a nearly flawless record of denied appeals.
    Frederick is drowsy again; the Miltown has settled into the crevices of his brain, and he shifts back to his bed, for the afternoon sequel to the morning’s Miltown paralysis. For a while, even with twenty milligrams of tranquilizer cycling through him, it is hard to drift to sleep. Every time his eyelids begin to descend, he is jolted back into grinding awareness by another scream.

7
    It is night now. The men have had their final meal of the day. In an hour, during the final checks of their shift, the nurses will dispense the nightly dosing, sleeping pills for all, mixed with stronger sedatives for some. Most of the men in Ingersoll register this as merely another night, cannot know the horror that awaits them, a horror that will alter, in significant ways, the texture of their daily lives on the ward. The most observant, however, have noticed that the rain has begun, softly, to tick at the windows, beyond the cages that separate window from room.But even they cannot know the storm’s magnitude or what it will deliver. The storm clouds, like surreptitious Trojans, have slipped in under the cover of night, no one suspicious after the gift of that complacently beautiful day. For the most part, the men are restful now, some even in a rare festive mood, plotting a small improvised party that will soon commence in Lowell’s room, marking the occasion of the four bottles of scotch a few visiting students brought him as a gift.
    (Cocktails on the men’s ward of the mental hospital! This is how it is, in this era that now draws to a close.)
    The first bolt of lightning to reach Belmont speaks its name. Stanley peals manic laughter. Lowell says something in a language the others cannot understand. A limb of an oak tree snaps near Upshire Hall, the Harvard Club, where Professor Schultz registers the sound with normal human perception, and also with his strange form of awareness, the sound cracking through both. The gabbing electricity in the clouds above, each raindrop a fading scream, the wind murmuring like Jews reading the Torah, but garbled and at much greater volumes. All of this, nearly deafening, will soon find echo in the normal human register. But this is not what concerns Schultz. The tumult is not what prompts Schultz to relinquish his pen, not what drives him to clutch his ears, forgetting it is not his ears that receive these sounds.
    •   •   •
    As every night, James Marshall carefully wheels himself toward the bureau drawer that contains his flag’s box, removes the box, sets it on his lap, and then, in deliberate vectors, points himself toward the door. He moves slowly, as he must, excited motionmaking his wheelchair veer to the walls. He must be deliberate now. Something foreign and unbearable has claimed an essential part of him.
    In Lowell’s room, the last of Mayflower’s patient cocktail parties is at full tilt. The rich brown contents of the four bottles of Glenfiddich 12 splash around in each of the room’s fifteen glasses. Marvin Foulds, now in the persona of Guy DeVille, a foppish (perhaps, judging from his behavior around the men, homosexual) French poet, spouts off Rimbaud to Lowell, who corrects his French. A rarity: there are even women at this party, a special privilege before their release. Ruth, a pyromaniac housewife from Wenham, and the beautiful Brenda Logan, whose father patented some crucial alloy used on high-speed airplanes, whose reason for hospitalization seems little more than avid late-adolescent sexuality. Dr. Wallace is not present to witness the irony of Brenda celebrating her pronounced recovery by drinking too much whiskey and placing her hands upon