The Appointment
Some positions are offered. Some are arranged.
Arrival || Mystery || Atmosphere || Coldmoor
The letter of appointment arrived on a Thursday in November, on paper so thick and cream-coloured that Nora Ashby’s first thought was that it belonged to a different era entirely — to a time when institutions communicated by deliberate weight, when the heft of the stationery conveyed the gravity of what it contained. The Coldmoor Psychiatric Institute, it read, in a typeface she had never seen on any official correspondence before, required a staff psychiatrist of experience and discretion for a period of no fewer than twelve months, commencing the first of December. The salary was extraordinary. The location was given simply as: the northern valley, accessible via the Marten Pass road before the first deep snowfall of the season, thereafter by arranged supply convoy only. The name of the position’s previous occupant was absent. The name of the person who had recommended her for the position was absent. The name of the person who had signed the letter was present — Dr. H. Voss, Director — but the signature itself was not so much written as impressed, as if the pen had been pressed into the paper with more force than handwriting ordinarily required, leaving the letters slightly embossed, tactile under the fingertip.
She ought to have asked more questions before accepting. She knew this the way she knew many things that she nonetheless declined to act upon — with the clear, calm knowledge of someone who has already made a decision and is now constructing the reasoning to support it after the fact. She was thirty-four years old, a psychiatrist with eight years of practice, most of it at St. Anselm’s Hospital in the city, where she had treated soldiers returning from Korea with the kind of fractures that didn’t appear on X-rays. She was, by her own assessment and the assessment of most of her colleagues, very good. She was also, though she would not have used this word about herself, lonely in the specific way that competent people in demanding professions become lonely — not for want of company but for want of anyone who understood the particular quality of attention her work required. The job at Coldmoor offered, along with its extraordinary salary and its anonymous recommendation, one other thing she had not had in eight years of practice: novelty. A place she had never been. Patients she did not yet know. The clean possibility of beginning again in a geography where nobody knew her history.
She drove north on the first of December, her car packed with the things she calculated she would need for a year of relative isolation: clothes for every weather, her medical texts, her case notebooks from St. Anselm’s, her father’s chess set, a radio, two bottles of scotch. The city fell away behind her in three hours of highway, replaced by smaller roads and then smaller again, climbing through a landscape that changed its quality gradually and then all at once — the way altitude changes things, not inch by inch but in sudden renegotiations of what is possible in terms of colour and light and the weight of the air. The trees grew taller and darker and closer together. The sky grew lower. By mid-afternoon, though it was barely four o’clock, the light had taken on the orange-grey quality of an impending thing — not just evening but a deeper diminishment, the sky above the pass ahead piled with cloud that had the dense, purposeful look of cloud that has decided something.
She drove through the Marten Pass as the first snow began. Not gentle snow — the kind that announces itself with a few exploratory flakes and then commits — but immediate and total, arriving all at once as if it had been waiting on the other side of the pass for her specifically. The road descended into the valley and the valley received her with the snow and the dark and the silence of a very large, very cold, very enclosed place. She drove for twenty minutes in the white tunnel her headlights made and then, from behind a stand of pine that the snow was beginning to weight into new shapes, she saw the lights. High up. On a hill that the valley had saved for the purpose of putting something large on top of, the Coldmoor Psychiatric Institute rose against the darkening sky with all its windows lit. It looked, from the road below, like a ship at sea. It looked like something that had always been there. It looked, she thought — and immediately corrected the thought, because she was a psychiatrist who did not indulge in such impressions without noting them for later examination — it looked like it was watching her arrive.
The road wound up the hill in switchbacks, and as she climbed each turn, the Institute came into and out of view: a Victorian building of considerable age and considerable scale, four storeys high with a mansard roof that the snow was already defining, its facade punctuated by tall narrow windows that gave the impression of a building that was all eyes. She parked in the clearing before the main entrance, where a set of stone steps led to double doors of heavy oak. Before she could reach the steps, one of the doors opened, and a man stood in the rectangle of warm interior light with the stillness of someone who has been waiting without impatience — who has, perhaps, been waiting for some time and considers the quality of the wait to be of no significance because the arrival was always certain. He was tall, fifty-ish, with a face of precisely symmetrical planes that the indoor light rendered alternately ordinary and, when the angle shifted, something else entirely. He wore a white coat over a dark suit and held no umbrella despite the snow and appeared to feel no particular relationship to the cold. “Dr. Ashby,” he said, and she had the irrational but forcible impression that he had known she was coming before the letter was sent. “Welcome to Coldmoor. I am Dr. Voss.” He smiled. It was a perfectly adequate smile. It reached the edges of his mouth without difficulty. What it did not do — and she noted this, filed it, and moved on — was alter the quality of his eyes, which remained, throughout the smile’s duration, the focused, lightless attention of something that was watching her with more interest than the welcome warranted.
She shook his hand. She went inside. The doors closed behind her. The snow continued to fall on the valley below, and the road through the Marten Pass filled slowly with white, and by the time she had been shown to her room on the second floor and stood at the window looking down at the darkness, the pass was already half-buried. She was here for a year. She was not going anywhere. She thought about this with the deliberate calm of someone who has made a choice and will not unmake it, and then she unpacked her father’s chess set and placed it on the desk, and set the pieces in their starting positions, and looked at them for a while in the lamplight. Outside, beyond the glass, the snow fell on Coldmoor with the particular patience of a thing that has been falling here forever and intends to continue.