The History of the Hill
Land has memory. You only have to know where to press.
History || Coldmoor || Origins || 1941
She drove to the nearest town — a twenty-minute descent on the mountain road to a settlement called Marten, population perhaps eight hundred, with a general store, a post office, a church, and a small library that was open on Wednesday and Saturday mornings — on the first Wednesday after Holl’s visit. She signed out formally, telling Voss she needed certain medical texts not available in the Institute’s library. He approved this with the pleasantness that she had come to understand was not warmth but the management of an image. She drove down the white road through the trees and breathed the different air of a lower altitude and felt, briefly and then determinedly, the difference between the mountain and the valley below. The sky was wider here. The light was more honest. She parked in front of the library and went inside and asked the librarian — a young woman named Piet who seemed mildly startled by the appearance of a stranger in December — whether the library kept local historical records.
It kept more than she expected. Marten had a historical society, it turned out, that had been diligently documenting the valley’s past since the 1890s, and their archives were housed in three filing cabinets and a wall of folders behind the library’s main stacks. She spent four hours in those archives. What she found assembled itself into a picture by degrees, the way pictures assembled from fragments always did — incompletely at first, with gaps and questionable attributions, and then with increasing resolution as the fragments began to reinforce each other. The Coldmoor building had been constructed in 1887 as a sanatorium for the treatment of nervous disorders, by a physician named Dr. Ernst Kehl whose reputation, the local records were careful to note, had been mixed: brilliant clinician, acknowledged; innovative, acknowledged; not without controversy regarding his methods, the historical society’s 1904 report noted with the diplomatic understatement of people who were describing something worse than they wanted to write down. The Institute had operated under a succession of directors after Kehl’s death in 1921 — three names she cross-referenced against the personnel records Holl had helped her access — until the appointment of Dr. Harold Voss in 1948. She noted that the local records referred to the appointment as creating no particular comment at the time. She noted also, because she was looking for everything, that the local records showed no death notice for Ernst Kehl. The 1921 reference to his death was from a board meeting minute. There was no obituary in the valley newspaper. There was no burial record. She noted this as a small anomaly and moved on.
The records about 1941 were what she was specifically looking for. The historical society had a folder labeled COLDMOOR INCIDENT, 1941 — this labeling was itself interesting, the choice of the word incident rather than event or occurrence. Inside: a newspaper cutting from the valley paper, dated September 1941, reporting that a fire had occurred in a section of the Coldmoor Institute building, causing damage to one wing. No casualties. The wing in question was described as the north extension of the third floor. The article noted that access to the wing had been permanently sealed following structural damage. She stared at the article for a long moment. A fire in 1941. The north extension sealed. Room Seven, according to every reference she had accumulated, locked since 1941. The fire and the sealing were the same event. She photographed the article. She also found, in the same folder, a police report from October 1941 — six weeks after the fire — noting that three members of staff had been reported missing in the wake of the incident. Their names were listed. She read the names. She read them again. The third name on the list was Kehl, E. — which would be extraordinary if Kehl had died in 1921, twenty years before the fire. Which meant one of two things: either there was more than one person with the name Kehl at the Institute, or the 1921 death notice was wrong. She drove back up the mountain road in the thin winter light with her mind arranging and rearranging the pieces, and by the time the Institute appeared above the treeline, she had constructed, tentatively and with full professional acknowledgment of its provisional status, a theory that frightened her considerably more than any of the individual facts had done.