The Long Chain of Voss
Devotion taken to its furthest point ceases to be devotion and becomes something else entirely.
Voss || Kehl || History || Horror
She spent the entire evening after speaking with Bruck in her room, not sleeping, building the revised theory on the wall beside the structure of the lie she had already written there. She was aware — she recorded this awareness, because she was still, in the middle of everything, committed to the practice of documentation — that she was developing a theory that would, if presented to any of her former colleagues at St. Anselm’s, have required her own professional evaluation. A patient in a locked room kept alive and fed by the altered attention of other patients, overseen by a director who had been here since 1948 and showed no physical signs of ageing and ate without eating — she stopped. She went back to that observation. She had watched Voss eat at dinner for fifteen days. She had noted the redistribution of food on his plate without consumption. She thought about the fire of 1941, which had sealed Room Seven. She thought about the missing-persons report of October 1941, which included the name Kehl, E. She thought about the director named Alcott who had retired at sixty-one in perfect health in 1948 and been replaced by Voss. She went to her notebook and opened it to the page where she had written Alcott’s full name from the historical record: Martin Alcott, Director, 1932-1948. She stared at it. Then she got up and went to her desk and wrote, very carefully, on a piece of paper: Kehl — fire 1941 — sealed — Alcott leaves 1948 — Voss arrives — Voss unchanged in photographs from 1948 to present — Voss does not eat — patients retuned to perceive — feeds on perception. She connected the points with arrows. The arrows all pointed to one conclusion. She sat for a while with the conclusion and then put it where it needed to be: in the category of working hypothesis requiring verification, which was the category where the most important things always lived until they could be proved, and which was not the same as the category of irrational belief, no matter how strongly the two categories resembled each other from the outside.
The question of what Voss was — what he had been made into, what the mechanism of it was — was, she decided, secondary to the operational question of what she could do about it. She was a psychiatrist. She was not a detective, not a soldier, not an exorcist. She had training that was relevant to some of the things she was dealing with and entirely silent about others. What she had was a clear mind, twelve years of practice with the most difficult forms of human experience, and a cold stubborn refusal to accept that any situation was unmanageable if approached with sufficient precision. She also had three allies: Holl, who had nineteen years of observation and a piece of paper covered with the vocabulary of the third floor’s effect on patients; Hargreaves, who had been saying the true thing for four years and been catalogued as delusional; and Bruck, who had resisted the methodology for eleven years and documented its effects with the systematic attention of a musicologist mapping a composition he didn’t like but was prepared to understand completely. And Carey, in the room at the end of the corridor, who had two months of preparation ahead of the snowfall that closed the road and had spent eight months in confinement becoming more resolved rather than less. She had four allies in a sealed building in a valley closed by snow. She was going to use all of them. She picked up her pen and began drafting the plan.