The File With Her Name
There is no terror equal to finding yourself described in the past tense.
Revelation || Horror || Identity || File
She found it on the fourteenth day. She had been looking, in a general and methodical way, for any documentation of the previous doctor — Carey — that had not been pre-filtered through the administrative system or through Voss. There was a filing room adjacent to the medical records office on the ground floor, a room she had established a legitimate reason to access on her fourth day by noting that some of the second-floor patient files contained cross-references to earlier records that she needed for proper continuity of care. The filing room’s contents were organised by year and then alphabetically. She had been working backward from the most recent files, looking for anything with Carey’s name on it, on three separate visits that she had distributed across her clinic schedule in a way that appeared to have no particular pattern.
On the third visit she found the drawer labelled 1959 — Inactive — A through F. She was looking for a different name entirely, a patient cross-referenced in one of the second-floor files, when her fingers stopped on a folder. They stopped before her mind caught up with why, and this in itself was a warning she heeded: the body knows things before the conscious mind assembles them. She pulled the folder out. The tab read: ASHBY, NORA M. — PATIENT — ADMITTED OCTOBER 1959. She looked at it for a long time. The folder was real. The tab was real. The printing was the standard institutional typeface used throughout the filing system. She opened it. Inside: a standard patient admission form, filled out in the same standard typeface, for a female patient named Nora M. Ashby, born the same year as she was born, from the same city she was from. Admitted to the Coldmoor Psychiatric Institute on the fourteenth of October, 1959. Diagnosis: dissociative identity disorder with self-referential delusion. Admitting physician: Dr. H. Voss. At the bottom of the form, in a different typeface — added later, she noted, the spacing and impression slightly different from the rest — a single notation: Patient transferred to outpatient management, March 1960. File inactive. And below that, in handwriting she did not recognise, the words: Do not allow patient to return to facility.
She stood in the filing room and held the folder and conducted, in the part of her mind that she kept coldest and clearest for the moments that most required it, a clinical assessment of what she was experiencing. Nora M. Ashby was a common enough name — it was not impossible that another woman of the same name and approximate age existed and had been a patient here. It was not impossible that the coincidence of name, city of origin, and birth year was exactly that: a coincidence, an unsettling one, a coincidence that warranted investigation but did not warrant the conclusion she was being pulled toward by something other than her clinical judgment. She set the conclusion aside. She photographed the file with the small camera she kept in her bag for the same reason she kept the green notebook — because the professional protocol for evidence is documentation first, interpretation second. She replaced the folder in its drawer, in its precise original position, and left the filing room and walked back to her office and sat down and looked at her own hands on the desk for several minutes. They were, she noted with the particular detachment of a person in shock who has trained herself to observe herself in shock as a method of managing it, completely steady. This was either evidence that she was in full control of her response or evidence that the response had not yet fully arrived. She closed her eyes. She opened them. The room was the same. She was the same. She was a psychiatrist at a desk in an institution in a mountain valley sealed by snow, and her name was in a file dated 1959, and the file said she had been a patient here, and nothing about that was something she could rationally account for. She opened her notebook. She wrote: Found own name in patient file dated 1959. Dissociative diagnosis. Must determine: forgery, coincidence, or truth. If truth — what do I not remember, and why do I not remember it, and who arranged for me to come back? She looked at the last three words she had written. Who arranged it. She thought of the letter of appointment on thick cream paper. She thought of the anonymous recommendation. She thought of Voss saying you will be with the certainty of someone who knows what is coming. She thought of Thomas Hargreaves saying Room Seven — that’s what found him. She put her pen down. The snow pressed at the window. The building was very quiet. She thought: I have been here before. And then, which was worse: I have never left.