She locked the iron door behind her. She did not sleep that night or the night after.
Over the following weeks, Sister Agnes returned to the isolation wing 11 more times, always at night, always alone. She kept a meticulous record of each visit, noting the date, the time, the duration, and what she observed. The boy in room seven was always there, always in the same position, sitting cross-legged in the center of the floor, always awake, always looking at the hatch when she opened it, as though he could sense her approach through 12 inches of oak and iron.
On her third visit, he spoke. She slid open the hatch, and before she could say anything, he said, in a voice that she described as clear and calm and completely without accent, "You came back." She said yes. "They never come back," he said. "The ones who look through the door, they look once, and then they never come back, but you came back."
She asked him his name again. "They took it," he said. "When I came here, they took my name and gave me a number. I am number seven. But that is not my name. My name is in the room at the end."
Agnes understood that he meant room 12, the empty room with the blue light. She asked him what he meant. He smiled again, the same smile, beautiful, radiant, and deeply, fundamentally wrong in a way she could not articulate. "Everything is in that room," he said.
"Everything they took, not just from me, from all of us. The names, the memories, the parts of us that made us who we were. He puts them in that room, and the room keeps them."
She asked who he meant. "The doctor," the boy said, "the one who watches." Agnes asked if he meant Dr. Ness and pressed for more.
"What did the doctor do? How did he take things? What did it mean that the room kept them?"
The boy looked at her with those steady, patient eyes and said something that Agnes recorded with a hand she admitted was shaking. "You already know. You felt it when you looked inside. The cold. That is what it feels like to stand next to everything that has been taken from a person."
"All the warmth, all the self, all the pieces that make a human being a human being, pulled out and stored in a room like grain in a silo. The cold you felt is the absence of all those people, all those children, everything they were locked in a room with no name." Agnes asked him when he had been brought to Bleakwater. "I do not remember," he said. "I do not remember anything before this room."
"That is what it means to have your name taken. You lose the thread. The story of yourself unravels, and all that is left is the present moment, this room, this floor, this door, and the tapping." She asked him about the tapping. "I tap so that I remember I have hands," he said.
"I tap so that I remember I am here. If I stop tapping, I will forget that, too. And then I will be in the room at the end with all the others."
Pritchard spent 2 years trying to identify the boy. The intake records had been largely destroyed in a fire in 1903, which Agnes, writing 6 years before the fire, described as inevitable.
They will destroy the records, she wrote. They always do. From surviving fragments cross-referenced with other asylum registers and parish birth certificates, Pritchard narrowed the candidates to three. The most likely was a boy listed only as patient H.M., male, age seven, admitted April 1881, referred by private arrangement, no family contact authorized. No surname, no home address, no referring physician.
If this was the boy, and by November 1883, he had been in the isolation wing for over two and a half years in a room 8 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet, no window, no furniture, no human contact except the orderly who delivered food through a slot in the door. He was nine. He had been there since he was seven.
Sister Agnes did not limit her investigation to nighttime visits. During her regular shifts in the general ward, she began paying closer attention to the routines of the hospital. She noted which orderlies had access to the inner courtyard. She tracked the movements of Dr. Ness who kept an erratic schedule, sometimes disappearing into the interior of the building for days at a time. She listened to the conversations of the other staff, though these were few and guarded.
And she began to notice patterns.
Every Tuesday and Friday evening between the hours of 8:00 and 10:00, Dr. Ness descended to the isolation wing. She knew this because she could hear the iron door open and close from her room in the staff quarters if she pressed her ear to the wall. The sound was faint but unmistakable. A low metallic groan followed by a heavy thud. He always went alone.
No orderlies, no nurses, no assistants. He always carried the same things. A leather case approximately 2 feet long and 1 foot wide, the kind that a physician might use to carry instruments, and a lantern, although Agnes noted that the isolation wing already had gas lighting and a lantern was unnecessary. He stayed below for varying lengths of time, sometimes an hour, sometimes three. Once on a Friday in December, he did not re-emerge until well past 4:00 in the morning.
Agnes never saw what he did down there, but the boy in room seven told her.