The Misremembered Man by Christina McKenna

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    Eighty-Six lay curled up tight like a tiny leveret in a tiny nest, his blanket pulled over his head. The aching in his back, his knees, his hands could not be eased. In his mind he was still down there in the deserted hall, scrubbing the unending floor. He could not sleep.
    All around him, his comrades writhed and moaned in their sleep, the thin blankets that covered them rising and falling to the fearful rhythms of their dream worlds. The wind whistled in the loose window frames. He lowered the cover and peeped out, suddenly afraid. Somewhere, a door was banging. He thought it might be the door of the outside shed where the cleaning things were kept.
    Immediately alert, he rose up on his elbows in a frisson of disquiet, straining hard to identify the sound and the direction from which it came. He remembered stowing the bucket and brush, but had he fastened the door again? He could not remember and, as his thoughts churned round and round, the consequences of his oversight took shape and struck him with a terrible force. There would be fifteen on the backside with the tooled belt. He would have to go down and bolt it.
    He flung back the blanket, straightened his sore legs and eased himself onto the floor. It was strictly forbidden for a child to leave his bed after 10 P.M. So he was committing one transgression to escape the consequences of having committed another.
    His sockless feet whispered across the cold cement as he made his way to the heavy door, past the rows of restive sleepers. Someone whimpered, a thin mournful note sliding out from under a cover as if to pull him back. He did not stop, but carried on, quietly heaved the door shut behind him and turned to face the darkness of the corridor.
    He could see the newels of the staircase in the pre-dawn light from the landing window. Conscious of the risk he was running, he made for it on tiptoe, groping at the helpless air; past the adjacent dormitory, past Mother Superior’s quarters, Master Keaney’s room. A floorboard creaked in betrayal and he stopped, frozen by the hideous notion that he’d been heard. He held his breath for a moment, his foot poised above the traitorous board. He heard the shed door slam again as if in warning, as if urging him on. He quickened his pace and flew soundlessly down the stairs, all dread falling behind him in his eagerness to be gone.
    Outside, the wind battled him for control of the raging door, like a demon in the face of an exorcising priest, his nightshirt by turns ballooning out and plastering itself against his body. He was too small and his strength too weak. His bare feet slithered out from under him on the slick grass. He fell on his belly and lay there, feeling the damp grass through his shirt, his cheek to the earth, hearing all the way down beneath, where, he was assured almost daily, hell’s fires raged at its baleful core.
    But he could not waste time and got up quickly. He pitted his painful back and all his weight against the door until eventually it yielded. The rusty bolt he hammered home with his little fist, the huge relief of his achievement at once releasing him to run back the way he had come.
    At the top of the stairs he faltered, lassoed by a dreadful sight. The door to Keaney’s room stood open. In the darkness he felt a presence and smelled the fetid breath. Fear flared and choked him. In his mind, a curtain fell and a light went out. He yelled silently for the mother he never knew and the God who never listened as a heavy hand gripped his shoulder and propelled him forcibly into the room.

Chapter nine
     
    Dearest Lady …
      Dear Madam …
           My Dearest Lady …
                Dear Lady …
                     Dear Miss …
     
    Jamie McCloone was in despair as to how to address the anonymous woman behind the ad. Having already used and discarded four pages on the salutation, he worried that the whole writing pad might be in the