There was a brief wait, then the voice said, “Come in, please.”
An electric release clicked on the gate lock. Shayne turned the knob and went in, impressed and perplexed by the elaborate precautions to keep out unwanted callers. As soon as he was inside, however, he realized that the precautions must be for keeping the patients in rather than preventing the entrance of visitors. There were low board benches scattered around the enclosed lawn, and a dozen inmates of the institution sat on them and stared at him. Men and women alike wore white garments reaching to their ankles. Their dull, unfocused eyes told him that this was a mental institution rather than an ordinary private hospital as he had supposed.
One of the women patients, who was angular and heavybreasted, hummed the tune of an obscene song as he passed her. She stared at his figure with glazed eyes and suddenly stopped her humming to exclaim, “You big brute — you’re the cause of my being here.” Her voice was without inflection, a dull and meaningless monotone. The others looked on apathetically from their benches in the bright sunlight.
Shayne went up the walk into a wide white-tiled hallway. There were padded seats along the wall, no movable furniture.
A tall, thin-lipped woman looked out from a side room. She wore a nurse’s uniform, white and stiffly starched. She inquired, “Mr. Shayne?” and when he nodded, “Please have a seat. Doctor Patterson will be free to see you soon.” Her placid gaze rested on his face fleetingly before she turned away. Shayne had a feeling that she was puzzled by his presence, that her professional curiosity was aroused by her inability to diagnose the particular mental disorder which had brought him to the Patterson Sanitarium.
He turned away and sat down on one of the padded seats. The utter absence of sound inside the building was peculiarly forbidding. He caught himself straining his ears for the welcome sound of a car in the street outside — for any one of the multitude of unnoticed sounds which impinge upon our hearing every moment of the day and come to one’s attention only when completely absent.
Then he realized that the outer walls of the building must be soundproofed, and he stopped straining to hear.
He lighted a cigarette and the sound of a dull, muffled thumping came from the rear as he expelled smoke from his lungs. He glanced around but could see only the empty hall. The thumping continued, muffled and monotonous.
The palms of his hands were sweaty, and he was angered by a dryness in his mouth and throat. The unexplained thumping was more eerie than the silence it had supplanted.
A woman screamed somewhere inside the building. A ululating howl of inhuman ferocity knifing thinly through the air, rising to a shrill crescendo and descending jerkily to a minor key.