She searched for a response that wouldn’t betray her. “It’s the nature of the mind to hide from itself. But it is possible to come out of hiding, and find life again.”
“You’d know best, Doc. You’d know best.” He stopped at the door. “You’ll let me know if you need help?”
With Quentin, he meant. With the unpredictable savage they had both confronted.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Harper.”
Once he’d returned to his own room, she gave up all pretense of examining her notes and let the disordered tide of her thoughts wash through her.
She should be glad. Today Quentin had made definite progress—exceptional, in fact. She was now convinced that the delusions he suffered must arise out of his childhood.
But the complications of his condition only grew more formidable with every new discovery. She’d underestimated the extent of his illness. He’d illustrated his claims of lycanthropy by becoming someone—something—who possessed the ruthless ferocity of a wild beast, a barbarous taste for tyranny.
Yet there’d been the child: innocent, abused, begging for help. And the man she’d come to know, who so willingly gave of himself.
Where was the real Quentin? Which one was the man she had sworn to cure?
An unfamiliar thread of panic lurked inside her—the very real fear that she wouldn’t be able to handle his case.
She had been too careless. What if he should turn truly violent and threaten the others?
What if she were forced to remand his care to someone else, at a facility where he could be restrained…
Sickness filled her throat. Yes, she might betray him—to people who knew nothing of the work she and her father had done, who’d put his sanity in even greater jeopardy with their ignorance and primitive treatments.
She would not trust any traditional asylum with Quentin Forster. He mattered too much. As all her patients mattered. Until she had no other option, she would continue to treat him as best she knew how.
That best must be better than she’d ever done before. The time would come when she’d have to be honest with Quentin about the dangers of his condition. As soon as she had enough information to devise a theory, and explain…
“I must speak with you, Miss Schell.”
Lewis walked into the room, moving very much like a man with an important secret he was half-afraid to reveal, but determined nevertheless to do his duty. His chin jerked up and down several times as he came to a halt before her desk.
“I must speak with you, Miss Schell,” he said again.
“What is it, Lewis?” she asked. “You seem concerned.”
He shuffled from foot to foot. Johanna noted the sweat beading his brow, and the fact that the long hair he kept so meticulously combed over his balding head hung loose and unkempt.
“I am concerned—most concerned,” he said quickly. “I tell you this only to protect us all from evil.” He would not meet her eyes. “You must believe me.”
“Please, sit down—” she began, but he shook his head.
“That man—Quentin Forster—I saw him in the woods this morning.”
She came fully alert. “Did you?”
“Yes. I saw him—” He swallowed. “He was… unclothed.”
Johanna bit back a wild laugh. Lewis’s sense of righteousness would find such a thing appalling, though that begged the question of why Quentin would be…
Unclothed. She shivered. “Mr. Forster was in the woods, not wearing his clothing?”
“It’s worse. Much worse.” He closed his eyes. “He… undressed, and then I saw him… I saw him…”
“You may confide in me, Lewis.”
He gulped. “I saw him change… into a wolf.”
Mein Gott. At last Johanna remembered to breathe. “You saw Quentin turn into a wolf?”
“Yes. I’m not insane. I saw it with my own eyes.” He clutched at the lapels of his coat. “Evil. He must be evil. The devil’s work—”
Johanna stood, pressing her hands flat against the desk to quell her unsteadiness. How was it possible that Lewis had been pulled into Quentin’s unconscious delusion of lycanthropy, when he could have no knowledge of it? When Quentin himself spoke of it only under hypnosis?
“Quentin is not evil, Lewis,” she said. “I do not disbelieve you, but perhaps there is some other explanation for what you saw.”