THE SILENT WARD

On a night shift, the arithmetic is simple. You count the doors. Eighteen down the corridor of Ward D, one at the end, and the count is the same at three in the morning as it is at five.

Ms Ward has worked nights for nine years, and she has never once counted the doors wrong. She is not a woman given to drama. She does not believe in ghosts. She has read enough of the human mind in distress to be careful about what she claims to have seen. That is why this book starts where it does: a patient counts the corridor, arrives at nineteen, and then, separately, she counts it too and arrives at nineteen as well. Two people. One number. Nothing supernatural has happened yet.

The Silent Ward is a psychological horror novel assembled out of documents and their failure. Where a conventional haunted-house story supplies a seance, this one supplies a 1974 as-built drawing; an estate record stating that a room which does not appear in the file cannot be booked into, repaired, or admitted to; a minute book from a hospital management committee in 1961; a night-shift hours book in which every entry is made by whoever is holding the pen; a press photograph exposed at 22.40 on 13 May 1998, showing an empty corridor with somebody at the far end; and a duty roster with a name written in pencil that nobody remembers writing.