They Climb the Walls

The attendant peered through the rectangle of glass set high in the steel door.
“They seem calmer after he leaves. Wouldn’t you say?”
Doctor Moore tapped his thumb against his cigarette. Ash drifted to the tiles at his feet. He didn’t need to observe the girls. His attendant, Hale, was correct: they were always more sedate after a visit from the young chaplain.
“It won’t last,” Moore said. The calm never did.
“Perhaps there is something more the chaplain could do for them?” Hale suggested. 
He continued to watch the girls through the small plate of reinforced glass. There were three windows inside the room, those too reinforced, and fitted with steel bars.
Moore sighed. He’d questioned before if taking on a new attendant had been a mistake. Hale was far too wet behind the ears, and thus optimistic, for this line of work. The boy should have gone to medical school rather than come out here, to the middle of nowhere, where the only visitors were either the doe-eyed chaplain, or the rattled parents who would drive for hours, days even, to drop off the child they wished to forget—forever.
“The chaplain does all he can,” Moore replied.
Hale inhaled sharply and pulled his face away from the window. He hissed through his teeth. “I can’t stand it when they do that.”
Moore flicked another build-up of ash from his cigarette. What did Hale fantasize? That the girls wouldn’t start climbing again? Moore could already hear it through the steel door. The scrape of nails on whitewashed cinderblocks. The murmuring in a language that could not be translated. Their voices were subdued right now, the way they usually were after a visit. But at night, their moans would wake Moore in his bed.
“Better they do it here than where they were doing it before,” Moore mumbled. In pleasant suburbia homes, their bloodied nails staining their bedroom walls while mother and father, sister and brother, stood in the doorway, staring on in helpless horror.
“But there must be something we can do for them,” Hale repeated.
Moore dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his heel. He left it on the floor with the others. “We are. We welcome the chaplain every week, don’t we?”
“But all he does is pray over them!” Hale’s shout caused the murmuring to grow louder.
Moore clasped his hands behind his back and considered his attendant for a moment. Hale wasn’t just optimistic. He had an earnest sense of hope. If he intended to stay here, he couldn’t afford such a useless trait.
“The chaplain feeds them,” Moore said.
The skin between Hale’s brows creased. Moore could almost follow the young man’s mind as it raced to remember whether or not the chaplain had brought a picnic basket of food. He had not.
“You mean…he feeds them with the word of God?” Hale asked.
It would have been easy to say yes. However, in the end, it would only allow Hale a few more weeks of ignorance. Once news of the chaplain’s rapidly declining health reached them, followed quickly by the notice of his untimely death, Hale would suspect. After the next chaplain assigned to Moore’s institution fell ill and died, Hale would know without a doubt.
Moore turned away from the young attendant and viewed the girls instead. They had flocked to the windows overlooking the driveway to watch the chaplain as he walked to his car. Their bare feet hung suspended, a foot or more off the floor. Their hands reached through the iron bars and pressed against the glass, their appetites satiated—for a time.
“No, Hale,” Moore answered. “That is not what I meant at all.”