- Home
- Sarah Pearse
The Sanatorium
The Sanatorium Read online
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Simultaneously published in hardcover in Great Britain by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2021.
First American edition published by Viking in 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Pearse Ltd.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
A Pamela Dorman Book/Viking
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Pearse, Sarah, author.
Title: The sanatorium: a novel / Sarah Pearse.
Description: [New York]: Pamela Dorman Books; Viking, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020016188 (print) | LCCN 2020016189 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593296677 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593296684 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6116.E169 S26 2021 (print) | LCC PR6116.E169
(ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016188
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016189
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Ervin Serrano
Cover images: (building) David Clapp / Getty Images; (snowy mountains) Buena Vista Images / Getty Images; (frost) Shutterstock
pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
For James, Rosie, and Molly,
It’s a long way to the top (if you wanna rock ’n’ roll . . . )
—ac/dc
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
On nous apprend à vivre quand la vie est passée.
They teach us to live when life has passed.
—Michel de Montaigne
I have loved constraints. They give me comfort.
—Joseph Dirand
prologue
January 2015
Discarded medical equipment litters the floor; surgical tools blistered with rust, broken bottles, jars, the scratched spine of an old invalid chair. A torn mattress sits slumped against the wall, bile-yellow stains pocking the surface.
Hand clamped tight around his briefcase, Daniel Lemaitre feels a sharp wave of revulsion: it’s as if time has taken over the building’s soul, left something rotten and diseased in its place.
He moves quickly down the corridor, footsteps echoing on the tiled floor.
Keep your eyes on the door. Don’t look back.
But the decaying objects pull at his gaze, each one telling stories. It doesn’t take much to imagine the people who’d stayed here, coughing up their lungs.
Sometimes he thinks he can even smell it, what this place used to be—the sharp, acrid scent of chemicals still lingering in the air from the old operating wards.
Daniel is halfway down the corridor when he stops.
A movement in the room opposite—a dark, distorted blur.
His stomach drops. Motionless, he stares, his gaze slowly picking over the shadowy contents of the room—a slew of papers scattered across the floor, the contorted tubes of a breathing apparatus, a broken bed frame, frayed restraints hanging loose.
He’s silent, his skin prickling with tension, but nothing happens.
The building is quiet, still.
He exhales heavily, starts walking again.
Don’t be stupid, he tells himself. You’re tired. Too many late nights, early mornings.
Reaching the front door, he pulls it open. The wind howls angrily, jerking it back on its hinges. As he steps forward, he’s blinded by an icy gust of snowflakes, but it’s a relief to be outside.
The sanatorium unnerves him. Though he knows what it will become—has sketched every door, window, and light switch of the new hotel—at the moment, he can’t help but react to its past, what it used to be.
The exterior isn’t much better, he thinks, glancing up. The stark, rectangular structure is mottled with snow. It’s decaying, neglected—the balconies and balustrades, the long veranda, crumbled and rotting. A few windows are still intact, but most are boarded up, ugly squares of chipboard scarring the façade like diseased, unseeing eyes.
Daniel thinks about the contrast with his own home in Vevey, overlooking the lake. The contemporary, blockish design is constructed mostly of glass to take in panoramic views of the water. It has a rooftop terrace, a small mooring.
He designed it all.
With the image comes Jo, his wife. She’ll have just gotten back from work, her mind still churning over advertising budgets, briefs, already corralling the kids into doing their homework.
Daniel imagines her in the kitchen, preparing dinner, auburn hair falling across her face as she efficiently chops and slices. It’ll be something easy—pasta, fish, stir-fry. Neither of them are good at the domestics.
The thought buoys him, but only momentarily. As he crosses the car park, Daniel feels the first flickers of trepidation about the drive home.
The sanatorium wasn’t easy to get to in the best of weather, its position isolated, high among the mountains. This was a deliberate choice, engineered to keep the tuberculosis patients away from the smog of the towns and cities, and keep the rest of the population away from them.
But the remote location meant the road leading to it was nightmarish, a series of hairpin bends cutting through a dense forest of firs. On the drive up this morning, the road itself was barely visible—snowflakes hurling themselves at the windscreen like icy, white darts, making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead.
Daniel’s nearly at the car when his foot catches on something, the tattered remains of a placard, half covered by snow. The letters are crude, daubed in red.
NON AUX TRAVAUX!! NO TO CONSTRUCTION!!
Anger spiking, Daniel tramples it underfoot. The protesters had been here last week. Over fifty of them, shouting abuse, waving their gaudy placards in his face. It had been filmed on mobile phones, shared on social media.
That was just one of the endless battles they’d
had to fight to bring this project to fruition. People claimed they wanted progress, the tourist francs that followed, but when it came down to actually building they balked.
Daniel knew why. People don’t like a winner.
It’s what his father had said to him once and it was true. The locals had been proud at the start. They’d approved of his small successes—the shopping mall in Sion, the apartment block in Sierre overlooking the Rhône—but then he’d become too much, hadn’t he? Too much of a success, a personality.
Daniel got the feeling that in their eyes he’d had his share of the pie, and was now being greedy by taking more. Only thirty-three, and his architectural practice was thriving—offices in Sion, Lausanne, Geneva. One planned for Zurich.
It was the same with Lucas, the property developer and one of his oldest friends. Midthirties, and he already owned three landmark hotels.
People resented them for their success.
And this project had been the nail in the coffin. They’d had it all: online trolls, e-mails, letters to the office. Planning objections.
They came for him first. Rumors began circulating on local blogs and social media that the business was struggling. Then they’d started on Lucas. Similar stories, stories he could easily dismiss, but one in particular stuck.
It bothered Daniel, more than he cared to admit.
Talk of bribes. Corruption.
Daniel had tried to speak to Lucas about it, but his friend had shut the conversation down. The thought nags at him, an itch, like so many things on this project, but he forces it away. He has to ignore it. Focus on the result. This hotel will cement his reputation. Lucas’s drive and his compulsion for detail have propelled Daniel to a spectacularly ambitious design, an end point he hadn’t thought possible.
He reaches the car. The windscreen is thick with fresh snow; too much for the wipers. It will need scraping off.
But as he reaches into his pocket for his key, he notices something.
A bracelet, lying beside the front tire.
Daniel bends down, picks it up. It’s thin, and made of copper. He twists it between his fingers, noticing a row of numbers engraved on the interior . . . a date?
He frowns. It has to belong to someone who’d been up there today, surely? Otherwise it would already be covered in snow.
But what were they doing so close to his car?
Images of the protesters flicker through his mind, their angry, jeering faces.
Could it be them?
Daniel makes himself take a long, deep breath, but as he pushes the bracelet into his pocket, he catches a glimpse of something: a movement behind the ridge of snow that’s built up against the wall of the car park.
A hazy profile.
His heart races, his palms sweaty around his key fob. Pushing down hard on the fob to open the boot, he freezes as he looks up.
A figure, standing in front of him, positioned between him and his car.
Daniel stares, briefly paralyzed, his brain frantically trying to process what he’s seeing—how could someone have moved so quickly toward him without him noticing?
The figure is dressed in black. Something is covering their face.
It resembles a gas mask; the same basic form, but it’s missing the filter at the front. Instead, there’s a thick rubber hose running from mouth to nose. A connector. The hose is black, ribbed; it quivers as the figure shifts from foot to foot.
The effect is horrifying. Monstrous. Something scraped from the darkest depths of the unconscious mind.
Think, he tells himself, think. His mind starts churning through possibilities, ways to make this something innocuous, benign. It’s a prank, that’s all: one of the protesters, trying to scare him.
Then the figure steps toward him. A precise, controlled movement.
All Daniel can see is the lurid, magnified close-up of the black rubber stretched across the face. The thick ribbed lines of the hose. Then he hears the breathing; a strange, wet sucking sound coming from the mask. Liquid exhalations.
His heart is pounding against his rib cage.
“What is this?” Daniel says, hearing the fear in his voice. A tremble he tries to stamp out. “Who are you? What are you trying to do?” A drip slowly trickles down his face. Snow melting against the heat of his skin, or sweat? He can’t tell.
Come on, he tells himself. Get control of yourself. It’s some stupid prick, messing around.
Just walk past and get into your car.
It’s then, from this angle, that he notices another car. A car that wasn’t there when he arrived. A black pickup. A Nissan.
Come on, Daniel. Move.
But his body is frozen, refusing to obey. All he can do is listen to the strange breathing sound coming from the mask. It’s louder now, faster, more labored.
A soft sucking noise and then a high-pitched whistle.
Over and over.
The figure lurches closer, with something in hand. A knife? Daniel can’t make it out—the thick glove is concealing it.
Move, move.
He manages to propel himself forward, one step, then two, but fear makes his muscles seize. He stumbles in the snow, right foot sliding out from under him.
By the time he straightens it’s too late: the gloved hand clamps over his mouth. Daniel can smell the stale mustiness of the glove but also the mask—the curious burnt-plasticky odor of rubber, laced with something else.
Something familiar.
But before his brain can make the connection, something pierces his thigh. A single, sharp pain. His thoughts scatter; then his mind goes quiet.
A quiet that, within seconds, tips over into nothingness.
Press Release—Under Embargo until Midnight March 5, 2018
Le Sommet
Hauts de Plumachit
Crans-Montana 3963
Valais
Switzerland
5-STAR HOTEL SET TO OPEN IN THE SWISS RESORT OF CRANS-MONTANA
Located on a sunny mountain plateau above Crans-Montana, high in the Swiss Alps, Le Sommet is the brainchild of Swiss property developer Lucas Caron.
After eight years of extensive planning and construction, one of the town’s oldest sanatoriums is set to reopen as a luxury hotel.
The main building was designed in the late nineteenth century by Caron’s great-grandfather Pierre. It became renowned worldwide as a center for treating tuberculosis before the advent of antibiotics forced its diversification.
More recently, it gained international recognition for its innovative architecture, earning the elder Caron a posthumous Swiss Art Award in 1942. Combining clean lines with large panoramic windows, flat roofs, and unadorned geometrical shapes, one judge described the building as “groundbreaking”—custom designed to fulfill its function as a hospital, while also creating a seamless transition between the interior and exterior landscapes.
Lucas Caron said: “It was time we breathed new life into this building. We were confident that with the right vision, we could create a sensitively restored hotel that would pay homage to its rich past.”
Under the guidance of Swiss architectural firm Lemaitre SA, a team has been assembled to renovate the building and also add a state-of-the-art spa and event center.
Subtly refurbished, Le Sommet will make innovative use of natural, local materials such as wood, slate, and stone. The hotel’s elegant, modern interiors will not only echo the powerful topography outside, but will draw on the building’s past to create a new narrative.
Philippe Volkem, CEO of Valais Tourisme, said, “This will doubtless be the jewel in the crown of what is already one of the finest winter resorts in the world.”
For press inquiries, please contact Leman PR, Lausanne.
For general inquiries / bookings, please visit www.lesommetcransmontana.ch.
1
January 2020
Day One
The funicular from the valley town of Sierre to Crans-Montana scores a near-perfect vertical line up the mountainside.
Slicing through snow-covered vineyards and the small towns of Venthone, Chermignon, Mollens, Randogne, and Bluche, the route, almost three miles long, takes passengers up the mountain in just twelve minutes.
In off-peak season, the funicular is usually half empty. Most people drive up the mountain or take the bus. But today, with the roads almost stationary thanks to heavy traffic, it’s full.