The Ulysses Quicksilver Short Story Collection (Pax Britannia)

by Jonathan Green

  "And how are you feeling today, Mr Quicksilver?" the white-coated psychiatrist said without looking up from his clipboard.

  "Well, Doctor. I'm as fit as a fiddle, whatever that means. I would even go so far as to say I'm chipper. So I'm glad you're here, because there appears to have been some mistake."

  "Hm?" the doctor mumbled, his pen scratching across the chart clipped to the board.

  "Yes. I mean I've been incarcerated in this madhouse when there is patently nothing wrong with me!"

  "Really?" For the first time since entering the padded cell, the psychiatrist peered at Ulysses with piggy eyes, sunken into the flabby flesh of his face.

  "I'm no medical man, Doctor, but I know whether I'm feeling under the weather or not, and I feel fine. Bright as a button, I am."

  "Really."

  "That's what I keep trying to tell you. There's nothing wrong with me."

  "Hm." The doctor returned to note-taking.

  "Look, where am I? Is this Bedlam? It's Bedlam, isn't it? Just run along and find Professor Brundle, there's a good chap, and tell him that Ulysses Quicksilver would like a word with him at his earliest convenience."

  "Fascinating," the man observed. "Good day to you, Mr Quicksilver," he said, turning for the door.

  "You'll speak to Brundle for me?" Ulysses called after him.

  But the psychiatrist left the cell without saying another word, the bruiser of an orderly following after.

  The door slammed shut with a resounding bang and Ulysses heard the metallic grating of the key being turned, followed by the shunk of deadbolts. He had the unnerving feeling that he wouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon.

  III

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  It seemed like another forty-eight hours had passed before the psychiatrist returned. Another two days with nothing for company but his own increasingly wild thoughts.

  "Did you speak to Brundle?" Ulysses asked him before the tubby little man had even managed to bustle his way into the ammonia-reeking cell.

  The psychiatrist fixed Ulysses with his beady black eyes. His jowls wobbled as he spoke. "Ah, yes, Mr... Quicksilver," he mused, as he scanned his notes. "And how are you feeling today?"

  "Same as I was when you last saw me. Right as rain."

  "Right as rain? Interesting."

  "Yes, so did you speak to Professor Brundle?"

  "Tell me, Mr Quicksilver, do you know what year it is?"

  "Er... Nineteen ninety-eight. I think."

  "Good." The doctor wrote something down. "Very good. And your name? Your full name, I mean. Can you remember?"

  "Y-Yes," he said cautiously, for fear that the recollection might vanish again if he acted too hastily. "Ulysses Lucien Quicksilver."

  "Good."

  "Now I've answered your questions, doctor, perhaps you'd like to answer mine? Professor Brundle - did you speak with him?"

  The psychiatrist looked up from his notes.

  "I'm sorry. Who is this Professor Brundle?"

  "You know, the Director of this place. I asked you to have a word with him. I asked if you'd pass on a message - get him to come and see me at his earliest convenience."

  "You did not."

  "I did!" Ulysses shrieked. "I remember that quite clearly!"

  "And what else do you remember?"

  "What?"

  "It is a straightforward enough question, Mr Quicksilver," the psychiatrist tutted.

  "Do you mean, what else do I remember about our last meeting? Or -"

  "But we have not met before, Mr Quicksilver," the doctor stated calmly.

  "I can assure that we have!"

  "Ah, I understand now. You are confusing the semblance of a thing for the thing itself."

  "You understand? Well I don't!"

  The psychiatrist stared at Ulysses a moment before speaking.

  "You have not met me before, but you may have met my brother. Until today you were his patient."

  "Oh," said Ulysses, the wind taken out of his sails.

  "He looks like me. Contrariwise, I look like him."

  "Well now that we've got that cleared up, please can you tell Brundle I need to see him and we can get all this unpleasantness cleared up without any further ado. I'm known to him, you see. He's an acquaintance of mine."

  "Ah, another of your fictional acquaintances, is he? Yes, I understand now. He is another symptom of your psychosis."

  "I beg your pardon?

  "You have suffered a terrible trauma, Mr Quicksilver, and, as a result, you have retreated into a world that exists wholly within your own mind, populated by a complex and varied cast of characters, and in which you have cast yourself in the role of a heroic agent of the crown, undertaking daring missions on behalf of Queen and country. Is that not so?

  "What?" Ulysses was flabbergasted.

  "But, Mr Quicksilver, if we are to see you make any progress then you must accept the fact that you are making it all up, that you have imagined it all. You are, in reality, a clerk working for a firm of accountants, and have been for the last fifteen years."

  "But I'm not making it up. It's true, I tell you! Every last word of it! I demand to see my lawyer!"

  The psychiatrist regarded him with the severe expression of a disappointed headmaster.

  "It was Mr Screwtape who had you sectioned in the first place. Now take one of these," he said, passing Ulysses a blue pill, "and get some rest. Good day, Mr Quicksilver."

  Ulysses lay on the lumpy, wire-sprung mattress, hugging himself tightly, but then the straightjacket gave him little choice in that matter.

  Am I mad? he wondered, flexing his aching shoulders as much as the jacket allowed. I didn't think I was, but then if I'm not mad then everybody else must be. But does thinking you're the last sane man in the world mean that you are mad?

  No, he couldn't think like that. Give such thoughts credence and it would drive him insane. He had to have faith in himself. Why, only that morning he had... he had... He couldn't remember. What had he been doing that morning? Or had it been the day before? Or was it last week?

  "I have to get out of here," he said to himself. "But isn't that the first sign of madness, talking to yourself?"

  Ulysses felt that he was never going to be able to think straight again, locked away in this place, wherever this place was. It was as if there was something inside his head, playing with his thoughts.

  Without even realising he was doing it at first, Ulysses subconsciously tried to put a hand to the back of his head - he was sure there was something there. But the attempt was immediately hampered by the straight-jacket.

  Had it been another cruel trick of his mind, or had there been a little more give in the jacket this time?

  "So," he resolved, "before I am going to be able to do anything else, I have to somehow get out of here. And if I'm going to do that then I'm going to have to convince them I'm cured, in their eyes at least. I'm going to have to play along with the doctors' little game. But which of the two is most likely to be convinced by my little charade?" he pondered, as he stared at the blank white ceiling.

  Two eyes blinked into existence between him and the flaking paint.

  Ulysses started in disbelief and horror at the disembodied greeny-yellow orbs. The pupils of the eyes were black slits.

  The eyes were soon joined by a grinning mouth.

  "Dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum," it said in a sing-song fashion. "See either you like. They're both mad."

  "But I don't want to go among mad people," Ulysses said.

  As he continued to stare at the grinning mouth and the blinking, mesmeric eyes a face materialised around them. It was a broad face, furry and bristling with whiskers.

  "Oh, you can't help that," said the cat, "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

  "How can you know I'm mad?"

  "You must be, or you wouldn't have come here."

  But that doesn't prove anything, Ulysses considered. "How do you know that you're mad?"

  "
Because otherwise I wouldn't be here. Q.E.D." the cat smiled, and vanished.

  "So, you no longer believe yourself to be an agent of the crown?" the white-coated psychiatrist asked him again, a week later.

  "No, no - of course not. That, if you don't mind me saying so, is a preposterous idea, doctor."

  "And do you still wish to speak with this Professor Brundle?"

  "Why should I?" Ulysses asked. "He was nothing but a figment of my fevered imagination."

  "And your manservant - Nimrod, was it? - and this Lord De Wynter?"

  "A manservant, doctor? Since when do accounts clerks have personal valets? And what would a man like me be doing talking with a nob like his lordship?" Ulysses fixed his gaze on the scribbling psychiatrist. "Doctor, they were nothing but a fiction, the lot of them, the product of an over-active imagination and an exhausted, broken mind. But I'm better now. You've cured me. I no longer suffer from that... delusion."

  The man finished scrawling something on the paper in front of him - and was it his over active imagination, or his exhausted state of mind, or was his scribbling hand really moving from right to left across the page as if the man were writing backwards?

  He swallowed hard, struggling to keep the carefully cultivated look of serene composure on his face.

  "Very good. Very good. Well I am pleased to say you are making excellent progress, Mr Quicksilver. Continue like this and we may even have you rehabilitated into conventional society within the next five years, or so. We may even be able to take you out of that jacket in a week or two."

  "Five years?"

  "Yes. A most positive prognosis, don't you think?"

  Ulysses felt his shoulders sag and he sank back onto the bed, feeling more fatigued and defeated than ever.

  Five further years of incarceration within this stinking institution, with no contact whatsoever with the outside world.

  His eyes took on a distant quality, as if he were staring at something nobody else could see, and then they widened as his face took on an expression of anxious disbelief.

  "Doctor," he said weakly. "Can I have another of those nice blue pills you gave me?"

  "Why?"

  "Because a white rabbit with pink eyes just took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket and remarked that it's going to be late."

  IV

  The Knave of Hearts

  When he woke again - from a dream in which he was falling, over and over, down a well-shaft deep underground, his fall never ending - it was to discover that he was alone and lying on the uncomfortable, squeaky bed.

  He sat up, levering at the waist, his arms still strapped fast across his chest, and quickly scanned the cell. He looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor, peering into all the corners of the room. Mercifully, there did not appear to be any grinning cats or waist-coated rabbits waiting for him there.

  He relaxed and let out a weary sigh, as the reality of his situation hit home all over again. Five years, the doctor had said. And that was taking a glass half-full attitude.

  He stared forlornly at the door - he had never felt so utterly without hope - and it was then he noticed that the door was very slightly open.

  Ulysses' pulse began to quicken. It was now or never.

  Springing off the bed, Ulysses darted over to the door and, easing it open with one shoulder, peered through.

  There was nobody in the clinical white corridor outside. From somewhere in the distance he could hear the indistinct voices of doctors, nurses and orderlies going about their business. But there was nobody on guard outside the special guest accommodation with the rubber wallpaper.

  To his left, ten yards away, the corridor came to a T-junction and he could see one end of the nurse's station within the adjoining corridor, the paper-hatted woman sitting there absorbed in the register she had open on the desk in front of her.

  To the right there was another intersection and, beyond that- glory of glories - he saw natural daylight streaming through the glass panes in a pair of swing doors.

  A way out!

  "Alright, Bill!" he heard someone call, and then the voice retreated into the distance again. The coast was clear.

  Here was his chance.

  Glancing back at the nurse's station and seeing that the woman on duty was still deeply absorbed, barefoot, he crept out of the room.

  Although there was no one to see him - as long as the nurse didn't look up - Ulysses still hunched his body, as if by making himself smaller he would have a better chance of getting away.

  Then there were footsteps from ahead as someone approached the intersection.

  Ulysses jerked at his arms but, although he was sure he felt the tension in the sleeves slacken slightly, the buckles behind his back remained securely fastened. A flurry of strategies suggested themselves to him. Was there time to make it back to his cell before he was spotted, so that he might make his escape attempt later? Could he jump the person approaching and still get away? Or was his escape plan doomed to failure?

  He froze.

  As the footsteps came closer still, Ulysses' attention was suddenly drawn to a door on the other side of the corridor, not three yards away, and there stood the white rabbit. It was the same rabbit he had seen before, dressed in a waistcoat and tapping at the pocket-watch it held in one paw whilst it looked at Ulysses meaningfully with its bulging pink eyes.

  Ulysses felt himself wilt. It seemed that the psychiatrist twins had been right. He must be mad, and if he truly was mad, there was no point trying to escape from this place after all. But then, Ulysses reasoned, if he was doomed to spend the next five or more years of his life here, surrounded by the same four rubber walls, what did he have to lose?

  As the toe of a shoe appeared around the corner, Ulysses threw himself through the gap in the door, closing it behind him with a nudge of a shoulder. His heart racing, he let out his pent-up breath in a long, heartfelt sigh.

  "Are you the Knave of Hearts?"

  Startled, Ulysses turned, followed the sound of a child's voice to the centre of the room.

  The chamber was larger than the one in which he had been incarcerated. It looked to be an operating theatre or a treatment room of some kind. Gleaming stainless steel gurneys and wheeled stands with saline drips had been pushed to the sides of the room, along with what looked like a large battery connected to two metal paddles.

  Ulysses' eyes took in all of this in an instant, but his gaze lingered longer upon the child bound to the wheelchair in the middle of the room.

  She couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve years old. She was wearing a blue pinafore dress with a white apron over the top of it. Her hair was dark and straight and hung down to her shoulders. She was bound by a series of leather straps that had been buckled tight around her ankles, her wrists, head and chest. She was only able to move her eyes and mouth.

  Of the rabbit there was no sign.

  The girl fixed Ulysses with an intense stare.

  "Who did this to you?" he gasped as he stumbled towards her.

  "Are you the Knave of Hearts?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "Then what's your name?"

  "Ulysses. Ulysses Quicksilver." She reminded him of someone, although he couldn't quite remember who. "What are you doing here?"

  "Why, with a name like yours, you might be any shape almost."

  There was blood on her dress, splashes of red like rose petals. "What have they done to you?"

  "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" the child said

  "I don't know," he said as he pushed against the restraints of his straight-jacket. "Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat, and it is never put with the wrong end in front?"

  With a rattle and a click, and the smell of hot leather, the straps of the straitjacket sprang free.

  Ulysses shrugged off the straight-jacket and then fumbled at the catches securing the girl, the straps leaving distinct red marks on her when they came free.

  "They're all mad here,
you know," she said, smiling at him as he helped her up out of the chair.

  "That fact hadn't escaped me," he said in hushed tones. "I'm getting out of here and I'm taking you with me. Now, stay close."

  Holding her by the hand, he led over to the door.

  Easing it open a fraction, Ulysses prayed that the hinges were well-oiled and that they wouldn't creak and give the game away. They didn't.

  Peering through the gap, Ulysses glanced up and down the corridor. Whoever had interrupted his escape attempt before was gone. The way was clear.

  "It's now or never," he whispered to the girl, "and, personally, I'm in favour of now."

  She gave her smiling consent and the two of them were through the door in an instant.

  Scampering along the corridor, trying to make as little sound as possible, they made it to the double doors without being spotted. And then they were through them and away.

  V

  Curiouser and Curiouser

  They found themselves in a paved courtyard and, from there, followed the failing sunlight into the grounds that spread out behind the hospital. Broad stone steps led down to luscious lawns criss-crossed with gravel paths and dotted with curiously shaped pieces of topiary - all of them looking like over-sized chess pieces. Beyond, Ulysses fancied he could see the sea.

  He glanced behind him as they ran. There was something strangely familiar about the hospital building, with its belvedere towers and mock Italian Renaissance look. Ulysses was sure he had been here before, but when he tried to recall precisely when, the memory fled from him.

  "Why can't I remember?" he muttered to himself, and absent-mindedly, his free hand strayed towards the base of his skull.

  "What are you trying to remember," the girl said, not sounding at all out of breath, "something that has happened or that hasn't happened yet?"

  "I can't remember things before they happen," he said. What had the doctors done to her mind to leave her like this?