Nothing But the Night

by John Blackburn

  ‘Yes, Sir Marcus. But Sister sent for Dr Bryn-Williams and he and Mr Haynes decided to administer Genomycin. It worked almost at once, Sister Martin said. Within an hour the temperature was down and the pulse slower.’

  ‘Did it indeed?’ Thank you, Nurse, I’ll have a look at her myself now.’ Marcus opened the door and stepped into a room which was bright with flowers and gaily painted furniture and Beatrix Potter wallpaper. His frown vanished as he approached the cot by the window and the thin autumn sunshine lit up the smile of his best bedside manner, with its aura of strength and confidence and professional ability. ‘Sir Marcus is here and there is nothing to worry about. The danger is past because the specialist has arrived.’

  ‘Hullo, Mary,’ he said. ‘My name is Dr Levin and I’ve come to tell you that you’re a very good girl and are getting well quickly.’ Marcus beamed down at the face on the pillow and Mary Valley smiled back at him. She had strikingly blonde hair and blue eyes which contrasted strangely with a rather dark skin.

  ‘Hullo, Doctor.’ The child’s voice was sleepy but quite calm and unafraid. ‘Are you a proper doctor? Not like Mr Haynes? I heard Sister Martin say that he is only a bachelor of medicine. Have you come to tell me that I can go home?’

  ‘I hope so, Mary. Yes, I think you will be going home very soon.’ Marcus studied the faint mottling beneath her chin. Because of that the dean would be within his rights to keep her in hospital. The rash might be contagious, but he had no idea what had caused it. Certainly no common infection like measles or chicken pox, and clearly it was on the decline now. Genomycin might have saved Mary Valley, but he doubted it. The mottling suggested a sweat rash or a nervous allergy. Whatever Peter Haynes had said, the child appeared calm and in excellent mental health, but she had been in a motor accident and shock could produce strange symptoms at times.

  ‘Aren’t you happy here, Mary?’ Marcus patted the yellow bear on the pillow beside her. ‘Don’t you and your teddy like being with us?’

  ‘It’s all right, Doctor, except when Mr Haynes keeps bothering me, but it’s not my home. You should see the home Auntie Van Traylen made for us, Doctor Levin. Right up on an island at the top of Scotland and the house has towers and turrets like a real castle.’ The blue eyes gleamed at the memory. ‘I have to get back there for the parties. The first one is for Auntie Helen’s birthday when all the guardians come to visit us. Matron says that though Auntie is in heaven now, she will be there as well to enjoy the fun.’

  ‘Did she, Mary?’ Marcus fought back a frown. Helen Van Traylen had died very horribly by her own hand and this matron sounded a neurotic and unwholesome woman. ‘And what is the second party, dear?’

  ‘It’s November the fifth, of course, when we burn Guy Fawkes. Didn’t you have bonfire parties when you were a little boy, Doctor?’

  ‘We had fires, Mary.’ Marcus could almost hear the rattle of machine guns, smell the smoke of the blazing buildings and see tracer bullets arching up over the Warsaw Ghetto.

  ‘Mary . . . Mary Valley,’ he said pushing aside the memory as he took her wrist. The child was quite cool and the pulse almost normal, yet the chart on the bedhead told him that her temperature had been up to a hundred and seven. ‘That’s a pretty name for a very pretty little girl. How old are you, Mary?’

  ‘I am seven years, nine months and three weeks old. But Valley is only one of my names, Doctor.’ The child’s expres­sion altered slightly and he saw a trace of suspicion in her eyes. ‘I used to be called Mary Harb, but Auntie Van Traylen changed it to Valley when I was staying with her a week before she had her accident and went away. She said Valley was much prettier. When are you going to let me go home, Doctor Levin?’

  ‘As soon as I can, Mary, and Mrs Van Traylen was right. It is a much prettier name.’ Harb . . . Mary Harb. Where have I heard that name before? Marcus wondered. Not Mary, though. It was Anna Harb that rang a bell, but he couldn’t place it.

  ‘Now, let’s have a look at your chest, my dear, and we’ll soon see it you can go to those parties. Let’s hope it’s a treasure chest that will buy you a ticket to Scotland.’ Marcus reached out to loosen the pyjama jacket, but the child forestalled him, her little fingers working quickly at the buttons while she smiled coyly up at him. Haynes really was an unbalanced fool, he thought. There was no trace of mental abnormality here, though Mary Valley would lead some man quite a dance when she came to maturity.

  ‘So, there they are.’ Though his outwardly confident manner remained, Marcus wasn’t smiling any more. The rash was light purple and rather beautiful and it curved across the chest like the crescent of a new moon. Certainly an allergy and he felt he knew why it had not been recog­nized. Mary Valley was out of danger, but if that shot of Genomycin had not been injected in time she might have been disfigured for the rest of her life.

  But it is impossible, he thought, taking a lens from his pocket and craning forward. You are jumping to a con­clusion without evidence because this is your pet subject. Something else has caused this rash; something similar. You must be mistaken. Not even a maniac would go to such lengths. There was a mist of anger before his eyes and his heart beats quickened as the picture came into focus. The child’s chest was covered with five pointed stars and each star was of uniform height and diameter.

  Marcus forced his hand steady and he knew that there was no doubt at all. When he had last seen such a rash it was on the shaven skin of an animal, and the organism which caused it was the product of his own laboratory.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Then the mine-er, forty-nine-er, soon began to peak and pine.’ Though Marcus sang in a vain attempt to control anger, his normally tuneful voice was harsh and savage and his knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

  ‘Thought he oughter jine his daughter . . .’ The gears grated loudly when the traffic lights changed and he hurled his Ferrari forward with complete disregard for the speed limit. ‘Now he’s with his Clementine.’

  But to hell with Clementine and her bloody father. Kaldorella 6—that was what he should be thinking about. That was the preparation which had entered . . . no, been deliberately introduced into Mary Valley’s bloodstream. That was the demon which could have scarred her as badly as the smallpox if Genomycin had not caught it in time. Without that one little-used, unproved antibiotic, the rash would have spread, the pustules increased in size till they opened, became contagious and not only the child but a lot of other people been disfigured for life.

  The Kaldorella cultures, named after their discoverer, Professor Feodor Kaldor of Budapest, had been the first attempt to produce a man-made antibody, and though Kaldor had started successfully he had failed disastrously. Somewhere along the line he had gone wrong. His or­ganisms were efficient bactericides, but the vast majority of human beings were allergic to them and their cells revolted, producing the rash and the fever in the battle for survival. Preparation 6 was the most virulent of all Kaldor’s products, because not only were the side effects contagious but it appeared resistant to every antibiotic with the excep­tion of Genomycin. Some months ago, Marcus and the four other bacteriologists who made up Central’s research team had explored a means to turn this maneater into a friend. They had failed, but cultures had been retained in his lab—the laboratory around which he had shown Peter Haynes only yesterday and where Peter had been left alone for several minutes while he himself was called to the phone. So far, Marcus had not mentioned his suspicions to the dean. He had stated that Mary was out of danger but, though the rash was unlikely to be contagious, she should remain in quarantine till they knew its cause. In a very few minutes he intended to tell Peter that he would person­ally ruin him.

  Greenham Gate. That was where the bastard lived, and for once there was a parking space before the drab block of flats. The tyres scraped the kerb as Marcus shot into it, and he tugged savagely at the handbrake. He had just switched off the ignition when the door was opened for him and a face smiled down from the pavement.

 
‘Mark! You’re here at last, dear chap,’ said Peter Haynes. ‘Almost two o’clock. I thought you would have discovered my little deception hours ago and been round before lunch.’

  ‘But of course you can break me, Mark. I have no doubts on that score, old boy. You can throw me out of Saint Bede’s, have me struck off the register, even get me a stretch in prison, I shouldn’t wonder.’ Haynes had a sharp Cockney accent and there was mockery in the use of his out-of-date ‘old boys’ and ‘dear chaps’. He was a thin, wispy man of thirty-seven, with untidy fair hair and thick glasses. Behind the glasses his eyes looked as if they were out of focus.

  ‘But will you, that’s the point. After all, what have I done? Certainly I stole a quantity of the Kaldorella culture while your back was turned yesterday. Yes, I injected some of the stuff into Mary. But was she in any physical danger? You told me all about the culture, remember. That an adult dose of Genomycin would destroy the organism before the rash could cause permanent scars or become contagious, and I made quite certain that Sister Martin administered the antibiotic in time and in sufficient quantity. All I did was to make a little girl feel sick for a few hours, and I have no regrets at all. I had to gain time, you see. I had to stop her leaving the hospital till I’ve finished my examinations.’

  ‘Listen to me, Peter. It’s you who are ill, not that little girl. You must be crazy, completely out of your mind.’ Marcus had expected a denial, then an abject plea, and this bland admission horrified him. ‘We’re not in Nazi Germany. We can’t use human beings for medical experiment.’

  ‘I’m not crazy, Mark. Only worried, very worried in­deed.’ Haynes leaned wearily back in his chair. The sitting-room-cum-study of his flat was overflowing with books and papers and there was obviously no wife or housekeeper to disturb his untidy comfort.

  ‘You were the first friend I made when I came to Saint Bede’s, but I am not going to appeal to that friendship. At the same time, I recognize you as an expert in your field and I think you should do the same for me in mine. That child looks normal to you just as I might not recognize a person in the early stages of bubonic plague. But I tell you that Mary Valley is a very sick and dangerous little girl indeed and needs expert treatment. The Van Traylen people were demanding her release and they were within their legal rights. I had to find some means of keeping her in the hospital and I have not the slightest regret for what I did.’

  ‘Dangerous? A seven-year-old girl.’ Though Marcus was trying to stop smoking he pulled out a cigarette. He had always regarded Brian Plunkett as intolerant and out-of-date but the old boy could be right in describing Haynes and the majority of ‘head shrinkers’ as unbalanced.

  ‘Children grow into adults, my dear chap.’ Haynes took a lighter from his desk and held it out for him. ‘If Adolf Hitler had received treatment when he was seven your parents could still be alive and you might not have rotted in a concentration camp. Besides, several people have suf­fered from Mary’s illness already: she herself, the publican and the coach driver who had a wife and two children.

  ‘Yes, I believe the driver’s story, Mark.’ Haynes kept flicking the lighter on and off as he brushed aside Marcus’s interruption. ‘Mary has a morbid fascination towards fire and the very sight of the man lighting his cigarette could have set it off. I know that as fact, because I left this lighter by her cot as an experiment. She played with it quite normally and then, when she thought I wasn’t looking, she held the flame before the face of her teddy bear.’

  ‘All kids do things like that, Peter.’ Though Marcus made himself appear unimpressed, he remembered how the child’s eyes had lit up at the thought of the Guy Fawkes Party.

  ‘They don’t repeatedly dream about fire and pain, old boy; not well-balanced children. They don’t have one re­current night terror and talk in their sleep about men and animals being burned alive. They don’t experience real, physical agony in their sleep. But Mary Valley does, Mark.’ Haynes put down the lighter and started to rummage through the littered papers on his desk.

  ‘Mary has had that dream each night she has been in our care, and under mild hypnosis she related it in great detail. She describes a small room with a metal door and she is locked inside it. The door is becoming red with heat and beyond it she can hear the bellowing of beasts and a man screaming.’ Peter Haynes had found what he wanted and squinted short-sightedly at a sheet of foolscap.

  ‘I made a tape-recording of that session with her, Mark, which I will play back to you later. What I hope you will notice is the detail she goes into. The room smells of burn­ing rubber; there is a peep hole in the door and a scatter gun hanging on one wall. Another wall contains a safe with a brass plaque displaying its maker’s name, the Linksville Corporation, Detroit. Mary talks about the flames spread­ing across the ‘knocking pen’ and the ‘mutton hoist’ falling. As you know I lived for a year in the States, but it took a Dictionary of American Slang to tell me that those terms describe pieces of specialized equipment which are only used in the Middle West canning industry.

  ‘Little Mary Valley knew them though; rather strange that. And why should a seven-year-old child who has never been out of England speak of “scatter” gun instead of shot­gun?’

  ‘Perhaps someone told her the story, Peter.’ Marcus stood up and crossed over to the window. The earlier promise of a fine day was fading and the sky hinted at rain. By now his colleagues at Central must have finished their tests on the antibody and somehow he knew they would have recorded another failure. ‘What’s your diagnosis, Peter?’

  ‘I have no definite diagnosis, only a suspicion which I need time to verify. I hope that you will give me that time, Mark. I also hope that my suspicions are completely groundless.’ As Marcus turned from the window he could see the hint of a plea behind Haynes’s thick lenses.

  ‘If Mary was older I would say she was a schizophrenic, though as we know so little about schizophrenia it’s a term I detest. I do believe in what Karl Jung called archetypes, however. Racial and family memories, perhaps from generations back, which have returned and become lodged in the minds of the living.’

  ‘Memories of the dead.’ Marcus dragged at his cigarette and frowned. ‘I have the greatest respect for Jung as a pioneer, but you’re talking more like a witch doctor than a scientist, Peter.’

  ‘Maybe I am, old chap, but ours is a very youthful science.’ Haynes was rummaging through his papers again. ‘All I know is that Mary is obsessed by something she could not have experienced personally, and the wealth of detail makes it unlikely that she heard the story from a third person. From the little time I have had with Mary I am quite certain the condition will become progressive and incurable unless she has treatment. If I can help that little girl, Mark, I don’t give a damn if I have broken my oath, stolen from your laboratory or even risked my liberty.’ Haynes craned forward over a photograph he had finally located in the litter on the desk.

  ‘Unless you have me under lock and key, I am meeting Mary’s mother soon and I hope she may help to put me a little nearer to the truth.’

  ‘But I thought she was an orphan.’ Harb . . . Anna Harb. Once more the name ran through Marcus’s memory, but he still could not recall where he had heard it.

  ‘No, about half the Van Traylen children were removed from their parents on account of cruelty or neglect and Mary has a mother all right; rather a celebrated one. Her name is Anna Harb. Surely the dean told you about her visit to Saint Bede’s?’

  ‘He never mentioned the woman at all.’

  ‘Really. The old fool sticks to his parrot cry that any publicity is bad publicity where his precious hospital is concerned. But I thought you would have remembered her story, old boy. It made quite a stir at the time.’ Haynes was still staring at the photograph as if unable to take his eyes off it.

  ‘Anyway, Anna Harb arrived at the hospital on the morning after Mary was admitted. One of the newspapers had featured the crash and she had seen the child’s picture. She demanded to see her daughter
and when they refused, became violent and abusive. She shouted that the police and the welfare authorities had kidnapped the girl and now the orphanage people had destroyed her soul. It took Serjeant Jackson and two nurses to get her out of the building.

  ‘I wish I had been there, Mark. If I can only talk to that woman and understand her own illness, I may be able to understand her daughter’s. Please give me the time I need, old chap.’ He looked up and slid the photograph across the desk. There was a clear plea in Haynes’s face now and a nervous tic tugged at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Give me a chance, Mark. Cover up for a day or two. When you’ve heard my recording, you’ll know that we have to help that little girl.’

  ‘I’ll listen to it, Peter, but I’m making no promises.’ Marcus was beginning to have the uncomfortable feeling that Haynes’s highly unprofessional conduct might possibly be justified. He picked up the photograph and held it to the light, seeing a dark, heavy-faced woman seated against a white background. A trace of coloured blood was clear in the crinkly hair and the thick features, and her eyes stared balefully at the camera as if she were drugged or drunk or under hypnosis.

  ‘That’s my patient’s mother. That’s Mary Valley’s hered­ity.’ Haynes nodded as Marcus turned to the newspaper cutting clipped to the margin of the picture. The print was old and faded, but the headlines were clear enough. ‘Public Anxiety at Release of Triple Murderess.’

  Chapter Three

  Nine o’clock and the evening was cold and dank. Mist was rising from the river as the District Line train rattled across a bridge, and the buildings on the opposite bank were barely visible against the sodden sky.

  The next station would be his. Peter Haynes glanced at the system map, dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his foot. He felt worried and excited and pleased with himself all at the same time. Worried because Mary Valley’s condition was so obviously progressive, excited because it might lead him to a real breakthrough into the causes of certain mental illnesses, pleased with himself because . . . No, that was not really true. He was no longer capable of feeling self-satisfaction because so many of the causes he had followed were clearly lost before he had even joined them. Three marriages and eleven jobs had collapsed because of his fruitless crusading and he would probably lose the battle for Mary’s sanity as well. All the same, as far as the practical attempt to help her was concerned, things were not going too badly.