The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls

by King, John R.

  Next moment, Nurse Cragface arrived, feet planted wide like a rugby player’s and hands angrily jammed on hips. “Meister Boniface!” she roared, striding now between the rows of beds.

  “CLARICE!” he responded in desperate apology.

  Though some inmates had slept through the clanging chamber pot, none remained asleep after this exchange. Patients sat up and yelped to see the formidable nurse marching toward the patient.

  In the general tumult, I scuttled from my hiding place and stole out of the ward.

  The receiving room beyond was deserted and silent. I rushed past the nurse’s desk and into the opposite ward, skidding to a halt between two long rows of beds.

  This ward was different—utterly silent, utterly still. Each bed had an occupant, but the patients were not free. Straitjackets fastened hands to shoulders and tied ankles together. Bed straps bound bodies in place. Gags filled mouths, propped jaws open, kept tongues from being bitten off—or from forming words. I stared in pity at the patients and heard the quiet panic of breath in eighty straining nostrils.

  I stalked among the beds and studied the fugitive faces in their sterile white wrappings. Some could be ruled out by sight—that redheaded berserker, that black-headed boy, that man with the double eye patches. Others required a check of the chart that dangled from the foot of the bed: “Johannes T Godiva—melancholic” … “Michael Hartwick—megalomaniac” … “Jean Paul Rouel—opium addict …” Such perfectly sane names beside such damning diagnoses. “Fritz G. Heimsen—sodomite” … “Casimir Thoris Storaski—deviant” … “James Thomas—violent addlepate.”

  “Addlepate, perhaps—but violent?”

  I stopped and stared. I would hardly have recognized him—his eyes closed, his skin sunken, the gag across his mouth biting into sallow cheeks, hair spiking on the pillow. Silence looked like a corpse, wrapped in straitjacket and straps … .

  I pulled the Scots dirk from the sheath in my stocking. It was a small knife, but exceedingly keen, and its tooth quickly chewed through the straps on the bed. As each popped, Silence breathed more easily. “Now, just the straitjacket,” I said, cutting away first the buckles on wrists and then the straps on feet. I canted the blade in those canvas sleeves and sliced them free of Silence’s arms. The staff had set a cast on his broken arm, a plaster tube between his shoulder and his elbow. It was well done. I slid my dirk through the torso of the straitjacket and the legs as well and, last of all, cut that damned gag. Sheathing my dirk, I whispered, “All finished. You’re free.”

  Only then did Silence’s silvery eyes open, fixing on me. He sat up, and the straitjacket and bindings fell away as if they were paper. Only his bedclothes remained.

  “Come on, then. Let’s go,” I said, grabbing his hand.

  Silence clenched my fingers and rose in a flash. His eyes darkened with malice. “You threw me down once, but not again. This time, you’re the one who’ll die.” He lunged, his hands wrapping my throat.

  “Silence … it’s … it’s … me.”

  A dire smile spread across his teeth. “The Great Man—terror of London, lord of crime from Glasgow to Paris. But snip his lines—snip! snip! snip!—and his web folds and strands the spider—scurvy and scared.”

  “No … it’s … Thomas … .” My throat closed as his hands tightened.

  Enough. I buried my fist in his gut.

  Silence whoofed and bent forward, though his viselike hold on my neck didn’t release. Desperate, I kicked his knee sideways. Silence growled and fell beside his bed but pulled me down on top of him. We rolled once, getting tangled in the cut-up straitjacket. We rolled a second time, and I smashed my elbow into his chest. That blow sent air exploding out of his lips. I wrenched my neck free of his grip and scuttled back, panting.

  “What’s … happened to you?” I gasped.

  Silence rose from the ground and hurled down the cut-up straitjacket. He gave me a wicked smile. “Watch out.”

  “What?”

  A burly arm wrapped my neck, and its owner grunted as he tackled me. The orderly growled something in German.

  “Wait! I’m not the patient!”

  Silence strode past us and out of the ward, into the receiving room.

  “He’s the one!” I yelled, but the orderly only growled louder.

  From the receiving room, there came a great crash.

  The orderly lifted his head to look toward the noise, and for a moment his grip loosened. I bit his arm and rammed my elbow into his side and ducked my head and scampered away. The man was down for only a moment before he clambered up and lunged for me. I kicked a chair into his path and watched with satisfaction as he tumbled over it and sprawled to the tiles again.

  Another crash came from the receiving room. I ran to the door and saw Silence clutching the white lapels of a different orderly. Silence hoisted the man into the air. “So, the trap closes!” he raved, hurling the orderly backward to smash against the door of the surgical theater. The door split in half, and beveled glass shattered.

  Silence stood in the hailstorm of glass and wood. “Ha-ha! I know baritsu!”

  He’s mad, I thought. Even more than before.

  Rapid footsteps approached behind me, and I remembered the other orderly. I lunged aside and tumbled into a roll. The orderly charged, roaring, into the room, and he and Silence clapped eyes on each other.

  “Was ist?”

  Silence triumphantly crowed, “Das ist!” and vaulted toward his new foe. The two men grappled each other like bears. Beyond them, I glimpsed motion. The other orderly was clambering up from the wreckage of the door. He paused a moment to catch his breath and then threw himself also into the scrum.

  I cringed, unsure what to do. Silence was out of his mind and violent. I couldn’t take him with me. But if the orderlies did subdue him, there would only be more torture from the box with the wires … .

  And, too, the scientist in me was intrigued by this strange device … .

  I crept around the edge of the fight until I reached the doorway to the surgical theater. There, on one of the examination tables, sat the box with the wires and the crank. I tiptoed across the glass-strewn threshold and reached the device. It was heavy in my hands.

  Silence’s electrified figure formed the shape of a pentacle-a five-pointed star-but there was something more. His spirit seemed to be driven up from his body, an ectoplasmic presence that roiled in the air. It was as if this electric contraption had exorcised his soul from his body.

  I studied the box. This machine held the secret to Silence’s insanity. I swung it under my arm and stalked to the door to see how the fight progressed.

  The two orderlies and Nurse Cragface were dog-piling Silence, calling for assistance and more straps. Soon, he would be back in his bed, and tomorrow, Dr. Burckhardt would work him over again.

  I’d bought us a little time, though—time to learn what had caused this new madness, and time to correct it.

  Stepping gingerly over the shattered glass, I picked my way to the front door, threw back the lock, and strode out into the nighttime streets of Bern.

  17

  WRAPPED VERY TIGHTLY

  They have me. They won’t let me get away. That’s because I’m not supposed to get away. I’m supposed to be bound down and lie and wait.

  I am a pupa. I am wrapped very tightly, and I am transforming. I can’t remember what sort of worm I was before … can’t guess what sort of bug I’m soon to be. Is this a cocoon or a chrysalis? Will I be a moth or butterfly?

  18

  UNDERSTANDING THE CONTRAPTION

  It felt wonderful to march out the front doors of the Prefargier Sanatorium—especially given that only an hour before I’d been crawling into the ash trap in back. In fact, I felt downright rakish for the first time in days. This was my specialty: breaking, entering, taking, leaving … . I derived extra satisfaction from the generator under my arm. It felt like a grisly trophy—the heart of Cerberus ripped out by my own hand and borne away
from the shattered gates of hell … .

  Delusions of grandeur, however, cannot stand up to cold and wet. I spent that night holed up under a train bridge. Ah, yes—this was my true specialty: skulking, shivering, starving, snarling … A tramp. It took me a solid hour to fall asleep, at which point the Bern Express shrieked overhead, rolled to a stop in the station, and then rumbled back out again.

  Another hour of boredom ensued. The exorcism machine proved too tempting to leave alone. Idly, I clamped it to the metal girders above my head and cranked. A shower of sparks rained down over me and burned little holes in my coat. That experiment should have convinced me to quit, but bored as I was, I decided to hook the machine to a dead rat near the riverbank. After all, I had once used electricity to bring a plenary worm back to life. The rat was not as cooperative. He merely sparked and shuddered, eventually emitting a thick gray smoke.

  Scorched rat fur has a distinctly unpleasant odor.

  By the time the sun rose, I wondered who had fared worse that night: me under my wet bridge or Silence in his nice warm straitjacket. Getting up and brushing myself off, I walked to the open-air market that had fed us the previous day. There, I snatched one small leek and was trying for a radish when someone grabbed my shoulder and spun me about.

  I was poised to run, but the grinning, bewhiskered man greeted me avidly in German and pointed to the contraption I carried. I think he was an inventor—or mad. He held out a grubby fist with a few silver coins, and I felt tempted to sell the device—what with leeks and potatoes to look forward to. But I was not done experimenting with my exorcism machine.

  I escaped the German, found a suitably dark alley, and gobbled my meager breakfast. Silence would have done much better. Though my belly was far from full, it was time to fill my mind. I wended my way to the Stadt- und Univer-sitätsbibliothek. It was a grand old building: white limestone columns, windows with deep casements, a proliferation of porticoes … . Such architecture made sense in Rome, where windows could be flung wide for Mediterranean breezes, but not here on the roof of the world.

  With the exorcism machine at my side, I climbed a set of broad stairs, entered a pair of double doors, and strode to the main desk. A young woman stood there, and I told her that I was a repairman there to check the gas lines. “Bonjour, mademoiselle. Il y a un problème avec le gaz.” I hoisted the electrical contraption, clicked two of the alligator clips together, and gave the machine a crank. Sparks dutifully leaped between the metal ends.

  Her eyes grew wide, and she smiled at me. “Oui.”

  I told her that the trouble was apparently in the science library and asked if she could point me to it. With heels clicking and skirts swaying, the librarian escorted me through the cavernous central hall and into a large wing behind it. The young woman gestured grandly to the maze of tight-packed stacks. “Voilà, c’est là, la bibliothèque de sciences.”

  I thanked her, kissed the back of her hand (I couldn’t resist), and was rewarded with a blush as she pivoted and clicked away. It was a pleasant sight, watching her go: I was tempted to ditch the machine and this whole adventure and pick up where I had left off, but the last time I’d followed a skirt, I’d ended up hanging from a glacier. Even Anna hadn’t been worth that much trouble. The librarian’s swishing bustle was long gone before I roused myself from my reverie: “Silence in a straitjacket.”

  I attacked the stacks with a vengeance, first searching through books on electrical science—volts, amperes, frequency, direct current, alternating current—which led me at last to explanations of circuits and diagrams of generators. Aha! The very contraption beneath my arm was built on the specifications of the Gramme dynamo, with three sets of outputs for three separate circuits.

  At last I understood the machine, but I still wondered what it had done to Silence. I shifted to books on medicine. The trail led me first to the “torpedo fish,” an electric sea creature prized from the time of Christ for healing through electric shock. For fifteen hundred years, those poor fish were dragged from the Mediterranean and applied to one forehead or another. Then Ewald Georg von Kleist developed his Leyden jar—a device that could generate and store large quantities of electricity. By discharging his jar into patients, he claimed to cure paralysis, epilepsy, hysterics, and memory loss.

  Memory loss! So Burckhardt wasn’t a solitary quack: He came from a long line of them. But the generator hadn’t restored Silence’s memory. It’d left him raving mad. Why?

  My hunt followed a new lead—men who had been struck by lightning. In Galvanic Phenomena, I read the following account:

  A Lord Colin McComb of the Moffat McCombs has the unlucky distinction of being struck by lightning five successive times. Each strike temporarily rendered him savage and feral, like a man turned animal. On the occasion of the first strike, locals did not even recognize Lord McComb, so wild was his hair and demeanor. On the second occasion, he attacked a Scottish longhorn bull and wrestled the creature to the ground and gutted it and ate its spleen. On the third occasion, he pillaged a town and was driven off only by local lads who pelted him with rocks. When lightning had struck Lord McComb a fourth time, locals chased him to a lonely tor, intent on vigilante justice. Their job was done for them, however, by the fifth—fatal—lightning bolt.

  Another account read as follows:

  Among the Finns, one Iron Age cult of Thor used their native metal to fashion skvias, or twelve-foot-long lightning rods. With these implements, they made sacrifices to the thunder bearer. Priests conducted a prisoner to a mountain peak, required him to lie supine with legs and hands spread, and then chained his ankles, wrists, and neck to the skvias, which were pounded into the ground in the shape of a five-pointed star. If the prisoner could escape before a storm came, he was considered pardoned by Thor. If, instead, a storm came and struck him dead, he was considered a sacrifice. If the prisoner was struck and lived, the priests considered him a wizard—his mortal soul driven out of his body, and a divine soul driven in. A few such wizards became priests in the service of Thor, though most became necromancers in the service of Loki.

  I was on the verge of discovery. The electric pentacle had some arcane power to drive out one’s spirit or to drive in the spirit of another. Seeking the final piece of the puzzle, I consulted a book of Celtic mysticism, which described the major arcana of the tarot cards:

  The pentacle, or five-pointed star, is a symbol of earth in its perfect form, either the lost earth of Eden or the restored earth of the end of times. The five points of the pentacle represent the five powers of good: Lugh’s spear of living fire, Mannon’s magic ship, Conory Mor’s singing sword, Cuchulain’s speaking sword, and the stone of destiny, Lia Fail. Human beings may claim any or all of these symbols of hope and light in order to justly rule the world. When the star card is laid in its dignified position, it symbolizes protection from evil, divine help, and new birth.

  And then, later:

  The inverted pentacle, or the devil, is a reversal of the natural power and beauty of the earth. It is an inversion, a perversion, bringing an end to hope and life. Instead of claiming the divine power of good, the querent receives the destructive power of evil. Instead of protection, this card offers plunder. Instead of new birth, it offers demonic possession.

  A chill crept up my neck. I remembered Silence’s soul driven up from his body, his demon-charged fingers gripping my throat … I stared at the pentacle of protection and the inverted pentacle of destruction, and glimpsed another world. It overlaid the world of science; it churned up the phenomenological world like invisible winds churning up the sea. My body tingled. Every hair stood on end. I felt a queer, uncanny urge to flee.

  Then a hand touched my shoulder. I leaped and spun around.

  “Anna!” There she was: the same doe eyes and rosebud lips, the same blond braids arrayed in a heart shape around her head—and yet, she was different. In place of the white blouse and blue skirt, she wore a black dress with a high neckline—even a white bonnet. She look
ed like an old woman. I laughed harshly. “You’ve changed.”

  She glanced down at herself and blushed. “These aren’t mine.”

  “Stole them from a line, did we? Not a very good thief—”

  “I didn’t steal them. I’m not a thief.”

  “No, you’re worse. You’re working with the gunman. He’s your … your father.” It was sheer speculation, but the sad steadiness of her eyes confirmed it. “You were planning a double murder, weren’t you? While Daddy flings a man from the waterfall above, Daughter drowns another in the cauldron below!”

  Anna’s face grew red. “I don’t know why I even came here.” She strode off down the dark row of stacks.

  “I know why,” I said, picking up the generator and following her. “You came to play me. That’s what you’ve been doing all along—all that helpless act, all that mourning for a father who didn’t die five years ago, who’s been hunting us for the past week. ‘Let me stay,’ she says. ‘Let me buy you time,’ she says, when really she’s plotting with the killer. From the beginning—from before the beginning—you’ve been playing me …” I grabbed her arm and turned her about to face me, but her eyes were so hurt, I blurted the only thing I could think of: “I know about the cheese!”

  “What?” she demanded, stepping forward.

  We bumped together, and I stumbled—had to drop the generator and grab her waist to keep from falling. “A girl with a twenty-four-inch waist doesn’t eat two blocks of cheese!”

  She stared into my face. “You’re insane.”

  “Am I? Is the gunman your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you traveled with him to Bern?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you rope me into all this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m right about everything.”