The Ghosts of Heaven

by Marcus Sedgwick

  I agreed, and left.

  * * *

  I feel I have achieved a small thing for Dexter already. This apology can only serve to enhance his sense of status, and while Doctor Phillips clearly operates in some ways I find difficult, it is a rare man who can admit his mistakes and make amends for them.

  I will go to bed soon, I just want to read a little of Dexter’s poetry. It may help me to understand the man better.

  Thursday, March 31

  I curse myself that I am still so naive.

  I have been played with, on all sides it seems.

  My elation over my success with Dexter’s punishment lasted only one night, and even before I slept, I found I was unsettled by the man’s poetry.

  On Drowning is a strange piece of work; not all the stories concern water or the sea, though many do. The poem that gives the book its title is the third in the collection. A long and formless piece, I found, which hints at unknown things. Over the course of several pages, Dexter’s words wove some sort of terror into me, but exactly what that terror is of, I cannot say. All I can report is that his words, in some way, disturb. Everything is shadows and the suggestion of monstrosity, of horror in the water, of something dark and powerful beneath the waves, something—there is no other word for it—malevolent.

  * * *

  This morning, I went along the wards as lightly as I could, making one or two instructions to the warders over various patients, yet all the while I was eager to get to Dexter’s room.

  I found him writing, as usual, though this time he was standing and looking up out of the mediocre window, at the sky.

  He turned as I opened the door.

  “Can you hear the sea?” he asked.

  I listened, but all I could hear was the sound of doors clanging nearby. It seemed an odd coincidence to me that he should speak of the sea when the night before I had been reading his poetry, which appeared too obsessed with things aquatic.

  “Can you?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “It’s louder the higher up the building you go.”

  “Well,” he said. “What shall we talk about today?”

  I smiled, because there really is something disarmingly charming about his open manner.

  I decided to return his manner with playfulness of my own.

  “I have a surprise for you,” I said. “Will you walk with me?”

  “A surprise? You are the strangest doctor I have ever met,” he said. “And I have met one or two.”

  We came out into the hall and instead of turning for the doors to the outside at the eastern end of the building, we made for the central hall. Thinking back, I should have noted a slight change in Dexter even then, but I was busy with other thoughts, for he had just asked me a very interesting question.

  “Tell me, Doctor,” he said. “What is your opinion of psychiatry?”

  “I would rather you tell me yours,” I said. “Do you know something of it?”

  “I have read a little,” he said.

  “And your conclusion?”

  He waved a hand above our heads, and round about. I could almost feel the weight of brick and steel above us.

  “All this,” he said. “All this matter. To try to correct the ineffable disturbances of the mind. It seems … odd, at least, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You think psychiatry a more effective treatment? You think it would serve you better?”

  He tilted his head toward me.

  “Where are we going, Doctor?”

  “A short walk,” I said. “Your view of psychiatry, if you please.”

  “Well,” he said. “Do you know, that it is almost twenty years since Messrs. Freud and Jung visited our shores for the first time? You might think we had advanced further in our treatment of mental aberrations. That we might be trying to understand these matters on their own terms. Instead, it appears that Doctor Phillips and his colleagues would like to mend the mind in a physical way—as if it were a motor car that has broken down—and wrestle it with hammer and wrench.”

  I found his words as unsettling as his poetry. They would have hurt if they had been pronounced by some leading man of medicine, they hurt all the more for coming from the mouth of a patient.

  “Please, Doctor,” Dexter said. “Where are we going? I don’t much care for surprises.”

  He tried a smile, but I could see it was a shaky one. We had arrived at the main entrance hall, the curved cathedral that serves as the spinal cord to the building. I should have noted how Dexter was standing, facing the front door, to the outside, and his shoulders were hunched. He was frowning, almost wincing, as if trying to anticipate some attack from behind.

  I also should have noted that Solway and two other warders were in the hall.

  “We’re going to see Doctor Phillips,” I said. “He has something he wants to say to you.”

  “Outside?” asked Dexter, his voice trembling, and that was the last sane sound he uttered, because when I said, “No, in his office,” and turned to the spiral staircase, he began to back away from me, mumbling incoherently.

  The change in him was so sudden, so very swift, that I didn’t see it coming. Solway and his men ran over and grabbed Dexter roughly, and I understood that they had been waiting for us, for him.

  Dexter struggled in their hands.

  “Don’t be a bad boy, Dex,” said Solway. “The doctor told you where he wants you to go, didn’t he? So come along and play nice.”

  They started to force Dexter toward the stairs, and now I saw that Dexter was terrified to go.

  “No!” I said to Solway. “It’s okay. He doesn’t have to go if he doesn’t want to.”

  I was thinking that I had no idea that Dexter was so scared of Doctor Phillips. He’d shown no sign of that the day we’d all met. And then, as they forced Dexter to the stairs, and lifted him so he had to place a foot on the first step, I understood.

  It was the stairs he was afraid of.

  He fought, and fought so hard, that despite the three men accosting him, he managed to break free. But only for a second, then they had him again, and Solway pulled a short baton from inside his shirt and gave Dexter such a blow across the back of his neck that he fell to the floor.

  Still Dexter roared and screamed, over and over, though what he screamed was unclear. The commotion attracted the attention of patients of both first floor wards, and on either side of us they thronged at the doors and beat on the glass so hard I thought they would smash through. A great wailing and screaming echoed around and up the hall, and I looked up too then, as a shadow crossed the sun, to see Doctor Phillips on the balcony of the seventh floor, his hands on the rails, surveying the scene.

  Still Dexter thrashed, and violently, but Solway had him on his front now, his arms twisted behind his back.

  Solway barked at the two other warders to “see to” the other patients, and that they did, charging into the wards of both the men and women, pulling people by their hair, dragging them away from the window in such a rough manner that many just scurried off to safety.

  I begged the head warder to stop.

  “Please, Mr. Solway, please!”

  Solway took no notice of me, at least not directly, for then he spat into Dexter’s ear, saying, “Let’s show the doctor what you’re really afraid of.”

  He rolled Dexter onto his side, still twisting his arms so badly that he had utter control over him, and he pointed Dexter’s face up, up into the curved space of the hall, where the staircase ran round, floor after floor, forever, or so it seemed.

  “Look!” hollered Solway. “Look!”

  Dexter’s eyes were wide open in terror as he looked to the very top of the building where that fine spiral staircase ascends into the cupola, and then he screamed a long and empty scream, a howl right from the bottom of his mind, that spoke of unnameable horror at the world before him.

  Thursday, March 31—later

  I have just returned from a midnight excursion.

  Once ag
ain, I could not sleep.

  The day was a long and painful one after Dexter’s episode.

  The whole thing, I realized, had been a setup to humiliate both Dexter and myself, to show me that I knew nothing and that Dexter is as mad as Phillips believes him to be.

  It seemed that wherever I went in the whole vast building, I could hear the cries of one lunatic above those of three thousand others. Dexter’s wailing lasted all morning and most of the afternoon, during which I not only had to work but also had to endure my most patronizing lecture yet from Doctor Phillips as he painstakingly and with great deliberation took me to pieces in front of Doctor Delgado, two other juniors, and Solway.

  Dexter, according to Doctor Phillips, has an immense pathological fear of the spiral form. When shown even a simple drawing of a spiral, he grows uncomfortable. Forced to hold one, he becomes wild, and in the face of something as powerful as the staircase of the hospital, he loses all control, and becomes violent if unrestrained.

  I made the mistake of asking Doctor Phillips if he knew the cause of this behavior.

  “Is there some trauma that Dexter experienced? Did something happen connected to a spiral staircase, perhaps?”

  “There does not have to be a pleasing little explanation for everything in life, Doctor James,” he said. “The man is a lunatic. Do not look for method in his madness, for there is none.”

  I tried not to hang my head, nor to look as defeated as I felt, but I felt pretty rough and it must have been obvious.

  And Doctor Phillips had one last barbed remark for me, before he was done.

  “To seek the rational where there is only irrational might itself be an act of madness. No, Doctor?”

  * * *

  This evening, I sat and listened to Verity read for a while. She is improving all the while and despite her slow start in life, she makes me proud every time she finishes a chapter. She refused to speak of school today and I didn’t have the heart to push her. Instead, I told her to wash herself up and get to bed, and when she was ready, she trotted over and gave me a peck on my cheek.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Father,” I said, and she nodded.

  “Good night, Father,” she said, and I told her to sleep well.

  * * *

  But sleep didn’t come for me, and in the middle of the night, I rolled over and saw Dexter’s book by my bed, in the half-light.

  I put my hand out for it, but my hand hovered halfway, and then refused. Instead, I found myself climbing the spiral stair to the circular balcony, and began to pace.

  In Connecticut and elsewhere, on houses near the sea, are those rooftop verandas known as widow’s walks, from where the wives of sailors would gaze out to sea, hoping for sight of their husband’s ship safely returning. And from where the wives of the drowned would gaze at the waters that took their husbands away.

  Such did I feel, only with the roles reversed. I play the widow, walking around the cupola of the insane asylum, a fearful sentinel staring out at the sea with no more anger now, but just a hollow endless pain.

  I had begged Caroline not to go. Not because I feared for her on the voyage. Because I could not stand to be without her for two months. But her English grandfather was dying, and wished to see her again, and would pay for her crossings.

  She made it to England before her grandfather died. He got to see her. But I never got to see her again. Somewhere in a storm a way off shore her ship sank, all hands lost.

  Even now, after all this time, I still cannot shake the knowledge that she is down there somewhere. My drowned wife. Her body is still there, at the bottom of the sea, and even though I know what horrors will have happened to her body since then, it changes nothing. She is down there.

  Thursday, March 31—later, continued

  Standing on the widow’s walk, I stared at the sea for a long time, or at least where I imagined it to be. Then, I slid my hands into the pockets of my jacket, which I had thrown over my pajamas, and my fingers closed around the key to the seventh-floor gate.

  Dexter came back to my mind. Before I thought rationally, I was halfway down the main spiral and, no more than a minute later, I was opening Dexter’s door.

  He was quiet, but not, as I’d imagined, sleeping.

  “Who is it?” he asked, and his voice was hoarse, no more than a broken whisper, broken I supposed by his day of screaming. He sounded tired.

  “Doctor James,” I said, and he fumbled in the dark, switching on a little light on his desk.

  “You should not be found in here with me, Doctor,” he said. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “That’s a good question,” he said. “A very good question. You had better pull the door to, but do not allow it to close, or you will be shut in with a lunatic until the morning, when no doubt all they will find of you is your white bones, with some frantic tooth marks here and there.”

  “Are you trying to scare me?” I asked.

  He sighed softly.

  “You’re already scared,” he said.

  “Me?”

  “Don’t protest,” he whispered. “You are scared. Of many things.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s obvious. To one who is terrified himself, it’s quite easy to spot a fellow sufferer.”

  Dexter was already controlling the conversation, and I found to my alarm that I did not care about that as much as I should have. So I forced myself to care, and tried to wrestle the conversation back into my control.

  “What happened this morning?” I asked Dexter.

  “You saw that for yourself.”

  “I did. But I’m trying to understand it. They tell me you’re frightened by spirals. That the staircase disturbs you. Is that true?”

  There was a long, long pause before he answered, but I knew the trick was not to prompt him, but merely to allow the silence to mount until he could not refuse an answer. Finally, it came.

  “It is.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Did you have some accident? Was there something that made you fear the spiral? It is only a shape. It must have some powerful connotations for you. Perhaps a loved one—”

  “—a loved one tumbled down the spiral staircase of Montauk lighthouse and crushed her skull on the bottom step? No! Doctor James, no. No. It is not that simple. I am not that simple. There is no pathetic cause and effect for me. Unlike you.”

  I ignored that last remark. Or I should say, I tried to, because I was, by then, already wondering what he knew of me.

  “What then is it, about the spiral, that terrifies you so, so much that you are reduced to a screaming heap at the mere suggestion you walk up one?”

  Dexter did not answer me directly.

  “What is your desire for life, Doctor?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “What do you want from life? What are you trying to do with your life?”

  What do I want? I thought. I cannot have what I want. That chance has gone. I decided to limit the question to that of my work.

  “I want to help people, and I want to improve myself so that I can help people better.”

  “Noble,” Dexter said, and there was no suggestion of sarcasm in his whisper, but, rather, a hint of admiration that brought tears to my eyes.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I have spent my life trying to fill my mind. I have spent it trying to fill the thing, and yet the more I learn, the more I realize still remains to be understood. I wrote my poetry to explore the world, and in doing so I find I have been nothing more than an ant, standing at the shores of the Atlantic, wondering what lies on the other side. But at least I know there is another side.

  “So I have tried to open my mind further, and to fill it further, and yet the process appears to be an infinite one, on and on, forever.”

  He fell silent. I thought about what he said, but could find no connection to spirals. Then I felt stupid for trying to make
, as he put it, a simple cause and effect where he had told me there was none.

  “Have you ever been locked in the dark, Doctor?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “You should try it sometime. It is remarkable. After a period of time in total darkness, you begin to see things. I am not talking about hallucinations. Your eye starts to show you certain lights and shapes. These are called ‘entoptic phenomena.’ I read about them in von Helmholtz’s recent book. You read German? I would lend you the book, were it not for the fact…”

  He trailed off and glanced at the shelf above his head. Only now, in the gloom, did I see that all his books were gone. Every single one.

  “Doctor Phillips took them away.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because of what happened today.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  Dexter hung his head, and I didn’t know what more to say. The empty shelves gaped at me, like a wound, somehow. No, like a crime, but more than a theft, like a murder. Phillips was trying to kill Dexter. That was the mad and angry thought that came to me as I saw the bare wooden shelf hanging above Dexter’s bowed head.

  “It’s not so bad,” Dexter said softly. He looked up. “I am not reading at the moment. At the moment, I am writing my book. Hopefully Doctor Phillips will relent by the time I wish to start reading again, and return my books to me.”

  I could not speak. All I could manage was a brief nod of my head.

  If Dexter noticed my doubt, he made a firm job of hiding it.

  “Anyway,” he said, “according to von Helmholtz’s book, it seems that, denied of any visual stimulus, the eye starts to fire off all by itself, seeing ghosts if you like, and the lights that are seen fall into a few groups. There are lines, and there are groups of dots. There are zigzags. And there are spirals.”

  “Spirals,” I echoed, watching Dexter’s hollow face as he spoke in the weak light of the bulb on his desk.

  “Did you know that these few shapes are the first shapes that humans ever made? In caves all across the world, at times so distant from us it can barely be imagined, the first men scrawled these shapes onto the rock, in charcoal and ochre, and by some miracle, we can still see them today.