by R. N. Morris
‘So. This is it. Your worst fear.’
‘I suppose it is.’
Dr Leaming made some adjustments to the control panel. The lighting in the room dimmed and modulated, so that all Silas could see now was the reflection of his own nudity exposed. It was as if his ghost had left his body and was hovering above him.
‘What do you see?’
‘A man.’
‘Do you recognize him?’
‘I suppose it’s me. It’s a mirror, after all. That’s how mirrors work.’
‘And it frightens you, what you see?’
‘It’s not that that I’m frightened of. It’s what’s in here.’ Silas watched himself tap the side of his head.
There was a heavy clunk of gears and the chair began to vibrate.
‘Everything bad that happens to you is your own fault. You cause it. You make it happen. It’s punishment for something bad you did long ago.’ There was a beat before Dr Leaming added: ‘Is that what you think?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not the only one to have such thoughts, you know.’
‘I don’t suppose I am.’
‘But in your case, you have more reason to entertain them than most.’
‘Do I?’
‘You’ve killed people.’
‘In the line of duty. If I hadn’t killed them, they would have gone on to commit worse crimes.’
Silas felt the first jolt in his right thigh. It was not exactly the pleasant tingle that Dr Leaming had led him to expect. He cried out and saw the grimace of shock distort his features. And then laughed. It really hadn’t been as bad as all that. It was just that he wasn’t expecting it.
‘That’s what you tell yourself. But you don’t believe it. You killed them because you wanted to. Because it gave you satisfaction to do so. Because you are a killer.’ The strange thing was, there was nothing disapproving or judgemental in Dr Leaming’s voice. ‘That’s what you’re afraid of.’
‘Yes.’
‘It started with your father’s suicide.’
‘Yes.’
‘You wanted your father dead.’
‘No.’
Dr Leaming made some further adjustments to the control panel. This time Silas was ready for the jolt of electricity in his thigh. His reaction was limited to an involuntary twitch of the leg.
‘You see, it isn’t so bad. You don’t have anything to fear from the chair. Your fear is up there, above you.’
‘What if I hadn’t said “myself”? What if I’d said “spiders”?’
‘Where does the fear of spiders come from?’
‘Some kind of primitive survival instinct? It seems irrational now. But perhaps it began as a tactic for protecting us from poisonous spiders.’
‘No, but where does it come from, really? The fear? All fear?’
‘From ourselves?’
‘Exactly. So whatever you had said, eventually you would have had to confront yourself.’
Silas frowned, self-consciously creating a thoughtful expression. It was hard not to be self-conscious confronted by a reflection of himself naked.
‘Why do you blame yourself for your father’s death? You couldn’t possibly be responsible. Why do you feel guilt over that? Over something you played no part in?’
‘Perhaps if he had been able to talk to me …’
He felt another jolt of electricity through the muscle of his thigh.
‘Don’t lie to yourself, Silas. You must be honest, otherwise this won’t work.’
‘I don’t know what you … what you’re driving at.’
‘You don’t feel guilt at your father’s death. Your guilt is because you wanted him dead.’
Silas shook his head in denial of Leaming’s suggestion. But he saw in the eyes that looked down at him an acknowledgement of its truth.
After Silas began the treatment, he and Timon Medway no longer sought each other out at the pump house. From now on, they were never alone in each other’s company. Whenever their paths crossed, they stared blankly ahead.
They were aware that their unlikely friendship had not gone unnoticed. Mr Ince made no secret of watching them; he meant them to know that he was on to them.
It seemed they both intuitively felt that their plans were entering a crucial phase. Silas was astonished to discover that he missed Medway’s company. Although he accepted that they were wise to let this distance grow between them, he suspected that Medway had turned from him, possibly because of some unwitting offence that he had committed. He felt himself cast adrift.
To compensate him for this loss, he spent as much time as he was allowed in Henry Hicks’ undemanding company. Mr Ince saw this too. Silas had to accept that he was one of the two most interesting individuals in the asylum as far as Mr Ince was concerned. The other being Timon Medway.
A rectangle of tremulous light floated in the darkness above him. Framed within it was the naked body of a man. Freakishly pale and thin, the man lay as still as a corpse laid out on a mortuary table. As if the thing he most feared was movement.
The man was strangely familiar, like a figure in a dream whom you take to be a close friend, but who turns out to be a phantom invented by your sleeping mind.
The room, and the world that contained it, had been swallowed by the darkness.
They were alone now, he and this man who watched him with a detached and slightly quizzical expression, as if none of this was anything to do with him.
They were suspended high above the void, with nothing but the void above them.
Out of the void, a voice spoke to him: ‘What do you fear, Silas?’
For the first time, he found himself at a loss how to reply. Perhaps there was nothing he feared any more.
He looked into the eyes of the only other man in existence and at last recognized his fear.
‘Him.’
He felt a sharp punch in the back of his thigh, as if he had been struck with a hot hammer. He saw the man shift his leg uncomfortably, as if he had felt it too.
‘Who is he?’
Of course, he had always known. That is the way with dreams. If this was a dream. ‘It’s me.’
‘Good. Very good. And why do you fear yourself so much, Silas?’
‘Because of what’s inside me.’
‘What’s inside you?’
‘Horrible, horrible things.’
‘You have to confront what is inside you. You have to confront your fears.’
The void was suddenly filled with a screech of grinding machinery. Whatever was supporting him began to quake violently. He saw the man – the man that was himself – tremble as if gripped by a fit of the chills.
‘We must shake the fears out of you.’
The darkness folded in on itself, then shimmered and shifted and rippled as if something was being unfurled in it. There was a change to the soft glowing rectangle, a subtle transformation in the light that illuminated it.
And something happened to the body that was contained in it too. It flickered and faded and then came back into view. But now it was covered in black markings, almost every inch of it inked and scrawled with dark graffiti.
He scanned the markings with a mixture of horror and wonder. A whole world of pain and cruelty was depicted on that body now – on his body, for it was still his face that confronted him. He saw decapitated corpses and corpses pierced with knives and needles, corpses bent over and obscenely violated, corpses bound and bloody, bodies dismembered and rotting. He saw the mutilated corpses of women and children, and even babies.
‘What do you see now?’
‘Death.’
‘The death that is in you. That was in you. The death that is the source of your fear. Death is the fear that brings all other fears into focus. It’s what gives fear its stringent taste.’
The noise of machinery intensified. There was another adjustment of the darkness and he felt himself slowly lifted higher in the void.
‘What’s happening?’
‘You’
re going to meet your fears. Head on.’
It must have been a trick of the light – or rather a trick of the dark. But he had the sense that the markings suddenly came to life, twitching and writhing with an unnatural animation. Not that he was looking at them directly. It was like the tree near the pump house, thrashing its branches about when he couldn’t see it, only to freeze into a rigid pose whenever he was looking at it.
The cranking and ratcheting stopped abruptly and the rising void juddered to a standstill. He was inches from his own face.
Then his face, too – like the rest of his body – had flickered and faded. Another face appeared where his had been. This face was familiar to him, yet still he could not prevent himself from gasping when it was revealed to him.
‘What do you see?’
But the other man’s face had vanished as soon as it had appeared. His own was staring back at him.
‘Timon Medway.’
There was another stabbing punch in the back of his thigh. This time he had expected it. Even so, his knee jerked up, hitting something solid and setting it rattling.
‘You saw the face of evil. The face of your own evil. There is a Timon Medway inside you. That’s why you have killed so many men. You are trying to kill what there is of them inside of you. That is the only way you know to overcome your fears. But you cannot overcome your fears that way. Because there will always be another Timon Medway. Someone else to remind you of the evil inside yourself.’
‘What can I do?’
The question went unanswered, except for the heavy grinding of machinery. He felt himself lowered once more in the void. The rectangle of light in which his body was framed flickered one last time and then went black, its negative imprint shimmering for a moment on his retina.
THIRTY-SIX
Silas breathed in the sticky heat of the greenhouse. It reminded him of another place, a hot, airless room in the roof space of a high building. Except the air was fuller here, bursting with moisture and rich, clammy smells. A cloying vegetal sweat mingled with the tang of fertilizer.
He had managed to recruit Henry Hicks into the gardening detail. Silas thought it would do the young man good not just to get outside now and then, but to put his back into some honest toil. He found the work gave him purpose, and he hoped it would do the same for his strange friend.
To plant and tend and harvest the food that they all ate – it simply felt like a good thing to do. It made him feel less hopeless, somehow. It connected him to life, to all the lives that were lived there. Once, he might have shunned any bonds of community with these suffering people. Now he welcomed them.
And just to watch a plant grow from a seed, to measure its sprouting shoots with his gaze, to support those shoots with canes, to pick the parasites from its leaves, to watch the burgeoning fruit upon its stems – all this was a privilege, wherever it was experienced.
Henry’s passivity made it difficult to know whether he was a willing participant. Wherever you placed him, whatever you asked of him, it seemed to be all the same to Henry.
They were sowing spring cabbage in planting trays. Silas plunged a forefinger into the compost. It was Henry’s job to drop one or two seeds into each hole, which Silas then covered over. It was undemanding and absorbing. They worked in companionable silence.
Silas heard the scrape of the greenhouse door opening. He straightened his back and looked around.
The man whose body and face had replaced his own in the darkness was approaching.
They had not spoken since the treatment began. There was an urgency now to their exchange, as if they were not sure how long they would have together.
‘How does he do it?’
Timon Medway had reached the bench where they were planting the cabbage seeds. Henry Hicks seemed to have an instinctive fear of Medway. He backed away, leaving Silas and Medway together.
Medway affected a wounded expression and waved a sarcastic farewell with the fingers of one hand, bending them lamely at the knuckle. He glanced distractedly at the contents of the bench, picking up an empty terracotta pot which was on a slate tile.
Medway stared into the plant pot, as if he expected something to emerge from it, a white rabbit perhaps, or a dove.
‘Oh, simple stage craft. There is a two-way mirror in the ceiling. I am lying behind it, on a glass platform raised a few inches above the mirror. By carefully changing the way the light falls on the mirror he is able to make parts of me appear and disappear.’
‘And the markings on your body? Are they …?’
‘Tattoos.’ Medway put the pot down with extraordinary delicacy, as if he believed it to be an ancient Ming vase. With typical perversity, he did not put it back where he had found it and now noticed the slate tile it had been sitting on. He touched it lightly with a finger, as if he doubted its reality. Once that was confirmed, he turned his full gaze on Silas.
‘Permanent?’
‘I am life. The bringer of light. But I am also death. It is right that I should be marked as such.’
‘How can you bear to have those monstrous designs on your skin? Forever!’
Medway frowned as if he did not understand the question. ‘It is necessary,’ he insisted.
‘Is that what he does to everyone?’
‘The timing may vary. But the essentials are the same.’
‘Is it always you?’
‘Yes. I appear to be most people’s idea of evil incarnate. Even lunatics’.’
‘But what if they don’t know who you are?’
Timon Medway was indignant at this suggestion. ‘Everyone knows me! And even, let us say, for argument’s sake, someone does not recognize my face, they recognize what is in me. That’s what matters. Besides, I usually make some efforts to get to know them before the treatment begins.’
‘As you did with me?’
Medway smiled. ‘Well, in your case it wasn’t necessary, was it? We already knew each other. You know full well why I renewed our acquaintance.’
But Silas suddenly felt that he didn’t know anything any more.
Medway must have seen the wariness in his eyes. ‘You do trust me, don’t you?’
‘I would be insane to trust you.’
Medway found this inordinately funny. The gourd of husks was briskly shaken.
‘How does it work? How does it make them fearless?’
‘Don’t you feel it working on you?’
‘I don’t know. I …’
‘You haven’t tested it. Perhaps we should.’ He turned back to the bench, picked up the slate tile and held it in front of him by both hands, as if to shield himself from a blow to the solar plexus. ‘What do people fear most?’
‘Don’t start that!’
‘Pain, I would say. Wouldn’t you?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘If Leaming has been successful then you will have no fear of pain. You will not hesitate, for example, to clench your hand into a fist and punch this slate with all your strength.’
‘Why should I do that?’
‘You will learn from it.’
‘I will break my hand.’
‘I thought you trusted me?’ Medway pouted reproachfully and gave the slate a brandishing shake, meant to show how firmly he was holding it. ‘Aim at the tile with all your might. Everything will be fine. Trust me.’
The tile was about half an inch thick, perhaps a little less. A substantial enough object not to shatter at a blow from him. It was fair to say that his hand would come off worse in any altercation.
But whatever else he was feeling – bemusement, annoyance, and even boredom – Silas had to admit fear was not among his emotions just then. How could it be? He was entirely in control of what he was doing.
And so he clenched his fist, tensed the muscle of his forearm as he drew it back.
‘Ankanchankan!’ They had forgotten Henry Hicks.
Silas looked up to reassure him. ‘It’s all right, Henry. Nothing bad is going to happen.’
He clenched his hand even tighter. He felt the energy building in the tension of his biceps.
Timon Medway’s reflexes were admirably quick. He whipped up the slate and jumped to one side. But he was not quite quick enough. Silas caught his knuckles on the abrasive tile as it was swept away. He hardly felt it, but there was an almost musical ping as he made glancing contact.
‘Sorry!’ said Medway, grinning in a way that suggested he was not sorry at all. He dropped the tile carelessly to the floor. ‘That wasn’t supposed to happen. Let me see it.’
Silas held out his outstretched hand, showing specks of blood drawn through the grazed skin.
‘You’ll live.’
‘I trusted you.’
‘And you were right to. Did you break your knuckles?’
Silas frowned at his wound, as a delayed pain started to make itself felt. He shook his hand vigorously to ward it off.
‘Sattass dass?’ wondered Henry.
‘It’s all right. It’s nothing.’
The rusty squawk of the greenhouse door sounded its alarm again. All three turned to see Mr Ince approaching, his stride curiously assertive and wary at the same time. He walked with his pelvis thrust out, but his shoulders drawn back. As if he was hastening towards something which repulsed him.
‘What’s going on here?’
‘We’re sowing cabbages,’ said Silas.
Mr Ince squared up to Silas, but found himself to lack a couple of inches on the other man. To compensate for this, he took out his key fob and jangled it in his hand, as if he was considering giving it a good swing on its chain, the way you might take out a dog for exercise.
All of this proved too stressful for Henry. He gave a high-pitched whine and then cried: ‘Aldan sandantarn.’
Mr Ince snapped. ‘I’m sick of your fucking gibberish!’ He spun on his heels away from Silas and in one motion swung the key fob, now at the full extent of its chain, lashing it across Henry’s face.
Silas rushed at Mr Ince with his shoulder down, pushing him into shelves of brassica seedlings. The shelves clattered apart, bringing all their contents crashing to the ground. But the two men were left standing. Silas had one hand at Mr Ince’s throat. Mr Ince’s face darkened. He eyed Silas with a steady hatred.