by F. G. Cottam
The hospital was mid-Victorian, neo-Gothic in architectural style. It was a large building and occupied spacious grounds somewhere between the wooded heights of Dulwich and Crystal Palace. From the windows of the rooms facing northwest on the top floor of the hospital there was a view on a clear day of most of London, its landmarks indistinct from this distance except when the sun reflected off the river and gave the meandering city remote perspective and shape.
There was much about the hospital Seaton didn’t like. But his fall had been so sudden and appalling, he lacked the energy to hate or even very much resent the place. There were areas, though, that he could not help fearing. He feared the confinement of the narrow lifts, with their criss-cross iron gates that had to be securely drawn shut before the enclosed cubicles would drift up and down on coils of asthmatic cabling between floors. And he was frightened of the stairwells, dim stone chasms with purple marbling on the steps and bronze banister rails. He didn’t like the stairwells at all. So he stayed away from the upper floors of the hospital, where the recreation rooms and library and television room were sited and all the windows were always securely locked. And consequently, the view of the city in the distance below remained pretty much lost to him.
Odd aspects of the hospital inflicted emotional wounds he did not expect and could not defend himself against. The food was not terrible. But it was institutional. And its sweetish metallic smell of steam and daily stewing would contrast mockingly with Lucinda’s occasional cooking, in the cramped kitchen of their little Lambeth flat, as she conjured meals over their one bright summer together with the easy flair she brought to most things in scenes he had been complacent enough to think would go on being acted out between the two of them for years. Perhaps, even, forever.
They played music at the hospital through an old tannoy system. There seemed to be speakers everywhere and so there was really no avoiding it. And the patients were offered no choice concerning what was played. Whoever compiled the play list seemed very partial to the Marvin Gaye song ‘Abraham, Martin and John’. Seaton had been fond of it himself. But that had been before recent events. Now, in the hospital, he would wait for the line about the good dying young and think of his brother under the pond at Hampstead at the age of twenty-one, and he would be broken by the simple proven truth of it.
There was a maze in the grounds. It had fallen into neglect. It was a dense and careless topiary it was not clear had been planned as a maze until you stumbled into it. Seaton could imagine some mercantile prince having commissioned the mock-Gothic splendour of the whole estate in a prolonged fit of Pre-Raphaelite whimsy. That whimsy had dictated the garden and inspired the dense and mysterious puzzle of leafy passages on its eastern border. One day, towards dusk, a fortnight after his arrival and accompanied by a pretty nurse from Dundalk, Seaton wandered into the maze and they became separated. He tried very hard to find his way out as the terror blossomed in him and the afternoon light diminished. But when he knew he was completely lost, he cracked. The orderlies located him by his screams. He had soiled himself. He had to be strapped down and sedated after, so great was the panic in him brought on by his isolation in the maze. They injected him with Thorazin and it was two days before he regained consciousness and a full week before he came properly to his senses and wept with bitter shame at the spectacle he must have made of himself and the condition he had descended to.
It was at the hospital that he saw his first ghosts. Strictly speaking, he classed the three grinning figures seen in the mirror at the Fischer house as ghosts, too. But they had been malevolent, had meant him physical harm, he was sure. The ghosts he started to see at the hospital merely watched him through eyes that were dead, stiff in their period clothes, lurking in unexpected places. But he came to anticipate them, as he grew more watchful and less easy to shock. He hated it most when he awoke in the night to sense them clustered in the far corner of his room observing him in his sleep. Moonlight would stroke their musty clothes and vacant faces. They watched him silently. But he thought their still scrutiny intrusive nevertheless. He recognized none of them as people Pandora had mentioned in her journal. Perhaps she had met them and thought them unworthy of comment. Perhaps she had never known them at all. She had been a Fischer acolyte briefly, after all, intrigued by his powers only for a short and catastrophic period in the course of her enigmatic life.
He opted not to converse with the staff psychiatrists. Instead, he gazed at the walls of the rooms where they held what they called their interviews until the time was up. He felt guilty about this, about the scarce resources in public-health provision he was wasting week after week. But the sessions were scarce enough themselves. And the waste wasn’t wilful. They asked him about his dreams. In truth, he would dream about Lucinda in pleated summer silk, with the brim of a mourner’s topper forced down over her tawny bob and a monocle screwed into one eye above her death’s head grin. Or he would dream of a woman fleeing with a small boy through a familiar wood, the boy shivering in tattered underwear as the pearls around her throat snagged against branches thick as thorns. Or he would dream of a foul, thick-breathed beast that lurked on the edge of his vision and caused him to piss his pants, gushing, unmanned. He couldn’t describe his dreams, he didn’t think. If he did, he feared he would end up wearing those constraints he’d imagined being used behind the multitudes of doors spreading from the landings of Klaus Fischer’s madhouse.
His mother came. She walked with a stick, he saw, since his brother’s death. She patted his hand and told him he’d lost weight. He winked at her and told her he’d be okay with time. Time was all he needed, he said. Time, the healer.
‘And prayer,’ she said. And she rose. ‘Your friend Michael keeps me informed,’ she said. ‘A lovely boy, is Michael. From Liverpool.’
Seaton knew that among British places, his mother approved almost exclusively of Liverpool. He nodded. ‘I’ll be grand in the end, Mum. Just give it a bit of patience.’
He cried after her departure, but didn’t castigate himself for that. It was normal, he thought. It was nothing at all to do with the insanity.
He’d been there eight months when Doctor Malcolm Covey arrived. He’d seen the buds, tentative, breaking through the topsoil in the hospital grounds. Other than the neglected maze, the grounds were tended like punctilious tapestries, Seaton thought. A lot of people with green fingers seemed to be prey to mental instability. Maybe it was just that the mad craved neatness in their chaos.
‘You’re haunted, aren’t you?’ Doctor Covey said.
And Seaton broke his rule and looked at him. He’d seen him, of course. You couldn’t miss him, with his cape and his fedora hat and the blue puff in the white room of his Havana cigar, flagrant against the hospital regulations. But Seaton looked at Malcolm Covey, made eye contact, thinking, This one is different. This one is gifted.
‘There’s a great miasma of self-pity, of victimhood, gathered around you like an aura.’
Seaton said nothing.
‘Or in an image better suited to an Irishman, like the melancholy halo of a martyred saint.’
Seaton laughed. He had to. It felt good. It felt like straps unbuckling on him. ‘Where have you come from?’
‘I read about your case.’
‘And they put a name to me? In this account you read?’
‘Of course they didn’t. This is an ethical profession. But the account was bylined. The author, one of the house chaps here you persistently ignore, is an acquaintance. I offered to consult. Your mother was written to and very kindly consented. Here I am.’
‘Why?’
Covey shifted his considerable weight in his chair. He rolled his cigar in his fingers and then puffed at it. ‘I have some experience of the paranormal. That’s to say, I don’t dismiss its possibilities, its eventualities and repercussions. Not out of hand, I don’t, at least.’
Seaton nodded.
‘What are you thinking, Paul?’
‘That you’re a fierce ta
lker, so you are. For someone paid to listen.’
Covey said, ‘I know something of the history of the Fischer house.’
Seaton hadn’t told them he’d been there.
‘You have a press contact in the Metropolitan Police?’
‘Had. Bob Halliwell.’
‘Exactly. And Detective Sergeant Halliwell made it his business to follow the route taken to the Isle of Wight by your credit card. He talked on the telephone to the proprietor of a shop at Wootton Creek that rents bicycles.’
Covey pronounced ‘bicycles’ like they were machines just invented. God knew what he made of ‘credit cards’ and ‘telephones’, Seaton thought. He looked as though he would be far more comfortable with coffee houses and light opera and horse-drawn carriages. Seaton wondered had Bob, in these inquiries of his, contacted Lucinda.
‘Being the punctilious detective he is, Halliwell concluded that your interest in Pandora Gibson-Hoare put you in the Fischer house over the weekend we’re assuming triggered your breakdown. When he found out where you had been, he told the people here. Why are you laughing?’
Seaton wiped his eyes. ‘Because the Fischer house was once a loony bin. I’d forgotten about that. I’m just thinking it’s ironic, in the circumstances.’
‘You’re mistaken,’ Covey said. ‘It was never used as an asylum. Abandoned by Fischer, it was compulsorily purchased by Hampshire County Council in the spring of 1947. And the original intention was indeed to use it as a facility for the mentally deranged. But that never actually happened. Work was begun on converting the interior of the building, but the contractors met with a series of unforeseen problems and the scheme stalled and was quietly dropped.’
‘What sort of problems? Subsidence? A touch of rising damp?’
Covey studied the tip of his cigar. ‘I don’t know if I ought to tell you.’
Seaton laughed again. ‘You mean the information might affect the balance of my mind? Bit fucking late for that, doctor.’
‘The architect commissioned to carry out the conversion, a local man, was found at the foot of the cliff overlooking Freshwater Bay. It was thought to be a walking accident. But then the surveyor was discovered, dead of a fatal gunshot wound from a Luger pistol his wife said he’d brought back in his duffel bag as a souvenir from the war. It was the Great War she referred to, not the war so recently concluded. It could have been an accident. He could have been cleaning or playing with a loaded weapon.’
‘Rare bit of misfortune, though,’ Seaton said. ‘Given that he had owned the pistol for close on thirty years.’
Covey nodded and smoked. ‘Just so. Then a week after the cliff fall, two workmen disappeared from the site. They were not discovered until forty-eight hours after it was first realised they were missing. They were not searched for. It was assumed they’d walked off the job, in the manner common enough to itinerant labour at the time. Gone to a better-paid job, or to one working more companionable hours or nearer home. But they were found hanged, next to one another, from coat hooks on the wall of the billiard room in Fischer’s warren of a basement.’
Seaton had started to sweat. The thought of Fischer’s warren of a basement and the horrors that might lurk there had dragged him reluctantly back to Brightstone Forest. In his mind, the sun glinted, orange and baleful on the glass of the asymmetric windows of the tower through thinning trees. ‘I can’t go back there,’ he said out loud.
If Covey thought this remark directed towards him, he showed no indication of it. He didn’t react to Seaton’s words at all. ‘Work stopped on the lunatic scheme after that,’ he said. ‘The property remained an asset on the books of the county council. But I think the Fischer house is essentially an asset no one has ever known quite how to realise, or to profit from. No one since Fischer, at any rate.’
Seaton said, ‘Why does my case interest you?’
‘I’ve an interest in the paranormal,’ Covey said.
‘You’ve already told me that.’
‘Klaus Fischer had a similar interest, I believe, though he pursued it for reasons very different from mine. I’ve learned that he held ceremonies at the property in Brightstone Forest, in the guise of parties, until 1933. In 1933, he very abruptly left. It seems that fifty years ago he quite fled from his domain. But in the seven years he owned the house, I suspect he was rather industrious, after his own peculiar fashion.’
‘Psychiatrists don’t believe in magic,’ Seaton said.
‘I’m here to be persuaded,’ Covey said.
‘It isn’t my job to persuade you.’
‘Nevertheless. I’d like to know what happened to you over that weekend.’
‘I’m disinclined to tell you.’
Covey shrugged. ‘You might change your mind. The man who doesn’t change his mind, doesn’t think. Do you know who said that?’
‘No.’
‘Take a guess.’ Take a card. Take any card.
‘Wittgenstein,’ Seaton said.
Covey smiled. ‘Freddie Laker,’ he said.
And Seaton laughed again.
He saw Malcolm Covey once a week for a month. Over four hour-long sessions, he told him everything. Or he thought he did. At the end of the month, he agreed to let Covey hypnotise him. Covey told him the hypnosis was to enable him to recall details about the weekend on the Isle of Wight he might have forgotten. He might have been so shocked or scared by some of the things he had seen and heard there that he had suppressed them in the manner common to victims of trauma. The time Seaton had spent asleep on the forest floor near the stream seemed particularly to interest Covey.
Seaton agreed to the hypnosis, even though he knew that undergoing it would, in a way, break his own pledge never to revisit the Fischer domain.
He agreed because, so far, his experience of talking to Covey had helped him. He was better able to sleep, much less prey to nightmares. The panic attacks he had suffered in the shower at the hospital, and on one horrible occasion in a hospital lift, stopped occurring. Mostly, though, he was helped by Covey’s demeanour, as the psychiatrist puffed on his cigar and listened to the tale unfold. Covey never once looked incredulous. He never once betrayed any doubt through tone of voice or facial expression about the credibility of the story or his patient’s sanity. Maybe he believed what he was hearing, Seaton thought. If he didn’t, the man was a convincing actor.
‘The iconography can be explained in one of two ways,’ Covey said, in their final session at the hospital, after the hypnosis.
‘The iconography?’
‘The stuff you thought you heard and saw. The period detail.’
‘Hear and see. It’s still very much with me.’
‘The things you hear and see, then. The music played on shellac 78s. The camphor and lavender water and spats and morning-coat paraphernalia.’
‘I wish I could dismiss it as mere paraphernalia.’
‘It could simply be that you are suggestible. You are, quite, you know. It comes, of course, from Pandora’s account. The trappings of her narrative inform your mind and, crucially, your imagination in ways that disturb you. Consequently, you devise your own nightmare movie and fill it with period props.’
‘To what end?’
Covey hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know? You can surely do better than that, doctor. It’s your job to know.’
‘There’s a bleaker possibility,’ Covey said.
‘Illuminate me,’ Seaton said.
‘You won’t be illuminated, Paul. The alternative explanation is much darker, you see.’
Seaton exhaled. He felt frightened. Covey’s voice had taken on a gentler and more sympathetic tone. He realised that he had tensed his own wasting muscles, had braced himself in his chair in the way someone might steel themselves against the delivery of awful news. He thought, though, despite his fear, that even bad news would be a welcome change from the staleness and tedium of hospital routine. Seaton knew enough, now, to know that the routine here wou
ld keep him stable. He knew, equally, that it would never be enough to make him well. This part, what the doctor was about to say, was why Covey was here. Everything else had been preamble. All of it. Sigmund Freud and Freddie Laker. Wittgenstein and Jesus Christ.
‘Illuminate me,’ Seaton said again.
‘The second possibility, is that the thing really does exist. They brought it into being. In the terminology of their own coven, they spawned it. This would have taken powerful magic and it would have been done only at terrible risk. But Crowley and Fischer were powerful magicians. So, I believe, was Wheatley, however buffoonishly he came across to you in the Gibson-Hoare journal.
‘What the demon knows of us, mankind if you will, it first learned from Fischer and his circle. We’re all at our most impressionable in youth. And it was so very young and hungry and impatient for sensation in those far-off days of Fischer’s house parties, was it not?’
‘I don’t know,’ Seaton said. ‘I don’t know anything about demonology, Doctor Covey. I don’t know why something from hell would have a taste for Fats Waller. I don’t care, frankly. I’m beginning to doubt, though, that you are who you say you are.’ And beginning to regret, too, allowing himself to be hypnotised.
Covey leaned back in his chair. ‘Do you think your brother’s death was accidental?’
‘I do. It was a coincidence. Thinking otherwise is very tempting. But Patrick died because he was in a hazardous place, careless because the day had been long and hot and he was drunk.’
‘Why were you not taken by the beast?’
‘Because it can’t cross running water. It had me. And then it didn’t. It’s the only explanation.’
‘You’ve just told me you know nothing about demonology.’
‘It’s the reason they spawned the thing on an island,’ Seaton said. ‘I’ve had a great deal of time to ponder on this. Tides, Doctor Covey. Currents. They wanted to keep the thing corralled. After a fashion, for more than fifty years, they’ve succeeded.’