Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  “He just died,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Gillespy died, of heart failure, supposedly. But, I dunno…”

  Ryan looked out into the night. For once, he was not looking at or for anything. After a moment he sighed.

  “That’s rough,” he said at last. “Gillespy was a decent sort. Heart failure must have been quick. Best any of us can hope for. Do they still bury lunatics in unmarked graves? Even better. Let him rest in peace.”

  “Do you think… he was killed?”

  Ryan looked at me sidelong then scanned up and down the street. He ignored a single car speeding noisily past us. “Undoubtedly.”

  “But how?”

  Ryan smiled with half of his mouth. “If you ever get an answer to that question, be sure to include it in your report,” he said. “Poor old Gillespy. Still, his shuffling off is convenient. They had intimated they would prefer him that way. Dead men tell no tales, et cetera.”

  Them, They.

  “Lucky I didn’t have to ask you to volunteer for that particular fatigue,” he said.

  Ryan was the tough sort who would shoot a wounded comrade rather than see him slowly bleed to death in no-man’s land. He would expect the same treatment himself, if it came to it. I could understand that view, but it takes a hard, hard man to pull the trigger on one of his own. The army is dead set against it, but hunters are not soldiers.

  “As to the question of what we’re tracking,” Ryan resumed, “we have to thank your friend, Miss Horniman, for summoning it.”

  Miss Horniman was an individual whom I had encountered in my previous case. A scion of the Horniman Tea family, she had been instrumental in helping identify a certain object in the Horniman Museum, though I had not acquainted her with the full facts of the case. In her youth, Miss Horniman had been a member of the Golden Dawn, an esoteric society dedicated to magical research.

  In the course of the Horniman case, I had alerted TDS to the fact, some decades earlier, that her group might have been more dangerous than they thought. Most supposed psychics were tricksters, or deluded themselves. A few were not. Evidently, an investigation had been launched.

  “There was a group of women within the Golden Dawn, who called themselves the Sphere. Well-meaning do-gooders trying to use their powers for world peace.” From his tone, Ryan might have been talking about the Calcutta Ladies’ Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Bengal Tigers. “Seems they made psychic contact with an entity in the late nineties. It disappeared, supposedly for another plane of existence. But maybe it has just taken that long to get here in person after they opened the door.”

  I tended to take astral planes and psychic beings with a generous pinch of salt. Most of the people who went in for that sort of thing just had overly active imaginations. As my friend and former business partner Skinner remarked, it is funny how many people who believe in psychic powers think they’re gifted, or sensitive to vibrations, or are the reincarnation of someone important. I read once about a party where two grand ladies ended up refusing to speak to each other because they both claimed to be Cleopatra in a previous life… They and a hundred others.

  But, occasionally, there is a genuine talent, a real phenomenon. Which is something I would not believe had I not had ample first-hand experience.

  “What was this entity?”

  “No real name. They called it the Egyptian Astral,” he said. “Don’t read too much into that. They summoned it using Egyptian symbols. Popular back then. Miss Horniman eventually twigged that it wasn’t exactly benign, that it was something alien and malevolent. They carried out a banishing ritual, but there’s an old saying about not calling forth that which you cannot put down. And now it’s here, feeding off humans, or…”

  The pause stretched out. I knew he would finish if I gave him time.

  “Or maybe it’s just playing with us,” he said.

  I wanted to press him on what I should be looking for or taking note of. Would this entity be something that had landed from outer space, like a falling star? Would it be a miasmal, malevolent presence, or a concrete being, and if the latter, what form might it take? I had seen alien beings before and knew they took a variety of forms.

  Ryan’s head snapped round suddenly, and he looked away from me to stare down the street. I knew that movement. It was the way a gamekeeper turns when he hears a poacher, or a policeman at the tread of a burglar, or a hunter when he hears a tiger on the jungle path. Ryan’s eyes bored through the night.

  “What – “

  He held up a hand for silence.

  I had heard nothing and looked in vain down the street, trying to follow his gaze.

  In the distance, I could see two men emerging into the lit circle beneath a streetlight. They were indistinct, but I had an impression of broad-shouldered types in long coats, moving rapidly towards us, side by side. They were too far away to make out their faces or anything about them, but their gait conveyed something of relentless determination. It was as though they went on rails rather than striding.

  “Run, Stubbs!” Ryan ordered.

  I have never been one to run from a fight, but this was a categorical order, and there was something about those marching figures… I do not know what I would have done if I had been on my own, but my legs seemed to move of their own accord as soon as he spoke.

  I thought I saw something in Ryan’s arms. He had not held anything a minute before—I would have sworn it—but he seemed to be opening a long leather case, of the sort that might hold a rifle. But it was only an impression, and I was already going.

  “And for God’s sake,” Ryan shouted, “don’t look back!”

  I took off like a rabbit into the shadow between lights, hoping there were no slippery leaves underfoot.

  A dull boom, more like muffled thunder than a gunshot, swept over me. It was oddly drawn out. My back prickled as I ran. As I rounded the corner, there was a tremendous shriek. My first thought was that it was a human cry, but the sound rose to the pitch of grinding metal, the noise a locomotive makes when the wheels stick and slide along the steel rails.

  By an effort of will, I did not turn my head but ran on, as fast as I could, past street after street until I made it to the safety of home. I fumbled and dropped my latchkey on the doorstep. There was a pounding in my ears, but I registered that it was only my heart, not pursuing footsteps. I was almost calm by the time I entered then closed the door, but I took care to bolt it behind me.

  That night, I was troubled by a recurrent dream in which I was pursued down dark streets by pairs of men running on silent feet. Every time I thought I had lost them, they appeared again out of the shadows, closer than before. Their faces were bland, there was something wrong with their hands, and I knew it would be death if they caught me. I managed to stay ahead somehow—I’ve always been faster than most men of my size—and some time before dawn, they stopped pursuing me, and I slipped away into the quiet byways of quaint domestic dreams.

  Chapter Three: Inside the Asylum

  Dr Beltov was the senior physician and greatly respected, if not liked, by one and all. He had studied in Vienna and Paris and Berlin, where his mind had taken on a fine edge by honing against the finest thinkers in Europe. I don’t know how many languages he spoke—and I’m sure it was quite a few—but his English was as correct as a BBC announcer.

  Beltov was rather direct, without the polished manners of the other doctors. Unlike the others, who came and went as though they passed through a revolving door, Beltov was not planning to move on to his own practice, where he could help fashionable ladies with their neuroses. He did not have the right look; he favoured jackets a few shades too bright and in unlikely colours, paired with equally unexpected shirts and ties.

  Also unlike the others, Beltov had a passion—you might almost call it a mania—for the precise recording of clinical data. He had no time for vagueness or intuition, but insisted that every piece of information must be recorded accurately, as if he w
as a detective collecting pieces of evidence to catch a murderer. You had to respect his thoroughness, though I could see why the other doctors found him to be such a trial. Nothing got past him that wasn’t stamped, certified, and guaranteed.

  “He’s a stickler,” was Miller’s verdict, which he unfailingly attached to every anecdote about Beltov’s insistence on forms be filled in and details noted, all the way down—and I do not exaggerate—to recording bowel movements.

  People thought Beltov was a humourless medical machine, but I do not believe this was true. As a case in point, while the other doctors had two or sometimes three framed certificates on display, Dr Beltov had at least a dozen covering the wall beside his desk, some of them rather extravagant. He caught me scrutinising one once. I’d been trying to decipher the gothic curlicues, but even the language was impossible to tell.

  “This one records my achievement in swimming twenty-five metres in primary school,” Beltov told me, with an entirely straight face. “My research indicates that the content of the certificates on the wall is not relevant for their effect, just the total number.” I’d assumed this was his sense of humour.

  Beltov was a man of contradictions. Insisting that patients needed to be treated rather than merely stored, “like cabbages in a barn,” as he said, he was the one responsible for the therapeutic regime. He instructed all sorts of therapies be carried out, some of them most inconvenient for all concerned and with little obvious utility, with their failures duly recorded in great detail. But he was the most sceptical of any of the doctors when it came to individual treatments. He openly doubted their efficacy, and always demanded more data when one appeared to have succeeded.

  “Five centuries of chaining up patients in the dark, and of whipping and abusing them, has proved that it is possible to worsen their condition with suitable treatment,” said Beltov. “All we need is an equally reliable means of improving their condition. This will probably take longer.”

  When I came to Dr Beltov with news of Gillespy’s death, the first thing he did was to note the time on the clock on his mantelpiece. The splendid clock was Beltov’s pride, unique in its having a case made of glass, with all of the moving brass innards visible. Having checked the clock, he double-checked the time again against his pocket watch. The glass clock, though impressive, was not an especially reliable timepiece, and it required constant adjustment.

  He rattled off a string of questions about how and when we had found Gillespy, and I answered him.

  “I will investigate,” he said. “You must answer my questions in writing and record everything that happened, as soon as possible. Memory is fragile. No detail must escape.”

  He left me there with pen and paper, returning twenty minutes later.

  “It is a tragedy,” Beltov said. He sounded tired. “All men must die, but they should not die so young. The provisional cause is heart failure due to choking, and the coroner will confirm this.”

  I had heard that men could swallow their own tongues and choke themselves deliberately. Perhaps this was one such case.

  “But in the end, we are responsible. Would he have died if he were not in this place? We cannot know.” He looked at the clock. “We know so little, and there is so little time. We cannot undo the past, but we must learn what we can. Write!” I had slackened in my note taking to listen to him. “Write everything before it fades.”

  It was as though Gillespy’s death might still be worthwhile if we could gather data from it. Beltov was of course correct about heart failure, being a doctor as well as a psychologist. The exact cause, assuming there to be a triggering factor, remained unknown.

  “I will do the autopsy,” said Beltov. One of his more gruesome habits was to dissect the brain of every man who died in the hospital, searching for physical signs of pathology. Sometimes, madness could be explained by a tumour or growth pressing on a part of the brain, but nobody knew what caused such tumours. It had been suggested that the tumours were caused by a bacterium and might spread by infection. Nobody knew, but Beltov was painstakingly adding to his notes.

  “For all the good it’ll do,” Donnelly said to me later. Donnelly was a cheerful cynic and a great help to me. “He knows more about the bowel movements of every man in this place than I know about my own. If there was a Nobel Prize for counting shit, your man would be saying hello to the king of Sweden.”

  I had come to assist him in restraining a patient while Dr Easton took a sample of spinal fluid. Easton was hearty rather than precise, and he did not share Beltov’s mania for precision. The rather vampiric procedure he was undertaking involved sticking a long needle in between the vertebrae. The patients were understandably anxious and prone to resist.

  “This might sting a little,” Easton said lightly as he stabbed in the immense needle, having checked that the man was fully immobilised. “I know it hurts, but it’s necessary.”

  Dr Easton was a ruddy, fair-haired man, as utterly English as Beltov was foreign. He had the build of one who had played rugby for his college ten years previously, but was now more in the habit of enjoying a good dinner. Easton adopted a rather casual style rather than adorning his speech with medical jargon, so everything he said sounded like plain common sense. There were limits to his patience, though—he had a way of standing too close and talking too loudly when he was asserting himself with recalcitrant patients.

  “Hope for a negative result,” Donnelly said afterwards.

  “Hope for a positive one,” said Easton. “That way we can treat him.”

  The test, Donnelley explained, was for syphilis, which caused a sort of dementia that could be cured. The cure, however, was not so pleasant, as it involved deliberately infecting the patient with malaria. Apparently, the malarial fever burned out the venereal disease.

  “An ingenious treatment,” said Easton, “and with a pretty good success rate. Maybe a bit uncomfortable.”

  “I’d rather stay mad,” Donnelly said, “and stay safe in here with three meals a day and no work to do, instead of going back and telling me missus I had the clap and getting what for.”

  “That because you’re a feckless Irishman with no sense of responsibility,” said Easton, but he said it lightly. Donnelly was a good worker and a reliable colleague, even if the doctors found him too clever by half.

  Beltov continually clashed with the other doctors. Dr Hamilton, a Scot who was a specialist in the field of talking cures, generally gave him little trouble. Hamilton had the humility to admit that such treatments had little utility in the asylum setting and was content to learn, though he still put forward theories about archetypes and other theoretical entities, all of which irked Beltov.

  “You say this is true because you learned from Spencer, who learned from Kaufmann, who learned from Jung, who learned from the great Freud himself,” he fumed. “One day this spiral will grow until we are all students of students of Freud. But what is at the centre of it all? What is the source? How does Freud know?”

  “Revealed truth, perhaps, Dr Beltov,” said Hamilton.

  “That is not science.”

  Hamilton was content to leave it at that. His world might contain other types of truth than those admitted by Beltov, but in the hospital where Beltov reigned, only scientific cures were acknowledged. Dr Easton was more of a brawler and engaged Beltov at every opportunity. I once caught the two arguing when I went to empty the ashtrays in the doctors’ common room.

  “If we can get Ross’s war record, I’m pretty sure we can diagnose him with shell shock,” said Easton.

  “Shell shock is nothing more than a convenient portmanteau into which you can stuff every case that suits you,” said Dr Beltov.

  “Hardly,” said Easton, without rancour. “We have a patient with the worst night terrors I’ve seen, and numerous other symptoms that tally with shell shock, and if his service history shows he was under fire—”

  “I was taking issue with your interpretation of shell shock as physical brain injury,” s
aid Beltov.

  “Shell shock, as we understand it, is surely caused by the shock of shells,” said Easton. “The percussive impact of a shell-burst is damaging, and the brain is a sensitive organ. If—or when—you open up the cranium and see the haematomas, we could prove it, but the external signs are a fair indicator, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would not say,” said Beltov. “The correlation of shell shock with explosions is questionable… What is it, Stubbs?”

  “I’m sorry, Dr Beltov, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop on your conversation,” I said, and started to move away.

  “But I think you have something to say to us,” said Beltov. “Say it.”

  “Not really,” I said. “At least not medically. I’m not qualified. But I served in the Royal Regiment of Artillery in the war. Only as a bombardier. But they always taught us that the blast from a shell wasn’t effective.”

  “Not effective?” said Easton, an ironic smile about his lips. “I’ve seen pictures of a whole landscape of craters, and I don’t think they were left by moles!”

  I laughed politely. “Not effective against personnel,” I said. “That’s why we had to have shrapnel shells, you see. It’s the shell fragments that do all the damage. The blast itself… The explosion is very loud.” Exactly how loud you will never know until you have been under bombardment yourself, which is a memorable experience. I doubted whether Easton had ever been on a battlefield. “It pounds your ears like nothing else, but it doesn’t have much real force. Blasts can destroy fortifications, but shrapnel is what causes casualties.”

  “Thank you, Stubbs,” said Easton, still ironic. “Fascinating anecdotal evidence.”

  “Yes, very interesting,” said Beltov, taking out a notebook and a mechanical pencil to scribble something down. “It should not be difficult to discover the actual pressure exerted by a shell.”