Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  Chapter Eight: Voices in the Dark

  When patients were first admitted to the asylum, their effects were catalogued and stored away. Personal possessions were not exactly forbidden, but they caused problems, and few were approved. The usual accoutrements of life—house keys, loose change, wallet, watch—were not needed there. There were no doors to unlock, nothing to spend money on, and no appointments to keep. Jewellery and other items that might be subject to theft were also discouraged because of the trouble that thievery, or the accusations of it, could cause. In any case, cufflinks, tie-pins, and the like were unnecessary. Pen-knives and lighters were of course strictly forbidden; I supposed an inmate might have had a cigarette case, but I never saw one.

  Clothing was a standard-issue uniform, as in many hospitals, so patients were relieved not only of their possessions, but also of the skin they wore in the outside world. Their clothes were kept, along with the other effects, in a storeroom.

  Gaining access to the storeroom required some subterfuge. Truly valuable items were lodged in an immense safe, which was camouflaged to look like a mahogany cabinet, in the superintendent’s office. Even so, the storeroom could only be accessed by special permission, or when checking patients in or out. A good deal of thought went into ensuring that the attendants could not pilfer anything, human nature being what it is.

  It was going to be an exceedingly risky business. Getting caught would mean instant dismissal and possibly police proceedings. That would be the end of my mission, and the end of my chances of finding anything out. It would put me under equal danger from both my overlords in TDS and from the opponent whose track I was attempting to pick up. The whole thing had to be managed with some care. If successful though it might give me my first real glimmerings of what I was up against.

  It was not without trepidation that I put my plan into action.

  I picked a quiet night. There were few regular duties on the night shift, but it was mainly a matter of doing the rounds and being there in the event of any incidents. While there was not much to do, at least three attendants on the premises were required, in case of any contingencies. There was a rota of rounds and checks to be made between ten at night and six in the morning, but the place was often as quiet as the grave.

  Miller and I had been sparring, our hands padded with towels as makeshift gloves, at his insistence. He was not a fast learner. I could drill a movement into him with enough repetitions, but as soon as he saw an opening, he forgot everything, dropped his guard, and swung wildly. If Miller ever entered a boxing ring, he would be carried out feet first.

  The activity did at least satisfy Miller, and when the half-hour came around, he agreed readily enough to walk the patrol circuit. It would take him fifteen minutes at the least, more if he stopped to talk, or box shadows, or practice headstands in the empty hall.

  Miller paused on his way out. “Hey, Harry, what’s the second sign of madness?” Before I could reply, he gave the answer. “Hairs on your palms! What’s the first sign of madness?”

  “Looking for them,” I said.

  “Looking for them!” he repeated, with his gap-toothed smile. The joke would always be as funny to him as it had been the first time around. He headed off, throwing sloppy punches at imaginary opponents.

  Donnelly, the other attendant on night duty, had started playing patience, with the cheerful hopelessness of a man who does not expect it to work out. He did at least have a complete deck—none of the packs in the patients’ common room had the full fifty-two cards. Like the patients themselves, I suppose.

  I indicated that I was headed for the lavatory. Donnelly barely responded. I was sure I could be out of the room ten minutes without him noticing any time had passed, and it should only take a fraction of that.

  I slipped the key from the board. Mindful of the fact that it might be missed if I took longer than planned, I put another key in its place so it was not obvious which key had been taken. Then I made my way upstairs, walking more quietly and carefully than a man with an entirely clear conscience would have done.

  That was where danger began. I had no business being on that floor at this time of night. I had brought a pocket electric torch, so I would not need to turn on the lights.

  The storeroom was like a cloakroom, or the lost-property office of a large railway station. There were rows and rows of coats hanging up, each with a little number pinned to it. Half a dozen stands sprouted sticks and umbrellas, from which paper tags dangled. Every wall was covered from floor to ceiling with cubby holes for suitcases and brown cardboard boxes. I quickly located the one numbered two-twenty-three, which held the personal effects of Patient Gillespy.

  If Gillespy was an investigator like me, then he must have had notes, at least a pocketbook or diary or address book. He had to have had something, at least to say what he had been doing and what he had found out before he went over the edge. Surely he would have kept such a thing on his person. I placed the cardboard box on a convenient shelf and removed the lid.

  Somewhere below me, somebody moaned loudly. Other voices joined in, telling him to shut his cake-hole and be quiet.

  The shouting increased in volume. Two men were yelling at each other now. It was unusual and could spell trouble. I was going to be needed, and soon. I put the lid back on the box and stood, listening.

  Miller’s voice cut in, not as loud as the others. I could not make out the words, but I could hear his tone of remonstration. Go back to bed and forget about it, otherwise there would be trouble. He did not know who had started it, and he did not care; the whole lot of them would be punished in the morning if they did not pipe down at once.

  Miller had a shrewd idea of how things worked. That type of threat was very effective among men forced to live together. He had experienced it for himself in the army, as I had done. Collective punishment appealed to a universal pack instinct. Anyone who got the whole dormitory punished knew he would be in for it.

  There was dead silence. Miller made one last comment. “That’s more like it,” perhaps.

  I released the breath I was holding and opened the box again.

  As I did so, I was struck by another thought. What I was holding was the sum of the objects on Gillespy’s person at the point when he had been committed, which is to say at the exact time that he had lost his senses. Of course, there was no way of knowing what experience, or what realisation, had driven him out of his mind—I suspect Dr Beltov would criticise me for accepting the view without evidence. I had an intuitive sense that it was a sudden thing.

  Perhaps it had been something transient, but perhaps it was something tangible. Two of my previous cases had involved uncanny objects. My former colleague Skinner had hinted at the power of certain writings to affect men’s sanity. If that were the case, it was entirely possible that whatever had affected Gillespy’s mind was inside the box. To open it was to set off a booby trap.

  I hesitated. The world is full of people with an unwarranted faith in their ability to handle things. You might say that the entire sport of boxing is based on the principle that, when two men step into the ring, one of them is wrong in his assessment of their relative strengths. If we all had a clear-sighted view of these things, nobody would ever take on a stronger opponent.

  I touched the ring that hung on a gold chain round my neck. I never claimed to be free from superstition.

  I opened the box.

  Inside, there was a scarf and some woollen gloves. Gillespy had evidently been admitted during a cold spell. Then there was an empty cigarette case and a box of matches. There was also, to my surprise, an electric torch, the twin of my own.

  A rolled-up magazine proved to be Sporting Life; I flicked through it, but there were no sheets of paper hidden between its leaves, nor were there any notes scribbled in the margins. The scraps of paper in the bottom of the box were receipts from a cafeteria. A flyer from a barber shop offering half-price trims, two bus tickets to Gipsy Hill, and a picture postcard of Crystal Pal
ace, which had not been written on. It showed one of the front elevations, by the water tower. Someone had drawn a circle around the base of the stairs, where the Sphinxes are. Another Egyptian connection, by the look of it.

  Perhaps Sherlock Holmes might have reconstructed Gillespy’s entire life history from that collection, but I doubted it. My correspondence course had warned me about the dangers of becoming too attached to one particular piece of evidence. Just because a suspect has the address of a nightclub on him does not mean that it is germane to the case in hand.

  I was about to put everything back when the torchlight gleamed from something I had not noticed at first because it was in shadow and it was transparent.

  It was a glass tube, stoppered and sealed with wax at one end, almost full of clear liquid. From the way the liquid moved, it might have been water, but it might have been something thicker and more syrupy. The tube was perhaps six inches long and an inch and a half in circumference. There was no smell about it.

  The sealed end showed every sign that it was meant to remain corked soundly so it could not be opened accidentally. It was as though whatever was in the tube was meant to stay there permanently. It was not likely to be a vial of medicine or poison—it was more like those medical samples that the doctors retained. Or, perhaps a sacred relic? Holy water from Lourdes or some other significant place? Special water had featured in my last case too, but that had possessed a distinct, if elusive, glow. This looked like ordinary water.

  I put everything else back in the box and replaced it on the shelf, but I carefully slipped the glass tube up my sleeve, careful not to break it, though the glass seemed quite thick. It might have been something or nothing, but it felt good to have a possible clue.

  I headed back to the common room, not forgetting to lock the door behind me. I was even more alert to every noise, and there were always noises. Some rooms echoed with moaning or sobbing, and sometimes it was only snoring, but even that had a disconcerting animal quality when heard from the darkened corridor.

  Walking the halls on your own at night could be a spooky experience. You had to keep a firm grip on your imagination and not let it run wild at every moving shadow.

  I was back in the common room with Miller and Donnelly, playing a desultory game of dominoes, when we heard the distant sound of a telephone.

  “That’s the upstairs phone,” said Donnelly, cocking his head. “Who’d be calling this time of night?”

  “It must be a wrong number,” suggested Miller.

  The ring-ring kept going.

  The telephone upstairs was used only by the superintendent for matters relating to administration. Another phone was at the disposal of the doctors, and might be called on a medical matter, but not the superintendent’s phone. Nobody would call that number after office hours, except by mistake.

  “They’re mighty persistent about it,” said Donnelly. “Do you think it’s too loud?”

  I had the same thought. A sound like that might rouse a light sleeper after a time, and that might mean trouble. One man could wake another, and soon the whole ward is up. It could be difficult to settle them again, and it was vastly preferable for sleeping dogs to be let lie. One of us ought to answer it.

  The superintendent’s office was locked, but we had the keys to every room in the building on the board. There were all sorts of situations where we might need access. I stood up.

  “There’s a grand man, Harry,” said Donnelly.

  I slipped the key off its hook and hastened upstairs, wondering if the caller would ring off before I got there.

  The superintendent’s office was even bigger in the dark, an enormous cavern stretching in all directions. I did not know where the light switches were, but the windows were open, and shafts of moonlight lit up strips of the space, including the superintendent’s desk and the telephone. I skated on a rug and nearly fell, but recovered my balance and picked up the phone while it was still ringing.

  “Hello, Norwood 278,” I said. I was mentally prepared for a wrong number, or some sort of emergency case who had been given the incorrect number for the asylum.

  It was neither. “Long distance call for you,” said the operator.

  There was a rushing sound, the one you hear when you put a seashell to your ear, then some buzzes and clicks. Then, faintly but distinctly, a voice cut through it. It was a woman’s voice with an American accent. “Mr Stubbs,” she said. “We’ve been having some trouble getting hold of you.” It was Miss De Vere. The beautiful, wealthy, and lethal member of TDS, whom I had met on the Stafford case.

  “How did you know I would answer?” I asked.

  “I called you,” she said, casual as ever. “It’s the only channel still open.”

  “Do you know what happened to Ryan?” I asked.

  “I’ve some idea,” she said, which was no sort of answer at all. And also quite characteristic.

  “Is he dead?”

  The rushing rose to the sound of a breaking wave, as if the Atlantic Ocean itself was sharing the conversation, and blotted out the start of her sentence. “… what you mean by dead.”

  “Pardon?”

  Her voice was lost in static. “…urned the place down.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “…Too late….” were the only words I caught as the hissing intervened and her words were submerged beneath the static. All I could hear was the cadence of her speech, the words as indistinct as faces lost in fog.

  “I can’t hear you!” I said, desperate. “Speak louder!”

  “…with the glass.”

  “Tell me what I have to do,” I said, enunciating as clearly as I could.

  Her voice came back suddenly. “He’s getting close, and he’s dangerous.” On the last word, her voice altered, slowing and deepening to a bass male tone, like a slowed-down gramophone record.

  “Dangerous,” said the echo, reproduced by some freak of the telephone system. It sounded nothing at all like her. It was the croak of an enormous frog. “Dangerous.”

  “Miss De Vere?”

  The fizzling rose again, getting louder and louder, closer and closer, rushing towards me like a torrent of hissing snakes, angrily slithering down the telephone line. I had such a sudden fear that they would erupt out of the earpiece that I slammed it down.

  Instantly, I regretted cutting the connection. I picked up the handset again, but of course there was nothing, not even the operator. I waited a minute to see if Miss De Vere would call back. A board creaked behind me, and I whipped around. Was something moving in the shadow of the bookcase?

  I fumbled for the switch on the desk lamp, picked it up, and pointed it around the room like a torch. There was nobody there.

  I locked up behind me and trudged down the stairs again, trying not to look behind me.

  “Who was that then?” Donnelly wanted to know.

  “A bad connection,” I said.

  Chapter Nine: A Well-Earned Drink

  A day or two later, it being a mild evening, we took a couple of benches outside the Hollybush public house, Donnelly, Vanstone, and me in mufti, and Miller in his white attendant’s tunic.

  I was still a little shaken by an event earlier in the day. I had been called on to assist with a new patient, a particularly noisy individual who was violent even when straightjacketed. It had been some time before I had recognised the red, spittle-flecked face as belonging to Eric Woods, the projectionist. He screamed obscenities and threw himself around like a wild animal. I could make out no sense in what he was saying.

  Nobody could tell me what had happened to Woods. The attendants did not have a great deal of curiosity about admissions, and of course nobody told us anything. If I was lucky, I might be able to get a look at his notes later.

  When we left the asylum, we left all that behind us. In the outside world, there was a sense of being all in the same unit. Other people gave us wary looks. We were the men from that strange place, and the miasma of madness still clung to us.
We were not quite outcasts, but nobody was ever entirely comfortable talking to us until they had a few drinks, at which everything spilled out and they were all agog to hear what we could tell.

  The conversation, which would have been called gossiping if we were women, was generally about work. Away from the doctors, the other attendants, and the patients, we could talk about them freely, expressing opinions that were not safe to say within the confines of the institution.

  Of course, there was always a lot of grumbling about which doctors did not know what they were doing, which ones had made a fuss about nothing, and which ones had made us do pointless work. As the newcomer, I was treated to a lot of historical stories, and anecdotes were wheeled out to be shown round.

  The chief entertainment, though, was from Donnelly, who took a great delight in turning the world upside down for our entertainment. He could prove at the drop of a hat that the patients, who got three square meals a day and did no work, were the only sane people in the asylum. That day, he was on another tack and waxing lyrical.

  “It would be a terrible thing if they could treat madness,” he said. “What kind of art, what sort of literature would we have without bards and poets who can glimpse beyond the grey confines of this world to the luminous worlds beyond? Where’s your romance? Stubbs, where’s your science fiction without visions and hallucinations of other worlds?”

  “Madness in small doses, maybe,” said Vanstone. “Just a bit of spice on a Saturday night. But raving lunacy’s no good for anyone.”

  Vanstone had a gloomy mien, which made everything he said sound wiser than it was. His undertaker’s face was a professional asset; it seemed to reassure patients just as effectively as Miller’s perpetual cheer.

  “Is it not?” asked Donnelly, and Miller guffawed.

  “He’s going to tell you what it’s good for,” said Miller, nudging Vanstone. “Listen now, he’ll tell you.”

  “Poets and painters have to be a bit mad, perhaps,” I said. “But as far as practical matters go…”