Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  The windows were way up high—the cell’s height was its largest dimension by far—and there was the iron door with its spyhole.

  There must have been many more secure cells in this world, and no doubt an accomplished escape artist could have been out of there in a day. I might have even been able to think of a course of action myself, but my mind was not running in that direction. Stone walls do not a prison make, as the poet said. Imprisonment and liberty have more to do with mental condition, and my mental condition was poor. My world had been broken, and I could not mend it however long I sat and stared at the tiles.

  I had gained a swift understanding of how the inmates felt and why they behaved as they did. They could not mark off days and wait for their sentence to be over. They could not hope to escape, because they had nowhere to escape to; their families had forsaken them. The only thing they had to look forward to was the next mealtime. If they clung on to wisps of their former life, pretending to drive a car, or drag a string instead of a dog’s lead, it was because the rituals were comforting reminders of a better world, even if they were without substance. These and a hundred other things became plain to me on my first day of confinement, and I wondered how I could ever have failed to realise them before.

  I could follow the course of events from inside my cell. I could hear the shouts and cries from the farther parts of the building as the place woke up each day. At mealtimes, the door in the segregation ward opened and closed, then the squeak-squeak-squeak of the trolley led to the next door, and the same sequence repeated until he got to me. Then, the key turned in the lock and, for a brief minute or two each day, I had company.

  The attendants had been uncommunicative at best. Some of them were abusive. They wanted to avoid contamination by whatever madness had dragged me over from their side and into the cell. When it was Miller’s turn, he was stony-faced and barely said a word to me. I had always known him as a cheery type, but as he slapped down the water cup I felt actual alarm. I was painfully aware how reliant I was on his goodwill. If he spat on me or kicked me, I could do nothing; no complaint would ever be heard.

  Today though, it was Donnelly. Even though I had struck him, I hoped he might take a broader view of things.

  “A fine afternoon to you, sir,” he said. “Room service: your lunch is rissoles and rhubarb crumble with custard, still good and hot from the kitchen.”

  “Thank you,” I said, keeping still, with my hands down so as not to seem threatening. I raised them slowly to take the tray. “Are you allowed to talk to me?”

  “You know me, I’ll talk to anyone.” His cheer seemed forced. “Getting me to shut up is the hard part. You’re the last in the row, and they won’t miss me for five minutes.”

  “What am I doing here?”

  “What is any of us doing here?” The quip was not enough, though, and he added, “I’m not privy to the details, but surely it’s connected with your helping Ross to escape, don’t you think?”

  I settled the tray on my lap and took a drink of water from the tin cup. Your mouth gets very dry when you cannot have water whenever you want it.

  “That might be a criminal matter,” I said, “but I’m not mad.”

  “Not for me to say,” said Donnelly. “The doctors will explain it all to you in a day or two. Surely, they will.”

  I spoke carefully. I felt as tentative as a man trying to pick a lock with a twig. “Would you know if the superintendent is aware of my presence here?” With Beltov dead, the superintendent was the one person I felt I might be able to talk to. How many inmates, though, had asked me the same question?

  “It wouldn’t make any difference if he did or didn’t,” said Donnelly. “Wherever there’s a case in question, he’d ask the doctors, as he’s not a medical man himself. And Dr Nye is emphatic.”

  That was exactly the answer I would have given a few weeks ago—the same one I had given, in fact, almost word for word; I probably learned it from Donnelly. It was all too true. The superintendent had no special reason to take my word. No doubt the paperwork was all there, signed by a magistrate who was happy to accept the word of the esteemed Dr Nye.

  A pang of sympathy seemed to strike Donnelly, the first inkling I had that he saw me as a pathetic figure rather than a menacing one.

  “Sure, we know Ross is loaded and you were only going along with him for the money,” he said. “I don’t blame you a bit myself. Judging by that house, he’s not short of a few coppers. But Dr Nye is… He doesn’t like it. He thinks you’ve been infected, like all those others following FitzRoy. Once you set the record straight, you’ll be out of here.”

  “What about Ross?”

  Donnelly shrugged. “He’s not far away from us now.” I took that to mean he was also in the segregation wing. “He’s quiet.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “Did that stuff spoil your memory?” he asked with genuine concern. Sometimes patients were confused and suffered amnesia after a dose of a sedative. “He was there in the same room with you. Playing aeroplanes.”

  “He was a pilot,” I said.

  “You do remember!” Donnelly’s face lit up. “And I thought we might have addled your brains. Dr Nye measured out the dose, and I swear he put enough in there to knock out an elephant. Glad to hear there’s no lasting effects. Anyroad, got to be going now.” Satisfied that I was in something like my right mind, but evidently not keen to prolong the conversation, Donnelly backed out. The key turned in the lock, once, twice. The wheel of the trolley squeaked, and he was back on his rounds.

  My stomach gurgled, reminding me how hungry I was, and I set to the rissoles with an appetite. My ma would have been ashamed to serve them, as there was so little meat among the stodgy potato. The runner beans with them were stringy, too, but everything is a feast to a famished man. I polished it all off in no time, and the rhubarb crumble did not take much longer.

  Being on my own and unobserved, I licked the plate clean of the sweet custard and tart rhubarb juice. I was still hungry, but less so than I had been. Things looked slightly better on a stomach that was, if not full, not quite so empty. The situation was still desperate.

  At least Donnelly had talked to me, but he had spoken to me as though I was an inmate, not a former colleague. The free-and-easy manner had been replaced with that guarded tone adopted when talking to a lunatic. And he had confirmed my suspicions.

  There was a discrepancy between the version of events I had experienced with Ross and what everyone else saw. Common sense insisted that the flight had been a dream or a hallucination of some sort, but the facts and details kept presenting them to me. If I accepted what Donnelly said—and of course I had to—then they had found me indoors, “playing at aeroplanes.”

  By that account, the whole flight must have been a waking dream, like the storm at sea that had seen me blundering about and breaking roof slates from underneath. What about the man that Ross had bought the plane from—might he remember something? We must have dreamed him as well. I wanted desperately to go to the aerodrome and see whether it matched my memory, even though I already knew that it was futile.

  It seemed so real. That phrase kept floating back to me. It seemed so real. It was not like my earlier experience with the storm, where real life had overlapped with my dreaming and where I could separate the two. With the flight, I could not unpick what had happened and what had not.

  The flight, however, was only part of a much larger problem relating to my mental condition. It had unfolded in the manner of a train wreck happening in stages. The locomotive runs into an obstacle on the tracks. At first, it seems to have escaped damage, but then the heavy freight cars behind start slamming into it, and the whole train crumples up like a concertina. The train was me. As long as I kept going forward, I had been fine, but then all my past and all those mad adventures began to catch up with me. At the time, I had been grateful to survive them, but their momentum and the freight-load of implications they carried was beginning to
crush me, and I could not get out of the way.

  The Shackleton affair, the Roslyn D’Onston case, and the Horniman investigation each trailed a long streamer of unanswered questions about what I thought was real and what I might have imagined. As long as there were others such as Yang or Skinner or Ross, who would more or less go along with the same narrative as myself, we could travel along together, shielded from the disbelieving world.

  I had never before seriously doubted myself and my own sanity. Perhaps I lacked the intelligence or the imagination to consider the possibility. A mirror was being held up to me, and I was being forced to take a long, hard look at my actions. Evaluating your life from the vantage point of an asylum cell is not a pleasant experience. Even what is good in your life is soured from that view, because it all led to that cell in that place. Everything that seemed promising is revealed as false hope and self-deception. Everything bad looks like inevitable steps towards a bad end.

  Nor does it get any better with time: as day adds to day, each one lays down a hard layer of regret, guilt, and confusion, building up like lacquer into a shell that becomes more impenetrable each day. In that situation, you do not need anyone else to torment you: every man is his own torturer in that cell.

  However, my morose inactivity was interrupted the very next day after Donnelly brought me lunch. Miller and Vanstone came to escort me to see a doctor.

  I was braced for an encounter with Dr Nye himself, but instead was ushered into Dr Hamilton’s office. The two attendants waited outside, ready to intervene, but the psychologist seemed quite relaxed, moving a few papers around his desk as I took a seat. It felt strange to be sitting down there, in one of the doctor’s rooms, but then it felt more than a little peculiar to have left the cell at all.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, and you could hear the soft Edinburgh burr in his voice, before finally looking up at me. “Mr Stubbs. This is a most unusual situation. I hardly need to tell you that. What I would be most interested to hear would be your point of view. Would you like to elaborate upon the events that led up to your being here?” He was warm and sympathetic, an unlit pipe in his hand. The beard, perhaps, helped by masking the expression of his mouth and placing all the emphasis on those open blue eyes. “Tell me anything you like,” he said. “I’m not asking you to incriminate yourself. I’d like to understand your thought processes a little better—maybe get you to understand them a little better, too.”

  Dr Beltov used to have a glass clock above his mantelpiece. Dr Hamilton had little figurines, elongated hunters and warriors and dancers, carved out of dark wood. They were African; Donnelly said that Hamilton had worked out in the Gambia for a spell. I tried to remember what Dr Beltov had said about Hamilton. I recalled that he was a Jungian, whatever that meant, and a follower of William James, and Beltov thought Hamilton was not sufficiently sceptical of telepathy and psychic phenomena. That was not enough, however, to tempt me into telling the full story.

  I am no good at lying, but I had decided to follow the line that Donnelly had suggested. Ross had offered me a great deal of money if I helped him, I explained, and that was quite true. The offer had only come well after I had already rescued him, but I omitted that in my account.

  I told him about the escape, Ross’s experiences in Egypt, and his desire to complete his peculiar spiral pilgrimage. Dr Hamilton’s brow furrowed while I was talking, and he made me go back and describe parts of it over and over again. He made no notes but sat with his hands clasped ostentatiously behind his head, the stem of the unlit pipe gripped between his teeth, in the manner of a listener rather than a doctor.

  “And what did you think when he told you all this?”

  “I like to keep an open mind,” I said.

  “Even so, reincarnation and ancient pharaohs and mysterious Egyptian sages.” His tone was gently chiding, trying to get me to see how silly it all sounded. “It sounds more like something you’d see down at the cinema on a Saturday morning, doesn’t it?”

  That of course reminded me of something else. “Did you hear about that cinema reel?” I asked. “And Eric Woods, the projectionist.”

  “I’d be very interested to hear about it from you,” he said, not put off by my change in direction.

  I tried to give him as good an account as I could for a story told backwards, tracing the incident of the Phantom of the Cinema backwards from the picture house to the projectionist, then to Tom Reynolds, the photographer of the extraordinary and his source back here in the hospital. Finally, I offered my conclusions about the apparatus known as the sarcophagus.

  “That has a bit of a flavour of Old Egypt about it too, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “Could it be true?” I asked. “Can you really extract images from someone’s brain like that and project them on a screen?”

  Hamilton chewed his pipe thoughtfully before replying.

  “Have you come across any of Dr Nye’s work on magnetic treatment?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “You were quite intimate with Dr Beltov, I believe. Did he ever discuss Dr Nye with you?”

  Another shake.

  “And you know, of course, that it was Dr Nye who committed Ross.”

  “I did know that,” I admitted.

  “And the Faradisation treatment, which Dr Easton says you found so objectionable—you knew that was Dr Nye’s? Somehow, he seems a recurrent theme in your story.”

  He waited a moment, a trick that I was beginning to recognise. Leaving a silence is always a good way of prompting the other party to say more than they mean to. Silence can be better and more insistent than the most pointed question; it leaves the listener to answer the question in their mind.

  “I don’t know,” I said, a little defensively. I had not mentioned Nye once, but somehow his absence left a lot of Nye-shaped holes in the story, which were as significant as if I had come in shouting that he was a fiend.

  “Hmm-mm.” Hamilton reached down and placed an open book in front of me, flicking away the tissue cover of a glossy illustration. “Take a look at this for me, will you? Tell me what you think that is?”

  It was a symmetrical black-and-white shape, which at first looked like nothing but spilled ink. The caption said simply, “Plate Seven.” It was one of those images made by folding the paper over; this one might have been the silhouette of a flattened moth, or at least a moth and a bee both squashed together, and that was what I said.

  Hamilton made a non-committal noise and turned over another page, and again flicked the protective cover away. It was another winged silhouette, with a trunk and limbs that might have belonged to a squat human. The head was all wrong though, oddly shaped and with a mass of fronds or feelers radiating from it.

  “What is this book?” I asked.

  “The inkblots were originally developed by a Swiss gentleman named Rorschach,” said Hamilton, taking the pipe from his mouth. “The set we have here are an evolution of his set.” He hardly needed to say that Dr Nye was the mind behind them. “We use them to diagnose certain types of patients. Some of these resonate with the subconscious mind of patients with… particular pathologies. Now, what does this picture suggest to you?”

  “I couldn’t say. A sort of imaginary monster, I suppose,” I said.

  “Yes, it could be that,” he said, in an encouraging tone.

  Hamilton flicked over several more pages and unveiled Plate Thirteen. This time I recognised it at once. The image on the page was nothing; it might have been an old tree stump with a few twisting branches and projecting roots. But there was no mistaking its identity, and it brought back the memory of a terrifying encounter during the Shackleton affair with full force.

  “A tree stump,” I said, too quickly.

  “Not a monster?” said Hamilton, tracing the outline of what could have been a leafy branch or a wing.

  He shut the book and slid it to one side. I could hardly suppress a sigh of relief when he did. I was not sure what else there might be i
n those pages, but I was sure I did not wish to see any more than I already had.

  “This has been most useful,” he said, offering a reassuring smile. “It really has been very interesting hearing your side of things. I hope we’ll get to have another chat soon.”

  “What is to become of me, Doctor?” I asked.

  “Please don’t worry,” he said. “You’re settling in very well. I expect you’ll be able to leave segregation in a few days. Then, you’ll be able to get out and join the other patients.”

  He smiled again without showing his teeth and held out his hand, inviting me to look forward to the prospect of becoming an ordinary inmate like any other. I did not have the heart to ask about magistrates or release or anything like that.

  I should have guessed before I went in that the diagnosis of paranoid delusions had been affixed to me like a brand on a bull. Everything I said or did would be seen through the prism of that diagnosis. Mentioning Dr Nye or not mentioning him would both have had the same significance.

  I racked my brains for anything I could say which would make it clear that I was not mad, that there really was a pattern behind it and that I, along with Gillespy, was working undercover for a mysterious secret society. Three random deaths with perfectly simple accepted explanations were really caused by some supernatural force. Somehow, the man in charge of the hospital, who appeared to be a highly respectable, eminent psychologist, was an evil genius masterminding it all for some unknowable purpose of his own.

  “Thank you very much, Dr Hamilton,” I said.

  What could I say? My own tales were all too reminiscent of every other inmate’s story. The interview with Dr Hamilton did nothing to settle my mind, and it set to growing the seeds of doubt that had already been planted. What if I really was mad?

  Something of this had troubled me since the end of the Roslyn D’Onston affair. The climax of that case had occurred in an underground cavern beneath one of the small factories on Brickmakers Road. Arthur Renville had later assured me that a couple of his lads had been over the area rather thoroughly and assured themselves that no such subterranean space existed. The entrance had been hidden to my eyes and only appeared by what might be called magic.