Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  At the other end of the circuit, electricity coiled around Nye like swarming pythons. His arms were folded across his chest in a protective gesture. He appeared to be unharmed, but as I watched, a dozen more of the lashes found him, the tentacles an enraged monster made of living lightning. For another moment, an aura of electricity hovered around him without touching. Then, something gave way, and it collapsed, enveloping him and burning as it went.

  Nye was not burned from the inside out, but from the outside in. The electric chair is a spark by comparison. Even lighting does not burn its victims completely, but as the fire went out it left Nye a blackened statue of himself.

  The electric arcs vanished, leaving flame burning along the length of every cable. I was dimly aware of distant explosions downstairs: all the wiring in the building must have caught and the fuse boxes all blown out in that last orgiastic electric discharge.

  Smoke billowed over and around me as the apparatus gave a few last electrical sputters.

  The clamour from the rest of the building, screeching and screaming, started to press in on me.

  I wanted to be sure Nye was dead. In their state, the two men looked even more like polar opposites, though they were really different versions of the same being, incarnated in two bodies at once. Positive and negative had met and cancelled each other out. Or had they?

  I could believe Nye still was alive, for a time being; even if those burns only went down a quarter inch, the complete destruction of the skin is invariably fatal. Though it might take a while for him to die, someone—or something—like Nye might do further damage before he succumbed.

  Then he moved, and I stifled a cry.

  His chin had shifted, or had seemed to. Or was it just the carbonised flesh crumbling away? I moved forward gingerly.

  There was a sound, a strange dry rustling, coming from him. Or, rather, from his body.

  Part of his chest flaked away, and then a piece broke off from his shoulder. I could have persuaded myself that it was merely the final disintegration, except for that sound. Something was scraping and tapping.

  A section of cheek the size of my palm fell away and clinked on the floor like a piece of thick black porcelain. It revealed a hollow cavity beneath. It was as though I was looking at one of those hollow chocolate animals.

  Another section of abdomen was pushed out from the inside. The statue in the shape of Nye was an enormous black eggshell, and something was hatching from within.

  Nye was dead, surely utterly dead. But even in death, he had somehow reincarnated himself, taking on another form, drawing on the electricity that destroyed him to incubate something and bring it to fruition in the blink of an eye.

  A pale, worm-like limb emerged into the air. I caught only the shortest look at it, but it was too much.

  Reading this, comfortable in your armchair, and with the cool consideration of relaxed surroundings, could again tell me a dozen things I ought to have done. I could have found a solid poker or other substantial blunt instrument and smashed the thing with all my strength. But few people, finding a scorpion scuttling across their desk, would be able to coolly crush it with a paperweight and ring for the maid to clear up the mess. No, faced with that situation, you might panic a little.

  Filled with the most awful revulsion, I picked up Nye’s chair, with his hollow remains in it, even as it cracked and split. Pale tendrils like the horns of snails started to protrude.

  I was shouting, not words but that inarticulate roar they teach you to let out during a bayonet charge. It was a yell to overcome terror and convert it into sheer desperate action.

  I took three running steps and flung the whole lot through the glass balcony doors with a tremendous crash. It sailed through the air, over the railings, to smash down in the shadows of the stone courtyard two storeys below.

  With the electricity gone, it was dark except for the rays of the yellow-green moon. The charred outer body had been shattered to fragments on the flagstones. Nye’s newest form unfolded and unbent itself, extending its many limbs. I could not see well enough to describe it. There probably is no name for it in any human language, and my powers of description are not adequate for the task.

  I was paralysed by shock and confusion. Like a mouse hypnotised by a snake, or the soldier who stares stupidly at the smoking grenade that falls at his feet, or the boxer who cannot understand how his opponent has dodged a blow and fails to react for a fatal second. Whatever the thing was, my mental machinery was not able to compute a course of action but instead lay idle, waiting for a stimulus to which it could respond.

  I was not the only one watching. A hundred other pairs of eyes, and a hundred other brains more attuned to understanding, had witnessed the fall. And while I gaped, stupefied, they rose and acted as one.

  Windows burst into the courtyard on all sides, scattering glass stars everywhere. It was like seeing a dark wave strike a breakwater and shatter into spray, only this wave was human.

  “…for Saint George, and for England!” boomed a voice. The figure below, leading the charge, must have been FitzRoy; like the others he was hooded, but a foil crown gleamed in the moonlight.

  As though on cue, as though they had been waiting for this moment, the inmates poured into the yard from three directions, converging on a point directly below me, all of them. They were howling and screaming like banshees and silhouetted by the flames behind them, their limbs contorted by a wild fury. Instead of clothes, they had wrapped sheets around themselves, wearing them like hooded robes. I could see no faces.

  I could not say really what I saw. They did not look like the stooped, weakened inmates that I knew. There was something more beastlike than human in their loping steps and hunched bodies. This was what a charge of Viking berserkers looked like, when unleashed ferocity turns men into animals. Nye had done it—with his meddling, he had pushed them through to another level of insanity—though he cannot have foreseen that it would be turned on him.

  They hurtled forwards as though it were a race, with a golden prize for being the first to reach that thing. And perhaps there was a prize, one that all of these men had thirsted for so long: revenge on their tormentor.

  The scene jumped abruptly, like a movie reel that skips some frames. The light in the courtyard changed, and the berserkers were gone. The pale thing stretched and struggled to get upright on flaccid limbs.

  Then the howling mob smashed through the windows again as if replaying a different staging of the same event.

  Another jump, and the courtyard was empty again. The shapes of the windows had changed, becoming more elongated and with Norman arches. The pale thing stretched and lurched, straightening out like a chrysalis starting to harden with exposure to the air. It needed just a few minutes more, but in seconds the horde burst through again, bearing down on it with maniacal fury.

  Each time the Nye-thing tried to change track and shift to another world, the pursuers followed a second later, a pack of hounds baying for blood with as little care for the rules of the universe as he had. Their collective madness tore through the barriers between worlds that should have stopped them. If magic was madness, they had the gift; they bore down on him through a dozen transitions.

  I imagined them skipping through other worlds and passing strange geometries, alien vegetation, and bizarre landscapes as they spiralled in, with each transition shorter than the last as they converged on the centre of the gyre and fell upon the soft, flopping thing there.

  It fought them, but it was the fight of a newborn calf against a pack of wolves.

  They say a pack of piranha fish can strip a whole cow down to its bones in seconds. These were piranhas in human form, with teeth and jaws and tearing claws and a strength and savagery beyond anything human. Moonlight and firelight gleamed off their limbs, eyes, and wet hands. There were too many of them to all attack at once—they piled on like a rugby scrum. As they tore it and pulled it apart, more and more of them joined; there were several scrums instead of one, a
nd it was not a fight but a cannibal feast, an unholy communion.

  All trace of the thing disappeared as they ripped it into shreds and devoured it, scatter and squabble among themselves for the final few fragments.

  Instead of spiralling outwards into the world, the gyre had reversed itself and spiralled back to its point of origin, becoming nothing again. The Ouroboros had devoured itself, leaving no trace in our world.

  I staggered back and was enveloped by a choking cloud of smoke. Electrical insulation was still burning from a dozen fires. A funnel of light from an electric torch shone through the smoke.

  “Stubbs!” It was Smith, stepping carefully over the debris of melted cables towards me. “Are you hurt?”

  “Not particularly,” I said, and it was true. I had plenty of bruises, and trickles of blood were running down me from the slashes down my side and elsewhere. I’ve come out of fights feeling worse.

  Smith shone the beam around the room, lingering on Ross’s body a moment. “We have to go,” he said, leading me by the arm. “The Old Bill will be here in a minute.”

  Everyone we passed seemed too dazed to notice us. Inmates wandered around in states of undress and nakedness as though sleepwalking, or sat mumbling to themselves, or milled about staring. Donnelly was herding a group away from the building; he did not notice us. The mania had run its course, and they were exhausted, mentally and physically.

  Looking back, the fire was still burning in the superintendent’s office, and smoke poured from at least two other windows. It did not seem to be spreading through the structure. The fire service should be able to save the place if there was not too much delay. As if in answer to my thought, sirens started up in the distance.

  Smith had provided himself with both the keys to the side gate in the confusion, and he opened it for me. “I’ve got to stay here and clean up,” he said. “You scarper. You know the way to the Knight’s Head from here?”

  That was Elsie Granger’s stronghold. The New Town is a walled enclave of six streets, and the gate that connects it with the high road is manned by a policeman at night.

  “Go to the end of Rockmount Road and whistle twice,” he said. “If they give you any trouble, tell ‘em Smithy sent you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Now, clear off,” he said, waving me away and locking the gate between us.

  I wondered whether I should go and find Arthur instead. But after my last interview with him, Elsie Granger seemed the better bet.

  The streets were deserted, and I slunk along in the shadows, all too aware of my outfit and how easily I might be picked up by police racing to the scene of the fire. But nobody except a few cats noticed me, and after a couple of wrong turns, I made it to Rockmount Road and whistled as instructed.

  A moment later, a face appeared over the wall, and an electric torch shone in my eyes.

  “It’s Harry Stubbs,” I said. “Smithy sent me.”

  A rope ladder was flung down, the wooden rungs clattering on the pavement. Without ceremony or very much welcome, I had made it to safety.

  It was all anticlimactic, even when Elsie Granger stood me a couple of brandies. It seemed to me then that the difficulty was all still ahead of me. But events were to prove me wrong, as usual.

  Epilogue

  The extended spell of unnaturally warm, dry weather had ended abruptly. Autumn came to its senses as if making up for lost time with wet, windy days and lowering skies. The withered leaves were stripped from the trees and trodden black and slippery underfoot. Everyone was wearing overcoats and scarves, with umbrellas blown inside out. The news, too, had moved on, and all the talk of war with Germany had been overtaken with political scandal and economic analysis.

  The fire at the asylum had attracted little attention; firemen had put it out in short order, and there was less damage than there might have been. There were few soft furnishings or other flammable content, and had been evacuated promptly. The only death had been Ross.

  The investigation that followed naturally enough homed in on Dr Nye, and as soon as it did, his whole set of credentials collapsed like a house of cards. As I had guessed, he was a fraud. His imposture became transparent as soon as he died. His wild schemes for treatment, which had seemed so promising, were dismissed in a breath. Under the slightest examination, forgeries and lies turned up everywhere. Institutions where he claimed to have worked had never heard of him, papers which he published were nowhere to be found, colleagues were nonexistent, and experiments had never been carried out.

  A bubble had burst, one which had only been sustained while Nye was alive by the force of his will. Not that anyone except me knew he was dead. He was assumed to be on the run after killing Ross; the patient’s burned body still attached to the apparatus left little doubt as to the cause of death. There were warrants out for his arrest. The matter was kept quiet, with only a couple of stories in the more colourful newspapers, and they added so many fanciful details that nobody would believe it, anyway.

  One immediate consequence of Nye’s posthumous unmasking was that I found myself suddenly in the clear. The paperwork in my case was not in order. The magistrate’s signature had been forged, and in any case Nye had no authority to certify me. If you care to see it, I have a certificate to say I am as sane as anyone. It is not a thing I treasure, but I keep it by me in case I am challenged by those who have not heard the full story.

  My incarceration was an egregious act of malpractice. I suppose I could have gone to law. The superintendent wrote to me personally, enclosing a cheque in compensation. It was hush money by any other name, but I was happy enough to take it. I politely declined, however, his offer of my job back. I never wanted to see the place again. Curiously enough, Smith has continued to work there.

  Although I have now had time to ruminate and digest my experiences, I am little the wiser.

  The simplest explanation is that Ross and Nye were both mad, entangled in a folie a deux of mutual destruction that dated back to their childhood. I too was caught up in their madness. It is a neat explanation, which covers all of the publicly known facts of the matter. I do not relish the idea that I myself had “an episode,” and that the balance of my mind was disturbed, even temporarily. To any fair-minded reader, though, this would be the most logical conclusion. The deaths in the asylum were accidents or suicides, involving no external actors.

  Certainly, there was no physical trace in my cell of the two beings I left there to validate my story. Presumably they dissolved or vaporised the moment that Nye was destroyed… assuming they ever existed. According to Smith, the only riddle when my cell was opened was what had happened to the bed, how it came to be detached from the floor and short of a couple of legs.

  Against the view that it was all delusion I would need to weigh the comments made by Ryan, and his apparent demise at the hands of Nye’s agents. A sceptic might suggest that Ryan never existed, that I imagined him too. I have to concede that this too is possible. But then you have to ask whether I also imagined Miss De Vere, who provided my letter of reference and is clearly more substantial than any mere figment.

  The other possibility though is equally disturbing. If I am not mad, then the world is. A person can be in two places at once, and bodies can pass through solid walls. Uncertainty pervades everything, and even history is not fixed. It is a world that mocks our attempts to make sense of it, where chaos rather than order reigns.

  I struggle to accept that Nye was the incarnation of some cosmic principle, let alone a divinity, or that the god of elemental Chaos—supposing such a thing exists—should take such an interest in the human race. Again, it is easier to believe that his beliefs were a part of his megalomania. On the other hand, it is no stranger a story than scripture—and more especially if you take the Book of Job to be a historical account and not merely a fable.

  I am edging my way towards a middle view. Nye and Ross did control powers beyond what is understood by current scientific thinking, but only ima
gined themselves to be gods. If unchecked, Nye might have succeeded in setting into motion an ever-expanding cycle of madness—or sanity, as he saw it—with consequences that can hardly be imagined.

  This version of events is perhaps a self-serving one, as it represents me as being not only sane but actually heroic, albeit in a small way. Perhaps that is why this version of events makes most sense to me.

  I was not the only one to be officially discharged. Not long afterwards I saw FitzRoy go by in a taxi, deep in conversation with another man who might have been his son. The face of a woman in a headscarf working behind the counter at a florist looked oddly familiar. It was fully five minutes later that I realised it was Grogan, living now as a woman.

  There was one final act to carry out.

  Sally insisted on coming with me to Ross’s funeral. West Norwood cemetery is a grand Victorian necropolis with an avenue of great tombs. There are two angels everywhere, and even a few obelisks and pyramids. Perhaps it was grand enough even for a pharaoh. The day was foul, and it took an effort to keep my umbrella over the two of us.

  There was a pretty decent crowd. I guessed most of them were his friends from his service days, but there were one or two queer characters who might have been friends from esoteric circles. The only people I recognised were Miss Bentham, of course, and Maggie. I shook hands with them both, but we hardly exchanged a word. Miss Bentham looked sad and solemn all in black; even her little Pekingese worse a black collar.

  “You might not think it,” I told Miss Bentham, “but he died a hero.”

  She smiled bravely and nodded, but said nothing. I think she believed me. I think she knew.

  The coffin was closed. Ross’s remains must have presented quite a puzzle for the undertakers; embalming him would have been impossible, but perhaps needless.