Descension

by Shani Struthers

  “I won’t,” Eclipse looked in the direction of the building they’d only recently left. “But remember we’re running out of time.”

  “It’d be handy to know how much time we do have, though. Your friend that works for Rob Lock, can he do some digging for us and find out?”

  “I’ll ask. So… hopefully, I’ll see you soon?”

  “Oh yeah, Eclipse, you will. Very soon.”

  * * *

  “Damn!” The nightmare propelled her out of sleep. Although she had visualised plenty of white light before turning in, writhing walls and clawed hands had still managed to make an appearance. Cash was snoring gently beside her, Jed, however, was sitting upright at the end of their bed and staring at her. Can’t sleep either? I don’t blame you. How she wished she could give the furry mutt a cuddle – what a shame her arms would pass straight through him if she tried.

  Lying back down, she screwed her eyelids shut – would she be able to rest again, or was that a vain hope? Damn again if it was the latter – she’d meet her father, a few hours from now, a bleary-eyed and haggard wreck and he’d wonder what the hell he’d sired! That wry sentiment making her smile at least, she turned on her side and cuddled Cash, relishing the warmth of his body and how smooth his skin was. She’d told him earlier what had happened, not all of it, not the lurid details; he didn’t need those images plaguing his mind as they were plaguing hers, but the general gist of it. He’d raised an eyebrow that Eclipse had turned out to be a man.

  “Ruby,” he’d said, “I’ve said it so many times, what you do is dangerous. I don’t particularly mean in a spiritual sense, but in a practical sense. You went into a derelict building with a man you didn’t even know. Okay, you weren’t harmed, but you could have been. What could have happened doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “The minute I saw him, I knew he was okay.”

  “Ruby—”

  “And I’d taken precautions, you know that.”

  “Eclipse,” he’d mumbled. “I mean honestly, who calls their kid that? I expect he had a goatee beard.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Long straggly hair.”

  “Long but not straggly.”

  “Some kind of colourful coat.”

  Ah, she couldn’t defend her newfound friend on that score.

  “So,” he continued, “the place is haunted; in fact, the whole estate is a bit dodgy at the moment. What are you going to do about it? What’s the plan?”

  “The plan is to research and then return.”

  “With Eclipse?”

  “With him and the team. It’s not a paid job, but I want them with me if possible.”

  “What about me?”

  “Of course you, if you want to.”

  “That’s a lot of us.”

  “It is, and I’d rather we had permission from the site manager to go in there, rather than breaking in under cover of the darkness. Although if that’s what it comes to, so be it. Eclipse knows someone who works for Rob Lock, the site owner; he’s working on getting him to find out a demolition date. Once we know that, I’ll approach Mr Lock as Psychic Surveys, and ask for permission.”

  Cash pulled a face. “That’s another risk right there. A site owner can’t just allow people into a derelict building, not knowingly anyway; there are all sorts of health and safety issues involved. And this Rob Lock, he might not be prepared to turn a blind eye.”

  He had a point – it was a risk going the professional route, one that might be too big to take. And so she’d be forced to sneak around. With Psychic Surveys, she’d dragged psychic talent into the open and kept it there, on the high street, loud and proud, a business as essential as any other, and expanding, slowly but surely. Work was always steady and her reputation was excellent. To be reduced to such furtive measures at Cromer irked her – but it would irk her even more if she got banned from the site.

  With all this mulling, all this cogitating, there was no way she was going to be able to go back to sleep. That chamomile tea she had in the cupboard was calling to her – that and a bathroom trip. It was 4.30 am. If she drank the soothing tea and gazed at her computer for half an hour or so, surely her eyes would droop and she’d be able to return to the land of nod before the alarm went off at eight. God, she hoped so. Leaving the comfort of her bed at an ungodly hour yet again, she made her way to the bathroom. Staring at her reflection in the mirror whilst washing her hands, she thought how pale she looked, pale and… something else.

  Like a thousand people at once?

  That’s what she’d said to Eclipse, trying to describe how it had been in the asylum, a feeling that hadn’t quite gone away. Behind the green of her eyes were the eyes of so many – strangers to her – and yet, were they really? Wasn’t everybody connected in some way? Certainly everyone was in this world together, in the shit together. Was there such a thing as someone else’s war? This battle, the one that the patients at Cromer still waged, was hers too – hers and Eclipse’s. She’d made it so.

  A few minutes later, a cup of steaming tea beside her, her laptop providing a glow in the dim kitchen, she clicked on her emails. Eclipse had sent the photographs and slowly she scrolled through them – pictures of men and women, young and old. There’d been children at Cromer too, children born there – but these were all adults. She read their names, such ordinary names: Ronald Brown, Stephen Evans, Sarah Carstairs, Annie Gibb, Doreen Hughes, Melissa Bates, Mary Wilson – the women far outnumbering the men in this selection. Not that that surprised Ruby. When she’d first been called to Brookbridge, she’d started reading about mental health in a bid to understand it and had found a paper on female institutionalisation in the nineteenth century. What she’d discovered was astounding. Women were frequently admitted to asylums during this period for the slightest of reasons – for not accepting a marriage proposal from someone eminent; for PMT, otherwise known as ‘insanity attacks’; for having more than one sexual partner, or for not having sex at all, for being ‘frigid’. Men were admitted too, she wasn’t denying that; she’d dealt with the spirits of male patients several times over, but it was women who seemed to be more susceptible. In the nineteenth century there’d been no standardised diagnosis of madness, rather it was left to the discretion of the doctors to decide who should be admitted or not. Reading through some of the patient notes that Eclipse had sent, this hadn’t changed dramatically in the early twentieth century. One patient, Agnes Jones, was considered ‘unruly’, and, in order to constrain her she had been placed for long periods of time in what they called a Restraint Chair, sometimes with a hood over her head. Ruby’s eyes widened as the words sunk in. What the hell is a restraint chair? She could google it, but she didn’t want to, not at this hour, adding to the already terrible images in her mind. Just reading about it, envisaging it, complete with straps and hooks, was enough.

  Another patient, Mary Wilson, was deemed to be suffering from psychosis. Ruby remembered seeing a picture of her and matched up the photo with the notes on her screen. A young woman, aged twenty-four; hysteria and hallucinations were amongst her symptoms, no reason for them given, no background information, no attempt to understand – the notes merely concentrated on what she was at the time – ill.

  Reading further, Ruby took a sharp intake of breath. Mary was one of those who’d been lobotomised, the operation recorded as successful. If so, then when had she been released? The notes were severely tattered in places, and subsequently some words were illegible, but right at the end she could make out a date – 1943. Mary had died, at the asylum, aged twenty-six, her treatment not so successful after all.

  Ruby glanced at the clock, it was 5.10. She’d give it ten more minutes, and then go back to bed; try and find some escape from all this, although ‘this’ was helping her to understand the experience of individuals at least, as opposed to the mass she’d encountered. The tea had remained untouched and was now barely warm, but she finally began to sip it without taking her eyes from the screen. Cl
icking on another photo of patient notes, she zoomed in. These belonged to Rebecca Nash – a girl who was barely out of her teens, and who’d lived beforehand with her mother in Angmering, Sussex. Her illness: she could hear voices. Ruby shrugged. Perhaps she was schizophrenic: wasn’t that supposed to be one of the principal indications of that illness? Oh, and auditory hallucinations, Rebecca had been suffering from those as well. As with Wilson’s notes, a few sentences were illegible due to deterioration, the ink faded rather than the paper crumpled or torn. Rebecca’s birth date of 18th December 1921 was recorded in a box at the top right of the paper, so it was apparent that these notes would have once again been written sometime in the 1940s. According to the doctors, Nash could sometimes be violent, lashing out at nurses, her language described as profane. She’d endured the restraint chair too, and solitary confinement – over and over again, it seemed. She was often considered to be in a distressed state and also dangerous. Other treatments included continuous baths to calm her when agitated – Ruby had yet to find out what a continuous bath actually meant, but it didn’t sound healthy – and, insulin shock treatment. Again she needed to know more about that. None of the treatments seemed to improve Rebecca’s health; if anything they would make her protest further: ‘I’m not lying, I’m telling the truth. I do see people. I hear them. They’re always with me, always. They won’t leave me alone. They want me to help them, you see? They’re lost. Confused. And that’s all I try to do, help them.’

  Reading the transcript – actual words recorded from the mouth of Rebecca Nash – caused Ruby’s jaw to fall open. The mug that she held in her left hand also jerked, spilling the last of its contents over her and the laptop.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  Immediately, Ruby jumped up and rushed over to the sink to grab a cloth, not to dab at her clothes but to save the laptop. As she did she sent the chair behind her crashing to the ground, the sound in the otherwise silent kitchen, deafening.

  “Shit!” she swore again, bending to pick it up just as Cash raced into the room, Jed at his heels.

  “Ruby, what the hell?”

  “Oh Cash, sorry, I got a bit of a shock, that’s all.”

  “You got a shock?” he all but accused.

  Trying to explain, she pointed to the computer that Jed was now sniffing at, his ghostly nose at one point nudging the keyboard – his interest in what was on screen as keen as Ruby’s.

  “Those are patient notes, from Cromer – notes that were left on the floor and trampled on. Eclipse took photos of them and sent them to me.”

  “And?” said Cash, still with a frown on his face. “What did you find?”

  “That one of the patients was called Rebecca Nash; that she was there in the 1940s. Whether she died there I don’t know yet, but back then, so few got out.”

  “What was wrong with her? What illness did she have?”

  “That’s just it, Cash. I don’t think she had an illness. I think Rebecca was psychic.”

  Chapter Ten

  On the day that Ruby was meeting her father for the first time, she should have been filled with nothing but the urgency to dash to Windsor. But, after a night of Rebecca Nash and all those she’d read about – the faces she’d seen staring up at her, beseeching her almost – she also wanted to hurry back to the asylum to help those souls, just as Rebecca had wanted to help them. At least she had the freedom to do that. She didn’t run the risk of torture, of being locked up for her efforts with the key as good as thrown away. Had a lobotomy been performed on Rebecca? It was likely. Even if she’d got out of the asylum, it would have been as a shadow of her former self.

  As sympathetic as Cash was, he had managed to persuade her back to bed and she’d fallen into a fitful sleep that was also filled with shadows. When the alarm clock rang, she’d lain still for a while, with Cash’s arms around her and Jed by her side, once again thinking how lucky she was, but more than that: how unlucky others had been.

  Although she’d wanted to do some more research into the asylum and the exact methods of treatment they used, Cash assured her they could do that en route to Windsor. “Right now, you just need to have some breakfast and get yourself ready to meet your dad, okay? Get yourself all psyched up.”

  “Psyched up?”

  He grinned. “If that’s a pun, it was unintended, honest.”

  She’d decided to drive after all, needing that focus, so it was Cash who sat in the passenger seat with his iPad. They’d hardly left Lewes when he was online. A ‘restraint chair’ was exactly as she’d imagined, but what she didn’t know was that prior to 1933, the hours that someone could spend strapped to the chair were uncapped. It was only after 1933 that the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene ruled that a patient couldn’t spend more than two hours in continuous restraint or three hours in seclusion – guidance that was accepted in England too – in theory.

  “I’ll bet there were those who broke the rules,” declared Cash. “After all, who was going to tell? Back then, authority meant a lot more than it does now. Doctors were like gods, weren’t they? It was their way or the highway. It also says here that before 1933, iron handcuffs were used to restrain patients having an ‘episode’. Iron handcuffs, Ruby!”

  Ruby kept her eyes on the road but his words caused her breath to quicken slightly. Poor Rebecca. Poor all of them. “Cash, it said in the notes that Rebecca also received continuous bath treatment and insulin shock therapy, what are they?”

  “Hang on.” There was a minute or two of silence before he started speaking again. “Here we go, hydrotherapy was a popular treatment in the early twentieth century and continuous baths were when a patient was placed in a canvas hammock in the bath and then covered with a canvas sheet with just their heads poking out. Fresh water was then poured at approximate body temperature into the bath, whilst the old water drained away. This was supposed to have a calming effect.”

  “Oh okay,” Ruby said, relieved. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “Maybe not, until you realise continuous baths could last for several hours or even days.”

  “Days?” Ruby all but spat the word.

  “That’s right. Other hydrotherapy treatments include Scotch douches, where patients were blasted with alternating jets of hot and cold water, and then wrapped in packs of sheets that had been dipped in varying temperatures of water, remaining in them for several hours. Ruby, these treatments were thought of as help, not torture, at least by some.”

  “Sounds pretty torturous to me. Okay, what about this insulin business?”

  “Ah, now this is interesting. It was believed that patients with schizophrenia and who were also diabetic, improved psychologically after a coma.”

  “A coma?” Again, Ruby was stunned. “An induced coma, you mean?”

  “Yep. Coma was induced by the injection of a large amount of insulin, although it says here the methods of administering the treatment were varied, and there were no real guidelines for doing it. The patient would suffer epileptic seizures an hour or two after injection and before the onset of coma. After they’d been in a comatose state for about an hour, the patient would be brought back by an intravenous injection of glucose. The patient would then undergo this treatment another thirty to forty times over a set period, after which they were supposed to be much improved.”

  “Improved my arse! It sounds horrific.”

  “The treatment was abandoned in the mid 1960s apparently and replaced by tranquilisers – a much easier option I should imagine, for the doctors anyway. Less work involved. Drugs have replaced ECT too, electroconvulsive treatment – you know, where they attach those wires to your head and turn up the voltage.”

  “Yeah, I know. God, Cash, if I’d been born then, that could have been me, you know, suffering such a terrible fate. Not only would the odds be stacked against me and my mother – because I was born outside of marriage – add our abilities on top and voila! You’ve got all the ingredients for a long stretch inside, possib
ly a lifetime.”

  “Thank your lucky stars you were born a lot later then.”

  “I do. I’m really thankful. I’m wondering if Rebecca was eventually lobotomised.”

  “Ah, lobotomies,” said Cash. “Let’s see what I can find out about them.”

  Ruby was about to stop him, to say she’d heard enough, but one benefit of this research was that it was keeping the nerves at bay regarding Peter, giving her something else to chew over other than their imminent meeting. With that in mind, she let Cash continue. She had to know this stuff anyway, if she were going back into the remaining ward block. Ignorance was not an option, no matter how damned blissful.

  “Lobotomies,” he continued, “were hailed as yet another miracle cure. Yep, it really sounds it! Inserting a spike into a person’s brain and giving it a good wiggle.”

  “It goes back centuries though, doesn’t it? Wasn’t it ancient practice to drill holes into skulls in order to release evil spirits? I remember learning about that in school.”

  Cash nodded. “Yeah, yeah, me too. It was called trepanning I think.”

  “So, come on, what about more modern practices?”

  “The first operation was performed in the US in 1936, then from the 40s onwards it was in wide use in the UK with around one thousand operations per year.”

  “Eclipse quoted similar statistics.”

  “Oh, did he?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “How come he knows so much?”

  Ruby explained about his grandmother.

  “Oh right, so he’s quite the expert.”

  His slightly frosty tone caused Ruby to frown. “Well, he has a personal interest, for sure, but he’s also a very compassionate man. The plight of his grandmother, of those like her, it moves him. He wants to do something about it. Make a difference.”