Parrish’s brow creased. “Everything?”
“The stories, you,” Stanhope looked around him, “this place.”
“Very interesting.” Parrish turned to the window behind him. “Would you mind coming here for a moment? I’d like to show you something.”
Stanhope got to his feet, circumvented the desk, and joined the doctor to stare through the mullioned panes. He checked his watch. Despite the fact that it was early-afternoon, it already seemed to be getting dark outside. The dim greyness of the day only made the bleak, windswept landscape seem all the more forbidding.
In the distance, close to the trunk of an ancient and stunted oak, a number of crows seemed to be engaged in a macabre dance beneath the tree’s naked, twisted branches. And what was that thing they seemed to be congregating around, the one that resembled a pile of wet sandbags? Had that hunched, tattered shape perhaps been chased across the field, made it as far as the safety of the oak, and then met an even worse fate from what lived inside it?
Stanhope eyed the gaping dark hole in the tree’s trunk. Had some hideous, spider-like thing emerged, bitten into its unsuspecting victim, and then scuttled back into the warrens beneath the field?
“I think these stories really are starting to get to me,” he said, trying to stop his voice from shaking.
Parrish laid a hand on his shoulder. “Good,” he said. “I’d be very disappointed if they weren’t by now.” He pointed to where Stanhope was already looking. “Do you see those birds, there?” Stanhope nodded, trying not to shudder. “Do you see what they’re doing?”
“To be honest, I thought they were dancing,” Stanhope replied with a nervous laugh.
“I suppose in a way they are. It’s a bleak and thankless life for such creatures in this weather. Food is scarce, and the worms stay hidden deep in the earth, where it’s warmer. The only way those crows can survive is to encourage their prey to come to the surface. So they pretend to be the rain, the rain that would drown the worms if they stayed where they were. The poor things rush to the surface to avoid a watery death and are instead gobbled up by the hungry monsters waiting above.” Parrish smiled. “It’s rather a good example of something using fear to get what it wants.”
Stanhope looked at the older man, incensed. “And is that what you’re doing with me?” he said.
“Perhaps, just ever so slightly,” said Parrish with a twinkle in his eyes. “But I rather expected you to be a good sport about it instead of turning into a shivering mass of jelly. Now stop wondering if that’s a corpse out there by the tree and sit back down.”
It was with a sense of relief that Stanhope resumed his seat.
“Feeling better now?” Parrish asked.
“I am, as a matter of fact,” said Stanhope. “Perhaps you actually are a good psychiatrist after all.”
“I like to think I know my way around the human mind,” the doctor replied, looking away for a moment, the hint of a smile on his face as if he were sharing a private joke with someone. “Anyway, back to business. You were exhibiting an interest in our female patients?”
Stanhope shook his head and chuckled. “I am no more interested in crazy ladies than crazy men,” he said. “I just wanted to know if there might be any psychiatric conditions women suffer from that men don’t.”
Parrish shook his head. “Post-natal depression aside, there’s not really much of a difference. Of course there are far more cases of anorexia and bulimia nervosa in women, but neither of those conditions is exclusive to the female of the species.”
“What about the other way around?”
“You mean psychiatric conditions exclusive to men?” Parrish rubbed his chin. “Interestingly enough, no, which has made for some rather unusual cases in itself. Even a condition as rare as Ripper Psychosis, which was thought for many years to be suffered only by men, has now had a few female cases documented world-wide.”
Stanhope eyed the tape recorder on the desk. The one that was meant to be recording his interview with Parrish; the one that still hadn’t been switched on yet, because Parrish wouldn’t let him. “Ripper Psychosis?” he heard himself ask.
Parrish nodded. “Do you know what a delusion is?” he asked.
Stanhope shook his head. “Not an exact definition, no.”
Parrish pointed at a heavy red volume on a high shelf. “Well, to be precise, a delusion is defined as a fixed, false belief out of context with the social and cultural background of the patient. In Ripper Psychosis, this fixed false belief is that the patient—”
“—believes that they are Jack the Ripper?” Stanhope interjected with a sardonic smirk.
Dr Parrish did not look pleased at the interruption. “In some cases, yes,” he said. “Such as the one earlier about the young chimney sweep, and another we will get to later. But not all. Some merely believe that their actions are being motivated or controlled by the spirit of Jack the Ripper, that the terrible things they feel they are being made to do are beyond their control.”
“Despite the fact no one still really knows who he was?”
“That’s hardly important, is it?” Parrish raised an eyebrow. “No one can conclusively prove the existence of God, Mr Stanhope, and yet there are plenty of people who feel as if their actions are influenced by Him. The ‘God Told Me To’ psychosis is far commoner than you might think. We have quite a few of those upstairs, actually.”
“And quite a few Ripper Psychosis cases as well, I presume?”
Parrish shook his head. “Not that many, no. As I said, it’s actually a very rare condition, which in turn makes it all the more fascinating and worthy of study than the more common or garden delusional problems we see a lot of in here.”
He bent over, picked up a bulging file from the bottom shelf of the closest bookcase, and laid the crammed and battered box on his desk. “Very fascinating indeed,” he said.
“Is that just one case?” Stanhope asked.
“It is.” Parrish had the box open now, and was searching through for the case summary. “But very much worthy of all this study. You see, I had never come across a case quite like his before. Outwardly entirely normal. He could hold down a job, he lived in a nice flat, he even had normal relationships with other human beings. And yet for some reason, something triggered inside him and suddenly he was off on a killing spree to rival the famous Victorian serial killer.”
Stanhope could not help but look interested. “Do they have any idea what started it?” he asked.
“He’s been examined by specialist after specialist. Poked, prodded, tested and re-tested.” Parrish picked up a document whose yellowing typed pages were held together by a rusty paperclip in its top left-hand corner. He handed it to Stanhope.
“Personally,” Parrish said as the other man began to read, “I think it all began with the séance ...”
<
~ * ~
R. CHETWYND-HAYES
The Gatecrasher
SOMEONE SAID, “LET’s hold a séance,” and someone else said, “Let’s,” and five minutes later they were all seated round a table. There was a lot of giggling, and any amount of playing footsie under the table, and it is possible that the entire idea might have collapsed if it had not been for Edward Charlton.
He was a tall, thin youth, with a hungry intense expression that is often peculiar to young men who embrace some burning cause. He had long-fingered hands that were never still, and his ears, which were rather large, stuck out like miniature wings.
“I say.” No one paid much attention, so he raised his voice, “I say, let’s treat the matter seriously.”
This had not been the original intention, and everyone looked at him with astonishment.
“I mean to say,” he cleared his throat, “if one is going to do this kind of thing, one should do it properly.”
Normally he would have been laughed down, but they were in his flat, and good manners, or what passed for good manners in tha
t company, demanded the host be given some freedom in his choice of entertainment.
“What do we do?” asked a blonde girl.
“We all hold hands.” He waited for the ribald comments to die down, then went on. “So as to form an unbroken circle. Yes, and I’ll turn all the lights out except the table lamp.”
They sat in the semi-gloom holding hands, and the occasional giggle was more an expression of uneasiness than one of merriment. Edward felt more confident now the lighting had been subdued, and his voice was stronger.
“You must empty your minds,” he instructed.
“That won’t be difficult for some of us,” a voice remarked.
“Then,” Edward went on, “we must concentrate all our powers on the spirit world.”
The young man cursed when a feeble wit asked: “Whisky or gin?”, but nobody bothered to laugh.
“Now concentrate,” Edward ordered.
They all obeyed him in their different ways, but an undisciplined mind is like a wild stallion when subjected to restraint. Under Edward’s continual bombardment of whispered “Concentrate”s, several minds tried to chain thought, but mental pictures manifested in the void, and the senses would not be muted. Hand could feel hand, ears heard the sound of breathing; eyes saw the shaded table lamp; smell sipped at a whiff of perfume, and imagination was never idle.
“Is there anyone here?” asked Edward in a stage whisper.
“Only us chickens,” the humorous one could not help himself, and now several voices ordered him to belt up.
“If anyone is there, come in,” Edward invited, “don’t be afraid - come in.”
There was an ungrateful silence; the blonde girl shivered and tightened her grip on her neighbour’s hand. Presently the shiver ran round the entire circle, passed from hand to hand, up arms, down legs, leaving behind a paralysing coldness. Consciousness fled, and was replaced by dreams.
Edward walked in the footsteps of a tall man; a great towering figure dressed in a black coat and matching broad-brimmed hat. The man stopped, then turned, and Edward looked upon the lean dark face, the deep sunken eyes, the jutting beak of a nose; the coat fell open revealing a row of knives stuck in a black belt. He heard the distant sound of carriage wheels, and tasted the bitter fog.
The room was like an ice chamber; the table lamp dimmed down to an orange glimmer, and the air was full of fog. All around him he could hear the moans of his companions. Slowly the fog lifted, rose to the ceiling and gradually dispersed, and the coldness went as the lamp grew brighter. Edward looked at the faces of his companions with astonishment that gradually merged into horror. It was as though they had all gone to sleep with their eyes open. The blonde girl had fallen back in her chair and was moaning as though in great pain; one young man had his face twisted up into a snarling grimace, another was opening and closing his hands while staring with unseeing eyes at the overmantel mirror. Edward whispered, “Stop messing about,” but without much conviction; then he rose, went over to the wall switch and flooded the room with light. They all returned to the land of the living shortly afterwards.
The mass exodus began some five minutes later; no one said much, but eyes accused Edward of some unspeakable crime; a violation, an act of indecency, an unpardonable breach of human behaviour.
The last man to go out of the front door looked back at Edward with scornful, but at the same time, fearful eyes.
“I wouldn’t be you, brother,” he said, “not for all the tea in China.”
He slammed the door, and Edward was left alone.
~ * ~
His bed stood on a dais situated in the centre of the far wall of his sitting room; during the day it was surrounded by a curtain, but at night he drew this back and by raising his head could see the entire room. As he lay on the bed and put out his hand to turn off the bedside lamp, the fear came to him, and he wondered, in that revealing moment, why it had not come before.
The fear was at first without form. It was just black, unreasoning terror, and he shrank back against his pillow and tried to see beyond the circle of light cast by his lamp. Then he knew. He was afraid of the dark. He lay awake all that night with the light on.
The next day was spent in anticipation of the night which must follow, and when he finally put his key into the lock and opened his front door there was a sense of fearful expectancy. But his flat was empty, was almost irritatingly normal, and he experienced a strange feeling of disappointment. As he ate a solitary meal before the artificial electric log fire, and later tried to read a book, his mind circled the canker of fear, like a bird flying round a snake. He toyed with the idea of going out; perhaps staying the night at a hotel. But this fear took him to the borderline of insanity. If he were to leave the flat, he would be haunted by the knowledge it was empty; his imagination would picture what was moving among his furniture; if his body slept, then surely his soul would return here and bring back some macabre memory to the waking brain.
He did not intend to fall asleep, but he had been awake the entire previous night, and unconsciousness smothered him unawares so he did not hear the book fall from his lax fingers. The icy cold woke him. The limb-freezing, hair-raising chill, and the wild thumping of his heart. He choked, cleared the bitter bile from his throat, gripped the arms of his chair, cried out like a frightened child as his sitting-room door opened, then closed with a resounding slam. The overhead electric lamp trembled slightly, then began to swing to and fro, making a pattern of light circles dance a mad reel across the room. He looked up at the swaying lamp, and as though it had been caught out in some childish prank it suddenly became still; his gaze moved across the ceiling and travelled down to the overmantel mirror, then stopped. A man’s face was staring at him out of the glass.
A face that was long, lean, and dark. The sunken, eyes, glittering pools of darkness, stared down at the shrinking figure and betrayed no emotion. Indeed, the entire face was a blank mask; the eyes moved, studied the room with the same unreasoning stare, then looked down again. The thin lips parted, and Edward read the soundless word.
“Come.”
Like a sleepwalker, he rose and walked to the mirror.
Greek Street mumbled in the half-sleep that falls upon Soho in the small hours. The after-theatre crowds had long since finished their late dinner and gone home; now only the night-club revellers, or more likely seekers of esoteric entertainment, still moved like maundering snails along the pavement, glancing hopefully into darkened doorways, or looking upwards at lighted windows.
The girl came upon Edward suddenly. She materialized out of a shop doorway and gripped his arm, while gazing up at him with the air of one who has just stumbled upon an old and extremely dear friend.
“Hullo, darling, how nice to see you again.”
One blue-painted lid closed in an expressive wink and that part of Edward’s brain that still worked took in the words, the expression, and the wink, then came to a decision.
“Let’s start walking, darling.” The full red lips scarcely parted, and the blue eyes were never still. “You never know when a bloody copper is going poke his nose round the corner.”
“Let’s walk,” said Edward in a flat voice.
She took his arm, and together they walked along the pavement. The girl gave Edward a calculating sideways glance. “Like to come to my place, darling? Five quid and no hurry.”
“I would like you to come to my place,” said Edward.
“How far?” Now there was a hint of suspicion in her voice.
“Off the Edgware Road.”
“Rather a long way. Have to make it worth my while.”
“Shall we say thirty pounds?” Edward suggested.
Next time the girl spoke her voice sounded like a cash register.
“You a pussy, dear?”
“A pussy?”
“Yes, pussy - cat - do you go in for the rough stuff? If you do, count me out. I’ve got me other clients to think about. In any
case, I’d want more than thirty pounds.”
Edward chuckled and the girl frowned. “Nothing like that. Just your company.”
She relaxed. “All right then. Ten pounds down in the taxi, and the rest when we say goodbye. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Edward.
~ * ~
He opened his front door and, after turning on the hall light, stood aside for her to enter. Despite the carefully applied makeup, tell-tale lines marred her face and the muscles under her chin sagged slightly; the brash metallic blonde hair was brittle, while her calves were plump and streaked with extended veins. He helped her take off the light blue coat, noting with cold detachment the short, sleeveless, and very low-cut black dress. He then guided her through the sitting-room door and she gasped with pretend, or perhaps genuine, delight at the cosy surroundings.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 28
