The Sleep Room

by F. R. Tallis

  I wasn’t sure how safe it would be to attempt further sedation. Particularly so, given that Chapman had been taking a new drug that I had little experience of. It was possible that antagonistic substances were interacting and making him worse, rather than better. I tried to contact Maitland, but his secretary at St Thomas’s had no idea where he was. Indeed, she didn’t even know that his wife had been in a car accident.

  Chapman’s behaviour was becoming more and more erratic, and when he started banging his head against the iron bars I knew that the time had come for drastic action. I called Hartley and we both manhandled Chapman into a straitjacket. We then took him to the padded cell, which was located in the tower and to my knowledge had never been used before. It felt horrible, forcing Chapman up the stairs like a prisoner, and I had to keep telling myself that it was for his own good. Hartley unlocked the door and we dragged Chapman inside. It was a claustrophobic space, the floor being no more than an eight-foot square. The walls and the back of the door were upholstered with stuffed leather pouches, which made self-injury impossible. There was a naked bulb suspended from the high ceiling, and a small window, set well out of reach, which admitted insufficient light. Chapman had exhausted himself and became limp. He sank down in a corner and groaned. ‘Just rest, Michael,’ I said, affecting a carefree lightness of tone. ‘As soon as you stop hurting yourself, you can come downstairs again. I promise.’ Mucus bubbled out of his nostrils and I wiped his nose with my handkerchief. It is hard to explain, but I felt like a traitor. Hartley locked the door and gave me the key. ‘I’ll leave another one with Sister Jenkins,’ he said gravely.

  When Hartley had gone I looked through the peephole in the door and saw Chapman, just where we had left him, in the corner, hunched, broken. The spectacle of his lonely seclusion was almost too much to bear. I discussed Chapman with Sister Jenkins and we decided to watch him closely. Every thirty minutes, a nurse would climb the stairs and check that he was all right.

  At ten o’clock in the evening there was a knock on my door and when I opened it I saw Jane standing on the landing. It was just my luck that Sister Jenkins had given her the job of monitoring Chapman. The situation of her late arrival reminded me of all those other nocturnal visits in the past – her falling into my arms, hot kisses and the feel of her undergarments through her uniform. I was irritated by a frisson of desire.

  ‘Mr Chapman has soiled himself.’ Jane’s lips barely moved as she spoke. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘He might suddenly become violent again. I think I’d better help you.’

  She did not thank me. We went to the padded cell, in silence, and washed Chapman. After we had changed his pyjamas, Jane mopped the floor with carbolic. I tried to engage Chapman, but he had retreated so far into himself that he seemed completely unaware of my presence.

  Jane and I parted, stiffly.

  I don’t know why I tried, at that late juncture, to make conversation, or why I chose a topic which was so obviously freighted with emotion. ‘Did you hear that Maitland’s wife has been injured in a serious car accident?’

  Jane spun round and her expression communicated both anger and exasperation. She showed me her palms and replied, ‘I don’t know what you expect me to say.’ Then, snatching up the mop and bucket, she strode off in high dudgeon.

  I went back to bed and slept fitfully. In the early hours of the morning I awoke and was alarmed to hear screams. It didn’t take me long to work out that it was Chapman. I jumped out of bed, put on my dressing gown, and rushed up the tower steps. Looking through the peephole, I could see nothing. Jane must have turned the light off earlier, having found Chapman asleep. I flicked the switch and saw Chapman running around the cell. The space was so small he kept colliding with the walls and falling over. He didn’t appear to be trying to hurt himself, but rather desperately trying to evade something that was chasing him. ‘Go away!’ he shouted. ‘Go away! Leave me alone!’

  ‘Michael,’ I commanded. ‘Sit down, for heaven’s sake. You’ll sprain your ankle if you carry on like that.’

  He stopped dead and came right up to the door. ‘Let me out, Dr Richardson. Please let me out. I won’t pinch myself, I won’t. I’ll be good. I give you my word. Please, please let me out.’

  ‘Sit down, Michael. I don’t want to have to bind your legs as well as your arms.’

  I offered him reassurances and told him that I would return if he called. Eventually, he became less agitated and retreated to his corner, where he crouched down and wrapped his arms around his knees. I asked him who it was that he had been telling to go away, but he only twitched and shook his head. His eyes began to revolve in slow, suspicious circles and he pressed his lips together in mute, childish defiance.

  When I was confident that the crisis had passed, I said, ‘Michael, I’m going now. Try to relax.’

  ‘Please,’ he whined. ‘Leave the light on.’

  ‘But you won’t sleep,’ I protested.

  ‘For the love of God, Dr Richardson.’ His voice cracked as he made his plea. ‘Please. Leave the light on.’

  I did as he asked and went back to bed.

  The first thing I did the following morning was attempt, once again, to contact Maitland. He wasn’t at home, or at his club, but he had telephoned his secretary at St Thomas’s. She was able to inform me that Mrs Maitland had had a successful neck operation and that Maitland was still at her bedside. He had promised to call again as soon as his wife’s condition was stable.

  When I went to see Chapman, he was still restless, but not as febrile as the day before. With Nurse Brewer’s assistance, I managed to feed him and he swallowed his pills without complaint.

  ‘You seem a little better, Michael,’ I ventured. He assented with a minuscule movement of his head. ‘I’d like to transfer you back to the men’s ward as soon as possible, but you must stop all this head-banging and pinching. Do you understand?’ He nodded, this time demonstrating more interest in what I was saying. ‘Let’s see how you’re feeling this afternoon. We’ll make a decision then.’ I had been sitting next to him on the floor and I pressed down on the cork tiles to get back on my feet. When I reached the door, I looked back at Chapman and our eyes locked.

  ‘Goodbye, Dr Richardson.’ His croaky farewell was touching.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ I replied.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he repeated, somehow imbuing the word with ominous finality. It made me feel uneasy. I have many regrets – more than most, I suspect; however, I dearly wish – at that moment – I had listened more intently to the quiet but insistent voice of intuition issuing its mysterious warning. If I had, then things might have turned out very differently.

  At eleven thirty I was in the sleep room. All of the patients were dreaming, and had been dreaming for an hour or so. I found myself hovering at the head of each bed, studying the face of each occupant, and thinking about each individual life – hitherto, completely unknown to me. They were such tragic cases: orphaned, disowned, forgotten, lost. I brushed a lock of hair from Marian Powell’s forehead, and pitied the child that had suffered so much ill-use. Covering Elizabeth Mason’s hand with my own, I imagined her, broken-hearted, refusing to surrender her wedding dress. These were women who had slipped through all of the safety nets that society had to offer – family, charitable organization, asylum. They had ended up at Wyldehope as a last resort. If Maitland failed them, they would be shunted from institution to institution for the rest of their lives. But were they getting any better? I had no idea. Maitland seemed more concerned about how long they could be kept asleep, rather than whether or not they were showing any signs of improvement. Palmer had questioned the efficacy of deep-sleep therapy. I thought of Rosenberg, the athletic Stratton, and the CIA memorandum in Marian Powell’s medical notes; the American colonel who Jane had seen visiting the sleep room at St Thomas’s, and the rumours that Maitland was connected in some way with British intelligence.

  I was pondering these issues when the door b
urst open and Nurse McAllister almost fell into the sleep room. She had obviously been running down the stairs. Her cap had fallen off and she looked very frightened.

  ‘Quick!’ she cried. Almost inarticulate with shock, she only managed to add, ‘Mr Chapman. Something dreadful.’

  I rushed up to the tower, taking the steps two at time, and when I came to the padded cell I saw Lillian Gray looking through the open door, a hand clasped over her mouth. Something made me slow down as I made the final ascent, an unwillingness to confront the boundless horror prefigured by the nurse’s contorted features. I forced myself forward and, by degrees, the interior came into view. What I saw made me halt at the threshold and reach out on either side for the support of the wooden frame.

  Chapman was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him. His straitjacket was on the other side of the room, a crumpled heap of leather straps and canvas. Blood trickled down his cheeks, issuing from the two dark, empty orbits formerly occupied by his eyes. One eyeball was close to my right foot. It had been hurled with some force, causing the sclera to split and exude a transparent mass of gelatinous humour. I scanned the floor but could not find the other one.

  ‘Dear God,’ I said. ‘Michael. What have you done to yourself?’

  He raised his head and directed his empty black sockets towards me. There was something about the shape of his face that was wrong. It seemed weirdly elongated. A strange presentiment made me call out to Lillian, ‘Don’t look. Turn away.’

  Chapman opened his mouth and allowed the second eyeball to tumble down his chest and roll across the cork tiles. A fine flagellum of nerve tissue whipped the floor with each rotation.

  Then, he began to sing: ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.’

  ‘Go downstairs – call an ambulance.’ I addressed Lillian Gray without looking at her. ‘And ask Nurse McAllister to bring me some morphine, antiseptic and bandages.’

  As Lillian’s footsteps receded, Chapman began to sing again: ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream . . .’ And he continued repeating the same refrain, until the morphine took effect and sent him to sleep.

  I never saw Chapman again. He was taken to Ipswich. The following day I received a telephone call from an orthopaedic surgeon, who informed me that, in addition to gouging out his own eyes, Chapman had also managed to sustain several other injuries. He had broken his leg and numerous hairline fractures had been detected all over his body. ‘The poor man must have really thrown himself about,’ said the surgeon. A different image suggested itself to me: books with broken spines.

  17

  The following day, Maitland telephoned. I asked him about his wife’s condition and he explained that she was much improved. When she had been admitted to University College Hospital, it was thought that she might have suffered a brain haemorrhage, but this now seemed unlikely. She did, however, require the surgical removal of a damaged intervertebral disc in order to relieve pressure on the spinal cord. Maitland was still obviously very concerned about his wife’s health, but he was sounding much more himself, not at all like the distracted individual I had last seen leaving Wyldehope. I took a deep breath and said, ‘Hugh, something’s happened.’

  ‘Oh?’ he responded, failing to register the trepidation that caused my voice to crack. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘One of the patients had to be transferred to Ipswich.’

  ‘Not one of the sleepers, I hope.’

  ‘No. Not one of the sleepers,’ I repeated.

  Maitland listened to my account of Chapman’s mental disintegration without a single interruption. When I had finished, I braced myself for a broadside of curses and remonstrations. But there was only a thoughtful pause. ‘I did try to contact you,’ I began again, nervously attempting to essay a defence. ‘You were unavailable.’ I may have pressed on ineffectually for a while before my excuses petered out.

  ‘Why didn’t you give Mr Chapman more sedation?’ Maitland asked.

  ‘I wasn’t sure how much more I could risk, what with him being on a new drug. I had already given him over four hundred milligrams of sodium amytal and it simply wasn’t having any effect.’

  With tactful deference, I politely reminded Maitland of my prior reservations. I had always been doubtful about the new antidepressants from America. Maitland was, as a rule, intolerant of contradiction and I was expecting some kind of angry refutation; however, perhaps he was still so preoccupied with his wife that he was disinclined to argue. Instead of reprimanding me, he agreed – albeit with some reluctance – that a ‘bad reaction’ was a possibility that could not, at this stage, be excluded. He then asked the question that I was, of course, dreading: ‘Tell me, James, how did Chapman get out of the straitjacket?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘Who put him in it?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Are you sure that you put it on properly?’

  ‘Yes. Quite sure.’

  ‘Then how . . . ?’ Incomprehension prevented his sentence from reaching its conclusion.

  What could I say? That I believed a poltergeist was responsible? ‘There must be something wrong with the fastenings,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Have you checked them?’

  ‘Yes. To be honest, I can’t find anything amiss, but that’s the only explanation.’

  ‘Unless . . .’ He invited me to consider the less palatable alternative.

  ‘Unless I am mistaken and I wasn’t paying sufficient attention when I secured the straps.’

  ‘It happens, you know. I assume Mr Chapman was struggling.’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  His next comment was preceded by an ambiguous beat of silence. ‘I’m sure you did your best.’

  Maitland then asked me if any of the nightingales had been significantly affected.

  ‘Nurse McAllister and Nurse Gray saw the worst of it. But I think they’ll be all right.’

  ‘Good,’ he responded. It never ceased to amaze me how Maitland was always so considerate with respect to his nightingales. ‘Please make a point of thanking them for me – for their dedication and courage.’

  We spoke for a few more minutes and Maitland informed me that he intended to visit Wyldehope in a few days. I wasn’t expecting his garbled, sympathetic farewell. ‘Look, James. I wanted to say: it can’t have been easy for you lately. I realize that. What with Christmas – and now this business with Chapman. You’ve had a lot to deal with. Let’s hope things calm down a bit now, eh?’

  It was a sentiment I shared. But things didn’t calm down. And worse was yet to come.

  I dreamt of the lighthouse, once again. I saw its penumbral outline against the starless sky, its yellow beam sweeping across the slowly moving waves, and heard the harsh noise that accompanied each revolution of the lamp. There was something about this image that now filled me with a terrible, unspeakable dread. The fear was formless, overwhelming, and found expression in a cry of terror that woke me up. The gloomy seascape persisted for a moment and then shattered as if it had been painted onto broken glass.

  Darkness and preternatural cold: that is what I remember. The curtains were drawn and must have been overlapping, because I could see absolutely nothing. There was no strip of sky, made faintly luminous by a hidden moon or a scattering of stars. The fear that had accompanied the lighthouse dream had survived the dream’s dissolution, and it became, if anything, more intense. I did not move, because of a strong sense of expectation that made me hold my breath and listen intently. When I blinked, I could hear my eyelashes on the pillow. I had no idea what I was waiting for but the presumption was so strong I was all but paralysed. My frozen state revived memories of childhood: the indisputable reality of monsters beneath the bed, inhabiting their shadowy realm of dust and silence – always ready to pounce. I was lying on my side, my knees raised and my back rounded. As I might have done when I was a small boy, I gri
pped the blanket and attempted to cover my head with it, but my efforts met with resistance. I assumed that the edges had been tucked tightly beneath the mattress and pulled somewhat harder. To my utter astonishment, I felt a response. It was as though a rival had taken hold of the other end and was now pulling in the opposite direction.

  The terror that I experienced was wholly physical and confirmed the descriptive cliché of flesh ‘crawling’. A tingling sensation rippled over my body and my scalp prickled as each hair began to rise.

  I clutched the blanket tightly, but it began to slip from my fingers. There was a sudden wrench and my protective cover was whipped away. The top sheet, blanket and eiderdown flew across the room and landed heavily near the window. I was naked and my sudden exposure reminded me of how cold it was. The fear that had had its origin in the lighthouse dream continued to compromise my ability to take action, and I remained in a state of petrified immobility. If human beings possess a sixth sense, then it must have been through this channel that I received impressions of movement: something travelling from the far corner of the room, past the foot of the bed, and then coming to a standstill beside me.

  It is frequently written that the greatest threat posed by the supernatural is to the mind. There is nothing to fear, so they say, except fear itself. But I was in the presence of a power that could raise a man up and cast him down again, a power that could break a leg and fracture bones, a power that might levitate my bed and send it sailing through the window.

  I imagined myself hopelessly flailing in the updraught of rushing air, plummeting to my death. What would they say about me? He was odd, like his predecessor, Palmer. He went crazy after an unhappy love affair. He spent too much time in his rooms, alone.

  It was coming closer. My eyes were wide open, I could see nothing, but I knew that it was coming closer. This perception was confirmed when I heard a sigh next to my exposed ear. There was a faint sibilance, two syllables of equal length, but lacking in articulation. These words, if they were words, were unintelligible. I began to tremble and, irrationally, closed my eyes. I kept them tightly shut, pressing the lids together, attempting to interpose at least something between my conscious self and the poltergeist. The passage of time was no longer marked out in minutes and seconds but aeons and eternities. I felt the mattress sag, as it might if someone had just sat down on the edge of the bed. The springs groaned and the sheet tilted downwards. I wanted to scream. I wanted to open my mouth and scream so loudly that Hartley, someone, anyone, would come to my rescue; however, when I tried, I experienced the disconnection between intention and action so typical of nightmares. I produced a tremulous, asthmatic wheeze and my mouth was so dry, when I swallowed, it felt like I was choking.