The Sleep Room

by F. R. Tallis

  If the poltergeist meant to harm me, there would be no escape. There had been no escape for Mary Williams or Michael Chapman – and there would be no escape for me. I pressed my eyelids even more tightly together and braced myself for violence, the sudden release of impossible forces. What actually happened shocked me far more than anything I had expected.

  I felt spidery fingers repositioning my hair with exquisite gentleness, a touch that was as light and insubstantial as a puff of air. Then a hand landed on my own. For a few moments, it stayed there, the fleshy palm pressing against my knuckles; however, an instant later, the contact was terminated. The mattress springs produced an ascending scale of indeterminate pitches and the sheet beneath me became level again. I could still sense the poltergeist’s progress, as it drifted to the door, where it stopped, to turn the handle. The hinges complained and a draught caressed my cheeks. I heard a curious metallic impact followed by a high-pitched chime that quickly faded. After this, there was nothing but the soft conspiracies of the sea, wind and shingle. I don’t know how long I lay there for. When I finally opened my eyes, I was confronted by the same unyielding darkness, but the atmosphere in the room had changed. There was no imminence, no sense of something about to happen.

  Even after such an experience, habitual rationalism made me reconsider, once again, the tired explanations I had rejected months earlier: hypnopompic hallucination and so on. But it was a sterile exercise, empty intellectualism. In reality I was certain that something very remarkable had happened, particularly so with respect to the ‘touching’, which seemed to have been imitative of my small ministrations in the sleep room.

  I switched on the lamp. When my eyes had adjusted to the light I looked around the room. Apart from the conspicuous and untidy pile of bed coverings under the window, it looked much the same as it always did. The face of my alarm clock showed four thirty. There was little chance of me going back to sleep again, so I put on my dressing gown, picked up the dirty teacup from the night before, and crossed the hallway to the kitchen. I filled the kettle with water, put it on the stove, and lit a cigarette.

  My limbs felt heavy. I was exhausted. Not in some trivial way, but profoundly so, the result of a cumulative, ongoing process that would, if left unchecked, bring about my mental and physical collapse.

  It was impossible to go on. I realized that now. Palmer had understood the situation and I should have listened more carefully to his advice. A sane man couldn’t live under these conditions – at least, not without unburdening himself now and again. And this was the nub of it. A psychiatrist cannot admit to seeing things that cannot be explained. As soon as he does so, he crosses the line that separates himself from his patients.

  I would have to resign. Maitland would be furious and my prospects might be damaged, but there really wasn’t any alternative.

  The kettle boiled and steam billowed out of the spout. Condensation appeared on the window and I turned off the gas. I picked up my used teacup and was about to rinse it under the tap when I noticed something at the bottom, partly submerged beneath the brown residue and dregs. It was a wedding ring.

  I fished out the plain band and dried it on my dressing gown. It was darker and larger than the one I had found before, the one that had belonged to Palmer’s young wife. I turned the gold beneath the light bulb and watched a yellow spark chase around its circumference. For some reason, I had a strong urge to put it on. I held it close to the end of my ring finger, but could not bring myself to penetrate the inviting circularity. Moreover, I was overcome by a dreadful feeling of despair. A paroxysm of grief that made my breath catch. I had come close to proposing to Jane, and the ring represented a loss that, in truth, I had barely come to terms with. In fact, as I stood there gazing at the ring, I found the courage to be honest with myself. I had underestimated the emotional impact of everything: not only the poltergeist (or whatever that capricious spirit might be), but the wearing intensity of my relationship with Maitland, Jane’s betrayal, Mary Williams, Chapman and the sleep room. I had fooled myself into believing that a combination of hard work and bloody-mindedness would be enough to see me through, but I was less robust than I had imagined.

  At six thirty I went down to the wards where I found Sister Jenkins.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ she asked, tilting her hand beneath the desk lamp. The fit was snug.

  ‘In my bedroom.’ I no longer cared what she thought.

  ‘But how could it have got up there?’ Her features acquired the fixity that comes with burgeoning suspicion.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I replied, already walking away.

  In my diary, I noticed that Edward Burgess was due for his final appointment. I had seen him a few times since Maitland had treated him with excitatory abreaction, and since then Mr Burgess had been getting steadily better. He was less anxious, his nightmares had subsided, and he no longer suffered from transient paralysis. Although he looked much the same – sloping brow, deep-set eyes – his features had filled out and the tightness of his jacket suggested that his appetite had returned.

  ‘Well,’ I said, at the conclusion of our interview. ‘I don’t think you need to come here again. Do you?’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I’m feeling very well indeed. Thank you.’

  As he stood to leave, he looked at me rather too closely. ‘Are you all right, doctor?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked.

  ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I am. I didn’t get much sleep last night and I have a headache.’ We walked down the corridor and out onto the landing. ‘Is your driver waiting outside?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. He is. Don’t come any further, Dr Richardson. There’s no need. I can see myself out.’ Burgess stopped and looked around at the staircase and vestibule. His expression was not admiring. ‘Not sure I’d like to work here. Strange old place, isn’t it?’ Our eyes locked and he seemed about to say something else, but instead he shook his head and smiled.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘Keep well.’ He nodded, buttoned up his coat and descended the stairs. When he got to the door, he turned round and shouted up at me. ‘If you feel like a change of scenery, come to Lowestoft. There’s a fancy restaurant. Just opened. I’d be happy to buy you lunch.’

  I leaned over the stair rail and called down, ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  He raised his hand. ‘I hope your headache gets better.’ He then opened the door and stepped outside. Sunlight was streaming through the windows and the air was saturated with a heady smell, like tar or paraffin. As I pushed myself away from the banisters I noticed that one of the carved animals had a blackened face. I crouched down and examined the woodwork more closely. It had been scorched. The varnish had bubbled up and when I stroked my finger over the damaged area a sooty residue came off on my fingers. I wiped my hands clean with my handkerchief and returned to the outpatient suite where I began writing Mr Burgess’s discharge summary.

  It must have been about one fifteen when I heard one of the nurses approaching. I was already looking up, expectantly, when Nurse Fraser appeared. She stood in the doorway looking somewhat flustered.

  ‘Yes?’ I prompted her.

  ‘Dr Richardson . . .’ she began. ‘We have a problem. The sleep-room patients . . .’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘We can’t wake them up.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  She lifted her arms and let them fall by her side. ‘We can’t wake them up.’ The repetition of the same phrase did not make it any more believable.

  I put my pen down. ‘Which patients?’ I asked. ‘Who can’t you wake?’

  ‘All of them,’ she replied.

  18

  In the sleep room, I found Sister Jenkins anxiously pacing between the beds. Nurse Page was standing next to a trolley on which six covered meals had been stacked.

  ‘Dr Richardson,’ said Sister Jenkins, beckoning me to her side. ‘This is most peculiar.’

  ‘You can’t wake t
hem up?’

  ‘No.’ She reached out and shook Sarah Blake’s shoulders. Then, positioning her mouth next to the sleeping patient’s ear, she said loudly, ‘Sarah. Wake up. It’s time for lunch.’ Another vigorous shake was equally ineffective. Sarah Blake’s head lolled from side to side but her eyes remained closed. ‘They’re all the same,’ Sister Jenkins went on, ‘completely unresponsive. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘Might one of the nurses have made a mistake? Too much chlorpromazine, perhaps?’

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ Sister Jenkins replied. ‘Nurse Fraser has been on duty this morning. All of my nightingales are scrupulous, but she is painstaking. She would never have made such a bad miscalculation.’

  Notwithstanding Sister Jenkins’s confidence in Nurse Fraser, I decided to check the charts, but found everything in order. There was nothing to suggest oversight or error. The patients had received varying amounts of medication depending on how peacefully they had slept in the preceding observation period. If anything, they had been given slightly lower doses than usual.

  Sister Jenkins moderated her voice. ‘Have they drifted off into some form of . . .’ She hesitated before whispering, ‘Coma?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘Look at their eyes. Rapid oscillations – see? They’re dreaming. As far as I know, dreaming isn’t observed very often in coma patients.’

  ‘What are we to do, Dr Richardson? They must be fed, washed, voided.’

  ‘Well, you can’t do any of that now. Clearly.’

  ‘Shall I telephone Dr Maitland?’

  ‘No. I’ll call him after I’ve conducted some tests.’

  I lifted one of Kathy Webb’s eyelids and studied the trembling grey iris beneath. Her pupillary reflexes were normal. ‘Kathy?’ I said. ‘Can you hear me?’ I clapped my hands together loudly. ‘Kathy?’ There was no response, not even a twitch. I patted her cheeks, softly at first, on one side of her face, then the other. Eventually, I was giving her hard slaps that made the skin darken. She remained quite still, her expression impassive, the only movement being that of her eyes. I then attached electrodes to her scalp and ran an EEG. There was no generalized slowing in the delta range. Nor was there any evidence of epilepsy. What I saw was the low amplitude waves associated with normal dreaming.

  The other sleepers were just the same. No amount of rocking, slapping or shouting could rouse them, and they all produced identical EEGs.

  When I was satisfied that I could do no more, I telephoned Maitland’s secretary and asked her to get him to call me back. He did so after twenty minutes. I did my best to explain the situation in a calm, clear-headed way, but a panicky excitement kept on threatening to ruin my measured delivery. When I had finished there was a long pause. I thought the line had gone dead. ‘Hugh?’ I called into the mouthpiece. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’m still here. Just thinking, that’s all. I need to see this for myself. I’ll be up later this afternoon.’

  ‘But what about your wife?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s being well looked after,’ he replied. ‘She’ll be fine.’

  Just after five o’clock, I was attending to a patient on the men’s ward when I looked out of the window and saw two bright headlights travelling across the heath. I quickly concluded my business and went out into the vestibule. When Maitland entered, he dispensed with any civilities and asked abruptly, ‘Any change?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘They’re just the same.’

  We went directly down to the sleep room, where I demonstrated how the patients could not be woken up. Afterwards, I showed Maitland the EEG recordings. He said very little and his expression was so severe I became quite nervous. Irrationally, I began to think that he held me responsible for what had happened. When I had finished he went to the beds and tried to wake the patients himself. He then ordered Nurse Page to prepare some syringes. ‘Benzedrine,’ he said to me. ‘That should do it. A double dose of Benzedrine. The effect will be similar to that of adrenalin. We’ll see increases in heart rate and a steep rise in blood pressure, with fluctuations of 10 to 30 millimetres. Restlessness, tremor – palpitations, perhaps. It’ll create a level of physical arousal completely antagonistic to sleep.’

  We injected all of the patients. I listened to Marian Powell’s heart through a stethoscope and heard the beat accelerating, but she remained stubbornly unconscious. Celia Jones and Elizabeth Mason also failed to stir. I watched Maitland taking Sarah Blake’s pulse, before leaning over the bed and lifting her eyelids with his thumb and forefinger. He looked not merely puzzled, but frustrated. Only ten minutes later I saw him preparing more syringes. When all of the patients had received yet another dose of Benzedrine, Maitland drew me aside and said, ‘Well, James, I owe you an apology. I was rather sceptical when you suggested that the sleep-room patients had started dreaming at the same time. One can only assume that your prior observations were indicative of an incremental, ongoing process that has now reached its rather dramatic conclusion.’

  ‘What do you think is going on?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say. But if you’re asking me to speculate . . .’ I gestured for him to continue. ‘There must be something about the conditions that prevail here, in the sleep room, that have opened channels of mutual influence: prolonged sleep, proximity, altered brain chemistry, or a combination of all three. As to the basis of the phenomenon, I suppose the interplay of electromagnetic fields is a reasonable preliminary hypothesis. That’s what you believe, isn’t it? You’ve said as much.’

  ‘There isn’t – as far as I know – another scientific alternative.’

  Maitland grumbled his assent. ‘They appear to have entered a collective dream state from which they cannot be roused. Why should that be? Why should they become stuck, as it were, in a rapid-eye-movement phase of sleep?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied, ‘brains are, in some sense, more porous when dreaming, and thus more likely to influence each other. In due course, this entanglement might reach a critical threshold beyond which the process becomes irreversible.’

  ‘If we had another EEG machine, it would be interesting to compare the traces, would it not?’

  ‘There might be correspondences, similar patterns . . .’

  ‘Which would be a truly astounding result.’

  ‘I wonder,’ I mused, all too conscious of the controversial position I was about to articulate. ‘If we asked these patients what they were dreaming about, and they were able to answer, would they report dreams with common elements?’

  Maitland considered my provocative suggestion for a moment and then said, ‘Let’s not get carried away, James. Something very interesting is occurring, certainly. But we must remain sceptical. Think of all those medical men in the past, who were professionally embarrassed by patients who purported to have special powers: mind over matter, prescience, telepathy. They were tricked into believing all sorts of nonsense.’

  ‘This isn’t the nineteenth century, Hugh.’

  ‘All the more reason why our peers will be unforgiving if we make the same mistakes.’

  ‘Do you really think that this’ – I swept a hand over the beds – ‘has a simple explanation.’

  ‘Probably not. But we have to eliminate all the alternatives before we start making any outlandish claims.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Hysteria. What if these patients are exhibiting a hitherto undocumented form of group hysteria?’

  ‘That doesn’t seem very plausible. They are asleep.’

  ‘We must proceed with caution,’ Maitland sighed and adopted the manner of a world-weary grandee. ‘Believe me, James, I’ve seen all manner of strange phenomena on my travels – everything from poisonous snake handling by Christian evangelists in Tennessee, to cases of possession by monkey spirits in Bali. Congregations, tribes – all kinds of group or gathering – are exquisitely susceptible to the power of suggestion.’

  ‘I don’t believe that these women are in a
state of self-hypnosis.’

  ‘Nor do I. Not really. But if we are going to convince the scientific community that human brains can influence each other during sleep, then we had better be confident of our findings.’

  Our discussion had been somewhat technical and Maitland had repeatedly betrayed his concerns about how the situation could be best negotiated to ensure the survival of his academic reputation. When I looked at the sleeping patients, however, I was reminded of the fact that the problem with which we were faced had both an intellectual and a human dimension.

  ‘What are we going to do if they don’t wake up?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t have to worry about that,’ Maitland replied, sounding a little irritated. ‘Well, not yet, at any rate. We’ll stop all sedatives and ECT and introduce regular intravenous stimulants. I would also suggest that we keep the lights on. You never know, it might help.’ He paused and appeared to be ticking off the items on some mental check list. ‘We’ll ensure that they are properly hydrated with drips, but if they continue sleeping, we’ll also feed them through nose tubes. Voiding will have to be achieved by enema, with digital removal in those cases where faeces have become impacted.’