The Asylum

by John Harwood

  Keys. Or an implement; something heavy enough to break open the gallery door. Or to use as a weapon against Dr. Straker. The light was too dim to see into cupboards and drawers. I thought of trying the panel on the wall, but if he was watching from outside and saw the light . . . I moved from bench to bench, ignoring Lucia’s pleas.

  “Be quiet,” I said as I passed behind the chair. “If you speak again, I will bind your mouth shut.”

  She began to weep instead. I would not look at her.

  After a hasty circuit of the room, I had found a hammer, a chisel, a heavy screwdriver, a candle and a packet of vestas. Fury at this woman I had never truly known, except through the pages of my journal, had kept the worst of my fear at bay. I turned to face her at the last.

  “Georgina! I did love you, I swear! I would have come back for you!”

  “You are incapable of love,” I said. “Or truth.” I stood looking down at her, trying to recover something of those lost weeks, but nothing would come. Terror had blurred the likeness that had deceived so many. Her eyes were glazed; the kohl had run in dark, glistening streaks.

  “At least untie me,” she pleaded. “Give me a chance of life.”

  “What chance did you give me? I would sooner release a serpent.”

  Her head sagged forward; the chair shook to her trembling.

  “What will he do to me?” The words were scarcely audible.

  “He may tear your heart out and roast it before your eyes, for all I care.” But then I thought, If I leave her thus, I am no better than she is.

  “If I escape him, I will save you if I can. For a prison cell.”

  “Let me loose for a moment, or I shall soil myself.”

  “You have soiled yourself already,” I said, and turned my back on her.

  It was so dark in the corner by the desk that I had at last to light the candle. I worked the blade of the chisel into the gap between the drawer and the frame and pounded it with the mallet—the noise was so deafening that I expected Dr. Straker to appear at any moment—until the whole front of the drawer broke loose with a rending of timber. My hands were shaking uncontrollably; it took me an age before the writing case was safely buttoned inside my dress. And then I could not manage the lighted candle as well as the tools; I blew out the flame and dragged myself up the stairs, pursued by Lucia’s cries.

  With the tools clutched to my bosom, I was forced to edge sideways into the darkness between the wall and the heaped furniture. I had gone only a few steps when the hammer slipped from my grasp. Stooping blindly to retrieve it, I lost my balance and fell against the stack, dropping the candle.

  An ominous tremor ran through the floor. I was scrambling back toward the gallery when the whole pile collapsed with a roar like thunder. Something struck me between the shoulder blades, and I was flung violently forward, into oblivion.

  I knew, as the throbbing in my head became too insistent to ignore, that I had been unconscious for a long time. I was lying on my back, in darkness, with one arm against a stack of chairs and the other jammed against a wall.

  I grasped the rung of a chair. The whole pile shifted alarmingly as I levered myself onto my side, wincing at every movement, then rose painfully to my feet and tested my limbs. There was a cold, sticky patch on my temple, which stung like fire when I touched it, but nothing seemed to be broken. If I could find another way out, I might still escape.

  As I emerged onto the gallery, I heard, far above me, the tower clock striking the half hour. But it was surely much too dark for half past six; it must be half past seven. They would have been hunting me for an hour at least.

  On the western side, the windows still glowed with a dim, purplish light, which seemed to float in the upper part of the chamber. All was deathly quiet, except for the pounding of my heart, and a faint singing in my ears. Or was it the vibration I had felt before?

  Below, the lamp still burned by the vestry door. Lucia’s white, terrified face peered upward; the marks left by the kohl looked like streaks of blood.

  If I were to hide beneath a bench nearby, I might be able to slip out while Dr. Straker was occupied—I shuddered in spite of myself—with Lucia. But I could not descend without her seeing me; she would surely betray me if she thought it might save her life.

  No; the safest thing would be to remain hidden up here until he had—finished with her. When daylight came, I might be able to move enough of the debris to reach the gallery door.

  The invalid chair creaked. Lucia was fighting to free herself, straining until her eyes stood out in their sockets and the chair rocked back and forth on its wheels. She forced her head forward, struggling in vain to reach the straps with her teeth, and at last collapsed into harsh, choking sobs.

  No, I thought, no; I cannot bear it. My feet had carried me to the stairs, without the slightest notion of what I meant to do, and my hand was upon the rail, when I heard a lock turn over. The vestry door flew open; Dr. Straker appeared, and strode across to the panel without so much as a glance at Lucia. Lights sprang up along the wall behind her. He moved on to a black cabinet nearby, opened the door, and reached inside; I heard a series of rapid clicks, like a ratchet, followed by a flash of blue light.

  “Well, Miss Ardent,” he said, speaking over her shoulder, “you have caused me trouble enough for one night. Miss Ashton is still at large; we will recapture her soon enough, but I have no more time to spend on you.”

  Lucia tried to speak, but it came out as a sob.

  “You will feel nothing, I promise you; nothing at all,” he said, turning back to the cabinet. “It may comfort you to know that your death, at least, will serve some useful purpose. Your body—or, as the world will believe, Miss Ferrars’ body—will be found in the wood tomorrow morning. Heart failure—regrettable in one so young, but then her mother had a weak heart. Foolish young women will persist in wandering about strange woods at night, exposing themselves to shocks of all kinds—if you will forgive the expression . . .”

  Lucia was making a low, keening sound, like a wounded animal in its death throes. He took the leather coronet in both hands, pressed it down on her head until the outer band was almost covering her eyebrows, and tightened it at the back, with the wires looping down from the chair. Then, from the bench, he picked up a small dark box, with more wires attached to it. He came around the chair and stood looking down at the terrified Lucia, with the wires trailing behind him. Then he raised his right hand in a gesture of finality.

  “No!!” My voice rang through the tower. Dr. Straker spun round, scanning the gallery.

  “Miss Ashton, is it not?”

  “Yes,” I said hopelessly.

  “Pray descend, and join us. You have nothing to fear, I assure you.”

  I did not reply.

  “Now please, Miss Ashton, be sensible. This apparatus is capable of every degree of effect, from a faint tingling sensation in the temples to instant death. I give you my word of honour that you will suffer only the mildest of seizures: you will wake tomorrow and recall nothing of these—unfortunate events. Frederic will have learnt a valuable lesson, and will, I am sure, remain just as devoted to you. Indeed, we may even anticipate your becoming mistress of Tregannon Asylum: a poetic irony I shall savour.

  “As for Miss Ardent here, you cannot possibly care what becomes of her. I suggest you avert your eyes.”

  Lucia appeared to have fainted with terror; she lay slumped in the chair, her head lolling sideways, her eyes closed. Now that all hope had gone, I felt strangely calm.

  “If I escape you,” I said, “you will be hanged for murder.”

  “So be it,” he said, and brought his hands together.

  Lucia’s body convulsed so violently that I thought her spine had snapped. Whatever sound she made was lost in my own cry of horror and despair.

  “Miss Ashton, Miss Ashton, calm yourself. Think of all the lives that may be saved—your own included—by this machine. We must all die, sooner or later, and some lives are not wort
h prolonging. So long as she lived, my life’s work was in jeopardy. You might even say that she died in the cause of science, that others might live longer and happier lives. The greatest good of the greatest number, Miss Ashton: it is the best we can hope for.”

  He bent over Lucia and removed the coronet from her lifeless head. From the wreckage at my feet, I managed to free a piece of wood about three feet long. More lights came on; he tilted one of the shades so that the light caught my face.

  “Now really, Miss Ashton, this is sheer foolishness. The last thing I wish is to cause you pain. You shall wake tomorrow, I promise you, feeling better than you did the first time; I shall reduce the current to ensure it.”

  I moved closer to the opening in the floor, grasping the piece of wood with both hands, and placed myself so that I could bring it down on his head without striking the railing. My unnatural calm had deserted me; I was trembling more than ever.

  “How did you know—the first time?” I said.

  “Ah, well . . . I thought it best not to mention that you did come to see me, on the night of your arrival, with a most affecting tale about Felix Mordaunt, and the Wentworth sisters—you seemed excessively anxious about your late cousin’s parentage—and their testamentary arrangements. If you had known that Clarissa Wentworth had been blackmailing Edmund Mordaunt for the past twenty years, you might have been more circumspect. I myself knew nothing of this until last spring, when Edmund confessed to me that he had claimed the estate under the terms of a will he knew to be null and void. And, as he soon discovered, Clarissa Wentworth knew it too. She came to him with what appeared to be a copy of Felix Mordaunt’s last will and testament, threatening to produce the original if he did not make her a handsome allowance. To this he agreed, on condition that she lived abroad.

  “He never dared called her bluff, but I had no such inhibition. I wrote to tell her that there would be no more money, only the certainty of imprisonment for blackmail if she ever dared contact us again. All would have been well if she and her daughter had not crossed your path, but as it was . . .

  “Of course, I could not allow you to leave, and so I brought you here. It was a textbook demonstration of the apparatus; all it lacked was a professional audience. My one mistake was to assume that you had left your writing case in your room, but when that wire arrived, purportedly from your uncle, I saw how the game might be played. I have a gambler’s instinct, Miss Ashton, and am not averse to risk: I chose to play it long. I pretended to believe that Lucia Ardent was indeed Georgina Ferrars; I knew that sooner or later she would have to come here in search of those papers—where did you hide them, by the way?—and so it has transpired. Frederic’s falling in love with you did complicate matters rather, but I was able to turn even that to my advantage. He brought Lucia Ardent to me, thinking he was doing your bidding, when in fact he was doing mine: letting her believe that I would be away this afternoon was the surest way of luring her here unannounced.

  “All that remains, Miss Ashton, is to relieve you of these unpleasant memories. You will come to no harm, my word upon it. So kindly lay down that chair leg, and descend.”

  If you faint, you will die. I cast frantically around for something, anything that might delay him, and remembered Frederic saying, “Two have died in the past year.”

  “Why should I trust you? You have murdered three people already.” My mouth was so dry that I could scarcely form the words.

  “What do you mean?” he said sharply, pausing in midstride.

  “Your two patients who died of seizures. Frederic told me.”

  “Are you saying that he knows?”

  “He—he suspects.”

  Dr. Straker stared up at me.

  “No,” he said at last, “I don’t believe you. Frederic is incapable of concealing anything from me.”

  “But I know,” I said. “You have just admitted it, and now you mean to murder me.”

  “Upon my honour, Miss Ashton, you are mistaken! You may call this murder if you will,” he said, gesturing toward Lucia’s body, “though I prefer to think of it as self-defence; she would happily have murdered you. But the others, no; I meant to cure, not kill them. Both men were in the grip of incurable melancholia, and had been so for years. Both had tried repeatedly to end their own lives; one had spent more than half his adult life in a straitjacket. And we have—or had—no effective treatment for such patients. None whatsoever. For all my experience and training—in theirs and so many other cases—I might as well have been the proprietor of a country hotel.

  “And then—why should I not tell you, since you will not remember?—I had been experimenting with galvanic stimulation of the brain, and thought I might as well try it upon the younger of the two. With the dynamo recently installed, I had all the power I needed at my disposal, and also the means of controlling it precisely. At the accepted levels, the treatment had no effect whatever, but as I increased the voltage, he began to report some relief. The benefit, however, was fleeting. I raised the level still further—and induced a seizure.

  “When my patient regained consciousness, he had lost all memory of the treatment, and of the fortnight preceding it; so far as he could recall, he had never set foot in this room. And for the first time in years, he was free of his affliction; the black cloud had lifted from his mind. The remedy that had eluded so many had been delivered into my hands.

  “But I have seen too many false dawns. I watched, and waited, and kept my counsel, and all too soon, the darkness began to encroach again. I decided to risk another treatment, and this time, the seizure proved fatal.

  “Judge me if you will, Miss Ashton, but what else could I have done? On the one hand was the certainty that, without my intervention, the man was doomed to a life of torment and would sooner or later make away with himself. On the other was at least the possibility of a cure. I dared not confide in anyone; if the Commissioners had heard of it, we might have lost our licence. But I vowed that my patient’s death would not be in vain.”

  Dr. Straker’s gaze had not left my face. He was standing no more than five paces from the foot of the stairs, his head thrown back. He seemed to be summoning all of his eloquence; his voice had grown louder as he went on, until it echoed like a preacher’s in the darkness overhead. Surely, I thought, the attendants must be searching the grounds for me? Clutching my makeshift weapon, I kept as still as I could, praying that someone would overhear him.

  “For the next few months, I devoted every moment I could spare to testing and refining the apparatus. I felt certain there must be a level at which the memory of past suffering would be purged altogether, the mind cleansed of its morbid tendencies, the patient freed to begin life anew—and so I ventured to try it upon the older man. You may recoil, Miss Ashton, but consider: you can establish how much power it takes to stun a rat, and how much more to kill it. But you cannot ask the rat if it recalls the shock, or whether its state of mind is in any way improved. For that, you must have a human subject: how else can the science of mind ever advance?

  “This time I proceeded with the utmost caution, raising the voltage so gradually that he recovered from the initial seizure within minutes, but still with no recollection of what had happened. And again, the relief from melancholia was short-lived. I induced two more, at slightly higher voltages, and was on the verge of proving my theory, when—it was a fault in the apparatus, a fault I have since eliminated, but sadly too late for my patient.

  “But I had kept my vow; their deaths were not in vain, Miss Ashton, for I had learnt exactly how much power I could safely employ, and I had perfected my apparatus, albeit at grievous cost. And so, when it became necessary to—eliminate your memory of certain events—I was able to proceed with confidence. It was, as I said, a textbook demonstration; I only wish the Commissioners could have witnessed the proceedings.

  “And now, Miss Ashton, now that I have been absolutely candid, you must be able to see that I mean you no harm. I understand your reluctance, but you must
think of the greater good. If I were to release you now, my work would be lost, my reputation ruined, and Tregannon Asylum bankrupted. Frederic would lose his inheritance; and besides all that, I should very likely be hanged for murder. Whereas you need only undergo a brief, painless treatment for all these unpleasant consequences to be averted.

  “Now—will you come down, or must I fetch you?”

  The floor seemed to be dropping away beneath my feet. I dared not reply, for fear of betraying my weakness.

  “No? Then I fear I must disarm you. You have the advantage of position, but I have always fancied myself at singlesticks. I shall try not to hurt you any more than—”

  He was interrupted by the jangling of a bell on the wall behind him.

  “That will be Frederic; I told him my engagement in Bristol had been cancelled. He knows not to ring unless the matter is urgent, but it will have to wait.”

  Crossing to a stand by the vestry door, he drew out a heavy blackthorn stick and moved toward the stairs. All the blood seemed to drain from my body.

  The bell rang again, more insistently. Muttering irritably, he strode over to it and stabbed with his finger at a bell-push.

  “That should silence him.”

  “But now he knows you are here,” I said desperately. I took a deep breath and cried, “Frederic!” thinking he must be close by, but Dr. Straker merely laughed.

  “That is an electric bell, Miss Ashton. Frederic is in the asylum; if you had a steam whistle, he would not hear you.”

  “But he knows I have escaped; he will wonder why you are not directing the search.”

  “He may wonder all he likes. You will be found unconscious in the wood, close by Miss Ferrars’ body, as it will seem; he will blame himself for defying me.”

  In a few strides he had reached the foot of the stairs. The railing shook; I leant forward, raising the length of wood, and flung it like a spear at his upturned face. He tried to fend it off, but it struck him lengthwise across the forehead; his stick clattered to the floor, and he slid back down the stairs, clutching at the railing. I was back at the head of the stairs with another piece in my hand, shaking like a leaf but determined now to survive, before he had recovered his balance.