by Mark Morris
I tried to get the nurses on my side, but it quickly became clear that they were all too fearful of Tallarian’s austere manner and too respectful of his social standing to go against his wishes. He had told them I had been restrained for my own good, and although none of them said so, from the way they acted around me – cautiously, nervously – I suspect he might also have told them that, despite my friendly manner, I was unpredictable, even dangerous. Even Ruby, the oldest, shrewdest and least deferential of the nurses, couldn’t be persuaded that I was being held prisoner for anything other than the right reasons. Neither could she be persuaded to undo the straps around my wrists and ankles, not even when I told her that my limbs were cramping up from inactivity – which they were a bit – and that I needed to stretch and bend them.
‘You must think me born yesterday, sir,’ she said cheerfully, tipping me a wink.
‘I didn’t mean all at the same time,’ I said. ‘You could release one arm, let me bend it a bit, just to get the blood flowing, and then strap it back down before you release the other arm.’
My half-baked idea was that with one arm free I could undo the rest of the straps and make my escape before Ruby could alert Tallarian, but she shook her head almost pityingly.
‘I could do that, sir, but not without Dr Tallarian in attendance.’
I sighed. ‘What has Tallarian told you about me, Ruby?’
‘Why, nothing sir.’
‘Has he told you I’m violent? That I’m a criminal of some kind? If so, he’s lying. I mean, if those things were true, why hasn’t he called the police?’
She looked at me with narrowed eyes, and for a moment I thought I was getting through, but then she wagged a chubby finger at me.
‘You’re a wily one, sir, and no mistake. A charmer, to be sure, but wily all the same.’
I sighed. ‘You do realise that Dr Tallarian intends to torture me, don’t you?’
This time she burst out laughing. ‘Torture, sir? Well now, that is a story!’
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘He isn’t the kindly philanthropist you think he is. He threatened me earlier. He says he’ll do anything to make me tell him who I am and where I’m from.’
She shook her head, still amused. ‘If that’s the case, sir, then why not tell him what he wants and have done with it? Why keep it a secret at all?’
‘I can’t tell him,’ I said. ‘The information might be… dangerous.’
‘Dangerous!’ she scoffed. ‘Oh, I’ve never heard the like!’
Realising that this was getting me nowhere, I decided to change tack. ‘How big is this hospital, Ruby?’
She regarded me suspiciously, and then, obviously deciding that I was doing no more than making idle conversation, she said, ‘It’s not as big as some, sir. This building was used to store tea before it become what it is now. There’s room for forty beds here, though it’s never enough.’
‘So you’re always full?’
‘More than that, sir. We have the sick queuing outside the door most days. Soon as one patient takes his leave, be that feet foremost or under their own steam, there’s another to take his place. One minute the bed’s empty, the next it’s occupied again, oft-times before the sheets have barely had chance to get cold.’
I thought of the sheets I was currently lying on and tried not to shudder. ‘And how many staff work here, Ruby? Just Dr Tallarian and the three of you?’
She nodded. ‘It’s not enough, sir, truth be told, but there ain’t the funds for more.’ With a fierce frown, she added, ‘Works his fingers to the bone, Dr Tallarian does. Hardly ever sleeps. We girls all thinks the world of him – and so do his patients.’
‘Why does he do it?’ I asked.
Her frown became a scowl. ‘How do you mean, sir?’
‘Well, he looks wealthy enough. Surely, if he wanted to, he could set himself up in private practice, earn better money in a more salubrious area? So why stay here? Flogging himself for a pittance?’
‘He does it out of the goodness of his heart,’ she said in a voice that dared me to contradict her. ‘He’s a veritable saint, Dr Tallarian is, and nothing you say about him will change my opinion one bit.’
After she had gone, huffing and scowling, I thought about what she had said. If Tallarian was going to carry out his threat to make me talk, presumably he would do it away from the eyes and ears of the staff and the other patients. Later that day I asked Agnes how many hours she and the other girls worked, and she told me that they each did a twelve-hour daily shift, albeit staggered. Currently Charlotte worked from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m., Ruby worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and she herself worked from noon until midnight. Which meant that for four hours out of every twenty-four – between midnight and 4 a.m. – Tallarian was here alone, apart from his assistant, a man called Thomas Huckerby, who, from what I could gather, acted as porter, general handyman and, if required, surgical assistant.
My guess, therefore, was that Tallarian would come for me sometime after midnight. And if he did decide to interrogate me somewhere out of earshot of the other patients, then I guessed there was always the possibility that he might first unstrap me from the table, in which case I ought to be ready to take my chance and flee. Of course, the likelihood is that he would drug me first, or even that he and Huckerby would hold weapons on me to keep me compliant. But even so, I resolved that if I saw even the smallest opportunity to escape, I would take it.
With this in mind, I dozed on and off throughout the day in order to be as energetic as possible when midnight rolled around. Which was why I couldn’t believe it when, sometime after 10 p.m. (or ‘ten bells’ as Agnes had called it), with the windows showing nothing but blackness and the gas lamps providing the only illumination, I felt my eyelids growing heavy.
Angrily I blinked myself awake. What was I doing? I couldn’t afford to fall asleep now, not with midnight creeping closer. I was surprised that adrenaline wasn’t keeping me alert – and then it occurred to me that my tiredness might not be entirely natural. I had been so hungry when Agnes had turned up earlier with a bowl of beef broth that I had accepted it gratefully, thinking it would give me strength for whatever lay ahead. But now I realised that the food must have been drugged. But with what? What did doctors use in Victorian times to induce sleep? Laudanum? Alcohol? Not that it mattered, because knowing what it was wouldn’t change the fact that I couldn’t do a damn thing about the effect it was having on me. I felt woozy, detached from my body. I tried to fight it, but it was no use. Nothing could stop me from going under.
How long I slept for I don’t know. When I woke, my head woolly and my stomach rolling with a faint nausea, I knew immediately and instinctively that I was no longer in the room with the stained-glass wall. How I knew I wasn’t sure – I was still so out of it that I couldn’t work out what my senses were telling me. When I tried to open my eyes I realised I couldn’t even do that. Whatever had been slipped into my food had numbed me to such an extent that my body was completely unresponsive to the commands my brain was trying to give it. Wondering whether I had been paralysed, I imagined myself lifting my hand and rubbing gently at my eyelids, trying to prise them apart. And then I realised that I wasn’t imagining the action at all, I was doing it! My fingers were rubbing at my eyes!
The knowledge was like an injection of adrenaline into my recumbent system. My body jerked, my head rising from the surface on which it was resting, and my eyes tore open. For a moment I was dazzled, but the glare quickly receded into a dullish orange glow. Something bird-like hovered in front of my face; I blinked at it, trying to make out what it was. Then it came into focus, and I barked out a laugh – it was my own hand! But what was my hand doing rubbing at my eyes and hovering in front of my face? Why wasn’t it strapped down?
Looking quickly around, I saw that I was in a small room, dank and dark. Around me were stone walls with no windows, above me a low ceiling. The only light came from a candle in a tall brass holder that had been placed on the floor at
the foot of the bed. Not that it was much of a bed. It was more a raised wooden board covered by a thin mattress. There was white fungus growing on the walls, water stains, still glistening with damp, on the ceiling. It was freezing cold and my shivering body was covered in nothing but the coarsely woven hospital gown I’d been wearing since I got here. My bare feet, sticking out of the end of the gown, were bone-white, though my toenails were purple with cold.
It wasn’t the cold or the damp that had alerted me to the fact I was no longer in the room with the stained-glass wall, though; it was the sounds coming from beyond the arched opening to my left. They weren’t the busy, purposeful sounds I had been used to – the clop of footsteps on wooden floors, the rattle of metal trolleys, people calling out to one another – but more the restless movements you might expect to hear in a hospital dormitory late at night: rustles and shuffles, snorts and groans. They were the sounds made by living things in close proximity to one another, mammals shifting uncomfortably and uneasily in sleep.
What was going on? Had I been moved closer to the other patients rather than away from them? But why was it so cold here, and why were my surroundings so grim? And, more to the point, why had I been freed from my restraints?
Still groggy, I tried to sit up, and felt a tugging on my right wrist. Looking down, I realised that there were restraints, after all, that my right arm was still secured to the bed (or was it a table?) by a leather strap. A quick check confirmed that there were restraints around both of my ankles too, that only my left hand was free. Strange. How could Tallarian have been responsible for such an oversight? Unless the restraint securing my left wrist had been deliberately unbuckled. But who would do that, and why?
With numb fingers I undid the buckles on the straps securing my right wrist and sat up, groaning at the creaking pain in my spine. I lifted and bent and stretched my right arm a couple of times, and then rotated my shoulders, wincing at the sharp crunching sounds they made. Gritting my teeth against the bolts of pain shooting through my upper body, I leaned forward and unbuckled the straps around my ankles. Despite my eagerness to find out where I was and to get away from here, I stretched my legs slowly and carefully, mindful of the knotting cramps that might seize my muscles at any moment, kneading the backs of my calves and thighs in an attempt to get some warmth into them.
At last, tentatively, I swung my legs from the bed and planted my feet on the floor. Although they were already numb, the wet stone was so cold that it cut through the numbness and made my bones ache. Clenching my teeth to stop them from chattering, I slid my backside from the edge of the bed and stood up. It had never occurred to me before quite how small feet were, how much we relied on them for strength and balance. I swayed a moment, my head swimming, and then moved cautiously away from the bed. I felt like Frankenstein’s monster as I took one step towards the arch, and then another. Although I was gaining in strength and confidence with each step, it didn’t escape my notice that my previous plan – to fight off my captors and run like hell – had been so ambitious that it now seemed risible.
It was only when I reached the arch that I realised it wasn’t simply a doorway, but a short passage, which cut through a stone wall that must have been at least two metres thick. At the far end was a glow of brownish light, illuminating an expanse of floor, beyond which was what looked like a wooden surface heaped with clutter.
I plunged through the passage, my head still swimming, my breath rattling and phlegmy at the back of my throat. My limbs felt stiff and awkward through lack of use. After half a dozen shuffling steps, I was standing at the threshold of the next room, my left hand clutching the stone wall to stop me from swaying. I looked around, taking in the details, my mouth open in astonishment and horror.
The room was at least four times bigger than the one I had come from. It was a laboratory of sorts, or maybe more accurately it seemed to be part laboratory, part workshop and part operating theatre. The stone floor was dominated by a large central table, the wooden surface of which, although scrubbed clean, was covered in ominous dark stains. In an alcove in the corner furthest away from me, to the left of a closed wooden door, was a glass-fronted cabinet whose shelves were stacked not only with phials, bottles and items of medical equipment, but also a line of specimen jars, each of which was filled to the brim with a cloudy, yellowish preserving solution. In some of the jars floated small creatures (monkeys, cats, snakes), whereas others contained bleached bodily organs. From half a dozen jars at the end of the row peered a number of deformed human foetuses in various stages of development.
Stretching along the next wall, at a right angle to the cabinet, was what I had seen through the arch – a long workbench, on which stood the room’s only illumination, a glowing oil lamp. The workbench was heaped with scientific equipment and what looked like the metallic paraphernalia from a number of dismantled engines. Many of these bits and pieces had been screwed and bolted together to create new and bizarre forms, the purposes of which I could only imagine.
My eyes barely skimmed across these details, however, intriguing and grotesque though they were. It was the wall to my left which snagged and held my attention. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with dozens of cramped wooden cages, and in each cage was a living creature. I could see rats, cats, dogs and, on the bottom row, most horrifying of all, children.
Because the room was dimly lit, my mind was reluctant to accept what I was seeing at first. The children, filthy and dressed in rags, had been forced into spaces so small they could do little more than lie with their knees drawn up to their chests. As I slumped against the wall, unable at first to do little more than stare, one of them raised its head and looked at me. When I saw what had been done to it, my gorge rose and I clapped a hand to my mouth.
The child, a scrawny boy of maybe six or seven, had had his teeth and lower jaw removed and replaced with a hinged, grotesquely oversized shovel-like contraption, inset with a double row of triangular metal ‘teeth’. Though the light was dim, I could see that where the boy’s flesh had been forcibly fused with the metal it was horribly infected. His face above the artificial ‘jaw’ was black and swollen, and around the heads of the screws that had been affixed to the bone just beneath his ears, the skin was split and suppurating with pus.
The boy was not the only prisoner to have been mutilated so horribly. As my gaze skittered from cage to cage, I couldn’t see a single child or animal who hadn’t been subjected to some kind of monstrous modification. A tiny girl of no more than six or seven had had her right arm removed and a metal limb, comprising a number of linked pistons operated by an intricate system of levers and pulleys, inserted in its place; an older boy had had the upper left quadrant of his skull – including his eye – replaced by a transparent dome, in which a seemingly haphazard assortment of tiny interlocked cogs whirred and spun within a tangled nest of multi-coloured wires. In the upper cages I could see a rat whose legs had been replaced with wheels; a cat with an exposed metallic spine and a raised scorpion-like tail; a dog whose working internal organs, including its heart, pulsed and twitched in an external glass container that was attached to its butchered body via a mass of rubber tubes.
As I peered into one cage after another I shook uncontrollably, not only with cold now, but with fear, pity, revulsion and disbelief. These were clearly Tallarian’s early experiments; prototypes for his army of flesh and clockwork monstrosities that I had encountered in my own time. Horrific and pitiful though the creatures were, at least their presence here provided evidence that Tallarian had not become corrupted purely because of my proximity to him. On the contrary, I had stumbled into a world of madness, even of evil, so palpable that it seemed to poison the air. My instinct was to run, for fear that I’d become somehow contaminated by that poison, but I resisted the urge, and instead pushed myself away from the stone doorway and approached the stack of cages. As I got closer to them the boy with the metal jaw hissed like an angry cat. I opened my mouth to speak to him, and with an eff
ort forced a few croaking words out of my dry throat.
‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help.’
But how could I help? By opening the cages and letting the poor souls free? By putting them out of their misery? The boy stared at me as I spoke to him, though I saw nothing approaching comprehension in his eyes. He hissed again, his hideously oversized jaw creaking open and shut.
Some of the occupants of the other cages were stirring now too, turning bodies or heads to regard me. I heard scraping and clanking and (horribly) squelching. A cat began to yowl; a dog in an upper cage started to growl and then to make high-pitched yelping and whimpering noises. Afraid that the din would alert Tallarian, I raised my hands and made what I hoped were reassuring shushing sounds, but that only made things worse. The clamour increased, the yowls and barks accompanied by clicks and whirrs and creaks. It was like some hellish orchestra, a symphony of working machine parts and the tortured screams of living creatures.
Abandoning my attempt to placate the menagerie, I crossed to the workbench on the opposite wall and snatched up the oil lamp. I raised it to head height and swung round, looking for a weapon I might use to defend myself against Tallarian and his henchman, should I encounter them. The light fell across a wooden chair in the shadows to the right of the door, on the seat of which I was delighted to see my leather jacket. I hurried across and picked it up, and saw that my sweater, jeans, underwear, socks and boots were tangled together in a crumpled heap underneath. The clothes were a bit grubby, and a V of material had been snipped from the pocket of my jeans, presumably so that Tallarian could examine the denim in more detail, but they were generally okay. With no sense of self-consciousness whatsoever, I peeled off the smock-like gown I was wearing and dressed quickly in my own clothes. The jeans pockets were empty, and there was no sign of the items that Tallarian had taken from them, but I could live with that. It would be a pain to be without them if I ever got back to my own time, but as things stood, just getting back to my own time would be cause for celebration.
