Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  MASTER OF CHAOS

  Book 4 of The Harry Stubbs Adventures

  By David Hambling

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 David Hambling

  Copy-edited by Samantha McCabe

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  David Hambling is a journalist and author who has lived in Norwood, South London since 2000. He writes about science and technology for New Scientist magazine, The Economist, WIRED, Popular Mechanics, and writes a science column for Fortean Times (“the magazine of unexplained phenomena”). In addition to non-fiction books, his “Shadows From Norwood” project seeks to bring HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to South London, via the Harry Stubbs novels and a number of short stories.

  Visit the Shadows from Norwood Facebook page –

  https://www.facebook.com/ShadowsFromNorwood

  for links, photographs, interactive map and more about the Harry Stubbs Adventures series

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  For PRE

  Professor Sigmund Freud and his school have, in recent years, discovered a part of this body of Truth, which has been taught for many centuries in the Sanctuaries of Initiation. But failure to grasp the fullness of Truth… has led him and his followers into error.

  —Aleister Crowley, “Magick in Theory and Practice”

  Both the Modernist artist and the schizophrenic are characterised by a pronounced thrust to deconstruct the world and to subjectively reconstruct human experience without reference to objective reality. Layers of reality exist side by side, frequently fusing into each other, and … a profound sense of alienation from the empirical world runs rampant.

  —Brigitte Berger, “Schizophrenia: Chicken or egg?”

  MASTER OF CHAOS

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Meal Duty

  Chapter Two: Hunting the Tiger

  Chapter Three: Inside the Asylum

  Chapter Four: The Book of Job

  Chapter Five: The Phantom of the Cinema

  Chapter Six: Hydrotherapy

  Chapter Seven: The Projectionist’s Wife

  Chapter Eight: Voices in the Dark

  Chapter Nine: A Well-Earned Drink

  Chapter Ten : Questions And Answers

  Chapter Eleven: The Electric Cure

  Chapter Twelve: Stormy Seas

  Chapter Thirteen: The New Physician

  Chapter Fourteen: Out and About

  Chapter Fifteen: Ross’s Story

  Chapter Sixteen: Into the Gyre

  Chapter Seventeen: Inside

  Chapter Eighteen: Fight Your Demons

  Chapter Nineteen: Master of Chaos

  Epilogue

  Editor’s Note

  London, 1925

  Prelude

  Sitting comfortably, as I hope you are, with a drink at your elbow and thoroughly at your ease, you are secure in your world.

  You have no reason to fear that the floor will give way beneath you, precipitating you into a fathomless pit. You are not afraid of being sucked up into the sky, or that the building will collapse around you like a house of cards. Your world is solid, reliable, predictable.

  I was once equally secure. Then the floor gave beneath me, and if I have climbed back out of the abyss, I will never sit quite as comfortably again.

  Madness is something we can all laugh at. In less enlightened times, people would go to see the lunatics in Bedlam for entertainment, as if they were animals at a zoo. You might sympathise with the poor chap with his broken leg in a cast, but someone with a broken mind is ridiculed for his injury.

  There was a time when I wanted to tell the world about my adventures, the discoveries that I had made, and the secrets that lie beneath our everyday existence. I burned to tell the truth, to let everyone know about the occult powers and alien beings that moved among them.

  That impulse has left me.

  Like the other documents I have deposited with Latham and Rowe, these pages are sealed, with strict instructions that they are not to be opened until after my death. I am determined that nobody will read them while I am still living—not merely from personal embarrassment, but because of the damage that will be done to my reputation as a man of sound mind and good judgement.

  There is no earthly reason for you to believe any of what I say. I can hardly enclose the tooth of a dragon I have slain with this manuscript as a token of my good faith. So, I only have one reason to expect your credence.

  Many who fought in the Great War never spoke a word about their experiences when they came home. They knew that they could never be understood, that their words would make no sense to those who had not experienced the terrible conflict for themselves. I leave these words for a future generation because this is a war which is not over.

  You may recognise certain patterns in these pages which echo events of your own time. This alone might cause you to be receptive. In that unfortunate instance, you will want to know what has been unleashed on the world, and I might be able to provide some slight insight. It is little enough, but to those who collate such intelligence, it might contain some vital clue to the survival of the human race.

  There—I am sounding properly mad now. If you have stomach enough for a deal of death, destruction, and madness beyond the ordinary, and if you are not afraid to approach madness yourself, then read on. I will give you a full account of my dealings with that being that I call the Master of Chaos.

  Chapter One: Meal Duty

  The trolley announced its progress down the corridor between the rooms of the segregation wing with rhythmic squeaks from one wheel. The trolley was a massive thing, and at another time it would bear two full tea urns or a hundredweight of laundry. Today, it rolled easily, its only cargo a half-dozen tin trays, each bearing two dishes under domed metal covers, and a water jug. There were six portions of fish pie, each with runner beans from the garden, and six bowls of stewed plums with custard for the segregated p
atients.

  The fare was not perhaps the sort of thing they serve at the Savoy Hotel, but it was decent enough grub. My own lunch had been comprised of the same food from the same kitchen, and I could vouch for it. Bringing the trolley to a gentle halt, so as not to spill the water jug, I cleared my throat and knocked on the first door.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Collier,” I said. “Time for lunch.” Having knocked, I peeked through the spy hole.

  Collier was a slight individual, made smaller by his way of hunching over and wrapping his arms around himself. His dark hair hung limply around his face. He was rocking back and forth on his bed, which was the only furniture in the room. He stopped when I opened the door.

  Collier was one of the melancholic sort. They were the commonest type in the place, men who had been beaten down by circumstance and, due to some flaw in their mental constitution, had been unable to get up again. It was not always easy to tell them from the dipsos—the dried-out alcoholics, or “suffering from Korsakoff’s Syndrome,” as we were supposed to call them—or from the shell-shock cases. In fact, those categories were not mutually exclusive. There were unfortunates who could be classed as all three.

  They were listless, spiritless beings. Everyone there, except for those few in the grip of mania, was subdued, muted. Something in the air drained their energy. It aged them: it was a world of shabby, stoop-shouldered men, who were prematurely bald or greying. They all resembled each other, but none of them saw it. Ten times a day, someone would stop me and explain that he was not like the others, that he did not belong in there, and that the doctors or the superintendent or some imaginary authority could vouch for him. All he needed was a chance to explain his case. I always nodded and agreed.

  “Time for lunch?”

  Collier seemed to come back from a great distance.

  I allowed him a minute to understand the significance of the tray I held out.

  “No, I’m not hungry.”

  The room smelled of carbolic, as did the rest of the asylum, with a whiff of something less pleasant. There was a grate over a drain in one corner for the occupant to relieve himself. The overall effect was not appetising. “You don’t have to eat every meal,” I said. “But if you choose not to eat, I am required to record that fact in the register.”

  He knew well enough what that meant. There were plenty there who tried to starve themselves. Sometimes it was to mortify their flesh, or because they thought they were being poisoned, or for more inscrutable reasons. And there were hunger strikes. Any missing of meals was recorded, and if it continued to a certain point, a warning was issued.

  If a patient failed to heed the warning, a regime of force-feeding would be instituted. This was a highly unpleasant procedure, falling not very far short of torture. Based upon the other attendants’ accounts of their experiences, it was not a process that I ever wanted to be involved with.

  “I had breakfast,” he said heavily. “I’ll eat dinner. But nothing now.”

  The evening meal would be cold, probably just bread and meat paste, and nothing nearly as appetising as what was on my cart. “It’s a pretty decent fish pie,” I said, by way of encouragement.

  Collier looked at me as though I was having a joke at his expense. He shook his head.

  “Would you at least like some water?” I said.

  “Yes, please.”

  Politeness was a habit with many of the inmates, however withdrawn they were. Sometimes, it was the last thing to go. I poured a tin cup of water, and Collier drained it quickly, suddenly discovering that he was thirsty. It got warm in those rooms, which had no windows to open or fresh air to breathe.

  He accepted the offer of a refill.

  “Last chance for fish pie,” I said, but Collier shook his head.

  It seemed impolite to refuse a meal that had been brought round specially. Collier could have at least taken the tray, moved some of the fish pie around with a spoon, and scraped the custard off the stewed plums, which were a little on the sharp side. One would have thought he would want to show a little appreciation for those who were, in effect, his jailers, and that he would go to lengths not to offend them.

  If I had learned anything, though, it was that the inmates in the place were unfathomable, and their ways were not the ways of men on the outside. They had their own manners of thinking.

  The story that I had heard was that Collier’s two children had died of measles. He had gone into a decline and had given up his work—or been fired from it. His wife left him, and in the end, he had tried to hang himself. The attempt had failed, and he wound up in the asylum. The idea of self-destruction came back to him at intervals, though, which was why he was in segregation, where the tiled cells limited the methods by which a man could harm himself.

  The occupant of the next room was a well-spoken man called Ross. If you did not know he was mad, you might think he was permanently hungover. He was not one of the ex-drunks, though, whose damaged brains processed even the simplest question at quarter speed and sometimes produced no answer at all. Ross was a victim of night terrors, which deprived him—and everyone else nearby—of sleep.

  Ross would scream at volume and for a protracted period almost every night, usually several times. He still seemed to be asleep when he did it, and the others would shake him and slap him until he came around and stopped screaming. He wore a haunted look.

  I was not clear why Ross was in segregation, whether he was actually considered to be in imminent danger of harming himself or others, or whether the move was an administrative measure to move him out of the ward for a while, so he did not wear on the nerves of others. I could well believe that some of his roommates would be highly disturbed by his terrors. It was never the most peaceful place to spend the night, but the volume and intensity of Ross’s night terrors were unique.

  I had never heard what his story was. Men who had been in such disasters as train crashes or shipwrecks sometimes had night terrors like that—and of course, some of the shell-shock cases from the war.

  “Ah,” Ross said, looking up as I opened the door. “Stubbs. I thought it must be you. Very quiet, not clattering around like the others.”

  He was tall and on the lean side, hollow-cheeked, his features marked with the lines that come with prolonged mental anguish. He was standing in the middle of the cell. Ross was given to pacing around in circles, seemingly following the pattern of some dance in his head. He was always pleasant, barely on the right side of ingratiating, and knew all of our names.

  “Fish pie today. It’s Friday,” I said, handing him the tray.

  “Very welcome, I’m sure.” He lifted the cover and inhaled the aroma. “So, it’s Friday then. Easy to lose track in here. It’ll be the weekend for you soon, then.”

  “We have to work shifts on weekends too,” I reminded him. The job played havoc with any sort of social life you might want to lead, eating into evenings and weekends and holidays alike. They needed more staff.

  “No rest for the wicked, eh?”

  “Enjoy your lunch, Mr Ross,” I said, passing him a cup of water.

  “I say, you haven’t got a cigarette, have you? I’m dying for one.”

  The inmates were permitted to smoke, though only under supervision, and of course they were never allowed matches or lighters in their possession. Cigarettes—invariably Woodbines, as they were the cheapest—were a kind of currency. As it happens, I did not smoke. When I was a lad in the Army, I found I could swap my cigarette ration for others’ chocolate, so I never developed the habit.

  “You can have one as soon as you get out of here and back to your block,” I said. Asking favours was one of those signs that they were trying to get around you and strike up a friendship. Giving him a cigarette when he asked might mean being tricked into giving him something he could kill himself with later. Even when the rules seemed harsh, they were there for a reason.

  Ross bowed, indicating that he understood, and I departed.

  Hooper, in the nex
t cell, was unpredictable, swinging between wild activity and sullen inertia. When he was in an excitable state, he could be dangerous. He was cooling off for a few days in segregation after a scrap with another inmate over, of all things, a cleaning cloth. The men spent some time on inefficient cleaning fatigues, some working at half-speed and others sweeping dirt back where it had come from. Three of them could do the job of one ordinary man, but they prized the opportunity to do work.

  Hooper seemed calm enough. In any case, the gross disparity in our sizes—I was twice as big as he was, and he had no muscles to speak of—meant that any trouble would be short-lived. Hooper had a round moon face and curly hair, and seemed pleased to see me, lifting the lid from the tray as soon as I passed it over.

  “Friday—fish pie,” I said.

  “Fish pie, Friday,” he replied at once, like a sentry giving the countersign. “Friday, fry-day. Why isn’t the fish fried, eh, on Friday?” He looked up at me with big eyes.

  “Maybe they fried it before they put it in the pie.”

  “Pie, pie, pi, pi,” he said. “Twenty-two over seven is an irrational number—you can’t work it out however long you try, and I did try. My, my how I tried. That was irrational! Who said anything is easy as pie? I say, do you know why pies are circular?”

  “I’ve no idea,” I said.

  “It’s so there’s more to go round!” he said, laughing merrily. “It all goes around and around, you know. It’s all irrational.” Hooper was a pleasant sort when he was in this mood, and seemed entirely harmless, for all that he did not make much sense.

  “Well, you enjoy your lunch, now,” I said.

  “They came for him next door,” he said, suddenly serious, jerking his head to indicate the room on the other side. “Just now.”

  I had not heard or seen anything, which I surely would have done if something had happened. Gillespy, in the next room, was not scheduled to be moved. The chalkboard at the end of the corridor showed who was in each cell, and it had not been amended. I suspected that this move was part of Hooper’s fantasy world.