Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  Many of the patients lived at least partly in worlds of their own. Some of them talked to themselves, or responded to voices only they could hear. One of them pulled a piece of string behind him, apparently in the belief that he had a dog. Another would pull on an old pair of cleaning gloves and stamp down the corridor emitting engine noises and making hand signals before he turned. It was comical, but there was also something pathetic in how these men clung to rituals from their previous lives, as though they could bring the past back by re-enacting it in symbolic form.

  Hooper, of course, was adamant that his neighbour had been moved. “Oh, but they did take him,” he said. “No fried Good Friday fish pie for him. The fish won’t feed him. He’ll be feeding the fishes. It all goes around!”

  “Who came for him?” I asked. Of course, it was a foolish question, but trying to gather information had become second nature.

  Hooper rolled his eyes. “Oh them, them, the ones that come round for you. Soft-footed, slow-thighed, steely-eyed, blank, and pitiless. They come round and round.” He made an odd circular gesture with one hand and muttered something that sounded like “Robber-row, robber-row, robber-row.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Protection,” he said. “I’m still here, but he’s gone.” After a moment of what seemed like sober reflection for the man who had supposedly gone, Hooper tossed his head, took up his wooden spoon, and started eating with every sign of enjoyment.

  I left him to it.

  “Oi, Harry!” Miller hailed me from down the corridor as I turned the key in Hooper’s door. Miller was an attendant, a burly man with a bald head and something of the bulldog about him.

  As soon as he was in range, Miller threw a sloppy punch at my jaw, which I blocked easily. Miller was a good man in a grapple, and skilled in the art of subduing patients with the minimum of fuss by using his weight and strength. His boxing, however, continued to be woeful. I blocked a left, and a right, and another left. The blows were getting wilder, and the next right completely sailed past my head. I let it go and counterpunched, striking him below the sternum.

  Miller let out an “Ooff” and stepped back, wincing and grinning broadly. One of his front teeth was missing. “Every time!” he said. “You get me every time, and I can’t even touch you.”

  Horseplay was part and parcel of Miller’s character. Although a good ten years older than I was, he was a boy at heart. Miller never tired of arm wrestling, or trying to lift someone off the ground, or seeing who could balance a penny on their nose longest. He still could not resist the temptation to trade punches with me, long after the novelty of having a “famous boxer” on the staff had paled with the others. Along with an Irishman called Donnelly, and a Cornishman called Vanstone, Miller and I formed a close circle within the group of attendants.

  “You need to practice with a bag,” I told him, “so at least you can hit a man standing right in front of you.”

  “Here, Harry,” he said, suddenly abashed and looking down at the trolley. “You haven’t got one tray over, have you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” I said. “Collier wasn’t interested.”

  “That’s what I hoped! It’s just, well, Harry, I dropped one going round the sick ward, and I thought maybe…”

  Miller was as tough as they come. I’d seen him singlehandedly pin down a maniac who had torn off a straightjacket and thrown another attendant clear across the room. A long white scar ran down his arm from wrist to elbow, left by an inmate with a jagged piece of metal. They said Miller disarmed the man, with his blood pouring all over the place, and kept him subdued until help arrived. At the slightest provocation, he would show you the indented scars on his calf that had been left by an inmate who’d clamped on with his jaws like a terrier and hung on for ten minutes, while Miller waited for others to remove him.

  For all his physical courage, Miller was scared to go back to the kitchen and tell the cooks he had dropped the tray. He was as frightened as a schoolboy who had broken a window. I handed him my spare tray. “You weren’t trying to balance it on one finger again, were you?” I asked. “Hold that tray with both hands, now.”

  “You’re a pal, Harry!” Miller said.

  Miller was essentially good-natured. He was no intellectual, but anyone who could cope through the rough-and-tumble and keep smiling, as Miller did, was a treasure. He might have been more prone to accidents than most, but if it was a member of my family in the wards, I would far prefer to have an overgrown boy like Miller looking after him instead of the surly types who would let a patient go without lunch if they were a tray short.

  “You haven’t heard anything about them moving Gillespy, have you?”

  Miller looked at me dumbly for a second. “He’s in room four. What would they move him for?”

  “I dunno,” I said.

  Miller seemed to doubt himself. He put the tray down, went over, opened the spyhole to room four, and stood back.

  “Is he there?” I asked.

  “Oh dear” was all he could say, but his tone was eloquent. “Oh dear. Better open it up, Harry.”

  The spyhole gave a limited view of the room, but I could see a man propped up against the far wall. I did not like the way he was arranged. It was not a natural position for a living human being.

  I unlocked the door with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The men in this place did strange things. They adopted peculiar postures and could freeze into statues for hours on end, but Gillespy was not one of that type.

  His eyes were open, but he did not seem to be breathing, and there was no pulse in his neck. His flesh was warm, but perceptibly cooling.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” said Miller, squatting down next to me. “How did he do it?”

  The inmates in the segregation ward were searched thoroughly, but there was no indication that Gillespy had cut himself, and there was no suspension point for a hanging even if he had the rope for it. Some of the wilder ones threw themselves at the walls, but I could not see any sign of contusions.

  “How did he do it?” Miller repeated. He took Gillespy’s chin and moved it left and right, up and down, looking for any signs of choking or strangulation. “He must have done something to himself.”

  “Poison?” I said.

  “He hasn’t had his lunch yet,” said Miller, as if that was evidence. “Dear, oh dear.”

  “I’ll go and tell Dr Beltov,” I said, standing.

  Miller seemed unwilling to leave. “He must have done something,” he repeated.

  There was nothing else in the room except the bed, which was fixed in place and gave no clues. The bedding was in place. The tiled walls stretched up blankly to the ceiling, and the floor was bare.

  Miller was still frowning at the body, as though it would all come clear if he looked hard enough. I made a conscious effort to scan everything for details. The heels of Gillespy’s shoes were scuffed, which was not so very unusual. There were no signs of fresh injuries on him, but he was pushed up against the wall in a distinctly unnatural posture. His neck seemed partly discoloured, but that was probably from the angle at which he was lying.

  “I’ll tell Dr Beltov,” I said.

  “Weird,” said Miller. “I never saw one like this before, did you? How do you think he did it, Harry?”

  Chapter Two: Hunting the Tiger

  It was a fine autumn evening, rather warm and humid if anything. The summer seemed to be dragging on, and it was becoming interminable. It had not rained for weeks, and everything was looking brown and parched. It took something to get Londoners to complain about the lack of rain, and that Indian summer was doing just that. The dusty, smoky air burned your throat, and it wanted a good cloudburst to settle it, but the sky, though often hazy, refused to yield a single drop of rain.

  I was therefore in something of a desiccated condition when I visited the Conquering Hero, and very much more refreshed on my way home. It was dark, despite the street lighting, and I did not see the man who hai
led me.

  “Stubbs!”

  I stopped and looked about before seeing him sitting on the bench. It was only the glowing cigarette that drew my eyes to him—otherwise, he might have been a part of the bench itself. He was wearing a hat, and his face was partly shadowed. There were many butts scattered about his feet. They could not all have been his, but somehow I felt that he’d been waiting for me a not-inconsiderable amount of time. I stepped closer.

  “Got a minute?” he asked.

  He was well-dressed, in a city suit with shoes that had been recently polished. Neither his hoarse voice nor what I could see of his face rang any bells. “Do I know you?”

  “Ryan,” he said. “From head office.”

  “I think there may be some confusion,” I said.

  “Only on your part.” Ryan put the cigarette between his lips and passed me a business card. Holding it up to the light, I saw it was identical to the ones I had for Lantern Insurance, the fictitious company I worked for as the only employee. It had the same typeface and the same stock image of an old-fashioned lantern shedding beams of light. Only the name was different: J Ryan, and the title: Regional Manager.

  At first, I thought there had been some peculiar mix-up, that there was another Lantern Insurance which happened to use the same symbol, that he had come into possession of one of our cards and mistakenly thought that I worked for the same firm. Then I noticed, in tiny letters underneath the company name, the legend “A Division of TDS.”

  TDS was the secretive organisation which was my real employer.

  The initials TDS might have stood for Theral Development Society, as I had originally been told, but then again, they might be more mutable. My research had also turned up a few others, including a Tribus Dies Syndicate. It was a shadowy organisation to say the least, dedicated to stamping out interference in human affairs by violent means. I was a reluctant participant, kept in line by the threat of blackmail and violence to my family. You were either with them or against them.

  “Where is Miss De Vere?” I asked, referring to my superior. She was a doctor of psychology, among other things, and the only contact I’d had with the organisation thus far.

  “Our Lady of Holocausts is in Chicago… or New York, Boston, some damn place.” Ryan did not care for Miss De Vere. “You can talk to me instead. Take a pew.”

  It had not seemed polite to loom over him, though I think I was more bothered than he was. I took a place a respectful distance from him. Ryan sat immobile. Normally, someone might adjust their posture when you move close, but Ryan was like a shop-window dummy, turning only his head.

  “The famous Harry Stubbs,” he said. “The Norwood Titan. The last man standing.”

  “Not that famous,” I said.

  “Not that famous,” he agreed. “But with a reputation in certain circles.” Ryan was weary and irritable. He did not want to be there any more than I did. Also, there was something peculiar about his eyes—one of them might have been glass, but I could not tell which one.

  “I’ve been waiting for instructions,” I said.

  My orders had been scant indeed—barely a couple of lines typed on a slip of paper instructed me to get a job as an attendant, with the reference from Miss De Vere. I had sent my weekly summary report to a Post Office box, but there had been no further indication of what I was to do. And when I summoned the nerve to call Miss De Vere’s answering service, I found it had been cut off.

  “I’m maintaining a complete record of my observations on a day-by-day basis. It’s difficult without knowing what to look for. There was a death today, but I’m in the dark as to precisely what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “God,” he said slowly, with an exhalation of smoke, as though appalled by my breach of good taste. “You really are like they said.”

  Aware of how much I had drunk, I reined in an impulse to answer back with anything like the irritation I felt. “You wanted a word with me,” I said. “Mr Ryan, you are the senior manager from head office, and you have my full attention. The floor is yours.” I made a sweeping gesture.

  “It’s dangerous enough, my being here now,” he said. “We haven’t kept you in suspense for the fun of it.” He looked up and down the street with the searching gaze of a hunter. You could see down the row of streetlights in each direction, and there was nobody under any of them.

  “I’m sure you haven’t,” I said. “I’m sorry if I seemed insubordinate.”

  “No matter.” He looked at me and tapped his own ear in the place where part of mine was missing. “That ear—lose it in the War?”

  “Our war,” I said.

  “Piece of advice. Don’t let Them fix it for you.” I did not need to ask who he meant by ‘Them.’ He cleared his throat then went on in a different tone. This was the briefing. “Before I got into this game, I used to shoot tigers.” He might have meant to be matter-of-fact, but his manly pride was obvious. “It’s quite an exciting pastime. Useful too. A man-eater can kill dozens of natives, or more. Tigers are quite a pest. They kill more than they need for food—hunting is as much a sport for them as it is for us. That’s my conclusion, anyway. They have a fiendish intelligence, tigers.”

  He leaned back and briefly seemed to contemplate the darkness above us for a moment before continuing. Under other circumstances, that glance into the sky might have seemed eccentric, but there was something ominous about it, as though he was on the lookout for aircraft. “Lions are dumb brutes. Stupid as sheep. Shooting lions is a game for bravos who want a pelt for the fireplace to impress their neighbours. Leopards are more like it. Tigers though, are a sport for men. Point being that a tiger isn’t wandering around with a target on its back, waiting for you to plug it. The things are damn near invisible when they want to be. When you’re hunting a tiger, the last thing you are going to see is the tiger.”

  I recalled the paradoxes that my Chinese friend, Mr Yang, had so enjoyed—this sounded like one of them. You don’t see a tiger when you’re hunting tigers.

  “You won’t just blunder into a tiger on the trail, not unless you’re very lucky, or very unlucky. A tiger can maim you with one swipe.” He looked involuntarily down at his legs then looked up again. “It’s not like shooting a pheasant. As soon as the tiger knows you are hunting him, he starts hunting you. You have to track a tiger by the signs he leaves. The claw marks in trees and the spoor that mark its territory. Spoor—that’s shit, if you didn’t know.”

  “I’m familiar with the term,” I said.

  “You can learn a lot from tiger shit,” he said, relishing the word. “See what it’s been eating and when. Footprints, sometimes, in the soft mud by a water hole. But mainly, you track a tiger by its kills. That’s what tells you where it is. The spread and timing tell you about its range and the times of the day it’s active.”

  I felt that I should be taking notes, but also that it was all a preamble. Ryan checked up and down the street again.

  “You can tell from a kill the animal that did it. An experienced man-eater will break the neck at once, but young animals leave a bloody mess. Timid animals might only eat the liver, then go off when they’re startled and not come back. Bolder animals get all the meat off the carcass. The claw marks, the teeth marks, they are like the fingerprints of the criminal. Except, unlike fingerprints, the kills tell you something about the personality that left them. Anyway, you appreciate what I’m saying?”

  “The general principle is clear enough,” I said.

  “Well, it’s the same here. Except in this case, our ‘tiger’ is leaving a psychic trail. The patterns of trauma in his wake show where it has been, maybe where it is going. The people in that hospital—some of them—if you could read their brains aright, would be like a map of his area of operations. His hunting grounds.”

  I almost spoke up to mention Renfield, the madman in Bram Stoker’s great Gothic work, Dracula. Renfield had been driven mad by an encounter with the vampire. His madness, which centres around an obsession wi
th eating flies and other insects for their blood, is a lunatic echo of the evil Count’s own modus operandi. Ryan, though, was not the sort to be impressed by analogies with popular novels.

  “You say ‘he,’ but what is he? Surely not anything like an actual tiger?”

  Ryan flicked ash from his cigarette like a cat twitching its tail. Miss De Vere was sensitive about information being given out. She was prone to extreme measures to prevent knowledge from being spread. It would not be an exaggeration to describe it as a scorched-earth policy. Ryan would surely have to tell me something, but not necessarily as much as I would have liked to know.

  “We can’t say for sure. Most likely, it will look human, at least superficially. They tend to. Some extension or projection of it, anyway. All we can say for definite is that it’s an intruder here. And it’s dangerous to sanity.”

  My previous experience with the uncanny, with things that do not originate in our world, suggested that susceptible brains could be damaged by encountering them, as an eye is damaged by staring at the sun.

  “Even more so than most of them,” he said, as if following my line of thought. “Not just the incidental shock of something that human beings are not built to cope with. This is deliberate psychic damage.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You don’t have to,” he said bluntly. “But remember it breathes madness. Get too close and you’ll go mad, too. As Gillespy did.”

  It took me a second to make the connection, hearing the name out of context like that. “Gillespy—the one in the asylum?”

  “He is—or was—one of us.” Ryan said “us” in a way that included me. Ryan was, like me, a reluctant recruit, without any great enthusiasm for the job. He did not have Miss De Vere’s missionary zeal. He was a tiger hunter, not a crusader. “One of my beaters, you might say. Your predecessor. He was on the trail of an umbrella-maker who had gone mad while pursuing occult interests—and he suddenly cracked up.”