Mirror of the Night

by E. C. Tubb

  “Do you?”

  “Certainly I do. After all, you didn’t steal it and you’d taken a lot of trouble to return it. They should have recompensed you in some way.”

  “They did,” said Henshaw quietly. He relaxed in his chair. “That gem belonged to a python, a snake-god. He rewarded me in the only way he could. I’ve travelled a lot since then and held down some peculiar jobs but one thing I’ve never had to be afraid of. Snakes never trouble me. I’ve never had to be afraid of being bitten by any snake large or small. In fact my last job was working at a snake farm in India. We milked the snakes of their venom to make a serum against snakebite. We had all sorts there, cobras, krites, mambas, all the poisonous types you can think of. Everyone got bitten sooner or later, but I never did. In fact I could handle them bare handed and they wouldn’t touch me.”

  “Interesting,” said Winters. “Very interesting.” He looked sharply at the stranger. “But something tells me that you haven’t told us everything.”

  “No,” admitted Henshaw. “I haven’t.”

  Tony didn’t say a word. He was staring at the palm of the stranger’s right hand. At the palm, and at the shape of a python tattooed on the skin.

  THE ENEMY WITHIN US

  Doctor Carl Wenham hurried along the green and white painted corridor and tried not to feel guilty at being late. Not that it was wholly his fault. When the conditions of employment at a hopelessly understaffed mental clinic practically demanded that he do all his paper work at home he felt justified in oversleeping once in a while. But, human nature being what it is, he still felt guilty and as he entered his office the expression on his assistant’s face didn’t make him feel any better.

  “Morning, Carl.” Doctor Fenarge, a tall, thin man with a face curiously resembling that of a horse, didn’t glance at the wall clock but he might as well have done.

  “So I’m late,” said Carl quickly. “With the work I have to take home it’s a wonder that I’m here at all.” He grinned as he recognized the psychological attempt at justification of his tardiness. “Sorry, John, I just overslept.”

  “Forget it.” Fenarge stretched as he rose from his chair. “I’ve been holding the fort and covering up. There’s a couple of patients waiting outside to see you and Hermitage phoned down to say that we can expect a visit from a representative of the popular press.” He made a face as though he would like to spit. “I suppose we’re in for the usual thing; does the Moon have any influence on our patients, are the new treatments having any colossal success, do we consider that the strain of modern life is a contributory factor to the rising incidence of mental ill-health? The same old guff to fill a couple of pages with sensationalism for the morons to gloat over.”

  “Lucy can handle it.” Carl slipped off his topcoat and wriggled into his white jacket. “That girl’s tabulated all the questions and filed them in her mind together with appropriate answers.” He shrugged. “Anyway, we should worry. Any publicity is good publicity if it persuades a single borderline case to volunteer for treatment before it’s too late.”

  “You think so?” Fenarge didn’t trouble to hide his sneer as he changed, slipping cigarettes and matches from his uniform jacket into the pockets of his shabby raincoat. “By the time they get through with describing all the juicy details of pre-frontal leucotomy, insulin shock, lobotomy and electro-therapy you won’t be able to see a patient for dust.”

  “Perhaps.” Carl sat down, not paying too much attention to the other’s outburst. Fenarge had carried a grudge against the press ever since some casual remarks he had made before a reporter had been exaggerated and used as a basis for a silly season scoop. He nodded at his assistant as Fenarge left the room and picked up the thin sheaf of papers that gave the bare details of the two warped personalities waiting for him in the other room.

  As usual they were the end products. Minds that had finally given way and broken down. Both had been sent from the local courts for observation and reports so as to determine what could be done with them, and Carl forced himself to quench his inevitable anger against a social system which insisted that mental ill-health was something not quite nice to talk about.

  No one was wholly normal—no one could be when the normal was an average of the whole. Everyone was neurotic in some degrees, struggling with personal difficulties which, though non-existent to others, made their life a perpetual hell. Most managed to compromise with their troubles, venting their frustration in apparently unconnected ways, swinging between elation and despair and yet remaining outwardly normal to other, equally neurotic people. Others had been unable to adjust and swung from neurosis to psychosis, running from the difficulties of the real world into one of their own imagination.

  By that time they were ready for Carl and the clinic.

  * * *

  The first case was one that he had seen too often. A woman, caught shoplifting, pleading kleptomania, and promising to undergo treatment if the court would be merciful. It could be a genuine case, there was certainly some mental quirk which insisted that a woman, well able to buy the things she stole, should run such social danger, but there was an equal chance that she had grown wealthy through theft and had engaged a clever solicitor.

  The second case was more interesting. A man had tried to commit suicide, had been found, resuscitated, and brought to trial for attempted self-murder. His explanation had not satisfied the court and so he had been sent to the clinic. Carl pressed a button and smiled at the fresh-faced nurse who answered the summons.

  “Ready for the inquest, Lucy?”

  “The reporters you mean?” She smiled. “I can see to them.”

  “Good. You know what to do. Cut down on sensationalism and emphasize the fact that if only people volunteered for early treatment we could do a lot more good. Why they don’t come will always beat me, but there it is.” He looked down at the papers in his hand. “Take the woman, Mrs. Blain, to observation. Send the man, Mr. Smith, in to mc.”

  He sighed as he prepared himself for the interview.

  * * *

  Smith was a carbon copy of millions just like him. Like his name there was nothing about him to single him out as a personality. A man, no longer young, sparse grey hair, weak eyes, weak chin, lined features and a harassed expression. Not tall, not big, not outstanding in any way. A clerk perhaps, a cog in the machine of commercialism, his individuality, if there had ever been any, crushed by routine and regimentation. Carl had seen his like a thousand times before and the least surprising thing about him was that he had tried to end it all. It was probably the most original thing he had ever done.

  But he was a man and was entitled to be treated as such.

  “Now, Mr. Smith.” Carl spoke with a professional warmth and calculated friendliness. “We needn’t go into just how you came to be here, I have the details on my desk, but I would like you to tell me what it was that made you decide to end your life.” He smiled at the shrinking figure in the chair and shook a little white cylinder from a packet. “Cigarette?”

  “No thank you, sir.” Like the man the voice was colourless, an impersonal drone devoid of both life and character.

  “No? You can if you wish, you know.”

  “I don’t smoke, sir.”

  “I see.” Carl reluctantly returned the cigarette to its packet. It was hardly professional conduct to smoke when the patient refused to join in but he badly wanted a cigarette. “Now, Mr. Smith, about this trouble…” He let his voice die into questioning silence, not looking at the patient, his pencil held loosely over a scratch pad, more for effect than anything else for experience had taught him that most people like to think that what they say is important enough to be taken down. What he really did was to watch the swinging second hand of a large-scale chronometer visible to him but not to the patient.

  “It tried to kill me.” Smith blurted the words with something like horror then lapsed into silence as if afraid of the enormity of what he had said.

  “So it tried to kill
you.” Carl managed not to sigh. For once he had hoped for a relatively straightforward case. Smith could have tried to kill himself for any one of a dozen quite good reasons. He could have been in debt, his girl friend—if he had one—could have proved unfaithful. He could have been passed over for promotion, lost at cards, been laughed at, hated his landlady or had a grudge against the local policeman. All of which had at one time or another served as reasons for a man killing himself exaggerated as they were by his neurosis into things of tremendous significance and magnitude. He could even, though this was rare, have calmly weighed the futility of living and decided that the game just wasn’t worth the effort. But now it appeared that Smith had passed into definite psychosis and was plagued by the ‘its’ and ‘theys’ of paranoia. Deliberately Carl didn’t ask the obvious question.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How?”

  “It made me put my head into the gas oven and turn on all the taps. If I hadn’t been found…” Smith shuddered and nervously licked his lips.

  “I see. I take it then that you don’t want to die?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. That’s one thing out of the way.” He stared at the little man. “You know, you don’t have to lie to me. I’m here to help you and I want you to realize that. No one wants to put you in prison or hurt you. Did you tell the magistrate that you had no intention of trying to kill yourself?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I see.” Carl was beginning to wonder just why Smith had been sent to the clinic. He had a persecution complex but so did a lot of other people and the courts were only concerned with the crime at hand. Attempted crime that is for suicide was the one crime a man could commit with the certain knowledge that he would never have to pay for it. If Smith had eaten humble pie, expressed his regret and promised not to do it again, there was little they could do but warn him and set him free. Obviously there was more to it than that. “Would you like to tell me just what happened? Why you felt that you had to kill yourself?”

  “I didn’t try to kill myself, sir. It made me do it.”

  “Against your will?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you think that it will try to do the same thing again?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” Smith’s sloping shoulders slumped as it beneath a terrible fatigue. “I suppose it will.” He didn’t volunteer just what the ‘It’ was and Carl didn’t want to ask. Information of that nature had to be given willingly or it would inevitably be distorted. Carl tried again.

  “Will you tell me just what happened that night?” He glanced at the papers before him. “The police found you at eleven fifty-five, they were called by the occupant of the next room when he smelled gas and couldn’t open your door. They reported that your windows were fastened and that the room was empty but for yourself.” He looked questioningly at the little man. Logic he knew had no place in a paranoiac’s world. The ‘It’ could be anything from a giant amoeba to a man from Mars but it was important that he learn from the patient’s own lips what it was that troubled him. “At what time did you retire?”

  “About ten, I don’t keep late hours, sir, it doesn’t like me to get too fatigued. I locked the windows and door, I always do, the neighbourhood is full of thieves and some of the other residents wouldn’t hesitate to rob a man while he slept.” Once started Smith seemed to have no difficulty in carrying on, and Carl noted with satisfaction the dropping of the stilted ‘sir.’ “I took my medicines and went to bed. It had been behaving lately so I suppose that I must have got a little careless, in any case I just didn’t think that there could be any danger, and I fell asleep.” He shuddered. “The next thing I knew was that I was in hospital, more dead than alive, and that a policeman warned me that I was under arrest for attempted suicide.”

  “You mean that you rose from your bed, put your head in the oven and turned on the gas all while you were asleep?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Incredible!” Carl shook his head as he thought about it. He had heard of somnambulism before but never to this extent. It was possible, if the death wish was strong enough, for a man to place himself in danger whilst asleep, but usually such cases had some readily apparent cause. According to Smith he didn’t want to die, had no intention of dying, and his precaution of locking himself in against problematical enemies seemed to prove that.

  “It made me do it,” volunteered Smith timidly. “I told you that before.”

  Yes, thought Carl grimly. You told me that before, but obviously you have no intention of telling me just what this ‘it’ is. He sighed as he recognized the pattern, the mystery, the hints, the obvious waiting for the inevitable question and the inevitable distortion of the answer. A man who believed that he was persecuted hated to pin-point his enemies, to do so would be to provide something concrete to be knocked down, and so he took refuge in half-truths, generalizations and sweeping accusations. The origin of the complex might have been his immediate boss, but he would never admit it. Instead he would expand a perfectly harmless individual into an imaginary network of spies and agents whose sole purpose of existence was to hunt him down. As the mere fact of being hunted gave him a fictional importance, the patient would cling to the fantasy against all logic and argument, and, the more argument he received the more cunning his enemies appeared.

  Carl sighed as he admitted defeat and asked the inevitable question.

  “In effect then, you claim that it tried to murder you. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “What is what?” Smith looked genuinely puzzled and Carl remembered that the prime requisite of any psychologist is patience, patience, and still more patience.

  “It tried to murder you,” he explained gently. “What ‘it’? Who or what tried to kill you?”

  “Oh!” Smith looked down at his hands. “Didn’t they tell you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to think this is insane,” said the little man seriously. “Sometimes I think so myself, but I’ve had proof, too much proof, and it nearly killed me.”

  “What nearly killed you?”

  “It did.” He looked down at his hands again and when he looked up his eyes held an expression which made Carl remember that he faced a man broken by his own inner conflicts and that there was nothing remotely humorous or amusing in insanity. He made his voice very gentle.

  “Please try to be patient with me but I want you to tell me what it was that nearly killed you. I want to help you, you know that, but I must know what it is that is troubling you.”

  “Of course.” Smith licked his lips with his nervous gesture. “I call it ‘it,’ because I’ve disowned it, or rather it’s disowned me. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that I tried to kill me.”

  “What?” Beneath the cover of the desk Carl clenched his hands until the nails dug into his palm. Used as he was to the vagaries of the mentally ill, yet he was still human and with limited patience then, as he stared at the haggard features opposite him, the man’s meaning became clear. “You mean…”

  “Yes,” said Smith simply. “My body tried to kill me.”

  Carl sighed and pressed the button on his desk.

  * * *

  Fenarge scowled as he prodded a spoon into the cup of tepid tea, sipped, pulled a face, and swallowed the brew in two great gulps. “One day,” he said bitterly, “they’re actually going to put some sugar into this stuff and then get certified for insane waste.”

  Carl grunted from where he sat in the white cone of a desk lamp. His head ached and his eyes seemed filled with sand so that the printed forms before him blurred and wavered a little. Tiredly he pushed them away, cursing the eternal paper work that took so much of his time when he would rather be dealing with actual patients. He shivered as he reached for his tea, the cold of the winter night overrode the obsolete heating system so that the air held a bitter nip. Thankfully he lit the cigarette Fenarge threw towards him, filled
his lungs with smoke and blew a distorted smoke ring at the too-bright eye of the desk lamp.

  “Speaking of certification,” said Fenarge casually. “How’s the pet patient?”

  “Smith?” Carl shrugged. “He’s been under observation for a week now and his delusion is as strong as ever it was.”

  “I read about it.” Fenarge gestured towards the files. “Paranoia, of course, but it’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone accuse their own bodies of attempted murder. Schizophrenia?”

  “Naturally, he has all the basic symptoms. Disorder of thinking, emotional incongruity, hallucinations and disturbed impulses but it is the outlet that is so unusual. He literally regards his body as something totally separate from his mind, something in fact, quite inimical and it’s going to be the devil’s own job to restore his sanity.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t even try.” Fenarge stared at the tip of his cigarette. “You know, sometimes when I look at what we have to deal with and the things we do to try and restore ‘normality,’ I wonder if we’re doing the right thing. All these people,” his gesture included both the wards and the world, “have reached a state of mind which, to them, is perfectly satisfactory. They have given up, surrendered, lost themselves in a world of their own imagination, and then we jerk them out of it, shake up their beliefs and force them back into the life from which they have escaped. In a way we set ourselves up as Gods, and sometimes I wonder if one day we may have to answer for it.”

  “If I didn’t know you, Fenarge,” said Carl evenly, “I’d say that you were talking like a fool. We’ve only got the end products here, those who have finally ‘surrendered’ as you call it. But what of all the others? What of the millions who hover on the borderline? Do you think for one moment that they are happy? Have you ever seen a manic depressive? Can you even guess at the black misery those damned souls are in? No, Fenarge, the popular conception of insanity, that of a man sticking straws in his hair and acting like an irresponsible moron, is so far from being the truth that those who propagate it should be shot as public menaces. It is scorn and ridicule that prevent people seeking early treatment, the social stigma attaching to any family with a member ‘not quite right in the head.’ Damn it, Fenarge, as a doctor you should know better!”