Mirror of the Night

by E. C. Tubb

  “You’re jumping the gun again, Carl.” Fenarge shook his head at the other’s expression. “I agree with you, every word, but I wasn’t talking about borderline cases. Take old Mrs. Perkins for example. All her life she has tried to emulate a horse in the sheer, animal-like drudgery of bringing up a useless husband and eight children on an income hardly sufficient to house and keep a thoroughbred dog. Finally she gives up, or her mind breaks, or she goes insane, take your pick of what you call it. She comes here and we look after her. She is in no pain. She has no worries. She spends all of her time talking to the friends she never had, surrounded by luxury she can never hope to experience, and living in a world of pure fantasy. What can we offer her? We stab her brain with electricity and jar her with shock therapy. We may even manage to jerk her out of her private world and back to an acceptance of reality. Then what? Back home to a selfish clod and a gang of whining children. Back to eighteen hours a day slave labour, to semi-starvation, to blows and brutality. Can you honestly say that we are doing the right thing if we ‘cure’ her?”

  “Special pleading,” snapped Carl irritably. “We can’t be judges as to who and who not to cure. The social system isn’t our fault—it only fills our wards, and our job is to empty them as fast as possible.”

  “Send them back to hell, you mean, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t say that and you know better than to believe it. Not all of those who come here are happy—quite the reverse in fact. A paranoiac lives in a world in which he can never know a moment’s peace. A manic depressive is so miserable that if he gets any better he will commit suicide as a way of escape.” Carl glanced at his wristwatch. “Time for the night round. You’d better come with me, Fenarge, I’d like your opinion on Smith. I’m getting a little worried about him.”

  “Why?”

  Carl didn’t answer as he crushed out the butt of his cigarette and led the way out of the office.

  * * *

  The wards were long, narrow, overcrowded relics of a bygone era. The rows of white-sheeted beds rested on a polished floor and a night-light threw a bluish glow over the ranked cots, giving them a vague, almost unreal air.

  Sound murmured from them, the sigh of a restless mind, the subdued mumblings of a rambling brain, the sudden laugh of a twisted soul who somehow, somewhere, had found humour. Once a man reared up and swore with vile obscenity at a figment of his imagination, and low sobbing from a patient far gone in misery made a subdued whisper in the restless silence.

  “I’ve put Smith in a private room,” said Carl quietly as they trod on rubber-soled shoes through the frigid, dim-lit wards. “I didn’t want him upset by the others.”

  “Padded?”

  “No, he isn’t violent and besides, he’s only under observation.”

  Fenarge nodded, feeling his usual discomfort as he followed the psychiatrist through the silent hospital. He doubted if he could ever get used to the sight of blank yet watchful eyes, the dull faces and vacuous expressions of the patients, the sense of alieness, the impression of an invisible barrier between them, the uncomfortable feeling of handling something that could, at any moment, explode in his face. And yet dealing with the mind held a fascination all of its own. The problem was stupendous and, in a way, he relished the challenge. He swallowed as he followed the elder man through a narrow door.

  Smith was awake, lying supine, his hands outside the sheets his eyes glazed as they stared up at the ceiling. He didn’t look towards them as Carl silently dismissed the male nurse, and he didn’t pay any attention as Carl sat down beside the cot.

  “How are you feeling, Smith? Comfortable?”

  “Yes thank you, sir.”

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “No, sir.”

  Carl sighed at the terse answers and the stilted title. He nodded to Fenarge to sit down then leaned across the motionless man and gently timed the pulse.

  “How’s it being behaving, Smith?”

  “Not too badly, thank you, sir. I had a little trouble when…” Almost the man blushed. “I don’t like using…”

  “I know, Smith, but you must get used to it. I want you to have absolute rest, absolute you understand, and going to the lavatory isn’t resting.” Carl smiled with warm understanding. “What happened?”

  “I tripped, my ankle turned just as it did…” Again the little man seemed to be on the point of a confidence and Carl tried not to sigh at the invariable recoil away from what he needed to know. Fenarge leaned forward, his voice startlingly loud in the hushed silence.

  “How did it all begin, Smith? When did you first decide that your body was a rebel with a life of its own?”

  For a moment Carl thought that his assistant had gone too far. Explanations were anathema to a paranoic for explanations would reveal how illogical his concepts were, but to his surprise Smith didn’t wander into vague generalizations and wild assumptions, neither did he immediately freeze into silence. Instead he looked thoughtfully at the young man.

  “Do you think that I’m insane?” he asked quietly, then, before Fenarge could answer, “Never mind. I realize how it must seem, but I’m not insane, though sometimes I wish I were.”

  “Tell us about it,” urged Carl gently and frowned Fenarge to silence as the little man began to speak.

  “I’ve always lived a quiet life, I was a clerk before I had to stop work, and I’ve read a great deal—odd books mostly, several text books and works dealing with the mind and the body. I started taking an interest after my body almost killed me, and I wanted to find out why.” He paused as if searching for words and Carl forced himself not to interrupt.

  “I suppose it all started when I was doing a lot of paper work, my eyes began to ache and it wasn’t until I caught a cold and had to rest that they grew better. After that I always seemed to be falling ill. Colds, migraine, gastritis and even childhood diseases such as chicken pox and mumps. Each illness seemed to coincide with a period of intense work and always I seemed to get better when the work eased up. Even then I didn’t guess what was wrong and it wasn’t until the first time my body tried to kill me that I began taking it seriously.”

  “When was that?” Carl kept his voice low and was surprised to get an answer.

  “About five years ago. My ankle turned just as I was about to cross the road. It was raining, the traffic was heavy, and I fell down in front of a bus. If the driver hadn’t managed to pull up I’d have been cut in half by the front wheel.” He paused again and in the dim light Mark could see sweat shining on the sallow features. “That was the first time. The second incident happened about a year later. I was standing on the Embankment watching the sunset on the water. I still don’t know how it happened but one moment I was leaning on the parapet and the next I was in the water.” Incredibly he smiled. “I can’t swim and if a policeman hadn’t been passing by I should have drowned.”

  “Coincidence,” whispered Fenarge and fell into silence at Carl’s glare.

  “Perhaps, but it began to worry me. Little things began to mount up, a slight cut invariably meant a fester or a poisoned hand. I had to stop shaving myself—I was afraid that my hand would cut my throat. I even had to move to a ground floor room—I was afraid of falling down the stairs. Little things perhaps, nothing in themselves, but when things keep on happening there has to be something behind them. It took me three years to discover that my body was trying to injure me, and even then I didn’t think it would go as far as murder.”

  “What did you think it was after?”

  “Rest.” Smith stared at Carl and his eyes shone in the dim reflection of the shaded bulb. “It wanted to rest, and the best way it could do it was to incapacitate me.”

  “So you believe that your body has conscious awareness?” Fenarge spoke before Carl could stare him to silence. “Is that what you are trying to say?”

  “Yes.” Smith looked at the young man, then, slowly, his eyes shifted towards the psychiatrist. “Is it so incredible?”

  “It’s
uncommon,” said Carl cautiously. “I assume that you’ve given the matter some thought?”

  “I have,” said Smith grimly, and for once his voice seemed to hold life and character. “It isn’t hard once you study it. In the old days a man had to rely on his body, he depended on his reactions and had no time to think, but now we have replaced the automatic response to danger with studied consideration. The body may not like that. It was used to being the superior partner and I believe that it is getting its own back in the only way it can. You see, we are made of cells, and each cell has a life of it’s own. Groups of cells make the nerves and muscles, other groups form the eyes and skin, yet other groups make the ears and sinews. We work those groups hard, work them without any consideration for what they may really want, and, like humans, they want to rest. The brain won’t let them rest—and so they revolt, go on strike, refuse to obey their commands.” He raised himself on one elbow and his eyes glittered with a desperate urgency.

  “You’ve got to believe me! You’ve got to! Because it isn’t just me, you know. What about all the inexplicable suicides? The freak accidents? The rising tide of chronic illness? I’ve read about it and I know what’s happening. Cancer—what else is that but a revolt of body tissue? Ulcers—a protest against wrong feeding. Weak eyes and deafness, aren’t they caused by artificial light and traffic noise? There are a dozen clues and once you admit the fact that the body has a separate awareness then you can see what terrible danger we are in. My body has ruined me, I can no longer work, I’ve got to consider it at every moment of the day and night and if I forget and force it to do what it doesn’t want then it strikes back. Wounds which refuse to heal, pains for no apparent cause, injuries through the inexplicable failure of a muscle to obey and do its job. Finally…” He gulped and relaxed, his thin features shining with sweat. “It’s going to kill me. I know it but what can I do? I’m so tired of having to watch it all the time. So tired…”

  “Then get some rest.” Carl tipped a capsule into a glass, added water, and handed it to the little man. “Here. Drink this and get some sleep.” He waited until the man had swallowed the sleeping draught. “Now, don’t worry, Smith. Don’t worry about anything. We’ll soon be able to solve your problem. Just rest now and leave it all to us.” He let his voice fade into silence as the lids closed over the glazing eyes then, gesturing to Fenarge, left the tiny room.

  * * *

  They didn’t speak on their way back to the office and Carl was glad of the silence. His headache had grown worse and his eyes burned in his head. Overwork, of course, every specialist in the clinic was overworked but knowing the cause didn’t help the complaint. Irritably he snapped on the desk light and reached for Smith’s file.

  Fenarge lit cigarettes, passed one to Carl, then stared thoughtfully at the heaped papers on the desk.

  “What did you think of it?”

  “Smith?” Carl shrugged. “A typical, well-integrated delusion, but I had expected as much.” He sighed. “He will have to be certified, of course, if we let him go he would only kill himself in one way or another.”

  “You think so?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? He is convinced that his body is killing him so, in order to bolster the delusion, he will subconsciously hurt himself, take risks, have accidents, anything to prove his point. The inevitable result is that he will commit suicide.”

  “I wonder.” Fenarge frowned and looked at his cigarette as though he had never seen it before. “What he said could make sense, you know. I’ve been thinking about it and it isn’t as crazy as it sounds.”

  “Of course it makes sense,” snapped Carl tiredly. “Any concept will make sense if you choose the right premises on which to base your logic, but that doesn’t mean that it is right. You noticed the way he mentioned cancer and in that he was right. Cancer is an uncontrolled growth of normal tissue but there is no reason to suppose that the cells do it deliberately through conscious awareness. He mentioned stomach ulcers and we know that they are psychosomatic—worry and mental strain will cause ulcers, but he was arguing in reverse. The idea of the body and mind as separate identities has been dropped long ago. We now know that mind and body are one, that without a healthy mind we cannot have a healthy body.”

  “And vice versa?” Fenarge smiled at Carl’s expression. “Can we have a healthy mind without a healthy body? If mental stress cause stomach ulcers, wouldn’t stomach ulcers cause mental stress?” He dragged at his cigarette. “I was watching Smith while he was talking and it seemed to me that he was an intelligent man who had given the matter some thought. I know that intelligence has nothing to do with stability, quite the reverse in fact. It takes intelligence to work out an entire new concept, based on delusion, but the thing is that he was right in what he said.”

  “Please!” Carl tried to control his impatience. “If you’re going to believe in everything a paranoiac tells you you’ll wind up as a patient. There’s a man here who can convince you that he is a reincarnation of Moses and, if you accept his proofs, you will believe him. Another is convinced that he holds the secret of immortality, we won’t know if he is telling the truth until he dies, and anyway, he refuses to divulge it. There is a woman who will convert you to accepting the fact that we are all dead and Earth is Hell.

  “Sometimes I’m tempted to believe her, but the main weight of evidence tells us otherwise. Smith has an arguable case—they all have, but that’s why he is here. If he didn’t believe in it, it would remain no more than an imaginative fantasy.” He frowned. “One thing I will admit, he didn’t try to stress it too much and he was right about the rising incidence of psychosomatic illnesses.”

  “Exactly. Oh, I know that he could have got it all from books but when you think about it, it becomes a tempting suggestion. Are we being too insistent on saying that the brain controls the body? The ancients didn’t believe that. The old tales of possession and the biblical warning that, if thy hand offends thee cut it off, goes to prove that at one time they must have held similar beliefs. Could we be wrong? Could our bodies really have a separate awareness and if so, wouldn’t that awareness develop, mutate perhaps over centuries of time?”

  “No!” Carl crushed out his cigarette and picked up a pencil. “I don’t want to be offensive, Fenarge, but I don’t think that you’re cut out for psychiatry. You’re too impressionable, too prone to sympathize with the patients’ delusion. I would suggest that you try some other field.”

  “Thank you.” Anger made the assistant’s voice brittle. “Are you going to submit that suggestion to the Board?”

  “Do you want me to?” Carl stared at the young man, a formless shape outside the cone of brilliance, then, recognizing that his irritation stemmed from fatigue and overstrain, forced himself to smile. “Sorry. But I was serious about the warning. You wouldn’t be the first psychiatrist to end up as a patient in a mental ward. Forget Smith and his wild delusion. It’s an interesting conception, but your own experience should enable you to discount it utterly.”

  “It doesn’t,” said Fenarge quietly. “Just the reverse in fact, but never mind that now. What will happen to Smith?”

  “The usual. Rest and occupational therapy. Maybe we’ll try insulin shock then, if that fails, electro-therapy and narco-hypnosis.” He sighed as he made swift notations on the file. “What we should try, of course, is psycho-analysis but we haven’t got a couple of years to spare even if we had the staff to do it. From the strength of his delusion I’m afraid that we may have to try neuro-surgery. It’s quick, will get rid of his delusion, and enable him to return to his work. In any case we can’t let him go as he is. It would be murder.”

  “I suppose it would.” Fenarge glanced at his wristwatch and rose to his feet. “Time for another round.” He stepped forward as Carl made to rise from the desk. “I’ll handle it; you finish the paper work and I’ll meet you in the canteen. Right?”

  Carl nodded, squinting as he stooped over the closely ruled forms.

  * * *
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  It grew very quiet after Fenarge left. A low gurgle came from the radiator as it struggled against the biting cold then the gurgle faded to silence as if yielding to an invisible foe. Carl grunted rubbing his eyes and wishing that he could get away from it all, thinking of taking some of his unused leave and knowing that when it came to it his conscience wouldn’t allow him to leave patients who depended on him.

  Twice he made mistakes, filling out the wrong sections on the form, and then his pencil broke and made an ugly tear in the thin paper. He sighed, then leaning back lit a cigarette and frowned thoughtfully at the drifting smoke.

  Could Fenarge have been right in his defence of Smith? It was an interesting speculation and his tired mind toyed with it as a dog will toy with a bone. Why did eyes ache when overworked? Why did mental strain induce stomach ulcers? Were accidents caused by slowed reactions and if so, why? Was it possible that highly specialized groups of cells such as an eye or a tendon, could have a dim awareness of their own?

  The drifting smoke seemed to close around him and his imagination painted vivid pictures of a slave state, ruled by a tyrannical brain, the slave-cells whipped to the limits of their endurance, finally to revolt and deliberately sabotage the whole. It was logical enough, he admitted. Take a slave state in which the labouring class had no idea of the whole complexity of their nation. A modern city, say, where the garbage collectors wanted a rest and so let the sewers overfill so as to get laid off until the damage had been repaired. Or a factory where the boy threw a spanner in the works, because he wanted a day off to see a football match.

  Could the body be like that? Could a muscle fail so as to cause injury and force the whole to rest? Were the ancients right in their supposition of the body as being a thing separate from the mind? Carl remembered the tales of anchorites who had whipped their bodies to erase desires, others who had struck off their hands for killing in the heat of rage. Senseless procedures in the light of modern knowledge but if the mind and body were twin identities then the idea of punishing the flesh for refusing to obey the dictates of the mind made sense.