Beneath London (4 page)

“Of course you must join them, Langdon, but surely not
today
, not on a day that we’ve marked as our own?”

“Not at all. We’ll make our foray on Tuesday, and so we must be in London on Monday. You’re to come along, he says, if you’re amenable. Gilbert has already talked to William Billson at the Half Toad, and has booked our usual room for a week.”

“If Gilbert is anxious that we come into London then so am I, and it’s a perfect time for a holiday, what with the children being away. At the moment, however, there are shortbread biscuits in the crock by the sink that might go well with that pitcher of shrub.”

But they were once again interrupted by a clatter from the front of the house. St. Ives looked out to see a rising dust cloud thrown up by the wheels of a chaise driven by a heavy woman in a flamboyant scarlet garment and with a shocking lot of red hair. It was their neighbor, Harriet Laswell – more commonly known as Mother Laswell – from Hereafter Farm, a quarter of a mile away to the west. She had a deep understanding of the paranormal and occasionally held séances for the citizens of Aylesford if they had a pressing desire to chat with someone from beyond the pale.

St. Ives rejected the idea of trying to hide. Alice frowned on that sort of thing, and it was too late anyway: Mother Laswell, climbing the veranda stairs, had apparently spotted him through the window. He swung the door open and invited her in, seeing in her face that she was troubled. The afternoon at once became sensibly less empty, and when he felt the breeze through the open door it struck him that something had come into the day that struck a false note – a chill beneath the superficial balminess. He saw that clouds were moving in from the north like an invading army, promising a change in the weather.

THREE

T
he madhouse and surgical hospital called Elysium Asylum, owned and operated by Dr. Benson Peavy, lay on Wimpole Street near the corner of New Cavendish Street. It was a large house built of gray stone on a deep property half hidden by ancient trees and greenery, and with an expansive lawn on which the more sober-minded lunatics could be seen playing croquet on warm afternoons. A high, spiked, wrought iron fence surrounded the property, its gates kept locked at all hours. The gatehouse was occupied from early morning until nine o’clock at night, and no one entered the grounds without passing the gatekeeper, who used a speaking tube to summon one of the staff to attend to the occasional visitor.

Many of the occupants were thoroughly deranged, dwelling in so-called “quiet rooms,” with double glass in the windows and the walls filled with oakum to dampen noise. Even so, passersby could hear occasional shrieks and incoherent snatches of feral human speech from within the depths of the asylum. The keeping of mad patients in private hospitals was a lucrative business, particularly if a patient’s family was interested in the inflicted person’s welfare and comfort, and so the hospital also contained a number of “day rooms,” which were nicely outfitted – bright rooms with paintings on the walls and sunlight through windows, barred only for the safety of the patients. Visitors came to the asylum now and then to commune with a loved one or in order to see whether a family member, not quite right in the head, might be housed in the aptly named hospital. At those times, selected lunatics, usually drugged with laudanum, could be shifted into the very pleasant day rooms for observation.

Dr. Peavy’s operating theater stood in the depths of the house, hidden and locked away in a vast cellar. In it, the unwanted and unidentified were trepanned, flayed, dismembered (sometimes while fully conscious) and otherwise experimented on in the name of science. It was visited upon invitation by the sort of men, and occasionally women, who were willing to pay a considerable sum either to be enlightened or entertained.

Today there was but one man in the audience, a man whom some knew as Treadwell and others as Klingheimer, and who in fact had possessed a number of names over the decades. He had been watching and listening with a keen avidity these past two hours. He had no idea of being entertained by what he saw: he was largely indifferent to the process, but he had a deep interest in the outcome. At present there was a lengthening silence in the operating theater, which was worrisome to him.

Inside the surgery a man sat bound with leather restraints into a heavy chair that was fastened to the tiles beneath it. A disk of skull some four inches in diameter lay on the table beside him, along with the bloody trephine that had sawn out the disk. From the brain visible within the patient’s opened head, gold wires coiled away, affixed with tiny thumb screws to similar wires protruding from the head of a well-conducted asylum resident named Willis Pule, who sat in a separate chair alongside.

Pule suffered no restraints, and his head was un-trepanned. There were small holes drilled into his skull, however, through which wires had been inserted into his brain many months previously. The tiny wounds had healed, and the wires, now permanent, were usually invisible in his hair, when he wasn’t wandering through the mind of another human being, some of those minds being frighteningly chaotic and obscure. Pule’s insanity was transient, and at present he was very nearly rational, and had been free to wander the asylum without restraint for the past months, earning his keep as a subject in benign experiments. Today Pule was a mind reader, uttering aloud the thoughts that traveled along the golden wires issuing from the exposed brain of the man next to him.

Mr. Klingheimer watched Dr. Peavy’s face through a pair of purple-tinted goggles, which revealed a layered aura of colored light roundabout his head. Klingheimer “read” the glow and shimmer and hue of the aura. Anger had just come into the aura in a red wash, which quite likely meant that the patient’s mind had gone silent or else that he was dead. Peavy himself was insane, it seemed to Klingheimer, for his fond regard for the pain and misery of others had no rational ends. As a child he had no doubt tortured small animals, and in that way he was still a child. His particular insanity shone as an ochre band of light around his forehead, a sickly color like an unhealed wound. To Mr. Klingheimer’s mind, Peavy wore the face of a man who would one day be murdered or hanged.

The doctor was no doubt a savant, however – a keen student of the electronic stimulation of the brain. He had endeavored for years to transfer thought from the mind of one being into the mind of another, lately with great success. He had carefully mapped and measured various parts of the cortex, plumbing depths, seeking out regions of memory and speech, and what he believed to be the seat of psychic experience. His electronic equipment, contained within a wheeled box built of wood, leather, and brass, and covered with glowing dials and switches, generated carefully measured electrical currents, as well as registering cortical impulses. The Elysium Asylum, along with Mr. Klingheimer’s wealth, allowed Peavy a measure of medical freedom impossible elsewhere. He wisely distributed his income among foreign banks and kept cash money, passports, and other documents ready to hand in the event that he was forced to flee on short notice.

Peavy’s utter lack of scruples made him quite valuable to Mr. Klingheimer, as did Peavy’s love of money – a simple, predictable motivation. Klingheimer himself was largely indifferent to money, however, perhaps because he already possessed it in vast quantities. He sometimes wondered whether that indifference would disappear if he were suddenly made a pauper. He believed that it would not, for he was entirely satisfied with the perspicacity of his own mind. Mr. Klingheimer had no “feelings” to use the popular term – no sympathies as such, except for a mild admiration of genius in others and a fervent wish to possess what lay within their minds in order to expand his own. His intention was quite simply to appropriate others’ genius, to pirate it away with the help of Benson Peavy and his machinery.

A spray of sparks erupted from the electronic machinery, and there was the smell of burnt dura mater on the air, which reminded Mr. Klingheimer that he hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning. The aura roundabout the patient strapped into the chair faded and winked out. Mr. Klingheimer removed the goggles, put them away securely in the pocket of his coat, and asked, “Has our patient succumbed, Dr. Peavy?”

“Perhaps. Tell us what Mr. Simmons is contemplating, Pule.”

“He’s gone silent,” Pule said.

“He’s dead then?” Klingheimer asked.

“It’s meaningless if he is,” Peavy told him, “but, yes, stony dead, I should think. The experiment was immensely revealing, and the man is inarguably happier in his present state.”

“Given that one day I’ll be in a similar position, I don’t share your definition of ‘happier.’”

“You’ll be sitting in the other chair, Mr. Klingheimer. Nothing at all similar about the position.” Peavy unhooked the dead man’s neck restraint, and the body slumped forward, revealing that the neck and back were awash with blood. “It was merely the trepanning that did it,” Peavy said. “The man bled to death. I severed a small artery, which I attempted to clamp off. It leaked rather copiously, however. His family is traveling in the south of France. By the time they’ve returned he’ll be disposed of.”

“What about you, Mr. Pule?” Klingheimer asked. “How are you feeling? Did the man’s death unnerve you in any sense? Did you
feel
the death?”

“No. He went missing. One moment he was thinking of his child, who drowned, and the next the curtain fell and his mind went dark.” Pule’s face, pock-marked and gaunt, glowed a strange shade of green, the result of a diet of luminous fungi.

“How strict is Mr. Pule’s diet, Dr. Peavy?”

“He eats fungus for dinner and supper. Stewed, raw, juiced, boiled, and roasted. His blood appears to be about a quarter fungal soup, if you grasp my meaning. He’s never been fitter – apparently growing younger by the day, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. That at least is going well. Have we another willing subject for the trephine, then?”

“In fact we do,” Peavy said. “But we’ll need more subjects soon. Few of the patients are expendable without arousing suspicion.”

“We shall find more subjects for you, then. Suspicion is the great bug-bear to men like us, indeed it is. The streets are alive with superfluous humanity, however, easily plucked from the pavement and beneath the notice of their fellow men, alas.”

Mr. Klingheimer rose from his seat now. He was tall, some three inches above six feet, and he appeared at a hasty glance to be sixty or perhaps even seventy years old. His carriage was that of a much younger man, however, and he possessed obvious strength and vigor. His own skin had a green pallor to it, although it was not as pronounced as that of Willis Pule. His smile was very nearly perpetual – an evident mask to his acquaintances (for he had no friends).

“I wonder if you’d fancy a holiday, Dr. Peavy – a little jaunt into Kent, at most overnight, but more likely a single long day. I require your considerable skills. I believe you’d find it good sport, and profitable, too. I can guarantee you a head or two, immensely interesting heads, at no risk whatsoever.”

FOUR