The Ghosts of Heaven (23 page)

“Have you ever suffered from a sickness of the mind?” he asked. He didn't turn round to hear my answer, and answer had I none. I think he knew that, and he went on speaking.

“What is the connection we have to the world, Doctor? Is it our hands? Our sense of touch? Our eyes and ears? Our sense of smell, perhaps all these things? Are these the connections we have to the world around us? No. They are not. The only true connection we have to the world is our minds. Yes, our senses can feed us information, but the information means nothing on its own. It is our minds that give things meaning. It is our minds that create the world for us. And minds can be mistaken. Minds can become confused. Damaged. What then of the world? How does it appear then? It, too, appears confused and damaged.

“When that starts happening,” Dexter went on, “it is a frightening thing. A truly, deeply frightening thing. It is like running in circles, seeking answers that don't exist, only to come back to where you began, and no wiser than you were before. Like a mad dog in the sun, running in circles. And yet, with each completed circle, you do not come back to
exactly
the same place, because you have sunk a little further into madness. You are one level farther down on a spiral, and the spiral, unlike all other shapes you can draw, is infinite. It can never be depicted complete. You can draw a circle, or a square or a triangle. A star. You can draw it and it is done, but you can only ever show
part
of a spiral, you can only ever
hint
at it, because truly, it goes on forever. And when you feel your mind sliding down the spiral ramp to oblivion, to wild and dark and utterly terrifying oblivion, to an oblivion that you know full well to be endless, that you will suffer for all eternity as in some medieval hell of the mind; well, Doctor, it can be enough to destroy the strongest bravery.”

He finished, and now I saw what it was that terrified him about the spiral; it was the endless slide into the void. The void of madness.

“Charles,” I whispered. “What are we going to do?”

He turned away from the window then, and came and sat by me on the bed.

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said.

“What for?”

“For using my name.”

I remember blinking. Thinking.

I held out my hand.

“Perseverance,” I said.

For perhaps the only time in our short friendship, I saw Dexter confused.

“Perseverance?” he asked.

I flushed, as I still always do when this comes up.

“It's my name,” I said. I shrugged. “Parents with strange notions about the days of the Puritans.”

He smiled.

“Perseverance,” he said. He shook my hand. “This is what we're going to do. I'm going to climb to the top of that spiral stair. And then you have to promise to make me well again.”

“Charles,” I said, “I can't do that. But, I promise you, I will try.”

He closed his eyes, and nodded.

Then his eyes slowly opened and he even winked at me.

“When am I to perform this miraculous feat?” he asked, and for the first time, I actually thought he might be able to do it.

“This evening. Doctor Phillips is expecting you at seven o'clock.”

“Let's make it seven-thirty,” he said, grinning. “Keep him waiting awhile, yes?”

I laughed.

“Good man,” I said, and was about to leave him when he spoke again.

“Doctor? Those ancient carvings, of spirals? You think they are harmless relics of the early world. But take an atlas of the world, one evening, when this is all over, and plot their locations on the map. Then join the dots, as a child would … See what you find.”

I said nothing. He was insinuating strange powers to these devices, and I refused to play along.

Once again I was about to leave when he spoke.

“Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“If I fail to climb the stair…”

His words trailed away. We both knew that his outcomes were bleak, whatever happened to him, but he saw it in more dramatic terms than me.

“If I fail,” he said. “If I fail, Hell is waiting for me.”

His eyes were hollow pools of fear and misery and I knew not what to say, until from somewhere in that strange Puritan upbringing I had, some words from a poem came back to me.

“Then in that case,” I said. “Unto you I shall allow the easiest room in Hell.”

Dexter smiled. Closed his eyes.

“Thank you, Doctor.”

*   *   *

At seven o'clock, I left Verity in our rooms, unlocked the gate on the seventh floor, and went to wait at the door to the first-floor men's wing.

Dexter did not appear, so I went to his room and found Solway standing in the open door. True to his word, Dexter refused to come out of his room for half an hour, though Solway shouted at him, and insulted him, and jeered at him.

Then, on the stroke of half past, Dexter stood up, with Solway in midsentence, his mouth gawping, and set off down the corridor.

I followed a few paces distant, and the collective mind of the asylum was all alive around me. Somehow it appeared that every patient in the place knew what was happening, from the sanest individuals of the sixth floor, down to the truly disturbed minds of the first.

As Dexter walked along the corridor, the inmates banged on their doors and let out shrieks and cries of pain. It occurred to me then what phase of the month it was. Like an omen.

Solway walked behind Dexter, abusing him still, but Dexter showed no sign of concern at all until he came to the foot of the stair. Then he stopped, and my heart began to sink.

He could not do it. What had I been thinking? I looked up and saw Doctor Phillips at the balcony of the seventh floor, just as before.

He saw me and smiled. I looked away, noticing that once again, there was a jostling crowd of onlookers who'd come to witness Dexter's failure.

Then, just as I was berating myself for my idiocy, Dexter put his right foot on the first step.

It was as if the whole asylum held its breath. I glanced from Dexter to Phillips and back again; the Doctor was still smiling, confident no doubt that Dexter would be unable to make the second floor, never mind the seventh. That seemed likely. Dexter lifted his other foot and made the second step, and the third, but it was causing him immense strain to do it, that we could all see.

His fingers were clenched into tight balls, sweat was running down his forehead, and his mouth was set in a thin line. He was halfway up the first flight of stairs now, and his legs were shaking badly, but by God, he was still going.

I began to follow him. I kept my distance because I wanted Dexter to do it by himself, and for himself, something that I knew was important. He needed to beat Phillips, and beat him on his own terms.

When he made the second-floor landing, there was a banging on the glass and some patients who'd gathered behind the doors there were laughing, clapping their hands.

Dexter paused momentarily, then walked across the landing to where the flight to the third floor is, and placed his foot on the first stair.

A loud howl came from behind the glass as he did so, but Dexter showed no sign of noticing. He just kept going and going, and he reached the third floor in half the time of the second.

Again he crossed the floor and again he kept going, up and up, and I began to think he could really do it. Still Doctor Phillips was smiling down, serene, almost happy, and I saw the better side of him, that he actually wanted Dexter to prove him wrong.

At the landing of the fifth floor, the doors to the wards were open. A few warders hung about in the halls beyond, and came out onto the landing itself, some patients with them, but all kept their distance from Dexter, as he kept on, up and up, foot by foot, step after step, his eyes screwed tight.

I followed, closer now, and wanted to call to Dexter to encourage him, to keep him on, but I dared not for fear that Phillips would accuse me of interfering, but it hurt me to keep quiet as I could see that Dexter was in trouble.

He'd reached the landing of the sixth floor and started on the last one, to the seventh, but it was costing him great pain. His legs were shaking, and his arms, as he clung to the bannister desperately for support, needing its help every step of the way now, and those steps were coming very hard indeed.

He had slowed to a crawl. After each step, he'd have to wait while he summoned enough energy to go on, and only when he could control the terrible tremors in his legs did he manage to take another step up.

But he kept on, slowly, so slowly, and then, he was within three steps of the top, then two, and then in a rush he hurried onto the landing. He fell to his hands and knees in front of Phillips, while the great crowd of patients who'd seen him make it, and followed him up, gave an almighty cheer.

I was one of those, yet I cheered silently, as I hurried after Dexter where he was still on hands and knees in front of Phillips. The Doctor was smiling still, smiling down at Dexter, who got to his feet, uncertainly.

“I did it!” he cried, in triumph. His eyes were wild. He looked terrible. He was running with sweat and his arms and legs continued to shake, but he lifted a finger toward Phillips and pointed.

“I did it,” he said, his voice broken with high emotion. “I win the wager, Doctor. So you can call off your scientists. Doctor James told me what you're planning for me. But I won!”

Doctor Phillips' smile didn't falter, it seemed fixed on his face. He looked at me.

“Doctor James told you?” he asked. “That's interesting. Unfortunately, it's too late.”

Dexter's smile faltered.

“What do you mean?” he stammered.

“It is too late. We have already begun the procedure. Last night you were given a sedative in your food, and in the night we injected you with the dose of malarial blood.”

I stared at Phillips in horror. He was smiling as he told Dexter, “You might start to feel feverish soon. It seems as if you already might be.”

Dexter rubbed the spot over his shoulder that had been troubling him earlier on, and my head swam as I realized Phillips was telling the truth. The whole thing was a game, and it didn't matter if Dexter won or lost. It never had.

There was a terrible cry.

It came from Dexter, but those words cannot fully elaborate my meaning. I mean to try to say that the cry came from within him, from
deep
within him. I, who have heard the shouts of the insane countless times. I, who have learned to block them from entering me; I, the calm and rational doctor; I trembled with terror at the sound of that scream. It was the sound of deep, primal terror, it was the sound that lies far inside us all, the fear of the horror of being born into a universe that has neither meaning nor purpose and which can offer us no comfort. It was the cry of the soul that is truly alone, abandoned and without hope, and I swear that everyone in that great, aching hall, everyone who heard that single note of pain, will never, ever be the same again.

All that in the smallest division of a moment of time, and then, as I lifted my head, I only had time to see Dexter rush forward at Phillips. He bowled into him and I thought he meant merely to attack him, but before anyone else could react, Dexter had charged into the Doctor, and hurtled with him toward the balcony. With an almighty push, Dexter lifted Phillips off the ground and tipped him over, roaring as he did so.

The Doctor's scream was the only sound as he fell the six floors to the marble hall below.

There was a moment of nothing, just stunned silence, and then pandemonium broke loose.

Solway and another warder rushed at Dexter, but it was as if this single murderous act was a trigger, because instantly those other, usually docile patients who had been watching Dexter's climb sprang upon the staff.

Uproar burst out on all floors of the hallway, and as more warders started to arrive at the sound of trouble, the patients who were free began to fight back. I tried to reach Dexter, but was detained in assisting Solway to wrestle another inmate to the ground.

By the time that was done, chaos was everywhere.

Someone had opened the doors to the wards of the second and even the first floors. A riot was in full spate.

*   *   *

It took a long time to quell the trouble. The inmates were aroused by the sight of Phillips' blood, which pooled out from his head and around his body, and it took every warder and doctor present, myself included, to restore order to the asylum.

When we had, Dexter had vanished.

I sought him.

I had ended up struggling with some patients on the third floor, and I ran back up to the seventh floor, expecting to find Dexter, but he was gone. Then, horrified, I saw that the gate to Doctor Phillips' and our apartments stood open, and in the back of my mind I knew that Phillips had left it open when he'd come out to watch Dexter climb the stair.

I ran through the gate, looking for Dexter, and with mounting terror, began calling Verity's name, loud at first, and louder still. I looked in every room, but there was no sign of her.

I knew who she was with.

 

Monday, April 18—continued

The manhunt began at once, first in the asylum and, when that proved fruitless, outside. Dusk had fallen as Dexter made his climb and now darkness had come, so the entire staff of the asylum gathered on the gravel in front of the building with what torches and flares could be found.

There was no time to be lost. I rapidly gave orders to various groups as to which pieces of ground should be covered. Everyone looked to me. In a moment, I had been placed in charge, by Dexter's murderous hand. And even in that terrible moment I made some decisions. As soon as we had found Verity, and Dexter, that very minute, I would start to run the hospital my way. Delgado and the others would be gone, and I would do my utmost to disgrace them, too.

I made that promise to the poor women of the lower wards, unable even to voice what was being done to them.