The House of Sleep (40 page)

∗

Earlier that afternoon, Lorna had finished her shopping in town, and then, walking back up the hill towards Ashdown, she saw something most peculiar. Seven cars from the local taxi service drove past her in the direction of the railway station: five of them containing patients, it seemed, while the
other two contained members of the cooking and cleaning staff. She stared after the taxis in bewilderment, and a sudden, nasty premonition visited her: she knew that something wrong, very wrong was happening at the house. She quickened her pace up the hill, and by the time she arrived outside the gates of Ashdown she was almost running.

She could tell, as soon as she entered the hallway, that the house was now completely empty: it had a ghostly, abandoned air, and the front door had been left to swing open and shut in the wind. But although empty, it was far from quiet, because somewhere beneath her – somewhere in the basement – loud music was playing. Amazingly loud music: for not only could Lorna hear it, she could even feel it, through her feet. The whole floor was shaking with the force of this music. Lorna recognized it at once: nobody could have failed to recognize it, it was one of the most famous arias in the world, sung by one of the world’s most famous tenors. As she dropped her bags of shopping and stood in the hallway, fearful, undecided, the music came to an end but started again almost immediately. Somebody had loaded it on to a CD player, with the repeat function engaged.

It took Lorna a few more minutes – during which time the aria stopped, and started again – to summon the necessary courage. At last, having looked into Dr Dudden’s office, and looked into the dining-room, and looked into the L-shaped kitchen, she willed herself to open the door to the basement, and slowly descended the stairs. Even when she had walked only as far as the laundry, still ten yards from the half-open door to the laboratory which she had never before been permitted to enter, the music was quite overwhelming. She put her fingers in her ears as she crept along the brightly lit corridor; and then, after steadying herself against the wall, and taking a series of long, deep breaths, she gently pushed the door wide open and stepped inside.

Lorna could not have said how long she stood there, horrified, unable to move, struggling to make sense of the scene
before her. Perhaps it was only for a few seconds. The room seemed to contain twelve tables, each supporting a glass tank. Some of the tanks had been upended, one or two had been shattered: four of them contained dead rats, and three contained dead dogs. In addition, there were a number of dogs, rats and rabbits scuttling dazedly about the room, showing every sign of malnutrition, mistreatment and exhaustion. Electric wires were strewn everywhere. Lorna drifted among the animals, regarding them warily, with a mixture of pity and revulsion, occasionally stooping down to take a closer look but unwilling to touch them.

Her priority, in any case, was to locate the source of the music and to turn it off. It appeared to be coming from a room at the far end of the laboratory, and she made her way hastily towards this, knowing that she would not be able to think clearly until silence was established.

The room she soon found herself in was large enough, but it contained no furniture except for one straight-backed, uncomfortable-looking chair, a television and sound system, and a variety of exercise equipment. Guessing herself to be in some sort of sleep deprivation centre, Lorna blocked her ears even more firmly and knelt down by the CD player, trying to see how it could be turned off. As she did so, a chill descended on her, and she froze in the act of reaching for the off button. She was aware, abruptly and very distinctly aware, of a human presence in the doorway behind her, just a few feet away.

She turned, saw Dr Dudden, and screamed at the top of her voice.

It was not the fact that he was almost naked – naked except for a pair of swimming trunks. Nor was it the crazy, hostile gleam in his eye, although that was frightening enough. What most terrified Lorna about Dr Dudden’s appearance that afternoon was the condition of his hair. It seemed to have gone berserk, to have acquired a lunatic life of its own. He must have plastered it thickly with glue, for it stood up stiffly,
in four or five spiky clumps, and he had stuck about a dozen electrodes at random all around his skull: some of them were wedged into his hair, one was even glued to his ear, and all were connected up to a network of thick, multicoloured wires which dangled along the floor behind him: yards and yards of them, trailing out of sight. He looked like a cross between Medusa and a deranged punk.

‘Don’t turn that off.’ There was an icy control in his voice, even though he was shouting to make himself heard above the thunderous, endlessly repeating aria. ‘Whatever you do, don’t turn the music off.’

‘But it’s so loud…’

‘What are you doing snooping around here, anyway?’

Lorna stood up, but came no closer to Dr Dudden. He was blocking the doorway to the laboratory, her only escape route.

‘I wanted to know where the noise was coming from,’ she shouted.

‘Noise?’ echoed Dr Dudden. ‘You call this
noise
?’

‘Well, it just sounded so different, from – from what you normally listen to…’

‘What’s the matter with you, woman? Are you scared of a bit of passion – a bit of emotion?’

‘Dr Dudden… are you all right?’ she asked now. ‘Where is everybody? What’s happened to all the patients?’

‘Patients! Ha!’ He snorted and, much to Lorna’s relief, turned his back on her and walked away, the yards of wire slithering behind him. She followed him into the laboratory, straining to hear what he was saying but catching only a few words: ‘patients… worthless… waste… cretins…’ Then, quite without warning, he wheeled around and confronted her face to face. He had seized a loose length of wire from one of the tables, and was now stretching it between his hands, winding it around his fingers, tugging it viciously taut. Lorna took a few steps away, until her back was to the wall.

‘Look, doctor… don’t you think you’d be more comfortable with some – with some clothes on?’

He ignored this suggestion, and hissed: ‘Who’s Ruby Sharp, then?’ The aria faded away, and promptly started again, seeming louder than ever. ‘I found an EEG in my office relating to someone called Ruby Sharp. I’ve never heard of her.’

‘She… she was a patient,’ Lorna said, her eyes not leaving the wire, and his restless hands. ‘She came here last night.’

‘You admitted a patient, without a referral? Without my permission?’

‘She was – Dr Madison seemed to know her. She said that she talked in her sleep.’

‘And did she? Did she talk in her sleep?’

‘She… she talked, yes. I transcribed it this morning. But –’

‘But what?’

Lorna hesitated, constrained by her own incomprehension now, as much as by fear. This incident had been worrying her all day: she did not understand the secrets, the private history shared by Ruby and Cleo, who so clearly knew each other from some bygone period in their lives. Nor did she understand what Ruby had been trying to tell her former friend – or former lover, whatever she was – by pouring out the unbroken, incantatory stream of words which had been captured on tape during the early hours of the morning. But she did know one thing: Ruby had not been asleep at the time. Lorna had not mentioned this to Dr Madison, but she was certain of it. The polysomnograph readings had proved it.

‘Well – she talked, but she wasn’t asleep,’ she explained, stammering. ‘I think she was faking it, for some reason.’

Dr Dudden looked at her for a moment, then started to laugh. It was a shrill, mirthless laugh, with an audible undertone of mania.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘I see: they’ve started already, have they? They’re already sending their spies down here. Sneaking into the clinic, posing as patients. Snooping around in the middle of the night. Planting cameras and microphones, I wouldn’t be surprised. Oh yes, it’s started, all right. But they won’t
smuggle any more people in here – and do you know why? Because from now on, there are going to be no patients at all. From now on, Lorna –’ he advanced towards her, raising the wire towards the level of her throat ‘– it’s going to be just you and me.’ They stood like that, inches apart, their eyes locked together, until he lowered the wire, took hold of her wrist in a pincer-like grip, and said: ‘Come with me.’

He pulled her in the direction of the second door at the back of the laboratory: the door behind which his long trail of wires seemed to disappear. He tugged it open with his free hand, and for the second time Lorna screamed, as soon as she saw the enormous perspex cage, with its giant turntable and its blue pool of water.

‘Let go of me!’ she shouted. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Pull yourself together, woman, for Christ’s sake. You’ve nothing to be afraid of. You’re looking at one of the most remarkable pieces of scientific apparatus ever designed. You should feel privileged.’

‘Let
go
of me,’ Lorna repeated. ‘Let go!’

‘I need your help,’ said Dr Dudden. ‘That’s all. I need your help with a little experiment. There must be two of us, Lorna: otherwise there’s no point. It takes two to tango. Remember that.’

Lorna glared at him: more angry, now, than afraid. ‘I have no intention of
tangoing
with you, doctor. Now or at any other time. Nor do I have any intention of getting into
that
–’ she indicated the cage, with a toss of her head ‘– in the company of someone who is quite clearly mad.’

Dr Dudden winced visibly at this last word, as if at a sharp pinprick. Then, slowly, miraculously, Lorna felt the grip on her wrist begin to relax. The burning fury in his eyes died down, faded, until it was no more than a feeble glow, superseded by something colder and blanker: a hard sheen of disdain, mixed with bitter resignation. He let go of her wrist altogether, and backed away.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That was silly of me. Why should you
be any different from the rest, after all? Why should you be any more enlightened?’

Standing slightly ajar in the perspex wall was an almost invisible door, through which the wires attached to Dr Dudden’s skull had been fed, lying flat across the turntable and leading all the way up to the hole at the top of the wooden partition dividing the cage in two. Now he gathered up the loose wires in his arms, opened the door even further, and stepped on to the turntable itself.

‘No, I should have remembered that I’m alone,’ he continued, turning to address Lorna. ‘Quite alone. Nobody could understand, nobody could even begin to understand. I’m so far ahead… It will take you all
years
, years to realize what I was trying to do.’ His smile was rueful, ironic. ‘Very well, Lorna: you can run along now. I shall be quite all right down here. They’ll come and find me in a few days, anyway. They’ll be here soon enough.’

‘
Who
will be here?’ she asked, in a kind of despair. ‘What are you talking about?’

He shook his head, and closed the perspex door.

‘Dr Dudden–’

But Lorna realized that he could no longer hear her, and she could only watch helplessly as he sat down on the turntable, crossing his legs, folding his arms, as if he were preparing himself for meditation. Then he began to speak, but to himself, not to her. The words were difficult to make out at first. Lorna was already on the point of leaving, of running upstairs to phone for the ambulance service, when she realized what they were.

‘None shall sleep,’ he was saying. ‘None shall sleep’: over and over, like a mantra, as the CD continued to play in the next room, at full volume, and Pavarotti’s celebrated rendition of ‘Nessun Dorma’ swelled to yet another deafening climax.

∗

Cleo lay on the bed in her hotel room, listening to the traffic noise from Russell Square, the multilingual babble of voices
drifting up through her open window, and thought to herself that, no matter what came of this evening, her life would never be quite the same again. There could be no going back.

Later, as she applied her makeup, changed her skirt, prepared herself for a fortifying drink in the hotel bar, she realized that there was too much fatalism, too much melodrama in that idea. She had managed without Sarah for twelve years now. Just recently, she had been managing rather well. There was no reason why this sudden resurrection of hope should change everything, no reason why she couldn’t go back to the clinic tomorrow, no reason why she shouldn’t continue to live without Sarah, just as she had resolved to do on that terrible night at Ashdown, the last time she had seen her, the last time she had heard her voice. Since then, Cleo had lived the life of a single woman, and could continue to do so.

If only to prove this very point, she lingered in the bar for more than an hour, drinking two gin and tonics and pointedly ignoring the overtures of the several lone men who attempted to catch her eye. She went on to an Italian restaurant, where she had a small carafe of red wine and an excellent vegetable lasagne, and declined an invitation to join the gentleman sitting at the window table for coffee and liqueurs. After that she began to walk, not in any great haste, towards the tube station, brushing shoulders with the tourists and the young people hurrying past her on their way to a Friday night out in the West End.

For once, on the train, she took no notice of the advertisements, declined to read the back pages of other people’s newspapers, and instead looked closely, for the first time, at the faces of her fellow passengers. She saw happy couples, and unhappy couples; couples who had nothing to say to one another, and couples who could not keep their hands to themselves; couples who had just met, and couples who seemed to be on the verge of splitting up. She saw married men on their way home to their wives, and she saw single men on their way home to their videos and their microwave dinners.
She saw women on their own, women in pairs, and women in groups, and she thought to herself: Yes, I can take my place with these people. Whatever else has gone wrong, whatever other mistakes I may have made, I know who I am, now. I know who I am, and it suits me.