Twelve Minutes to Midnight (10 page)

XVI

Penelope scrambled backwards, the heel of her boot scraping against the stripped wooden floorboards. Wrapping herself in the darkness of her coat, she crouched behind the furthest of the filing cabinets, sheltering in its shadow as the footsteps entered the room. The echo of Lady Cambridge’s voice was followed by the heavier tread of a second set of footsteps, and Penny held her breath in fear. Then she heard the low rumble of Bradburn’s voice answer in reply.

“I had no choice – I had to come.”

Peering around the edge of the filing cabinet, Penny saw the statuesque figure of Lady Cambridge standing imperiously beside the table and chairs at the front of the chamber. She was dressed in a white linen nightdress and shawl, the lace-trimmed material flowing from her neck to her toes, but the stark beauty of her features was marred by a thunderous look. Facing her, Bradburn wrung his grimy cap in his hands, 
the scar-faced orderly shifting uncomfortably beneath her gaze.

“No choice?” Lady Cambridge replied sharply. “No choice but to go against all our carefully planned arrangements? No choice but to raise me from my bed at this ungodly hour? May I remind you, Mr Bradburn, that I am a recently widowed Lady of unblemished reputation. If anyone should have seen you sullying my doorstep—”

“I promise you, Lady Cambridge,” Bradburn protested, “nobody saw me.”

“My servants saw you,” Lady Cambridge snapped in reply. “Servants see, servants talk. I keep my staff firmly in line here, but even they raise an eyebrow when some guttersnipe arrives on my doorstep at half past two in the morning.

“And what for?” she continued, brandishing a thin sheaf of papers. “This?”

Even through the gloom, Penny could just make out the familiar spidery scrawls scratched across the topmost sheet.

“There are hundreds of patients in Bedlam, yet tonight you’ve brought me the work of only a handful of them.” Lady Cambridge flung the papers down on the table and turned on the orderly with a snarl. “What exactly am I paying you for?”

Bradburn scowled as the pages scattered in front of him.

“This was all I could smuggle away,” he 
muttered in a guttural growl. “It’s not like when I could just sneak the papers out one night at a time and put the ones you didn’t need back the next day. Ever since that blasted author Flinch came sniffing around, Bedlam’s been tight as a drum. Dr Morris is collecting the papers from the cells almost as soon as the freaks finish writing them.”

Listening from the shadows, Penny felt a nervous thrill of excitement. It seemed that she had already managed to throw a spanner into the workings of Lady Cambridge’s mysterious plan.

“It’s not good enough,” Lady Cambridge replied, a hard edge of steel entering her words. “For six long months I have laboured at this scheme and only a handful of years are yet to be revealed. The days of the nineteenth century are almost at an end – I need those papers.” She pointed towards the shadowy rows of oak cabinets, her lace-trimmed sleeve draped decorously from her arm. “When the last pieces of the jigsaw are in place, the course of the coming century will be determined by me. I will hold the secrets of all the wonders and the horrors yet to come. The fate of nations, the entire world will rest in my hands.” Her dark-blue eyes flashed in warning. “You would do well not to disappoint me, Mr Bradburn.”

“But what can I do?” the truculent orderly moaned. “They’ve got the nurses running
double-shifts
at midnight now – they’re watching the 
patients like hawks. I can barely slip them their nightly dose without getting caught. How am I supposed to get more of the Midnight Papers out of there?”

A cunning smile slowly crept across Lady Cambridge’s lips.

“We just need to change the time you administer the dose,” she replied, “so it takes hold when there won’t be as many people on guard. There’s no need for us to wait until twelve minutes to midnight to find out what the future holds.”

Tossing her hair back decisively, she strode towards a walnut cabinet at the far end of the room. Craning her neck to follow her path, Penny edged out of the shadows. She noticed for the first time that this cabinet wasn’t a filing cabinet like all the others, but instead a medicine cabinet with rows of jars and bottles neatly arranged on shelves behind a glass door. Opening the door, Lady Cambridge drew out a tray filled with tiny glass vials and turned to face Bradburn.

“You go back to Bedlam now,” she told him. “Administer a double dose to every patient.”

The orderly blanched, the colour draining from his face in an instant.

“But the last time I gave them all a double dose, one of the inmates died,” he protested. “If that happens again and I’m caught, they’ll string me up for murder.”

Lady Cambridge was unmoved. 

“We’ve no time left to waste,” she told him. “Before the dawn rises, I want you to bring me back the final dispatches from the century to come.”

She thrust the tray towards him and, with apelike fingers, Bradburn clumsily reached for the glass vials. He transferred them, one by one, from the tray to the folds of his overcoat pocket. As he worked, Penny crept forward in the gloom. Reaching the end of the row, she rested her hand against a shadowy filing cabinet and peered around it. She had to find out what was in those vials. The cloudy liquid inside each one shimmered like tiny teardrops as the glass vials clinked into place.

Penny felt a prickling sensation on the back of her hand. Glancing down, she saw, with a sudden rush of horror, a large red-and-black spider crawling across her skin. As she flung out her hand in fear, its pointed fangs struck out, piercing her skin and pumping their venom in. A low moan escaped from Penny’s lips, the pain from the bite impossible to contain. Landing on the ground, the spider scurried back into the shadows, whilst Penny stood there swaying, her hand clinging to the cabinet for support.

With a cold sweat soaking her brow, Penny could feel her muscles begin to twitch in spasm as the venom took hold. It felt as though a huge weight was pressing down on her from within. 
Her breath came in shallow juddering gasps as a creeping paralysis began to crawl through her veins. Penny could feel her arms, legs, even the muscles in her face stiffening as the poison spread. She tried to shuffle backwards, desperate to take refuge in the shadows until the feeling had passed, but her feet wouldn’t obey and she tumbled to the floor with a crash.

“What in damnation was that?”

Bradburn’s bark echoed through the basement. Frozen where she lay, Penny stared up helplessly as hurried footsteps approached and then Lady Cambridge and the orderly stood over her.

“It’s that girl who was snooping around the hospital with Flinch,” Bradburn snarled. “That damned author must be around here somewhere.”

Casting her cold eyes along the shadowy row of cabinets, Lady Cambridge shook her head. She stared down at Penelope, an unsettling smile fixed upon her face.

“I think the girl has come alone. Miss Tredwell, isn’t it?”

Penny could only nod her head mutely as the freezing paralysis crept across her lips. She watched with a growing sense of dread as the same large spider crawled down Lady Cambridge’s arm. Silhouetted against the sleeve of the cotton nightdress, its shiny black body was split by blood-red stripes. As the burly orderly edged away in revulsion, Lady Cambridge stood 
there unmoved, the spider finally nestling in the hollow of her open palm.

“
Latrodectus torperus
,” she declared, stroking a finger along the back of the spider. “A rare arachnid of the black widow genus. You have nothing to be scared of, my dear,” she told Penny, leaning down to place a soothing hand on her feverish scalp. “Its bite is not fatal and the effects wear off in a matter of hours. Its venom merely induces a fast-acting paralysis, numbing the nerves and muscles until its victims cannot move an inch. So much more effective than a guard dog, I find.”

A worried look flashed across Bradburn’s face.

“If she’s not going to kick the bucket then how are we going to get rid of her?” he asked gruffly.

Lady Cambridge took a step towards him, the spider still held in her palm. As the orderly tried to pull back in fear, she reached into his pocket and withdrew one of the glass vials.

“Take her back to Bedlam with you,” she ordered as Bradburn’s scarred face flushed with relief. “A triple dose should be enough to tip her into madness. That will be the last we hear of Miss Penelope Tredwell.”

Kneeling down on the floor beside Penelope, Lady Cambridge pulled the stopper from the neck of the vial. Inside the glass, the cloudy liquid swirled in the gloomy half-light.

“In some ways I envy you,” she told Penny, as 
she prepared to pour the liquid into her mouth. “The dreams you will have, the wonders you will see.”

Her mind trapped behind an expressionless mask, Penny’s thoughts raced in fear. She had finally discovered who was behind the sinister events at Bedlam, just in time to be dragged into the heart of the nightmare herself. As Lady Cambridge bent closer, the glinting vial held in her hand, Penny struggled to free herself. Every inch of her body trembled as she tried to escape, but the freezing paralysis held her tightly in its grasp. She strained to force a few words from her lips, desperate to ask the one question left in this mystery.

“What is it?” she hissed through gritted teeth.

Lady Cambridge raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“My dear, you do have a hardy constitution for one so young,” she replied, the vial poised in
mid-air
. “This is the venom of a creature long-thought extinct.
Architarbi somnerus
– the dream-weaver spider. I discovered it in the depths of Africa. My husband and I encountered a remote tribe in Abyssinia who hunted and captured the spiders alive. Their medicine man extracted the venom and used it in the primitive ceremonies they’re so fond of over there. He claimed to us that drinking the venom brought him visions of the tribe’s future. He said that he had prophesied that we would come – that he had seen us before in his 
dreams and knew the fates that would befall us.”

Lady Cambridge stared down at Penelope, the certainty of her smile suddenly chilling.

“The medicine man told me that the spiders had been waiting for me – the woman who would weave their webs around the world. The Spider Lady – the keeper of their secrets. All I had to do was harvest from the minds of men the visions that the spiders’ venom revealed. Then I would wield a power greater than anyone had ever known. The future itself would be mine to tell.”

She paused for a moment as if reliving the memory.

“But the tribesman told me something else too,” Lady Cambridge confided, her eyes narrowing as she spoke. “He said that the spiders were dying out; the strange powers they held waning as the century drew to a close. He warned me that if I did not fulfil this prophecy by the day the twentieth century dawned, then the spiders would betray me and snare me forever in a nightmare. I only have until this New Year’s Eve to seize my destiny.”

The thin line of Lady Cambridge’s smile hardened.

“My husband thought this was all
mumbo-jumbo
, especially when the medicine man warned him that he would never leave the shores of Africa alive.” Her eyes glittered darkly. “He sadly passed 
away soon after this, but I brought a colony of dream-weaver spiders back with me to England. With these creatures at my command, I could read the pages of history before they were even written. There was only one drawback – anyone who drank the venom of the dream-maker spider was driven into the arms of madness. It seems that the constitutions of our fellow countrymen are not as resilient as those of the Abyssinian tribesmen.” She glanced up at Bradburn, the orderly still staring nervously at the black widow spider crouching in the shadows by her side. “So who better to bring me news of the world yet to come than those who are already mad?”

As the vial hovered over her lips, Penny found the strength to whisper a final question.

“Why?”

Lady Cambridge shook her head scornfully as though she couldn’t believe Penelope’s foolishness.

“We stand on the brink of a brand-new century – the last of the millennium. Why should we peer only inches into the future when we could see for miles? Soon, kings, queens, prime ministers and presidents will kneel at my feet to learn the secrets I hold. I can sell this knowledge to the highest bidder – even change the course of history with one touch of the tiller.”

She tipped her hand, forcing the open vial between Penny’s lips. 

“Now drink up, my dear,” she said with a terrible smile. “I want you to tell me my future.”

Penny gagged as the foul-tasting liquid slipped down her throat, but Lady Cambridge kept the vial pressed tightly to her lips until every last drop was swallowed.

“There there,” she breathed with a satisfied sigh. “Time to sleep, perchance to dream.”

Penelope lay there frozen, unable to respond. Lady Cambridge’s voice echoed strangely in her mind, the words sounding as though they were coming from a great distance away. She watched powerlessly as Lady Cambridge rose to her feet, gathering her white shawl around her, and turning towards Bradburn.