Ian Johnstone - The Bell Between Worlds

Its small eyes seemed to catch the twilight and they burned in the shadows. The nose twitched, sniffing the polluted air. Sylas pushed himself as far back on the window seat as he could, hoping that the shadows would hide him, but their eyes seemed to meet. The rest of the world faded and he was filled with a new, creeping terror.

“This is a life-giving journey. It is a bitter-sweet elixir that restores my spirit, strengthens my heart and, most of all, opens my eyes.”

SYLAS GRIPPED THE EDGE of the seat, willing himself to climb down into his room, but his limbs were frozen. The pale yellow eyes of the hound penetrated deep inside him, calmly peeling away the layers until they saw weakness and loneliness, until they glared coldly at a boy’s thoughts of his mother.

“Sylas!”

It was Tobias Tate’s grating voice, coming through the trapdoor.

“Sylas! Come down!”

Sylas glanced at his watch. Five past seven – he was late.

He glanced back out of the window in time to see the beast drop its head and resume its stooped prowl along the ruined remains of the aisle, passing quickly out of sight.

“Come here AT ONCE!”

Sylas peered down into the churchyard until he was sure that the hound was gone, then sighed, heaved himself off his seat and walked over to his trapdoor.

He found his uncle standing in the corridor, hands on his hips, peering at him as if he was an account that would not balance.

“Well?” he squawked, his voice echoing down the passageway. “Where’ve you been?”

“Sorry I’m late,” said Sylas dismissively – he was in no mood for another lecture from his uncle. “I saw something really strange from my window... something in the churchy—”

“Daydreaming, I knew it!” growled his uncle. ”Well, I have no interest in your nonsense. And there’s no time for dinner now – you can daydream about that!”

“Fine!” sighed Sylas, pushing past his uncle into the flat.

Tobias Tate watched him go and frowned, seemingly a little disappointed to have had the wind taken from his sails.

Dinnertime was spent sifting, trawling and rummaging through endless mountains of paper. What made this task especially infuriating was that everything was already in the right place, filed properly into the many piles about the office. But, as an accountant of great care and attention, Tobias Tate had to be convinced of this. Sylas would make helpful observations and suggestions while being chastised, corrected and mocked; a torture that only came to an end when his uncle had dissected and exploded every sensible suggestion put to him, and Sylas had been duly reminded of his dull wits, poor instincts and low birth.

On this particular evening Sylas found this task more frustrating than ever, not only because of his anger about their earlier clash, but also because his thoughts kept turning to the hound in the churchyard and the strange Shop of Things. His mind was filled with images of the dark hound and, more excitingly, the endless warren of parcels and packages, the amazing flight of birds beneath the mobile and the peculiar runes of the Samarok. But he knew it would be some time before he would get back to its pages: the filing would take as long as it would take. Tobias Tate’s old grandfather clock tick-tocked its way through the endless minutes and chimed the passing of interminable hours.

Finally, as the clock struck nine, his uncle sat down in the chair in his favourite corner, ate a quick dinner (which he reserved entirely for himself), put his hands behind his head and fell asleep. He drew breath in long, deep snores of rasping snorts that built to a crescendo of clucks and splutters and then began again at the bottom of the scale.

Sylas could not believe his luck – this was his chance to escape. But he must not be hasty – his uncle’s finely tuned ears might hear him leave. He replaced the pile he was sifting through and edged closer to the desk, then picked up some papers by the window and rustled them loudly. His uncle snorted and spluttered, but his eyes stayed closed and the metronomic drone of his snoring resumed. Sylas smiled quietly and replaced the papers, taking care to leave them exactly as he found them – his uncle had not asked him to check this pile.

As he drew his fingers away, he froze.

He blinked, certain that his eyes were playing tricks on him.

In the header of the topmost letter was a logo: a stark, black-and-white fern leaf coiled into an almost perfect circle, with the words Winterfern Hospital for the Mentally Ill emblazoned below in silver lettering. Sylas had seen that logo before, on the white coats of the doctor and nurse who had taken his mother away. But it was the date on the letter that had made his blood run cold.

Two weeks ago.

His stomach turned. He picked up the letter, seeing as he did so that there was another beneath it dated three months before. A cold sweat formed on his brow. Now he could see the letterhead of another jutting out further down the pile, bearing a date of a year before. He turned his eyes back to the one in his hand – the one from just two weeks ago – and began to read, his heart racing. The room receded – all he could see was the stark black type.

Ms A. Tate: Clinical Report

Dear Mr Tate,

Amelie has shown some continued improvement under the revised regime of sedatives and occupational therapy and is responding particularly well to her new surroundings in the garden room. She has developed a keen interest in botany and spends extended periods reading and walking in the hospital grounds. Nevertheless she continues to experience severe psychotic episodes throughout the night and some hours of the day.

We recommend a continuation of the current course of treatment. As we have indicated previously, while her guardian’s visits are extremely helpful, we feel that family visits would also be beneficial.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Adrian Kopenhauer

Supervising Psychiatrist

Sylas’s hands began to shake. He took up the next letter and the next. Each was another Clinical Report, each dated three months before the last. He turned slowly to the sleeping form of his uncle and stared at him, his chest heaving, tears in his eyes.

Tobias Tate continued to snore, oblivious.

Sylas shook his head in disbelief. How could this be? His mother, still alive? And his uncle knew all along?

He grabbed the pile of papers, whirled about and rushed from the room.

“… we wake to sounds that assail the senses and crowd the mind, like dreaming that will not end.”

SYLAS SAT LISTLESSLY ON his mattress, papers strewn about him, tears pouring down his face. His wonderful room, his sanctuary from the world, was suddenly cool and dark, hollow and soulless, for surely it was part of this great lie, the sham that lay in scattered pieces around him, typed in hard black letters for anyone to see. It too had hidden the truth from him, for had he not lived in it every day of the past four years? Had he not grieved in it? Had he not looked down from its window into the churchyard and thought of his mother? Given her up? Let her go?

His eyes shifted back to the mattress, to the scores of Clinical Reports, Review Meeting Reports, Annual Statements, and then finally to the document in his trembling fingers, the Order of Committal, the document that gave the doctors the right to take his mother away against her will, the document that had started it all.

At the bottom were two signatures. One of these he knew all too well.

It was his uncle’s.

Sylas felt nauseous. He forced himself to look away, but everything he saw around him seemed to be part of the lie: the familiar walls of his room, his meagre furniture, the crooked beams of the old building, even the picture of his mother. Even that. It was no longer what it had been to him – a piece of her, a way to feel close to her. Instead it was just a snapshot, because it was not how she was today, not how she looked in her ‘garden room’, or walking around the hospital grounds, or how she would look at him if he was with her now.