Eric McCormack - Cloud

She must have seen that I was genuinely interested, so she talked more as we walked.

“I should have mentioned that Eildon House specializes in artists and academics who’ve somehow gone wrong,” she said. “By that I mean many of them have undergone the kinds of psychological traumas associated with people in their professions.

“Of all the artistic types referred to us, writers are in the majority by far. It’s no exaggeration to say we’d need ten Eildon Houses to accommodate all the writers with severe problems.

“Our academic inmates are often quite brilliant, as you’d expect. Yet they have a tendency to commit the most disproportionately awful criminal acts — for example, they might stab a department head to death over their teaching assignments, or shoot a dean who’s denied them even a tiny research grant. One of them is particularly infamous in this country for other reasons. His name’s Professor Artimore — you’ve probably heard of him?”

Naturally, I hadn’t.

“Well, he’s a very interesting case” was all she said.

By now, Sarah Mackay and I were walking along a corridor lined with century-old black-and-white photographs. The subjects wore the uniforms of Eildon House employees and were assembled in groups, like football teams. Their faces were unsmiling and wary, as is often the case with people who’ve never seen a camera before.

We arrived at a door with the sign Director on it and she led me inside.

The office was spacious, with a number of filing cabinets and a wide desk in front of a big window. Thick iron bars on the outside marred an otherwise beautiful view of the hills. The office walls were a plain, greyish colour with no ornamentation aside from several more of those old black-and-white group photographs I’d seen in the corridor.

Facing the desk were a shiny black leather couch and armchair. Beside them was a kneeling stool, the kind of thing you’d find in a church. She noticed me looking at it.

“Eildon House used to have its own chapel,” she said. “After the government took the place over, they put many things in storage, including the chapel furniture. That prie-dieu had actually been used by Andrew Eildon exclusively. When I saw it, I thought it might be useful in my office and had it brought up. Sure enough, some of the inmates now prefer to kneel when they come to see me.” She smiled. “You’re welcome to use it, if you wish.”

I assumed she was joking and smiled back. She seated herself in the armchair and I sat on the couch. Despite its expensive appearance, it was unyielding.

WE’D BARELY SETTLED when a young, pretty woman wearing a white housekeeping uniform came in. She was carrying a tray with a pot of coffee and two cups on it.

“Thank you, Georgina,” said Sarah Mackay.

The woman laid the tray on the desk and left.

“Georgina’s one of our inmates,” said Sarah in a matter-of-fact way. She saw my surprise. “Yes, half of our inmates are female. Madness is one of those areas where women have always had equal rights.”

I wondered why this Georgina wasn’t under lock and key. “It’s a long story,” said Sarah.

“She likes to help out and her medication makes her quite sociable, so most of the time there’s no need for her to be locked up. She’s here because she wanted to be a writer. Would you like to hear about her?”

GEORGINA, after graduating from university at the age of twenty-two, had decided to write a novel and bought a typewriter for the purpose. For a year following that, she stayed home every day, and for almost every hour of the day did virtually nothing but write— tap, tapping out her first novel, hour after hour, seldom leaving her room. She was so dedicated she rarely took time to eat, so that after a few months her body began to wither away and the tips of her fingers blistered, eventually bleeding onto the typewriter keys as well as down over her clothing.

Inevitably, Georgina’s family could no longer deal with her and a series of institutions for the mentally infirm became her home. If they took away her typewriter, she’d fall into a catatonic state. If they gave it back to her, she’d immediately revert to her suicidal typing. There seemed to be no middle ground. Drugs and extended counselling were ineffective.

“IN THE END, she was committed to Eildon House,” said Sarah Mackay. “When she first came here, her file contained some of the many hundreds of pages of the novel she’d been writing. I read them carefully. It wasn’t really a surprise to discover that her main character was a woman who sat in her room all day, writing a novel. In the course of writing, this woman came to understand that all the other inhabitants of the world outside her room were conspiring against her. What was worse, they weren’t actually people at all but huge rodents disguised as human beings. She could hear them hissing and scratching at her door trying to get in. She herself was the last real human being on this earth, and she knew that as long as she kept up her desperate typing the rodents couldn’t get at her. Hence, her compulsion — and, by extension, Georgina’s.”

After hearing this I felt curious: what was wrong with Georgina to make her believe such frightening nonsense?

“You’ve put your finger on a dangerous aspect of the writing profession — the inability of writers to separate reality from fiction,” said Sarah. “In an invented story, it’s quite all right for a heroine to believe that all the human beings in the world have turned into rodents. In fact, it contains interesting possibilities. And Georgina must have been sane enough at first, for she wrote about her heroine in the third person. But as she herself began to lose her grip on reality, she began to write in the first person— she’d come to identify completely with her character.

“As I mentioned, we’ve tried all the latest psychotropic drugs on her and at times they seem to help. She can wander about Eildon House doing little jobs — such as delivering coffee and so on, as you’ve just seen. If I let her have her typewriter back, she’s fine at first and writes about her character in the third person. But after a while she gradually reverts to the first-person narrator — a sure sign she’s returned to the manic state. So we have to take the typewriter away from her. That deprivation makes her catatonic again and we give her more of the drug till her behaviour’s quite balanced once more. It’s been a vicious circle so far, but we haven’t given up on her. If we can’t get her to stop reverting to the first person, we may try another mix of drugs that’ll make her give up writing altogether and become a normal human being on a permanent basis. But that’ll only be as a last resort.”

The story of Georgina being out of the way, Sarah Mackay now began interrogating me closely about my own life history. She applied herself to the task in the way, no doubt, she would question a new inmate. Only detailed and considered responses satisfied her. I had to tell her at some length where I’d gone after I fled from Duncairn, how I’d ended up in Canada, about my marriage, and about my work. She listened with great concentration, drawing me out with shrewd questions about Alicia and Frank. She seemed especially interested in the complexities and recent development of my father — son relationship with him.

Finally, she turned to the purpose of this present trip to Scotland. I was required to tell her all about my meeting with the curator, my finding of The Obsidian Cloud in Mexico, and the mystery of its author, Macbane.

Sarah listened to all of this with rapt attention.

“How fascinating,” she said. “His story sounds just like some of those old Upland legends Mother used to tell me.”