Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

Miss Wolf turned to face her inquisitor, and in so doing, to face all of the rest of us as well. She did not colour, nor did her expression change from that of stoic impassivity. “It’s largely rubbish, of course. Most of what you just said. But I am in agreement with the predicate of your premise, Miss Bocker: that panic and havoc and precipitant action would not be wise — would induce retaliation upon a rather grand scale. Now I am happy to tell you what I know of the Tiadaghton Project and to explain what my role has been in it, but only for the purpose of helping us all to keep our heads, to effect a careful and studied analysis of present circumstances with all the tools of cool intellect that have marked your previous fortnightly gatherings. Mr. Graham knows what I mean, do you not, sir — your being a man who has spent a long and fruitful life in dispassionate research — in investigations divested of unproductive emotionality. Is this not the wisest course, sir?”

Mr. Graham blushed at what he perceived to be a compliment (for never before had he been commended for his dispassionate, emotionallydivested investigations).

Miss Wolf continued: “In this matter you must all approach your present situation just as I approach my own rueful position — one from which I do eventually hope to extricate myself — without giving license to dangerous, sudden impulse.”

“Yet,” struck in Mr. Upwitch, “do you or do you not intend to steal away with young Mr. Dabber in the dark of some forthcoming night and be done with all of this — with all of us ?”

“Do I wish to leave this place and never return? I most certainly do. Is it my wish to go arm-in-arm with the man I love? Yes. One hundred times yes. But it is my fate to remain here for the present. I am powerless to do much more at this unfortunate juncture than that for which I was hired: to maintain through sophisticated chemical therapies the illusion of the disease you call the Terror Tremens.”

“So that is what you do,” said I.

“Surely you had figured it out by now.”

“So you will confirm for us,” joined in Muntle, “that there is no such mental affliction.”

“That I most certainly will confirm or I should never have been given a job here,” replied Miss Wolf matter-of-factly.

“You say ‘to do much more than that for which I was hired,’” I interposed, “yet you have healed Bevan. I saw him. I spoke with him. You were not hired to do this.”

Miss Wolf nodded again, this time with obvious discomfiture. She lowered her eyes and could very well have been at that moment mistaken for a different sort of woman altogether — one made suddenly ineffable by thought of love. “I have done a little here and there to assuage my conscience, which grows more troubled by the day. I plan, as well, to give drugs to your Dr. Timberry to administer to young Florence Scadger. The medicine will treat her tuberculosis and eventually heal it. Outside this valley the disease is quite manageable with proper treatment and rigourous attendance by the patient to a specific pharmacotherapeutic protocol.”

“And who else have you helped?” asked Antonia.

“I have been making secret, unscheduled visits to the patients of the Lung Hospital over the last couple of weeks, administering the same drugs to them that are used on the outside. It is a lengthy series and I pray that it will do some good. I intend shortly hereafter to give all of my Outland medical supplies over to Timberry so that he should continue in my stead. I’m not an ogre or a monster, though I will admit that some of what I do and do not do these days is motivated by fear for my own safety. I cannot help it; my situation is growing precarious.

“Now this has reminded me of the woman whose dead body was discovered by young David Scadger last month. I knew this woman, or at least I knew of her. The Tiadaghton Project is a massive construct that ably protects itself from any threat, be it large or small, and especially that of the renegade variety. Apparently, Miss Martin had become just such a threat— a cog that was set to fly off the machine and draw dangerous attention to it. The Project has its rules and those rules are adhered to without variance. Everything serves the illusion that Dingley Dell is everything you see round you: a sheltered, pastoral, Victorian entity, a quaint and curious anachronism in a modern world. But there is another deception, which must also be maintained: that which is presented to the rest of the world — that this valley is home to a highly restricted government-sponsored installation wherein sophisticated weaponry is manufactured and tested, though there be no small number of those who believe a different story entirely: that visitors from some other world reside here. It’s a fiction no one goes to great lengths to disprove since it sends the imagination far afield of the actual truth about this place.”

Here looks of astonishment were exchanged amongst Miss Wolf ’s silent auditors. To think that there are those who believed Dinglians to be ultramundane!

“It has been my job,” Miss Wolf continued, “to keep quiet those who return from what you call the Terra Incognita — to keep those who have viewed life in the twenty-first century as it truly is from threatening the health and functionality of the machine. I silence the Returnees by creating the necessary symptoms of the Returnees’ disease: I bring about narcolepsy and dementia and disorientation when it is called for. I induce seizures in the most intractable patients.”

“Were you responsible for the death of Mr. Gamfield?” I asked coldly. “I understand that he beat his head against a wall until his brains spilt out.”

Ruth Wolf lowered herself slowly into a chair. In a hushed, nearly imperceptible voice she said, “That isn’t true, nor was it my doing. Gamfield’s death came, in fact, at the hand of Dr. Fibbetson, who took it upon himself to supplement the pacifying drugs that I had already given the patient. The man is more than mere bumptious idiot. He is an imbecilic menace. The grisly, fictionalised account of Gamfield’s death was put forth to create the necessary fiction that the disease — this spurious disease — has worsened in its manifestation and symptoms. While the families of the patients have become more impatient, the patients themselves have also grown more restive. And it is no easy task to keep men and women under lock and key perpetually sedated, especially those who do not go easily into their restraints or fall most readily into the required stupor. The Tiadaghton Project would prefer that every escapee from Dingley Dell be captured and summarily executed, and a good many have been. Far too many…”

My heart leapt into my throat at that moment to hear confirmation of what I had come to fear. Antonia and Muntle were taken aback as well. Slingo took Uriah’s hand, or perhaps it was the other way round.

“But there are those, as you know, who do make it back. And they must be dealt with. Bedlam is the place where they are quarantined. It is where I do my job. And it robs me of a piece of my soul every day that I am at it. I would gladly walk away — no, run in a fast sprint from my duties here if I could. But I would be writing my own death warrant. Just like Michelena Martin did, for I am certain that she too was trying to get herself away as fast as she could.”

Muntle ran his hand across his chin in rigourous thought, then flung that hand with a sharply pointing index finger in the direction of the now most forthcoming Miss Wolf. “Tell us why the Tiadaghton Project is coming to its end.”

“It appears that Dingley Dell has been purchased by a private industrial concern. A modern steel mill is to be built here, of such size and sophistication as to make your tiny steam-puffing foundry look like a child’s play-toy. It seems that we, unknowingly, have entered the end times.”