John Harwood - The Asylum

Grey, drifting vapour hung low overhead, curling amongst the treetops. Sheep wandered in and out of patches of mist, their cries muffled by the damp. Beneath the wall, indistinct figures hunched over their spades.

You will be closely watched. Beyond the fearful promptings of my imagination, I had seen no sign of it. Could Dr. Straker really have stationed watchers all around the estate? How could he know which direction I would take?

I had only to imagine what I would have done in your place, Miss Ashton, to anticipate your every movement.

There was the fallen tree, and the path leading into the wood. Except for the distant labourers, there was still no one in sight as I passed beneath the canopy.

The trees grew even closer on this side. Some had been felled many years ago, and new ones had grown up around the stumps. I could not help leaving a distinct trail as I hurried along the path, flinching every time a twig snapped beneath my foot. Sooner than I expected, I emerged into a clearing in which stood a dark, ivy-covered mass, dripping with moisture. Frederic had described the stable as it had appeared on a sunlit afternoon; in that grey, murky light it was scarcely recognisable as a building. There was the broken lintel, with rubble heaped around a narrow opening.

I held my breath, listening. Though the asylum was no more than fifty yards away, I could hear only the dripping of water and the muted calls of birds. I moved reluctantly closer.

Frederic had said that the tapping sound came only when he was not listening for it. I knelt by the opening and tried to peer into the darkness within. A dank, chthonic smell wafted out at me—followed by a metallic clang.

I scrambled over the rubble and fled, realising too late that I was running in the wrong direction, with the noise still ringing in my head.

Not the sound of a murderer burying his victim, but the tower clock striking the hour.

As the last echoes died away, I caught a glimpse of black stonework amongst the trees ahead of me: the side—no, the back—of the original house. I picked my way through mounds of sodden litter until the path ended by the uneven remnants of a flagged walk. The rain was falling more heavily now, pattering over the leaves and splashing onto the stones.

No one has lived there for years. Many of the windows on the ground floor were choked with ivy; the panes above were black with grime. In places, where sections of the house had been built out from the rest, there was scarcely room to squeeze between the foliage and the crumbling masonry.

If I could find a way in, I thought, this might be just the place; no one, surely, would think of looking for me here. The first door I came to was massive, banded with rusty iron and quite immovable, but around the corner of a buttress, I found an alcove, about six feet square, with a door in the right-hand wall. Glancing up, I saw the tower looming overhead.

The door was narrow, arching to a point at the top, like the entrance to a vestry, with a massive keyhole below the latch, and a rusty iron ring hanging from a pivot in the centre. I lifted the latch and tugged, without much hope, but to my surprise it opened with only a rasp of hinges.

I stepped over the threshold, into a cylindrical stairwell, lit by a single window no more than a foot wide. Stone steps, deeply worn, spiralled upward into the gloom. There were no other doors.

Outside, the pattering of the rain increased to a roar. I have done nothing wrong yet, I told myself. If anyone catches me, I am simply looking for shelter.

After three complete circuits of the staircase, I came to an archway in the wall. The stairs continued upward, but I passed through the opening, into a bare stone chamber with an even narrower door set into the wall beside me.

Either the rain had stopped again, or the walls were so thick as to muffle the sound entirely. I grasped the handle, half hoping it would not turn. But this door, too, was unlocked; it opened halfway, and stopped against an obstruction.

All I could make out, at first, was a jumble of furniture, mostly chairs and tables and benches—no, church pews—stacked so close to the wall that only a narrow passage, leading away to my left, remained. Murky light filtered down from above; the pile was too high for me to see over.

I crept along the passage, wincing every time a board creaked, toward a strip of light—a window?—at the end. The floorboards were thick with dust, which clung to the damp hem of my cloak, leaving an all too visible trail. A few paces from where I had entered were two massive wooden doors, both immovable.

The oblong of light broadened as I approached; what I had taken for a sill was a railing, waist high, with solid oak panelling beneath. I emerged onto a gallery running the width of the building. The light was coming from lancet windows in the walls high above me. Through a circular hole in the floor, an open staircase spiralled downward.

I stole toward the balustrade and peered over, into what had once been a chapel, but was now a storeroom or a workshop of some sort. All of the windows below had been bricked up, as had the entrance; the only visible door opened into a vestry nearby. I remembered Frederic saying, “He calls it the temple of science,” and understood why there were no windows. I had blundered into the very heart of Dr. Straker’s domain.

Ranged around the walls were tables, benches, and cabinets bearing tools, bottles, racks of tubes, notebooks, coils of wire, and pieces of apparatus made up of brass wheels and polished rods and glass cylinders, with cables snaking away from them. A dozen or more oil lamps hung suspended from wires above the benches. Amidst all of this equipment were homelier touches: a teacup, a tantalus with a single glass beside it, a biscuit tin. A closet stood open; I could see clothes hanging from a rail, a tall hat on a peg, a pair of boots beneath. A long trolley, like a narrow bed on wheels, stood by the vestry door; it had two handles projecting from one end, and rails around the side: the sort of thing, it struck me, that might be used to transport an unconscious patient—or a corpse.

I became aware of a low, continuous humming, just above the threshold of perception. A swarm of bees, perhaps, trapped inside the wall? No, the sound was too constant; I could not tell where it was coming from, but there was a strange, underlying vibration to it that set my teeth on edge.

As I began to back away, I heard, from somewhere below, a key turning in a lock. I dared not run, and could only crouch below the balustrade as footsteps, heavy and confident, approached. The footsteps halted at the foot of the stairs, as it seemed; through the opening in the floor I heard a drawer open and close, followed by the sound of riffling paper. Then silence, until at last the footsteps retreated, the door closed, and the echoes faded into silence.

The rain kept up for several days, but every afternoon I put on my damp cloak and tramped about the grounds, approaching the meeting place from a different direction each time. Frederic came to find me on the third day, a Monday, to tell me that he had received a note from Miss Ferrars, saying that he might call upon her at Gresham’s Yard if he wished. He would be going up to London on Wednesday. Despite the pricking of my conscience, I would have been glad of his company, but he seemed to feel himself honour bound not to linger. It occurred to me, as he walked away, that a young man as susceptible as Frederic might easily fall in love with Lucia.

Through the interminable days and nights of waiting, I pored over my journal until I knew it by heart, and could almost convince myself that these were genuine memories; except that the gaps between the entries remained as blank as ever. I imagined, in a sort of waking nightmare, returning from a walk to find Dr. Straker with my journal in his hand, saying, in his cool, ironic way, “It is a fiction, woven out of your disordered mind. Those wills exist only in your imagination.” I had loved Lucia, and she had betrayed me, and yet, no matter how often I reread those passages, I could not feel as I knew I ought to feel, or think beyond the prospect of escape.