Visitor in Lunacy (9 page)

I press my fist to my head, feeling the fly struggling against my palm.

“Are you unwell, Renfield?”

There is only one explanation: I am Doctor Seward; Doctor Seward is me. One soul rent in two.

“Renfield?”

On the heels of the intensifying pain comes a blinding light, rushing in around me like a wave. Acrid bile rises in my throat and my legs collapse beneath me.

“Hardy!” Seward calls for assistance, urgently but without alarm. “Hardy! Come here, would you?”

٭

The cold wakes me. I am face down on the bed and naked, unable to recall whether I undressed myself. Afraid I might suffer another influx of light I keep my eyes tightly shut.

Time passes and eventually I put my hand to my face and risk looking through my fingers. It is night and the shutters are closed. Lying perfectly still I watch my room take form as my eyes grow accustomed to the dark: the edge of the mattress, the chair, the bookshelf on far wall.

Every attack is the same: a sudden and alarming pain in my right temple, followed by an extreme peripheral white light that quickly spreads and consumes my entire field of vision. The experience is so excruciating I become bewildered and prone to entertaining irrational thoughts. Breathing here steadily in the cool dark, I understand perfectly well that Seward and I do not share a soul. The whole idea seems preposterous. But it can be hard to remain sensible when one is in agony. Finally I take my hand down from my eyes.

Outside, my guards are changing shifts. During the day my room is left unlocked and I am allowed to wander about as I wish, overseen by the attendant who sits beside the gas-jet at the end of the corridor. As the sun sets the door is locked and guarded by unseen night watchers. Staring down at the hair on my chest I listen to them talk.

“He died a week ago. Went to bed feeling faint one night and never woke up. His wife found him beside her in the morning, stone cold.”

“What are they saying it was?”

“No-one knows. It was right out of the blue. My wife's convinced a plague's on the way.”

“Mine too, and my kids. Our neighbour fell ill and the whole household went into a panic. I couldn't make them see sense. I said to them: what's the point in getting into a flap? There's nothing much we could do about it even if it were true.”

They exchange good-nights and one of them leaves to go home, his footsteps trailing away down the corridor. The remaining watcher lights his pipe.

From elsewhere in the building: the wailing of a soul in distress, a fellow resident in a hopeless battle with himself. I remain staring at the far wall.

On the floor in corner of the room is a dark and unfamiliar shape. I try to bring it into focus but it resists, refusing even to reveal itself as something solid or merely a shadow. Frustrated that I cannot make it out I reluctantly leave my bed and step carefully over, my bare feet cold against the ground.

Squatting and placing my hands on either side of the object I find a sturdy wooden box, roughly a yard square with a lid and a metal clasp. I pick it up and give it a shake but hear nothing. Flicking back the clasp I lift the lid and put my hand inside, pressing down on the smooth base. It is empty.

Something brushes against my wrist. Instinctively I recoil, pulling my arm away and staring into the black space that seems only to grow blacker. Once my confidence is regained and my heartbeat has slowed I use the ends of my fingers to tip the lid shut. Taking the box to the window I place it on the floor. I open the shutters to let the moonlight in and carefully open the lid again.

 Inside is a collection of house spiders. I don't know what to make of this. There are roughly ten in number, in various stages of growth. Where have they come from? It must be a trick of some kind, an attempt to force me to question my sanity.

Hardy is the culprit, I am sure. He has taken a fierce dislike to me from the beginning and resents my wealth and my previous social standing.

Seeing one of the bigger spiders is threatening to escape I bring the lid down with a bang.

“You all right in there?” says the watcher.

“Fine, thank you.”

٭

Seward is in the doorway. Now more than ever I am perplexed by the time scales in which I exist. Sometimes I look out of the window in the belief that mere moments have passed only to see that the sun has shifted to the other side of the sky. On other occasions I have thought myself a prisoner in my room for weeks on end, then been told that no more time has passed than the gap between breakfast and dinner. I have no idea how long it has been since we last spoke.

“It is unhygienic,” he is saying. “It will make you unwell.”

With my back to him I sit on my chair and watch the flies race around the room. Currently there are thirty two in total. I know this because I have been keeping a careful log using the paper and notebook the doctor agreed to supply for me. I am also in possession of sixteen arachnids: ten common house spiders and six skull spiders.

My method of trapping the flies is simple. Attracted by the food festering in the sunshine they gather in great numbers on my sill. When plenty of guests have arrived at the banquet I pull down the window. My approach and the sash juddering in its frame disturbs them, of course, and I lose a great many to the outside world, but I usually manage to catch at least a few in the room. A second deposit of rotting food in the far corner is enough to keep most of my captives here when I reopen the window and begin my experiment again. Eventually these flies become meals for the spiders, half of which I keep in the box while the other half are allowed to roam the room, spinning their webs if and where they please.

“Please close the door behind you,” I say to the Superintendent. “Quickly.”

“I really am very sorry but I'm going to have to insist you remove them all.”

I cast him a wounded look. My new doctor, I have learnt, is easier to manipulate than Carey.

He continues: “Or at least get rid of some of them, at all events.”

“You are very kind to humour me.”

“You have three days in which to do it. No more. I will not be swayed.”

“Thank you,” I swivel around in my chair to face him. “I have one more request, if I may.”

“Go on.”

“If it pleases you, I should like to be allowed out more often, and farther afield than the airing court. I am wasting away here. It does no good to be inactive. Exercise would benefit me both physically and mentally, I'm sure.”

“You know I cannot allow you into the grounds just yet, Renfield. That's not to say it will never happen. We'll see how you progress.”

A blowfly lands on my trouser leg: a healthy fellow, shiny and plump. I watch him scuttles and halt, scuttle and halt, seeking food. Fully expecting it to fly away and reach down and attempt to pinch it between my thumb and forefinger. To my great surprise, I succeed. My technique must be improving. Holding it up to my face I make a study of my catch, its one delicate wing crushed against its side while the other buzzes sporadically.

Seward comes further into the room: “Are they your pets? Do you mean to take care of them? Because flies and spiders cannot be cared for, you know. They're not that kind of animal.”

Without thinking about it I pop the creature onto my tongue and close my mouth.

“Renfield! For heaven's sake, take that out.”

It is too late for him to stop me. I have already swallowed it whole.

“What do you think you're doing?”

This is a very good question: “I am feeding myself, Doctor Seward. I would have thought that much was obvious.”

“But why would you eat such a thing?” He bats a fly from in front of his nose. “It's revolting.”

He is right. It is revolting and has left a deeply unpleasant after-taste: “This is very good and very wholesome food,” I say, then try to suppress a cough.

“It is dirty and almost certainly bloated on carrion. Were you not, just a few moments ago, talking about the importance of physical health?”

“The fly is alive, Doctor. Therefore a life-giving thing. It stands to reason, wouldn't you agree? It's logical.”

He frowns disapprovingly: “It is vile. Clear these animals away or I will arrange for it to be done for you.”

٭

I am one of forty in the airing court, hemmed in, disturbing the dust. Attendants stand over us, smoking and talking with key chains rattling on their belts. Pushed up against the brick walls which keep us from the unseen land beyond are a number of heavy wooden benches. It is on one of these I rest while an unfamiliar grey-haired attendant sips from the drinking fountain to my side. A short, balding inmate shuffles by, lost in some indecipherable monologue and watching his feet scrape incrementally forward.

Under the thatched roof of the shelter – the design of which is similar to those along the seafront at Plymouth - a group has formed, idiots mainly, drooling and contorting, while others act the part of the melancholic, scowling and shaking their miserable heads. One makes a remark that angers another and a messy scuffle breaks out, speedily quelled by our guardians but not before a sad-eyed chubby man receives a bloodied nose. Returning to his spot beside my bench the grey haired attendant calls over to a colleague in the hope of starting a conversation.

“We need a storm.”

“Say again?”

“We need a storm. To clear the air. It's too muggy. Can you sleep at night? I can't get more than a few hours.”

The other attendant shrugs and looks disinterestedly away. It occurs to me that since I was locked up my hay fever hasn't bothered me at all.

Perhaps the families of the night watchers were right. Perhaps the country is on the verge of a terrible plague, on the brink of catastrophe, just as David's American showman friend predicted. Could the disease have already run its terrible course, spreading through our population by unknown and unstoppable means, leaving little but death in its wake? Piles of anonymous corpses burning in Regent's Park. Bodies disfigured by boils, breathing their last in Trafalgar Square. A mass exodus from the cities to the countryside where there are too few homes and too little food. A nation turning against itself, splitting into tribes. A bloody civil war. A dead island. How can any of us know for sure, locked away in this place? I eye the attendants with suspicion. Is it so farfetched to imagine they are keeping the truth from us? Perhaps the incurable fever has spared only those who are cut off from society: the prison inmates and the asylum lunatics? Are we the only ones left? The morally dubious, the mentally corrupt, the physically ill? Are we destined to be the flawed and unwitting fathers of a new race?

A cloud passes in front of the sun and the air cools. How do I feel, I wonder? What is the apposite word?

Through a window on the top floor of the red brick madhouse I catch sight of a silhouette, a figure observing me through the glass. Is it Hardy? No, it is not Hardy. The cloud moves on and the glinting sunlight obscures the stranger.

'Expectant' is the word. I am 'expectant'.

Refreshed after a spell in the open I ask to be accompanied to the door of my corridor, where the duty attendant uses his keys to let me inside. One of my fellow residents, to whom I never speak, is busy lighting his rationed cigarette from the gas-jet. He is smartly dressed with a neat and narrow moustache but his hands, I notice, are covered with brightly coloured paint. Without acknowledging him I approach my door, stopping in my tracks when I hear a disturbance from within. I look over my shoulder at the attendant and the smoker but they seem not to have noticed. The noise comes again: a frenzied rustle, something inhuman. I open the observation hatch but can see nothing unusual, only the zigzagging flies and the open window. Cautiously I turn the handle.

Perched on the headrest of my bed is a sparrow. A sparrow! Battling to escape it launches blindly at the wall, propelling itself up along the plaster and knocking against the bookshelf before dropping to the floor. Closing the door behind me I dash across the room and pull down the sash, sending a cloud of flies into the air. I must not let this opportunity slip.

Now the bird is trapped I sit down on my chair and rest my chin on my hand, captivated by its struggle: “Extraordinary.”

Eventually and inevitably it runs out of strength and takes shelter against the wall at the end of my bed. This is far from the first time I have suspected my life is being manipulated by some outside force. What is this sparrow if not a sign and a gift? The box of spiders, I now see, was magically placed in my possession to aid me towards some unknown end. And now a bird has flown in through my window: the next step in the plan. Is this the work of God? Or some other force? Yet again I remember the silk-clad man who comforted me in the alleyway; the elderly gentleman spied by Miss Morley as he waited in the square outside my home.

Leaving my chair I crouch down beside my new pet and, watching its tiny frightened heart beating in its chest, take the exhausted creature in my hand.

٭

“I wonder if I am in the right place at all. I am here to be treated, correct? To be cured of some perceived antisocial trait? But what if I am not insane?”

Not long ago Hardy and Mr Simmons, the Principal Attendant, entered my room carrying a small table between them, on which stood what I recognised to be a modern phonograph. Seward followed soon after, with a chair and three neat folders of notes. Having made himself comfortable he prepared the equipment and told the attendants to leave us alone.

“You feel you have been imprisoned unjustly?” He has been attempting to grow a beard, without much success. Blonde wisps of hair are faintly visible below his nose and on his chin. “Because if the court was incorrect it must follow that you attacked your victim in full possession of your senses.”

“If you accept that I attacked anyone, yes, but I do not. I have no memory of it and therefore no reason to believe it.”

“Then why were you sent here?”