Dark Asylum Read online

  ‘It’s the future, Jem,’ he had said to me on our first meeting. ‘Look at the nation! In the last twenty years our land has changed beyond recognition. There are factories where once there were fields, chimneys and sewers in place of trees and streams. What effect might this have on our minds, our spirits? There are more of us mad than ever, and no wonder! Crowded together, one on top of the other, forever looking out at grimy walls and breathing in the stink of London. So many people, each of us passing amongst hordes of strangers every day! I see no sign that this’ll change, and the number of those whose wits are turned by it grows apace with each year that passes. What are we to do with them all? How can we help?’ He had smiled then, his face aglow with the optimism of youth. ‘The profession is still crystallising. There is no consistent way of approaching the mad – should we chain them to the walls and hose them with water to frighten their demons into submission? Should we sedate them and hope that one day they won’t wake up? Should we – God forbid – slice open their minds as Rutherford would have us do, gouging out the parts that make them objectionable? Or should we simply offer them the same humanity, the same care and consideration we would offer any other human being who was lost or troubled?’ He flung his arms wide. ‘Such opportunities! But I can help them, I’m sure of it. I have ideas. New ideas.’

  Today, however, Tom Golspie was looking discouraged. He had kicked off his boots and was lying on his chaise. ‘Hello, Jem. Will.’ Dr Golspie made a limp gesture with his hand. His pipe lay on the hearth beside him and the room had a heavy, unpleasant smell to it, smoky and musty and thickly herbal. ‘You don’t require me to get up, do you? You’re always welcome, both of you.’ He sighed, and closed his red-rimmed eyes. ‘But I cannot be bothered with such tedious pleasantries as standing.’

  ‘Are you tired?’ I said.

  ‘Tired?’ he laughed. ‘Merely frustrated. By myself and the limitations of my own mind more than anything.’ He sat up, his expression fierce. ‘If I could at least understand the patients’ experiences. I feel we stand on the outside and try to look in, which is simply impossible. We need actually to be inside. Only then can we truly know. And once we know,’ he spread his hands, ‘why, then we can help!’

  ‘You mean that to understand the mad, we need to be mad ourselves?’ said Will, sitting down on one of the stiff-backed chairs and stretching his legs out before him.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s something one can step in and out of voluntarily.’

  ‘But one can’t leave everything to men like Rutherford. All that heroic stuff with saws and knives. This is the brain, the organ that houses our mind, our memories, our very being! We cannot just slice it up – such guesswork! It’s not as though he might stitch a bit back on if he doesn’t like the results.’ He shook his head. ‘I only attended that butchery last month out of curiosity – and to make sure old Rutherford didn’t scoop out poor Letty’s entire brain and have done with it.’ Dr Golspie threw himself back onto his cushions and reached for his pipe. ‘I need a brain. A whole one. Preferably in a head, and ideally with a spinal cord. But they are so hard to come by.’

  ‘You can have mine,’ said Will. ‘Once I’m done with it.’

  ‘I fear it will be quite empty,’ said Dr Golspie. ‘And therefore of little use.’ He sucked in a lungful of smoke. ‘I would like to feel what it’s like to be mad, just for a little while. It would be a most instructive experiment.’ He held up his pipe. ‘Hashish,’ he said. ‘It’s said to bring one close to the condition.’

  ‘You’ll need more than a pipeful for that,’ I said. ‘You must eat it, and in quantity.’ I pulled the package out of my pocket and put it into his outstretched hand. ‘The dawamesc I promised you.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Will.

  ‘A soluble paste made from hashish,’ I said. ‘Rather a large quantity. Don’t you dare take the stuff when you’re alone, Golspie.’

  ‘How much should I have?’ he said.

  ‘I’d suggest a quarter ounce in a single dose, perhaps a little more. Be sure to take a light meal first.’

  ‘Do you really think you should be encouraging him, Jem?’ said Will. ‘D’you really think he should flirt with madness?’

  ‘If we are with him at the time—’

  ‘What if he cannot regain his senses?’

  ‘Then I’ll end up in here for good.’ Dr Golspie laughed. ‘I won’t be the only one. There are a few who should not be here.’

  Will looked aghast. ‘Who?’

  ‘Edward Eden – there’s one for a start. He’s no madder than you and I, merely simple – harmless, naive, an innocent adrift in a world of wickedness.’ Dr Golspie sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘Dr Hawkins would never have accepted him. But Dr Hawkins is not here, and Edward Eden’s father was very generous. Edward Eden is one of our wealthiest patients. Rutherford signed him into Angel Meadow, and as he hardly concerns himself with the male patients – he’s not been along here for weeks, you know – it’s been left to me to manage the fellow.’

  Edward Eden, Dr Golspie told us, was the heir to Eden’s Mourning Warehouse, a large and successful drapery and funeral business at St Paul’s Churchyard. Edward had been schooled by his father in all aspects of the business from an early age, but showed neither aptitude nor enthusiasm for any of it. One day – a day which was to prove his undoing – Edward was sent into the very heart of his father’s retail empire: the basement cash office. Here he was given the task of checking the contents of the small boxes brought in by the cash-boys before they were sent back out to the waiting customers. These boxes were numbered according to the precise counter from which they had arrived, and each contained the customer’s money along with a receipt filled in by the shop assistant. Although other, more capable, hands took the money from the boxes, examined the receipt and supplied the correct change, Edward was required to check everything before the boxes were sent back out onto the shop floor.

  Things did not proceed smoothly. Bored with his task, Edward soon gave up counting pennies and peering at receipts. Cash boxes began to accumulate before him. Searching for a distraction, all at once he noticed a crack in the plasterwork beside his desk. Something moved behind it. Was a small creature trapped, trying to get out? A spider, perhaps, or a beetle? Perhaps it was a mouse! Edward liked spiders and beetles and mice, so he loosened the plaster with his fingertip. A bigger crack appeared. He stuck the nib of his pen into it and levered off a chunk of the wall the size and shape of a slice of bread. Behind it, kept warm and moist by a wraith of steam from the heating pipes below, a mass of cockroaches seethed. The wall appeared to be stuffed with them, he told Dr Golspie. Crammed full, as though the building itself were built not out of brick and stone at all, but out of wriggling, scuttling insects. Edward knew this because he had made another, smaller hole with his pen further along. A leg had appeared within the aperture, and a brown shiny carapace, like a huge dried date, had shifted within.

  The cockroaches tried to get away from the light, pulsating in the manner of rotten leaves caught in a blocked drain. Excited, Edward jabbed at them. Would it not be nice to have a few insect companions while he went about his tedious work in the cash office? Cockroaches began to drop onto the blotter, plopping into his inkpot and racing across the table top. Edward’s excavations grew larger. There appeared to be an inexhaustible supply of the creatures and soon they were everywhere, their little scratchy feet trailing spirals of ink as they danced across the growing pile of receipts. Beside him, the cash boxes continued to arrive. Clack . . . Clack . . . Clack . . . they went as they slipped through the chute onto his desk. He became dimly conscious of another sound too – the anxious murmur of a crowd of cash-boys, all awaiting their boxes. The cockroaches seethed and tumbled over his fingers. Perhaps they would enjoy a ride in a little box? ‘I would,’ said Edward. Soon, the hole in the wall was empty, and all the cash boxes had been passed out of the hatch to the waiting boys. The screams of the lady
customers, and the shop assistants, could be heard outside in the street.

  ‘Edward Eden is simple, that’s all,’ said Dr Golspie. ‘He cannot be cured or changed, there is no physic that might “improve” him, no procedure that might turn him into the man his father wishes him to be—’

  He had hardly finished his sentence when a terrible wail echoed up the corridor. Dr Golspie, who had been growing more and more languid and drowsy the more he talked, sprang to his feet as though stabbed by hot pins. The three of us rushed out into the hall. Further along, a door stood open. Dr Golspie barged past the two male lunatics who were standing outside, evidently enjoying whatever was taking place within, and plunged into the room. On the table stood a large cage, inside which a wriggling mass of mice teemed and squeaked. Against the wall, a young man with a round pale face was crouched in terror. Before him, Dr Rutherford loomed, his face furious. On the floor in front of them was a dead mouse, squashed.

  ‘What in heaven’s name is going on here?’ cried Dr Golspie.

  Edward Eden pointed a finger. ‘It’s him!’ he cried. ‘He came in just as I was about to put Francis back in his cage. He frightened me, and when I dropped Francis he, he . . .’ Edward’s chin trembled. ‘He stamped on him!’

  ‘What have you done, sir?’ said Dr Golspie.

  ‘What have I done?’ cried Dr Rutherford. He gestured at the cage of mice, and the sack of oatmeal that had clearly been used as food for the creatures. ‘We do not permit the patients’ rooms to be used in this way. Cages of mice? What were you thinking?’

  ‘These are Mr Eden’s mice. He’s been breeding them.’

  ‘Breeding mice?’ thundered Dr Rutherford. ‘I find mice are excessively adept at breeding themselves. I cannot believe you have countenanced such an activity. More than that, you seem to have sanctioned it!’

  ‘Why, yes I have, sir,’ said Dr Golspie. ‘It’s been very calming to the patient to have things to care for, things that depend upon him for food and shelter. I’m most struck by the effect it’s had upon his mind—’

  ‘And so you permitted it?’

  ‘I permitted the orderly husbandry of mice, yes, sir. For therapeutic purposes.’

  ‘The orderly husbandry of mice?’ It was clear that Dr Rutherford could hardly believe what he was hearing. I glanced at Will. I could see that he was trying not to laugh. Dr Rutherford saw it too and the sight enraged him further. ‘Pole?’ he screamed, looking about for his favourite henchman. ‘Confound the man, where is he? Pole!’ Clearly unwilling to wait for assistance, Dr Rutherford stalked over to the fireplace. He produced a bunch of keys and unlocked the cage that surrounded it. He picked up a poker from the hearth, and proceeded to ram it into the fire, levering the coals so that they roared and flamed.

  ‘Oh, God, no,’ murmured Will.

  ‘Sir, I must protest.’ Dr Golspie stepped forward.

  Dr Rutherford pushed him aside and seized the mouse-filled cage. The mice inside began to whirl and leap, trying to scramble away, but it was no use. Dr Rutherford wrenched open the cage door. I heard Will and Dr Golspie cry out, and the sound of my own voice raised in outrage. The crowd that had gathered in the doorway began to scream and bellow, one or two of them laughing and clapping, as though they had no idea what they were watching, only that it was a spectacle and had therefore to be approved. And beneath the hubbub was a terrible high-pitched squealing as the mice tumbled onto the burning coals. They writhed and danced on the embers. Some of them managed to spring out, but Dr Rutherford was onto them, shovel now in hand, scooping them up and flinging them back onto the flames. And then it was over. Pole appeared, flanked by two burly attendants. One of them struck Edward Eden across the head with a leather truncheon, and they hauled him away.

  ‘Where have they taken him?’ said Will, visibly shocked.

  ‘Downstairs,’ said Dr Golspie. He shook his head. ‘Poor fellow.’

  ‘It’s your fault if he suffers,’ cried Dr Rutherford, the shovel and poker still gripped in his hands. ‘Your fault entirely.’

  ‘What happens downstairs?’

  I had been downstairs only once before. I found I could not reply.

  Angel Meadow Asylum, 18th September 1852

  The path that led me here began in the shadow of this very building. Prior’s Rents: the name has become a byword for dirt and misery. Its walls conceal more secrets, have seen more pain and grief than anyone unacquainted with the place can possibly imagine. Once, it was the only home I knew. I slept with the chill of its stones creeping into my flesh. I awoke with the cries and groans of its wretched occupants ringing in my ears.

  There is no beauty and no hope in Prior’s Rents, no grass, no birdsong, and no sunshine. There are no broad airy thoroughfares, only a maze of passageways dominated by Prior’s Row, a foul lane flanked by crumbling walls and blistered with patches of aged cobbles. Beyond the Row is a cluster of cottages – pale and peeling and crowded together like toadstools. Long ago the cottages skirted a pond. They looked out over fields and trees at the smoky haze of the distant metropolis. But the fields and trees are long gone, and the pond has become a pestilential pit.

  Behind, the cottages, a crooked line of chimneys point from the slumped roof of a large ugly building. Once, the building was a part of St Saviour’s Priory. Later, it became the fine home of a lady and gentleman, who incorporated the cottages into a stable yard and had gardens full of fruit and flowers. But time, the city, and inheritance law, worked their shady magic. The place fell derelict, the gardens trampled beneath London’s greedy expansion. The brick-men who fired the kilns for the building of St Saviour’s Street made it their home, their masters dividing up rooms, slicing through moulded plaster and blocking up windows. Tenements rose up on either side to house those who could not fit into the old mansion’s crowded chambers. And when the brick-men left, others of a more degraded hue took their place – road sweepers, bone collectors, rag pickers – the very dregs of the city’s miserable poor. It became a place of noise and squalor, of crime and sorrow.

  You’d think I would be glad to leave, that I’d seize the chance to put it far behind me. And so I was. So I did. But the devil was right about one thing: once you’ve been a part of the Rents, there’s a piece of it that’s always inside.

  My earliest memory is of boots. Brown and black. Big and small. Caked, always, with filth. I was a child, perhaps no more than eight years old, curled up on a ragged blanket beneath my mother’s bed. In front of me, every night, was a reeking chamber pot. Beside that were the boots. Above my head, the bed creaked rhythmically so that the wire beneath the thin mattress bowed and dipped, bowed and dipped, with such violence that it sometimes touched my shoulder. I was not allowed to sleep in the bed – it was big enough only for my mother and my mother’s gentlemen friends. So I lay beneath, feeling the bow and dip of the mattress, hearing the sounds that came from above. Every night I lay there. Every night I feared that the bed would break, and I would be crushed: crushed beneath my mother, who was crushed beneath a man. We would both die, I thought, me and my mother. The man, of course, would simply put on his boots, and walk away.

  The room I shared with my mother was at the top of the old mansion. I thought I would never forget it, but time papers over even the worst of things and my memories now seem to be made up offragments, like a miscellany of photographs pasted into an album. I can recall the floor – bare, but for a mat of sacking before the fire; the fire itself no more than a gaping black mouth, the ashes in the grate clustered against its lower lip like rotten teeth. In one corner was a washstand and pitcher, cracked and dirty and filled with brownish water drawn from the pump in the yard. In the other stood my mother’s bed, its mattress stuffed with sawdust, rags and newspaper, its coverlet patched and darned. At the window was a table covered with oilcloth. I remember my mother at the window bent over her work, or sitting close to a tallow candle, sewing, sewing, sewing till her fingers were too cold to move and her eyes burned with tirednes
s. But that particular memory is dim and half-formed, for all those stitches were never enough to stop her life, and mine, from unravelling.

  I remember the stairs, crooked and reeking of piss, winding up to the top of the house. I remember stepping carefully over the creaking boards, flitting across a bridge of planks that traversed the landing where the worm-eaten wood had given way. A man was killed there. He fell through the rotten floor when he was drunk and he lay there, down at the bottom of the hole, his limbs twisted, and his jaw broken wide. I knew the man. I knew what he did to my mother when she’d put away her sewing.

  Goblin and I moved the planks one night when we heard him staggering up the stairs, so that he was forced to cross the rotten floorboards in the darkness. His corpse lay there all night, and for most of the next day. Then it was gone. Goblin said it had been sold for cat’s meat. Neither of us was sorry.

  Goblin was my friend. We were almost the same age, he and I, and born on the same day, a Monday – ‘execution day’ Goblin called it, because that’s the day when there are hangings at Newgate. He said he would look after me, always.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ I told him. ‘No one else will.’

  When I was older, I liked to spend the mornings in town, watching the fine ladies and gentlemen walking up and down. I liked to listen to theirfancy talk and I’d try it out on Goblin when I got home. Goblin always laughed when I spoke like the ladies, making my voice all high-pitched and bird-like. ‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘My dear child! Have you no shoes? There are Levant slippers for sale at Checkall’s. Very reasonably priced. Can you not buy a pair to keep your toes warm?’

  ‘Slippahs?’ said Goblin. ‘Wot’s slippahs?’

  I remember both of us laughing at that, at Goblin trying to talk fancy. ‘Slippers are something you’ll never have,’ I told him. ‘But I will.’