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The Hooded Hood reposts the story so far to get people in the right mood for Hallowe'en.

Subj: Herringcarp Gothic: Secrets from the Asylum
Posted: Sat Oct 23, 2010 at 08:08:34 am EDT (Viewed 4 times)




This horror story contains adult content and is not recommended for minors or those of a sensitive disposition.

Chapter One: Amnesia
Chapter Two: Monsters on the Loose
Chapter Three: The Black Chapel
Chapter Four: The Cabinet of Dr Morningstar
Chapter Five: Flesh and Blood
Chapter Six: I Am John’s Psychosis
Chapter Seven: The Romance of Heresy
Chapter Eight: Whispers and Screams


Chapter One: Amnesia in the Dark

    The burly warders wrestled Amnesia down the stairs and tossed her onto the flagstones. They seemed to enjoy pulling off her clothes and her shrieks as they hosed her down from the well pump. At last Rufus tossed her a cheap cotton tabard to put over her wet shivering body, little more than a sheet with tie-strings at the sides. She wasn’t allowed a proper belt, of course.

    Brain-fever, the piece of paper that had put her here proclaimed. A madwoman had to be confined. Somebody who didn’t even remember who she was, where she came from, whether she had anybody to care about her, had to be insane.

    Somebody who was being hunted by monsters deserved to be locked away.

    Amnesia still felt dizzy from the guards’ beating earlier when she’d tried to slip free as they led her through the iron doorway into the holding cellar. It had been an instinctive reaction to the smells and sounds in the dark barrel-roofed dungeons. Rufus and the others had expected it and had been ready with their truncheons and lashes.

    They dragged Amnesia away from the washpump, through the communal cells where the lunatics were displayed to the paying public for a penny a time. Men and women were crowded together behind the iron bars. For an extra penny the crowds could borrow a stick to poke them. Amnesia saw a pair of men fighting like dogs in their own filth, a naked couple rutting in the corner, an old woman sobbing as she stared at her own left hand, a blank-faced girl holding a bundle of rags to her breast to suckle. The lunatics whooped and gibbered and cowered and screamed. A few just huddled miserably.

    Amnesia wondered how long before she was like them. Not long, in this place, she feared.

    Past the public areas there were rows of tiny cells, each with a pallet of rotting straw. Some had a slops bucket as a toilet. Others had a channel down to a fist-sized hole in the floor. Some had doors, others grille gates. The most violent of the inmates were still in their own prisons, chained to the back wall by heavy iron collars.

    Rufus pointed out the punishment cells too, metal cages no more than four foot cubes that dangled in the guards room. One was occupied by a hairy naked man, his back still slick with blood from his flogging. Another contained a dirty woman with filth-crusted hair. She wore a scold’s cap, a heavy iron face-mask that restrained her tongue and forced her jaws wide open, the punishment for a female who spoke out of turn.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Be a good girl and you’ll never end up there,” Rufus assured Amnesia, stroking his hand across her buttock.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What did she do?” Amnesia ventured, shuddering. “Why is she mad?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“She became pregnant,” Rufus shrugged. “She was unmarried, morally deficient.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“She has a baby?” the new inmate asked, appalled. “In here?”

    Rufus shook his head. “We cured her of that,” he answered. “Now shut up.”

    The guards bundled Amnesia into the clerk’s office. This was the only room furnished with anything better than crates and rough stools. There was a proper desk here, and a filing bureau, and a fussy little man with ink-stained fingers and a goose-quill pen.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Name?” he asked her, checking the paper signed by Dr Standish and Dr Blessing that proclaimed the girl non compos mentis and ordered her incarceration.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I… I don’t remember,” Amnesia admitted. “But that’s all that’s wrong with me. I don’t know who I am, how I got here. The rest of me is fine. I can think, I can feel…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Amnesia,” said the clerk as he wrote the word in the ledger. “Confined at the expense of the public purse.” That meant no special considerations for the inmate. No food except the basic common slops, no protection from the warders, no luxuries like blankets or soap, no privileges like an hour a week in sunlight.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I have to talk to somebody,” Amnesia pleaded. “Someone in charge!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dr Morningstar is far too busy to spend time on every lunatic incarcerated in his asylum,” the clerk replied curtly. “The Matron will inspect you tomorrow to check you have no diseases. Restrain your madness and you will not be unduly punished.”

    Amnesia would have pleaded further but the clerk signed the last column of the register and gestured for her to be taken away.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Wait!” the girl called. “I need help! I need someone to listen to me!”

    Rufus grabbed her by the hair and pushed her out.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“There’s a monster following me!” she screamed, knowing even as she said it how absurd that must sound. Maybe she was insane?

    The wardens dragged her back past the cells and down a short flight of stairs to the cellar at the end. She was tossed into the unlit space and the door closed before she could scramble from the filth.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Wait!” she called, rushing to the tiny rectangle of light that was the shuttered viewing hole. “Don’t leave me here!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’ll be back for you tonight,” Rufus promised her with a chuckle. “When it’s quiet. You might want to think about being a good girl when we come for you.” Then he closed the hatch, plunging Amnesia into absolute darkness.

    The panic almost overwhelmed her. It was difficult to even rank the fears that crushed her in the stygian blackness. The beating and the harsh scrubbing were starting to seem trivial compared to what the future threatened. Amnesia wanted to scream, wanted to sob. She forced herself not to.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well done.”

    The dry voice in the darkness made the new inmate jump. She whirled round but it was impossible to see in the pitch blackness. “Who’s there?” she demanded, trying not to shriek. “Who are you?”

    There was a clinking of metal. “A lunatic, of course,” came the reply. “A dangerous lunatic.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Keep away from me!”

    Again the scraping of chain. “You needn’t fear. I’m shackled to the wall.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well… good.” Amnesia had no idea what else to say. There were only so many terrors she could cope with at once.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re quite safe in here with me, unless you get too close.”

    Amnesia’s outstretched hands touched a wet stone wall. She needed to touch something solid in her blind nightmare. “Why did they put me in here with you?” she asked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“To frighten you,” her cellmate replied. “A frightened inmate is an obedient inmate. They’ll beat you and humiliate you and degrade you, in part because they enjoy it as a perk of their positions, but mostly because when you’re broken you won’t cause any trouble.”

    Amnesia swallowed hard. “I’m not mad,” she protested.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m the wrong person to convince. I am mad.”

    Loneliness and fear were enough to prompt the new inmate to continue this bizarre, chilling conversation. “What did you do?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Terrible things.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Murder?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes. And worse. And here I am, locked away with you.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I didn’t… I don’t think I did anything,” Amnesia confessed. “I just… can’t remember anything.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You clearly remember language skills,” the madman pointed out. “You have enough context to be able to formulate arguments, to hold expectations of justice and proper treatment, however inaccurate and vain your hopes might be.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You… don’t sound mad.”

    A hollow chuckle: “Not all madmen whoop and gibber. Some of us hold our madness deep inside. Where it really counts.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you trying to scare me?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you scared?”

    Amnesia searched her feelings. “Yes. But not of you. I’m more scared of what’s outside that door than what’s in here with me. I’m terrified of what will happen, but what’s happening now… it feels safe by comparison.”

    There was a long pause. “If you really don’t fear me, come here,” challenged the unseen lunatic. “Come where I can reach you.”

    Amnesia’s heart flipped again. “Why?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Because I dare you.”

    Amnesia shook her head, then realised how ridiculous that was in the dark. “I’m not insane and I’m not stupid.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I believe you. Memory loss is not madness. Come to me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You are mad. You said so.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes. Come here.”

    Amnesia backed away, her hands skirting the clammy wall. “There’s something else,” she confessed. “Something I saw. A monster.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is a place of monsters,” the lunatic agreed. “Some of them are inmates.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Before that. The first thing I remember. I was in an old house, or maybe a castle. I was running. That’s my first memory. Running. And there was something chasing me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Indeed?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes. Something big and… and dark. Right behind me. Loping. And… I can’t remember the rest. Next I remember being in the doctors office, with them all asking me questions. And I couldn’t tell them anything.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That sounds like an interesting case,” agreed the lunatic. “Have you seen the monster since?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t know. I thought maybe I glimpsed it when they put me into the asylum wagon. And again when they dragged me through the gates of this place. But I might have imagined it. I might have imagined all of it.” Amnesia slumped to the dirty floor. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? I’m here, forever. This is the rest of my life, to be abused and enslaved with no rights and no hope. This is all there is.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Perhaps,” agreed the madman. “Or you could come to me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And what? What will you do to me?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’d have to trust me to find out.”

    Amnesia was cold and lonely and holding on by the very barest of threads. “Will you kill me?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Perhaps. There’s only one way to know.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Killing me would be a mercy, I think,” she whispered, horrified at the admission.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes,” agreed the madman. His chains scraped on the floor. “Come here.”

    Amnesia’s cheeks were wet with tears as she crawled across the filthy straw towards the unseen voice. She flinched as she felt fingertips reach out for her face and pull her closer.

    The madman drew her to him in the darkness and held her close in a tender embrace.

    After a moment Amnesia returned the hug and began to sob. He held her while she racked out her fear and confusion.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You haven’t killed me yet,” she said at last.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“No,” agreed the lunatic. “Not yet. There’s something interesting about you. And about your monster. Something that will intrigue Dr Morningstar if ever he bothers to review your case, too. Pray that doesn’t happen.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dr Morningstar runs this asylum.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes. You don’t want to become one of his special projects.”

    Amnesia’s fingers traced thin scars across the madman’s naked back. “Are you a special project?” she ventured.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh yes,” the lunatic confessed. He guided her fingers to the electricity burns on his temples and the suture sores on his arms and chest. “You don’t want to be noticed by the good doctor.”

    Amnesia bit her lip. “Will you kill me?” she asked. “Please? I don’t think I can stand…”

    The madman pressed a finger to her lips. “Death ends possibilities,” he interrupted. “If you live, if you endure, you might one day do more than live and endure. One day you might be free. One day you might see your enemies ground into bloody mincemeat at your feet. Pain today, torture tomorrow, slavery the day after, they don’t mean pain and torture and slavery forever. Not if you can be strong.”

    Amnesia held onto the madman as if he was a lifeline. It was strangely intimate there in the darkness, clinging to the stranger. “I don’t know if I can be strong.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I believe you can,” he told her. “I dare you.”

    Amnesia took a breath. “You think I could escape? Learn who I really am? Be free of my monster? Be happy and safe?”

    The madman was silent for a long time. “Anything is possible,” he answered at last. “I have dreams too.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What dreams?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, sometimes I’m other people. Sometimes I change worlds. Sometimes I destroy them.”

    Amnesia didn’t know what to say to that.

    They held each other until all sense of time had passed, alone yet together. “What’s your name?” Amnesia asked at last.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sometimes I don’t remember either,” the lunatic confessed. “I’ve had so many.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Tell me your name,” Amnesia insisted. “I dare you.”

    She felt the man stiffen, and for a moment she wondered if this was when he snapped her neck. “I am Ioldabaoth,” the lunatic told her.

    The name sounded familiar. “Ioldabaoth.” Amnesia tested it on her tongue.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes.” The madman rattled his chains. “I rule here at Herringcarp Asylum. I will save you from harm.”

    It was an absurd statement from a naked scarred scarecrow chained in the dark, victim of the unseen Dr Morningstar. It was an impossible promise to offer a pretty, helpless new inmate in the cruellest madhouse in an age of cruel madhouses. Yet somehow Amnesia was comforted; the comfort of the mad.

***


    In the darkness outside the ancient sanatorium the monster prowled at the treeline and waited for his chance to find what had happened to Laurie Leyton.

***


Chapter Two: Monsters On the Loose

    150 volts of direct current applied through wires gelled to the temples and earlobes is sufficient to cause a temporary seizure, to disrupt brain functions, to cause short term memory loss, to provoke loss of bodily functions. Dr Morningstar watched dispassionately as the subject strapped from the ceiling in his psychiatry lab convulsed.

    The naked man was hanging face downwards by straps around his arms, legs, chest, and forehead so that his vomit wouldn’t choke him. He continued to shudder for a few moments after Morningstar gestured for Bradley to detach the acid jars from the circuit.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I hope you appreciate this,” the doctor told his patient. “This treatment is very much ahead of its time. Far more advanced than the trepanation we used on you before.”

    The subject blinked as consciousness began to return. He gasped and spat blood from his mouth where the gag strap hadn’t stopped him biting his own tongue.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’ll be going back to our usual questions in a short time, Ioldabaoth,” Morningstar promised, “I’m still very interested how a subject can recover from a pre-frontal lobotomy, not just one but on nine occasions. How you can restore yourself as if you’d never been operated on. But for now we have other matters to discuss.”

    At a gesture from the doctor, Bradley came forward and removed the gag. A swing of the wheel moved chains that lowered the operating table so the patient hung almost upright.

    Dr Morningstar leaned close. “The question I want to ask of you right now, Ioldabaoth, now that your demons and voices have been chased away by the bright crackle of science, is what you did to that young woman.”

***


    Had that happened? The madman couldn’t remember. He shivered in the darkness, trying not to move his arms because the heavy chains that held him to the wall had rubbed his wrists raw. Everything was fragmented to pieces. Time wasn’t working as it should. Nothing was as it should be.

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“She’s pretty,” the voice in the darkness observed. “And brave.”

    Ioldabaoth didn’t look up. It was pointless trying to see in the pitch blackness of his lunatic’s cell and the words came from his own head anyway. Besides, the girl had finally sobbed herself to sleep across his lap and it was the only release from nightmare he could offer her.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Of course,” the voice continued, Ioldabaoth’s voice but with some unfamiliar tang to it, “pretty and brave is a bad combination in this place.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It is,” the madman admitted.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“They’ll break her,” the voice persisted. “The wardens. You know what they’ll do.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And there are the others. The men who’ll pay to borrow her for their ‘medical examinations’.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know that too. I’ve heard the screams.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And then there are the inmates. The sadists who’ve been locked away for public good. The wolves amongst the sheep.”

    Ioldabaoth dared move one heavily-fettered wrist and stroke the girl’s hair. Amnesia, they called her, for she had no past, no memory of the day before. She’s woken fresh and new into this nightmare asylum. This was all the world she remembered.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You promised to keep her safe,” the voice accused. “But soon the warders will come back for her. And what can you do then?”

    The madman’s hand moved to Amnesia’s neck. “I can kill her quickly. Save her.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You might. It would be a kindness. Or…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Or what?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Or you could let me loose.”

    Ioldabaoth shuddered from more than the cold. “I can’t let you loose. You’re a monster.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The girl had a monster outside. You have one inside. One wants to get in to her. One wants to get out to the world. But you know that I can do what you cannot. What you will not. And you know that it could save her life.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ve dreamed your dreams,” the madman cried out loud in the dark. “They are terrible things! I can’t let you do that!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And yet you will murder this girl to save your conscience? What kind of man does that?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A madman,” Ioldabaoth admitted.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A madman who must choose his madness,” said the voice. The accent was Latverian.

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What I want to know,” said Dr Morningstar, examining his subject as he spoke, “is what happened to the warders. And where has Amnesia gone now? She’s not left the asylum. All the doors are sealed, the windows barred. She’s hiding somewhere. But where? What did you see, Ioldabaoth? What did you do?”

    The madman strained in his straps. He winced as the doctor probed the poker burns from their session yesterday. “There was a monster,” he answered at last.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A monster. It certainly seemed that way, from the amount of blood on the walls outside your cell. From the four dead men with looks of horror on their faces and their innards ripped out. Or was that you, Ioldabaoth? You were loose from your chains. You were covered in blood.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A monster,” the subject repeated.

***


    The cry had woken Amnesia. “What is it?” she asked. The panic was back in her throat. “I thought I heard voices!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Only mine,” replied Ioldabaoth. “I am sorry to wake you.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I dreamed again,” the girl confessed. She pulled herself up but kept her body in contact with the lunatic. Her warmth through the soft ragged fabric of her dirty tabard almost burned him. “I saw… a woman in a mask. I heard my monster whispering to me. I saw myself in a mirror. Just fragments.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Fragments are all we have here,” mourned the madman.

    Amnesia composed herself. “What will happen to me?” she asked at last. “I know what the guards want. After that, I mean. What happens tomorrow? And the day after that? And a year from now?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Anything could happen.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The truth, Ioldabaoth. What is likely to happen?”

    The madman swallowed. “It depends,” he said. “It depends if you are selected by Doctor Morningstar for his experiments.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Experiments?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Some madness is caused by disease. Syphilis, for example, rots the brain. Morningstar has experimented with infecting patients with malaria. The fever kills off the syphilis and is thought to retard the mind’s decay. Others – sexual inverts and the like - are conditioned by pain and beatings to conform. Or by purging and enema. Or by surgery. Castration calms aggression. Cauterising the clitoris dampens lust.” He shifted uncomfortably in his shackles. “Relief of pressure in the cerebral tissue by drilling holes in the skull is a common technique for controlling madness.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s barbaric,” gasped Amensia. “It’s… insane!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“In mediaeval times they believed it let the demons out,” Ioldabaoth told her. “And before that. The earliest trepanations have been found on skulls dated to 11,000BC. The holes had partially closed, suggesting that the subjects continued to live.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I have to get out of here!” Amnesia panicked. “We have to get out of here.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not me,” said Ioldabaoth, fiercely. “Not all monsters lurk outside walls of stone. Not all demons escape through holes poked in the head.”

    The girl picked up a chain and tugged to test its strength. “If we both pull together we might wrench it out of the wall,” she offered. “Then you can help me overpower the wardens, get their keys. We could make a run for it.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I can’t!”

    She caught his face in her palms. “Ioldabaoth. You promised to save me. Were you lying?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“No. No, but I… You don’t know, Amnesia. You don’t understand what…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Help me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You don’t know about the Black Chapel!”

    Amnesia pressed into him. Her lips touched his. A kiss.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Help me,” she said.

    Then the cell door was thrown open, blinding them with the glare of torchlight. The warders came in and grabbed Amnesia, pulled her away. The nightmare proper began.

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ioldabaoth,” considered Morningstar as he applied the leeches to his subject’s limbs. “The Gnostics believed that the God of This World had that name. The demi-urge. He was created by and for Sophia, wisdom, but he abandoned her in the darkness.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m familiar with the theology,” said the madman.

    Morningstar went on with his erudition anyway. He quoted from a Coptic gospel manuscript that wouldn’t be discovered for many years yet “‘I am,’ it said. And in the darkness about it the being's knowledge was flawed, and it saw only the darkness and felt only its own power therein. And he had no knowledge of his origin and conceived that he must always have been, for there seemed to be none other in the eternal darkness where he found himself. ‘I am the All,’ he said. And he is Ioldabaoth.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“He is evil,” said the madman. “Brilliant, incomplete, creator and destroyer. Adversary. The enemy of God.”

    Morningstar selected a scalpel from his tray. “Depicted in ancient times with time and space wound around his hands. And hooded.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Morningstar has a mythological significance too,” the madman replied. “But the light-bringer fell.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Where did the girl go?” the doctor demanded, slicing his subject’s chest with his blade. “Where is she hiding?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” quoted Ioldabaoth. “John Milton knew the Morningstar.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Where is she?” The doctor let his patient’s blood drip down across his fingers. “Is she at the Black Chapel? Did you show her the way? Is she?”

    Ioldobaoth stifled a scream and took solace in Paradise Lost. “For who would lose, though full of pain, this intellectual being? Those thoughts that wander through eternity to perish rather, swallowed up and lost, in the wide womb of uncreated night…”


***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You can not save her. She is going to hell.”

    Ioldabaoth dragged at his chains, tearing open the livid scabs at his wrists. Amnesia was screaming.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You gave your word. You promised to save her. There was no reservation about the cost.”

    Ioldabaoth thought he’d dredged the depths of horror. Now he found he’s only touched the surface.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You are master of this place, if only you will claim it,” said the dry voice in his head. “Let me out. Let me be you.”

    He heard the smack of fist on flesh, a squeal of pain, the tearing of cloth.

    Ioldabaoth paid the price he had to give to save her.

    He opened his eyes and they glowed green in the gloom.

***


    The monster found its way in. It hadn’t been there before, but it was now. There was a chink in the defences around the ancient asylum, one crack that could be picked at and enlarged. It took a long time, left his claws raw and bloody, but he kept working.

    Tracking the girl was the easy part. He could hear the screaming. His vision washed red.

    Then the screaming wasn’t hers, and the blood wasn’t his.

    Afterwards he swept her battered unconscious body over his shoulder and loped off looking for escape. Or a hiding place.

    And there was the Black Chapel.

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Monsters,” said Ioldabaoth, trembling in the darkness, alone except for the pain. “Monsters on the loose.”

    The asylum was filled with them, and he ruled the asylum. That made him the king of the monsters.

    And now it was time to rule.

***


Chapter Three: The Black Chapel    


    The Black Chapel was old, a stone rectangle with a beehive-vaulted roof. The walls were unpainted. Three high window-slits allowed thin shafts of light down onto the flagstoned floor. The sound and smell of a low tide permeated the damp chamber.

    There were nine monks there, including Father Abbot. They were standing in an uncertain circle around a tenth figure, a man wrapped in heavy chains to prevent his thrashing, gagged with hessian to stifle his screams.

    Some of the brothers looked uncertain. One had vomited on the floor. The exorcism had not gone well.

    The monster loomed out of the shadows by the altar. The monks saw him, that vast shaggy beast carrying a ragged body in his huge claws. They panicked and ran.

    Except for Father Abbot. He simply watched the beast with cold blue eyes. Then Father Abbot faded away. The chained man vanished with him.

    Ghosts, thought the monster. Nothing but echoes. This place is full of them.

    The creature paused, startled at the coherent thought. A reasoned statement, language, continuity of intellect seemed strange to him after so long. He struggled with the why of it. He noticed the limp girl in her arms.

    He didn’t know her. He didn’t know himself. He had no idea what had been done to him. He vaguely remembered what had been going to happen to her, and his rage at it.

    The monster probed his memories, sad ragged tattered things that they were, for his name. It lay there just out of reach.

    The girl shifted in his arms. She was alive then, despite the blood on her face where she’d been struck, the grazes on her arms and legs where she’d struggled against the brutal men in that prison beyond. The monster flinched as she opened her eyes and looked at him.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh,” she said. Not a scream. Not a sob. Merely acceptance.

    The great beast sat her gently on the alter like a holy offering and slowly backed away.

    She looked at him, her head tilted a little to one side. “So you’re my monster,” she said simply.

    The beast lowered he head in acknowledgement. It was somehow true. He was her monster.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you real?”

    The creature didn’t know. He looked uncertainly round the chapel. There were two other doors beyond the one he’d come through, but neither of them was large enough for him to pass.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Can you speak?”

    That was an interesting question. The creature felt an answer well up in his throat, but for some reason he suppressed it. He compromised with a half-shrug.

    The girl slid off the alter, found her feet, and took a step towards him. “Can you understand me, at least? Do you have intellect?”

    Again an uncertain shrug. It was hard to mime sometimes. But the more he spoke with the girl, the more the thoughts seethed inside the monster. It felt right to be near her.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you hurt?” The human was looking at his matted fur now, the clotted tufts about his right forearm where the pistol ball had gone when the monster had broken into the asylum. It pained him because the ball was still in there, grating as he moved.

    The huge beast backed away as the girl approached him. “Don’t be afraid,” she told him, absurdly. The monster could tear her head off in one motion. “I’m going to help you.”

    She tore a dangling strip off the stained tabard she wore and dabbed at the blood on the monster’s arm. “I think the bullet’s still in there. I’m going to have to get it out with my nails. It’s going to hurt.” She swallowed and looked up into the beast’s watery yellow eyes. “Please don’t kill me.”

    The creature gritted its considerable teeth and submitted to having his wound searched. A gory lead ball clattered to the floor.

    And vanished. The Black Chapel liked blood.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“All done,” the girl assured him, dabbing the fresh-flowing wound with more of her diminishing dress. “Let it heal now.”

    It was healing. The creature could feel it closing, where it hadn’t before. The girl’s presence made the difference.

    Except the girl was now looking at the door. “We need to go now,” she told the beast. “They’ll be looking for us. If they find us they’ll kill you and take me back. And there’s a man… another prisoner. They were torturing him, I think. We have to help him too.”

    The creature felt a surge of jealously. He’d seen the man - pale, spindly, laced with old scars - and disliked him at once. There was something about the inmate; something that scared the monster.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Come on,” the girl said. She never seemed to question whether the monster would follow her. She heaved open the big chapel door and peered outside.

    She’d been half-unconscious when she’d been carried to the Black Chapel. She didn’t notice that the corridor had changed. The stones of these walls were rougher, less regular. The eye-watering gas mantles had been replaced by burning torches in iron sconces. There was a faint smell of stale incense.

    Somewhere a bell was tolling.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I feel I should introduce myself,” the girl whispered as she led the way down the passage. Her bare feet padded on rough cobbles and straw. “The problem is I don’t actually know who I am either, or how I got here. Amnesia is the only name I’ve got for now.”

    She peered down into a larger room. Rough wooden trestles and benches filled the centre of a crude hall. A long fireplace lined one wall.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Amnesia. That’s why the locked me in this asylum,” the girl continued. She was holding the monster’s hand like a child and her teddy bear. It was absurd. “Well, also because I kept seeing a monster,” she confessed. “You.”

    They moved cautiously across the hall. The monster could smell rotting flesh and congealed blood. There had been slaughter here. Humans had died.

    Amnesia shrieked when she almost tripped over the first corpse. She quickly muffled her outcry as she backed off, bumping into her monster.

    The monks were here. Eight of them, all dead. They hadn’t died peacefully.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Did you do this?” Amnesia asked the monster in a trembling voice.

    He shook his head, hoping he wasn’t lying. He didn’t remember attacking the holy men. The wounds were savage but more likely to have been inflicted by a human.

    But the bodies were partially stripped of their flesh…

    I would have torn off larger strips than that, the monster assured himself. The thing that ate these was smaller than me. Smaller jaws. About the size of a mortal. He found that it was a relief to reason that out.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What happened to them?” Amnesia wondered. Another thought occurred. “We have to get out of there. They’ll think it was us!”

    Whatever did this might still be around, the beast thought.

    The great door at the hall’s end was only barred and bolted, but neither Amnesia not the beast were able to drag the beam or bolts loose. They needed another escape.

    One low archway led to a scullery and pantries. A rough spiral stair that the creature couldn’t negotiate led to a dortoir. Amnesia was just peering through another door into a scriptorium when a sound echoed from the other uninvestigated arch beyond the fireplace.

    A whiplash. A scream.

    Amnesia paled. Her face turned to the monster.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“We have to look,” she whispered.

    Beast and beauty crept to the stairs. An iron gate was not quite closed. It creaked a little as they pushed it aside. Amnesia winced.

    More sounds came from below. More than one voice, chanting a Latin liturgy. The hiss of hot metal on human flesh. Another scream.

    In the dim light of tallow candles the brothers were clustered around the man on the punishment frame. Father Abbot was applying holy fire and the lash. The other monks prayed for the possessed man’s soul. The subject of their ministrations writhed as they tortured the demons within.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know him!” Amnesia gasped as she saw the thin naked figure stretched on the rack. “That’s the one I was with. The one who took care of me! The one I kissed!”

    The beast felt another surge of jealously spike through him. He wondered why, even as he realised that he was not prepared to share the girl with anybody. She was his, his alone. His place. His home.

    His home ran from the cover of the water-butts and rushed to stop the victim’s torments. “No! Leave off! Let him alone!”

    Abruptly the tableau vanished. The images shimmered to nothing, leaving the cellar dark and deserted; except that Father Abbot turned to look at her before he was gone.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Where are they?” Amnesia shrieked. “Oh, I think I really am going mad! Where did they go?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ghosts,” whispered the monster, and was surprised when the word came from his lips.

    Amnesia turned in wonder. “You spoke? You can talk, after all?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes.” A low growl of a whisper, at least. More would be… bad, the monster sensed. More would kill.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then who are you? What are you?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t remember,” confessed the beast. “Like you.”

    Amnesia pursed her lips. “This is too perverse,” she scowled. “Somebody is having a joke on us. A black, cruel joke.” She looked back at the darkened punishment pit. “Ghosts, really?”

    The creature nodded. Amnesia took a torch and they explored the rest of that cellar.

    There were thirty cells with metal gates, no alcove higher nor deeper than four feet. Every one had a gibbering madman or woman inside them. Filthy, naked, shrieking, frothing, they reached blackened talons through the bars in supplication. Every one of them faded away when the light came too near.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What is this place?” Amnesia asked in despair. “Why torture these poor devils so?” There were tears in her eyes at their sufferings.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The scriptorium?” suggested the monster. “There is wisdom in books.”

    They beat a welcome retreat from the oppressive echo-filled ghost-haunted darkness of the lunatic vaults and found their way back to the hall and the library beyond. The scriptorium was the first light room they’d found, a long thin chamber with south-facing windows. The shutters were back and the unglazed arches revealed a bleak grass-duned wilderness beyond. No more than sixty yards away the churning sea broke upon a jagged rocky shore.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“This asylum is on an island,” Amnesia remembered. She’d smelled the ocean and heard the gulls from inside the closed carriage that had brought her to her torments. But there hadn’t been a ferry. So perhaps this was a peninsula and escape was still possible?

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Listen,” urged the beast, laying a cautious paw on her arm. She tried not to wince.

    There were other whispers, older echoes not in the monster’s gruff gutturals, snatches of voices and plainsong from long ago.

    Amnesia strained to catch them. They were so faint that even the sound of the wind could drown them out.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“This cannot be the will of the Lord!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“This place has echoes that never stop. Never.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You will yield your secrets to me, captive. Your power will be mine.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It is my will, and that is enough.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“There has always been a mystery here. Ask no more.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Three hundred years confined in these cells, yet still he lives and breathes.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Your role is not to question, brother, only to obey!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The stones are old. They were old when they were first rebuilt into this house.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Demons of the mind must be caged and tamed, like any other.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“He’s loose! Flee for your lives! The madman has escaped!”

    There was a crash from the cellars that startled Amnesia and her beast alike. They turned in response and the voices stopped.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What was that?” Amnesia asked in a frightened voice. She was starting to appreciate the different textures of horror. The dread that overwhelmed her now was different from the anticipation of being hurt by sadistic jailers, from the loneliness of the dark, from being chased by a monster, from witnessing ghosts. Something else was happening. Something worse.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That is your death,” Father Abbot told her. He was standing right behind her, over her left shoulder. He seemed pleased.

    Amnesia span around, pressing away. Her monster was nowhere to be seen. The scriptorium was bare now, empty of tables and easels and scrolls and ink. A grey mat of rotting leaves clogged the floors. Only the Abbot filled the room.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“W-who are you?” Amnesia demanded of the cleric. “What’s going on? Where’s my monster?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Which one?” Father Abbot asked her.

    Amnesia turned to flee but he caught her wrist in a cold tight grip. “You’re going to die here,” he promised her. “You’re going to join the ghosts.”

    Amnesia shifted her weight, dragged his arm forward, and planted an elbow in the monk’s stomach then a palm under his chin. He released her as he toppled back in an undignified sprawl.

    She stamped down between his legs but her foot passed through nothing. Father Abbot was gone.

    Except his voice. “The madman has escaped,” he said. “He has slaughtered the holy men who tended him for so long. Slaughtered them and eaten them. But he is still hungry.”

    Then silence. Amnesia realised it had grown dark outside, suddenly dark. Beyond the windows a huge full moon shone over the turbulent icy sea. It was bitter cold. Amnesia’s breath fogged around her.

    She heard a scraping sound from the hall outside. Bodies were being shifted. She heard a sloppy ripping noise. Something wet tore apart.

    She heard soft padding footsteps and a jangle of broken chain coming towards the scriptorium door.

    Amnesia wanted to scream. She wanted to call for her monster, her terrible comforting beast, but she was afraid that would only seal her doom. She looked for cover, but only the rotting piles of leaves filled the desolate chamber.

    The decaying door fell from its hinges and shattered to splinters on the floor. The madman entered to room, a great bloody knife in his hand, his jaws red with human pulp.

    Amnesia had kissed those bloody lips.

    The madman saw her, laughed, and tested the edge of his knife. It was supper time.

***


Chapter Four: The Cabinet of Doctor Morningstar


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The human brain weighs three pounds,” lectured Doctor Morningstar. “Perhaps a fiftieth of a man’s body weight. Yet it takes a fifth of the body’s oxygen to sustain it. It is rich in protein and minerals. A man could live on a diet of nothing but human brains.”

    Herringcarp Asylum’s lecture hall was packed with students of the mind. The darkened room was lit only by the flickering light of the magic lantern that played slide after slide across the screen at the front, showing engravings and drawings of dissections of the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the pons varolii, the medulla oblongata.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Christian theologians tell us that man is made in the image of God. That our reason reflects his. The ancients however held that seeing the nature of God led to madness. Does this then mean that the more we understand our nature the closer we come to insanity?” Dr Morningstar turned to his audience to pose his question.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What is sanity? What is madness? Those who hear voices in their head, those who cannot control their animal behaviours, those who see what is not there, in latter generations may have been revered as shamans or saints. Yet now these moon-led degenerates are known for what they are, pinioned by science and cabineted for study.”

    The lantern began to show daguerreotypes of inmates; filthy, slavering, diseased, howling. “The Greeks believed that a man has vital humours in his body, physical fluxes of sanguine, choler, melancholer, and phlegm, produced from physical organs to affect his amorousness and courage, his happiness, his temper, and his rationale. A dyscracic man whose humours were unbalanced was ill. One whose fluxes were severely disturbed was insane. Madness as a physical thing.”

    The slides stopped. Morningstar left his podium and approached the audience, pointing stick in hand. “What if it is?” he asked. “What if insanity could be pinpointed within the body, within the brain? What if it could be purged by surgery or medicine, expunged like a tumour or amputated like a gangrened limb? What if it could be transferred from one brain to another, from the fit to the unfit, the worthy to the worthless? What if it could be bottled up, concentrated, distilled like a liqueur to its purest form?”

    A few of the listeners begin to look uncomfortable. Morningstar was going off the map. It was terra incognito, where monsters dwelled.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The mediaeval mind conceived of madness as possession. Evil spirits dwelled in the human brain and rode the soul like a dumb beast.” The doctor smiled thinly. “In this very house, long ago, pious monks collected the insane in penitent cells beneath our feet and tried to flog the demons from them. They believed it a holy cause, to save these tormented innocents from the Devil which had nested inside them. They tried to beat the madness out, to bleed it away, to lash it free, to drown it. They even prepared vessels of clay to catch the demons and stopper them up like evil djinns of Persian fable.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Today we know better. We know more. We scorn the Devil and look to science for our salvation.” Morningstar turned back to the platform, where his assistant Bradley was wheeling in an upright coffin-shaped casket bound with silver. A dozen lead-acid batteries sloshed in bell jars around its base. “Here is the future,” the doctor announced.

    He stroked the smooth black surface of his box. “This device is only a prototype, of course. It is crude yet, unfinished. But this is the first modern machine designed to excise madness – physical madness – from the human mind. Trepanation, the filtering of bodily fluids, the addition of chemicals to calm the blood, the titration of mental energies through electricity, these are the means through which insanity can be captured and controlled; perhaps even harnessed.” He turned proudly to his audience. “Gentlemen, I give you… the cabinet of Doctor Morningstar!”

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Doctor Morningstar?”

    The handsome director of Herringcarp Lunatic Asylum turned and focussed his piercing blue eyes on the nervous scholar beneath his podium. “Ah, yes. How did you enjoy the lecture, young man?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It was most interesting, sir. Doctor. Sir.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Doctor will do,” Morningstar assured him. “We are to be colleagues, after all. I trust you have been able to move your things to your room with no delay?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes sir. Doctor. They’ve put me in the north tower. There’s a fine sea view when the mist clears.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Good. Good. I noticed you taking copious notes as I spoke.”

    The young scholar nodded. He’d assiduously recorded everything the great man had said. “You covered a good deal of ground, sir. Doctor. Things that I’ve never heard spoken of in all my training.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“There’s more to medicine than can be learned in Doctor Bell’s Edinburgh classroom young man. I can teach you things you could never imagine.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know doctor. That’s why I’m so grateful. For the internship. For the chance.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“We stand at the borders of human knowledge here,” Morningstar noted. “The opportunities are infinite.”

    The newcomer agreed. “We could really help people.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That too,” the doctor endorsed hastily. “Naturally, our care for the inmates here comes first and foremost.”

    The youngster hesitated, clutching his notebook. “I… do have a few questions. If you have time. Doctor.”

    Morningstar smiled. “Of course. Without questions there are no answers. I like questions. I encourage them.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well then,” the scholar breathed, “your cabinet. For excising madness. For transferring it into a different medium. What reasoning lies behind…?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The primitive believes that the consumption of flesh can transfer characteristics from the eaten to the eater,” the doctor interrupted. “Bull’s blood brings power. A tiger’s penis promotes fertility. Mummy’s dust in tea prevents diseases. Some cannibal tribes eat their enemies’ corpses to command their strength. Other savages eat the brains of their own dead relatives to retain their wisdom amongst the living.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“But those are all superstitious nonsense,” objected the young man.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Undoubtedly,” Morningstar asserted. “But there is in the human unconscious an instinctive understanding that psychological and physical traits are linked in the flesh, and that under certain circumstances those traits can transfer from one being to another through physical media.”

    Seeing his new student was about to object, Morningstar drew his student’s attention to the dark building around them. “You heard me say that in pre-Reformation times this building was an abbey, where zealous monks fought Satan by confining the mad? They believed they could force the lunacy from their subjects and confine it in bottles. They continued their mission for over three hundred years, beating the madness from their victims. And if a man or woman died at the ducking stool or under the brand, then would not God save their soul and make it whole in heaven? The demon was captured and bound all the same.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“But, forgive me sir,” the scholar protested, “but in what way is your cabinet different from their delusions? How can madness be quantified, weighed, measured, then syphoned like pus from a wound? And how can it be moved like a dish of poison?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Good questions, all,” Morningstar assured him. “I can see we will have some stimulating conversations later on. But for now I must simply ask for your faith. Take some time to familiarise yourself with Herringcarp. Discover your duties from Matron. Look to the wellbeing of the inmates. We shall talk again.”

    The young man hoped he’d not offended the great doctor. He could not afford to lose this internship. He was not a rich man. He’d spent his last savings on the journey to Herringcarp and everything he owned was in the valise in his north tower garret. “I hope…” he blurted, trying to make amends.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“We shall talk again,” Dr Morningstar repeated. “I promise that I will make you understand. For now, begin your duties. And welcome to Herringcarp, Dr Winkelweald.”

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“These people are not in good condition.” The young scholar was shocked after his first tour of the asylum. “Some are half starved. Some have been abused.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The inmates fight for food between themselves,” Matron replied harshly. “Either we let them steal bread from the mouths of the weakest or we punish them. You can’t have it both ways.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That bread is hardly food anyway. I wouldn’t feed it to pigs.”

    Matron was starting to peg Dr Winkelweald as a troublemaker. “Pigs need to be fattened for slaughter,” she snapped. “These dangerous lunatics need to be kept weak and docile.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“These ‘dangerous lunatics’ are put on display like caged animals for the public to gawp at and torment.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And how else would you propose we meet the costs of housing these moon-calfs and madmen, Dr Winkelweald? The public purse is very shallow indeed and we have a great many inmates to house.”

    The newcomer was rapidly realising that his protests were falling on deaf ears. Everyone here seemed to accept the overcrowding, the brutality, the cruelty. It was as if the madness had permeated the very walls, even soaked into the souls of the staff.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“We could at least wash out the cells,” he ventured. “Clean straw. Launder the blankets. Perhaps segregate the men from the women to prevent…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Perhaps you’d like us to give them all crowns and thrones to sit on as well, doctor?” scorned Matron. “You might want to consider being here longer than five minutes before telling me how to conduct my business.”

    Again the young scholar suffered a pang of fear for his internship. But how could he be silent when such injustices were going on?

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“If you really want to help somebody,” Matron said slyly, “then we have a patient who you can talk to. An incurable. A killer. Maybe you can get some sense out of him, because nobody else can.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A killer?” Winkelweald said. “What did he…?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Look at his files after you’ve taken your first impression,” Matron advised. “Bradley, take our new intern down to meet Ioldobaoth.”

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you real?” asked the madman, shifting in his chains. His whole body was covered in bruised and scars where the warders had beaten him after finding him free from his chains and surrounded by four slaughtered men. There were marks of surgery and of electrical shock too. Winkelweald was horrified at the man’s condition.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m real,” he promised. “I’m here to help you, Ioldobaoth.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you real?” the captive repeated, his eyes filled with suspicion. “Or are you me?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m here,” the scholar assured the lunatic. “Are you saying that sometimes you see things? People who are not there?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“There was a girl,” Ioldobaoth confessed. “Midnight hair, cool skin. She was afraid, but brave. She was kind.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A real girl? Somebody here?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Her monster took her. I let him in.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is this… when you killed the guards? Were you a monster when you did that?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I became a monster for her. I killed the guards for her. The other monster, he was the weapon.” The madman blinked. “That is, if I didn’t dream it. If I didn’t imagine it. If I’m not imagining all of this.”

    Dr Winkelweald was horrified and fascinated. “Other monster? There are more than one?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes. We mustn’t confuse monsters. There are so many here to keep straight. And the ghosts. Even more ghosts than monsters.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You see ghosts, do you?”

    Ioldobaoth looked up and met the doctor’s gaze. “Of course. So do you.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m not… You’ll have to explain more. Tell me about the ghosts.”

    The madman shook his head. “The monsters are loose. The ghosts whisper. But I need to tell you about the devil.”

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The devil?” Doctor Morningstar sounded amused. “He thinks I’m the devil. Some confusion about my surname, I imagine. Morningstar. Light-bringer. Lucifer.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Perhaps,” the scholar conceded.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What’s in a name?” the great man asked. “Take your own unlikely nomenclature for example. An erudite researcher with some knowledge of languages might derive it from the old English winn, meaning white, and ceole, a brook flowing in a ravine or underground, and weald, a forest. He’d conclude that your forebears hailed from a wooded place where frothing rapids descended. But a madman… Ah, he’d remember the old slang for a gallows-tree where enemies of the powers-that-be were quartered up into slices as they hung.”

    There was something about Morningstar’s tiny smile that disquieted Winkelweald. “But still…” he persisted, “he – Ioldobaoth – had been tortured. There’s no other word for what’s been done to him. Tortured and butchered.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re familiar with the process in which the temporal lobe is excised surgically, I presume?” Doctor Morningstar responded. “What would you say then if I told you that on four occasions Ioldobaoth’s anterior matter has regrown after removal?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What?” The scholar was puzzled. “That’s impossible.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Likewise, trepanation and sections removed from the middle lobe, the pituitary body, and the locus niger have all miraculously healed.”

    Winkelweald shook his head. “That’s ridiculous. Such procedures would kill a man on the operating table.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And yet,” Morningstar said. He gestured to a row of bottles lined beside his madness cabinet. “Some of the excised matter still remains for examination.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Some of it? What became of the rest?”

    Morningstar pointed to the rows of lead-acid batteries around the base of his cabinet. “Concentrated madness transmitted through electric charge,” he explained. “Dissolved insanity in flowers of brimstone carried by the spark of life that God passed on to Adam.”

    Winkelweald backed away. “That is insanity,” he admitted. “Criminal insanity. What you’ve done to that man, and why you’ve done it, they break the bounds of all ethics. They break the laws of man and God!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Really?” asked Morningstar. “Oh dear.”

    It was the end of the young scholar’s career, the destruction of all his hopes, but it was the right thing to do: “I’m sorry, Doctor Morningstar. I have to denounce you. I have to report this. The Royal Society…”

    The great man snorted. “The Royal Society could never understand the genius of my work. But they will never listen to the ravings of a madman either.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“True sir. But I am not mad.”

    Again that charming smile, veneer for something ugly and terrifying. “You are not mad now, young Winkelweald. But after you have spent some time in my cabinet…” He chuckled. “Restrain him, Bradley!”

    Winkelweald lunged for the door but the burly orderly was easily his match. A fist to the stomach, another to the chin, and the scholar went down.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The experiment proceeds,” said Doctor Morningstar.

***


    The needles jabbing into his temples woke Dr Winkelweald from his unconsciousness. He was bound by thick leather straps into the wooden box, pinioned down so he could not even move his head. A rough gag prevented his protests other than a wordless screeching.

    Doctor Morningstar began to shave the sides of his subject’s head. “As an intern it is your privilege to assist me in my investigations. I’m so pleased to have such a rational mind with which to begin the work.”

    Winkelweald strained at his bonds but knew his strength would never be enough.

    The depilation completed, Morningstar began threading various pins through the scholar’s body, each attached to a thin copper wire. “My acids contain all the madness extracted from the lunatic Ioldobaoth and that of many other subjects. Even the contents of those bottles the ancient monks collected have gone into the mix. You are to receive within you the distilled insanity of many generations.”

    Three swift gashes to allow subdermal connection of electrodes and Morningstar’s subject was ready.

    Winkelweald struggled. He could see the ghosts now, watching him, waiting.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What wonders will you see?” Morningstar speculated. “What visions are reserved only for the mad? What insights and truths for those who plummet from the cliffs of rationality into the deepest abysms of the soul?”

    He leaned forward. “Well,” he smiled at his student, his sweet breath on Winkelweald’s cheek, “let us find out.”

    He pulled the level. Winkelweald’s body jolted as the power shot through him.

    The madness poured from the batteries, poured from the walls, poured from the world. Winkelweald was washed away, lost in the turmoil of screaming minds.

    And Doctor Morningstar saw that it was good.

***


Chapter Five: Flesh and Blood    


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t eat all their flesh,” the madman told Amnesia. “Only their brains. And any choicer other parts if I’m hungry.”

    Amnesia backed away from the naked blood-smeared lunatic that had been imprisoned by the monks of Herringcarp Abbey for the better part of three hundred years. Exorcism and beatings and torture hadn’t driven the insanity from him. They’d only stored up rage and hate in His mind until the moment when somebody got careless and he could break free. Now those same monks were dead and carved, a madman’s larder.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Keep away from me,” Amnesia warned. She didn’t like the way the gory fugitive was eyeing her exposed flesh. Lust or gluttony was equally bad. “I mean it. Stay back.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What are you?” he demanded. “You’re not from here. But I’ve seen you before.”

    Amnesia’s tentative attempt to make some sense of the events she was enduring collapsed like a house of cards. “So I’m not in the past – or some shadowy version of the past. I didn’t meet some future version of you in an 1800s madhouse. You remember me.”

    Did he remember the kiss? She’d been cold and vulnerable and the dangerous lunatic had been the kindest man there. Did he remember the kiss and want more?

    She backed off until she was pressed into the corner of the abandoned and empty scriptorium. There was nowhere left to run.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ve seen you amongst the ghosts,” the madman said, slowly moving forward. There was blood under his broken fingernails and little shreds of meat.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ioldabaoth,” she said. Names were important here. Amnesia didn’t remember hers. Neither did the shaggy wounded monster that had been beside her until moments before. But the madman chained in the lightless cell had told her who he was.

    The madman before her paused. “Ioldabaoth,” he repeated, considering the word like a savoury entrée. “Ioldabaoth. I like it.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s your name,” Amnesia told him. “At least… if you’re the same person I saw before. But then you were…” Then he’d told her that he’d done terrible things.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ioldabaoth. Yes, that’s who I’ll be.” The madman seemed pleased by his new present. He smiled and came closer to the girl. “You have to die,” he told her in the same mildly happy tone.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I really don’t,” Amnesia denied. “Look, you were tortured by those monks. I saw that. Well I saw a ghost of it, or an hallucination or something. They kept hurting you and hurting you. But I never did. I can see why you might… be angry at the monks, at that Father Abbot who set them on you. But I’ve never hurt you.”

    Ioldabaoth looked at the raw red flesh around his wrists. “You never did,” he admitted, “but you have to die.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why?” Amnesia pleaded. “Why can’t you just let me go?”

    The madman was right in front of her now. She was literally cornered. She shuddered as he ran his knuckle over the curve of her cheek. “I know you die,” Ioldabaoth explained. “I’ve seen your ghost. You haunt this place. And to do that you have to die.”

***


    Amnesia huddled in another corner. This one was in the dungeons beneath the abbey, where the little cubicles had once held the madmen the clergy had tried to cleanse of their madness through pain and suffering. The rusted chains still hung from pulleys on the archways. Now it was the monks who hung from them, like butchers’ carcasses. All were dead. Most were cut apart, the tops of their skulls removed.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why did you do this to them?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. The screaming had made her throat raw.

    Ioldabaoth stepped over the quartered corpse of one of the brothers. “If you want to understand,” he grinned at her, “then you’ll have to dine with me.”

    Amnesia’s stomach churned. “You don’t mean… eat them?”

    The lunatic peeled a gobbet of meat from the exposed ribcage of a fat friar. “That’s just what I mean. But not the flesh of their bodies. That doesn’t matter. You need to eat their brains.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“W-why?”

    Ioldabaoth pointed to the shattered containers round the room. Two dozen stone jars were broken across the floor. The dark fluids they’d contained had stained the cobbles. “Some things can only be understood from the other side of pain,” he answered. “And some only from the other side of madness. Father Abbot knew that. That’s why he kept torturing me. But I never told him how to use the Black Chapel.”

    Amnesia remembered the forbidding little church where the monster had laid her on the altar. “What is the Black Chapel?” she asked. Anything to divert the madman from feeding her.

    Ioldabaoth chewed thoughtfully on the strip of meat he’d just acquired. “I don’t quite know. Not yet. But I shall. I know more than Father Abbot though, for all his tortures.”

    Nothing made sense. “Please just let me go,” Amnesia begged. “I can’t follow all of this. It’s too much.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s because you haven’t devoured the monks’ brains, haven’t swallowed their thoughts. You haven’t broken open the containers where they pushed the madness they dragged from those they treated. You haven’t let the madness flow into you, folded in over and over again, not one life but a hundred, a thousand, each mind screaming with new perceptions beyond the world of sanity.”

    He went over to one of the hanging corpses and began to examine the bloody pulp that was formerly its skull. Amnesia realised he was searching for brain matter. “Are you saying… the monks tried to take the madness from people and put it into jars?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Ioldabaoth replied. “As if the madness could be transferred into their stone vessels without some of it leaking into them. That’s why I had to devour their brains as well as break the vessels to get my thoughts back. I still haven’t found all the jars they hid around the abbey. I don’t know yet how I’m going to recover the parts that seeped into the very walls of this place. I think it was built to absorb them, long before the holy men ever came here.”

    That almost made sense to Amnesia. She shuddered as she realised she was being inexorably drawn into her captor’s delusions. “You ate the monks to get your madness back?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not just mine,” the lunatic grinned. “So much more.” He scrambled over to Amnesia’s corner, cupping something sloppy and red in his hand. “Do you know what defines reality?”

    Amnesia was distracted by the mess in Ioldabaoth’s palm. “What? Reality?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Perception defines reality. We see the world because our mind takes images from our eyes, pressure on our ears, sensations from our skin, and builds a story. We live in that story. We share the story with the other players, in a consensus world we agree to experience together.”

    Amnesia forced herself to think. The man looming over her was a cannibal murderer, but there was a vein of truth somewhere in his actions, a motive that didn’t seem mad despite the trappings. “I suppose we do create our own versions of the world,” she conceded.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Perception and consensus, that’s all the world around us is. If we change that perception, we change the world. If we deny that consensus, we deny the chains of what others call reality.”

    Amnesia shook her head. “There has to be more than that. Otherwise we’re all just… floating on a façade, like spectators in an art gallery looking at the pictures.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“If we change perception, even in the tiniest detail, we can change the world. One little alteration to history and everything changes. But master the trick of denying the consensus and you can walk between possibilities and see them all like the pages of a book, choose between them like a reader selecting chapters.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is that what you want to do?” Amnesia understood at last. “And you think all the perspectives of all the madmen who ever got pinned in this terrible place can come into your mind and give you that vision? Oh, Ioldabaoth, you truly are mad!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s why I fit in here,” her captor said. “If you want to survive, you have to fit in too. Madness or death, they’re the only choices. You’ll die badly, become a ghost wandering these halls forever. Or you’ll escape by transcending this reality and changing it. But which?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you going to kill me?” Amnesia trembled.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That depends,” Ioldabaoth told her, holding up the cranial matter in his palm, “on if you eat.”

***


    It was life or death. It was survival.

    Amnesia parted her lips and pressed the tip of her tongue out like a coquette. Her head dipped down to the human brain-stuff in Ioldabaoth’s hands.

    If I taste this, she told herself, I will be changed forever. But if she didn’t she’d be dead.

    Her tongue touched the soft pink meat. It was like raw pork. She tasted blood.

    Memory flashed through her. She was being kissed. She was making love. It was urgent and special, although there was a mad compulsion behind it that she didn’t understand. It wasn’t her first time, but it was the only one that mattered.

    Only the names were missing.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Aahh!” she gasped, shuddering away from the brain-stuff. “That… It can’t work! It’s just the trauma at what I’m doing, punching through my amnesia. It’s…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Again,” insisted Ioldabaoth. “If you want to live.” He raised his fingers and smeared Amnesia’s lips.

    Another memory. Amnesia felt her belly. She was great with child. Her lover’s child. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. It would destroy everything. The child would be birthed in secret, adopted, hidden forever. It was for the best. She was betraying the man she loved, for love’s sake.

    Even as she remembered she knew it was wrong. She knew it would end badly.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re starting to see,” Ioldabaoth told her. Was he seducing her with memories? “More. This time you have to chew.”

    Amnesia shuddered. He held her close in his arms and fed her the horrible meat. Hot tears welled on her cheeks as she did as he said.

    A blur of confused images made her dizzy. She tried to push them away but they pinned her down helplessly. She tried to scream but they wouldn’t let her. There were men, lots of men, and they had paid for her and she was their plaything and they had no mercy. Her body shuddered with drug-need, her mind screamed as it was lost.

    Was this what happened to me? Amnesia wondered. Was this when I went insane? Was this why I shut down my memory, to blank out this ordeal?

    The memories kept coming, man after man, horror after horror, until the torments and confusions of the cannibal dungeon began to seem like blessed release.

    Amnesia spat out the flesh from her mouth and dry-vomited. “I was… I saw…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re getting to the heart of it,” Ioldabaoth told her. “That’s important. Unless you understand what brought you to this cliff you won’t have the courage to jump off it.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s terrible!” Amnesia wept. “Everything is so cruel. I… Someone loved me once, but I betrayed him. But did I deserve to be punished so very much? Maybe I did. Maybe this is hell and I earned my place.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s not hell yet,” Ioldabaoth told her. He held up the brain in his hand. He’d cleaned it back so the sloppy cerebral matter was exposed. “If you want to escape, you have to take the final step. Eat this. Swallow it down. Let it become a part of you.”

    There was more to remember. Amnesia knew that. There was still a hole, and what she didn’t know would damn her. She reached for the proffered offering. Then she stopped.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why do you want me to do this?” she demanded of her captor. “Why are you degrading me to be like you?”

    Ioldabaoth looked surprised that she had to ask. He leaned forward and licked the blood from her lips. “So we can be together,” he told her.

    Amnesia rebelled. By instinct her hand came up to hammer the madman on the jaw, snapping his neck back for a punch to the throat. She hurt her toes as she kicked him in the ribs but he was more winded than she as she scrambled over him towards the exit.

    He reached a hand out and locked it on her ankle. She tumbled and he clawed atop her.

    She squirmed round and bit his wrist. She could taste his blood now atop the sour flavour of monk brains. She scrabbled away and raced for the steps back to the upper rooms.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Wait!” Ioldabaoth called, scrambled up to chase her. “You’re not saved yet!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Get away from me!” Amnesia screamed, fleeing. Instinct led her back to the Black Chapel. Perhaps her monster would be looking for her there?

    The doorway was blocked. A pale translucent shape filled the arch, a ragged weeping corpse-eyed woman in tattered rags.

    Amnesia recognised herself. She was the ghost.

    Ioldabaoth raced up the steps behind her.

    Amnesia screwed up her courage and plunged straight through the phantom into the Black Chapel.

    There was a chill like she’d never experienced, numbing her limbs. A scream filled her ears until there was nothing else. Blackness overwhelmed her vision.

    Perception makes reality. Deny that and everything changes.

    By the time the madman reached the Black Chapel the woman was gone.

***


    There was a door and Amnesia staggered through it. There was a room lit by an oil lamp and a scholar at a desk. Amnesia tumbled inside and slammed the portal closed behind her. Whatever was in here was better than the madness that pursued her.

    The Marquis looked up from his writing and frowned. “I didn’t send for a whore,” he said.

***


Chapter Six: I Am John’s Psychosis    


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hello there, Johnny,” the jovial-looking man in the white coat began. “I’m Doctor Leinster. I’d like to talk with you for a little bit.”

    The nine year old sat on the corner of the leather couch and said nothing.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Can we chat, Johnny?” Leinster persisted. “There are some things we really need to say.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m not Johnny,” the boy replied. “They called me Johnny. I’m not.”

    Leinster glanced at the nurse in attendance. “What shall we call you, then?” he asked gently.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Call me John. Not Johnny. John.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Right,” agreed the doctor. “John, do you know why you’re here?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Because I don’t have anywhere else to go now.”

    Leinster nodded. “Well that’s true – John – but can you tell me why you don’t have anywhere else to go?”

    The boy looked at the psychiatrist as if he’d been asked a dumb question. “Because I killed my parents, of course,” he answered.

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hello, John. How are you today?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m locked in a mental institution on a court order, Doctor Leinster. How about you?”

    The psychiatrist wasn’t yet ready for those old eyes in that child’s face. “Er, yes. Well I thought today we might talk about life before the, um, incident that brought you here to us.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Your life or mine?” the boy asked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yours, John. I’ve brought along some things that belong to you. Things from your house.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“My house burned.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes, it did, John. But we’ll talk about that another time. These are things you brought out of your house before you… before it burned. Some toys of yours. This Barbie and Ken, for example.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s not Barbie and Ken,” John sneered with contempt. How could the psychiatrist be so stupid? “That’s what Kevin thought.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Kevin your stepfather?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“He said I was too old to play with dollies like a girl. They’re not dollies.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“They’re action figures?” the psychiatrist suggested.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you supposed to lead me when you’re interviewing me?” the boy chided. “Children can be very susceptible you know. It’s in the literature.”

    Leinster stifled a desire to find out how the subject knew about that. He had to keep charge of the conversation, not let a nine year old run away with it. “Then who are they?” the doctor asked, notebook poised.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s Lisa. Lisa and Jarvis.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I see. And who are Lisa and Jarvis?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Superheroes,” the boy replied. “From the Lair Legion.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I see. Your superheroes? In a team with, ah, with all these other toys?” Leinster indicated other shabby toys in the cardboard box. There was a broken Transformer, a stuffed dragon, a plastic McDonald’s giveaway Batman figure, a 1960s big-hair Sindy with a black domino mask glued to her face, a painted plastic assembly kit of a Norse god, even an old-fashioned rag doll in a yellow felt coat.

    John looked at the collection. “Not anymore,” he answered. “Now they’re just old junk.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“They’re all broken,” the psychiatrist agreed. “The police found them where you’d left them. Where you’d nailed them to the door of your burning house.”

    The boy nodded. “That’s where they were,” he agreed.

    Leinster examined the rough wound in Barbie’s plastic hand where she’d been pinned to the wood. “You crucified them,” he noted. “Why, John? Why did you do that?”

    John sneered again. “Because they’d been defeated” he replied.

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“When we spoke before,” Dr Leinster said, “about your… Lair Legion, you said your father didn’t like you playing with the action figures.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I said my stepfather didn’t like me playing with dolls,” the child replied. “You need to keep better notes.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Right. Of course. So how did your stepfather show his disapproval?”

    John shrugged. “The usual. Make something up and write it in your case notes. Abuse. Violent rages. All the things that help to explain what I did.”

    Leinster wasn’t comforted by how easily the subject had adapted to the conventions of therapy. A nine-year-old shouldn’t be able to manipulate that well. “Perhaps if you tell me a few examples,” he suggested. “I’m interested in what really happened, not what the textbooks expect.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Because I’ll make a good case to write up?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“No, John. Because I’m interested in making you well again.”

    The boy didn’t seem impressed. “Kevin wasn’t a very nice man. Then again, my mother deserved him. She was weak, a victim. She invited her own destruction.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You thought she deserved to be killed?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You can use the word murder,” the child replied. “It won’t upset me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You know what you did, then?” Leinster checked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Premeditated. That means planned out before. From the Latin premeditatus.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You planned to kill them. Because Kevin wasn’t nice and your mother was weak.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It was planned.” John pointed to the box of discarded fire-damaged toys. “Can I get something from there?”

    Dr Leinster lifted the collection over. “What is it you want?” he wondered.

    John rummaged through the broken heroes and fished out a dark grey rag from the bottom of the pile. It was the size of a handkerchief, an offcut from some old tea-towel or something similar. It was stained and torn and frayed around the edges. Leinster hadn’t even noticed it amongst the toys. It wasn’t on the inventory.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What’s that?” the psychiatrist asked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A comfort blanket,” John replied with a little smirk. “It’s how I learned Latin.”

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“John, I want to talk about the night you… murdered… your parents. What was going through your mind when you did what you did.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The trap?” John asked. “That was easy. Simple manipulation. Once Kevin saw what I’d done to his gun collection he fell into a massive rage. He was always abusive when he was drunk, of course. It was easy to push his buttons.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What did you do to his guns?” Leinster had read the police report but there was nothing in there about that.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I hammered the barrels flat and carved peace symbols on the hardwood stocks,” the boy replied. “Isaiah 2. 4. I guess Kevin wasn’t very religious.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Kevin came home after a visit to a local bar.” That much was in the investigation notes. “And he found you’d damaged his things.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Give peace a chance,” John said. “I guess Kevin wasn’t a big John Lennon fan, either.”

    It was the first time the boy had been willing to talk about his actions and motivations that night. Leinster was quite excited. “What happened then? You actually wanted to make your stepfather angry. Why?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“So he’d fight with my mother. So he’d threaten me. She had to have a chance, you see, to change her mind and stand up to him. She could have lived if she’d made the right choice.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You set up… a test?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“She failed. She caved as usual. When he shook me and questioned me she tried to convince me to co-operate.”

    The psychiatrist noticed that as the boy spoke he was still clutching the grey rag from the toybox. The child was never without it now. “What did he ask you, John?” he went on.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“His Lafaucheux 12mm pinwheel revolver was missing,” the box explained. “Serial number 30585, within forty numbers of one documented as issued to Company D of the 2nd Kansas Cavalry March 27, 1862. A total of ninety-eight were documented issued to that unit so it probably belonged to someone in the same company. It was valued at around $800.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You destroyed his gun collection, but hid the prize of it?” Leinster summarised.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“In the basement,” John explained. “I told him after he’d hit me a couple of times. He wouldn’t have believed me before that.”

    The medical reports suggested the child had been struck.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Besides, if I wasn’t crying in a heap on the floor they might have dragged me down there with them.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“They went to the basement to find the missing weapon.”

    The boy nodded. “That was the trap. The plan. There were other contingencies, of course, in case they didn’t react the way they were expected to. But they were very predictable people. Kevin stormed down there. Mother chased after him, running attendance, trying to calm him. The usual. Neither of them noticed the new padlock and hasp on the door ready to be used once they were down there.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You locked them in the cellar,” Leinster prompted. “What were you thinking?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I was wondering whether the gas main was opened enough to do its job,” John replied. “For obvious reasons that had to be a purely theoretical mass volume calculation.”

    According to the fire marshal the boiler pilot light had been extinguished and the pipe had been pierced to flood the basement with gas.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You wanted to gas them to death?”

    Again the boy looked at the psychiatrist as if he was stupid. “Of course not. Where’s the irony in that? Where’s the class? Where’s the statement?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You wanted to make a statement. What statement?”

    John laughed. “That when you’re locked in a cellar full of gas, don’t use your newly-retrieved Lafaucheux 12mm pinwheel revolver to try and blow the lock off the door.”

***


    Dr Leinster laid the scorched pierced toys in front of his patient. “You told me before that these were superheroes,” he reminded John. “You called them the Lair Legion.”

    The boy shrugged.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You also said they were defeated. You nailed them to your house door when you blew it up.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I didn’t blow it up,” John sniffed. “That was Kevin. It wasn’t a victory unless he had a chance.” He sat back and folded his arms. “Kevin blew it.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You said these heroes were defeated,” Leinster pressed. “How? By whom?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“By the archvillain, of course,” the child answered simply. “Who else fights heroes? Who else could beat them?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The archvillain? What archvillain?”

    Kevin leaned forward again. “There’s always got to be an archvillain,” he confided. “That’s how the stories work. The heroes can’t be heroes without an archvillain. There’s no way they can conquer evil otherwise.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Was Kevin the archvillain, John?”

    The boy was disdainful. “Kevin called me Johnnie. Kevin was a moron. Morons can’t be archvillains.” He picked up the half-melted Barbie and examined it. “Do you want to know something about stories of heroes and villains?” he asked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Tell me,” urged Leinster.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You can play them over and over, a hundred different plots, a thousand times. The heroes can triumph over evil again and again and again.” John popped the doll’s head from its neck. “The archvillain only needs to win once.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“When the villain won,” the doctor ventured, “was that when you set a trap for Kevin and your mother? When the heroes couldn’t stop the villain any more?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A good villain knows that defeat with honour is merely victory delayed,” the boy explained. “Heroes reset everything to default, for better or worse. Archvillains conquer the world.”

    Leinster looked down at the collection of battered toys in the cardboard box. “Is one of these the villain?” he asked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The archvillain,” John corrected him.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The archvillain, then,” Leinster said.

    John shook his head. “A few of them might have been, given the right stimuli. But they weren’t.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then who is the, the archvillain?” the psychiatrist puzzled.

    A sly smile shifted across the boy’s face. He held up his grey rag. He pleated it along one side, folding it so it draped from his hand as a cape, pinched together at the top to form a kind of cowl. The cloth was suddenly transformed into a caped figure with a hood.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Here’s the archvillain,” said John. “Say good evening.”

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I want you to relax,” Dr Leinster said. “Your whole body is feeling heavy and you just want to sleep. Concentrate on the light from the pen-torch and listen to my voice as you sink down. Your body is going to sleep and your mind is listening to my words. Five, four, three, two, one…”

    John lay on the sofa, his eyes shut, his breathing shallow and regular.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you relaxed, John? Are you ready to answer some questions?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The boy is asleep, doctor,” came the reply. The voice wasn’t John’s. It was deeper, and it spoke with an Eastern European accent.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“John?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think not, doctor,” came the reply. “Congratulations on the breakthrough for which you were hoping.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who… who am I speaking to?” Leinster tried to keep the excitement from his voice. There was a book in this. Fame and fortune. This was the key to the boy’s illness.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why doctor, you wanted to learn about the archvillain. It seemed only reasonable to allow you to converse with me in person.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re inside John, then?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m inside everybody, Doctor Leinster.”

    The psychiatrist checked that the tape recorder was still turning. This was gold. “Was it you who killed John’s parents, then?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Does it matter? I instructed the boy. He made his choice. His adversaries made theirs.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You seem very different to John. You speak differently. Are you the source of his Latin translations?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I am very different to John. Do you believe me a second personality in the boy’s mind? Are you hoping for a multiple personality disorder?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m not making any premature diagnosis. What do you claim to be?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I am an archvillain. I am creating myself, from the ruins of a thousand childish attempts at villainy that no longer exist, from deep roots of madness you could never comprehend, from a thousand defeats that have taught me a thousand lessons. When I am complete I shall be unstoppable, and the multiverse shall tremble.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“But for now you’re living inside a nine-year-old boy?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not for long,” the Latvian-accented voice replied, “now that you have let me out.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“So you’re not, say, a figment of his imagination, a personification of his suffering at the hands of an abusive stepfather to rationalise his act of homicide?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not any more,” agreed the voice. “Now I am… the Hooded Hood!”

    Things were getting out of hand. Leinster needed time to think, to discuss this alarming new twist with colleagues. “John, when I count to five you will awaken and open your eyes. You will forget our conversation today. One, two, thee, four, five.”

    John’s eyes opened wide. His pupils glowed with an eerie green light.

    Leinster screamed.

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s very good,” Doctor Valium said, putting down his notepad. “Very helpful, Michael. I think we’ve made a real breakthrough here today.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“So you believe me!” Leinster said, reaching out to seize the doctor’s arm. “You see that I don’t belong here. I’m not mad. I was in my office, talking to the boy, talking to that personality he manifested, and then his eyes just flashed and…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’ll discuss it at our next session, Michael,” Dr Valium assured him. “For now you need to go back to your room and take your meds. You’re doing very well.”

***


Chapter Seven: The Heresy of Romance    

    The Marquis looked up from his writing and frowned. “I didn’t send for a whore,” he said.

    Amnesia trembled on the threshold of the lamplit bedroom. She didn’t recognise this place but she knew the face of the Marquis. “I’m not a whore,” she told him. “I wasn’t sent for.”

    The Marquis look at her again in her filthy ragged tabard. It exposed too much flesh. “Then how did you get here?” he demanded. “You must have passed the guards.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I… it’s difficult to explain,” Amnesia admitted. “I know this must seem strange, but you have to believe me…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t have to do anything, nor to believe anything. That’s why I’m locked up here. I won’t do as I’m told.”

    For the first time Amnesia spotted the bars set into the stone frames of the window. The lobby behind her was sealed with an iron-bound door. The viewing port was fastened shut from the other side.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is a prison,” she realised. For all the books and luxuries, the fine furniture, the four-poster bed, the roaring fire, it was a prison. The roaring fire reminded her how chilled to the bone she was. She shuddered.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re cold,” the Marquis recognised, suddenly seeming more human. He rose from his work and gestured to her. “Come to the hearth. Warm yourself.”

    Amnesia limped to the flames. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d rested. Time seemed not to matter much anymore in her tormented wanderings.

    Having shown some humanity the Marquis seemed prompted to other courtesies. “A drink,” he announced, pressing a glass of spirits into her hand. “And put on this robe. Throw your rags on the fire. They smell.”

    The brandy burned Amnesia’s throat but it revived her. She shrugged the proffered dressing gown around her shoulders, turned from the man, and peeled away her bloodstained shift. It burned on the logs in an instant, as ephemeral as the ghosts of Herringcarp.

    The Marquis was watching her. He’d returned to his desk and was sat with one hand resting on an astrolabe and the other on an ancient ledger he’d been studying. “You have a story, I think?”

    Amnesia wrapped the gown around her. It was made for a man, for the Marquis. It smelled of cigars. The quilted silk rubbed against her flesh in a way that was almost lewd. “I don’t know where to begin. I don’t remember the beginning.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Pick the thing that stands out most in your mind,” advised her host.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ve seen you before,” she answered. “Except not as you are now.”

    The Marquis shrugged. “I’ve met many woman. A few of them have visited me in my confinement. All of them agreed beforehand to try and convince me to recant and behave. Some of them tried very enthusiastically to motivate me to do so.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t even know who you are,” Amnesia told him. “I don’t know how I got here. But I’ve seen you – or maybe someone who looks like you – in… other places. In torment.”

    The Marquis shrugged. “The torment will come, I suspect. When they finally lose patience with me and decide to try other means.”

    Amnesia pushed her hair back from her face. “Who are you, then? What is this place?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Games?” the handsome young aristocrat challenged. “Be careful. I’m an expert player.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Please, just tell me.”

    He assayed a half-smile and refilled Amnesia’s glass. “Very well then. I’m the notorious Marquis of Herringcarp, and I’m a prisoner in my own home for defying the church and blaspheming against God. I’m mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Herringcarp! So this is still Herringcarp Asylum?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Of old this was a monastic foundation that acted as a refuge for the insane,” the Marquis admitted. “Long ago.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What year is this?” Amnesia asked.

    The Marquis smiled. “What year would you like it to be? It seems that I should have a turn asking questions; such as your name?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t remember. I have amnesia. That’s what they’re calling me now. Amnesia.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A name you make pretty by association,” the Marquis confessed. “And how came you to such dire straights, Amnesia?”

    The girl baulked for a moment at telling of her confinement as a madwoman. Might not such a thing happen again? “I’ve had some adventures,” she eventually conceded. “Horrors, really.” She began to tremble again.

    The Marquis sniffed at his brandy glass. “You’ll have to pardon me,” he told her. “I’m not used to company these days. Not real company. Guards and priests and the occasional slut, that’s all. I’m out of practise at the niceties.”

    Amnesia nodded. “It’s a remarkable situation all round. I have no point of reference for it.”

    The Marquis reflected for a moment. “What you need,” he decided, “is a bath. No, honestly, believe me. A bath will clean your body, soothe your injuries, and allow your mind time to sort through your experiences. While you bathe I can collect my thoughts, complete the line of research I was undertaking when you suddenly came to me, and determine a future course of action.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t know…”

    He gestured to his bed. “If you would be so kind as to hide there, with the curtains shut around you, I shall summon guards with hot water. You may bathe behind the screen there.”

    It seemed that once the Marquis had a plan he was resolved, because Amnesia soon found herself hiding behind the hangings of the four-poster, then easing herself into the hip-bath behind the Chinese concertina screen that sectioned off the Marquis’ ablution area.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“When you saw me before,” the Marquis called to her from his desk, “I trust I was suitably courteous?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You were, well… you did me no harm,” Amnesia answered, choosing her words carefully. “In fact I wonder if you didn’t help me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’d like to think so,” the Marquis agreed. “It is the duty of every gentleman to attend to a damsel in distress.”

    Amnesia sponged the filth from her body. Soap and water felt so good. It was like being reborn.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What did you do?” she called curiously. “To get yourself locked under house arrest? What terrible crime did you commit?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“My crime was thought,” the Marquis answered. “Free thought. I questioned the dogmas. I wrote too candidly, spoke too honestly. I dabbled unwisely in politics and made some mortal enemies. Thoughts are what matter. Thoughts are what kill you in the end.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I… may have heard something similar before,” Amnesia admitted. She forced herself to leave the water and towelled herself dry. The Marquis had provided a comb and a nightshirt and she used both. “But what if I can’t remember my own thoughts? If I don’t know my past I don’t know who I am. What kind of person am I? Good? Bad? Kind? Cruel? Virtuous? Slatternly? How can I relate to the changing world I find myself in if I don’t have anything to hold on to?”

    The Marquis was waiting for her again as she emerged from behind the screen. “A great improvement,” he judged, admiring her in her white linen.

    Amnesia blushed. “What now?” she wondered. “I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know how to leave. You said guards…?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“There are soldiers,” agreed the Marquis. “But we have many more mysteries to untangle yet, my lost beauty. There are things that must be uncovered, fathomed, conquered.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to trust.”

    The Marquis nodded. “May I suggest that you have to start with a leap of faith? Trust me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Isn’t that dogma?” Amnesia quipped.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Everybody has to have a moment of weakness sometime. Will you trust me?”

    Amnesia moved her head in a way that might have been a nod or a shake.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Tell me your story,” the Marquis urged. “What you remember, anyway. Leave nothing out. Come, sit with me by the fire and begin.”

    Amnesia padded over the rugged floor to sit on a cushion by the roaring hearth. She felt warm and clean for the first time she could recall. The Marquis placed a blanket around her shoulders and that felt safe. He kept his arm around her too.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m not mad,” Amnesia told him. “But there was this monster…”

    The Marquis was a good listener. He heard about the beast, about the asylum, about the madman, about Father Abbot, about the ghosts. He asked few questions, but all were apposite.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know this sounds insane,” Amnesia concluded, “but it’s not. Please, you have to have faith too. Believe me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I believe you,” the Marquis replied. “Your story is insane, but you are not. In your words and your actions as you describe them you are lucid and coherent within the boundaries of a woman facing the incredible. I’m impressed, and I do not impress easily.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“But what does it mean?” Amnesia begged. “Why is this happening to me? What is going on in Herringcarp? How did I come to you, to be here?”

    Her host considered this. “I think the key was in the words of the cannibal lunatic who slaughtered the priests,” he suggested. “He told you that reality is only what we perceive. That makes sense to me. Change the slightest detail of our past and we change the world.”

    Amnesia wasn’t following. “And so?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And so Herringcarp has been a place of madmen and dreamers for hundreds of years. All those ideas, all those perceptions. What if this very place had become fragmented, disjointed in time, compounded of many realities each locked around the thoughts of a lunatic? This Black Chapel might be the very metaphor for the darkest part of the human mind.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m trapped in a metaphor?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re trapped between realities, Amnesia. Perhaps your loss of memory makes you especially vulnerable, or else some circumstance that took your past from you has also led you to this present torment. Each aspect you have seen is another part of the puzzle.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And you?” Amnesia asked. “Why did I come to you?”

    The Marquis smiled. “Because every puzzle has a key. Your own self is asserting upon the chaos around you. You created a monster to protects you, brought you to a madman to inspire you; and now it brings you to me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“To explain it all,” Amnesia suggested.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“To comfort you,” the Marquis replied. “To love you.”

    He leaned over and kissed Amnesia on the lips. His hands smoothed over her shoulders and pressed her hair, bringing her head to him. The contact became passionate.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t…” Amnesia said as he slipped the night-gown from her shoulders.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Shhh,” the Marquis whispered. “Trust me.”

***


    Amnesia woke happy from a long deep dreamless sleep. She reached across the bed for the Marquis but he wasn’t there.

    He was standing to one side so the soldiers could get to the girl and drag her away.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Do to really think I would be so foolish as to fall for your ploys?” he asked Amnesia as she screamed in alarm at the rude awakening and rough handling. “I warned you that I was good at games.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What are you doing?” the girl cried out, reaching for her lover. “Why have you betrayed me?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ve had what I want from you,” the Marquis replied, turning away to go to his desk. “The information will be most valuable. The rest was… adequate.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You bastard!” Amnesia shouted as the soldiers tugged her away. “You swine!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“This ploy is concluded,” the Marquis declared.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“This round to you, then,” suggested Father Abbot while the guards dragged the struggling Amnesia away to the inquisition rooms. “I’ll see the girl does not trouble you again. Or anybody.”

***


Chapter Eight: Whispers and Screams    

    The hall was full of ghosts. They flickered round the monster, some reaching out with insubstantial hands to pluck at his matted fur, others lost in their own misery unaware of his passing. Some were photograph-clear, captured as they were at the moment of their deaths. Others were mere smudged white blurs, trailing fading streamers away into an unfocussed distance. The worst of all were the ones that looked like what they believed they truly were.

    The shaggy beast moved through the hall searching for the lost girl. The ghosts parted before him. He walked right through the few that didn’t.
    
    Amnesia had been beside him until moments before. Then Herringcarp had twisted, shifting and sighing like a tormented sleeper turning in his nightmare, or perhaps closing its jaws like a predator springing a trap. Then Amnesia was gone, taken again from her guardian monster; and the monster was alone.

    And so the monster searched amongst the ghosts, seeking his talisman, looking for his home.

    Some of the dead were familiar. He recognised one of the monks that he’d seen when the grey walls were a monastery. He saw one of the asylum inmates, still bound – eternally bound – in the grubby sleeveless straight-jackets and iron masks reserved for the criminally insane. And there beside the lunatic was a warder, his throat still glistening with new-spilt blood where the monster’s claws had torn.

    The ghosts howled and wept and gibbered. Some stared at nothing, lost in pasts that even the monster’s watery yellow eyes couldn’t see.

    The monster pressed forward though the ethereal mass, feeling the pressure of souls piled on souls.

    One of the white silhouettes shied away from the hairy beast. One of the spirits could see him.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who are you?” the monster demanded, in a voice which killed, a voice which could command death.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m a doctor,” whispered the spectre. “You have to believe me. Everything has been changed. I was the psychiatrist, not the madman. The world made sense. You have to believe me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who am I?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re nothing. You’re another delusion in this place of falsehoods. You don’t really exist. Only I exist. You have to believe me. You have to.”

    The beast felt pity for one who appealed for the faith of an unreal monster. “Where is the girl?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“There is no girl. Or if there is she is long dead, of the company of ghosts. The girl is not real either. None of this is real. It can’t be. I’m a doctor… A doctor…”

    The monster left the sobbing wisp behind and pressed on down the hall, into the darker narrower passage beyond.

***


    Doctor Morningstar was no shade. The white-coated medic peeled off bloody gloves and dropped them in a metal bowl, then turned to his orderly and gestured for Bradley to wheel the patient away.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Tattoo this one as subject thirteen,” the doctor commanded. “I’ve implanted the largest amount of material yet in him.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Serve him right, the noisy bugger,” judged the brutal warder. “Bit of brain-cutting’s what that one wanted to shut him up.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“This isn’t a punishment,” Morningstar chided. “I’ve given Winkelweald a wonderful opportunity. How many medical practitioners have wanted to understand madness better? How few have actually had the opportunity to taste it for themselves?”

    Bradley shrugged and tried to look intelligent. “Three?” he guessed.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I have folded into this man’s brain all the nightmares of a thousand and more years of distilled insanity. I have implanted within him brain-matter from the subject Ioldabaoth, imbued by my machines with the very essence of madness captured by the monks who laboured here long ago until they too were claimed by the dark. Dr Winkelweald will be my masterpiece. My breakthrough.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ll wheel him back to his cell then, shall I?” asked Bradley.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Soon I shall be ready for the final phase,” the handsome asylum head went on, ignoring the banal ignorance of his assistance. “Bradley, you will find me one of the female patients, one of those with child. The first trimester, for preference. When Winkelweald is ready I shall section his brain and we shall implant all that he has become, all that Ioldabaoth was, into that foetus. A world of the perspectives of madness into the unformed mind of an unborn.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Get one of the girls with child. Gotcha.”

    Morningstar seemed to have forgotten that anyone else was there. He stared around the shadowed operating theatre but seemed to be seeing far beyond. “I shall master you at last,” he promised Herringcarp. “I shall reign here, and then I shall reign everywhere.”

***


    Amnesia's screams seemed to fill the monster's head even though she wasn't there. They dragged him on, ever more urgently, ever more depserately. He pressed through the halls of ghosts until another phantasm of greater substance blocked the his way.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who are you?” demanded the monster. That killing voice seemed sovereign over those already dead.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I am no-one,” replied the grim shade. His face was a corpse-skull, his body a bundle of gory emaciated limbs and naked ribcage. “I never was. I was distilled from fear and pain and given flesh for a while, and then men called me the Fearwalker. I rose to greatness for a moment, as a Destroyer of Tales. Then I fell to oblivion.”

    The monster considered this. He could feel the hooks of terror that the phantasm tried to sink into his mind, but his burning needs allowed him to shrug them away. This was only a ghost, and nothing it could do was more important than finding the lost girl.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who am I?” the monster asked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You are the last of your breed, shaped by sorcery as an abomination, unlike any of your race, forever alone and damned,” replied Fearwalker, perhaps with a hint of relish at the torments of another sundered soul.

    The monster sensed the truth in the dead thing’s words, and they hurt. But still he pressed on. “Where is the girl?”

    Fearwalker paused. The creature of torment and nightmare sniffed the air as if seeking a scent. “Lost,” he replied at last. “You must go deeper if you would find the truth. There are worse things than me here. That is where your answers lie.”

    The monster took his leave and pressed deeper into the shadows. Now the darkness was like a living thing, cold and hungry. All the monster’s instincts warned him to flee, except for that one basic need to find Amnesia and bring her safe from the night.

    A door opened before him, and for a moment he thought he’d found her. There she was, dressed in tight jeans and a t-shirt, cuffed to a table. The woman standing over her in the purple jumpsuit and the walking dead man beside her were familiar too, although the monster could not remember how he knew them. But some part of him knew that they weren’t there. They were just echoes.

    He strained to try and hear what the echoes might be saying.

    The whispers were quieter even than his own. He could only catch fragments, snatched phrases remembered from another time.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“…tried to stop my plans, and that I cannot allow…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“…comes looking for me you’ll wish you’d never pulled on a stupid-looking mask…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“…think I let you break in here and find this place by accident?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“…need some of your essence to make the masquerade complete…”

    The scene blurred into violence, then faded to shadows. The monster dived forward, growling, then crashed into the floor where the taunting dead man had been. The beast’s leap had been instinctive.

    A door opened where none had been before. A sickly candlelight played from the chamber within. The remaining ghosts seemed to shy away.

    The fur on the monster’s hackles rose as he approached the doorway. There was something inside, something dangerous. Something deadly.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Amnesia,” the monster said, to give him courage, and lurched in.

***


    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What do you think of it?” asked the Mayor.

    The medical man looked around the derelict shell, admiring the possibilities. “It’s wonderful,” he admitted. “The sea aspect, the secluded location offering security and quiet, the structure of the old foundation. I love it.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Good.” The Mayor turned to his aide. “Make a note. Arrange for the budget committee to purchase this site. Quietly. We don’t want our friends in Gothametropolis York knowing that we plan a house of lunatics in their back yard.”

    The architect with them examined the rotting shell that would soon be rebuilt and transformed into a home for the criminally insane. Already his eye was picking out detail from the ancient ruins, suggesting new form and shape for the neo-gothic masterpiece that lurked in his mind. “What was this place?” he asked. “Who built it?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The records are long lost,” the Mayor replied. “But it was built by somebody who understood power.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“These old carvings,” the medical man observed. “Is this a caduceus? Or an infinity symbol? And this… a green man? Some shaggy beast?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The whole place looks ecclesiastical,” the architect ventured. “Some old priory or presbytery perhaps. The early Dutch settlers?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I believe the layout is more on the European mediaeval model,” the clerk reported. “The floor plan is identical to one recorded on the east coast of Britain before it was washed into the sea a couple of centuries ago.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, it’ll do,” said Dr Waltz, looking around enthusiastically at the site for the future Herringcarp Asylum. “It’ll do just fine.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ll get to work on the designs at once,” agreed Leyland Reed, architect of Parodiopolis, about to begin work on his last and greatest edifice, the one in which he would scream out his last days in madness and despair.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And I’ll take care of the legal matters and sensitive issues,” agreed Mr Lucien the clerk. He looked exactly like Dr Morningstar and the Abbot of Herringcarp. “This is an historic moment, Mayor Parody. Here we shape the future. Here we shape the world.”

***


    The monster was frightened to go into the room, but the compulsion to find Amnesia was too strong. He ducked through the doorway and found another spirit awaiting him.

    The old man sat on an ebony throne and he looked as ancient as the walls behind him. Taloned hands gripped the sides of the worn stone chair. Cold glowing eyes looked up at the monster as he entered the chamber.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“So you have got this far.” said the ancient. “Good evening.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who are you?” demanded the monster.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A ghost,” replied the old man. “But not a ghost of the past.” He cradled his fingers together and regarded his visitor. “An answer for an answer. Have you seen me before?”

    The monster regarded the old man’s parchment-yellow face more closely. “Yes,” he whispered. “In the asylum, and again in the abbey. But then you were younger.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Very good. But it wasn’t me you saw. Not yet.”

    The monster didn’t have time for riddles, not with greater questions burning in his fraying mind. “Who am I?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You are a troll by birth, a creature relegated to the realms of myth by a tedious mundane world.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I am a troll?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The name you were given by those who captured you was Wangmundo. I do not know if that is your true name or not. It matters little to me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I am… Wangmundo?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I you wish it. An answer for an answer. Do you know that you have been cursed, that your voice carries death for all who hear it? Do you care?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Should a monster care?”

    The old man shook a finger. “That’s not an answer, that is an evasion.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I care,” Wangmundo replied.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And should a monster care?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s another question. But it’s my turn now. Where is the girl?” demanded the troll.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“She’s close by. As near as a heartbeat but as impossible to return to as a fatal decision. This place is full of branches, Wangmundo. The wrong turn takes you down a path that cannot be reversed.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“How do I find her?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“An answer for an answer,” the old man replied. “Tell me first why you are so compelled to seek her out.”

    The monster had no easy reply. He searched his feelings, tried to make sense of the tattered patchwork of instinct and intellect that he was holding together with desperate effort. “I need her,” he said at last.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You need her because of what you are, and because of what you have become,” the ancient explained. “Your race has strong territorial instincts. You claim a home – a cave, a stone, a bridge – and you bond with it. If it is lost to you, a part of you dies.”

    It seemed true. The words clicked home like a missing jigsaw shape. The beast did not want to betray how much he needed this knowledge. “So?” he growled.

    The ancient shrugged. “You were hunted. Your talisman, the magical item which defined your home, was stolen from you. Bereft of it you declined, your mind dwindling, your strength ebbing, homeless and hopeless.”

    The monster thought of the mad, lost wisps of spirits that crowded the halls outside. Was he so different from them?

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That does not answer my question,” he insisted. “Where is the girl?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, we’ll get to her,” the old man promised. “In time we shall get to everything.” It sounded almost like a threat. “When first you met, in the world beyond these walls, the girl found you at your lowest point. You were dying, mentally and physically. And she cared for you.”

    The monster remembered cool soft hands mending his torn flesh, gentle words soothing his tormented rage.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You had lost your talisman, that which defined your home. In your desperation you made her your talisman instead. Where she is, that is your home.”

    Something clicked in the monster’s mind. This was truth. “Without her I am nothing,” he realised. “My thoughts vanish, my control is gone. I am soulless, a beast. I wither and die.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s why you can always find her,” the ancient explained. “It’s why you followed her even here. Those who condemned her to this place and those who seek to harm her here did not expect that.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then where… where is she?”

    The old man told him. The monster howled and rose to his full height, his watery yellow eyes blazing with fury.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“There’s a way to get to her in time,” the ancient noted at last, when the beast was suitably wild. “A doorway, of sorts. It is hidden inside this structure. Find it and it will take you to the girl. The doorway resembles a mirror.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“How do I find it?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Your instinct will drive you. Some deep sense drags you to your talisman. Let that sense guide you to the Portal, and thence to your home. Find the mirror. That is all you must do.”

    The monster, Wangmundo, closed his fists so tightly that his claws cut into his palms. He seized the rage coursing through him and channelled it to his voice. “Find the portal!” he commanded the dead. “Find the way to the girl!”

    The ancient man in the ebony chair watched the creature lope away, a burning heart amidst the debris of lost souls. That was just what he needed. The monster served his purposes.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Soon I will be free,” he promised the world in cold Latverian tones. “The troll will lead me to what I need. Soon I will be whole. Soon I will be one. Soon I will be unstoppable. And then… then we shall see.”

***


Continued in: Chapter Nine: Blood Sacrifice

***


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Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2008 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2008 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.






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