Spawn of Man (2 page)

‘Working late tonight, Mr. Douglas?’ inquired Miller.

‘Yes, John. I will be occupied until the dawn in my private quarters and must not be disturbed, you understand?’ replied Daniel.

Miller looked at Daniel with disapproval. ‘Certainly, Mr. Douglas, but begging your pardon, I would rest easier if you would permit me to… assist you with the erm, other patients.’

Daniel knew the man was a decent fellow and that his employer’s safety was his motivation for offering his assistance with the segregated inmates. But Daniel could not allow any outside agencies’ involvement in tonight’s events.

‘That will not be necessary, Mr. Miller, but thank you for your concern,’ said Daniel. He crossed the wooden floor of the reception area that housed the attendants’ offices and unlocked the door to his private rooms on the north side of the institute.

John conceded with a nod of his head and retired to the office. He was not happy with
Daniel’s decision to work alone with the inmates that had been isolated from the rest of the institute’s community and saw it as dereliction of his duties to consent to such an arrangement. He had heard the noises that emanated from the rooms beyond the door, as had other members of the staff.

Daniel walked into the study, closed the door behind him and locked it, then strode across the small room and unlocked the second door, leaving the key on the writing desk. This second door was of steel design and although he shut it as he passed through, it remained unlocked, as he no longer held the key. His mind was already racing ahead to the evening’s task.

Daniel hurried down a flight of stone steps, around the right-angled bend and down a second flight, turning the overhead lights on as he did so. The subterranean chamber was bathed in pale orange-yellow light, like the dying sunset that ebbed in the night sky outside, and Daniel stopped for a second and surveyed the enclosed space. Each side of the room had three cells, complete with sturdy iron bars, still hidden in relative darkness. At the far end of the room there was another door, this one left ajar. As if controlled by the same lever that fired the array of lights into life, a discordance of screams and wails began, dreadful and lamenting, as figures shuffled from the shadows, manacled with heavy chains.

Daniel held his head in his hands as the cacophony increased in volume, seeping into his skull, threatening to explode it from the inside.

‘Are you unwell, Doctor Daniel?’ questioned the young woman in the middle cell on the right.

Mary was the only patient in this room that Daniel did not deem it necessary to manacle.

‘Pardon me, Mary?’ Daniel lowered his hands and stared at the occupant of the cell, revealed in shallow brightness.

There was no question she was exceptionally beautiful: an abundance of flaxen locks tumbling over her rounded cheeks, copiously applied makeup, which she was allowed to possess in return for her co-operation, full red lips, cunning green eyes and an elegant nose, exquisitely flared at the nostrils.

‘You seem troubled, Doctor Daniel; may I be of some assistance?’

‘No, Mary, thank you, it is nothing,’ replied Daniel.

‘You know I would love to help you with your work, Doctor Daniel. I am a fully trained nurse and could be invaluable to you in many ways doctor.’ She lowered her head to regard him with devilish intent.

‘I’m sure, Mary, but I prefer to work alone, we have discussed this before have we not?’

‘Very well, doctor.’ She smiled, but it was the smile a wild beast might display at the thought of devouring its prey.

Mary was quite insane and believed she was a still a practicing nurse; however she had not been employed as such for over four years. She had seen great horrors in the field hospitals of France during 1917 and when she had returned she seemed composed and erudite but that was only a façade. Inside she harbored deep, angry mental scars, psychological injuries that persuaded her to attempt the “cure” of four patients via major invasive surgery. This had been administered without anesthetic whilst the patients were lucid and restrained by straps.

Daniel left Mary and stepped over the cable that trailed from her cell. Identical cables wove their way out of each of the six cells; thick and insulated like immense snakes curling out between the iron bars and slithering through the open door at the far end of the chamber. The cables were attached to each inmate by a series of electrodes placed directly on the surface of their brains, through a surgical incision into the skull. Although Daniel strove to maintain a sterile environment, it had been impossible due to the nature of the surroundings, and the inmates had suffered infections and adverse reaction to the surgical procedures.

The inmates had crept forward out of the shadows to the limitations allowed by their restraints and were now visible as gruesome apparitions in the weak ambience of the chamber. The wounds, where electrodes cut into their heads and through their skulls, were suppurating, open and infected. The metal conductors themselves resembled many-limbed insects, quarrying into the craniums of the hapless lunatics.

Blood oozed and crusted down the sides of their faces and their hair was matted with pus that was dark and aged. The smell was rank and offensive as Daniel cast a look at each inmate and progressed down the aisle between the cells. The cables fed brain waves and electrical activity, generated by the firing of nerve cells, into a generator in the room beyond the second door at the top of the gangway. The generator calibrated each patient’s specific brain waves and then channeled them into receivers built into a chair in the centre of that room.

The chair had been designed by a lunatic whom Daniel had encountered whilst searching for suitable patients for his research. The man was called Bartholomew and Daniel had found him locked in a padded room in an asylum in London. He had been ranting incoherently, swapping languages sporadically, and intoning detailed
instructions for the construction of a demonic device to contact the dead.

The man insisted he had projected his will to the realm of death and had been instructed to recover a long-lost book by the creatures that held dominion there. Daniel had been fascinated by the man and had transferred him to his own facility immediately. The process was not difficult once the appropriate pockets had been lined, and the individual now occupied the last cell on the right in the underground chamber.

Bartholomew had told Daniel that he had been given information that revealed the location of the book and that at length he had secured it. At first he seemed eager to pass the book on to Daniel, as if purging himself of its taint. But as time passed, Bartholomew became more and more agitated, until he demanded the book be returned to his safekeeping. Daniel would not hear of it though, and studied the book and its designs intently.

Working from the book’s blueprints, Daniel had commissioned carpenters to produce the chair, faithfully replicating the design. Although none of the craftsmen had questioned the project, Daniel was aware of their unease at the subject matter. However, he was content with their assumption that he was merely an eccentric with too much money and too much time on his hands.

The patient who had originally drawn the plans was frantic the whole time the chair was being constructed, even though the work was completed in a workshop far removed from the institute, and the patient had no means of knowing of its undertaking. Similarly, its transportation to the institute and its placement in the room it now occupied had been carried out at night, whilst the inmates were sedated.

Daniel had tried to placate Bartholomew by discussing for hours his misgivings about Daniel’s interest in the chair. The man fervently believed he had been given a draft for assembling a vessel that would enable a connection to be forged between this world and the afterlife. Daniel wanted to believe the patient had indeed been bestowed with a dark knowledge. A wisdom that had originated on another plane of existence, a plane where the essence of his son Frank now resided. When he listened to what many judged to be insane babbling, he found himself convinced by the man’s rationale.

The chair itself was heavily elaborate, with an abundance of designs sprouting from the woodwork, and rested on bowed legs, like that of an animal bent for an attack. The seat was manufactured from human skin, stretched tightly over padding and dyed a deep red, as if it had been dipped in blood. Daniel had secured the material through a surgeon friend, using research as the excuse for its necessity, and had attached it himself.

The high, angular back of the chair was carved into a plume of spindles that fanned up and out from the seat with every hideous depiction of human suffering laced into the columns. And this theme was mirrored in the arms of the piece with scenes composed of naked bodies subjected to heinous acts of butchery. The delicate engraving presented limbs severed from torsos and heads severed from necks by monstrous, bloodthirsty ghouls. The chair may have been Bartholomew’s work, inspired by architects from beyond the grave, but the addition of the generator and the cables had been effected by Daniel.

Daniel approached the cell where Bartholomew was incarcerated and spoke to him. ‘Bartholomew, are you awake?’

The man was huddled in the corner of his cell, coiled on the floor, but he replied instantly, ‘Yes, I am awake, doctor. I have been awake for three years. I dare not sleep.’

‘Why is that, Bartholomew, why dare you not sleep my friend?’

‘You know the answer to that question doctor. They still wait for me. I will not give them opportunity to take me, to pour their poison into me again.’

‘But I find it hard to believe you have not slept in three years. The human body is incapable of such a feat. Bartholomew, you are an intelligent man, you must know that yourself?’

‘Do not patronize me, doctor. I
am
an intelligent man, just as you believe yourself to be. But you are thinking like a fool now, like I was, seduced by their promises!’

‘Whose promises, Bartholomew?’

‘The dead! With their entire empty words and falsehoods. You must understand,’ the inmate said, shifting his posture so that he moved into the half-light, nearer to the front of his cell, ‘I am not insane. I wrote my notes whilst in a rapture induced by my exposure to a place far beyond your wildest imaginings.’ And he wept now, digging his long, broken, dirty nails deep into his forearm, gouging chunks of flesh from a self-inflicted gash than ran across the muscle there. The blood trickled through the dark hair and dripped onto his lap.

‘Why do you hurt yourself so, Bartholomew?’ sighed Daniel.

The man smiled, a severe little manipulation of his mouth, that narrowed his eyes and gave him the look of a mischievous child. But
there was nothing childlike about the man in the rest of his appearance, fully six feet with a wild shock of prematurely white hair and manic, dark brown, almost black irises that seemed to bore through one’s skin to read the soul.

He began beating one fist mechanically against his temple, just in front of an electrode, inducing a bluish contusion that discolored the skin, and spoke in rhythm with the blows, ‘I-am-simply-reminding-myself-that-I-am-alive, that-I-still-exist-on-this-plane, that-I-have-come-back-from-their-domain.’

‘You mean from the afterlife, Bartholomew?’

The inmate ceased his blows, ‘Yes, from the afterlife doctor. You have no idea what you are dealing with my friend. The chair is a portal. You must not contemplate its actualization. It is a means for them to rip apart the thin veil that separates their world from ours. That can never be allowed to happen!’

The man’s agitation escalated, so that he clawed his bearded cheeks, drawing fresh threads of blood that leaked in crimson, vein-like configurations down his flesh.

Daniel now noticed a single finger, cut off just above the knuckle, lay discarded on the stone floor of the cell. It lay bent and vertical as if beckoning, and a small pool of dark liquid seeped from the detached end. Bartholomew tracked the sweep of Daniel’s eyes to the grisly specimen. Daniel looked at the patient again and noticed an inordinate amount of blood blemishing his teeth and lips, spilling over the whiskers of his bearded chin and onto his bare chest. Daniel wondered what other appendages he had gnawed on.

‘Bartholomew, you said the dead instructed you on the chair’s design. How exactly did they achieve that? Please tell me again.’

Although Bartholomew was adamant any attempt to construct the chair would result in calamity, if he were engaged intelligently he would become animated on the subject.

Consequently, Daniel had become adept at walking the thin line between encouraging the patient’s disclosures, without being condescending.

Bartholomew replied, ‘I trained my mind to become detached from my body and to ascend to the next plane of existence, to the place after this place, the first stage of our journey after physical death.’

‘Are you saying you visited this other world with your mind, actually witnessed life after death?’

‘Yes, that is precisely what I am saying doctor. The human mind is able to project itself independent of its physical body; it is just a matter of the correct schooling in the procedure.’

‘And once there, on this other plane, you interacted with the dead? They perceived your presence?’

‘Of course. I assumed a body fitting the realm my mind existed on. That realm is made of a universal substance, a universal matter, and one may adapt it to best represent oneself.’