The House on the Strand

  He came down just after the clock in the hall struck eleven. "Everything's under control," he said. "No panic stations. Your wife's all right, and so are your stepsons. Now what about you?"

  I tried to stand up, but he pushed me back into the chair.

  "Have I hurt her?" I asked.

  "Slight bruising on the neck, nothing more," he said. "It may look a bit blue tomorrow, but it won't show if she wears a scarf."

  "Did she tell you what happened?"

  "Supposing you tell me?"

  "I'd rather hear her version first," I said.

  He took a cigarette out of a packet and lighted it. "Well," he said, "I gather you didn't want any dinner, for reasons known best to yourself, and she spent the evening in here with the boys, while you were in the library. Then they decided to go to bed, and she found you had gone to the kitchen and switched on the lights. There was bacon on the stove burned to a frazzle, the stove still on, but nobody there. So she went down to the basement. It seems you were standing there, near the old kitchen, so she said, waiting for her to come downstairs, and as soon as you saw her you went straight across to the foot of the stairs and began swearing at her, and then you put your hands round her throat and tried to throttle her."

  "That's right," I said.

  He looked at me sharply. Perhaps he thought I would deny it. "She insists you were fighting drunk and didn't know what you were doing," he said, "but it was a pretty grim experience for all of them, and she and those boys were scared out of their wits. More so, as I gather you're not a drinking type."

  "No," I said, "I'm not. And I wasn't drunk."

  He did not answer for a moment. Then he came and stood in front of me, and taking some sort of flash thing from the bag he had with him he examined my eyes. Afterwards he felt my pulse.

  "What are you on?" he asked abruptly.

  "On?"

  "Yes, what drug. Tell me straight, and I'll know how to treat you."

  "That's just it," I said. "I don't know."

  "Was it something Professor Lane gave you?"

  "Yes," I replied.

  He sat down on the arm of the sofa beside my chair. "By mouth or by injection?"

  "By mouth."

  "Was he treating you for something specific?"

  "He wasn't treating me for anything. It was an experiment. Something I volunteered to do for him. I've never taken drugs in my life before I came down here."

  He went on looking at me with his shrewd eyes, and I knew there was nothing for it but to tell him everything.

  "Was Professor Lane on the same drug when he walked into that freight train?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  He got off the sofa and began walking up and down the room, fiddling with things on tables, picking them up and putting them down again, as Magnus himself used to do when coming to a decision.

  "I ought to get you into hospital for observation," he said.

  "No," I said, "for God's sake..." I got up from my chair. "Look," I said, "I've got the stuff in a bottle upstairs. It's all there is left. One bottle. He told me to destroy everything I found here in his lab, and I did--it's all buried in the wood above the garden. I only kept the one bottle, and I used some of it today. It must be different in some way--stronger, I don't know--but you take it away, have it analyzed, anything. Surely you realize, after what has happened tonight, I couldn't touch the stuff again? Christ! I might have killed my wife."

  "I know," he said. "That's why you ought to be in hospital."

  He did not know. He did not understand. How could he understand?

  "Look," I said, "I never saw Vita, my wife, standing at the foot of the stairs. It wasn't her I tried to strangle. It was another woman."

  "What woman?" he asked.

  "A woman called Joanna," I said. "She lived six hundred years ago. She was down there, in the old farmhouse kitchen, and the others were with her too. Isolda Carminowe, and the monk Jean de Meral, and the man the farm belonged to, who used to be her steward, Roger Kylmerth."

  He put out his hand and held my arm. "All right," he said, "steady on, I follow you. You took the drug, and then you went downstairs and saw these people in the basement?"

  "Yes," I said, "but not only here. I've seen them in Tywardreath as well, at the old manor house below the Gratten, and at the Priory too. That's what the drug does. It takes you back into the past, straight into an older world."

  I could hear my voice rising in excitement, and he kept a firm grip on my arm. "You don't believe me?" I persisted. "How can you possibly believe me? But I swear to you I've seen them, heard them talking, watched them moving, I've even seen a man, Isolda's lover Otto Bodrugan, murdered down in Treesmill creek."

  "I believe you all right," he said. "Now supposing we go together and you hand over that remaining bottle?"

  I led him upstairs to the dressing-room, and took the bottle out of the locked suitcase. He did not examine it, he just put it in his bag.

  "Now I'll tell you what I'm going to do," he said. "I'm going to give you a pretty hefty sedative that will put you out until tomorrow morning. Is there some other room than this where you can sleep?"

  "Yes," I said. "There's the spare-room along the landing here."

  "Right," he said. "Collect a pair of pajamas and let's go."

  We went together into the spare-room, and I undressed and got into bed, feeling suddenly humble and subdued, like a child without responsibility.

  "I'll do anything you say," I told the doctor. "Put me right out, if you like, so that I never wake again."

  "I shan't do that," he answered, and for the first time smiled. "When you open your eyes tomorrow I shall probably be the first object you see."

  "Then you won't pack me off to hospital?"

  "Probably not. We'll talk about it in the morning."

  He was getting a syringe out of his bag. "I don't mind what you tell my wife," I said, "as long as you don't tell her about the drug. Let her go on thinking I was crazy drunk. Whatever happens she mustn't know about the drug. She disliked Magnus--Professor Lane--and if she knew about this she'd dislike his memory even more."

  "I dare say she would," he answered, wiping my arm with spirit before plunging his needle in, "and you could hardly blame her."

  "The thing was," I said, "she was jealous. We'd known one another for so many years, he and I; we were at Cambridge together. I used to come and stay here in the old days, and Magnus seemed to take charge. We were always together, the same things intrigued us, the same things made us laugh, Magnus and I... Magnus and I..."

  The depth of an abyss or the long sweet sleep of death, I did not mind. Five hours, five months, five years... in point of fact, so I learned later, it was five days. The doctor always seemed to be there, when I opened my eyes, giving me another jab, or else sitting at the end of the bed swinging his legs, listening while I talked. Sometimes Vita looked in at the door with an uncertain smile, then disappeared. She and Mrs. Collins between them must have made my bed, washed me, fed me--though I have no recollection of eating anything at all. Memory of those days is blotted out. I could have cursed, raved, torn the bedding, or merely slept. I understand I slept, and also talked. Not to Mrs. Collins, but to the doctor. However many sessions it took between jabs I have no idea, nor do I know just what I said, but I gather I spilled, as the saying goes, the beans from start to finish, with the consequence that in the middle of the following week, when I was more or less back to normal and sitting around in a chair upstairs instead of lying in bed, body and mind felt not only rested but completely purged.

  I told him so, over coffee which Vita had brought and left with us, and he laughed, saying a thorough clear-out never did any harm, and it was amazing the amount of stuff people locked away in attics and cellars they had forgotten about, which would be all the better if the light got through to it.

  "Mind you," he added, "purging the soul comes easier to you than to others, because of your Catholic background."

  I stared.
"How did you know I was a Catholic?" I asked.

  "It all came out in the wash," he said.

  I felt strangely shocked. I had imagined that I had told him everything from start to finish about the experiment with the drug, and had described to him, in detail, the happenings of the other world. The fact that I had been born and bred a Catholic had no bearing on this at all.

  "I'm a very bad Catholic," I said. "I couldn't wait to get away from Stonyhurst, and I haven't been to Mass for years. As to Confession..."

  "I know," he said, "all in the attic or underground. Along with your dislike of monks, stepfathers, widows who remarry, and other little things along the same line."

  I poured myself another cup of coffee, and one for him as well, throwing in too much sugar and stirring furiously.

  "Look here," I said, "you're talking nonsense. I never give a thought to monks, widows or stepfathers--with the exception of myself--in my ordinary present-day life. The fact that these people existed in the fourteenth century, and I was able to see them, was entirely due to the drug."

  "Yes," he said, "entirely due to the drug." He did his abrupt thing of getting up and walking round the room. "That bottle you gave me, I did what you ought to have done after the inquest. I sent it up to Lane's chief assistant, John Willis, with a brief word that you had been in trouble with it, and could I have a report as soon as possible? He was good enough to ring me up on the telephone as soon as he had my letter."

  "Well?" I asked.

  "Well, you're a very lucky man to be alive, and not only alive but here in this house and not in a loony-bin. The stuff in that bottle contained probably the most potent hallucinogen that has ever been discovered, and other substances as well which he isn't even sure of yet. Professor Lane was apparently working on this alone: he never took Willis fully into his confidence."

  A lucky man to be alive, possibly. Lucky not to be in a loony-bin, agreed. But much of this I had told myself already, when I first started the experiment.

  "Are you trying to tell me," I asked, "that everything I've seen has been hallucination, dug up from the murky waste of my own unconscious?"

  "No, I'm not," he said. "I think Professor Lane was on to something that might have proved extraordinarily significant about the workings of the brain, and he chose you as guinea-pig because he knew you would do whatever he told you, and that you were a highly suggestible subject into the bargain." He wandered over to the table and finished his cup of coffee. "Incidentally, everything you've told me is just as secret as if you had spilled it into the Confessional. I had an initial struggle with your wife to keep you here, instead of sending you in an ambulance to some top chap in Harley Street who would have bunged you straight into a psychiatric home for six months. I think she trusts me now."

  "What did you tell her?" I asked.

  "I said you had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and suffering from strain and delayed shock owing to the sudden death of Professor Lane. Which, you may agree, is perfectly true."

  I got up rather gingerly from my chair and walked over to the window. The campers had gone from the field across the way, and the cattle were grazing once again. I could hear our own boys playing cricket by the orchard.

  "You may say what you like," I said slowly, "suggestibility, breakdown, Catholic conscience, the lot, but the fact remains that I've been in that other world, seen it, known it. It was cruel, hard, and very often bloody, and so were the people in it, except Isolda, and latterly Roger, but, my God, it held a fascination for me which is lacking in my own world of today."

  He came and stood beside me at the window. He gave me a cigarette, and we both smoked awhile in silence.

  "The other world," he said at last. "I suppose we all carry one inside us, in our various ways. You, Professor Lane, your wife, myself, and we'd see it differently if we all made the experiment together--which God forbid!" He smiled, and flicked his cigarette out of the window. "I have a feeling my own wife might take a dim view of an Isolda if I took to wandering about the Treesmill valley looking for her. Which is not to say I haven't done so through the years, but I'm too down to earth to go back six centuries on the off-chance that I might meet her."

  "My Isolda lived," I said stubbornly, "I've seen actual pedigrees and historical documents to prove it. They all lived. I've got papers downstairs in the library that don't lie."

  "Of course she lived," he agreed, "and what is more had two small girls called Joanna and Margaret, you told me about them. Little girls are more fascinating sometimes than small boys, and you have a couple of stepsons."

  "And what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

  "Nothing," he said, "just an observation. The world we carry inside us produces answers, sometimes. A way of escape. A flight from reality. You didn't want to live either in London or in New York. The fourteenth century made an exciting, if somewhat gruesome, antidote to both. The trouble is that day-dreams, like hallucinogenic drugs, become addictive; the more we indulge, the deeper we plunge, and then, as I said before, we end in the loony-bin."

  I had the impression that everything he said was leading up to something else, to some practical proposition that I must take a grip on myself, get a job, sit in an office, sleep with Vita, breed daughters, look forward contentedly to middle-age, when I might grow cacti in a greenhouse.

  "What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Come on, out with it."

  He turned round from the window and looked me straight in the face.

  "Frankly, I don't mind what you do," he said. "It's not my problem. As your medical adviser and father confessor for less than a week, I'd be glad to see you around for several years to come. And I'll be delighted to prescribe the usual antibiotics when you catch the flu. But for the immediate future I suggest that you get out of this house pretty quick before you have another urge to visit the basement."

  I drew a deep breath. "I thought so," I said. "You've been talking to Vita."

  "Naturally I've talked to your wife," he agreed, "and apart from a few feminine quirks she's a very sensible woman. When I say get out of the house I don't mean forever. But for the next few weeks at least you'd be better away from it. You must see the force of that."

  I did see it, but like a cornered rat I struggled for survival and played for time.

  "All right," I said. "Where do you suggest we go? We've got those boys on our hands."

  "Well, they don't worry you, do they?"

  "No... No, I'm very fond of them."

  "It doesn't matter where, providing it's out of the pull of Roger Kylmerth."

  "My alter ego?" I queried. "He and I are not a scrap alike, you know."

  "Alter egos never are," he said. "Mine is a long-haired poet who faints at the sight of blood. He's dogged me ever since I left medical school."

  I laughed, in spite of myself. He made everything seem so simple. "I wish you had known Magnus," I said. "You remind me of him in an odd sort of way."

  "I wish I had. Seriously, though, I mean what I say about your getting away. Your wife suggested Ireland. Good walking country, fishing, crocks of gold buried under the hills..."

  "Yes," I said, "and two of her compatriots who are touring around in the best hotels."

  "She mentioned them," he said, "but I gather they've gone--got fed up with the weather and flown to sunny Spain instead. So that needn't worry you. I thought Ireland a good idea because it only means a three-hour drive from here to Exeter, and then you can fly direct. Hire a car the other side, and you're away."

  He and Vita had the whole thing taped. I was trapped; there was no way out. I must put a brave face on it and admit defeat.

  "Supposing I refuse?" I asked. "Get back into bed and pull the sheet over my head?"

  "I'd send for an ambulance and cart you off to hospital. I thought Ireland was a better idea, but it's up to you."

  Five minutes later he had gone, and I heard his car roaring up the drive. The sense of anti-climax was absolute: the purge had been very thorou
gh. And I still did not know how much I had told him. Doubtless a hotch-potch of everything I had ever thought or done since the age of three, and, like all doctors with leanings towards psychoanalysis, he had put it together and summed me up as the usual sort of misfit with homosexual leanings who had suffered from birth with a mother complex, a stepfather complex, an aversion to copulation with my widowed wife, and a repressed desire to hit the hay with a blonde who had never existed except in my own imagination.

  It all fitted, naturally. The Priory was Stonyhurst, Brother Jean was that silken bastard who taught me history, Joanna was my mother and poor Vita rolled into one, and Otto Bodrugan the handsome, gay adventurer I really longed to be. The fact that they all had lived, and could be proved to have lived, had not impressed Dr. Powell. It was a pity he had not tried the drug himself, instead of sending bottle C to John Willis. Then he might have thought again.

  Well, it was over now. I must go along with his diagnosis, and his holiday plans as well. God knows it was the least that I could do, after nearly killing Vita.

  Funny he hadn't said anything about side-effects, or delayed action. Perhaps he had discussed this with John Willis, and John Willis had given the OK. But then Willis didn't know about the bloodshot eye, the sweats, the nausea and the vertigo. Nobody did, though Powell may have guessed, especially after our first encounter. Anyway, I felt normal enough now. Too normal, if the truth be told. Like a small boy spanked who had promised to amend his ways.

  I opened the door and called for Vita. She came running up the stairs at once, and I realized, with a sense of shame and guilt, what she must have been through during the past week. Her face was drained of color and she had lost weight. Her hair, usually immaculate, was swept back with a hasty comb behind her ears, and there was a strained, unhappy look in her eyes that I had never seen before.

  "He told me you had agreed to come away," she said. "It was his idea, not mine, I promise you. I only want to do what's best for you."

  "I know that," I said. "He's absolutely right."

  "You're not angry, then? I was so afraid you'd be angry."

  She came and sat beside me on the bed, and I put my arm round her.

  "You must promise me one thing," I said, "and that is to forget everything that's happened up to now. I know it's practically impossible, but I do ask you."