The Lunatic's Curse Page 14

  The motive was simple enough: money. The Perambulating Submersible was unique. It would be sought after all over the world. Tibor was going to be famous. Rex wasn’t sure how he felt about this either, but there were more important things to worry about than fame. And as long as Dr Velhildegildus was occupied building the underwater craft then he couldn’t conduct any more Lodestone interrogations, and in the meantime Rex could investigate the meaning of his father’s cryptic last words.

  Did he trust Dr Velhildegildus? ‘Hmm,’ mused Rex. It was an odd thing. When he was in the same room as him, listening to him speak, he believed that he was a man of his word. It was only afterwards that he was not so sure. But they had a deal and it was to neither’s advantage to break it.

  A shadow fell across the page and Rex looked up to see Hildred in the doorway. Startled again by the intensity of her eyes, he wondered if he would ever get used to them.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Rex quickly folded up the plan. ‘Er, I’m not really supposed to say.’

  ‘I promise not to look.’

  ‘I’m finished anyway.’ He picked up the list and Hildred sat down opposite him with her legs tucked neatly under her. Rex could see that her boots were grubby and her fingernails were black.

  ‘Did Dr Velhildegildus say anything about when the asylum would be ready again?’ she asked.

  Rex laughed. Bearing in mind Dr Velhildegildus’s other priorities, he thought it might be quite some time before they saw any new faces. ‘Are you anxious for more work?’

  Hildred shrugged, and it was quite a sight to see. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m not used to the emptiness. When I was with the Panopticon there were people around all the time.’

  ‘What about your mother and father?’

  ‘My mother died in an accident a long time ago, and Father, well, he left the Panopticon after that. I haven’t seen him since. Besides, your father is so much more interesting. Tell me again about the man with the serpent’s tongue.’

  ‘Mr Sarpalius,’ recalled Rex. ‘I remember having a drink – I’m sure now that it was drugged – and I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, I was lying beside the lake. Oh, and I’d hit my head.’ He put his hand up to his skull. The wound was still tender. ‘That’s when Father said he couldn’t take me with him.’

  Hildred frowned. ‘But he didn’t want you to stay with Acantha either.’

  ‘I watched them drag him away,’ said Rex quietly. ‘The doctor said he died from a lung disease, something he caught in the asylum. If he’d never come here he would still be alive.’ A note of bitterness had crept into his voice. ‘The night he went mad he said he’d found out something about Mr Chapelizod, and that he wasn’t to come to the house any more. Acantha just watched him, as if she knew what was going to happen, but I can’t prove that she did.’

  ‘It certainly looks as if she has something to hide,’ said Hildred. She was cracking her knuckles, as she always did when she was thinking.

  ‘After that Acantha took me to Dr Velhildegildus and he used his Lodestone Procedure on me.’

  Hildred’s eyes widened. ‘What on earth’s that?’

  ‘It’s a sort of interrogation. It’s very hard to resist. Dr Velhildegildus is so persuasive. He has a way of making you say stuff even though you don’t want to. It’s like a dream – you don’t know what’s real and what’s not.’

  ‘I doubt he would get anything out of me.’

  Rex snorted at Hildred’s confidence. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. I barely remember what I told him!’

  Hildred chewed thoughtfully on her lip. ‘And then he asked you here to help him out? Don’t you think that’s a coincidence?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Rex cagily. ‘He knows I’m a Grammaticus. I’m good at making things, and that’s exactly what he needs, for the asylum, I mean.’

  Rex looked at Hildred’s grave expression. She seemed determined, even more so than he, to work out the mystery.

  ‘What about the book your father gave you?’ she asked.

  ‘I know all of the stories inside out. My favourite is Daedalus and Icarus – they were stuck on an island with a maze too.’

  ‘Maybe that means something.’

  ‘Well, I’m hardly going to make wings and fly away!’

  ‘What about the warning?’

  ‘On your head be it?’ said Rex. ‘It sounds as if I have to do something, but I just don’t know what.’

  They both fell silent. Rex looked over at Hildred. He wanted to unburden himself completely, to tell her what he was really doing with Dr Velhildegildus, but he stopped himself. ‘It’s hard to know who to trust these days,’ he said quietly.

  ‘You can trust me,’ said Hildred. ‘You have no reason not to.’

  Rex smiled. ‘I do believe I can.’

  ‘You know,’ said Hildred, ‘I’m really glad you’re here. Apart from anything, what on earth would I do on my own? Let’s face it, Mrs Runcible is plain odd, Walter Freakley spends all his time messing about with his boat, and as for Gerulphus! I don’t know what he does all day. Have you noticed how he keeps disappearing?’ Then she jumped to her feet. ‘Enough talk. Let’s go see if we can hear those voices again. I’m sure it won’t be so bad in the daytime.’

  31

  All Part of the Job

  The question of what Gerulphus did at the asylum was indeed a valid one. While Rex was busy with his list and Hildred was with Mrs Runcible, Gerulphus was enjoying a light snooze, and the peace, by the kitchen fire. Mrs Runcible chatted incessantly. ‘Enough to drive a fellow mad,’ he murmured.

  From under the Hebdomadal he considered his current situation. As far as Tibor Velhildegildus knew, he was just Gerulphus, the asylum caretaker. Dr Velhildegildus seemed happy with that; Gerulphus certainly was, and what Tibor Velhildegildus didn’t know wouldn’t harm him! In fact there were lots of things it was not necessary for the ‘mind doctor’ to be aware of for the time being; namely what Gerulphus had done before the breakout and how after the breakout he had seized the opportunity to change his life. Who wouldn’t have in the same situation? It had all worked out very well indeed. After all, Mrs Runcible was perfectly happy in the kitchen – she had always loved to cook – and Walter Freakley enjoyed his job as boatman. So why shouldn’t he, Gerulphus, take the chance to have a little satisfaction too?

  Hildred was right. He did spend much of his day out of sight. Mainly he spent his time wandering the empty asylum corridors, taking immense pleasure from the fact that there wasn’t the noise there used to be. He had always found the shouting, screaming, moaning, complaining and general cacophony of the inmates most unpleasant. Gerulphus enjoyed his own company, and always had, even as a little boy. He had never been particularly sociable. Just as well; few wished to spend time in his company. To others, he didn’t look right – people were so judgemental! But no one cared about that here. He thought about his present companions – hardly his intellectual equals but at least they accepted him. Sometimes Mrs Runcible would not see him from morning until evening but she never said a word. Her meals were as hit and miss as his appearances for them; when it came to cooking, enthusiasm was no substitute for skill.

  Gerulphus sighed and the paper flapped gently on his nose.Yes, weighing up his past life and his present position, there was no doubt that he was now in a far better place. He knew that he had to make the most of his relative freedom. Now that Dr Velhildegildus was in charge, his days here were numbered. But he had come to view all obstacles as opportunities.

  ‘Ah, well,’ he murmured, ‘all good things must come to an end.’ Whatever the doctor was up to, and Gerulphus knew he was up to something, he would not let it interfere with his own plans. He had been very interested to hear that young Rex was to come over. It was a shame about Rex’s father. Of all the lunatics in the place he seemed the least mad. He had tried to help him, and Hooper, during those difficult days, but Fate had other ideas. Tired of thinking, Gerulphus laid down the journ
al and roused himself. There was one job he had to finish before he left.

  A short time later Gerulphus was standing at the end of the tunnel of cells, as had Rex and Hildred the previous night, in front of the last door. He pulled a long chain from under his shirt upon which there were two keys. Using the larger one he unlocked the door. It opened with ease – he had oiled the hinges – and once inside he made sure to lock the door behind him. This cell was much bigger than the others and in the centre there were two tables side by side. On shelves around the room, and against the walls, there were glass jars and pots and miscellaneous oddments, but Gerulphus paid them no heed.

  On the wall behind the door there was a panel of wood. Ostensibly its purpose was to provide hooks upon which to hang old branding irons, but Gerulphus knew better. He pushed aside one of the irons to expose a keyhole. He put the second key in the hole, turned it and the panel swung out like a door, revealing a dark hole in the wall behind it. Gerulphus climbed through and the panel closed slowly behind him, leaving not a trace of his presence.

  Gerulphus had entered the underground maze.

  *

  Gerulphus stood with his lantern and listened for a moment. All was quiet. He strode off with the confidence of one familiar with his surroundings. As he went along the subterranean passageways he passed at intervals the grinning skulls and skeletal remains of previous occupants of the asylum above. For it was here, down in this labyrinth of catacombs, that the bodies of the lunatics were laid to rest when they passed on. They were not given a coffin or even a simple wooden box, merely placed in roughly hewn shallow cavities in the walls, where down the decades they dried out and turned to dust. Gerulphus was not in any way unnerved by his silent and desiccated companions; he lacked the imagination to be.

  This was where in a moment of weakness he had taken Ambrose and Hooper, to protect them from the rampaging lunatics – they really were completely mad! When it was safe, Freakley had been more than happy to row them over to Opum Oppidulum.

  Gerulphus’s confident stride was deceptive. In truth, it was possible to get utterly lost down here and Gerulphus knew of at least three skeletons that were seated on the ground rather than lying in their proper resting place in the wall. There was also a lone skull. Perhaps they had been mistakenly laid to rest and then revived – only to die anyway. Or perhaps they were one of the many lunatics abandoned regularly in the labyrinth by the cruel warders . . .

  Ticking off the turns on his long fingers, and taking great care to avoid a very deep hole in the middle of onepassageway, Gerulphus eventually rounded one final corner and stepped out into an enormous chamber to enjoy a sight that was nothing short of spectacular. The whole space was lit by a strange luminescence emanating from the rocky walls and convex ceiling. Some sort of lichen, he had concluded, that cast an odd blue glow across the place, which was reflected and intensified by the sheet of sparkling water that greeted the eye. Water? Yes, for in this underground chamber, by means of prehistoric underwater passages, Lake Beluarum lapped gently on a sparkling sandy shore.

  During the lunatics’ breakout, genuinely fearing for their lives, the warders themselves had hidden in the tunnels but, in an ironic twist of fate, they had met their death at the hands of a lunatic who was already in there.

  A sort of poetic justice, thought Gerulphus. He might be the asylum caretaker but he had little sympathy for the warders. They were no better than Chapelizod.

  But the underground lake wasn’t the only thing Gerulphus had discovered. He went towards the water’s edge, dropped to his knees and began to rake through the pebbles. After a few minutes he picked out one which shone quite unlike the others. A diamond. Just recently there were always one or two to be found in the pebbles, and he made sure to collect them every day. And with the advent of the full moon and the rising water they seemed to be washing up with increasing regularity. Gerulphus smiled and put it in his pocket to add to his collection.

  Next he crunched purposefully towards a rocky ledge that ran around the wall just above the surface of the water and climbed up on to it. About halfway around, part of the ledge projected out into the water. Gerulphus walked to the end and picked up a stick that was lying there. He knelt at the edge, his pale blue reflection looking back at him, and began to hit the surface of the water rhythmically. The noise echoed around the chamber, a sort of watery slap, and he continued for some minutes. Nothing happened but he kept going. It made him smile to think that if anyone were to look at him now they could be forgiven for thinking they might be in the presence of a genuine lunatic.

  And then he stopped. On the far side of the chamber, where the rocky ceiling came down in a curving arc to meet the lake, a ripple spread slowly across the surface. And then another and then another. Gerulphus watched with bated breath, the stick suspended before him, until finally a huge, dark and triangular scaly fin broke the surface and cut through the water.

  ‘Ah, here you are, my lovely,’ whispered Gerulphus, almost, but not quite, with affection. ‘Ready for your snack?’

  As it approached, the true size of the monster became apparent. It cruised back and forth for a while, with each pass coming ever closer to the end of the rocky promontory. Then in one smooth and graceful movement it rolled over on its side and looked at Gerulphus with an enormous left eye. And its skin glittered with the hundreds of delicate diamonds that were pressed into its fleshy scales.

  32

  An Unexpected Encounter

  Rex thought he would never get used to the smell in the tunnel of cells and he hated inhaling the damp and fungal odour. This time, he avoided even looking into the tiny rooms and went straight to the locked door at the end. Hildred was already there with her hands flat on the wall again. She certainly has strange ways of doing things, thought Rex.

  ‘I can’t feel anything,’ she said. ‘Yesterday, I could feel reverberations in the rock. Now, nothing.’

  Rex pressed his own ear to the rock and they both stood silently for a few more minutes, concentrating intently.

  ‘It must have been my imagination,’ said Rex finally. ‘But I’ll tell you what is real – the smell of fish! Mrs Runcible was cooking some this morning and the stink seems to have made its way down here.’

  ‘Forget the fish,’ said Hildred impatiently. ‘Let’s see what’s behind this door. Have you got the picklock?’

  Rex was surprised to find that his hands were shaking, and the simple task took longer than usual. It didn’t help that Hildred was breathing down his neck in anticipation. When the lock finally sprang he pushed the door open into the coal-black room.

  Hildred smiled. ‘That’s a good trick,’ she said, and went straight into the darkness.

  Rex followed. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘we can’t both have imagined it.’

  ‘Imagined what?’ said a deep voice from the shadows.

  Rex dropped the lantern in fright and Hildred grabbed at it before it hit the floor. Then both she and Rex near leaped out of their skins as a ghostly figure came out of the darkness towards them.

  ‘Gerulphus!’ exclaimed Rex with a mixture of relief and fear.

  Hildred gripped Rex’s arm and he could feel that she was shaking.

  ‘I’m intrigued,’ said Gerulphus in his familiar monotone. ‘What is it you think you imagined?’

  ‘We heard noises down here yesterday,’ said Hildred, recovering. ‘We came to have another look.’

  ‘But today it is quiet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then maybe it is all in your head. Or it could be the ghost.’

  Was that a smile on his face? wondered Rex.

  Hildred spoke first. ‘So what brings you down here? Dr Velhildegildus does not plan to use the cells again, does he?’

  ‘I would not allow it,’ said Gerulphus firmly, and his voice was tinged with sincerity and his face showed what passed for an expression of sadness. ‘Some terrible things were going on here under Mr Chapelizod and to this day it is my greatest reg
ret that I didn’t do anything to prevent it. But Cadmus Chapelizod was a clever fellow. He and the warders were all in on it together. In fact the head warder was almost as bad as he was. They went to great lengths to hide what they were up to. As caretaker, I wasn’t even allowed down here. Chapelizod insisted that I spend my time in the grounds. As for Mrs Runcible and Freakley, she was in the kitchen and he was in the boat.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Hildred kindly (rather too kindly, thought Rex). ‘You mustn’t blame yourself. You weren’t to know.’

  Rex did not find Gerulphus as convincing as Hildred did, and he couldn’t help remembering the state of the asylum grounds when he had arrived. They didn’t look as if they had been titivated at all.

  ‘Now, if you look around in here for example,’ continued Gerulphus evenly, ‘you will see what I mean.’

  He closed the door fully and took up a position with his back to the panel.

  ‘As you can tell,’ he said, ‘Mr Chapelizod was not a man to suffer fools gladly.’ He lit his own more powerful lantern and in its spreading light Rex and Hildred watched with growing horror the shapes that emerged.

  ‘Oh my word,’ breathed Rex finally. For there was no doubt about it. This was not a cell; it was a medieval torture chamber.

  Rusty chains strung through metal hoops looped across the walls. Manacles were riveted to posts buried in the floor. There were racks of long-bladed knives and sharp irons rested in the corners, as if just left there casually. Even the tables, innocent in the dark, once fully revealed conspired in the horror, with handcuffs at one end and ankle straps at the other. The floor was strewn with stained straw and wet with brown puddles. And, like all the other cells, there were rats biding their time in the shadows. The shelves on the back wall were crammed untidily with corked brown bottles of unidentifiable liquids. A large bell jar sat at one end of the bottom shelf and, unable to help himself, Rex went closer, only to recoil in disgust when he saw that it was filled with slow-moving, dark-skinned, mottled, writhing creatures.