Hospice Belladonna II

Leonard explained the patient he had to her, and Hannah listened.  From time to time she nodded, but she never interrupted and didn’t ask questions.  Only when he’d finished speaking did she finally speak back to him.

“Matson is right,” she said.  “Your patient will be here for a different reason to the others, and while I don’t have a problem with that, I think they might.”

“Who are they?”

“The other patients,” said Hannah.  “Matson hasn’t quite told you everything about the Silver Carillon.  It steals senses, just as he says, but we’re certain now that it does so by creating a copy of the patient in a pocket dimension somewhere.  Each time they lose a sense it’s transferred to the copy of them living in this pocket dimension, and the final chime is when they transfer over there completely.  Then there’s nothing really living left in this world, just the body they were inhabiting while they were here, and that’s now vacant.”

“So you keep it alive while you search for a way to bring them back?” asked Leonard, though he wasn’t really listening to the answer.  It was obvious how the hospice worked.

“No,” said Hannah.  “We destroy the body.  There are other things out there,” she waved a hand heavenwards as vague as though she were describing the general cloud formations.  “That would like to take up residency in a body in this time.  We can’t take those kinds of risks, especially not with the scholars of the Silver Carillon.  They generally know things that it would be better not to let get out.”

“Destroy?”  Leonard looked shocked, finding it hard to believe that he’d heard what she said properly.

“Yes, we usually incinerate it.  There’s a bio-waste facility in the basement; it’s part of the tour if you’d like to take it.”

“That’s barbaric!”

“It is necessary, Leonard.”  She emphasised his name.  “Losing a mind is an easy thing to do.  If we find a way to bring my scholars back, then finding bodies for them to inhabit will be the easy part.”

They sat in silence for a moment, and Leonard looked around the room while his mind raced with the implications of what he’d just heard.  This hospice actively killed people when they reached what they considered a terminal stage.  Was that illegal, or just unethical?  He noticed a pile of magazines on an occasional table and wondered if there was a trade journal for euthanasia.

“Until they reach that stage,” said Hannah, breaking the silence at last, and trying to make eye contact.  Leonard let his gaze slide back to the magazines.  “The other patients appear to know about each other in this pocket dimension.  We think that they must situated together, and as their senses transfer over they see more and more of each other, but it becomes harder and harder for us to talk to them and reach them.  Your patient won’t be in that world with them, so he won’t make the same connection, and they’ll know he’s different.  That might cause problems.”

“You mean they won’t like him?  You make this sound like trying to keep dogs who’ve not met before together.”

“It kind of is,” said Hannah, and there was a sudden gentleness in her voice.  “These are very sick people, Leonard, who are undergoing a profoundly difficult transition.  It might even be a lethal one.  But they are, to some extent, doing it together.  Putting a man in with them who isn’t part of that might not be good for him, might not be good for them.  Is that a chance we can take?”

Leonard sat there, shaking his head.  “I don’t know,” he admitted.  “I need to know enough about this place to make that decision though.  I think it’s mine to make.”

“I don’t think anyone will want to take it off you,” said Hannah.  She stood up.  “Shall we begin the tour then?”

Hospice Belladonna I

Leonard walked past the Hospice three times before finding it.  It was behind a simple door in what appeared to be a row of terraced houses on a residential street.  There were numbers of some of the doors, but not all of them, though he realised that in hindsight he should have paid more attention to the house with the nameplate that read Shipwreck House.  The houses’s doors opened directly onto the street; there was no garden or front path, just the cracked and gum-marked pavement, and a bus-stop across the road with a shelter missing a panel of plastic.  The windows in the houses were grey and reflected the cloudy sky without betraying any of the secrets of what might lie inside.  A strand of greying ivy struggled up the wall about a third of the way along, looking ready to give up and die if the weather turned nasty.  Leonard finally counted numbers until he worked out which was was 113, and stopped at an Institutional Green front door, still struggling to believe that this could be the front door to an exclusive hospice.  It took him a minute to convince himself that he’d counted right and that this must be the address he’d been given, and then he knocked, slightly hesitantly, on the door.

Nothing happened for a moment except for a bus going by behind him, all black exhaust, grumbling engine and the whine of a slipping fan-belt.  Then the bus was gone leaving behind the acridity of burning oil, and he heard brisk footsteps.  A bolt snapped back, and a chain rattled.  The door opened, and a youngish woman with a scarf over her hair and sunglasses on regarded him from the doorway.

“No junk mail, no pamphlets from any God, and no peddlers,” she said.  “And if you’re a tradesman I don’t recognise you but the entrance is round the side and if you don’t know that you better get yourself back to your depot and talk to them.”

“I’m Leonard,” said Leonard, offering his hand.  The woman seemed to ignore it, but the sunglasses concealed her eyes completely.  She could have been looking at in with horror.

“I don’t want any,” she said.  She stepped backwards, the door swinging closed towards him.

“I’ve got a letter of authority,” he said, fumbling in his coat pocket.  “From Matson.”

The door stopped with less than an inch to go before being closed completely, and opened again.  The woman stepped forward and held out her hand without saying a word.  Leonard fumbled some more, trying to pull an envelope out that had gone in smoothly when he left the office; finally he pulled it free and realised that it had turned sideways in his pocket.  He thrust it at the woman who opened it and read it as carefully as though he’d announced that he was an angel from God returning the galley-copies of the Bible with some edits that needed making.  He tried to ignore the rankling in the back of his mind that his name had elicited no worthwhile reaction but that Matson’s clearly had.

“Come in,” said the woman, holding the letter and envelope out to him to take back.  He did, and went in.  He closed the door behind him and found himself in a long, narrow hallway with grey-painted walls and chipped skirting boards.  The woman was already half-way along it, so he hurried a little to catch up.  He noticed that he was passing doors on both sides, which suggested that the terraced houses might have been knocked into each other beyond the front-doors.  The corridor ended in a doorway that led out into a spacious kitchen that was cool and empty, and he was walked briskly through there and out into a glass-roofed conservatory.  The woman gestured at a woven armchair and sat down on a three-legged stool in the centre of the room.  She slipped the sunglasses off, and Leonard noticed that her eyes were bright and a lustrous blue.

“I’m Hannah,” she said after he’d sat down.  “I’m the nurse here at the hospice, though at the moment I’m the cook and the cleaner as well because there aren’t so many patients in.  If we get more patients we’ll hire more staff; it’s not a big deal.  It’s just that there’s not a lot to do when numbers are as low as they are.”

“Right,” said Leonard.  “Right.  I think I’m here to talk about a possible patient, though I’m not sure how possible.”

“Oh everyone’s possible,” said Hannah, allowing a faint smile to touch her un-made-up lips.  “It’s just whether it’s the right time or not.”

Our Lady of the Rocks II

“So what’s the problem?”  Matson didn’t bother to conceal his yawn.  “I did silence the plane, although it’s technically against regulations, but I still can’t sleep properly in those seats.  I want my bed, boy.”

Leonard was reasonably certain that, despite appearances, he was nearly ten years older than Professor Matson, and the boy bridled a little, but he was beginning to appreciate that perhaps he’d never appreciated Professor Matson before.  “You silenced a whole plane?  How many people was that?”

“About two hundred.  I’ve had bigger audiences for lectures, so it’s not a big deal.  Now what’s the problem?  Spit it out, I’m leaving in two minutes.”

“I need a letter of referral from you,” said Leonard, getting straight to the point.

“For who, for what reason, to where?”

“For a man who has no eyes, and no obvious reason for having lost them,” said Leonard.  “To a place I’m told is a hospital of some kind, called Our Lady of the Rocks, and because there are people there who might be the only people who can help him now.”

Professor Matson sat in silence for a moment, and Leonard suddenly realised that he had mismatched eyes; one was green and one was blue.  Matson steepled his fingers together and leaned back in the chair, resting his chin and nose on his fingers.  When he spoke his fingers jerked as his mouth moved, and it looked rather odd.

“Belladonna is Our Lady of the Rocks,” he said.  “She’s kind of the opposite of a goddess for drowning sailors; instead of beseeching her to save them, or bring them driftwood, or wash them ashore, they pray to her that the ocean take them instead.  She’s rather darkly aspected most of the time.  You won’t have come across her much in the standard literature, she’s pretty much only discussed on stone tablets and temple inscriptions, and there are many scholars who think that she’s immoral and shouldn’t be discussed anyway.”

“Can people call themselves scholars if they think that?”

“Certainly.  Especially when their tradition of scholarship is deeply intertwined with their religion and their holy book explicitly deals in morality and ethics.”

“She’s not European then?”

“Hard to say.  But she is Our Lady of the Rocks, and the building with that name is more of hospice than a hospital, as you might now have guessed.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A hospital seeks to cure you, a hospice seeks to make you comfortable while you die.  It’s an oversimplification of course, but I’m tired and want my bed.  There are six beds and one nurse at this hospice, and I believe only three of the beds are filled, so there will be space for your patient.  How did he come to lose his eyesight?”

“Not his eyesight, his eyes.  We don’t know.  He is lucid, but when we ask him about it he gets a bit hysterical.  There seems to have been some woman he approached, or who approached him; it’s not clear from what he’s saying.  Either way, he seems to have spent an evening drinking with her, and then left with her in a taxi.  And at some point during that journey she removed his eyes and left him.  The taxi driver seems to have panicked and dumped him at the side of the road and driven off.  The police were called by some students passing by who’d been out clubbing, and then he made his way to us through the usual channels.”

“Ah.”  Professor Matson unsteepled his fingers and suddenly looked very tired indeed.  “I’ll write you your letter now, if you have pen and paper?”  Leonard passed them across the table.  “You have a bigger worry, I think, Leonard.  The people in the hospice are academics; they’re people who research… well, the kinds of things that we then un-research if you like.  They are all people who’ve studied a device called the Silver Carillon that was returned from an expedition that may or may not have ventured on to the Plains of Leng.  This device appears to steal senses from people who learn how to use it; sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.  After that it steals something else that leaves them a semi-comatose husk.  However, it doesn’t take their eyes or their ears or their nose.  But there are creatures that do, and they are called the Ilmatu.  And they are normally confined to the far north of the world, as they are creatures of ice and cold.  If you have one on the loose down here now, that will be a serious problem, and it will have to be contained.  I suggest you contact an old friend of the department’s and talk to her.  Because you will need her help.   There you go.”  He pushed the letter across the table and stood up.

“What’s her name?” asked Leonard, reading the letter.  It seemed all in order.

“Isabella Bonfontaine.”

Our Lady of the Rocks I

There was a thump as someone tried to open the door to Leonard’s office, clearly expecting it to be unlocked.  Leonard jumped, then smiled.  He sat down in his chair and pressed the intercom button, which buzzed for a moment.

“Sir, there’s a man here,” said a frantic sounding male voice before the intercom cut off.  Leonard pushed the speak button this time.  “It’s fine, it’ll be Professor Matson,” he said.  “The door is open.”  He pushed the door unlock button next, and a few seconds later the door opened, more cautiously as though the opener were expecting a practical joke to be played.  When the door was clearly opening it sped up, and bounced off the door-stop that protected the wall.  In the doorway was a frail-looking elderly man who surely couldn’t have pushed the door open like that, or caused the original thump.

“Professor Matson,” said Leonard standing up and offering his hand.  Matson glared at him, and walked briskly across the room, his speed and gait completely at odds with his delicate appearance.  He sat down in the visitor’s chair ignoring Leonard’s outstretched hand.  Leonard maintained his smile, dropped his hand, and sat back down as well.

“I’m sorry about the door,” he said.  “Apparently there’s a degree of extra security comes with promotion; none of the offices in this building can be entered without a keycard or someone inside the office unlocking the door first.  The first week I was in here I forgot my keycard twice and ended up spending the day sat with my PA outside my own office like some kind of naughty schoolboy!”

“It seems disrespectful to me,” said Professor Matson.

“Oh surely not,” said Leonard quickly.  “You do have to be quite senior to get one of these offices.”

“No, I mean it seems to be disrespecting me,” said Matson.  “Why should I have to knock on anyone’s door?  It’s not like I come here unless you’ve specifically asked for my help, Leonard, is it?”

Leonard paused for a moment, wondering how Matson managed to turn the conversation around so easily, and then recovered.  “I did ask for your help three days ago, Professor.”

“And would you door have been magically unlocked for me then?”

Leonard shuffled in his seat.  There had to be a trick to the way that Matson did it, but he’d still not figured out what it was, other than deeply irritating.

“Never mind the door, can you help me?  I was definitely hoping that you’d appreciate the urgency of the message and come a little sooner.”

“I got your message this morning and came straight over, to walk into your locked door.  As you must have known, if it was that urgent, I was in San Francisco until last night.  Three hours ago I was still on a plane.”

“Ah, I didn’t think to check…,” Leonard paused again.  Hadn’t he checked?  He was almost sure that he had, but Matson didn’t lie about these things.  And with this promotion he was finally aware of a lot more of what the department did and he did know what had been going on in San Francisco.  The biggest shock to him had been when he realised what Professor Matson’s job actually was; it explained all of his sudden and awkward absences, his complete lack of a life outside of the office, and some of his more worrying mannerisms.  And his utter immunity to censure.

“Never mind, Leonard.  Tell me what the problem is and I’ll tell you what I know.  I gather you’ve got the appropriate security clearance these days?”

Leonard pulled a small plastic card from his pocket and silently offered it across the table.  Professor Matson rested his hand on his for a moment and then nodded.

“They don’t make them like they used to,” he said.  He pulled a lucky rabbit’s foot from his own pocket and set it on the desk.  “That’s mine, forty years old I think,” he said.

Leonard reached over and rested his fingers on it, expecting this to be a practical joke.  To his shock the foot twitched, and then kicked.  He pulled his fingers back, but the rest of the rabbit still appeared, traced in the air by a tiny glowing dot, and it turned to look at him.  Something deep in the rabbit’s eyes seemed to explode, and Leonard instantly knew what Matson’s clearance was, and it was terrifying.

“Shit,” he said, as the rabbit faded away.