The Dead Hour
Footsteps echoed along the dim corridors of the Institution. A distant cry, a scream of despair, came from a far-off room, and was quickly answered by a few identical shouts. The man walked with deliberate strides, his eyes focused on the notepad held in his hand as he scribbled notations and names of disorders, all manner of human complaints and ills. No names of the patients— simply numbers. Little mention of treatment— mostly addendums to cases that had caught his attention, special circumstances and peculiar side-effects, strange variations on classic themes. Another list was started on a separate page— the numbers of suicides, the times of the deaths. His concentration was disturbed by the secretary who clicked up to him on high-heeled shoes, out of breath.
"Doctor—"
He glanced up immediately, cool blue eyes piercing her gaze.
She gestured down the hall at the elevator, trying to regain her breathing.
"You're out of shape," he said levelly. "You should exercise more often and moderate your eating habits."
She blushed faintly, but only said, "Doctor, there's a— gentleman here to see you. He's in your office."
He was off immediately, leaving the secretary behind as he moved at a smooth, fast pace towards his office. Reaching it in a few moments, he pushed open the door and made to flip the light switch.
"Do not touch the light," came a voice from the darkness. His eyes widened slightly and he stepped all the way into the room, closing the door carefully behind him. "So good to see you again, Doctor Crane."
The owner of the voice was a shadowy bulk behind the desk, seated in Crane's leather desk chair; Crane stepped forward and took a seat in front of it, in the dark blue and un-cushioned chair he provided for his visitors. He kept himself from shifting on it, but leaned forward to speak.
"I thought you were going to contact me only by telephone from now on," he said. "Its dangerous for you to come here."
"Danger means nothing to me," said the visitor.
"Dangerous to me," clarified Crane. "The first few times you pulled stunts like this I ended up with three more people on my payroll. I don't bribe people for the fun of it, you know. If I do it too often it starts to look suspicious."
"What is suspicion to a man such as you?" came the voice, mockingly. "Given enough backing, the entire city could be on your payroll, as you call it, and it wouldn't bother you in the least."
"I would rather keep things comfortable for me," Crane said. "I have my practice to think of."
"Yes, the practice— I understand you are getting some curious glances."
"Why should you say that?"
"An abnormal amount of suicides here at this institution, is there not? Strange circumstances?"
"No more than normal," said Crane, nearly gritting his teeth. "The only thing strange is that they all pick the same hour of night to do it at."
"I am curious— to what do you attribute that?"
"Some sort of government conspiracy, no doubt," Crane said, facetiously. "Listen, I run a business operation here, sir, and if nothing else I have my patients to think of."
"Yes— yes, I'm sure you do." The visitor sounded thoughtful. "There's nothing quite as important to you as the doctor-patient relationship, is there?"
Crane looked hard at the dark shape on the other side of the desk, his glasses slipping down his nose. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"It does not matter," said the man. "I came only to ensure the first delivery of the new product. It is time to begin putting our plan into action, Doctor Crane. The world awaits those strong enough to provide justice."
A bag was placed on the table. As Crane leaned forward to examine it, the shadow stood and moved towards the door. He disregarded the exit of the visitor and picked up the bag.
There was a white powder inside it; the texture and smell of it unlike any drug he knew. He studied it closely. It would affect their mind, he had been told at the inception of this misadventure. It seemed so long ago now; although surely it was not more than six months. However, six months was quite a long time, he reminded himself, for him to stay loyal to an organization. Largely, so far, he had remained so because it fit in with his own ends. And they paid well. If they didn't explain everything to his satisfaction, he knew enough, and it was worth it.
A new product demanded to be tested.
Crane smiled to himself, a twisted quirk of his lips. Playing with the bag with one hand, he ran the other through his red hair, letting the thin strands wrap around his fingers as he contemplated the first step of the future.
"Call it," he whispered to the bag, "my insatiable sense of curiosity."
"Sir?"
"Are you not doing what I told you to? I dislike being disobeyed."
"No, sir, we're getting right on it. Its just—"
Crane sighed. "How many?"
"Two this time, sir. Both during the dead hour."
Crane closed his eyes and breathed out heavily, not letting irritation show on his face; instead putting it all in his voice. "I'm not keen on this myth of the dead hour, Mr. Leese. Just notify the families as necessary and take the bodies to the morgue. It is standard procedure, it should not be difficult."
He went to visit Karen as they brought in a patient for him to interview. Karen lay asleep on her cot, her mouth open slightly, her breath soft and her hair tumbled halfway over her face. She looked young and innocent, as though nothing bad had ever happened to her. Not at all like a mental patient in an institution.
She looked like the woman he'd wed, seven years ago.
He crouched by her cot, his face untouched by any of the emotions he felt. Running a tentative hand over her hair, he felt the questions recurring in his mind, the wonderings of a dejected intelligence— what causes someone to lose their mind, out of the blue, no previous history of mental illness, no precedent set for it by her family. And why did it have to happen to her?
He left her there and went to the holding room wherein the patient sat, his arms bound in a straightjacket, his head shorn and his eyes wild. Crane smiled gently; they'd brought him Carroll. Convicted rapist of ten years ago, now a sad and lost man who reacted badly to being spoken to. He was clearly quite nervous with being the only person in the room with Crane; his head twisted side to side, his eyes darted. A wild animal thing, looking for escape.
Crane settled down into the chair across the table from him, leaned forward and steepled his fingers.
"What?" he said gently. "What are you afraid of, Carroll? What is it you fear?"
Carroll didn't speak, but this wasn't a surprise. He hadn't spoken in three years.
Crane nodded slowly as he watched the expressions that crawled across the man's face. Fear and apprehension, despair and a gut-wrenching dread. All to the good. Perhaps not the best candidate for an experiment, but no matter what happened to him, no one would think it strange.
He removed the small bag of powder from his jacket pocket and placed his paper and pen to one side, ready to take notes.
Some time later he walked back towards Karen's room, his face fixed in his normal smooth expression and his eyes betraying nothing, while inside, his mind was a turmoil. The effects of the powder astounded him; it was like nothing he'd ever seen. To turn a quiet, albeit already insane, man into a raging lunatic, screaming about his fears— Carroll hadn't stopped screaming, either. He'd kept on, and kept on, and was screaming even now, everything he'd ever been frightened of overwhelming him and reducing him to something so much less than human, something completely incapable of control. If it weren't for the straightjacket that bound his arms he would have attacked Crane himself; as it was, he had run at him, and Crane had stepped back, then run away, hit his head against the wall repeatedly, anything, anything to get the images out of his head. Crane had sat and watched him, a slightly amazed, pensive look on his face, lips parted and eyes wide behind his glasses. One hand slowly tapped his pen against his lips as he observed.
Observed, like a good physician should.
Eventually, after Carroll had succeeded in knocking himself out and collapsed on the floor, his face a bloody mess, Crane had started writing.
Now, he reached Karen's room and rested a hand on the doorknob for a second, composing himself before he entered. Impressed as he was with the effects of the drug, as always when he saw her, his mind leapt to the time, three years ago, when she had first been admitted to a hospital. Free for release, pending psychiatric evaluation. Based on the things she had been doing, that meant she was not actually going to go free at all. No doctor in the world would let her back out on the streets.
Her body still bore scars. He could see the white lines of the healed cuts from where he stood.
She was awake now, and marginally cognizant; the same condition she usually maintained. Her eyes followed him as he crossed to her and squatted on his haunches in front of her, looking up into her eyes.
He spoke for a few moments, a litany of small talk designed to soothe her; once she had accustomed to his being in the room, her tense shoulders eased and she sat back, her head coming to rest against the wall. At this he got up and sat beside her.
"I know you can't understand," he said softly. "I depend on it, really. I've always been honest with you, Karen. I can't pretend that I don't still love you, and I can't pretend that I don't resent you." She looked at him briefly, then away, and he tilted his head and hesitated slightly, drawing breath before he went on. "If nothing else, you give me an nonjudgmental confessional. Truly you are better than any priest." Another slight smile crossed his lips and his eyelids lowered halfway over his startlingly blue eyes as his gaze dropped to the juncture of her neck and shoulder. "What could I tell you about what happened today? The wonder in my mind at what I just witnessed— it is truly amazing, Karen. I've never seen anything like it. I thought I was past being astounded; just when you start to feel safely jaded—" One hand lifted and dropped again in a listless gesture of half-hearted expansiveness. "Humankind turns around and jolts you out of your stupor. I know where we're going, Karen— I know what we're doing. Basically. I know as much as I need to, right now. And it—" He drew another breath, shaky this time. "It amazes me."
His mind leapt with a lightening pace from his excitement about the future, to the troubles of the past. He'd always prided himself on not truly possessing a conscience. Karen was his conscience, if he had one at all. She knew all his secrets, and she would never be able to tell. But the slightest shadow of a doubt fell over him then, and he remember nightmares.
"The things that will happen," he said. He knew he was speaking disjointedly, but he couldn't make his thoughts come out the way he wanted. "Karen, remember when we were young, growing up, and we had such irrational fears? You were afraid of sharks, and I was afraid of scarecrows—"
Her eyelids flickered and for a moment her face took on a look of understanding. He stopped speaking immediately and waited for it to pass; when it did, he went on, carefully.
"I can control that, Karen. I can make people feel that sort of fear— and its wonderful, Karen, such power. Such power." Crane trailed off, finding that his hands had clenched the cloth of his white coat over his legs, twisting it tight. He stared in some confusion at his fingers, which had betrayed how passionately he felt about this. Deliberately, he willed his fingers to let go of their hold gently, and return to either side of his knees.
This kind of passion, he had not felt in years.
He hadn't felt fear like this in forever.
He hadn't ever admitted the truth.
He leaned over to whisper in her ear.
"Every time I look in the mirror I see that a little more of my soul has gone missing—"
The start she gave was, perhaps, a reaction to the closeness of him rather than his words. She would allow him to touch her gently, put his arm about her; three times in three years he had dared to kiss her, cupping her chin in his hand and turning her face up to his. But now, at the feel of his breath on her ear, she got up immediately and stumbled away from him; the look of horror on her face indicated that, after all, she did comprehend what he was saying— and she did not wish to be close to him on the strength of it.
Mere words had such power to her—
The doctor overcame the husband for a moment, and he lowered his eyes to the pad of paper that he held in his hand. In his illegible physician's scrawl, carefully cultivated during college, he noted this down.
The next day he had another session with Carroll. The man had finally stopped screaming when his voice gave out; now, he lay propped up, his eyelids fluttering wildly. Crane regarded him thoughtfully. In his mind, the curiosity—
What would he do, given another dose?
What would he do, given a slight addition to his fears?
Crane had always thought that the best way to face your own fears was honestly, straight-forward, point-blank. He lifted the mask and settled it over his face; it was made from a rough-weave bag, the make simple, childlike. Tipping the powder into his palm, he raised it to his face, gazed through the eyeholes of the mask at the whimpering, crying Carroll, and blew.
That night he sat alone in his room, going over his notes from the day. There were very few from the second session with Carroll; he'd thought that the man's reaction the first time had been bad. The second time was infinitely worse. The sounds of Carroll's screams of terror echoed in his head.
He smiled very slightly, mirthlessly, and underlined a word in his notes. Carroll was quiet now; after a few hours shouting in a hoarse and inhuman way, his voice had left him entirely, although he continued opening and closing his mouth. Soundless he might be, but the terror hadn't lessened.
"Scarecrow," he had repeated, endlessly. He had upset the other patients; they'd had to sedate him. Had he, perhaps, woken up again, gotten his voice back by now, back for a second wind?
What exactly did he see?
The curiosity overcame Crane again. Closing his eyes and severely doubting his own judgement, he put the tiniest pinch of the powder in his palm, casting it in the air towards his face.
For a moment, he felt nothing. Then, the very blackness that came from having his eyes closed began to wake hysteria in his brain. What did he fear the most, now, having overcome his childish terrors? The dark? Or what he would see when he opened his eyes?
Lashes fluttered, and those startlingly blue eyes opened.
He stood in the middle of the room, and all worldly terrors surged around him, unnoticed.
He looked in the mirror, and he saw himself for what he had become.
The tech came to him in the morning with the news.
He sat white-faced through the unfortunate tech's stumbling recitation. His expression didn't change in the least; he focused only on listening.
Finally he said, "Who let Carroll in with her?"
"She was wandering," said Leese miserably. "Wandering like she normally does, visiting the patients. She only heard him— she didn't— she wasn't in the room with him, she— she only heard him."
"Yes," said Crane quietly. "And what was he saying?"
"The same thing he's been saying," replied Leese, confusedly. "Over and over, the Scarecrow's going to get him— the horror of it— what's been done to him, in his mind. Delusion, sir—"
"An effective one," said the doctor, and nodded. "When did it happen?" He asked even though he already knew the answer; the tech confirmed it.
"The dead hour, sir— no one was about. Nurse Lawsome was talking to her before she went off her shift; when Anderson made the rounds, there she was— hanging, sir. Already dead."
Crane nodded once more, his blue eyes blank. Somewhere inside there was a beast howling with grief; but the beast drowned out by the impenetrable silence of his empty heart.
With a careful and deliberate hand, he took down the circumstances of the case on his notepad.