It seemed that every unpleasant odor in the world had been collected and injected into the stifling atmosphere of the Novgorov Asylum. The stench made the senses reel and the stomach lurch; but when the initial nausea passed, the ears were assailed by something far worse.
The sounds of insanity.
Cries, groans, chants of sing-song lunacy, laughter, and mumbled conversations all mingling together into an incomprehensible sound of Babel—many tongues ignorant and unconcerned with one another, speaking of secret agonies and hidden ecstacies that no one even wanted to understand. The sounds droned on, and no soul asked for explanations, for there were no listeners. A handful of beings, scarcely human, cloistered together in the drab, dark, filthy, windowless room . . . but no one to hear their voices.
Occasionally one of the residents would stop and glance around at his fellows as if just noticing them for the first time, triggered by some unseen apparition of a diseased mind to venture forth out of his closed little world. If lucidity did not exactly come at such moments, something in the eyes hinted that he caught a brief glimpse of the reality of his surroundings. Then the laughter and nonsensical chanting turned to cries and groans of horror. For the reality was too awful to face, and the retreat into madness which followed was welcomed as a peaceful sleep.
Basil Anickin had spent his share of moments within the netherworld of reality, oblivious even to the presence of his fellow wanderers. His whole being had been so absorbed in hatred and a thirst for vengeance that the prison physicians had deemed him mentally deranged. But even after removing him to the asylum and applying appropriate “curative measures,” his visions continued to be stained with the blood of his enemies. Nothing existed, in reality or lunacy, but hate and blood and violence.
They gave him drugs and treatments until his skin paled, his eyes glazed over, and his body sagged with despair. Finally they concluded that their efforts had succeeded in curing him. His teeth no longer ground out curses. His clenched fists relaxed. His eyes lost their lethal intensity. He became a docile lump of a man. Such was the goal of their methods, and it appeared they had worked.
The confident physicians gradually lessened the treatments until they were discontinued. Slowly, by degrees, Basil remembered why he was there. Gradually came the sense that he was different from the others, that they were crazy but he had only come unhinged. Once, in another world—he could not say if it had been real or not—he had been driven by something. He had felt passion and life. He remembered a purpose, a reason to live.
How had he come to land in this pit of human filth . . . ?
As the effects of the drugs dissipated, from deep inside his bosom came a new feeling to the surface. New, but not new. He began to discover something that felt old and very familiar . . . and slowly the hatred grew.
Somewhere, out there where the air was not filled with stench or the haunting sounds of agony, was one to whom justice was due—his justice! Someone had wronged him, someone had used him, someone had made a fool of him.
Someone . . . but who could it be . . . ?
Basil struggled to form answers to his half-seen questions. But his numbed mind was still too foggy, too slow. Summoning every effort of the will, he tried to speak clearly and behave with sanity so they would give him no more medicine or—God help him!—take him into that tiny room again. There was something he must remember! But he could not think right when they deadened his mind.
The other inmates in Basil’s cubicle were too absorbed in their own shadowy worlds to take notice of the lawyer. They lived and breathed in parallel universes, none ever touching another. But one fellow, an old man who had been in the asylum for years, occasionally included Basil in his unreality. He fancied himself royalty, no less than a grand duke, whose days were taken up with bemoaning the fact that he, rightful heir to the throne, had been banished in exile to this miserable hellhole. How Basil, of all people, fit into his imaginary court was uncertain, except that the fellow commented now and then how much the doctor’s son resembled a certain Polish prince he had once known.
One day the “grand duke” sidled up to Basil. “I had a visit from my sister . . . the Grand Duchess Alexandra, you know.”
Basil squinted dully at the old man. “What do I care?” he said.
“I think she has taken a fancy to you.”
“Me?”
“You may be too modest to admit it, but you are a handsome lad—for a Pole, at any rate.”
“Leave me alone.”
“You could do worse than win the hand of a grand duchess.”
Basil turned away. He didn’t have to listen to this fool. But before he could make good his retreat, the old man spoke again.
“She gave me a message for you,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” asked Basil, annoyed now.
“Don’t be proud, lad,” he said, thrusting a crumpled piece of paper into Basil’s face. “Such an alliance between our houses is imperative.”
Basil did nothing, said nothing.
Thwarted, the would-be tsar stuffed the paper into Basil’s hand and shuffled off for an important audience, in his words, with the foreign minister.
Mechanically Basil lifted his hand and opened the paper with his fingers. The words were as crazy as the deliverer of the note:
The Coronation is set at last, this twenty-ninth day of October in the year of our Lord, eighteen hundred and eighty. The Crown shall make you free.
He shook his head and began to wad the paper up in his hand when suddenly he stopped. A memory from some former time flashed into his mind.
He too had secrets! Secrets from those he hated. He and his comrades had communicated in code to one another. Codes like . . .
This note sounded like some of those back then . . . messages he himself had sent! Gradually images of words, communications, floated back into his consciousness.
“The Coronation . . .” It could mean anything—but almost certainly some major event!
What event? When?
Ah, when? That was the interesting part of the code. It was in the numbers—he remembered that much! But not so simply as what it said. No, not October 29, that was the decoy. When the numbers were written out like this, it meant something else. Something about . . .
Yes, within the numbers. Twenty-nine . . . two and nine . . . Two-nine . . .
That was it! The second day of the ninth month! Now he remembered how the code worked. He had thought it up himself! September 2, 1880.
A big event to occur on September 2. When could that be? He hadn’t an idea of the date now. He had given little thought to the passage of time. How long had he been here? He didn’t even know what season of the year it was!
And what was the event?
Could it truly be a coronation? Was the tsar dead? Could the impossible have happened without his hearing about it?
No, that was too obvious. If this code was really a code, then it meant something else.
What does it matter, anyway? Basil fumed. The note is from a crazy old man who imagines himself to be the rightful heir to the Russian throne.
Or was it?
He studied the piece of paper more closely. The writing was firm and clear. It was obvious the old man’s trembling hand could never have produced such script. Someone must be sending him a message.
Someone from the outside!
Basil shook his head several times, trying to get the jumbled pieces of his memory to jog themselves into some order that made sense.
Yes, he had friends out there. He remembered that much. There weren’t only enemies. He had comrades with the same purpose he had. Comrades and purpose which would not rejoice in a coronation but rather would grieve. What could a coronation mean except that they had failed.
He sighed and reread the note. Struggling to make sense of it, he read the whole thing again, moving past the word coronation and on through the words . . .
Suddenly it jumped out at him—the single word that held the substance of the entire message:
. . . shall make you FREE.
Perhaps this message had nothing to do with the tsar at all—but with him. Could it be possible?
Did the message concern his freedom rather than the tsar’s coronation? Perhaps . . . it could not hurt to think about it . . . to wonder . . . to wait. It might be that if he waited long enough, that day would come—September 2—and somehow he would be free.
If only he knew when. Perhaps it would even be tomorrow!
But no matter when the time came for freedom or coronations or whatever it was, he had to be ready! He would be ready. He had to rid himself of the awful cloud the drugs had drawn over him. He had to force himself to remember all he could . . . to remember everything. He had to remember!
But the momentous event of the message did not occur the next day . . . or the next.
And the waiting gave him time enough, with his determined effort, to clear away most of the remaining cobwebs and replace the muddled, unfocused fog with the clarity of his true insanity.
Memories returned. Hatred swept in to kindle his passions anew. When the keepers of drug cabinets were not looking, his teeth clenched and ground silently, while behind his back his fists tightened. When he lay in his bed, his nostrils stinging with the foul smells around him and his hearing dominated by the babbling of voices that had once included his own, the hatred at last found a name upon which to hang itself—Remizov. And the violence also knew its purpose afresh—Fedorcenko.
Basil Anickin once again had a reason to live.