An Unfortunate Dwarf

THE PLANS OF Beechway High Secure Unit are like the map of the Odyssean labyrinth. So multilayered, multifaceted you could lose yourself. A print of them has been framed and mounted in Melanie’s office and now AJ stands and stares blankly at them. Maybe there is something in this place that can engulf a person. It swallowed Pauline and Moses and Zelda. Maybe it’s busily swallowing him too.

He runs his hands through his hair. Scrunches up his eyes and wishes he could take a pill – some of the drugs the patients get when they go into crisis. Something just to switch his head off and sluice things out of him. He glances over his shoulder at the kitchenette. The little touches of homeliness Melanie has added. A print of a cat sleeping on a white Mediterranean wall. A teapot in two pieces, painted with the blue water and sky of the Riviera. He’s sure he and Mel have touched something in each other. But this? This secret? All the openness he thought they had – after sex and laughing and their candid admission sessions – after all that, she’s still hidden things. AJ is sure it’s got something to do with her separation from Jonathan, he just doesn’t know what. This is turning to a bleaker day than the one when his mother died –alone in the garden, with grass and earth coating her half-bitten tongue.

He washes up the coffee cups. Melanie’s left an open packet of chocolate digestives, which he diligently wraps and tucks into a tin. He switches off the light and heads back through her office. At the door he stops. He stands very still, his head against it, his hand on the light switch. He breathes in and out.

Then he switches the light back on, goes to the window, lowers the blinds and sits down at Melanie’s desk. It’s made of functional beech – very light and honey-clear, everything organized carefully. There is an old-fashioned in-and-out-tray stacker with one or two envelopes in it. Her computer is a PC with a light-up wireless mouse on a mat that has a quote printed on it, white against a blue background: Failures do what is tension relieving, while winners do what is goal achieving.

AJ looks at the mat for a long time. Eventually he touches the mouse. Just his finger resting lightly on it. The computer comes to life.

It is password-locked.

Of course it is.

He sits back, almost relieved. He doesn’t want to be the sneak. He really doesn’t. He has no right to spy on Melanie or judge her. It’s not as if he’s perfect. She’s had it hard, and maybe he should understand more. She didn’t know where all this would lead. He’s going to call her. Say he’s sorry. He pulls out his phone and looks at the screen and instantly all he can picture is Isaac Handel with his hands around Zelda’s neck. He puts it back in his pocket.

He taps his fingers on his knees, undecided. Then he opens the bottom drawer of her desk. There is nothing much of interest in there – a sponge bag, a pair of purple kitten-heel shoes – maybe in case she needs to look smart for an unexpected occasion. Also some deodorant and a pair of flesh-coloured tights. In the next drawer there is a desk organizer full of paper clips and rubber bands. Wedged under it is a hefty paperback book.

He pulls the book out: Screaming Walls – A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to the UK’s Most Haunted Asylums. It must be something she’s bought in the wake of The Maude’s appearances. Maybe she wants to study precedents of the unit’s ‘haunting’. The date of publication as 1999 – long before the first manifestations of The Maude in Beechway. Out of curiosity he flicks to the index and looks for Beechway. It’s not mentioned. He’s about to put the book back when something else occurs to him.

The index takes up four pages, but he runs his finger down each page, just out of curiosity, his eye scanning the alphabet: Bedlam (Bethlem); Care in the Community; Cherry Knowle Hospital, Sunderland; Denbigh Hospital; DSMV diagnosis; ectenic force; Hine, G.T. (architect); Mental Health Act, effects of; Ryhope General; St George Field, Bethlem; ‘Sitting’ and possession . . .

He comes to a halt, his finger under the words. Sitting and possession?

Quickly he turns to the page number.

The text is dotted with plans and photos of a mock-Gothic building, a classic workhouse structured on the enpeigne or ‘comb’ principle, with separate units connected like the teeth of a comb to a spine. The Gothic Revival details have been shored up by some hasty council; a set of columns that would originally have been constructed of iron core covered in plaster to resemble stone have been replaced by stacked and painted breezeblocks. But the pointed arched windows and external crenels remain intact.

Hartwool Hospital. It’s in the north of England near Rotherham. He races through the text, muttering the words under his breath like a reception-year child on his early reading books.

Multiple episodes of self-abuse were attributed to the influence of the so-called ‘B ward sitting demon’. Rumoured to be the ghost of a past matron, a dwarf who abused the patients . . .

AJ’s pulse beats strong and loud in his ears.

A suicide attempt in which the patient tried to cut off his own nose . . .

Patient X reported an incubus crouched on her chest when she woke . . .

Staff absences and resignations were occasionally blamed on the fear there was a ghost dwarf or an unknown entity that sat on the chests of patients . . .

. . . hallucinations and delusions of haunting . . .

. . . this crude image of a dwarf squatting on a patient’s chest was produced by one of the patients in 1997 . . .

He stares at the image. A line drawing of a dark shape crouched on the chest of a supine patient. Next to it a photo of a gravestone in the grounds of the now-abandoned hospital.

Our sister Maude, an unfortunate dwarf, who departed this life and was born into the spirit life, 18 September 1893

AJ glances to the page header – Hartwool Hospital. Rotherham. His pulse is deafening now.

Hartwool Hospital is the place Melanie worked before she came here. The place she was transferred from during the Care in the Community upheaval.

The place she worked with Jonathan Keay.