‘Might one of the nurses have made a mistake? Too much chlorpromazine, perhaps?’
‘I very much doubt it,’ Sister Jenkins replied. ‘Nurse Fraser has been on duty this morning. All of my nightingales are scrupulous, but she is
painstaking
. She would never have made such a bad miscalculation.’
Notwithstanding Sister Jenkins’s confidence in Nurse Fraser, I decided to check the charts, but found everything in order. There was nothing to suggest oversight or error. The patients had received varying amounts of medication depending on how peacefully they had slept in the preceding observation period. If anything, they had been given slightly lower doses than usual.
Sister Jenkins moderated her voice. ‘Have they drifted off into some form of . . .’ She hesitated before whispering, ‘Coma?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘Look at their eyes. Rapid oscillations – see? They’re dreaming. As far as I know, dreaming isn’t observed very often in coma patients.’
‘What are we to do, Dr Richardson? They must be fed, washed, voided.’
‘Well, you can’t do any of that now. Clearly.’
‘Shall I telephone Dr Maitland?’
‘No. I’ll call him after I’ve conducted some tests.’
I lifted one of Kathy Webb’s eyelids and studied the trembling grey iris beneath. Her pupillary reflexes were normal. ‘Kathy?’ I said. ‘Can you hear me?’ I clapped my hands together loudly. ‘Kathy?’ There was no response, not even a twitch. I patted her cheeks, softly at first, on one side of her face, then the other. Eventually, I was giving her hard slaps that made the skin darken. She remained quite still, her expression impassive, the only movement being that of her eyes. I then attached electrodes to her scalp and ran an EEG. There was no generalized slowing in the delta range. Nor was there any evidence of epilepsy. What I saw was the low amplitude waves associated with normal dreaming.
The other sleepers were just the same. No amount of rocking, slapping or shouting could rouse them, and they all produced identical EEGs.
When I was satisfied that I could do no more, I telephoned Maitland’s secretary and asked her to get him to call me back. He did so after twenty minutes. I did my best to explain the situation in a calm, clear-headed way, but a panicky excitement kept on threatening to ruin my measured delivery. When I had finished there was a long pause. I thought the line had gone dead. ‘Hugh?’ I called into the mouthpiece. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’m still here. Just thinking, that’s all. I need to see this for myself. I’ll be up later this afternoon.’
‘But what about your wife?’ I asked.
‘She’s being well looked after,’ he replied. ‘She’ll be fine.’
Just after five o’clock, I was attending to a patient on the men’s ward when I looked out of the window and saw two bright headlights travelling across the heath. I quickly concluded my business and went out into the vestibule. When Maitland entered, he dispensed with any civilities and asked abruptly, ‘Any change?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘They’re just the same.’
We went directly down to the sleep room, where I demonstrated how the patients could not be woken up. Afterwards, I showed Maitland the EEG recordings. He said very little and his expression was so severe I became quite nervous. Irrationally, I began to think that he held me responsible for what had happened. When I had finished he went to the beds and tried to wake the patients himself. He then ordered Nurse Page to prepare some syringes. ‘Benzedrine,’ he said to me. ‘That should do it. A double dose of Benzedrine. The effect will be similar to that of adrenalin. We’ll see increases in heart rate and a steep rise in blood pressure, with fluctuations of 10 to 30 millimetres. Restlessness, tremor – palpitations, perhaps. It’ll create a level of physical arousal completely antagonistic to sleep.’
We injected all of the patients. I listened to Marian Powell’s heart through a stethoscope and heard the beat accelerating, but she remained stubbornly unconscious. Celia Jones and Elizabeth Mason also failed to stir. I watched Maitland taking Sarah Blake’s pulse, before leaning over the bed and lifting her eyelids with his thumb and forefinger. He looked not merely puzzled, but frustrated. Only ten minutes later I saw him preparing more syringes. When all of the patients had received yet another dose of Benzedrine, Maitland drew me aside and said, ‘Well, James, I owe you an apology. I was rather sceptical when you suggested that the sleep-room patients had started dreaming at the same time. One can only assume that your prior observations were indicative of an incremental, ongoing process that has now reached its rather dramatic conclusion.’
‘What do you think is going on?’
‘It’s impossible to say. But if you’re asking me to speculate . . .’ I gestured for him to continue. ‘There must be something about the conditions that prevail here, in the sleep room, that have opened channels of mutual influence: prolonged sleep, proximity, altered brain chemistry, or a combination of all three. As to the basis of the phenomenon, I suppose the interplay of electromagnetic fields is a reasonable preliminary hypothesis. That’s what you believe, isn’t it? You’ve said as much.’
‘There isn’t – as far as I know – another
scientific
alternative.’
Maitland grumbled his assent. ‘They appear to have entered a collective dream state from which they cannot be roused. Why should that be? Why should they become stuck, as it were, in a rapid-eye-movement phase of sleep?’
‘Perhaps,’ I replied, ‘brains are, in some sense, more porous when dreaming, and thus more likely to influence each other. In due course, this entanglement might reach a critical threshold beyond which the process becomes irreversible.’
‘If we had another EEG machine, it would be interesting to compare the traces, would it not?’
‘There might be correspondences, similar patterns . . .’
‘Which would be a truly astounding result.’
‘I wonder,’ I mused, all too conscious of the controversial position I was about to articulate. ‘If we asked these patients what they were dreaming about, and they were able to answer, would they report dreams with common elements?’
Maitland considered my provocative suggestion for a moment and then said, ‘Let’s not get carried away, James. Something very interesting is occurring, certainly. But we must remain sceptical. Think of all those medical men in the past, who were professionally embarrassed by patients who purported to have special powers: mind over matter, prescience, telepathy. They were tricked into believing all sorts of nonsense.’
‘This isn’t the nineteenth century, Hugh.’
‘All the more reason why our peers will be unforgiving if we make the same mistakes.’
‘Do you really think that
this
’ – I swept a hand over the beds – ‘has a simple explanation.’
‘Probably not. But we have to eliminate all the alternatives before we start making any outlandish claims.’
‘Such as?’
‘Hysteria. What if these patients are exhibiting a hitherto undocumented form of group hysteria?’
‘That doesn’t seem very plausible. They are asleep.’
‘We must proceed with caution,’ Maitland sighed and adopted the manner of a world-weary grandee. ‘Believe me, James, I’ve seen all manner of strange phenomena on my travels – everything from poisonous snake handling by Christian evangelists in Tennessee, to cases of possession by monkey spirits in Bali. Congregations, tribes – all kinds of group or gathering – are exquisitely susceptible to the power of suggestion.’
‘I don’t believe that these women are in a state of self-hypnosis.’
‘Nor do I. Not really. But if we are going to convince the scientific community that human brains can influence each other during sleep, then we had better be confident of our findings.’
Our discussion had been somewhat technical and Maitland had repeatedly betrayed his concerns about how the situation could be best negotiated to ensure the survival of his academic reputation. When I looked at the sleeping patients, however, I was reminded of the fact that the problem with which we were faced had both an intellectual and a human dimension.
‘What are we going to do if they don’t wake up?’ I asked.
‘We don’t have to worry about
that
,’ Maitland replied, sounding a little irritated. ‘Well, not yet, at any rate. We’ll stop all sedatives and ECT and introduce regular intravenous stimulants. I would also suggest that we keep the lights on. You never know, it might help.’ He paused and appeared to be ticking off the items on some mental check list. ‘We’ll ensure that they are properly hydrated with drips, but if they continue sleeping, we’ll also feed them through nose tubes. Voiding will have to be achieved by enema, with digital removal in those cases where faeces have become impacted.’
‘This situation will be very difficult to manage.’
‘Don’t worry. I don’t expect you to handle things on your own, James. This is an emergency. I’m staying.’ He offered me a tight smile. I sensed that he was expecting me to respond with an expression of gratitude, but all I could do was return an economic nod. He registered my reticence, and became magnanimous. ‘You look tired, James. Take a break. I’ll see you after supper.’
Outside, the air was fresh and cool. I smoked a cigarette and watched a thin crescent moon becoming periodically dim, and then bright, as a train of small clouds passed in front of it. The sea was calm. A bat flew past, sensed more than observed.
After I had eaten a light meal in the dining room, I went down to the sleep room again. Maitland had switched all the lights on: nine hanging bulbs, hidden within conical shades and projecting interlocking circles of luminescence onto the tiles. I could see the ceiling properly for the first time. It consisted of unvarnished planks, supported by massive, transverse beams. Deprived of its dark recesses and shadowy boundary, the sleep room looked smaller than usual. The alignment and orientation of the six beds no longer evoked sympathetic images of underground temples or standing stones. The atmosphere of enchantment had been dispelled and something more mundane had taken its place.
Maitland was on his own. I could only assume he had dismissed the nurses. He was walking from bed to bed, taking blood pressures, pulses, temperatures, and making notes on the charts. Celia Jones was connected to the EEG machine, and Maitland would occasionally return to her bedside in order to scrutinize the traces on the scrolling paper.
Eventually, he saw me standing by the door and said, ‘Ah, James. Come over here. Celia Jones is producing some interesting spindles. My guess is that they are connected with the inhibitory processes that are preserving sleep.’ I went over and examined the patterns, which were indeed interesting. Maitland continued to busy himself. He did not seem in the least bit anxious, and his eyes shone with a kind of fevered excitement. His absorption was total and I very much doubted that he had spared a single thought for his wife since his arrival.
It occurred to me that only hours before I had decided to resign; however, that decision now seemed to have lost much of its emotional urgency. I couldn’t raise the difficult subject of my departure in the middle of a crisis. Maitland would be furious, and rightly so. I hadn’t changed my mind. I still accepted that I would have to leave – and as soon as realistically possible – but it wasn’t the right time to hand in my notice. Furthermore, I have to admit (with no small amount of attendant shame) that I was curious to see what would happen next.
When I retired for the evening, Maitland was still freely associating ideas, and making notes with purposeful energy. ‘This is fascinating, isn’t it?’ he said. Then more softly, ‘Quite fascinating.’
I ascended the stairs and passed Hartley, who was working an oily substance into the banisters. It was an activity that I had seen him engage in many times before. He looked up from his work and nodded. I almost stopped to ask him if he had seen the blackened carving. What did he make of it, I wondered? But I had too much on my mind, and Hartley had never been very talkative.
On entering my apartment, I went straight to the study. Sitting at the bureau, I toyed with a pen and thought about the sleep-room patients. I remembered their sad histories of abuse and abandonment. They were not merely brains, collections of cells, suspended in communal oblivion, but people.
What if they didn’t wake up? I asked myself. Tomorrow. Or the day after – or the day after that. What if they couldn’t be roused after weeks, months, or years? What would happen to them? Heart failure? Infections? Stroke? The appropriate course of action would be to transfer them all to Ipswich, a general hospital, somewhere properly equipped to deal with life-threatening medical emergencies. But Maitland wouldn’t agree to such a suggestion. He wanted to observe, test and monitor outcomes. He was conducting an experiment now. In fact, he always had been. I should have realized that as soon as I saw the letters ‘CIA’ on the memorandum in Marian Powell’s notes.
I wanted to work through my thoughts on paper, and searched through the bottom drawer of the bureau for a writing pad. The drawer had become quite cluttered and I had to remove several objects, including Palmer’s Reserpine. As soon as I picked up the container, I knew that something had changed. It didn’t rattle. I prised the lid off and looked inside. There was nothing there. The three white tablets, with their distinctive scored surfaces, had disappeared.
19
The following morning I was summoned to Maitland’s office. He was seated behind his desk, the surface of which was completely covered with EEG read-outs, statistical manuals, and sheets of paper covered in his distinctive hand. The folders that I had surreptitiously examined – the ones from the grey cabinet containing the referral letters and documentation for the sleep-room patients – were piled on top of each other next to the telephone.
‘Have you been working all night?’ I asked.
‘More or less. Although I think I managed to get some sleep at about three. Thirty minutes, perhaps.’ He pointed to the Chesterfield and then tidied up some of his papers. I would have expected him to show more signs of fatigue, but he was well groomed and looked positively cheerful. He had recently shaved – the smell of his cologne was strong – and his hair glistened with a fresh application of pomade. ‘Please,’ he boomed hospitably, ‘do sit down.’