The Angel of Highgate

23 A MIND AT WAR

From outside the tent came the concussive boom of artillery and the steely clash of armies colliding. Inside, the muddy tent floor was strewn with hundreds of dead, dying and grievously wounded soldiers packed so tight it was difficult to step between them. Doctor Jonas Hooke bent over a rickety operating table, the front of his gown sprayed with blood, sawing off limbs, probing pliers into gaping wounds, ripping loose jagged chunks of shrapnel, sewing slippery coils of intestine back into place. The smell was atrocious, the ground the tent was pitched on little more than churned-up muck weltered with gore and the filthy boots tracked from the latrine pits. Through it all, he floated at the center of a sickly sweet cloud of chloroform that numbed and blurred everything and reduced life to a ghastly dream glimpsed only in snatches of fitful sleep.

After each surgery, the body on the litter before him would be hauled off and a fresh one slapped down. Soon the faces merged in an anonymous blur of flesh tone. All he saw were wounds to suture and mangled limbs to amputate. He grew adept at holding the scalpel in either hand, so as cramp set in he would transfer it from one to the other. In truth he was more butcher than surgeon, and quickly learned the slaughterhouse tricks for removing a hand with a few quick scalpel cuts, a leg or an arm with the frenzied violining of a bone saw, a mangled hand with a dextrous whack of the cleaver. Orderlies dragged away arms and legs to be stacked in piles. Carts laden with torsos missing heads and limbs were dragged from the mud in carts pulled by whinnying horses, eyes rolling and crazed from the incessant gun and cannon fire.

The earth ceased to exist. He stood with one foot astride heaven and hell, severing the silky fibers that bound human souls to the earthly plane.

One day he was sewing up a soldier after pushing the man’s guts back into his body, when he looked up to see a strange and uncanny apparition — a tall, thin man in a black frock coat with a bone-white top hat. Unseen and ignored by the orderlies and doctors rushing back and forth, he stood among the dying wounded littering the tent floor.. His face was elaborately mustachioed with bushy sideburns. The man wore rose-tinted pince-nez and was staring directly at him. He seemed uncannily familiar and now he smiled and raised his hand, covering one eye with something square: a Tarot card, the Hanged Man.

Suddenly, all sound drained away, as if his ears had been stoppered with wax. For a moment stretched to breaking, he no longer heard the shouts of the doctors and nurses, the moans of the dying or the skull-numbing concussion of heavy artillery.

Then the sound returned in a rush. He heard a plooooooomph sound and looked up to see a bright star shining through the surgical tent’s canvas roof as an incendiary shell exploded directly overhead. Instantly, the canvas roof dissolved into flames and a cataract of fire swept through the canvas structure, burning alive wounded soldiers, nurses and surgical officers alike.

Somehow, miraculously, he survived. When they found him, standing stock-still, staring into the woods a half-mile from the scorched remains of the medical tent, his clothes were still smoldering and all his hair had been burned off, down to the eyelashes. The blast had temporarily deafened him and cut the cords connecting his words to his tongue, his mind to his limbs. When the doctors moved an arm or a leg, it froze in that position, like a broken marionette, although the glint of intelligence in his eyes showed a still-functioning mind entombed in a body.

“Catatonia, brought on by an attack of the nerves,” they wrote on his medical discharge papers. He was shipped back to England to convalesce in a sanatorium in the countryside, one entire wing of which was populated with cases like his: soldiers whose bodies were intact, but whose minds had been broken in Crimea.

Like many other patients, he was wheeled about the grounds in a bath chair, and on days of pleasant weather, parked facing a formal garden with a reflecting pond; beyond that, a pleasant stretch of lawn gently descended into an ancient wood bordering the property. Here he would lay slumped in the chair, limbs twisted, gazing blindly at the view before him.

Then one day a shape emerged from the woods, the figure of a man who strode up the sloping green lawn. As he approached, it was evident that the man was dressed in the high fashion of a gentleman with luxurious side-whiskers, a mop of curly brown hair. He wore rose-colored pince-nez spectacles perched upon the bridge of his nose. Atop his head was a white top hat, tilted ever so slightly to one side. It was the same figure he had glimpsed the moment before the incendiary shell exploded. The mustachioed man with the Tarot card. The hirsute figure reached the reflecting pond and strode straight across, his feet not leaving so much as a ripple in its mirror surface. The Tarot reader reached the bath chair and stood looking down at him.

He somehow knew the top-hatted gentleman had come for him. The bath chair crashed to its side as he lurched out of it. Without ever speaking, the gent in the white top hat turned and walked away and he followed, splashing clumsily through the reflecting pool as the figure he followed floated over it, descended the greensward, and plunged into the dense woods.

Although two entered the woods, only one emerged from the other side, for Doctor Jonas Hooke vanished and the creature named Silas Garrette assumed his place.