The Angel of Highgate

6 THE MAN WHO CRAWLED IN THROUGH THE WALLPAPER

The laudanum was nearly gone.

Augustus Skinner fumbled the slender, smoke-brown bottle from the bedside table, pressed it to his lips, and gulped the final mouthful. He reached to set the bottle back, but it slipped through his clumsy fingers and toppled to the rug somewhere. He fell back in the bed, his body undulating liquidly in oceanic waves of warmth, his face flushed and perspiring. The wound still throbbed, but the pain was a voice calling his name from a long way away — insistent, but easily ignored.

The physician who presided at the duel, Doctor Silas Garrette, dug the lead ball out a week ago, but infection had set in. He explained to Skinner that — as with wounds the doctor had treated while an army surgeon serving in Crimea — the ball had not been clean and had undoubtedly pushed foreign matter (fibers of clothing, dirt, gun oil) into the wound, which had painfully abscessed and swollen into a red mass the size of an orange, suppurating pus and a sticky red ooze. Now the critic had run out of laudanum, and had dispatched a servant with an urgent summons for the doctor to return. That was an hour ago, but laudanum had the effect of dissolving time as well as pain, and Skinner fell into a chaotic tangle of disturbing dreams.

The knocking forced his eyes open. Part of the dream? No, the knock came again.

“Come,” Skinner called out, eyes squeezed shut in an attempt to retard the giddy, counter-clock revolution of the room.

The knocking continued: a woodpecker hammering on a tree.

Skinner opened his eyes to find the door to his room had mysteriously vanished, leaving six or seven or eight blank walls. The rapping resumed, and this time his eyes followed the sound to its source: a bulge in the hideous yellow wallpaper next to the dresser. But then a hand appeared, pushing through the floral pattern as if moving a branch aside, and then an arm squeezed through, followed by a shoulder and a white top hat as a man clambered out of the wallpaper. He stood for a moment brushing away the detritus of the wallpaper’s floral design from his sleeves, calmly looking down at Skinner.

It was the doctor, Silas Garrette.

Skinner’s mind was whirling from the effects of the laudanum, and he knew he was witnessing a particularly vivid hallucination. He had once visited a carnival — a bit of whimsy where various woodland creatures (rabbits, moles, dormice) had been dressed in the tiny clothes of men and women and posed as if attending a tea party. The doctor bore a striking similarity to one of those figures, as if someone had dressed up a stuffed stoat in a gentleman’s suit, complete with a white top hat and a pair of rose-tinted pince-nez over the beady brown eyes. Skinner’s gaze traced downward, expecting to see a bushy tail protruding from the back of the man’s suit trousers and finding its absence somehow jarring.

“Are you real, sir, or some phantasm conjured by laudanum?”

The doctor touched the brim of his white top hat, but never removed it, despite the fact they were indoors, which struck Skinner as the very height of poor manners.

“It is I, sir, Doctor Garrette. You summoned me.” The physician’s face was like a cemetery statue disappearing beneath a tangle of overgrown foliage: a voluminous pair of bushy mustachios entwined enormous sideburns sculpted like elaborate topiary. The top hat seemed to float atop a hedgerow of frizzy, tightly curled hair, which matched the mustachios in its ersatz, shoe polish shade of brown — a cheap dye job.

“Thank God you have come. The pain…” he sucked in a deep breath and shudderingly released it, “…is worse.”

The white top hat nodded. “I need to drain the pus.”

“Again?”

“It will relieve the pressure. That is why it throbs so. Please turn over.”

The doctor brought the candle closer. Laying face down, prostrate across his bed, Skinner could not see what was happening behind him, but watched as the candle flame stretched the doctor’s gangly shadow across the bedroom wall. Skinner’s face burned with the ignominy of the situation as he lay sprawled in the posture of a naughty boy awaiting a good spanking, the chill of the room raising goose bumps as the doctor lifted his night gown and icy digits palpated his hind quarters.

“The wound needs to be lanced,” Doctor Garrette intoned in a gravely professional voice.

“Laudanum,” Skinner said. “Give me laudanum first.”

The doctor moved to the bedside table where his black Gladstone bag yawned. He reached a hand down its throat and drew out a smoky-brown bottle stoppered with a cork. “This is a very strong tincture of laudanum dissolved in gin,” he said. “I must caution you. It is stronger than the laudanum you buy in the shops. I mix it myself. You are not to take more than a thimbleful.”

Skinner snatched the bottle from the doctor, yanked the cork with his teeth and gulped a mouthful. The inside of his cheeks puckered as what felt like cold mercury trickled down his throat.

The doctor unrolled a leather holster of medical instruments across the bed and drew something out — from the glitter of steel, a scalpel. “Do you require something to bite on?”

“Just cut me, and be done!”

Skinner fixed his gaze upon the yellow wallpaper and watched the doctor’s shadow loom over him, the arm raised, the scalpel flourished. The shadow arm came down and Skinner let out a howl as the wicked keen blade sliced a burning path.

Skinner fumbled the laudanum bottle to his lips and glugged a second mouthful.

“Again, I warn you,” the doctor chided. “An overdose would be fatal!”

“Yes, I heard you!”

The doctor applied a fresh dressing to the wound, which throbbed, throbbed, throbbed with the pounding of Skinner’s heart. Finally the physician finished his ministrations and the critic slumped back into the bed pillows.

“And now my bill, sir,” Garrette said.

“Can’t it wait?”

“I have children. I must think of them.”

“Top drawer,” Skinner waved vaguely. “Take what is owed you.”

Augustus Skinner did not remember the doctor leaving. In truth, he did not remember much else, for the laudanum had taken effect and he felt his body dissolving into a buoyant gas until all that remained of him was a head floating like a cork on a puddle of ether.