The Bedlam Detective

FORTY-SIX

Dr. Sibley must have been as surprised as anyone by his collapse. It was as if he’d dropped in midstride, pitching forward and landing hard.

“Did you plan for this?” Sebastian said.

“Actually,” Sir Owain said, looking down on his motionless companion, “I did. Although what I intended was something less spectacular. He was supposed to start yawning and take himself off to bed.”

“You drugged him?”

“A few drops in his wine. They ought to have been perfectly safe. The drug came from his own kit.”

Sebastian said, “I don’t see him breathing.”

“No,” agreed Sir Owain. “Nor do I.”

Sebastian dropped to one knee and checked the doctor’s pulse. First at the wrist, and then again at the side of the neck.

“The man’s dead,” he said.

“Is he?” Sir Owain said. “Damn.”

Sebastian looked up at him. “Is that all you can say?”

“It was only supposed to put him out for a few hours. I must have misjudged the dose.”

“Well, you’ve killed him. Which makes the rest of any scheme for determining your guilt a touch redundant, wouldn’t you say?”

“It is a setback, I have to admit.”

“A setback?” Sebastian said, rising, and with a sudden rush of blood to the head that made him dizzy. “I’ll say it is. It’s all over, Sir Owain. Consider yourself arrested.”

“Can you do that?” Sir Owain said. “You’re not a policeman.”

“Any private citizen is bound by law to …” He meant to go on to say, arrest any person who commits a felony in his presence, but his thoughts wandered right off his subject and then he struggled to remember what he’d intended to say.

Sir Owain said, “How do you feel?”

Sebastian snapped himself back into focus.

“Why?” he said. “What did you do?”

“The dose was in the decanter. That’s why I only drank water.”

It was a moment or so before the realization took hold. Sir Owain seemed willing to give Sebastian all the time he needed, watching him with patient sympathy. Sebastian made a start toward the door and Sir Owain stepped aside to let him by.

He felt a sudden need for the night’s cold air. He seemed to float out of the kitchen and down the hall toward the main doors. He was aware of his legs working under him but not so sure they were under his control. He failed to stop himself and hit the door hard. He’d have slid to the floor, but he managed to keep hold of the handle.

He thought at first that he lacked the strength to get the doors open. But then he realized there was a much simpler explanation. They were locked.

Sir Owain had caught up with him by now.

He said, “If it’s any reassurance, Doctor Sibley downed far more of it than you did. How was I to know it would be the death of him?”

Sebastian remembered the revolver. He’d been able to fit it into one of the jacket’s lower pockets, in the lining on the inside. He fumbled for it. It should have come out easily. But it wouldn’t. The harder he tried, the more entangled he became.

Sir Owain watched him for a while, then reached in and took the gun away, unhooking it from the lining with ease.

He said, “Mine are not the kind of beasts you can fight with one of these. Trust me. I have tried.”

Sebastian pushed him away. He aimed himself toward the study, where the telephone was. He rattled and rattled at the doorknob, and then belatedly remembered how Sir Owain had turned the key in the door when they left it.

“Give in, Mister Becker,” Sir Owain pleaded with him. “I can see you’ll need to sleep this off before we can hope to achieve anything.”

With a great effort, he knocked the older man aside. Sir Owain staggered a little. Sebastian moved without a plan, willing to settle for any route to safety, not even knowing where safety might lie.

He found himself in a corridor by the kitchen, a service way between a wall of the old house and some of the newer work; there were iron girders overhead, and glass skylight panels above the girders. Some of the glass had been smashed, and the roof was open to the night, but far too high to reach.

The fallen glass hadn’t been cleared up, and crunched underfoot.

Sir Owain said, “That’s what happened when the beasts tried to enter.”

There was a door at the end of the passageway. It wouldn’t open. Or he couldn’t open it. Sebastian turned around and fell back against the door.

Sir Owain gestured toward the damage.

“They came out of the jungle and followed me all the way home,” he said. “Now they wait for the dark. I do my best to fortify the building, and they do their best to find a way in. I stay up all night and I fight them off. Or do I? Do I, Mister Becker?” His face was right before Sebastian’s now. “Or do I merely create powerful memories of events that never took place? The human mind is an amazing instrument of perception, Mister Becker. How far should we trust the instrument’s perception of itself? That’s what you can help me to find out.”

Sebastian felt his legs going. Sir Owain caught him quickly and helped to lower him to the ground.

“Now,” Sir Owain said, “what has all this running achieved?”

“I won’t sleep,” Sebastian vowed. He wasn’t sure whether he was speaking aloud, or merely forming the words in his mind and getting no further with them.

It seemed he spoke, because Sir Owain responded.

“I don’t think you’ll have any choice,” he said. “I’m not even sure what I gave you. If there’s an antidote, I’ve no idea what it would be. We’ll just need to get through this.”

“Get me to a doctor.”

Sebastian was terrified of sleeping at the madman’s mercy. But he could feel himself sliding ever farther away.

“It would make no difference,” Sir Owain said. “Sleep, Mister Becker. And when you wake up-assuming that you do wake up-we can begin.”