The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Read online

  RICHARD T. KELLY

  The Possessions of Doctor Forrest

  {A Novel}

  To my dearest Rachel, Cordelia, Lucy

  Wheresoever the hour-glasse is set up and time fixed, unthinkable yet measured time and a fixed end, there we are in the field, there we are in clover … Therewith a man can live at rack and manger like a lord and astonish the world as a great nigromancer with much divel’s work … How will such an one come to think about the point in time when it is become time to give heed to the end! Only the end is ours, at the end he is ours …

  THOMAS MANN, Doctor Faustus

  (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)

  We are going to be reincarnated. Whether we know what our reincarnation will be, I doubt. I expect it will be full of surprises, most unforeseen. Some, given our vanity, are likely to seem outrageously warped.

  NORMAN MAILER, On God

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I: ABSENT FRIENDS

  1 Dr Lochran’s Journal: Uneasy dreams

  2 DI Hagen’s Notes: A man of night and day

  3 Dr Lochran’s Journal: Bad for the soul

  4 Malena’s Diary: His mere possession

  5 Dr Lochran’s Journal: The cure for what ails

  6 Dr Hartford’s Journal: Inmates of Blakedene Hall

  7 Eloise’s Workbook: The knife and the wound

  8 Dr Hartford’s Journal: Some devil

  9 Dr Lochran’s Journal: A disturbing encounter

  10 Dr Hartford’s Journal: Through the trees

  11 Dr Lochran’s Journal: The looking-glass

  II: CAUSES OF DEATH

  12 Dr Hartford’s Journal: The mask

  13 Dr Lochran’s Journal: Like a monster

  14 Dr Hartford’s Journal: Intruder

  15 Dr Lochran’s Journal: The Burnt Man

  16 Dr Hartford’s Journal: A tempest

  III: DIABLERIE

  17 Dr Lochran’s Journal: Conspiracies

  18 Dr Hartford’s Journal: Dispossession

  19 Dr Lochran’s Journal: The shape of a man

  20 Dr Hartford’s Journal: A mermaid’s tail

  21 Olivia’s Correspondence: Lost in the dark

  IV: THE CONFESSION OF DOCTOR FORREST

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Am I hearing myself think? Or is she whispering to me? Sometimes I can see her lips part, feel her breath at my ear, the poison start to pour. Sometimes not. Regardless, her voice is always in my headspace, probing and clinging like a tongue, insistent, irresistible.

  Her voice is not mine. I ought to know the difference. And yet hers has grown so entwined with my own. We’re alike now in so many ways – like-minded, she and I, this dreadful intimacy of ours. I suppose I have been waiting, all my life, to be so very close to a woman. From no desire of my own, never, but only because ‘telepathy’, in some form, is what women claimed to want from me – claimed incessantly. They should have been more careful.

  So, now, it’s her. My sister, my anima. She stands before the darkling surface of the cheval glass, reflective, as though she were made of the mirror. She awaits my decision, as if she didn’t know, as if she didn’t infest every thought in my mind.

  And he, my enemy – the apex of the triangle we form in this room – he’s looking from her to me – perplexedly, some veil of concern on his face. If he had a notion of what might be about to befall him, that concern would be unfeigned and very urgent.

  His lips are moving, for sure. ‘Robert,’ he’s saying, ‘this is all wrong, man …’ That mask of sympathy he’s wearing, is it for me? He’s no friend of mine. And yet, is there still time enough for me to show him some kindness?

  For this feeling now rising up my spine and over my skin like some questing rat, some necrotising rot, is richly appalling but replete and commanding as supreme music – foul, monstrous, a heavy-headed beast swaying and stirring to its senses, gestated from my gut or my groin or cracked out of my head like a malformed god-foetus, the Evil infant, a spider-baby hatched from a skull, majestically fat with venom and filth.

  And what am I but the worm, the vassal, the guilty man? I will obey all directives. She to whom power is given, I must rise and do her bidding. There is a pulse behind the din in my head, a chime, diamond-hard, vehement, telling me Do It. Take it. Take what you need. From him. ‘You are not permitted to dissect living subjects. Not yet …’ Doc Laidlaw’s old jest in Anatomy lab, back when we were boys. Now we are grown, for all it was worth.

  And this man before me, I am going to cut in half – be the cut from nave to chaps or ear to ear, I can’t yet say. But I do know it now, his fate is sealed – his fate, and mine. I cross the threshold, I step inside, and I fall.

  Part I

  ABSENT FRIENDS

  1

  Dr Lochran’s Journal

  Uneasy dreams

  August 22nd

  Last night a dead man came to call on me – a friend, thank God, though to my shame I let our friendship fall away in the years before he died. For my defence it had got that we met, even spoke, so very seldom. Everyday life interposed itself, bedevilling every arrangement, thwarting our best intentions – in the usual way of things. Still, for all my regret I can’t say I was glad to see my old friend now, risen from the tomb like Lazarus.

  Hearing the rap of our old brass surgery-knocker I went down and opened the front door. There stood Edmond, tall and fair-haired and foursquare as was. But this time no customary crushing handshake, no ‘Ah, Grey, old boy!’ He was silent, smiling faintly and strangely, waiting for me to bid him over my threshold, which, of course, I did.

  On closer inspection he didn’t look so different, save for a certain lunar whiteness to his corneas, glinting in the half-light of our living room. He lowered himself into the grasp of Livy’s beloved baggy blue sofa. I fetched us the humidor and a dram of the good Glenlivet, which he ignored. He asked after ‘Olivia’ and Cal. I responded politely, asked likewise of Anna and Peter – for all that I knew the truth, and that these poor exchanges were just as flat as those we would rush through in the desultory late years of our friendship.

  It was enough to set me thinking back, pondering how much Ed and I ever really had in common beyond our vocation in surgery. A love of good sirloin, certainly. Our summer places in Dorset, barely a mile apart. And Lions rugby, I suppose, though Ed always professed a pseudo-plebeian fondness for football. In the main, though, he was a man for The Arts; and though I’m no philistine, I can’t be doing with high-flown chitter. But as he sat there before me, sphinx-like and unnerving, I suddenly remembered that stormy etching of Livy’s he always admired, gilt-framed at the left of the rear reception fireplace. So I glanced back over my shoulder to check on its dependable presence, and, of course, something wholly other hung in its place. Then we were talking about some unfathomable business in which he believed I could be of help to him – some will or matter of probate, the setting of his worldly affairs in order. It all began to seem so sad and fruitless that I felt a catch in my throat.

  ‘But Edmond,’ I uttered finally, ‘you died already …’ Spoken like a child, or some tipsy oaf at a party – a long way short of my best bedside manner, at any rate.

  Ed merely smiled as if in pity. ‘Grey, old boy, that never happened. We don’t die. Not us.’

  All of a sudden he held a pack of cards in his hand, offered to ‘tell my fortune’. I’d no truck with that. It ended up that we walked outdoors awhile, in the general direction of the Heath. But one minute he was at my si
de and then he was gone, then I was elsewhere entirely – in the usual asinine manner of dreams. The setting dissolved to the first hospital I ever worked, that grim old hole in Norwich, then to some dank and moss-grown shed in dense woodland … On waking from this mire of sinister nonsense I wasted no time in getting dressed and downstairs, the kettle on and the day’s graft begun. Still, I confess, I found myself brooding about Edmond for much of the morning.

  To this day I shudder to think of how cruel and basically bloody avoidable was his death. He drowned on holiday in the Florida Keys, trying to rescue Peter, then only nine years old, in waters that had by all accounts turned very suddenly turbulent. The lad was never a strong swimmer but he’d bobbed and breasted a fair way out to sea alone, only to crack his head on a buoy. Edmond saw it too late. Being plenty robust he swam out swift as Leander, managed to get an arm round Peter and make some headway against the blasted current – but only so far, the shore still a way off, and so he headed for the tip of a rocky peninsula, where he managed to push and shove Peter up and onto a low ledge. By now, though, Ed hadn’t the strength left to propel himself out of the water, for the waves were fairly pounding on him. Worse, the rocks were coated with razor-sharp shells that slashed his fingers wherever he tried to grab hold. The panic, on top of the physical exertion, must have been catastrophic to his already thickened coronary arteries. With unsettling ease I can imagine myself in Edmond’s place, assuming his plight – the shortening breaths, the numbing fingers, the fearful strain on the left ventricle. At the funeral Peter, quite desolate, told me that he had watched from his ledge on the rocks, groggily semi-conscious, as his father’s grip loosened by a little and a little, and then Edmond toppled back and the water roiled over his head.

  I do wonder – if Ed’s rescue effort had failed utterly, and Peter instead had been carried out to sea – could he possibly have lived on with the loss of his child? I doubt it. And had he a choice, even a devil’s choice like that, he would have chosen it to be as it played out. As for Anna – Edmond would have known she would just carry on, because she was a coper and a stoic, and in time she would find some other man to be with her for the rest of her days.

  But what nags at me now is that I just don’t know if she ever did. Or what became of Peter. We simply drifted out of touch, another form of death. This is what ‘Time the Enemy’ will do to us, if we allow it.

  August 23rd

  Evidently I’m not myself at the moment, my head in an unhealthy place. For sure I never dreamt I’d turn into a hopeless scribbler. I’m well aware the whole anxious business of Robert has been preying on me, but I can’t stick all the blame for this disquiet onto poor, dear Doctor Forrest – whatever may have befallen him, or wherever the hell he’s taken himself.

  The fact is, I’ve had other bad dreams lately, all much as foul as each other. One night just over a week ago – the night before Robert’s disappearance, an omen? – I lay awake for what must have been an hour, steeped in the kind of unease that comes with all the nocturnal bangs and groans of a big old house. I started listening to the bedside clock tock-tocking, ever louder – before it hit me that we have no such clock anywhere in the room. On cue, the tocking mutated by degrees into a sound like a humanoid growl, first guttural, then full-throated. I lay there, paralysed by alarm, deaf in one ear on the side where Livy slept soundly, that hellish roar building in the other. Then I felt hot breath on my face, though I didn’t dare turn my head toward The Presence. This is insanity, I thought, as calm as you like. And yet, in the murk of the dream-state it is blasts of lucidity like this that get one through and out the other side.

  What should be my remedy, short of a heavy self-prescription of diazepam? Were I to confide in Steven, most eminent head-shrinker of my acquaintance, then the good Doctor Hartford would no doubt tell me all this is highly meaningful – the subconscious daemon wreaking mischief at a time when it knows me to be vulnerable, beginning to worry about the bitter end; hopeful, perhaps, that there might yet be some light – soupily warm, unearthly and beckoning – at the end of the tunnel. All that rot.

  No, there is no return to this life, nothing and no one ever comes back. And I’ve yet to stoop so low as to wish the facts were otherwise, even though I watched my mother be quite incapacitated over my father’s coffin, refusing to let go for those impossibly tough final moments. Maybe I’ll be no different if such a day dawns for me. More likely Livy will suffer it first. Maybe sooner than I think. On these darkening mornings, after the ever more uncomfortable ablutions, scraping at my face before the smeared bathroom mirror … I do, as they say, see the old man staring back at me.

  But, the End is the End, it must be faced, and in doing so we’re reminded to be serious and useful and loving to one another. To be brave, above all. What have I said myself to so many small patients and agonised parents, as kindly as I could manage? ‘This is hard for you, I know, but I’m afraid you’ll have to play this hand.’ I was only imitating old George Garrison, my and Robert’s first surgical mentor. I heard his routine so many times: he was just so bloody good at telling people they were going to die. Not for him the semi-autistic, jargon-infested stammering of lesser men in white coats. Garrison made the unlucky ones in his care figure out their fate for themselves: ‘Now, you know what we’ve been doing here, with your treatment. Why do you think we did that? Yes, that’s right. And have you felt any better? No? A little worse? I see. So, what conclusion do you draw …?’

  In some profound way George’s patients were always grateful for that sense of self-awareness he gifted them. The fact is, old Garrison could make anyone in the room see that it was all basically out of their hands – when your number comes up then sayonara cruel world.

  I suppose, if I’m honest, I rehearse these familiar matters in my head as some unsteady bulwark against the fear that Robert is really gone – dead – maybe even by his own hand. Christ alive, is that possible? I’ve been fighting down the thought ever since I got the news. But the plain facts persist. Robert was last seen around 7pm on August 14th, leaving his clinic for the day a shade later than customary. As I told the young sergeant Goddard, I’d spoken to Robert on the phone the night before: nothing out of the ordinary, we shared some shop talk (even mused a little – I shiver to think of it now – about that wee missing girl who’s been all over the news). The next morning he failed to show for a 10am appointment, noon went by, and his loyal secretary Fiona raised the alarm – one that resounds to this day, since there’s still no trace of him. I have, as they say, begun to dread the phone, and each time it rings I brace myself mentally: ‘Why did you let yourself laugh just then? Now you’re about to be told something terrible …’

  And yet, still, the spirit revolts: I just won’t accept the doomsday scenario. No, it’s Robert I expect to see on my doorstep, spreading himself rangily across the blue sofa, eyes shining again after all his recent miseries, tumbler of Glenlivet raised in hand.

  ‘Rab,’ – I might say – since no one else gets away with calling him that – ‘Rab, thank God you’re alive, man.’

  ‘Ach Grey,’ – he might reply – ‘you fool, you clod, you fucking eejit. We don’t die, not us. And “God” has nothing to do with it.’

  To a degree, I do accept – Robert had been gone from us awhile, in spirit if not in body, his mood of late so dark and erratic. Evidently for those who made his acquaintance in the last five months – the months since Malena walked out on him – he left a poor impression. These latecomers got no sense of his usual liveliness, the high gleam around his presence, the assurance with which Rab could lead you off on a scurrilous evening’s entertainment.

  It’s possible my diehard friendship with such a man struck onlookers as just as much of a mystery. Robert and I were always an odd match, on paper: me, I accept, the guy you’d go to for an onerous favour, the fellow you would trust with your wife; Robert defined by his fashionable lateness, his promiscuous openness to any better offer – not to speak of his doctorat
e in sexual predation, that quite raptor-like pursuit of any female who took his fancy, whatever her marital status. Edmond could never abide Robert for one minute, may even have thought less of me by association – a supposedly sound paediatric surgeon consorting with this disreputably flashy nip ’n’ tuck merchant. (Steven too, of course, has had these ‘issues’ with Rab down the years.)

  Not that I cared, or care now. Our life’s great friendships are dropped on us in strange little ways but – I really do believe – for providential reasons. We are meant to encounter our opposites in life and be changed by them – transformed, in some manner. For Robert and me – from Kilmuir College through medical school to our professional practices – our lives have been bonded by links of steel, our heartaches and triumphs and secrets all shared. I love him, I always have – even when he’s disappointed me, let me and himself down. This is a moral requisite of any true love, is it not? And in the manner of the Irish I am resigned to the belief that our dearest friends will, as a matter of course, be the death of us.

  In loving Robert, though, I have to ask myself if I correctly diagnosed the gravity of his recent decline, or the causes of it. Was he authentically depressed, sufficiently sick of life to want death? He’d begun taking those bloody pills, yes, yet somehow – daft of me – I’d ranked it more of a piece with his long, colourful history of pharmaceutical ‘experiments’. Of course I’d noticed in him that share of midlife gloom to which we’re all now prey, but I daresay it weighed on him – the greying of his coal-black hair, that turn to ‘cragginess’ in his looks. He spoke gloomily of ‘the gravity of time’, such that for his 45th birthday back in April I tried to make light by gifting him a walking stick, a handsome piece of good birch with a silver-plated crutch handle – I have one myself, and I felt sure Rab would accept his membership of the Old Boys Club with a broad grin. But you know at once when you’ve done the wrong thing … Within a half-hour we’d mended fences sufficiently to be sipping champagne on the lawn outside his place, but when I expressed the simple wish that he achieve all he hoped for in the coming year, he emitted a sour sort of a laugh.