Crown

The Asylum operated as two separate facilities beneath the same roof. One admitted private patients, providing the wealthy with a respectable place to send relatives whose illnesses had become inconvenient, distressing or difficult to explain to visitors. The other housed convicted murderers suffering from severe psychiatric disorders. The distinction governed admission, supervision and the expectations of those paying for the patients’ continued confinement. Jude Banks belonged to the second facility. Whatever else might be said about him, nobody had placed him there to spare the family embarrassment.

When he woke, it felt as though somebody had hauled him out of sleep before he had finished with it. Dreams remained close, their meaning already escaping while their unpleasantness stayed behind. His mouth was dry. His tongue felt too large, resting awkwardly against his teeth, and the back of his throat carried a chalky taste he could neither swallow nor clear. He tried to gather enough saliva to make the effort worthwhile. Nothing much happened.

He remembered taking his medication. He remembered lying down, the pillow beneath his head and the bad spring under his left hip, which squeaked whenever he turned too quickly. He had learned to move around it in his sleep. Those details came back with the reassuring solidity of things repeated often enough to become independent of thought. Then he tried to turn onto his side, and the movement stopped almost before it began.

This was not his bed. His weight rested on something hard, with pressure beneath his thighs and across the backs of his shoulders. A chair. He could feel the shape of it now: heavy, substantial, made from wood and steel. Leather held his wrists against the arms. More leather secured his ankles. When he pulled, the straps creaked but did not give. Their surfaces were old and cracked, polished in places by contact with other people’s skin. Whoever had fastened them knew how much movement to allow before movement became useful.

He looked ahead. A faded emblem marked the wall, small enough that it might have escaped the attention of a man with something else to look at. A circle of thorns. The sight produced recognition before he could assemble a proper memory around it. His stomach tightened. He knew the room, the chair, the things that happened after waking in it. For a moment he wanted the emblem to be something similar, some ordinary mark his frightened mind had mistaken for the one he remembered. Then the leather creaked beneath his hands again, and there was no room left for that possibility.

He was back here. They had brought him back while he slept. The knowledge made him pull harder against the straps, although he already knew what that would achieve. His wrists pressed into the edges of the leather, and the chair remained still.

The room smelled like an old barbershop sink: drainage, sweat and damp surfaces that had been wiped without becoming clean. There was something electrical in the air too, a faint sharpness that reminded him of a plastic comb lifted from dry hair. Above him, an incandescent bulb glowed inside a cloudy glass enclosure. Its yellow light faltered occasionally, changing the room by so little that he might have imagined it if he had not been watching for everything.

Someone stood on his right. Jude tried to turn towards them and discovered another restraint. Padding held his head against the back of the chair, with straps arranged to stop him rotating it far enough to see who was there. He could move his eyes. He could raise his chin a fraction before the pressure beneath it increased. At the edge of his vision a white sleeve appeared, followed by gloved hands.

He watched those hands because there was nothing else about the person he could examine. The gloves fitted closely, outlining the joints and tendons as the fingers moved. They adjusted something beside the chair, paused, then turned a dial. The movements were neither hurried nor hesitant. Jude recognised that ordinary, practised economy and found it worse than excitement would have been. Whoever stood beside him had things to do. Jude’s fear was not one of them.

A switch clicked. The machine began to hum, a low electrical sound that seemed to occupy the room more completely than its volume justified. Something moved above his head. He tried to look up, but the restraints stopped him, leaving only a shape descending at the upper edge of his sight. A coiled wire extended from the ceiling. At its end hung a device shaped like a crown.

It lowered until it hovered over his scalp. Jude could not judge the remaining distance, and that uncertainty made the skin beneath his hair tighten. He had been through this before, often enough to recognise the sequence and dread the intervals between its parts. The hum rose sharply in pitch. He flinched as far as the chair permitted, his body responding to what it expected before anything had happened. He knew what the voltage felt like. He knew how little his knowledge helped.

But the sensation that came was different. It did not arrive as the electricity he remembered. It was closer to a sound, although he could not locate it in his ears or separate it from the substance of his own body. His teeth seemed to receive it first. Then his spine. Something hammered behind his eyes with a rhythm he could feel but not follow, pressing against a place where an old memory ought to have been. He tried to breathe and found himself holding the breath halfway in. The room sharpened, the yellow light becoming briefly unbearable, and his pupils widened.

Then the chair was gone.

He was standing beneath a sky that should not have been above anything. The air was red. Overhead, blackness moved with the depth and weight of water, an ocean turned upside down and held there by a means he could not see. Shapes twisted inside it. They were enormous, though he had nothing by which to measure them except their slow movements through that impossible depth. Watching them, he understood that they were drowning. The understanding came without an explanation. They had been drowning for so long that death seemed no longer to be something they knew how to do.

The ground yielded beneath his feet. Thick, hot mud pressed around his boots and resisted when he tried to lift them. He could feel the effort through his legs, the unpleasant suction releasing only after he had put more strength into the movement than he expected. Far away, somebody screamed. Other cries followed, or perhaps the first had altered as it travelled. The sounds reached him muffled and obstructed, as though the people making them had lungs full of something too heavy to expel.

He knew this place. That frightened him more than the sky. He had encountered it in dreams whose details vanished when he woke, leaving only a reluctance to close his eyes again. Now the details stayed. The mud, the red air, the sounds of people struggling to make themselves heard: each seemed to confirm something he had once known and worked hard not to remember.

Ahead of him stood the entrance to a hallway. He could not understand how it belonged to the landscape, only that it was there and that he was moving towards it. Stone walls narrowed the space beyond. Dampness gathered on their surfaces, shining in the red light before the passage took him farther inside. The ceiling curved into an arch. At the end waited a wooden door, slightly open.

He did not decide to pass through it. The movement was already happening. His boots creaked, and his clothes weighed heavily against him. He became aware of black wool, of garments whose cut and weight belonged to some ceremony he did not wish to identify. A rope lay over one shoulder. He knew the feel of it without reaching up.

Beyond the door, he stood on a raised wooden platform. The boards groaned beneath his weight, old enough that each sound seemed to come from a depth greater than the wood itself. He had the impression of other people standing where he stood, their weight and waiting somehow retained in the structure. He looked down at his hands. They were ready for work.

A woman stood nearby, barefoot and shivering. Her makeup had run down her face, dark tracks mingling with dirt and another substance he could not identify. A guard held her by the elbows. Without that support she might already have fallen; her body kept making small attempts to fold, and each time the guard’s grip returned her to the position required of her.

“Please,” she said. The word caught in her throat, and she had to begin again. “Please, not like this. I have children. They need me.” She looked towards him, searching his face with an attention that made him want to step away. “Please. I’m not ready.”

He moved closer instead.

The hood in his hands was black and rough. He could smell old sweat and mildew in the material, and beneath those smells something he associated with people who had breathed into it while waiting. His hands lifted it towards her face. She flinched when his fingers touched her, but the guard held her still. Jude watched the fabric cover her eyes and mouth. Her breathing changed immediately, becoming enclosed and close.

“I didn’t do it,” she whispered. He heard her through the hood. “Please, someone else. Someone else—” She coughed, and her knees gave way. The guard caught her weight and brought her upright again. For several moments she could do little except breathe. Then she said, more quietly, “They won’t understand. My babies… they’ll wait for me. They’ll keep waiting.”

He took the rope from his shoulder and placed it around her neck. The movements came easily. His fingers knew where to go, how to arrange the loop and how much to tighten it. He checked the knot. It was perfect, and the certainty with which he recognised that perfection filled him with a horror his hands did not share. They remained steady. They had not hesitated when she spoke about her children. They did not hesitate now.

He stepped back. A lever stood beside him, its steel worn smooth where other hands had taken hold of it. He knew that it would resist slightly. He knew the little additional effort required to overcome that resistance. The knowledge was intimate and practical, the kind a man acquired by doing something more than once.

The woman was still crying beneath the hood. He could hear her trying to speak between breaths, gathering herself for another appeal because there was nothing else left for her to do. The guard had withdrawn. Jude’s hand closed around the lever, and she said, “Please—”

He pulled.

The lever resisted, then moved. The trapdoor fell away beneath her feet. There was a thick, abrupt sound as her weight reached the end of the rope, and her body jerked before beginning to swing. Jude saw the movement of her bare feet. He had just enough time to understand that he would remember them.

Then he was back in the chair, dragging air into his lungs.

The machine clicked off. Sweat ran beneath the padding behind his head and cooled along his temples. His hands strained against the leather, fingers spread, as though they could still release something they had been holding. His heart beat with an urgency that felt foreign to him. He tried to swallow, tasted the chalk again and fixed his eyes on the faded circle of thorns.

The person beside him spoke before he could make sense of where he had been. The voice was cold and sharply articulated, each word given the force of a separate instruction. “Tell me what you saw!”