The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(44)
The first of those journeys (that was what he called them: journeys, not fainting fits) had occurred the same day he was discharged from Guy’s Hospital, where he had been sent to recover from his terrible mutilation. Clayton had ignored the nurses’ advice and left without even waiting for Sinclair, who had offered to take him back to his own house, where he could finish his convalescence under his wife’s care. Once out of hospital, in a further act of revolt, Clayton had eschewed taking a carriage and insisted on walking back to his modest apartment on Milton Street. As he walked, he swung his truncated arm almost brazenly, oblivious to the compassionate looks of the passersby and the awful cold that froze his phantom fingers, fingers no glove could ever keep warm again. He needed to clear away the cobwebs clinging to his brain after thirty days of swallowing opiates, and also to stretch his stiff legs. But he soon regretted his decision: it was too cold outside, his legs ached, he had an excruciating itch where his severed hand had been, and he noticed he felt more and more giddy with each step. Then, as he cut down a side alley, he sensed someone following him. He knew this without needing to turn around or to hear a noise behind him. However, before he could do anything about it, he felt an icy hook pierce his stomach and jerk him upward. He wasn’t aware of falling or hitting the ground. Only of the darkness, and the smell of horse manure.
That was the first time he ever dreamt about Valerie.
When a few sharp slaps on his cheek brought him round, he found himself face-to-face with a well-dressed gentleman who was gazing at him with a concerned look. He was a middle-aged fellow, with a pleasant face that might have appeared anodyne were it not for a very black goatee that looked like it had been colored in with a piece of charcoal, and a pair of flamboyant gold spectacles. The man introduced himself as Doctor Clive Higgins and explained he had been following Clayton for a few streets, alarmed by his sickly pallor and unsteady gait. But Clayton had fainted just as he was about to catch up with him to ask if he was feeling ill. Clayton mumbled something about his recent stay in the hospital and asked the doctor to let him continue on his way, assuring him he was quite all right and that he lived close by. Clayton was lying because he wanted to be left alone as soon as possible, the sooner to be able to relish the strange, beautiful images the dreams had left in his head before they vanished. Doctor Higgins let him go, but not without warning him, in an oddly serious tone, that he was in need of help that he, the doctor, could provide. Then he pressed a cream-colored card with gold edging into Clayton’s hand. Underneath his name was printed the address of his consulting rooms and the puzzling title Doctor of Neurology, Psychoanalysis, and Other Afflictions of the Soul.
After promising to pay him a visit, Clayton hurried home. When he arrived, he emptied a triple dose of the sleeping pills he had been given at the hospital into his good hand, swallowed them down with a mouthful of brandy, and lay on the bed with his heart pounding, not even bothering to take his coat off. He was so desperate to resume his beautiful dream exactly where he had left off that he didn’t care if the number of tablets he had taken meant that he never woke up again. But he didn’t manage to dream about her again. He woke up a few hours later with a pounding headache and a feeling of anxiety produced by the overdose of pills.
He had to wait another twelve days before he dreamt about Valerie again, this time in the theater. The same icy hook in the stomach, the same sudden feeling of being hoisted into the air, the same dizziness and precipitous darkness. But also the same dream, so wonderful and vivid that when he awoke, for a few hours at least, everything around him seemed more illusory than any dream. A week later the same thing happened again, this time while he was making a cup of tea, which had ended up in pieces on the kitchen floor beside his unconscious body. And yet, he never managed to dream about her when he slept any other way. He had tried taking pills, alcohol, a mixture of the two, lying in bed all day reciting from memory tedious police reports, or stretching out on the sofa until the early hours. But it was no use. He never dreamt about her during his normal sleep. No, those dreams came to him only during those fainting fits.
And yet there was no pattern, nothing he could control. They were liable to happen to him at any moment, in the most unexpected situations, regardless of what he was doing at the time. It made no difference whether he was nervous or relaxed, standing or sitting, alone or in a crowd. They just happened: a slight dizziness followed by that sharp pull in his stomach that caused him to collapse suddenly. Journeys, he called them. How else was he supposed to describe them? In the end, while his body remained sprawled on the floor where he fell, his mind soared far away from there, always toward the same place.
Although he never felt happier than when he was having those strange fainting fits, they soon became a source of concern. They happened so often that Clayton had to admit he could no longer treat them as occasional incidents, but rather as an unmistakable sign that something inside him had radically changed, that his soul was no longer the same. His most recent journey alarmed him the most, because he had fainted in the middle of an investigation. He, the highly acclaimed Inspector Cornelius Clayton, had collapsed at a crime scene. What would Sinclair say if he found out? What would his superiors think? And how long would he be able to conceal those incidents? This time he had miraculously avoided being discovered unconsious in the old lady’s study, enabling him to omit that shameful fact from his written report, but next time he might not be so fortunate. He dreaded to think what would happen if it were revealed that he suffered regularly from fainting fits. Doubtless they would put him on sick leave, send him to a doctor, and refuse to let him carry on working until they had discovered what ailed him. And what would become of him then, if he couldn’t occupy his mind with other things? He would go crazy, that was certain. Work was the only thing that brought calm to his brain. Only when he was immersed in an investigation, fixated on the details of some case, juggling theories and conjectures, was he able to stop thinking about her. Almost.