Twelve Minutes to Midnight

Extract

“It’s nearly time.”

Rising from his desk, Dr Morris gestured for them to follow him. Turning left as they exited his office, the doctor quickly led them towards a gloomy stairwell.

“The basement is where we keep our most troubled patients,” he explained, wheezing slightly as he hurried down the single flight of stairs, a gas lamp fixed to the wall spluttering as they descended, before regaining its yellow glow.
“Although, of late, it seems as though the entire hospital is filled with agitation and despair.”

At the bottom of the stairwell, Penny saw a long corridor stretching out in front of them, a dim light suffusing the gloom. The doors of the patient’s cells were spaced at regular intervals to the left and to the right, and at the head of the corridor, slumped on a straight-backed chair, an unshaven guard sat dozing, his broad chest slowly rising and falling as Dr Morris stood crossly in front of him.

The doctor coughed to clear his throat, waking the night orderly from his slumber with a sudden start. The man’s bulldog face twisted into a snarl, barely suppressing his rage at being woken. Beneath his left eye, Penelope noticed the broad weal from an old scar slashed across his cheek. Glancing up at the doctor, the dishevelled orderly muttered a half-hearted apology as he rose from his chair, a ring of keys clanking around his waist.
“If you could unlock Fitzgerald’s cell,” Dr Morris ordered the guard, his frosty tones expressing his displeasure.

Glancing suspiciously at Monty and Penelope as they stood waiting behind the doctor, the night orderly selected a key from his chain and crossed the corridor to a door on his right. Bending his broad shoulders, he unlocked the cell and swung the door open. Hurrying forward, Dr Morris gestured for Monty and Penelope to follow him as he stepped inside the cell.

Monty turned to Penny, a nervous twitch flickering across his fearful face.
“This wasn’t what I agreed to,” he hissed. “There could be a maniac in there and he expects us to walk right in.”
“Pull yourself together,” Penny replied, her voice low and calm. “You’re supposed to be Montgomery Flinch, Master of the Macabre, not some lily-livered milksop.”

“The cell is currently empty,” Dr Morris’s voice floated out into the corridor, “but you’ll be able to see the evidence clearly here, Mr Flinch.”

The orderly stood waiting by the cell door, a surly expression fixed to his disfigured face as he watched them both intently. Squaring his shoulders, Monty stepped forward with Penny close beside him.

As he strode into the cell, Monty held his handkerchief to his face, as though to protect himself from whatever maddening vapours might be lurking there. Next to him, Penelope gasped in amazement as she took in the sight that awaited them.

A single bed, chair and small table were the only items of furniture in the cell, but its whitewashed walls were covered entirely in words. Scrawled chalk marks, whirls of black ink, even marks etched in what looked like blood; an avalanche of language exploding across the walls of the cell. Penny stepped further into the room, the single light fixed to the ceiling throwing her shadow across the scene.

“Fitzgerald passed away two nights ago,” Dr Morris revealed. “He was one of the first patients to be afflicted and his mania overwhelmed him in the end. This isn’t all that he wrote – there are endless stacks of paper, scraps of his clothing, even carvings on his bedpan – all filled with the same madness that is written across these walls.”

Penelope stepped closer, inspecting the wall and trying to decipher the words written there.

... great cities of glass and steel reaching up into the heavens ... landmines erupting underfoot in a desolate barbed-wire forest ... the mud and the rats and the screams and the dying ... sinister iron birds peck at the sky ... ruptured metal and the melting of stone ... a mushroom cloud rising on the horizon, the smoke devouring an entire city ...

Penny shivered, the unsettling beauty of the words chilling her blood. She’d expected to read the half-formed rantings of a mind touched by madness, but she sensed some deeper secret was buried beneath these unfathomable words. The strange visions they conjured crept into her mind.

“Quick,” the rasp of Dr Morris’s voice interrupted her troubled thoughts, “it’s nearly
twelve minutes to midnight.”

He ushered Monty back out into the corridor, Penelope following close behind. Opening up the shutters of the viewing window into the next cell, the doctor motioned for them to watch. Lifting herself up on her tiptoes, Penny peered inside. In the darkened room, a patient lay sleeping, his face just visible in the half-light spilling from the window as his body slumbered, shrouded in a sheet. The doctor glanced down at his fob watch as the second hand approached the twelve.
“Now,” he whispered.

The patient sat bolt upright in his bed, his hands suddenly scrabbling for the paper and pencil left on the table by his bedside. His eyes were still half-closed in some kind of trance, but as his fingers closed around the pencil, he started to write, the words flowing across the paper without a pause. From the cells around them, Penny could hear the sounds of more patients waking, the thud of their footsteps echoing down the corridor as they rose from their beds, quickly followed by the incessant scratching of pens and the scrape of chalk against stone.

“Mr Flinch,” the doctor turned towards them, his eyes wild with despair, “can you help us?”

Penelope looked up at Monty, the actor’s pale face frozen in fear and then back towards the doctor.

“My uncle will do everything that he can,” she replied. “Rest assured of that.”