Obscure Parodyverse Moments #10: The Cabinet of Doctor Morningstar
This story continues from
Obscure Parodyverse Moments #7: Amnesia,
Obscure Parodyverse Moments #8: Monsters on the Loose,
Obscure Parodyverse Moments #9: The Black Chapel
“The human brain weighs three pounds,” lectured Doctor Morningstar. “Perhaps a fiftieth of a man’s body weight. Yet it takes a fifth of the body’s oxygen to sustain it. It is rich in protein and minerals. A man could live on a diet of nothing but human brains.”
Herringcarp Asylum’s lecture hall was packed with students of the mind. The darkened room was lit only by the flickering light of the magic lantern that played slide after slide across the screen at the front, showing engravings and drawings of dissections of the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the pons varolii, the medulla oblongata.
“Christian theologians tell us that man is made in the image of God. That our reason reflects his. The ancients however held that seeing the nature of God led to madness. Does this then mean that the more we understand our nature the closer we come to insanity?” Dr Morningstar turned to his audience to pose his question.
“What is sanity? What is madness? Those who hear voices in their head, those who cannot control their animal behaviours, those who see what is not there, in latter generations may have been revered as shamans or saints. Yet now these moon-led degenerates are known for what they are, pinioned by science and cabineted for study.”
The lantern began to show daguerreotypes of inmates; filthy, slavering, diseased, howling. “The Greeks believed that a man has vital humours in his body, physical fluxes of sanguine, choler, melancholer, and phlegm, produced from physical organs to affect his amorousness and courage, his happiness, his temper, and his rationale. A dyscracic man whose humours were unbalanced was ill. One whose fluxes were severely disturbed was insane. Madness as a physical thing.”
The slides stopped. Morningstar left his podium and approached the audience, pointing stick in hand. “What if it is?” he asked. “What if insanity could be pinpointed within the body, within the brain? What if it could be purged by surgery or medicine, expunged like a tumour or amputated like a gangrened limb? What if it could be transferred from one brain to another, from the fit to the unfit, the worthy to the worthless? What if it could be bottled up, concentrated, distilled like a liqueur to its purest form?”
A few of the listeners begin to look uncomfortable. Morningstar was going off the map. It was terra incognito, where monsters dwelled.
“The mediaeval mind conceived of madness as possession. Evil spirits dwelled in the human brain and rode the soul like a dumb beast.” The doctor smiled thinly. “In this very house, long ago, pious monks collected the insane in penitent cells beneath our feet and tried to flog the demons from them. They believed it a holy cause, to save these tormented innocents from the Devil which had nested inside them. They tried to beat the madness out, to bleed it away, to lash it free, to drown it. They even prepared vessels of clay to catch the demons and stopper them up like evil djinns of Persian fable.”
“Today we know better. We know more. We scorn the Devil and look to science for our salvation.” Morningstar turned back to the platform, where his assistant Bradley was wheeling in an upright coffin-shaped casket bound with silver. A dozen lead-acid batteries sloshed in bell jars around its base. “Here is the future,” the doctor announced.
He stroked the smooth black surface of his box. “This device is only a prototype, of course. It is crude yet, unfinished. But this is the first modern machine designed to excise madness – physical madness – from the human mind. Trepanation, the filtering of bodily fluids, the addition of chemicals to calm the blood, the titration of mental energies through electricity, these are the means through which insanity can be captured and controlled; perhaps even harnessed.” He turned proudly to his audience. “Gentlemen, I give you… the cabinet of Doctor Morningstar!”
***
“Doctor Morningstar?”
The handsome director of Herringcarp Lunatic Asylum turned and focussed his piercing blue eyes on the nervous scholar beneath his podium. “Ah, yes. How did you enjoy the lecture, young man?”
“It was most interesting, sir. Doctor. Sir.”
“Doctor will do,” Morningstar assured him. “We are to be colleagues, after all. I trust you have been able to move your things to your room with no delay?”
“Yes sir. Doctor. They’ve put me in the north tower. There’s a fine sea view when the mist clears.”
“Good. Good. I noticed you taking copious notes as I spoke.”
The young scholar nodded. He’d assiduously recorded everything the great man had said. “You covered a good deal of ground, sir. Doctor. Things that I’ve never heard spoken of in all my training.”
“There’s more to medicine than can be learned in Doctor Bell’s Edinburgh classroom young man. I can teach you things you could never imagine.”
“I know doctor. That’s why I’m so grateful. For the internship. For the chance.”
“We stand at the borders of human knowledge here,” Morningstar noted. “The opportunities are infinite.”
The newcomer agreed. “We could really help people.”
“That too,” the doctor endorsed hastily. “Naturally, our care for the inmates here comes first and foremost.”
The youngster hesitated, clutching his notebook. “I… do have a few questions. If you have time. Doctor.”
Morningstar smiled. “Of course. Without questions there are no answers. I like questions. I encourage them.”
“Well then,” the scholar breathed, “your cabinet. For excising madness. For transferring it into a different medium. What reasoning lies behind…?”
“The primitive believes that the consumption of flesh can transfer characteristics from the eaten to the eater,” the doctor interrupted. “Bull’s blood brings power. A tiger’s penis promotes fertility. Mummy’s dust in tea prevents diseases. Some cannibal tribes eat their enemies’ corpses to command their strength. Other savages eat the brains of their own dead relatives to retain their wisdom amongst the living.”
“But those are all superstitious nonsense,” objected the young man.
“Undoubtedly,” Morningstar asserted. “But there is in the human unconscious an instinctive understanding that psychological and physical traits are linked in the flesh, and that under certain circumstances those traits can transfer from one being to another through physical media.”
Seeing his new student was about to object, Morningstar drew his student’s attention to the dark building around them. “You heard me say that in pre-Reformation times this building was an abbey, where zealous monks fought Satan by confining the mad? They believed they could force the lunacy from their subjects and confine it in bottles. They continued their mission for over three hundred years, beating the madness from their victims. And if a man or woman died at the ducking stool or under the brand, then would not God save their soul and make it whole in heaven? The demon was captured and bound all the same.”
“But, forgive me sir,” the scholar protested, “but in what way is your cabinet different from their delusions? How can madness be quantified, weighed, measured, then syphoned like pus from a wound? And how can it be moved like a dish of poison?”
“Good questions, all,” Morningstar assured him. “I can see we will have some stimulating conversations later on. But for now I must simply ask for your faith. Take some time to familiarise yourself with Herringcarp. Discover your duties from Matron. Look to the wellbeing of the inmates. We shall talk again.”
The young man hoped he’d not offended the great doctor. He could not afford to lose this internship. He was not a rich man. He’d spent his last savings on the journey to Herringcarp and everything he owned was in the valise in his north tower garret. “I hope…” he blurted, trying to make amends.
“We shall talk again,” Dr Morningstar repeated. “I promise that I will make you understand. For now, begin your duties. And welcome to Herringcarp, Dr Winkelweald.”
***
“These people are not in good condition.” The young scholar was shocked after his first tour of the asylum. “Some are half starved. Some have been abused.”
“The inmates fight for food between themselves,” Matron replied harshly. “Either we let them steal bread from the mouths of the weakest or we punish them. You can’t have it both ways.”
“That bread is hardly food anyway. I wouldn’t feed it to pigs.”
Matron was starting to peg Dr Winkelweald as a troublemaker. “Pigs need to be fattened for slaughter,” she snapped. “These dangerous lunatics need to be kept weak and docile.”
“These ‘dangerous lunatics’ are put on display like caged animals for the public to gawp at and torment.”
“And how else would you propose we meet the costs of housing these moon-calfs and madmen, Dr Winkelweald? The public purse is very shallow indeed and we have a great many inmates to house.”
The newcomer was rapidly realising that his protests were falling on deaf ears. Everyone here seemed to accept the overcrowding, the brutality, the cruelty. It was as if the madness had permeated the very walls, even soaked into the souls of the staff.
“We could at least wash out the cells,” he ventured. “Clean straw. Launder the blankets. Perhaps segregate the men from the women to prevent…”
“Perhaps you’d like us to give them all crowns and thrones to sit on as well, doctor?” scorned Matron. “You might want to consider being here longer than five minutes before telling me how to conduct my business.”
Again the young scholar suffered a pang of fear for his internship. But how could he be silent when such injustices were going on?
“If you really want to help somebody,” Matron said slyly, “then we have a patient who you can talk to. An incurable. A killer. Maybe you can get some sense out of him, because nobody else can.”
“A killer?” Winkelweald said. “What did he…?”
“Look at his files after you’ve taken your first impression,” Matron advised. “Bradley, take our new intern down to meet Ioldobaoth.”
***
“Are you real?” asked the madman, shifting in his chains. His whole body was covered in bruised and scars where the warders had beaten him after finding him free from his chains and surrounded by four slaughtered men. There were marks of surgery and of electrical shock too. Winkelweald was horrified at the man’s condition.
“I’m real,” he promised. “I’m here to help you, Ioldobaoth.”
“Are you real?” the captive repeated, his eyes filled with suspicion. “Or are you me?”
“I’m here,” the scholar assured the lunatic. “Are you saying that sometimes you see things? People who are not there?”
“There was a girl,” Ioldobaoth confessed. “Midnight hair, cool skin. She was afraid, but brave. She was kind.”
“A real girl? Somebody here?”
“Her monster took her. I let him in.”
“Is this… when you killed the guards? Were you a monster when you did that?”
“I became a monster for her. I killed the guards for her. The other monster, he was the weapon.” The madman blinked. “That is, if I didn’t dream it. If I didn’t imagine it. If I’m not imagining all of this.”
Dr Winkelweald was horrified and fascinated. “Other monster? There are more than one?”
“Yes. We mustn’t confuse monsters. There are so many here to keep straight. And the ghosts. Even more ghosts than monsters.”
“You see ghosts, do you?”
Ioldobaoth looked up and met the doctor’s gaze. “Of course. So do you.”
“I’m not… You’ll have to explain more. Tell me about the ghosts.”
The madman shook his head. “The monsters are loose. The ghosts whisper. But I need to tell you about the devil.”
***
“The devil?” Doctor Morningstar sounded amused. “He thinks I’m the devil. Some confusion about my surname, I imagine. Morningstar. Light-bringer. Lucifer.”
“Perhaps,” the scholar conceded.
“What’s in a name?” the great man asked. “Take your own unlikely nomenclature for example. An erudite researcher with some knowledge of languages might derive it from the old English winn, meaning white, and ceole, a brook flowing in a ravine or underground, and weald, a forest. He’d conclude that your forebears hailed from a wooded place where frothing rapids descended. But a madman… Ah, he’d remember the old slang for a gallows-tree where enemies of the powers-that-be were quartered up into slices as they hung.”
There was something about Morningstar’s tiny smile that disquieted Winkelweald. “But still…” he persisted, “he – Ioldobaoth – had been tortured. There’s no other word for what’s been done to him. Tortured and butchered.”
“You’re familiar with the process in which the temporal lobe is excised surgically, I presume?” Doctor Morningstar responded. “What would you say then if I told you that on four occasions Ioldobaoth’s anterior matter has regrown after removal?”
“What?” The scholar was puzzled. “That’s impossible.”
“Likewise, trepanation and sections removed from the middle lobe, the pituitary body, and the locus niger have all miraculously healed.”
Winkelweald shook his head. “That’s ridiculous. Such procedures would kill a man on the operating table.”
“And yet,” Morningstar said. He gestured to a row of bottles lined beside his madness cabinet. “Some of the excised matter still remains for examination.”
“Some of it? What became of the rest?”
Morningstar pointed to the rows of lead-acid batteries around the base of his cabinet. “Concentrated madness transmitted through electric charge,” he explained. “Dissolved insanity in flowers of brimstone carried by the spark of life that God passed on to Adam.”
Winkelweald backed away. “That is insanity,” he admitted. “Criminal insanity. What you’ve done to that man, and why you’ve done it, they break the bounds of all ethics. They break the laws of man and God!”
“Really?” asked Morningstar. “Oh dear.”
It was the end of the young scholar’s career, the destruction of all his hopes, but it was the right thing to do: “I’m sorry, Doctor Morningstar. I have to denounce you. I have to report this. The Royal Society…”
The great man snorted. “The Royal Society could never understand the genius of my work. But they will never listen to the ravings of a madman either.”
“True sir. But I am not mad.”
Again that charming smile, veneer for something ugly and terrifying. “You are not mad now, young Winkelweald. But after you have spent some time in my cabinet…” He chuckled. “Restrain him, Bradley!”
Winkelweald lunged for the door but the burly orderly was easily his match. A fist to the stomach, another to the chin, and the scholar went down.
“The experiment proceeds,” said Doctor Morningstar.
***
The needles jabbing into his temples woke Dr Winkelweald from his unconsciousness. He was bound by thick leather straps into the wooden box, pinioned down so he could not even move his head. A rough gag prevented his protests other than a wordless screeching.
Doctor Morningstar began to shave the sides of his subject’s head. “As an intern it is your privilege to assist me in my investigations. I’m so pleased to have such a rational mind with which to begin the work.”
Winkelweald strained at his bonds but knew his strength would never be enough.
The depilation completed, Morningstar began threading various pins through the scholar’s body, each attached to a thin copper wire. “My acids contain all the madness extracted from the lunatic Ioldobaoth and that of many other subjects. Even the contents of those bottles the ancient monks collected have gone into the mix. You are to receive within you the distilled insanity of many generations.”
Three swift gashes to allow subdermal connection of electrodes and Morningstar’s subject was ready.
Winkelweald struggled. He could see the ghosts now, watching him, waiting.
“What wonders will you see?” Morningstar speculated. “What visions are reserved only for the mad? What insights and truths for those who plummet from the cliffs of rationality into the deepest abysms of the soul?”
He leaned forward. “Well,” he smiled at his student, his sweet breath on Winkelweald’s cheek, “let us find out.”
He pulled the level. Winkelweald’s body jolted as the power shot through him.
The madness poured from the batteries, poured from the walls, poured from the world. Winkelweald was washed away, lost in the turmoil of screaming minds.
And Doctor Morningstar saw that it was good.
***
Continued in Sins of the Flesh
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
Not one but two references to eating brains. [Spoilers] - Al B. Harper - Tue Feb 20, 2007 at 07:20:42 am EST