All Bedlam Courses Past (part twelve)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter One

The Peculiar Nature of Logical Science

(part twelve)

Now, what was the difficulty? They had lied to their subject. The orderlies no doubt had sported him a bit. Ebrach looked at the marker. “And how did Dolphinus Braggert die?”

As in a game of blind man’s bluff, he seemed in colder territory, easing the tension.

“He was fifty. Pneumonia, an unremarkable death.”

Yet something was begging. Ebrach spotted another of the small stones, twenty… One, or seven. He moved closer to answer this. “Do you know them all, then? These numbers connect in your recollections to names in your files?”

“Twenty-seven,” Kempf said. “You would like to hear the story of Gannon Tunley. Yes, since you ask, of course.”

A hot coal underfoot this time. “Is Tunley’s a case of special interest? I apologize,” Ebrach added, politic. “I believe you suspect me of knowing more than I can.”

“Not at all.” Then, with a churlish skirting of eye-contact: “That girl has been in the files at times I haven’t been there to supervise.”

Suspicion being a cankered fruit that must die on the vine, Ebrach made no defense. “The experiment on Tunley proved not of scientific value.”

“I suppose your work has given you some fair notion of delusional states? There are many varieties. Tunley was a hypochondriac.”

“As are thousands who walk the streets. In addition to…?”

“Well, yes, in addition to a premature senility. An overreliance, when at large, on patent medicines, mostly alcohol. Tunley had…very objectionable…personal habits.”

“You say at large. He was not a resident?”

Kempf’s face expressed a rooted aversion to the memory of Gannon Tunley. “Because the staff so disliked the exigencies of tending him, and because they felt he did these things on purpose, the house physician… I did not myself override his recom-mendations. He wished to put Tunley on a regimen of scopolamine, a tincture. Keeping him subdued, not to inflame his propensity to addictions. There was an idea Tunley might benefit, regain his faculties to a degree, by electric shock treatments.”

The dénouement could be no mystery. Tunley was dead and buried, here under marker twenty-seven. He had been overdosed, or the electric treatment had failed in some…there was decidedly something in the air, Ebrach thought…

Not shocking, then, but difficult to explain to the lay public, manner.

His silence struck the alert Kempf censorious. “It was thought that here was an opportunity to learn, by experiment, something of the nature of hypochondria. You appreciate these patients were not ‘loved ones’ in any rational sense of the term. If they had been, they would not have come to this…”

“Fate.”

“Well, I don’t care for that. I wasn’t going to say it. No, all these things can be measured. They exist. They are not of some…some susceptible person’s… Not of some fairy realm.”

13

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part thirteen)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)