The Outsiders (15 page)

Little
did I know that he had already embarked upon his foolhardy plan and
that it was already far too late for me to restore him to his
former state of mental stability. In any event, I only had a
single, all too brief meeting with my increasingly distant young
friend after he made his fateful decision.

I had not
seen him for perhaps six weeks and, as a result of consulting with
his colleagues at the museum and those few, close relatives with
whom he would occasionally correspond, I was becoming increasingly
concerned at the state of both his physical and mental health. Each
time I had attempted to see him at his laboratory I was informed
that he was either absent or unavailable to receive visitors. Phone
calls were redirected to the museum switchboard and, although the
operator was almost painfully keen to help, Deacon adamantly
refused to take calls and all messages requesting he contact me
went unanswered. After a fortnight or so I resorted to writing to
my friend, setting out my concerns as clearly and a forcefully as I
could and pleading for an audience at the earliest possible
opportunity.

Still
there was no response.

Although
I could not give up entirely on my friend, I had reached the
conclusion that, short of physically forcing my way into his
presence - an option that, given my advancing years, was
impractical as well as unsavoury – I had no choice but to accept
that, for now at least, I could do no more to help him. Although I
sat on the museum board of friends and maintained an active
participation in the Aldwark Archaeology and Local History Society,
I held no official position with regard to the museum and could
only enter the private offices upon specific invitation.

The
solution to my problem, at least of a sort, came in the form of an
approach from the directors of the museum. A letter arrived at my
town house one Saturday afternoon asking that, if I could spare the
time, I should attend a meeting at the museum that evening to
discuss a matter of some delicacy. No further information was given
in the missive but it was signed on the behalf of the three
directors and it was with they that I was to have the meeting.
Under the circumstances it seemed clear that there was only one
likely topic of conversation.

On a warm
summer evening in the dying days of August, with the air sweet with
the scent of honeysuckle along Church Walk, I approached the museum
with a combination of relief and trepidation. It was a matter of
great satisfaction to me that I should at last have some means of
approaching Deacon and ascertaining his state of mind. At the same
time I was concerned that matters should have come to such a
juncture that the directors of the museum had become involved, a
situation that could only prove harmful to the archaeologist’s long
term employment prospects.

In the
event the meeting, though brief, was relaxed and friendly. All
three directors were old acquaintances and all knew of my affection
for the young archaeologist. It was for this reason that they had
called upon me for assistance. Though they chose not to reveal any
great detail, they admitted that the museum had suffered greatly
over recent weeks as Deacon had withdrawn to his laboratory and had
failed to carry out any of the regular tasks assigned to his
position. They realized that the other members of staff had been
attempting to conceal the problems and considered that this was
admirable, if misplaced loyalty for which there would be no
recriminations. But once they had gained some notion of the nature
of the affliction that had so altered the behaviour of their
promising young employee they had decided that, in the manner of
such establishments ‘something must be done’.

It
appeared that that ‘something’ was my good self.

They had
called me to the museum that late summer evening in the hope that I
would go straight away to the laboratory and speak with Matthew
Deacon; explain the gravity of the situation to him, seek to gain
some idea of his state of mind, perhaps persuade him to take a few
weeks leave of absence from the museum, on full pay of course. In
short they sought my good advice in the hope that this might
convince the obsessive archaeologist that things could not go on as
they were. Something – as the phrase was once again repeated to me
– must be done.

I
realised, of course, that these gentlemen must be unaware of the
breech in friendship that had occurred between Deacon and myself at
our last meeting but I also knew that this was not the time to
raise the point. I had been offered the opportunity I had been
seeking for many weeks and would not now set it aside for the sake
of an unspoken white lie. I agreed without hesitation to their
proposal and left the director’s private offices in the museum en
route for the laboratory and a commission to save the career and,
quite possibly, the sanity of my young friend.

3

Entering
the stairwell and ascending to the first floor I was quite
unprepared for the scene that greeted me as I stood at the door to
the laboratory. What had previously been a well ordered and
organised place of research and restoration was now little more
than a midden. The structure of the room has been rearranged in
such a radical and unconventional manner as to make it almost
impossible for its occupant to carry out any of his prescribed
tasks. The huge wooden bench, which had dominated the centre of the
room since for longer than I could remember and which had held all
the equipment, glassware and chemical tanks necessary for the
conservation of the most fragile artefacts, was now resting
crookedly against the far wall under the tall shutterless windows.
Though it was now mid evening and the sun had passed from the sky,
it was clear that its shrivelling heat had already done irreparable
damage to a delicate fragment of medieval tapestry that Deacon had
been charged with preserving and even from the door I could almost
see the colours fading from the cloth as it lay unnoticed and
forgotten on the worktop.

Boxes of
finds, the treasured results of half a dozen excavations which,
until just a few weeks before, had been carefully stacked and
catalogued on shelves along one wall of the laboratory awaiting
closer examination and description, were now piled in a confused
and unrecorded mound in in one corner of the room. Already some of
the boxes had split and sherds of Roman Mortaria and scarlet Samian
ware – perhaps even the piece that had distracted Deacon on the day
he first saw the spirit – lay scattered across the floor. Carefully
ordered volumes of books and journals were now piled around the
room, seemingly dumped anywhere when no place could immediately be
found for them in Deacon’s new order. In short the whole scene was
one of the utmost turmoil.

But
whatever the confusion into which the laboratory had descended it
was immediately clear exactly what had been the aim of this
reorganisation, though that term can be applied only loosely. For
Deacon’s desk, the dark chunk of Victorian furniture at which he
would sit to write reports, collate data and answer his
correspondence, had been dragged forth from its position under the
windows. It was a position it had occupied, as best I could tell,
for many decades and to which it was admirably suited given the
natural light that would illuminate whatever work was being
conducted there. Now it had been dragged, pushed and cajoled across
the concrete floor, through scattered and crushed artefacts and
torn papers, to be installed in a new position, just inside the
room right in front of the door leading onto the landing and
stairwell. It was a position from which the occupant of the chair,
which stood behind the desk, could observe the stairs at all times
and gain access to them in a moment.

It took
no great feat of deduction to realise why Deacon had so disrupted
his working environment though the realisation of what he had been
attempting since last we met sent a chill hand stroking down my
spine. Unable to uncover the secrets of the apparition that
continued to haunt both the stairwell and his own tortured psyche,
the archaeologist had decided on a more direct approach to the
problem. His aim was simple; to intercept the ghost of the girl on
the stairs and try to communicate with her directly. To a sane man
it would seem a dangerous and foolhardy course but to Deacon, now
sunk into an obsessive madness from which he could find no release,
it was a simple plan that would provide the answer to all his
questions and so release him from his burden.

The man
himself was there in the room, slumped across his desk just in
front of me, clearly alive – I had entertained momentary fears
about that point as I climbed the stairs - but also in a deep
sonorous sleep. I stood for a moment looking at him trying to form
some plan as to how to approach him without causing alarm, but even
as I watched he stirred, muttered something unintelligible and
raised his head to regard me through half opened, black rimmed
eyes.

“
Wh...who’s there...who, oh...” he sat upright in the chair,
rubbed his hand across his face and focused his eyes upon me more
steadily. “Doctor? Doctor Trenton? What are you doing here? I
thought... I thought it was her..I...” The sentence remained
unfinished and a pregnant pause hovered between us.

“
Good evening Matthew.” I regarded him for a moment with a
mixture of disappointment and concern. “I would ask how you are but
I can see from the state of your office and your person that all is
not well with you.”

He
mumbled something again and rose. He did at least have the good
grace to look embarrassed. Stepping further into the room in
response to an assumed invitation I noticed that a low cot was
arranged along the wall behind the desk and concluded that it was
many nights since the archaeologist had occupied his lodgings above
the chemist’s shop in the corner of the market square.

He was
moving into the centre of the laboratory; the only relatively clear
space amongst the jetsum of his ruined work. I winced as a grinding
snap marked the destruction of another piece of pottery under his
uncaring boots. I had planned to approach things carefully so as to
avoid any chance of the meeting degenerating once again into a
confrontation but now that I saw the depths into which my friend’s
life had descended I forgot my caution and launched a desperate
plea for sanity.

“
What has happened to you Matthew? What have you done to your
laboratory, to your work? Can’t you see that you have put
everything at risk with this mad obsession of yours?”

He stood
amidst the wreckage of his life, eyes closed, unshaven face turned
to the heavens, bearing a look of desperate resignation. When he
spoke his voice was broken, reflecting his shattered
spirit.

“
She would not let me be. Never, not for a moment. She was
always there, waiting, watching, whispering to me. Urging me on
to...to find the answers. To help her. Doctor,” he looked at me
directly for the first time, “I was only trying to help her, only
trying to do something right, something honourable. Would you have
acted in any other way if you had been the one she
asked?”

I
regarded him with pity for a moment, convinced that his mind had
finally broken under the strain of these last, lost weeks of
solitude. At what point he had begun to create the voice that he
claimed had guided him in his search I could not tell. Certainly I
believe it was at some time after our last meeting. But that was
immaterial. It was clear now that, as he had become more desperate,
he had searched within himself for reassurance and had found a
cause, a mission if you like, to free the spirit from its eternal
climb into oblivion. And when he had finally realised that his
searching would yield no salvation for either the spirit or himself
he had chosen this new course.

When I
did not immediately answer his question he continued. “I see her so
often now, every day, sometimes many times a day.” He laughed, a
bitter cackle devoid of joy. “Ironic isn’t it? For all those years,
the only person in the history of this whole benighted place who
has never seen her and now? Now I can’t stop seeing her. Day and
night, over and over again she opens that front door and climbs
those stairs right past that door,” he pointed a shaking hand
towards the entrance behind me, “ half a dozen times a day
sometimes and just as many at night. And every time I hear her
coming I try to get onto the landing to catch her... I try to get
out of the door so I am close enough to se her face, anything that
might give me a clue as to who she is. But she is always past me
before I can reach her. No matter how hard I tried, how quick I was
to realise that she was coming through the door, I could never get
onto the landing before she was climbing the second flight of
stairs. And when I tried to follow her up it was as if I were
walking through tar, as if it were a dream, one of those dreams
from which you think you will never awaken.” He slumped back
against the wooden bench and gave a low moan of despair “perhaps it
is a dream. Perhaps I am fated never to awaken.”

“
It is no dream Matthew. This is your life and you need to
reclaim it. If you do not then...well, I was going to say that your
future employment at the museum was in jeopardy but I fear that may
be the very least of our concerns.”

Deacon
remained silent. The news that he might forfeit his position at the
museum did not seem to give rise to any greater concern than that
which he already felt and I suspect that, at this moment, he would
consider it a blessing if he escaped having lost nothing more than
his reputation and his position.