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I might have heard the terrible Evil as it advanced on him.

But I had my own nightmare to contend with.

Extract from the Diary of the Reverend Mr William Macksey Friday 25th December 1903 (continued)

My dear wife brought word of young Torby’s arrival. As I write now, I remember it clearly, as if the final sane moment before madness overtook my senses.

We took the cart back to Mausolus. Mr Torby tried to tell me that, to top the strange death of the first patient, a second poor soul had been beaten to death. My blood ran cold as he described the damage the woman’s skull had sustained; he stated, almost guiltily, that he could only stare upon the shattered visage for a mere moment. I doubt I could have observed for that long.

Charles warned me that a deep and enveloping darkness had descended upon the place, and that with many staff having been granted a holiday for 120

Christmas there were few left to stem a tide of anarchy and evil. Even so, I was ill prepared for the scene we observed as we came down the expansive driveway. The front doors were standing open, patients were walking and running through the grounds without supervision. (It cannot have been more than an hour since Mr Torby left Mausolus House to find me; I could see by his face that even he was shocked by how much worse things had become in his absence.) Two or three orderlies passed us as we approached the building; it was clear that they were heading home with scant regard for what was happening at the hospital. Charles Torby tried to reason with them as we passed, but there was little time for any real debate and, in any case, the gentlemen simply turned up their collars and set their eyes yet more firmly on the sights and sounds of the village.

Mr Craig – a young man of about Charles Torby’s age – stood outlined in the doorway, hand in mouth, aghast. We questioned him urgently. He said he could not be sure who had opened the doors to liberate the patients, nor did he know where Dr Christie was. He had last seen the governor when he had brought him yet more bad news – another brutal death, this time of a Mr Haward. Craig took us at once to see this latest body; Charles in particular was almost overcome by what he observed. It was like, he said, a scene from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe that the late Mr Haward was so fond of.

This poor fellow was sprawled across a corridor, frozen as if in the act of fleeing some threat. A dark handle protruded from his back; the weapon was so deeply embedded in him that I could not tell if it were a kitchen knife or some great cleaver.

I have never seen such blood.

It was imperative that we find Dr Christie. It would not be safe for us to search individually; I therefore followed Messrs Torby and Craig through the dark corridors of Mausolus House. Each of us was tense for any sound, any unexpected movement; at times, we inched forward into the shadows, and I would not be exaggerating to say that we feared for our very lives.

We searched the ground floor and the floor above that and found naught but overturned items of furniture and shed garments, often torn to ribbons.

I estimated that around one half of the patients had been freed – and, in some cases, with doors forced off their hinges and lying in the corridors, I surmised that the incarcerated had somehow liberated themselves. The air stank of human filth; those gaslights that were working flickered feebly within a gathering gloom. It seemed always that there were shouts and curses coming from just around the corner, or the floor below, but we did not see a soul as we paced the cold, stone corridors. I felt that I was in my very own, very private hell, and that Hogarthian torture and abuse was forever happening just out of sight.

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I could not believe that Christie would desert Mausolus, and neither could Torby. It was possible he had gone into the village to raise the alarm; more possible still that we had not yet found the man, and that he was trying to do what he could to staunch