The Bloodstained Parasol
A Study in Madness
By JAMES RAVENSCROFT
WITHIN the room were sounds that were unpleasant to hear. They were dreadful maniacal shouts of command, shrill cries of terror, the more awful because constantly broken by hoarseness, and moanings of infinite tenderness and sadness.
"He is in one of his spells,’" the attendant said. "Perhaps it would be just as well not to see him now. It is not a picture that you would want to carry with you."
The attendant’s voice was one of gentle solicitude and pathos. Doubtless long service in the place had made it so. It was a private sanitarium, in the National Capital, for the hopelessly insane, to which my profession as specialist and alienist gained me admittance.
The sounds hypnotized me; I could not turn away. The small iron grating in the upper part of the door drew me like a magnet, and I went and looked into the room.
A pale-faced, emaciated, wild-looking man, standing in the middle of a bare mattress on a heavy iron bedstead, was yelling and gesticulating madly at some imaginary object at the bottom of the door.
"Get away, curse you, get away!" he cried frantically. "Begone, you brute! Out of my sight! Would to God I had burned you as fine as ashes! Oh-h-h-h-h! Oh-h-h-h-h!"
The groans which ended the fury cannot be described; they were those of a soul in agony. His whole appearance was that of one convulsed with a terror as of death.
At first he did not see me as I peered through the grating; his eyes, bright with the glitter of madness, were fixed in a fearful stare at the bottom of the door.
"It is over for a while," said the attendant.
The words roused the man and he raised his eyes to the grating. A wan smile of relief broke the expression of horror on his face, and he at once stepped off the bed and came to the door. A beady sweat, not the kind caused by heat, though the day was sultry, was on his brow and upper lip, and his body relaxing from the tension of the spell, was shaking with a nervous palsy. He was clad in pajamas of some coarse white material and his feet were bare.
"Pardon me," he spoke in low tones and with an accent of breeding, "but that infernal dog distracted my attention and I didn’t see you. I’m glad you came. I remember you quite well, indeed. You were doing interne work, were you not?"
I yielded to his humor, grateful that I could help to ease his tortured spirit, and nodded affirmatively.
The glitter in his eyes seemed to be intensified, and putting his face almost against the grating, as though he meant his speech to be confidential, he said:
"Perhaps you saw her?" His voice was almost a whisper. "She came in when I was dissecting. I was always dissecting, then, always dissecting. Understand? I cut things up, alive and dead, dead and alive. That was the beginning of the hell."
He said it so sanely, so remorsefully that I, startled, looked closely at him. Reason appeared to be reinstated on her throne. Then he broke out again.
"I cut them to pieces, but I didn’t burn the pieces and they escaped, out of the windows, through the keyhole. They even hid in the pockets of my clothes until I was on the street, and then they would leap out and dart away."
He moistened his thin, dry lips with his tongue and took hold of the bars of the grating, and went on:
"No, I didn’t burn the pieces and they escaped. That dog follows me in pieces. At night its feet scratch at the bottom of the door and its eyes look in between the bars of this window. Its red, dripping tongue lies on the bed beside me and its hot, horrible breath smothers me. Its footsteps trot up and down the floor and its hellish moans and whines drive me crazy. Listen! It was alive. That’s why she struck me! A soft, white thing it was, and I threw up my hand and caught it. She dropped it and I took it and kept it. That’s it, standing in the corner over there."
Involuntarily I shuddered and looked toward the corner designated by his gesture. There was nothing in any of the corners.
"And after the dog is gone, she comes. She comes slipping, slipping. I can’t hear her, I can’t see her. She comes to get her parasol. But when she see the bloodstains on it she turns to a ghost. I try to wash the stains out, but I can’t. Every time I put water on them they spread."
He leaned closer to the bars, and with one eye cautiously on the attendant, he whispered:
"I’m working on a solution that will entirely remove the bloodstains, so she will take the parasol, for when she does the dog will leave, and then I can get a long, quiet rest."
He paused and looked furtively around the room, and then began his awful babblings again.
He called piteously after me as the attendant took my arm and drew me away. I remembered little else that I saw in the sanitarium.
"Tell me about him," I implored, as soon as we were out of hearing of his cries. "Who is he? How did he come to be here?"
The attendant hesitated.
"Not every one should hear that story" he remarked, thoughtfully, as if half talking to himself, "but, of course, with you, a specialist, it is different."
He took me to a chair on a porch. From there I could see into a section of the grounds of the inmates, where benighted beings were engaged in assuming their various and fantastic roles of madness.
"His name I shall not tell you," he began, "for that is a secret and very properly so. I shall only relate briefly what happened to him, as it came to me from his mother. His people are prominent and wealthy. It wrecked his mother’s life, but the only thing that could be done was to give him up to this place. When they come here to see him they wait until he is comparatively free from symptoms of an attack, and then they go look in at the grating, as you did. Strange to tell, he recognizes only one of them, a sister, but he believes her to be a sister who died some two or three years before he became insane.
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