London, 1892.
The rain had been falling for three days without rest, a steady curtain that blurred the cobbled streets and turned the Thames into a dark, swelling serpent. Detective Edmund Harrow was summoned not to a manor or an artist's studio this time, but to the iron gates of Bethlem Royal Hospital—Bedlam, as the city called it with a mix of fear and fascination.
The letter of summons was terse:
"Detective Harrow,
A patient has died under circumstances that defy both natural explanation and sane reason. Your discretion and skill are required.
—Dr. Alastair Wren, Chief Physician."
---
The Asylum
Bedlam loomed like a fortress against the rain, its windows barred, its walls damp with age. Screams, laughter, and muttering drifted faintly through the halls, echoing in ways that chilled the bone. Harrow was led down corridors lined with iron doors, each with a slit through which pale eyes sometimes peered.
Dr. Wren greeted him: a gaunt man with spectacles perched too far down his nose, his hands clasped tightly as though to keep them from trembling.
"The patient," Wren explained as they walked, "was named Jonathan Hale. Thirty-three years old. Committed two years past for mania and delusions. Last night he was found in his cell, throat cut, though no implement was present. His door was locked. His bedding unmarked. No sign of entry or escape."
"A locked-room death?" Harrow asked, his voice low.
"Precisely. But there is more. Before his death, Hale had been raving for weeks about 'the Fool who comes at midnight.' We dismissed it as lunacy. Now…" Wren hesitated. "Now, I am not so certain."
---
The Body
Harrow was shown to the small stone cell. Hale's body lay upon the narrow cot, a sheet draped respectfully over him. Pulling it back, Harrow examined the wound. The cut was clean, deliberate. Not jagged like a desperate suicide, nor clumsy as one might expect in madness.
His hands were clenched tightly, the nails broken and bloody. Beneath one fingernail, Harrow found a scrap of paper. Unfolding it carefully, he read three words scrawled in a hand uneven but purposeful:
"He wears bells."
---
Whispers in the Wards
Harrow spent the next day speaking with patients in the adjoining cells. Each account was more unsettling than the last.
One woman whispered through the slit of her door, "He dances in the shadows. I hear him laugh. The Fool laughs when death is near."
Another, rocking endlessly on his cot, muttered, "Jester's mask, jester's mask…red smile, white face…"
A third insisted that Hale had been chosen, though for what, she could not say.
Dr. Wren grew pale as Harrow relayed what he had gathered. "These are hallucinations, surely. Contagious imagination. Bedlam breeds such things." Yet even as he spoke, his eyes flicked nervously toward the barred windows, as though expecting some painted face to leer back at him.
---
A Hidden Visitor
Harrow pressed the guards and attendants for their logs. Most swore that no one had approached Hale's cell in the night. But one orderly, a young man named Crispin, admitted under pressure that he had heard music—soft, like the chiming of tiny bells—just past midnight.
"I thought it a dream," he stammered. "But it was there. I swear it."
When Harrow asked if Hale had enemies, Wren confessed something troubling. "There was a visitor, weeks ago. A man whose name I did not catch. He requested to speak with Hale, claimed to be an old acquaintance. He wore gloves, and a…curious smile. When I pressed for his credentials, he vanished as swiftly as he had come. None of the staff admitted to letting him in. Yet Hale was different afterward. Quieter, but…frightened."
---
The Revelation
That night, unable to leave with questions unanswered, Harrow lingered in the asylum. The halls were silent save for the occasional groan of the old building. At midnight, he heard it—faint, distant.
The sound of bells.
He followed, heart pounding, down the corridor to Hale's empty cell. The sound ceased as he reached the door. On the wall above the cot, carved shallowly into the stone, were new words that had not been there before:
"The Fool watches."
The scrape of the carving was fresh. The stone dust still littered the bedding. But the door had remained locked.
---
Aftermath
The next morning, Dr. Wren found Harrow pale, sleepless, but resolute. "Hale was no suicide," Harrow told him. "He was silenced. Someone was here. Someone who should not be possible."
Wren whispered, "But who? How?"
Harrow had no answer. Only the growing certainty that this Fool—whoever, whatever he was—was drawing nearer, weaving himself into Harrow's cases like a spider spinning threads unseen.
And for the first time since donning his badge, Edmund Harrow wondered if he hunted a man…or a specter.