Asylum

by Kristen Selleck

  “No,” Chloe said calmly. “You weren’t there with his family, were you? It was Christmas. The smells, pine and gingerbread, all the small things, the child excited from the very idea of Santa, his father…the way he looked at his mother when she didn’t realize it, when she was taking pictures of their children…and so many other things. The outdoors, the white against the green needles, those wet black rocks. He saw it, didn’t he? The ‘more‘, the great big something…he saw it. That’s why nothing bothered him. He was my chance to grow wasn’t he?”

  And suddenly, quite suddenly, she was sure she had arms, hands, wrists…and he was holding them. His fingers, oh, but she knew his very fingerprints by the burning grip that circled the phantasm form of her once forearms.

  “Get away from me!” she commanded the thing. She tried in vain, to scratch the thing away from her legs, she couldn’t move her arms.

  “But there was Sam! What of love? What of all you say he knew? Damn you girl, think, think with your human brain! You still have one! You walked down the hallway. You opened the door. He was kissing Sam! You think you’re so far above me! Tell me it didn’t hurt! Tell me everything didn’t come crashing down! Think girl, think! You know that love is a passion, quelled before the alter of self.”

  And then pain…and doubt…and uncertainty. It hurt, things started to fall apart, things started to ache. There was still a human body, a human ego, the whole blackened stretching human existence, throbbing, swelling at the stab from the dark Thing’s well-aimed words.

  “Let go, let go, please let go!” she begged.

  Where there was, only moments before, the feeling of growth, there was now the feeling of weight, of being dragged down into a mire. Where the dark thing touched her, rot spread. Her ideas were gossamer, the thinnest of shining butterfly wings trying to lift her. The rot touched her where the words did and microbes of doubt ate at all the thin shining fabric. She wilted. Yet that room was still there. The one where Seth gripped white wrists that may have been hers, and stared into the portals that illuminated the dark around her. There was no more chance of her rising, but maybe she could crawl. Maybe she could crawl her way back to that place, where there was a body and things that could hurt.

  “Oh, I was close,” she thought.

  `”Stay here!” the dark voice commanded her.

  With bleary earth-filled eyes, she squinted into the dark where her legs should be, and saw something that curled and twisted along her two dimly blue-jeaned legs. It was a person. A woman, with a long black dress that curled and leaked and faded into uncertain shadows, a woman made of dark shapes sharp enough to grow nails and long pointy teeth. Human, and not human. She remembered what terror felt like.

  “Get it off me!” she cried. “Help, George! They found me, they’ve got me, George come back!”

  And it was stronger then her. George wasn’t coming back. George was gone. The shape of Kirkbride Hall couldn’t hold even his clinging form. He grew out of it. Was he nothing now? Would she follow him into nothing? How did the black thing get so strong…so quickly? One minute she dismissed it, not even listening to its words, and then it grew. It loomed over her, it threatened. A woman with a black thundercloud dress that filled the whole horizon, and the rain was coming to dissolve her.

  Some notion of balance…didn’t she just say such a thing?”

  “You should do something,” she whispered for balance sake. “I was just saying something…I felt that I was getting closer to you. That you would put a finger on the scale. You should do something.” Though there was no hurry in her now. She stopped trying to fight, to break free. She floated.

  “You can go if you want,” the woman offered. Her pointed teeth shrinking back into her gums. Her smile became friendly, and full of comfort. A grey blue dawn broke over a slanted distant horizon. It illuminated no landscape, no single familiar earthly marks. Just mists, oatmeal-colored mists, tinged in blue and purple and mauve, highlights of the unfamiliar sunrise. The imposter sun bled across the endless folds of the woman’s black dress, turning it cold blue where it touched.

  Friendly smile still attached, the woman patted neat hair, twisted severely into a perfect bun. She seemed to be the only fixed part of the strange world.

  “You can go, if you want. Really, maybe you should. Here I’ve been wasting my time trying to talk sense into you. Sure, if you believed half the garbage you’ve been throwing at me, you can see for yourself you’re better off out there, outside your body. Who needs these molecules, right? Love beyond forms and all that…go on now. I’ll stay right here. Send me a postcard from the studio of the celestial design committee,” she smirked, not bothering to look at Chloe.

  “I couldn’t leave if I wanted to,” Chloe admitted, defeat evident in her voice.

  “Sure you can, it’s up. Up and out and keep going, just go right through the room. Here now,” the lady bent down and laced her fingers, half in jest, half seriously offering Chloe a leg up.

  Chloe squinted towards where a sky should be. She didn’t see any room at all, only a pinprick of white light. A star in the eerie blue-white morning. The dark lady followed Chloe’s gaze upwards.

  “And what are we doing now?” the voice hissed at her.

  “Oh I don’t know. I guess I thought this was your place now, your star. Isn’t it though?” Chloe asked without any concern.

  The star shone brighter, larger in the shifting cloudscapes. Larger, and falling…a falling star, a meteor? Maybe it was left over from her dream after all.

  “Stop doing that,” the dark lady ordered.

  “It’s not me, at least I don’t think it is. Well…it isn’t a star at all, is it? What is it then? It’s very bright, isn’t it?” Chloe cocked her head.

  “Stop it!” the woman was a Thing again. “Make it stop. You’re doing it, I know you are. It’s nothing more than wishful thinking, it’s not real. Some medieval belief of the modern peasant class.”

  “You don’t seem all that sure. It’s so bright. It’s too bright! You know what it is? What is it, what kind of medieval belief? It’s not God is it? No…something though. What are you doing?”

  The eerie medium she hung suspended in was glowing, reflecting back that blinding whiteness. The Thing lost it’s shape, it was a shadow once again, wrapping snakelike, round and round her legs, pulling her down, away from it. For a mesmerizing second, she wanted to go with the dark Thing, to hide. The Other was too bright, it was coming too close. It would burn her, blind her, make of her a shadow. The blackness sucked at her ankles. ‘Down, deeper’ it beckoned.

  Chloe wavered between her fear of the unknown light and her horror of being lost in the dark. One horrible, one unbearable, but between them…

  Chloe wrestled against invisible straights, kicking and slapping at the dark thing down by her legs.

  “Get off me, get away from me. I’m not going anywhere,” she thought, but her thoughts were too small to be heard in the presence of all that light.

  The dark melted, slipped away from her, bunched up and then flapped and blew away, a broken black umbrella on the wind, disappearing. Too much light…and yet, squinting through it, she saw, or thought she saw something…a shape she remembered.

  And then, as quickly as it came, the light receded, and in its retreating wake there was frozen earth and wet black rocks, the flat sheet of the lake at night, a midnight sky, black fading into royal blues around the edges. The last remnants of it’s light gathered at the top of the nighttime dome and burst apart, running down the edges of the world in drips and streaks, each drop of liquid light stopping at a different point, freezing, becoming a tiny point of illumination in the black sky, a star.

  Chloe sat on her snow covered rock, alone on the shore of Lake Superior at night. The water lapped gently, rare feathery clumps of snow fell lightly here and there.

  So peaceful, a good place to rest. In the absence of the light she had no desire to move, she barely even thought. She wasn’t at all sure
how to get back, but it didn’t seem to matter. Perhaps it would never matter. She sat and watched the tiny variations in the gentle waves that slid over the rocks, a dreamy smile on her face. If time passed, she wasn’t aware of it.

  And it was the wind that called her, or at least she thought it was the wind. Listening, remembering what was real, she thought it sounded more like a voice. One she knew. Chloe closed her eyes and touched her own hand to her cheek. If she thought about it, very hard, she could almost feel another hand there, larger and warm. She smiled. It was a voice after all. What was it saying?

  “You and me, Kiddo. You and me, I’m right here next to you. I have been right along…I always will be.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Chloe opened her eyes. She didn’t bother moving, she didn’t wonder at the strangeness of the scene before her eyes. Sam was nearby. A grey-haired, kindly-faced man was helping her to sit up. Seth hung over her, but because he was watching Sam, she saw him before he saw her. When he turned back, she smiled.

  “I’ve had such a strange dream,” she whispered.

  “Me too,” he whispered back.

  “And you were there, and you, and you…now where’s Toto?” Sam said from the floor.

  Chloe smiled and closed her eyes again. She felt drained, she could have laid uncaring on that couch for days. Except…except, it was cold in the room, wasn’t it?

  Looking past Seth, she could see the curtains blowing faintly on a snow-laced breeze. The window had been busted out, tiny pieces of glass covered the carpet. There were a lot of questions she could have asked, but there was one important thing she had to do first. Something she‘d put off too long.

  She lifted her hand, and laid it against Seth’s cheek.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I know,” he answered, wrapping his hand around hers.

  “No…you don’t. I couldn’t say it. I thought I was protecting myself or something. I thought if I admitted it, it was just going to make it hurt more when you went away. I can’t…I still can’t figure out what you see, but it doesn’t matter. I love you, and I’m sorry…about all this,” she looked around the ransacked living room, wincing, as she again noticed the man.

  “Beats a normal Friday night at the Eat,” he smiled.

  “Oh you guys and your mush,” Sam complained, as the man helped her to her feet.

  “Well then don’t look a minute,” Seth said. He leaned in, rubbed his lips against Chloe’s and kissed her gently.

  Behind his back, the old man disappeared. Sam brushed a few shimmering pieces of glass off herself, and surveyed the mess of the room with a frown. A lamp lay on its side, the bookcase looked as though it had exploded. Snow had blown in and was melting on the carpet in front of the window.

  The man returned, carrying a large square of cardboard and a roll of duct tape. He proceeded to block up the window while the others watched. When he finished, he turned and cleared his throat nervously.

  “I…well, I’m pretty sure I can get permission for an exorcism,” he offered.

  “Well then, what the heck was that that just happened?” Sam asked, righting the fallen floor lamp.

  “A prayer to St. Michael, asking for his protection, his assistance.”

  “Well, that was some pretty good praying there, Father. Kudos on that,” Sam said. “But are you saying that they’re not gone, or that they can come back?”

  “I don’t…I don’t know,” the priest admitted, spreading his hands. “I can find someone who does though. For now, why don’t we just start at the beginning. Start by telling me when you first noticed that something wasn’t right.”

  The priest was about to settle into the arm chair next to the couch, when he stopped and held out his hand to Chloe.

  “Father Andrew, by the way,” he introduced himself.

  “Chloe Adams,” Chloe mumbled, shaking his hand. “Thank-you. I’m not sure what you did, but I was losing an argument, I didn’t think I could ever get back, and then there was light. Just so much light.”

  “What did happen?” Sam asked. “I just remember my head hurt so bad, and it felt like the room was going to collapse on me and then…and then everything just went black. Was it George? Did George do all this?”

  “No!” Chloe said, sitting up abruptly. “No, it wasn’t George at all. George was against them, George was trying to tell me about them, about…how we have to stop them…the bad ones. So much stuff, there was this plot, it had to do with the asylums, and trying to bring people back. Experiments with bodies, keeping souls earthbound. We have to find Abraham’s Men, because the bad ones are getting close to figuring it out. They might have already figured it out.”

  “Figured what out?” Seth asked.

  “How to live forever, how not to die.”

  “Please, let’s start at the beginning, I seem to have come in a bit late,” Father Andrew reminded her.

  So, for more than an hour, Chloe, with a few interruptions from Sam, related all the strange occurrences that made up their first semester at college. Even Seth was surprised at times. When she caught the priest up to the events of the night, she stopped. For once, Sam didn’t offer any help, just stared at the carpet morosely. Chloe coughed and shrugged.

  “So earlier, I was in my room, and I was drinking a little, and I guess I kind of…invited George to possess me, if he was able,” she admitted.

  Seth rubbed his forehead slowly, but he didn’t say anything. Sam continued to stare fixedly at the carpet.

  “That was incredibly foolish,” Father Andrew reprimanded her. “Why? Why would you do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know…I don’t know!” Chloe waved the question away impatiently. “I just did.”

  If Father Andrew noticed that none of the three met his eyes, he didn’t remark on it. Chloe hurriedly continued her narrative.

  “Well at first, I was in a dark place, and I was scared, but then George came and he talked to me. He said I was inside myself. He told me about the bad ones. Their history, they go back a couple of hundred years. They started experimenting with bodies back in the 1700’s, using electricity to restart hearts, and move limbs and stuff. They started learning about the human brain even, about how you could bring someone back, but they might just be a breathing body, because they were still brain dead. And then, he says, they started trying to learn about souls. Whether or not they could trap them, use them, put them back in bodies. He said you can find traces of it in history. Some kind of religious movement back in the 1800’s, all about talking to ghosts-”

  “Spiritualism,” Father Andrew offered.

  “Yah, that. They were using the asylums for experiments, and George said that the reason the asylums are all closed, is because they don’t need them anymore. They’ve figured out what they needed to. He says that’s why it’s important that we stop them. They found some kind of answer, and it’s going to be bad.”

  “I don’t understand,” Seth stopped her. “That whole time you were out, you were in your head having a peaceful conversation with someone? Because from out here, it looked like you were fighting something, like you were hurting.”

  “Oh, I was. George left. I don’t know why, it was like…like he just got sucked right out of my head. And he told me, he warned me that there were bad ones that could find me. Bad ones that were dead, and still around. He said they were close, that they can latch onto living people, like parasites, and that there was one near me. He said that people that had addictions were the ones they most…” Chloe trailed off.

  Sam glanced up from where she sat picking at an invisible spot on the carpet to see three sets of eyes upon her.

  “What?!” she demanded.

  “It was a woman-thing,” Chloe said, still studying Sam. “It came after George left and I was trying to…to get out of my head, to wake up. It grabbed onto me, made it all dark. It talked to me too. It tried to convince me…I don’t know what it wanted me to think. Maybe that there was no point to any
thing. There was no good or evil, no heaven, no God-”

  Father Andrew snorted.

  “And I started to believe it…but then oh…so much light. Just so much light, and it just blew the Thing away from me, and I saw…I thought I saw…” She trailed off, her eyes widening as she remembered.

  “You saw?” Father Andrew leaned forward in his chair.

  “A sword. A sword and it was on fire, and it was more terrifying than any of the dark things or ghosts, but I didn’t want to run away from it, or hide…I didn’t even want it to go away. I didn’t mind if it struck me down on the spot, because it was also so beautiful…amazing…something, I don’t know that there’s a word for it. It did go away, and I was alone there, but I didn’t care. I don’t think I’ll ever be afraid of anything again.”

  “St. Michael, the archangel,” Father Andrew whispered reverently.

  “How did you come back to us?” Seth asked.

  “I heard you. I heard you calling me, and I closed my eyes and I wanted to be where you were, and when I opened them…I was,” she smiled at him.

  He took her hand and pressed his lips against the back of it.

  “No more of this, right?” he asked. “It’s all done now. We’ll move out of Kirkbride, we don’t even have to wait for a transfer. We can get an apartment.”

  Chloe didn’t answer, she knew he wouldn’t like what she would eventually have to say. Instead she looked at Father Andrew.

  “And what happened while I…while I was gone?” she asked him.