Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Yes. There are many who would hurt him if they could. Hurt us. I can’t let that happen.” In a quick and fluid motion, she lunged forward and put a slightly clawed hand on his chest, just above his heart.

  He felt a tugging at first and then a dull ache, but he couldn’t pull away. A burning sensation radiated outward under his skin, spreading in all directions beneath her palm and bent fingertips. His heart began to beat faster

  “Please don’t,” Ben whispered. It was all he could manage to say.

  She gave him one of those little smiles again but her hand remained rigid. The burning was traveling down his arm now. He felt weak.

  She guided him gently to the floor, crouching beside him as he shrank into himself. Her hand remained over his heart. He tried to curl into the fetal position and found he couldn’t; his bones and muscles wouldn’t comply. Suddenly he didn’t bend the right way, and he began to struggle against the rebellion of his body.

  “Shh.” Maisie’s soothing voice came from above him. “Shh, now. I have what I need. You’re going to have to die.”

  Ben heard the grinding of his bones and the red-hot fire of his muscles detaching. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was the darkness in his lungs and head, which turned back on him and swallowed him whole.

  * * * *

  When Larry Myers turned the corner of the third floor hospital wing and walked down the hallway at 8:00 a.m. to give Benjamin Hadley his medication, his mind was on other things. He’d had a date the night before, and it had gone far better than he could have expected. He wasn’t great-looking and certainly not rich, nor was he especially quick-witted or funny. As his father had always told him, he didn’t bring all that much to the table. He was smart enough, but suspected that the best way to apply that intelligence was always going to elude him. Frankly, Larry’s best asset in the dating world was that he was persistent. He wasn’t a stalker, but he was genuinely enthusiastic and his endurance, at least prior to the bedroom, was admirable. He was the kind of guy whose desperation fell somewhere between endearing and pathetic, or so he was told, and so he did all right for himself with those women easily moved to pity.

  Linda, the woman he’d been with last night, had a beautiful cloud of chestnut curls, sexy green eyes, hungry lips, and long, long legs. He knew that the social politics to which he pretended to ascribe, to some degree, would have dictated that he notice more substantial and lasting attributes than her breast size or how it felt to grab her ass while she was riding him. However, when the bulk of their relationship pretty much just consisted of her riding him, he didn’t see much reason to notice a whole lot more.

  Larry’s mind was on Linda and her beautiful body; he hadn’t been thinking of Ben Hadley as anything more than a perfunctory task that morning, and so when he unlocked and entered Hadley’s room, he didn’t register the blood stain on the sheets hanging off the side of the bed right away. It took a moment, but then the small dark pool seeping out from under the bed began to spill across his thoughts of Linda and finally register as something wrong. Still, he’d turned and managed to say, “And how are we this mor—” before dropping the little paper cup with the pills in it. Larry took in the scene by the bed with no remarkable change in his expression, but internally, a wildfire of panic had engulfed all other thought.

  Hadley’s bedsheets had been heaped in a tangle at the foot of the bed. There was a little blood on them, enough to make a brown-ringed stain on that already begun to dry on the part that hung over the side. That in itself wasn’t so alarming, except that it drew one’s eye to the floor, and there was the real problem.

  Blood was coming from under the bed.

  The edge of the sheet just grazed the sticky surface of the floor. To get a better look, Larry gingerly drew back the blood-speckled fabric. He couldn’t move the bed; in Connecticut-Newlyn, the beds were bolted to the floor. Still, he could peer under, or if he had to, toss the mattress. He pulled out the little pocket flashlight he kept clipped to his belt loop and clicked it on, directing the beam through the dust particles skittering out from under the bed.

  The light found an upturned eye, glazed with clouds.

  Shit. Oh fuck. Oh shit. This is bad…

  Larry had no love for the inmates of Connecticut-Newlyn—most of them were, in his opinion, terrible people, if “people” was even an apt description—but dead inmates meant investigations and interviews and paperwork. Dead inmates meant policy changes and scrutinizing. It was his job to keep them alive until they died of natural causes or became well enough for the state to execute them. Gut instinct, though, told Larry there was nothing natural about the death under the bed.

  He rose on shaky knees, took a deep breath, and grasping the edge of the mattress, flipped it up.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, his stomach lurching. He turned his head and called on his walkie for Kenny and Joe.

  “Can it wait?” Joe asked on the heels of a static crackle.

  “No. Come now.” Larry, bent over, fought to keep the world from swimming away from him.

  “But—”

  “Drop what you’re doing and come now, goddammit!”

  He took another look at the mess under the bed and immediately regretted it. Staggering backward, he gagged, trying to force down the rising acid gorge with big gulps of breath. When he thumped against the doorframe, he felt a little more in control but not much, and held on to the walkie and the flashlight as if they were the only things keeping him standing.

  Beneath the metal frame of the bed, the body lay facedown, although many of the bones had been broken as if to facilitate the odd new positions of the limbs and head. Some of the broken shards jutted through the skin, but mostly, the body had taken on the appearance of a thin leather sack filled with sharp things. Several fingers of one hand had been removed; two had been shoved into the ears up to the second knuckle. The rest were clutched by the death grip of the other hand. The upper right portion of the head, including one of the eyes, was missing. The other eye lay cradled in what remained of its socket. The tongue lay just outside the lips like an ancient offering at the mouth of a sacred cave. Another offering, the heart, had been removed and placed on the altar of the back.

  Larry’s gut had been right. Death was not uncommon at Connecticut-Newlyn. Suicides, even homicides happened often enough that none of the orderlies was unfamiliar with it. But whatever that was under the bed, whatever had done that to a human being—that was most certainly not common.

  Neither was the layer of dust coating the body and its rearranged organs, as if it had been there for years.

  Kenny got there seconds before Joe, who slammed into the back of him when Kenny stopped short.

  “What the fuck is that?” Kenny muttered, pulling on his rubber gloves.

  “That,” Larry said in a low, shaky voice, “is what’s left of Ben Hadley.”

  Chapter 3

  Ernest Jenkinson had been a custodian for almost fifty-five years. He’d been drafted just out of high school, which was fine by him. He’d never been much for school anyway and had no more of an interest in going to college on the government’s dime after Vietnam than he’d had before the war, when he’d have had to pay his own way. What he realized too late was that if nothing else, a degree was a bargaining chip in the workforce; with it, he might have landed a job with decent pay and benefits. Without it, and with no training and the wrong color skin, Ernie Jenkinson learned to scrub toilets. Ernie’s dad had raised him to be the sort of man who recognized a job as a blessing, though, and who tackled any job he had with the work ethic of a mule, so when Ernie Jenkinson became a janitor, elevated years later to custodian, he set about becoming the best damn one he could be.

  Ernie was popular around the hospital, loved by the unlovable and unloving. He never thought much about it, but if he had, he might have chalked it up to just treating those residents lik
e normal fellas. They didn’t get much “normal” in their lives these days—probably never really had, truth be told. And he cleaned up their piss and blood and shit and broken things, the evidence of tantrums and fights and plain good old-fashioned clumsiness, and never once made them feel like anything but regular Joes about it. That was not to say that any of them could pull one over on Ernie or treat him low. Ernie didn’t put up with anything less than civility, and the crazy folk at CNH saw something in him worth being civilized to.

  It might have been that Ernie was a Vietnam vet. He’d seen some shit and he’d done some shit, and while neither alone would have earned him the loyalty of the CNH residents, both seemed to do the trick. He’d killed and seen killing and didn’t judge. He’d cleaned up messes back then, as well, though it had been for his government and, he’d thought then, for his country. One or two of the residents were ex-soldiers, and because Ernie had outranked them during his service years, they saluted him.

  It could also have been that they thought of him as a protector and guardian. Ernie wouldn’t allow mistreatment of residents by anyone—not by each other or the orderlies, and not even by nurses or doctors. He found ways to settle differences and restore what he’d come to call the civilization of the ward. His little forms of justice were accepted, even appreciated by the others. Ernie was fair and efficient and treated people, even them—maybe especially them—like human beings. The folks under Ernie’s custodial care at CNH never suffered a new resident to show him anything but the utmost respect.

  The residents were not above the occasional practical joke, however, all in good fun. That was what Ernie thought the muddy footprints leading down the hall from the rec room were, initially. About halfway to the resident bedrooms, they spiraled up the corridor walls and onto the ceiling, where they changed shape. Though there were fewer toes, those that remained were longer and pointier, with something like a toe protruding from the heel. Ernie had to hand it to the jokester; whoever had made these prints—What was that stuff, mud? Or paint, for God’s sake?—had not only managed to plant them in some difficult-to-reach places without getting caught but had worked in all the loving details of an actual animal foot, down to toeprint ridges and everything.

  Ernie smiled. The guys around the rec room knew about his interest in what science folks called cryptids. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Bridgewater Triangle creatures in Massachusetts, the Mothman—all that was a light distraction to fill the hours when he wasn’t working, sleeping, or drinking beers. He watched all those monster hunter shows on the Travel Channel, all the documentaries about legendary large cats and chupacabras and swamp apes. Ernie had been around a long time and appreciated that there were still mysteries in the world, still answers to get up in the morning and look for. He didn’t take much to the alien stuff; sure, there was probably life out there somewhere, but it was too far away for Ernie to ever see in his lifetime. Undiscovered species of animals right here on his own home planet, though, now that was something he could get behind.

  So, he’d play along. He’d follow the footprint trail and see what the fellas had in store for him. Pushing along his custodial cart, he whistled to himself as he followed the print pattern down the side of the wall again. He reached out and touched one just at eye level, scraping at it with his thumbnail. What was that stuff?

  He brought the flakes on his fingernail up close to his face to get a good look at them. Not mud, he saw, and not paint, either. He frowned. Actually, it looked like dried blood. He looked at the print again. The stain was certainly dark enough, with just a tinge of red, to be dried blood, but—

  He had only a moment to notice that the prints ended at Ben Hadley’s room, with one wrapped around the doorframe, when two orderlies, Kenny and Joe, turned the corner and came running down the hall. They pushed past him and buzzed the door to the bedrooms and hurried through, stopping short just in the doorway of Ben’s room. If they had noticed the footprints in passing, they didn’t show any sign of it.

  Ernie left the cart and the footprints where they were and buzzed himself through the same door. His arthritis had been acting up a bit, so it took him longer to reach Ben Hadley’s room, but he found the two orderlies, as well as Larry Myers, one of the male nurses, gawking at some mess on the floor beneath a bed frame. It took a few moments to realize what mess was…or had been.

  “Good Lord, what happened to him?” Ernie asked.

  Larry jumped, turning to notice Ernie behind him. “I—I don’t know. I don’t—God, what is even capable of doing something like that?”

  “Any one of the fuckers in this place is capable of that,” Kenny muttered quietly.

  No one replied. It was cool in the room, but the air had begun to smell like rot. In the blazing jungle sun of Vietnam, Ernie had become familiar with the smell, but no one ever grew used to it. It was probably hardwired into human DNA not to.

  “I’ll call the police, then, Larry,” Ernie finally said, somewhere between a question and a statement. He didn’t need the nurse’s permission per se, but there were protocols, meant to protect them as well as the residents.

  “Yeah,” Larry said. The hand he ran through his thinning hair was shaking badly. “Do that. Joe, Kenny—go get Dr. Wensler. He’ll need to be briefed. And Dr. Ulster—I think she was his doctor. I’ll stay with the…with the body.”

  Ernie nodded and headed toward the hall where he’d left his cart. He’d need it at some point, after the police and doctors and crime scene folk had left. This one wasn’t a suicide or an accident, so maybe he’d just have to close off the room until the police cleared it. He focused on these things, the practical things, the things that brushed against the fringes of his job description, because his mind wasn’t quite ready to tackle Ben’s death head-on yet. He’d liked Ben Hadley, despite the man’s having murdered an upstairs neighbor. As folks around this place went, Ben was one of the better ones. He was a nervous fella, and he’d admit as much to anyone, but on his medication, he was almost a nice, normal, shy guy. Maybe others couldn’t understand Ernie’s feeling bad about Ben’s death, but he didn’t care. He’d call the police and make sure they came. He’d make sure they didn’t just brush the murder off as one less sick, crazy killer in the world.

  If nothing else, the nature of Ben’s death proved that there was something else, a far worse killer, somewhere in the hospital.

  Ernie eyed the footprints again, the ones made in blood that no one else seemed to notice, even though they led right to a dead man’s room. As he made his way down the corridor, he felt their spiraling pattern around walls and ceiling to be stifling, like a coil pulling tighter and tighter.

  For the first time in fifty-five years, Ernie was afraid like he hadn’t been since that first night in Vietnam, and he thought he just might have come across a mess he had no way to clean up.

  * * * *

  If Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital was the domain of Ernie Jenkinson, then lands surrounding the business most certainly belonged to the hospital’s groundskeeper, George Evers. Ernie and George had been friends for the better part of those fifty-five years of Ernie’s employment, and during off hours, where one was, the other was usually close by. Ernie’s wife had died in ’92, and George’s back in ’83, and neither had ever been inclined to remarry. Rather, they were content to drink beers at the Silver Deer Tavern up the road or go fishing when the weather was nice, and trade stories about the war or, sometimes, about the hospital itself.

  George was not as well-liked as Ernie around the hospital. To say that people feared him was not, perhaps, entirely accurate, but it was a general unspoken rule that one did not mess with George Evers. With most people, he was taciturn almost to the point of being rude, and he had a nasty temper. Whether the lines in his face had caused the permanent scowl and frown or the other way around, no one could remember. George was like a cliff, worn with time and shaped by decades in the elements. He was imm
utable and immovable in most instances. Whichever side of the hospital’s bars one found oneself on made no difference to George; it was the land he loved, the land he worked for. The rest could be damned. The only exceptions and the only people who had ever known the awful particulars of the hard, tragic storms that had weathered George were Ernie and George’s wife, Marian, God rest her sweet soul.

  Of course, the domain of George Evers extended to the utility shed some two and a half acres behind the hospital. It was an old shed, worn and splintered like George himself, but it served its purpose. Had George been a younger man, he might have rebuilt it. In fact, he often discussed such plans with Ernie over beers. However, the shed, like the hospital and the men who took care of it, had been standing since the 1940s, and while it wasn’t going anywhere, it wasn’t going to get rebuilt, either.

  It was George who first noticed something wrong with the shed. To be more accurate, his first thought upon hiking the two and a half acres across hospital grounds was that after all those years in the sun, he’d finally started going soft in the head. For decades he’d been taking the same routes through the grounds, past the same trees and boulders and small, decorative benches, and yet somehow, he’d wandered off course and ended up where the shed clearly wasn’t. He’d found some type of barn instead, and from the smell of it, one used to store chemicals rather than animals or landscaping tools.

  The problem was, there had never been a barn on the hospital grounds before. George was certain of that. As he glanced around his surroundings, he was at least reassured that he was in the right place, where the shed was supposed to be. It wasn’t the wrong patch of ground he had found; it was the wrong structure.

  Ernie complained from time to time that the hospital made changes to things without giving any of the staff a heads-up, but George had never seen it affect him firsthand. He felt nettled—more than nettled, actually—that someone had touched “his stuff,” had messed with his equipment and moved things around without telling him, even if it was to move everything into a bigger space. They’d done one hell of a sloppy job, though. The barn looked crooked in a way that hurt the eyes. It offended the human sense of perspective somehow, as if vanishing points and proper angles were alien concepts to the builder, and symmetry a great unknown. George was no architect, but he had always appreciated the fine, clean lines of a well-constructed building, however small, and this barn was wrong in ways it was difficult to pinpoint consciously.