Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  She wasn’t so afraid of death anymore. Death was quick. Death had no memory. Scars, on the other hand, got to be really heavy to carry around after a while.

  Kathy closed her eyes and counted her breaths. When she’d let the seventh breath go, she opened her eyes again, and the echoes were gone.

  When they’d been kids, long before he’d ever cut her, Toby used to hide things from their dad in a hole in the wall in his bedroom. Mostly it was cigarettes or porno magazines or the occasional bottle of booze. There had been a loose piece of Sheetrock behind the headboard of his bed, and he’d gotten pretty good at stashing things there. Kathy knew about it; Toby had always said it was their little secret, and sometimes he’d share a smoke or a sip of the bottle he was hiding when their dad wasn’t home. It had been exciting then, a special string of moments the two of them shared, when he wasn’t teasing her or growling at her or looking at her in that way that made her uncomfortable. He was just Toby, her big brother, and she probably loved him more during those moments than any other time.

  Their dad had caught them, and Toby’d made it look like it was only him smoking and drinking. He’d covered for Kathy, and for his trouble, their dad had beat him pretty good. He’d had the beginnings of a black eye and bruises all over his back after that, but he’d wiped the tears away and winked at her after, as if to let her know it had been worth it, and nothing was ever going to change those moments or take them away.

  Kathy was pretty sure it was after their dad had plastered and spackled the wall that Toby had taken to hiding things in his closet, but it wasn’t the same. After a while, Toby wasn’t the same.

  She went to his bed and bumped the corner of it. It didn’t move. Margaret had told her once that after several incidents of inmates tossing their beds in fits of rage, they had begun bolting them to the floor. Kathy figured that in order to get to the wall behind his bed, Toby would have had to find a way to loosen the bolts without the orderlies who changed the sheets and made up the beds noticing. Nudging one at the head of the bed with the toe of her boot, she saw that it was, indeed, loose. She bent and unscrewed the bolt on that side, then went around to the other side and undid that one. After unscrewing a third at the foot of the bed, she was able to pivot the frame enough to get to the wall behind it. Sure enough, there was a hairline crack outlining a patch of loose Sheetrock about the width and height of a laptop screen. She dug her nails into the crack and wiggled it loose. It was a messy job and if the hospital was still standing in the morning, the staff was sure to find out about it, but she wasn’t too concerned with protecting the integrity of Toby’s hiding places just then.

  Tossing the Sheetrock aside in a small white puff of dust, she reached into the hole in the wall. She half expected her hand to graze smooth, stringy, slimy things, the innards of a hospital beginning to change into something else. Instead, her fingers closed around a canvas strap, and she pulled out a small black backpack. On the front zippered pocket was the symbol of the Hand of the Black Stars, a black silhouette of a palm-up hand against red and white, and six black stars, between and surrounding the fingers. It looked like it had been painted on or colored in marker, but applied with careful reverence. Kathy looked at it with disgust.

  She gave the backpack a quick shake, and the contents returned a muffled thump. She’d certainly open it before handing it over to her brother, but first, she wanted to get back to him and Henry. The air in the room where he had been imprisoned for almost three decades was starting to get heavy, and she needed to get out of there.

  Slinging the little backpack over her shoulder, she nudged the bed back in place and headed for the door. Then she noticed the glow out in the hallway.

  She frowned. All over the third floor, it was lights out as usual; the floor was dark, aside from moonlight through some of the bedroom windows and the small oblong lights between the ceiling tiles that ostensibly had been installed in case staff needed to see down the hallway. What glowed just outside Toby’s door now, in that hall space between his room and Henry’s, was too bright for either of those things. The way it pulsed colors was unusual, too. She’d seen those colors before in the ivy outside the building and in Edgar’s eye. These were colors that Henry’s imagination had attributed some meaning, and that meant whatever was in the hallway was going to be a problem.

  As if in answer to her thoughts, a sexless voice said, “Kathy, come out. I want to show you things. Beautiful things.”

  Kathy didn’t answer. She stood motionless, soundless, with Toby’s backpack on her shoulder and her gun in the holster on her hip.

  “Kathy,” it said, “I want to show you Toby and Henry. They’re mine now, and they can see such lovely colors. The colors of Ayteilu. Come see.”

  She hoped that was a lie. Whatever was out there might be willing to hurt Toby, but not Henry, not yet…not unless Maisie’s plan was working faster than Kathy thought.

  She let the backpack slide down her arm until she could slowly unzip the top.

  “Kathy, come out or I’ll kill them.”

  “No, you won’t.” She rummaged around, feeling for an object she thought might be in there.

  The thing in the hallway laughed. At least, Kathy assumed it was a laugh, although it sounded to her more like the cry of someone about to break.

  “You’re feisty,” it said. “You’ll be fun to pull apart.”

  She felt something cool and smooth and pulled it from the backpack. She allowed herself a small huff of relief; it was an artifact she had been hoping Toby had. It looked like it was made of shiny black glass or porcelain, but it wasn’t. That substance didn’t come from anywhere in this dimension, nor did its shape, which was something like a three-dimensional, symmetrical kind of arabesque. It was a word in a language no human tongue would ever pronounce, and it was powerful. If Maisie had used certain spells to anchor herself and her army to this world and bring her own bleeding through, then the artifact in Kathy’s hand would most likely be the best weapon Kathy had against that army.

  At least, she hoped so.

  “Kathy?” The glow waxed closer. “I’m going to hurt your friends. I’m going to break them into little pieces. Come out and watch.”

  “I have a better game to play,” Kathy said. The artifact was growing colder in her hand. “How about you come in here and see?”

  A hand, stiff and waxy like a mannequin’s, came around the doorframe, its fingers bending with some effort. The glow pulsed a bright blue, then green. A moment later, the lower half of a leg dangling from a useless knee appeared just below the hand, its foot jerking around.

  “I like games,” the sexless voice said, and it giggled in that horrible high-pitched, hysterical way again.

  “You’ll like this one,” Kathy said. She took several cautious steps closer to the door, raising the artifact like a weapon.

  A second later, the glow came into view. Its source was blindingly bright, a cloud of light, threaded with the veins of tiny soundless storms and fog. The light burned Kathy’s eyes, but she couldn’t turn away. The cloud had been right; there were beautiful things to see—endless star-sprinkled space painted with nebulae, black holes swirling into infinity, fountains of blood and shards of bone shooting up into sunset-streaked skies over alien worlds, bodies arranging themselves as they pleased, over and over for eons, the cycle of creation and life, death and deconstruction, and over again, forever…

  Before the light could swallow her mind, Kathy thrust the artifact into the midst of it.

  At first, she felt nothing. Then a biting cold clamped down on her fingers, her hand, her wrist. The pain was sharp, a hundred ice shards and splinters shot under her skin. She held on to the artifact even though her fingers were growing stiff and the pain was eating into her arm. The cloud suddenly screamed, a piercing wail of pain and surprise, and Kathy was able to turn her head away. Just when it felt like her hand had crystallized
and was about to shatter, she pulled back her arm and the cloud exploded.

  The force knocked her backward and she fell onto the floor just before the bed. All around her, glinting rainbow particles hung in the air, millions of tiny fragments that had made up cloud and tentacle, hands and legs, and then those particles fell to the ground with an almost musical glasslike tinkling sound. In seconds, the confetti that had been a monster winked out and was gone.

  Kathy rose shakily and inspected her hand. The whole area that she had plunged into the cloud’s light was bright red and raw, her knuckles split and bleeding, but otherwise, her hand seemed okay. Her joints were locked, though, and it took a few seconds to work enough feeling back into her fingers that she could pry the artifact out from their grasp and return it to Toby’s backpack.

  She was just zipping up when she heard slow clapping from behind her. She turned and saw Orrin stretched out on Toby’s bed. He was still a pale shade of blue, and that black stuff he’d coughed up had dried on his chin and t-shirt. His forearm a few inches above one of his wrist knives had bubbled and peeled some, but otherwise, Orrin looked fine.

  “Impressive,” he said. “You killed one of the Others. I was starting to think they were indestructible in this world.”

  “No,” Kathy replied, “they’re not. But you’re still going. A little worse for wear, pretty boy, but still holding up, huh?”

  “Holding up is what I do,” Orrin said, leaning forward. He fixed his gaze on her. “I’m tough to kill. Maybe even impossible, by the time Maisie’s done with us. Not like the humans here. They don’t bend so well, but wow, how they break!”

  “Some people are harder to break than others,” she said.

  “Breaking people is also what I do,” Orrin replied, and rose from the bed. “Let’s see how hard you are to break, Kathy Ryan.”

  Chapter 12

  “So which way are the pharmaceuticals?” Holt asked in a low voice as they emerged from the stairwell.

  “This way,” Ernie replied, hooking a finger to the left. “Down past the offices and on the right.”

  The two men moved as quietly as they could down the hall, past empty offices and blood-streaked doors, until they came to a corridor veering off to the right. While the first- through third-floor wings of the building were used for patient rooms, therapy rooms, and bathrooms, the fourth-floor wings beyond the administrative offices were set aside for medical and pharmaceutical storage, labs, and maintenance. They had once housed the isolation ward before the restructuring of the hospital, and those rooms that couldn’t easily be converted to accommodate the modern changes were either used for file storage or left empty. Ernie never liked being in those fourth-floor wings if he could help it; there was something not right about them. Maybe it was age or neglect that clung like shadows to the walls, and made folks jumpy, but Ernie didn’t think so.

  The door to the pharmaceutical and medical supplies storage room was unmarked, other than a yellow and green sticker by the room number, to keep any patients who might be wandering where they shouldn’t from accessing medications. It was always kept locked, as the small sign on it indicated, for the same reason. He’d had no reason over the years to ever unlock the door, other than to assist the occasional scatterbrained orderly who had locked himself out and/or the keys in. His boss, however, had granted him keys to every locked spot in the hospital, and he’d marked the key to that door with the same colors. Ernie wondered briefly if Wensler would show up and give him grief about him and Holt breaking into the hospital’s supplies. Years on the job had trained him to be leery of such things. Given the state of the hospital just then, though, he supposed Wensler showing up and firing him over stolen drugs and scalpels was the least of his worries.

  He found the key quickly on his big jingling key ring and let himself and Holt inside.

  Metal shelves had been erected under the fluorescent light, which came on as soon as they crossed the threshold. Hundreds of white and nearly translucent orange bottles lined the shelves, many of which had long chemical names he couldn’t pronounce, even if he could see the labels clearly without his reading glasses.

  “Any idea where the sleeping pills are, friend?” Holt asked, throwing up his hands at the sheer volume to look through.

  “Not a clue,” Ernie said.

  “Looks like the shelves are marked, at least by drug type. Let’s see here…opiates, anticonvulsants…” Holt peered at the shelves’ different labels.

  “Look for benzodiazepines, then,” Ernie said, “or NB hypnotics.”

  Holt gave him a questioning look.

  “It’s not whatever you’re thinking, boss. The orderlies call them benzos and NBs. Short for benzodiazepines and non-benzodiazepines, they told me. Words just stuck in my head.”

  Holt shrugged. “Okay. Benzos and non-benzos it is, then.” He found the benzodiazepines two shelves over and one up from the bottom, in boxes marked Klonopin, Valium, Restoril, Xanax, and Ativan.

  “These…aren’t these anti-anxiety meds?” Holt asked.

  “I guess so. Grab a couple of boxes of those and a couple of NBs. One or the other has to be right.”

  Holt grabbed a box of Xanax and another of Restoril, tore them open, and shoved the bottles into the pockets of his trench coat, then turned to the shelf of non-benzodiazepines below it. “Oh, hey—Lunesta. I’ve heard of that stuff. That’s the moth stuff, right? From the commercial, the glowing moth?”

  “I think so.” Ernie was starting to feel very anxious in that supplies room, and not because of Wensler and his policies. The room had gotten smaller somehow, like the shelves were pressing in, and the low hum of the fluorescent lights was starting to unnerve him.

  Holt grabbed two boxes of Lunesta, tore those open, and shoved those into his pocket as well, then straightened up again. “Think we can grab a scalpel from here?”

  They moved through the shrinking shelves toward the sterile medical supplies and found a scalpel still in its packaging. Ernie grabbed it and stuffed it into his pocket.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I have a bad feel—”

  “Help me!” a man’s voice called from down the hall. It sounded furtive, desperate, as if whoever it wanted help from could return at any minute.

  Ernie and Holt exchanged glances.

  “I thought nobody was housed in the isolation rooms anymore,” Holt said.

  “Nobody is,” Ernie said. He grabbed another scalpel package and ripped it open with his teeth.

  The two threaded their way through the shelves until they got to the door. Ernie had a strange sensation that they had somehow gone the wrong way, that the doorway in front of them was a different door, the wrong one, but he shook off the feeling. There was only one door in or out of the room, the one with the yellow and green sticker above the room number and the sign reminding people to always keep it locked. The feeling persisted, though, as they brought their gathered supplies into the hallway, so Ernie glanced at the wall. The room number was there, and it was the right one—456.

  The sticker was gone, though. There wasn’t even that grimy-looking little residue left behind. Frowning, Ernie closed the door. It was blank from top to bottom. No sign.

  “What? What is it?” Holt asked, puzzled.

  “Something’s wrong,” Ernie replied.

  “Hey! Hey, you down there! Please, help me! I locked myself in!” The voice was indeed coming from one of the old, unused isolation rooms, down at the end of the hall. Ernie thought he recognized the voice, too, but that made him feel more rather than less suspicious of it. The owner of that voice shouldn’t have been there.

  “Who are you?” Holt asked.

  “Myers! Larry Myers! I’m an orderly here. Please, let me out before those things come back!”

  Ernie nodded with grim satisfaction.

  Holt started down the hall but Ernie put
a hand on his arm to stop him. “Myers only works day shifts,” he said in a low voice.

  Holt nodded.

  “Please,” Myers said. “I’ve been stuck in here since three this afternoon and I have to piss like a racehorse.”’

  “How’d you get locked in there?” Holt asked.

  “I ran in here to hide from one of those, whatever the fuck they are, those glowing cloud things. When I pulled the door closed, it locked. Look, I’m not one of those things. Are you going to let me out or what?”

  Holt looked to Ernie, who shrugged. “Your call, boss,” he said to Holt.

  The detective led the way past the isolation rooms. The glass windows on those doors were barred, and the doors were made of metal. They required special keys; Ernie kept them on a separate ring attached to the main key ring and was fairly sure he’d never used them, nor had the guy before him.

  Holt pressed as close as he could to the dust-streaked glass, trying to peer through, but seemed to have no luck. Myers pounded on the door. Both men jumped, and Holt backed away from the window.

  “For God’s sake, let me outta here!” Myers cried. “Please! I don’t want them to do to me what they did to Joe. Oh God!”

  “Let him out,” Holt said to Ernie. He looked almost apologetic. “We can’t leave him in there.”

  “If that’s a ‘him’ at all,” Ernie muttered. Holt didn’t answer, but he drew his gun. Ernie searched the jangling mess of keys and found the smaller ring with the isolation room keys on it.

  He let out a breath. “Here goes,” he said, and unlocked the door.

  It squealed loudly as Holt pulled it open, the sound disproportionately loud, its echo ping-ponging longer and farther than it should have. A musty smell of sedentary stone and stale air wafted out to them on a puff of dust that Ernie waved to clear away. Then the two men looked into the gloom inside.