Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  The isolation rooms had no proper windows, but there was a tiny, heavily barred slit near the top of the high ceiling. It was no wonder the medical community had discontinued use of the rooms in the name of humanitarian progress; the little cell in front of Ernie struck him as a questionable step up from a medieval dungeon. If there was a man in there, then the gloom had already begun to stick to him like sweat.

  “Myers?” Holt called into the room.

  “Yeah,” the shaky voice replied, sounding relieved. “I’m here. I’m here.”

  A figure stumbled out of the darkness. It certainly looked like Larry Myers—curly black hair cut short to minimize the contrast of his receding hairline, the beginnings of a paunch just starting to hang over his belt, hairy arms ending in hairy knuckles, and bright, earnest green eyes. His scrubs were torn across the chest. A cloudy bruise was forming over the outer corner of one eye, and a thin stream of dried blood had left a crusty trail from his left nostril to his upper lip.

  Holt put his gun away to help Myers into the hallway, but Ernie caught a look from him that seemed to say keep an eye on him and keep the scalpel handy. Ernie did; he watched the orderly as the man panted, his wild-eyed gaze darting up and down the hallway.

  “Where are they?” he asked in a near whisper. “Those things, those cloud things—where did they go?”

  “Haven’t seen them up here, buddy,” Holt replied gently. “Haven’t seen or heard anything on this floor but you.”

  “Are they gone?” Myers asked.

  “Looks that way, son,” Ernie said. “How about we get you out of here?”

  Myers turned to Ernie, and the bright fear in them dulled to confusion. “What are they? What the hell are they?”

  “It’s a long story, Mr. Myers. Let’s get you out of here first.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Myers said.

  “Okay. Let’s take care of that.” Holt led the man, with Ernie in tow, to the far end of the hall. A sign for the men’s room indicated a door on the left, and Holt drew his gun.

  “Just in case,” he told Myers, whose empty stare was fixed on the weapon. He pushed open the door and they slipped inside.

  Holt checked the stalls while Myers fidgeted impatiently by the sinks. When he gave the okay that the place was clear and holstered his gun, Myers ran to the nearest urinal. While he was relieving himself, Holt sidled up to Ernie and said in a low, confidential voice, “So, is it him?”

  “Larry Myers?” Ernie responded in the same tone. “Don’t know the man all that well, but I…I think so. Seems like him. No little, you know, quirks, like with George.”

  “If we turn him loose at the front door, he’ll never make it off the property. Look at him.”

  “Take him back downstairs, then?”

  “That’s my thinking.”

  Myers zipped up and went to the sink. The water took a moment, then spurted suddenly from the faucet, as if the pipes had been turned off and on again. Myers flinched when the water hit the porcelain but managed to do a serviceable job of washing his hands.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, now what?”

  “Now you come with us.”

  “Where? Are we leaving now?”

  “We can’t do that just yet, Larry. You’re gonna have to trust us, okay?” Ernie clapped a hand on the orderly’s shoulder.

  “What? Why? That’s crazy! We have to get out of here, we—” His eyes grew wide. “What was that?”

  Ernie hadn’t heard anything. He turned to Holt, who shrugged.

  “What was what, Mr. Myers?” Holt asked.

  “It’s one of them,” Myers whispered. “Can’t you hear it? It just—there, it just said my name again.”

  “We don’t hear anything,” Ernie said. Under normal circumstances, that might have made a man feel better; he could chalk up Myers’s voices to delusion. After what he’d seen lately, though, all it meant was that Ernie was at a disadvantage. He was essentially deaf to whatever was threatening Larry Myers.

  “Let’s go,” Holt said, evidently thinking the same thing. He drew his gun and led the trio out of the bathroom. “Which way is the voice coming from, Mr. Myers?”

  Myers pointed down the corridor from which they’d come.

  “Good,” Holt said, gesturing for them to follow in the opposite direction. “Stairs are this way.”

  Their passage down the corridor was tense and mostly silent; Ernie’s joints creaked so badly he could almost hear them inside his head, but the rest of him held it together. Larry Myers flinched from time to time, stopping short in front of him, and Ernie had to nudge him to keep him going. Holt drew his gun on shadows. Ernie was relieved when they reached the corner.

  They turned onto a lightless void, an end of the earth into which the rest of the hospital seemed to have fallen. That’s what it looked like to Ernie’s tired old eyes, just for a moment, before he realized that the lights had gone out.

  “Fuck,” Holt said. “What happened to the lights?”

  “They like the dark,” Myers whispered. His whole body was trembling noticeably now.

  Holt ignored him. He rummaged through the inner pockets of his trench coat until he pulled out a very old cell phone. He flipped it open and brought up the flashlight app, then shined it down the hallway. It did little good; the beam of light was too thin to make out anything more than shapes, and it didn’t reach too far.

  “Come on,” he grunted, leading them into the blackness. Myers snatched at Holt’s trench coat like a child, and Ernie held on to his shoulder, an uneasy train rolling slowly through a dark tunnel that groaned and mewed all around them. Just like on George’s street, he felt things watching him, jostling with each other to get closer, grazing close enough to him to just miss touching the raised hairs on his arms and the back of his neck before gliding back into the black again. When the little red digital elevator sign proclaiming the fourth floor came into view, Ernie relaxed, but just a little. That meant the stairs were close by.

  He was about to point that out to Myers and Holt when something passed in front of that number four for a moment, and the train stopped short. Ernie bumped into Holt, who he could now make out as a silhouette with a reddish halo.

  “You okay?” Holt asked.

  “Yeah, but…” Ernie frowned. Holt’s was the only silhouette in front of him. He was sure he’d never let go of Myers’s shoulder, but the middle man was gone.

  “But what?”

  “Myers. He’s gone.”

  “What? How?” Holt sounded genuinely perplexed. “Where could he have gone?”

  They heard Myers laughing from somewhere beyond the light, although he sounded hysterical enough that he could have been crying, too. A few seconds later, it was joined by more lunatic laughter, as if every crazy person in the whole damned hospital was laughing with Myers.

  “Larry?” he called above the laughter. “Larry, where’d you go, son?”

  “Mr. Myers? Mr.—ah, fuck it. Let’s go, Ernie.” Holt grabbed Ernie’s leave and ushered him to the stairwell.

  Suddenly, the red glow behind them got much brighter, and the stairwell door started melting around the edges. It fused to the doorframe, sagging at an odd angle but effectively blocking the way.

  “I’m a-f-fraid I c-can’t let you leave,” a voice from behind said.

  The men turned to find Edgar leaning against the wall by the elevator doors, his one eye socket glowing brightly and casting a bloody tint to his face and neck.

  Holt gave the boy a bone-weary sigh. “We ain’t about to let you stop us, kid.”

  Edgar considered that a moment, then said, “Sounds like an impasse, huh?”

  “It does indeed.”

  “Guess we’ll have to fight it out,” Edgar said with an almost wistful smile.

  “Guess so,” Holt replied, and he and Edg
ar charged each other.

  * * * *

  Orrin grinned at her, and that double set of fangs pressed into his bottom lip. As he sauntered closer, he dragged his wrist blade against the wall, leaving a deep furrow that, having pierced the skinlike paint, split the wall open to reveal alien flesh and muscle underneath. The way he was looking at her reminded her so much of Toby that it made her skin crawl.

  “But damn, do I ever want to cut you…”

  And Orrin would cut her, too, if given a chance. To get close enough to use the artifact on him meant getting close enough to get cut.

  Again.

  She unzipped the backpack.

  “Where’s Maisie?” she asked, stalling.

  Orrin shrugged. “Who knows? Maisie does her own thing.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “We all do.”

  “Now, on that point, I’ve heard differently.”

  “Oh?” Orrin paused.

  “I heard you and your brother don’t take a proverbial piss without Maisie or the Viper signing off on it.”

  Orrin’s grin faded, but he said nothing.

  “Sounds to me like Maisie and the Viper are running the whole show,” she said, pulling the artifact out of the backpack. “She must trust him an awful lot to give him so much power over the rest of you…expendable types. Maybe she’d got a thing for him, or—”

  Orrin suddenly slashed out at her, his wintery eyes flashing. She lunged backward, managing to dodge his wrist blade by mere inches. Evidently, she’d hit a nerve. He glared at her and dove at her again, but she knocked his incoming arm away from her face.

  She shoved the artifact at his face, but this time, he was ready for her defensive strike. He tilted his head out of the way and backed off, but just a little.

  “Your toys are a joke,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’m going to carve you up so bad even your crazy butcher of a brother won’t recognize the pieces.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” she replied tersely. “That’s a good one. Did you come up with that on your own, or do you still get all your thoughts from Henry?”

  “This is all me, bitch,” he said, and plunged one of the wrist knives into her shoulder.

  The pain was staggering. It knocked the wind out of her, and for several seconds she just held on to his arm. He was pressed close to her, so close that she could see ice storms swirling through his irises and an uncontrolled hate in the depth of his pupils. He smelled like nothing, felt almost like nothing, and though his face was inches from hers, he had no breath. She observed and held on to these things to keep from passing out. She clutched his elbow to keep from sinking to the ground. And with her other hand, the one holding the artifact, she reached around him as if to give him a hug and plunged the artifact into his back.

  “You…you…” The ice storms in his eyes suddenly stopped moving, but that hate grew fathoms deeper. There was something else there, too, swallowing the hate like a black hole. Kathy thought it might have been fear.

  Orrin opened his mouth either to say something or to scream, but no sound came out. Instead, the opening that was widening in his back like a vortex started to pull at his insides. His tongue and then his teeth were sucked down his throat and he seemed to be getting shorter. His face distorted and then crumpled in on itself. Just before the eyes were vacuumed up inside the head, they grew wide, that frozen ice storm splintering into a million tiny pieces of despair.

  Then the whole of the creature that was Orrin folded in on itself and disappeared. The artifact clanked to the floor. She scooped it up, put it in the backpack, and tossed the strap over her good shoulder.

  A moment later, a sharp cry from the adjacent room sent her running. As she burst into Henry’s room clutching her injured shoulder, she saw the young man on the floor. Toby leaned over him, not quite able to get to him on the floor with his injuries. It looked like he was trying to prod Henry’s shoulder with his crutch.

  “What did you do?” she yelled, tossing the backpack to her brother. She rushed to Henry and crouched beside him.

  “Nothing!” Toby protested. “One minute he was fine and then he grabbed his head and screamed and fell over like that. I didn’t do anything to him.”

  Kathy looked up into his eyes and saw he was telling the truth—or at least as much of the truth as Toby was able to tell. He hadn’t done anything to Henry…

  …she had. The thought dawned on her with awful clarity. The tulpas weren’t entirely removed from their connection to Henry, not yet. It was possible that hurting one of them might hurt their creator as well.

  “What happened to your shoulder, Kat?” Toby shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “Orrin happened. It’s fine. It’s not that deep. Henry, are you okay?”

  “He’s gone,” Henry whispered, shaken, as Kathy helped him sit up. He looked up at her with frightened eyes. “Orrin…what did you do to him?”

  “I…I think I undid him,” Kathy said. Truthfully, she really wasn’t sure what happened. She hadn’t thought the artifact would kill Orrin, only slow him down. She still didn’t think it would affect the tulpas with greater power, like Maisie or the one Henry called the Viper, but if it could be used to thin out their army some, she was all for it.

  “How?” Toby asked. “I don’t understand. You shouldn’t have just been able to—wait.” Toby thought about it for a moment, and a small smile crept over his face. “That sneaky little bitch,” he said finally.

  “What?” Kathy asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “The spell she did to keep them here, it has certain…clauses that can be finessed. In the event, let’s say, that you summon a number of entities to fight, and you give them each a certain degree of staying power, you can include a part that allows the most powerful entity to siphon off strength and substance from lesser entities around it to ensure victory. It’s only a little bit from each, not enough for any of them to notice, but given the number of things out there…” He shook his head. “That artifact should only have hurt this tulpa, Orrin. But she pulled just enough of the ground out from under his feet without him noticing that it dispelled him entirely. Chances are, that artifact there will work on any tulpa of Orrin’s strength or less. Maisie, though, clever little minx that she is, will be a much tougher problem.”

  “The Viper, too,” Henry muttered.

  “What?” Toby looked at him as if just remembering he was there.

  “The Viper, too. He’s not…like the rest of them. He was never a friend of mine—he’s a friend of theirs.”

  Kathy and Toby exchanged glances. She wasn’t sure what that meant, and from the look on Toby’s face, he didn’t seem to, either.

  “Viper controls the Wraiths, both kinds, and the Others. Orrin always thought he and Edgar controlled the Others, but they didn’t. They just wrangled them, like wild animals, you know?” Henry spoke softly, his eyes seeing somewhere distant and unreachable now. “The Viper was the only one who controlled anything, except Maisie. The Viper does whatever she says. He’s…I think he’s the one who killed those kids. He and Maisie.” He began to shiver violently, but Toby waved behind his back that it was okay. In a moment, Henry regained control of himself.

  “If I try to stop them, they’ll kill me, won’t they?” he asked Kathy.

  “My honest opinion? They’ll do whatever it takes to be free. If this final part of the spell needs to be done at twelve midnight, they’ll come gunning for you at twelve-oh-one.”

  To Toby, he said, “And you can make them stop? It’ll work?”

  Toby was about to answer when a shout came from the hallway.

  “Wait here,” Kathy said to them. Her shoulder ached, and she tried to pull her sleeve out of the wound but the blood there was already drying, making it stick to her skin.

  “Wouldn’t dream of leaving your side,” Toby said w
ith a snide gesture at his swollen, purple ankles.

  Kathy grabbed the backpack out of his hand, unzipped it, and took the artifact. Toby didn’t argue. He simply watched her until she walked out with it. Even with her back turned, he could feel his eyes on her. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to his stare again.

  Another shout sent her down the hall and around the corner toward the elevator and stairs. It didn’t sound to her like something inhuman; rather, it sounded like a man, and she had this panicked feeling that it was either Holt or Ernie, that they had met with trouble.

  What she found instead was a pudgy, unremarkable man with fuzzy black hair entangled in that glowing blue ivy she’d seen outside the building. The ivy had him strung up a foot or so off the ground, plastered to the wall next to the elevator doors. All about him was a stomach-turning stench of vomit and burnt hair. From the tiny trickles of blood and the indentations in his skin and clothes from where leaves and vines touched him, it appeared that the ivy had tiny teeth.

  “Help me,” he croaked when he saw her. “Don’t let them kill me!”

  Kathy approached the vines slowly, drawing out the pocket knife she always kept in her pocket. It only had a three-inch blade, but it had come in handy countless times on countless cases.

  “Hold still,” she told him. “I’m going to try to cut you loose.”

  She plunged the little knife into the vine wrapped around his wrist and heard a tiny scream like the hissing of steam through a teakettle. The opening smoked and oozed a purple gel with an almost overpowering smell of ammonia. It didn’t seem to affect the knife blade, but it dripped on the man’s scrubs and he began to scream and wiggle violently.

  “Knock it off!” she shouted at him, and when he stopped struggling, added more softly, “Don’t make this thing tighten its grip on you. I think I can cut you free, but we have to be very careful.”

  “Okay. Okay.” The man sounded grateful. “Whatever you need to do. Just hurry up.”

  Kathy found little spots between the teeth to hold down the vine while she sawed into it with the knife. She could feel it vibrate and let out its little steam hiss beneath her fingers every time she did. Its smoking purple blood pattered to the floor and sizzled there.