Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  She managed to get an arm and both legs free and was working on the chest when one of the vines suddenly forced its way down into the man’s throat. His eyes got big and he began to make gagging sounds. Afraid that cutting it would only allow it to wedge farther down the man’s throat, Kathy pulled on it instead. It was hard to get a good grip on the thing without pressing her palm down on those tiny razor-wire teeth, but she pulled anyway.

  The man’s face was changing from a flustered pink to an angry red. His eyes were watering. The worst part was the little gagging sound in his throat, the tiny death rattle.

  “I’m trying,” she told him. “I’m sorry, I’m trying, but—”

  Suddenly, the ivy withdrew. It pulled out of the man’s throat, and he erupted in a series of coughing fits and spitting. It recoiled from his arms and legs and unwrapped itself from around his chest. The man fell to the floor, his skin bloody from a hundred tiny holes, his scrubs smoking. When his coughing subsided and his gasps for air evened out toward regular breathing, he said, “Thank you. Thank you, oh God, thank you. I’m Larry Myers.”

  “Mr. Myers, I—”

  “Larry, for pretty ladies like you.” He smiled up at her weakly.

  “Larry, then,” she said with the faintest touch of impatience. “You’ll need to come with me. I can get you someplace relatively safe.”

  Larry gave her a weak, thin laugh. “Lady, I don’t think any place in this whole goddamn hospital is even remotely safe.” He let Kathy help him to his feet and leaned on her as she walked him back toward the inmate bedrooms. She had almost reached the corner when Larry’s whole body shivered and then went rigid. His eyes grew wide and blood bubbled up from his throat, spilling over his lips. She looked down to see something that looked like a tree branch made from black smoke jutting out from the man’s chest. Blood and bits of an organ, probably his heart or a lung where the branch had torn through, hung from the little wispy twigs.

  Kathy pulled away from Myers and turned to see a shadow figure made entirely of black smoke. Henry had mentioned something about Wraiths, and Kathy supposed this was one of those. It turned faintly glowing eyes on her and withdrew the tree branch, which reformed into a human-shaped arm and hand. Tiny droplets of blood sprayed in its wake, and Larry Myers fell to the ground. The Wraith looked at Larry, and Kathy heard a horrible crunch like a thousand teeth grinding at once. Larry’s body crumpled then, as if an invisible hand was wadding up paper, and when it straightened out again, it looked all wrong. The shoulders had shifted too far down along his ribs, and his legs bent the wrong way. His neck had contorted in such a way that the head, with its wide, glazing eyes and swollen, bloody tongue, hung between his shoulder blades.

  When the mangled thing spoke to her, the mouth didn’t move, but a number of voices all braided together still came out of it. “Lady, I don’t think any place in this whole goddamn hospital is even remotely safe.”

  “Let him die,” Kathy whispered. She clutched the artifact.

  The voices replied, “Oh, Kat. Silly, stupid Kat. You should have stayed out of my room.”

  Kathy considered plunging the artifact into Larry’s back, just to take away the Wraith’s vehicle of communication, but a tendril of mist had coiled around the body’s ankle without her noticing. It yanked Larry back toward the Wraith before letting go and melding into the creature’s abdomen.

  “I’ve thought about it, you know…stab you to pieces and drag whatever’s left of you out into the woods. I’d hide you better than the others. Dad would neeeever find you. No one would ever find you.”

  Kathy turned and ran.

  Chapter 13

  Holt crashed into Edgar with his full weight, but the boy barely moved. He wrapped his heavy hands around that tiny little chicken throat, intent on snapping it, but the boy barely seemed to notice. Edgar clutched the sleeves of Holt’s coat, but his one-eyed gaze remained fixed on Holt’s face, that laser-red iris boring a tracking hole into his forehead. The glow in his skull grew brighter, and Holt thought, This is it. This little twerp is going to melt my face off. He couldn’t feel heat—he could barely feel his grip on Edgar’s throat—and he wondered if it would hurt when the skin slipped off his skull.

  Not all of it. Not enough for your mama to recognize you, but not all of it. Like on the roof, the thought in his head wasn’t his, and didn’t belong there. I’ll leave an eye, for you to see it all…

  Surprised, Holt took in Edgar’s grin. Gone was the meek, cowing demeanor, the furtive look of guilt and fear. This Edgar, a being let loose to revel for once in his strengths and make his own decisions, was in some ways more terrifying than the other creatures they had seen. This Edgar, the alien thoughts suggested, had something to prove and planned to use Holt to do just that.

  This Edgar was inside Holt’s head, and in turn, dragged him to some places inside his own.

  All around them, the hospital began to dissolve, and a vast universe with bright, swirling nebulae and countless brilliant stars moved above them at dizzying speeds, engulfing the sky above an endless plain of strange grass beneath their feet. They were someplace where the Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital had never existed, a place with strange constellations and beautiful, terrifying flora in the distance. In the valley where they stood, all around them a war was raging. People-shaped things made of mist and black smoke, electricity and storms, were fighting with long, curve-bladed weapons the likes of which he’d never seen, and with flashes of light. Some of them rode the backs of huge black velvety beasts that looked like a hybrid of horse and dog. Others swooped in from the sky on flying snakes. Holt’s standing in the midst of the clashing alien beings seemed to go completely unnoticed. The warriors were oblivious to both him and Edgar, who watched Holt watching…what, Edgar’s memories? Henry’s? Was there a difference?

  Was this that place where Henry used to escape as a child?

  “It is,” Edgar replied to his thoughts, offering a proud, satisfied look at the carnage around him. “This was the first war Henry plunged us into. He was a child then, but he’d created whole armies, intricate battle plans. Thousands were imagined and died right here on the Nightplains. It was terrifying and glorious. It’s where I lost my eye.” He turned his head toward Holt and pointed to the withered black socket on the left side of his face.

  “What are we doing here?” Holt asked. “Where’s Ernie?”

  Edgar turned away. The world around them blurred for a minute, and when it cleared, they were standing on the sidewalk of a quiet lower-middle-income suburban neighborhood. Before them stood a gray two-story Colonial missing about half of its shutters. The rusting metal numbers 8 and 2 hung crookedly from the aluminum siding over a dented mailbox near the front door.

  “This was Henry’s house,” Edgar said. “Bad things happened here. Horrible, awful things Henry never talks about.” He turned back to Holt. “We saved his life, you know. We couldn’t stop anything from happening to him for a long time, and then for a while, we could only influence little things. But Henry got stronger. So did we.”

  “Why are you showing me this?” Holt asked.

  “Because I can. Because we’ve earned our freedom, our…autonomy. We’ve earned the right to be real.”

  “You sound like Orrin now.”

  Edgar flinched just slightly. “Well, he’s right. Maisie and the Viper are right. It’s a matter of survival. All living things just want to keep living.”

  “You’re not living things,” Holt replied. “You’re figments of a very sick man’s imagination. You’re all his desires to murder, to get revenge, to hurt. You’re everything wrong with anything that can think and reason.”

  Edgar aimed that one-eyed blood-glow glare on him. “You’re wrong—about all of it. Humans are what’s wrong with this world. And…and killing isn’t murder if it’s to survive. We’re only trying to keep from disappearing.”

  “Is th
at the bullshit that Maisie and this Viper fella have been feeding you and your brother? I don’t think you believe all that. You’re smarter than that. I think you’re showing me these things to justify the killing you’ve done. Like killing my partner. You want me to feel empathy.”

  The neighborhood around them grew dark and crumbled away, pieces of it falling into a black emptiness that contained nothing but him and the angry red glow of Edgar’s eye.

  “I don’t care what you feel,” Edgar said in a sullen growl. “I just need you to die. Slowly or quickly, that’s up to you.”

  Red light shot out at Holt from the nothingness, hitting him square in the chest. He landed on his back on the hospital hallway floor with a bone-jarring thud and an oof. Ernie’s worried face appeared over his.

  “Are you okay?” Ernie scooped up the bottles that had fallen out of Holt’s pocket and hauled him to his feet. He was surprisingly strong for an old man. Holt clapped him on the shoulder and nodded he was okay, then looked around the hallway.

  “Where’d he go?” Holt asked, alarmed. “What happened to Edgar?”

  “He’s gone,” Ernie said. “Disappeared almost an hour ago, brother. You been dead on your feet, so to speak—some kinda trance or something. I tried to wake you. Splashed you with water from the fountain, smacked you around some, but you just stood there. Then you collapsed, like whatever was holding you up just dropped you.”

  “That…an hour? That can’t be right.” An ache was starting to form behind Holt’s eyes, and he pinched the bridge of his nose. “He was inside my head, Ernie. And…oh God…I was inside his.”

  A brief flicker of worry passed over Ernie’s features but he said, “Don’t you worry none. That’s over now. Let’s get this stuff back to Miss Kathy, eh?”

  Holt nodded and let Ernie lead him to the stairs.

  A glow from the other side of the stairwell door brought them to a dead stop. The glow pulsed different colors—blue, red, purple, green, yellow—and they could hear the occasional odd thwap! as if someone was smacking at the door with a wet towel.

  “Now what the hell is that?” Ernie asked. He sounded more annoyed than afraid.

  “Light show,” Holt said, and wondered where, exactly, the thought came from.

  “Come on.” Ernie steered him back in the direction they’d come. “We’ll go the long way.”

  As they turned the corner, they could see more pulsing lights at the opposite end of the hallway, coming from around the far bend.

  “Shit,” Ernie muttered.

  “They’re closing us in.” Holt didn’t feel as worried as he thought he should have at the idea. That was probably residue of Edgar in his head. Edgar, who had had a chance to kill him outright but didn’t. Why? And what had he meant by it being his choice whether to die slowly or quickly? What had Edgar done to him?

  “This way.” Ernie ushered him into one of the offices. From the large oak desk and the wall of framed credentials, Holt recognized it as Wensler’s office. Ernie shut the door behind them and locked it, then helped Holt over to the couch.

  Once he was sitting, he felt a little better, and told Ernie so. The old man gave him a skeptical look and took the chair nearby.

  “You sure about that, Detective?”

  Holt nodded. “He showed me their world—the war games Henry used to make them play as a kid. And he showed me Henry’s old neighborhood. He was trying to make me feel sympathy for them, I think.”

  “For Henry?”

  “For the tulpas. I think he was trying to justify their being free.”

  “Well, I’m sure they believe that. Think they got a right to be alive and all. Can’t say as I’d blame ’em, if they weren’t vicious killing machines. So we got to look at our problem here and now. Both stairwells are blocked off. Unless we try the elevator down there, I don’t see how we gonna get back to Miss Kathy.”

  “The elevator?” Since his partner had been mangled, Holt had been nursing a new terror of elevators that he’d managed to submerge mostly beneath the surface of his consciousness. He’d explained about what happened to Farnham to Ernie in the car ride to Kathy’s, but he’d kept it objective, factual, like he was writing up a police report. He hadn’t been able to unlock the feelings associated with it. They had been trapped inside, just as Farnham had been trapped inside with a monster, slowly dying floor by floor, one excruciating and endless minute of physical mutilation and psychological torture after another. Holt didn’t know if he could take the helplessness of being caged in the elevator even for one floor, and didn’t know how to express it. Even now, he struggled to get words out before they were stunted by the memories of Farnham’s leg being torn off. “Ernie, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Isn’t there another way downstairs? A fire exit?”

  “Look, those lights we saw, they don’t mean nothing good. You know that. They’re blocking off both stairwells. The elevator’s the only clear way we got.”

  “But I can’t get on that elevator, Ernie. I can’t.”

  “Well, I ain’t leaving you here, man,” Ernie replied.

  “Farnham died on that thing. His leg…” Holt shuddered.

  “I know. I do. But there ain’t no other way, boss,” Ernie said in a softer tone. “If there was, believe you me, we’d take it.”

  Holt looked up at him. Ernie’s expression was unyielding, but his eyes were sympathetic. Holt understood that arguing wasn’t going to get him anywhere; Ernie was bound and determined to get him back downstairs in one piece, and Holt was grateful for that. It steadied him a little.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. Let’s get it over with.”

  When Ernie tried to help him to his feet, he waved the old man off. His body was okay; he could get around okay. It was his mind that Holt was worried about. It felt like a sanctuary that had been ransacked in some horrible home invasion, his most private place where everything that ever mattered had been laid bare to a monster. He’d had thoughts and memories thrust upon him, and he wasn’t sure he could bear up under their weight. To Ernie, though, he said, “Thanks, but I’m okay. Really. Let’s do this.”

  When the two men moved out into the hallway again, they saw the lights still hovering and pulsing around the corner at the far end of the hallway. Children’s shrill laughter—or maybe it was crying, or screaming—floated back to them with each change of colored light. That way was still out of the question. As they approached the elevator into which a nightmare thing had dragged his partner, Holt saw the pulsing light from beneath the door of that stairwell, too. The elevator itself, though, stood quiet, resolute, like the entrance to some temple, or some mausoleum.

  “You holding up okay over there?” Ernie asked.

  Holt nodded, his gaze fixed on the elevator doors.

  “All right, then.” Ernie leaned forward and pushed the down button.

  The little digital counter above the doors cheerfully dinged upon the arrival of the car on each floor—second, third, ding! And the doors were opening. For one terrifying moment, Holt thought he’d see whatever pieces were left of Farnham, or worse, whatever had torn him apart.

  Instead, the doors opened on a neat, shiny black and mirrored elevator, gilded tastefully with gold. The carpeting on the small square of floor had a medium-sized, irregularly shaped, and brackish-colored stain on it, but was otherwise unremarkable. No blood, no body parts, and no monsters.

  “After you,” Holt said, and with a deep breath he intended to hold all the way to the third floor, he followed Ernie onto the elevator.

  “It’s only one floor,” Ernie said as the doors closed in front of them.

  “Right,” Holt replied. As the elevator car began to move, he did let go of that breath. Only one floor—no problem. No problem at all.

  The elevator lurched to a stop on the third floor. On the heels of its cheery ding, the doors should have opened, bu
t they didn’t. The men waited. Holt counted off forty-three seconds before the panic crept back into his stomach.

  “Problem?”

  Ernie pressed the button to open the doors. Nothing happened. He tapped on it multiple times, as if trying to kick it into gear. The doors remained closed. “Shit. Shit.”

  Holt happened to glance up at the little screen indicating what floor they were on. He’d watched it closely on the way down, and like a good little screen, it had reported their arrival on the third floor. Now, though, the digital segments were going crazy, cycling randomly through numbers interspersed with half-formed numbers, letters, and strange symbols. It was as if the elevator was still moving, transporting them someplace beyond the third floor, and it was all Holt could do not to throw himself against the doors and pound on them, screaming to be let out.

  A sudden thump on the roof rocked the little car, and Holt felt it slide an inch or so down the shaft. A thin metallic squeal made its way through the thin plate of steel between the thing on the roof and them.

  “What the hell was that?” Holt steadied himself against the wall and drew his gun out of habit.

  “We have to get the doors open,” Ernie said. “Help me.”

  “We don’t know what’s out there. That might not even be the third floor anymore.”

  The old man turned to him with patient but insistent eyes. “You’re right. We don’t. But I think we can be pretty damned sure that whatever’s up there on the roof ain’t nothing good. And when it opens up this tin can, we’ll be no harder to kill than fish in a barrel.”

  Ernie was right. Anything could be waiting for them outside those doors, but an uncertain danger in this case was better than a known danger on the roof. Holt nodded, and the two of them worked their fingers into the space between the doors, trying to pull them open.