Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  The doors gave a little under their touch. The thing on the roof wailed and stomped. The elevator car slipped a little.

  “Pull!” Ernie commanded, and Holt pulled. With a groan, the doors parted onto most of the third floor…but the other end of it. The elevator had taken them across the hospital to the opposite side of the third floor. Holt was just relieved they had made it to any part of the third floor, and that small victory, it seemed, was going to be short-lived. The car wasn’t completely aligned; one good thump from that thing on the roof and they would miss their target.

  Holt thought of Farnham’s leg caught between floors before it was crushed, and he shivered.

  “Hurry,” he said to Ernie. “Get out of the elevator. Go!” Ernie hiked over the lip of the third floor and turned to Holt just as the car slid again. Now the third floor came up to Holt’s knees. He looked up at Ernie.

  “Don’t think about it. Just get your white ass out of there,” Ernie said, leaning down to lend a hand.

  Holt took it. The elevator around him groaned and slid, throwing Holt for a minute.

  “Now, Holt! Now!” Ernie tugged on Holt’s arm as he hooked a leg over the side and rolled. He heard a long metal scrape followed a minute or so later by a crash, but Holt’s eyes were closed tightly. He waited for pain. He waited to feel cold, or some other sensation he imagined was associated with having a limb crushed and ripped away.

  “You okay?” Ernie’s voice was close to his head, and he opened his eyes to see the old man hovering over him for the second time that night.

  “I don’t know. Am I?” He sat up and saw both arms and legs were accounted for and where they were supposed to be. No blood, no cold, no pain. “Oh, thank God,” he said.

  “Pretty spry for an old guy,” Ernie said with a wink and a little smile. He helped Holt to his feet. “You still got the drugs on you?”

  Holt checked his pockets and counted out at least five bottles. “Some, yeah. I think we’re good on that.”

  “Okay,” Ernie said. “Let’s get a move on. I—”

  From the hollow depths of the elevator shaft came that wailing sound again, and this time, the thumping was traveling up the sides.

  The men looked at each other. “Run!” Holt shouted, and they took off down the hall.

  It was only when they reached the corner that Holt glanced back, and he knew that one brief look would be enough to stick with him the rest of his days, however numbered they might be. As awful as seeing Farnham’s leg had been, it was nothing compared to the monstrosity he saw climbing out of the elevator shaft. The thing was huge, fully the size of the elevator car if not bigger. It was made of so much indignity, so much grotesque aberration, that at first his brain only took in parts of it. Only later were those parts correlated into one terrible picture. He recognized Pam Ulster’s legs and Farnham’s tattoo and a number of unfamiliar heads wearing the hats of guard uniforms, all dangling from slimy gray stalks.

  Someone was tugging on his arm—Ernie—and they were running again, running as fast as their creaking bones and swelling joints would allow, running away from one horror and, Holt was sure, right toward the making of another.

  * * * *

  Kathy skidded around the corner just as Holt and Ernie came around the far bend. From the looks on their faces, they, too, had something awful nipping at their heels. Kathy reached Henry’s room first and held the door open for them, gesturing for them to hurry. They practically fell into the room, and Kathy shut the door behind them all.

  For several seconds, they stood panting, trying to catch their breath, while Toby and Henry just watched them.

  Toby finally broke the silence. “Tough day at the office?”

  Kathy shot him a look. Holt reached into his coat pockets and tossed him bottle after bottle of pills, most of which Toby caught and piled up on the bed.

  “Now what?” Kathy asked.

  Outside, whatever had been chasing them caught up. There was a loud thump on the door and a multitude of colored lights through the small window.

  “Whatever you’re going to do, son, you best do it now,” Ernie said.

  Toby gave him one of those snakelike grins and leaned forward. “You ready, Henry?”

  Henry, who looked terrified, nodded.

  “Okay. Let’s begin.”

  Chapter 14

  “The first thing we’re going to have to do is roofie Henry here.” Toby tapped a sleeping pill from one of the bottles into the palm of his hand and offered it to Henry. “You need to take this.”

  “Why?” Henry asked, looking from pill to Toby suspiciously.

  “Because,” Toby said with barely concealed impatience, “I don’t think you’re in any frame of mind to get into the meditative state I need you to be in.”

  “Like, how I was when I made the…the tulpas?” Henry asked.

  “Exactly. I know you can do it, but I need you to do it now. This will help relax you.”

  The monsters thumped and wailed outside. Henry still looked doubtful, but with a glance at the door, he took the pill anyway and swallowed it.

  “Good,” Toby said. “You tell me when it starts to kick in. In the meantime, sweet sister, how about you come over here and help me set things up?”

  Kathy swallowed the discomfort that Toby’s tone and accompanying look were attempting to arouse. She crossed the room to her brother. “What do you need me to do?”

  Toby reached into his bag and handed her a piece of black chalk. “Draw a triangle. Make it big—about five feet long for each side.” She did, using the tape measure he handed her to get the size and straightness of the lines right. He then proceeded to instruct her as to a series of words to write above and below each of the three sides of the triangle. Some were names of that terrible alternate-dimensional pantheon, names she recognized. Other words were, as Toby explained, crude translations of the ancient three-dimensional language of the Convergence, the space between all worlds and all things.

  The symbols that needed to be drawn at each point of the triangle he insisted on doing himself; Kathy helped him to the floor, and with the meticulousness of a scientist, he carefully plotted and drew symbols reminiscent of the wards she had brought and the artifact she’d found in his backpack. In the center, he drew small circles inside each point and an eye in the middle of it all. He then instructed her to get the candles from his bag and put one on each of the circles. She did, then helped him back into his chair.

  “No one touch the chalk,” Toby said, breathing hard. The exertion had worn him out, but he was doing his best to hide it. “Not under any circumstances, understand? It’s all our asses if you do.”

  Kathy and the other men nodded.

  He turned to the boy. “How ya feeling, Henry?”

  “Okay,” Henry said. He was still sitting up but his eyes were closed. “Pretty good, actually.”

  “Good,” Toby said. “I want you to start concentrating on Maisie and the others. Call them. Bring them here, okay?”

  Henry opened one eye to look at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be reading something over here—just ignore me and focus on them. Make them come to us.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” Henry said, closing both eyes again.

  “Try,” Kathy said.

  “Okay.” Henry’s brow crinkled as he concentrated.

  Toby pulled a small black leather book with gold gilding out of the backpack, flipped to a page he was evidently familiar with, and began to read under his breath in a language Kathy recognized as ancient and powerful. She wasn’t fluent in it, but she knew enough to recognize phrases; he was calling on the gods of other dimensions to force the summoning of the tulpas. His voice was almost hypnotic as the words fell into a chanting rhythm, and for a moment, Kathy thought the room swayed. The moonlight looked almost liquid and cast weird slips
of light and shadow over everything. The thumping outside the door seemed to fade.

  Kathy felt a nudge and turned to see Toby handing her something as he read. It was another kind of artifact. He nodded at Ernie, and she passed it over to him. Then Toby handed her one for herself and one for Holt. Each was different in the detail of its arabesques, but all were made from the same material and stood on small, flat pedestals of strange stone engraved with symbols like those Toby had drawn at the points of the triangle.

  He paused in his reading. “Don’t let those go. They’ll be the only weapons you have,” he said softly, and then began to read a new passage in the book.

  He took a small vial out of the backpack and sprinkled its contents nine times on the center of the triangle. It looked to Kathy like some kind of dark oil, a summoning oil probably, which was popularly used by Toby’s old cult, the Hand of the Black Stars.

  Kathy glanced at Henry to see how he was doing. His eyes were still closed, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. He was clenching and unclenching his fists in his lap, and it looked like he was mouthing his own words silently to himself. Please come, maybe. Something like that.

  As Kathy, Holt, and Ernie watched, a ball of light about the size of Kathy’s fist formed in the center of the triangle, about four feet above the chalk-marked eye. It elongated vertically and grew brighter, then split into two and then three. From the center points of each beam of light, humanoid forms were developing—one with a red eye, one with a patch of golden scales on the face, and the last…

  Kathy hadn’t yet seen the Viper, but she recognized him immediately. He wore all black—black cowboy hat, black boots and jeans, black shirt and jacket. Whatever predatory or snakelike aspect Toby took on when dealing with human beings paled in comparison to the cold hate in the Viper’s features. His skin, too, had faint scales and his face a blend of man and serpent features—hooked fangs, a flattened head. His body was lean with corded muscles, which rippled up and down his neck and across the backs of his hands like a bunch of tiny snakes moving beneath his skin. He wore sunglasses, but Kathy was sure that if he were to take them off and level a gaze at her, he’d have the eyes of a snake as well.

  The lights around them faded, and Maisie, Edgar, and the Viper stood at the center of the circle. Maisie looked absolutely livid.

  “What the fuck is this?” she asked in her cute little girl’s voice, glaring at Toby. “What are you doing?”

  “If you’re using spells to give yourself permanence,” Kathy said as Toby kept reading, “then you’re bound by the laws of those spells.”

  Maisie turned a gaze flashing with rage on her.

  “Where’s Orrin?” Edgar asked from behind her.

  “I killed him,” Kathy said without emotion.

  Edgar looked gutted for a minute, but hate rushed to fill the void surprise had left. “Then I’ll kill you,” he growled.

  The Viper put a hand on Edgar’s arm as he advanced on her.

  “Don’t,” the Viper said. His voice was deep, scratchy, with the faintest bit of hiss. “You leave the triangle and you’re as dead as your brother.”

  “Henry,” Maisie said, softly switching tactics. “Henry, honey, what are you doing?”

  Henry opened his eyes but avoided looking at Maisie.

  “Don’t tell me you’re helping these people. They want to take us away from you.”

  Henry shook his head, more to keep her voice out of it, Kathy supposed, than in answer to the inquiry.

  “Henry, make them stop. If you lose us, who will protect you?”

  “You’re hurting people,” Henry said. “You’re going behind my back and hurting people.”

  “We’re only doing what we have to in order to protect you,” she said sweetly. She smiled when she saw the wavering in Henry’s face. “We’re doing what we’ve always done—trying to keep you safe.”

  “And…and when you’re real? Like, solid, I mean. When you don’t need me anymore—then what?”

  Now it was Maisie’s turn to waver, but she recovered in an instant. “Well, then we’ll be here for you in the flesh, Henry. We’ll be a real family—like you always wanted.”

  “Don’t listen to her, boy,” Ernie said. “She ain’t lookin’ out for you anymore. You know that.”

  “Shut up, old man,” Maisie growled, her voice changing from a young girl’s to something much older, much more sinister. “Don’t get involved.”

  “They aren’t your family,” Kathy said, keeping a wary eye on the trio in the circle. “They’re the reason you’re in this place.”

  Toby stopped reading suddenly and got to his feet; it was an effort, and a painful one, from the looks of it, but when Toby looked up at the trio hovering above the eye in the triangle, his expression was one of perfect calm. There was no fear, no human emotion at all, and in that, he looked less substantial, less human than the things he was confronting.

  He spoke to Henry without taking that placid gaze off the tulpas. “Henry, they’re lying to you. Had we done this ten minutes from now, they’d have already reached the point where they don’t need you.”

  “Liar!” Maisie growled.

  “Am I?” Toby drew another vial out of his backpack, then leaned on his crutch to free both hands. One held the vial. The other held an artifact. He poured the contents of the former onto the latter. “Henry, disconnect from them. Unimagine them.”

  “Stop,” Edgar said. He looked panicked.

  “Make them go away,” Toby said.

  The center of the triangle glowed red for a moment and then a burst of light from Edgar’s eye shot out at Toby. He held the artifact up just as the beam found its mark. It bored into the artifact, which blocked it from reaching Toby’s body. His hands, though, began to blister, and he cried out in pain.

  Kathy took up the book he’d left on the bed and skimmed the passage. Toby was weakening; his hold on the artifact was slipping. She found what she was looking for—a minor binding spell—and began to read.

  The red beam dissipated with a shout from Edgar, who cupped a malformed hand over the radiant eye. Toby sank into the chair with the artifact clutched in his badly burned hands. The skin had turned black in some places and had sloughed off in others.

  “You okay?” Kathy touched his shoulder.

  “Keep reading,” Toby said through gritted teeth. “Page 117.”

  She turned to the page he instructed and saw several passages underlined with red pen. She began to read, hoping her pronunciation would do.

  Maisie said, “You’re going to die.” She began muttering her own litany of words in that strange language, but Kathy kept reading. She glanced up to see Maisie’s eyes were closed, and the Viper and Edgar were watching her series of hand gestures as she spoke.

  Suddenly, the room around them began to change. They were on a battlefield of blood-spattered blue-green grass, beneath a black-and-blue-streaked night sky glittering with silvery stars. Henry stared around him, wide-eyed with wonder and surprise more than fear. This, Kathy supposed, was his safe haven made real. This was Ayteilu.

  In the grass, a clearly delineated triangle with an eye glittered over the blades, though what it was made of, Kathy couldn’t say. It seemed to still keep the tulpas bound, though, and to her, that was the important thing.

  “You can have this,” Maisie said to Henry. “You can have all of this. Just say the word and we can make it real forever.”

  “Let us kill them,” the Viper said. “Just smudge the triangle, Henry.”

  “Henry, don’t,” Holt said. “If you do, hundreds, maybe thousands will die. They won’t stop at the hospital, the town, or even the state. They’ll keep spreading like an infection. They’ll kill whoever gets in their way. You can’t let that happen. You aren’t like them. You aren’t a killer.”

  Suddenly, Henry’s eyes flashed anger, then
went cold. The look he gave Holt was chilling; Kathy had never seen him look that way—in control and full of hate, like Toby—and for the first time since the ritual started, she was worried about what Henry would do.

  “You don’t know anything about me, Detective,” Henry said. “None of you do.”

  “Henry, we’ve known you since you were a kid,” Edgar said.

  “We’ve always been there for you, always protected you. That won’t change,” Maisie said.

  Henry’s calm faltered. His eyes misted. “Shut up,” he said. “Just shut up, all of you. Let me think.”

  A few minutes went by in which sad faraway birds made sounds like crazy children laughing, and alien breezes blew by them, lifting their hair and bringing the scent of sweet, strange fruit. Kathy could see why Henry escaped here in his head. It was beautiful and powerful, a place that until tonight had existed for and because of Henry, a place where he was a god.

  Except now he wasn’t, and the struggle inside his brain was seeping out, creeping over his features. It wasn’t his world anymore, and even if he wanted to play god, it had become too big a job for him.

  “Go away,” he said finally. “Maisie, Edgar…Viper…go away. And take this world and everything in it with you.”

  Maisie and Edgar wavered a little where they hovered, and both of them looked genuinely frightened.

  “Henry, please don’t do this,” Maisie said.

  “It’s time,” Henry said, tears spilling down his cheeks. “You’ve got to go. You have to let me be free.”

  “But Henry, I love you,” Maisie said, and Kathy felt a genuine pang in her heart at the way Henry looked at her. He’d likely been waiting all his life to hear someone say that. Once, it might have made all the difference.

  “Maybe you do,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper, “but I think you love the idea of life more.”

  Watching Maisie’s expression change from pleading to anger was like watching lava cool and harden. Emotions in the tulpas, if they truly existed at all, were thin and brittle, simply tools to manipulate with. Even now, the tulpas were still so much a reflection of how Henry saw the world.