Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Maybe Derek—maybe he hid it better than she could. She was relieved when he rolled over, away from her, in his sleep.

  If these things were affecting others, there would be no one she could trust. Anyone could have seen the images the thing in her dream showed her (having flashed before her eyes, those images themselves were gone, but had left their horrid afterimage).

  She got out of bed and stood by the window, looking down at the Old Ward wrapped in night. Sometimes, she thought she saw jerking movements in the shadow, or snippets of chattered nonsense-words carried on the air. She stood a long time, filling up with thoughts that might not have been hers entirely. When Derek stirred in bed, it was light outside, the sky a soft pink dissipating to blue. She climbed quietly into bed next to him. She didn’t want him to know. He couldn’t know.

  ***

  Derek woke suddenly, shaken from sleep by a feeling that vanished as soon as he opened his eyes. Beneath his arm, Myrinda’s body lay rigid, so much so that he called to her softly to see if she was lying awake. She didn’t answer. He peered over her shoulder and saw her eyes were closed.

  He rolled out of bed and went to the window. Outside, beyond the apartment grounds, that last remaining part of the asylum stood silhouetted in the dawn. The Old Ward.

  While Derek could appreciate the once stately and elegant architecture of the old building, there was something about it that Derek didn’t like. It looked out of place, even out of time next to the modern facade of the apartment building. It was more than that, though. It was the nagging idea that whatever was going on with Myrinda was coming from that building—which struck him as stupid to even entertain consciously. Derek was reasonable, well-educated. He had experienced a number of different slices from the pie of life, and was no stranger to the odd and unexplainable, particularly in reference to the behavior of others. He wasn’t the type to let feelings, especially seemingly sourceless ones, override logical thinking. There was something wrong, though, and not just with Myrinda. The old woman, Aggie, had worn the same distressed look just before she died. The cop—he had to be a cop, or ex-cop, the way he carried himself—and the guy from 2E both seemed jumpy lately. The latter could have been uncomfortable around big black guys, maybe, and the cop could have possibly been profiling him, but Derek didn’t think either was the reason the one always looked so startled and the other always looked so hungry and haunted. Maybe that drove the old couple to steer clear of him (the way the sharp little woman looked at him as if she expected him to rob her at any minute), but not the others. No, it was Derek’s job to be observant, and although he didn’t know the cop, the couple, or the other guy, he did notice a distinct atmosphere of increasing unease, to greater or lesser degree, among the other residents that seemed to mirror that inside his apartment.

  He wished Myrinda would talk to him about it. He was trying to give her space, to let her work through it in her own way and come to him in her own time. Often enough, he felt on the outside of things. He didn’t like feeling that with his girl, nor did he like the insidious feeling that Myrinda and the others were all experiencing something in a language he couldn’t hear, let alone understand.

  Derek turned to the bed. Myrinda moaned in her sleep, shifting stiffly. He knew her; this was about more than just Aggie’s death. It had started before that, with the tape on the vents, and it seemed to be getting worse, not better. If she wouldn’t come to him, he’d ask her outright.

  He went to take a shower. The hot water felt good; it washed the chill of the night and of his thoughts off his body. He dried off, wrapping the towel around his waist, then applied deodorant and cologne, brushed his teeth, and shaved before returning to the bedroom to dress.

  When he got to the doorway, he saw Myrinda sitting up in bed, facing away from him, toward the window. He watched her unmoving form for a few seconds before entering.

  “Morning, babygirl,” he said, grabbing a pair of boxer briefs from a dresser drawer and slipping them on.

  She didn’t answer. Not a strand of hair on her head moved.

  “Myrinda,” he said, crossing around the foot of the bed to her.

  For just a second, Derek thought he saw blood painting the side of her face. A second later, it was gone. A trick of the light from the window, maybe.

  “Myrinda, we need to talk,” he said. “You need to talk to me.”

  Her gaze was fixed on the window. On the Old Ward.

  He took her shoulders, shaking them gently, and looked into her eyes. “Myrinda, I’m asking you. Please talk to me.”

  Myrinda’s eyes changed then, and whatever haze she was in seemed to clear a little. “Derek,” she said.

  “I’m here, babygirl. Talk to me.”

  “I’m scared,” she mumbled.

  “Scared?” He looked around the room. “Scared of what, baby?”

  “The fingers,” she replied dully. “And the mouth-creatures in the Old Ward. And the wound.”

  Derek glanced out the window behind him, then back at Myrinda. He was getting really worried about her. Maybe she needed to see a doctor.

  “Baby, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Now, I want to help, I want to make it okay, but I can’t do that if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

  A little of the old Myrinda, the one he knew, flashed in her eyes. In a slow, rambling voice, she told him about the fingers that had crawled out of the vents. Then she stopped short. There was more that she was holding back. Derek knew it. And what she had told him made little sense. Dead fingers in the vents? Was that what the duct tape had been all about?

  Derek settled back with a sigh. Something in his expression triggered an odd smile that made her face look cruel. Then it passed, and he was looking at the Myrinda he knew again.

  “I don’t know how to respond to that,” Derek said.

  “You asked me what was going on,” Myrinda said. “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know why it happened, but it did.”

  “Baby, I think maybe the stress of the move—”

  “No.” She pulled away from him. “No, it has nothing to do with the move. I’m happy here, really. I like—I love it here. This is home now.”

  “Okay, baby. I’m not saying the move was a bad idea. I’m just trying to understand what’s happening with you, that’s all.”

  “I’m not crazy,” she said, although the way she said it, it sounded to Derek like she was trying to convince herself more so than him.

  “I know that. I know you’re not crazy.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  Derek considered how to answer that. “I believe you honestly believe you saw the fingers.”

  Myrinda frowned. “That’s a nice way of saying you think I’m imagining things.”

  “I think even under the best of circumstances, all this change can cause a lot of strain. All this time cooped up in the apartment, away from family and friends, about to start a new job—”

  “A new life. With you. It’s what I want.”

  He reached out and touched her face. “Me too, baby. That’s why I want to help you figure out what’s really going on, what’s weighing on you. I want you—us—to be happy. I need you to trust me.”

  Tears formed in her eyes. It took a long time for her to speak. “There’s something wrong...here. On these grounds. Aggie was right. It’s...making us, I don’t know, sick or something. I feel it. It...makes me think things. Feel things.”

  Derek waited for her to continue. That there was something affecting the people in the building, well, he’d thought as much himself. When Myrinda started staring off into space again, Derek asked, “What do you mean, Aggie was right? What did she say?”

  Myrinda told Derek all about what Aggie had told her in the basement about the wound to another dimension and the creatures that came through, the way they carried an insanity sickness that told her things, showed her horrible, horrible outcomes and promised life without consequence. She spoke in a slow, almost sleepy ki
nd of monologue, and when the stream of words began to trickle, she looked lost and confused, like a woman who had awakened to find herself in strange and unfamiliar surroundings.

  Derek took Myrinda’s hand and stroked it for a while before speaking. He wanted to make sure he spoke carefully, so as not to upset her. He was nearly sure now that Myrinda needed a doctor, but he didn’t want it to be confrontational. In her state, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to pry her through the doorway. “What do you think about what Aggie told you?”

  She smiled thinly. “I believe she honestly believed what she said.”

  Derek frowned at her.

  She looked at her hands in her lap. “I believe her,” she said. “I—I’m starting to believe her. At least, there’s something to what she was saying. I...I don’t know all the details, but I can feel it, Derek. I can feel different thoughts in my head. Different ideas. Different moods. And they scare me. The ideas...they scare me.”

  He pulled her close, stroking her hair, and she seemed relieved to sink against him and let him hold her. “It’s going to be okay, babygirl. We’ll figure it out. Everything’s going to be okay, I promise.”

  “I don’t want to leave,” she whispered.

  ***

  In apartment 2C, slats of morning sunlight speared the gloom beyond the curtains, but reached nothing they could illuminate properly. Dust motes fluttered in the light.

  Outside the front door, a little plastic bag lay, its contents congealing and curling with the onset of rot. A sickly-sweet smell of organic decay had begun to seep slowly from the seal. The bag had been there the better part of the night and into the morning, its donor dreaming of sex and violence across the hall.

  The front door of 2C opened just a crack and a hand with long fingers reached for the bag. The fingertips groped the seal, pinched it, and pulled it over the threshold, leaving a small crimson smear on the hallway floor. The door closed. A lock clicked.

  Inside, a woman’s high-pitched giggling echoed through the rooms.

  ELEVEN

  It took Wayne three days to work up the courage to approach the Old Ward. When he thought about it, he supposed maybe he’d been hoping that the anxious, violent thoughts and the hallucinating, if that’s what seeing the girl was, would just go away. Like shining light on the monster in the closet and making it disappear, a part of him had been hoping that his discoveries at the library would somehow have the same effect, that maybe he’d feel more in control knowing he wasn’t crazy, wasn’t growing a baseball-sized tumor somewhere in his brain.

  The girl didn’t go away. He’d seen her one other time after that day in the crowded parking lot, and that had decided it for him.

  Wayne had woken up that morning early, while it was still dark. He’d been dreaming, although he couldn’t remember all the details—something about a blue-lit alley and a man in gray sweats with a sharpened paintbrush jutting out of the bloody, jelly mess that had been his eye. The man had been surrounded by a crowd of shadowy waifs, each of them covered in some kind of thick black ooze. Whatever the ooze was, it bubbled and pulsed, fizzling and smoking as it ate into their skin. He remembered the tightened red skin patches just visible beneath the ooze splitting open. The old man reached out for him just before the crowd closed in on him. What happened before or after in the dream, though, had first blended into the blue-lit pre-dawn of his bedroom, then dissipated altogether.

  He’d stumbled across the hall to the bathroom and urinated by nightlight, washed up, then shuffled groggily back to the bedroom. He hadn’t even been near the window, hadn’t been thinking about it consciously, until a gravelly voice had spoken his name.

  He stopped, raising his head slowly to look around the bedroom. It was empty. He spun around, convinced from the sound of the voice that it was close, maybe behind him. No one was there.

  “Wayne,” the voice called again, this time from much farther away.

  Without really knowing why, Wayne glanced at the window, all traces of sleep gone from his head. His stomach tightened. “Hello?” Fear strangled his voice to a whisper.

  “Wayne,” the voice called again. This time, it definitely sounded like it was coming from someplace outside. Strange, though—the volume didn’t strike Wayne as being loud enough to carry from outside, even though the window was open. “Come out here.”

  With hesitant steps, Wayne made his way to the window and, in spite of the little voice screaming in his head to look away, for godssakes, look away!, he peered down onto the sparsely lit grounds below.

  The girl was standing just off the walkway below his window, looking down. The jagged stumps of her legs disappeared in the long grass. Her arms were crossed over her chest in a dirty straightjacket, the areas where her hands would have been tucked under her armpits.

  “Who—?” He breathed the question, but it lacked the force of breath to carry.

  The bowed head lifted, its stringy black hair parting to reveal what might have once been a pretty face, before the latticework of scars on the left side. Wayne couldn’t see the girl’s eyes; even though the moon shone down on her gray and mutilated face, dark shadows pooled deep in the sockets.

  “Do you want me, Wayne?” she asked in the same gravelly voice. “Do you want to see me fall apart?”

  Before he could answer, the girl did just that. It was as if dozens of invisible fishing wires had diced her up. A chunk of scar-crossed face and a lump of hair slid away from the rest of her head, followed by another. One by one, pieces slid off the upright whole of her body, thumping to the grass, smacking wetly to the concrete walkway.

  Wayne tried to look away, but he couldn’t. His neck muscles strained, his eyes bulging at the grotesque horror going to pieces just below his window. His hands clutched the windowsill. What scared him maybe even more than what was happening outside was the fact that instead of feeling nauseous at the sight, he felt aroused.

  “Stop,” he whispered, as much to himself as to her.

  The straightjacket cut away, still binding the pieces of her arms, and fell to the ground. The two standing legs collapsed in the grass.

  Finally, the spell on him broke and he pulled himself away, breathing hard. He felt disgusted, confused, the sweat on him cooling and sticking.

  “What the fuck is happening to me?” he whispered.

  He’d run the shower in the darkness, sinking into a near-fetal curl in the tub and letting the hot water rain over him. Light began to come through the window before he finally shut the water off and got out. After drying and getting dressed (there was no way he could sleep, even now), he’d chanced a quick look out the window. As he’d expected, the pieces of the girl were gone.

  It wasn’t going to stop. Whatever was going on in this building, whether it was chemical waste or ghosts or something crossing through from another world, it was getting to him, getting inside him, and he had to get it out.

  He wanted to see if there really was a Book of Gates. He had to know, actually. He couldn’t get the thought out of his mind.

  Now, with hours of morning sunlight putting distance between him and what he’d seen early that morning, Wayne stood in front of the heavy double doors of the Old Ward, taking in the warmth of the sun on his face (he certainly wasn’t crazy enough to do this at night—why tempt fate?). Birds chirped overhead. A light breeze lifted his hair. There in the daylight, the Old Ward didn’t seem so imposing. It looked smaller somehow, a sagging, decrepit monument to archaic ways, a soulless brown brick shell collecting dust, flaking paint, growing thick and muted with cobwebs.

  The building was stoutly t-shaped. Wayne had downloaded and printed a floor plan of the asylum from the internet. Directly inside, he would find “parlor”-style waiting areas flanking the centrally-located lobby, each side with separate public bathrooms for men and women. Ostensibly, these areas were for family and close friends to wait while patients were checked in, brought out for visits, and the like. The front desk, usually set in the middle of the fairl
y large lobby pavilion, served as the face of the asylum in a way, the first thing patients and their loved ones saw. Behind it, beyond a door always locked by a card key, a long hallway stretched back the entire depth of the building. Along this hallway, closest to the lobby, were the administration offices, staff dining and bathrooms, a kitchen that took up the better part of the right-side length near the dining room, and some kind of greenhouse room for growing fresh herbs and vegetables across from the kitchen. The cross piece that made up the length of the building ran just beyond that locked door as well, perpendicular to the hallway. It contained all that was left of the asylum therapy areas, with a men’s wing of patient bedrooms spanning the left side, and a women’s wing to the right. At the far ends of each wing were staircases to the upper floors of the asylum, patient dining rooms and small bathrooms. There were places that weren’t clearly labeled on his particular map, but he assumed from their placement in the structure that some of the larger ones might be common kitchen areas for supplying food to the different wards’ expansive dining rooms. The other larger areas he figured for the common shower areas. In both cases, those large, unmarked rooms were located near what would have been turns down hallways to other wings, so it made sense that they might be commonly-shared areas. There were also areas labeled “drying room”; he wasn’t quite sure what those were, but assumed they might have been locker-room-type places for patients to dry off after showers. The pattern on the map repeated with each zig and zag of the wings, with more unstable and more dangerous patients’ sets of rooms, bathrooms, dining areas, and the like placed farther and farther from the administration, but these subsequent extensions no longer existed.

  Wayne imagined pulling open one of those large wooden doors. He could see the lobby in his mind, its indistinct shapes of shadow scurrying as he entered. He imagined dragging open the door to the hallway, its dull, dusty creak echoing down the empty corridor. He pictured years-old untouched darkness punctured by sunlight, shadows forming slowly into mangled people, their hands and feet lopped off, their clothes stained with blood and body fluids, their hair thick with grime and their faces blank, the dead skin sloughing off in some places to reveal bone and—