Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  He shook his head, snorting lightly at himself. He told himself it was just an empty building, like a thousand other old abandoned empty buildings all across the world. He didn’t even think any part of the massacre had actually happened in the Old Ward itself, which meant there was nothing inside, nothing to be afraid of. Certainly no silent army of mutilated dead people.

  With a deep breath, he took a step forward, then another, into the shadow cast by the Old Ward.

  The sun passed behind a cloud then, and the sounds of birds immediately ceased.

  Wayne stopped, listening carefully. The air was different, like he’d crossed into some barrier. He couldn’t help thinking about what the old librarian had said about Symmes and La Claviére’s gates. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Even if he found some moldy old book, what would it prove? Instead of standing out here in front of an abandoned building, he probably should have been trying to contact the EPA, maybe get an agent out here to find that chemical spill....

  Except he knew there was no chemical spill to find. He knew that inside his head, inside his chest. Could breathe it inside of him from the soundless air. What was wrong with this place was inside that building sometimes, and when it wasn’t, it was in and around the apartments.

  He climbed the three wide concrete steps and grasped the metal door handle. With a grunt, he yanked with all his strength, and was surprised to find it swung soundlessly toward him.

  The sunlight didn’t penetrate too far into the darkness. He could make out a chipped tile floor of a nondescript neutral color, and nothing more. He pulled a pocket flashlight out of his jacket pocket and clicked it on.

  The flashlight offered up pieces of the interior at a time—more tiles fading down a hallway beyond the scope of the flashlight, frames of cracked glass that reflected the flashlight glow, obscuring the prints behind, torn vinyl seating perched on rusting metal frames, a front lobby desk in the center with a large crack along the front of a wooden veneer and large, irregular stains dried beneath. To either side were doors to the parlor areas. Against the back wall stood a door. He thought he could make out a metal box affixed to the wall next to it—Wayne assumed it was a key card reader, probably the newest thing in the whole building.

  He took a step inside, half-expecting the door to swing shut behind him, closing him off from the day. It didn’t.

  With a glance back at the outside, he exhaled, wiped his sweaty hands on his pants, and moved forward into the darkness.

  Wayne approached the lobby desk first, skipping the flashlight over its dirt-gray surface. When he leaned over the top to look behind the desk, his fingers grazed the wood and he shivered involuntarily. Something about the silkiness of it, the way his elbows slid instead of sending up dry puffs of dust, made him cringe. It was like touching the muzzle of something alive, something unnatural and dangerous.

  He quickly pulled away from the desk, again wiping his hands on his pants. The dust that clung to his fingers rolled into gray strings that he slapped away from his clothes. He didn’t want any part of this place on him if he could help it. That he was breathing in the particulated remnants of the place occurred to him only peripherally, and he kept those thoughts out there where they were.

  It was only a desk. Only an old piece of wood with some nails.

  He shined the light on the doors to the parlors. They were as good a place to start as any. The one on the right was locked—even with a good, hard thump of the shoulder, he couldn’t get it to budge. He crossed the room to the other door. It opened with a groan that sounded to Wayne like a giggle.

  The little bit of light that slanted in through the front windows caught motes of dust and showed more ripped vinyl seats. He could imagine families sitting in those seats, anxious, crying, nervous, waiting on loved ones they would, in a sense, have to put on a shelf, out of sight and away from everyday life.

  He shined the flashlight around, picking out torn, crumpled papers, old wrappers, and dead leaves in clumps on the dirty floor. No book.

  At the far side of the room were the bathrooms. Wayne didn’t think it likely that Symmes would have taken up in one of the public restrooms to open a gate to another dimension, but hey, what did he know about such things? A quick look around would confirm to his satisfaction that he wasn’t doing a half-assed job of searching.

  By force of habit, or maybe upbringing, he made his way to the men’s room. Like the rest of the building, the bathroom looked pretty shabby. Few tiles stood intact around the bottom two thirds of the room. Grime had been worked into the grout between them to make it a dull gray. The sinks showed rings of rust like old bloodstains around the drains. The stalls on the doors were missing, and the urinals, when he passed them, gave off a faint, unwholesome smell mixed with bleach. The women’s room he found in much the same state, and what he found in the parallel parlor area and its bathrooms very much mirrored what he had already seen, except for some spray-painted obscenities where the bland prints had likely hung, informing the reader of acts performed by Cassidy or requesting such acts be performed.

  By the time he made it back to the lobby, he felt kind of silly. What was he doing there anyway? What did he really think he was going to find, and what good would it do if he did? In fact, he—

  Wayne’s thought broke off midway. The large door to the hallway was open slightly. Had it been open before? He couldn’t remember, but he didn’t think so. A breeze from outside, maybe? But that was stupid. A breeze from outside might blow the door closed, not pull it open.

  If but if there was no electricity, it was possible that maybe all the doors on a card system had been sitting unlocked. The building was old. Maybe shifts in the foundation caused the doors to drift open.

  He went to the door to wedge it open so he could fit through. It groaned on old hinges but opened with surprising ease. He paused under the door frame; he could have sworn, before the last of the echo died down the hallway, that he heard faint, high-pitched laughter from its far end.

  He stepped through, clutching his pocket flashlight like a weapon.

  According to his map, the two doors closest to him were administration offices. It made sense to Wayne that if Symmes was going to keep a book anywhere in this building, it would be in his office. Besides, he wasn’t quite ready to tackle whatever was, real or imagined, giggling down the far end of the hall. He shined his flashlight on the little plaque affixed to the front of each door. Susan Snow, MD, PsyD, read the one on the right. Leonard Abrams, ED, PhD, the other read. Both these names he remembered from his research as victims of the massacre. Both these doors yielded rooms piled with splintered wood on the floor and spattered with dark stains over the once tasteful couches, the neutral walls, and the non-descript and deliberately uninspiring paintings on the wall. It amazed Wayne, in a way, that so much of this building had been left exactly as it had been—the furniture, the paintings, the rotting medical journals and books on the bookshelves against the far walls, even the paperwork which time, dirt, and water had congealed into solid, misshapen lumps. He would have thought much of it would have been confiscated by investigators, more by the evicted owners when the asylum shut down, and whatever was left, by looters and bored kids. But these rooms looked abandoned, as if everyone had suddenly been evacuated, or had simply disappeared.

  He picked through each room’s contents, paying closer attention to the books on the shelves, but found nothing of any real interest. He didn’t think it likely, anyway, that Symmes would have trusted his colleagues with possession or even knowledge of a book like the Livre des Portes. He returned to the hall and was momentarily confused by the exceeding dark, then dismayed to find that the door to the lobby had closed. He didn’t know whether to laugh or panic. If this were a horror movie, he thought, that door would be locked, and I’d be screwed. Immediately, he moved to the door to try the handle. It opened without a problem onto the lobby. He could see the rectangle of outside cut by the front door. Still sunny.

  Wit
h relief, he let go of a breath he hadn’t realized he was so tightly holding onto, then turned back to the hallway. Screw this hunting and pecking, he thought. I don’t have all day. I need to find Symmes’s office. He shined his flashlight on each door as he passed, reading off more names of people he recognized from his research had been killed or killed others. Finally, he came across a door whose plaque read Geoffrey David Symmes, MD, PhD, PsyD. He pushed open the door, and fought an instant wave of nausea.

  Unlike the rest of the Old Ward he had seen so far, which smelled musty, like old paper, dust, and faint antiseptic, this office assailed him with a smell like rotting meat. Maybe some small animal had wandered into the Old Ward, gotten lost there, and died in this room. Shining the light around it, though, Wayne saw that the place had been stripped nearly bare; no pictures hung on the walls, no desk or couch to afford the bland room an aspect of comfort. What was left of the wood paneling (it had been a Director’s office, after all) hung in a bowed strip against a corner of the back wall. Most important to Wayne, there were no bookshelves and no books. Wayne remembered the librarian telling him that Symmes had been questioned about the massacre by the police. Maybe they had confiscated everything.

  Maybe the Livre des Portes was in some evidence locker at the Bridgehaven Township Police Department, and he was wasting his time picking over old ghosts.

  But something told him that wasn’t true. For one thing, if the police had found such a book, it probably would have made enough news that the librarian would have known about it. And even if the police kept it quiet, as they did numerous aspects of the massacre, the townspeople would have found out anyway, which meant the librarian would have known. Besides, any man who had been lucky enough to find such an incredibly rare and, in his mind, powerful book, would probably have hidden it so even teams of police couldn’t find it. To Symmes it was, after all, a kind of murder weapon.

  So that was it, then. If there wasn’t anything else there to see—

  But there was. There, in the empty corner of the room, just behind the paneling, was a long, perfectly vertical crack and what looked like maybe a small latch. It was hard to tell in the gloom.

  Bracing himself with a gulp of less noxious air from the hallway, he dove back into the office to inspect the crack. With his finger, he traced the rough line all the way up to a spot just above his head before it banked to the left.

  It was a door.

  He tried to open it, but the paneling blocked the way. Grimacing, he tried with one hand to yank the paneling away. It wouldn’t budge. He clamped the small flashlight between his lips, pointing the light on the door, and with both hands, yanked the paneling with all his strength. It took two tries, but the paneling came away in a small puff of sheetrock dust. He tossed it aside and, taking the flashlight from his mouth, followed the crack with light all the way around.

  The door, if it could be called that, looked like a crudely-drawn child’s chalk outline. There was even a messily markered-in circle of black where a knob should have been. Graffiti, then. That was a disappointment. He flicked at the latch—that was real, at least—in disgust and gave the sheetrock a little shove, as if picking a fight with it.

  The scored piece of sheetrock swung away from him into inkiness. Wayne stood there for nearly a full minute, dumbfounded. It really was a door.

  When he got himself back together, he shined the flashlight into the opening, and discovered it was a small stairwell, with metal stairs leading down. Maybe it was a secret passage down to the tunnels. Wayne could see the forethought in building an escape route from the Director’s office, in case...well, in case the patients rioted and massacred everyone in the building. He could have slipped down into the tunnels and out to safety.

  By accounts, he hadn’t. Maybe he hadn’t known about the door. Maybe when Symmes took over the position and the office, the paneling had already boarded it over.

  Or maybe, Symmes had known. Maybe he’d used it to find a nice, quiet, secret place to open a gate to another dimension, and when that went terribly, terribly wrong, to hide the book away from anyone else who might ever want to try the same.

  From somewhere down below, he heard what sounded like a metal door swinging closed.

  Maybe whatever Symmes had let through into this world had taken up residence down there in the dark.

  What drove him to jog down those steps and pull open the door, even he couldn’t identify. The impulse to do it was strong, though—overpowering and inexorable. He found he wasn’t even too worried about it. After all, he was a journalist. Journalists observed. They watched like omnipotent spectators. They wouldn’t be hurt, couldn’t be killed. They were the ones who carried on knowledge of the Narrative, so others could find it and open doors. He would do that, would find the Narrative, would mingle with the chaotic ones and dance in the blood they spilled and howl at the alien moon with them and—

  He shook his head, feeling momentarily dizzy. Those were not his thoughts...were they? He didn’t even know what they meant. He didn’t want to know.

  At the bottom of the stairs, he shined light on the gray metal door. Faded strokes of red paint evidently marked it as something, but he could no longer tell what. He opened it, echoing that same sound he’d heard right back up the staircase, and slipped silently through.

  The cavernous corridor he was standing in was no doubt an entrance to the underground tunnels. He swallowed dryly. The book was here. He could feel it. And by God, he wanted it.

  But which way? The tunnel extended to the left and right, swallowed on either end by utter abysmal black. A thick pipe, bundled together with several thinner pipes, also marked by indecipherable red paint slashes, ran its length. A fat black spider, its bloated body shiny in the flashlight glow, scurried to get out of the light. In its temporarily abandoned web hung the carcasses of several tiny dead.

  A ping against the pipes to the right set him walking in the other direction. A part of his mind was developing distinctly uneasy feelings about all this, urging him to turn around, to climb those stairs and run, don’t walk all the way to the sunlight and fresh air and manicured lawns of the apartments. That part of his mind, though, evidently didn’t control his feet, which carried him away from that metal door. Even with the flashlight, he felt swallowed by the tunnel, its lips blocking out his view of the door and its throat carrying him along to some awaiting acid gullet. That uneasy part of his mind, which so often seemed to take on the voice of his old partner, Jerry, tried to tempt him with cold beer and his DVR backlog. It tried to push its way to the front of his mind and make the other thoughts, the ones that didn’t feel like his, shut up a minute so Wayne could listen to reason. It tried telling him it wasn’t too late to get the hell out of there. But it would be, soon. Very soon.

  A ghostly pulse of pale bluish light far down the hall did finally slow his steps. It had illuminated nothing, but it had thrown him, just the same. There shouldn’t have been any source of light down there except his flashlight (the batteries of which, Jerry told him in that petulant way he’d always had, were gonna die and leave him stranded in the dark down there). He waited a moment to see if the light would pulse again, if maybe it was some kind of emergency system or something. Seconds ticked off in the murk. No pulse of light repeated itself.

  Wayne had started to shiver. It was cool, but oppressive, the air stale and unstirred. He suddenly very much wanted to be out of there. He turned back toward the direction of the metal door, and his toe thumped against something. He shined the light down and in surprise, sucked in a lungful of tunnel air.

  He crouched down slowly, his fingers first brushing, then lifting, the burled brown, cloth-bound cover of the old book. Gold-stamped in calligraphic text on the cover were the words Livre des Portes, and in the bottom left corner, the name La Claviére. For the most part, the damp and rats and whatever else was down there had left the book untouched. The papers crackled with age as he turned them. In the weakening glow of the flashlight, he per
used the text. He didn’t know much French, just the tidbits here and there that had stuck with him since high school French classes. Still, he could make out a few phrases. A chapter about securing the key (Sécurisation de la Clé), a chapter about doors and windows (Les Portes et Les Fenetres), and a lengthy passage about using le sang des betes et des enfants.

  A shuffling sound in the direction of the metal door drew his unwilling gaze away from the book. He paused, listening again, and immediately he heard a low drag across the pebbled concrete floor and another loud bang against the pipe.

  Something was down there in the tunnel with him.

  His heart pounded so loud it thumped in his ears. He covered the tip of the flashlight with his palm so that it looked like he was seeping bloody light across the back of his hand. He didn’t dare shine the light down the tunnel and draw attention to himself.

  Whatever it was down there lurched forward, knocking chunks of concrete out of its way. A bang against the pipe following the dragging sound gave Wayne the terrible impression it wanted him to know it was coming. It was marking off the shrinking distance between them with each step.

  “Oh shit,” he whispered in a voice softer than a breath.

  Suddenly, the other thoughts in his head were gone, and the Jerry-voice had full free reign to panic. Run! It screamed at him. Run, for godssakes! Don’t just sit there, waiting for whatever that is to reach you!

  While he agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment, running away from the direction of the metal door would only plunge him deeper into an unknown length of tunnels. He didn’t know where the far exit was; the map from the Internet didn’t show the tunnel system. He would be down there for hours, maybe days, lost in a labyrinth with...Symmes only knew what. No one knew where he was. No one would come looking until his rent was due.