Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  The door opened, and a short, pale guy with floppy hair and glasses answered. His bulk was soft but fairly tidy, like he was used to eating for fun but tried, at least occasionally, to reign it in. He wore jeans and a faded gray t-shirt. In spite of the thin blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he was shivering uncontrollably.

  “Excuse me. I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning, but it’s an emergency. Are you Wayne Tillingford?”

  “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “I’m Derek Moore. My girlfriend and I live across the hall in 2E. She’s actually the reason I’m here. Do you have some time to talk?” Derek hoped, as he stood in the doorway, that his larger presence and the tone in his voice left Wayne with no other option than to make time. Wayne seemed to pick up that vibe, because after a moment, he stepped aside to let Derek in.

  “So what’s this all about?” Wayne led him to a tastefully masculine den and flopped on a leather couch. Derek sat in a chair across from him. A black and white cat sidled along with them and hopped up onto the couch beside Wayne, curling into a ball.

  “This might sound crazy. Well, it is crazy. But maybe...maybe not to you.” He paused. Wayne said nothing, so he continued.

  “My girlfriend, Myrinda, has been seeing things. Hearing things. At first I thought she might have just been stressing out over our move here, but now I think it might be more than that.”

  Wayne leaned back, pulling the blanket tighter around him. “What kind of things?”

  Derek tented his fingers and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Okay, here it goes. I’m just gonna lay it out for you like she told me. She says there is some kind of...of hole, or something. Some kind of opening, and she says these creatures have come through from some other world. She told me they’re hurting people, driving them crazy. Now look, before you say anything, I know how this all sounds, but—”

  “She’s right.” Wayne was wracked with a powerful shiver then, and he shook his head. The cat beside him twitched, then went back to sleep. “I’ve seen them.”

  “Well, uh, okay, then you know there is evidence all around this building that being here isn’t safe. These things are driving her over the edge. I need to get her out of here.”

  Wayne snorted. “Not safe. Ladies and gentlemen, the award for Most Obvious Understatement goes to Derek Moore.” He leaned forward, an odd smile stuck crookedly to his face. “But you can’t go. They aren’t done here yet, and they won’t take the bad thoughts and feelings away until they’re done. If they’ve already touched her, they have her mind until they’re finished playing with it. Leaving won’t fix that.”

  “Well, then, they’re going to have to give up their toys a little early,” Derek said. Wayne’s words annoyed him, but beneath that annoyance, Derek was afraid. What if it was already too late to help Myrinda? Still, there was a chance for her to get better outside of this place. Continued exposure certainly wasn’t going to help. “I’m taking her out of here, and if I have to cut down every single one of those ugly motherfuckers, I’ll do it. But I need to know what you know. Myrinda mentioned you. She said they were stalking you, too.”

  “I don’t know your girlfriend.”

  “Well, she knows you,” Derek said impatiently. “Or at least knows of you. And she’s in trouble, and right now, you’re the only person left alive in this building that I know of who’s seen these things and knows what I’m up against. I am not going to let these things take her away from me, you hear? So whatever you know, you need to tell me.”

  Wayne paled at Derek’s mention that he was the only one left alive. He stroked the cat’s head absently and looked away, considering something for several long seconds before looking Derek level in the eye.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Derek admitted truthfully. “I think she’s somewhere in the Old Ward. She told me that’s where they go when they aren’t working over someone in the apartment building.”

  Wayne shivered, but it looked disjointed to Derek. His head and limbs twitched independent of the others instead of as a whole. He said, “If she’s there, check the tunnels first. Save yourself some time. Find Symmes’s office. There’s a passage leading down from there.”

  Derek nodded. “Okay, thanks. Now, what can you tell me about these things?”

  Wayne sighed. “Look, you seem like a nice guy, and I can tell your girlfriend is very important to you. But really, I don’t have the answers you seem to be looking for. It sounds like she told you more about these things than I know.”

  “What are they? Can they be hurt? Killed?”

  Wayne shook his head helplessly at each question. “I told you, I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is, they came because of the book. It’s what caused the massacre. Then they go and build this apartment right on top of the old ground. It was like dumping new fish in a barrel for these things.”

  “What book? What are you talking about?”

  Wayne pointed to the bedroom, and Derek stood up. He glanced at Wayne, who gestured for him to go and get it.

  The bedroom contrasted sharply with the rest of the apartment. A tumble of sheets lay in a heap in the center of the room. The bottle of water on the night table sat in a whitening ring on the wood, its contents splashed over disarrayed magazines. On the desk by the window lay an old book of moldy leather, dust worked well into its cracks. The cover was in French. He picked it up gently, and it emitted a puff of paper dust that smelled crumbly and old to Derek.

  He carried it back out to the den. Wayne shivered again beneath his blanket seemingly at the sight of it.

  “What is this?” Derek asked, handing it to Wayne before returning to his seat.

  “The Book of Gates. It was written, supposedly, from ancient languages of faceless demons or something. All these old books have stories like that—murder, blasphemy, secret rites and societies dedicated to protecting the knowledge contained between the covers.”

  “What does it have to do with what’s going on at Bridgewood?”

  “It’s a detailed account of descriptions, prime locations, and means of opening gates to other dimensions. Gates to alien worlds, where alien things can come through.”

  “Aggie’s wounds,” Derek muttered.

  “I’m sorry?”

  He shook his head. “Go on.”

  “The director of the asylum, this guy Symmes, he used the book to open the gate. He lost control, though. He brought them here, and they incited one of the worst events in this town’s history. When he found out a new building—residential apartments, of all things—was going to be built on the spot, he killed himself.”

  “Jesus,” Derek muttered.

  Wayne leaned back. “You and your girlfriend know the history of this place before you moved in?”

  Derek nodded. “Yeah, Myrinda told me all about the asylum that was here before. She told me about the massacre.”

  “Right,” Wayne said. “But what about what came before? Before the asylum was even built? Native Americans sent their insane up the hill to be fed on by the spirits. Colonists claimed devils passed between earth and hell there so frequently that they caused it to be a ‘weak spot.’ There was a reason Symmes chose this place to try and open a gate.”

  “Okay, so if he opened a gate and these things came, then maybe we should just close the gate. Is there something in the book for that?”

  “There is no way to close the gate so far as I can tell,” Wayne said. “Symmes couldn’t do it. My French isn’t great, but I think it says the only option is to replace it by opening one somewhere else.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Derek said. “You said that book’s been around for hundreds of years. How come there aren’t gates open all over the place, then?”

  “It isn’t that easy to open one. The chapter on keys says that even if you can find a spot for a gate, you can’t open it if it’s locked. You need to have the right keys.” Wayne shrugged. “You need the right conditions—certain spots,
certain times, specific elements that form the keys. Special, and I’m guessing pretty rare, circumstances.”

  “So we can’t close this gate...but what about sending these things back through it?”

  “I haven’t come across anything that even suggests a way to do that,” Wayne said.

  “Well, I don’t like the idea of messing with another gate,” Derek said, shaking his head. “Forgetting for a second the fact that you’re forcing these things on some other unsuspecting world, you just said conditions have to be right. We don’t know what those conditions are. We don’t know what could happen if we screw up. There are too many ways this could go sideways in a minute.”

  Wayne sighed. “Told you I couldn’t help much, big guy.”

  Derek thought a moment. “If we can’t send those things back, we kill them. All of them. And if we can’t close the gate, well, what about blocking it?”

  “Blocking it? With what?”

  After a moment, Derek threw up his hands. “I don’t know. Anything in that book we could use?”

  “No, noth—wait. Wait a sec.” Wayne flipped through the book. He pointed at a paragraph in French. “This here says the gate can’t stay open if conditions change. It doesn’t close, I don’t think. Not exactly. I don’t know what that word means, but here I think it’s saying it—” he gestured, looking for the right word, “—folds. Sounds like, in essence, if the angles aren’t right to hold it open, it folds in on itself.”

  Derek clapped him on the shoulder. “That’ll work. How do we get it to fold?”

  Wayne smiled, but there was no pleasure or humor in it. “Doesn’t say.”

  “Damn it!” Derek bolted up out of his chair. “Are you going to help me or not?”

  Wayne flinched and the cat, startled, jumped off the couch and trotted out of the room. “I don’t know how.” He pulled the blanket tight around him again. “Look at me. I lost, geez, I don’t even know how many days. I went into the Old Ward, into the tunnel. That’s where the book was. And I saw one. It...did something to me. I don’t know what, but I can feel it, like a tide, trying to draw thoughts away from me, trying to wash over me. Like how it feels when you can’t keep your eyes open anymore, you know?”

  Wayne searched Derek’s steady, disapproving expression but didn’t seem to find what he needed. He sighed.

  “Myrinda was right,” he said softly. “They are hurting me.”

  Frustrated, Derek turned to go. He’d made it half-way to the front door when Wayne spoke.

  “Wait.”

  Derek turned. Wayne, looking sicker than when he had first answered the door, said, “I’m sorry. I’d help if I could. Hell, if I could, I’d burn that fucking Old Ward to the ground, with those things inside it.”

  Derek felt some of the frustration dissolve. He offered Wayne a nod of thanks. “That, actually, might not be such a bad idea.” Then he walked out the front door, leaving Wayne Tillingford to whatever was eating him up inside.

  ***

  Not long after he was left alone his apartment, the chaotic ones started talking to him again.

  He hadn’t told Derek how they stroked the violence in him, nor did he mention how he’d spent the better part of his first morning back pouring through the book they’d left with him, trying—and failing—to find something he could use against them. Leaving the book with Wayne had been a tease, a rug they’d yanked out from under him. They knew Wayne wouldn’t be able to do much with that book. Even if he could speak fluent French, which he couldn’t, he was no experienced occultist, nor was he in any kind of shape to fight back. What they’d done to him in the tunnel made sure of that.

  Having resigned himself to the fact that he’d get nothing useful out of it, he’d set fire to the book in the bathtub. As he stood watching, waiting for it to catch and spread the flames, it occurred to him that fighting all the thoughts the chaotic ones were feeding him was really what the problem was. If he just gave in, just let those urges flow, they’d set him free. He smiled to himself, amazed at his own stubborn blindness. They had only been trying to unlock the other facets of his soul, to complete him. He needed to embrace all of what he was, and what he could be, and all he could accomplish if he let go of the fear of consequence. That fear, he realized, was the single most damaging and restrictive human quality to the progress of the species as a whole.

  After a good hour and a half of standing there (time flew when you were self-discovering), he came to the conclusion the book wasn’t going to burn, so he buried it way in the back of his closet, done with wasting time over it. It was no matter. He had other things to do this morning anyway.

  SIXTEEN

  Hal Corman woke to see the dead body of his wife in bed next to him. Her skin had taken on the color of ashes mixed in milk. The wide, surprised eyes had developed a white film that reminded Hal of an undeveloped Polaroid. He kept waiting for it to clear, for the picture of her irises to emerge, but it didn’t. She was still laying on her side, her body stiff and cold, and what blood was left in her had pooled dark purple in the areas that touched the pillow and mattress—the side of her face, her arm, one of her legs.

  Eda was dead, and Hal had killed her.

  He was acutely aware of the silence, of being the only living, breathing thing in the whole apartment. Beyond that, he reached inside himself to feel something about Eda’s death—guilt or grief, shame, anger, joy, relief, anything. He felt nothing, and that, at least, scared him.

  He rolled out of bed, not yet awake enough to consider what to do with her body, and sat down in his chair—maybe the only thing in the apartment that was really, truly his. He turned on the television, flipping idly through the channels. He had thought, maybe even hoped, that the upside-down commercial man would appear again. He supposed it was a matter of closure. However, as he went from channel to channel, there was no sign of the man. There was one channel which gave him temporary pause; he noticed manicured green lawns and a few dazed-looking people milling around, but it was just a documentary on the history of mental hospitals and asylums in the New England area. He shut off the television and sighed.

  He glanced at the kitchen, where no coffee was brewing, no snap of newspaper pages being smartly turned and folded. It was his kitchen now. The food in there was his to cook any way he wanted. The coffee could be brewed as strong as he liked, and he didn’t have to wait for newspaper sections like a dog begging for scraps.

  Still, he didn’t feel much like cooking, anyway. Instead, he took a shower. While he got dressed, he made small talk with Eda, explaining how he was going to play hookie from work today and maybe tomorrow. Work just didn’t seem all that important anymore. She said nothing.

  She was starting to look funny, all half-purple like that, and he told her so. With some effort, he rolled her over to her other side so he could talk to her as he crossed the room to the dresser. He put on sweat pants and a faded green t-shirt with a pickle company logo on it. It was, to say the least, not her favorite item of his wardrobe. He was actually surprised to find it buried at the bottom of his t-shirt drawer; he’d assumed she’d thrown it out months ago. He explained that since it was his day off, he wanted to lounge in comfort. He giggled thinly when she didn’t answer, and then responded in the best impression of her voice.

  “Stay there,” he told her, giggling uncontrollably to himself. “I’ll be right back.”

  He picked up his wallet off the dresser and grabbed the keys he’d left by the front door. He felt lighter once he was out in the hallway, and surprisingly, he felt warmer, too. He hadn’t realized how cold Eda kept the apartment all the time. Well, that would change now.

  He whistled as he walked down the hall to the elevator. It felt good not to think or feel, not to have to worry about anything. It felt very freeing.

  He pushed the down button and waited, still whistling. The doors opened, and he stepped inside. He thought maybe he’d get one of those egg white omelets from...where was it, McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts?
He couldn’t remember. No matter. He’d try both and see. He’d get one of those omelets for breakfast and a large cup of coffee and sit a while, and just enjoy the day. Maybe he’d even—

  The doors opened and he stepped out into the lobby. That was when he heard the growl.

  He turned and saw the mottled thing with the long, pointed fingers and pivoting legs scaling the wall next to the elevator. It paused, hanging upside down with its strangely blurred back to him, and as Hal stood rooted to the spot, wide-eyed and gaping, its head turned around with a horrific bony crack. Its head looked like a leathery ball unzipped, its lipless mouth and little needle teeth filling his vision. From that mouth, beyond those teeth, it laughed.

  Hal knew for certain it was the upside-down commercial man.

  The thing leaped at his throat, cutting off his scream.

  ***

  Wayne had thought—hoped, even—that the compulsion would leave him once he was out from under the heavy miasma of Bridgewood’s influence. It didn’t. He carried it with him like cold germs. Like the black garbage bag whose drawstrings were balled up in his fist.

  Inside the bag, Warner dozed. Wayne had drugged the cat, not from any vapid sense of affection for or memories of their history together, but rather, for a more practical reason. Cats had claws, and the plastic of cheap garbage bags could rip under an onslaught from an angry enough feline. He knew if Warner clawed a hole through the bag and his mission was foiled, reduced to a sloppy half-attempt, it would somehow be more awful, more horrific than the simple, blunt, quietly efficient act itself. There was no freedom to be found, no sense of completion and restoration, if he didn’t go all the way through with it.

  Warner shifted in the bag, thumping against Wayne’s thigh. The cat was starting to wake up. Wayne reached the highway’s sloping grass embankment, and made his way down toward the nearest lane. It was fairly quiet at that time of day, that pocket of time after morning rush hour and before the lunch hour. A car passed every five or ten minutes. That was good.