Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Hadley looked confused for a moment. “No, not at all. He’s just…some guy. The new guy. But I think his friends are, uh, dangerous.” A shiver racked his whole body, and he shook his head slowly. “I’ll tell you that much. The drugs, Henry’s drugs, don’t affect them. They do what they want, when they want. And no one messes with Henry’s friends, even Toby.”

  “Oh?” Kathy chose to gloss over the mention of Toby’s name. Given the body language of the man sitting across from her, it didn’t appear that Hadley had made the association between her and her brother. “How are Henry’s friends dangerous?”

  Hadley looked around, glancing at the corners of the room as if looking for invisible cameras. The year of therapy and deprogramming prior to Hadley’s being committed to the hospital hadn’t worked out nearly as many mental bugs as his family might have hoped. Kathy waited patiently as Hadley squirmed a bit in his seat, checked under the table for hidden microphones, and glanced around the room for invasive ears once more.

  “If I tell you,” he whispered finally, “they’ll kill me.”

  “Mr. Hadley, we’re in a secure facility. No one will hurt you.”

  Hadley scoffed. “This place can’t protect anyone. It wasn’t built that way. It exists to protect you…from us.”

  “Do I need protecting from you?”

  Hadley thought about it for a moment. “Not from me. Not anymore.”

  “Okay, well, why don’t you tell me the names of Henry’s friends, and I’ll look into it on my own, okay? I’ll keep your name out of it.”

  He considered it. Leaning toward her conspiratorially, he spoke in a low voice. “Well, let’s see. There’s Orrin. Edgar, too. I think they’re brothers. And there’s Maisie. She seems to be the one making all the decisions. And…there’s the Viper. I don’t know much about him other than that Martha and the others were—”

  Hadley paled suddenly, his eyes darting wildly around the room again.

  “Martha? Who’s—”

  “Shh! They’re nearby! I know they are, and I’ve said too much. I shouldn’t’ve told.”

  “Mr. Hadley, it’s okay.”

  “Don’t tell them! Don’t tell them I told. Please!”

  “Mr. Hadley, please calm down. I promise I won’t say anything about you to—”

  Hadley covered his ears and began shaking his head; any further attempt on Kathy’s part to induce him to talk about Henry Banks’s “friends” or anything else was met with more of the same. He muttered about tongues and hands and drugs, the drugs! until Kathy finally put the notebook back in her purse and signaled to Kenny.

  On her drive back to her apartment, she thought about the interview. She hadn’t gotten anything from Ben Hadley on the pantheon of interdimensional deities that the Hand of the Black Stars cult—Toby’s old friends—and now this fairly new group, the Shining Light of Imnamoun, believed in. Their faith in those entities was powerful…and dangerous. Experiences in Colby, Connecticut, had proved the danger of this other dimension, this place called Xíonathymia, and of the servants of its terrible gods. The problem with interviewing so many of these cult members was that a good number of them were too crazy to be coherent, or too scared of their old associates to talk. The Hand, in particular, was a tight-lipped bunch; once, a girl of about fourteen had cut out her own tongue with a piece of broken bathroom mirror to avoid spilling secrets, and another time, a young man in his twenties had dragged a broken bedspring across his neck. He’d only succeeded in a nasty scrape, but it was enough to get him relegated to special, around-the-clock observation and at least temporarily out of Kathy’s reach.

  Kathy hated not getting the information she wanted. She prided herself in having both a fair degree of skill and exceptional luck in skirting around, skipping over, or plowing through obstacles that stymied most others in her line of work. She could be persuasive. She could even be a little intimidating. And she got answers nearly every time.

  Nearly.

  However, it hadn’t just been striking out with the interview that had gotten under her skin. Over time, she’d developed a certain instinct for picking up the signs that a problem of an otherworldly nature was gathering momentum. It was part of what made her good at her job, that ability to distinguish between the rantings of lunatics, the fantasies of the desperate, the delusions of the misguided, and genuine supernatural occurrences. The last on that list happened infrequently, to be sure, but more often than the general public was aware of, and Kathy and her colleagues did their best to keep such occurrences quiet and to a minimum. While there was no doubt in Kathy’s mind that Ben Hadley was mentally unbalanced, there was something in the earnestness of his fear regarding Henry Banks’s “friends” that warranted further investigation. She would have to go back and take another crack at Ben Hadley, and maybe talk to Henry Banks as well. If something was going on at Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital, Kathy wanted to know.

  * * * *

  What had been a very taxing day was stretching into a very long and uncomfortable night. After the cop lady or whatever she was left, nothing had gone right. In the games room, Robert had undone about a third of the puzzle Ben had been working on for the last month and a half. Nellie kept licking her fingers and trying to put them all over Ben’s face, particularly in his ears, which he absolutely hated. Then there had been no Jell-O with the dinner trays. The food at Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital more or less sucked, in Ben Hadley’s opinion, and was made bearable only by that small treat. It wasn’t the taste, although that was pleasant enough. Jell-O was a comfort food to Ben in a way he didn’t quite understand. Maybe it was because it looked like it was giggling when he shook the cup a little, or maybe it was the simple pleasure of vibrant color. Ben’s therapist likely would have attributed it to a subconscious connection to some simpler, safer, more ordered, and quieter time in Ben’s life, back when there was someone in it to make him desserts. Whatever the reason, the absence of the Jell-O was a small but upsetting void in Ben’s evening, a way point between a difficult day and what turned out to be an even worse night.

  He’d gone to bed early—right after choking down the gray lumps of instant mashed potatoes and the creamed spinach—just to put an end to the day. They’d wake him later for his nightly pills, but for the next hour or so, he just wanted to blot out the world. He could feel anxiety creeping in, the noiseless din in his mind from which the Bad Thoughts came and the whirlwind preceding that need to take action.

  Ben had dreamed about awaking in a desolate street in some empty suburban neighborhood. It wasn’t one he recognized outright, but pieces of it were familiar. On one neatly kept lawn sat a little white house with blue-checkered curtained windows. It was Mrs. Merman’s house, across the street from where he’d lived until he was eight. A few houses down on the right was another ranch home from another street where his foster parents had lived all through his high school years. It wasn’t so nice, nor were the people in it, he remembered. Across the street was the apartment building he’d moved into when he was eighteen, next door to the halfway house he’d stayed at after his very first nervous breakdown. Even in the dream, where the deepest and truest feelings are safe from therapists’ questions and group talks and police interrogation, where he could admit the truth behind the curtain of sleep—even there, he felt nothing for any of those places, nor could he muster up even the memories of feeling for the people who had one occupied them.

  Ben himself sat in his hospital bed in the middle of the street. It occurred to him that being parked right there in the path of potential oncoming cars was not safe, but he felt no immediate need to move. There were no cars on the street, moving or otherwise. There were none in the driveways. There were no dreamsounds of traffic from adjoining or adjacent streets. In fact, other than the buildings, there were no signs of human life or influence at all—no toys or bikes left on their sides to wait for little hands to retrieve them, no garbage cans by
the curb, no garden hoses left uncoiled in the grass.

  But then he noticed the chalk scribblings on one of the driveways. The house beyond was not one that he recognized; it was a gray two-story Colonial missing about half of its shutters. The rusting metal numbers 8 and 2 hung askew from the aluminum siding over a dented mailbox near the front door.

  Ben’s attention returned to the driveway. As he slid off the bed, he noticed that dust had begun to accumulate on his sheets in a thin layer of soft gray. The still life scene all around him was likewise dusted, though Ben hadn’t noticed its slow accumulation. He looked up at the sky, convinced dust or ash must have just begun to fall, but the endless whiteness above him was too bright, anxiously bright, and he looked away. He cut a path quickly to the sidewalk, sure as one can only be in dreams that the dust meant deterioration, the decay of a moment time had passed by, a memory that would begin to erode from the edges inward until the mind holding it lost that hold completely.

  When he reached the sidewalk with the chalk, he was surprised to find that the dust hadn’t fallen anywhere over the markings, and the bright colors—Jell-O colors—stood out against the irregular ring of gray surrounding them. The chalk marks took up most of the middle of the driveway, as if the children of the house had spent the better part of a summer day on them, before both the day and the artists moved on with time. There were stick figure children playing stick figure games beneath crude suns with stick figure dogs. There was a boxy hopscotch pathway along the left side near the dust-frosted grass. There were hearts with initials and cross-outs and more initials. It made Ben smile seeing the innocent graffiti of childhood, those little hearts and figures and games.

  Something that caught Ben’s eye from a spot on the driveway closer to the house drew his attention. He frowned, though at first it was only because of the incongruous aspect of the symbol. He hadn’t quite taken in the surrounding words, relegated to the hazy periphery of his dream vision. It was an eye, and although still crude in its aspects, given the medium, it appeared to have been sketched by a more experienced and steadier hand than the rest of the chalk markings. There was far more detail in the background behind the eye, reminiscent of tapestries from one of his own thankfully eroding memories. His dreamself muttered the Platitude of Okatik’Nehr the Watcher, to shield himself from the Terrible Gaze.

  He turned from the eye and saw the other chalk drawings had changed as well—only a little, but just enough to cast a sinister light on the actions performed. The stick figure children weren’t running with the stick figure dog, but chasing it with sticks and rocks. The hopscotch path had become a series of broken summoning squares that left open doors and invited in the Myriad. Ben shuttered, turning back to the eye, but it had gone away. In its place was some type of house or barn with a large door, and streaks of bright yellow and green had been drawn as if emanating from beneath.

  It was then that he noticed the poem, scribbled in stanzas surrounding the new structure.

  Little Benny spent the day

  With Edgar, Orrin, and Maisie May

  They had a game they said was nice

  With cards and boards and glit’ring dice

  But Little Benny lost a turn

  And felt his muscles start to burn

  Edgar, Orrin, and Maisie May

  Called the Others to come and play

  They laughed at what Ben once had been

  And changed his bones beneath his skin

  In the dream, Ben Hadley tried to scream, but the shape of his throat had already begun to change. It felt as if a balloon had been wedged into his windpipe, and each time he tried to suck in a lungful of air, he succeeded only in inflating the balloon. He clawed at his throat in a panic and felt it swelling. He tried to run back to the bed in the center of the street and its thick blanket of dust, back to the confines of his hospital bedroom. It looked so far away, that bed, and the dust seemed bound and determined to slow him down. It was only up to his ankles but he could do no more than slog through it, and with each failed breath, his field of vision was growing dimmer.

  His collapse just a foot or so shy of the bed brought him out of the nightmare, and he sat up panting, pulling in the dark, stale, semi-sterile air from all around him. He tugged at the neckline of his t-shirt, still caught in the grip of panic, then yanked it over his head and flung it away from him. He couldn’t bear for anything to be touching his throat just then, with the dark of his room still mingling with his fading dream vision and the chalk images still floating behind his eyes.

  He noticed the sound of footsteps only gradually, only as his own ragged breathing finally started to slow to normal. Someone was walking down the hall outside his door. It might have been an orderly, maybe one heading toward his room. He might have cried out in his sleep, and the staff was coming to check on him.

  Ben was sure, though, that those footsteps really belonged to one of Henry Banks’s friends. He didn’t know how they had managed to manipulate his dream like that, but it had been a taunt, a promise of things to come. They were angry that he had told the cop lady about them. They had heard. They knew. And now they were going to do to him what they had done to Martha and the others.

  He began pounding on the walls, the doors, the desks, anything to make noise, anything to stay awake and keep Henry’s friends at bay. He paced like a tiger back and forth, back and forth, pounding the walls until Larry came. He was relieved to see the nurse, though not even the meds that Larry brought in could calm him down. The footsteps had been matching his pace, and fists angrier and stronger than his had pounded the hallway walls in answer.

  Ben tried to tell Larry about Henry’s friends, but it only made him more nervous—so much so that Larry had called Kenny and Joe and they’d had to hold his arms down while Larry injected him with the stuff that made him sleepy.

  Most of all that was a blur now. The dream, that damned dream, was the only vivid thing in his mind, still Jell-O-colors bright, but everything that followed was blurry, its edges already eroding. Once again, Ben found his ability to draw clear-cut lines between what was inside his head and outside of it to be faltering. He was nervous, and his nerves made things cloudy and uncertain.

  Once Larry and the others had left, he rolled off the bed and staggered toward the locked door.

  The hospital was old and made strange sounds, some of which sounded like voices, but most of which were not too different than footsteps and pounding on the walls. Just then, though, Ben could hear nothing but the rushing sound in his ears from the drug they’d given him. He pressed the side of his head against the door and listened.

  For a long time, the hallway was quiet. Then the rushing in his ears faded to a dull, cottony monotone and he thought he could hear singing. The voice beyond the door was faint but unmistakably feminine, and although Ben couldn’t make out the words, he knew it to be the song from his dream, the one whose lyrics had been scrawled out for him in chalk.

  It wasn’t until the melody grew closer that it dawned on him whose voice was singing. It was one of Henry’s friends, Maisie. And although her singing came from just outside the door now, it never really got any louder…

  …not until it entered the room.

  Ben flinched at the voice suddenly so close behind him. He wheeled around, breathing hard.

  Behind him stood a silhouette of a young woman, maybe a foot or so shorter than he was, with the bony thinness of an early adolescent. Her singing had fallen to a soft and almost soothing hum, but that broke off as well. Then she said, “Hello, Ben.”

  “Are…are you Maisie?”

  A little giggle. “I am.”

  “What do you want?”

  She stepped into the moonlight coming from the high window.

  Her curtain of light brown hair hung straight and obedient to her shoulders, tucked on both sides behind her ears. Her eyes were doe big, almost anime big, an
d a sharp blue, with soft lashes. A sprinkling of freckles dusted the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Her skin was winter pale, but she wore a little floral summer dress. She looked like a young girl…mostly. There was something a little off, though. She had no scars, no birthmarks, no lines at all anywhere in her skin, which gave Ben the odd impression that Maisie was what his therapist would have called “somewhat idealized,” a doll or mannequin version of a person drawn from imagination and not an actual flesh-and-blood, living person herself. His therapist said that people like him and Henry tended to do that, especially with women and children. Maybe Maisie was what Henry wanted her to be.

  Ben thought it more likely that Maisie pretended to be what Henry wanted, but beneath, she was something else. As if in response to his thoughts, he saw that the more he took her in, the more pronounced an unusual feature of hers became: she had a strange patch of glittering, iridescent scales around her left eye and part of her cheek.

  After allowing him to study her for a bit, she spoke. “I’ve come to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, about some incantations you have in your head, like those in Toby Ryan’s. I imagine yours will be very helpful…but I can get those from you in just a moment. I’ve also come to discuss with you this pesky little habit you have of talking about us to other people. I’m sorry, but I can’t have that, not just yet.”

  Ben’s mind raced. “Did you kill Martha? You killed her, didn’t you? And the others…”

  Maisie smiled with her perfectly innocent little girl’s mouth.

  Ben backed away. “No,” he said. “No! No! Please don’t do this. You don’t have to do this!” He stumbled over the corner of his bed and let out a cry.

  “Ben,” Maisie said in that soothing voice, “let’s not be difficult. I just want to talk to you.” She took a step toward him. “I just want to protect Henry.”

  “Protect him?” Ben held his breath for a moment. Maybe she wouldn’t kill him after all. Maybe she really did just want to talk.