As she made her way back to the car, her resolve set on returning to see Henry Banks, she thought she heard a howl from someplace far off, behind the hospital. She stopped, turning in the direction of the sound to listen. The air was silent and cool, and although the tiniest hairs stood up all over her, nothing she could see or hear seemed out of place.
Reluctantly, she went back to her car and, with a last glance at the hospital, got in and drove off. She’d come back the next morning, and the next evening if she had to, and every day until they let her see Henry Banks. She had a very bad feeling that things were about to get both bad and strange at Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital—the one place in the world where the security of the normal was the only thing keeping the world safe from what was inside.
She glanced at her phone and saw two text messages waiting for her. The first was from Reece, checking on her, and she replied that she was okay and on her way home. The second had no name attached, only a symbol of a sun, which was how she listed her clients in her phone. She recognized the symbol as the one she’d assigned for the Institute for Holistic Research. She tapped on the text message to open it, expecting some feedback and possibly some disappointment regarding her report.
Instead, it read, Re: Henry Banks. All the info you can get. Same fee.—GH
She frowned. The Institute was suddenly interested in Henry Banks, simply from her note? It was possible they were just being thorough; she certainly planned to be, and intended to follow up with the Network for that specific reason. Still, the suspicious part of her made her wonder what the Institute wanted. Had Henry Banks been on their radar before? Did comparing Ben Hadley’s records with Henry’s lead to an overlap of a word, a phrase, a common acquaintance or location? So far as she knew, they’d never met or had anyone in common prior to the hospital. Maybe the Institute was concerned with their experiences overlapping now, then. But if so, why?
She started the car and pulled out of the parking lot when her phone alerted her to another text message. She pulled it up and saw it was from the Institute again. That one read, Re: Also, pls send evidence of referenced tulpas if possible.—GH.
It was strange, to say the least. She had some calls to make and emails to send. It was going to be a long night.
Kathy had just turned the corner out of view when the power from the electrical station of the grounds was cut off, and the entire hospital went dark.
* * * *
The creatures that came across from Ayteilu through the electrical station singed the grass as they walked. Flickering and jittering, they joined the mist Wraiths in the darkness. They brought no bodies with them and made no attempt to bend the circuitry and metal of the station to their will. They needed only the electricity, bundled together in a crackling, sizzling semblance of a humanoid.
The electrical Wraiths had made it across the gulf of Henry’s mind and joined their smoky brethren.
One tested out its new form by hurling a small lightning bolt at a decorative bench. The stone cracked in half and the bench folded in on itself in a little pile of rubble. They had no mouths to cheer each other on, but there was a general sense among the creatures of victory. They were free.
The first wave made their way toward the row of residential buildings beyond the next hill, where the Viper said to meet him. Most of those emerging from Ayteilu—the electrical Wraiths, the mist Wraiths, and all their beasts taking on physical forms would be there. So would Orrin and Edgar and their Others, the mad ones. Some of the Wraiths and their beasts would be sent ahead to begin infiltration of the hospital. Ayteilu had already begun to leak through to the top floors, so there would be a little taste of home as well as new places and substances to explore.
All of them had been told they would have an opportunity to try out their new bodies and see what they could do. They could claim what they wanted from the wreckage of each building and build on themselves, choosing a form for this new world. There might be meatbodies in the way to dispose of, and they would do so because the Viper told them to. They did not kill for fun like the Others and they had no interest in pleasing Maisie, but they had less interest in crossing the Viper.
One of the second wave of creatures saw a soda vending machine just outside an old office building. It had long been empty and unused, but the shape and the colors appealed just enough to the creature that it consumed and assimilated the machine, reforming into something new in the shadows. Another absorbed an old pay phone and began reshaping, delighted by the ringing sound it could now make. Two others combined to take on the rusted shell of an abandoned work van, left to rot in the tall grasses. When they discovered the slicing metal edges and small metal teeth they could form along their massive half-van body, they rumbled their approval.
A flurry of sparks erupted as the last of them passed through. The great glass and concrete mammoth at the center of this new land went dark. Immediately, the blue ivy of Ayteilu’s Hunger Valley worked its way through the cracks of the hospital façade and grew along the side. The fungal sponges with their thick silvery dust and soft, wet bodies began to eat at the foundation, choosing the main building’s basement as their new valley home.
One of the mist Wraiths gave a nod to the last wave of others to follow. There was so much in this world to become and to remake. The excitement among them sizzled like their bodies. It was going to be one long, glorious night.
Chapter 5
Detectives Holt and Farnham had just left Dr. Wensler’s office and were making their way down the corridor when the lights all over the hospital went out. They were plunged into total darkness for several seconds, and then the pale blue-white emergency lights came on. These, like the electrical doors and certain pieces of medical equipment, Holt had been told, ran on a separate circuitry system than the usual lights. For the safety of patients and staff alike, Wensler had said, though it certainly didn’t seem to Holt like it had contributed much toward the safety of Ben Hadley, nor had it evidently kept Belle and Barney McGuinness from reaching the roof of Parker Hall and jumping to their deaths. Death seemed to be a popular pastime at Connecticut-Newlyn lately. Following the McGuiness suicides, there had been Sherman Jones’s death of supposed natural causes, Ridley Comstock’s accidental death by autoerotic asphyxia, and an undetermined manner of death (though the coroner was leaning toward suicide) in the violent passing of Martha Lupinski, which Wensler had chalked up to coincidence. Holt, who believed true coincidences were rarer than a decent politician or an honest junkie, thought the deaths might be connected—or at least thought that it was worth looking into a little further—though he couldn’t quite see just how. It was a feeling, one Farnham was just a bit too young and inexperienced to trust in himself yet, but Holt knew the younger detective would follow his lead. Police work was an art, as far as Holt was concerned, and not a science, and art was about seeing with more than one’s eyes.
For example, a number of murders at a loony bin for the criminally insane had a nice ring of karmic justice to it, with killers killing killers and all, and he might not have thought too much harder about the filth cleaning up the filth except that some of the pieces didn’t fit. Holt wasn’t going to win any awards for Humanitarian Man of the Year or anything, but he was a good cop; he knew when things didn’t fall neatly into place like one hoped a murder investigation would. This one didn’t, and despite who the victims were, it bothered him. He’d had a gut feeling something was seriously off about the whole mess just from the preliminary report on Hadley and had grown more suspicious with every evasive answer Wensler and the doc with the nice legs gave him. There were too many Houdini moves necessary to have pulled off a murder like Ben Hadley’s in a place where high security protocols and nervous eyewitnesses, however delusional, were the norm.
As they glanced around the eerily blue-lit and exceedingly quiet hallway, warily scanning for signs of trouble as a result of the power failure, Holt picked up his end of the di
stracted conversation.
“But anyway, yeah, I think we ought to look into her. The name, Ryan—it’s familiar. Remember Jack Glazier, over in Colby? I think he used her on a few cases a while back. I’m almost sure of it.”
“I’m not sure Glazier’s the best judge of character, Mike,” Farnham said, taking a tug of that vape pen of his. Since he’d switched to it about a year ago from a pack of Newports a day, he lived quite literally with his head in the clouds, though these clouds were faintly vanilla-scented and, to Holt, reminiscent of his aunt Cordelia’s candle-strewn bathroom.
Holt shrugged as they were buzzed through the doors toward the elevator and stairs. “Clearly, the broad’s into some weird shit, but like she said, it’s about what folks believe. And she believes she has some jurisdiction in this situation. If she’s gonna be poking her nose around here, I want to know what she’s up to and why.”
“Fair enough,” Farnham replied in a vanilla mist. They had reached end of the hallway just as the regular lights came back on. He gestured toward the elevator or stairs, deferring to Holt’s preference, and Holt nodded at the elevator. Farnham pushed the button to take them down to the lobby.
As they stood waiting, Farnham added, “I guess we could get her number from Scissor-Legs in there.”
“You saw those, too? Damn, what I could do with those wrapped around my neck.”
Farnham chuckled. “No shit.”
“So, yeah, let’s get this Kathy Ryan’s number from the good doctor and see what’s what, huh?”
“Sure, I’m on it,” Farnham said. “I guess we could—”
Farnham never finished his thought because there was a ding and the elevator doors opened just then on something horrible beyond. Holt instinctively drew his gun on it, backing away slowly. Farnham, on the other hand, seemed to have had his police training shocked right out of him.
The thing in the elevator hung from the dislodged emergency escape panel in the ceiling of the car. The arm supporting its weight was ropy with lean muscle, sheathed in a bluish and rubbery-looking skin. Its hands, or maybe they were paws, were too big, their color tapering to black on the backs just before the knuckles. The multijointed fingers ended in great, curving talons of shiny white, almost like marble. Its legs were the same. There was little to differentiate the squarish bulk of the head from that of the torso, and together they were large enough to take up most of the interior space, but it was the familiarity of that bulk that bothered Holt.
The swirls of color and the odd, slotted area where the stomach should have been reminded Holt of a soda vending machine. It was as if the thing in the elevator had swallowed one. No, it was more like the thing had been wearing the vending machine for so long that it had begun to disintegrate and work its way in as a part of the thing’s skin.
It dangled a moment from the ceiling of the elevator and then opened its mouth. It wasn’t exactly a roar that came out—there was no real sound—but it was the force of a roar, the vibrations, the sound of air whizzing past an ear, and it hurt Holt’s head.
Farnham remained standing in front of it, dumbfounded. He’d found his gun holster but the ability to unclip his gun from it seemed to have eluded him. He’d also dropped the vape pen, which had rolled away somewhere. He managed to mutter, “What is that, Mike? What is it?” and then the thing dropped to the elevator floor.
Holt opened fire on it. When the thing screamed again, the vibrations were louder, so much so that the detectives put their hands over their ears, a reaction rather than a reasoned response. They wanted to filter out that horrible soundlessness, that awful pressure in their heads. Holt tried to fire at the thing again but couldn’t bear to pull away from his pounding head.
The slot in the creature’s stomach area opened, and for one absurd second, Holt expected a can of soda to come popping out of it, the aluminum wet with condensation and maybe some monster goo. Instead, long, black viperous tongues emerged, snapping and swaying in the stale, antiseptic air. One of them shot out and wrapped around Farnham’s neck. His eyes bulged and his face began to turn a dark, dark pink.
Holt fired again, trying to stun the creature into letting Farnham go. When that didn’t work, Holt pulled a pocket knife from his pants and rushed toward his partner. He began sawing at the tendril around Farnham’s neck. That seemed to only make it worse, though whether it was from making the creature squeeze harder in anger and pain or because that grayish liquid from the wounds was burning Farnham’s skin, Holt couldn’t tell. He just knew Farnham’s eyes were bulging and the tip of his tongue, protruding like a grotesque and graying slug, meant the man couldn’t breathe.
Holt drew back and was about to charge the thing instead and drive the knife deep into the meat above the open slot when the tentacle made a snapping sound and quickly withdrew, yanking Farnham off his feet and into the elevator.
“John!” Holt cried out, diving for his partner. He managed to grab Farnham’s leg, and he pulled hard. The elevator doors closed on it and the car began to rise with only some of John Farnham inside it. Holt let go quickly, hoping John could pull his leg in, but the limb didn’t disappear from view. It folded once it reached the top of the floor and then seemed to flatten like a tube of toothpaste. Blood ran down the front of the elevator, and the messy lump that had once been Farnham’s leg below the knee thumped to the floor in front of him. Farnham’s blood splattered his shirt, warm and wet.
Holt couldn’t look at it. He glanced up instead at the arrows above the door and the digital screen telling him the elevator door was going up.
Holt frowned. There were only four floors in the hospital, and he was on the top floor now. There was no “up.”
He pounded on the down button as if he could somehow stop the ascent of the car to God only knew where. Above him, the digital screen counted off the rise from the fourth to the fifth, the fifth to the sixth…the sixth to 137 and then a jumble of malfunctioning digital pieces of numbers. A cheery ding and the sound of elevator doors opening from somewhere above sent Holt scrambling for the stairwell. He had little time to register in the back of his mind that no guards had come to assist, not even at the sound of gunshots only a hospital corridor away, when he skidded to a stop. There was, of course, a perfectly normal staircase going down to the lower floors, but going up…
Holt whistled, his gun hanging helplessly at his side. The part of the stairwell that should have ended in a neat and blandly painted wall was gone. In its place was a mess of gray-green growths that could have been large stones or maybe fungus. Long blades of grass poked out from the spaces between, as did thin trees scraped nearly free of bark, vines that wrapped around them, and strange bowl-shaped and flesh-petaled things that might have been flowers. Set into this odd backdrop were irregular, somewhat erratic stairs partially floating and partially balanced on one another, leading up into the starry night. They turned a corner that led, presumably, onto the roof.
Holt hesitated. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t imagine this was some kind of elaborate joke, but he also couldn’t wrap his brain around what had taken Farnham and what he was looking at right now as being real. He wanted someone to explain, either to tell him he was as crazy as the other loonies in the bin or to confirm that what he was seeing had some kind of explanation. Further, it was unbelievable to Holt that no one had heard the commotion, that no one had been alerted by the sight of Farnham’s bloody stump by the elevator, but Holt supposed it was no more unusual than anything else that was happening.
Behind him, back in the hospital, there was silence. No one was coming. He had to get to Farnham. He didn’t look forward to the idea of doing it alone, though, and glanced back once again as he pulled out his cell phone to call for backup from the station. When he tapped the screen to turn it on, though, nothing happened. It was dead, its little screen dark and silent.
“Fuck,” he muttered to himself, then turned toward the doo
rs leading back into the hallway. Maybe he could wake somebody up in there, maybe get somebody to assist.
The doors were locked. Part of Holt wasn’t surprised, but he could feel the first flare of true panic setting in. “Of course you’re locked. Fuckers,” he said, smacking the doors, then turned back to the stairs. He didn’t have time to mess with the doors and no backup was coming, apparently. He had to move forward. If Farnham was still alive, he wouldn’t be for much longer.
He picked his way up the strange stairs, keeping toward the center. Over the edge of the staircase he could see the grounds below. It was a long way down, longer than it should have been. If one of those stone steps shot out from under him or crumbled away…
Holt pushed the thoughts from his head. He was rounding the corner now, cautious footstep by footstep, and saw that the steps kept rising. They came to an abrupt end about six or seven feet above the solid surface of the roof. The whole area below appeared to be empty, but there were many corners where the Mansard slopes cast shadows on the flat planes below them. Holt couldn’t see Farnham or the creature from the elevator but he did see a leg-width trail of blood leading into the dark.
With a clumsy leap, a bone-jarring thud, and an oof, Holt managed to land without too much pain on the roof below the stairs. He’d worry about how to get back down later. He had to find Farnham.
He took a mini-flashlight from his jacket pocket and switched it on. It didn’t do much to light up the space around him, but it cleared a path of visibility over the trail of blood. All around him, the silence ate into everything. The moon seemed unable to reach certain spots, no matter how close he got to them or how intently he focused the flashlight beam. There was a faint sick-sweet smell that reminded him of a mother’s old tampons left too long in a garbage can, or the breath of some new “uncle” at the house whose dental surgery has become infected.
Inside the Asylum Page 7