Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  He shook his head. Those didn’t feel like his thoughts. He didn’t know what those things smelled like, though he supposed he could guess. Dead homeless people and heroin overdoses and old ladies whose souls left for better places but whose bodies lay unclaimed for a summer month—those smells he knew. Those smells, like the one on the roof, got up inside the nose, the hair, the clothes. Those smells followed you home. Smells like untreated cigarette burns festering on bare shoulders or the carcasses of zenner-beasts in the desert after being picked through by the acid flies, or—

  Holt blinked as if to squeeze those thoughts out of his head. He was sure that time that they weren’t his. But if not his, then whose? Wherever they were coming from, they were products of a head he most definitely did not want to stay in.

  “He calls them tulpas,” the pretty doctor lady had said.

  Holt shivered, though the air was warm and uncomfortably sticky. The blood trail was his best lead to Farnham, so he focused on that, following it several feet until the flashlight beam picked up a pair of scuffed sneakers.

  Holt jumped and bit down on his tongue to stifle a shout. Then he snapped the flashlight to eye level.

  A man who had begun to turn gray in both hair and skin looked solemnly at him. His work overalls, also gray, were torn in several places, the fringe shredded and sticking up stiffly. The man was staring at him, it seemed, without really seeing him. Holt had seen people before with the thousand-yard stare, people preoccupied with so much that it crowded out everything else behind their eyes. This man, though, was different. This man looked…empty, as if everything had been drained out of him. Even psychopaths, with their shark eyes, didn’t look like that. Only the dead looked like that.

  Pulling out his badge, Holt approached the man slowly, as if approaching a lion. “I’m Detective Holt,” he said in a calm, measured voice. “You need to leave this roof, Mr.…?”

  For several seconds, there was no answer and no movement, just a gray, dusty thing propped up like a man. Perhaps he was deaf or blind…though if that was the case, why was he up on the roof in the dark? And could he sense all the horribly weird stuff going on around him? How had he managed to get up here, and had he seen Farnham?

  Holt was about to ask some of those questions when the gray man finally responded, “Evers. George Evers.”

  “Mr. Evers,” Holt repeated. “I’m going to need you to come with me, okay? If you’re hurt, we can get you some help, but—”

  “No,” the man said. There was no hostility or malice in his voice. His face remained unperturbed.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your friend is dead,” Evers said. “The vending machine and the lawn mower got to him. Maybe the rake, too.”

  Holt glanced around slowly, unwilling to take his eyes off the gray man for too long. The man wasn’t making any sense, but then, neither was anything else that had happened that night.

  “You saw Detective Farnham? Can you tell me where he is now?”

  “Who’s to say? They might move his bones around. Or absorb him, maybe. They needed him. They might need you, too.”

  “Mr. Evers, please, just come with me. I’d like to hear more about this, but I don’t think you’re safe up here, and—”

  “I can’t come with you.”

  “Why not? Mr. Evers?”

  The man didn’t answer. He tugged at something growing out of his ear, then backed into the darkness and disappeared.

  “Mr. Evers? Hey! Mr. Evers!” Holt tried to follow into the dark, his flashlight in one hand trying to split the shadows while his gun nosed around alongside it. There was no trace of Evers or Farnham or anyone else. There was only the roof and the suffocating black of an alien night and smears where the blood trail had ended beneath the gray man’s feet.

  Holt stumbled on anyway. All around him, the lightlessness had taken on substance and its own kind of volume, so that he felt like he was wading through water. He couldn’t make out much, even with the flashlight, and didn’t see the lump on the ground until he tripped over it.

  “Jesus! Shit!” He caught himself before he fell, but stumbled backward against a wall, breaking the thickness of the air all around him into tiny bubbles of oily black that bumped and floated before his eyes.

  Before he could wave all of the bubbles away and get back to what he’d tripped over, he saw something fly over his head and over the ledge of the rooftop. He rushed to the edge and looked down, fighting the lurching dizziness of vertigo as he did so.

  In the arc of one of the hospital’s streetlamps lay a crumpled heap that made his heart sink. The body below was missing part of a leg.

  Holt backed away in horror, his flashlight trembling in his hand. Something had tossed Farnham to the ground like a rag doll. That gray man didn’t look strong enough. Likely, it had been that thing from the elevator. But where was it? Where the fuck was it?

  The flashlight beam caught something and he swung back to the spot. It was Evers, standing near the edge of the roof, and this time, Detective Holt did cry out, a body-racking cry of fear, anger, and confusion.

  The old man’s eyes had gone as gray as the rest of him, mottled with the white, dry frost of death. There could be no seeing from those eyes, and yet Holt was sure Evers saw everything—in this world, and maybe in others, too. The smile beneath those cloudy eyes was way too wide for a human mouth to make. When he opened wide to laugh, the bottom jaw hung down to the middle of his chest.

  It was the teeth, though, that Holt would remember in the long nights to come—those long, horrible teeth, like dirty icicles that should never have been able to fit in that shriveled little man’s mouth, teeth that looked so cold that every one of them sinking into the skin would spread frostbite deep into the meat of a man, and just rot all that living flesh away…

  Evers waved at him and then jumped over the side of the building.

  Holt, dumbfounded, let his gun lead to the edge of the roof again. When he looked down, though, he pointed the gun at the ghoul he was sure must be clinging to the side of the building just out of sight.

  George Evers wasn’t there at all. Once again, the man had vanished, and Holt was pretty sure he wasn’t coming back. Down below, the hospital grounds looked so far away. The real world, the normal world, was so far away. And lying smack-dab in the middle of it, surrounded by a dark halo of his own cooling and drying blood, was what was left of Farnham.

  * * * *

  During the hospital blackout, Maisie found the serial killer Toby Ryan in his room. He was sitting in a chair, looking out the barred window onto the parking lot. He seemed lost in thought, though unlike with Henry or even Ben Hadley, Maisie couldn’t tell what he was thinking about. His thought waves, their patterns and colors and textures, were different. They were cloaked somehow, shut away from her. Maisie didn’t like that. He had in his head the secret to substantiation. She was sure of it. He could fill in all the gaps in Ben’s knowledge, all the missing symbols and fragments of incantation Ben couldn’t quite remember. Those secrets could be adapted; Henry could use them to give permanence and independence to Maisie and all the others. They wouldn’t have to be just another man’s thoughts, however fully realized they might be, and at the whim of his creation and destruction. They could break the life link with him, and they could be free—free to exercise their own will, free to bring their home, Ayteilu, the sanctuary Henry had created, pouring into this world with them. They could be free to survive…and to create and destroy. Toby was the key to that. Toby had the last of the answers, and Maisie was going to get them.

  Toby was a good-looking man, in a rakish sort of way, in his mid-forties, but the years, or perhaps the mileage, had only begun to show around his eyes. His hair, still blond, had grown into little spikes from the military cut he’d worn in his admittance photo in his file. Wiry, muscled arms with various occult tattoos were crossed over his che
st. She couldn’t see his eyes from the way his head was turned, but she knew his eyes were blue. Sometimes, they were blue. Other times, they were black.

  Suddenly he seemed to sense her behind him, a predator’s instinct that he was not alone, and he turned to her, his expression placid but guarded.

  “So, you’re real, then. One of Henry’s friends.”

  Maisie moved into a stream of moonlight and gestured at her cheek. “Scales give it away?”

  Toby studied them a moment. “They’re no scar, but they’re sexy. But no. Rumor has it you have a way of walking through walls, and well…” He crooked a thumb toward the space behind her. “Door’s locked, sweetheart.”

  “Hmm. Attractive and smart,” she replied with a small chuckle.

  Toby let himself smile a little. If snakes could smile right before they struck, they’d smile like Toby Ryan, Maisie thought, and knew with some frustration that it was Henry’s opinion as much as hers.

  Toby said, “Oh, darlin’…you shouldn’t tease. I haven’t always been nice to girls who tease.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Aww, has old Henry been talking about me to you?”

  Maisie strolled by him with dreamlike slowness. Sudden moves wouldn’t do in a locked room with a predator like Toby. He wanted her uneasy and uncomfortable, furtive and darting, but that wasn’t Maisie’s way.

  “Ben talked about you. Ben did a lot of talking, actually. Too much, if you ask me. Henry, on the other hand, doesn’t care for you. He’d prefer to keep knowledge of you from me, but he can’t. I suppose you scare him a little.”

  “Well, the real question is, do I scare you?” In the moonlight from the window, Toby’s eyes glinted, and she could see hunger in them, a barely controlled lust seasoned with years of hate. “Are you worried, being in here alone with me?”

  Maisie shook her head. “No more than a tiger worries about being alone with a gazelle.”

  “Oh, you’re cute.” He chuckled. “You’re…that’s cute.”

  “See, poor Henry is afraid a lot. It’s why I’m here, why I exist. He doesn’t realize that if anything, you’re the one who should worry about being in here alone with me.”

  “Can’t say as I’m seeing any reason to be afraid of you, sweetheart,” he said with amusement and just a tinge of impatience, giving her a once-over from his chair. The snake was gauging when he ought to strike.

  “That’s unfortunate for you. You would be, if you were smart.”

  Toby arched an eyebrow and leaned toward her. “Oh really? You know, I’ve carved up girls’ faces and breasts and stomachs like Thanksgiving turkeys. I’ve shoved all kinds of things into their tight little spaces and cut them up from the inside out. I’ve splashed around in their blood and, honey, I still dream about all those screams. And they were all girls like you.”

  It was Maisie’s turn to smile. “No, Toby. I daresay you’ve never met a girl like me.” She sauntered over to him and leaned down until her face was close to his. He seemed both breathlessly thrilled and uncomfortable with her proximity. It had been a long time since he’d been allowed to get that close to a woman. She reached out and touched his face and he grabbed her wrist. She grabbed his and could tell from his expression that he was surprised by her strength. She could feel the faintest glimmer of fear from him at something he saw in her eyes. She could tell that much, even with Toby.

  “You think you’re a badass monster because you’ve killed a few girls?” she purred at him. “You have no idea what a monster is. What I am. No idea at all.”

  When he let go of her wrist, she let go of his. He rubbed his arm where she’d left the beginnings of bruises.

  “And just what kind of monster are you?” he asked, looking up at her.

  “Just one who wants to pick your brain.” She smiled again. “So to speak. Someone who wants the benefit of your experience.”

  Toby frowned, confused. “You want to hear about me killing all those girls?”

  “No, that was not the experience I meant. I want to hear about your time with the Hand of the Black Stars. Specifically, their ways of making things that were not from this world…well, stay.”

  Toby choked out an astounded laugh. “What? Get the fuck out of here, sweetheart. I’m not telling you shit about that.”

  “But you will, Toby. You will. You’ll tell me everything I need to know.”

  Toby glared at her, but there was something beneath the glare that made Maisie smile. “I’m not Martha, you crazy bitch,” he said. “I’m not Ben Hadley, or any of those other suckers you twisted up in this place. You can’t threaten me.”

  “Oh,” Maisie replied. “I don’t plan to threaten you. I plan to show you exactly what kind of monster I am.”

  And Maisie May began to change.

  Chapter 6

  For a decade or so after Toby Ryan’s conviction and admittance into Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital, Kathy Ryan was convinced that if she never saw her brother again, it would be too soon. A part of her—a hard, sharp little ball of hate and shame and guilt compressed and crushed, pushed down and compressed again, layer after layer, year after year—had wanted the state to execute her brother. It wanted him dead, that little part. And every time it tried to rise and bob to the surface, coated with new therapeutic insight or well-meaning sideways opinions, new guilt or flare-ups of anger, she’d squeeze it back down to manageable size and shove it deep into her subconscious like Toby’s box of finger bones at the back of his closet and try to forget about it.

  Her brother had hurt her in a number of ways on a number of levels. He’d threatened to rape and murder her. He’d cut her face deeply enough that almost thirty years later, the scar remained. And that hard, sharp little part of her jostled around, cutting her insides a thousand little times until even its nesting place was scar tissue, and Kathy Ryan, who couldn’t forget the scar or the man who caused it, did manage to begin to forget about how she really felt about both.

  Toby hadn’t been executed, though. He’d been remanded to a mental hospital for the criminally insane instead, and the gears that turned the wheels in the machine of justice went grinding on by. Kathy had learned to be okay with that, too. He was out of sight if not out of mind, and he couldn’t hurt anyone else anymore.

  When Margaret called and left a message for her the morning after her last visit to the hospital, Kathy had been hoping it was with word from Dr. Pam Ulster, giving her the okay to come talk to Henry Banks. She intended to talk to the man one way or another, but it was always easier when there were fewer red tape hurdles to jump on the way.

  Instead, Margaret had left a message asking Kathy to call back about an incident with Toby. It was a professional courtesy call, because Kathy was pretty sure she wasn’t listed as her brother’s closest next of kin; to the best of her knowledge, he didn’t have anyone listed. Both of the Ryan siblings preferred it that way. But Margaret didn’t know about the hard, sharp little ball embedded deep down in Kathy and thought she might want to come down and check on Toby.

  Toby, who’d once snapped the neck of a bird with a broken wing with one hand, right in front of her, to “put it out of its misery.” Toby, who’d gotten between her and her dad’s wrath more times than she cared to remember.

  She would have liked to believe that when that hard little ball tried to resurface, it had softened a little with sentiment and time, but…she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t want him dead anymore, so she supposed at its core, the ball was empty now, its layers just accumulated after-feelings, the detritus of trauma. She may not have been self-aware enough to begin healing, but she knew herself well enough to know she wasn’t ready to begin peeling back the layers to find out what really was left at the center.

  Kathy texted Reece, who had already left for work by then: Problem with T at hosp. Going to see what’s up. Will check in later. Love u.

 
; He was working the homicide of a teenage boy in Colby and probably out in the field, so she didn’t expect him to answer right away. She showered, dressed, took a swig of vodka from the bottle in the medicine cabinet, brushed her teeth, and gathered up her keys and her purse. A text response was waiting on her phone as she picked it up on her way out the door.

  Aye. Love you, too, babe. Ring if you need to.

  Kathy decided not to call Margaret back but rather just to show up. Whatever Margaret had to tell her about Toby, she needed time to prepare to hear it. The worst of the possible scenarios ran through her mind, and she systematically tried to discount them.

  Maybe the administration was thinking of transferring him. They’d never consider releasing him, but they might move him…unless they were considering his release. Every time the suggestion had ever come up, Kathy had been there with notes and research from Psychology Today and signed statements from mental health professionals. She’d been there with her scar and her story and she’d fought to keep her brother committed. To release him would be a smack in her face. It would also be dangerous to the surrounding community. Toby was relentlessly unapologetic. He’d told doctors on more than one occasion that he would keep killing if released; he was compelled to. They couldn’t possibly think of releasing him.

  He could have escaped. Except that it wasn’t really likely that he could or even would. The residents called it being a “house pet,” when one got used to the hospital life, its rules and meds and comforting, familiar schedules. Kathy had come to believe that was the mind-set Toby was in, that he’d adjusted to being a house pet. She supposed it was possible she’d been wrong that he’d been biding his time or that he had changed his mind. Maybe he wanted to be free to experience the sexual thrill of killing and mutilation before he was too old to get an erection anymore…but Kathy just couldn’t see it, not with all the deaths happening at the hospital just then. He’d always been fascinated with dead things and he’d enjoy the commotion. He’d want to live through the carnage and the violence vicariously, even if it wasn’t a string of girls specifically.