Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  As if thinking the same thing, George turned and shuffled toward the door. Ernie supposed it was possible his friend hadn’t seen or heard him. It could even be that he’d seen Ernie and not recognized him, if he had in fact had a stroke. Either way, George didn’t look in any kind of condition to be going home alone in the dark. If Ernie let him go on his way, Marian from the Great Beyond would have both their hides.

  Ernie pulled a few crumpled bills from his wallet and tossed them onto the bar, then slid from the bar stool. The world rocked a moment then straightened itself out, and he made his way toward the front door of the Tavern, which George was currently pushing open onto the night.

  A moment later, Ernie emerged onto the front stoop and half expected to see George waiting for him there, chomping on a cigar and watching the pretty young things as they went to and fro between bars and restaurants along the street. When he wasn’t, Ernie glanced up one side of the street and down the other, trying to make out the shuffling gray form. It had been one of the first springlike days of the year, and that mild weather had only just begun to cool. George liked walking better than driving ever since the eye doc told him his cataracts were getting worse, so Ernie didn’t bother looking for George’s car. The man only lived two blocks away from the bar, and many nights had found the men stumbling back to George’s when they were too drunk to drive. He didn’t see George on the street heading toward the direction of his house, though. He didn’t see George anywhere. On a good day, George didn’t move so fast anymore—faster than Ernie, sure, but not so fast that he could have made it up the street and around the corner in the three minutes between his and Ernie’s leaving the bar, and certainly not looking like he had.

  Ernie took off in the direction of George’s house anyway. Maybe he had taken his car after all, or had hitched a ride up the street. He couldn’t think of any other place but home that George would go off to in the night. If he hurried, he might be able to catch up to his old friend.

  It took a good ten minutes of practiced weaving up Shale Street and halfway up McCumber to Ashton Road. George’s place was a little white and blue ranch on the left about a quarter of the way down. There weren’t too many streetlights on that road, but most folks kept their porch lights on the whole night. Not a lot of money flowed along Ashton Road, but it was a mostly white street, and through his growing concern over George, he couldn’t help but wonder what folks peeking out from their curtained windows would think of a half-drunk black man stumbling alone down the road. He chuckled. Most of George’s neighbors probably recognized Ernie by now, and while maybe not all of them liked a black man wandering their street, they kept themselves to themselves about it. Things weren’t like they were when he was a pup. It wasn’t like the lynch mobs were going to be throwing rocks and calling cops on him. Besides, it had been a long time since Ernie Jenkinson had looked threatening, anyway.

  He was so lost in musing on the neighbors that he nearly plowed into George, who stood partially hidden in shadow from a large oak whose branches reached over the street. George was standing in front of a curbside mailbox that was not his own, with his hand closed over the little flag. He didn’t move even so much as to glance at Ernie’s approach, and he didn’t speak. He wasn’t checking for mail, either, but just holding on to the little red flag. That close to him, Ernie could smell the man, a nauseating mix of urine and sickness, rot and toxins from the inside seeping out of his pores, and a kind of charnel mustiness.

  “George, you okay? I been tryin’ to reach you for days, man. What you been up to?”

  George turned his head and looked at Ernie, but for all the recognition there, he might as well have been looking at a brick wall.

  “Hey now, you know this ain’t your mailbox, right? Can’t be stealing other folks’ mail, now. What say we go on back to your place and sort out what’s goin’ on with you? Come on,” Ernie said, and took George’s arm. He recoiled immediately. The skin beneath the sleeve was so cold that its chill came up through the fabric, and it was way too soft. It felt to Ernie like rotting vegetables, how they got slushy and almost pastelike if they sat too long at the bottom of a trash can in the sun. It had slid all over beneath the pressure of Ernie’s touch, so that his fingers seemed to push it out of the way to reveal something chunky and very hard underneath.

  “George, we need to get your ass to a doctor, you hear? You ain’t right.”

  “Been at work,” George said, but his voice sounded more like an echo than the sound that made it.

  “All right, then. Tell me on the way,” Ernie replied, and swallowing his distaste, took George’s arm again. George let Ernie lead him nearly all the way to George’s house. They were in view of the man’s lawn when George stopped short. Ernie, who had his work cell phone in his hand and was about to call for an ambulance, looked up.

  “Come on, George. We almost there now,” he said to his friend, giving the arm in his grasp a little tug. He suppressed a shudder at the way the flesh yielded under the skin, but the meat of the arm remained rigid.

  “Can’t,” George muttered.

  “Oh yeah? And why not?”

  George turned his head and looked over Ernie rather than at him. “The rake is in there. The lawn mower.”

  “We ain’t goin’ in the garage, G. We—”

  “Some of them mist folks, too. If I go in there they’ll rearrange me again.”

  Ernie frowned at him. “You ain’t makin’ any sense. I think we need to get you on over to the hospital.” He tapped the cell phone and the screen lit up, casting a faint blue glow on the men. He’d tapped the phone icon and the 9 when George put a cold, hard hand over it. Ernie heard the crunch before the phone crumpled in his hand. When George pulled away, a black hairy thing like a centipede with pulverized metal and plastic embedded in its body crawled over his palm on multijointed legs, while its circuitry eyes, sticking up from random stalks along the back, turned in unison to focus on him.

  Ernie, who was not at all squeamish about insects in general, tossed the thing as if it were on fire, wiping his hand on his pants leg. Then he looked up at George in amazement.

  “What—what did you do? How…?” He floundered, looking for the words. George had not only crushed his cell phone but reshaped it and set it in motion. Ernie suddenly thought of the footprints, and it occurred to him that he was alone in the dark without a car or phone. The man, if it was a man anymore, wasn’t George, at least not most of it. No stroke did that to a man. Nothing the good Lord above or the devil below ever put on this earth did that to a man. Whatever was left of George, it was lost, and what was left…well, Ernie knew in his bones that it was dangerous. He hoped Marian, God rest her soul, would forgive him when he beat feet out of there, and he hoped his old legs would do the job of carrying him out of there fast enough to make it worth the risk.

  “You’re like the other cop,” George said with almost mechanical atonality. “You won’t bend. They’ll just kill you.”

  “George, I’m gonna go get help, okay? You go on…go on home,” Ernie said as he backed away. All around him, the neighborhood seemed different, and he kicked himself for not noticing it before. The shadow-dappled, tree-lined street of white folk wasn’t settled in, quiet and comfortable for the night. There were things in the dark he couldn’t see but he could feel, more animated and likely more dangerous than whatever had gotten inside George, and they were watching. Waiting, for now. It wouldn’t make any difference, putting space between him and George; it was whatever was skulking around in the bushes or laying low around the sides of the houses he had to worry about.

  George made no attempt to go after him, and for that, Ernie was glad. He just wanted to get away from him, away from the tittering, trembling shrubbery lining houses and walkways, the glare of porch lights like angry, glazed eyes, the picket fences that looked like teeth, the movement of charcoal silhouettes in the lightless side alleys between hous
es.

  Ernie couldn’t have run if his pants were on fire, but he found he could hustle-jog, and though he knew his knees would have him damn near crippled in the morning, he kept at it. He focused on the stop sign at the end of the road. He thought if he could make it to the sign, he’d be close enough to civilization, real civilization, to be safe. He’d be out of that weird, somehow stained pocket of neighborhood where his oldest friend had been reduced to little more than a sack of sick and broken things and had begun to pass on that sick brokenness to the street on which he stood.

  An inky spot near the edge of his vision darted between two shadows, and Ernie stopped. He shouldn’t have; he realized that a second later, but he’d been struck with the notion that any movement of his would draw the thing’s attention, as its movement had alerted him. Now there were eyes on him, though, a dozen or so little glittering pairs of ice-chip blue light that moved with him as he picked up jogging again. If there were bodies attached to those eyes, Ernie couldn’t see them. He could only barely hear them, slipping through the negative spaces, where light and color and normalcy couldn’t reach.

  To Ernie the footprints on the street materialized out of nowhere, not catching the moonlight at all but seeming to swallow it.

  He skidded to a stop, unwilling to touch the deep blue-black that formed those awful marks. He had a crazy notion that the prints were like holes in the earth, punched right through into another reality by whatever ungodly feet or paws had stepped there, and if he were to step on one himself, his leg would fall straight through it. They weren’t shaped like a man’s footprints at all; they were more like what those prints in the hallway of the hospital outside Ben Hadley’s room looked like—three toes, long and pointed, with a shorter fourth toe protruding from the heel. And they were everywhere, crisscrossing each other in a frantic dance pattern running every which way.

  “Shit.” Ernie’s chest ached, and he hoped that if it was a heart attack, it would take him down quickly. The footprints had closed him in, spiraling outward in multiple directions as if a wild, frenzied dance of invisible hooves and paws whirled all around him and into the darkness. From beyond that lightless circumference, he heard a scraping sound like metal tines being skipped over pavement, and behind it, a slithering sound.

  The rake is in there…

  His knees had begun to throb up his legs and down into his shins. He’d never be able to outrun them, whatever they were. He wasn’t sure he’d even be able to walk toward them. The stop sign at the end of the road looked impossibly far away now. Ernest Jenkinson was a dead man.

  Then a gray sedan wheeled around the corner and shot down the street. It skidded to a stop a few feet in front of Ernie, and in the sweep of the headlights, he could have sworn he saw various squat, rust-colored, tool-shaped heads and slippery-looking wings pulling back from the sudden light and noise, and behind them, misty silhouettes.

  The driver’s side door opened and a man swung out. He looked beaten to hell and back, his rumpled suit reduced to a stained and tattered mess of rags. Blood and some of the footprint stuff speckled his beard. He fired a couple of shots toward an encroaching silverbacked beast maybe three or four feet high, with rows of mouths and bladed teeth whirring where its stomach should have been. Its leathery wings snapped when the gun ricocheted with a metal ping off one of its stubby legs, and it gave a guttural little growl like…Like an angry riding lawn mower, was the thought that came to Ernie’s head, and he almost laughed. They were being attacked by George’s gardening equipment.

  Another shot landed close to him and Ernie jumped. He looked down to see what might once have been a weed-whacker, looking now more like a bladed scorpion with a long, erect tail, which the bullet had dropped near his feet. Beneath it, that black-blue hole-in-the-world stuff was spreading, and Ernie was almost positive that bits of the pavement were crumbling away and falling into its void.

  “This way, old man! Now!” the guy from the car was shouting. He gestured to the passenger seat. “Come on! I’m almost out of bullets!”

  For one terrible second, Ernie was sure that his legs had locked from the pain. He was dead certain they wouldn’t move no matter what kind of command, plea, or threat messages his brain sent them. Then he found himself moving, his legs propelling him in that hustle-jog toward the car. It was a weird disconnected feeling, his legs reacting without any other necessary stimulation than sheer survival and preservation.

  When his hand closed around the metal handle of the door and he pulled it open, the groan it made echoed the last groans in his knees before they gave out and he fell onto the passenger seat. The bearded man dropped in beside him and slammed his door. His arm shot out and he emptied the rest of his gun into a pale, blood-splattered lumbering thing that reminded Ernie of a stewpot filled with a sloshing soup of alien internal organs. It caterwauled in anger but backed off just enough for Ernie to get the door closed.

  “The name’s Holt,” the bearded man said between ragged breaths as he threw the car in reverse. The car shot backward on chirping tires.

  “The detective from the hospital?”

  Holt slammed the car into Drive and sped back toward the Stop sign. “Connecticut-Newlyn? I thought you looked familiar.”

  “Custodial Services. Ernie Jenkinson. I went round to check on George…and, and…my Lord. George Evers, he…” Ernie had no more words. All the stress, both physical and mental, finally caught up with him and his body erupted in a series of bone-jarring shudders.

  “He isn’t George anymore,” Holt said solemnly, turning onto the main road.

  Ernie watched the stop sign sail by and thought reaching the boundary to the normal world would have made him feel better, safer, than he did. That cop hadn’t come out of nowhere by coincidence, and he hadn’t been surprised at what he’d seen, either. Which meant the boundary he was looking for was still a good distance away.

  “No shit, sir. Don’t look like nothing is what it used to be anymore.” He shook his head. “If you don’t mind my askin’, what the blazes is goin’ on out there, Detective?”

  “Was gonna ask you the same thing,” Holt replied, “seeing as how it’s bleeding outward from somewhere on the hospital grounds.”

  “What is?”

  “Whatever’s changing people into things and things into beasts. I don’t have much to go on right now but a name, but I can tell you what I think.” Holt glanced in the rearview and frowned. Ernie tried to catch whatever it was Holt saw, but it was gone.

  “What’s the name?” Ernie asked.

  “Henry Banks,” Holt replied.

  Ernie shot him a quizzical sidelong glance. “Henry? Aww, I know Henry. Boy’s harmless. Besides, this can’t be no man, even a killin’ man, doing this—this…” He gestured toward the night beyond the car.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

  “But…but how?”

  “I don’t know,” Holt said, “but I think I know someone who does.”

  Chapter 7

  The information on the internet about tulpas had provided Kathy a place to start, particularly with its definition as an “emanation body” and the earliest mentions of it or something like it in the fourth or fifth century CE. In many of the early Indian Buddhism texts, the tulpas were manifestations of other spirit versions of the conjurer. The multiplication miracle of Buddha was said to be a divine ability to project multiple versions of himself into the world. The Tibetan Buddhists believed tulpas—the nirmanakaya, sprulsku, sprul-pa—to be creations of or even avatars of deities, though the ability of “unrealized beings” like humans to have or even be divine tulpas was not outside the realm of possibility, either. From what Kathy could tell, there was a slight evolution of the meaning of the word from “emanating body” into “thoughtform” that changed the context. A 1927 translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead was one of the earliest mentions of “thoughtforms” specif
ically. What Kathy found interesting, though, was that throughout its evolution and despite its fluid definition, the concept of tulpas was an ancient one—that of sentient and more or less autonomous beings brought about by the use of the mind. They weren’t just imaginary friends come to life or the fractured multiple personalities associated with dissociative identity disorder, but both of those ideas, or at least covering all that ground in between.

  Kathy was waiting on Henry Banks’s psychiatry files, but she thought she knew what she’d find in them. She’d seen broken, abused children with an amazing ability to create whole worlds in their minds and disappear into them during times of stress or horror, particularly during a cult’s programming or a family’s deprogramming phases. She had also seen what the force of will could do in opening doors to other dimensions or summoning entities from other planes of existence. That Henry Banks might be able to do a little bit of both—summoning from the planes of existence in his own mind all his protectors from the most terrifying and tumultuous phases of his life—was not only possible, but probable.

  The next bit of research was to find accounts of those who had direct experience with tulpas in action. Belgian-French explorer, spiritualist, and Buddhist Alexandra David-Néel claimed to have witnessed the mystical process in action in twentieth-century Tibet, including the ability of the tulpa to develop a mind of its own. She also found the 1937 account of Francois de Boudiard, a French scientist and philosopher who claimed to have perfected the meditation and deep concentration methods necessary to summon a thoughtform to perform a simple task. Much like with the tulpa created by David-Néel, de Boudiard’s tulpa took on a will of its own and was subsequently destroyed. She also found several Western occult magicians claiming the ability to create and command tulpas to serve both good and evil purposes for their masters. Many cases showed a clearly subservient role to their creators. In some, relationships extended to the romantic and even sexual. Creators of tulpas treated them as somewhat real individuals with likes and dislikes, thoughts and emotions separate from their creators. However, in every case she could find, the tulpas, once they had served their purpose, were dispelled or summarily deconstructed. Even the Network’s files had little on what to do if those tulpas chose, in their autonomy, to not give up the ghost, as it were. If tulpas were so fully realized and granted so much power by their creators that they could prevent their being sent away or destroyed, what then?