He wasn’t surprised when Reuger radioed down that someone had pushed the emergency stop on the elevator—an inmate shirking the lights-out rule, she suspected—but he was uneasy. He shoved off the wall on which he was leaning and walked over to the elevators and sure enough, one of them was stopped on the fourth floor.
“No problem,” Vargas called back on the walkie. He pulled the key ring from his belt and pushed through the door to the stairwell. “I’m on my way up. I’ll bring the keys up and we’ll manually open it.”
“Okay,” Reuger said. She sounded nervous. “Just hurry, okay?”
“You scared, Jo?”
There was a crackling of static that might have been a huff. “No, of course not,” she replied. “But the noises the guy’s making in there are just kind of freaky, you know?”
Vargas smiled as he climbed the stairs. “What kind of noises? Like ‘oh, oh, oh baby, ohhhh, oh JoAnn, do me!’” He laughed.
“No,” she said, sounding flustered. He could almost feel her blushing over the walkie-talkie. “Like…like animal noises.”
“Like I said—”
“No,” she repeated more firmly. “Like whip-poor-wills, kind of. Like if they could laugh. Long, eerie whistle-laughing. It reminds me of…” Her thought, wherever it was going, trailed off. “It’s just creepy. Why would he make noises like that? Can’t you hear it? I’m holding the walkie up to the door.”
Vargas listened for a few seconds, then radioed back. “Can’t hear it, Reuger. Sorry.”
“You can’t hear that? Are you fucking with me? You’ve got to be fucking with me, right?”
“Sorry, I can’t,” he protested with a chuckle. “Look, I know it can be a little unsettling walking around a nuthouse at night, but I really think—”
“Wait, the door’s opening,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper. “It—” Then she began to scream.
“Reuger? Reuger, what’s going on? Reuger!” He bolted up the stairs, taking two and three at a time. He nearly took a spill on the second-floor landing but caught himself and leaped toward the next flight of stairs.
He was breathing hard when he broke through the stairwell door into the fourth-floor corridor. He skidded to a stop just before the blood. It was everywhere in front of the elevator—on the closed elevator doors, the walls, the waxy leaves of the plastic potted plants to either side of the elevator…and the floor. It was thick on the floor, its heavy, coppery taste coating the back of Vargas’s throat.
Vargas pulled out his Taser. Slowly, his gaze panned the hallway. The silence was as thick and cloying as the smell of blood. The office doors were all closed. Small droplets of red had managed to reach the nearest ones, dark against the polished honey oak. There was no sign of Reuger anywhere—no sign other than the blood, assuming it was Reuger’s blood. Even her walkie was gone.
Vargas glanced up at the digital window over the elevator. It reflected back a frozen red 4. The elevator was still on this floor…and whatever had been inside, whatever had made Reuger scream, was just behind those metal doors.
Should he call on the walkie? Try to use the silence to his advantage? He wasn’t sure.
“Shit,” he whispered to himself. “Shit, shit, shit.”
He decided to back out into the stairwell and call Luftan. He was pretty certain prying open the door was the way to go, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to do it by himself.
“Luftan,” he said into the walkie in a hushed voice. “You there?”
No answer.
“Luftan,” he said, a little louder. “Ted, where are you?”
The walkie didn’t so much as chirp. Vargas was about to head back down a floor when a crackle of static made him jump. It was all he could do to keep from tossing the walkie in surprise.
“Yeah, Yeah, I’m here. Checking out the solitaries on two. What’s up?”
Luftan sounded guarded…not quite afraid, but on alert for sure.
“It’s Reuger. She’s gone.”
“Like, took off?”
“No, like missing. There’s blood everywhere. I think she…I think whatever took her is still in the elevator. Up here.”
“Whoever.”
“What?”
“Don’t you mean ‘whoever’?” Luftan asked.
“Yeah, sure. Just get up here, okay? It’s a mess.”
“Well, shit,” Luftan responded. “Gimme a minute. I’ll come up.”
A few minutes later, he heard Luftan’s footsteps echoing through the stairwell and saw his tall, lanky shadow jogging up the wall. He appeared a second later with a club in one hand and a Taser in the other.
“So what’s goin’ on, boss?” he said in a low voice, joining Vargas by the stairwell door.
“I don’t know,” Vargas whispered back. “She called me on the walkie and then started screaming, and I came up and found…that.” He gestured toward the door.
Luftan looked at him a moment, then eased open the door. “Jesus,” he breathed. “One of the baby killers did that?”
“I don’t know,” Vargas repeated. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
The two crept into the corridor, inching up to the blood on the floor. It had begun to congeal, though instead of turning a rusty brown, it looked threaded through with stringy veins of blue so dark it was almost black.
“What is that shit? The blue shit in the blood? Is that some kinda chemical or somethin’?”
Vargas didn’t answer. His gaze was fixed on the elevator doors. They kept opening just enough to flash a large, bloody pile of rags and then closing. Open and close, open and close, open and close, each time with a cheery little ding that ratcheted up Vargas’s unease.
The rags inside were the same color as a night guard uniform.
“Gotta get those doors open,” Luftan said. As he crossed through the blood puddle, his boots made sticky crackling sounds on the floor.
“Luftan, man, seriously?”
Luftan looked confused, then glanced down at his shoes. “Oh. Yeah. Right.” He turned back to the elevator doors and shouldered them open a little farther, then worked on wedging his nightstick in between them.
He happened to look down into the car. “Oh, fuck!” He stumbled backward, nearly slipping on a still-wet spot on the floor. Luftan, whose face never wore any expression but vaguely sadistic amusement, looked genuinely scared. His chest was hitching with deep breaths and he’d lost both the Taser and the nightstick. His wide eyes were staring at the elevator doors, now completely closed, as if he could see right through them, and what lay beyond was getting worse.
“What?” Vargas took his shoulder and shook it a little. “What did you see?”
“That was Reuger,” he said. His voice had taken on a simple, amazed quality, like a child’s.
“Teddy, is she alive?” Vargas asked calmly. He didn’t feel it, but he was afraid if he lost it, Luftan would go careening over some unseen edge into a place where whatever was on the big screen in the theater of his mind’s eye would keep playing over and over on a loop for the rest of his life.
“That was Reuger,” Luftan repeated. “That was her head. Where’s the rest of her, Vargas? Where the fuck is the rest of her?”
“I don’t know, buddy,” Vargas said.
“We have to find the rest of her…”
“We will. We will. First, we have to get everything on lockdown. And right now, I need you to go down into the lobby and call 911. Tell them we have a staff death here at the hospital, okay? Can you do that?”
“Of course I fucking can,” Luftan muttered, but there was no fight in his words. He looked somehow shocked soft, shocked thin. He shuffled toward the stairwell and paused so long at the door that Vargas thought he might have forgotten where he was supposed to be going.
“Ted?”
“There’s
more in there,” Luftan said. He turned to look at Vargas. “Moving parts…that aren’t JoAnn. I don’t know what they are.”
“Parts?”
“They were wearing her head.”
Vargas frowned, shaking his head. “I don’t understand.”
Luftan turned back to the door. “You have blood on your shoes,” he said softly, then pushed through into the stairwell.
Vargas watched the space where Luftan had been for a few seconds, listening as the echo of the guard’s footsteps faded. Then he turned his attention back to the mess in front of him.
The digital number 4 still reigned over the elevator doors. Whatever lay behind them waited soundlessly for his next move. He circumvented the blood as best he could, inching his way toward the doors. That close to them, he could hear faint singing, punctuated by loonlike laughter. Reuger had been right; they did sound like whip-poor-wills. They also sounded like hysterical children laughing. They sounded like strings of nerves untangled from the body and stretched so tightly that they were on the verge of snapping.
Suddenly remembering the row of offices just down the hall, he glanced in their direction, their own doors like cool, polished oak shields against the horrors just a few feet away. There was always someone working late—Wensler, Dr. Ulster, somebody—so why weren’t they poking their heads out? They had to have heard the commotion, and Dr. Wensler would never have put up with such a ruckus on his nice, quiet floor, sufficiently removed from the unfortunate and unavoidable dregs of his workplace.
He made his way back around the blood and moved down the hall toward the offices, stopping at Dr. Wensler’s first. He did not relish the idea of reporting yet another messy death to the director, but it had to be done anyway. Taking a deep breath, he rapped on the door, then waited.
“Come.” Dr. Wensler’s command, even muffled through the door, had authority.
Vargas opened the door, words of apology already on his lips.
“Dr. Wensler, I—”
Dr. Wensler wasn’t there. Confused, Vargas scanned the room. It wasn’t that big, though it was, of course, the biggest office. It was tastefully decorated in muted modern furnishings and bland water paintings representative of nothing. The oak desk dwarfed nearly everything else in the room, including the expensive leather chair, the throne from which Dr. Wensler asserted his dominion. The gold plaque on the desk informed visitors of the director’s position. To the left was a door that Vargas believed led to a small personal employee bathroom, and behind the desk chair was a large window looking out over the hospital grounds, but there was otherwise no place for a grown man to have gone.
Vargas slipped into the office. “Dr. Wensler?” he directed toward the closed bathroom door, in case the director had stepped inside. “You in here?”
This time, there was no answer. Vargas crossed around behind the desk to make sure the man hadn’t fainted or found himself in the sudden grip of a heart attack. The floor was bare, other than the tidy carpeting. Just to be on the safe side, he peered out the window. The ledge outside beneath the window frame was two, maybe three inches wide. There was no way Dr. Wensler in his expensive shoes could have stood on it, and there was, to Vargas’s relief, no body on the ground below, either.
He headed to the bathroom door and opened that, flipping the switch on the wall just inside, but the little room was empty. It was, in fact, a bathroom, and bigger than he’d imagined. It even had a small shower stall next to the sink. Vargas had no time to admire it, though. He flipped off the lights and closed the door.
“Dr. Vargas?” he asked the empty room, but it didn’t answer. Whatever he’d heard, or thought he’d heard, either hadn’t come from that room or wasn’t there now.
Vargas emerged into the hallway again and looked at the elevator. A trail of footprints followed him down the hall. They didn’t look like blood, at least not human blood; they were a dark bluish-black, with three foretoes and one on the heel, like some large bird.
Like a bird, maybe, that made horrible child-laughter whip-poor-will noises.
His gaze followed the trail, which appeared to have paused before the room he had just been in and then turned off and disappeared under the door of an office across the hall. The name by the suite number read “Pamela Ulster, MD, Developmental Psychology/Psychopathology.”
Vargas’s stomach dropped. Not all of the doctors were friendly with the non-medical staff at the hospital, but Dr. Pam had always offered warm smiles and friendly interest in Vargas’s well-being. He liked her and hated to think whatever had gotten to Reuger had gone after her, too.
He stepped around the footprints and eased open Dr. Pam’s door. It was dark inside, and as light from the hallway spilled in, Vargas thought he saw movement.
Vargas flipped on the switch and poked his head in. Dr. Pam’s office was like a smaller, less ostentatious version of Dr. Wensler’s, with tidy desk and chair, some soothing prints of non-things hanging on the walls, and a soft-looking couch and big easy chair. Dr. Pam wasn’t there, and neither was anyone or anything else living, so far as he could tell, except for a little potted plant in one corner.
Confused, Vargas closed the door. Where was everyone? And where was Luftan with the damn police? When he turned to the hallway, the footprints had multiplied, creating frenzied spirals and crisscrosses all over the floor, walls, and ceiling. They were everywhere, including the doorframe right next to where his hand was resting. He jerked it back.
“Fuck this,” he muttered to himself, and took off for the stairwell. He had made it just about halfway when the elevator doors opened. He skidded to a stop.
A thick black mist streamed into the hallway, spreading out without really getting any thinner or lighter. It moved quickly, pouring itself onto the floor as if filling up invisible people-shaped glasses. When the smoke had resolved itself into four distinct human silhouettes, each of them opened their eyes. Four pairs of glowing almond shapes bored into him, watching him.
From the elevator car behind them, beyond the open doors, he could hear metallic grinding and soft rustling, something that might have once been an end table sidling out alongside an odd lamp-shaped bird. He saw an arm in a dark blue sleeve waving what Vargas thought was a thick piece of fabric at him until he recognized one of Luftan’s chest tattoos. The source of the arm was out of view in the elevator, but a fleshy tendril where a head might have been dipped and wavered around the door.
“What the fuck are you?” Vargas whispered.
The mist people tittered and giggled, and the sound was very much like the way children must sound as the breath is being squeezed from their tiny little throats.
It was, in fact, the way Vargas’s screams sounded, once the mist people and their odd furniture descended on him.
* * * *
Dr. Pam Ulster had finished her therapy appointments for the day—eight individual counseling sessions with her regular patients, as well as three group therapy sessions, two of which she covered for Dr. Wensler. He had left early that afternoon, around 4:00 p.m.—a descent from on high to attend some board meetings or some such thing. She didn’t really care; the hospital as a whole breathed a collective sigh of relief once he’d left the premises. He wore about him like a vampire’s cloak an air of constant scrutiny, fringed with disapproval, which Pam found exhausting. She had once harbored a hope that the old man would retire, but she knew now he would not. They’d have to pry the hospital out of his cold, dead, iron grip.
She’d had therapy sessions until eight that night and then she’d spent the next few hours catching up on paperwork. There was always a lot of it—session notes to type up for the file, billing and insurance paperwork, treatment forms. It seemed to multiply like rabbits on her desk, and she was glad for those few quiet hours in the evening when she could get it down to a manageable and acceptable level.
It hadn’t been so quiet that evening
, though. During the last of the individual therapy sessions, around 7:30, it had sounded like the walls were groaning, and the lights flickered, threatening for several seconds to plunge her and her patient, Gina Maldonado, into another blackout. Around 8:15, Pam had heard footsteps, which in itself wasn’t unusual except that they sounded like they were climbing the walls. At 9:00, she’d heard a shout in the corridor outside her door. Frowning, she pushed back her desk chair, slipped those murderous heels back on her feet, and went to the doorway to investigate.
The sound was unlikely to have come from a patient; they were all in overnight lockdown on the floors below. A security guard, then? If the security staff were screaming, that was probably not a good sign.
She peered up and down the hallway over her thin, fashionable reading glasses, but it was empty. Its unearthly quiet had settled again like a layer of dust on the place. Whoever had shouted was gone now.
She returned to her desk and the file lying open on her blotter:
BANKS, HENRY
Age: 28 years
Birthdate: November 2, 1990
Height: 5’8’’
Weight: 185 lbs.
Eye Color: Blue (left)/Green (right)
Hair color: Blond
Former Residence: 82 Crownwell Street, Newlyn, CT
Family
Father: Joseph Orrin Banks (deceased)
Mother: Eleanor Maisie Banks (deceased)
Grandfather: Marcus “The Viper” Banks (deceased)
Aunt: Lydia Banks (deceased)
Uncle: Frederick Edgar Banks (deceased)
Diagnosis: Undetermined. Psychotic features, possible DID. See Abuse and Family History, p. 7.
Pam sighed, pulling off her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose where a headache was forming. She was at a loss as to what to do for Henry Banks. She took pride in the fact that while many of her patients couldn’t get much better, they didn’t really get any worse. Henry, on the other hand, seemed to be steadily declining. His delusions were taking on more import in his mind, more substantiality. The delusions in particular about a trio of friends and an outlier entity who he claimed had been responsible for the killings were very strong; in fact, they seemed to be having a mass delusion effect on some of the other patients, as well. She hadn’t wanted to put him in isolation just yet because they felt it really benefitted Henry to interact with other people and she didn’t believe in her gut or in her professional opinion that Henry was a physical threat to anyone. She had no doubt the police were right and someone had murdered Ben Hadley and Martha and maybe even the others, but it hadn’t been Henry who had done it.
Inside the Asylum Page 12