Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  That it had been his delusions was a notion so laughable that she’d naturally dismissed it when the other patients first brought it up, but now, after Kathy Ryan’s visit and a thorough review of Henry’s file and her own notes…

  Well, the truth was there. It was between the lines, but it was there, and once she’d seen it, she couldn’t unsee it. Delusions, by their very definition, weren’t really there. Henry’s friends, on the other hand, most certainly seemed to be. In that context, he was a danger to others, but only if those…things…were doing what Henry commanded, and not, as Kathy Ryan suggested, taking the initiative to kill on their own.

  If Kathy was right, then Henry was just as much in danger as everyone else in the hospital.

  Pam got up and wandered to the window. It was dark already. Those pre-summer evenings when the end of the workday meant crossing a dark parking lot alone after leaving a mental hospital for the criminally insane always set her on high alert. She wasn’t afraid per se, but she certainly kept an eye out for anything unusual, even before she left the building. It was, maybe, that awareness that drew her attention to the odd pulsing glow a couple of acres away, over one of the hilltops. She tilted her head, surprised. What was out that way? Utility buildings, she thought. Maybe an old toolshed the landscaper used. She supposed he might have been burning leaves or other yard debris, though she couldn’t imagine why the fire glowed green like that, or changed color. Green pulsed to blue, blue to purple, purple to white, white back to blue, blue to red, red to yellow, and back to green again. It was kind of pretty, how the glow slipped and slid over the hilltop like liquid light, like dripping paint in a pastoral landscape. She smiled…until she noticed that the glow was flowing toward the hospital.

  She blinked her tired eyes and slipped her glasses back on. The glow broke into pieces, and those pieces resolved into figures, but they still glowed, some yellow-white and some faint blue or green. Some, she saw, didn’t glow at all. Rather, they seemed to suck all the light and even some of that pastoral landscape into them like humanoid black holes. Among them were packs of strange beasts that looked kind of like furniture and appliances in some nightmare funhouse. The pulsing colored lights she had seen, alternating hues and intensity, she could tell now were massive clouds of brightness from which myriad appendages waved and flopped, some tentacle-like and others very much like human arms and legs.

  All of the things were swarming the hillside, moving like a small army toward the hospital.

  Part of Pam Ulster—the logical, scientific, A-type personality part—knew she should be worried. Something very strange and very bad was happening down there, and it was moving closer every second she stood there gaping like an idiot. She couldn’t will her body to move away from the window, though. All she could do was replay the same thought-loop over and over in her head: They’re in my notes. The light clouds are the Others and the black holes are the Wraiths and the beasts are the Little Ones and they’re all in my notes. Henry told me about them and they’re all in my notes.

  She began to laugh. It came on her suddenly, and that worried, logical part of her felt trapped and helpless. This wasn’t her. It felt more like the laughter was seeping into her as opposed to coming out of her. She kept laughing, though, and laughed hard, too, and for what felt like a long time. When that crazy mirth had died down to a giggle, she looked out the window again. They were gone. The rest of the laughter in her died at once.

  A phantom hand came to rest on her shoulder…or perhaps it had been there the whole time.

  They were here. They’d made it to the hospital. They were in the hospital.

  And they’re all in my notes…

  She turned away from the window. She was alone in the office, or at least, she thought she was. But there were noises in the hallway again, chirps and tweets and a low keening that reminded her of some strange, sad bird.

  Slowly—she couldn’t make her body move as quickly as her mind wanted—Pam moved to the door and locked it. Whatever was out there, she wasn’t about to let it in while she had any control of herself left. Scanning the room for something she could use as a weapon, she kept an ear on the noises in the hallway. They were getting closer. That low bird wail sounded like it was right outside the door now.

  She scooped up a heavy glass paperweight and turned back to the door. A dark smoke had begun to pour in from the crack underneath, and at first she thought maybe the hallways had caught fire, that they were trying to smoke her out or get her to jump out her office window. Then she realized that the smoke was not formless; it was pulling together, stretching upward as if being poured into a humanoid mold, and when everything from the feet to the top of the head had taken shape, it opened its eyes.

  Pam wanted to scream, but the mist was holding out its arm, its hand closed into a fist, and the gesture seemed to be pulling the air out of her. Her hands flew to her throat, clawing at the invisible pressure there. It was coming from the inside where that alien laughter had been. It felt like her vocal cords were being tied in knots, and each knot was squeezing acid down her throat. Pam’s arm flung out in an attempt to grab something, anything, the corner of the desk even, to pull herself away from the force intent on killing her. Objects fell from her blotter, but she barely noticed. Her vision grew fuzzy around the edges.

  By instinct, she hurled the glass paperweight at the mist, and as the glass shattered against the far wall, the figure dissipated.

  Immediately, the pressure inside her throat withdrew, and she could breathe. Her vision cleared, then grew wet with tears. She leaned over her desk, coughing, gasping, and wheezing for several long minutes.

  Finally, her breathing returned to normal and she wiped the tears from her eyes. Her throat still felt a little sore, but she thought she was all right. She went to the small water cooler in the corner of her room and poured herself a small paper cup of water from the cold side. After emptying it over the hot coals in her throat, she felt better, steadier. She crumpled the cup and threw it in the trash. She could think again, and her thoughts, she was sure, were her own.

  She had to get out of there. That was all there was to it. Either Henry Banks’s mass delusion was starting to affect her as well, in which case, she might as well pull up a residential bed right alongside him, or…

  …Or Kathy Ryan was right, and Henry Banks had been telling the truth, and everything in her notes was fact and not fantasy.

  She wasn’t sure which would be worse, though she suspected before the night was through that the latter would prove to be the greater evil.

  Pam grabbed her purse and headed for the office door. The sounds had died away sometime between when she was choking and that moment when she stood with her hand on the doorknob; probably when the smoke thing had disappeared, so had the sources of those awful noises. Right then was probably the best and maybe the only time to escape.

  She eased open the door as quietly as she could and peered out into the hall.

  It was empty. It was also utterly silent, but she thought that wasn’t unusual for that floor at that hour, until she realized she wasn’t sure what hour it actually was.

  Stepping into the corridor, she was uncomfortably aware of the echo her high heels made on the tile floor. It sounded thunderous to her, and she tried leaning forward on her toes as she hurried down the hall toward the elevator. The button, it seemed, had already been pushed, and the elevator car was on its way up. Although it made her feel vulnerable to be standing out in the open like that, the elevator seemed like a better option than the stairs.

  Or was it? Wasn’t there some sage advice about using stairs rather than an elevator during times of emergency? No, that was in a case of fire or power failure.

  “What was that?” she suddenly asked the solitude. It didn’t answer. “What was that thing?”

  It occurred to her as she stood there waiting for the elevator, still waiting as if it was
ever going to come in her lifetime, that she’d been in close proximity to Henry so many times. Countless times, really. She’d been his therapist since before his trial. That meant she had probably been in the room with those things, those friends of his, before they were strong enough to show themselves. She knew Maisie and Orrin and Edgar and even the Viper almost better than Henry did. She knew about the lives and histories of those monsters all the way back when they probably were still fantasies. They had probably touched her shoulder just like some had in her office earlier. And if they could do half of what Henry had ascribed to them over the years…

  It was all in her notes. She remembered the way Henry described Maisie’s ability to get into people’s heads, how Orrin was razor sharp, fast as the wind and possessed of a temper like a storm, and how Edgar only had one eye, but he could shoot laserlike fire from it. Henry always seemed to sympathize with Edgar, whom he’d once sketched as being small and gaunt, almost birdlike, with all the earmarks of a fringe outcast. Edgar, Pam believed, was as close to how Henry saw himself as any of those creatures got. Maisie was his dream girl, one who would love and mother him and take care of him while simultaneously needing him in her life. Orrin was in wit and charm, body and soul, who Henry wished he could be. Along with their collection of misty Wraiths and shapeshifting imps and miasmic living light clouds he called the Others, they were an army of defenders in a world so vastly different from the tragic, brutal one in which Henry had grown up. She’d always been amazed by his creativity and attention to detail. She’d even suggest he write and draw comics with his ideas.

  He’d laughed at the time and told her he didn’t want to give them a reason to take over the world.

  She shivered. Frustrated with the elevator, which clearly wasn’t working (the digital screen above said it was on the sixth floor now, and there was no sixth floor), she turned to the stairwell and headed for the stairs. In that narrower space, her clicking heels reverberated at an almost deafening volume, but she couldn’t wait out in the open any longer. That Wraith thing could come back at any moment and crush my insides, she thought, or the Others could come.

  They would come and turn me inside out.

  That’s what Henry said they could do. The Others could reach inside like the Wraiths, but they weren’t content just to flatten lungs or crush hearts or squeeze minds to jelly. The Others rearranged people. They moved bones and organs, cells and tissue, rerouted blood. They made bodies never meant to change shape into new and horrible things. It was something Henry had spoken about with awe and tinges of both fear and satisfaction. He claimed it was what had become of his grandfather in the end. It was why they’d never found all of the old man’s body—only what was left, what the Others didn’t need after he’d been rearranged.

  She’d reached the second-floor stairwell landing when a glow from a floor below made her heels chirp as she stopped short. The light pulsed different colors, hypnotizing and almost soothing in their hues. She could almost imagine she heard a soft heartbeat with each color change.

  She shook her head, her thoughts returning to her original concern. Her proximity to Henry and thus to these creatures might mean she was more susceptible to them. How much of herself had she shared with Henry in an attempt to reach him? How many careless things about herself had she let slip in simple casual conversation? And what did they need to know about her to gain control? She didn’t think it was much. They certainly seemed to be able to come and go inside her head that night almost as freely as in Henry’s.

  The glow beneath her seemed to pulse delightedly in response to her thoughts.

  She couldn’t go that way. One of those Others was in the stairwell with her. Could it sense her? Smell her? What had her notes said about how they found prey? All she could remember was that Henry thought they were crazy. She’d even helped him find the word to describe them: berserkers, like those wild warriors of old. Manifestations of Henry’s psychopathic anger and desire, she’d thought at the time—his Id-beasts.

  Now the glow was rising up the stairs. Within minutes, maybe seconds, she’d be able to see the tips of those waving tentacles, the stiff fingers of those mannequinlike hands…

  She turned and ran up the steps. The exploding echoes of her heels were like a gunfight all around her. The alien sedation that had been weighing her down ever since the first odd noise in the hallways that evening was finally lifting, and true panic was setting in. Those things were coming for her, coming to rearrange her, and there was no way out.

  Once she had burst through the stairwell doors and back into the fourth-floor hallway, she kicked her heels off toward the reception desk and then bent to catch her breath, her manicured nails resting just above her knees. Her panting was loud like the echoes of her shoes had been, and she was sure it was only a matter of time before that glow ascending the stairs engulfed her in its blinding, pulsing colors and—

  “Pam,” a soft, sexless voice said behind her. She cried out, nearly falling over in her attempt to stand up straight and turn at the same time. No one was behind her. She felt tears of panic and frustration gather wet and hot in the corners of her eyes, blurring her vision. She staggered away from the sound of the voice and toward the offices again, unsure where to go or what to do next. That haze of thought invasion, that sense of someone else’s calm being forced into her brain, was beginning to return. It made her feel weak, confused, and ineffective. Maybe it was the first step in the rearranging process.

  Instead of collapsing through the doorway of her own office, she sagged against Dr. Wensler’s. He always locked up before leaving, and so when her resting hand turned the doorknob and it moved inward behind her into the dark, she was surprised. She caught herself, flipped on the light, and slipped in, locking the door behind her. The last was a reflex, a taught behavior to establish safe boundaries. Locking the door wouldn’t do any good and she understood that intellectually, but it made her feel better to have done it.

  She managed to make it to the sofa before her legs gave way, and she sank onto a soft cushion and began to sob. Then she began to laugh, thinking about how annoyed Dr. Wensler would be to learn she was getting tear stains all over a $6,000 sofa there just for show.

  The she began to cry again, squeezing her eyes shut tightly. This wasn’t going to end well. She didn’t need the alien thoughts to tell her that. They wanted her, maybe because Henry liked her or trusted her, or maybe because she knew too much about him and his thoughts and feelings. Maybe they wanted everything back that he’d ever shared with her, or maybe…maybe they were angry that it was her professional opinion that had confined Henry, and them by extension, to the Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

  She felt the pulsing colored light before she saw it even through her eyelids.

  “Pam,” the sexless voice called to her. “Oh, hi there, Pam.”

  She opened her eyes. A cloud of light and wispy fog about five feet across hovered at eye level in a far corner of the room. It had turned off the office light; she hadn’t noticed that behind her closed eyes, either, but now, the glow was casting red then blue then greenish-yellow light over Dr. Wensler’s desk and over its softly waving tentacles, which she saw now were about a half foot thick and made of a smooth, rubbery gray skin. A human leg dangled from the cloud, and Pam got the absurd image of a naked man trying to climb out of the endless source of light. An arm, just opposite, waved upward like that of a drowning woman, its long fingernails translucent.

  “What are you?” she whispered to it. “How can you be?”

  “I am all the things,” the sexless voice responded, and laughed. The sound reminded her of a loon or whip-poor-will, or the broken laughter of a child with all the sanity beaten out of him.

  “Are you going to kill me?” Pam wiped the sweat from her palms on her skirt. She was glad to be out of those terrible, painful shoes. No one wanted to die in shoes like that.

&nb
sp; “Eventually. After I play.” A lunatic giggle.

  “Why do it?” she asked.

  “For fun,” the voice said, and the colors pulsed more brightly. “Because I can.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Will it hurt?”

  “Only until you die. Then the hurt stops…usually.”

  “When will you do it?”

  “Now, if you’re ready.”

  She closed her eyes. “I am.”

  “You were his favorite,” the sexless voice said cheerily. “The one who mattered.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, and her hands clenched, gathering her skirt in bunches.

  “Yes, nice.”

  Then the light got bright enough to turn the black behind her eyelids red. She could hear her bones grinding and shifting, actually hear it from inside her own head, and the burning began as tissue ripped and organs stretched. She might have bled, but the sensations on her skin were too strange to classify. She would have screamed, but by then, nothing was left of her mouth.

  The last thought she had as Dr. Pamela Ulster was that she was going to leave one hell of a mess on Dr. Wensler’s expensive couch.