Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

Orrin, who she supposed didn’t know what the talisman was, kept coming at her. When he got within about five feet of her, though, he staggered back, clutching his head.

  Edgar, who had hung back, almost cowering against the double doors, strode forward. “Orrin?”

  “She’s got head magic,” Orrin said. “I can’t cut her.”

  “Got it,” Edgar replied, and descended the steps. His furtive demeanor had gone. His one eye glowed deep red in the dark, and just as Kathy was about to speak, a bright beam of red shot out of the socket. It hit Kathy in the shoulder and the pain was immense, a burning that traveled down her arm and up toward her neck, her lungs, her heart. She cried out but managed to hold on to the talisman. If she dropped it, she was dead.

  Shaking off the pain, she glanced at Holt and Ernie. They, too, had their talismans out, shoving them toward Orrin like ID badges. Orrin growled, swiping the air in front of them with his wrist-knives. Edgar turned to the men as well, and this time when the light came from his eyes, it went from red to white hot, so bright it hurt their own.

  Kathy threw an arm up to cut the glare and shouldered past Orrin toward Edgar.

  He turned back to her just as she reached him. Up close, the talisman seemed to hurt him, too. The fire in his eye dulled to an ember and he cried out.

  Then Orrin was on her, with an arm around her neck. The crook of his elbow pinched her windpipe and squeezed, and explosions of dry, panicked pain went off in her head. For a thoughtform, he was surprisingly strong—neither entirely solid nor entirely ephemeral, but some liquid, fluid sliding scale in between.

  She raised the talisman to his forearm, and the skin there began to smoke and flake away. Orrin growled behind her and squeezed more tightly. She thrust the talisman over her shoulder toward her best guess at his face, and the pressure on her neck broke. Kathy gasped for air, coughing, as Orrin howled from somewhere behind her.

  She looked up just in time to see Orrin charging her again when Ernie flew across her field of vision, tackling Orrin to the ground. He shoved his own talisman in Orrin’s mouth, and the boy began to turn blue. Kathy glanced at Edgar and saw the eye gearing up again with a deadly red glow.

  “Ernie!” she shouted, and the old man looked up as a red beam burst forth from the boy on the stairs and shot out toward him.

  For one terrible second, the beam lit Ernie’s face in a blood glow, and she thought she smelled sizzling flesh. Then Holt was behind Edgar, springing at the boy with his talisman. He reached around and plunged it into the fiery eye. Edgar screamed and crumpled to the ground.

  Orrin was on his back convulsing, coughing up blue-black ichor onto his own chin, his t-shirt, and the ground around him. Ernie lay motionless next to him. Kathy’s heart sank.

  Then Ernie coughed and sat up, rubbing his ear. Kathy and Holt rushed to him, yanking him to his feet and away from Orrin. When Ernie took his hand away, blood and a few shreds of what was left of his ear came away on his fingers.

  “You okay, Ernie?” Holt asked.

  Ernie looked too dazed to speak. He let them drag him up the stairs past Edgar’s still form and to the double doors of the hospital. Kathy fished for the key ring on his belt.

  “The key card with the blue label,” Ernie mumbled.

  “Hang in there, buddy,” Holt said. “You just hang in there.”

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Ernie said, and tried to chuckle, but it came out as a cough. “Just a little banged up, is all.”

  Kathy found the key card with the blue label and ran it through the electronic door lock. A second after, the familiar buzz let her know she could open the door, and she ushered them inside.

  The front lobby was quiet, even for the night shift. Margaret had, ostensibly, gone home for the night, though it was strange to imagine her having any sort of life out from behind that desk. Kathy knew that the night crew had at least three security guards, and one of them usually took up a post by that first set of doors, which led to the bedrooms and hydrotherapy room. No one was there at the moment. She supposed it was possible that he might be patrolling the second floor—Margaret had mentioned something about their being short-staffed—but the conspicuous absence of a guard gave Kathy an uneasy feeling.

  She and Holt got Ernie over to one of the chairs in the lobby’s tiny waiting area, and he waved them off that he was okay.

  “Much obliged for the help, folks, but I seen worse than that in the war,” he said with a smile. “It’ll take more than that to kill old Ernie here.”

  Holt took a look at the side of Ernie’s head. “You’re a tough old dog, Ernie. Looks like the boy’s laser cauterized the wound a little, at least. Bleeding’s mostly stopped. We can get that ear bandaged up, though, if you want.”

  “Not much of an ear to bandage, I imagine,” Ernie said. “Can’t hear none outta that side.” There was no expectation of reassurance in his voice. He might not have been able to see the charred tissue, but he obviously knew enough about the damage. “Nah, let’s just get to Henry, take advantage of the moment’s quiet, okay?”

  Kathy nodded. “You saved my life, Ernie. I owe you a huge debt of gratitude.”

  Ernie waved it off, blushing a little. “Nah, woman, I was just relivin’ some old football days, is all.”

  She grinned. “All right, All-star, let’s get moving, then.”

  Ernie rose. Kathy could tell from the pained expression that flickered across his features that despite his bravery, he had an old man’s bones and an old man’s aches and pains to go along with them. He had too much pride, she imagined, to let it show, but he was hurting. Kathy just hoped he hadn’t cracked any of those old bones trying to save her sorry ass.

  The three of them headed toward the elevator. Henry, she knew, was on the third floor, near her brother.

  “I think we should take the stairs,” Holt said, eyeing the elevator doors suspiciously. Kathy glanced up at the digital screen above the doors, which displayed “4.”

  She shrugged. “Okay. Probably faster anyway.”

  In the stairwell, the silence grew thinner, somehow tinnier and hollower. The echoes of their steps and their occasional words were strange, coming too soon on the heels of their noise or too long after. Holt seemed distinctly ill at ease. He had his gun drawn, even though it would do little good. She figured it was a kind of security measure, a product of police training that made him feel less helpless. Neither he nor Ernie had their talismans now; they were essentially going into a firefight without a bulletproof vest. She kicked herself for not reminding them to reclaim theirs from the tulpas outside.

  They reached the third-floor landing with a little huffing and puffing, and emerged onto the corridor by the elevator. The now familiar surroundings still spawned that slick weight in her stomach that greasy lump of discomfort. It was not so easy to bury as that hard little hateful part of her, maybe because it lifted once she left the hospital. It was there now, though, and the total quiet, the empty nurse’s station and the lack of a patrolling night guard so far as she could tell made it feel much heavier.

  “What room’s he in?” Holt asked.

  “307,” Kathy and Ernie said in unison.

  “Okay, lead on.”

  Ernie led them to another set of reinforced glass doors. He opened these with a yellow-labeled key card, and gestured for them to go first. Their footsteps thundered, despite every effort to be quiet.

  Room 321, 319, 317… The walls felt narrow and slanted at unnatural angles there, and in many cases, the numbers next to the doors to each room hung slightly askew. That same ivy on the roof extended out from under some of the doors, waving and reaching for their shoes as they passed. Kathy wondered about the other inmates, and where the ivy was thinnest, she tried to peer through the windows. She couldn’t see much, but what she did see wasn’t encouraging; mostly, shadowed masses more ivy than person groaned in the corners
or from the beds.

  Room 315, 311, 309… One of the doors had a rust-colored handprint on it, and a blood smear like a comet tail trailing toward the wall. Beyond it, something that was once a man had been bent backward, and it crab-scuttled on its toes and fingers toward the door. Where the head had been was a ghoulish mask of distorted features. Only the eyes remained human, and in them was a glazed terror that made Kathy flinch.

  On the right, Room 307’s door was closed. Kathy did not look at the door next to it. She didn’t want to see her brother’s room just then, or whatever personal effects he thought made him look more human. Instead, she stepped aside to let Ernie unlock it. Then she slipped the talisman chain around her neck, and without knocking, she went inside.

  The man on the cot was asleep. The room was uncomfortably cold, but Henry slept in a short-sleeve hospital-issued pajama set with no sheet or blanket on him. He didn’t stir as she, Ernie, and Holt approached. Kathy looked around the darkened room. Other than the cold it was, so far as she could tell, untainted and untouched by the alien infection happening elsewhere in the hospital.

  Maybe Henry genuinely didn’t know what was happening. She’d said she thought he didn’t more than once, and had thought she believed it until she took in his room. The poor guy was sleeping away his own creations’ rebellion.

  “Henry? Henry, wake up.”

  Henry stirred but his eyes didn’t open. Kathy looked back at the men and they shrugged.

  “Hey. Hey, Henry,” she said, gently shaking his arm. “I need to talk to you. Wake up.”

  “Not just now, he can’t,” a sweet, cultured girl’s voice said from the shadows. “Henry’s taken something to help him sleep.”

  Startled, Kathy turned toward the voice and saw a girl with a patch of iridescent gold scales around one eye. She could feel energy from this girl that the other tulpas didn’t have and a kind of barely reined-in anger. If Orrin and Edgar originally had been manifestations meant to guide him, then this one was clearly meant to protect him, and if Ernie was right about Henry’s not being a killer, then Kathy was willing to bet a good bit of his murderous rage was standing right in front of her.

  “You think you’re taking care of him,” Kathy said, keeping her voice even.

  “I’m keeping him safe and out of the way,” the girl replied. Her eyes were snakelike, full of subtle defiance and predatory cunning. It occurred to Kathy that the talisman she had just might not be strong enough to protect her, let alone all three of them.

  “That’s what I’d like to do, too,” Kathy said.

  “What you’d like to do,” the girl said, eyeing the talisman as she came closer, “is to convince dear Henry to make us go away.”

  “I can’t convince him of anything he doesn’t want himself,” Kathy said. She held still, her body tensing to move quickly should the girl strike. “Although I can’t imagine he’ll be too thrilled that you want to leave him.”

  An odd expression Kathy couldn’t quite place passed briefly over the girl’s face, and then that imperturbable calm held sway again. “After all we have done for Henry, he’s delighted to do something for us. He’s willing to help us in any way that he can.”

  “He isn’t willing because he doesn’t know, does he?” Kathy asked. “You’ve been going around behind his back, gathering your spells and rituals to grant yourself life—real life, not just a shade or reflection of life. You want what he has. And when you’re done with that, Henry will be of no use to you.”

  The girl tilted her head and studied Kathy. “You almost sound as if you think we don’t care about him. That’s not so. We’ve sheltered him his whole life. We’ve protected him against the things that would have killed him.”

  “And you killed for him. That’s why he’s here, isn’t it? Because you killed those kids?”

  “Don’t you know? We’re not real,” the girl said with a small laugh. It was an ugly sound, much older and more jaded than her young throat seemed capable of making. “We’re just Henry’s imaginary friends. He’s a sick boy. A lost, broken boy. And we’re just the parts of him he can’t resolve or let go of.” The last part sounded bitter, and Kathy was struck by how Henry’s personification of anger was as much directed inward as it was outward.

  The girl glanced at Henry, then focused her golden gaze on Kathy again. “How did you get past Orrin and Edgar?” she asked suddenly.

  “We put them down. Just like we’ll put you down, if you won’t and Henry can’t.”

  “You can try,” the girl said with an amused smile.

  “We intend to do more than try,” Kathy said.

  “You can’t undo what’s been set in motion. No one can, not even sweet little Henry. Not now.” The girl sized up Kathy again, as well as the men standing mutely behind her. “Go ahead. Try to wake him up. He’s drugged pretty heavily. You won’t get what you’re after, but give it a try. You can’t stop us now. It’s no matter.”

  She backed up into the shadows from which she came, and for a few seconds, all Kathy could see were her eyes and glint of her scales.

  “It’s our world now,” the girl purred, and the last of her Cheshire Cat glow winked out.

  “Was that…one of them?” Holt asked from behind her. “Why didn’t she attack us like the others?”

  “She doesn’t think she needs to,” Kathy replied, “or doesn’t want to take the chance. Help me wake Henry up. We have to get to him before she finishes those rituals or she may very well be right.”

  Chapter 10

  Outside of Henry’s bedroom, the hospital began to change more rapidly. George Evers had returned and was tasked with infecting Dr. Wensler and the night guard, Vargas. He was also told to pile the dead bodies in the art therapy room on the third floor, where those who could absorb them would.

  In the bathrooms, green water began to flow hot enough into the sinks to steam the mirrors above them. The ivy liked that and snaked its way down the hall to toward the smell of the waters of home.

  In Wensler’s office, the big polished oak desk shook itself free of the junk on its back and joined one of the lobby chairs in the hallway. The chair wore the head of a blond woman in a security guard’s cap on its seat, and through the head’s eyes, it took in its new world.

  The waxy artificial potted plant from one of the fourth-floor offices had grown legs and taken a walk to the pharmacy closet. It had outfitted itself with syringes in every new plastic tendril, wrapped in every leaf, until it looked more glass and needle than plant. It couldn’t talk, but it waved its branches in delight, and the soft tinkling of glass and metal against each other sounded like music…or laughter.

  The television in the recreation room on the third floor came alive, crackling with energy as it unplugged itself from the wall with newly grown arms the shape and power of a gorilla’s. It cheered on the chess table’s transformation in the stolen voices of faraway broadcasts.

  The floor tiles all over cracked and split upward as the things taking root beneath began to grow. The ceilings dripped rocky stalactites of crystal.

  In the infirmary, Toby Ryan’s bed was empty, the sheets thrown back in a rumpled ball. The IV for his pain meds dangled beside it. There were no night nurses to notice, nor any doctors to wonder. The entire floor was empty.

  It wasn’t quiet, but it was empty.

  Toby knew what was happening, probably better than most. And as he limped painfully down the stairs toward the third floor and Henry Banks’s room on a stolen crutch from the supply closet, he hoped to hell his only living relative knew, too.

  * * * *

  It took a long time to wake Henry Banks. It had taken a lot of shaking and some smelling salts from the nurse’s station supply cabinet to bring him around, and then even then, he was groggy. He rubbed his shaved head with overlarge hands bound to skinny wrists. As he sat up, he glanced at each in turn, though he avoided
meeting Kathy’s gaze for too long. He seemed uncomfortable with her in the room; if he’d even registered her face, he hadn’t let on. She saw the boy had scars of his own—on the back of his neck and the underside of his jaw. She guessed them to be part of his painful collection of burns and deep cuts, and she felt a kind of empathy for him.

  He didn’t seem surprised to see them there in his room at night, though beneath his increasingly sullen expression, he looked worried. He stared at his lap and yawned. His breathing was slow and shallow, and his posture was so tightly cringing that it seemed he was trying to collapse inward.

  When he seemed sufficiently awake, Kathy tried to talk to him. “Henry Banks, I assume?” She was aware that often, her voice grazed people like a blade across the skin, just enough to put people on the defensive, and the boy looked like he’d spook easily. She tried to keep her voice soft. “I’m Kathy.”

  “I know who you are,” the boy mumbled.

  “You do?”

  “You’re Toby’s sister. Kathy Ryan.”

  Kathy forced a smile at the top of Henry’s head. “I am.”

  “He says you fight monsters.”

  “I suppose I do, from time to time.”

  Henry glanced up, but only for a moment. “Not monsters like us. A different kind.”

  “Many different kinds.”

  “He said you’d be coming eventually. I think he was hoping you’d visit him, too.”

  “I’m here to see you tonight.” Kathy tried to switch gears. “It’s very important. I’ve brought your friend Ernie and Detective Holt with me if that’s okay. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

  Henry finally looked up at her. “About what?”

  “About your friends.”

  A brief flicker of emotion, a mix of both fear and relief, crossed his face. “The doctors don’t believe they’re real.”

  “I know,” she replied. “But I do. I’d just like to know a little about them—what they’re like, where they’re from, that sort of thing.”