Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Henry,” Maisie said coldly. “We would have spared your life.”

  Henry closed his eyes. “Go,” he said, and seemed to be concentrating, probably on deconstructing them, as Toby had suggested. “I want you all to go away.”

  Maisie and Edgar wavered again, growing transparent, but she clenched her fists and muttered something under her breath and they grew solid again.

  “Enough of this,” the Viper said. “Maisie, it’s time. Call in the Others.”

  Kathy felt something clutch her leg and looked down. Toby, holding his badly burned hands out like a beggar, was sitting on the grass, looking up at her. Pain etched lines into his face, and yet in that moment, he looked like the boy she remembered growing up with.

  “Pages twenty-four, seventy-three, and ninety-two. Force them back. Close the door behind them.” Then he passed out on the grass. She hadn’t realized it, but she was still clutching the book in her left hand. She looked from the book to him but had no time to check on him before a bright, multicolored glow on the horizon arrested the assembled group’s attention. Kathy’s gut tightened, remembering the thing that had attacked her in Toby’s room. There were more of them, evidently many, many more, and they were coming.

  “Oh, shit,” Ernie said, holding his artifact tightly.

  The Others crested the hilltops, forming a wide circle around Kathy and the group. Grouped together like that, they were a ring of light with writhing gray and black tentacles and mismatched human arms and legs dangling like jewelry from their cloudy masses. On the ground, interspersed between the tentacles, was a small army of beasts that looked to Kathy to be part everyday household item and part flesh. She saw a coffee table wolf, an ottoman frog-thing, and a number of sheets, towels, and articles of clothing twisted together to form angry, faceless soldiers. There were winged lawn mower beasts and snakelike brooms and rakes, a savagely mutated giraffelike thing that might once have been a vacuum cleaner, and birds made from odds and ends, bits of glass, wood, plastic, and even grass clippings. Shepherding those beasts were the black-smoke Wraiths and their electrical cousins. All told, there had to be hundreds of creatures waiting to attack—far more than their little individual artifacts could counter.

  “Do it, Edgar,” the Viper said.

  Kathy glanced at Edgar. He looked scared and a little hesitant. The socket around his red eye had grown purplish, like a bruise. He looked at Kathy with it, and there was almost an apology there in its crimson depths.

  Then Edgar whistled, and the Others came pouring forth, tightening the circle.

  Chapter 15

  Kathy began to read out loud. She tripped over the pronunciation of the first few words, got flustered, took a breath, and started again. She didn’t understand the nuances of everything she was reading, but she thought it was a pretty powerful banishment command. It probably would have been more effective if Henry had been casting the spell, but there had been no time to prepare him to say or understand the words. The world, she supposed, would have to make do with her attempts to dispel the tulpas.

  “Henry,” Ernie said, “if you got any way to stop this, I suggest you do it now.”

  Henry opened his eyes and glanced around. “Oh…oh my God, I—I…I can’t, I don’t know how…”

  “You’re going to die,” Maisie said. “All of you.”

  A murmur arose from the light clouds, a rush of whispering like wind over the mouths of bottles. Kathy couldn’t make out the words but had a feeling that the language was similar if not the same as the one she was reading. She suspected they were responding in a way, maybe trying to counter the dissipation commands. She read more loudly, over their growing din.

  In her periphery, she saw Holt and Ernie wielding their artifacts like swords as they kept an eye on the approaching horde. They closed ranks with Henry, who was crouched over Toby, shaking his shoulders.

  “Please wake up,” Henry muttered. “Come on, Toby. Please.”

  A gazellelike thing with a razor where teeth should have been broke from the tightening circle and galloped toward Holt on folding-chair legs. A birdlike lamp, the top of whose shade was a gaping maw of writhing, needlelike tongues, took to the air and swooped toward Ernie.

  Kathy read louder, faster.

  Suddenly, Henry stood. His body was shaking but his hands were clenched into fists. “Go!” he bellowed. “I want you gone!”

  Kathy glanced up and saw the first line of monsters fall. It was as if Henry’s words put up an invisible wall, and as soon as the beasts that had taken on furniture and tools to supplement flesh were torn apart. The momentum of the beasts was so great that they ran into Henry’s invisible wall like lemmings off a cliff. The flesh was shredded by unseen hands from the items it had absorbed, and the latter fell to the ground, stickily spattered with that black-blue ichor they seemed to bleed.

  Ernie and Holt cheered. Henry looked relieved. Toby groaned and opened his eyes.

  Kathy noticed that the black-smoke Wraiths slowed, even while the electrical ones charged ahead. For several minutes, the invisible wall crackled with electrical energy, glowing brightly and giving off an uncomfortable heat and smell of ozone. There was a bright ring of sparks, and then the electrical Wraiths, too, were gone.

  “Stop!” Maisie screamed. She was beginning to change; gone was any semblance of youthful innocence. The golden scales had taken over in large patches all over her, and her eyes had been swallowed by a black of deep and starless space, a black that could cause freezer burns with a glance.

  The Viper tried to cross the chalk and step outside the triangle. A spark of green exploded beneath his foot and he drew back, grimacing.

  “Go!” Henry roared, and the wall of his will burst outward in a supernova halo of force. It halved the ranks of the smoke Wraiths but didn’t dissipate all of them, nor did it seem to have any effect on the Others, whose colors pulsed with excited rapidity.

  Wobbling, either from the exertion or the sleeping pills or both, Henry sank to his knees, breathing heavily. He’d done what he could, but Kathy could see it had taken everything he had. From the corner of her eye, she also saw Toby motioning to the other men to help him up, and she renewed the energy of her reading.

  She turned the page and saw that the words came to a sudden stop. The written sentiment seemed to cut off mid-sentence, as if the author had been violently interrupted; stains in the margins and on the page just beneath the last line of words appeared to confirm it. Kathy looked at Toby and threw up her hands.

  “There’s nothing else!” she cried over the cacophony of the Others’ excited, angry, hungry, delighted voices. They were advancing again, with the few remaining Wraiths between them, pushing through the invisible boundary Henry had erected.

  “Just give me the book and let me handle the rest,” Toby said, leaning on Ernie. Seeing her expression, he added, “Trust me. Just this one time.”

  Kathy considered it, nodded, and handed Ernie the book. She couldn’t hear what he was saying over the voices of the Others, but she could see his lips moving, could see the sweat on his forehead dripping down the side of his face. The blank pages of the book wavered a moment, then filled with loops and pothooks and strange arabesques in ink not unlike the blood of Ayteilu’s beasts.

  Now, in the center of the triangle, Maisie and Edgar looked worried. The Viper looked angry. Kathy had never seen such rage in a human face or even in nonhuman faces, and she had seen many that could barely contain the hate behind them. Anything that had ever come close had been fueled by desperation, and she supposed in the Viper’s case, it was no different.

  Desperate beasts did desperate, dangerous things.

  The Viper grabbed Edgar suddenly and hoisted him into the air, then threw him out of the triangle.

  Maisie watched in surprise and horror as Edgar’s body broke the sparkling barrier of the tria
ngle in passing over it, smudging it open. The boy himself, who landed a few feet away on the grass, looked scared, broken, betrayed…and then in pain. Spears of green light rained down and pinned him to the spot, piercing his clothes, his semisubstantial flesh, his face, the dark hollow of his empty socket. He began to bleed everywhere.

  Then Edgar caught fire. It was liquid, almost beautiful in its emerald brilliance. It started on his legs on the shins of his pants and quickly spread up his body to his neck and cheeks. Edgar shrieked in terror and agony. His one eye flickered as he rolled back and forth across the grass, trying to put out the flames. Then he seemed to shrink a little and stopped moving. The flames went out. Edgar began to fade.

  The triangle prison holding Maisie and the Viper winked out, and the Viper stepped forward.

  Toby, who had been taking in the scene in his periphery as he chanted, held up a hand and shouted a phrase in that strange three-dimensional language, and a swirl of light opened a few feet away.

  “Why did you do that to Edgar?” Maisie shouted over the din, but she made no move toward the body. If Kathy had to guess, she seemed angry not so much because of what the Viper had done but because he’d done it without asking her first. She wrapped those almost childlike fingers around the base of the Viper’s throat, and Kathy thought she saw a brief instant of fear or surprise on the Viper’s face. Outwardly, though, he just smiled at her.

  “You have what you wanted,” the Viper said, meeting her angry gaze.

  Then the Others closed in.

  They were everywhere, those clouds of light and mist, a cacophony of sexless voices, a mad brawl of kicking legs and swinging arms. Their tentacles lashed wildly outward, and their smaller tendrils waved and stung. Their colors pulsed at crazed intervals that hurt the eyes and head. The Wraiths swam between them, darting mists of black ink stirred into water.

  Ernie swung his artifact at the encroaching clouds like a bat, and from the depths of their light, they giggled. He missed more than he hit, but those few instances where the artifact connected with a probing, strangling tentacle or stolen arm or leg left smoking indentations in the appendages. Kathy lost him and Holt in the fog of the Others’ pressing bodies, but she could hear them both shouting and grunting as they wielded their artifacts in defense.

  Henry and Toby flanked the portal. Kathy could see them through the mists, both black and hazy gray, because the monsters didn’t go near them. They all seemed to instinctively know what that swirling blue was, the size and shape of a full-sized mirror, pulling inward like a little black hole. In Toby’s case, the words he was saying, as well as his proximity to the portal, were staving them off. With Henry, Kathy supposed it was some vague respect, like for a father figure. They swarmed all around him, but none wiggled so much as a tendril or finger in his direction. Likewise, Henry stood there, eyes closed, just feeling his creations all around him.

  Sensing where Kathy was most vulnerable, they went after her injuries—tentacles lashed her shoulder, her half-frozen hand, an old knee injury. There were too many of them; she had to get away.

  Kathy stumbled toward Toby and Henry, coughing as the Others’ clinging mist slid wet and cold down her throat. She stabbed at the clouds of light with her artifact when they got too close. One yanked hard on her hair with a rotting human hand. Another tried to wrap a tendril of slimy gray around her throat, but she pressed the artifact to it until it fell sizzling to the ground.

  She heard Holt cry out, and through a parting of the Others’ bodies, she could see that a Wraith had taken hold of his wrist. There was a teeth-jarring crunch of bone as the Wraith tried to “rearrange” his hand into something else. She could see splinters of bone sliding under the skin of his swollen, purple hand, whose shape was elongating into something like a claw or a long pair of shears.

  He switched the artifact to his good hand and swung at the Wraith, obliterating half of its head in a wispy trail of vapor.

  Toby shouted a string of words and the world stopped; that’s what it felt like to Kathy, that all sound and all movement had stopped. The Others were no longer a frenzy of slashing, whipping tendrils and tentacles, punching arms and kicking legs. Their pulsations ceased. No one moved. No one even breathed.

  A few seconds later, the world revved back into action. The wild, chaotic laughter of the Others had become wails of surprise as the swirling blue portal began to suck them in. Many stretched thin, nearly to the point of bursting, and then were drawn into that endless blue. First, she could make out Ernie, who had several small cuts and slashes on his face and arms but looked otherwise unharmed, then Holt, who was holding it together despite the mangled, split-open, pus-oozing thing that had once been his hand.

  The Others scrambled to hold on to something, anything, as the force of Toby’s portal, combined with the will of Henry Banks, sucked them up into some alternate space. Whether that was back in Henry’s imagination or subconscious or some faraway dimension, Kathy didn’t know and didn’t care. They were disappearing, and that was all that mattered.

  When the last of them whooped and howled and disappeared into the blue void, it closed with a little snap, and the world grew dark. Kathy felt a lurching sensation like the first movements of a roller coaster or a descending elevator, and then the sky lightened.

  They were on a roof—the roof of the hospital—she, Henry, Toby, Ernie, and Holt.

  Then she saw Maisie and the Viper.

  Her heart sank. They were, perhaps, too strong to undo with spirit spells. They might have siphoned off just enough of the Others’ energy to become permanent in this world, neither entirely flesh nor spirit but something in between. Something real, she thought, and very deadly.

  Henry grabbed the artifact from her hand and rushed Maisie, eyes blazing. When he got close enough, the Viper punched him in the mouth. Henry reeled from the blow, then charged the Viper, who grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the ground. Henry clawed at the Viper’s arm, but it held him a foot or so off the ground like a steel girder. His face began to turn an unpleasant red.

  Kathy raised the artifact, intent on bringing it down squarely on the Viper’s arm, but his closer one was free and it darted out and punched Kathy in the eye. She went down hard on her back, the wind knocked out of her. As she gasped for air and tried to sit up, she brought the artifact down on the toe of his boot.

  He shouted, more in annoyance than pain, and kicked out at her, connecting with her bad shoulder. The force of the kick was hard enough to shove her back a few feet, and the artifact skittered out of her grasp.

  Suddenly, the Viper’s eyes grew wide and his mouth gaped open. Streams of blue-black dribbled over his chin and from the small snake slits of his nose. A face, burned and half-faded, rose above the Viper’s shoulder as the latter sank to his knees. It was little more than a charred remnant, not unlike the Wraiths in substance and color, but Kathy recognized that brightly glowing red eye. Edgar had taken the artifact from the ground and plunged it into the Viper’s back, and his own marred hand had begun to dissolve from contact with it.

  He glanced once at Henry, and the apology was just there under the burned and flaking features, and in the fading light of that red eye. Then the light went out and he collapsed in a sizeable pile of ash which, a few seconds later, was carried away on a wind Kathy didn’t feel.

  When the Viper collapsed, his body burst open into a multitude of black snakes and serpents, which slithered off into the shadows of the hospital roof. Their angry hisses faded as, ostensibly, they faded from existence, too.

  While her friends were dying, Maisie had been changing. All the embezzled energy she had taken from the others like her made her shine; she hovered a foot or so off the ground in a bright golden glow. Within, she had become something almost fishlike, a siren with long, long fingers and even longer claws, with soulless eyes and sharp little teeth. Her hair streamed and waved in the air above her li
ke that of a drowning woman. Kathy would have said there was almost a serenity about her, except that she felt the hate radiating off that glowing body like its own kind of heat and knew that Maisie was gathering strength to attack.

  Before Kathy could warn the others, she turned that hate on Toby. She made a motion as if she were picking him up by the front of his shirt, and he rose in the air about six or seven feet. Then she mimed slamming him into the roof, and he came down hard. Kathy thought she heard a bone break. Sweat broke out on Toby’s forehead and he groaned. Ernie hustled over to him and knelt beside him, checking for mortal wounds. For a moment, Kathy thought Toby might pass out, but he managed to nod that he was okay to Ernie and then force out a few other shouted words in that in-between-worlds language. Maisie’s head rocked back as if she’d been slapped by a large, invisible hand.

  Her anger shrank and grew hard in those dead eyes, and she pulled back her fist to go at Toby again, but Holt stepped between them.

  “It’s over,” Holt said. “You’re alone. You’ve lost.”

  “I never expected to be anything else but alone,” Maisie said sweetly. She shot forward, and this time, actually took a clump of Holt’s coat in her fists. She opened her mouth and a wet gurgling came out of her throat. Then she hurled him off the roof like she was tossing a piece of wadded-up paper into a wastebasket. His yell was one of surprise rather than fear as he sailed into the night sky and disappeared over the side…and then it stopped abruptly.

  Kathy felt a pang of sadness wrapped in anger. “You bitch,” she said.

  Maisie smiled. The golden glow around her arced toward Kathy like a tiny comet, and Kathy turned her head. The part of her face still exposed, though, felt hot and uncomfortable. The second shot of heat hit her with such force in the stomach that it knocked her over.

  “No!”

  Kathy looked up to see Henry charge Maisie, wrapping his arms around her waist and knocking her out of the sky. Her halo of gold intensified, and Kathy could smell burning hair as that halo engulfed Henry. Still, Maisie was wavering in his arms. She struggled against his grip, but Henry kept her pinned to him. They stumbled toward the edge of the roof.