Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Kathy saw Henry’s intention in his expression. He was determined not to let his creation win. Maisie must have seen it, too, because those dead, black eyes grew wide in their sockets and she opened her mouth to protest.

  Henry never gave her a chance. He pitched himself off the roof and took Maisie with him, still struggling in his grasp.

  A couple of heartbeats later, the hospital shivered a little and the gold glow dispersed in an outward ring that lit up the ground beneath them. Then the night, the normal night, reclaimed the hospital grounds.

  Chapter 16

  They found Holt in some thick shrubbery close to the side of the hospital. He had a broken leg and possibly a sprained shoulder, but he was alive. He’d even joked about the odds of landing in the same bush from a fall off a roof twice in one week. It took Kathy and Ernie almost an hour to untangle Holt from the shrubbery. He was high up and the branches that had broken his fall were thick and very strong, more like a tree than a bush. Some of their jagged ends had pierced the outer portion of his thigh, while some had caught him in the meat on the back of one of his arms. All in all, though, he was conscious and in good spirits. He was alive only by sheer dumb luck, and he knew it. Holt insisted on avoiding hospitals or an ambulance. He needed time, he told them, to work out what to say to his superiors regarding the events of the night. There would be few bodies to recover, and a lot of paperwork, and after all they had been through, he wanted to keep Kathy and Ernie and even Toby out of the worst of the messy aftermath.

  Kathy made some phone calls and assured Holt that members of the Network would assist in his efforts to resolve the situation at Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital; they had done so in the past for plenty of law enforcement officials and others who Kathy recommended their assistance to. It was more important just then that they get him checked over and his wounds taken care of. He insisted he was okay, that they could set his leg in the infirmary and stitch him up there. Ernie was surprisingly knowledgeable about bandaging field injuries, as he called them, and within another hour or so, Holt was good to go. He might have a limp for the foreseeable future if not permanently, but he was fed antibiotics to prevent infection and patched up well enough to leave the grounds. Ernie, who also claimed to be holding up just fine, offered to drive him home.

  Kathy had seen it before; he and Ernie both would be okay for the night, chalking up their shaking hands and the hollow feeling in their guts to the experiences of the night and their narrow survival. There would likely be nightmares in the coming weeks and months, and little things would begin to fall apart—blood pressure, cholesterol, enlarged prostates. They might drink themselves to sleep for a while and might lose their train of thought sometimes. However, men like Holt and Ernie were made of tough stuff, and in the end, she thought they would be all right. She certainly hoped they would.

  As Kathy walked them down the front steps, the three of them deliberately avoided looking at the broken, disjointed, and partially burned body of Henry Banks, which lay sprawled in a puddle of blood about thirty feet away on the pavement. There was no trace of Maisie other than the damage she had done to Henry and a small sprinkling of glittering, golden dust between his open, encircling arms. Kathy genuinely felt sad for the boy. He’d been sad and angry and scared and brave, but ultimately, he’d known how dangerous his means of protecting himself from the world was. Kathy liked to believe that if heaven was a place or state of mind one could shape to one’s idea of a perfect paradise, Henry had found a way to go to Ayteilu instead of having it come to him.

  A scouring of the hospital turned up absolutely no trace of Ayteilu or its flora or fauna. The reversion to known reality seemed complete, and Kathy was relieved for that. Wensler would have a number of messes to clean up that even his best bureaucratic skills would have trouble sweeping away, but the encroaching, invading world was gone, at least. With the brain death of Henry Banks, the tulpas and their world had ceased to be, and with the destruction of tulpas, all the lesser creations of Henry’s had lost any chance to remain in this world separate from their creator.

  There was also no sign of the physical bodies of George Evers, John Farnham, Pam Ulster, Larry Myers, or the three security guards who had been on duty that night. There were indications, however, that those people had enough of the other world mixed into them that when it was banished, it took them with it. There were ID tags left in small piles of ash, tooth fillings, an arterial stent clotted with pieces of heart tissue, a badge wrapped in a scrap of dress pants, and a guard’s nightstick coated with blood. Maybe Holt would be assigned to the case.

  Kathy returned to the hospital roof, where Toby had insisted on staying until all the other loose ends had been tied up for the night. He’d wanted the fresh air, he said, before having to go back to his permanent prison cell. She told him he could have until just before dawn, and he agreed. They sat together in silence awhile, watching the lightening of the horizon. It reminded her a little of their childhood, of those nights stealing sips from the bottle he hid behind his bed.

  Finally, she spoke. “So why’d you do it? Why’d you help me?”

  Toby looked up at the fading stars—their stars, the right stars—and said, “I don’t know. I guess…I guess I changed my mind.”

  “About what?”

  “About wanting to watch the world end.” He looked at her with uncharacteristic tenderness. “I know there’s something wrong with me. There always will be. And I know you hate me for what I did to you. No, don’t say anything. You don’t have to. I know I did an unforgiveable thing to you. To the world, maybe. I don’t feel bad about what I did to those women. Sometimes I wish I could, but I don’t. And I know what that makes me. I don’t want your pity or sympathy or anything else. I just want you to know I do feel…I don’t know, something…about what I did to you.” He sighed and looked away. “That thing that’s wrong with me might well make me do it again to you or someone else, if I were free, though. So I’m not going anywhere. And that’s because of you.”

  “Oh?” Kathy felt intensely uncomfortable, unsure what to say to him. That hard, angry, hateful little part of her wavered with uncertainty.

  “The doc says I can’t feel, not like normal people do. There are one or two switches in my brain that are flipped the wrong way. But I think…well, I think I do love you, as much as someone like me can love another person. Which probably means nothing. So I’ll tell you the truth. I wanted you to think I helped you to protect you, to do what I couldn’t do for you these last few decades. To be there, like a brother should—like I used to be. But the truth is more complicated than that.”

  “How do you mean?” she asked, that discomfort seeping into her chest…into her heart.

  “Well, you were right, what you said about me a while back. About people like me, how we’re different. We go through the early part of life confused as to why people feel and think so differently than us, why they don’t have the same urges. Our emotions get…I don’t know, disconnected, or connected the wrong way. The wrong things happen at the wrong times and we get off on it. And then one day, something big happens. I guess it grows on you, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like one day something snaps into place and all the confusion and anger and sadness congeals into a kind of a high, a power trip. It’s like being lifted up from a crowd and feeling the sun after suffocating beneath the weight of the world. One day you’re a loner, a loser, and the next, you’re the secret apex predator of the human race. And it all makes a kind of internal sense, that it’s exactly the way it should be, and fuck anyone who doesn’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this,” Kathy said.

  “The doc says it’s a stressor that does it,” Toby went on, ignoring her. “The end of a relationship, maybe, or a death in the family, like Mom dying. Or it’s something at work, you know, like at your job.” He looked at her. “It unlocks something in the genes—our genes
. Now, a job like yours, with the kind of stressors that would drive most normal people insane…they haven’t affected you that way. Not yet.”

  “Why should they?”

  “Why shouldn’t they?”

  “I’m not like you,” she said softly.

  “You’re not as different from me as you think. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, I wanted you to think I helped save the world to keep you safe from evil. Evil like…me. But I think…I dunno, I think maybe I did it so there would be other chances for those stressors to break you. As long as you have a world to keep saving, there’s a chance one day those stressors will make you just like me. Then—”

  He stopped speaking abruptly. “Sun’s coming up,” he said.

  It was. Kathy felt gut-punched, and it took her a few seconds to realize she needed to get them both up and moving. He wanted her to break, to lose enough of her humanity that she became a monster, something destroyed and capable of destroying. He wanted to see her slip beneath the surface of human morality and decency and become feral like him. That hurt; it was a new cut that she supposed would take time to scar over. Then it occurred to her that maybe Toby didn’t mean that moment of broken humanity to be a thing that pulled her down into depravity, but in his own mind, raised her into something somehow more than human, a secret apex predator as he’d said, beyond the touch of things that hurt other mortal humans in the world.

  It was a fucked-up idea, but she thought she got the sentiment behind it—the only kind of brotherly love he was capable of giving. She understood that he wanted her to understand him, and maybe she did, maybe a little better than she ever had before.

  God help her, she understood.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” she finally said. “Let’s go, Toby.”

  She couldn’t convince Toby to go back to the infirmary, but he did let her help him back to his room on the third floor and settle him into his chair. She leaned in close but couldn’t bring herself to kiss his cheek, so she gave him a quick, awkward hug instead. She nevertheless felt desire and the beginnings of rage from him, and he knew it. They left it unspoken between them as she pulled away, that broken part of him that was never going to get fixed. All that had passed on the roof would be as wispy as her memories of joking and laughing, drinking and smoking with him in his room, fleeting moments of a different Toby than the man who had raped and murdered women, and would do so again if ever set free.

  That broken part of him that he had embraced and that she still feared was a kind of thoughtform of Toby’s own, too strong for either of them to conquer. She found that she could look over its shoulder, though, and offer him a little wave good-bye, and he could look around it to give her a little smile that for once was sincere and not snakelike.

  She locked the door behind her and retreated down the quiet, dark, empty hall without guilt and, finally, without tears.

  Acknowledgments

  Mary would like to thank Martin Biro, James Abbate, and the rest of the editorial staff at Lyrical. She’d like to thank Sue and Michael SanGiovanni, Christy SanGiovanni, Adam SanGiovanni, Michele and Mike Serra, Seedling, and Seed, and Brian Keene. Her love and appreciation for them is boundless

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  If you enjoyed Inside the Asylum, be sure not to miss the first book in the Kathy Ryan series by Mary SanGiovanni,

  In the rural town of Zarepath, deep in the woods on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, stands the Door. No one knows where it came from, and no one knows where it leads. For generations, folks have come to the Door seeking solace or forgiveness. They deliver a handwritten letter asking for some emotional burden to be lifted, sealed with a mixture of wax and their own blood, and slide it beneath the Door. Three days later, their wish is answered—for better or worse.

  Kari is a single mother, grieving over the suicide of her teenage daughter. She made a terrible mistake, asking the powers beyond the Door to erase the memories of her lost child. And when she opened the Door to retrieve her letter, she unleashed every sin, secret, and spirit ever trapped on the other side.

  Read on for a special excerpt!

  A Lyrical Underground e-book on sale now.

  Chapter 1

  In the town of Zarephath, Pennsylvania, just past the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border and northwest of Dingmans Ferry out by the Delaware Water Gap, there is a Door.

  Many stories about it form a particularly colorful subset of the local lore of the town and its surrounding woods, streams, and lakes. Most of them relate the same essential series of events, beginning with a burden of no small psychological impact, progressing to a twilight trip through the southwestern corner of the woods near Zarephath, and arriving at a door. Numerous variations detail what, exactly, must be presented at the door and how, but ultimately, these stories end with an unburdening of the soul and, more or less, happy endings. It is said “more or less” because such endings are arbitrarily more or less agreeable to the individuals involved than the situations prior to their visit to the Door of Zarephath. More times than not, the “less” wins out.

  There are some old folks in town, snow- and storm cloud–haired sept- and octogenarians who sip coffee and people-watch from the local diner or gather on front porches at dusk or over the counter at Ed’s Hardware to trade stories of Korea and Vietnam, and in one venerable case, World War II, and it’s said they know a thing or two about that door. The old-timers remember the desperation of postwar addictions and nightmares and what they used to call shell shock, of families they couldn’t help wearing down or beating up or tearing apart, despite their best efforts to hold things together. They remember carrying burdens, often buried but never very deeply, beneath their conscious thoughts, burdens that crawled their way up from oblivion and into nightmares and flashbacks when the darkness of booze or even just the night took over men who had once been children and who were expected to be men. They remember late-night pilgrimages through the forest on the outskirts of town, trekking miles in through rain or dark or frost-laced wind to find that door, and lay their sins and sorrows at its feet. And they remember that sometimes, forgetting proved to be worse.

  The old women too remember bruises and battered faces and blackouts. They remember cheating husbands and cancers and unwanted pregnancies and miscarriages and daughters being touched where they shouldn’t by men who should have protected them. The old women remember the Door in Zarephath being a secret, almost sacred equalizer that older women imparted to younger women, a means of power passed from one group whose hands were socially and conventionally tied to another. And they remember watching strong women fall apart under the weight of that power.

  And these old folks remember trying once to burn the door down, but of course, that hadn’t worked. The Door in Zarephath won’t burn because it isn’t made of any wood of this earth, anything beholden to the voracious appetite of fire. It had an appetite of its own that night, and no one has tried to burn it down since. Rather, the old-timers have learned to stay away from it, for the most part, to relegate the knowledge of its location and its promises to the same dusty old chests in the mind that the worst of their war stories are kept. There’s an unspoken agreement that as far as the Door in Zarephath goes, the young people can fend for themselves. While the folks in Zarephath won’t stop a person from using the Door, they aren’t usually inclined to help anyone use it. Not in the open, and not just anyone who asks about it. Behind some doors are rooms hidden for good cause in places human beings were probably never meant to know about—rooms meant never to be entered—and the old folks of Zarephath understand that for reasons they may never know, they were given a skeleton key to one such room. There’s a responsibility in that, the kind whose true gravity is maybe only recognized by those with enough years and experience and mistakes left behind to really grasp it.

  People often say the old-folks’ generation were stoic, used to getting by with very little and largely of a mind
frame not prone to histrionic anxiety or useless worry. People say it has to do with surviving the Depression and growing up in a simpler, more rugged time. But for the old folks in Zarephath, the strength of their fiber comes from what they remember—and from what they have come to accept forgetting. It comes from what they no longer choose to lay before the Door.

  * * * *

  To say the loss of Kari’s daughter, Jessica, had left a hole in her heart significantly understated the situation. It was more of a gaping maw in the center of her being, a hungry vortex that swallowed light and love, vibrancy and memory.

  It had swallowed her friendships early on. People, even the most well-meaning of them, rarely knew what to say when someone’s child died. Telling her time would heal all wounds sounded trite. Telling her everything would be okay sounded patronizing. How could such an inescapable hollowness ever be okay? And telling her Jessica was in a better place might come across as the biggest bullshit of all. There was no way anyone could possibly know what lay beyond the walls of mortality, and given the circumstances, the suggestion came across as being rather insensitive anyway. There was nothing even the most eloquent and empathetic could say to take away a hurt like that.

  “How are you holding up?” they’d ask with that look on their faces, part discomfort and part superiority in being somehow removed from such a horrible thing. Maybe the urge to slap that look off their faces showed through in her weak smiles and tired eyes. Or maybe her attempts to speak of banalities that went nowhere were just the kind of nothing-words that stalled relationships or even moved them backward. It was easier for people to drop away, couple by couple, then one by one. Eventually, those awkward meetings became fewer and farther between. The calls stopped coming, followed by the emails, and then eventually the texts petered off too. There were no further attempts to get her out of the house and reconnected with the world. She was a sinking ship and they were bailing before they got sucked into her currents. It was clear in their eyes, in their voices. It was in the distance they put between her and them. She had been relegated to a kind of camp or colony for people who had undergone an Awful Tragedy, a thing they were thankfully unable to relate to in any meaningful way.