Inside the Asylum

by Mary SanGiovanni

  That gaping maw had swallowed her job, as well. Her boss had been gracious in granting her time off from the office. He’d given her weeks, a month, and then another. She had dipped into and then run dry her long-term disability time. And when she’d come back to the office, the Mondays and Fridays when she couldn’t find a reason good enough to get out of bed looked bad. Her zoning out during production meetings looked bad. Her stacks of unfinished paperwork looked bad. She’d quit after enough “please close the door” conversations led her to believe she was on the verge of being fired.

  It had swallowed her marriage, certainly. Steven hadn’t managed more than a few months in the house, the two of them passing each other like solemn ghosts from different eras, unseeing, unhearing, and unable to comfort each other in the grief that had overwhelmed them both. When he finally drifted away for good, out of the house and into an apartment in another state, he became no more than a name on divorce paperwork and a face in old pictures she tucked away in a box.

  She hadn’t lasted much longer there in the house amid the dust and empty picture frames. If Jessica’s spirit had haunted the old house instead of her memory haunting Kari, then it might have been more bearable. At least she’d be able to feel some presence of and closeness to her daughter. But the girl wasn’t there, at least not so far as Kari could tell. The girl had fled that house and that life, and wherever her soul was, it seemed far beyond Kari’s reach. So Kari had fled that old house and life too. The problem was, although the new house in Zarephath was the only thing that had gone well in a long time, it didn’t feel like home, not like the one with Jessica’s room, plastered as it was with posters of smiling, clean-cut objects of innocent preteen crushes. Not like the one with Steven’s clothes on his side of the closet and his keys on the table by the front door. She supposed her sense of security and family had been engulfed by that gaping maw too.

  Finally, it had swallowed her sense of self. Her sleep was shot to hell, and the depression and anxiety had become so bad that who she was no longer existed without the meds. Kari hated what the meds did to her; rather, she hated what the lack of meds in her system did. First, there was the headache, a storm of pain that gusted not just around her head, but up her nose and through her sinuses, behind her eyes and down her throat. There was the heavy weight of heat that made her sweat, a sour kind of sweat that turned her stomach if she lifted an arm or turned her head toward her shoulder. Then came the dizziness, an offshoot of the headache whose roots seemed to reach down into her arms, hands, and fingers, sucking the strength out of them and making them shake. Her eyes would narrow to a glare from the pain and fog. Within her chest, a growing sense of unease would turn into a panic whose edges fluttered far from and untethered to any rational ground.

  It was during those times that the memories of Jessica hurt worst. In fact, there were so many memories that she was starting to forget what it was like not to hurt.

  She felt all those things the night before she found out about the Door in Zarephath. It coincided with the one-month mark in the new house, and perhaps more importantly, the eve of the third anniversary of Jessica’s passing. If it were possible, the pain was sharper and deeper and more all-consuming now than it had been in those nightmare-blur first weeks right after finding Jessica’s body. Losing someone, she thought, was like quitting an addiction. First there came the withdrawal pangs of the mental and physical sort, the ache of not being able to hear her laughter or footsteps on the stairs, see her smile or hug her, smell the child-hair smell. But in a way, the routine, the comfortable familiarity, was a much tougher part of the habit to break. Kari found she still looked out for the school bus at five minutes to three, still made sure the door was unlocked and checked the sidewalk for Jessica’s approach from the bus stop. She still found herself sometimes at the bottom of the stairs to call her daughter down for dinner or call up to tell her to brush her teeth and that Kari would be up in a minute to tuck her little girl in. She still made lists of toys to buy her daughter for Christmas, still perused the Halloween costumes for something Jessica might like. She wasn’t sure if those rote actions were her way of proving she was still there, still Mom, or if they meant she herself had become a shade stuck in an endless loop of repeating the past.

  That night before, as she bent over the dishwasher, she grabbed a handful of serrated knives by their blades. They pressed into the skin of her palms, cold but not hard enough to cut her. Her hand shook and she dropped them to the counter with a clatter.

  She was due to have lunch the next afternoon with Cicely, the nice old lady next door and one of her only acquaintances in Zarephath, or anywhere at all anymore. They had planned on the Alexia Diner on Dingmans Turnpike, and over what had become their weekly coffee and hot open-faced turkey sandwiches, she intended to tell Cicely she was finished—with life, with everything, with trying to fight the current to be normal, functional, and in the process of healing. She wasn’t any of those things, and she couldn’t pretend anymore. She was cocooned in her personal world of grief and simply saw no other ways to break free. And no amount of friends’ well-meaning attentiveness or love or understanding, and no amount of her own swallowing of pain and indignation and unfairness could make up for it.

  The loss of Jessica felt like a fist crushing what was left of her heart in her chest. And she was simply finished. The guilt and the sadness were too much to carry alone.

  She had hidden the note from Steven. She’d hidden it from everyone. It felt like the last thing, the only thing, she could do to protect her precious daughter. She’d found it crumpled into a tight little ball in Jessica’s fist. The girl’s reasoning was suggested in a few neat lines of looping girlish script. She couldn’t keep secrets anymore; there were so many and she felt so guilty and embarrassed and even afraid, but mostly, she was exhausted.

  Kari knew how she felt.

  She picked up one of the knives again, entertaining the kind of thought that had come to fill in those tight little end spaces where her mind let memories of Jessica trail off. End-cap thoughts, was how she’d come to think of them. This one was less refined than some of the others; it involved a lot of blood—a tubful, maybe—and the indignity of being found naked or maybe just in her underwear. Messy and embarrassing and probably painful, if cutting her legs while shaving and letting them slip back under the warm water was any indication.

  Her almost-twelve-year-old daughter had done something and gone somewhere she never had been and could never have imagined, had lived a part of her life and ended it without her mother and father, and that seemed wrong. It seemed wrong that children that age should ever feel the need to take on adult things like that, especially alone. Kari didn’t want Jessica to be alone. And if Jessica could open that door to another plane of existence, then how could Kari call herself a decent mother and yet not have the guts to follow?

  Kari put down the knife.

  She’d talk to Cicely. Then she’d decide.

  * * * *

  People like Toby Vernon built entire lives and whole senses of self around lies. Lies were the brick and mortar that built cities, even empires, of good faith, goodwill, and human connection. Among the sharply honed senses of the predator was a toolbox of excuses and fabrications based on body language, expressions in the eyes, and tones of voice, wielded quickly and efficiently to achieve a result. Lies allayed fears or manipulated them, soothed guilt or exacerbated it. Of all the talents to protect and develop as a primary survival skill, lying was at the top of the list.

  And people like Toby were good at it.

  He was turning forty that year, which meant he had spent the last twenty-four years since his conviction, incarceration, and release perfecting his ability to lie. He had learned to change like a chameleon. He could be charming, unassuming, unworthy of notice or comment. He was also selective and, at times, ruthless. And it had been almost two and a half decades gone by since he had been arrested
or convicted of anything that had to do with children.

  However, his confidence, and with it some of his skill, had waned after the girl in Dingmans Ferry. It wasn’t that he didn’t know deep down, deeper than his lies and justifications could reach, that he hurt children. He had, in the past, tried to justify it as a necessary evil, a means of pain management or sedation or simply an inexorable addiction. He was not so deluded as to think the children were unaffected by his…attentions. It had never been so clear to him, though, nor had it ever inspired such self-loathing, as it had with that girl. Something changed after that. Toby had taken a good look at his life the last four decades or so and realized that all that perfected lying had never been perfect at all. He had never escaped his mother’s belief that he was a monster, pure and simple, the kind that most of the rest of the world would see put down sooner than a rabid dog.

  It made him afraid of others, as if he were somehow suddenly exposed. Mostly, it made him afraid of himself, a notion he wasn’t used to and didn’t like at all.

  Toby had always wanted to be normal, to date regular adult women, to get married. When he’d realized, much to his disappointment, that his sexual attraction to preadolescent girls wasn’t something he could outgrow or ignore, he’d resigned himself to what he was. In fact, he’d suppressed instead that sad, self-pitying hope of ever getting better. After the Dingmans Ferry girl, though, that need to feel normal reemerged, and it was almost—not quite, but almost—as strong as the urges themselves. He didn’t want to feel self-loathing every time he drove past a playground or worry that the hawk-eyes of watchful mothers in grocery stores were judging him with disapproval and hostility. He no longer wanted to feel that old familiar tension and discomfort throughout his body at the birthday parties of family’s and friends’ children.

  There were only so many times one could park a half-block or so from the middle school during recess and come to a boil of lust and shame, only so many uncomfortable drives home with a hard-on in his pants and the echoes of his mother’s disgusted words in his head, before it came time to admit to being at a crossroads. Down one way lay peace; there might never be redemption, but there might be some cosmic credit for and solace in having overcome the basest part of himself. Down the other way meant the risk that one day, those little bloodied flower-print panties were going to end up shoved down some slender, pretty little throat or some fragile set of growing bones was going to break. He didn’t want that. Lord knows, he didn’t want it to come to that.

  He asked the gods behind the Door to take the urges away.

  Edward Richter had told him about the Door. He knew Ed from the hardware store, where the old man had been working stocking shelves and ringing up purchases for the last seventeen years. Ed was more than a familiar face around town, though Toby wasn’t sure he could quite classify Ed as a friend. Ed shared the same affliction, a predilection for children, though his preference was for little boys. Toby had seen it right away: the familiar mannerisms and expressions and the wolfish look in the eyes, just as he supposed Ed had recognized the same in him. It was a tenuous bond between them, for hunting is a lone pastime, and a lonely one.

  He and Ed got together once a month, usually at Ed’s house, a small, pale-yellow bi-level on the edge of town out by the woods. They drank beers and vented about work or politics or debated the merits of the Mets vs. the Pirates. Sometimes they talked about their respective stints in jail. Sometimes they talked about children. But until that one night three weeks prior, Ed had never mentioned the Door. No one had, in all the years Toby had lived in Zarephath.

  “Well, Ed,” Toby had said that night in response to Ed’s asking after his well-being, “I’ve hit a wall, I think.”

  “In what way?” Ed cocked an eyebrow at him and sipped his beer.

  Toby shook his head. “I drove past the park yesterday—you know the one out on Miller Road, by the firehouse?”

  Ed nodded. The flash in his eyes, imperceptible to anyone but a fellow predator, told Toby that Ed knew it well.

  “There was this little girl. She was sitting on top of the monkey bars, with her feet dangling over and the wind moving little blond strands of her hair across her cheek…She was beautiful, Ed. I mean stunning. I wanted her. But…it was more than just wanting her. It wasn’t enough, just watching her.”

  A small, uncomfortable smile passed over Ed’s lips. “It seldom is.”

  “I wanted to hurt her, Ed.”

  The older man looked up in surprise. “Oh?”

  “I don’t know, it was…not like the other times. It was more intense a feeling, more…primal. Savage. I never felt that before…at least, not to that extent, you know?”

  “Can’t say that I do,” Ed said, shifting in the chair. “Not that I’m judging, mind. Just not familiar with what you’re describing.” Something in his eyes and the tone of his voice led Toby to believe Ed was lying. It was the subtlest shift to survival mode through denial and diminishing. Toby wasn’t going to argue, though.

  “I can’t keep on like this. I need to do something before I…hurt someone. Jesus.” He rose, stalking to the far corner of the den with his beer. Suddenly that little room seemed incredibly stifling to him, with its dim, seventies color scheme and old furniture that clung to its ghosts like a dust shroud. “I can’t take it anymore. I wish I could carve this whole part of me away, make these feelings just dry up.”

  “And therapy…?”

  Toby groaned. “It’s useless, man, especially in the short-term. You know that. And I’m frankly terrified a shrink will suggest the surgery. I guess maybe I could do the drugs, but the guys on the forum who are taking them seem so miserable, or just numb to everything. I don’t want to be like that, either. Plus, there are all these possible side effects—serious ones.” He sighed. “I don’t know what to do. I just want to be normal. I want the urges to go away. I’d do anything at this point. Christ, maybe I should be on those damn drugs…” He shook his head. He felt lost.

  “Well, uh…there is another way. No drugs, no surgery, and no therapy. But you have to be really sure, really clear in your own head about what you want. Is that what you really want?”

  Toby turned to the old man. “Yeah, yeah, of course. Wouldn’t you, I mean, if you could get rid of that part of you that feels what we feel for kids, wouldn’t you cut it out of you? It’s like a tumor, Ed. I’d just as soon be rid of it.”

  Ed cleared his throat. His gaze was fixed on his beer bottle, but Toby knew he had something to say, hanging there just behind that unsmiling mouth.

  “What?” Toby prompted.

  “Well…there’s the, uh…the Door.”

  “What? What door?”

  “The Door…you know.” Ed gestured toward the window and beyond it, the edge of the forest. “The one out in the woods. The Door.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ed. The door to what? And what does it have to do with me?”

  “Ain’t no one ever told you about the Door? For fuck’s sake, how long have you lived in this town?”

  “Ed, what door?”

  Ed gazed at his beer for several seconds before answering. “It’s a Door that…gives you stuff. Or takes stuff away that you don’t want anymore. Like suppose your old lady is cheating on you with the guy down the street, right? Well, you go to the Door—you have to go alone, see, at night—with a letter. You fold the letter and seal it with wax that has drops of your blood in it. And inside, the letter asks for your wife not to see the guy anymore, or for the guy to just go away, right? Just up and disappear. And in three days—never heard of it taking no longer or shorter—you get what you want. Like, the guy gets hit by a bus, maybe. Or he just vanishes, no trace, just gone. You get your old lady back. Maybe.”

  “You’re kidding me.” But Toby could tell that the older man wasn’t, just as he could see the predator behind Ed’s grandfatherly eyes. Ed
was serious; he believed what he was saying whole cloth.

  Ed shook his head slowly. “You ask any of the old folks around here. They’ll tell you. The Door is real. Go out, see for yourself. It’s standing out there, plain as day. One of Zarephath’s great unkept secrets. And it does work, just like I told you. You ask for something to be taken away, like, like your attraction to little girls there, and you will get what you want. Though I gotta say, it may not be like you think…and you can’t take it back. You can’t undo what you asked. And you sure as hell can’t open the Door no matter what, no sir.”

  “So you think a magic door is going to solve my problems? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  Ed shrugged. “Poke fun all you want, but you go see if I’m telling tales. Go see.”

  “If it’s so great and powerful, then why haven’t you ever used the Door?”

  Ed gave him a faint smile. “I’m an old man. Not much of a sex drive anymore. No real need. Besides, I guess when I was a younger man, I was…selfish. Selfish, and a little afraid of giving up the only thing I knew, only thing I was sure about. And of course, the old folks at the time made sure I knew about the drawbacks, just as I guess I ought to make sure you know.”

  “Drawbacks?”

  “You don’t get nothing for free, Toe. You know that. Like I been tryin’ to say, there’s risk, using that Door. Always risk.” He sipped his beer thoughtfully. “Of course, it sounds like there’s a mighty big risk in your not using it at this point too. Guess it’s up to you.”