Chaos Read online

  CHAOS

  BEFORE ONE

  The voices used words Julie didn’t always know, but the tones, the underbreath meaning, she understood well enough. They told her about death’s mouths gaping open to devour her in the darkness with teeth and tongues of flame. They told her about storm clouds pressed into blade-shapes that cleave the glassy eyes of dolls. They told her about broken cats and viper pits and facial rot. And because they talked so much and so often and so dirty, dirty-ugly all the time, she knew she’d never be able to leave. The doctors, who couldn’t hear anything, would never let her go. No one wanted heads full of doorways, or houses full of a head’s worth of voices. Those voices said things in words so bad and dirty, she thought the owners of the voices must poison whatever invisible mouths spoke with them from the other place. Sometimes she wanted to lean her head toward the spot where she’d first heard them—the black puddle. She thought maybe if she did, though, her ear would go through the black and come out on the other side, in their world, like when she was a girl digging on the beach, trying to dig all the way through to China. She was scared her ear would fill forever with those ugly voices, compounding and multiplying until the noise was so great she’d have to dig them out with a spoon or something. Even without benefit of her rare lucid moments, she knew that would not be good.

  From the window of her room on the third floor, she could see the sloping grounds of Bridgehaven Asylum’s front lawn falling away into darkness. The black puddle could have spread. Beyond the small, sharp circumference of light from the eastern parking lot lamps, the world could have been eaten up for all she knew. She could be alone, floating on an isolated remnant of the human world. All around the building, alien voids could be filling with alien stars and chilling foreign emptiness, churning and swirling and crashing. She shivered. For all she knew, they had set loose the death mouths to chip away at the world she’d always known, and now they had free reign to get inside the building, inside her, and stuff her to bursting with their dark suggestions and dirty words and strange poison.

  Julie wrapped her thin arms just beneath her ribs. She got pains in her stomach sometimes, and she was sure the dark from that other place had infected her when she touched it, and gnawed at her insides. The doctors said that wasn’t true, that the symptoms were in her head, but when the pain yawned and then growled in her gut, she felt afraid. And sometimes the pain would be in her head, quite literally—stabbing bolts of blinding agony followed by the frenetic jumble of the whispered voices. That was worse than the pain in her gut. During those times, her mind showed her terrible pictures—a bloody altar of rock, piles of flayed skin and bleached bones stacked like firewood, the death mouths. She hated it. Even the pills couldn’t cleanse the stain of those images from her mind.

  ***

  Across the hall, Mrs. Rossi neatly unfolded her suicide note and laid it on her pillow. Then she crossed over to the door, straightening her clothes as she did. They were soft clothes: a light sweatshirt and elastic-waistband sweatpants. Nothing with zippers or snaps or drawstrings, or anything hard or sharp. Her hair hung gray-black and straight, not-quite-yet unclean but close, falling in her pale, doughy, dead-eyed face. She peered into the hallway. Julie in the room across from hers was muttering to herself. She could see the girl standing by her window, a frail wisp of a thing faded somehow, as if whatever sharpness of color or feature that solidified a person’s place in the world had been bled out of her.

  Mrs. Rossi hated her. It was Julie who had opened up the Pandora’s door to the other place, a place beyond but somehow inside the Asylum, existing over and under and through the Asylum. It was all that little waif’s fault. Skinny little straw bitch, she was, a scarecrow with a sharp pin sticking out of her heart, sharp enough to have pierced into something dark and awful.

  She swallowed the anger that knotted in her throat as she crossed back to her bed. She looked down at the note, written with drawing paper and a felt-tipped marker she’d taken from the art therapy room. Her gaze traced her tight-looped, heavy-stroked script, slanted slightly to the left.

  Maybe not all the waif’s fault, but mostly. Mostly.

  Mrs. Rossi had been committed for exhaustion, as she told it, in 1993. She’d been a very nervous sort, the kind whose anxieties took on intolerably unmanageable proportions. She didn’t sleep well, nor did she eat well, which she blamed on vividly bad dreams and a nervous stomach. She’d forget things—sometimes only little things, like where she put her car keys or what she had done with her checkbook, and sometimes bigger things like working and bathing. Her skin was raw in patches on her arms and legs and the backs of her hands, where she’d scratched and then washed off and rewashed off the film of germs from the outside world. Her nephew and niece had been concerned. But all things considered, she wasn’t the dangerous type. She wasn’t on the suicide watch, nor was she considered any kind of threat to herself or others—certainly not on her pills, and not under supervision. She was just tired, was all—worn out—and the doctors and nurses and orderlies knew that. Maybe she sleepwalked, but she was sure that had only developed since she’d been here. It seemed a few other odd quirks had developed, too, during her residency at Bridgewood Asylum. The anger, for one thing. And that unsettling sort of feeling she got sometimes like waking up from a dream or a nightmare, that twilight feeling of not quite being sure where unreal ends and real begins. Still, she had never been a threat. They didn’t watch her like they watched most of the others. She wasn’t—well, she hadn’t been, until now—a problem for anyone. Lately, though, she knew what was happening. It was just a suspicion at first, but it grew and took shape in her mind. So she had prepared. The imps and phantoms that Julie had let slip across demanded blood before they’d go away. The chaotic ones. They demanded screams to drown out the moaning in the darkness.

  Mrs. Rossi would make sacrifices. That girl from across the hall, that stupid little schizo bitch who’d let them all cross over—she would be the first in making things right.

  True, it had been Mrs. Rossi who had found the spot where the other world bled through. She’d been taking a walk outside during recreation time, enjoying the autumn breezes, the late afternoon sun thin but warm and gold on her face, when she happened to look down and see it, pooled half under the east wing’s concrete foundation, three feet away from the art therapy room window on the far shady side. It was an amorphous puddle whose boundaries shifted and changed, ebbed and flowed, breathing its blackness across a span of about three feet. Its dimensions were strange; it wasn’t quite a hole, seeming to have no depth at all, and yet Mrs. Rossi was sure that if she reached into it, her hand would pass through into nothingness and keep going. It tainted the space around it, Mrs. Rossi noticed. The stucco had a washed-out quality that made it seem less a thing of substance and more a suggestion of a backdrop; the same effect leaked out onto the grass, fading it to a dull waxy yellow. Its reek made her eyes water and burned the inside of her nose like bleach, an acrid smell so strong it was almost a taste. Beneath that, warm air like a breath from a decaying throat gusted up from the black.

  She’d looked around the grounds. It had been a wonder, actually, that no one had found it before her. Julie was talking to an invisible someone on one of the nearby soapstone benches. Mr. Ottermeier sat slumped to the left on another bench farther away, while Angela, a young, full-figured red-head, whispered things in his ear beneath the soft snow drift of his hair that only they two could know. Carter tossed an imaginary ball (or, knowing Carter, a radio, a bomb, an elephant) into the air and caught it, tossed it and caught it, and griped and pulled away when Janelle tried to take whatever it was from him. Orderlies milled around, keeping an eye on things.

  Mrs. Rossi looked back down at the spot. She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed
closer, as if it had sensed her and was reaching out, flowing in her direction. She took a couple of cautious steps closer to it. She thought at first she could hear singing, very faint, coming from somewhere deep inside and well beyond the...what was it? A wound in reality? Her gut seemed to believe that. She frowned, and took a few more measured steps closer.

  No...it wasn’t singing, then. It was moaning. It reminded Mrs. Rossi of wind across an open bottle neck, only...sadder. Much sadder, much emptier, more hollow. The tone rose and fell, rose again, held, sank. It was heartbreaking, the sound—so much so that she began to feel dizzy, tottering at the lip of the spot, her chest tight and full of sharp things, her throat choked with the awful despair she breathed in. Her vision blurred, and she let the tears fall.

  A sudden scream made her jump, uttering a little cry of her own. It cut off just as suddenly, as if that degrading throat from which it came were suddenly strangled into silence, or slit. She blinked, shook her head, and moved away until the resumed moaning seemed like a breeze that had already moved past her.

  Mrs. Rossi had only wanted someone else to confirm what she was seeing. Lately, especially lately, she saw things sometimes, so she hadn’t really wanted to draw a lot of attention to that, no sir. She didn’t want meds changes and extra counseling. All she’d wanted was confirmation, another set of eyes agreeing to the verity of the pulsing puddle of ichor beneath the foundation. She’d called to Julie, who stopped chatting up the soapstone bench and came over. Julie had seemed fascinated, almost entranced by the wound (that seemed an apt way to think of the puddle, as a wound in the world). She had heard the moaning too, only she claimed there were words stuck in the sound like splinters in the skin. She said the words were sad and awful, worse than her other voices. When she’d looked up at Mrs. Rossi, her big blue eyes twinkled behind tears.

  Maybe Mrs. Rossi had found the spot, but it was that goddamn skinny-assed bitch across the hall who’d stuck her fool hand in it to pet the sad voices. She’d reached into it, shivered, and pulled a lump of the other world out. Like sand or smoke, it dissipated in Julie’s hand, first in chunky black wisps and then to nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. She’d broken whatever weak membrane stretched between worlds, and in so doing, she’d let the other place in. Mrs. Rossi was sure of it; she could feel it. That wound, that soft tissue between this world and what she knew in her gut was an alien place of damaged, insane, breathing outer darkness, carried an infection. Over the weeks that followed, she could feel its abandon, its savage disregard for order and sense, permeating the bedrooms, the group therapy rooms, the hallways. It was wild, indifferent, a feral intelligence that pooled and spread and drifted like thick smoke all around them. It terrified her, and at the same time, made her feel alive and strong. Alive and dangerous. In control.

  Beneath the pillow on her bed was Mrs. Rossi’s knife. She reached under the cool linen and pulled it out. It was made from the handle of a paintbrush, one of those old wooden ones and not the plastic kind. She’d swiped it from the art therapy room by slipping it under the band of elastic in her bra, right under Ricardo’s nose. She could have a bra. She was a lady, after all, and she had never given the staff, especially Ricardo, reason to believe she’d use it against them.

  She’d spent a long time biting at the paintbrush handle, shaping one end into a point with her fingernails and teeth. Slow and tedious work, that, not to mention the nervous butterflies in her stomach every time one of the orderlies walked past the piece of loose wall plaster near her bed where she’d been hiding it. She’d whittled it down to a decently sharp point, and she thought it would serve its purpose. She’d just have to be careful not to let it break off in anyone’s neck.

  The time had come. She knew what those from the other place were planning: their own sepsis, their own gangrene, black-blooded chaos and orgies, cannibalistic frenzies and torn-up flesh. She heard their voices. Julie heard them, too. Julie knew. Of course Julie knew. She’d drawn the damned things out in the first place.

  Mrs. Rossi touched the suicide note gently, almost fondly, like it was the cheek of a child. She wouldn’t be coming back. They might never understand what she was about to do, but it seemed important to her, even in the face of everything that was going on, that she have some written record that her intentions had been good. She’d meant well. The little white square, folded neatly, an even number of times with the folds perfectly bisecting the paper into even quadrants, said all she thought needed to be said.

  It read:

  I tried to take it all back.

  She picked up the paintbrush-handle knife, slid it up the sleeve of her soft sweatshirt, and moved out into the hall and toward the game room. She could just about smell them there, the same acrid kind of smell as that goddamned hole outside.

  ***

  In a cold and boxy blackness beyond the east wing where the ichor had spread and congealed, beyond steel doors that required passcodes and special keys, came a sound lost in the hum of impending chaos. A figure wrapped with cloth and buckles giggled high and hysterical, its whole body shaking on its stained mattress. The manacles around its leg tittered metallically against the tiled floor. It knew; its glee was uncontainable. It waited for them to come to it.

  ***

  For reasons beyond her conscious ability to access, Julie started to cry, moaning softly amidst the sobs as the shuffling footsteps in the hall reached their destination. The pain in her head began in earnest just as Mrs. Rossi buried the makeshift knife into dear old Mr. Ottermeier’s throat, and spouts of blood pattered down onto the chessboard in front of him, and the chess pieces he never moved. Julie closed her eyes against the light of her room as Mrs. Rossi pulled back on her thrust into Carter’s skull and most of his eyeball came out with her make-shift knife. Around the time Ricardo came running down the hall, Janelle and already bitten off most of Angela’s bottom lip, and Julie felt the voices eating into her stomach. When in retaliation, Angela had broken Janelle’s jaw, which hung slack against her neck, Julie knew the pictures in her head of all the blood were real.

  Throughout the asylum, some invisible, silent timer went off. In unison, on some preternatural cue, the others understood what Mrs. Rossi believed, and started making their own lists of sacrifices. The violence swelled. The braying and howling and screaming, the merciless abandon, the tinny metallic smells of blood and fear, the organic smells of rot and urine, were all accessible to Julie, inside and outside her head. They caused her to sink to a shadowed corner of her room and rock and cry, clutching her stomach and head, until Mrs. Rossi came for her with the paintbrush.

  ONE

  Before tenanted apartments actually held their ground, crowding the Old Ward on the hill, there had been fire.

  Fire had eaten through the original buildings comprising the apartments known as Bridgewood Estates. People in the town below, looking up at the smoking hill, whispered that it was providence, that benevolent forces in their far-sightedness had seen fit to cleanse what never should have been built on in the first place. But that land (aside from its historical significance, relegated to the last-standing main building of an asylum) was prime land, an immense span of gorgeous hilltop overlooking a clean and tidy New England town, encircled by solid oaks and maples. It didn’t flood, didn’t take the brunt of harsh wind, was not so elevated as to accumulate too much snow nor too steep a slope to prevent reasonable access to the jobs and stores and shops below. Despite protest, the plans to reconstruct the apartments progressed. There were petitions online and in print, the vehement arguments of the historical society, even the unspoken implication of the unexplained fires that took down millions of dollars’ worth of the original construction. However, none of these could prevent the town of Bridgehaven from seeing the fiscal potential in building apartments where the crumbling remains of a historically shadowed embarrassment stood cluttering up the land.

  Myrinda Giavelli knew about the fires before she and Derek Moore ever set foot on the property. She k
new the asylum had something of a sordid history. Internet and library research yielded that Bridgehaven Asylum had been closed since the mid-eighties, a result of cutbacks and asbestos and the deinstitutionalizing of mental health care. There were other reasons, though, which could be found only to the persistent Internet searcher—neglect and abuse, sexual assaults and rampant drug use. There was even the hushed suggestion of cannibalistic patients running wild one night in the final year before the asylum’s closing. She found it all fascinating; it contributed, in a way, to the mystique of the place.

  She’d heard some of the rumors during their stay in Bridgehaven while looking for apartments; there had been the idle chat of the hotel people when she mentioned where she and her boyfriend were looking to rent, the odd looks of elderly diner patrons staking their booths out and holding court over coffee and hash browns, when the topic came up with waitresses. The people who were responsible for what happened in the decade or so before Bridgehaven Asylum turned out its inhabitants and closed its heavy wooden doors never spoke of it, but the old store keepers and bar hounds in the town below were easy enough to prod. Many of them claimed ex-staff members as friends, or ex-patients as old acquaintances. Their talk was often delivered apologetically not for the content but for the perpetuation of its telling. That those with the money and influence to make such a place go away actually did their best to do so was really no surprise. So sixteen months after the demolition crew’s departure, the Bridgewood Estates were built, then rebuilt—bigger, stronger, more spacious, with slightly higher rent than anticipated, but given the amenities, worth every penny.

  The Bridgewood Estates apartments stood to the right of the Old Ward. There was only one building, a long series of apartment suites encased in cream-colored brick, rising two lofty floors and stretching its arms out along the grassy acres where once the extensive eastern wing of the old asylum stood. The building’s peaked roof rose slate gray against a serious sky. On lower floors, bay windows alternated with neatly New England rectangles, while those windows on the top floor curved beneath gothic arches. This was to be Myrinda’s and Derek’s new home.