Inside the Asylum Read online

  So they sat and waited while the Others ran and tore at things in the darkness, a silent show of mad, dancing, light-changing silhouettes. Two of them had set upon an owl and were pulling off its wings while a third extended the fingers of its tendrils into the meat of the bird to explore its insides.

  “D-d-do you think she’ll b-be out soon?” Edgar asked in that stop-start, jerking way he had. His good eye glowed like an ember in the dark.

  “Soon,” Orrin said, and gave his brother a reassuring nod.

  “They’re not easy t-to wrangle when they’re this r-riled up,” Edgar said, gesturing at the Others. “Henry’s g-gonna b-be pissed if he looks out the window tomorrow and sees d-dead b-b-birds all over the parking lot.”

  “You worry too much,” Orrin told him.

  “D-do I?”

  Orrin didn’t reply just then. Edgar’s worries weren’t without substance. Henry could be pacified, but the longer Maisie spent in that hospital, the greater the chance that someone else would discover him and Edgar and the Others and cause them to make an unpleasant scene. That wouldn’t be good for Henry or anyone else.

  Finally, he said, “She’ll be out soon.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we find the Viper and see what comes next.”

  * * * *

  As Henry dreamed, the darkness spread in silence. Inside the utility shed about two and a half acres behind the hospital, the darkness pooled in the corners and seeped through the cracks in the floor. Waves of inkiness washed over the detritus of hospital maintenance. Tendrils snaked around and inside the lawn care equipment and tools. Bottles of chemicals were probed and poked until they spilled, and their smoking, acidic contents were drunk and assimilated. The darkness lapped up the shadows and the night itself and made them its own.

  As it took the shed’s contents, it changed them. It brought the imps through from Ayteilu to claim and reshape them. Orrin had called it “giving land to a country.” Maisie and Edgar just called it “breaking through.” But the Viper knew it for what it was. He sat on a length of old fence just outside the shed and watched through the open door as a riding lawn mower became a silverbacked beast whose underside contained rows of mouths and bladed teeth. Leathery wings broke through the creature’s back and folded themselves neatly against it. Its legs, shaped like a bulldog’s only longer and more powerful, grew from its sides, hoisting its bulk a good two feet off the ground. It had no eyes and no discernible nose, but it seemed interested in sniffing around the doorframe of the shed, adjusting to its new surroundings.

  The Viper hopped off the fence and strolled over to the shed. Inside, a new shape was forming from a puddle of darkness and industrial cleaner. He watched as the substance traveled upward, dipping in and out of feminine curves as it formed legs and hips, a waist, breasts, arms and shoulders, a neck, a head. The last things to appear were the eyes, which, when opened, focused a cold, bright green gaze on him. Black swirls lifted off her body like steam. This new being, an ebony mist condensed in human form, took a step forward and waited. She and the Others coming through and developing behind her would follow the Viper’s orders. Maisie couldn’t control them; the mist Wraiths only ever listened to the Viper, even in Ayteilu.

  What had once been a rake wiggled off its hook on the wall and slithered by the Viper’s feet. The rake head had formed a bottom jaw, and those rust-colored tines grew sharp. The creature’s jaws were immense. What passed for the Viper’s smile found his face as he watched that snaking tail, muscled though it was, just manage to push forward the large skull in front of it.

  The Viper looked up at the sky. It was a clear night; the stars of this universe twinkled overhead like tiny eyes. He supposed that one night, he’d look up and see Ayteilu’s familiar constellations…but not tonight.

  He took a step back as the shed itself began to change. The wood creaked a little and then stretched, and the dimensions of the building increased. In minutes, it was the size of a large barn. The substance of the wood had taken on the faint red tint and rough grain of the trees in Ayteilu. From within, the newly formed were beginning to find ways to make sounds—little sounds, but new and exciting to them all the same. Soon, they would growl and roar, and find the strength to devour this world. Soon…when the constellations of Ayteilu remapped the sky.

  Gently, he closed the barn door. The darkness and its changes would spread soon enough, but there was no sense in letting the creatures inside roam free just yet. Maisie and Orrin and Edgar had to do their parts first to make Henry stronger.

  The Viper glanced up at the sky once more, then walked off into the darkness. The shed-turned-barn shuddered with the new life inside it, and the darkness began to spill out from under the door.

  Chapter 2

  Kathy Ryan had little patience for red tape of the bureaucratic kind. Her work often led her to the outskirts of society, law, and even reality, and jobs were a lot tougher when her intolerance for the maddening delays of protocol and jurisdiction put her at odds with law enforcement. Usually in those cases, it was a balancing act between those who believed and wanted to stop cosmic calamities and those who wanted her to get the hell off their turf.

  Still, she worked to cultivate professional if not friendly relationships with various law enforcement agencies and had made several inroads in that regard over the years. She was the kind of woman who got results regardless of the obstacles, and law enforcement liked that.

  Actually, she ran into more problems when she was hired by special interest groups or individuals to consult on cases, rather than by police or federal agents. The red tape, particularly in a state-run facility like Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital, was a pain in the ass.

  Still, she had ways around it.

  Silver Street was lined with birch and quaking aspen trees just starting to bloom. It was pretty, really. Any other person could almost forget, driving through rolling acres of flatland, that the road ended at the visitor parking lot of an insane asylum. Kathy couldn’t forget, though. She’d made the drive six times in her life, and it never got any easier. That same knot would form in the pit of her stomach, and her chest would get tight just as she crested the hill and saw the parking lot.

  This time was no different, even though she was there to see someone else.

  By the time she pulled into a spot just outside of Parker Hall, her palms were sweating. She wiped them on the thighs of her jeans and took a deep breath. Stern and unwelcoming, the red brick building had narrow, barred windows and a mansard roof. From the main building, long, slanted wards, dubbed “halls,” stretched out from Parker Hall’s administrative offices like wings.

  She knew the staff at Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital liked to think of their resident charges as patients rather than inmates, but to Kathy, neither word seemed to fit very well. In many ways, she thought they were like caged animals or sharks in tanks. Her life had taught her that they were not more than human—not the boogeymen so much of society made serial killers, mass murderers, and spree killers—but she found it tough sometimes not to think of them as less human.

  She’d questioned many of them in the course of her work, mainly in connection with tenuous or substantial ties to the occult. Some remained silent and observant behind their unsmiling mouths, soft voices, and inability to make eye contact. They might have almost struck the average person as painfully shy. Then there were some who charmed and smiled, talked up a blue streak about almost any topic laid in front of them, just glad to have someone to talk to…or at. Kathy’s brother fell somewhere in between, one of those quiet, smiling, arrogant assholes that enjoyed making people uncomfortable by alternating silences with sudden, shocking revelations. Different strokes for different folks. They all had some vague idea that the outside world did not see them as patients or inmates, either, but as monsters. And how did they see themselves? Most understood they were killers; some saw themselves as heroes, an
d even more as victims of their tragic lives and circumstances. A rare self-aware few understood themselves to be the predators they were. The subject of murder, of course, usually made all of them cagey and evasive. Many seemed to find any reaction to their answers to be of interest and importance. There was only maybe one true similarity among them: The residents of Connecticut-Newlyn were dangerous.

  Kathy had never visited her brother there when her father was alive. Even if she’d wanted to—and she hadn’t—her father had forbidden her to see him. She didn’t often dwell on her father, who had never understood how powerful his hands were and how scary his voice could sometimes be. He was a man with limited social skills and resources raising two kids alone, and he’d almost lost one to the other. Every time he’d looked at Kathy’s scar, the one that ran unevenly down through her left eyebrow and over her eye to plant itself just below the socket, then down her cheek to her jawbone, he’d get this strange look in his eyes, part horror and part anger, and she’d turn away from him. No little girl wants to see her father look at her like that. It took a long time to realize neither the horror nor the anger had been directed at her, but by then, those looks had formed a kind of scar of their own inside her.

  Kathy parked the car and sat a few moments staring at Parker Hall. Toby was in there. Toby, who had once beaten a boy into unconsciousness after he called her a slut when she was in the sixth grade. Toby, who once covered for her and took the brunt of their father’s rage over a broken lamp, and a day later, snapped the neck of an injured bird she was trying to save right in front of her. Toby, who had murdered all those women, who had threatened to rape Kathy, kill her, and dump her in the woods. Toby, who had carved his distorted feelings for her into her face.

  He was hard to hate, but he was even harder to love. And if any resident of Connecticut-Newlyn could be more aptly described as a caged animal than Toby, Kathy hadn’t met that person.

  She forced herself to get out of the car, slamming the door a little harder than she’d meant to, and made her way up the long paved walk to the front door. After pushing the intercom button, she gave her full name, then flashed her ID at the CCTV camera mounted above the front door. A click and a crackle preceded a loud buzz that made her flinch. She opened the front door.

  Ahead and to the right, Margaret, a middle-aged woman with coiffed blond hair, a tired mouth, and cool eyes magnified by thick glasses, sat behind a glass wall in a small office. She looked up as Kathy approached and gave a little nod.

  “Hi, Margaret,” Kathy said as she held up her ID against the glass between them, then slid it through a narrow slit onto the wooden desk on the other side.

  “Hello, Katherine. How are you?” Margaret returned Kathy’s credentials, then handed her a laminated visitor’s pass on a lanyard with a clip. Then she slid a small clipboard with log lines halfway down the page through the same slit in the glass. A pen on a chain dangled behind it.

  “New protocol. Just sign your name, the time—it’s 11:36—and in that space there, who you’re here to see. I was keeping track of visitors manually for some time, but now we have to scan signatures, so there you go.”

  “No problem,” Kathy said, filling out the line. “I’m here to see Ben Hadley.”

  Margaret, whose stoic exterior rarely betrayed her opinions of the residents of Connecticut-Newlyn, shook her head.

  “Sad case, that one.”

  “Why?” Kathy found that sometimes, it was the people in the background of an institution like Connecticut-Newlyn who had more useful information than those she had reason to interview.

  “High-strung. Nervous. Lately, it’s nightmares.”

  “What about?”

  Margaret shrugged. “Who knows what goes on in their heads? He screams for a while, then cries for a while, then whispers about imaginary friends for a while. Not his, mind you. He claims another patient—our new guy, Henry Banks—has some pretty dangerous imaginary friends.”

  “Really…this Henry Banks, what’s his story?”

  “Claims those same imaginary friends butchered a bunch of kids in his basement. Creepy, quiet. You know the type.”

  “And Ben shares his delusion about these, uh, imaginary friends?”

  “Seems to,” Margret replied. “Between his screaming and one of them walking about all night—the footsteps echo all down those upper-floor wings—it can be very disruptive. Sad, but unsettling all the same.”

  “I can imagine,” Kathy said. She was surprised any of the patients was allowed to walk around like that at night; she didn’t think anyone was allowed outside his or her room after lockdown. She made a note to ask Ben Hadley about it when she spoke to him. “What room is he in again?” Though she often met with interviewees in the visiting area and not their rooms, she’d come to find it helpful to know who they roomed near, who their daily influences were, and what ideas were being exchanged between them and others. Margaret seemed to have caught wise to her methods, and offered the information freely in most cases.

  “Who, Henry?” Margaret checked a list on the wall. “He’s in 307. Two down from your brother on the right.”

  At the mention of Toby, Kathy tensed. “No, Ben Hadley.”

  “Oh, right. 305. Right between them, as it turns out.” She offered a brief, somewhat perfunctory smile and returned to the endless signing, stamping, and filing of her ambiguous paperwork.

  “Thanks, Margaret. See you in a bit.”

  Kathy’s visitor pass got her through two more security doors. The third was opened for her by a huge rolling snowball of an orderly, Kenny, before she reached the visiting area. Kenny nodded at the paperwork she showed him for her interview, then left her at one of the long cafeteria-style tables to retrieve Henry Banks.

  She looked around the visiting area. It was relatively small—few of the residents of Connecticut-Newlyn received visitors—with uncomfortable chairs and bland walls. She understood the common areas were somewhat more homelike, but the hospital maintained an unexciting, professional and objective decorative style throughout. Even within the residents’ rooms, there were few personalized touches, other than some simple allowances given to those who worked hard and stayed out of trouble—prints of landscapes, the occasional personal photo, birthday cards, that sort of thing. The staff at Connecticut-Newlyn believed in breaking down the aberrant aspects of character through therapy and carefully modulated medication and then rebuilding healthier pathways of thought and behavior. Kathy was not involved with the minutiae of the process; her specialty was in the occult, particularly where it became entwined with the supernatural. To her, abnormal psychology was useful only so far as it explained the thought processes behind certain occult practitioners’ behaviors and rituals.

  A few minutes later, Kenny returned with a man probably in his late forties, with thin-rimmed glasses and a small goatee and mustache. They were graying much faster than his hair, which was vaguely military in style and nearly all black. As he shuffled along behind Kenny, he seemed bent and a little twisted like an old tree, only barely weathering the storms of his memories and whose upheaved roots threatened to send him crashing down at any moment.

  He sat heavily in the chair across from Kathy, glanced at her scar, and then looked her in the eye. “Are you my lawyer?”

  “No, Mr. Hadley. My name is Kathy Ryan. I’m a private consultant.”

  “What do you consult in?”

  “That depends on the situation,” Kathy replied. “Primarily, I work with companies and law enforcement officials to assess the potential dangers of fringe occult group activity. That, I guess, is the easiest way to explain it. It’s a specialized field.”

  “And you’re here to talk to me?”

  “I am, if you don’t mind my taking a few moments of your time. I’d like to talk to you about some of your old friends.”

  Hadley blinked a few times as if trying to remember. �
��Which ones?”

  Kathy pulled a small notebook out of her purse. “You were a member of the Shining Light of Imnamoun, before your family removed you. And you made some interesting claims that—”

  “Oh. That was a year and a half ago. Why are you asking me about it now?”

  “Well, Mr. Hadley, while the information you relayed to your deprogrammer was of interest, as is the cult itself, investigation into your claims took some time.”

  “You had to make sure I’m not delusional, I guess? A product of brainwashing and abuse?”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “And what did you determine? I mean, I’m here, right?” He studied her, his gaze alternating between tracing her scar and the contours of the rest of her face.

  “That’s not necessarily relevant to the reality of your experience. I’d like to hear about it in your own words.”

  “Hmm.” Hadley shifted in his seat, seeming mildly pleased to be believed for once. “Well, sure, if you want. There isn’t much to tell, though, beyond what I told Jerry, my—what did you call him?”

  “Your deprogrammer.”

  “Right, right. Funny. I thought you might be here to talk about Henry Banks.”

  Kathy sat back. “What about Henry Banks?”

  “Well, his friends, for starters. The ones he brought with him.”

  “Are he and his friends affiliated with the Shining Light of Imnamoun as well?”