I apologize for the delay with getting this bit up. Life happens, you know the drill, and I really appreciate all of your well-wishes on my schoolwork. I took my Oral Exit Exam today, which is essentially when you sit in a room with three of your professors and they yell at you for an hour. But it's out of the way now, and I'm able to bring ya'll this.

On the other hand, I want to say that I was just beyond thrilled with the response I got for Chapter 8 – seriously, you guys, I feel so touched to have you folks following along and enjoying something that I created. It really hits me right here. In the heart, that is. Not really any other organs so much.

Chapter 9: The Crazy House

The Crazy House for Boys had stood abandoned for about three years. Its forsaking had nothing to do with progress - no one had suddenly realized that keeping unstable children in cages until their brains turned to sludge was inhumane or ineffective. Budget cuts had done the place in, and now all the inmates had been merged with another asylum across town. Dib had read about it in the newspaper when Gaz tossed the article to him one day.

"Guess you'll have to find somewhere else to go after graduation," she'd said offhandedly. Dib didn't find the joke particularly funny at the time, but he'd been glad to know that the place was defunct.

Any of that relief was gone now. Dib gawked up at the looming building, eyes flitting between the rows of dimmed, broken windows and the halfheartedly bolted door a few feet in front of him. The sun was just grazing the horizon behind him, casting a blinding reflection on all the glass that remained. Glowing unearthly in twilight, the asylum almost seemed to be on fire.

No one had thought to take the sign down - the words "CRAZY HOUSE" screamed proudly at him through peeling paint from a billboard near the treeline. As if he needed reminding. His headache pounded softly as he stared at the sign, always present but mercifully subdued right now.

Dib was surprised by his own level of calm. He was surprised that the sight of the building wasn't making him ill (for several years after that unfortunate Halloween incident, he'd gotten lightheaded driving past the place. He still took serpentine routes through the city just to avoid it). There was no particularly acute sense of fear freezing his feet in place on the badly overgrown lawn.

Not to say that he'd forgotten the careless mockery of the psychiatrists, or the blood-fizzing panic that accompanied being strapped into a straitjacket. Not to say that he'd ever quite been able to separate the brutality of the asylum from the nightmarish flashes of other dimensions that he'd seen there. More that he'd perfected the art of pounding trauma into fun-sized packages at the bottom of his mind, where it was unlikely to derail him into hysterics.

Instead he felt a calm foreboding. A quiet dread. An understated and penetrating sense of badness. It did not cloud his thoughts or rattle his judgment, at least not that he could detect. Instead a softly focused shadow curled cat-like in the back of his mind, impossible to ignore but equally difficult to pinpoint.

Just go in, find Gaz, and get out. Do what you have to do.

With all the square-jawed determination of a dog running into the street, Dib walked up to the double doors. The padlock on the doorknob wasn't particularly new or strong-looking, but any padlock was certainly more trouble than no padlock. Feeling very stupid for getting stopped so quickly, Dib wondered how it was that freaking Torque could get into the Crazy House just to make out with Zita and he was having trouble when his sister's life was at stake.

Because Torque wouldn't take the front door, genius.

Good point. He shuffled through the undergrowth against the side of the building, looking for a low window or a trash can to lever himself up with. Finally he came across a half-broken tree on the eastern wall, with sturdy-looking branches that pointed neatly toward an already shattered window.

Wedging one boot into a crook in the tree's limbs, Dib hauled himself up. His scabbed hands scraped painfully against the tree bark, and he found it difficult to climb very fast or without nearly losing his balance. By the time he'd made it to the branch across from the window, the wounds on his palms flared red and threatened to open again. He rubbed the fine mist of blood off on his jeans.

Clinging carefully to the limb beneath him, Dib wriggled around until his feet faced the asylum wall. He inched himself close to the window, placing a boot on each corner of glass. The upper pane was missing but this one had to be cleared if he was going to slip his way in. Bending his knees and counting down from three, he snapped out his legs and kicked the window into the room beyond.

The tinkling of broken glass sounded as the window crashed onto the floor inside. Dib maneuvered himself delicately down through the opening, feet first, stomach rubbing uncomfortably against the branches as he tried to get more leverage. He let go of the tree the instant he felt one foot against the cheap ruddy carpet, which proved to be a very bad call.

Dib had underestimated his weight. Springing back against him, the branch righted itself before he could plant his feet on the floor. His feet kicked uselessly, he nicked his stomach against a shard of glass still remaining on the windowsill, and Dib landed on his back inside of the room with a spine-rattling thunk. The last part of his body to hit the ground was his head - occipital lobe first.

A hollow agony blossomed inside his skull as it cracked against the floor, dialing his headache up to eleven. Every part of the room shook violently. He couldn't focus his eyes well enough to get a good look at his surroundings - the wavering walls and shuttering corners seemed to move no matter how he watched them.

He tried to sit up but his body had stopped cooperating. His arms stayed locked by his sides, ignoring his brain's increasingly frantic orders to move, damn it. Dib wondered for a horrified moment if he'd been paralyzed. He pictured Gaz slowly bleeding out within walking distance of him, as he starved to death on the floor of a rotting asylum.

It took quite a sight to wrench Dib's morbid thoughts from him. That sight, as it turned out, was a strait-jacketed man crouching in the corner of the room.

The prisoner's rasping breath caught his attention and Dib tried to crane his neck to get a better look at him. Out of the bottom edge of his eye Dib could make out the patchy black hair, the white sleeves coated in filth. And the blood smeared around the man's mouth.

Dib's body was already rigid with the strange paralysis, but every tendon in his body seemed to wind tighter. His joints begged to give. Every second that his muscles contracted against his will was another second that the man in the corner leered down at him.

The prisoner was stirring now, stumbling awkwardly to his feet without the aid of his arms. Slurping blood as he moistened his lips with a pointed tongue. Dib tried hysterically to rationalize why there was a man in this room with him, his thoughts ricocheting incompletely like shattered bullets. They'd shut the place down, no one should be here, where the HELL were Zim and his sister?

Blood dripped down the man's chin like saliva. Dib felt it splatter loudly on his ankle, his exposed belly, his neck as the restrained inmate stood over him. The blood drops felt hot and slimy, but not near so much as the man's breath as he knelt at Dib's prostrate side. Crawling revulsion lashed inside his stomach. His bones screamed painfully at him for movement, but Dib couldn't even open his mouth to scream.

The man's teeth were pointed. He wriggled halfheartedly beneath the straitjacket, and Dib got the sick sense that the man would touch him if he could. Grab his paralyzed shoulders and sink the ragged, dirty nails into his skin. Dib wasn't sure if he was actually shaking or if the room was doing it for him. Somewhere in his gut parasites that fed on fear squirmed excitedly.

All of Dib's internal protests went ignored. He grimaced his eyes shut. If the man noticed Dib's twisted expression, he was certainly too focused on the teenager's throat to give any indication. The hot, metallic breath fell on Dib's neck and he waited, frozen, to feel teeth on his skin.

The room seemed to breathe. It heaved slowly and then fell into openness. And when Dib opened his eyes, the man was gone. No sign that he'd ever been there. Dib didn't hear him leave. The blood that he'd felt so clearly on his exposed ankle no longer itched him.

Dib's muscles relaxed into jelly around his bones. He kicked himself awkwardly onto his side, knees to his chest, eyes roving around the room for any indication that the vampire inmate had been real. These visions were getting more demented by the moment.

The others hadn't seemed quite so tangible. Quite so realistic. Once he'd gotten back to the real world he could look back on the flashes and acknowledge "yeah, that seemed a little odd." But this one had been seamless...and that gnawed horrifically at him. What else had he hallucinated? For how long? What percentage of the past two days had happened during blackouts inside of his head?

Dib realized that on some screwed-up level that he wanted it to be real, if only so he could trust his own brain again. At the end of the day he had only his own thoughts to guide him - the physical world had become untrustworthy. Capable of fluctuations. There was nowhere else to retreat if his own mind turned on him.

It doesn't matter. Well, okay, yes - it does matter. But all this started when you got involved in Zim's case, so we have to hope it will go away once this is finished. You got the rest of your life to beg antipsychotics out of a shrink.

Exhaustion was making Dib's blood feel like lead. No bed on earth could have felt as comfortable and inviting as the grungy floor he was curled up on. But he couldn't sleep now. There would be time to rest when he was dead.

Dib heaved himself to his feet, bracing against the wall for support. His muscles still felt weak and watery from the temporary paralysis, but some warmth was returning to him. Walking out into the hallway, Dib paused for a moment while his eyes adjusted to the darkness deeper in the building. The foul smell of the place still hung in the air, much like he'd remembered it; a paradoxical mix of antiseptic and excrement. Only a little dustier now.

Wisps of sunlight worked their way in at steady intervals down the hall, from rows of open doors like the one he'd just walked out of. These were the cells, he realized. The one he'd been kept in years ago was a little different - padded and padlocked - but this floor must have been for the less dangerous patients. Dib felt the corner of his mouth turn up humorlessly at the thought of being a "dangerous patient." Mostly he just seemed to be a danger to himself and the people he cared about.

He walked carefully past the open doors, glancing briefly in each one as he went. No patient remnants haunting corners, no monsters. Most bothersome, he found no chunks of alien machinery or abandoned taco boxes. No sign of Zim at all. Just carpets covered in stains and crumbled leaves and tiny rooms with walls scarred by fingernails and age. His ears strained against the creaking silence for Zim's maniacal laugher somewhere deep within the asylum. Only stillness.

The hallway ended in a T-shape. Dib stood uncertainly at the intersection, unsure of which direction to turn. Standing still sent a crawling uneasiness through him - the dual aggravations of restlessness and fear - and he started gnawing impulsively on his ring-finger nail. Every second he stood here stupidly was a second Gaz could be slipping away from him. Another second she might be in pain at the hands of that intergalactic psychopath.

A gurgling sound, not unlike water surging through pipes, sounded off to Dib's right. He snapped his head to the side, barely registering the sting at the tip of his finger where he'd torn off a sliver of skin. For the first time he noticed that the light leaking out of this hall of doorways was a little different. It was the cool starkness of fluorescence rather than the dusty warmth of sunlight.

Dib stepped carefully, inspecting each door as he passed it. The first three were tightly locked, and when Dib glanced into the little windows in the center of each one he saw only empty, dirt-caked corners. The fourth was jarred open a few inches, casting a clean wedge of light onto the floor. Dib opened it all the way with more curiosity than forethought.

This room was made of four cells, with the walls broken down in between like some half-assed home renovation. Dib nearly tripped over the stripped wires and coiled hoses that littered the floor, intertwining and disappearing snake-like into the walls. Even in exile Zim hadn't changed his taste in technology.

At first Dib thought that the place was filled with computer terminals. The air hummed with stagnant warmth and little lights seemed to blink from every corner. Bulbous sculptures of glass and steel and plastic were erected at intervals, with pipes blooming out of their tops like vines. Some were lunchbox-sized, others took up full corners from floor to ceiling.

Dib approached the smallest one and looked inside. It held organs in miniature, bobbing in fluid like ping-pong balls and Dib pulled himself away the instant that the grisly sight registered in his brain. None of the other containers were much better. Dib walked by doll-sized spinal columns that had been dried and labeled, little brains giving off pulses of electricity in their tanks, and a few more smears of gore that made his stomach lurch and his head dizzy.

In the farthest corner, suspended in a glass tube, was what looked like a hunk of meat. About the size of a pillow, the thing was veined and creviced all over like a brain. It pulsed spasmodically, five or six different tones of crimson and blue making up the lumpy surface. Wedged snugly in one of the bloody fissures was a single eye that blinked very slowly at Dib as he stared at it in gape-mouthed horror. This - whatever it was - was alive.

Just as he made this connection, he heard the thing moan. Very softly with a mouth that he couldn't see, but the hollow and creaking sound came clearly from the lump of gore as if he'd heard it outside the tank.

Twice in his life Dib had been turned inside out. Both times by Zim's doing, and only for a few seconds. It had been a crushing, suffocating agony. One that this former-human in the tank before him would never escape.

Dib looked for a panel on the side of the machine. Something with buttons and information outputs. With a bit of prying he found a collection of multi-colored switches on the top of the tank, as the eye nestled amongst viscera gazed, unfocused, at him. One of the buttons was bright red and set apart from the rest. Dib pressed it, hard, holding his finger down much longer than was probably necessary until the thing's quivering slowed to a stop.

What the purpose of this tiny torture chamber was, beyond making him feel nauseated and grimy, Dib didn't know. If he felt some small gratification at putting the gore-thing out of its misery, then it evaporated the instant that he stepped back into the corridor to continue his search for Gaz.

He redoubled his speed as he half-ran through the hallways, partly to help him shove thoughts of the things in the lab out of his mind. Every shadow his skinny form cast on the wall became a deformed experiment, every glint upon glass were Gaz's slowly dimming eyes.

And then he saw it. Them, really. Dib rounded another corner and saw that the matte-painted wall to his right was coated in black handprints. Most were smeared at the edges, dark and solid as if made with fingerpaints. They fell at different heights, different angles - some more faded than others. Dib spread his own hand on top of one and watched it disappear beneath his fingers.

The handprints belonged to children. At least a dozen of them. Imitation cave-paintings across the walls of an abandoned asylum.

The stomach-drop of a monster sighting rattled him as he studied the markings. There was no way of knowing how new they were - maybe some herd of disturbed kids had painted them ten years ago. Or maybe Zim had been lobbing the hands off of the nine-year-olds he was kidnapping.

He drew his hand away from the wall as if there was a fire on the other side. The handprints weren't all concentrated in a single space like buckshot – they ran down the length of the hall. Kids marking their way from lunch or to death, he had no idea.

Dib followed the marks, breath hooking in his throat. Now that he had some idea what state Gaz might be in when he found her, he found himself torn between running as quickly as possible and standing stock-still in fear. The appeal of ignorance was strong. He forced himself down the hall, to the left – to where the handprints disappeared behind the doorway of another little room.

This one had no window in the closed door. Dib yanked futilely at the locked doorknob for a precious thirty seconds or so. How were you supposed to knock a door down again? Foot to the lock, right?

That was what he tried. Bracing himself against the moldy floor, knees locked, Dib rammed the heel of his right combat boot as hard as he could at the lock of the door. He was rewarded with a spray of cheap plywood as the door gave way – probably they hadn't built the place expecting any of the inmates to have steel-toed shoes.

Dib allowed himself a second or two to feel proud of breaking the lock on his first shot. Then he heard the squeaking, muffled cry coming from inside of the room and nearly tore the door off by its other side as he burst in.

Sixteen years of insults tend not to lie – Dib would know Gaz's voice anywhere, and he could make out a few profanities from the white bundle huddled in the corner of the little cell. She'd been wrapped up in something eerily like spider web - but, of course, improved with Irken technology. The clumps of purple hair sticking out of the silvery strands reassured him – that and the flailing profanity, of course.

"It's okay, Gaz. I'm here. I just have to figure out how to deal with this...stuff." He said with exaggerated loudness, unsure if she could hear him under the white sheath. The stuff felt strange and cottony between his fingers and quickly grew spotted in red as he tore at it with his bleeding fingertips. It proved too tough for him to wrench apart. Gaz's kicking beneath the bundle was becoming more spastic and her muffled cries more urgent.

In a moment of panic he pulled a handful of threads loose and bit down as if he were trying to get a package of Cheez-poofs open. The fibers tasted metallic. He ground his teeth, feeling it come apart in his mouth and trying to keep his tongue as far away as possible. It wasn't until he'd worked his way through a few strands that something occurred to him.

This stuff was Irken. So it was sensitive to water.

Dib bit hard at his tongue, summoning a mouthful of saliva. He spat a gob into both of his hands, making a mental note never to tell Gaz how he'd freed her, and grabbed at the stuff. Dissolving like cotton candy between his palms, the silvery matting tore away in great fistfuls. Within seconds he could make out Gaz's dirty tee-shirt and roving brown eyes beneath.

A sort of tense relief washed over him at Gaz's vitality. Zim must not have hurt her. He hadn't been too slow or stupid getting here. Besides, he was desperate for some kind of company in this wretched building - he wasn't sure how much longer he could walk the hallways alone before he ran the risk of never coming back out again. Gaz was an ill-tempered rock he could cling to.

She clawed, thrashed, fought against her bindings with such violence that it actually got in his way as he tried to undo more of the fibers. The growling which had been somewhat subdued before reached a fever pitch, until he was finally obliged to reassure her -

"I'm going as fast as I can!" Dib pulled a clump of strands out of her face and she slapped bad-naturedly at his hand.

"No," she gasped, with a half-snarl that up until then he'd ascribed to her aggravation at being kidnapped. "You don't get it. It's a freaking trap, you moron."

Dib stared down at his half-freed sister. He felt the fetid, heavy silence of the air around them as the moment seemed to freeze. It was a trap. One he'd walked right into, blindly, his clouded mind too full of idealized heroics and desperation to predict otherwise.

"We might still have a chance," he said softly, glancing feverishly around the room as if he expected the walls to produce spikes and start closing in. "C'mon, get up - it's only a little ways to where I came in."

Gaz kicked off the remaining strands. "Dib, the only way we're getting out of here is if-"

She stopped short, eyes fixed somewhere behind him. White-rimmed irises shone with a fear he'd seen on her face only a handful of times. Dib pivoted his body, throwing himself defensively in front of her, boots squeaking against the ground as he looked for the threat.

He was so focused on the door and hallway beyond that the movement on the ceiling above him went unnoticed. Until a spindly, small-bodied monster crinkled into being two feet above them. The thing locked its silvery legs around his head with a violent swiftness, muffling any light or sound.

A hand grabbed his hair and wrenched from the roots. He felt the tingling coldness of metal against his temple. A flash of purple light that blinded the corners of his vision.

Followed quickly by pain.

The headache snapped Dib's skull. Drove a screwdriver through his ear and swirled it around. Every nerve ending was being yanked with tweezers. Dib tried to breathe but the pain seized at his chest and forced air from his lungs. He couldn't hide. There was no room in even the farthest reaches of his mind to think of anything other than the screaming agony that tore at his body. It broke him into a thousand pieces and fused him back together only to take a shotgun to his head again, ad infinitum until nothing remained but suffering.

He was going to die. He felt sure of it. No one could feel this sort of pain and live. Dib would gladly take death, beg for it, if he had the capacity for words any longer.

The darkness was the greatest mercy he had ever known.

Sorry for that bit of cliffhanger – it's just how these things work out, sometimes. I'm hoping to get the next chapter up a bit sooner than this one. I felt like this chapter was a bit dull and bridge-y, especially following "The Descent," but that's mostly so that we can have a breather before the climax gets going. Also I don't like how the title of this one is "the Crazy House" because I feel like that's too similar to the title of Chapter 4, but I'm too tired to think of anything much different ATM. Anyway, thanks for reading! You're all beautiful and amazing people! And any reviews would be great :)