Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  The geese overhead honked their lonely song and she looked up into the sky where they flew in a V formation. Why did God implant in birds the ability to fly like that, and yet he allowed only a handful of humans to see the world the way it really was? Only a few knew that the world was inhabited by monsters — real ones, the Revenants. And the Others, who'd brought her here and locked her away in this place. Only a few had been born with Orion's Brand, a red mark that identified them as Ones Who See.

  And the number of the few was dwindling daily.

  A nurse padded up behind Jocelyn.

  "You didn't eat much of your breakfast, Jocelyn," she said.

  Had the nurse been trying to sneak up on her, to catch her searching for Revenants in the trees? Jocelyn had learned by bitter experience that when she was scanning for the Revenants that stood in the shadows waiting for nightfall, for a full moon, her own eyes glowed golden, and it was a light "normal people" could see.

  The spies the heart-eaters had planted on the sanitarium staff looked for the light, tried to catch you using it. If they did, they'd find a way to take some small piece of you to mark you — a lock of hair, a fingernail, anything that would identify you so the Revenants would know you were not just One Who Sees but a warrior.

  Revenants could see through walls, find you wherever you hid, hear what you said even in a whisper. And they slipped in sometimes now, stalked the hallways in the moonlight.

  It hadn't always been like that. Jocelyn could remember when she had first come here as a child, kidnapped from her parents by the Others to use as a slave for their experiments. Though the Others did terrible things to her when she was strapped down, gave her drugs that made her crazy, this place was at least safe from the Revenants. But days became months that became years and the world darkened. The ancient runes on the doors and windows were losing their protective power. It had been too long since the ancients had put them there, painted in their own blood. Nowhere was safe now.

  She turned toward the nurse, removed her earbuds, and smiled. They liked it when you smiled. They thought it meant you were happy.

  "I wasn't hungry is all. I don't like oatmeal."

  "I saved some fruit for you, in case you get hungry before lunch." The nurse smiled, too, and maybe her smile did mean she was happy. Jocelyn didn't know about that but she could tell she hadn't been caught. Either the nurse hadn't seen her eyes glow or she wasn't a spy.

  "What are you listening to?" the nurse asked.

  "'Flawless,' by Beyoncé and 'Blank Space,' by Taylor Swift," she said. Jocelyn had never heard either one of those songs, but she'd seen the names listed on the playlist.

  "I like Taylor Swift," the nurse said, and went on talking about the singer. It was clear she wasn't a spy for the Revenants, but she might be in league with the big orderly who had caught her last night, knew that she'd seen. The orderly who would come for her tonight if she couldn't escape. Escape where? Outside these protected walls were the Revenants! But in here was certain death at the hands of the orderly with the Beast on his shirt.

  Her heart began to hammer, her palms grew wet with sweat, but she couldn't let the nurse see. If you got emotional, if you showed fear or seemed upset, they would give you a shot and you'd wake up in that room with leather straps that tied you to the bed. Jocelyn couldn't be tied down! Not now, not tonight, not after what she'd seen when she was on patrol last night.

  She crept out of her bed every night after lights-out, stalked the shadows of her ward, made a circuit, checking the dark corners, the puddles of moonlight in the unlighted crafts room and the cafeteria. Always wearing the magic necklace of paper clips she kept hidden in the hollow base of a lamp. Virginia had given it to her. When she wore it, white leopard marks appeared on her body — like thousands of scars — that made her blend into the shadows if a Revenant looked her way. She'd never been in the other wings of the huge hospital. The doors at both ends of her ward only opened from the other side at night.

  Her advantage was that Revenants didn't know she could see them in the moonlight. Actually, she couldn't see them, but she could see the spot where they were. She could tell a Revenant was there because the light around their invisibility was different from the light everywhere else. It was a very subtle thing, had taken her years to figure out, but you could see little ripples in the air where a Revenant was standing in the moonlight. A little like looking at the bottom of a still pond and then you toss a pebble into it and the bottom of the pond is still visible there but there are ripples in the water that distort what it looks like. When a Revenant stood in moonlight, the normal light did that, it made ripples as it passed over their crooked, misshapen bodies.

  Of course, Virginia could see Revenants anywhere, light, dark, hiding, disguised — it didn't matter. More than that, though, Virginia didn't have to fight them as Jocelyn did. She had the power to kill Revenants with her blank stare. Jocelyn had watched her do it once, stood in awe in Virginia's doorway as she melted a Revenant without even leaving her bed!

  So whenever she could, Jocelyn would sneak into Virginia's room and coax her out of bed into a wheelchair. Virginia never looked at anybody — perhaps because she might melt normal people, too, but Jocelyn didn't think that was it. Virginia had never spoken a word to anybody the whole time she had been here, but she talked to Jocelyn, didn't say words out her mouth, of course, but she spoke inside Jocelyn's head.

  But Virginia hadn't joined Jocelyn last night, wasn't there when she spotted the Revenant standing in a shaft of moonlight streaming in the crafts room window. She wouldn't engage it unless it tried to take someone's eyes, then she would fight. One on one, she had killed many Revenants. She couldn't fight more than one at a time, though. Even Virginia, the most powerful warrior she'd ever known, couldn't stand up to a hunting pack of them.

  When Jocelyn had been in the Dark Place, where she'd hidden for months after the Others kidnapped her, she had watched a pack of Revenants kill the old lady in the room across the hall. They looked at her with their yellow eyes, her blood dripping off their fangs, and listened to her scream as they ate her heart while she was still alive. They'd plucked out her eyes first — they liked blue eyes best — so the old woman couldn't see, but Jocelyn had seen. Jocelyn had screamed and the nurses gave her a shot and locked her in the room strapped down to her bed.

  The Revenant last night had been small, though. Jocelyn had been certain she could take it if she had to.

  And then the red-haired nurse with bad breath had come in the door at the end of the hallway, left the heavy door to close slowly behind her and lock. But the Revenant slipped through before it did. Jocelyn had followed.

  She didn't know any other part of the hospital, but she'd followed, winding through the maze of hallways, around corners, down carpeted passageways and stone floors, down stairs. They passed the big gold archway that led to the glass atrium on the front of the building. She paused to look up at it. Through that archway and beyond was the lobby that opened out into a world full of Revenants.

  When they reached the hospital basement, there were no windows, no moonlight, no light at all except for what shone beneath a closed door on the far side of the basement, beyond the metal doors where she could hear the boiler. She moved silently toward the door … and heard human voices behind it. Men's voices. And the high, keening cry Revenants made when they were hungry.

  She was frozen to the spot in terror and horror as soon as she understood. She turned to run, but the door opened before she could get away and the big orderly saw her.

  "You, hey you. What are you doing down here?"

  He was huge, a giant with hands the size of shovels, his footsteps like hammer blows on the concrete floor as he chased her — clump, clump, clump!

  He caught her, grabbed her and demanded to know why she was there, what she'd seen.

  What she'd seen, of course, was a room where humans were making a portal for the Revenants, a way around the protective runes on the doors and w
indows.

  She had gotten hysterical, cried, sobbed, begged him not to hurt her. She promised him if he'd let her go, she wouldn't tell anybody what he and those other men were doing in that room.

  "You're right about that, sweetheart. You're not going to tell a soul." He had started dragging her back toward the doorway. "I will cut you into little pieces and feed you to—"

  To the Revenants!

  She fought him, twisting and squirming until she managed to wiggle out of his grasp. She ran away, hid behind boxes in the basement while he looked for her, yelling that he would shut her up, that he'd find her, kill her to keep her silent. She'd sneaked out of the basement, came back up to her ward before dawn, hid in the broom closet.

  " … Jocelyn, did you hear what I said?"

  The nurse had been talking about that singer but Jocelyn hadn't been listening. She'd been trying to figure out how she could sneak out of the ward tonight. She could put a piece of tape over the part of the heavy door that locked automatically when it closed. If nobody noticed the tape …

  "I asked if you'd mind having some company after lunch?"

  Jocelyn froze.

  "Company? Somebody's coming to … I got a visitor?"

  She didn't want to get too excited, expect too much. She'd had visitors before, thought she would have time alone with them so she could explain that she'd been kidnapped, was a prisoner here. Time to plead with them to take her through the land of the Revenants — back home.

  But she'd been watched every second so she had no time to tell anybody anything.

  "Yes, you do. I told them they could come and talk to you if you didn't mind, but if you don't want company, I will send them away."

  Not want company! Of course, she wanted company. Today! She would tell the visitors about the orderly who was going to kill her and they would rescue her and take her away from here.

  "Who is the visitor?" She asked the question as if she didn't care.

  "There are two of them. One of them is Brice McGreggor. He's the sheriff of Kavanaugh County, and the other is his friend Bailey Donahue. I don't think you know them."

  She didn't know them. But a sheriff! Could it really be true that a sheriff wanted to talk to her?

  "I don't know them," Jocelyn said, looking at the floor. "But I'm glad for the company if they want to come sit for a spell."

  "You need to eat your lunch first."

  Ah, that was it. Tell her she had company so she would eat the drugged food and then she wouldn't be able to tell the visitors anything. But she was onto their tricks. She knew where she could stuff food, down into the flower pots in the dining room, into her pockets and then go to the ladies’ room and flush it. She knew how to make it look like she'd eaten when really she hadn't.

  "I didn't eat much breakfast so I'll be hungry."

  "Good. I'll bring them to you when they get here after lunch.

  Then the nurse went away and left her alone. Her mind was spinning. Maybe she wasn't going to die tonight after all! Maybe she was going to be set free!

  Chapter Eleven

  "Just so we're clear on this," said the rodent-faced man who glared at them across a broad cherry desktop that looked like an operating table without a patient — and probably was as clean. "I tried strenuously to dissuade Ms. Strickland from allowing you to come here today."

  A sign on the door, "Roderick Styles, Administrator," had identified the office but there was no name plate on the desk. In fact, the office looked as sterile and impersonal as a room at Motel 6. Not a book out of place on the bookshelves, which Bailey suspected were just for show anyway. The titles she could see, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Moby Dick, The Sun Also Rises, Paradise Lost did not seem to her to be the kind of reading material the man in front of her would have selected. He looked more of a Marvel comics kind of reader. Definitely not John Milton. She was sure the interior decorator who'd been hired to make the place seem like the domain of an intelligent, educated, erudite man, had better taste in fiction than Mr. Styles.

  "Obviously, you weren't successful," Brice said, cold.

  The man bristled and flushed, highlighting the patch of beard on his lower lip that was supposed to look sophisticated. Without sufficient testosterone to grow out more than a tuft of fuzz, though, it only looked ridiculous. His raging case of Little Man's Syndrome was exacerbated by the presence of a man Brice's size in his office.

  When they'd all discussed the local mental hospitals she and Brice should search, Dobbs had suggested they go directly to the owner of Forest Hills — a personal friend of his — bypassing the puffed-up banty rooster sitting in front of them now, which was likely what had ruffled his feathers.

  Brice had spoken to the owner earlier in the day. The sanitarium had been founded by her great grandfather, Anthony Garfield Strickland. He had built it here in this out-of-the-way place as a secluded retreat for the wealthy patients it housed, offering the privacy the uber-rich and much-respected East Coast old money crowd demanded for their precious loved ones. Wouldn't want it to get out that there was, ahem, mental illness sprouting somewhere on the family tree.

  Though Brice could probably remember the place before it began its decline — and perhaps T.J. and Dobbs could comment upon it in its prime — the 2015 version of Forest Hills Sanitarium in McKinley County, West Virginia was old, seedy and depressing.

  Once Brice dropped the name Raymond Dobson, the current owner, Andrea Strickland, couldn't have been more accommodating. Bailey intended to ask Dobbs about that. In truth, she knew little about the histories of the old men who'd shown up at her house in the rain the night she tried to commit suicide. She imagined there were some stories to be told there! But you couldn't very well dig into someone's past without expecting them to dig into yours.

  Ms. Strickland didn't ask a single question about the full-of-holes story Brice and Bailey had cooked to explain why they were looking for a young woman whose name they didn't know and whose description they didn't have.

  The administrator, however, was not inclined to be so easily satisfied.

  "You need to understand that the blood types of our residents is proprietary information which we cannot release to a third party without violating the provisions of the Patient Privacy Act."

  "We don't want their blood types," Bailey said. "We just want to ask them a few questions. A dog bite isn't such a casual injury you'd be likely to forget it."

  "I don't understand why you have come to believe that one of our residents is the person you're looking for."

  "I don't mean to offend," Brice said, though clearly he absolutely did mean to offend. Or at least to put the man in his place before he could shoot more holes in their story, which already looked like a colander. "But you don't really have to understand why we want to know what we’re asking, Mr. Styles."

  The man's face colored again and a vein began to throb in his temple, but he kept his squeaky voice level.

  "You're wasting your time, Sheriff. If you had called me instead of Ms. Strickland in the first place, I could have saved us all a lot of trouble. I can assure you there is no one here who can help you."

  He started to rise, as if dismissing them.

  "Actually," Brice said coldly, "Ms. Strickland gave us the names of two residents who fit the profile of the person we're searching for. We'd like to talk to them."

  Styles sat back down before he ever got completely to his feet. A thin glaze of sweat now covered his brow and his upper lip.

  "Which two?”

  "Jocelyn Farrington and Virginia Mason."

  Styles looked like someone had pulled his chair out from under him and he'd landed on his butt on the floor.

  "Jocelyn Farrington's mental state is such that … you can ask all the questions you want but you can't believe her answers."

  "We'll decide what we can and can't believe," Brice said.

  The man backed up to punt.

  "Very well. I am glad to cooperate with the police in any way I
can. I will ask Miss Farrington if she would be willing to talk to you. Her family … can afford her care, but they never visit, no one visits, so she could refuse to see strangers. She can refuse to answer your questions, and even if she does … you don't really understand what you're dealing with here. She has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has a whole construct of reality that is totally delusional. Everything she says is a total fabrication."

  Brice said nothing for long enough to make the moment uncomfortable. When he spoke, his voice was soft.

  "Why are you so determined to discredit whatever Miss Farrington says before the words even leave her mouth? What is it you're afraid she'll say?"

  Chapter Twelve

  As Brice and Bailey followed the orderly Styles had summoned to show them to Jocelyn Farrington's room, Bailey inquired under her breath, "Is it a crime to cause somebody to have a stroke — because if it is, you just committed it."

  They went down the hall to an elevator and rode it to the second floor. This hallway had more the feel of a "nut house" than Westminster Acres. People crying out, others making unintelligible noises. Bailey glanced into a room as they passed it and a woman there was strapped to the bed, writhing and making sounds that were almost words but not quite.

  Brice looked neither right nor left. His face was utterly devoid of expression. Not the look of a face in repose, but a face where every facial muscle was held rigidly in place.

  They paused in front of Jocelyn's closed door, thanked the orderly and stood silent until the man was out of earshot.

  "You ready for this?" Brice's voice sounded strained, like it was hard for him to engage his vocal cords.