Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  She nodded and started to knock on the door, but he touched her arm.

  "You think you'll connect to this girl if she's the right one?"

  Bailey had been wondering the same thing herself. The flashes of connection had been more brilliant with Macy Cosgrove than the ones she'd had after she painted the strangled girl, and there was probably a reason for that, though Bailey couldn't think what. Maybe children were just better connectors; they felt things more easily and more purely. When she'd smelled breakfast cooking, and heard "Country Roads," that wasn't really playing on the radio, it had been distinct, clearly not a real sound from the real world, but a sound that was unmistakable, like a memory.

  This time, her flash images had been more vague. The perfume smell had faded so quickly, if she hadn't been a perfume junky, she might not have noticed it at all. And if there'd been an image of some kind to go with it, she hadn't seen it. The music a few minutes ago had been so faded and washed out it was difficult to picture and recall. If she hadn't concentrated, the image would have receded like a dream that's only stored in temporary memory and fades so fast you can't grab hold of it.

  She'd heard music a couple of other times, too, but it was so distant it was barely audible. Either it was far away or in another room. She had heard sounds like distant buzzers. Were they the sounds of nurse call buttons in a hospital, or something else entirely?

  She could fit all the flashes of connection to the girl who was beyond this door and to this mental hospital, but they would likely fit other places, too.

  "Maybe I'll connect. Maybe not. Let's just see what happens."

  She knocked and a small voice called out, "Come in."

  It wasn't really a hospital room, had more the feel of a dorm room, though the furniture was old and worn, like it had been expensive when purchased and kept in good shape. A standard-sized bed with a flowered bedspread, a desk, two chairs, a book case.

  Bailey called up the images the girl saw when the man threw her to the floor. There'd been piles of clothes on the floor, the closet door ajar. This room was neat, not a sock out of place. Still … change a couple of details and it could …

  The room definitely had an aroma, a distinct bottled fragrance — Pine-Sol. Smelled like somebody had just used a gallon of it on the floor. The girl could have been wearing the most expensive perfume on the planet and the cleaning compound would have masked it.

  There was a girl sitting on the edge of the bed, her back as straight and erect as a piano teacher. She was looking at her hands in her lap, which were wiggling and twisting, like she was trying to get something off them. She had long hair and it was blonde, though it seemed to be a lighter shade than the girl in the portrait. But now she was sitting in the sunlight streaming through a high window. It would look darker with less light.

  The girl was coiled as tight as a watch spring.

  Bailey waited for the hammer blow of connection, or even a thin tug of recognition. She felt nothing at all.

  "They didn't want to let you talk to me, did they?" the girl said. Her voice was soft and she didn't look at them when she spoke. She never stopped wringing her hands, either.

  "You're Jocelyn Farrington, is that right?" Brice said.

  She looked up then, but didn't meet their eyes, kept her own eyes roaming around on their faces, always moving.

  "Yes, and you are a sheriff and his friend and they said you were coming to visit today but I didn't tell them how bad I wanted to talk to you or they would have given me drugs and tied me down with the leather straps in the bed in that room like they always do when they know I've seen something they don't want me to see."

  She said the whole thing in one long stream, a single sentence without stopping to catch her breath. Brice and Bailey exchanged a look.

  Brice gestured toward the only two chairs in the room and asked if they could sit. She nodded. Brice sat in a worn wingback and Bailey sat in the desk chair beside the girl's desk. The desktop had a gooseneck lamp and a pile of papers. The only one she could see was filled with strange shapes, like hieroglyphics. On top of that was an iPod with earbuds attached.

  "My name's Brice McGreggor and this is Bailey Donahue. We're glad to meet you."

  "Jocelyn. I'm Jocelyn."

  She stopped wringing her hands. It seemed to take a great force of will to do it, like she had to grab hold of herself and make her hands be still. Then, with an equal force of will, she moved her eyes slowly up Brice's face until she met his eyes. She only held the look for a second, then looked away. She turned to Bailey then and did the same thing, moved her eyes slowly upward until she was looking Bailey in the eye. She instantly looked away. Then grabbed herself and made herself look back, look deep into Bailey's eyes.

  Her eyes were a startling shade of light blue. Then the eyes darted away, like pulling a hand away from a flame. They landed on the papers on the desk and the girl looked alarmed, glanced at Bailey, back at the papers, clearly afraid Bailey'd seen them and …

  And what?

  Bailey tried to divert her.

  "You like music, do you?"

  She was looking at her hands again, shook her head, paused, then nodded.

  "Some. The old ones."

  "Old? Like … Simon and Garfunkel old? ‘Sound of Silence,’ maybe?"

  Jocelyn let out a little cry, a mouse squeak, and relaxed. Something like a strangled sob escaped her and she started to rise. She didn't, though, just sank back on her bed, no longer tense.

  "Yes!" she whispered. "And the ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Heard It Through the Grapevine’ and ‘Pretty Woman’ and all the old songs … you're human." There was awe and wonder in her voice.

  She sat then, just looking at them.

  If she'd been listening to 'Sound of Silence' and Bailey heard it through their connection … why didn't she feel something?

  Brice looked at Bailey, as if handing the ball off to her.

  "I guess you're wondering why we have come to see you today," Bailey began.

  "I don't care why you're here. I've only had a few visitors since I was kidnapped and locked up — anybody who shows up is welcome."

  "Who kidnapped you?"

  "Not the Revenants. The Others."

  The Others. The strangled girl had wanted to go home and warn them about the "others."

  "All that matters to me is that you are here. You're here and you're human and you'll listen to what I have to tell you. You won't let that man come tonight and kill me."

  Bailey shot Brice a look.

  Yes," she said, "we'll listen.”

  And for the next half hour they heard a strange tale of creatures that could only be seen by some people, special people, creatures that stalked invisibly among humans, pale lions that took from the herd of humanity those who could not defend themselves. They also hunted people like Jocelyn, the Ones Who See. When they caught you, they took your internal organs, pulled your beating heart from your chest, and ate your eyes — they especially liked blue eyes.

  Bailey listened in horror and fascination, wondering what it must be like to see the world as a place with monsters lurking in every corner, waiting to attack and kill you, eat you alive — literally — while you begged them to kill you. She tried to tune out the actual words and concentrate on the girl and the emotions. Tried to connect somehow to this person, tried to match whatever she sensed from her to the panic, the terror of a girl racing down a dark hallway—

  Brice squeezed her arm and then interrupted the girl.

  "I'm sorry, Jocelyn, would you please repeat that part? Tell me what happened to you last night when you were hunting Revenants in the moonlight."

  "It slipped out of the ward and I followed it out into the hospital. I've never been in the other wings, but I kept track of where I was, where to turn, so I could find my way back. We went past that arch, the one you have to pass through to escape."

  The girl was searching for a hallway with a golden arch.
<
br />   "Tell me about the orderly," Brice said. "Describe him."

  "He's huge and ugly.

  "Does he wear jewelry?"

  "Not when he's in hospital whites. Then he just wears the one ring with the sparkling stone."

  Bailey tensed.

  "He has holes in his face, like he had the measles or acne maybe. And this morning, when he threatened to kill me, he was wearing the Beast."

  The girl was running from the "Beast."

  "A t-shirt. It's a rollercoaster, I think."

  Bailey tried not to flinch, instantly saw the hands encircling the girl's throat.

  "He threatened to kill you?"

  Jocelyn described her adventure the night before, how the orderly told her he would cut her up — I should cut you into little pieces with a chainsaw — and ended by describing the "throat-slicing" gesture the orderly had made when he saw her this morning.

  "It's a good thing Virginia didn't go hunting with me last night. Nobody knows what Virginia knows or sees," Jocelyn said. “She's in there in the darkness by herself and she won't let anybody but me in." She paused. "Sometimes we change places with each other and nobody can tell. Identical twins."

  Virginia was the other girl they'd come to see, the one who was catatonic.

  Jocelyn reached out tentatively and touched Bailey's knee.

  "You are … real," she said. "I can feel it."

  Bailey, on the other hand, felt nothing at all. While the girl was talking, Bailey had glanced around the room, looking for anything like the images she'd felt from the connection to the girl in the past few days. She'd been listening for the "sounds" ever since she entered the facility, and it could be that the discreet nurse-call buttons were what she had heard, but she couldn't be sure.

  Jocelyn's medical records were sealed so they couldn't find out whether or not she had a scar on her backside, and they couldn't very well ask her to drop her drawers so they could check for themselves. Only one way to find out.

  "Jocelyn, I'd like to ask you about scars. Do you have—"

  Jocelyn's head snapped up and she looked at Bailey as if Bailey had slapped her.

  "No," she said in the pitiful whine of a little child. "Oh, please, no." She began to shake her head. Tears welled in her eyes.

  "Jocelyn, are you alright? Did I say something to upset you?"

  "You're looking for the necklace that protects me. I should have known. I shouldn't have hoped."

  Her lip was quivering but she forced a brave smile. "But you won't find it. Tell the Most High Revenant that you failed, just like the other emissaries he sent to steal it from me."

  Jocelyn returned to the rigid posture she'd held when the two of them entered the room. Wound tight. Not looking at them.

  Bailey looked at Brice and he shrugged.

  "Thank you for your time, Jocelyn," Brice said.

  Silence.

  The two got up and went to the door. "Let's see what Virginia has to say," Brice said as he opened it.

  Jocelyn lifted her head but never made eye contact.

  "She won't tell you where it is. Jeni is too smart for all of you."

  Bailey's breath caught in her throat.

  "What did you call—?"

  "Identical twins: Jocelyn and Jeni."

  Chapter Thirteen

  As soon as they closed the door of Jocelyn's room behind them, Bailey squeezed Brice's arm.

  "Did you catch that? Jocelyn and Jeni. That was the last thing the strangled girl said. She called out, 'Jeni.'"

  "Is Jocelyn the one? Did you feel anything?" Brice's tone was brusque, almost demanding. He wanted this hunt to be over!

  Well, so did she. But she wasn't sure.

  "She ticks a lot of boxes. The song … I heard ‘Sound of Silence’ in my head while I was waiting for you to bring me the lanyard. And that's what she listens to." She paused. "But I didn't feel anything, no connection."

  "Makes sense now that Styles didn't want us to talk to her. He must be in on it."

  "In on what?"

  "Down in the basement, I'm thinking a meth lab, but maybe just a distribution point for oxy. It's something drug related, and that orderly thinks Jocelyn knows about it. He'll have to silence her."

  "But why would he care? Nobody'd believe her if she told."

  "The guy who murdered that girl kicked her teeth in. This isn't his first rodeo. Men like that don't take chances."

  He pointed down the hallway. Virginia's room was two doors down. Clearly, he wanted to get this done and get out of here.

  "Maybe you'll connect to this girl."

  But she didn't.

  Virginia Mason proved to be exactly as the hospital administrator had described her. She was completely catatonic. No light of any kind in her eyes. She had retreated down so far into herself she probably couldn't even see daylight above.

  Bailey couldn't help feeling her skin crawl, looking into those lifeless eyes. She'd painted a catatonic child and the portrait had led her and the others into an unimaginable nightmare. She shrugged it off, tried to feel something, any kind of connection. But there was nothing, though Virginia met the minimum requirements for inclusion on their search list. She had blonde hair, not quite the right color either, but that could be the quality of the light. Her eyes were a muddy blue. It was hard to imagine a girl like this — who walked if you led her, sat down where you put her, opened her mouth for you to feed her and sat where you left her — would be able to summon the mental wherewithal to run from a killer.

  Still, looking deep into the girl's vacant eyes, Bailey had a sense that there was an awareness there that understood very well what was going on around her, an awareness that had not been shoved off the deep end into psychosis but had willingly leapt off into nothingness rather than live in a reality too horrifying to countenance.

  It was impossible to say what that awareness might or might not be capable of.

  The two of them got into the elevator alone and Bailey reached past where Brice's finger hovered over the button with 1 on it toward the green button marked B.

  "Let's go have a look at what's in that room some guy's willing to kill for."

  "We can't. Our visitor’s passes only allow us to enter the public areas of the hospital and specified private rooms."

  "Like I give a rip about obeying the fine print on our visitor's passes."

  "We can't go barging in like Sherman marching on Atlanta," Brice snapped. He held up one finger. "One, I have no jurisdiction here, absolutely no authority."

  "Then we call Sheriff Oliver and—"

  He held up a second finger. "Sheriff Oliver has no right to search these premises. And you'd be hard pressed to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant based on the testimony of an institutionalized mental patient."

  "But—"

  He held up a third finger. "Operations like this one don't exist in a vacuum. It's a sweet setup — a rambling old building out in the middle of nowhere — where a heavy traffic flow in and out wouldn't be noticed by nosey neighbors. This county has a reputation …"

  "You think the sheriff is being paid off—"

  "I didn't say that! But I'm certain there's somebody up the food chain from our weasel-ly Mr. Styles who's powerful enough to make things happen. Or make things go away."

  "So what do we do?"

  "We don't do anything. I will have a chat with Mr. Styles."

  Brice strode through the frosted-glass door marked Offices toward the dignified wood-paneled door marked “Roderick Styles, Administrator.”

  When she realized he intended to barge right in, Styles's administrative assistant leapt to her feet.

  "You can't go in—"

  Brice opened the door and found the administrator in a meeting with two men wearing hospital whites. Doctors, probably.

  "Excuse me, gentlemen," he said, "I need a word alone with Mr. Styles."

  Styles turned the color of a ripe tomato, so outraged he couldn't even find his voice.

  "Yo
u can't come barging in here like this—"

  Brice went to his desk and leaned over it, using all six feet six inches of his body to intimidate.

  "I just did. And you do want to talk to me … alone."

  He glared at the little man, who wilted like an out-of-season rose.

  "If you'll excuse me, please," he said to the two men, who'd already displayed the good judgment to get up and start toward the door. "I am so sorry for the interruption." He hauled out as much bravado as he could muster. "This won't take long." Tried for authoritative and in charge. Missed by a mile.

  As soon as the door closed behind the last white-coated man, Brice said, "I know what's going on in the basement of this building."

  The man should definitely never take up the game of poker. All that bright red color drained out of his face and his lip literally began to tremble. He sat, probably because his legs wouldn't hold him upright any longer.

  "I don't know what you've heard, but I can assure you—"

  "Put a sock in it! Here's how this goes. I talk. You listen." Brice was leaning over the desk again and the man actually looked up at him like a mouse at an eagle. "We clear?"

  The man said nothing.

  "That was a question. Are. We. Clear?"

  "Yes," he said, his voice airless. "Say what you have to say so I can go back—"

  Brice had learned from experience that when you were trying to put the fear of God in a man, less was usually more. Get to the point, blunt and harsh.

  "Two things."

  Brice looked at his watch.

  "Thing One: In exactly twenty-four hours, some good friends of mine in the West Virginia State Health Department are going to conduct a ‘surprise inspection’ of every inch of Forest Hills Sanitarium. Shingles to foundation. Flies on roadkill. With me so far?"

  The man couldn't speak.

  "You got twenty-four hours to dismantle your little basement enterprise. If I could arrange it sooner, you wouldn't have twenty-four hours.

  "Thing Two: This is the biggie. You better start lighting candles to whatever deity you bow to, praying that Jocelyn Farrington never gets another ingrown toenail. That she never has a nosebleed. That she never tweezes her eyebrows too close. Because if I ever find the slightest mark on that girl, the tiniest scratch, I will hunt you down and…" He dropped the next four words individually, like single stones into a pool. "Beat. You. To. Death."