Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  She waited. Still nothing.

  Bailey'd been prepared to be sucked into a vortex of fear and pain and brutality and violence. But that didn't happen. She turned to look at Brice, who stood in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest, an unreadable look on his face.

  Then she turned to T.J., who was watching her carefully.

  The quiet grew uncomfortable. She made a show of looking around behind the portrait on the easel. "Anybody check to see if this thing's plugged in?" Brice came into the room to stand beside her.

  "Were you wrong, maybe? Was Jeni alone in the room?"

  Not a chance.

  "Jeni was in so much pain …" Just saying it took Bailey's breath away for a moment. "She'd have told him about the others, but he didn't ask."

  Dragging her eyes over the portrait, she scanned the vague outlines she'd painted of other things in the room and came to rest on the closet door, open just a crack. Bailey had run from an intruder and taken refuge under a bed, as Jeni had done — but maybe the other girls …

  Placing the tip of her brush on the slash of darkness between the open closet door and the jamb, she consciously tried to paint it in more detail.

  And then it happened.

  This was not like the other times she'd had visions or seen whole scenes — as viscerally real as having a hallucination. When that happened, the rest of the world vanished and she fell down into a hole and lived someone else's life. It was like peeking into a cave to get a look at a bat and suddenly the whole flock comes roaring out at you, a black mass, coloring the sky and the world black and you're consumed by that blackness, fall through it into another reality altogether.

  It wasn't like that this time. This time the bats were individual.

  She sees an image through someone's eyes — one of the girls! The girl is looking out the window of a moving vehicle. A gold archway, with words, instantly gone, then she sees only trees and power lines. Then there's a view out a different window — a different girl — and there's a sign. The sign flashes by so fast Bailey barely catches sight of it.

  Someone else … and her mouth is taped shut. She can feel the edge of the tape scraping against the bottom of her nose but it doesn't hurt, not like the pain in her wrists. They're bound together with the zip-lock ties that fasten so they can't be undone. The ties bind her wrists to someone else's wrists, digging into her skin so deep she feels blood and she wants to cry out but doesn't dare.

  Big, rough hands grab her arm — the same girl? A different one? — and she's lifted up off the floor of a vehicle, like a cargo van, and tossed out of it onto the ground. She lands on her knees on rocks with sharp edges and they cut into her bare skin and then into her shoulder through the filmy fabric of her dress when the weight of someone shoves her off balance onto her side.

  The scene goes dark. But not dark as in nothing there, dark because what the eyes see is darkness; where the girl is, there's no light. Then a shaft of it appears, a flashlight beam.

  A wall, just a rock wall. Warmer air. Not warm, really, just air that doesn't have the bite of chill outside.

  A sound. A rumble. A lawnmower. No, not a lawnmower. Something else.

  A chainsaw.

  Someone screams. Shrieks. Wails. Blood splatters on the bare wall, runs in rivulets down the black rock.

  Then Bailey isn't seeing through the eyes of one, but the eyes of several, like watching three different movies on three different screens at the same time and the dialogue is garbled.

  " … movie stars …"

  "…tiny pieces…"

  "… have to hose it off …"

  Screaming. Crying.

  "Oh, God, please noooooo."

  Begging and pleading.

  Then the images clear. Each one jolted Bailey separately, like when there's too much static electricity and everything you touch snaps and pops and shocks you.

  Bailey steps back, not completely gone from the studio this time.

  Here but not here.

  She is somewhere that the room is dim, the images indistinct, like she's viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope. There's light at the other end of a long tunnel and Brice, T.J. and Dobbs are in that light. They're calling to her from the light and she begins to run toward it.

  A huge rumble roars, sound pounding through her, and the earth beneath her shakes.

  She is suddenly terrified, so scared she barely has air to run. She cries out but the sound shatters into tiny pieces against the rock walls of the tunnel. She sees that as she runs toward the light, the circle is closing, the light shrinking, getting smaller and smaller. If she doesn't get to the light before the portal is closed altogether, she will be stuck in the dark tunnel in the absolute black with no way out.

  Stuck there in forever darkness.

  Dead.

  So she dives for it, leaps out of the darkness — "Fight back!" She screams the words inside her mind and hears them reverberate in other minds. — into the light and the tunnel behind her vanishes, disappears with a little sparkle like a soap bubble and is gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  "Bailey."

  It was Brice. He was holding onto her arm, looking into her face and she knew she had heard him calling her name before, but it had seemed to come from a long way away. From the top of some great chasm and she'd heard it deep in the depths of the darkness there.

  "Are you alright?"

  "Define alright."

  "Are you hurt? Did they do something to the girls?"

  "They're taking them somewhere in a van, have them tied up in the back lying on the floor, so all they can see out the windows are passing trees, power lines, tall things like that."

  T.J. and Dobbs gathered around as she spoke.

  "This was … like Macy and her little brother—"

  "Meaning it ain't happened yet."

  She hadn't thought about it, but no … these events hadn't happened yet.

  "But the images just flashed and were gone. It wasn't a single continuous scene I could watch unfold."

  "Sorta like a sketch," T.J. said and gestured at the painting.

  Bailey looked at the canvas for the first time, focused on what she'd added to it — which wasn't much. Ghostly shadows now inhabited the dark interior of the closet, pale outlines. Sketches on the darkness that lacked detail. It was clear that someone hid there, more than one someone. The light reflecting off their faces was only barely enough, though. You had to look closely to see them at all, but then it was like one of those dual-image pictures that once you see the second image you can't not see it.

  "How many girls?" Dobbs asked.

  "I'm not sure. More than two. More than three or four, even. I hopped back and forth among their experiences, seeing things from first one girl's perspective and then another."

  "Describe what you saw," Brice said.

  Bailey knew it was vitally important that she remember every detail of every flashed image. She concentrated hard, but it was like feeling her way back into a dream that was fading even as she tried to grab hold of it.

  She described the plastic ties that bound the girls' hands and how they cut into the skin. She recalled the image of lying on her back in a moving vehicle, the floorboard carpet smell. New. It had a new-car smell.

  "Trees and power lines and signs fly by."

  "Signs?" Brice’s attention was intense. "Tell me everything you can about the signs."

  "Not signs — sign, singular."

  She turned away from them, holding up her hand for them to stop talking. She went to a low shelf and picked up a sketchpad, grabbed a pencil out of the cup she used to hold them — a minion cup, the little guy with just one eye. Sitting down in the small chair in front of the desk with her laptop resting on the top — turned off — she made shooing gestures toward the door. The puppy had accompanied the group into the studio and now plopped down at Bailey's feet.

  "Stop asking me questions. Go away and let me jot all this down now while it's still f
resh in my mind. It's fading fast."

  "I'll make another pot of coffee," Dobbs said.

  "And if we don't drink it, we can always use it to pave the driveway," T.J. said.

  Bailey jotted down:

  Trees — mostly bare, but a few still had some gold leaves. One had faded red.

  The end of October was long past the peak of autumn foliage, and the unseasonably warm weather had prevented the brilliant colors a hard freeze and cold weather would have brought.

  Power lines. More trees, these bare.

  She wrote down what the girls said, how they begged. What the men said, their exact words, trying to capture it all before the images faded away like the smoke from a dying campfire.

  When she'd put down everything she could think of, she took the sketch pad into the kitchen and handed it to the men seated at the table.

  "Here are the puzzle pieces. You'll have to put them together."

  The first thing she'd seen had been a sign. From the girl’s view, the sign was upside down and backwards, but it was still clear what it was. "The Nautilus Casino. Where your every desire will be fulfilled."

  The van had passed under that archway, had probably left from the back of the hotel parking lot.

  "Which way'd they go?" T.J. asked.

  "I don't know."

  "How long was they in there? How far'd they go?"

  "I don't know that either. They were on the highway for a while, then they left it, turned on another road that was bumpy. Then they turned again onto a road — it wasn't like a road at all. They tossed the girls out of the van onto the ground and rocks dug into their hands and knees."

  "So they weren't at some building?"

  "No. It was dark. The sky was velvet black, big hunks of stars, so they weren't somewhere the lights of the city would have been reflecting. Out in the country somewhere."

  Bailey caught the look Brice and T.J. exchanged.

  "What?"

  "What they's planning … it could be … messy and noisy."

  "A chainsaw!" Bailey gasped out the word. "I heard them crank it up. And the walls were made of rock, stone. Somewhere with rock walls. And the girls were begging, pleading. Crying, 'no, don't …'"

  Bailey remembered what T.J.'d speculated, that the men were going to kill the girls … and video their murder. Cold nausea curled its greasy fingers through her guts.

  "We're playing beat-the-clock here," Brice said. "They're on their way, or soon will be, to a secluded place they've picked out. I don't imagine what they've got planned is going to take very long. Then they're off to Who Knows Where on a Learjet parked and gassed up at Crenshaw's airport."

  "Pray for a flat tire," T.J. said.

  Bailey turned and left the kitchen, returned to the studio with Bundy tagging along behind, sniffing the baseboards, the rugs, the legs of furniture — everything in his path. She let him in, then closed the door — not because she didn't want the men to see what she was doing but because she didn't want to be distracted by their voices. She'd just thought of something, and maybe …

  It was worth a try.

  She went to the painting on the easel. The paint of the vague shadowy faces in the closet was still wet, but Bailey wasn't interested in that portion of the picture.

  She studied the terrified, horrified face of the girl who had been hosed and hadn't betrayed her friends. Jeni. Evgenia.

  Bailey had connected with her as she had connected with the other people whose portraits she'd painted, capturing the ugliness of their brutal deaths in freeze-frame for posterity.

  Except Macy Cosgrove didn't die.

  And Macy recognized … something … about Bailey when they met that night as she watched the Fourth of July fireworks high in the sky — just minutes before everything her family owned was swept away. Minutes before she and her family narrowly escaped being washed away with it. Bailey had reached out to the little girl, had touched her and when she turned around, the bond went snap, like a stretched rubber band going back to its original shape.

  She had asked the little girl, "Do you know me?" The child had smiled and nodded. So the connection didn't just go one way. It was not just that Bailey was connected to the little girl, Macy had been connected to her, too.

  Macy'd been the only other image Bailey'd painted that she'd been compelled to paint, where the magic had reached out through the canvas and created the image of a future event. The painting she decided to paint had shown an image from the past. And that image had led her and the others into the worst nightmare of their lives. But even then, Bailey had connected to the subject of the painting.

  So was it possible that there was some way for Bailey to use that connection? Was there a way to communicate with Evgenia?

  And if there were, what should she try to communicate?

  The whole idea sounded impossible, of course. She barked out a burp of sardonic laughter. Impossible? Like anything about her ability to paint the future was possible! Nothing in her life existed between the fences of possible and impossible anymore, not since she woke up in a hospital bed with a ceiling tile as her best friend and Oscar in her skull.

  Bailey reached out to the face in the painting, touched it. It wasn't like there was some kind of electric current, no connection of energy that she could sense. But she closed her eyes anyway, and concentrated.

  What could she say, what could she try to communicate that would do the girl any good? She certainly couldn't communicate some complicated message, instructions on how to escape from plastic hand ties — if, indeed, there was any way to escape them. It wasn't like this was some open phone line where she could chat, or maybe drop a text into the system and it would show up with a smiley-face emoticon at the other.

  What could she tell Evgenia that would help her and the others?

  Delay.

  Bailey whispered the word aloud, concentrated on it. Blanked out every other thought and image.

  DE-LAY.

  Slow them down.

  Stall.

  She waited to feel … something.

  Nothing.

  If there was any communication going on, she was unaware of it.

  "Bailey," Brice called.

  "Coming," she replied and went back down the hallway to the kitchen. Bundy followed along happily.

  "What can you tell me about the sign you saw?"

  "It flashed by so fast I didn't see all of it. Couldn't make it all out." She pointed to where she had jotted down what she could see of the sign. "There were some letters in front of the W that I didn't get. It was above the other letters. The W on top and beneath it was OH7."

  She crossed the room to lean over Brice's shoulder to point out the sign on her sketchpad.

  "OH7," he mumbled the words to himself. "A road sign, maybe? Ohio Route 7?"

  Out of the corner of her eye, Bailey saw the puppy squatting, preparing to do his business in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  "Nooooo."

  She leapt around the chairs, picked him up before he could get in position and hurried out into the back yard with him, holding him out from her in case he decided to let it fly anyway. Depositing him in the grass, she told him to "go potty," and reached into her pocket for a treat so she could pop it into his mouth the instant he let the liquid flow. Bundy sniffed the grass as if it was the first time he'd ever encountered such a phenomenon.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The puppy stopped sniffing the grass, turned toward Bailey and began to bark furiously.

  She sensed rather than saw, felt a presence and started to turn around. But before she had a chance to move more than her head, a gloved hand grabbed her upper arm in a vice grip and she felt the cold metal of a knife at her throat.

  "Move, squeak, so much as breathe loud and I will slice your throat all the way to your backbone." It was a low voice, full of pebbles, harsh and grating.

  For emphasis, the man pushed the knife into her neck and the blade sliced as sharp as a scalpel into her skin, rele
asing a river of warm blood to slide down the front of her neck into the V of her blouse.

  "Move!" he whispered, holding her tight against his body, his face beside her ear. The smell of his breath was gagging, the stench of garlic and onions and rotted teeth.

  Bundy continued to yap, standing in front of Bailey, looking past her at the man, who kicked at the dog but the puppy danced out of his way and kept barking.

  Not man, men. When she turned she saw the other one. He was carrying two guns — some kind of big rifles, automatic weapons. One on a strap over his shoulder and the other in his hand.

  Dragging her, half-carrying her, the men moved with remarkable speed across the back yard, gliding through the shadows, around the huge maple and oak trees. Bailey only briefly considered shouting for help, but she had no doubt that if she made a sound, it would be the last sound she ever uttered. If she cried out, the men would have to run, and they couldn't do that dragging her along. He'd kill her, drop her body in the grass and be gone.

  The old board fence had been built the same time as the Watford House and extended out from it on the north and south sides before making right-angle turns at the edge of the property and stretching down the back sides of the yard. It was obscured along most of its length by ancient vegetation, box-trimmed shrubbery, thick and impenetrable, overgrown bushes and vines, morning glory and honeysuckle, that stretched up over the top and down the other side. The gate was in the center of the fence line that stretched across the back of the property. You could see it from the back porch. Brice had stationed a deputy in her neighbor's back yard on the other side of the gate. What had hap—?

  The men didn't drag her toward the gate, but made for the back corner of the yard instead.

  Swarms of terror, black shrieking harpies with horror faces flapped their bat wings in the pit of Bailey's belly, clawed at her bones and stole her breath. Her racing heart slammed blood through her veins, pounding a stake of panic into her chest.

  The puppy followed them, out of range of the man's kicks, barking furiously.

  At the fence, Bailey saw how the men had entered, how they'd pried out the nails where one section of the slat fence was attached to the post and then pushed the section inward far enough to make a space to pass through. When they got to the opening, the second man went through, turned and the first shoved Bailey into his arms. She couldn't see in the darkness beyond the fence, into the back yard of the house that faced the street which ran parallel to Sycamore.