Chapter 17
He was furious. How dare this charlatan tell him that his father wanted his inheritance, his inheritance, distributed to some bullshit charitable organizations that didn’t need any more dribs and drabs from well-meaning fools?
He’d expected, for the amount he’d paid that blasted medium, that the man would at least have the decency to tell him what he wanted so that he could contest the will.
But nooo. The jackass had to have some sort of goddamn moral code.
He raised the sunglasses to his face, then frowned. These weren’t his.
In the doorway, he turned and looked back, then saw his sunglasses—Ray-Bans, naturally, unlike whatever cheap piece of trash this pair was—sitting where he’d left them on the edge of the desk. He must have grabbed the other pair.
With a sigh, he walked back and reached out to put them back.
I sighed, staring down with annoyance at my sunglasses—cheap pieces of trash, apparently. My things were supposed to be safe, but people just kept touching my stuff. It was one thing when it was someone I knew, but something completely different when it was a stranger.
I knew it hadn’t been intentional, but it was still irritating.
I was packing up the rest of my things to go back home when the bell on the door drew my attention.
Hart came in, his expression worried and… guilty?
“Good afternoon, Agent Hart,” I said mildly.
“Just Hart, Rayn.”
I smiled, although I was pretty sure it didn’t go all the way to my eyes. I was tired, annoyed, and seeing Hart brought a resurgence of guilt over the fact that I’d completely messed up whatever I’d been building with Raj—whether a friendship or something more.
“Good afternoon, Hart,” I corrected.
His lips twitched a little, but he didn’t smile.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“Nothing—well…” He trailed off a little. “Not so much what happened so much as what we found… and what needs to happen.”
I felt my eyebrows rise. “What do you mean?”
Hart sighed, running a hand over his braid, tugging on the end. “I went back into the old Tranquil Brook files,” he said softly, hesitantly, almost as though he were afraid to tell me whatever it was he’d come to Beyond the Veil to tell me.
I waited.
“And found a Dr. Robert Garraway.”
I swallowed, my pulse climbing.
Hart studied me. “Do you remember a Dr. Garraway?” he asked. “He retired about three years before… the facility was shut down.”
I looked up at him, fighting to keep my voice steady as I met his gaze.
“I couldn’t tell you almost anyone’s name,” I replied grimly.
A dozen or so people at most. Chris, of course.
A nurse named Ashley. Another nurse named Vaughn.
Two of the orderlies—Daryl and Terrence.
Some of the patients. Sara, Rupert, Llewellyn, Harry, Jasper, Clint, Isabella.
I’m sure if I thought particularly hard about it I could come up with a few more.
But even the people I’d known hadn’t really named the doctors. The doctor needs to conduct more tests or The doctor says that taking this will help you feel better. Rarely ever giving names.
I wondered if that was intentional, a way to keep any of us from telling family members about the people who were abusing us.
Or maybe it was just an automatic part of the depersonalization of the institution.
If no one had names, then they could pretend that we weren’t fully human.
Didn’t deserve to have the magic we had.
And it had the additional—perhaps unintentional, perhaps not—effect of turning them into more frightening monsters.
Hart nodded once. “Well, the problem is, we don’t have all the records. Just what was pulled for the criminal cases.” He sounded bitter. “The rest was left there. So we need to go back.”
My breath caught in my throat.
But Hart had already held up his hands. “I’m telling you we’re going back. And we might have something to bring to you when we’re done. I’m not asking you to come with us.”
I could draw breath again, although there was also a strange sense of disappointment—because they weren’t asking me.
I didn’t want to go back to Tranquil Brook. There were very few things I could think of that I explicitly didn’t want to do more than that. But I couldn’t help but think if I’d been any other contact psychic, he’d have wanted me there. Just in case.
That the only reason I wasn’t being asked to go along was because I’d been a patient…
Well, maybe it wasn’t the only reason.
Maybe it was because Raj hated me that much.
I was walking down one of the grey-walled halls, the cracked tiles beneath my feet cold and hauntingly familiar, their flecked grey-green-beige surfaces pocked and stained by things better not thought about.
I knew these halls. Knew that the painted steel swinging doors to the left led down a hall to showers and tubs that you hoped had other people in them besides you and the orderly assigned to you, and the set to the right led to places that had black stenciled letters that read TREATMENT and THERAPY, but meant TORTURE and MANIPULATION.
I didn’t want to be here. I’d never wanted to be here, but somehow it was worse now that I knew what the world was like outside of it.
The lights around me flickered with that particular electric sound that only flickering fluorescent lights can make.
The harsh brightness I remembered was dimmed, perhaps by time, these lights barely illuminating the corners of walls that had been made dingy by grime—dirt, mold, I wasn’t sure what else.
The intermittent moments of darkness that washed over me when the lights cut out seemed to leave shadows in their wake, and I struggled to see to the end of the hallway, even though I knew there was a window there that looked out over the grounds.
Somewhere.
The hallway seemed longer than it should have been. Longer than I remembered, anyway, and the mismatch between my memory and what lay before me caused my heart to pound and my mouth to go dry and taste sour.
Beneath my bare feet, the tile grew slick, wet, water flowing down the hall, just enough to lap at my toes and splash up around my heels. I swallowed, knowing where the water had to have come from.
Then I had to decide whether or not I was going to find out why the baths were flooding.
I knew I shouldn’t, that I wasn’t going to want to have discovered the answer, but I couldn’t help myself.
I turned left, sloshing my way carefully down tiles that were slick, the cold water rising to the level of my ankles.
Around me, the flickering continued, the sound of water echoing off the walls and ceiling, growing gradually louder as I approached the long room with its rows of tubs.
The facility had been built in an age when hydrotherapy was all the rage, and bathing for the sake of cleanliness definitely wasn’t. They’d made sure to schedule only patients of the same gender to bathe at the same time, since you were going to be naked in an open room with one another.
The gender of the nurses or orderlies who ‘helped’ you was apparently irrelevant.
Whether they actually helped—or just observed—or not depended entirely on the person.
While most of the nurses and orderlies probably did want to help or were at least apathetic to our existence, there were always too many who were driven by the power they had over us.
Power they could exercise in many small and large ways.
Flashes of memory pushed against my awareness, but I shoved them away. I didn’t have time to deal with them now.
I hesitated outside the closed double-doors, the remnants of the thick black letters above the doors reading HYDROTHERAPY just barely legible, a smaller black plastic sign on the wall reading BATHS providing the room’s more modern usage.
Water burbled out from under the door, dark and cold. Bitingly cold. So cold it felt like acid.
Breath rasping in my lungs, I forced myself to push open the heavy doors, what felt like the weight of a hundred ghosts pushing back from the other side. Although I didn’t particularly want to, some unknown compulsion forced me onward, and I put my shoulder to the door, leaning my weight into it.
With a long-suffering groan, the door gave way.
All of the tubs were overflowing their stainless steel sides, the water weirdly dark as it cascaded over the rounded lips of a half-dozen baths.
The water should have flowed into the grating in the center of the floor, but it seemed those were flooded, as well, as the water rippled across the room, reacting to the movement of the doors and my sloshing feet.
I shuddered as my scan of the room revealed that at least one of the tubs held more than just icy water.
A sodden lump of fabric—that I knew instinctively wasn’t just fabric—floated at the surface of the one farthest from me, all the way down the weirdly long row and to the left.
Moving forward was like wading through cold molasses, although the lapping water around my ankles was clearly more liquid and less opaque, the pink shape of my feet distorted and strange through the swirling water, like the pale bellies of bloated dead fish attached to my ankles.
I glanced in each of the other tubs as I passed, but only the one had more than dark water.
I stopped beside it, staring down at the mass of off-white, stained fabric billowed around the form floating inside. Stringy brown hair floated out from the face-down skull—the only feature that was recognizably human.
I knew the face I was going to see, but the same horrifying compulsion that had dragged me down the hall and forced me to walk across the room made me reach into the chill water that felt almost oily against my skin and scrabble through sodden fabric for a bony shoulder to turn him over.
My own face—but younger, much younger—stared sightlessly up at me, the dark irises that looked nearly black filmed over and made a milky grey. The skin was paler than mine had ever been in life, and my skin hadn’t seen sunlight for most of the fourteen years I’d spent here.
What I hadn’t expected was that my own corpse would come back to life with a gasp in front of me.
It was enough to startle me awake, choking on a cry.
Apparently, even the fact that Hart had mentioned going back to Tranquil Brook had been enough to send my subconscious back there. At least I hadn’t dragged anyone else into that nightmare with me.
A glance at the clock told me it was four-seventeen in the morning.
My skin—like the knit boxers and t-shirt I wore as pajamas—was damp with sweat, my heart pounding and my breath fast and shallow. I closed my eyes, trying to ease the panic attack pushing against the back of my throat.
Every sense felt hypersensitive, the sound of my own pulse and respiration loud and rasping, the rev of an engine and rush of tires down Broad Street outside startlingly loud as a solitary car sped past, making me jump.
Breath shuddered in my chest.
I wanted desperately not to be alone. To find Raj…
But I couldn’t do that, and I knew it.
With a sigh, I pushed back the sweat-soaked covers with shaking hands, then bundled them all up and stuffed them into my laundry basket, along with my shorts and t-shirt. I debated the merits of showering immediately versus once I’d put my laundry in, and decided I needed to be clean more.
I leaned against the molded plastic wall, both hands spread, holding me upright as I stood under the thankfully hot water, letting it run over my skull, down my neck, back, and the sides of my face, and down into the drain, the water swirling away the sweat and the tears that I let escape under the spray, although not the anxiety that had produced them.
I was honestly surprised that I was tolerating the water, but the thought of not scrubbing myself clean had been too strong. And the fact that this water was both flowing and hot went a long way into keeping me from breaking down in the shower.
I spent probably a half hour—maybe longer, I don’t know, I didn’t actually check the clock when I finally dried myself off and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a clean t-shirt—in the shower, then shoved my laundry into the tiny in-unit washer to clean out the cold sweat.
I wasn’t going to be particularly useful at work in another four hours, but it wasn’t like this was the first—or would be the last—time that nightmares had stolen my sleep.
I just—
I’d had worse nightmares, worse panic attacks. Nights that I’d been wakeful all night or starting at midnight, one, or two in the morning instead of a quarter after four.
But there was something about this one that had left me particularly drained.
Maybe it was the fact that I was already exhausted and worn out from trying to gain control over either my psychic abilities or my death magic.
Maybe it was the guilt.
The guilt was particularly strong at the moment.