Colour of Death, The

by Cordy, Michael

  But this time it was different — very different. Immediately, she sensed something: heat. It didn’t just come from the wall she was touching. It was in the air around her. She could smell smoke, sense its acrid taste on her tongue and feel the burning in her throat and lungs. “Fire,” she said aloud. Then she saw a woman huddled in the corner, holding her nightgown around her as if the flimsy cotton would shield her. The apparition had a pale violet tint, which flickered on and off, but the woman looked real: Jane Doe could see and feel the terror in her eyes. She turned to escape and saw flames blocking her path. Fire was billowing into the room from the corridor outside, its searing fingers crawling across the ceiling and walls, reaching to claim the woman who was now coughing and screaming. As Jane Doe realized that she too was coughing and screaming, she felt strong hands grip her and pull her backwards, through the door and out of the room. Suddenly, the fire receded, the pale flickering violet was gone, and she could see Fox looking into her eyes. His now-familiar face comforted her. “What did you see and feel?”

  As she told him about the woman in the fire his eyes widened. Her account seemed to affect him almost as much as the experience had affected her. “Did you predict that? Is that in your envelope?”

  He folded it and put it in his jacket pocket. “One more room, then I’ll tell you everything.” He paused. “You OK for the last one?”

  She was still trembling but she could tell from Fox’s face that he was on to something and needed to know what. “I’m fine.”

  The last room, 410, was on the top floor. As Fox unlocked and opened the door she could feel her courage ebbing away so she hurried in before her nerve failed. The window was closed and the day was warm but even before she touched the walls she began shivering and felt the hairs rise on her forearms, as if a chill air was blowing. Steeling herself, she reached out and placed her palm against the wall.

  “How are you doing?” she heard Fox ask. “You look very pale.” She didn’t answer because another sound immediately intruded on her consciousness: the smashing of glass. Then a sudden rush of cold air hit her face, making her take a step back. “What’s happening, Jane? Tell me what you see.” Suddenly, the flickering pale violet returned and the window in front of her changed — the frame was no longer freshly decorated but cracked with flaking white paint. Then a man appeared to her right, tall and thin with a beard. He was holding a chair aloft and using it to hit the window as hard as he could. The glass was strong and it took him four blows to break the pane. He looked over his shoulder and she felt the terror in his eyes. Then she realized another man was coming into the room —with a knife. The bearded man grabbed one of the shards and held it like a blade. As he did so she felt the glass, cold and hard, in the palm of her own hand. With icy awareness she realized she was witnessing the scene in the third person but experiencing it from the first, from the bearded man’s point of view. In that instant she knew the bearded man was about to die. He raised the glass shard, defensively, but backed away toward the open window. Then the other man rushed him and stabbed him repeatedly. She doubled over with each stab as if they were entering her own body.

  “What’s happening, Jane? Speak to me.” Fox’s anxious voice reached her from some faraway place but she was too immersed in the nightmare to respond. She could only watch helplessly as the mortally wounded bearded man climbed onto the windowsill, desperate to evade his attacker, and jumped from the window. She felt herself falling, then all went black.

  She awoke to discover herself shaking with cold and shock, being carried from the room in Fox’s arms. In the corridor the cold left her but when she tried to stand she was still shaking. “You OK now?” he asked, his blue eyes creased with concern. He was also shaking, as if he could feel her cold.

  She leaned on him and nodded.

  “What happened in there?” he asked.

  As he listened to her he shook his head in disbelief. Pale, he looked as tired and drained as she felt. When she finished he pulled the sealed envelopes from his pocket and stared at them. “Did the experiment work?” she asked.

  He frowned and glanced behind him, as if worried he might be overheard. “Let’s go back to your room. I’ll explain everything there.”

  Chapter 14

  Back in Jane Doe’s room Nathan Fox laid the four envelopes in a line on the desk. Was it her imagination or were his hands still shaking?

  “So what’s in them?”

  “Look for yourself.” He pointed to the envelope with the number 207 scribbled on the cover. “Open them in order.”

  She picked it up. “This relates to the first room, right? The one in which nothing happened.”

  “Right.”

  She tore it open. Inside was a single line handwritten in black ink. She read it aloud. “In room 207 Jane Doe will not hallucinate.” She smiled. “You got that right.” She reached for the second envelope, room 222. Again she read the message aloud. “In room 222 Jane Doe will hallucinate. The hallucination will feature a man lying in bed by the window. He will look peaceful and appear asleep.” She looked up at him. “You got that wrong. I didn’t see anything.”

  He remained silent, just looked up at her, unblinking. She opened the next envelope, pulled out the enclosed slip of paper and read the prediction. “In room 302 Jane Doe will hallucinate. The hallucination will feature a woman being consumed by fire.” Her mouth felt dry. “How did you know that?”

  He didn’t answer, just kept looking at her. “Open the last one.”

  She reached for the final envelope and tore it open. As she read the last prediction, she could hear her voice shaking. “In room 410 Jane Doe will hallucinate. It will feature a bearded man smashing the window with a chair before being stabbed repeatedly by another man and jumping out the broken window. She may well feel intense cold.” The paper slipped from her hand and she watched it fall to the ground. “How did you know that? How did you predict two of my hallucinations? That’s impossible.”

  “What I did was relatively easy. What you did was impossible. I simply recognized a pattern. What do all your hallucinations have in common?”

  “They all have the same flickering pale violet tint?”

  “What else?”

  She frowned. “They’re frightening?”

  He shook his head. “Why are they frightening, apart from the fact you’re seeing and sensing things no one else can? What’s the common theme in all your hallucinations, including the ones you had at Oregon State before coming here?”

  She thought for a moment. Then it came to her, clear and cold. “Death.”

  He nodded. “In all your hallucinations you see or sense a person on the point of death.”

  He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a file. “These are the patient files for the Pine Hills Psychiatric Hospital which used to be on this site. Those weren’t predictions I wrote in the envelopes. Quite the opposite. They were records of historical events — deaths. Nineteen years ago there was a fire in this hospital. Most patients got out but Mary Lopez, the woman in room 302, perished. Two years later, in midwinter, Bob Kesey, the bearded man in room 410, was attacked and killed by a psychotic patient with a knife. He tried to escape by jumping out of the window but was dead before he hit the ground.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “That’s what I thought.” He pointed to another entry. “This is the record of Frank Bartlett’s death. He was the man in the Bart Simpson T-shirt you saw committing suicide yesterday. The description matches your hallucination exactly. One of yesterday’s orderlies was there when Bartlett died and he said you included accurate details that weren’t even in the report. What’s more, records show that decades earlier another man committed suicide in the same room. He hanged himself exactly as you described.”

  She put her hands over her mouth. “You’re saying that what I saw in those rooms actually happened?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” He pulled out another folder. “Your medical fi
le records most of the hallucinations you had at Oregon State. This is where I first noticed the pattern. They all, without exception, involved death.”

  Numbness seeped through her as she tried to process what Fox was saying. “Those happened too?”

  “Yep. I found death records that matched the location and description of almost every recorded hallucination.”

  “What about the second room today? Who was the man in bed you predicted?”

  “His name was Jack Lee and he died peacefully in his sleep from an aneurysm.”

  “Why didn’t I see him?”

  A shrug. “I don’t know.” He frowned, reached into his briefcase and pulled out a typed loose-leaf document. “Jane, this is getting a little out of my area. Unless you’re perpetrating the most elaborate and pointless hoax, something unprecedented is happening. I can just about explain how your total synaesthesia unconsciously synchronizes all your five senses to create these vivid episodes of dying, but you’re not just creating them — you’re recreating them. These people actually died exactly as you described and your synaesthesia can’t explain that. Even if your memory was intact you couldn’t have known about all those deaths, especially in such detail.

  “What’s so bizarre is you have no memory of your own life but appear to have perfect recall of other people’s deaths.” He leaned forward and, for the first time since she became Jane Doe, she looked into his intense eyes and didn’t feel alone. “What we need to do is discover where these memories are coming from and how you’re accessing them.” He opened the document. It was peppered with yellow Post-it notes covered in scribbles. “There’s a theory…” He stopped suddenly, weighing his words. “May I be totally frank?”

  “Please do.”

  “As I see it, we have two options here. The conventional approach: I treat this as purely a psychiatric problem and brief Professor Fullelove. She’ll then brief other psychiatrists who’ll try and diagnose your psychosis and draw up a treatment plan. The problem is, apart from your amnesia, I’m not sure the issue is purely psychiatric. And I don’t want to turn you into a medical freak show.”

  She shuddered at the thought. “I feel enough of a freak already. What’s the other option?”

  “We assume this is more than a psychiatric issue and speak discreetly to someone with more relevant experience.” He waved the document. “The author of this has a theory which kind of fits what’s happening here. Although, to be honest, it defies normal logic.”

  “So do my hallucinations.”

  “The point is,” Fox continued, “they might not be hallucinations. Strictly speaking, hallucinations are perceptions in the absence of external stimuli. But if the theory in here is valid, then there could be some external stimuli present.”

  She craned her head to read the title page, expecting it to be on psychiatry or neurology, but the first words she saw told her otherwise. “The Echo of History?”

  “Like I said, this is getting out of my area of expertise. I’d like to sleep on it and discuss this with the author tomorrow. Do I have your permission to talk about your case?”

  “Can I come with you?”

  He considered for a second. “If you like. We’ve got to do it quickly, though. Your face is all over the news at the moment and the last thing we want is for the media to get any more curious about you.”

  She indicated the document. “Can we trust the author to be discreet?”

  “Oh, yes.” He smiled at the question. “I trust the author with my life.”

  Chapter 15

  As the setting sun turned the Willamette River to molten bronze, Karl Jordache stood in a disused warehouse in Old Town, studying the corpse at his feet. He wasn’t as shocked by the sight of the second homicide as he was by its speed. According to the pathologist, time of death was only a few hours ago, a day after Vega’s murder a few blocks from here.

  The gray-haired corpse lay on the floor, legs splayed apart, arms tied behind its back. The dead man was wearing a woman’s blue silk dress and had four stab wounds in his chest. “The vic’s name is Josh Kovacs,” said Kostakis, scratching his bald, spherical head. “Back in the day, he used to be a bit player in prostitution and drugs, before he took too much of his own product. For the past few years he’s been nothing more than a wino and a junkie, hanging around the alleys off Burnside. The MO’s different from the first killing but the signature’s the same. Both victims were stripped of their regular clothes then dressed in women’s clothing, and their bodies were bound and staged. Vince Vega was found in women’s underwear and had his throat slit with a heavy-duty hunting knife. Kovacs was found in a woman’s gown and stabbed four times. The knife was probably the same as that used to cut Vega’s throat. Unlike Vega, there was no ketamine in Kovac’s blood but enough downers and booze to mean the killer probably didn’t need to sedate him.” Kostakis pointed down at the sheet of paper stapled to Kovacs’ forehead. “And that, of course.”

  Jordache read the message, each capital letter written in a different color. The wording and lack of punctuation was identical to that stapled to the first victim:

  SERVE THE DEMON

  SAVE THE ANGEL

  “What’s the connection between the victims?”

  “Both were scumbags with a history of narcotics and vice and may have moved in the same circles back in the day. Otherwise there’s no obvious link.”

  “What about the gown, and the underwear found on Vega? Do we know where the killer got them?”

  “The women’s clothes weren’t from a regular store. They were factory rejects, with the brand labels cut off.” Kostakis checked his notes. “It’s hard to trace clothes like this but we do have one lead. Two days ago one of the storekeepers in a thrift market on the border of Old Town and the Pearl sold items that matched the fancy lingerie and gown. She remembers the customer because most of her clientele are women. He wanted the biggest size and was pretty specific about color and type of clothing. Like he was buying it for a particular reason. She didn’t get a great look at his face because he wore a broad-rimmed hat, but she says he was large, had creepy pale eyes and smelt funny.”

  “Get one of our artists down there and get a likeness of this guy. What did she say he smelt like?”

  “Weird, dead, like decaying meat.” Kostakis indicated the victim’s obscured face. “And that? What do we do about that?”

  Jordache frowned. “I don’t know yet. First, I want to find out all we can about the guy with the odor problem and the hat.”

  Part Two

  The Last Echo

  Chapter 16

  Hundreds of miles from the man-made sprawl of Portland a storm was building. It was born in the Canadian Rockies and raced along the mighty Columbia River, through Washington State, toward a remote tract of privately owned land in the vast Oregon wilderness. The storm whipped through its high canyons and dense forests before reaching a remote cluster of timber and stone buildings nestled in lush, rolling meadows, between a dense forest of giant sequoias and a rushing river.

  This isolated Eden was man’s only footprint for miles around. The corral was so large that the horses within it appeared to be running free and wild. But these were not wild horses. They were neither the mixed breeds nor the dun-colored Kiger Mustangs that roamed the region but the purest breed of all: thoroughbreds. The highly strung animals flicked their manes, snorted at the moon and galloped in circles, unsettled by the gathering storm and the three exhausted horsemen arriving in their midst. Perhaps they sensed the fury of the lead rider, the storm in his head a match for any raging in the night sky. His thick silver hair flailed in the wind as wildly as the horse’s mane, and his intense green eyes seemed luminous in the night. He was not young but his tall physique was as lean and muscular as that of a man half his age. His followers called him the Seer but tonight he felt blind. He and two of his most trusted Watchers had spent days scouring the thousands of acres that made up his land but still hadn’t found what he was looking for.
Only a trace of where the object of his quest might have gone. He dismounted the exhausted mare, patted her wet flank, unhitched the saddlebag and draped it over his shoulder. Without looking back, he left the other two riders to tend to his spent horse. His muscles ached but as he walked among the panicked horses he breathed in their wild energy. A stallion reared before him. He gripped its mane in his strong hands, stroked its neck and breathed into its flared nostrils. The horse calmed instantly and the Seer smiled through his rage. He released the horse and opened the gate leading from the corral.

  As he strode through his dominion, past the slaughterhouse and the shed that housed the settlement’s main generator, expectant faces stared out from lit windows. Some came out of their cabins to greet him, touching the center of their forehead and bowing low, but all remained silent when they saw he had returned alone, without his prize. He strode on past the Great Hall, ignoring the figures painted on its large twin doors. As he approached his private quarters, he glanced up at the round stone tower that dominated the settlement. A flash of lightning illuminated its large blue eye, a glittering mosaic of embedded dumortierite crystals, which stared down from the top of the tower’s white walls. The all-seeing eye seemed to taunt him. For all its power it could not find what he was seeking.

  He pushed open the door to his quarters, and entered a timber-beamed chamber, one wall of which was lined with bookshelves crammed with reference volumes, academic texts and books on world religions. On the far wall a six-foot-tall tapestry depicted two men, one a shadowy twin of the other. Both had their legs and arms outstretched like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, and had seven wheel-like vortices running up their spines, from the pelvis to the crown of the head, each vortex a different color of the rainbow.

  The seer’s three beautiful Wives lay on a rug by the fire: Maria, flame-haired and heavily pregnant; Deva, a brunette cradling a newborn in her arms; and Zara, a much younger Nordic blonde. Dressed in indigo robes, each had an indigo dot painted on the center of their foreheads, like the Hindu tilak. When the Seer entered, each bowed her head, touched her tilak in greeting and jumped to her feet. The blonde took his saddlebag and the redhead poured him a cup of fiery poteen from the earthenware jug on the table.