The Colour of Death by Michael Cordy Read Free Book Online

the hell could he know?  Vega had told no one.  The cloying smell intensified, became overpowering, as the stranger’s massive frame bent over him.  “Who are you?” Vega screamed.  “ What are you?”
    The stranger’s pale unblinking eyes stared into his.  “A demon,” the man replied in his low growl.  “A fallen angel freed to walk among the children of men and spread my dark wings.”  The man moved behind him and Vega’s last scream was cut short as the cold steel of his tormentor’s blade sliced through his throat.  The final image Vega registered before he died was the face of Jane Doe in the newspaper.

 
    Chapter 7
     
    As the nurses bundled Jane Doe into the ambulance she felt for the locket round her neck, opened it and studied the picture inside of a smiling baby.  Holding this one link to her past comforted her, although she had no idea who the baby in the photograph was.
    Jane Doe had once been somebody but now felt as if she had been dropped into hell, a lost soul bereft of any bearings.  The nurses reassured her how lucky she was to be heading to a special private clinic, but it was hard to feel lucky about anything when you couldn’t even remember your own name.  They told her that the vast asylum she was escaping being transferred to was the actual place where they’d shot the Jack Nicholson film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest , which might have meant something if she could remember the movie or who Jack Nicholson was — or anything before the night of the fire, ten days ago.
    As she sat alone in the ambulance and watched the state hospital recede into the distance it didn’t seem like she was escaping anywhere.  How could you escape from your own mind?  Physically she was much improved; her burns and the bullet wound to her head had been superficial.  Mentally, however, it was a different matter.  She caught her reflection in the window.  Looking at the eyes of the stranger staring back at her made her feel as if she was peering into the windows of a forgotten home, for which she had lost the keys.  The amnesia had left her adrift in the world, untethered from all things familiar, a stranger to everyone including herself.  Her hallucinations frightened her more, though.  And sleep brought little respite.  The nightmares that visited her sleeping hours were as disturbing as any waking visions.  The doctors clearly didn’t know what to do with her, apart from trying to fill her with pills, most of which she had refused.  How could she hope to find herself again if she was drugged up to the eyeballs?
    After some time she felt the ambulance slow.  Out of the window a freshly painted sign revealed that she had arrived at the Tranquil Waters Clinic and Residential Retreat.  The ambulance drove down a long gravel drive, through magnificent grounds, past a peaceful lake sparkling in the sun, and stopped outside a Victorian building, connected by a glass walkway to a new modern wing.  “You’re lucky to be out of the state hospital,” said the ambulance driver.  “This place is the best in the area.”
    She said nothing.  The doctors, visibly relieved she was now someone else’s problem, had already briefed her on Tranquil Waters.  The original Victorian building had apparently housed the infamous Pine Hills Psychiatric Hospital, which once treated hardcore psychotic cases and the full-blown criminally insane.  Since its closure, however, Oregon University Research Hospital had bought the site, totally renovated the old building, added the new wing and renamed it Tranquil Waters.  The private facility now had an enviable reputation for research, treatment and the long-term care of patients with dementia, memory loss, and a range of neuroses and anxiety disorders.
    As the driver helped her off the ambulance and led her toward the forbidding Gothic façade of the original Victorian block, she didn’t expect this place to be any better than the last, however fresh