chapter Nine
St. Bernadette's Psychiatric Clinic had taken great pains not to look like a mental asylum, to distance itself from the negative connotation of institutional sanatoriums: nightmarish loony bins where crazies were locked up and caged, left to sit in a mess of their own filth. It was a small four-story building located on a pretty hillside in a sleepy Cleveland suburb. There were no bars on the windows, there were no armed guards at the gates, and none of the nurses were named Ratched. The lobby was peaceful and cheerful, decorated in soothing pastel colors, and patients were allowed to wear their own clothes - none of that shuffling in hospital gowns and slippers.
The mental hospital looked innocuous enough, but even so, when Bliss arrived in the afternoon, she could not help shuddering. In a past life, she had been sent to a place not unlike this one, and she could still remember the horror of that experience: the shackles and the tests, the buckets of cold water poured on her head during her ravings. The clinic was more like a college dormitory than a prison, but Bliss could bet that the windows at Case Western weren't built from two inches of shatterproof acrylic you couldn't break with a sledgehammer.
She had left Jane back at their motel. For a moment she wondered whether she'd done the right thing; Jane had wanted to come, though she was too tired to protest when Bliss insisted she stay behind. But Bliss wanted to speak to the girl alone. It was her task, after all, her burden, to find the hounds.
"Sign here," the young guy at the desk said, pushing over a few papers.
Bliss scribbled on the page. "What's this?"
"Liability waiver. Means you can't sue the clinic if anything happens to you after seeing her. Or when you see her." He had a flat nasal accent, less midwestern than southern Appalachian, a real twang. Bliss had always thought of Ohio as the Midwest, like Kansas or Nebraska, but as they'd moved through the state, she'd discovered it was a real patchwork, a hodgepodge of big cities and dying steel towns, affluent suburbs that rivaled the toniest Westchester neighborhoods and a pretty rural countryside dotted with horse farms and lush green forests.
"I don't get it. What's going to happen?"
The orderly shrugged. "Not supposed to say, but see that lady sitting over there?"
Bliss nodded. There was a smiling middle-aged woman sitting by the window, talking softly to herself. Once in a while her whole face would twitch in a frightening spasm.
"Yeah, well, Thelma used to work here. Now she's a patient. She was your patient's nurse you know. Spent a week with her and went insane. And then there's the janitors ..." He stopped without finishing the sentence. He only shook his head as he took the clipboard back and handed Bliss a visitor pass. "What do you want with her, anyway? You a reporter or something? Or family?"
Bliss shook her head. "Neither."
"Law enforcement?"
She shook her head again. The orderly finally stopped asking questions and they arrived at the girl's room. Bliss noticed immediately that there was something strange in the air. The feeling of death was all around, a grim darkness just behind the door. She did not feel frightened, only curious. She had lived with the spirit of Lucifer, so she knew what evil felt like. This was not the same. It was not the emerald-sharp feeling of hatred and spite; this was a feeling of dread and sloth, rot and ruin, misery and pain.
There was a small placard next to the door that read PATIENT: FIFTEEN.
"No name. Nomen nescio," the orderly said proudly, as if Bliss would question his knowledge of Latin. "The doctors thought they'd call her Nina but it didn't stick. She's not a Nina. So now we just call her by her room number. Fifteen."
Bliss peered through the peephole. Inside she saw a young girl perched at the edge of a long flat mattress. Her toes were curled around the bottom and dug into the foam. Her head hung down at an odd angle, swaying slightly as if broken. Her dark hair was shorn to the scalp, and Bliss felt a chill at seeing how skinny she was. Skeletal, with dark bruises on her arms.
The girl looked up straight at Bliss's eyes through the porthole and Bliss jumped back, startled by the girl's arresting stare. There was something wrong with the girl's eyes - Bliss was sure she saw a flash of crimson, but when she looked again, they were just a normal blue.
Just then the orderly unlocked the door. "She's all yours. Buzz when you're done."
"You're locking me in there ... with her?"
"Rules. You signed the waiver."
Bliss kept her face impassive as the door locked noisily behind her. She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms. The girl never took her eyes off Bliss. "You're not scared of me," she whispered. Her voice was soft and weak.
"Should I be?" asked Bliss.
"They're all scared of me," she said softly, picking at the mattress. It was pocked with holes, Bliss saw, and lacked sheets, even a pillow.
"I heard." Bliss looked around the bare room. There was nothing in the space except for the mattress on the floor. No books, no pictures, not even a window. How long had the girl been living like this? "What's your name?"
"Fifteen." Her voice was quiet and subdued, defeated and sad.
"That's what they call you."
"That's right."
"What's your real name?"
"I don't know." She shook her head. "If I did I wouldn't be here."
"Why are you here?" Bliss checked the records. The fire had been only a month earlier, and the girl had been in the hospital since then, with little change or progress in her condition.
"There was a fire," the girl said. "It burned everything."
"You were in the house. What happened in that house? What happened to you?" Bliss asked.
The girl put clenched fists to her eyes. "I don't know. I don't remember."
"I want to help you," Bliss said. "Please."
"No one can help me. Not anymore."
"Look, I know what you're going through - I've been in a place like this. I was in a mental institution once. I know what it's like. You don't have to be here. You don't have to hide. Let me help you," Bliss said, fiddling with the charm around her neck that held the Heart of Stone. She had taken to wearing the dark talisman, wanting to keep it close, as if the glittering amulet could draw the hounds to her, help her on her journey. She moved closer to the girl. "I think I know what happened ... I know about the hounds. They're the ones that attacked you that night, isn't that right?"
At the mention of the hounds the girl scrambled to the far edge of the room, as far away from Bliss as possible. "I don't know what you're talking about. Leave me alone."
Bliss removed a dusty notebook from her bag and read from it. "'They will come for us, and when they do, we must be ready. We have protected the house, but will we be able to protect each other?'" She looked up at the girl. "This is your journal, isn't it? You wrote these words. What does it mean? The hounds were coming for you? But the house was protected somehow? Who are the others? Where are they?"
The girl shrugged.
"What did they want with you? Why did they come? How did you survive?"
"I don't know. I told you, I don't know what you're talking about," the girl said, growing more and more agitated.
"I was hoping you would help me ... I am ... looking for them. I need to reach the hounds," Bliss said, feeling as she uttered the words that it was a hopeless enterprise her mother had set her on.
The girl began to shake and rock back and forth, whimpering a little, like a wounded animal. "Get away from me ... get away ... "
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry ... please believe me, I don't want to hurt you," Bliss said. "But I need to know about the hounds."
"The hounds!" the girl screamed suddenly, her eyes blazing, looking directly into Bliss's green ones. "Why do you seek the hounds? Beware! No one hunts the pack!"
They stared at each other in silence. Then the door opened. Time was up. Bliss left the room.
"So. What'd you think?" the orderly asked as they walked back to the lobby. "Hard nut to crack, right?"
Bliss did not answer, trying to convince herself that the girl in the room had no idea what she was talking about, that she just wanted to scare her. But Bliss had seen a lot in her lifetimes. She didn't scare that easily.