The Blue Ridge Project: A Dark Suspense Novel (The Project Book 1) (17 page)

Robert woke up in the back of a taxi, his head resting on something hard, with corners.

“Hey, buddy, I asked are you gonna pay me or what?” The voice came from in front of Robert, and he sat up and opened his eyes. Apart from the driver, he was the only one in the car. Jimmy was nowhere to be seen. He looked out the side window and saw the steps leading up to the Regent Hotel, bathed in sunlight. The last few hours were a mystery to him, lost in a blackout that defied explanation. His memories of visiting the storage unit were relatively clear, then there was nothing until he woke up.

“Where’s the other guy?” he asked, his tongue dry and his voice raspy. He coughed once, and sharp pains pierced his temples, making him wince.

The driver looked over his shoulder, one arm on the headrest of the passenger seat. “Other guy? Man, just give me my fucking money.”

Robert handed over the fare and grabbed the box of his father’s journals. He slid out of the back of the taxi and kicked the door shut with one foot.

“Fucking drunks,” the driver said before he sped off. Robert headed up the steps and into the lobby. After sticking his head into the bar and seeing no one, he went directly to the elevator, passing a tired-looking woman with black hair who was speaking to the receptionist.

*****

Andrea ran her credit card through the machine again, but it made the same obnoxious beeping sound it had the last three times.
Denied
flashed up on the little screen.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. If you have cash, I’ll be more than happy to give you a discount. Special rates for officers of the law.” The male receptionist smiled a brilliant smile of white teeth and barely restrained contempt.

“There’s no need for that, thank you.” Andrea counted out the bills onto the desk, and the receptionist took them and counted them again. He then passed her a key with a small black keyring with the room number on it.

“Excuse me,” Andrea said in a quiet tone, “isn’t this room on the same floor as the room where one of your guests died recently?”

The receptionist’s hearty “my-house-my-rules” grin fell from his suddenly ashen face. “M-m-ma’am?”

“Never mind. Thanks.”

She grabbed the key from the desk and made it to the elevator just as the doors were closing. There was a man with ruffled hair and red-rimmed eyes inside carrying a box full of folders.

“Hi,” she said, “thanks for holding it. Floor?”

“No problem. Thirteen, please.”

“Ah. Mine, too.” She pressed the button and the elevator started up. She could smell old whiskey and sweat coming off him, but she didn’t have the energy to care. All she wanted to do was have a long shower and get some sleep. Her confession to Silvers, the shock of finding a burnt shell where her home used to be and the anger slowly draining from her left her feeling hollow and spent.

They got to their floor and stepped out together. He went on ahead, down to the end of the hall. She raised a hand to him as he maneuvered the box to the get the key in the door. He waved back and pushed backwards into his room.

She unlocked hers and went straight to the bathroom. After showering until the water started to cool, she toweled off and sat on the bed. She pulled the envelope with the pills Silvers had given her and plucked one out. She looked at it for a few seconds. It was round, smooth and white. It was also blank, with no letters or ridges on it. A short nap suddenly seemed like a great decision. She shrugged and popped it into her mouth, swallowing it dry. She then lay down on the bed and was asleep in five minutes.

*****

Robert sat on the edge of his bed with the folders spread out in front of him. The prospect was daunting, now that it was tangible. His father’s words, right here, only an arm’s length away. He would get to know his father’s mind after all these years of not even thinking about him. One label caught his eye more than the others. It was on a blue folder, different from the standard brown of the rest. The folder was also much thicker.

The label read
Project Notes
. As he opened the folder, a small vial of clear liquid fell out and hit the floor. The cap popped off, and the liquid seeped out onto the plush rug. Robert saw a thin vapor coming from the spill, put the folder on the bed and leaned over to have a closer look. A smell hit his nostrils like fresh leaves burning, and he fell forward onto his face, unconscious, the folder falling off the bed and spilling its pages around him.

The sound of a door slamming woke Andre
a 
up. Her eyelids felt heavy and she rubbed them as she sat up. She looked around the room and her breath caught in her throat. It wasn't the hotel room she had laid down in. From where she was sat, it looked more like a cell.

The spacious double bed she had laid down on was now a single cot against a gray wall. There was a blue line running around the middle of the wall, intersected by a steel door with a porthole window and a hatch underneath. A simple white desk stood in the corner. Sheets of paper were piled up haphazardly on it beside different colored crayons in various stages of use in a rubber cup. A plastic chair was upended beside the desk. There were no windows, and two yellow light bulbs in wire cages lit the room.

She put a hand to her forehead. Feeling dizzy and nauseous, when she stood up her knees were trembling. She looked down and saw she was dressed in white sweatpants, a t-shirt of the same color, and a blue hospital gown. Her blood pounded in her ears as she lurched over to the door, a monstrous headache perched above her eyes. The view through the grid pattern in the round window of the door was out into a hallway. From her limited viewpoint, she could see other doors across the gray hall with windows like hers. She pulled on the fixed handle but the door didn’t even rattle on its hinge.

She banged on the window and shouted.

“Hey! What’s going on? Where am I? Let me out of this fucking room!”

Her voice fell flat in the small room, the sound disappearing as soon as she shouted. She banged again, hard enough to hurt this time. When she finished, she could hear a pair of shoes clicking against the floor as somebody came down the hall. A man’s face appeared at the window and she pulled back from the door.

He wore a pair of glasses, which were perched on the edge of his nose. His eyes were muddy brown, and he smiled benevolently at her through the glass, his face criss-crossed by the wire in the window.

“Miss Nox. What appears to be the problem?”

Andrea stared at him, the pounding in her head clouding her thoughts. “Let me out of here. I’m a detective in the Beacon City PD.”

The man through the window pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “Oh Andrea, oh dear, oh dear. And we were making such good progress.”

Andrea frowned and put a hand to her forehead again. The lights were pulsing in time with her heartbeat, and it felt like the top of her skull would split apart. “What have you done to me? Have I been drugged? My head is killing me.”

“Just a reaction to the sedatives wearing off, I believe. It will pass soon enough. You got quite … agitated in our last session.”

“Session? What the fuck are you talking about? Who are you, what’s going on here?”

The man outside the door sighed, his shoulders slumping slightly. “Andrea, I’m Doctor Richardson. You’re at the Blue Ridge Institute. You are a patient here.”

Andrea shook her head, hearing the words but not understanding. “What do you mean, what the fuck is this? Where are my clothes? I was just at a hotel, at the Regent Hotel!”

“Interesting,” Richardson said softly, before he turned and walked out of sight.

“Hey! Hey, come back here! Let me out!” Andrea screamed, kicking the door. The effort made her head spin, and she sat down on the bed and put a hand over her eyes.

*****

Robert came to curled up in the fetal position at the foot of the bed. He unfurled his body and sat up slowly, so as not to aggravate the pain already creeping around his head. He rubbed his eyes and looked around the cell he now found himself in. A single blue stripe bisected the four gray walls, stopping at the heavy-looking door with the glass porthole. Standing up and stepping gingerly over to the door, he looked out into the hall outside. There were doors into what he assumed were similar cells, smooth gray floor between his side and the one opposite. There was the smell of bleach and some other medicinal odor that he couldn’t identify.

As he raised a hand to pound on the door and ask what the hell was going on, Jimmy’s face appeared outside the door. Robert’s mouth stayed open, the shout dead in his throat.

“Robert, listen carefully,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. A slim blue folder slid under the door and into the cell. “We don’t have much time. You’re being held here against your will. Do not believe what they tell you, especially Richardson. Say nothing about the folder, either. I’ll be in touch when I can.” Just as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone. Robert tried to look down the hall but his range of vision was too limited.

He stooped down and picked up the folder. It had no label or title. After another quick glance out into the hall, he sat down and started to leaf through its contents.

There were some sketches and diagrams, mostly of electronic components or chemical compositions. Others showed different versions of the chair he had seen back in the storage container, some of them depicting human figures in the seat with wires attached to their heads.

He looked at these, frowning, and turned onto the next section, which had handwritten notes, barely legible.

Before he could start reading, he heard a clicking of shoes coming down the hall and quickly stuffed the folder under the mattress of the cot. He heard someone shouting, then a soothing voice in reply. The voices seemed to be coming from right across the hall. He peeked out of the window and saw a man in a white lab coat talking through the window of one of the other cells. After the conversation had finished, the man turned and walked to Robert’s door.

He smiled and pushed his glasses up on his nose.

“Hello Robert, how are you feeling?”

Robert stared at the man and said nothing.

“Well, I’m sure that you’ll have something to say in our group session, won’t you?”

The door to Andrea’s cell opened and two men appeared in the doorway. They were dressed in black shirts and pants, and looked strong. Andrea leapt from her spot on the cot and charged at the small space between their bodies, but they caught and held on to her, holding one arm each. She struggled briefly against their grip, but she was felt weak and dizzy, and the throbbing pain started to return.

The man with the glasses who had spoken to her earlier appeared.

“Now, now, Andrea, if you won’t behave, I’ll have to use medication and restraints. I don’t think you’ll enjoy either, and definitely not both. So how’s about some good behavior, hm?”

Panting, hair hanging in front of her face as she looked him in the eye, she eventually nodded.

“Good,” the man said, and nodded to the two men holding her. They let her go, but stood very close to her, ready to grab her again if she moved in a way they didn’t like. The man in the glasses walked up towards a door at the end of the hall, and Andrea followed, the two black shirts walking alongside, expressionless.

The door led into a kind of common room. There were some potted plants in the corners, and the center had a semi circle of chairs. The black shirts took up positions at either side of the door.

In the middle was a man dressed similarly to her, a man she recognized from somewhere. It took a few seconds to realize that it was the man who had held the elevator for her in the hotel the night before she had woken up here. He looked up as she came in, and behind his confused look she saw that he recognized her, too.

There were two other people at the end of the row of chairs, one older woman and one younger man. They were dressed in white coats like the man with the glasses, but the last time she had seen the woman, she had been in a comfortable room with a painting of a stag on the wall.

“Silvers,” she said to her, “what the fuck is going on here?”

The man in the glasses pointed at the seat next to the man she recognized from the elevator.

“Please take a seat Andrea, so we can get started.”

*****

Robert looked at the woman as she sat down beside him, and then back to Jimmy, sitting at the last chair beside the woman who had been called Silvers. He blinked hard and then turned back to the man with the glasses in front of them.

“Like she said, what the fuck is going on? And who the fuck are you?” he asked.

The man with the glasses sighed.

“You know the answer to that, Mr. Duncan,” the man replied, “but I’ll help to jog your memory. I’m Dr. Richardson, your psychiatrist. This is the Blue Ridge Institute, where you have come to get better.”

“Bullshit,” the woman beside him said. “Last thing I remember, I checked into a hotel, and I fell asleep. Now I’ve woken up here, drugged, and who knows what else. There’s a few steps missing there.”

“Me, too,” Robert said. “I’m a little suspect of the circumstances, to say the fucking least.”

Richardson pulled a chair from the end and sat in front of them.

“I’m sorry to say Robert, Andrea, that you’re both suffering from a mental disorder. Psychosis, to be more precise, which is creating delusions of a paranoid nature. They stem from traumatic moments in your past. Your mind has created these delusions, mixing reality with fantasy to the point where you can no longer tell what is real and what isn’t.”

Robert and Andrea looked at each other and back to Richardson.

“For you, Robert, it began with your father leaving when you were a child. Then, your failure as a journalist, which triggered a spiral of negative behavior, coupled with alcohol abuse and subsequent blackouts. It affected your relationship with your partner, Ms. Rush, so much so that she felt compelled to leave you for her own safety. You began to stalk her, and then her new employer, Senator Frey. You created this fantasy that he was part of some sinister child-trafficking operation, and you set out to harass and attempt to blackmail him with fake photos. Very serious stuff, even if he hadn’t been a government official. Problems only worsened after your mother’s death, as you struggled to hold on to the fragile reality you created amid increased emotional turmoil. Luckily for you, the senator is a compassionate man, and convinced the courts that you needed help more than you needed punishment, so you were ordered into my care.”

Robert sat back, his mouth hanging open, dry and silent.

“As for you, Andrea, losing your parents at a young age in such a violent way left deep emotional and mental scars, like your anger issues. You were a competent police officer, up until the death of another officer at your hands. It was too much for you, the guilt of shooting another cop, and you stopped working at the Beacon City Police Department.

“The strain and loneliness was too much, and you snapped, creating a scenario where you were drafted back into the force to help solve some bizarre murders, worthy of your imagined talents. However, your sense of persecution persisted, involving members of your department and a caricature of an investigator who questioned you after the shooting. When it became too much, in frustration you burned down your own apartment. A physical representation of your self-sabotage. Shortly afterwards, you were admitted here.”

“No,” Andrea whispered, her mind reeling. “I don’t believe you.”

Richardson sat back, his hands clasped in his lap.

“Think about it, Andrea. All of these supposed murder scenes, where were the rest of your colleagues? Why was there no mention of these deaths in the news? Why is it that you were singled out to investigate? What makes you so special?”

Andrea opened her mouth and closed it again.

“I think I owe an apology. I tried out some experimental methods to help with your condition, both of you. Doctor Silvers and Mr. Tarvill here were assigned to help you work through these fantasies. They were to role-play, to have bit parts in your delusions, to help you to reach their conclusions and come back to reality.”

“It’s impossible,” Robert said. “There’s no way!… I would remember all  of that. What about the evidence? I talked to Pete Jergens, he’s real, you can ask him. I was there with him, in person. I showed him those photos.”

Richardson sighed.

“After your visit, a visit during which I can only assume you deeply upset Mr. Jergens, he committed suicide. He left a note about his guilt for falsifying evidence during his time in New Zion. Don’t you see, Robert? Your delusions can have consequences for other people, consequences that can’t be remedied.”

“Why don’t we remember?” Robert asked after sitting with his mouth open for a few seconds, soaking in the news of Jergens’ death.

“Your minds are subjective things. Reality is defined through perception, which takes place in the brain. With a chemical imbalance, or traumatic damage to the psyche, it can become impossible to tell the difference between a construct of your imagination and the truth. Your brain processes signals sent by itself, so if there is a corrupted part, so to speak, how would you be able to tell on your own?

“
That’s why you are here. We can help you, but only if you take the first steps to admitting the truth. To acknowledging that you have invented a scenario to hide what has really happened.”

Robert shook his head weakly, and Andrea closed her eyes.

“I don’t believe it, I know my own mind, even if I’ve made mistakes before,” she said, doubt creeping in her voice.

Richardson stood up, and so did Jimmy and Silvers.

“I think maybe we should take a break here,” Richardson said, a small smile on his lips. “It’s a lot to take in at once, now that you're both somewhat lucid. Maybe you would like to go back to your rooms and rest, think on it a while before we speak again, how does that sound?”

Neither Robert nor Andrea said a word, as both looked at separate spots of nothing on the floor. They were still silent as they were escorted back to their cells, opposite each other.

Before Robert was gently pushed back into his cell, he looked back at the room they had just left. He caught Jimmy’s eye before he turned away.