Bondurant leaned back in his chair. The office was quiet except for the faint ticking as the clock hands moved toward nine. Darkness painted the windows and a few dots of stars hung above the black mountains beyond. The children would be settling down for evening prayers, boys in the Blue Room, girls in the Green Room. Except for the house parents on duty and the night-time cleaning lady, the staff was gone, either in the on-site cottages or far beyond the hard walls of Wendover to Deer Valley.
Bondurant opened the bottom drawer of his desk. His Bible lay next to the wooden paddle and a purple velvet bag. He lifted the bag. Crown Royal. The first sip bit his tongue and throat, the second burned, the third warmed him so much that he shivered. Someone knocked on the door.
Bondurant traded the bottle for the Good Book, slid the drawer closed and parted the Bible to a random chapter. The Book of Job. That was one of his favorites, with suffering and a defiant and unrepentant Satan, and someday he was going to get around to understanding it. That and the damned parable of fishes.
"Come in," he said.
Nothing. He pressed the button on his speakerphone. The receptionist's office was left unlocked at the end of the day in case the staff needed to get to the patient files.
"Hello?" he said, listening as his amplified voice echoed around the outer office.
Still nothing.
Bondurant rose, annoyed that he should have to answer his own door. He swung the door wide. No one there. He crossed the receptionist's office and looked down the hall. There, in the dim angles leading to the cafeteria, a shadow moved among the darkness. One of the boys must have sneaked out of the Blue Room, probably on his way to swipe a treat from the kitchen.
"Hello there," Bondurant said keeping his voice level. Even if you were angry, you had to feign calm. Otherwise, you ended up yanking the little sinners by their ears until they cried or bending the girls over your desk and paddling them and paddling them Bondurant swallowed. The person had stopped blending into the shadows. The hall was quiet, the air still and weighty. Bondurant's lungs felt as if they were filled with glass.
"Aren't you supposed to be getting ready for Light's Out?" Bondurant said stepping forward.
The figure crouched in the murk. Bondurant cursed the lack of lighting in the hall. The budget never seemed to cover all the facility needs, though administrative costs rose steadily, along with Bondurant's salary.
As he drew nearer, Bondurant realized that the figure was too large to be that of a client. What was a staff member doing creeping around the halls at night? The house parents were supposed to stay with the children, to act simultaneously as guardians and jailkeeps. The cleaning lady would be cleaning the toilets in the shower rooms in the boys' wing, the same schedule she'd used for as long as Bondurant had served as director. Maybe it was one of Kracowski's new supporters, one of the cold and shifty types who acted as if they needed no permission or approval.
"Excuse me, did you know it's after nine?" Bondurant saw that the person was plump and squat, drab in the half-light. Nanny? Had she gotten headstrong and come back to prove she had in fact seen something that couldn't exist?
"Everything's going to be okay." Bondurant wished he'd studied psychology now, because he sounded to himself like a TV cop trying to lure a suicide away from a ledge. He held out his hand and closed the twenty feet of distance between them. What if she broke down and did something crazy, like bite him?
"You can tell me all about it," he said.
Fifteen feet, he wasn't sure the person was Nanny after all. Ten feet away, and he was still uncertain, though he could tell it was a woman.
She huddled face-first in the corner, shoulders shaking with sobs. But no sound came from the woman. She was aged, her hair matted and gray, her legs bare beneath the hem of her gown. The gown was fastened by three strings clumsily knotted against her spine. The skin exposed in the gap was mottled. The woman was on her knees, her broad, callused feet tucked behind her.
Bondurant hesitated. Perhaps he should get one of the house parents, or call the local police. But the police had long complained about Wendover's runaways and the extra security calls. This was different, though; kids ran away all the time, but how many grown-ups ever ran to Wendover? Before Bondurant could make up his mind, the woman turned.
Bondurant would have screamed if not for the numbing effects of the liquor. The woman's face was twisted one corner of her lip caught in a rictus, the other curved into a crippled smile. Her eyelids drooped, and her tongue moved in her mouth like a bloated worm. What Bondurant had taken for sobs now seemed more like convulsions, because the old woman's head trembled atop her shoulders as if attached by a metal spring.
Worst of all was the long scar across the woman's forehead, an angry weal of flesh running between the furrows of her skin. The scar was like a grin, hideous atop the skewed mouth and slivers of eyes. The woman held out her shaking arms. The tongue protruded like a thing separate from the face, as if it were nesting inside and had just awakened from a long hibernation. The lips came together unevenly, yawned apart, spasmed closed again.
Oh, God, she's trying to TALK.
Bondurant took an involuntary step backward, forcing another breath into his chest. Sour bile rose in his throat, a quick rush of heartburn. He would have broken into a run if his legs hadn't turned to concrete. The woman scooted forward on her knees, a shiny sliver of drool dangling from her warped chin. Her soiled gown was draped about her like an oversize shawl. Her lips quivered again, the worm-tongue poked, but she made no sound.
Bondurant shouted for help, but he couldn't muster much wind and the cry died in the corners of the hallway. Bondurant gave up on mortal assistance and sent summons to a higher power.
He remembered the tale of the Good Samaritan, how the Samaritan had helped Jesus on the side of the highway. Or maybe it hadn't been Jesus, maybe it was somebody else, or Jesus might have been the one doing the helping. Bondurant was fuzzy on the details, but the long and short of it was that a Christian reached out his hand when someone was down.
Even if that someone was a twisted shambling wreck that the Devil himself might have cast out from the lake of fire in disgust.
"It's okay now," Bondurant said his voice barely above a whisper. "What's your name?"
Again the lips undulated the sinuous tongue pressed between the teeth, but still no words came out. The woman raised one eyelid and Bondurant looked into the black well of an eye that seemed to have no bottom.
"Let me help you up," he said. He closed his eyes and reached for her hands. A cold wind passed over him, shocking his eyes open.
The old woman stood before him now, arms raised.
The woman brought her hands to her face, curled them into claws and began raking at her eyes. In her frenzy, the gown came loose, one shoulder showing pale as a grub.
The woman's mouth gaped open, the tongue flailing inside, and her fingers pulled at the skin of her eyelids. Bondurant could only stare, telling himself it wasn't real, that Jesus and God would never allow something like this in the sacred halls of Wendover.
And even through his fear, he was already scheming his cover-up, planning the story he would give to local authorities.
She broke in, I tried to stop her. No, I've never seen her before…
The woman's gown fell farther down her shoulders, and Bondurant could see more scars criss-crossing the flaccid breasts. Still the gnarled fingers groped and the flesh gave way beneath her fingernails. The lips trembled as if trying to shape a scream, but only silence issued from that dark throat.
Bondurant had been trained to handle violent or aggressive clients. He knew a half-dozen different restraint techniques, from the basket hold to the double wrap. If he could only grab her, pin her arms behind her back, then Then he only had to wait either for her to get tired or for help to arrive.