Colour of Death, The 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 file 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,”
