The Seer by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 38

The day's end finally arrived, and as Gordon was

finishing the notes on his last patient, the light on his answering machine lit up once again. Assuming it was Tom, Gordon picked up the phone, answering immediately.

“Hey, Tom,” he began. “How are you?” There was no hesitation in Tom's response, and his voice reflected a great deal of excitement.

“Gordon,” he said. “You are not going to believe where we're going this weekend.”

Gordon paused near the end of his notes. “Well, don't keep it a secret, what's going on?

There were a few moments of quiet as a curious tension developed.

“Do you know what AMHI is?” Tom asked.

“Yeah, the Augusta Mental Health Institute,” Gordon replied.

“Well,” Tom continued. “I got written permission to do an investigation there. What do you think?” Nearly everyone in the mental health community knows about AMHI. In its day, it was the last stop for the chronically mentally ill, but stood abandoned since 2004, with its patients transferred to the Riverview Psychiatric Center. Unbeknownst to the team, Tom had been working with the state for quite some time, and only now succeeded in gaining access to the site. He had certainly done his homework, discovering that, over the course of its history, more than eleven thousand people had died there. Most had been resigned to unmarked graves, leaving them to an eternity of lonely anonymity.

Gordon was somewhat familiar with its history, but

its primitive methods of treatment were something he had only read about. Psychiatric care had come a long way since AMHI's patients wandered its halls.

“AMHI,” Gordon replied. “You got permission to go into AMHI?”

Gordon had yet learned how to control his ability, how to shut it off, or single out one individual, while shutting the rest. But, by this time, he had become consumed with curiosity at the opportunity to see what he'd only read about, and excitedly agreed to go.