A Vow, a Visit, and a Vision.

 “Do you think I was too hard on him?” Chrysanthemum paced back and forth across the dimly lit conference room.

“You seem to care a lot about this Bentley character,” said the only other person in the room, an older man seated at the table, “If you keep bringing him up then you might start making me jealous.”

Chrysanthemum blushed and played with a few strands of her hair. The older man was fairly good looking for someone his age. His hair was held in place with so much gel that not even a tornado could mess it up. The man’s nose and jawline both looked as if they were made of stone. His arms were rather muscular and his face was painted with the type of deep wrinkles that tell many stories. He had striking green eyes, much like Bentley’s, that carried a certain tiredness and pain of someone who had seen one too many tragedies. He was very well-groomed though and clearly looked as if he made it a point to take care of himself. His tailored gray suit combined with his weathered features gave him the appearance of some grisly lawyer who operated beyond the law. He raised a large paw and gestured for Chrysanthemum to come over. She practically skipped over before sitting down in his lap like a kid meeting a mall Santa.

“Maybe I’m trying to make you jealous,” she said with a smirk. The older man smiled and placed a calloused hand on her cheek before drawing her in and kissing her. After a few passionate seconds, Chrysanthemum playfully pushed him away.

“Not at work Hank,” she said with an innocent smile.

“Why not?” He brushed some hair from her face with the back of his hand. “If anyone sees us then I’ll just fire them.”

“But that might mean trouble for me too,” she said.

“I won’t let that happen, you’re the only one I can count on to direct our task force,” Hank said, “If you were gone then I’d have to take up that mantle again, and I’d retire if it came to that.”

“But what would the organization do without its precious general?” Chrysanthemum buried her head in his wide chest. “And I wouldn’t want you to have to retire before you achieved what you came here to do.”

“Not what I came here to do, what I was put on this Earth to do,” Hank said, his face twisting into a harsh scowl.

“Don’t worry,” she said as she began to run her hands through his hair and down his neck, “We’re going to save this world from those monsters.”

“I’ll kill every last one with my bare hands if I have to,” Hank said, biting down on his lip. He lowered one of his hands to the small of Chrysanthemum’s back and with the other he began to stroke her caramel hair softly, trying to calm himself down again. Chrysanthemum felt as if she could stay in this moment forever and give up the world around her, but she knew that her soul would never be able to properly rest until she closed the gateway. She had lost too much to not see this thing to the end.

“We can’t fail Chrysanthemum,” Hank said.

“I won’t let us, no matter the cost,” she said, “After all, I only have so much left to lose.”

Chrysanthemum and the General shared a final quick kiss before she got to her feet and left him alone in the darkened conference room.

She walked a few paces before one of the small beige-suited men, a member of the organization’s monster clean-up crew, came running around the corner and bumped into her legs. He went flying down to his butt and rubbed his nose before looking up at her.

“Captain,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice, “Zacharias has requested a meeting with you.” Chrysanthemum’s eyes widened.

“Are you sure?” Cold sweat droplets began to form all the way down her back, making her salmon colored blouse stick to cling to her skin.

“I’m sure,” the small man said, “And he insisted that it was urgent.” Chrysanthemum thanked him and took off hustling through the maze of hallways until she arrived at the small room in the heart of the organization’s headquarters.

The large metal doors seemed to pass their own judgement as she stood in front of the entry.

“Here goes nothing,” she said before pushing open the doors. A single fluorescent light cast a narrow beam down at the far end of the otherwise pitch black room. Under this beam was a mahogany desk with a short old man sitting behind it. He looked straight ahead, not reacting at all to Chrysanthemum’s entrance. Heavy iron shackles were secured to the old man’s wrists and ankles, both attached to a thick chain emerging from the stone wall behind him. The room had always felt like a dungeon to Chrysanthemum. The old man always looked surprisingly clean for a prisoner though, especially considering the fact that she didn’t think he was ever afforded such luxuries as haircuts or showers.

He had been kept in chains at the organization for longer than Chrysanthemum knew. In fact, he had been there for so long that nobody but the General knew anything about the old man’s origins. For whatever reason though, he refused to share any details about this short old fellow. The one time Chrysanthemum had asked about him, the General had given her a vague response that she couldn’t quite make sense of.

“He’s a special individual, someone more valuable to our cause than you could ever imagine. He must be kept here at all costs,” he had said in an ominous tone. Chrysanthemum had never questioned the General about the man after this. Morality would’ve told her that keeping the old man here all these years was somehow inhumane, but morality was a useless tool in her line of work.

“Hello,” she called out to the old man, her voice bouncing off the walls in cold echoes.

“Chrysanthemum,” he responded in his gravelly voice, “Thank you for coming to meet me.”

“Of course,” she said, “What is it you needed me for exactly?”

“I want to talk with Bentley Flynn immediately,” he said. The stiletto of Chrysanthemum’s heel gave out at that exact moment and she went stumbling backwards, catching herself just before falling.

“How do you know about Bentley?”

“I’m sorry but details are something precious that I’m not able to spare at the moment,” he said. She could not think of any way that the old man could have possibly been made aware of Bentley’s existence.

“Bentley was sent back to his apartment yesterday, we left on pretty bad terms too,” she said hesitantly, “I doubt he’ll ever come back here again.”

“Doubt is a path that leads only to destruction,” he sighed. The fluorescent light overhead began flickering out, descending the room into total darkness momentarily before lighting up again. The old man’s gaze had moved to a point right above Chrysanthemum’s head. She turned to see what he was looking at but there was nothing other than more darkness.

“It’s starting,” he whispered.

“What’s star—”

A searing pain in Chrysanthemum’s head sent her falling to her knees on the cold concrete floor. Scenes of unspeakable death and horror began flashing across her eyes like some torturous slideshow. She tried to scream but felt her throat fill up with darkness before she could produce any noise. Familiar voices that she only heard in nightmares assaulted her ears like claws raking across a chalkboard. Chrysanthemum tried to think but only one thing ran through her head over and over like a broken record.

Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me.

Chrysanthemum clawed at her face, trying to get the visions to stop, but they just kept moving faster and faster. The visions continued to speed up, spinning throughout her head like a carousel gone awry, until finally her vision went completely and utterly white.

She sat still for a moment, sinking deeper and deeper into this blankness, feeling it wrap around her tighter and tighter, suffocating her like she was being mummified. She heard a horrible popping noise and suddenly she was in her childhood home. Her room was exactly as she left it, the walls were plastered with posters of her favorite bands and movies, string lights hung from the ceiling like Christmas decorations, and her bed was as far away from being made as one could possibly get.

There was one difference between this vision of her room and how she remembered it though… this version of her room had no door.

She walked towards the wall as if it had some magnetic power attracting her, not worried at all about running into it for some reason. When she reached the wall she just absorbed into it as if she and the wall were engaged in some reverse cell mitosis. Chrysanthemum came out of the wall into the hallway on the other side, all the lights were off and light switches appeared to be nowhere in sight. She slowly made her way down the hallway, her hand braced against the wall, until she entered the living room that it opened up into. In the living room, standing front and center on the Persian rug that her parents loved so much, was a foreboding outline with a faint glow surrounding it. The man’s back was turned which would have given her a chance to escape, but instead she found herself tip-toeing towards him. She slowly reached out an arm and tapped on the figure’s shoulder. The man spun around and found himself face-to-face with her, their noses almost touching.

Chrysanthemum knew right away, even though the face was drenched in shadows, that it was unmistakably Bentley.

The only thing that made her hesitate was that where Bentley’s sharp green eyes should have been, there were only empty sockets. Without the eyes, Bentley’s face looked more like a skull than the face of a living, breathing human being. She could not describe why but she had to make sure that his eyes truly were gone, as if making her way through the stages of grief and first having to grapple with denial. The soft embrace of the hollow sockets sucked in her fingers like they were greeting an old friend with a tight hug. They were terribly cold, she felt that if she kept probing these sockets for too long, she would lose the tips of her thumbs to frostbite. After the chill became too much to bare, she removed her fingers, making a suction cup noise as she yanked them free. Chrysanthemum stood there in front of the eyeless Bentley, awaiting a reaction, any reaction. Bentley gave none.

Finally after a few minutes of stillness, Bentley began to clap. It started slowly and then began to build up. The claps got quicker and quicker until Chrysanthemum could barely make out the movement of his hands anymore. The applause shook the walls of her childhood home, threatening to bring everything crashing down around them. She wanted to tell him to stop but her lungs were still drowned in darkness, making breathing a chore and speaking impossible. So, thinking quickly, she did the next best thing and reached out to grab his hands. For how cold his hollow eye sockets had been, his hands were surprisingly warm.

“This doesn’t feel like a good type of warm though,” Chrysanthemum thought, “There’s no security or protection I feel in this grip, only turmoil.”

How exactly she could feel the turmoil radiating from his hands to hers, she was unsure. All she knew was that it was there, as clear as day. She could tell that this Bentley was fighting desperately against something internal and losing, like two plants fighting bitterly over who would get the sunlight and condemn the other one to death by darkness. It was an internal struggle the likes of which Chrysanthemum could sense far exceeded even her own, something she had only ever felt in one other person before. Bentley looked down, if you could call it that due to the lack of eyes, at his now stilled hands being held in place by Chrysanthemum. He looked back up until his hollow sockets were staring directly into Chrysanthemum’s eyes. His face, which had shown no emotion up until this point, curled into a devilish grin.

Bentley started to laugh hysterically. It was a terrifying cackle akin to a hyena after years in solitary confinement. It was the laugh of someone who had lost everything, someone truly and entirely insane. Chrysanthemum let go of his hands and took a half-step back, trying to make sense of all that was happening.

“Hee-hee-hee,” he laughed in a high-pitched giggle, beginning to convulse horribly as he did. He laughed and laughed with reckless abandon until the laughs began to turn to dry heaves. He hunched over and tried to vomit as if he would die if he didn’t soak the floor with puke in the next minute. The convulsions got progressively more violent as it became evident that he was nearing the vomit climax. Instinctively, Chrysanthemum reached out her hands to catch it. With one particularly brutal spasm, he vomited into Chrysanthemum’s hand. She clasped her fingers around what she now held as if it were more precious than diamonds to her. She turned her back to Bentley and opened her fingers to examine her haul.

The two glossy eyeballs stared up at her, looking terribly afraid like the eyes of a newborn child. She recognized these sharp green eyes despite only having met them with her own a few times now. The severed eyeballs soaked her hand in some viscous liquid, but she felt at ease rather than disgusted as it drenched her palms.

Chrysanthemum turned back around to thank Bentley for the gift but he was already gone. The eyes realized this at the same time that she did and began to panic, looking around frantically for their owner. They began to glow red as they came to terms with the hopelessness of their situation. Then, like a scoop of ice cream left in the Sun, they started melting in her hands. She tried to catch the goopy remains of the eyes but it continued to slip through her fingers before hitting the ground and spreading out beneath her in a rapidly expanding puddle. The puddle climbed up the walls and swallowed the ceiling too before she could even react.

Again, Chrysanthemum was surrounded by nothingness.

She blinked and her mind returned to her surroundings. She was still on the floor in the old man’s room.

“I’m sorry you had to see all that,” he said, “But you’re unfortunately a part of all this too.”

“What was that?” She steadied her breathing, trying to keep her composure as she regained control over her thoughts and actions, something she had lost over the course of the vision. Cerbs had stopped scaring her long ago, but that vision had sapped her of her will to even exist. Her head was still spinning but the savage scenes that had plagued her were gone.

“That was the reason why I need to speak with Bentley immediately,” he said, “Also, you should answer that.”

Chrysanthemum realized that her phone was ringing.