“A sketch artist? Someone that will listen to my description of the man's face, then draw it, using their own drawing as feedback for me, so that I can narrow down what he looked like in a way everyone else can see?” Not getting a reaction to that, she sat quietly, waiting.
Blinking rapidly for a few seconds, swaying just a little bit, the other woman finally nodded.
“That seems like a well thought out plan. I don't believe we have anyone like that at our disposal at the Constabulary. Do you think your own artistic skills would be up to drawing a picture?” Westmorland let the question hang in the air while Gwen thought about her answer.
“I can try. My drawing ability's not that great. Now if I could get to a computer with Photoshop on it, I could do this no problem.” She looked at the other woman, who didn't react, except to request of the nurse that some paper and a pencil or other drawing tools be found. Before the nurse left, on a whim, Gwen asked if some food and perhaps tea could be arranged, as well as a chair for the detective. If this woman wasn't about to fall down, she was a lot tougher than she looked. For that matter, as nice as everyone had been to Gwen, no one even bothered to actually look at the detective in more than passing. She was strange, but you'd think in a hospital someone would notice her obvious distress.
They talked about the crime of the night before, but Gwen made herself not add anything that she didn't absolutely remember, even as she felt herself led to it a few times. She'd seen enough police procedural dramas on television to know that eye witness testimony tended to suck, and had read enough online to know that the better a person thought their memory of an event was, the worse it would probably turn out to be. People who thought they were perfect tended to be a lot worse than average across the board, regardless of what they were doing. If she could make sure she didn't let herself add more than what she'd seen, maybe that could be avoided. Probably not, but it was the best she could offer at the moment.
The nurse and two men in white outfits came in then, one man carrying two chairs, the other a single one. The nurse moved to set the tray she carried with more of those small sandwiches on it in front of Gwen.
“Oh, no, I'm fine. If you could give those to the detective please? The tea as well. Thanks. I could use that paper though, let's see if my artistic skills... remain at all. It's been a long time since high school art class.” When she said it, memories suddenly flooded back. How her pictures, as good as anyone's she'd thought, constantly got lower grades than average no matter what she did, until one day, testing a theory, she turned a picture in with Dan Gordon's name on it. Then it had gotten an A. She'd kind of stopped trying after that, in that class at least. Why try if her work wasn't going to be given a shot anyway?
Westmorland looked at the tray of food as the nurse poured a cup of tea. She left it sitting in place on the dark brown wooden serving tray, not touching the plain white cup of tea either as Gwen began to draw. Apparently pencils didn't come with erasers here, so she had to ask for one of those, or something like it. Doctor Grainger, Doctor Professor Grainger, she reminded herself, provided a small white blob, about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, that looked like clay, once he understood what she wanted. It looked strange and had a tacky, slightly sticky feeling in her fingers but worked to remove the lines on the thick, slightly gray paper well enough.
Halfway through the picture, Gwen looked up enough to see that the detective hadn't eaten anything, simply staring at her instead.
“Detective Westmorland... Why aren't you eating? You clearly need the food.” Gwen gestured for her to eat. “When was the last time you ate, anyway?” She wondered out loud, knowing that she had probably overstepped a half dozen social boundaries as soon as she'd said it, from the embarrassed reactions of the men in the room.
The woman looked up, and seeing no clock asked the time.
The large man, Grainger, pulled a shiny pocket watch out of his black vest pocket and told her it was twenty past seven.
“I last ate... three days and seven hours ago,” she said simply, then took a bite of her sandwich when Gwen urged her to. Both men blanched slightly.
Her doctor, Schmidt, stammered slightly as he spoke.
“But, but how? You're a Constabulary Detective, a Westmorland asset! Do you mean to tell me that no one thought to feed you or care for you in three days? This is outrageous! Who's your caretaker?” The man seemed truly concerned, as far as Gwen could tell. Indignant now that he realized the problem existed.
Gwen suggested that she keep eating and the sandwiches began to vanish efficiently, as did the tea.
“My last caretaker quit suddenly. There's a shortage of individuals willing to provide active twenty-four-hour-a-day care for someone like me, fewer women than men. The hours are irregular and the work can be tedious.” After getting this out, with more prompting from Gwen, she ate the rest of the sandwiches and drank the tea until they were gone.
Gwen went back to drawing, letting the doctors fuss over the detective for a while. The woman obviously needed them at the moment more than she did. If she needed someone to tell her to eat it was shocking that they let her go out alone at all. Her words were bright enough sounding, if flat, so some kind of autism or... Gwen didn't know enough to keep going, it could be anything really.
It was wrong of whoever was her boss not to see to her care though.
When she had the picture done as well as she could, she handed it to the other woman, being careful not to reach too far, since her chest still burned and throbbed where she'd been stabbed. Luckily the long blade had missed the heart, and the major veins and arteries, she'd been told. They expected her to need several more days of bed rest before she could leave. She'd had beatings from school boys that had taken longer to heal from.
“That's pretty close. I wouldn't try to use it like a photograph, but that's basically him. The hair's a mix of silver and white. I know I shaded it in gray, but it actually stood out a lot more than that, a stark contrast. I really noticed it. I couldn't capture it... but he looked almost fatherly, friendly even, until, you know, he stabbed me in the chest.” She went over the whole story again, telling them how she woke up and couldn't move, tried to observe everything in case she got out alive. She recounted the taste of the ball gag, what was said to the man when he removed it and what he said in return.
Westmorland returned to her state of highly concentrated focus, staring right at Gwen, her eyes unmoving, the last bite of tasteless little sandwich in her hand, “This group had you lying flat, unmoving, most likely a form of systemic paralysis, not ropes, and when you spoke you fought them as you could, resisted and insulted them instead of pleading for your life?” Her eyes, which had been cold, or at least non-responsive, grew slightly misty at this.
The doctors just seemed uneasy, as if shocked by her unladylike language. These people really had an almost Victorian vibe to them in some ways. The rest was mainly just strange. She was discussing being stabbed in the heart by a cult and the men were uneasy because she'd said “fuck” at the time? Would they have been happier if she'd used “darn” instead?
“Well, I don't think it can really be called resistance when you're pretty sure you're about to be killed like that, but it's what I said. He seemed, I don't know, almost happy that I didn't beg for my life or something. He didn't say why, but the way he said it made it seem like these people had done this before.” She continued with the story until she remembered blacking out.
The men looked uncomfortable again, maybe because she'd just described being stabbed in the chest, maybe something else. She didn't know these people well enough yet to know why they reacted a certain way.
This time Doctor Professor Grainger asked her about her last words, before she lost consciousness.
“I, uh, said “fuck you.” I don't know if he heard me, having been kind of stabbed at the time. Makes things a little hazy. That was what I tried to say at least.” She started to hold up a hand, then had to stop herself because of the pain.
“I know, not very original, I remember thinking that at the time, I just couldn't come up with anything clever on such short notice. Really though, if they want witty remarks at a time like that, they should have given me more time to come up with something. I'm sure I'll come up with the perfect thing to have said, in a week or two, you all know how that goes, right? Anyway, then I heard something, but couldn't tell what exactly, since I went out about then.” Gwen smiled a little, just because her face would make the movement so easily.
It was so cool.
The other woman sitting by her side told her what happened then, how a group of twenty constables and four detectives stormed the place. How the field healer went to work almost instantly and held her to life long enough for her to stabilize. It had been very close.
Then she told them about how the perpetrators had managed, somehow, to vanish one by one.
“We don't know if they translocated, became invisible, or simply baffled minds, but they were there one instant and gone without a single trace the next, however they did it. The only victory we got there was that they didn't get their sacrifice this time. Hopefully we'll catch them before the next. You, or at least Katherine Vernor, were to have been number five in the last thirty days. The hope is that failing now will force them to restart, giving us time to catch them and break their pattern. This,” she held up the drawing Gwen had made, “is our best lead at the moment. I need to get it back to the district house and let the others see it. Would it be alright if myself or others visited you here, later, if there's need?” she asked politely, as if Gwen could or would say no.
Gwen smiled, not caring how it looked to anyone else, then realizing that with this new face it might even look... pretty. The idea didn't feel balanced to her at all, almost throwing her for a few seconds.
“Funny thing about that, since having been stabbed in the chest and almost killed, I suddenly have nothing, not one thing, in the whole world I'd rather do than to help take these assholes down.”
Nodding, as if this made perfect sense, the detective rose, walking to the door, where she stopped before leaving.
“Very good, Miss Farris. Since you're the only person to have seen any of these people and survive, I think you may be able to make great strides in helping to take them down as you said. We'll be in touch. Soon.”
Then she left, not saying anything more. It was abrupt enough that it left a void in the room for a second.
Doctor Schmidt stood, a formal thing, not stiff, but clearly done as if on some hidden signal that Gwen missed altogether. The blond man extending a hand to Grainger to shake before leaving the room himself, stating that he should check on his other patients.
Grainger looked at her with a mix of hunger and... embarrassment. Gwen could get the hunger at least. How often did you get to question a person from another world, an alternate reality most likely, and have them captive in a bed so they can't run away? The embarrassment didn't make sense though. Not at first. Luckily the stout man explained.
“I need to leave myself, since it wouldn't be proper for a man to be alone with a lady in your condition, lest she be taken advantage of. Please, when you feel up to it, contact me at the university? I think we may be able to track down what exactly took place that delivered you here, if we don't wait too long. Such things fade over the course of years, after all. Here's my card.” He set it on the table next to the mirror.