I looked over at Christine, who gave me a half-nod, half shrug. We were anxious to start exploring the house and the grounds, but without our furniture there'd be no place to rest, and the water wasn't even turned on yet. I also didn't want to refuse the hospitable offer from our new neighbor, despite the awkward timing.
"We'll fix you up some lunch. You're all probably hungry about now." He put his hands on his knees and smiled at Jessica. "Rosy has a special iced tea with honey that'll make your tummy feel all better. Would you like that?"
Jessica nodded, returned a weak, thin smile.
Well, I was hungry, Christine probably was too, and there was only a bag of chips in the car. Earlier we'd discussed heading into town to find a diner, but it seemed we had other plans now. "Sure, lunch would be just fine. Thank you." I limped to the car, got out my spare pants and put them on. Christine gave Jess the Pepto, and the five year old, now beyond the trauma of throwing up, was more than thrilled to be sipping it right out of the bottle.
We all piled into the minivan—Phillip and his new friend Page in the back seat, Jessica sitting on Christine's lap in the front. As we drove off toward Phillip Deighton's house, I looked along the side of the house and saw nothing but woods.
I couldn't help but wonder how far back those woods went.
T
he road curved quite a bit, for no good reason, I thought, as Deighton's house faced the same easterly direction as mine. The charming colonial appeared around a bend of woodland—we'd passed nothing but thick trees on the left with open pastures on the right, each giving way to the front porches of some additional homes. Each house had its very own stretch of woods in the back that possessed an inviting relaxability.
As I pulled into the long gravel driveway I wondered why past Ashborough physicians hadn't set up an office in the center of town where the thickest flow of traffic would bring in the most patients. Perhaps it was tradition to maintain a sense of isolation, keep a safe distance from society where there'd be minimal distraction and a stream of peace and quietude. It had been this way since the 18th century, back when these houses were built by hand. Like today, there would've been only one doctor in town with a house in the wooded outskirts that you had to travel to if you needed some fixing up. I wondered, with some dismay I might add, if those doctors made house calls, and whether that kind of service might be expected of me.
Am I on a housecall now? Could this be some kind of diversionary tactic on the part of Philip Deighton?
I tried to convince myself that hunches like this were the side-effect of a tired anxious mind, but for some very emphatic and unexplainable reason, I thought otherwise.
You can meet my wife, she's anxious to meet you, Mr. Cayle. She's one of your regular patients...
"Well...here we are. Home sweet home," Deighton said. "Been here thirty-two years. Couldn't imagine uprooting myself like you folks just went and did." He stepped from the car, Page circling his ankles, yapping happily. Jessica, in an amazing transformation from sick to cheerful, chased after the dog.
"Easy, Jess," Christine said. "We don't want to have any accidents here."
The house was much like mine, from what I could tell, a rather large New England Colonial blanketed in darkwood shingles and white trim. The driveway ran like a vein alongside a generous sprawl of lawn. Like the driveway, the walk to the house was also unpaved. At the end of the walk, four wooden steps led up to a gray-painted, wrap-around porch. The mild spring weather had compelled the azaleas alongside the porch to release their blooms, the scent of which hung pleasantly in the air; a few bumblebees rejoiced, buzzing in ariettas. Obviously, the house had more of a lived-in look to it than mine, complete with a weathervane in the grass, a cowbell on the eave, and cornhusks on the front door. This was small-town New England at its finest. Phillip led us all inside, then pointed me in the direction of the stairs.
"Bathroom's to the left at the head of the steps," he said with enthusiasm.
I'd brought the first-aid kit with me, and realized with some amusement that I'd never had to use it for a tetanus shot before. I worried for a moment as to whether or not there would be syringes inside, as it had been so long since I'd looked through it. But my conscience told me not to worry. The needles would be in there, just as sure as there was a throb of looming infection in my foot.
"Thanks," I said. I smiled absently at Christine, then looked over at Jessica who was feeding Page a slice of bologna Phillip had gotten from the refrigerator. I started upstairs and heard Christine begin to narrate our reasons for deciding to move out of Manhattan. I figured by the time I finished cleansing the wound and injecting myself, the whole tale would be told and we could go on our merry way back to 17 Harlan Road. Home sweet home, as Deighton had said.
The steps creaked on the way up and at the top I made a left just as Phillip instructed. There was an open door about eight feet away at the end of a long wallpapered hallway; waist-high wainscot moulding with etched floral patterns ran the entire length. A faint stale odor lingered in the air, it could have been mothballs but might have been something else. Something
old
. Like a head of hair that hasn't been washed in a month.
I stopped and turned for a quick moment, saw two more doors on the opposite side of the stairs, one straight ahead, the other in the wall alongside the landing; I figured them to be bedrooms. I shrugged my shoulders, then spun back, grabbed the doorknob, and entered the room. The first thing I did was look at my watch—it was one o'clock. This might have been an instinctive diversionary tactic, a way for me to dissuade my mind from realizing that I'd made a wrong turn. But the effort of such a move lasted but a fleeting moment.
I wasn't in the bathroom. I was in the master bedroom, face to face with Mrs. Deighton.
She was asleep in bed, thankfully, propped up against two pillows, head tilted awkwardly and resting on her left shoulder. My palms began to sweat but I did not drop the first-aid kit. I held it tighter as my heart began to trot in my chest; the acids in my stomach began to seep along its walls, threatening to visit my throat. Somehow I'd either made a wrong turn at the top of the steps, or the clever Phillip Deighton purposely misguided Ashborough's new physician into the bedroom of his first patient.
This is what you're in for, neighbor. Just a little fair warning.
Mrs. Deighton moved. It was an involuntary bob of the head, quickly followed by a knee-jerk snort through the sinuses that tossed her swathed arms through the mess of sheets covering her. My heart took a more forceful trot—a gallop, perhaps—and for a few tense seconds the room seemed to spin around my head. My feet were cemented to the floor, and I held my breath in what I hoped was an effort to not wake the sleeping woman—but knew in my hammering heart was unanticipated fear stiffening my backbone.
I probed my physician's mind for a diagnosis, and immediately came up with cancer, that ill-fated malady that plagues nearly one in every nineteen Americans and is mostly at the root of all incurable, unexplainable medical enigmas. The signals seemed obvious. A good portion of her lower jaw had been cut away, a crude job if you ask me, primitive looking and carelessly jagged. But I'm not a surgeon, nor did I have any details as to the severity of the problem, so I couldn't know exactly what options for surgery existed at the time. All I could tell was that there'd evidently been a malignant tumor festering in her jawbone at one time that nobody knew about, not even Mrs. Deighton, and it had grown and grown until it was too late to save her jaw, so it was sectioned away along with a hardy portion of her cheek, and what you had left was a gaping hole that revealed a wet blackness inside that no one should ever have to look at. Let me tell you, I've seen my share of open wounds, and this baby was a doozy.
Call me foolish, but I took a step closer, my eyes probing the horrific imperfection with utter curiosity, and I couldn't help but just stare at the virtually boneless face, at the involuntary gape disbanding the shriveled skin. In some crazy, ridiculous way, I thought I was looking at the rind on a rotting apple discovered at the bottom of some forgotten fruit basket. The doctor in me wanted to study it. No,
ogle
it. Christ, I felt like a kid in the freak tent at the circus. What was wrong with me?
I turned and let the vision of the woman go. I focused on a photo hanging on the wall, that of a younger Phillip, an unblemished Rosy, and a younger girl, perhaps fifteen years old, between them. Their daughter, I assumed. There was an open door inside the bedroom and I slipped past it into the bathroom. I found the light switch, flipped it. The room filled with a sharp yellow glow and reflected off the ceramic tiles which climbed all the way to the white plaster ceiling. The throb in my foot began to intensify, and the feel of it against the cool air as I hurriedly removed the bandages sent gooseflesh across my skin. I pulled the shower curtain aside and let the water run in the steel-toed tub, keeping it tepid. Once the tub was a quarter of the way filled, I immersed my foot. There was an initial sting, but pain soon turned to alleviation as the injury soaked.
As I stood there, I tried hard to think of the movers who were probably filling my front lawn with cardboard boxes, and how I really needed to get back to the house so I could tell them where all the furniture needed to go. But it was difficult to stay focused; the image of the woman from the next room stayed with me,
haunted
me, made me shudder with disgust. I felt repulsed, not much different than if the loathsome fur of a water rat had rubbed up against my ankles. And this woman, was she really going to be a regular patient? Jesus Christ, it was bad enough simply stomaching the image of her in my mind. How on earth was I going to
examine
her? Perhaps it'd been the unanticipated nature of sighting her that had me so unnerved; I told myself that my professionalism would take over once I was settled into my position as Ashborough's respected internist. I hoped.
After five minutes I removed my foot from the water. Examining the puncture I could easily make out the beginnings of infection setting in, the appearance of a warm red ring about the perimeter of the wound. In a few hours pus would start amassing—the nectar of decay. Oh joy.
Time for an inoculation.
This is one of the perks of being a doctor. You can administer a medication or write yourself (or a family member) a prescription without having to spend a few hours seeing the doctor, dropping off an Rx, and spend God knows how much time waiting for all this to happen. In a matter of a minute I had the syringe unwrapped and fitted into the plunger, had dispensed the vaccine, and inoculated myself in the thigh. To this day I still wince at the pain brought on by the needle, despite however brief it lasts, and I hoped this would be the last one for a while. Two sharp pokes in one day was more than this doctor could stand.
I leaned over and closed up the first-aid case.
I saw something move.
In my peripheral vision, an elongated, lopsided shadow splayed across the tiled wall; it looked like a sea-serpent's head. I jerked away in a startled reaction, leaning into the shower curtain then grabbing it to prevent me from falling into the tub. Three plastic rings
popped
from the shower rod and clattered on the floor; the rest held just fine, long enough until I regained my balance. But the noise had jarred the silence, a more than sufficient clamor to wake Mrs. Deighton. Unless, of course, the shadow itself had belonged to the unsightly woman, now arisen from her slumber to investigate the odd noises in her bathroom. I wondered what she would think finding a strange man in her bathroom, barefoot and clutching her shower curtain. It'd scare the bejesus out of her.
Better give her some fair warning.
I stepped toward the door, and cringed back at the same time, at first keeping my eyes on the wavering shadow then at the open door leading into the bedroom.
"Hello?" I called, half whispering.
No reply. Might be hard of hearing too.
I called out again, this time louder. "Hello? Mrs. Deighton? Your husband told me I could use the bathroom."
I stepped out of the room.
Mrs. Deighton was awake all right, out of bed and standing beside the lone window in the room. Wearing only a nightgown, she was faced in a way, thankfully, so I wouldn't be compelled to have to visually spelunk the cavern in her face.
Her eyes were pointed out the window, and the ball of flesh that was her mouth quivered as if tiny jolts of electricity were lancing through. Her body swayed slowly back and forth, as though she were under the influence of some potent spirits.
She turned toward me in an ungraceful totter, eyes muddy yet still piercing in their focus. She didn't scream, didn't make a move. It was as if my presence had been expected, or perhaps unnoticed. Her jaw still quivered, except now I could see that dark open half of her face, and the dangle of loose skin that joggled from it like a turkey's wattle. For the first time in my career I was playing with the fact that this
woman
might not be human after all, as ludicrous as that sounded. I felt no more civil than one of those terrified Englishmen that had chased the Elephant Man John Joseph Merrick down in that fated London Subway over a century ago.
Our eyes locked, and the first thing that came to me was that they were
different
, somehow devoid of emotion, as though they'd seen terrible horrors beyond the unacceptable rigors of cancer. Then I
saw
...there
were
additional horrors, those of which seeped into my world at once and staggered my breath, sending adrenaline racing through my weakening muscles. Her right hand...it was gone. Somewhere between the elbow and forearm was a gnarled mass of knotty scar tissue amassed in an explicit stump. Half the bicep on the same arm was missing which formed a glaring u-shape. Those were the more obvious injuries. All over her exposed skin, on her arms, neck, shins, and feet, were tiny masses of white scars, some more prominent than others but each as startling as the next.