They told me to stop writing today. They caught me writing with one hand and pulling my hair with the other. "Regressing," they said. Getting worse instead of better. That the writing is a trigger. They said they might cut my hair, and I cried and promised I'd stop. But I haven't. It's hard to stop writing now that I've gotten started.
I haven't shown them, of course. Every time I finish a page, I hide it under my mattress. Part of me thinks that I've been hiding the truth for West for so long, I can't start divulging it now. And part of me knows that if they saw what I've been writing, they'd - well, I don't know what they'd do. But they wouldn't believe me.
I'm not complaining. Like I said, it's nice here. I can take walks outside if I want. I'm not locked in a cell the way I would have been at Sefton Asylum. The way that thing that had been Dean Halsey was locked up, batting itself endlessly against the padded walls.
Of course, Dean Halsey isn't locked up any more. And that doesn't help me sleep any.
Our fourth year of medical school was too busy for us to try any more of West's experiments. We had clinicals at the teaching hospital, and were applying for residency programs across the country. West had his eye on a surgical residency in Amherst that was very prestigious. He tried to bully me into applying to surgical residencies as well, but on that point, I stood firm. I'd gone to medical school wanting a family practice, and a residency in family medicine was my first choice. However, I did acquiesce to proximity, and chose Amherst as my first match. West grumbled, but admitted that applying to different programs would increase our chances of getting into the same hospital.
West's first goal in getting a residency was to keep the two of us together - a goal that I considered to be nearly impossible due to the manner in which medical students are matched to positions - that is, by computer algorithm rather than any conscious choice. I could hardly complain, of course, as I couldn't imagine having to endure a residency in another hospital - or worse, another state - from West. But his motives were more oblique than mine. I finally got up the nerve to ask him why he was so set on us getting a residency together, and he just smiled and said "we have a lot of work to do."
I didn't sleep for a week after he said that, and asked no more questions.
One afternoon, as we sat drafting applications, West turned to me and said "we should probably get married."
My mouth went dry, and for several moments, I couldn't speak. I finally managed to sputter out "why?"
He shrugged. "Married residents are more likely to get matched together," he said. "Not by much, but it could help."
"Oh. All right," I said, and we both went back to our applications.
Objectively, I was aware that as far as proposals go, this one would be considered disappointing by most women. But until that day, I'd never much thought about getting married. Now, faced with this curt, businesslike proposal, I was touched, rather than disappointed.
We applied for the license the next day, and a few weeks later were married at the Essex Superior Court. We were in scrubs, fresh from a night shift, and refused the offer to have our picture taken under the cheap arch entwined with dusty plastic flowers set up in the hallway. We had no rings. The one thing I did do was immediately apply to change my name to West.
It was a week before I thought that I ought to call my parents to tell them I'd gotten married. The shock my mother displayed at the news told me how far from the norm I had strayed. They insisted on us coming to Boston for a weekend visit - an unmitigated disaster. West only agreed to go after being threatened with divorce, and a change in my top residency pick to Los Angeles. He greeted my parents' attempts at enthusiasm with stony silence, and spent most of the weekend on the porch chain smoking and working on his residency applications on my laptop.
My parents were furious, and after a painful dinner during which West ignored their small talk and barely touched my mother's (admittedly terrible) chicken Kiev, she hissed "is it too much to ask him to act like a human being?"
I didn't answer, and didn't relax until we had driven out of the city, and were headed back to Arkham.
After we'd submitted our matching sets of residency applications, we had a brief calm before we embarked on our interviews. We both grew increasingly twitchy as Match Day grew ever closer.
The students were given Match Day off, which, for West, only made things worse. Without an outlet for his excess energy, he spent the day chain smoking and pacing through the apartment, until I started coughing and kicked him out into the courtyard.
The Match Day ceremony at Miskatonic University was a formal affair, which further agitated West, as he abhorred all things ceremonial. I had to force him into the suit I'd bought for him, and he resisted all the attempts I made to soothe him prior to the ceremony itself.
At the ceremony, we were lined up in alphabetical order (a benefit of changing my name, ha ha), and those who had been matched to a residency were handed sealed envelopes. This, I reflected while the envelopes were being handed out, seemed needlessly cruel to the students who had not been matched,and who would begin to scramble for the remaining positions tomorrow. This thought was quickly extinguished once an envelope was placed in my hand.
At the signal, we tore the envelopes open at the same time. The text on my letter seemed to run before my eyes as I searched for the words I desperately wanted to see. My breath caught when I found them all - Family Medicine, Amherst.
I turned to West who, on seeing the expression on my face, broke into his magnificent cloudburst smile. I fairly shuddered at the sheer joy of it, and could only think that despite the strange, unsettling events of my years as a medical student, this moment was worth them all.
We spent the next months in a blur of finishing clinical work at Miskatonic for good, and preparing to move and begin our residencies. For me, the blur was mostly happy, as I was thrilled by the prospect of settling into something approaching cozy domesticity with West. It would be demanding, certainly, but we weren't the sort of pair to lounge around. We'd be lean, hungry, driven - together. And I began to develop the hope that, with the punishing schedule of a resident, and the no doubt fascinating things he'd be learning during his surgical training, West would eventually abandon his strange experiments with corpses, and turn his ambitions to the living.
I was wrong, of course. I was stupid even to think it.
It was the house that made me realize that nothing was going to change with West.
He'd disappeared after his shift one Tuesday afternoon, absconding with my car. I didn't particularly mind his taking the car, as my plan for the day was to take a hot bath and sleep, which I did. I missed him next to me in bed, though - the way I could lean my forehead between his shoulderblades, the way he'd turn to curl one arm around my waist. I found it difficult to sleep without him.
(still do.)
I'd tossed and turned myself into exhaustion, then woke on Wednesday morning, late, to find him back, lighting a cigarette with a smug expression.
"Hey," I said, blinking.
"Hey," he replied. "I got us a house."
I sat up, the bedsheets pooling around my waist. "A house?" I repeated.
"In Amherst, for when we move. It's perfect," he said.
Perfect for what, I would find out when we finished out our last year of medical school, packed our things, and drove west.
(ha ha.)
I hated the house from the moment I saw it. It was an old farmhouse that stood alone at the end of a winding road, in the middle of land seemingly so fallow, no one had ever bothered to attempt to build on it after the farm had ceased operations. Our nearest neighbor was three quarters of a mile away. The house was old and dilapidated, and I got the rather cliched sensation that the front of it looked a bit like a face. There were the large, empty windows on the second floor, peering out onto the winding path that approached it, and the front porch sagged like a leering, toothless mouth.
West was nearly beside himself with excitement when we first drove up - me driving, him directing. "Well?" he asked, when I'd parked. "What do you think?"
He must have seen my expression fall at the mere sight of the place, because his own face hardened. He busied himself with lighting a cigarette - even though I'd asked him not to smoke with the car windows up.
"It's just a bit - run down, don't you think?" I asked.
He didn't answer for three drags on the cigarette. I started to hold my breath.
"If it's not good enough-"
"I didn't say that-"
"It's what we can afford on our salary. Unless you want mommy and daddy to-"
"I didn't say that!"
He responded only by jetting two streams of smoke from both nostrils. I realized then how dangerously close to the edge I was - how easily he could tell me to leave him there, and drive away, find a new apartment, and not to speak to him again. The fear I felt at the mere thought of West leaving me was more than any I felt upon looking at the sagging face of the house.
I took a breath, ignoring how it seemed to catch in my throat. "Will you show me around?"
I hated the inside of the house more than the outside. It was musty, mildewed, filled with dust that seemed impossible to get rid of. The ceilings were too low, the hallways too narrow, the rooms too small. Every room seemed to squeeze my chest a bit, and they became worse the further I ventured into the house.
But the absolute worst part came when West paused beside a door near the kitchen and said "this is the best part." He opened the door upon a narrow stairway, leading down.
The basement.
In contrast to the rest of the house, the basement was vast. It was dark and cool, seeming to have unplumbed recesses that couldn't be explored in only one venture. I looked around it, a strange choking sensation in my throat.
"For the lab," West said, consolingly. "For our work." He put his arms around my waist and kissed me on one cheek. "We're going to prove them all wrong."
I didn't answer.
In med school, veteran doctors delighted in telling students horror stories about how bad their residencies were. The reality was worse. Nothing anyone had said could have prepared me for the sheer exhaustion of the work, the number of hours spent at the hospital, the interminable movement from patient to patient, the tiny snatches of rest we were permitted before we had to get up and do everything over again.
This was the first time since I'd met West that our schedules were nearly incompatible. We managed well enough that we were able to get each other to the hospital in our single car, but for most of the days - and the nights - when we worked, we were entirely separated. We ate meals, went to sleep, and woke again, still at the hospital.
Still, I look fondly back on that time as a period of being happy. I was exhausted, of course, and I missed West, but i was secretly pleased that West's residency seemed to sap even his nearly inexhaustible stores of energy. On the rare days when we both were allowed to go home, West barely had the strength to mutter a few words about his day, flop into bed and sleep. I would stay up for as long as I could and pretend that the two of us were just normal junior residents, who had never engaged I recreational corpse resurrection - or, barring that, that West would eventually find a new and less terrifying interest to occupy him.
Our sporadic efforts at home improvement, however, told otherwise. When possible, we engaged both our meager salaries and limited time in attempting to make our ramshackle house a livable space. My efforts started in our bedroom - I scrubbed baseboards, slapped a coat of bright white paint on the walls, put up a set of bright yellow curtains that I deemed "cheerful," and that West didn't notice until I pointed them out to him. West spent his time in the basement.
I didn't have the fear of basements then that I have now, but I still avoided the place as much as I could. Consequently, I only saw the improvements that West made in great leaps. First there was only vast space, and then - a complex lighting system, lab tables, equipment. Some of it was ordered from a medical supply company, and some had been smuggled out of the hospital - West had a genius for theft, he never got caught. When I suggested once that he might not want to risk his job by taking so much equipment by himself, he only looked thoughtful and said, "maybe I'll have you take something next time." I never mentioned it again, for fear he'd follow through on the threat.
A year went by this way, and then two, without West making another attempt at his experiment. He'd begun actively working on an improved formula, and spent any time in the house that he wasn't sleeping shut in the basement with an array of chemicals. I sometimes joined him out of sheer loneliness, and helped as much as I could - talking through the changes West was making, and sometimes proposing improvements on my own. The bad ones were met with a snort, the good ones with silence.
But despite the progress West made with his formula, he still hadn't attempted to use it, for one simple reason - lack of readily available corpses. West's attempts to cultivate a mortician the way he had in Arkham were rebuffed on all sides, and with his residency schedule, he didn't have the time to try working at a funeral home himself. All of this I considered very fortunate, and inwardly prayed that it would continue until West finally lost interest. But I underestimated West's resourcefulness.
He hit on the solution in our third, and last, year of residency. I came back from my shift one morning to find a group of people sitting in our living room. Their shabby clothes and downtrodden expressions showed that they were fellow residents of the impoverished part of town. None of them stood, or said anything to greet me when I walked in. They only looked at me once, faces impassive, then looked away when they decided I wasn't worth spending further time on.
I walked through the room to the back parlor, a disused room that I rarely entered, and found West examining a man stripped down to a yellowing strap style undershirt and shorts. "What the hell?" I snapped.
West stood smoothly, said "would you excuse me?" to the man, took my arm and steered me out of the room, into the kitchen. Only his grip on my arm indicated how angry with me he was.
In the kitchen with the door shut, West turned to me without letting go of my arm. "It's just a few people from town who need some help," he said, his voice low and calm.
"You're not treating them?" I whispered, aghast. "You can't treat them - you'll lose your license before you even have your license!"
"Who's going to catch me?" West said, still completely calm.
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. West's grip on my arm tightened.
"West," I started, my voice strained, "you know I wouldn't say anything-"
"Good," West said, letting go of my arm. "Because I could use a hand in there."
"I've been on call for thirty-six hours, I have to get some sleep."
I winced in advance, waiting for another squeeze on my arm, but West let me go. "Fine," he said. "Good night." He turned and walked back into the parlor, shutting the door behind him.
I went to bed, but didn't sleep - I couldn't, not with all those people in my house. I lay awake, watching the bruise develop into a mottled purple above my elbow. It took three weeks to fade.
This state of affairs continued for several weeks - West treating our indigent neighbors on his off hours, me pretending to ignore what he was doing and locking myself in the bedroom until they were all gone. But one afternoon, when I'd just gotten off an overnight, West started calling me as soon as I walked into the house. I pretended not to hear him until I'd reached the top of the stairs, when I heard his sharp bark of his voice call me from the bottom step.
No good ignoring him now. I turned around and saw him looking up at me, irritated.
"I need some help," he snapped. "I've got a woman in, with a kid. She's complaining of chest pain, but he's sick too - I need you to look at him."
I stood there, hand on the bannister, thinking of refusing, thinking of my license.
West saw the indecision in my face, and held one hand out to me. "Please?" he said, quietly.
I walked down the stairs.
Once in West's makeshift examination room, I recognized both the child and his mother from my ventures to the cheaper grocery store in town - West's expenditures on medical equipment for his illegal practice and basement lab didn't leave much in our budget for groceries. She had a broad, inscrutable face studded with two small eyes spaced too far apart, which she turned to me as I entered the room. The little boy - he couldn't have been more than five, maybe younger - I remember as being particularly noisy, always whining for this or that treat, or shouting for the sheer pleasure of hearing his own voice. Now, though, he wasn't noisy - he was slumped, red-eyed and desultory, against his mother's arm. She ignored him, as did West.
I squatted in front of him, glad I hadn't changed out of my scrubs, so that I at least looked like an official doctor, even in this ramshackle setting. "Hi there," I said to the boy. "Not feeling too good?"
The boy nodded.
"What's your name?"
It took the boy a few moments to open his mouth and croak "Josh."
"Hi Josh, I'm Doctor West. It hurts to talk, huh?"
The boy nodded, looking at the floor.
"Hurts to swallow too?"
Another nod.
"Take him in the kitchen," West said, shoving a kit of equipment at me. I did so, taking Josh by one damp, sticky hand. I sat him in one of the chairs around our table, and set to work.
It didn't take me long to diagnose - it was textbook streptococcal pharyngitis - though I felt a pang of guilt that I couldn't do a throat culture, just to be sure. I gave the mother a prescription (the pad pilfered from the hospital by West, of course) for penicillin, explaining that Josh had to take the full course, even after he'd started feeling better.
"He doesn't have a penicillin allergy, does he?" I asked.
The woman only shrugged, then listened, still impassive, as I explained the symptoms of penicillin allergy. "You'll have to take him to the emergency room if he shows those signs, okay?" I said.
The woman didn't answer, and left after a few minutes with Josh in tow.
I vented my anger at West as we got ready for bed that evening. "If she hadn't been having chest pain, she'd never have brought Josh in at all!" I raged. "It's irresponsible - it's criminal! Some people should just - just be sterilized!"
"I agree," West said. He was sitting in bed, having a cigarette and paging through a medical journal without much interest. "But she can't have any more kids any time soon. Her heart's going to give out - I told her she'd have to get treatment at the hospital, but I don't think she will." He took a drag on his cigarette, let it out in a satisfied manner. "One of these days she's just going to keel over and die."
I stopped what I was doing - which was taking off my bra - to turn and stare at West.
"That's what this is about, isn't it?" I said. "You just want someone to die on you - what, so you can have another body?"
West didn't answer - he only raised his eyebrows, as though disappointed that I'd taken so long to figure this out.
"And no one would report it," I continue flatly. "You want another body that no one would care about."
West still didn't answer, and his eyes flicked back to his journal.
I finished taking my clothes off and slid into bed, brain churning over this new information.
"You did that on purpose, didn't you? With the kid? So I'd help?"
At this, West finally closed his journal and put it on his end table. "Are you going to help?" he asked.
I thought about saying no, I really did. But in the end, I never could say no to West for very long.
And so for the next several months, we worked - both at our residencies and at our illegal home practice. I kept telling myself that this was what I wanted, to do good in the community in which I lived, to help people when they were sick. But I wasn't invited to any Sunday dinners, or even a lunch or two. The indigent patients we treated seemed to regard West and I as demigods, who could heal with a touch, but who could not be spoken to on any kind of human level. This certainly seemed to gratify West's ego, but it worried me. I would lie awake after he'd gone to sleep, wondering what would happen if our makeshift practice ever got something wrong, if someone ever died because someone came to us instead of the hospital.
West worried too, but not about the practice. I caught him once, getting up for a shift while I still had a few hours of sleep to go, strapping a holster over his shirt and under his jacket. The visual was so strange that at first I thought I was dreaming.
"What's that for?" I murmured.
West turned to look at me. "Don't you ever hear it?"
"Hear what?"
"The noises. When we're out going to the car in the dark. Don't you ever hear them?"
"Hmm?" I said, not quite able to articulate a full word.
West seemed to pause. "Just for safety," he said. "Go back to sleep." He leaned down and kissed me on the forehead, and I slept.
On a blustery night in the March of our final year of residency, West and I were woken by a loud knocking at our back door. West was up immediately, and I trailed after him, struggling into a bathrobe and smoothing my hair.
There was a group of five men at the door, and they carried a sixth man among them. At first I wondered why it took so many to carry one, but when the prostrate man came into view, I understood. The man was enormous, easily the biggest I'd ever seen - both in height and girth. His face was broad with a squashed-in nose that was bleeding freely. He looked downright dangerous, as though if he were conscious, he could crush someone's arm his fist. Actually, all of the men looked dangerous to me, but when West started barking orders at them to carry the man into the parlor-cum-examination room, they did as they were told without question.
They got the man onto the table, and West squinted down at him. "What happened?" he asked.
The men looked at each other, and it was some time before one of them spoke up. "Just an... altercation," he said.
West turned his flat eyes on the speaker, and stared him down without saying a word.
"Okay-" the man said, putting up his hands as though to ward West off, even though he was a head taller and twice as wide as my husband. "A little friendly boxing match outside Greenway's."
West flicked his eyes to me, and I understood. Greenway's was a bar on the outskirts of town with a nasty reputation. If the men had been fighting - and likely taking bets on the outcome - they would surely have gotten arrested if they had taken the injured man to the hospital.
"He just collapsed in the middle of the round," the speaker continued. "Hadn't even taken a punch - not right then, anyway - and he just-"
"You should've taken him to the ER," West snapped, irritated. "There's only so much I can do here." He snapped his fingers at me - which I hated, but never could get him to stop doing - and said "cut off his clothes."
I worked fast with the shears, and the men around us became increasingly uncomfortable, shifting and looking into the corners of the room. In any other circumstance, I would have found it funny.
West didn't spend long examining the man before standing, shaking his head. "No," he said, "it's too late. He's gone."
"Oh shit," one of the men hissed, his voice sounding quavery and weak, displaying the extent of his cowardice.
West turned his eyes to him - flat, blue, contemptuous. "Go," he said. "We'll take care of him."
My stomach plunged as I heard West say this, but I kept myself still.
"You serious, doc?" another of the men said.
"Yes," West said, "Just go."
The men went, scattering into the dark like cockroaches. We heard their car motor start, then drift into the distance.
"He isn't dead," I said, once the motor faded.
"No, but he will be in a few minutes," West said, snapping off his gloves. "See how shriveled the testes are?"
I looked. I saw. "Steroid abuse?"
"Heavy, and for at least a decade, maybe two. His heart's giving out. I don't think there's anything we could've done even if he had gone to the ER."
I had my doubts about this, but said nothing.
"No time to get him downstairs," West said. "Watch him for me - yell if anything changes." He dashed off, toward the basement lab, leaving me alone with the man in his last few minutes of life.
I watched him as he took shallow little breaths, listened as his faint heartbeats grew more and more arrhythmic. I took the chance of rifling through his clothes, looking for a wallet or identification, but found nothing. Maybe his companions had taken it as a precaution. Maybe they had just stolen it. I wondered where this man had come from, whether he had any family, whether there was anyone wondering where he was or what he was doing. He had an ugly, pugnacious face, but maybe it disguised a kind nature - the kind of man who'd knock down another man for looking at him sideways, but who'd rescue a stray puppy in a storm drain.
I shook my head a little. All of these thoughts were just useless distractions - that's what West would say. If the experiment worked, the man would come back, good as new, and we'd find out all we wanted to know about him. Still, I couldn't resist brushing the hair off his forehead, just once. It was matted, sweaty and thinning, but it was the same blonde as West's, and had the same fine, almost silky texture. The man stirred slightly at my touch, then was still.
When West emerged from the basement, his expression was not the exultant one I was expecting. He looked tense, concerned, and carried two syringes in one hand.
"I'm not sure this'll be enough," he said, setting the syringes - click click - on a table. "He's so huge, and his body mass has got to be-" West cut off, pinching a bit of the man's torso in his fingers. "Do you think we have time to weigh him, at least?"
"I - don't know," I said, balking a bit at the indecision in West's voice. "It'd take both of us to get him off the table, and even then-"
West shook his head, taking the man's pulse. "No time," he said. "This will have to do."
We waited, and in only a few minutes, the huge man's heart stopped in his chest. I waited a few precious seconds to make sure there would be no further heartbeats before saying "now." West plunged his syringe into the man's neck, and after a moment's hesitation, the second syringe as well.
We waited. I held my breath, hovering inches above the boxer's face, searching for the eyelash flutter or nostril twitch that would indicate the first signs of life. Nothing happened.
I waited until I couldn't hold my breath any more, then let it out, slowly. I breathed in, then out again. Still nothing.
We waited for an hour. West started to pace, then lit a cigarette, something he'd never done in the examination room before. I alternately watched him and the corpse, waiting for something - anything - to happen. Nothing did.
I waited another half hour before I dared say anything. "West," is what I said, "I don't think it's going to-"
West threw his most recent cigarette butt into a corner and ran one hand through his hair. "We have to get rid of it," he said.
I shut my eyes, heaved a sigh. "No - I can't, I'm on call in the morning, I have to get some sleep-"
West lit another cigarette. "We still have to get rid of him. Before morning."
I stared hopelessly at the massive body on the table before us, wondering how to say no.
What I said was "I'll bring the car around."
I can't quite remember how we managed it. I remember being cold. I remember that the ground in the woods behind the house was frozen, and that it took us ages to make a shallow dip in the earth that was big enough for the man's enormous frame. I remember that by the end of it my hands were raw and bleeding through my gloves after carrying a load of twigs and nettles to cover the freshly turned earth, camouflaging it to match the rest of the thicket.
I remember West saying not to worry, no one would come looking for the man, not here, and in the spring when the ground warmed up, we'd come back and do a better job of it. I was too tired to argue, or even to respond. I only went to fetch another load of twigs.
By the time we got back to the house the sun was coming up. I had just enough time to take a shower and bandage my hands before I had to leave for the hospital, casting one envious glance at West, who had a forty-eight hour leave, and was already sound asleep.
I got through twenty-four hours of my shift before my resolve began to break down. Even with a five hour sleep allowance in the middle, I began to feel as though the hospital's hallways were wavering, and I had to catch myself in doorframes several times.
Whether fortunately or not, the attending with whom I was working noticed my state, and ordered me to go home, lest I pass something contagious on to the patients under our care. I felt a little ashamed at being called out as weak, but also grateful to be dismissed early, and relieved that I'd be able to get some sleep soon. The relief and gratitude, however, soon dissipated as I drove from the hospital to the farmhouse. Instead, I began to feel an intense anxiety that was heightened when I saw a host of run-down cars parked in the lawn of the house. My first thought was that it was someone looking for the huge boxer we'd buried the morning before - but then, they'd bring police, wouldn't they? And there were no police cars around the house. I walked quickly up the drive, nearly running by the time I got to the porch.
When I opened the front door, I heard raised voices. There were a few scattered people waiting in the living room, but the noises were coming from the parlor-cum-examination room. I dashed in, ignoring those who rose from the dilapidated sofa and chairs to ask how much longer Doctor West was going to be.
The scene in the parlor stopped me cold. West was surrounded by a group of men, one of whom I recognized as having been in the group that brought the boxer to our house. He gave me a guilty glance, then looked back to the group.
It was another man, one I didn't recognize, who was shouting - shouting, I realized, at West. It was a mixture of obscenities and sobs, culminating in a screech - "you killed her - you killed her!" I glanced around in confusion until I saw what he meant - a woman lay prone on the examination table beside West, partially obscured from my view by the group of men. I recognized her from her shape and bulk as the woman who'd brought in the child - Josh - with the strep throat. The woman West said would drop dead any day.
"I did no such thing," West said, his voice cold and stiff. "You should have taken her to the hospital, not to me."
The man wailed in despair. "I can't afford-"
"That's not my problem," West said, cutting him off.
It was the wrong thing to say, and the wrong time to say it, and I opened my mouth to say something - anything - to take the man's attention from West. What came out of my mouth, however, was a scream, as I watched the man reach into his back pocket and pull out a butterfly knife.
I was the only one who saw the knife at first. My scream alerted the man's companions, and the three of them lunged for him - too late. He had West pinned against the wall and slashed downward once with the knife before the others managed to wrestle his arm behind his back and drag him away. The man collapsed in their arms, sobbing out a woman's name - his wife's, I assume.
(and god why can't I remember her name?)
"Get him out!" I shouted, in a voice that didn't sound like mine. "Get them both out, now!"
Two of the men hoisted the attacker and drag-carried him from the parlor, leaving the other two to stare at the unwieldy corpse of his wife.
"There's a cot in the corner - wheel her out on that," I said. "Through the back door. Bring your car around." It was the way West and I had gotten the boxer out of the house, and if the two of us could manage that, these men could manage the woman's corpse easily.
As they rushed to assemble the cot, I caught hold of the arm of the man who'd brought the boxer in two nights ago. "Calm him down," I hissed in his ear. "He says anything - to the hospital, the police, whoever - about what goes on here, and you know what happens to you."
Actually, I had no idea what would happen to him - but the man's face turned ashy, and he began to nod frantically, squirming us way out of my grip. "Sure, sure," he said, "no problem, nothing to worry about."
I waited until the men had both the attacker and his wife safely in the car before shooing the remaining would-be patients out of our living room. They grumbled, but none of them dared to protest to my face. It was only when we were finally alone, with both doors locked and bolted, that I was able to turn my attention to West.
He'd slumped onto a stool as though in shock, one hand pressed to the left side of his face, blood running through his fingers.
"Let me see it," I said, prising his hand away. It was a nasty gash - it had missed West's eye by a quarter of an inch - but at least the knife had been sharp, the edges clean. I had to suture it myself. West refused any anesthetic save a scant handful of aspirin, but by the time I finished, he'd come to himself enough to criticize my stitches as "sloppy."
"Hold still and let me finish," was all I said in reply.
When I'd finished, and was snipping a piece of gauze to use for a bandage, I asked "what happened?"
West shrugged. "Her kid went missing yesterday. The police wouldn't issue an AMBER alert - too soon - so they were out searching the woods. And she just…" he made a gesture with his hands of something toppling over. "Too much exertion."
I froze, scissors in mid-cut. "Was it Josh?"
"Huh?"
"The kid who went missing."
West raised his eyebrows and gave me a disgusted look. I turned back to the gauze.
"Did they find him?" I asked.
West didn't answer.
Despite my exhaustion, I spent a sleepless afternoon pacing the empty house. My thoughts were consumed with scenarios - most of them involving the police raiding our illegal medical practice, or finding the body we'd buried in the woods. The day wore on, with no one attempting to visit the house, which worried me all the more. I was sure word of the altercation had spread among our usual patients - and who was to say that any of them wouldn't go to the police?
West affected indifference, but I could tell that the unexpected absence of patients made him twitchy. He smoked more than usual, stalking up and down stairs and in and out of rooms. We finally went to bed early for lack of anything better to do.
I don't remember falling asleep that night, but I remember waking up. The sound that woke me wasn't a knock, exactly, more of a rattling scratching that rose in volume before stopping, and then beginning all over again. My first thought, once my brain emerged from its sleep-induced haze, was of the police. The men from this afternoon had told them about our practice, and they were here to arrest us. Maybe they'd already found the body of the boxer. Now they were rattling at our back door, trying to get in.
West was already out of bed, tying the cord on his bathrobe. He turned, saw me awake, and said "it's just a patient." But he didn't bother to hide it when he took his gun out of his holster.
"You can't answer the door with that!" I gasped in sudden panic. "What if it's the police - they'll shoot you!"
"It's not the police, it's a patient," West replied, voice calm and steady.
"At the back door? A patient would come to the front!"
"So would the police," West replied, and I had to admit that he had a point. I realized then who he really thought was at the door - the dead woman's husband, come to finish him off.
"If we ignore him, maybe he'll go away," I suggested.
West threw my bathrobe at me. "Get up," he said. "If it is a patient, we should both go. If not-" He didn't finish the sentence. I put on my robe and followed him down the stairs.
The house was worse in the dark than it was in the daytime, full of odd creaks and groans as we walked down the stairs. I tried to quell my breath, to move silently and quickly as West did, but I couldn't quite manage it. Every step I took seemed to elicit a new whine or grunt from the floorboards, and the sounds mixed eerily with the resumed scratches and poundings at the back door.
When we finally made it to the kitchen, I felt as though my throat had been tied into a knot. Even in the dim moonlight, I could see the door shaking at the increased assault of whatever was behind it. It couldn't be the police, I realized - they'd be shouting at us to open up in the name of the law - well, nothing so cliched, but something to that effect. Whatever was at the door was worse than the police, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
"West," I whispered, "maybe we shouldn't-"
"Shhh," West said, and opened the door.
I didn't see what was on our doorstep exactly. I registered only a hulking bulk in the doorway that paused before lunging into the kitchen. Then there was only the flat crack as West fired his handgun over and over and over - so quickly I could barely distinguish one shot from another.
The figure slumped onto the tile floor, its head scudding to a stop inches from my feet. It was mud-streaked, battered, hideous. But I didn't start to scream until I saw what was in its mouth.
My ears were ringing from the gunfire, so I hardly heard myself - I only felt the rasping in my throat as I shrieked, then the rush of air as I breathed in. But before I could scream again, West hit me across the face, slamming me into a kitchen counter. I dropped to the floor, hitting my head on a protruding cupboard handle, my feet splayed in front of me.
I looked up at West, shocked. He looked back, as though almost puzzled by the fact that he'd knocked me down.
"You have to stop making that noise," he said. "Someone's bound to hear the shots as it is."
I looked at West, clutching my cheek, then looked down at the figure in front of me.
It was the boxer. His entire body was streaked with mud and dirt. His hands and arms were scratched, as though he'd fought his way through a cluster of nettles. But his face was the worst part. His mouth was smeared with a crusty brown stain that could only be dried blood, and protruding from it was a tiny hand. It could only have belonged to a child of five or younger, and it ended in a ragged stump. It looked like a starfish that had crawled upon the shore and died.
"Get up," West said, holding out one hand to pull me to my feet.
I got up, but I didn't take West's hand. I shot to one side, running up the stairs and into the bedroom. I dressed quickly, then grabbed a suitcase out of the closet, and stuffed it with whatever clothes I could get my hands on - mine, his, it didn't matter. West came in while I was cramming a fistful of my underwear into one of the suitcase corners.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"What does it look like?" I snapped, not looking at him.
He didn't answer for a time. I went to the bathroom and retrieved my toothbrush. When I came back, West was staring at my suitcase as though he'd never seen one in his life.
"Why?" he asked.
"You're so smart," I said, shutting the suitcase, hearing it latch. "You figure it out."
I went down the stairs, suitcase in hand. West followed.
"It's unnecessary," he said when we reached the foyer. "Next time-"
"No!" I shouted, whirling around, narrowly missing hitting him with a corner of the suitcase. "There's no next time! Not for me. I'm done."
At this, and for the first time since I'd known him, West appeared to be genuinely hurt. I'm sorry to say that I enjoyed it.
He didn't say anything more, and didn't stop me as I went to the car, put my suitcase in the trunk, and got in. He didn't even go beyond the porch - only stood there, leaned against the rail, and watched me go. As I backed the car down the path, all I could see of him was the red tip of his cigarette, tiny against the vast black of that house.
I drove for hours, keeping my mind carefully on the dark stretch of road ahead. It was only when I reached the outskirts of Boston that I had to pull over and sob, leaning my head against the steering wheel. I wasn't thinking about the boxer, or Josh and his mother, about Dean Halsey, or any of it. All I could think of was how certain I was that I would never see West again.
