This short story stars Jillian Nightingale, nurse of supernatural creatures for The Agency for the Betterment of Cryptohumanoid Health. If you'd like to read her other adventure I've written, it can be found here. This story takes place before the previous one, when Jillian is new to her rewarding, sometimes frightening, job!
- Sometimes I Feel Like I'm Being Watched.... -
“And you say the cough has persisted?” I asked, trying to
look my patient in the eyes.
“Yes,” she replied.
“It’s been three days, and it hasn’t gone away. A terrible tickle in the
back of my throat.”
When I looked down at my electronic tablet, a steadying
breath slipped between my pursed lips. I
had been successfully looking Ms. Pfeffernusse in the eyes for two minutes, but
I was getting exhausted. I pretended to
look at the screen a for a few moments longer than necessary, touching it even
though I had minimized the program that I used to keep track of my
patients. When I could stall no longer,
I said, “Well, we’ll see what we can do about that cough today,” and I looked
up.
Into hundreds of pairs of dead, glassy eyes.
“Is there something wrong, dear?”
Ms. Pfeffernusse was my second patient of the day. Her house was a little four-room ramshackle
structure that was probably older than my parents and was situated in the area
of the city known as ‘Little Loch Ness’.
She looked to be in her eighties, but, according to her file on my
tablet, she was quite a bit older than that.
Apparently, her appearance was deceiving.
But it wasn’t her appearance that was leaving me so
unnerved. It was the hundreds of
porcelain dolls that covered every available surface in her tiny living
room. On top of her television and china
cabinet, situated single-file on the couch, across the plant shelf that ran the
perimeter of the entire room.
Everywhere.
Even if this was a normal house call, I would think there was
something seriously unhinged about a woman who kept that many effigies in her
home. But this wasn’t an ordinary house call. I never did ordinary house calls,
anymore.
“When did you first start feeling under the weather?” I
asked.
“Maybe a day before the actual cough developed,” Ms.
Pfeffernusse went on. “I felt a tickle at the back of my throat for hours. Even
drinking water didn’t help.”
While my patient drolled on about her psychosomatic cough (I
had already figured out it was all in her head; she hadn’t once coughed since I
had set foot in her apartment), I finally let my eyes probe the room. It seemed that no two dolls were the same.
There were boy dolls and girl dolls, each with a different combination of eye
color, hair color, and skin tone. Even the ones that seemed almost
imperceptibly similar wore different outfits, though they sat on shelves
together, like twins.
I must have been looking at the dolls for too long, because
suddenly Ms. Pfeffernusse cut off her statement about her imaginary cough and
said, “Do you like my children? They’re
really beautiful, aren’t they?”
I swallowed. The
Agency had told me not to talk about the dolls unless she brought it up, and to
try to divert the conversation as soon as possible if she did. “Yes, they’re lovely,” I replied, and when I
put my eyes back on my patient I quickly added, “Are you allergic to any
medications, that you know of?”
“Would you like to see my favorite?” She asked, struggling
to her feet from her recliner. “I’ve had
her for so long that I don’t remember exactly where I got her.”
“Would you mind looking at this list of medications, Ms.
Pfeffernusse?” I asked quickly, acting like I was doing something important on
my tablet. “All you have to do is tap
the ones that you’ve taken before, and how they affected you. It’ll help me get a good idea of….”
“Janet is her name,” Ms. Pfeffernusse interrupted, and when
I looked up from my tablet I found her turning from her piano back toward me.
On the piano there was an empty spot in the layer of dust, as big as a doll’s
bottom, and in her arms was the former occupant of that space.
The doll’s porcelain face was so perfectly handcrafted that,
for a moment, I thought I was actually looking at a miniature child in Ms.
Pfeffernusse’s arms. Then its unearthly
pallid complexion, synthetic-looking brown hair, and disproportionate limbs
revealed the doll’s true nature. The old
woman slunk back into her recliner and cradled the doll in her arms. When she sighed contently, she almost seemed
to melt down into the old chair.
I had been doing well thus far with addressing Ms.
Pfeffernusse and drawing as little attention to the dolls as possible, like the
Agency had instructed me. But now
Janet’s lifeless glass eyes seemed to bore into me, and I couldn’t find the
willpower to draw my eyes away from them.
The doll’s eyes blinked.
The Agency had warned me this might happen, and had told me
that if it did, I above all shouldn’t panic.
But even though I was half expecting, I still jumped like a frightened
cat at the disturbing sight.
“What’s the matter?” The doll asked in Ms. Pfeffernusse’s
voice.
The Agency had warned me that, if she slipped, it was very
difficult to bring her back peacefully.
That if I wanted to keep her calm, I had to choose my words carefully
and exercise a great amount of understanding and tact.
Instead I panicked, fumbled my hand into my medical bag, and stammered,
“Uh… um….”
Hundreds of glazed eyes turned in my direction.
If I had more experience, I would have been able to talk her
down and deescalate the situation without immediately reaching for my trump
card. But it was my first day visiting
Ms. Pfeffernusse, and only my second week on the job. Though they were completely valid, I
didn’t feel very confident in my excuses as I whipped a black wand from my
purse and pressed the gem set into its end against my temple.
Dozens and dozens of porcelain mouths opened in silent
screams. To my further horror, each doll
began to lift from its place, scattering motes of dust about the room, and
levitate inches into the air. The dolls
drifted toward me, mouths open, staring with fixed gazes. Lazy circles of porcelain dolls drifted
around me and my Agency-issued folding chair. I held my breath, bit my lip, and
pressed the tip of wand against my temple until it started to give me a
headache.
Janet Pfeffernusse had lapsed into a full poltergeist
episode. The Agency for the Betterment of
Cryptohumanoid Health didn’t have many ghosts on in their caseload (ghosts’ physical
health was rarely an issue, and they moved locations so frequently that they
were often difficult to find), but Ms. Pfeffernusse was a special
exception. According to her file, she
had collected dolls during her life, and when she died, the compulsion to
collect only became worse. As her house
filler, her phantom developed a separate personality for each doll, even having a commissioning a
life-size one made in her old image.
I was supposed to keep her talking, keep her phantom
contained in the largest doll. But I’d
screwed up.
Poltergeists are psychic phantoms. In her full poltergeist episode, Ms.
Pfeffernusse was, not entirely of her own free will, trying to feed off of my
fear. Luckily for me, the wand of
mind-shielding the Agency had me pick up that morning was working
perfectly.
Once I was convinced that I was in no immediate danger, my
breath started to return to normal.
Trying my best to tune out the horrifically creepy image of the
open-mouthed dolls, I flicked my fingers across my tablet to find out what I
should do next.
“Ghost touch” I murmured aloud as my eyes skimmed the
screen. Urgently, I dropped the tablet
and rummaged my free hand into my medical bag. A moment later I produced a
piece of marble as small as my closed fist, carved into the shape of a
headstone. Per the instructions on the
tablet, I knocked twice on it with my knuckles.
The tiny headstone disintegrated into a pile of dust on my
lap and released a subtle pulse through the room that made my ears pop. The drifting dolls froze in the wake of the
ghost touch talisman. Their eyes rolled
back in their heads (an image that was sure to visit me in my nightmares for
months to come), and the drifted back to their places on the dust-covered
furniture. The tablet had explained how
each personality would follow its psychic trail back to its resting place, or
some other supernatural mumbo-jumbo. All I was concerned with was that I was no
longer surrounded by those horrible, silent faces.
The only two dolls that hadn’t moved were the little Janet,
which must have been Ms. Pfeffernusse when she was younger, and, of course, the
full-size doll that I had been talking to since I had stepped into the rundown
little house.
I dusted the remains of the talisman back into my medical
bag (I’d clean it out later) and, now sure that all the dolls were temporarily
incapacitated, I removed the wand of mind-shielding from my temple.
In my bag was the medicine I was supposed to give to Ms.
Pfeffernusse, disguised as treatment for whatever one of her personalities had
convinced her she had come down with this week.
I was supposed to have earned her trust with small talk and then offered
it to her, to ensure that she’d take it every day and keep her multiple personality disorder in
check.
So much for that.
I popped the top from the bottle, took one pill in my hand,
and slipped it between the artfully crafted porcelain lips of the old
woman. Awkward minutes passed, during
which I watched and waited, trying to ignore the pupil-less eyes of the dozens
of other dolls.
Finally Ms. Pfeffernusse’s eyes blinked open, and she sat up
in her recliner. Her arm had been
cradled around the doll of her younger self the whole time. “Oh… oh my, what happened?” She mumbled,
pressing her free hand against her forehead.
“It appears your condition is a little more serious than I
first thought,” I lied to the ghost inhabiting the huge doll. “You’re going to need to take two of these
every day; one in the morning and one in the evening. Do you understand?”
Ms. Pfeffernusse still
seemed disoriented, but nodded anyway.
Even though she had been dead for quite some time, my heart
broke for the confused poltergeist. If I
had done my job correctly, she wouldn’t have lapsed into the episode, and I
wouldn’t have had to use the ghost touch talisman. Before I could talk myself out of it, I took
a piece of paper from my medical bag and scribbled my number on it. “If you start feeling bad again, you can call
me at this number, any time, day or night.
Would that make you feel better?”
She looked at me with those glassy doll’s eyes, and for the
first time I wasn’t creeped out. “Thank
you, dear. That does make me feel much better.”
I left the medicine with Ms. Pfeffernusse, bid her a final
good-bye, and left her little house. I can’t believe I just gave my phone number
to a ghost, I berated myself. I’m just begging to be haunted. I should
have just left the medicine and gotten out of there. I can’t save them all.
“Maybe I can’t save them all,” I told the doubting part of
myself as I climbed into my car and started the engine. “But I can damn sure try to help the ghost of
Janet Pfeffernusse find some peace.”
I pulled away from the little house and followed my GPS to
the next patient prescribed to me by the Agency for the Betterment of
Crypohumanoid Health. According to his case, which I had read the night before, he was a gorgon who had
accidentally looked at himself in the rear view mirror of his car and turned
himself to stone.
Lucky me.
