Concentrating on driving posed a significant challenge, but I steeled myself to the task, which in this awkward, exhausted instance, meant ordering Elizabeth to back off and release as many of my five senses as she possibly could. Memory would wait, empathy could take a backseat. Right now what I needed was to come fully to grips with the vagaries of the twenty-first century so that I could pilot my Volkswagen safely and catch up to Dale at the ever-so-inviting offices of one Sienna Green.
He had no idea I was coming, of course, and I didn’t have a plan. All I knew for certain was that Sienna Green’s airport rendezvous had set off a bad case of the feeling in my shoulder blades, and how Dale couldn’t see it—or feel it—was beyond me. I hadn’t felt this way in her presence before, but now, with Elizabeth as a kind of co-pilot in my head, I knew for a fact that this was one doctor that wasn’t anywhere close to kosher.
“Stay calm,” I said, out loud, to myself and to no one. “Stay focused.” After a moment’s thought, I added, “Be tough in the way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at peace with what is around it.”
From deep inside my head, Elizabeth countered my Goldberg quote with a nonsense couplet—“Doctor Foster went to Gloucester”—and then went silent. Just as well; I’d nearly run a red light, and my Bug had somehow positioned itself at a perilous angle straddling two lanes at once.
“Drive,” I said, as the light changed, and I eased my foot onto the accelerator. “Drive forward. Drive downtown. Focus. Dale needs you.”
This quaint drivel, unworthy of being a proper mantra and highly suspect in its conclusion, got me to State Street, where I turned right instead of left, and wasted five crucial minutes in effecting a U-turn that didn’t involve trees, buildings, or oncoming traffic. I glanced at the dashboard clock and felt my pulse notch itself higher. Giving Dale and Sienna Green a head start had seemed like the wisdom of Solomon back at the airport, but now it revealed itself to be nothing but my typical brand of self-destructive hubris. I couldn’t very well rescue my friend if I didn’t ever arrive, now could I? Did she already have him alone, in an examining room, and if so what was she feeding him? More Seitapar, or worse? And what else did she want with him?
Jill had set off for home, none the wiser. Indeed, she and Dr. Green appeared to be the closest of friends. Which made no sense at all.
I turned in at Sienna Green’s office parking lot and took the only available space, the farthest possible from the entrance. As with my last visit—which had been what, twenty years ago? Fifty?—business was booming. A successful practice, as my William’s had been, and for that matter mine, too, after a fashion, before all had gone sour, south, and rotten. To cure the sick, to alleviate suffering (my own included): can there be a higher calling? This was why I’d gone into the ministry; it was why I had married William.
Stop it, I told myself. Those two paths are incompatible, they’re from different lives. And get out from behind the steering wheel. Stop sitting around, you have places to be, a job to do. A patient in waiting.
To steady myself, or perhaps to reassert my claim to the present, I fished out my iPhone and called up Iris’s most recent text, the one she’d sent while I was mid-flight, somewhere over the Great Plains, a message I’d received when we landed in O’Hare.
I would never have sent this text a week ago, but that was then.
The anagrams are tip of the iceberg.
Quist’s physician is a succubus. Look it up.
Deal with this. Quickly.
Even in my heightened, almost fevered state, I hadn’t needed to “look it up”. I was well enough versed in demonology to have already heard what I needed to know, and it all fit. Assuming the anagrams that made up Dale’s medications were Dr. Green’s own, they proved not that she was innocent, but that she had a fittingly mordant sense of humor.
I stumbled as I got out and had to hang on to the door for support. “Stay here,” I said, in my firmest voice. “Don’t you dare get out of the car.” I was addressing Bonesy, I suppose, and I can only hope that the man just then arriving at his neighboring vehicle thought I was talking to some unseen pet. Because if he didn’t think that, then he had already written me off as a lunatic. That I could not afford. Ministers are pillars of their community. They are the opposite of lunatic. They are normalcy and calm; they are islands of refuge and peace. They do not marry sixteenth-century physicians. They do not wind up dead in Tudor England, swinging five feet above the ground in a black iron cage awash in their own blood and feces.
Again, I realized I’d stopped, and that this time, I’d halted in the middle of the parking lot. The man who’d arrived at his car had switched on the ignition, and his brake lights glowed red; he was evidently waiting for me to get out of his path. “Sorry,” I said, though I knew he couldn’t hear me, and I hurried away toward the building’s main entrance.
Good God in Heaven, that waiting room! Too small, too stuffy, too hot; too many people and not enough chairs. Slack skin, unwashed hair, sagging and mildewed clothes, rheumy eyes, drool, tremors, coughing attacks, dazed expressions—these people were barely hanging on. How could any one practice draw such a legion of under-the-weather patients? To my unpracticed eye, I would have thought that for most of these people, a hospital would have been the proper place, or in some cases (for many were senior citizens), a nursing facility or even hospice.
The smell of the room didn’t help. It was a thick, sickly odor, at once chemical and fruity. Formaldehyde laced with Vitamin C.
I snapped my fingers. That was it. “Seitapar,” I said aloud, and as soon as I uttered the word, a woman not far from me rose from her chair and extended a trembling hand. “Got any?” she said, her voice a frightened quaver. “It’s for my brother, here, not for me, honest. But we’re out, completely out, and I’ve to see Doc Green to get more.”
Next to the woman, a husk of a man, ancient-looking, rolled his head around to gaze my direction. His eyes were wide and moist, as if they might slip from their sockets like underdone eggs. I realized with a shock that I knew him, that he’d come several times to my services. His name was Leonard something, Leonard Ziemer. The third week he’d come, it had been his birthday, and the entire congregation had belted out a dutiful round of “Happy Birthday”. That was a year ago at most, and he’d been all of thirty-seven years old.
I let my eyes rove again across the room. They were men, almost without exception, and hardly a one of them was as old as I’d first supposed. What lent them their years was their lassitude, their evident sickliness, the torpor on parade via every last straining cough and wheeze. These men were Dale Quist, in six months’ time.
Not your problem, said a voice, speaking early English, in my head. You’ve died already. All your cares ended at the crossroads.
“Not true!” I said, very much aloud.
More heads turned, and behind me, the sliding glass window rasped open. From the opposite side, a nurse in pink scrubs piped up. “Can I help you? Do you have an appointment?”
I very nearly told her I had an appointment with destiny, but instead I turned my back and marched to the interior door.
“Hey, now,” said the nurse, leaning bodily over the counter to keep me in view. “Sir, you can’t go back there without being called. Sir? Sir!”
I opened the door and stepped through.
I’m not sure what I expected. A vision of hell? Or at least something in poor taste? But no. As with my previous visit, this was an entirely average physician’s office, a calculated hush of subdued wallpaper and industrial carpet, arranged with appointment rooms to the left, staff cubicles and filing to the right.
I didn’t have a plan, or not precisely, but I did have a glimmer of something, and whatever that was, it involved technology, specifically the iPhone in my pants pocket.
Five of the six appointment room doors were shut. I heard a hacking cough coming from one, tears from another, and what sounded like pushups from a third. The remaining two emanated silence—until, just as I was about to pick one at random, I heard something bottle-like fall to the floor in the next one along. I changed course, seized the handle, and, with a firm grip on my phone, barged in.
What I saw made me sorry I’d picked the right door. Dale was on the examining table, his head lolling, his jeans around his ankles, and his Stetson upside down on the floor. Sienna Green, wearing a long white lab coat over a sheer blouse and a black, ankle-length skirt, was straddling his hips, and had just lowered herself into the one position in which I never wanted to see anybody, not even myself.
For a startled instant, nobody moved or said a word.
Dr. Green recovered first. “Out,” she hissed, and I saw her tongue flick across her teeth. “Out!”
With a rabble of hapless nurses and office assistants headed toward me, I did the opposite: I stepped inside, slapped the door shut, and locked it.
“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t do that.”
Sienna Green’s look of outrage curled into a snarl, and she leaned toward me, bracing herself with one hand against the cushioned table. “I will make your life hell,” she said, and her long black hair began rising off her head, as if she’d been filled with a surge of static electricity. “I swear to you, a living hell!”
I trust that had an impartial observer been anywhere in the room, he, she, or it would have described my responding smile as “beatific”. In truth, I was mostly muddled, and that anodyne smile was my attempt at self-defense, or even denial. Indeed, in a more grounded state, I would have run away, or never ventured inside, but discombobulation—mine, Bonesy’s, Elizabeth’s—granted me the trappings of courage that disguised my more cowardly soul.
It also granted me speed, or enough, anyway. Before Sienna Green could disengage herself from Dale—Dale who seemed semiconscious at best, totally punch-drunk—I had my phone out and aimed at the tableau on the table. Running on sense memory, my thumb reeled off not one but three shots. Why I had the flash setting on I don’t know—I hate flash photos—but Sienna Green jerked backward with each brilliant burst, and on the last exposure, her hands rose like wings to ward off the light.
“Sorry,” I said, my fingers racing over the phone’s icons. “I forgot to say ‘Cheese’.”
Dr. Green was in full motion now, lifting quickly off Dale, pushing back on her haunches, and dropping to the floor in a series of swift, strong movements. As she landed, one of her stockinged feet knocked against a half empty bottle of Seitapar, sending pills every which way and the bottle skittering into a corner.
Straightening up, she held out a hand. “I’ll say this only once. Give me the phone.”
My fingers were fast, yes, but they’d become newly clumsy in the wake of Swayfield-On-Witham, and Facebook was refusing to load with its usual alacrity. Stalling, I said, “Oh, come on. I hear there’s no such thing as negative publicity. Not even for a doctor’s office.”
I hadn’t intended to be glib; it just came out that way. I am, however, one hundred percent convinced that Sienna Green disliked my tone, and that when she hit me in response, she meant to do it. A punch like that to the temple cannot be written off as an accident, and my head banked off the wall, whack. Amazingly, my glasses stayed on (my bandages, too), but I slid to the ground, weak as a wet paper bag and blinking back a flock of flashing stars.
The phone, with the in flagrante delicto photo still only half loaded, dropped from my hand and clattered into a corner. Against all reason, a wind kicked up; papers fluttered from the counter by the sink, and in the drop ceiling, above, the fluorescent tubes flickered and buzzed.
Sienna Green stood over me, her wind-thrown hair flying like a tattered, angry banner. Her nostrils flared with equine annoyance, and her eyes blazed with hot contempt.
Given the chaos in the room at large, I half expected her to burst right out of her clothes, to reveal horns, a forked tail, brimstone skin. She could have, I’m sure, but even in anger, she had a dangerous sense of restraint. Even as her assistants pounded on the door, demanding to know if everything was all right and should they call the police, she dropped lightly to the balls of her feet and reached for my phone.
“Idiot,” she said. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
I knew one thing: my head hurt. But then, I also knew that I was starving to death, thirsty as hell, and that no one had come by the crossroads for hours, not even to gawk. I no longer had the energy to add so much as one last bloody scratch mark to my precious, stupid book.
Having claimed my phone, Sienna Green took in the photo on my screen and gave a heavy sigh. “This used to be easier. Being me. Time was, all I needed was to bribe the local grandee, whoever he was—duke, prince, banker—or write up a scroll, claim it was from the Pope. But now! Now it’s all social fucking media. It’s like a disease, that’s what it is. Viral, infectious. And look! Thanks to you, now I’ve got it, too.”
She flipped the phone toward me so I could see. Unbelievably, the photo had loaded. It was up, for all my friends to see. All eight hundred ninety-seven (and yes, I had the total committed to memory), about half of them in the Traverse City region. Amazingly, blessedly, Dale’s face was obscured, but Sienna Green’s was unmistakable.
“I’m deleting this,” she said, as behind her, Dale rolled off the table and all but fell to the floor. I thought for a moment he’d leap on Dr. Green’s back, tackle her, rescue me, but instead he began a feeble, frantic search for the fallen Seitapar.
Her fingers tapped at the screen. “There. All gone.” Despite herself, her eyes flicked to the door, where the pounding continued unabated. “But you win anyway. Six likes and one share in less than a minute. Very impressive. And very sad, for me. One thing a physician’s practice cannot stand is scandal.”
Ours is not a faith that can tolerate the harsh light of scandal. Apparently we UUs weren’t the only ones with that problem.
“So,” she continued, as she effortlessly crushed my phone between her fingers and thumb, “I’m going to go. Which is what you want, right? But before I do, just so you understand the difficulties you’re putting me through—because now I have to start over, set up shop somewhere else. Licenses, identification, medical degrees, Jesus God on high it’s enough to make me sick. Oh, yes, don’t look so surprised. I can invoke higher powers, too. Now where was I?”
She opened her hand and the cracked, decimated remains of my phone trickled through her fingers. In the far corner, Dale, still useless, was stuffing stray Seitapar into his mouth and gulping them, dry.
“Oh, I remember. Before I go, I’m going to end your life.”
“Can’t,” I said, with a lunatic’s easy confidence. “I’m already dead.”
“That’s all right. I don’t mind a good challenge.”
She reached out, grabbed me by the throat, and hauled me up. I choked, I kicked, I grabbed hold of her with both hands. No good; she pressed me against the wall with no effort whatsoever. As what air I had remaining turned stale in my lungs, the awful thought crossed my panicked mind that maybe I hadn’t died after all.
“A minister,” she sighed, as if the act of hoisting me higher along the wall gave her feral, sensual satisfaction. My feet dangled. “Of all the people to fill in for the cavalry.”
I tried to reply, but couldn’t muster more than a pained squeak.
“You’re different, I’ll give you that. With most ministers I meet, once they figure me out, they pull out a cross, wave it in my face. Not you. So I guess Dale’s wrong, and his girlfriend, too. You’re not a minister. You’re a charlatan. A wolf in sheep’s clothes—just like me.”
She squeezed harder and I felt something pop at the back of my neck; blood welled from where her nails dug into my skin, and the back of the room had gone completely out of focus. My legs kicked against the wall, jerking as if I were at the end of a noose; the heels of my Birkenstocks thudded against the drywall, too weak to make so much as a dent.
“Don’t worry,” she said, her eyes half closed. “Before I skip town, I’ll kill your friend, too. Pity, in his case. He had so much life to give.”
Her grip tightened, which I didn’t think was possible, and I felt myself blacking out.
“Bye now,” sighed Sienna Green, as if the taking of my life were rapture itself. “Into my hands you commend your spirit.”
Or that’s what she would have said, I’m sure, but the word “spirit” disappeared in a cry of alarm as the ceiling crashed in, sending splintered panels and light bulb glass flying in all directions. Through the shadowy gap, a diminutive brass-colored figure flung itself bodily onto Sienna Green’s head, and the two of them fell to the floor in a struggling, snarling heap. Bonesy, of all people, Bonesy the forsaken, had charged in to the rescue.
I fell, gasping for oxygen; Dale scrambled to get out of the way; Bonesy tore at Sienna Green’s face, just as she’d done to mine a few short days before. Blood spattered, and flesh, too. Sienna was stronger—she shoved Bonesy back—but Bonesy was quicker, and she wasn’t distracted by books anymore. Even as Sienna Green got hold of Bonesy’s torso, Bonesy’s claw-like hands ripped a deep welt the length of the doctor’s forearm, shredding first the lab coat’s sleeve and then the flesh beneath. More blood, flowing fast now; it was coating the floor in a slippery red lake.
“Dale!” I yelled, and I got down close to him, face to face and insistent. “Dale. Get up. We have to get out of here.”
He heard me, or seemed to. He swayed to a standing position, and when Sienna and Bonesy, still fighting like cats, slammed into him, he braced against the sink and shoved them off with a stiff-arm that for him must have been as natural as walking.
“Coming,” he muttered, one hand on the counter for support.
I tried to help, but first Bonesy used me as a springboard, which knocked me sideways, and then Sienna’s ruptured arm dragged across my face, smushing against my glasses and smearing the lenses so badly I couldn’t see.
“Dale? Where are you?”
“Here.”
A powerful arm seized me around the waist, and for the second time in as many minutes I was lifted from my feet. But this time, it wasn’t Sienna Green, it was Dale. With his other hand, he flung open the door, and we pitched through the gap like falling timber.
Five of Sienna Green’s nurses, assistants, and records keepers screamed in unison, and so, too, did a gaggle of Dr. Green’s other patients who’d apparently ditched their own appointment rooms to rubberneck the rampage in ours.
Behind me, Sienna Green got a two-handed grip on Bonesy, left clavicle, right hip. With a wrenching motion, she did her best to tear Bonesy in half. There followed a mighty, rock-like ripping sound, and Bonesy, so frequently mute, let out an animal shriek, a cry like a bandsaw biting into wood too hard for its teeth. Then, with a rising Bruce Lee kick, Sienna Green slammed the door in our faces.
Everyone else in the office fled pell-mell, as if they’d gotten their glimpse of hell on earth and now regretted what they’d seen. They could hardly have taken to their heels any faster.
Dale was helping me up, asking questions and dragging me toward the exit. His energy was back, no question.
“Wait!” I said. “We have to get Bonesy!”
“Get Bonesy? Are you crazy?”
That did sound crazy, now that he mentioned it. I said, no longer quite sure it was true, “But she came back. To rescue us.”
“That’s her lookout.”
He had me under the arms now so that my heels juddered on the carpet as he hauled me toward the waiting room. Just as we reached the door to the waiting room, I heard police sirens, and at the same moment, the door to appointment room five swung wide. Sienna Green, all but torn to pieces, lurched into view. Half her clothing had been sliced away, and she’d very nearly been scalped. Sections of her hair hung across her face like a bad wig, and other parts were missing. One ear dangled by the thinnest cord of tissue. Hardly anything remained of her long black skirt, and when I focused on her right thigh, if the blood hadn’t been gushing from the wound, I know I would have seen clear through to the bone.
Sienna Green leaned against the door frame, raised a tired arm, and pointed at me and Dale. “You,” she said. “Tell me. What in hell—” and here she gestured back to the appointment room, its shattered examining table, its dangling shreds of ceiling, the noisy jet of water spraying from the ruptured sink—“What in hell was that?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. How to explain Bonesy, even if I’d wanted to? A spirit? A killer? A friend?
Dale spoke for me. “Naw,” he said, “that’s not the question. The question is, what the hell are you?”
Sienna Green laughed, and the blood pooling in her mouth dribbled down her chin. “Oh, Dale. Have fun with the detox.” She leaned down, spat, and put her hands on her knees. Without looking up, she said, “We could have been great together.”
In a pained voice, he said, “I know.”
The sirens pealed closer. Outside, there was a terrific metal smashing sound, and a car horn started blaring. Had someone, or several someones, been in a rush to get out of the parking lot?
By now, Sienna Green had sunk to her knees, her hands out ahead of her for support. She giggled, and wiped at her mouth with what was left of her better, less blood-soaked sleeve. “Don’t get too excited,” she said. “I’m hard to kill.”
“Yeah?” Dale again. Somehow he’d propped me against a desk, although I had no memory of when he’d done it. He stepped past me, toward Dr. Green. “How ’bout you tell me the secret, Doc, and I’ll take care of that little problem right now.”
She giggled again, and sank to her elbows. “Not in your power.” She gave a one-note laugh. “Sorry,” she said. “I meant, not in your playbook. But don’t sweat it, big boy. Maybe I’ll look you up next time around.”
With what looked like the last possible effort—it was unbelievable, given her condition, that she was alive at all—she lifted her head and fixed her defiant eyes, newly violet, dangerously violet, on Dale. For his part, Dale hefted an all-in-one printer from the nearest desk and prepared to bring it down on her head, an executioner’s final blow, but just as he reared back for the swing, balancing as best he could on his bad foot, she smirked one last time and said, “Good luck especially with sweet little Jill.”
Dale roared, but as he swung the printer down—his blow would have surely killed an ox—Sienna Green evaporated in what I can only describe as a gentle detonation, a whooshing, windy blast that shot a fine rain of misty red droplets onto every available surface. I turned away, automatically protecting my face, and when I looked back, there was Dale, breathing hard and standing over the plastic wreckage of the printer and looking around in disbelief for any solid trace, beyond shredded clothing, of Sienna Green.
Outside, the car horn continued its braying, and the first of the police cars, along with a pumper truck, swerved into the lot. As if intent on reasserting a sense of normalcy to the day, the office telephone began ringing.
“Bonesy,” I said. “We need to get Bonesy.”
I was on my feet as I spoke, and I’d pushed past Dale before he thought to stop me. My sandals skidded on the blood-wet tiles as I entered, and I nearly fell. Where was Bonesy? There. And there. And there. Sienna Green had torn her to pieces, leaving ribs in one corner, hands in another. One tibia had fallen into the tiny wastebasket, and as for her head, it lay trapped under the room’s wheeled stool.
“Hey,” said Dale, from behind me. “If you’re gettin’ her, get her quick. We got company.”
The phone had stopped ringing, the police were storming the waiting room, and once again, I felt that vast internal scream take hold. This wasn’t just some forgotten brass rubbing strewn across the floor, and this wasn’t the final, fitting resting place for a demon that had terrorized and likely disfigured me. This was Elizabeth Wolcott, widow of William, and a skilled physician—as best she could be—in her own right. And if these shredded remains were Elizabeth, then they were also, if only as a trick of memory’s light, myself.
Yes, once again, as I reached into the various puddles of blood to retrieve what scraps I could of Bonesy, I dissolved into tears, an unalloyed keening that went on (so I’m told) for hours after the police found us and forced me away.
I have no memory of falling asleep, but when I woke, I realized that I had not dreamed, and I was clean and dressed in a hospital gown, and sunshine was pouring in through a large south-facing window. Munson Medical. Again. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked to be the exact same room I’d had before, and for that, well. For that brand of stability and order? I don’t believe I was ever been more grateful for anything in my life—and yes, that, too, made me cry.