The Philovores | Part 1

She knocked on the door to my office at 4:01 p.m. as I lounged behind my desk with a lukewarm cup of coffee, flipping through a copy of Harper’s. She had called ahead, wanting to explain everything over the phone, but I insisted she come in person. This is a good way to determine who’s serious. A Japanese monk used the same method to screen those who sought his counsel; one man overcame his fears on his way to see him.

“Come in,” I said. I put the magazine in the shallow drawer in front of me, took a sip of coffee, and looked up to see an uncommonly attractive woman, late thirties, I judged, closing the door behind herself and looking around the room with haunted eyes.

“Elizabeth Schwarz?” I said. “Come sit down.” I gestured to the polished wooden chair on the other side of the desk.

She did as I had suggested, producing a timid hand as she situated herself across from me. She wore a red blouse, white jeans, and a white blazer, and her borderline-black hair was pulled back into a messy bun. A swift glance showed no rings on her fingers. Her entire countenance was flustered and shaken, as if some dimensional quake had passed through her body and left it less solid than before.

I shook my head, refusing the proffered handshake. “Not my style. You can relax, though. Tell me why you came.”

She knit her eyebrows and withdrew her hand in an uncertain jerky motion. I fidgeted with my glasses and waited for her to speak.

“Mr. Light…” she started. Then she fell silent again.

“Or Calvin, if you prefer,” I said. “You told me several members of your family are ill, and that this began a week ago. What kind of illness?”

“Something wrong with their brains.” She sniffed and wiped one eye with the back of a hand. “Sorry. I only came because it says online you’re willing to look into paranormal claims, and you seemed like the most legitimate person I could find who would.”

“I am willing to check such claims out, if they appear substantive enough,” I said. “I should warn you, though, I haven’t yet verified any, and I do hold to the theory that a true verification of a paranormal claim would bring it into the realm of the normal.”

“That’s alright,” she said. “As long as you’re willing to look.”

“Depends on what I’d be looking at,” I said.

She glanced down at her lap and wrung her hands.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

“Well,” she said. “Um. My mother died a week ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She gave a small laugh. “Save your sympathy, it gets way worse. Anyway. I got the call a week ago, it was my dad calling. Said she’d died in her sleep, totally unexpected, probably a heart attack or a stroke. He sounded tense, like he was holding something back. But he was perfectly lucid, he spoke normally, he was just as intelligent as I’d always remembered. That’s important.”

I nodded and indicated that she should continue.

“I drove out to see him the next day, six days ago. He and my mom lived in a little town called Valeford, out west. They bought the house ten years ago, a big three-story thing. I thought I’d stay there for a few days while I sorted everything out. When I arrived, my father was…”

She paused to collect herself.

“He’d totally collapsed. It looked like an advanced form of dementia. He trembled, he shook, he drooled, he could barely walk, he could only make it to the bathroom half the time. He couldn’t speak in complete sentences. He kept repeating these mantras, like ‘my fault, my fault,’ and ‘get away, get away.’ He would hit himself, pinch himself, and stick little things into his skin until he bled, like forks and toothpicks. I caught him trying to slice little bits of his arm off with a razor—not at the wrists, he wasn’t trying to kill himself, and you could tell he wasn’t enjoying it... it was like he wanted to do it but also didn’t want to. And he had this awful rash on the back of his neck, circular, deep red, about the size of a plum or tangerine. He screamed when I touched it, but then he grabbed my hand and tried to make me touch it again.

“I wanted to take him to the hospital right away, but he threw a fit when I mentioned it to him. He was angry, then crying, furious with me, furious with himself... He refused to go to my car so I could drive him, and I couldn’t make him, of course. I didn’t feel right calling an ambulance either, I just...”

A tear started down her cheek. There were no tissues on my desk. I glanced around and saw a plaid-patterned scarf sitting folded on a bookshelf by my left shoulder; this I offered her. She gazed at it for a moment, perplexed, then realized what it was for and shook her head, wiping the tear away with a shaking hand. I placed the scarf between us on the desk.

“I called my brother, he was planning on arriving the next day, I told him what to expect. He offered to leave right then to help me, and he ended up arriving in the middle of the night. God, that house is awful at night. My dad fell asleep on the couch, finally, and I sat in a chair in the same room, keeping an eye on him. He shrieked and twisted around in his sleep. When my brother arrived and saw him, he insisted on taking him to the hospital. With both of us we could lift him into my brother’s car even if he resisted. He ended up barely waking up when we carried him, though.

“We got to Miskatonic General early in the morning, before the sun was up. They fussed over him in the emergency room for a bit—apparently his heart was off-kilter, and he hadn’t been eating much—and then they put him in a ward with a bunch of other serious cases and drooling idiots. They said he’d suffered some sort of brain trauma. They ended up scanning him, and it showed spongiform encephalopathy, all over. Do you know—”

“Yes,” I said. “Did they find the cause?”

“No. Or at least not yet. For all I know, they could call me right now and tell me they’ve figured it out. I really doubt it, though, because of what happened next.”

“Tell me what happened next,” I said. My interest was beginning to flare.

“My brother was the next one to go. We went back and stayed at the house, we knew we’d have to stick around for at least a few days to sort things out with my dad, maybe arrange to have him transferred near where one of us lives, and then four days ago I woke up and…”

She took the scarf and dabbed at her eyes.

“I made breakfast and ate it alone, and he didn’t show up. He usually gets up early. I went up to the second floor—that’s where the bedrooms are—and knocked on his door, but he didn’t answer. I went in, and he was curled up on the bed, shaking, muttering about some ‘cold thing,’ saying the same words over and over again just like my dad, and there was that horrible rash on the side of his neck.”

“On the side of his neck, on the back of your dad’s?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes. On the neck, both of them, but different places.”

“Did they... no, wait. Finish the story first, then I’ll ask questions,” I said.

“I called an ambulance that time. They kept him in the emergency room for a while. He was having trouble controlling his breathing, and eventually he needed a ventilator. Then one of the doctors who’d seen my dad got wind of it, and they moved him up to the same ward. They did a brain scan, and it was the same fucking thing, riddled with holes. And some of them had seen him just the day before when we took my dad in, perfectly normal and healthy, so they couldn’t deny something weird was going on.

“They isolated him in his own room, set up a few quarantine procedures, in case it was something contagious. They did the same with my dad. They offered to set them up in the same room, but I said no, I didn’t want my dad to know Tom... to know my brother had caught it, whatever the fuck it was. My dad was a little better, his condition had stopped declining, at least, but they’d had to strap him down to stop him hurting himself. He tried to refuse medication, he—how do I describe this?—he kept himself tense, all the time, when I was there. He kept telling me to get away, to leave town, but he wouldn’t say why.

“I had to tell my sister-in-law Mary what had happened to Tom—that’s my brother’s name. She was pregnant, you know, four months, until, um, until yesterday. It would’ve been their third kid. Anyway, she left the kids with her own parents and came to Valeford three days ago. It was awful, she was so upset, she ended up staying overnight at the hospital the first night, but then the next day Tom was doing a little better, they took him off the ventilator and he could almost speak in complete sentences. He said he didn’t know what had happened, but he wanted to get back home as soon as he could. So the night before last, Mary came to stay with me at my parents’ house, and she...”

Her voice caught, and she rubbed the scarf against her eyes.

I tried to make my voice gentle. “Did she get sick as well?”

“Yes. Just like Tom. I woke up and found her babbling mad, with that red blotch on the back of her neck. She’d miscarried too, the sheets... it was awful.”

“Has anyone else fallen ill?”

She shook her head. “No, except for my mother. I went to see her body at the funeral home two days ago, and there was that spot on her neck, they’d tried to cover it but the discoloration was still visible. So that’s what killed her, and now it’s cutting down everyone who comes to deal with it.”

She clenched and unclenched a hand.

“Has it killed anyone else?”

“Not that I know of,” she said. “My dad, and my brother, and Mary, they’re all still alive.”

“I’m really sorry all this has happened to you,” I said. “I do have to ask, though, where the connection to paranormal phenomena—”

“Oh!” she interrupted. “I forgot. Sorry. It was the night before last, I couldn’t get to sleep for a long time, so I wandered through the house, and I ended up in the cellar. Most of the floor was cleared off, and there were these two giant intricate diagrams drawn on it, I think painted. There were stains in the middle of each that looked like old blood. And there was a desk against one wall, heaped with scrolls and old books and paint jars, and bottles of powder, and animals in some sort of preservative fluid. Then, after what happened to Mary, I thought about how my dad kept muttering that it was his fault. I think”—she leaned forward a little, and her voice grew rough—“I think he called something up, and it got my mom, and it got him, and now it’s getting everyone else who comes to that house.”

“I hope you didn’t sleep in that house last night,” I said.

“I stayed at the motel,” she said. “There’s only one in Valeford, a little one. Some of my stuff is still at the house, though, and everything Tom and Mary brought is there. But I can’t figure out why it didn’t get me. I was there longer than either Mary or Tom.”

“I should warn you,” I said, “that there most likely isn’t an ‘it’ about which I can do anything, so you shouldn’t raise your hopes. I’ll check it out, though. First week free.”

“Thank”—she paused as she registered the final sentence—“...are you sure?”

“Hey,” I said, shrugging and leaning back in my chair, “I feel bad for you. You’re in a pretty awful situation, compared to what my clients are usually dealing with.”

“I can believe that,” she said, and laughed.

“I’ll drive out there tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll call when I’m close, and we can meet at Miskatonic General. I’ll want to see the patients first, then the house, to which, by the way, I do not want you or anyone else returning.”

“Okay.” She wrung the scarf between her fingers a little, then realized she still had it and deposited its rumpled form on the desk. “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“The scarf.” She reached for it, perhaps to fold it and smooth the wrinkles, but I put out a hand to forestall her.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, picking the thing up and shoving it between some books near where it had originally sat. I turned back to her.

There was a pause.

“Is there anything else I should know?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said. “No. Thank you. I can go.” She got up, made a motion as if to shake my hand, remembered the beginning of our meeting, and tucked the hand underneath her blazer.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

She nodded, pushed a strand of hair out of her face, and walked out of my office. It did not occur to her to close the door on her way out. I studied her legs, wishing they were not sheathed entirely in thick white fabric, while she waited for the elevator. She glanced around, looked back towards me once, and hugged herself underneath her blazer, tapping her feet in nervous distraction. Then the elevator came, and she was gone.

I realized a few seconds later that I had forgotten to ask her whether the hospital had analyzed the rashes. Had I truly been that distracted by her beauty, and her pain?

No matter. I would make all the proper investigations during the next day’s visit.

---

The next morning I woke up with a headache. Christ, I thought, this will not be pleasant during the drive. I took two Excedrin and filled a large plastic thermos with black coffee. The ghastly early November sun shot through the windows and lit up little motes of dust that floated through the rooms of my apartment. I opened the door to the balcony, and a gust of cold air raised gooseflesh on my arm. I breathed deep—the frigidity would, at the very least, clear my head and tamp down the nausea that often arose when I drove.

I checked my phone. No calls from Elizabeth. I dressed, pulling on a rather ugly knitted sweater over a button-down shirt, and a knee-length black coat over the sweater. I packed a few days’ worth of clothes and toiletries, donned my glasses, and contacted the front desk for my car. I grabbed a banana, dropped it into a pocket of my coat, then headed down to the garage.

It was early, and the roads were relatively clear, so I made it out of Boston before long. I cracked the windows. The rushing sound bothered me, but the coolness that subsequently suffused the car’s otherwise stuffy interior made up for it. I ate the banana, then opened the window to my left a little more so I could toss the peel onto the pavement outside. The sun was behind me, and half-hidden in clouds, and as the level of coffee in my thermos decreased my headache slowly ebbed.

Over the wilds of western Massachusetts the skin of modern life has only intermittently and unconvincingly been pulled. Little islands of manmade color—yellow, orange, red, and drab concrete creams and asphalt grays—float in the vast rolling expanse of green and shout feebly at the blasted white sky above. Things out here decay; the curbs disintegrate into gravel, empty, grimy windows stare from soiled warehouses, trucks trundle down weed-coated highways belching black smoke. Listless men with scraggly beards stop at run-down gas stations and man the counters of dirty convenience stores. The human tide, which so often runs over and chews through all that stands before it, has in these backwaters paused, become unsure of itself, lost its grip. The original inhabitants of this land are gone, and the white men who replaced them have turned in upon themselves, have relinquished control over the forest they once pretended to dominate, and as you drive farther west, past the tail ends of the suburbs, over the Miskatonic snaking up towards Vermont, you get the sense that ownership has reverted to that which was old before any human foot trod these hills.

After a while I stopped at a gas station to relieve myself. My coffee was gone, so I bought a cup at the store—black, I didn’t trust their additives—and stood drinking it while I pondered the gloomy woods that came nearly up to the ditch that bordered the parking lot. I could rest here for a bit, I thought, I was running early, and I liked the feeling of the wind in my hair.

My phone vibrated. I looked at the display: it was Elizabeth. I answered and put it to my ear.

“Hello?” I said. “I’m not that far away, I—”

“He’s dead,” she broke in. “Tom’s dead.” She sounded as if she’d been crying.

This was neither unexpected nor reassuring.

“Are you at the hospital?” I asked.

“Yes... yes. I am.”

“I can probably be there in an hour,” I said. I gulped down some coffee, went back to my car, and started the engine. “I’ll let you know when I show up. Anything else I should know?”

“There’s another rash on his neck.”

I skidded a little as I turned back onto the road and accelerated, and a spasm of anxiety shot through my chest. This was unexpected, and it was even less reassuring.

“Two rashes?”

“Yes,” she said. “Two. They overlap a bit, like a Venn diagram. The doctors say they don’t know what happened. They want to do an autopsy.”

“Let them,” I said. “And... hm. Keep watch over your dad and sister-in-law. Don’t let either one out of your sight for long.”

“Okay,” she said. “Fuck. I keep trying to contact the nurse who showed up when his monitor went off, but they said she went home, they won’t give me her name.”

“I’ll find that out for you when I get there,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. Her voice quavered. “Alright. Bye.”

She hung up.

I looked at the phone for a moment, my brow furrowed, then tossed it onto the passenger seat and shifted my gaze to the road ahead.

---

Miskatonic General was isolated, the trees again encroaching nearly to the parking lot, the gray front projecting the traditional air of corporate sterility. Hospitals must be sterile, to tamp down the infections that would otherwise conquer them, but somehow this always also manages to tamp down the vitality of the human lifeforms who go to the hospital to be saved, or, as the case may be, to die, or pretend that they are not going to die.

When I entered the lobby I saw Elizabeth, standing a few feet from the front desk, and I suffered a sudden flare of desire. She was wearing the same clothes as she had on the previous day, but they were rumpled and messy. Tears streaked her face, and one hand reflexively pulled at her hair in trichotillomaniacal fashion. I walked over to her. This will dissipate, I told myself. Female tears contain a pheromone that dampens male lust. I read this in some reputable source.

“Elizabeth,” I said. “I’m very sorry.”

“No need to say that,” she replied in a voice tightened to keep it from trembling. “You don’t know me, there’s no reason for you to care.”

I fumbled for words for a moment, then said, “Take me to your dad first.”

We went two floors up in a sleek steel elevator, coming out on the edge of a carpeted lobby with an air of forced calm. White plastic chairs surrounded round metal tables, and a small TV showed muted CNN. Several listless individuals of varying ages sat about. Elizabeth stalked up to the desk, and I followed.

“I’d like to see my father, Peter Schwarz,” she announced. “He’s with me.”

“Give me a moment,” the fat receptionist answered. She pressed a few keys, placed a phone to her ear, and spoke briefly to someone who presumably worked in the ward in question.

“Go ahead,” she said, placing the phone back on the receiver.

Elizabeth and I went down a short hallway to a set of double doors. She laid her finger on a button next to an intercom in the wall, pressed, and said “Elizabeth Schwarz, here to see Peter Schwarz in room 18.”

A pause.

“One moment,” crackled a voice from the tiny speaker.

We stood in silence for what had to have been twenty or thirty seconds. My preoccupation with her physical form had only partially diminished. The way she held herself with one leg slightly bent, the curve of her deliberately set jaw, they unearthed in me some dimension of craving I hadn’t known I’d possessed. Perhaps there was a mistake in my genes, and that pheromonal phenomenon was in my case reversed. Yes. This had to be it.

One of the doors opened, and a nurse invited us in. The inimitable smell of sanitized decay assailed my brain as the three of us walked towards room 18.

“You’ll need a mask and a gown before you go in, and you can’t take them off as long as you’re in there,” she said.

“Understood,” I replied. A gravelly scream rang out at the other end of the ward. No one reacted.

The nurse stationed herself at the door to our destination, watching as Elizabeth and I donned our protective gear.

“Does he know yet?” I asked, speaking through my mask. Warm breath fogged against my skin.

Elizabeth shook her head.

“I’m going to tell him, just to warn you,” I said. “It might convince him to tell us anything he knows about what’s happening.”

She nodded and opened the door, walking into the room. The nurse gave me a wary look as I followed.

I closed the door. The room had two beds, and a half-wall that screened each one from the other’s view. The one nearest the door was empty, the sheets clean. In the middle of the room hung an odd partition of translucent plastic through which Elizabeth was now squeezing. I went in after her, and beheld her ailing father.

He lay on a bed with wrinkled sheets, his wrists bound to the sides with leather clasps, his ankles hidden by the covers but, I assumed, subject to similar treatment. He looked very old, the coverage of his white hair spotty, his face lined with deep furrows, liver spots on his forehead and neck. Multiple tubes were attached to his circulatory system, and a bank of sophisticated medical machinery stood next to his bed. His lips were slightly apart, and his eyes were wide open. He stared up at me, sucking in ragged breaths, his entire body tense, his countenance showing stark fear.

“Mr. Schwarz,” I said. “Peter. I’m private investigator Calvin Light.”

He said nothing. His pupils darted around.

“I’m here to help you. Can you give me any information on why you’re in this condition?”

“Just go,” he murmured. “Just go, just go…”

I turned to Elizabeth and gave her a warning glance; she responded with a small nod and shrank into a corner of the room. I refocussed my attention on her father and addressed him again.

“The disease has spread. Your son Thomas is dead, and his wife is ill. Are you sure there’s nothing you can tell me?”

He stiffened with alarm, and began shaking his head. “No, no, no, no, no…”

I leaned over him a little, trying not to pay attention to Elizabeth’s figure in the periphery of my vision. “That won’t make it go away, you know. You know that very well. Elizabeth says you’ve been repeating the phrase ‘my fault.’ Well, is it, and if so, how?”

He continued shaking his head, but now he started to speak. “Just kill me… I called them up, I called them up.”

Elizabeth made a small noise, halfway between a whimper of fear and a harrumph of satisfaction.

“What did you call up?” I asked.

“I tried to put them down… it didn’t work. It didn’t work.”

“You’re going to have to be a little more articulate if you want us to understand what’s going on.”

He froze and fixed me with an intense stare. “Don’t be happy.”

I was momentarily confused. “Why not?”

“That’s how they get you,” he said. “That’s how they get you, that’s what they like. Don’t relax. Don’t relax.”

Elizabeth still stood in the corner, her body almost as tense as her father’s.

“I forgot to ask yesterday,” I said to her. “Did they analyze those rashes?”

She blinked. “What?”

“The rashes,” I repeated. “Did they analyze them? It’s important.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right. Yes. They said it was like frostbite. They couldn’t explain it.”

I nodded, then spoke to her father again. “Can you explain it?”

“That’s where they get you,” he said, and laughed. “Hurts like fuck. Not as bad as”—he tried to raise his hand, but the wrist clasp prevented him, and I divined that he was attempting to point to his head—“in here, but still hurts like fuck.”

I tapped his head with my forefinger, eliciting a shudder. “What happens in there?”

“That’s what they eat,” he said. “I think. I think.”

“Was he this lucid before?” I asked Elizabeth.

She shook her head.

“Okay,” I said, turning back to the old man. “What are they?”

He started trembling again. “You shouldn’t know, you shouldn’t know. Trust me. Trust me.”

I considered this for a moment. “Let’s try a different question,” I said. “How does one avoid being killed by them?”

“Go away, go away,” he said. “Far from the house as you can.”

“That didn’t work for Thomas,” I said. “He came in here sick with one rash, and now he’s dead, with two.”

An awful spasm of terror ran through the man’s body, and he began yelling. “Get out! Get out! Get everyone out! All of you! Get out!”

I put a hand on his shoulder, trying without success to calm him. Elizabeth stayed in the corner, saying nothing.

The nurse with the wary eyes rushed in, trailed by a doctor still adjusting the mask on his face.

“Stand back,” she told me. “We have to sedate him.”

I obeyed her. Peter Schwarz struggled as much as he could, but he was weak, and the doctor held him down easily as the nurse plunged the needle into a frail arm. Over the next half-minute his feeble writhings decreased, until he was still, looking very small and fragile on his sweat-stained bed.

The doctor regarded the patient with a critical eye. “We should change his bedding, and wash him. Anna, can you and Prakhar handle it?”

She gave him a single nod and left the room. The doctor approached us.

“Afterwards, we should let him sleep,” he said. “In the meantime, Ms. Schwarz, you can visit your sister-in-law. She’s awake.”

“Mm-hm,” said Elizabeth, distracted. “Yes.”

I went through the plastic sheeting and waited by the door. After a moment, Elizabeth followed, as did the doctor.

“There’s a trash can just outside the door, Mr…”

“Light,” I said. “Calvin Light. I’m a friend of Elizabeth’s.”

He nodded. “Yes. Put your mask and gown there, then I’ll take you to a washing station. We’ve put a few precautions in place since we don’t yet know what’s causing Mr. Schwarz’s symptoms.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said, as we left the room. All three of us peeled off our gear and tossed it in the foot-pedaled trash can, after which the doctor led us to a sink. He washed his own hands, then supervised our own cleansing activities until, satisfied, he asked whether we’d like to visit Mary Schwarz.

I looked to Elizabeth, who nodded. The doctor, who introduced himself as a Dr. Howard, led us down a couple of corridors to room 27, outside which he monitored us as we donned another set of masks and gowns. He instructed us to call for help if anything “unexpected” occurred, then strolled off as we entered the room and closed the door behind ourselves.

The setup here was the same as in Peter’s room—bed nearest the door empty, plastic partition adjoining the half-wall, blinds down. Mary, a portly woman somewhere in her thirties, lay on the bed, sheets down around her feet, hospital gown damp with sweat, IVs running into her arm. She, unlike her father-in-law, was not tied down. Her long light-brown hair was a mess, and her blue eyes were haunted and strangely empty—fitting, I reflected with a cold shudder, for a woman who had been quite literally emptied two days before. She looked up at me, a question written on her face.

“Mary,” said Elizabeth. “This is my friend—”

“Private investigator Calvin Light,” I said. “Elizabeth asked for my help, and I’m giving it for no charge. She and I are worried there’s something going on here the doctors won’t be able to help with. Do you remember anything of what happened to you?”

She closed her eyes. “Leave me alone.”

Elizabeth pushed me aside and clasped both of Mary’s hands in her own. “Please, Mary, come on,” she said, a sob crouching in the back of her throat. “You have to help us.”

“What’s the point?”

“You have two other kids!” she shrieked. “Don’t you want to pull through for them?”

Mary’s eyes reopened. “Let go of me.”

Elizabeth began to protest.

“Do as she asks,” I advised, my voice low.

She hesitated, then let Mary’s hands fall on the bed and retreated, standing at my side.

“We can wait for as long as you need,” I said. “But if there’s anything you can remember that you think might have caused you to get sick, it would be a great help for us to know.”

She was silent for a long time. Two tears trickled out of the corners of her eyes. Elizabeth opened her mouth, but I gave her a warning glance, and she said nothing.

Then Mary spoke: “It was like an icicle in my neck.”

“When did you feel this?” I asked.

“The night… oh, Jesus Christ,” she said. “The night it happened. It was like an icicle. And there were hands. I swear there were hands. Someone was holding me still and jamming something into my neck.”

Elizabeth clutched my arm. Her nails were sharp.

“You should tell the doctors,” I said. “They can report it to the police.”

Mary shook her head.

“Why the hell not?” hissed Elizabeth.

Mary closed her eyes again, this time shutting them tight, and flopped her head back and forth in a manner that reminded me of Peter.

“Would you like us to report it?” I asked.

“No,” she moaned. “Just go, just go.”

“Get her to stop shaking her head,” I whispered in Elizabeth’s ear. “Then we should do as she asks.”

She looked at me, bewildered fury in her eyes, but then she went to her sister-in-law’s side, trying to soothe her, promising we would leave.

“I’ll be at the washing station,” I said. “I’ll wait for you.”

I left the room, threw my gown and mask in the trash, and washed my hands. A couple minutes later, Elizabeth arrived and stuck her own hands under the frothing tap.

“I can’t believe you don’t want to tell the police,” she fumed. “Someone probably stuck her with a needle or something! Maybe it’s someone here, and that’s how they got Tom!”

“I wouldn’t be comfortable sharing it without her permission,” I said. “Not with what I currently know.”

“I’m going to fucking share it,” she replied.

“I won’t stop you,” I said. “But you may want to—”

“Excuse me?” A voice sounded behind my right shoulder.

It was Anna, the nurse. She was short, the top of her head barely higher than my chest, and a little plump. Her dirty blonde hair stopped around the middle of her neck.

“I, um, I heard what Mr. Schwarz was saying,” she said. “You might want to do what he says. I don’t know what’s happening, but I talked to Claire for a bit, she’s the nurse who found, um…”

“Tom Schwarz,” I supplied.

“Yeah, him,” Anna continued. “She found him last night, and she was saying some weird stuff, and they don’t want anyone talking about what she said. They sent her home and told her to take a few days.”

“What did she say?” I asked.

“Can you talk to her?” she said. “I want to help, but I don’t want to get mixed up in it. She freaked me out a little. Her name’s Claire Maugham, she lives in Valeford. 40 Thornbush Avenue. Her number…”

She plunged a hand into her pocket, but as she did so, someone called her name in an Indian accent from down the hall.

“I should go, sorry,” she said. “I’ll find you later. You have her address, though. 40 Thornbush.”

Then she was off, presumably on her way to Peter’s room.

“I should follow that lead,” I told Elizabeth. “Do you want to stay here, keep an eye on Mary and your dad?”

“Honestly, no,” she sighed, “but I suppose I have to. I’m exhausted.”

“I’ll return as soon as I can and take over the watch,” I said. “But until we have a better idea of what’s going on, we shouldn’t leave them alone for too long.”

“Okay,” she said. “Once you come back to, um, take the next shift, I’m going to go to the police.”

“If you must,” I said. “But you realize they might interfere with my investigation, and their approach will be considerably less open-minded.”

Her brow furrowed as she pondered this.

“I’m going now,” I said. “Call me if anything new happens. And don’t torture yourself. If there really is something spooky going on, there might be only so much we can do to stop it.”

She gave a short bark of a laugh. “Why shouldn’t I torture myself? Remember what my dad said? ‘Don’t be happy.’”

“Advice to consider but perhaps not to follow,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

I headed down the hallway towards the double doors.

---

Twenty minutes later I was in Valeford. I drove down one of its main streets, seeing among other things a gas station, a dusty-looking coffee shop, and a small general store with a boarded-up window. The motel, two stories high, appeared to loom one street over. A few people loitered about, some on the steps of the old stone-walled library, others smoking near a wreck of a building that appeared to have been gutted by fire many years in the past. All in all it was not a place to raise the spirits.

I turned onto Thornbush, a road mostly occupied by bare trees and one-story homes. A gust of wind blew into the car; this was less welcome than before, and I closed the windows. The numbers decreased as I went. At 60, I pulled up to the curb, stopped the car, and got out to walk.

40 Thornbush Avenue was a low, flattish affair with a peaked roof and an attached garage with a closed door. Trimmed lilac bushes stood around wide convex windows, and beige linoleum framed the front entrance. I strode up, deliberated between the doorbell and the knocker for a moment, then chose the doorbell.

After a minute, nothing.

Maybe the knocker would serve. I rapped it thrice against the door.

Long moments passed. Then the door cracked open, revealing the hard-eyed face of a woman in her fifties.

“What do you want?” she challenged me. “No solicitors.”

“Claire Maugham?” I said.

The face retreated a little. “Who’s asking?”

“I’m private investigator Calvin Light,” I said. “I’m working for—”

“I don’t want any investigators,” she spat, and began to close the door. I braced a hand against the white-painted wood.

“Please,” I said. “Elizabeth Schwarz hired me, for free.”

She paused. Then she said, “Hired you for free.”

“I realize I could have put that more eloquently,” I said. “But I’ve agreed to help her investigate the illness that’s affecting her family. We both suspect the hospital isn’t divulging all the information.”

Claire threw the door wide open. “Well, that’s because they’re not,” she said. “Come in, Mr. Light. Do you want tea or coffee?”

Five minutes later, we sat on either side of a glass coffee table in her living room, a couple feet from the window, afternoon light illuminating a room strewn with china figurines, ornate teacups, small knitted items of every conceivable description, and books on birds. I sipped at a cup of mint tea, while she drank black coffee.

“Everything I’m about to tell you is God’s honest truth,” she said.

I nodded.

“You’ll laugh at me, but that doesn’t change the fact that I saw what I saw.”

“How can I laugh at you if you don’t get to the point and tell me what that is?”

“Ha,” she snorted. “Well. I was the first one there when the alarm went off on the guy in 25. Schwarz. The second Schwarz to come in. I saw this thing.”

She took a sip of coffee and put the cup down, then clasped her hands together. Again, no ring, I noted.

“I swear I saw this,” she continued. “Everyone said I’d hallucinated, and I know people can have fake memories—”

I interrupted her. “I think I’m the most likely person on Earth to believe your story right now.”

She shrugged her shoulders in exaggerated nonchalance. “Well then. I saw this white thing crouching over him.”

She sipped her coffee again, placed the cup on the table again, clasped her hands again. I noticed a slight tremor.

“It was like a person, but it was all white, pure white, like a piece of paper,” she said. “It was almost glowing. It had these long… hands, with white fingers, and it was just holding him still, kissing his neck, sucking at it.

“I screamed when I saw it, and I backed away through the plastic—we put it up as part of the quarantine—and it didn’t even react, it just kept sucking at him. I backed into a corner in the empty part of the room, until I couldn’t see it. Then other people showed up, and I must have looked like an idiot, telling them about this white thing by Schwarz’s bed, but of course by the time they got there it was gone. I don’t know how it got out. Maybe through the window. Now they think I failed to follow protocol, he was flatlining and I did nothing, so I’m on leave and scheduled for a performance review. They’ll probably fire me. Say, how did you find me?”

“Another nurse,” I said. “Anna.”

“Huh,” she said. She picked up her coffee mug, held it for a few seconds, and put it down without drinking from it. “I guess she believed me. She’s the only one who really likes me there, everyone else hates me.”

“Is there anything else you can remember about the white thing?” I asked. “Any detail would be helpful.” I swallowed a bit of tea.

“It was… there were no fingernails, on the fingers. And I didn’t see any junk, so I guess maybe it was a woman, except I swear it didn’t have any… breasts, either. No hair. No hair anywhere, actually. It was like a goddamn paper cut-out figure with a face. It was like…” She trailed off.

“Do you mean it looked two-dimensional?” I said.

She shook her head. “No, no. Definitely 3D. What I mean is, it was like… ah, I know.” She got up, walked halfway across the room, snatched a little glazed figurine from the mantelpiece, sat back down, and held it out to me. It was a small cat, about the size of a chestnut, glossy white with minute facial features painted on in blue, pink, and black.

“It was like a human version of this,” she said, “except the face was all white too.”

“Hm,” I said. I leaned back in my chair. She seemed convinced that what she said was the truth. I was half-convinced myself.

“Do you believe me?” she asked. Her voice was insistent.

“I’m… willing to operate for now according to the hypothesis that you really did see that,” I replied.

“Good.” She got up and put the china cat back on the mantelpiece. “So what do we do? Do we do anything?”

“First,” I said, standing, “I call Elizabeth and tell her to get the hell out of that hospital.”

“That’s the woman who brought them all in, right? The one who hired you for free?”

“Yes,” I confirmed, walking towards the door. “I’m heading out now. Can I have your number, in case I need you again?”

She rattled it off, and I typed it into my phone.

“Hey,” she said, as I opened the door. “Is it not safe there?”

“The hospital?” I said. “No, I’d assume not, if you really saw that thing. That’s why I’m telling Elizabeth to get the hell out.”

“Should I call Anna?”

“Absolutely. Tell her to take the day off.”

I closed the door and walked across Claire’s yard, calling Elizabeth as I did so. I held the phone to my ear.

She picked up on the third ring. “What?”

“I talked to Claire,” I said. “I think you should leave the hospital, come back to Valeford. Then we can work on getting Mary and your dad transferred.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Meet me in the lobby of the motel,” I said. “I’ll tell you there.”

“Is this top-secret information or something?”

“No, but the hypothesis is outlandish enough that I’d rather share it in person.”

“What fucking hypothesis?” she growled.

“Meet me in the lobby,” I repeated.

“I’m stopping at the police station on my way.”

“I would advise against,” I said. “They’ll probably only be sand in the gears.”

“Tough.” She hung up.

I swore under my breath, returned to my car, and drove to the motel.

---

The Marigold Motel was a structure of crumbling reddish-brown brick that looked like it had seen its best days in the 1950s. I deposited the car in the mostly empty lot, walked into a lobby occupied by one old woman reading the Valeford Herald, rang a bell at the unmanned front desk, and waited. After a few seconds, an equally old man emerged, took my name and payment, and gave me a plastic keycard to room 203. I rode the slow, creaky elevator, deposited my duffel bag in my rather musty room, used the bathroom, then returned to the lobby via the stairs and sat down to wait.

A sharp jab to the shoulder pulled me out of vague, disturbing dreams involving minuscule porcelain figurines crawling under my skin.

“I’m here,” said Elizabeth, flopping down in the chair next to mine. “Tell me your hypothesis.”

I related Claire’s story.

She stared off into the middle distance, pulling at her hair. “I’m not sure whether to take it seriously.”

“Neither am I,” I said. “But it strikes me as in fact more plausible than some hospital-employed syringe killer having a grudge against your entire family. It fits the available evidence better.”

“This stuff isn’t supposed to happen,” she said. Her voice was a little numb.

“Lots of stuff isn’t supposed to happen. There may have been hobbits living in Indonesia as recently as a few hundred years ago, did you know that?”

“Why don’t you want us keeping guard anymore?”

“I don’t want you keeping guard anymore,” I specified. “I’ll head back there for one more shift, as it were, but then I’ll have to come back here to eat and sleep. I’ll be useless in the long run if I stay up nights.”

“Will they be safe?”

“No, but I want to keep you safe. If that white thing is really out there, you don’t want to tangle with it.”

She looked miserable. “I know you’re right, but it feels awful leaving them there.”

“It’s one of those things that feels wrong but is the right move,” I said. “Which reminds me, by way of opposites, did you talk to the police?”

“I could tell they didn’t believe me,” she said. “They said they’d send someone to interview Mary tomorrow. That’s all they said. That’ll go great.”

“We should talk to her again before then,” I said. “She’ll probably clam up once a policeman walks into her room.”

“Can I talk to Claire?” she asked.

“Let me call ahead.”

What followed was like the half-mad shuffling of pawns across the board of an indecisive chess player. I called Claire, Claire told me that Anna had told her that she got off at 5:00 and would call in sick the next day, Claire told me that, yes, Elizabeth could visit, Elizabeth went to visit Claire. I drove to the hospital, I called Elizabeth so she could call the hospital to tell them to let me into the ward, they let me in, I checked on Peter, who was sleeping, and Mary, who was irate and ordered me out of her room, after which I loitered in the lobby outside the ward. Elizabeth, detecting the same level of apparent truthfulness in Claire’s voice as I had, called Mary’s parents; Mary’s mother made plans to come to Valeford the next day, Elizabeth called the hospital to ask them to transfer Mary and Peter, Mary’s mother called asking them to transfer Mary, the hospital called Elizabeth back to tell her that, unfortunately, they couldn’t move Peter at this time, but if Mary’s condition continued to improve they would be happy to meet with Elizabeth and Mary’s mother tomorrow to discuss the possibility of transfer or release, Elizabeth called Mary’s mother and confirmed that the hospital had told her, Mary’s mother, the same thing, sans the part about Peter. Elizabeth relayed this information to me; we concluded that there was nothing more we could do that day, and I left the hospital and got in my car. The deep reach of the rural night bore down upon me as I drove back to Valeford.

I was starving by then, so I picked up a sandwich at the general store and began eating it as I drove the last few blocks to the motel, parked, and walked into the lobby. Elizabeth was waiting for me in an armchair.

“Oh,” she said, looking at my sandwich as I sat beside her. “I had dinner at Claire’s. I didn’t think to invite you.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We only met yesterday. We’re business associates.”

“We only met Claire today,” she pointed out.

I shrugged. “I’m not offended. Now if you’ll excuse me for a bit I have to eat this, or I’ll collapse.”

Over the next few minutes I made a small spectacle of myself as I stuffed bites of sandwich into my mouth. When a fourth of the item remained, I got up, tossed it in the nearest trash can, resumed my seat, and rested a weary head in my right hand.

“Why are you doing this for me?” asked Elizabeth.

“You came to me with a spooky case,” I answered. “All my life I’ve looked for evidence of the sorts of phenomena that everyone calls supernatural, and I think I might have it this time. And, if I do have it, I might be able to save some people from an early death, which I know feels good from the few other times I’ve done it.”

She stood up. “Come to my room.”

I stood in turn and met her eyes, in whose gaze I confirmed that the meaning of her invitation was in fact that which I had attached to it.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“If you insult me with that question again, the answer will change.” She began walking towards the stairs. “Come on.”

We didn’t speak as we went up to her room, which turned out to be 205, right next to mine, but attached to 207 via mid-wall door, while 203 was attached to 201. I noted the coincidence, and she rejoined that here I really had come across evidence of the supernatural. She held the door open for me with a wry smirk on her face, and I entered, looking around at the open suitcase near the closet, the bed to my right, the small TV and the door to 207 to my left, the lamp on the nightstand casting its feeble glow over the otherwise dark tableau. Elizabeth came in after me, and the door closed with a click.

She came up to me, the smirk gone, and I kissed her, my hands undoing the buttons of her blazer while hers unbuttoned my coat. Our outer garments fell to the floor, I took off my sweater and tossed it aside, then I put an arm around her waist and pushed her against the foot of the bed, while she bit at the flesh of my neck. I undid her bun, and her hair’s luxuriant darkness burst free. I barely registered its unwashed state.

“Whole job’s free now,” I said, as she fumbled at my shirt buttons. “Even if it takes more than a week.”

“Mm,” she said. “Consider this payment.”

I pushed my hands under her blouse, then under her bra, and squeezed her breasts as hard as I could.

“Fuck,” she said, “fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…”

She unzipped her own pants, pulled them down a little, then shifted her attention to mine. As soon as she freed my cock I turned her around and fucked her. I lasted barely a minute—I was too tired and inflamed to hold back. Then I stroked her with glistening fingers, and she couldn’t have lasted more than two.

Afterwards we again refrained from speaking, as if for fear of disturbing some holy silence. We peeled off the rest of our clothes, leaving them in a haphazard pile on the rug, and lay down atop the quilt, our bodies pressed together, her mouth nuzzling the hollow of my throat, my fingers stroking her spine. Her skin was hot, almost febrile, and I tightened my hold on her, listening to the heavy wash of her breathing.

Soon I grew hard again, and this time it was long, and slow, and by the end of it she was crying, which as if to confirm my theory regarding my broken genes only aroused me more. She stroked herself the whole time, while I subjected her breasts to savage pressure, and she came less than half a minute after I did, her back arching, a low and half-choked moan escaping from between her lips.

Once more we lay still.

“Oh, fuck,” she said. Her voice was faint. “Where have you been the past five years?”

“Sitting around in Boston,” I said. “You should have come sooner.”

“You came soon enough.”

“Only the first time.”

The November chill, seeping through the glass of the windowpanes and the white fabric of the closed curtain, began to drag its tendrils across my back. I shoved most of the pillows off the bed and crawled under the quilt. Elizabeth followed, nestling against me, finding my mouth for a soft, lingering kiss.

“Elizabeth,” I whispered.

“Calvin,” she whispered back. “Light. PI Light.” She giggled. “I like that better.”

I reached over her and turned off the light. A few minutes later we were both asleep.