New Title 1

by Essig, Robert

  SALPSAN

  Robert Essig

  Copyright © 2016 by Robert Essig

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover Art by Cinsearae S.

  http://Bloodtouch.webs.com

  Salpsan Robert Essig. – 1st ed.

  Robertessig.blogspot.com

  Chapter One

  The Arrival

  The house, tall and gray, looked like something in wait for a demolition crew. I turned after the taxi, perhaps hoping the driver would give me some sense of assurance, but he’d already made a record time U-turn as if maybe he had regarded the house in a similar manner, or perhaps the house was something of a fable in town. It was right out of an old movie, or better, it looked like an old prop house-front from a 60s B-grade horror film that had fallen into disrepair.

  There was no clear distinction as to the address, but the driver insisted that this was the house I was to be delivered to.

  With a deep breath, I headed down an overgrown cobblestone walkway to an oversized pair of weathered doors that were arched at the top and riveted together with mismatched steel bolts. On the front was a knocker clutched between the teeth of a brass gargoyle head. A strange touch and a bit disconcerting, though it had obviously been there for quite some time.

  The building could easily have been from the eighteenth century. A stone structure that sprouted from the midst of gently rolling hills in the middle of Nowhere, Spain. There were outbuildings sprinkled here and there, some of them crumbled to nothing but a pile of worn timber and stone, and others standing like miniature replicas of the house looming before me.

  I set my suitcase on the ground and rapped the knocker. It was delicate. The ring had rusted away yet it was sturdy enough for a few more knocks. Not many. I wasn’t sure how long I would be under the employ of Mister Adler, but I was certain the knocker would fall off by the time I left, not that I expected it to get much use.

  Standing there, waiting for a reply to my knocks, the chill in the air seeped through my cardigan, further agitating what was becoming quite a damning case of arthritis. I hadn’t prepared properly for the weather. At seventy-three, a woman of my age can get a chill in a sauna. I really didn’t know what to expect. I had to hope that the house was warm inside no matter how cold it was to look upon.

  A moment before I was going to knock again, the doors opened.

  Chapter Two

  The Patient

  The man who opened the door stood around ten feet tall, skinny as a model and as bald as a mole rat. What he lacked in hair on top of his head he made up for with an astonishing unibrow that was thick enough to be a serious mustache misplaced above his eyes. Beginning halfway down his ears were thick muttonchops that hit the rear of his jaw, following his chin-line like hairy triangles on the sides of his otherwise clean-shaven face.

  “Miss Fleicher?” he asked. His voice was thin and weak like tissue paper. Not at all what I had expected.

  “Yes, I am Marion Fleicher. I am here under the employ of Mister Terrance Adler.”

  “Please, come in. We’ve been expecting you. You were supposed to be here yesterday, were you not?”

  “My apologies, Mister—”

  “You don’t have to address me formally. Call me Blake.”

  “My apologies, Blake. My flight was delayed from New York. I missed my second flight and had to spend the night in Rome before I could get a flight into Spain.”

  Blake nodded, ushering me into the house quite hurriedly. I felt uncomfortable; however, he had known my name. I was confident that I was at the right house, so I complied and entered.

  “Quickly, you must come this way.”

  There was a moment of reservation as I looked into a pair of shifty eyes on the face of someone I, quite honestly, would have rushed by without a second look had we met in passing. I reminded myself that I had been hired and I was there to do a job, thus I must remain professional.

  I followed Blake through a thin corridor that opened up to what appeared to be a dining room. A quick glance to my left revealed a kitchen with a small refrigerator, like those you find in upscale hotels in America. The fridge stood out in my mind, though we rushed through the area quickly. I had been wary about the electricity in this place. The walls were stone, cold, lined with candled sconces, many of them bursting with waxen stalactites frozen in downward drip, beneath which were massive puddles of dried wax.

  We passed a steep spiral staircase and went through another claustrophobic corridor lined with hefty wooden doors. The last door at the end of the corridor, next to a small window that viewed the dreary landscape outside, was ajar.

  Blake burst through the door. “She’s here, Terrance. She’s here.”

  The first thing I noticed on entering the room was a most peculiar odor like sickness with a twinge of something I couldn’t place, something sour that awoke my sinuses like taking a whiff of menthol or perhaps lacquer thinner. There was a bed in the corner with the patient lying beneath a cover that resembled a death shroud pulled clear up over his head. For a moment I thought I had been too late, that he had deceased. My cheeks burned with momentary anger for I knew that what Mister Adler needed was a doctor, not a nurse. I had told him that in our correspondences, but he insisted that the issues were not life threatening. Perhaps I was foolish to take the job, but I really had no other option. I was in desperate need of both money and returning to the field in which I loved to work.

  “Don’t be startled,” said Terrence Adler, a man of average height with a thick mustache that nearly hid his lower lip and reminded me of a walrus’s whiskers. His eyes were black, frightening. In that moment, as I entered that room, I could have just as easily assumed that this man standing before me with the slicked back black hair and loose white dress shirt had snuffed the life out of the person beneath the sheet.

  “He needs help,” said Mister Adler. “He’s sick.”

  “How can he breathe with that sheet over his face?” I asked.

  I decided right then that I was there, the deal had been accepted, and that I was going to jump right in, so I set my suitcase and bag on the floor, crossed the room, and grabbed the sheet, revealing my patient.

  I nearly dropped dead of fright and shock, for what was beneath the sheets was something I never could have prepared myself for. I realize now that the sheet had been pulled up just before my arrival to shield me from the horrors of what I was going to be dealing with. Better to shoehorn me into it.

  I took a deep breath, looked away from the patient, then looked squarely into the eyes of my new employer. “You need to give me some information. I came here all the way from America to do a job, and it seems to me that you should have taken the time to properly prepare me for my position rather than throw me into the room like this, don’t you think?”

  Before Mister Adler had a chance to respond, the man beneath the sheets groaned and shuffled. After all the years I’d nursed at various hospitals in New York City I thought I had seen it all; however, there was always something worse than my previous worst case. I had no idea what I was up against, but the moment my patient showed such a clear sign of agony I went into what I consider to be a healthy natural response, for above all (even the nasty things that were printed about me in the papers several years ago) I am a nurturer.

  As I inspected my patient
closely, I asked for the proper instruments that I had been assured would be there on arrival. “I trust you have a stethoscope, a thin beam electric torch, a sphygmomanometer…a thermometer?”

  “Everything you requested is in this room. I confess that I am ignorant to some of those instruments, but I assure you that they are all here, lined up neatly on that table.”

  What Mister Adler said was retrieved by my brain; however, I was having a difficult time, particularly with touching my patient. I needed to at least press my fingers to his neck for a pulse, but that mouth, the strands of flesh that connected the upper and lower lip in thin strips like the membrane on a bat’s wings, the ear holes in the side of his head that appeared to be infected, swollen.

  “I hate to be brief, but I have to go,” he said. “Everything you will need is in here. If you could please care for your patient—stabilize him, do whatever you can to assure he doesn’t die—we can reconvene and have a proper meeting over dinner.”

  Mister Adler was gone by the time I turned to ask what my patient’s name was. Blake, too, had left. There wasn’t time to think. I probably could have caught them as they walked down the hall and called the job off, but I had never turned my back on a patient.

  Never.

  Stethoscope to my ears, I checked for a heartbeat. It was irregular, and I don’t mean in a way I had heard before. I mean irregular in that it had a beat that was…inhuman. I pulled the earpieces out of my ears and dropped the stethoscope on the bed, taking a step backward as if I feared some kind of attack, which I didn’t. That heartbeat. It was just so strange, so uncanny. Maybe the stethoscope was faulty.

  The weight of the stethoscope and suddenness of its withdrawal seemed to have awakened the patient, or perhaps alerted him that someone else was in the room. The eyes opened slowly, squinting at the brightness of the room. I couldn’t be sure, for I had gasped and it only lasted a minute, but the eyes had been orange, though as he squinted, they darkened almost to black. Tears ran down the sides of his face, traveling the cracked and rough texture of his mottled and leathery flesh.

  I whispered, “What is your name?”

  The body beneath the white sheet cringed, the eyes closing tight as if my voice was abhorrent and disturbing, perhaps too loud now that he was awake, and I knew I had to make a mental note of this behavior to do my best in treating him. This was a doctor’s job. This wasn’t a patient who was sick with a chronic illness as I had been led to believe, but someone with an ailment that needed a proper diagnosis, the thought of which caused me to take caution for my own health by pulling a surgical mask over my face. I also did this to ensure that I didn’t pass on some kind of germ that would bring my patient harm.

  As a nurse you find yourself shedding apprehension in the face of something that is less than appealing. You find that ability to help the wounded and needy and you harness it. That feeling to help, to assist the sick, the weak…it is power.

  My middle and forefinger pressed against the cold, clammy flesh. I felt for a pulse and shivered when I felt the same irregular beat I had heard through the stethoscope, but I was beyond the fear of the unknown. He needed my help.

  In but a whisper’s whisper I said, “I’m Marion. What is your name?”

  He grunted and sighed a puff of breath like rotten eggs and sulfur. I couldn’t be sure whether he understood English, but the immediate response indicated as much.

  Scanning the array of instruments on the table, I selected a thermometer. I had become used to modern digital thermometers, but I would make due with an old-fashioned mercury thermometer any day.

  “I need to take your temperature,” I said, perhaps too loudly, for he cringed again, his body shifting beneath the sheets. Strange that his hands never came up to shield his ears. I would have feared that he was paralyzed had it not been for his reactions to the sound of my voice, what I had always thought to be kind and gentle.

  I whispered again. “I need to take your temperature. Please open your mouth so I can place this thermometer under your tongue.”

  The eyes opened. They were beyond jaundiced, a deep orange that reminded me of pumpkin. Those eyes shifted, directing their gaze toward me, sad, despondent. I smiled to assure him that I meant no harm, but I couldn’t tell what he thought of me. What I saw in those eyes…

  I don’t know what exactly I saw in those eyes, but it was primeval, a glimpse into a fiery abyss that caused me to pause, transfixed. My mind swam, my skin flushed, and I felt faint.

  I looked away for just a moment and then looked back. His eyes were closed again, mouth agape. I took this as an invitation and placed the thermometer beneath a black tongue that looked gangrenous. His mouth closed softly over the thin piece of glass. As I waited for the mercury reading, I checked his blood pressure.

  Once I was finished with my detailed check-up, I concluded that my findings were inconclusive. Everything about this man was an anomaly. His blood pressure was too high, his heartbeat irregular, he was running a fever, and then there were the obvious physical traits that I had never seen or heard of before. Furthermore, I would have to meet with Mister Adler to find out who this man was and what he was here for. As far as I could deduce, he should have been in a hospital.

  After administering a fever reducer, I decided to take a look at the man’s body to find out if he had any wounds I should know about, perhaps something that would shed light on his condition. As I pulled the sheet down, I made note of what appeared to be calcium deposits on his body that reminded me of reptilian horns, but the real shock came when I revealed the man’s arms, placed neatly to his sides, cuffed at the wrists so that he could not move them.

  “Good God,” I whispered. “What is going on here?”

  Chapter Three

  Terrance Adler

  I stabilized my patient as much as I could, all things considered, and then burst out of the room and down the hallway in search of Mister Adler. I had taken on this job for a variety of reasons. Money was, admittedly, my number one reason; however, the ability to help someone in need was powerful. To fill the pit that had been left in my soul after my extraction from the medical field was something I had thought to be unobtainable. In any legal sense of the word, in the United States, it was, but here in Spain in the middle of nowhere nothing could stop me from helping. This gig was under the table, cash money with no dividends to Uncle Sam. After being stripped of my nursing license and losing my retirement and benefits, that was fine by me.

  We had emailed for quite some time, Mister Adler and I, before I agreed to his unusual query. I had a slew of questions for him to answer before I was confident that he wasn’t setting me up. He could have been a murderer, a psycho rapist, a sadist. He could have been setting me up for a fall, to finally put me in prison where so many people thought I belonged after what happened five years ago. I did my time: one year and six months of a two-year sentence. They had called me Mrs. Kevorkian. Called for my head.

  There was no way to tell what was behind any of the doors I passed, and I wasn’t acquainted with my company enough to open them in search of Mister Adler. The hallway opened to the sitting room with the spiral staircase. I paused, thinking about ascending the stairs, but it just wasn’t my place to snoop, and though I was upset with the conditions in which I had been emerged, I wasn’t one to ruffle too many feathers. I just needed to speak with Mister Adler.

  Through another hallway I found myself in the dining room. A pleasant fragrance of herbs and butter came from the kitchen. My disagreeable sensibilities were dulled for a moment because I was quite hungry. I hadn’t had a proper meal since touching down in Rome almost twenty-four hours ago.

  “Excuse me,” I said as I walked into the kitchen. I had expected a cook, but I found Blake slaving over a cluttered counter, chopping vegetables with shocking intensity, as if he was a master chef—for all I knew he was.

  He looked up, still chopping. I gasped because I thought for sure he was going to cut off the tips of his fingers, bu
t he seemed to know what he was doing and even liked this particularly disturbing parlor trick. Look, mom, no eyes.

  He must have seen the horror in my eyes, and perhaps that was what he was looking for, because he stopped the chopping so suddenly that I felt threatened.

  “Yes, Miss Fleicher? Can I help you with something?”

  “I need to speak with Mister Adler.”

  Blake grabbed a head of garlic, pulling several cloves free. “In due time, Miss Fleicher. Over dinner. We’re having roasted rabbit. How’s your patient doing?”

  I was exasperated. I threw my hands up and nearly walked out of the kitchen. “That’s what I would like to get to the bottom of. How am I supposed to care for a patient if I don’t know anything about him? I need to find out who this man is, whether he has any allergies, his blood type, and if he has any pre-existing conditions. I need some kind of chart to work with!”

  Blake smashed the garlic cloves and pulled away the paper-thin skins before mincing them. I took notice of what a strange man he was, the way he worked with such intensity I could feel it in the air. He worked like someone in a competition.

  As he minced, he said, “Dinner should be finished in an hour. If your patient is stabilized, then you can unpack your things. Would you like me to show you your room?”

  Images of the man in that last room down the hall flashed in my mind, the tears, the agony in a voice that had been far too strained to speak properly. I had only been there for an hour and so much had happened so quickly that I realized, as I stood in that small kitchen smelling the food of the gods, that perhaps I hadn’t given Mister Adler a fair shake.

  “Yes, Blake, that would be nice. I could use some rest before dinner.”

  He set down the knife, wiped his hands on the white apron he wore, and then led me out of the kitchen and back down the hallway I had come from. We passed the room with the staircase and just as I thought we were going right back to the patient’s room, Blake stopped at the second to last door and opened it.