I nodded. “You are afraid that I’m going to start having a seizure, aren’t you?”
“Not afraid. Attentive.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. I had apologized enough. “Okay,” I said. “Whatever. Can you hand me my computer? I would like to start working while you watch me.”
“I’ll be working too,” he said. “But to be clear, Lily Quinn, we are never going to be friends.”
“I know that,” I said.
And I’m glad, I thought. Who would want to be friends with this dick?
Bold
CHAPTER SEVEN
ELIAS
2019
We worked in silence for a while.
She was still sitting up in the bed, typing away on the computer with the expensive quilt pulled up around her legs. It was a little strange, I thought, and entirely surreal. It felt like no one should be in this room. This room felt like a painting, or a stage, and having a convalescing patient here felt like it went against what the room was for.
It was for opulence.
For health.
She didn’t look healthy, but at least she didn’t look as terrible as she did before. She typed fast, hard enough to make the keyboard make a horrible clickity-clackity sound every time she pressed against a key. It was very annoying. I also found it surprisingly distracting when I was just trying to go through some documents.
I hadn’t gone downstairs, but there had been no need. Dr. Overstreet had burst into the room, looking upset. She had gone over to Lily and grabbed her hand, asking her if she was okay over and over again.
It wasn’t until we had both assured her that Lily was fine that Dr. Overstreet told us that she was shutting down the castle effective immediately.
And that she expected us to be done as soon as possible.
I understood it. This was more than just her likelihood. It was also many of her employees’ livelihood. And it was a family jewel, too, a piece of history, more than just a castle.
It was the only reason there was a town, even ten minutes down the road.
But it might be the end of an era, I thought, and I might be the one ushering it.
The issue, of course, was that I also had to look after Lily Quinn while I tried to do my job.
At least she didn’t seem to be in danger of seizing.
She was tired, which happened, and she was thirsty, which I was a little more concerned about. We had bought some water while being in town, while dropping off Abigail, but even though it was sealed and in a corner of this upstairs room, it made me feel a little uneasy that it was in the castle at all.
Not that it should have. I knew I was being totally and utterly irrational.
The water was sealed, and it wasn’t in a shared space.
But it was in this room, and this room felt connected to the whole thing.
Still.
How could water affect people’s sodium levels? That made no sense.
Unless there was salt in it, and people would be able to taste that immediately, as soon as they took a sip of their drink.
They wouldn’t just be having salted water.
That made absolutely no sense.
“Dr. Arnaud,” I heard Lily say quietly. I turned to look at her.
“What?”
“I was just wondering what you could see,” she said. “You seem really focused on that corner over there.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “I’m looking at the water.”
“The water?”
“The water bottles,” I said. “Call me superstitious, but I don’t like having them in this room.”
She laughed quietly. “I’m definitely going to call you superstitious,” she said. She swung her legs off the bed and stretched. “Should we go downstairs, put them in the fridge?”
“Aren’t you working?”
“Yes,” she said. “You are, too, but stretching for a minute and going up and down some stairs isn’t going to me any harm.”
I smiled. “You’re right,” I said.
Except I didn’t want to put them in the kitchen, either, because something could contaminate them there too. They were sealed, unopened, still in the plastic wrapping around the bottles themselves.
“You don’t seem to be loving this plan,” she said.
I shook my head. “Call it… intuition,” I replied. “But something is wrong here and I don’t want it to mess with the water.”
She furrowed her brow, turning to look at it. “Looks like ordinary water to me.”
I glared at her. “The problem isn’t how the water looks. It’s how it’s making people feel.”
She thought for a second then grabbed the extra blanket that sat at the bottom of the bed and walked over to the corner, where the water bottles were placed. She threw it on top of them and turned to look at me. “That should help.”
“How?” I asked.
“You’ll stop obsessing over it,” she said. “And from what you say, there’s no way to stop the water from being contaminated if it is going to get contaminated, so it’s better not to look at it.”
“I don’t know how I feel about this strategy.”
“You’re free to move the blanket,” she said, then stretched, reaching out to the ceiling with her fingertips and standing on her tiptoes.
I nodded, but I knew I probably wouldn’t. She was right. It was making me feel better, even though I knew the water was under the blankets.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said as she began to pace around the room, which had darkened with the sunset. It was surprisingly dark, and it felt surprisingly claustrophobic, even though it was, in effect, a rather large room. “Well, first, do you mind if I open the window a crack? I feel like the air isn’t flowing in here.”
I shrugged my shoulders and stood up from the corner chair I had been sitting in, putting my laptop on the floor as I did so. “I’ll give you a hand,” I said. “These windows are tall.”
She nodded. “Yeah. They are.”
We walked together toward the window. She took a look at it, then tried to push forward the desk which was in front of it so we could have better access.
I held the window up at a higher point, and she held it from the bottom, and together, we began pulling. It wouldn’t budge. It didn’t move, not even an inch.
She groaned. “Do you think this window ever gets opened?”
“Doubt it,” I said. “Maybe it’s sealed shut. It doesn’t seem to have any give.”
“Let’s try again,” she said.
We tried again.
Once again, it didn’t work. I swore under my breath and positioned myself so that I would be able to leverage my body weight when I pulled on it again.
“Okay,” I said. “One, two, three…”
We pulled. The window budged slightly, making a creaking sound when it did, and then budget, but only a little bit. Not even an inch. We looked at each other and she shook her head. “We tried,” she said.
“We did,” I replied. “Maybe a lever…”
“A fan would also do it,” she said. “Do you think they have one?”
“Somewhere, surely,” I replied. “I wonder if they left the supply closets unlocked?”
“Probably. Dr. Overstreet knows we’re still here.”
“She does,” I said. “Let’s go, then. I’m also itching to get out of this room.”
She nodded. I didn’t necessarily want her company, but the castle was so big, and it was so dark, I didn’t necessarily want to go downstairs by myself. Not because there was anything supernatural, because I didn’t want to be in an unfamiliar environment all by myself.
It was a natural human impulse.
We walked to the door, which was cracked open.
She pulled it open completely and let me go through first. “So my question,” she said.
“Right.”
“You’re an epidemiologist?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But you don’t have t
o be a doctor to be an epidemiologist, right? It’s like being a chemist or…”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, different type of doctors. Some epidemiologists are PhDs, and some are MDs. The biggest difference is that MDs get to have clinical hands-on experience.”
“So you’re a PhD.”
“No,” I said. “I’m a clinician.”
“Oh.”
“Why didn’t you think I was?”
“You’re… I mean, you don’t seem good at having patients,” she said quietly.
I should’ve been mad, but I wasn’t. She was right, and if anything, it was one of the reasons I had decided not to work with the public. I had some interaction with patients, of course, and clinicians weren’t the only ones who did.
But I had been careful about choosing my career. I didn’t have the patience or disposition to work with the public, that much had always been clear to me.
I was fascinated by science, by humans, by bodies.
By healing.
But I didn’t want to deal with them. Not in a customer-facing capacity.
“I’m better with people that don’t tell me they can speak to my dead fiancée, for whatever that’s worth. How did you know her name?”
We were still going down the stairs.
“If I tell you, you’re never going to believe me.”
“You didn’t read it anywhere?”
She laughed quietly. “No,” she said. “I only googled you at the hospital.”
“I still haven’t googled you,” I replied. We had arrived at the bottom of the stairs, into the hallway. The overhead industry lights came on, one by one, until the hum of them seemed overwhelming.
It felt like it bounced off the stone walls of the hallway, back and forth, until it took over the space, even though it was relatively quiet, and coming entirely from above.
“You should,” she said. I noticed she had been looking at the lights herself. “I found it very edifying to google myself.”
“You did?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m not going to let you do that,” I said. “I’m not going to let you change the subject. How did you know about Meredith?”
“I didn’t,” she replied. “It was like… someone whispered something in my ear. Like I said, there’s no dialogue. It’s not like in the movies.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. It’s more like someone whispering to you during an exam when you don’t know the answers.”
“So it’s like cheating?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Sure,” she said. “It is a bit like cheating. It feels a little like it, too, but not exactly like it.”
“What does it feel like, then? Because you’re talking a lot about things that it doesn’t exactly feel like.”
“Hmm,” she said. We were still walking down the hallway, slowly. “I don’t know. It feels like someone grabs you by the back of the head to tell you a secret, I guess, but there’s no way to know if the person grabbing you is someone you love and care about, like a parent telling you you’re going to get candy later, or someone… worse. Someone dangerous.”
I furrowed my brow. “Is it scary?”
“Yes,” she said. “Every time.”
“Do you get startled?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Mostly it makes me feel like my mind is going entirely blank and like… I don’t know. Like it’s very hard to focus on anything other than whoever has a grip on me. Like there’s absolutely nothing I can do until I do what they are asking of me.”
“And what do they ask of you?”
“Mostly to talk,” she said, then shook her head. We were finally in front of the narrow steps that led downstairs. “Why do you want to know? I thought you didn’t believe in any of this.”
“I don’t believe in any of this,” I said. “But it’s clear to me that you do and I wanted to know what you would say, and how you think about it. Plus, I still want to know how you knew her name.”
“She told me,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders. “I know you don’t believe me, but she did.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because I keep thinking that what you’re saying is going to make things make sense,” I replied. “I keep thinking that it’s going to make things click into place, but it just doesn’t.”
She shrugged again. “Okay,” she said. “I get it. I wouldn’t believe it, either, if I wasn’t the one who experienced it.”
“At least you admit that.”
“I’m not shy about this,” she said. “For the longest time, I kept it hidden. I get that people aren’t always going to be receptive to it, but that’s not my problem. I put the information out there. Whether they believe it or not, that’s on them.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could, we both heard a loud thud.
It was coming from down the stairs. We both turned to look at it, neither one of us sure what it was.
She took off running first, down the windy and narrow stairs that led to the downstairs floor. I noticed how slippery and wet they were the moment I stepped on them, stretching my arm and placing it against the wall in order to maintain my balance as we both rushed toward where the noise had come from.
When I finally got to the first floor, though, Lily was still there. She was looking around at the wide space in front of her, her brow furrowed. “I don’t know where the noise came from,” she said. “Do you know where it came from?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Not at all.”
We both looked around. I closed my eyes, trying to see if I could hear something else. I couldn’t hear a damn thing.
“You go left,” she said. “I’ll go right.”
“I think I’ll go right.”
She rolled her eyes.
I went right.
There wasn’t much there, I thought. A reception area gave way to a small administration office that was unlocked. Tall bookshelves lined the walls, from top to bottom. They looked flimsy, almost like those filing cabinets that people got back in the seventies.
I didn’t want to go into the office. It felt a little like it was off limits. I looked around, glancing at the floor, trying to see if anything was out of place.
It was only when I looked at the desk again that I noticed something definitely looked out of the ordinary.
A chair that I hadn’t noticed before was sitting on the floor, on its side, perpendicular from the desk. That was why I hadn’t seen it. Its wheels were spinning, and though the chair looked new, it seemed as thought it was creaking, too.
Like it was made of wood, just like the desk in front of it, and like it was reacting to changes in the environment.
It was bizarre.
I approached it. It was a regular office chair, made out of something that looked and felt a little like leather, the back of it made of mesh. The arms looked sturdy, and the chair had four wheels at the bottom in a spider-like fashion.
I had seen plenty of chairs in my life, and chairs like these, they didn’t just… tilt and fall. Unless something was wrong with them, I thought, but that made no sense.
I had no idea what would cause a chair that was steady to fall to the ground like this, unless someone had thrown it themselves. But I didn’t think there was anyone left at Thornbridge, other than Lily and I.
“Hello? Is there anyone here?”
My own voice answered me by way of an echo.
I approached the chair, leaning down and looking at the legs. I spun the wheels. They seemed fine. Everything, in truth, seemed fine. There was nothing wrong with this chair, not that I knew that much about chairs.
Still, I knew enough about gravity to be certain that this shouldn’t have plummeted down. Not the way it had.
I fixed it.
I made it stand upright and stood up myself, wheeling it around for a little while, trying to see if I could feel any imperfec
tions. There were no imperfections. There was nothing wrong and there was no reason the chair should have flipped on its side or gone down to the floor.
I tipped it over, trying to throw it on the ground. It bounced, not really making the sound that we had heard before.
I muttered quietly, then felt someone watching me.
I felt a shiver go down my spine as I tilted my head up.
“Sorry,” Lily said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just heard a noise.”
“I threw the chair on the floor. Trying to see if that was the original sound. It was on the floor, tilted, when I got here.”
“Was that it?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “It definitely wasn’t. Did you find anything?”
“No. Absolutely zilch,” she replied. “Everything seems to be in order. It’s… bizarre.”
“Let me guess. By now, you’d be feeling something.”
“I didn’t say that,” she said.
“You didn’t have to say it. I can see it written all over your face.”
“Maybe you are psychic after all.”
She shook her head, but I thought I could see a hint of a smile on her face. “I’m going back to work,” she said. “You’re welcome to stay here, if you want, but it seems kind of boring.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I need to get to the bottom of this.”
She craned her neck to look at me, but didn’t say anything. Soon we were climbing up the stairs, neither one of us saying anything. The overhead humming of the lights felt like it was getting louder and louder.
“This place gets creepier at night,” I said.
She looked up at the lights. “You’re not wrong. Why are they so loud?”
“I don’t know. It makes no sense. I’m not an electrician, but…”
“Something is off?”
“Something is off,” I repeated.
She shook her head. “I want to slam it with a broom and see if that will do anything.”
“It’ll shatter it, I think. Or maybe nothing will happen. But if it’s the former, you’re probably on the hook for whatever it is that these cost.”
“Maybe not, then.”
I smiled at her. This was nice, or it would’ve been nice, if I was with anyone else.
It was clear that Lily Quinn was intelligent, but that had never been in question. To get anyone to believe in something like the scam she was pulling, she would have to be extremely smart. That didn’t surprise me.
The Healing Process Page 5