“No idea,” he said, looking around. “A pipe, maybe?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “We have to catch it. The poor thing is scared to death.”
He glared at me. “That thing has claws.”
“I know. And it’s in distress.”
His expression softened a little. “I guess you’re right. If there’s no way for it to get out, we do have to catch it.”
“I’ll go get a cardboard box,” I said. “You stay here. Make sure it doesn’t…”
“What? Jump off?”
“Sure,” I replied, with a smile. “Jump off.”
CHAPTER NINE
ELIAS
2019
At her insistence, we caught the cat. It took forever, but the cardboard box helped, and the fact that it was, in effect, cornered, helped too. The cat meowed and thrashed against the sides of the box, clearly still distressed, even after we took it to the breakroom.
Lily wanted to find a way to feed the cat, but I didn’t think that was particularly wise, so I decided to call the humane society instead. They would know what to do.
Lily found a can of tuna, poured it into a plastic bowl, and moved toward the cardboard box. She tilted the box up—only slightly—so that the cat wouldn’t escape and kicked the tuna under the opening. She also filled a bowl with water and spilled some on the floor as she repeated the same process, in case the cat was thirsty.
“Do you think it can breathe?” she asked, staring at the box.
“It can definitely breathe,” I said, smiling at her. “There’s plenty of air supply, and look, it’s not thrashing anymore. It was probably just scared. I mean, it’s not like the box is taped to the floor.”
“That’s true,” she said. “Have you tried to call someone yet?”
“Yes,” I said. “No signal.”
She took her phone out of her pocket and twisted her lips. “No signal for me either,” she said. “We couldn’t see it before, but I can check. Maybe it has a collar or something. Maybe it belongs to—”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I replied quietly, but she waved her hand at me, basically ignoring me.
I held my breath as she lifted the box. I thought the cat was going to run across the room, but it didn’t. It stood straight and looked up at Lily’s hand, its whiskers moving with her every movement.
“Hey, kitty,” Lily said in a high-pitched voice. “It’s okay, I just want to…”
She reached down, and the cat moved its paw up, stopping her from seeing if it had a collar or not, and scratching her wrist in the process.
“Fuck!” she said, jerking her arm away.
I swallowed, dread building in the pit of my stomach. “Does it have a collar?”
She shook her head. “Not that I can see,” she said, putting the box gently back on the cat, who didn’t seem to want to move from its comfy position. She held her arm up to her face and scoffed. “Shit. This hurts.”
“Let me see that,” I said, jumping up and looking up at her as she nodded.
“Here,” she said.
“We need to wash this. With soap,” I said. “And then we need to get you to a doctor. For all we know, this cat has rabies.”
“This cat does not have rabies, and you are a doctor.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have any treatment for rabies, and I don’t know how to test cats for it, either,” I replied as I led her to the sink. “Here, put your arm under running water while I look for a first aid kit. They must have one somewhere around here.”
I turned the faucet on and let the water run as she stuck her arm under it.
“Don’t move,” I said.
I opened a bunch of drawers until I finally found the one with the first aid kit. I walked over to where she was and looked at the wound, which wasn’t particularly deep.
The problem wasn’t the wound, of course. The problem was where it had come from.
“This is going to sting,” I said as I washed the wound with soap. “I’m sorry.”
She gritted her teeth, but didn’t resist.
“Have you been vaccinated for tetanus?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“How long ago?”
She thought for a second. “Honestly, I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
That wasn’t great, I thought, but flashed her what I thought was a reassuring smile. “Okay,” I said. “So after I clean this, we’re going to go to the hospital so a practitioner can give you a tetanus booster and maybe a rabies shot. How does that sound?”
“Like overkill,” she said.
“Rabies is serious,” I replied. “It’s preventable, but…”
She sighed. “Fine,” she said. “We can probably stop by a rescue or something. They’ll probably want to take the cat.”
“They might even want to test it,” I said.
She looked at the box. “For rabies?”
“Sure. I don’t know what else for,” I said, stopping the water. “I’m going to dry this then I’m going to put some dressing on it. I don’t think it’ll bleed but I don’t want it exposed to the elements.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“You might not actually be a bad doctor, after all,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“Take the compliment.”
“Thank you,” I said after I was done dressing her wound. “Let’s go, though.”
She looked at the box again. “Do you think it’s okay to leave the cat there?”
“Where is it going to go?” I asked.
“It got up to the top of the tower, Dr. Arnaud,” she said. “I have no idea where it is going to go.”
“It can be here for now,” I replied. “And all things considered, you can probably call me Elias.”
She cocked her head. “What? Why?”
I finished packing up the first aid kit. “You might have rabies,” I said. “It’s the only charitable thing to do.”
She cracked a smile but I told myself this wasn’t the time for jokes.
“This is serious,” I said. “We really do need to go to the hospital.”
“I’m right behind you,” she replied.
We walked out of the castle and toward my car. It was a sunny day, enough to contrast with the darkness outside. I noticed that she wasn’t rushing, which surprised me. If there was a chance I had rabies, I would have sprinted to the hospital.
She seemed eerily calm. I opened the door to my car, waited for her to climb in, and started it.
The engine sputtered when I did. We exchanged a look, neither one of us saying anything.
I turned my key in the ignition once again, waiting for the car to start, but it only sputtered again.
“What’s happening?” I asked, more to myself than to her.
She looked up at the castle for a second, then down at her lap, where her phone was. “I don’t know. But I’m not getting a good feeling about it.”
“We need to get you medical help. Right now.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah. You’re fine for now. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be fine in a few days, because again, you might have rabies.”
I watched her swallow. “I have no signal here. Even in the parking lot. Do you think I should call 911, or is that a waste of time?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Any other time, I would tell you not to. But I don’t see what other choice we have got.”
I looked at her fingers as she typed 911 onto her phone. When she pressed the dial button, there was nothing but a busy signal. “They’re occupied?” She asked, sounding baffled.
I shook my head. “Something’s wrong,” I said, feeling the anxiety build up inside me. Something was wrong, and it felt like the situation was getting more and more out of hand by the minute. I took my phone out of my own pocket, and tried to do the same thing she had done. Instead of a busy signal, my phone just did nothing.
It didn’t dial. As soon as I pressed the call
button, the signal seemed to die, and there was absolutely nothing on the other side.
I swore under my breath. “Keep trying,” I said, opening the car door after I had popped open the hood. “I’ll go and see if there’s anything I can see.”
“Do you know anything about cars?” Lily called after me.
“Nope,” I said. “Not at all.”
She laughed. At least one of us was good-humored about this, because the longer it went on for, the more it scared me. I looked at my engine, at the few things I could take care of, but none of them made sense to me, and I didn’t know enough to get the car to start again.
The only thing that might have happened was that the battery ran out of juice, but there was no one around to jumpstart me. I knew that Lily would have called her assistant to bail us out, but there was no way to make a call.
“This makes no sense,” I said, walking over to the driver’s side again. “Do you have internet access?”
She tapped on her phone a couple of times. “No,” she said. “None at all. You?”
I grabbed my phone from where I had left it on the seat and tried to look for something on the internet, but there was nothing. There was no service, and there was no internet, and the car wasn’t working.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said after a little while.
Lily tapped her fingers on the dashboard. “The castle used to be a hotel, right? And they still book tours and stuff. Surely they have a landline.”
“Probably,” I said. “Worth a shot.”
She smiled at me as she got out of the car, her earrings dangling when she did so. For the first time, I really looked at her since the scratch had happened, the sun shining on her face. Her make-up was smeared because she hadn’t taken it off before falling asleep, and though she looked tired, and her hair was up in what was now a high ponytail, I couldn’t help but think about how beautiful she looked, almost pixie-like, in the afternoon sunlight.
I swallowed and told myself to get a grip. None of this was necessary, and none of this made sense. I was still angry at her, but the way she looked… she was the only thing I seemed to be able to think about.
I told myself I was getting cabin fever. I was far too susceptible to it, and it was clearly a problem.
We went inside and both headed upstairs at the same time. She glanced at the breakroom, informed me the box was still there and the cat didn’t seem to have moved, then we continued on our way to Dr. Overstreet’s office.
Which was, unfortunately, locked.
“I’ll try and see if I can push in,” I said.
She looked at me, her brown eyes wide.
I wiggled the handle, trying to see if it would budge. Nothing happened.
“Do you remember if she had a phone inside?”
I blinked as I continued to try and push into Dr. Overstreet’s office. “She must have,” I said. “It’s her office, it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
I kept trying to make the door open, but to no avail. Even hitting it wasn’t getting me any results.
“These are castle doors,” she said. “I don’t think knocking on them really hard is going to do anything.”
I stared at her. She wasn’t wrong, but it was still annoying. “Do you have any better ideas?”
She thought for a second. “There have to be other offices on this floor,” she said. “Offices she didn’t have time to lock.”
I blinked. I didn’t like admitting it, but that was a good idea. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s try these other doors.”
She walked to the left, I walked to the right, and we tried different doors, one by one, and we were getting away from each other, every single door not working.
I groaned, frustrated, until I tried the last door close to the stairs. It creaked open. “Lily, I found one.”
“Sweet,” I heard her say, her voice an echo in the dim hallway. “I’m going over there. Is it an office?”
I peered into it. It was an office from what I could see. It had a small window, which was covered by white blinds. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness as I heard Lily’s footsteps get closer to me.
“Yes,” I called out to her. “It is an office.”
She walked into the office and I watched as she tried to find a light switch. I was trying to do the same thing on the other side of the room, but the walls were smooth and there was nothing on the walls except for small bumps from the paint.
“Nothing over here,” I said.
“Nothing here either,” she said. “Whatever. Let’s just see if there’s a phone on the desk.”
The desk was pushed to the back and the way the office was laid out made little sense. The office chair was facing the window rather than the door and there was no way for any visitor to come in and talk to whoever owned this office. It was strange, but there was no time to think about how weird it was.
I approached the desk, vaguely aware that Lily was approaching the desk too, and scanned the desk for any sign of a telephone or a landline.
There were only scattered papers on the desk, a pen in the middle of the papers, and nothing else.
Lily opened the top drawer, and at the same time as she did, the door to the office we were in slammed shut, sending a waft of air toward us.
“What the hell?” I asked under my breath.
I hadn’t noticed a draft earlier, and a draft in the hallway seemed particularly unlikely, but it didn’t matter. The door was shut, not even ajar, and Lily and I exchanged a look.
She practically sprinted toward the door. “I don’t understand,” she said. “It doesn’t look like there is a handle inside.”
“What?”
I heard her sigh. “I don’t have anything to grab onto.”
“Can you get your fingers between the door and the wall?”
She groaned, and I approached her, trying to see if there was anything she might have missed.
“No,” she finally said. “There’s not enough space. Maybe a lever?”
“Fuck,” I said quietly. “Okay. Let’s look for something that might help us pry it open.”
But before we did any of that, it was better to open the blinds. The office was dark. And I still couldn’t see that well. I walked over to the window, pushed the blinds up, and watched with a bit of horror as they came down again. “They’re not staying up,” I said.
I turned to look at Lily, who was looking at the window. “They’re probably old. Is there anything that can hold them up?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like a book, or file, or something like that.”
I turned to the desk, opening the top drawer. I grabbed the first large folder I could find and stuffed it between the window sill and the blinds. It didn’t do much, but at least it wasn’t extremely dark in the room anymore. A sliver of light came in from the window, not enough to illuminate the room, but just enough to make it feel a little less claustrophobic.
When the sun shone on the papers on the desk, and on the desk itself, I noticed how dusty the room was. “Lily?”
“Hm?” she asked. She was walking around the room, trying to find a lever or something, I assumed.
I noticed the large filing cabinets that were in the office, pushed to the side, near the walls. They were tall and green and looked like those archiving cabinets that had fallen out of fashion in the nineties. They also looked like they were locked, though there was no way for me to tell.
And they were all covered in dust.
Everything in the office was covered in dust, I thought, to the point where it looked like it was an office that nobody had used for decades. It was as if someone had left, gone home, and then the office had never been used again. It was bizarre.
Especially strange was the lack of a telephone, or landline. I looked down at the papers on the desk, trying to find who this office might belong to, or might have belonged to at one point.
I couldn’t understand the handwriting. It was
loopy, curled, a mixture of cursive and print, and I was only able to tell what a couple of the words meant.
“Elias?”
I looked up at Lily. She looked paler than before, and I didn’t know if it was the light, but there were bags under her eyes. I blinked. I was trying my best to seem like I wasn’t freaked out, though I very clearly was. “Yes?”
“You said my name. What?”
I licked my lips. “This might just be my imagination, but when is the last time you think this office was used?”
She looked around. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “It looks like it’s frozen in time. I’m just surprised Dr. Overstreet hasn’t cleaned it or anything.”
I nodded. “Couldn’t agree more. If there’s anything about that woman, she’s meticulous.”
“Yes. She seems thorough to me. She wouldn’t just forget an office, right?”
I nodded, once again, and we both looked around the office once more. Whatever we thought, the evidence was overwhelming. This was an office, it had once been used, and then it hadn’t.
It had been forgotten.
We didn’t know when, how or why, but that was just the truth. I swallowed. Something about this made me suspicious, but not just that, it scared me. If this office had been forgotten…
No. I wouldn’t allow myself to think like that.
We were people. We were important, someone would come for us before anything happened.
I watched as Lily walked over to the window, and I saw that she curled her fingers under it, trying to pry it open.
“Are you thinking about jumping?”
She laughed, dryly. “I don’t dislike you that much.”
I shook my head, smiling despite myself. “I didn’t think we were that high up.”
She tutted. “We are. Look for yourself.”
I walked over to where she was, leaning down so I could peer out the glass window, which was as dirty as the rest of the office. I wiped some of it with the back of my hand, trying to get rid of the dust. I leaned in closer to it, looking down.
The Healing Process Page 7