Doctor Perry

by Kirsten McKenzie

  With all the marked files off the shelves, he heaved the bag over his shoulder, locked up behind himself and dumped the lot into the trunk of his car. There was no reason to hang around any longer. If the police had already been to the Rose Haven, they were coming here next or home. The Rose Haven was the safest place for him and his files right now.

  58

  Sulia moaned as the room came into a fuzzy focus. It was like looking through a white veil because she still had her contacts in, making it hard to tell where she was, but it wasn’t in her room and confusion clouded her mind. She tried lifting her arms to remove the contacts but concrete blocks held them down. No, not blocks, straps, straps which cut into her wrists and her ankles too. A white coated orderly appeared on the periphery of her vision.

  “Hey,” Sulia croaked, but the figure ignored her. Clearing her throat, she tried again, louder this time. “Hey!”

  “Are you comfortable?”

  “What?” asked Sulia.

  “I asked if you were comfortable?”

  Sulia couldn’t think of a response when she didn’t know why she was restrained and had no memory of coming here.

  “I’ll be off now, but I’m leaving you in the safe hands of Doctor Perry,” Preston said, and laughed all the way upstairs

  When Preston went upstairs to wait for the doctor, the lab door didn’t engage behind him, leaving it ajar for whoever came next, and that was Elijah, who paused at the open door, nudging it with his toe, until it swung open exposing a room jam-packed with everything and which bore little resemblance to a doctor’s surgery, with a wall of pullout freezers on one side, and the other side dominated by a complex laboratory set up with test tubes and gas burners bubbling away in a complicated network of pipes and coils, and the body of a woman he now knew to be his friend, strapped to a hospital bed and jammed into the corner among old filing cabinets and broken office chairs.

  “Sulia?” Elijah called out, stepping into the room.

  “Elijah? Is that you?”

  Elijah wedged a stapler he’d randomly found on the floor into the door jamb to stop them from being locked in, before stepping over to the bed.

  “It’s me, now hold still while I try to undo these straps,” he said.

  Elijah eyed the leather straps tight around Sulia’s wrists and ankles. He flexed his fingers expecting the pain to return any minute, he’d do the best he could but his faith wasn’t strong.

  “How’d I end up down here?”

  “Can you keep the noise down,” Elijah whispered. He’d got the first strap loose and was working on the second one when he felt a familiar prickle in his fingers. No, not now, he needed to get Sulia out of these straps, then the pain could come.

  “Can you let me out?”

  “Sulia, shh, please, the door is open,”

  “I didn’t say nothing,” Sulia said.

  There was a dull thud coming from the wall of pullout freezers. Elijah assumed the staff used them for the recently deceased residents, so if the noise was coming out of there, they have even bigger troubles.

  “If the bugs have gone can someone get me out? There’s no handle in here.”

  Elijah looked at Sulia, who’d turned her heard towards the noise.

  “Go let him out, then come back and finish this. I’ll keep working on it,” she said.

  Elijah pulled open the freezer drawer he thought the noise was coming from. It wasn’t an empty drawer, but the person inside wasn’t capable of speech or of drumming their heels against the tray.

  Stripped of her pearls and her angora twinset, Muriel’s skin a filthy grey colour and her hair lay limp around her face, the wispy strands scarcely covering her skull. Elijah swallowed the bile which had crept up his throat. So this was where Muriel had disappeared to. As Elijah moved to open the next drawer, he properly saw what was left of Muriel’s face, and fear twisted in his gut.

  Muriel lay sightless on the slab, her eyes gone, although the empty sockets seemed to search out Elijah’s eyes.

  “Have the bugs gone now? I’m only coming out if the bugs have gone, although I am their boss,” came a voice from the next drawer.

  Elijah pushed Muriel back into her drawer and wrenched open the drawer speaking to him. A familiar face peaked out, his blood encrusted uniform even more dishevelled than the man in it.

  “Thanks man. Didn’t check if I could get out. I’ve been in there for hours,” Ricky said. “Have you seen any bugs? Have they gone?”

  Elijah had spent his life learning how to get the best out of a team, how to inspire individuals, and this was no different, he needed a different motivator.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Ricky.”

  “Ricky, I can tell you that the bugs have gone, for now, but when Doctor Perry comes back, he’s bringing them back with him, and their friends. There will be so many bugs, that unless we take out the doctor, those bugs are going to crawl under our skin and eat us from the inside. Do you think you can help? It’s Doctor Perry who brings the bugs into the Rose Haven, you ever see them anywhere else?”

  Transfixed by Elijah’s words, Ricky’s eyes were saucers. Elijah didn’t know if his words had made any difference to the kid, but it was worth a shot.

  And then Ricky nodded. “I’ll hide behind the door, you grab him, and then I’ll grab him before all the bugs get here.”

  “Perfect kid, now you get behind the door, and wait, and don’t say a word until I raise my hand like this,” and Elijah showed the boy what he meant.

  “A secret signal?”

  “Just like a secret signal. But be silent, you got that?”

  “Silent, like the bugs. I’m the king of the bugs. Silent, yup, got it,” and Ricky walked unsteadily over to the door and waited, picking at his arms.

  And then footsteps echoed down the stairwell, and Doctor Perry appeared, his doctor’s bag in one hand, his car keys in the other. He hesitated before striding over to his desk and placing his things down.

  “Mister Cone, I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” Doctor Perry said. “But you’re here, so we may as well chat. Your friend has been causing mayhem at the Rose Haven and it’s not good for the morale of the residents. You understand don’t you? She stole something from me, a long time ago now. People shouldn’t steal, it always comes back to haunt them.”

  Ricky looked ready to explode on the other side of the room, and Elijah tried placating him with subtle hand signals.

  “The procedure won’t take long, it’ll be over as fast as you took the lives of your passengers the night you drove drunk into a tree. You remember that night don’t you, Mister Cone?”

  Elijah ignored the barb. He’d heard much worse.

  Doctor Perry pottered about the chemical array in the centre the room, fiddling with the burets, and adjusting the heat of the flames under the beakers.

  “What’s all that for?” Elijah asked.

  “This? This is something I’ve been refining. Let’s call it a mood enhancer shall we? It’s had its difficulties but I’ve got it right now. It didn’t have the correct levels of the key ingredients but I’ve rectified that. Having access to the Rose Haven residents has been a boon to my research because you keep yourselves in tip top condition, not a single meth head among you. It has been wonderful, you’ve got no idea.” Doctor Perry rambled.

  “What are you going to do to Sulia?” Elijah asked.

  “Sulia? I will try her on my new tonic to see the reaction, I’ve been experimenting with the potency, There’ve been a few failures so I need to get it right before I move on, might not have another old folks home to, ah, aid me in my endeavours. I think I’ve got it right now but I will warn you, some patients experience a higher than normal level of pain.”

  At that, Elijah gave the signal, and Ricky launched himself at the doctor with a primal scream, his fists pummelling the doctor, with punch after punch after punch.

  Doctor Perry fell down, flailing at the unexpected assault, his arm
s by his face fending off the drug crazed madman attacking him. Elijah grabbed Doctor Perry’s arm, his concern for Sulia masking the pain threatening to bloom in his own hands.

  For the age he was, Doctor Perry gave a good fight, and at one point Elijah spied a handful of what looked like Ricky’s teeth on the linoleum. The meth would have made them fall out eventually, the doctor only hastened the event.

  And then Sulia materialised above the three men, her eyes now dark brown without the white contacts disguising their true colour. And in her hand she held one of Doctor Perry’s narrow necked flasks and a funnel. Sulia lowered her heavy bulk onto Doctor Perry’s prone body, rendering him immobile.

  “Hold his arms for me, Ricky,” she said.

  Like a puppy on speed, Ricky wrenched both the doctor’s arms above his head, pinning them down, and waited for his next instruction.

  “Remember me, Doctor Perry? Do I remind you of my Momma in Chicago? You tell me the truth now,” Sulia demanded.

  Doctor Perry’s eyes weren’t on the woman squashing the breath out of him, they were on the flask in her hand, the one from the end of the chemical process, containing the tonic he hadn’t tested. Through the transparent glass sides of the flask the tonic had a pinkish tinge.

  “Ricky is the best lab assistant ever, Doctor Perry. See that there? I helped make that, like yesterday’s batch, I added in some good stuff, the stuff the residents take. If you mix it all up, it’s better for everyone. Stops the bugs, no one needs the bugs in their lives,” Ricky played with Doctor Perry’s arms like a marionette doll.

  “Keep him still, Ricky, he will drink your super medicine now, and that will stop all the bugs, I promise,” said Sulia.

  Doctor Perry clamped his lips together, his head twisting from side to side.

  “Elijah, I’m gonna need you to hold his lying head still for me. He’s got a terrible thirst for revenge, and I’ve got just what he needs.”

  Elijah used his forearms to hold the doctor’s head in place, the four of them making the strangest tableau on the floor.

  Sulia pushed the funnel deep into Doctor Perry’s mouth, shoving it past the lips the doctor refused to open, and battering it through his teeth, until he lay there gagging.

  “Hold his nose, Elijah,” Sulia said.

  Elijah shuffled backwards to make sure he could hold the doctor’s head and clamp his nose at the same time. And although he had no expectations of what the liquid would do, the memory of Muriel’s eyeless corpse gave him the strength he needed to hold the trashing man as Sulia poured the entire contents of the flask into the funnel and down Doctor Perry’s throat.

  Doctor Perry’s body convulsed, once, twice, and was still. Elijah looked at Sulia.

  “Just wait, it’s coming. You can let him go now, he’ll be no more trouble,” she said.

  “No more bugs?” Ricky asked.

  “No more bugs, Ricky, but head on home now for a proper sleep, away from the mess. Elijah and I will clean it up, don’t want you getting into any trouble,” Sulia suggested.

  Ricky nodded and released the doctor’s arms. Ricky rescued his special pipe from the silver coffeepot, and then with the pipe in one hand and the plated coffeepot in the other, scarpered up the stairs. The woman was okay for an oldie.

  “Stand back, Elijah.”

  They both struggled to their feet, backing away from the body on the floor. They’d made it as far as the desk when Doctor Perry yelled out, his yelling turning into a gurgling choking sound as his tongue engorged and flopped backwards in his mouth which was changing shape the same way dough moves when it’s being kneaded.

  Doctor Perry’s legs shrank with incredible speed, the sound of his of femurs snapping under the pressure masked by his screams before his body went rigid and his teeth clamped down on the huge tongue in his mouth and bit it off cleanly.

  After that, Elijah looked away. The sounds were enough to let him know what was happening, he didn’t need to see. He watched Sulia’s face though and in front of his eyes, the stress of her past sloughed off her, relaxing every fibre of her body. She was still old, but contentment covered her like a cloak, softening her.

  The room fell silent and Sulia walked over to Doctor Perry, and she wrapped the newborn baby using the stole from around her neck, scooping him up in her arms.

  “This is what he’d been doing,” Sulia said, offering the infant to Elijah.

  Elijah wanted nothing to do with the creature in Sulia’s arms, it was unnatural and sickening. He shook his head.

  “I’ll take him upstairs and figure out what to do. I wonder if he’ll remember any of this, I hope not, don’t want to think I’ve spent my entire life tracking him down for what he did to my Momma, just to let him grow up and do it all over again.” Sulia walked up the stairs, cooing to the baby boy.

  Elijah sat in shock in the lab, in denial about what he’d seen. He’d have to go upstairs to Pauline, to tell her everything was okay, unless you were Muriel Lincoln, or Johnny Paulson, or whoever else the doctor had used for parts or in his experiments. He wouldn’t open any of more of the freezer drawers, he’d leave that to the police.

  Pushing off from the desk, the familiar pain back in his hands, and there in the middle of the chemical array was an identical flask to the one Sulia had tipped down Doctor Perry’s throat. Just a sip couldn’t hurt him. Elijah picked up the flask by its narrow neck, he had nothing to lose so took a small sip and waited, he almost took a second sip, the flask was at his lips when he felt the tonic kick in. And it was wonderful.

  59

  Gary Pemberton and Tony Street pulled up outside the Perry house. Today had been another wild goose chase, with the good doctor missing. His office looked abandoned, and he hadn’t made it into the Rose Haven yet, so the house in Heming Way was their final port of call.

  Walking up to the front door, Gary rang the bell and waited, sending Tony round the back, just in case.

  He rang the bell a second time, nothing and had his finger poised for a third ring when the door opened. Instead of Myra Perry, or the Doctor, or the twins, Tony stood there, shrugging, with a baby in his arms.

  “What the hell, Tony?”

  “No idea, ask the boys, found them in the kitchen with a baby bottle warming in a pot on the stove. They haven’t seen Myra since last night, or Doctor Perry since yesterday morning.”

  A shiver ran down Gary’s spine. Myra hadn’t seemed like the type of woman who would readily abandon the children she cared for. Based on his experience, a mother going missing like that was bad news, for the mother.

  “You ring Social Services and ask for advice, I’ll have a quick search,” Gary said.

  Tony disappeared inside with the baby. Tony had his own kids, he knew how to handle them, Gary didn’t.

  He checked upstairs and nothing looked out of place, the rooms downstairs were clean and tidy. There were dishes on the countertop but with the boys fending for themselves overnight that was to be expected. The bottle was still warming on the stove but Tony seemed to have everything under control there. The twins watched him from the breakfast bar with their peculiarly matched sets of eyes.

  Which left the garage, and it was with a heavy heart that Gary opened the door from the hall to the garage and flicked on the lights and stepped down onto the concrete. He’d taken only two steps when there was a crunching underfoot. Bending to have a closer look, he instantly knew what was on the floor and they weren’t a collection of white pebbles, they were teeth - human teeth. The biggest question now was where were the Perry’s?

  The twins sat in the back of Gary’s undercover police car, schoolbags on their laps, and stared out the window. They were being driven to the KID Palm Beach County Campus, an orphanage, with Myra in a baby capsule strapped between them.

  They’d told the policemen that the baby’s name was Arabella, the name of their favourite teacher, and the policemen had believed them. Jesse and James weren’t entirely sure what would happen at the orphanage, bu
t they’d come prepared with the last bottle of magic milk from the refrigerator, and their pocket knife. Whatever happened, they’d have fun, they always did.

  Cast of Characters

  ROSE HAVEN RESIDENTS

  Elijah Cone - resident

  Sulia Patel - resident

  Muriel Lincoln - resident

  Ryman Spittle - resident

  Nancy Brood - resident

  Jennifer Withers - resident

  Polish Rob - resident

  Francis Merriweather - resident

  Eileen Hislop - resident

  Ginger Bruce - resident

  John Burrows - resident

  ROSE HAVEN STAFF

  Tracey Chappell - manager

  Benson - weekend orderly

  Ricky Donovan - orderly

  Bart Stubbs/Smokey - orderly

  Preston Sergeant - orderly

  Pedro Garcia - orderly

  Tala - head nurse

  Jules - Yoga instructor

  Pauline Kerrigan - chef

  Cherie - receptionist

  DOCTOR PERRY’S CLINIC

  Lily - receptionist

  Molly - receptionist

  Don Jury - patient

  Sarah Miller - patient

  Clarita Swann - patient

  OTHER

  Mary Louise Jackson - jogger

  Myra Perry - Doctor Perry’s wife

  Trivelle Grifin - principal of elementary school

  Tom Williams - antique dealer

  Nate Blackwell - second hand trader

  Jesse and James - twins

  POLICE

  Clive Jeffries - lead detective

  Gary Pemberton - police detective

  Tony Street - police detective

  Emily Jesmond - police officer

  Burton - police officer

  Michelle - police officer

  KID Palm Beach County Campus*

  *This is a real orphanage in Florida. Please consider supporting them by going to their website to make a donation. Every little bit helps with their aims of the prevention of child abuse, the preservation of the family, and the treatment of abused and neglected children.