Chapter Eleven
Tuesday
As promised, Dr. Rook had delivered Patient Seventeen’s file to my office. I stayed up all night, hunched over my desk, poring over it. There wasn’t much to it. No photo. No birthdate. No previous medical records from his life outside. No medication lists. It had been scrubbed.
I’d hoped the file would give me at least a few pieces of the puzzle. Just like everything else in this cesspit of a hospital, it only stirred up more questions.
What was Rook trying to hide?
I sat back in my chair with a wince. The injection site ached. There was no telling what exactly he’d put into my body. If my hallucinations didn’t vanish like promised, then the dreams of Patient Seventeen would continue.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
At least meeting up with the real Patient Seventeen would snuff out that voice in my head telling me that the man in my dreams and the man in the black file were one and the same.
“Are you ready for him?”
I nearly fell out of my chair, the woman’s voice taking me by surprise. “Oh, Jesus, fuck—” The black file dropped from my hand, papers scattering. My attention jerked to find the head nurse in front of my desk.
Where had she come from? I hadn’t heard or seen her enter.
Nurse Beatrice’s lips flattened with disapproval. “This may no longer be a church, Dr. Beckett, but the Lord can still hear your foul mouth. Even here.”
My mouth opened to fire off a rebuttal that would have her Lord really pissed off, but the words crystallized in my throat. As the nurse hunched over to gather the papers, her sleeve rode up to reveal green veins.
They weren’t as visible as Fredrick’s veins, and they appeared to cover a smaller portion of Beatrice’s body.
“Nurse, how long have you had that kind of coloration to your veins?”
The nurse straightened with an offended huff. “Since I took the Treatment, doctor. It's a common side effect of the drug. They’ll likely start to appear on you too once you take your second shot.”
“Dr. Rook didn’t mention anything about a second injection.”
“Two total injections will be made over the course of your first month or two here. You won’t get the full effect until then.”
My mouth opened and closed. Rage throbbed in my throat, making it impossible to speak. Rook hadn’t said a damn thing about another shot. And that wasn’t by accident. He knew I would have said no—I should have said no.
I wasn’t in my right mind. I hadn’t been since Lauren’s death. The shot wasn’t right as well. All the employees here took it, and they seemed…off. Especially Fredrick. “The pharmacist… Do you know if he had those mutations before he came to work here?”
“I don’t remember.”
My eyes narrowed. The nurse’s tone suggested she was lying.
Something about the staff here didn’t sit right. The building was old. Could be lead paint, or the mysterious drug Dr. Rook injected into his staff. Or the toll of managing a mental health hospital that seemed perpetually stuck in the twentieth century. Or a bit of all three.
“Never mind. Just bring me Patient Seventeen.”
Nurse Beatrice looked me up and down, her lips curling as she took in my ensemble. A gray houndstooth pencil skirt and a close-fitting white turtle-neck sweater. “Perhaps the doctor would like to change first.”
The silent judgment etched into the lines of her face had me shooting her a less-than-friendly look. “Perhaps not. There’s nothing wrong with what I am wearing. My skirt is knee-length, and I can’t help that I have big tits. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“You’re not even wearing stockings.”
“Well, outside of the walls of Saint Bartholomew’s, it’s not the 1960s anymore. This is perfectly professional attire. Now, please have Ward Four orderlies bring me my patient, Nurse.”
Beatrice huffed at my terseness and left my office with the click of her heels fading down the hallway.
I sighed with frustration and pushed out of my chair to pace around the large chair bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Soon, Patient Seventeen would be seated there. A cannibal. A murderer. That was all I knew about him. How fucked was that?
“I’m going crazy, Joanie,” I muttered to the potted cactus on my desk.
“I allowed Rook to inject me with who-knows-what in exchange for providing care to a cannibal. Not because I think I’m up to the task of treating him, but because I want to convince myself that this patient and the man in my brain are not one and the same. ”
With a pause, I pivoted to face the plant with sobering realization. “Because I can’t shake the voice in my head telling me that this isn’t some crazy coincidence or a trick of the drugs. I feel like I know this man.”
My attention shifted to the open black folder on my desk. He didn’t even have a birthdate or a last name. How could I feel this way about a dangerous inmate? Of all my pills’ side effects, there was no way that an inexplicable connection to a cannibal I’d never met was one of them.
A noise had me turning toward my door, thinking that the orderlies were here with my patient.
Instead, Lauren sat in the big metal chair at the center of my office, her large doe eyes locking with mine.
My stomach sank.
I was hopeful that I’d seen the last of Lauren once Rook told me the Treatment would make the hallucinations go away. But I hadn’t taken the other shot yet.
Instinctively, I reached for the pill bottle in my drawer.
Fuck me. Empty.
I’d have to have Fredrick refill them, and there was no way in hell I was going down to the basement alone. Not after what he said when he thought I was asleep. I’d have to get a nurse to do it for me later.
“Dr. Beckett—” Lauren’s waifish plea had a fist of anxiety clenching my heart.
“Leave me alone!” Unable to stand the ghost of my past for a second longer, I hurled the empty prescription bottle at her. It passed through her chest and bounced off the chair seat.
That’s when the door opened, and an orderly appeared in my doorway. “Dr. Beckett. We have Patient Seventeen prepped and ready for you.”
He held the door open, allowing another staff member to push what appeared to be a human hand truck.
Strapped to it was a tall man with a sack over his head.
He wasn’t merely tied to the cart by leather belts, but the straitjacket he wore forced his arms into a pretzel over his chest, and he was encased in several yards of chain.
“Is all this really necessary?”
“Dr. Rook’s orders. He’s dangerous. One moment, he’s completely lucid and can hold thoughtful conversations. The next, he sees demons and monsters and becomes violent and hungry. If he perceives you as a demon—”
“He’ll bust through the chain and eat me?”
“Exactly.”
His sobering response took me aback. I’d been joking. I wasn’t entirely sure the orderly wasn’t.
“Right, uh, well, just put him in the chair.”
The orderlies both glanced at the chair with my hallucination of Lauren still seated quietly on the chair’s thick padding.
The two men swapped a confused look before one of them cleared their throat.
“Looks like you’re currently busy with a patient.
Shall we have her removed or come back when your session is finished? ”