He eased open the door even as the figure crouched over his mother was mucking about with her bare torso, taking something from her, sliding some spidery thing that struggled and screamed soundlessly out of her side and into his leathery dark bag. Sam cried out and the night doctor turned his head slightly to look at him with those cold pale eyes, those wet globes glistening yellow from the dim light in the hall, and that oh so elongated face which made no sense, the lower bit coming down into a kind of open snout, the upper half curved into a kind of bony blade. Before Sam could say anything else the night doctor had slid off the bed and through the window into the night and wind with a flap flap flap and a drawn-out sigh.
For days she seemed better, and Sam had begun to think the creature had simply removed the thing that had done her harm. And then his mother took a turn for the worse. And then she was gone.
And next he woke up an old man again, in the bedroom he shared with the wife who took care of him now, who’d been taking care of him since the first day they’d met back in college. The bed stand was covered with his pills, or hers, he couldn’t really tell anymore. He could barely remember the names of the pills. Not because he couldn’t, but because he didn’t want to be that interested.
“Sam, you scared me half to death.”
He shifted his head around and saw Elaine’s grey face there floating within the darkened chair, propped up by a pillow under the back of her head. The rest of the room was so deeply in shadow he wondered if his eyes were going, then saw the dark in the window and realised it was night. The window was open, the curtains stirring, beginning to flap. He held his breath and twisted his head, trying to examine the room. Things stirred there beyond his ability to actually see them, and he tried to blame it on the wind and his anxiety. “How long have you been sitting there?” he asked, trying not to search the room anymore.
“A few hours. You missed dinner. Do you want something?”
“I don’t know.” Was he hungry? He made himself sit up in bed. His right leg hurt—he recognised the feeling. He must have been asleep for a while, his right leg pinched beneath his left. “I really missed dinner?”
“It’s been about six hours. I decided to let you sleep. Sam, do you remember anything? I thought you’d had a heart attack at first, the way you just collapsed, like you’d been hit on top of the head or something.”
“I just…just had a moment I guess. What, did I black out? How did you get me home?”
“That couple came by, the one we ran into earlier? The Hernandezes. You don’t remember? Apparently they live only three houses down. He ran back to their house and pulled his car around, they helped you into the seat, and after we got here he helped me get you into bed. I kept wanting to call the doctor but you insisted you were okay, that you just needed to rest, but that you didn’t want to fall asleep.”
Sam did remember some of this, but it was like an imperfectly recalled dream. He couldn’t explain the lapse, which was disturbing. But he’d been distracted, hadn’t he? It seemed he hadn’t thought about his mother’s death in years. “But you still let me sleep?”
“I couldn’t keep you awake if I tried! You were so tired you could barely lift your head.”
So he had slept. He couldn’t stop himself from searching the room with his eyes again, straining himself, his chest beginning to hurt. He was being a whiny thing. He was going to make himself sick. It would be an open invitation for the doctor to slip in and meddle with his insides. He made himself stop, even though promising details were resolving out of the dark as his eyes adjusted.
“Sounds pretty embarrassing. I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me.” Maybe he was better, maybe the doctor had already done his work. He could only hope it didn’t cost him too dearly. “Did they, the Hernandezes, did they say anything?”
“Just how concerned they were. Janet and Felix. I told Felix you take blood pressure medication and he wondered if the dosage might be wrong. I’ll call Doctor Castro tomorrow and tell him what happened.”
You don’t know what happened, he thought, but left it unsaid. “Of course. But this is all backwards. You should be the one resting. I’m putting all this extra stress on you.” He glanced at the sea of medicines on her side of the bed. There were new bottles, he thought, the ones from today.
“I’m fine. We’re not our illnesses, Sam. That’s what you always say, remember? We’re much more than that.”
He couldn’t quite interpret her tone. Had there been resentment in the way she’d quoted him? “I could use a ham sandwich, I think,” he said.
“Fine.” She got up and started toward the door, then stopped, smiled. “And if you’re better tomorrow, I’ve invited them over for dinner.”
“What?”
“Janet and Felix. The Hernandezes. They’ll be our first dinner guests.”
After she closed the door behind her he glanced at the shadowed incomprehensibility of the room and rolled over, turned his back to it. He’d allow himself to be healed or taken, and at the moment he wasn’t sure he cared which. He waited a long time, but nothing occurred.
He did feel better when he woke up the next day, although tired and a bit on edge. The room felt empty, however. He could hear Elaine in the next room running the vacuum cleaner. When the noise stopped he heard her singing. It had been a while since he’d heard her singing. He smelled disinfectant, furniture polish. He glanced around—all their medicine bottles were gone.
“Elaine!”
She came running, out of breath. She grabbed the footboard and leaned over. “Are you…okay?” She wheezed, paused, then asked more steadily, “are you still ill?”
“No, no, I’m fine. You shouldn’t have run, honey. Where are all the medicines?”
“The Hernandezes may want to see the house, and it hasn’t had a really good cleaning yet.”
“But the medicines?”
“I put the over the counter stuff in our respective bathroom cabinets, depending on who uses what the most. The prescriptions, and the supplements—since we don’t take the same—are in a box in each bathroom closet. But I took out a week’s worth of dosages and put them into two of those weekly pill organisers—his and hers. I even split the ones that needed it into quarters and halves.”
“But why? Do you want them to believe we’re the super healthy older couple or something?”
“No, but I don’t want them to think the opposite, either. And it was just too much—I started to realise that as I tidied up. It needed to be handled—we’re both lucky we didn’t grab the wrong pills one day, or even overdose. It looked—I don’t know—it didn’t make us look like sick people so much as crazy people.”
In the bathroom Sam found the pill dispenser (blue, hers was probably pink) and took his daily dose. He pulled off his T-shirt and examined his pale torso. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, some kind of markings. Cuts or worn places, incisions or maybe even bite or chew marks. There was nothing definitive, but when had he gotten so pale? He looked almost slug-like in parts.
Elaine cleaned well into the afternoon, then she started cooking. Sam didn’t like the dark half-moons under her eyes. He stepped in with the cleaning, although he suspected he didn’t do it well, scrubbing obsessively in some areas and neglecting others. Before dinner he did a final sweep, jammed some random flowers from the back yard into a vase, and set the table. By this point he desperately didn’t want to interact with anyone new, but he understood they were fully committed now.