The Consultant (36 page)

From behind him came a terrible high-pitched giggle.  

The dwarf.
 

Dylan ran faster, tears blurring his vision. He managed not to cry out, though he could feel a scream of pure terror building in his chest. He kept running straight, not turning down any of the offshoot passageways because the bathroom had been along the same corridor as his dad’s office. He was afraid that he was running in the wrong direction when he saw the widened section of hallway where his dad’s office was located. It was farther away from the bathroom than it should have been, but he recognized it, and it looked regular.  

Mrs. Adams was sitting in her chair, grinning at him. “Better hide,” she said. “He’s coming.”  

Sobbing, Dylan ran through the doorway into his dad’s office, where all was as it should have been. He closed and locked the door.  

The lights went out.  

“
Daddy
!” he screamed, afraid to move.  

From beneath the door came the flickering light of a torch.  

“
Daddy
!”  

The doorknob rattled.  

And his dad stepped into the office.  

The lights were on again, and he could see through the open doorway that that weird castle-like place with the torches was gone. Everything was back to normal.  

Dylan hugged his dad, crying.  

“What is it, little buddy? What’s wrong?”  

“I had to go to the bathroom…and everything was dark…and there were torches…and I got lost…and a dwarf was playing hideand-go-seek with me…and…” He didn’t know how to explain everything so that it made sense, but even though his dad couldn’t really understand what had happened, he seemed to
believe
it, and Dylan felt so grateful that it made him cry even harder.  

His dad held him tightly. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here. I’m here…”  

**** 

Angie could feel the tension in the Urgent Care as she signed in. Outwardly, it was a typical weekday: the waiting room full, overwhelmed nurses hurrying from exam room to exam room, doctors pausing between patients only long enough to log reports. But there was…something
else
this morning, an uncomfortable feeling in the air, a sense that medical treatment was not the only thing happening here.  

She initially put it down to the presence of Patoff but was surprised to learn that he wasn’t here today. There
was
a consultant from BFG on the premises, but no one had seen him since opening, and from what Hannah, one of the full-time weekday nurses, said, they should all be grateful for that. Angie found it hard to believe that he could be creepier than Patoff, but when she turned around seconds later and came face-to-face with the man, she let out a small involuntary cry and immediately changed her mind. With a shaved head, a gold hoop earring and a scar on his right cheek, he looked more like a criminal than a consultant. The man smiled at her, and she saw that his teeth had been filed down until they were the size of a child’s.  

“Terence,” he said, introducing himself, and his voice was as rough as his appearance. “I’ll be observing today and making notes for Mr. Patoff.”  

Angie nodded an acknowledgment, and he pushed past her into the office.  

“Told you,” Hannah whispered.  

Like the other nurses, Angie attempted to stay out of the consultant’s way, which was easy because he popped up only periodically, disappearing throughout the latter half of the morning for long stretches of time. His presence could be felt, however, whether he was there or not, and everyone acted as though they were tiptoeing through a minefield.  

Weekday staff was different than the weekend staff, and Angie knew only two of the nurses and one of the doctors. Ordinarily, that would not have been a problem, but by the fifth patient in, she began to have the distinct impression that her presence here was not entirely welcome. She’d been called in because the Urgent Care was understaffed, yet the doctors and nurses with whom she interacted treated her like an unwelcome intruder. Even Hannah, who had seemed so helpful and accommodating at the beginning, was now formal and distant in their brief interactions.  

Handed a chart at the front desk, Angie opened the door to the waiting room. “Frank Rocha,” she announced. “Frank Rocha?”  

A mild-looking middle-aged man stood up from one of the far seats and walked over.  

Angie held open the door for him. “How are you doing today?” she asked as she took him to the scale at the end of the hallway  

“I’d be better if I wasn’t here.”  

She chuckled, marking down his weight. “We’ll try to have you out as soon as possible.” Leading him into exam room three and closing the door behind her, she motioned for him to sit down on the exam table as she checked his chart. “Sore throat, huh? Well, let me take your temperature and get your blood pressure, Mr. Rocha, and then we’ll get the doctor to come in and see you.”  

“
I
don’t have a sore throat,” the man said. “
You’re
going to have a sore throat after you suck my cock.”  

That was a rude and completely inappropriate joke, and she was about to tell him so when she saw that he was unbuckling his pants. He
wasn’t
joking.  

Angie immediately placed the digital thermometer back in its sheath and walked out of the exam room, her pulse racing. She needed to report this, and she walked up the hall toward admissions, looking for Hannah. The door to exam room one was open, and she glanced in as she passed by, seeing one of the doctors standing in front of the elderly woman whose vitals she had taken only moments before.  

“She was rude to me, doctor. She treated me like I…” The patient’s voice fell silent as she saw Angie passing by.  

Were they talking about me?
she wondered.  

Hannah wasn’t at the front counter, so Angie told the nurse there what had happened. Hannah was paged, but before she arrived, Angie saw the man—Frank Rocha—pass by the admissions desk and walk through the waiting room toward the exit. She considered stopping him, but at this point the best strategy was probably just to let him leave. The head nurse arrived seconds later, and Angie explained what had happened.  

“Do you want to file a report?” Hannah asked.  

Angie shook her head. “No.”  

“Good. Get back to work.”  

Her rhythm was off after that. It was as though she were returning to nursing after an extended absence and was not quite up on current procedures. Everything she did took longer than it should have, and she found herself overthinking what usually came naturally.  

Her first patient after a short lunch was a grotesquely overweight man with an upturned piggish nose who had come in after experiencing anal bleeding. She checked his signs, then gave him a gown and waited outside while he put it on. It seemed to take him an extraordinarily long time to change, and after nearly ten minutes, she rapped lightly on the door. “Mr. Mouzon? Are you ready for me to come in?”  

There was some sort of response, but she couldn’t make out what it was, so she opened the door a hair. “Mr. Mouzon?”  

She could hear the man crawling around the small exam room, his bare feet and the palms of his hands slapping the floor as he grunted like an animal.  

One of the doctors came up behind her, taking the chart from her hands. “Is the patient ready?”  

“Yes,” she said, hoping that this time she would have a witness.  

The doctor opened the door, and Angie followed him in. The patient was sitting on the exam table, and she could hear the rustling of sanitary paper as he shifted in his seat to look innocently over at them. “Hello, doctor,” he said. “Nurse.”  

Angie stared at the man, saw the dust on his hands from the floor. It occurred to her that she was being set up, that these patients were plants, sent to the Urgent Care by BFG to test her.  

But why? It made no sense.  

Although that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.  

Odd incidents continued to plague her throughout the day, and by late afternoon, her nerves were jittery and pretty well fried. She had never been so stressed out by a day of work, and when a delivery of bandages arrived shortly after three and she was asked to unpack the cartons and restock the supply closet instead of bringing in a pale, frighteningly severe woman from the waiting room, she was grateful for the respite.  

Emerging from the supply closet, Angie found the entire staff waiting for her in the hallway. No, not the entire staff. Hannah wasn’t there. Neither was anyone else she recognized. The people standing before her were all unfamiliar, and she thought that maybe the consultants had rigged this entire day as a test for her, that she had been called in to face fake patients and fake nurses and fake doctors in order to…  

No, that was just being paranoid.  

One of the doctors she hadn’t yet worked with—
Dr. Benjamin
, according to his nametag—stepped forward. “You’ve had a great first day,” he said, and it sounded as though he were reading from a script. “We’d like to take you out to celebrate.”  

She put down the empty boxes she’d been planning to take out to the dumpster. “We still have patients to—”  

“There are no more patients.”  

Indeed, she saw now, all of the exam room doors were open, as was the door to the waiting room. There were no patients to be seen. How was that possible? She glanced up at the clock above the front desk. It was six-ten!  

That couldn’t be.  

“You’ve had a stellar first day,” the doctor said.  

“This
isn’t
my first day,” she told him. “I work here every weekend. Before my son was born, I worked full-time at St. Jude’s. I’ve been a nurse for over twelve years.” She wasn’t sure why she felt the need to justify herself, but she did.  

She realized that there was no sign of the consultant, that she hadn’t seen him all afternoon. “Where’s…Terence?” she asked.  

“He’s gone.”  

The doctor was speaking slowly and evenly, as though to calm down an emotionally disturbed patient. The entire staff, she saw, was looking at her as though they were planning to commit her to a mental institution.  

“Come with us to celebrate.”  

She was suddenly filled with a terrible apprehension, a premonition that they were
not
going to take her out to celebrate.  

“I’m leaving,” Angie said, and strode quickly down the hall, through the open doorway into the waiting room, and outside. She didn’t bother to sign out, didn’t look back, and as soon as she hit the parking lot, she dashed around the rear of the building to where she’d left her car. She expected to be followed from the front, expected to see doctors and nurses streaming out the employees’ entrance in the back, but she made it into her car unmolested and after fumbling for several seconds with her key like the protagonist in a bad horror movie, she got the car started and took off. Her heart was hammering crazily in her chest, and she didn’t feel safe until she was several miles away in the heart of traffic.  

What the hell was that?
 

She had no idea, but there was no way she was going to let it happen again. Maybe she
was
being paranoid, but she was filled with the certainty that if she had not gotten out when she did, something bad would have happened to her.  

She thought of Dylan and Craig, and decided that she wasn’t going back to the Urgent Care. Ever. This wasn’t a career, it was a job. A part-time one at that. She received no benefits, was not dependent on the Urgent Care for anything but extra money, and she knew that, with her experience, if she quit, she could easily get a job somewhere else. Nurses were always in demand.  

The decision was made as quickly as that, and the second she knew that she was quitting, Angie felt relieved, lighter, more at ease. She hadn’t realized until that moment how stressful her job had become, how much she had begun to dread it, and the freedom was wonderful.  

She’d email her notice tomorrow.  

Craig and Dylan were waiting for her at home, with Chinese takeout from Pick Up Stix, and she was so happy to see them both, that she gave each of them a huge, hard hug, Dylan first, then Craig.  

Craig chuckled. “What’s that for?”  

“I quit my job.”  

“What?”  

She looked at Dylan. “Go into your room for a few minutes, okay? I need to talk to Daddy.”  

“But the food’s getting cold! We’ve already been waiting!”  

“It’ll just be a minute. I’ll call you when we’re done, okay?”  

“Okay,” he said reluctantly.  

She waited until he was gone and she heard him moving around in his room at the other end of the house before explaining to Craig what had happened. “It was after six o’clock when I came out,” she said. “Six o’clock! There are three missing hours there!”  

He nodded grimly.  

“You need to quit, too,” she said.  

“I can’t,” Craig told her.  

“You know how when you see a movie with people living in a haunted house, you always say they should get out, that they’re stupid if they stay? That’s us. Here. Now. Our jobs are the haunted house, and we need to get out.”  

“You already did. But I can’t. Not yet. Not until I have another job lined up. This isn’t a movie, it’s real life, and we have bills to pay. There’s no way we can make the payments on this house with what we’d get from Unemployment. And what about insurance? There are practical considerations.”  

“Then we sell the house.”  

He was getting frustrated. “It’s not that simple! First of all, neither of us wants to sell the house, do we? And what would we do? Have a garage sale, sell everything and move into some crappy apartment? What if no one wants to buy the place? What if we
can’t
sell it? Huh? We need to just calm down…”  

“Those consultants are dangerous. And scary. People are dying and disappearing and—”  

“I know,” he told her.  

“Well?”  

He sighed. “I can wait them out. I just need to…keep a low profile, stay out of the line of fire until it’s over.”