The Body In The Well Beside Me--Ep. 5

 Kwei--Wed

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Chapter five

After running down five flights of stairs, I exited Happenstance Hospital through a side door that opened onto a parking lot. If followed its perimeter, I would arrive at the front of the building. But I stopped where I was and viewed the hospital entrance from a distance, hoping to catch sight of Dr. Muscat. 

I practically jumped out of my skin as something vibrated against my thigh. Jesus. It was the phone. The screen had lit up and was showing a number with an area code I’d never seen. I put the phone to my ear but heard nothing. I looked at the face of the phone again and thought, maybe I have to turn it on first? I stabbed some of the illuminated buttons,  and after a moment, I heard a voice say hello from the phone’s small speaker. 

    “Yes?” I said hesitantly as I brought the phone back to my ear.

    “It’s Aaron--Dr. Muscat. Where are you now? Are you safe?”

    “Yes. I’m where all the cars are parked--kind of like the side of the building.”

    “Okay, I can’t come down right now,” Muscat said, "because the detective doesn’t want me to leave. You’ll need a place to stay for tonight. There’s no point getting in touch with Percival now--it’s too late.”

    “Where should I go?”

    “Look to your left along the main road. You see the red, lit-up letters, ‘Motel’?

    I turned to my left. “Yes, I do.”

    “I’ve reserved a room there for you to stay tonight. In the morning, call Percival to set up an appointment with him as soon as possible. It’s important you use the exact words, ‘Muscat sent me,’ as soon as someone answers the phone. He might pick up the call, but more likely, it will be his wife.”

    “Okay, Doc.”

    “By the way, I’ve pinned some cash into the left back pocket of your scrubs."

     I checked. It was small, flat envelope. "I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me, Doctor,” I said. Muscat could be in danger of being accused of aiding and abetting the escape of a suspect.

    “Not a problem,” he said. "Good luck.”

                                                                  ***

Ferguson had joined Muscat in the TV lounge, and just as the psychiatrist began explaining his broad findings concerning Mr. Price when the hospital PA system went off, “CODE YELLOW--5B, CODE YELLOW 5-B.” 

    Ferguson frowned. “That means 'patient missing,' right?”

    Muscat nodded and stood up. “And it’s from this ward.”

    Ferguson on his heels, Muscat went to the nurses’ station. “Who’s missing?”

    “Male patient,” the charge nurse said. “Name’s Marcus Price.”

    “Marcus has disappeared?” Muscat asked in feigned astonishment. “But I saw him just a little while ago!"

    “What?” Ferguson thundered at the charge nurse. “Disappeared where, how? How do you let something like that happen?”

    The charge nurse knew Ferguson. “I’m sorry, Detective,” she said. “Unfortunately we’re a brand new shift and Mr. Price’s room was empty when we went in to give him his medication. So he had to have left sometime during the previous shift.”

    “And no one saw anything?” Ferguson said in disbelief. “I need to speak to every nurse on that shift.”

    “What, now?” 

    “Yes, now, please." 

   “What’s going on?” the charge nurse asked.

    “Marcus Price is now a suspect in a murder case,” Ferguson replied.

      The nursing staff gasped in unison. 

     “He’s not in a bathroom somewhere?” Muscat said. 

    “We’ve looked everywhere,” the charge nurse replied.

    Ferguson was on the phone asking Dispatch to send a couple of patrol units to case the area around the hospital. “Hopefully he hasn’t gotten far,” he muttered as he hung up. He turned to Muscat. “When I saw you as I was coming out of the elevator, had you just finished seeing Mr. Price in his room?”

    Muscat nodded. “Yes. I thought he was doing well from the psychiatric perspective.”

    Ferguson gave him a one-sided, crafty smile. “You didn’t happen to discharge him from the hospital or anything like that, did you, Doctor?”

    Muscat regarded the detective with a neutral expression. “I couldn’t do that even if I’d wanted to. I’m a consultant physician on the case. Only the primary or the hospitalist physician is allowed to discharge a patient.”

    “I see,”  Ferguson said, but Muscat could detect the tiniest ember of doubt glowing in the detective's eyes. 

    “The man you were with,” Ferguson continued. “That was who? Another doctor?”

    “Oh, yes,” Muscat said. “He’s an extern from another institution rotating through our Psychiatry department.”

    “Okay,” Ferguson said tentatively. “Just that he had the same kind of build and skin color as Mr. Price.” 

    “Not really,” Muscat said lightly. “Side by side, the men appear quite unlike each other."

      “Uh-huh,” Ferguson said dully. “And you and this, um, extern had both just been in to see Mr. Price?”

      “Yes.”

      “How long was the visit?"    

       “We didn’t stay more than about fifteen minutes.”

        “Did he say anything to you? Did he talk about any plans to run away?”

       “No.”

        “Anything in particular you discussed?” Ferguson asked.

        Muscat’s stony stare was the only response.

        “Doctor-patient relationship,” Ferguson conceded. “Okay. Forget I asked.”

        “Will you be needing anything else, Detective?”

        “That should be it. If need you, I’ll give you a call.”

                                                                 ***

In the morning, I called Percival Sellers. A woman answered, and I presumed it was Mrs. Sellers, as Muscat had suggested. 

        “Mr. Sellers isn’t taking any new consultations,” she said in a flat, raspy voice. “Goodbye."

        “Muscat sent me,” I said hurriedly.

        Long pause. “All right, but you must come immediately before Mr. Sellers takes his mid-morning nap. Otherwise you’ll need to make another appointment.”

        She hung up.

        I hailed a taxi. As we drove through the town, I stared at cars I’d never seen before. We reached the outskirts of Happenstance where the landscape became progressively less populated the farther we went. After a while, the taxi slowed down to make a right onto a dirt road nearly swamped by vegetation. Before long, the road narrowed to a path.

        The driver stopped. “Sorry, I don’t think I can go beyond this point,” he said. “The car’s gonna get snarled in all this bush.”

        “Oh,” I said. “But is this the right place?”

        The driver shrugged. “That’s what the GPS says.”

        “The what?”

        “Sir, you gonna get down here, or not?”

         “I’ll get down,” I said hurriedly.

          I walked along the path for about five minutes until a house appeared in a clearing. Is this the place? The olive-green house was oddly shaped such that if you stared at it for a little while, the perspective seemed to change, like one of those drawings where you can see two different alternative images. I walked up to the solid cherry-wood door and pressed the bell beside it. 

        After a moment, Mrs. Sellers’s voice of came out of nowhere. “Who is it?”

        I looked around for a loudspeaker somewhere, but didn’t spot one. “Marcus,” I stammered. "Marcus Price. We spoke on--“

        There was a loud buzz and I pushed the door open to find myself in a gloomy foyer. A gray-haired woman appeared. 

        “Mrs. Sellers?” I asked tentatively.

        “Yes. Come this way,” she said, without ceremony.

        I followed her through a hall full of odd, gargoyle-like statues. What the hell is this? I thought, with a shiver.

        When we had passed out of the hall into a considerably nicer, sunlit living room, Mrs. Sellers said, “Wait here, please.”

        She went into another room through a door in one corner, emerging a few moments later. “He can see you now,” she said, holding open the door.

        “Thank you, Ma’am,” I said.

        I entered, and the door shut behind me. My jaw dropped. The musty room was packed with chaotic piles of books, papers, folders, magazines, boxes, newspapers, and pieces of old furniture. The only living being I saw was an orange cat sitting on a stack of books. It eyed me with detached interest.

        “Mr. Sellers?” I called out. “Are you here?”

        There was no reply, but soon, I heard the shuffling of feet and a man materialized. “Are you Mr. Price?” he asked.

        “Yes,” I said, swallowing hard at his appearance. Percival Sellers was an old, unkempt man with black, piercing eyes and a shaggy, gray beard. His ragged hair spilled onto his deeply furrowed face like a tangled web of dry, desert brush. I shuddered. My impulse was to get the hell out of there.

        “Come this way,” he said.

        As I followed Sellers's bowed, craggy figure, I wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into. I didn’t have a good feeling about it.

*Image: Laura Kneedler, Shutterstock

                                                                         ~~~ 

        

    

       

    

                                      

                                  

 

  

Hotel...

The Body In The Well Beside Me--Part Four

Kwei--Wednesday

Chapter 4

(Shutterstock)

 

After I cracked my head falling into the well, I suffered what the neurosurgeons told me was a subdural hematoma. They had taken me to the operating room and successfully evacuated the blood. So, I was fine except a couple issues: first, my gait was off balance, although the neurologist wasn’t completely certain why; second, and this was perhaps the most troublesome—there was a glaring discrepancy in my “cognition,” as they termed it. I thought the year was 1980, but it was really 2022. Both my arms were sore from being jabbed every day, sometimes several times a day, as the doctors ran so many blood tests on me without finding anything to explain the incongruity.

 

Working on getting my balance back was only a matter of physical therapy twice a day in the hospital. That problem was resolving and they thought they might be able to discharge me in a few days. It was my psychological state that was more of a challenge and that had everyone scratching their heads over. Dr. Muscat wasn’t the only psychiatrist who had arrived to examine me. Three others came in to render a second, third, and fourth opinion, and all of them left with puzzled looks on their faces. As for me, I had slowly become less mystified about my situation than they were. I’m a logical kind of guy, and logic told me that I had traveled forward in time from 1980 to 2022—as simple as that. Of course, it wasn’t that simple at all. No one had ever documented time travel in the real world. It was the stuff of fiction. 

 

That I had come from a different era was clear from all the amazing inventions I’d never seen before. The “telephone” practically everyone was using was really a kind of tiny “computer,” I guess, called a cellular or mobile telephone. It could perform tasks other than just send and receive calls—like taking photos, showing movies, and playing games. Dr. Muscat, the psychiatrist, told me that one cellular telephone could store a thousandfold more information than the computers that NASA used to send Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in 1969 when I was nine years old.

 

I discovered a bunch of other incredible things, like toilets flushing when you moved away from them. Scared the crap out of me. The computers were nothing like what I was familiar with. In 1980, they had just begun to take off, but in the time between then and 2022, they had developed into something out of this world, some of them so slim you could fit them in a briefcase.

 

Several social workers came through as well to explore my options. One of them, a graying woman with a stern expression, brought a “tablet” with her, which was kind of like the mobile telephone thing but bigger, and when I gave her my address and described what our farm looked like, she went on the tablet and found an area photograph from 1973 that exactly confirmed my account. But then she said, fiercely, “Marcus, you googled this information and now you’re regurgitating it as if you were alive in the 1970s, isn’t that right?” 

            “I what?” I asked.

            “What?” she said, frowning.

            “You said I did something . . .”

            “Regurgitated?”

            “No, the other thing.”

            “Oh. You googled it.”

            “What’s that?”

            She gave me the side eye. “Very funny. Look, everyone is tiptoeing around you asking all these academic questions about if you’re suffering irrevocable brain damage or delusions, but I know what’s going on here. Now, if you want me to help you, you’ve got to quit the charade. Does that make sense?”

            “Not really,” I responded.

            She sighed in resignation. “All right. What I’m going to do is try to get you into a homeless shelter once you leave the hospital, and I’ll work on your ID and social security number, since you don’t have anything like that with you. Are you sure something didn’t drop out of your pocket in the well?”
            “The detective said they didn’t find anything.”

            She stood up. “Very well. I’ll be back in a couple of days. They can’t release you from the hospital until we’ve firmed up your discharge details.”

 

***

 

Four days earlier

 

I was watching the clearest-picture television imaginable in my hospital room when Lamar Ferguson walked in. “Good morning, Mr. Price.”

            “Morning, Detective.”

            He sat on the chair facing my bed. “I wanted to ask your permission to take a DNA sample.”

            “What’s that for?”

            “Well, to rule you out as having anything to do with the death of Slate Thomas, the man in the well beside you.”

            “I’m a little confused,” I said. “How do you mean?”

            “Hard to explain,” Ferguson said, “but suffice it to say that the postmortem suggests there may be foul play involved in his death. So, it would be nice to know that you have nothing to do with it.”

            Well, it would, I thought. “Okay, so what do I need to do?”

            “It’s just an oral swab,” Ferguson said, holding up a plastic bag. “I take a sample from the inside of your cheeks—no pain involved. All you need to do is open your mouth wide.”

 

***

At the week’s staff meeting, Dr. Jeffrey Binomial, the Psychiatry Department head, asked Dr. Muscat to give the group his findings on the puzzle patient, Marcus Price.

            “Well,” Muscat said, “he’s rational, intact, has no auditory or visual hallucinations, paranoid thinking, thought disorder, or delusions of grandeur, reference, or persecution. I suppose one could say that his apparent conviction that he is white when he clearly is not is a delusion of bodily change, which we do see in schizophrenics, of course. However, it’s not that he thinks he’s changing in real time from black to white, so that’s completely atypical.”

            “He’s obviously delusional,” Dr. John Brotman declared, “and I think we need to start him on a small dose of an antipsychotic and watch for his response in the hospital setting.”

            Muscat smoothed back his mop of black hair and frowned. He rarely agreed with Brotman. “I don’t advise that at all,” he said crisply. “In the absence of more symptoms, there’s no place for meds right now.”

            “Aaron,” Brotman spluttered, “you just told us the patient thinks the year is 1980. We’ve ruled out any metabolic disorders with about a million blood tests, and you think the patient doesn’t have thought disorder?”

            “No,” Muscat said bluntly. He didn’t dislike Brotman, he just didn’t care for him. “The other consideration is—”

            “Don’t say it,” Brotman interrupted rudely. “Cerebromorphic Passive Memory Adoption. Not again.”

            “Tone it down, John,” Binomial said gently. 

            “Either CPMA,” Muscat continued, unruffled, “or, as the patient believes, time travel.”

            Brotman leaned back and guffawed. “You can’t be serious.”

            “I’ll remind you that long before we knew about mental health,” Muscat said icily, “Hippocrates thought yellow bile caused mania. I don’t believe he knew about neurotransmitters. Just because we haven’t discovered time travel yet doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

            “All right, look,” Binomial said with finality, “we obviously can’t arrive at a treatment regimen yet for Mr. Price. Aaron, keep visiting him in-house and when he’s released we’ll see if we can continue to follow him in the outpatient setting.”

            The meeting broke, and Muscat returned to his office where his phone rang. It was Detective Ferguson.

            “Doctor, have you come up with anything to explain Mr. Price’s strange behavior?”

            “I can’t say I have,” Muscat replied. “It’s a work in progress. Has something come up?”

            “I’m unable to go into the details,” Ferguson said, “but let’s just say that forensic results have made him a greater person of interest than before.”

            “Enough to arrest him?”

            “I’m sorry, I can’t disclose that.”

            “Very well, Detective. Was there anything else?”

            “That’s it, Doc. Thanks.”

                                                            ***

After a tasteless hospital dinner, I was dozing off in the bed when I heard my name uttered softly. I opened my eyes. “Oh, hi, Dr. Muscat,” I said, sitting up  in some surprise.

            “I’m sorry to disturb you, Marcus,” he whispered, moving closer. “Has Detective Marcus been in to see you?”

            “He was here a few days ago to get the NDA sample.”

            “DNA,” Muscat corrected. “He did an oral swab?”

            “Yeah, that’s right.”

            “You shouldn’t have let him,” Muscat said, “but never mind, it doesn’t matter now. Listen, we need to get you out of here.”

            My eyes widened. “What’s going on?”

            “I think your DNA matched with something on or around the dead man in the well. That means Ferguson is going to be on your trail because he’s itching to make an arrest. But something’s not making sense here, and I don’t believe you’re guilty of anything. You need to get yourself out of this situation before you’re falsely accused.”

            I was panicked. “What should I do?”

            “I want you to see someone called Percival Sellers. He’s a time-travel expert who lives outside Happenstance.”

            “So you believe me about the time travel?” I gasped.

            “I think there’s a good chance you have time-traveled, yes. I’m going to give you Percival’s phone number and . . .” Muscat dug in his pocket. “Take this burner phone--don’t worry about what that means. I’ll show you how to use it to reach Percival. But first, we must get you out of the hospital undetected.”

            “How?”

            Muscat produced a plastic bag. “In here are scrubs, a white jacket, surgical mask, and a surgical cap. Go to the bathroom and change into them now. Oh, and there’s a pair of glasses in there as well.”

            “Okay, okay,” I said, nervous and confused.

            I went to the bathroom and exited transformed. I looked like a doctor. Muscat was arranging the pillows on my bed so that they looked reasonably like me sleeping under the covers.

            “I don’t have any shoes, though,” I whispered.

            “Shit,” Muscat said, clapping his forehead. “Wait right here.”

            He disappeared for couple of minutes and came back with two pieces of blue, fluffy material. “Shoe covers we use in the OR,” he explained briefly, taking off his shoes and handing them  to me. “Put these on and I’ll wear the covers. You look good, but you have to appear more self-confident—arrogant, even. Walk beside me and don’t look at anyone. You don’t need to—you’re a doctor. That’s how we behave. Let’s go.”

            Muscat switched off the light behind us and I strode beside him with as much authority and aloofness as I could manage.

            “Oh, Doctor?” one of the nurses at the station called out.

            “Fuck,” Muscat muttered under his breath. “Keep walking.” 

            He turned to the nurse, who had a brief message for him. He thanked her with a smile, and hurried back to catch up with me. We turned to the right.

            “We’re going to take the stairway exit ahead,” Muscat said softly. 

            As we approached the exit, one of the elevator doors opened and Detective Ferguson came out. He saw us both and my breath caught. I dropped my head and spun around in the opposite as Muscat quicky confronted Ferguson to block his full view of me. 

            “Detective, I have some news for you,” Muscat said.

            “Really? What’s that?”

            “Can we talk about it in the lounge?”

            Muscat practically pulled Ferguson into one of the family waiting rooms. I turned back and walked quickly to the stairs. Once in the stairway, I began to run down. I had to get to this Percival Sellers guy before Ferguson got to me.

            

                                                                        ~~~