The Doctor Sneak Peek

by Erica R Stinson

  “Oliver?” Miss Susan beckoned him, smiling that pretty way that she did as he ambled to the large trencher-style table, as if afraid that Miss Haggerty would show up to forbid him from eating.

  Something that had happened once in a while and depending on whether she was angry enough with him or not for whatever it was he had done.

  Miss Susan had just set down a steaming bowl of soup for him along with a hunk of fluffy, white bread to sop it up with.

  “Oliver!” the young woman cried out in surprise as he hooked the bowl in and began to hungrily drink the hot soup directly from it, foregoing the spoon, despite the broth burning his mouth and fingers.

  You’re an animal!

  He could almost hear Miss Haggerty raging at him as he shamelessly gulped down the soup.

  Next went the bread, gone in three quick bites with barely a chew in-between.

  If it was in him, no one could take it from him.

  That’s what he’d learned early on.

  Miss Susan was staring at him, wide-eyed with a shocked hand to her mouth at the sight of him.

  The place-setting at the large dining table was a mess and he’d accidentally knocked over his milk-glass in his labors to eat by himself, the creamy liquid spreading rapidly.

  Oliver’s eyes flitted to the clean bowl he’d left and then back at Miss Susan, who seemed to understand him even though he’d not said a word.

  She came back with another bowl, pressing a spoon into his hand as she sat right next to him.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” she asked, another one of those pretty smiles on her face as Oliver began noisily slurping up the soup.

  During his last checkup with the bloated, old doctor that came to look after all of the children Miss Haggerty was informed that he was underweight.

  Oliver listened as Miss Haggerty lied about the boy being a finicky eater or never wanting to eat, when in truth she wasn’t always allowing him to.

  He often filched what scraps he could from the kitchen when he was on duty there, cleaning up.

  The one time he tried to speak up and tell the doctor that Miss Haggerty didn’t always permit him food at mealtimes, she had put him in the basement as punishment the second the doctor left the premises.

  After that, Oliver smartly learned to keep his mouth shut.

  Miss Haggerty had done a funny little laugh that he’d never heard before as she told the doctor that he was such a precocious child.

  And then the man had chuckled with a knowing nod, which made Oliver want to kick the doctor.

  But the old man had completely surprised him by lecturing Miss Haggerty about the importance of a proper diet for a growing boy.

  Even better was that she actually seemed to be listening to and respecting the doctor as he’d spoken to her and that had made Oliver take notice.

  He saw the power and knowledge that the old doctor had, even over a mean witch like Miss Haggerty.

  “Until next time, Oliver.” The doctor said, clapping him on his scrawny back before asking the nurse that always accompanied him on visits to send in the next child.

  Oliver knew that Miss Haggerty was a liar when she fibbed to the doctor about him not wanting to eat, but she made sure that everyone always believed what she said, even a doctor who should have been smarter than that.

  This is how she continued to get away with all that she had done to him and it wasn’t fair that she always lied.

  Always won.

  All Oliver knew was that he hated Miss Haggerty.

  ***

  1980

  Thwack!

  Thwack!

  Thwack!

  The sound the heavy, wooden cane made against Oliver’s bare back muffled in his ears as Miss Haggerty let him have it, or at least she tried to.

  He really hadn’t wanted to go against her, deciding that it was like reasoning with a brick wall, but she was wrong and this time he wasn’t going to allow her to get away with it.

  Recently, Oliver had been getting into more trouble for talking back and causing discord amongst the others.

  Miss Haggerty had accused him of being alone on the second floor but he hadn’t been.

  It was one of the smaller kids that had leapt at the chance to go exploring, but Oliver would take the punishment to spare the girl who had only wanted to retrieve a forgotten doll.

  He himself had seen her quietly traipsing up the stairs and then coming back down with the toy a moment or two later while he’d been sweeping the front hall.

  At first Oliver wasn’t going to say anything, let the waif take her much-deserved punishment for disobeying the rules.

  But watching the terror build in the eyes of the tiny girl, who couldn’t have been much more than six or so, as Miss Haggerty promised to find out who had been on the second floor had made him change his mind.

  The little girl would be ruined, as she already appeared to wear her heart on her sleeve in the short time that she’d been with them.

  She wouldn’t be able to take Miss Haggerty’s abuse.

  So there he knelt, in front of Miss Haggerty, as she beat him about the back and shoulders with her fancy black cane with the wolf’s head.

  It didn’t hurt.

  Much.

  Oliver delighted in watching Kung-Fu Theater on Saturday afternoons in the recreation room while keeping an eye on the children in his charge.

  He was the only one old enough to watch over the others because he had never been adopted.

  People came in to ooh and ahh over the infants, toddlers and smaller children.

  No one ever wanted him, not with the way that Miss Haggerty always dissuaded potential adoptive parents that showed the least bit of interest.

  Behavioral problems. The boy really should be institutionalized but we are trying to help him work through his issues….

  And the looks of pity would turn his way as polite smiles were pasted on faces and couples looked at the others.

  Lies.

  All lies that she loved to tell anyone that would try and show him the least bit of consideration.

  And he knew better than to contradict her, so Oliver hadn’t said anything at all.

  Just as he did now as Miss Haggerty continued to carry out his sentence, battering scarred-over flesh from years of punishment under the guise of ‘correcting’ and ‘guidance’.

  He had watched, and learned, as the hero of one story made his mind be in one place while his body was being beaten and abused by the bad guys.

  Meditation.

  It had been amazing!

  Oliver found that he was so fascinated by this feat that he looked up books on meditation in the card-catalog at the public library when they were allowed an outing to the local branch with some of the other social workers.

  On the way back to the orphanage and before they had gone inside, Oliver had hidden the small book underneath his shirt, not wanting anyone to know that he had it.

  He had also made sure that no one had seen him slip the instructional pamphlet into the recesses of his jacket, while deep in the stacks and right before they lined up at the exit to get back on the yellow bus.

  Over time, and as difficult as it was at times, Oliver learned the art of separating mind and body during unpleasant things.

  This applied knowledge was working especially well at the moment.

  Oliver noted that finding inane reasons to dole out punishments seemed to satisfy Miss Haggerty’s perverse desire to inflict pain on him.

  Oliver was not going to give her the pleasure of hearing him scream or cry as he had done many times in the past when he was younger, so he had simply meditated during the beatings.

  Calmed his breathing and shoved out the sound and feel of the damage being inflicted on his body.

  The old battle-axe couldn’t hurt him anymore.

  He had been studying Miss Haggerty for years and he could now easily see all of her faults; her weaknesses.

  His only savior, Miss Susan, was long
gone after Miss Haggerty got through chewing her up and spitting her out.

  Vanished like a fart in the wind one day about twelve years ago without warning.

  It was only later and simply by chance that Oliver found out that Miss Susan and one of the other social workers had been caught by Miss Haggerty, having sex, and both had been immediately fired.

  At least that was Miss Haggerty’s version of what had happened when he had eavesdropped on her while she was talking to the regional manager in the privacy of her office regarding the situation.

  He hadn’t even gotten a chance to say goodbye.

  Of course, Oliver had been extremely overwrought at the loss of Miss Susan and he’d been sent to the basement for having an outburst upon the news of her dismissal.

  To this very day, Oliver believed that Miss Haggerty had done this to get Miss Susan away from him knowing that she was all that he had.

  It was the only reasoning that he could come up with as he sat in that miserable basement.

  But as time went on, Oliver grew less and less perplexed about being sent downstairs.

  He began to look forward to it because it meant getting away from Miss Haggerty during that time.

  So at the moment Oliver remained quiet as she doled out her reprimand, Miss Haggerty breathing heavily as she began to grow tired from her efforts.

  The transparent fact that her ineffectual beatings no longer bothered him, Oliver could tell that his recalcitrance infuriated the miserable old bitch.

  So now Miss Haggerty had started finding ways to further get a reaction out of Oliver for the sole purpose of being able to punish him for it afterward.

  Very petty and passive-aggressive behavior if you asked him.

  Once the sun fell and it was lights out for all, this was Oliver’s favorite time because that’s when the old witch would booze off to sleep for the night.

  Everyone knew that Miss Haggerty kept a liquor bottle in her office and she probably hid one in her room, too.

  And sure enough, when he was actually brazen enough to steal into Miss Haggerty’s bedroom one night while she was passed-out drunk, Oliver saw that his suspicions had indeed been correct.

  He had gotten upstairs, and into the tyrant’s room, without her ever knowing a damn thing.

  That accomplishment alone had made him smile, something that was almost foreign to him since he really had nothing to be happy about.

  But it also made him feel powerful as he watched her sprawled out on her bed, the empty gin bottle at her side as she snored loudly with her mouth wide open.

  Next time he would bring a few of the dead cockroaches from the basement to drop into her opened maw.

  And Oliver had to take a quick moment, stifling his laughter as he thought about how funny that was going to be.

  Watching her inadvertently swallow them.

  He was quite confident that eating the bugs wouldn’t kill her, as insects were very high in protein, so no real harm done.

  He had even read that people in many parts of south-east Asia ate cockroaches.

  Crickets too.

  He couldn’t wait, wishing he had thought of the bugs before he’d come upstairs.

  Oliver had solid evidence that Miss Haggerty was afraid of rodents and insects, as he had noted in the past when either of the two made an occasional appearance in the common areas.

  She particularly got vexed when this occurred in the kitchen and he’d readily used his position as permanent dishwasher to taint her food with the cockroaches that he grinded up in the blender whenever he could while the hag was completely insensible.

  He wished he could do something similar with the rats, but he’d figure it out sooner or later.

  Oliver could do anything that he wanted, anytime he wanted and he was slowly beginning to realize this fact.

  Tempting as it was to just be done with all of this, for the moment he was going to bide his time.

  Concoct a plan to make his leaving one that would be worth every last bit of all the pain and suffering he had endured.

  And this illustrious scheme came to full fruition a few weeks later as Oliver finally bid farewell to Ida Haggerty’s Children’s Home and Orphanage once and for all.

  It wasn’t going to be hard at all to leave the dank, smelly old decrepit Victorian-style house.

  Not hard at all.

  And why would it be?

  It had never been his home and only a place where his parents had abandoned him as an infant because he was broken.

  Part of his master-plan was getting closure with them after he got finality with Miss Haggerty.

  Presently, she wasn’t too happy about her circumstances but as he had learned from her, deportment forced you to succeed in being better.

  Being perfect.

  No amount of screaming or crying would help her out of this, something that Oliver had made sure of.

  Not a thing had been left to chance.

  While he had been on kitchen duty that evening, he had slipped a massive dose of sedatives into the large tureen of tomato soup that was meant to be served with dinner.

  Mr. Stevens, who had been there nearly as long as Miss Haggerty, was on medication for anxiety and sleep disorder.

  The man kept his pills hidden in his room as he knew that their discovery would put his position there into jeopardy.

  If Miss Haggerty was an example, the state wasn’t really vetting the social workers that were in the system but Oliver was sure that someone with a perceived mental illness would definitely be turned out.

  After all, they had to think of the children didn’t they?

  Not even Miss Haggerty knew about the pills otherwise Mr. Stevens would have been out of there already.

  It was during his nighttime forays to the second floor that Oliver had found the labeled bottle in the recesses of Mr. Stevens’ medicine chest.

  The small wooden box occupied the top shelf of the closet, hidden behind extra blankets.

  The pills had been found underneath some Playboy magazines within the box.

  Looking at the pictures of the naked, buxom women made Oliver feel funny in his lower extremities but he didn’t know how to deal with that so he put the dirty magazines away and instead studied the bottle of pills.

  He committed the name and dose of the drug to memory so that he could research it.

  After the last trip to the library, Oliver had not only read up on the pills but figured out exactly how many would be needed to effectively contaminate the soup.

  Miss Haggerty was the only one in his cross-hairs.

  No one else.

  He definitely didn’t want to do away with the others even though it would have been very easy.

  Oliver had crept into Mr. Stevens’ room right after breakfast had been served on that last morning, knowing that the social workers were on duty in the many rooms on the first floor and preoccupied with the other children.

  Mr. Stevens wouldn’t be back up to his room until after dinner, at which point he would most likely be feeling too drowsy from the soup to notice his missing pill bottle.

  Obviously Oliver hadn’t put in enough of the pills to actually kill anyone but they would all sleep for hours and hours, dead to the world in which they wouldn’t hear a thing.

  Since he knew the kids were all locked in their rooms after lights-out, Oliver didn’t need to do anything to their bowls at all.

  They wouldn’t be able to get out of their rooms even if they did hear anything.

  And because he was always being made a spectacle of in front of everyone, Oliver knew that every child in the place was absolutely terrified of being sent to the basement so they wouldn’t dare disobey.

  He had complained to Miss Haggerty once about the practice of locking them in being a fire-hazard, something he’d read somewhere recently.

  But she didn’t care.

  She instead sent him to the basement for daring to challenge her in front of her staff.

  She didn
’t know it, but Oliver had become very skillful at picking locks and was able to come and go at his leisure.

  Another thing he’d learned to do by reading about it from his stolen cache of library books.

  Also, because he was the only person at the orphanage that didn’t have a roommate, no one knew about his nighttime excursions.

  In fact, no one bothered with Oliver much at all.

  Most likely afraid of being punished by association so he was definitely persona non grata.

  Then there was his arm, useless fucking thing, hanging at his side and that had scared them completely away.

  He used to long for even a single friend, but Oliver had learned years and years ago that the only one he could depend on was himself.

  All of this was Miss Haggerty’s doing.

  Bitch.

  But no one was going to come to Miss Haggerty’s aid this time and Oliver was pretty sure quite of few of them would actually cheer him on, social workers included.

  Bitch!

  Bitch!

  Bitch!

  Oliver shook his head to get his anger in check and refocus on the tasks at hand.

  It was easy to make sure that she received an untainted bowl of soup since he was always in the kitchen, cleaning it up, washing dishes or helping with the serving and preparing the trays to go out.

  Often he wasn’t allowed to eat at all until after dinner service was complete and by then his food was always cold.

  He hated nothing more than hot food not being hot.

  The bottom of the pot was his, leftover pieces of chicken or beef for him to eat even though he wasn’t allowed to use the stove to heat it back up.

  Once when he had tried to eat dinner beforehand, Miss Haggerty had slapped the food right out of his mouth.

  Hollered at him to clean up the mess and then she sent him to the basement so that he couldn’t sneak any food at all.

  She locked him in with a deadbolt that even he couldn’t disengage.

  Made sure he stayed there all night, a first for both of them and Oliver had suffered through hunger pangs the entire time.

  This made him wonder if she somehow knew that he was able to get outside of his room after lights out.