“That’s fine.”
“After he meet you, he’ll decide whether or not to come see your friend.”
“It’s an emergency.”
She looked up from the screen to my face, studying me with her dark eyes. “If doctor feels it’s necessary, he’ll come.”
“Even to Brooklyn?”
“Even to anywhere.”
She went back to typing, and I set my mind at ease. I was sure he’d think it was important enough.
“He’ll see you in a few minutes,” she said. “Just sit and wait.”
I nodded as she got up and rounded the desk, disappearing through the door on my left. I was alone for the next five minutes, just me and the kid who seemed totally oblivious to anything save his video game. She eventually stuck her head back out and said, “Doctor ready now.” I got up and she led me into a long hall. I was weighed and then had to stick my tongue out while she studied it and jotted down notes. “This just formality,” she said.
After that, I was brought to a large room divided into partitions by folding Chinese screens. I was installed on my back on a padded table and asked to wait. I could hear water trickling somewhere and New Age music from overhead speakers. It was a while before the doctor arrived. I began to doze.
The moment he entered, he stopped and stared at me with an unnerving expression. He was, quite honestly, exactly as I expected him to be: squat, solid, elderly, bearded, and gray-haired. Though short, his body was a rock; just looking at him, I doubted I’d be able to budge him an inch. His hair was deep and ashy, flowing down his back. Big bushy caterpillars slept on his forehead, and his eyes, dark and vastly penetrating, told of experience and wisdom.
“Hello,” I mumbled, feeling dwarfed in his presence.
He kept silent, then stepped forward. His gaze softened and all at once he appeared kind and benevolent. Even his voice, while gruff, had a cheery air.
“Good to meet you, Mr. Borough,” he said. “I’m Doctor Li Xi.” He stuck his hand out and I shook; it felt like grabbing a tree trunk.
“Good to meet you too,” I said. “Please, call me Roger.”
He bowed slightly. “Yes, Roger. And you call me Dr. Li.”
I nodded.
He came to where I lay on the padded table. The young Chinese girl followed, flitting about in his wake like a butterfly. I noticed she was absolutely silent in Dr. Li’s presence, and much less mischievous, almost submissive. He had the folder in his hand, was flipping through it. “Lie back, please,” he said.
“I think there’s been a mistake. I’m not the one who’s sick, it’s my friend—”
“I know that much, it says so here in your folder, but please lie back anyway. If you’ve spent any time around your friend in the last forty-eight hours, then I can gauge his energy from you.”
I didn’t really know what that meant, but it sounded good and so I did as he said. Laying my head down, I closed my eyes, drifted away to the New Age music, and soon I felt his fingers being dragged up and down my body. Very lightly, the ghost of a touch. Every so often I’d hear him mutter something. When he was finished, he told me to sit up.
“Show me your tongue,” he said.
I did, and he spent a few minutes studying it. Then he took my pulse three different times, in three different ways, and afterward he asked me to lie down again. He took the folder and left to confer with his assistant, assuring me he’d be right back.
It was not long. A moment later I was following the receptionist back out to the waiting room, where the little boy was playing his video game. She told me to wait for the doctor.
When Dr. Li reemerged, he was no longer wearing a white lab coat. He wore a tight gray suit, his coat slung over his arm, a leather doctor’s bag and umbrella in one hand, a small overnight bag in the other. He gave me a funny look. “We go to Brooklyn, yes?”
I shot to my feet. “Um, yes—now? Yes—okay, good.”
“I work for money. You do have money, right?”
I blanched. “Um—yes. Yes, we have money.” I just hoped that, together, Annabelle and I could cover the cost.
He caught me staring at his overnight bag and said, “Just in case. Sometimes these things require that I stay by the patient several days. Is that a problem?”
“That won’t be a problem.”
He started for the door, then, chuckling, informed me, “Good, we go. You drive. I sleep.”
Twenty minutes later, we were battling the traffic toward Brooklyn.
* * *
He did sleep. Almost the whole trip. I had thought he would question me and ask about James, what were his symptoms, that sort of thing, but the moment we got in the car he faced the window and began to snore. I drove aggressively, anxious to be back.
When I pulled into the driveway, the sun had descended over the western horizon. Dr. Li roused from sleep ten minutes earlier, but still he had said very little, and what he did say seemed trivial and unimportant. I kept looking for opportunities to talk about James, but before I found any we’d arrived.
I assisted Dr. Li and took his bags, leading him up the front steps. He was so calm and serene, with his small eyes, gray hair, and sleepy grin, that I was constantly reminded of my own discomfort and unease whenever he looked at me. He possessed that overall characteristic—to mirror back the darkness within a person. Randolf of Randolf’s Rare Books had had a similar effect on people.
As I let him in the house, I was flooded by a deep sense of dread. It came from the house itself, from the walls, ceiling, and furniture, a slowly leeching darkness, and I realized at once the Time Eater knew we were here.
It must be upset. Good, let it be. This is payback.
The dread was sticking to me, oozing down and weighting my steps. Darkness gathered into my chest, forming a knot. It was a terrible feeling.
Dr. Li surprised me by saying, “You take that into you… that no good.”
We were moving down the hall toward the kitchen. I stopped. “Take what into me?”
He gestured with his hands. “All this, all that is around, all that has converged here. Black spirits, emptiness. I watched you suck it into yourself when we came through the door. That no good, you must repel it—like this!” He shoved both hands, palms out, away from his chest, and made a humph noise.
“You try,” he said. “You push the bad energy away using your will. Imagine you can even see it leaving you. That helps.”
I did as he said, feeling a bit silly, but the moment I completed the action I felt lighter, less murky.
“It worked!” I said.
The doctor smiled. “Some very bad spirits in here. It will be a challenge to keep them out.” He bowed slightly, signaling for me to lead the way, and we started for the kitchen.
“Annabelle?” I called, flipping on the light and setting down Dr. Li’s bags. The harsh yellow mixed with the purple twilight from the window. “Annabelle?”
When she didn’t answer, I panicked. Don’t tell me she went up into his room again…
“Have you tea?” the doctor asked.
His request distracted me, which I realized was his intention. “Right, yes, tea,” I said and put the kettle on, retrieving three mugs instead of two, hoping Annabelle would join us.
“Black tea, if you’ve got it,” he added. “I need caffeine.”
I fixed the tea, the whole time ignoring the frantic voice in my head wondering where she was. “They need to steep,” I said, setting the mugs on the table. Anxiously I headed for the stairs. “I’ll go up and see what’s keeping her.”
“But here she comes now.”
He was right, for when I glanced up the stairwell, there was Annabelle coming down. She had a dazed look in her eyes, had dressed in jeans and a red blouse, her long hair dancing about her waistline. She moved slowly, as if in a dream.
“There you are,” I said. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”
She reached the bottom step and took my hand. Her skin was cold, clammy,
icy to the touch. She ignored my question, diverting the topic. “Police were here.”
My heart stopped.
Dr. Li called from behind me. “Police?”
Annabelle glanced over my shoulder whispering, “Is that him? Is it safe to talk?”
I nodded. “He’s safe. Come on, I’ll introduce you. But first let me know how you are.”
She met my eyes for the first time. “I’m fine, just had another scare. But we might as well talk about it in front of the doctor.”
We crossed to the dining table and sat down. “I made you tea,” I said.
She thanked me. Dr. Li was watching us, sipping from his mug with a hint of humor in his expression. It was hard to feel stressed or nervous in his presence, and right away I noted this effect on Annabelle. She became less rigid, more relaxed, even regained some of the color in her face.
I cleared my throat and introduced them. They shook hands, smiled. The doctor said, “What’s your relationship to the patient?”
“I’m an old friend,” she said.
“Ah, like Roger.”
“Even older. From childhood.”
“Why were the police here, Annabelle?” I asked, not caring if it came off as rude. I was tired of squirming in my own distress.
She looked at me with tired eyes. “They wanted to question him about Celeste’s disappearance.”
“Did you let them? What happened?” I could hear the anxiety in my voice, but I wanted answers.
“Like this, Roger,” the doctor told me, repeating the thrusting motion with his palms, and I performed the movement if only to get him off my back, though I did feel more relaxed after doing it.
“Now, you may speak,” he said, bowing toward Annabelle.
She thanked him nervously, then said, “I didn’t want to let them in but they were pushy, and plus I was alone and freaking out. When I told them James was too sick to answer questions, they said they’d have to determine that themselves. Otherwise, they’d get a warrant.”
I scoffed. “No way could they get a warrant. Based on what?”
“They seemed pretty convinced. They said not allowing them to see James was suspicious.”
“Bullshit.”
“Annabelle, you did the right thing,” Dr. Li said. “When up against people who are using full will, better to follow path of non-resistance—called wu wei. That way you’re in harmony with nature.”
She smiled. I could tell she appreciated the compliment.
But I was growing impatient. “So what happened?”
“I let them in, assuring them James didn’t know anything. We went upstairs, into the room, my heart racing. Boy, was it racing. I was sure we’d go in and there would be Celeste and that other girl standing there, alive but dead.” She stopped herself, glancing at Dr. Li, curious to see how he reacted, but the doctor only nodded.
“Evil spirits,” I offered.
He nodded again.
“Well, were they there?” I asked.
Annabelle shook her head. “Luckily, no. We walked in and James was lying on his side, turned toward the wall. He had the sheet pulled around his shoulders. We tried to wake him, but he was either asleep or faking sleep. After a while he came around. He seemed weak, and I realized he hadn’t eaten anything today. The officers tried asking questions, but James said very little. He only nodded and shook his head and grunted. They got a small amount of information this way, from the questions James could answer with a simple yes or no. I think he satisfied them as to how much he knows about Celeste’s disappearance—which is nothing. They went away happy.”
I took a long, deep breath. “That’s a relief. Do you think they’ll be back?”
“I don’t know, but they gave me their card and said to call if we heard anything. After they left I made James some soup and brought it up to him. I also helped him into the shower, then back into bed.”
“How’d that go?”
She paled. “Not too bad… he’s different, quieter. He stared at me the whole time with this dazed look in his eyes. Once I saw a flash of something—anger, I think—but that didn’t last. But he even started shaking. I thought he was cold so I put him in bed, but he kept on shivering. What do you think about that?”
I considered a moment. “Morphine withdrawals? Seems rather soon.”
“He’s on morphine?” Dr. Li asked.
“For a few weeks,” I said. “But today we… stopped the hospital-assigned nurse from giving him another injection. I’m pretty sure James didn’t want the stuff, that he was only taking it because he was getting hooked on it—because he wanted to die. He’d run out of hope. But yesterday he screamed at the top of his lungs that he wanted to live. I’m of the opinion that morphine and someone who’s dying but wants to live have nothing to offer each other. Just my opinion.”
“My opinion, too,” the doctor said. “How about this nurse? Will she be coming back?”
“We sent her away,” I said.
Annabelle added, “We didn’t send her. I sort of hit her over the head with a baking pin until she evaporated into thin air.”
I cringed as she said this, terrified of Dr. Li’s response, but he kept on nodding, smiling.
“We think the nurse was an evil spirit,” I said. “She attacked me, and there was something sinister about the morphine regimen she had James on.”
“After I struck her, she vanished like smoke,” Annabelle said.
Dr. Li sipped his tea, then did a strange thing: sniffed the air. He said, “Yes, I think she was another evil one. The place is infested with them. Your friend is in bad shape.”
His words put me so much at ease that I almost wanted to hug him. He was validating what we were telling him, rather than calling us crazy. He believes us, I thought. That means he can probably help us—help James.
“Pardon me for saying,” said Annabelle, “but you don’t seem like a doctor. You seem like a priest or a medicine man.”
“I’m all of the above,” he replied.
“I used to work in a doctor’s office, and the people there didn’t have many nice things to say about Chinese Medicine.”
“Few Westerners do. Some endorse it but most Western doctors have indifferent, negative attitudes. The philosophy behind Chinese medicine is right brain, but Western medicine is left brain. Chinese medicine deals with flows of energy. In the West, they don’t believe in energy. All is material, physical. That is why they ridicule us.”
“Your card says Esoteric Acupuncture,” I said. “What’s that?”
“It is acupuncture that has a very specific spiritual foundation. It incorporates the I Ching, the Indian chakra system, ancient Taoist magic, even the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Most comes from my personal experiences. When I was a young man in China I studied under elder grandmaster Chiang Zu. He taught me with vigorous practice much of what I know. The rest I learned through hardship.”
I nodded. “Fascinating. You know, I used to have an interest in magic.”
“Oh?”
“He used to cast spells for people in college,” Annabelle said, smiling. “Spells that helped these people deal with their problems, like completing schoolwork, handling bullies, and getting a date.”
I blushed with inferiority. “I studied occult metaphysics and witchcraft,” I clarified. “I was quite good, but I’ve forgotten most of it now.”
Dr. Li tapped the side of his head. “It is still in there. Knowledge of the infinite never goes away. And that very good. You may be able to help get us through this. How long ago, you say, in college?”
“That’s right, like twenty years ago. It was during the time that James and I attracted the Time Eater.”
His bushy eyebrows lifted. “You say, Time Eater?”
“That’s our name for the evil spirit because it has a strange effect on time. In a way, its main objective is to devour the past. I think we have quite a story to tell you.”
“I’m ready to listen,” the doctor said.
; Sighing, Annabelle rose from the table. “I think this is going to require more tea.”
Chapter Fourteen
We spoke long into the night. Mostly I spoke, though Annabelle contributed when she could. We told the doctor everything down to the finite details, and we didn’t hold back. We drank lots of tea while Dr. Li sat calmly, attentively.
When we were done, I glanced at the clock on the wall. “Christ, it’s almost ten.”
“Do you need to get back to the city, Doctor?” Annabelle asked. “You’re welcome to stay in the guest bedroom. Roger can sleep in my room with me.”
“He brought his things with him,” I said, pointing to the overnight bag.
Dr. Li bowed. “Thank you, I will do that. But first, may I see James?”
“All right,” she said. “We should probably head upstairs now, anyway. It’s getting late.”
She switched off the lights and I helped carry the doctor’s bags into the guest bedroom. I removed some clothes from the closet and my suitcase and brought them into Annabelle’s room so he would feel like he had the space to himself. We took turns using the bathroom and gathered outside James’s door.
“Ready?” she said. We nodded, and she opened the door.
I almost felt the darkness spring out into the hall. It wasn’t actually visible, but I felt it inside my head, in my thoughts, in my imagination. The others experienced the darkness in a similar way, taking big backward steps as it flowed through the doorway.
“This very bad,” Dr. Li said, frowning. He pointed. “In there, is very bad.”
“You don’t know the half,” I said. “You sure you wouldn’t rather wait until morning?”
“It’s usually less intense during the day,” Annabelle added.
But Dr. Li was resolute. He passed between us, taking the lead, and plunged into the room. We followed after.
As usual, everything was black and vast and filled with twinkling stars. In the distance, a series of large, colorful planets rolled aimlessly. In the center, suspended in midair, was the bed; atop that, on his back and staring into space, was James.
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