Day Five:

Today I went into town. And that girl who was being burned at the stake, the one that has been etched into the back of my vision since I encountered Figure, well I think I might have an idea what she felt like.

I drove my car, and perhaps I should have chosen to port over a less luxurious model, into the town square for the main purpose of meeting with Dr. Darner. It felt that each car that drove in front of me slowed down to a glacial pace when they noticed who was trailing them. And when I parked and made my way into the medical offices the glares I got seemed hot enough to light me on fire. I tried to imagine, to help me through it, what each of the townspeople who stared at me so blatantly would look like in the face of Figure. That, in the very least, tempered my anxiety for a moment. That is until I began to think of Figure again, and then it all ended up going up in nerves and smoke.

Doctor Gwendolyn Darner was on the fourth floor, so I decided to treat myself and take the elevator. I’d forgotten how nice it was to have machinery lift you from one place to another instead of trekking wildly along passageways that I’m almost positive rearrange themselves on an hourly basis.

A square-jawed, pale faced woman with spindly blonde hair greeted me at the reception desk.

“You’re late,” her voice grated on the unusually cold office air.

“There was… traffic,” I reasoned. If traffic meant six or seven assholes who felt slowing me down on my way to get a rabies shot was effective payback for purchasing their town’s prized possession.

“Take a seat.”

I thumbed through a few of the aged magazines that had been left on the table but my brain couldn’t latch onto any of the content. It just slipped back into anxieties. And they were all full of nonsensical drivel anyway. Perhaps a few weeks ago I would have at least found the socialite section of the tabloids interesting, as some of my acquaintances were bound to grace the pages every so often. But ever since I’d let the island of Manhattan those things felt small and worthless now. 

The fluorescent lights above me glinted off the glossy pages. The slight flicker to their glow made me feel a little sick. I had gotten used to fireplaces and candelabras. Suddenly being in this artificially sterile environment felt closed in and wrong. How could a crumbling mansion full of seven happy haunts feel at all better?

I almost missed them calling my name as I silently listed each one of them on my fingers.

Doctor Darner was an older woman, distinguished and challenging. Her gray hair was tied up in a bun and a pair of maroon glasses hung over her nose. She looked at me both under and above them, as if trying to discern me from every angle before speaking.

“Were you able to find the bat?”

“Bats,” I corrected her. “It was a lot of bats. Not just one.”

“Well, if animal control or any exterminators haven’t found the bat we can’t be sure that you are in danger of the rabies virus.”

“Considering what I’ve been through trying to get the electricity turned on in the last week I don’t think pest control or any town service is going to be making their way up to Whitlock Manor any time soon to come to my assistance.”

The doctor nodded in understanding. The hint of her lips lifted in a knowing smile. She wasn’t angry at me, I could tell, but she certainly was getting amusement out of my frustration.

“Are you from England?”

“No,” I always hated sitting on the tables in doctors offices. Even with the parchment over the seat the metal was just too cold for comfort. “But I did go to a boarding school in London for a few years.”

“Ah, that would explain it,” Doctor Darner tutted, looking down at her clipboard.

“Do people from England have a higher rate of bat related incidents?” 

“No,” She set the documents down on the counter and turned to me, arms crossed, “But you do speak with a slight accent.”

“Boarding school will do that to you,” I shrugged. This line of questioning wasn’t going to cure me of rabies.

“So you called in concerned you’d contracted the virus? Are you quite sure you had blood contact?”

“Honestly, I’d rather not wait around to find out. Can’t you just… you know… stab-stab, squirt-squirt?” I mimed taking a syringe and squirting the contents into the side of my arm. I was growing impatient. I knew that there was a countdown, a short number of hours before the vaccine would lose all effectiveness.

“We have to be absolutely sure. The process is quite painful, and they’re very expensive medicine.”

“Let me assure you, I can pay any amount of money. It’s really not even a matter of question. If insurance won’t cover it, which god knows they should, I’ll take out a checkbook and write it out to cash in your name if that’s what it takes.”

“It’s not a good idea to tell your doctor that you’re willing to bribe them,” Doctor Darner shook her head disapprovingly, but she still never lost that smile. She was playing with me, stoking my fire, and my fuse was shortening.

“I’d bribe the devil himself if it meant I wasn’t going to get rabies,” I hopped off the table at that point. I couldn’t take sitting lamely aside while being insulted for my insistence.

“There we go,” she nodded, “Lost the accent a bit when you’re angry. I have a theory that you’re putting it on, maybe even subconsciously, in order to appear more intelligent, more sophisticated.”

“That’s-“ I wanted to tell her that it was an insane assumption. That my manner of speaking was absolutely natural. But then I heard myself in my head and it began to echo like a voice calling out into a cave. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that I receive life saving medical care, and that I receive it in a timely manner.”

“Then we’re both in agreement,” she turned her back to me and began preparing a vial that was sitting on the counter. I had missed it when I entered. “I’ve already called ahead for the drug. And ran your insurance. We can administer the first shot today.”

“But…” she had caught me off guard in a rather clever parry. I was suddenly very uneasy about letting a woman who’d played with my emotions so thoroughly send a shot right through my skin.

“Did you really think that a medical professional would deny you treatment just because you bought a stupid building? I know that there are people in this town that want you out of it, and maybe a little worse than that. But I also don’t want to be responsible for starting a human borne rabies epidemic now, do I?”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“Lift your shirt and lay down, there will be some pain in the area where this is applied, but the topical anesthetic I’m using will help.”

I did what she asked, despite the fact that I didn’t trust her in the least. I wasn’t worried about the pain, that I could take. But the thought of a needle descending deep into my stomach crunched against my brain like gravel.

But as she prepared the numbing anesthetic and cleaned the site the smell of iodine calmed me. There was something about that sterile scent that brought me back to an untapped memory. I couldn’t place it, but I let it offer what little comfort it could. I closed my eyes.

“How much does it cost?”

“Your insurance covers almost all of it, you’ll only have a copay that you can take care of before you leave.”

“No, I know that,” I could hear her preparing the needle. I clenched my fists as tightly as I could. “But before insurance, how much does the vaccine cost?”

“Well, you’ll receive four shots, each around five thousand dollars. You can see why we don’t just hand these out like candy.”

I gritted my teeth as I felt the needle pierce my flesh. A five thousand dollar syringe filled with five thousand dollar liquid. And I couldn’t help but smile at the fact that I had somehow managed to spend more here in the small town of Hilltown in an afternoon than I could have possibly spent back home.

*

I realized, as I entered the grocery store, that I should have shopped before getting an agonizingly painful injection into my abdomen. I used the grocery cart to prop me up as I spent thirty minutes filling my cart with frozen meals before I remembered that the ice box wasn’t working because I didn’t have any electricity.

I then dumped all of the boxes of TV dinners into one freezer and decided that it would be more canned soup for me. I made a mental reminder to buy double of everything I purchased, foresight suggesting that Pilfer was going to steal half of what I bought.

I passed the produce section and longingly thought of the meals my chef would prepare back in my brownstone. I had thought about bringing him along with me, but he was a very superstitious man, and I really doubt he would have lasted long with Cassandra whispering into his ear while he prepared soufflés. 

Regardless I decided to chance buying a bag of grapes. On the off chance that Pilfer did get ahold of them then at least a few would fall from the vine onto the floor and I’d be able to pick from the scraps.

Right when I was thinking about the strange and depraved depths that my life had come to a cart slammed into the back of my knees.

“Are you gonna get some grapes or are you just gonna stand there and wait until they get ripe?”

I turned around and was greeted by the gruff snarl of a bald old man, who held his shopping cart like it was a weapon he wasn’t afraid to use. He pulled it back toward him as if he was readying to launch it toward me and finish what he’d started.

“Well now that you mention it, I do think they look rather dreary. Maybe I should look for a better batch,” I set down the group of grapes I was holding and slowly picked up a new vine to inspect. Now I understood the simple gratification that the townspeople got from blocking my car.

“They don’t have grapes in England then? First time you’ve ever seen them?” He pulled up next to me with his cart, cornering me in the produce section.

“Not from England,” I mentally replayed my own voice in my head, trying to scan it for traces of Britain. I guess boarding school had been introduced to me in the formative years of my life. Was my manner of speaking really that noticeable? “From here, actually.”

“I highly, highly, highly doubt that,” the man winked at me and popped a grape into his mouth, although the move was far from charming. It made me wince to see his wrinkly skin fold at the corner of his eye.

“At least now I am,” I grabbed a plastic bag from the turnstile and began to fill it with grapes. “Just moved in.”

“So that’s you?”

“You didn’t even know and you still treated me like a pariah? You must have good instincts,” I tossed the grapes in my shopping cart. Canned soup and grapes. The most rounded of diets.

“Creative types sometimes do,” I could tell he was inviting me to ask why he was a self described ‘creative type’, but I didn’t want to take the bait. I just wanted him to back up his cart so I could leave.

“Would you mind?” I pushed my cart against his as gently as I could without seeming hostile to indicate that if he didn’t move soon I might get a bit more aggressive. Passive aggression before outright aggression, I always say.

Instead he turned his cart and pressed even harder into mine, shoving me against the bin of grapes.

“You should be careful in this town,” he gritted his teeth as he said so, a grim warning indeed. He was one step away from becoming a come to life Scooby-Doo villain. 

“I’ve gathered that, thanks,” I pushed back into his cart, shoving metal against metal so that it ground together and made an awful sound. “Luckily I have more pressing things to worry about than the asshole residents of Hilltown.”

“Got to go check the stock exchange? Worried that the Nasdaq went down while you were out shopping for-“ he stopped speaking to gaze incredulously into my cart, “Soup? Do you have someone you have to feed with a straw back in that massive home of yours?” Finally he had let up on his cart. I made one large push and was able to get past him.

“As fun as it is to stand here and be insulted by you, I think I’ll take my leave.”

“Take your leave? What are you, a character in a Harry Potter book? Are you gonna take out your wand and curse me?”

“If only you knew,” I muttered darkly, deciding that he wasn’t worth my time to continue talking with. I had a manor full of seven ghosts that I had to deal with, not to mention the constant blood falling from the ceilings. Wherever it comes from. Whosever blood it is. 

*

On the drive back I decided to check my PO box. The only thing inside was an electrical bill for an old balance of $2,014. I wondered if they were waiting to come and turn on my electricity until I paid the previous owner’s bill. Well, in that case I decided that I wouldn’t pay my bill until they turned on my electricity.

*

I feel the need to note the obvious here: the mansion was much spookier to come back to once the sun had set. The combined time sink of dealing with the residents of the town drained all of my productive daylight hours. I’m not exactly sure what type of productivity I was aiming for, but I haven’t had any major self revelations recently, so I’m bound to run across one sometime or other.

Whitlock Manor sits atop a hill, probably the ‘Hill’ in ‘Hilltown’ if I took a wild guess. Perhaps that has something to do with their hostility. It stretches up taller than anything in the rolling New England landscape, and the spires of the castle fill the sky even further. 

It was built in the mid 1800’s, harnessing all of the gothic flare it could muster. I could see Dracula or the Adams family being right at home amongst the spiral staircases and secret passageways. Assuming there are any secret passageways; I haven’t found any yet.

The facade is a dark stone, the roofing brown oak shingles. Whatever isn’t stone in the castle is made of wood. And anything that isn’t made of wood is most likely a ghost. 

There are gargoyles keeping watch over the eaves, and gargoyle eggs on top of each spire. I didn’t know that gargoyles hatched from eggs, so that’s one lesson I’ve been able to take away from this experience.

However I still think the most impressive aspect of the entire estate is the front gate. Wrought iron spikes twenty feet into the sky, piercing with swirls and arrows that loop together in perfect symmetry. I wish I were a creative type, so that I could more accurately explain it. Maybe the old man at the store could have been more eloquent than me.

And then, second best, is the massive oak door, carved with some grotesque biblical scene along the rim, that separates the mysteries of the manor from the outside world. Although I do wish it would separate more of the draft from the outside world as well. Even when closed the wind howls awfully through the crack at the bottom created by uneven stonework. 

Luckily the building is absolutely rife with fireplaces. A fact that’s apparent when you look at the roof and notice the two dozen pipes and chimneys that sit above it. My favorite is a large, curved brick one that I suspect goes right to the main hall.

Still, it takes a few hours just to get the fires going in the rooms you want to frequent, never mind the upkeep that goes into keeping so much wood alight. 

When I came home tonight it was all I could do to drag my freezing ass up the three staircases to the master bedroom, trying not to focus on the horrific organ music, and start one lonely fire that went out twice before it grew to a mediocre size.

I’m writing this in the master bed, curled up under three blankets, journal and pen balanced at the tip of the small space between my sweaters and the covers. As I look out the window I can see that it’s started to snow. I know that the weather report didn’t call for freezing weather and flurries so I wonder if this is my own personal snowstorm. I guess not many other people have had the weather changed just for them.