Mrs. Turner

            Milton woke up in a hospital bed. There was bright sunlight pouring in through the window, and unlike most hospitals he had visited, there was a pleasant smell of herbs and flowers. Nothing around him seemed unclean, yet the carved stones hanging on the walls and the rich, patterned curtains made the place feel unlike any hospital he had visited before.

            “Good morning, sir,” said a young doctor, very tall, with glasses and a slight hesitation in his voice that suggested he was foreign-born, probably from Angoranna given his dark skin tone and dark red, straight hair. “You fell. Do you remember this?” Milton’s arm was in a cast, and he had a bandage on his head. He could not feel his right leg.

            “Yes, I remember,” said Milton. He reflected on the fact that he was just as foreign-born as this guy, though for whatever reason the Narcian and Arizradna accents were nearly indistinguishable. “Is my leg…?
            “We have it anesthetized at the moment. You suffered a compound fracture. We were forced to perform surgery to re-insert the bone, but you appear to be healing at a high rate.”

            “How long have I been here?” Milton’s voice was surprisingly strong. He’d woken up with a froggier voice than this before.

            “Three days,” said the doctor, though he pronounced “days” as “dace,” which confirmed Angoranna as his country of origin. “You appear to have jumped out of a window at the Maize-House Hotel, landing on the roof of the Moshiel Culinary School. In the fall, you suffered the leg injury, as well as a series of small fractures in your arm and a small wound on the side of your head.”

            “A small wound? But I was out for three days.”

            “Yes, you were anesthetized while we performed medical incantations to ensure the leg healed up nicely.”

            “Incantaions? Oh, right.” He was in Arizradna, where they seemed to think magic could be used in everything. He hoped they had a spell to fix brain damage, just in case the “small wound” was a bit bigger than it looked.

            “So what’s the prognosis, doctor…”

            “Ah, yes. Doctor Alwahi, but you can call me Vindur. The prognosis is very good. There is just one thing, Mr. Zweibel…”

            “Mr. Who?”

            “Mr. Zweibel. That is you, is it not?”

            Milton shook his head, which hurt. “No, I don’t know anyone by the name of Zweibel.”

            “Um,” said the doctor, who took another look at his chart. Yes, this was a new doctor. He seemed to panic easily. “Your room at the hotel was registered to a Bernard Zweibel, from Carathon, Narcia.”

            “That is not my name. I’m…” and then he remembered the dead woman in his bed back home, and thought again about letting the doctor know who he was. “Mark Turner. From Omlos.”

            Doctor Alwahi frowned and wrote down the name on his clipboard. “Right, well, regardless of your name, do you remember why you jumped out of the window?”

            He did very distinctly. The man in the blue hat who was not really a man at all had tried to kill him. Something about the House. He remembered that the man was in black and white. “You know, it was the craziest thing. I’d never believe it if I heard it myself. I tripped over a shoe. You’d be shocked how dangerous it can be to just leave things lying around near a floor-length window.”

            Doctor Alwahi looked skeptical. “We have counselors here at the hospital. If there is something wrong, you can talk to them about whatever you want.”

            “Why would I need to…? Oh, no I think you misunderstand. I really did trip on a shoe. “ He tried to sell the befuddlement. Of course he realized, maybe even when he was mid-air, that people would think he had tried to kill himself (actually, at that time, he was worried that people would think he had killed himself,) but explaining to this doctor, even in a place so nonchalant about the supernatural as Arizradna, that a colorless monster with a gaping maw of razor-sharp teeth had been trying to kill him seemed like a great way to get sent to a mental ward.

            For the next half hour or so, Doctor Alwahi did a basic check up, taking Milton’s pulse and listening to his breathing. He checked the bandages and appeared to like what he was seeing underneath. They were both somewhat quiet at that point. Milton was hard at work constructing the fiction of Mark Turner while he was attempting to just seem like a tourist with a tendency to trip over shoes.

            “Well, everything looks good. Doctor Grosin will be here at noon to do run a few more tests. Nothing invasive, she’s just going to check out that bump on the head.”

            Alwahi, who Milton very much doubted he would ever be calling Vindur, opened the door, almost bumping into a nurse. “Oh, excuse me…”

            “Can he see anyone? His wife is here.”

            “Uh, yes. I think that would be all right.”

            And then a woman in her mid-to-late twenties came in. She had long, light brown hair and was a little on the short side. She practically ran over to Milton’s bed and gave him a wet kiss. “Oh, Mark. Thank Kerahn you’re all right.” She turned to Alwahi. “He is all right, isn’t he? He’s going to be ok?” She seemed on the verge of tears.

            “Yes, we expect to be able to release him in a couple days.”

            She sighed deeply. “Thank you doctor. Thank you so much.” She kneeled down next to Milton and held his left had tightly. “You scared me so much, Mark. Never do that again.”

            Milton attempted to play along, though he was not sure why he was doing so. “Never again, I promise. It was not exactly a fun experience.”

            The woman laughed nervously, as if she was holding back tears. “Could I have a few minutes with my husband alone?”

            Alwahi looked to the nurse, then said “Sure. Doctor Grosin will be here in about two hours.” He closed the door.

            Immediately, the woman dropped the act. “You scared the shit out of all of us, Jack.”

            “I take it you’re with the House?”

            “I’m Dust, though you can call me Tessa if you want.” She put down her handbag and walked over to the window.

            “Ok, Dust, I’m Jack Milton, but I would imagine you already know a lot more about me than I do about you.”

            “You would imagine correctly. How’s the leg? Must hurt like hell.”

            “Actually, they’ve got it totally numbed.” Then something occurred to him. “Hey, how the hell did you know to call me Mark? I literally made that up about one minute beforehand.”

            Tessa yanked a small wire out of the curtains. “Because we bugged your room. We couldn’t be sure he wasn’t going to come after you to finish the job.”

            “’He’ being the guy with the blue suit?”

            Tessa looked incredulous. “Blue suit? That’s what you took away from that guy?”

            “Well, that and the teeth.”

            “His name is Aragoth. He’s one of the Lost Ones. I’ll put together a briefing for you when we get out of here.”

            “So you’re taking me somewhere?”

            “Yep.”

            “And do I have a choice in this matter?”

            “Nope,” and Tessa gave him a shit-eating grin. Despite himself, Milton found it endearing.

            “So where are we going?”
            Tessa pulled a small, brass device out of her handbag and held it up to her face to get a better look as she made some adjustments. “Towatki. Next town over, just a little under a track away. I have something of a safehouse there. At the least it’s where all my stuff is.” She put the device back in the bag, its purpose still a mystery to Milton. “Oh by the way, I told them that the reason the room was under Zweibel was a sex thing. Role-playing, you know. If it comes up again, just in case.”

            “Um, sure.”

            “Best to be consistent, you know.”

            “Ok, and what is Mark Turner’s wife’s name?”

            “Belinda.”

            Milton burst out laughing. “You’re joking, right?”

            “What?”

            “Who names… well, anyone Belinda?”

            “Fuck you!” said Tessa. She put the device back into her handbag, pausing momentarily, as if she were lost in thought. “Besides, Mark Turner will cease to exist as soon as we get you out of here, along with his adoring wife, so it doesn’t really matter what her name is.”

            “Whatever you say, Belinda.”

            Three days later, Milton was on a train in a private compartment with Tessa Olanis. It appeared those Arizradna doctors knew what they were doing, as Milton was able to walk comfortably for the first time since he had been shot in the knee.

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2012)