[ PART THREE ] "The Condemned" - Short Story

Instructions

!! TW: bl00d and needles !! 5:00 am, The Exam I awoke the young man some time before he would be able to feel well-rested, though a good enough time from when he fell asleep to give him an insatiable taste for rest. When I tapped his shoulder, Mr. Eiusdem slowly opened his eyes and made a distasteful expression as he blinked, attempting to bring the room into better focus. He did not complain to me verbally, however— either because he was too exhausted to come up with the proper words or he was too polite to utter them. “It is time for your examination,” I told him curtly as he sat up in bed. “The doctors have asked to see you. Follow me, please.” Mr. Eiusdem pulled himself out from under the covers and cast an uneasy glance at his box, as if he was hesitant to leave it in the room without his watchful eye to protect it. I offered him no words of comfort for his worries, and he quickly stifled them, getting out of bed and following a pace behind me on legs unsteady from tiredness. Again, I led the young man down the hallway and past the other doors to the other rooms of the hotel. It was a short journey from Mr. Eiusdem’s room to the doctor’s office at the end of the hall, but with every step Mr. Euisdem seemed to become more and more pale in the face, as if a sickness were rapidly coming over him. I did not find this peculiar in the slightest— I had seen many previous customers contract this immediate illness, and it always ended in some form of pitiful retching. When we reached the door to the doctor’s office, which was painted a dark shade of red instead of the green of the other doors, we found that it was already ajar, and we strode through it. The room was small, and it perhaps would have served better as a walk-in closet or a broom cupboard, but it had become an office, nonetheless. There were already two women in the room, both of them notably tall and slender, though naturally their stature went unnoticed due to the far more preoccupying feature of their facelessness. Indeed, a smooth plane of skin covered the front of their head where a nose, mouth, and eyes might usually be, and one could question their aptness as medical professionals with this rather inhibiting disability. The women carried themselves, however, with undeniable confidence and intelligence, and thus whether or not they were affected by the lack of features was too questionable. With a wave of her spindly-fingered hand, the woman guided Mr. Eiusdem into the wooden chair on the far side of the room. Though he held his tongue, his eyes glistened with shock and horror. He looked between the women and attempted to catch my gaze as a drowning man might attempt to seize the life raft, since to see a familiar face— or even a face at all— may have brought him some small comfort. I allowed him this moment of contact for a short moment before I returned my attention to the doctors. The gangly women circled him, poking and prodding at him with little respect for his privacy, their heads tilting from one side to the other like curious birds examining a shiny object on the pavement. In a short time, the doctors satisfied their physical examination of the young man and one of them went to the cabinet to retrieve a small glass vial paired with a thin needle. Mr. Eiusdem’s patience and politeness all but vanished at the sight of it, and instantly he was jolted into a terrified frenzy, attempting to leap from the wooden chair and thrashing around madly when the doctor without the needle held him back. Again, the woman tilted her head with expressionless idiosyncrasy, wielding the needle and vial in her hands. The young man screamed in panic, the series of events having thrown him into an awful swivet, but this too was stifled by the press of the second faceless doctor’s hand covering his mouth. The needle slid into his arm just above the inside of his elbow, vanishing into the pale flesh there and drawing out a sample of crimson bl00d which gradually filled the vial. When the doctor was finished with this, she removed the needle and returned it to the cabinet. Mr. Eiusdem’s terror, along with the drawing of his bl00d, had caused him to faint. I kindly thanked the doctors for their work and lifted the young man from the wooden chair, cradling his limp figure in my arms. Off I went down the hallway, placidly observing the stains in the carpet. When I reached Mr. Eiusdem’s room, I returned him gently to his bed and left him there to sleep a few hours more. [ CONTINUED IN PART FOUR. ]