Free Immortal Stories: Eve by Gene Doucette Page B

as Dr. Marks and led them to his reception area—a small space with a plywood floor beneath a dozen padded metal chairs, plus another three around a short desk.  The walls were lined with empty bookshelves and the space had a faint scent of mildew.
    “Now, which of you is the patient!” the doctor asked with a kind of manufactured enthusiasm.  “I’m afraid the notes I have on this appointment aren’t at all clear.”
    “There’s a complicated answer to that,” Rick said.
    “Ah, well, in this world of ours there are a lot of complicated things, aren’t there?”  He winked.  “Please, sit!”
    Marks stepped behind his desk and sat in a weathered office chair as she and Rick took less comfortable metal chairs on the other side of the desk.  Having never been to a medical doctor for professional reasons, Eve was uncertain how much of the inherent unwelcoming sense of this room was a product of this particular doctor, and how much was standard for all such offices.  Either way, aside from their host’s rehearsed jocularity, she didn’t feel welcome. 
    The doctor slipped on a pair of glasses and took a closer look at both of them.  “If I could be a tiny bit forward, here… Rick is it?  And you’re Eve.  I am terrible with names, so you’ll have to excuse me if I say them five or ten times over.  But I’m going to go out on a limb and say neither of you is here for me.  Professionally, I mean.”
    “That’s so, yes,” Eve said.
    “Why do you say that, doctor Marks?” Rick asked.  “I mean, it’s true, but what gave it away?”
    He smiled.  “Son, if someone handed you one of my business cards, you already know why.  I don’t treat humans down here.  A few times a month I work a rotation down at Saint Jude’s and then I’ll see humans, but out here I serve another kind of client.  You are definitely human.  Her, I’m not completely certain.”
    “I am,” she said.
    “You need some sun! ” he said with a laugh.  “Someone might come after you with a stake one day.”
    “My eyes are the wrong color and it’s still daytime, but I understand your point.”
    “Yes of course, I know your eyes are the wrong color, but someone else might not.  Thank goodness for those silly movies, people nowadays think much more highly of vampires—”
    “Hold up,” Rick interrupted.  “No, you know what?  Never mind.  I’m all the way on the other side of the looking glass already here.”
    “Now, were you testing me, Rick?  Was this why you came?”
    “Nah, I just wanted to hear someone else say this stuff.  I’ve been getting it from her for a few weeks now, and I figured either I was losing my mind or she’d already lost hers.”
    “You look healthy to me,” he said to Eve, in a way that sounded like a compliment and not a lascivious assertion.  This was perhaps a talent a medical doctor would have to develop, given how often he had to ask people to remove clothing for clinical reasons.
    “So, now that we all agree the world is full of stranger things than us, what can I help you with?”
    “I have a number of questions,” Eve said.  “But we actually have brought you a patient.”
    “Oh!  Are they still in the car?  You can bring them in, certainly.”
    “No, they’re here.  Dee, would you say hello to the doctor?”
    Dee hovered in front of his face.
    “H’lo,” she said.
    Dr. Marks nearly fainted.
    *   *   *
    “I’d heard of them, of course, but I never expected to meet one!” Dr. Marks said, a little later.  He was looking at Dee under a magnifying glass, and Dee, to her credit, was sitting still for him.  It helped that Rick had mushrooms in his pocket for her once this was over.
    They had moved to the doctor’s examination room, which was a brightly lit and far more impressively antiseptic area behind a cheap wooden door near the desk in his waiting room.  This had more of the feel Eve was expecting on a visit to a medical practitioner: stocked