Carla tried again, moving around, trying to renew eye contact with the woman. “Look, I really don’t think it’s a very good idea for Gary to leave right now. There’s still a risk of infection developing and he’s lost a lot of blood, at least let us keep him in overnight and maybe see how he’s doing tomorrow?”
She was close enough to smell the foetor rising from Mrs Taub’s chunky-knit, black jumper. The wool, impregnated with sweat and cigarette smoke and gobbets of food, had probably smelled better when it was still on the sheep. Gingerly and reluctantly, Carla risked putting her hand on the hostile woman’s arm once more.
Mrs Taub whirled around, her greasy black hair flailing behind her, and for a second Carla thought she was going to be attacked, but they were interrupted by a lilting, gurgling voice from the direction of the door. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five!” Carla turned to look, keeping half an eye on the wrathful Mrs Taub.
A man in a torn yellow raincoat, presumably Gary Taub’s father, was lurching into the room. He was completely bald, with a large, round belly, and a moon face that petered out in a succession of roly-poly chins. His expression was blissfully vacant, his eyes seemingly looking in completely different directions. More peculiar yet was his walk, a stiff-legged, waddling gait that pitched his entire body from side to side, his sandals slapping against oedematous feet with every step. “Once!” he announced brightly, “I caught a fish alive!”
Carla exhaled slowly. Perhaps the husband would be more amenable to reason. He did, at least, look less antagonised than his wife. She went to meet him at the door. He beamed at her as she approached. “Why. Did. You let. It go?” His voice was thickly rhythmical, like his walk.
Carla chose to ignore the rhetorical question, trying instead to reassure him about his son’s state of comparative health, her voice rising as his attention seemed rapidly to drift. He resumed his listing progress towards the boy’s bed. “Because”, he burbled “it bit my finger so! Ahhhhh! Which finger did it bite?” He grabbed Gary’s mutilated hand, eliciting a yelp of pain. “This little finger on. My. Right!” Chortling happily, he began pulling Gary towards the door.
Knowing better than to resist, Gary shuffled quietly alongside him, and, knowing better now than to stand directly in Mrs Taub’s way, Carla tried one last time to persuade them to stay. “Look, I’d be happy to address any concerns you have! We can arrange for you stay here with Gary! He’s going to need more painkillers, at least let us give you some to take home with you!”
Mrs Taub turned around as they reached the door and jabbed her index finger hard into Carla’s sternum. “Stay away!” she hissed, staring at Carla for long seconds and then striding off after her husband and son.
Carla exhaled slowly. Her heartbeat began to slow as the threat of violence receded. She was annoyed that it had accelerated at all. Annoyed to admit that she had been intimidated. In a hospital as well, an environment she had always regarded as her home turf. She rejoined Dr Khalil at the nurse’s station. He had a file in his hands, but over the top of his glasses he was watching the Taubs lumber back down the corridor towards the elevators, Mr Taub’s absurd, wallowing saunter casting spastic shadows on the wall.
“Unbelievable!” said Carla, angrily. “I can’t believe they’re just swanning out of here with him! As if we’re interfering by stopping him from sawing off his own fingers!”
“Well,” offered Khalil, putting his file down, “I don’t know about ‘swanning’. The swan is a graceful animal, whereas that…” He nodded after the family.
“He confirmed it was suicide you know. The Ramsgates and the girls. He confirmed that they drove off the road on purpose. He says he wanted to go with them. There you go, that’s suicidal ideation! We can hold him!”
Dr Khalil put up a hand wearily. “We cannot detain him. I can tell you now, the hospital will not sanction it. They have had legal problems with the Innsmouth church before. It cost them a lot of money. If we were to detain him, he’d be released with one phone call from their minister.”
Carla rounded on him. “The church? I’m sorry, do we take medical instruction from them now? What the hell does it matter what they think?”
“I know, it is unfortunate. The hospital though is ‘once bitten, twice shy’. There was an issue with a termination performed on an Innsmouth girl. The church got her to retract her consent, claimed it was done without her permission, made all kinds of noise about sectarian persecution – they are aggressively litigious in their dealings with outsiders. The hospital now prefers to leave them alone.”
“Oh, this is ridiculous” fumed Carla. “Which church, anyway? That warehouse near where we went this morning? The Evangelical Order of David? That one?”
Khalil nodded. “Yes, the EOD runs the old part of Innsmouth to a large extent. There was an attempt, a few years ago, to use them as a liaison. The church penetrates the community there in a way that officialdom has never managed. We thought we could use them to collect information on health problems in the congregation, provide us with an idea of the levels of social need in the town.”
“They refused to play ball?”
“Oh no. They agreed readily, but then they just reported back to us that everyone was fine. No-one had any symptoms of respiratory disease, everyone had central heating. There was no drug use, no psychiatric problems, no poverty and no crime. After a few weeks it was abandoned. They had just seen another opportunity to keep us outsiders at arm’s length.”
“Hmm.” Carla pondered for a few moments. “The Taub boy had a lot to say about that church. He even hinted that they were in some way responsible for his condition. And the other kids. He seemed afraid of them. I think that tomorrow I’ll have to go and have a look, talk to whoever’s in charge.”
“They won’t talk to you” said Khalil, quickly. “It might be better to tread a little carefully.”
“Oh, they’ll talk to me” Carla assured him. “I’m a federal employee. If they’re as keen on avoiding publicity as you say they are, it would be better for them to talk to me than have me come back with a posse of doctors and police.” Privately she doubted that she would be able to raise a posse like that. Her boss considered this a punitive assignment, to be wrapped up quickly and without fuss. The threat of action might get her somewhere though. She got up to leave.
“Well, I wish you luck, Dr Edwards. I would come with you, but tomorrow I must work here. If I can be of any other assistance…”
“I’ll be fine. You keep on looking for congenital defects in the birth records. I’ll see if I can find anything that links our cases to the EOD. Since they seem to be the only people who know anything about what happens in Innsmouth anyway.”
She regretted that parting shot later. It was a little unfair. Khalil was, after all, the one who had alerted the CDC in the first place. Or the EPA, at least. It had irritated her though, to see how reluctant he became in the face of the Evangelical Order of David and their enthusiasm for litigation.
It was still pouring with rain by the time she got back to the hotel, with no sign of it lifting. Carla decided to call it a day and eat at the hotel with the two or three other disconsolate, travelling souls. The food was indifferent, to say the least: frozen fish, despite the proximity of the sea, tinned vegetables, sauce from a catering-size, plastic tub, and a flavourless Viognier loaded with sulphites.
She kept her laptop on the table while she ate, partly to discourage anyone from trying to make conversation and partly so that she could look for information on the Evangelical Order of David.
Perhaps slightly surprisingly, they had no homepage at all. Or at least none that Google could find. The only hit was a link to a cult survivors site. Carla followed the link and scanned the page until she found a throwaway reference halfway down. The EOD was included in a list of active cults, that was all.