Mid-November, West Bass River plummet deeper into its constant sombre mood. Sunlight had totally distinguished behind thick, gray clouds. The wind was bitter cold, raged empty streets days and nights, withered the City to the colours of black and gray. Every morning, it’s either raining or snowing for the whole day, and sunlight becomes as superficial and fabricated as the legends of vampire.

Maisie Watson sweeps the duster across the altar, humming to herself. She brushes the light dust collected on the shiny onyx tablet with painted-yellow Chinese words carved vertically on it. On either sides of the tablet are two erected, flat-board-shaped objects, with double-folded translucent black veil, placed over them.

She has only seen Doctor Vu uncover those objects a few times, but she was too far away to see the details. As she lights a few sticks of incense and cleans the candles’ ash trays, she forces herself not to look. She is ashamed to say that she has tempted to peek what underneath more than once, over the years. But she never goes as far as actually lift the veil. Her finger would hovers, trembling, centimetres from the thin material, yet there’s a force defying her, driving her back, forbidden her filthy touch to contaminate the honoured souls.

Maisie Watson shifts the candles and the tablet and wanders off to clean away the scattered newspapers and half-read books. There is a holiness in this oriental house. Its melancholy and cold shade doesn’t resonate a desolated, chill feeling. As opposed, it generated an odd calmness in her soul, still and gentle like water lake lapping against a sandy shore. Against the approaching harsh weather, Doctor Vu’s house stands stoic like a lighthouse, a safe haven for her. She had viewed this more intimate than her own home.

Maisie Watson automatically stacks the books alphabetically by its first letter of the title. She glimpses at the spines, squinting to make out the words. The letters bend and twirl a bit, refuse to stand still. Unquiet Spirits, she reads, Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places. She quickly gives up and shelves them.

Her eyes stray to the window. Outside, snow is spurting in gushes, although it isn’t as cold as it seems, since Doctor Vu has only complained of his back ache once or twice in the morning, before he retreated to his Office and sneezing his way through a stack of paperwork. Occasionally, she hears Doctor Vu murmurs to himself, humming leisurely to the vintage classic music playing over the recorder, soft paper shuffle and snap into folders scacato. His routine day begins again, and she knows she’ll get send to do some errands or go pick some weed from his wild backyard for his experiments.

Doctor Vu had been well now, although he’s still looks ashy-pale under the fluorescent light. He had been wallowing in his bed for the weekend, shuffling out for a quick bite and swallowing pills periodically, yet the bags under his eyes only look bolder and more swollen, drawing attention to his hollowed cheeks. She had fluttering around him like a mother’s bird while he was having breakfast, stealing guilty glances at his face. Although he keeps saying it wasn’t her fault for getting him sick, she cannot shake the weight off.

A loud shriek of a phone call hulls Maisie Watson back to reality, yanking her off balance. She glances over her shoulder, back to Doctor Vu’s closed office door. She grabs the kiwi bag on the fruit dishes and hastily moves into the kitchen, where the sounds from the Doctor’s room filters out much clearer.

Doctor Vu is greeting the person, his voice hushed and secretive. She strains to make out some words, but only able to pick up some random English words that fragmented throughout the Doctor’s speech. His chair scrapes against the floor, signalling him standing up abruptly, and she knows Doctor Vu would throw an annoyed look at the chair for making such ear-bleeding noise.

Maisie Watson selects a knife and starts skinning the kiwi and cutting them into perfectly round slices. The knife is a bit dull. She pretends not to be distracted as Doctor Vu switches rapidly between Cantonese and Vietnamese and English, his pacing steps restless, on-edge. Loud and consecutive impatient thud and bang of storage stands stir the atmosphere, and she wonders did he misplaced his P-folder into his F-case, again. Or maybe it’s H and G mix-up today.

As she slices the blunt edge through the wet fruit, the sweet-sour odour osmosis into the thin, cool air, she ponders will there be a patient stopping by. Doctor Vu rarely has guests in his house. Maisie Watson cannot remember Doctor Vu’s parents’ faces, except a vague recall that they look like little mices, but she knows Doctor Vu’s patients as well as he himself does.

The patients come irregularly, but lately there has been an influx. They come sick and dizzy and green like banana trunk, their eyes sink into the sockets and glaze over by a thick mist, cracked lips and cracked voice. Lan, Man, Vien, she memorizes the names, forcing herself to correctly pronounce those foreign lettering, memorizes how Lan has extremely shaken hands and would sometimes spill the tea onto her crest, memorizes that Man has wispy raven hair and the deepest, stillest, disturbing black eyes she had ever seen, that Vien’s children would rather bite their own navel and die rather than pay her health fee.

Maisie Watson would sit them at the sofa and offer some green tea and a blanket to them, chatting with them, until Doctor Vu stalks out of his office with a big, black suitcase. She would then shadows in the kitchen while they converse quietly in a language she doesn’t understand.

Doctor Vu doesn’t talk about his job, never complain, never explicitly specified what he does. He doesn’t wake up at sunrise and go to work like the hospital doctors. There are times where she suspects he practices an illegal basement clinic, or house a lab inside his locked office, or actually involved in the Wessex gang terrorize West Bass, but from glimpses and snatches through the keyhole, she has finally dismissed the ideas.

Maisie Watson thinks Doctor Vu is a witch, or something similar, although she isn’t sure if that’s the right word for it. Thầy lang is the Vietnamese called him. Fake doctor. Some says it it utmost sincerity, most spit the syllables like it’s crusted poison blood on their tongue. The young men and women, specifically. They scroll through their phone and snaps at their parents, spewing science statistics and numbers and reasons. She doesn’t really like them. They remind her of the jocks and the people paying her, who look her down the slope of their nose, a simper plasters on their face. She knows the type well. The type that laughs at the underdogs, the type that thinks they know best, the type that run business and dictate laws.

Those young people would always be the ones that jeer and cut down Doctor Vu as he hands his patients the vials. Doctor Vu has always been diplomatic and lowers his voice, smiling dismissive. Although, Maisie Watson never miss the red threatening snarl shimmers at the bottom of his eyes, and she thinks the young ones didn’t miss it, too.

“Mai? Mai, come in here.” Doctor Vu’s voice summons her.

She jolts back to attention, immediately abandons the kiwi and rushes down the hall. “Doctor,” She knocks. “You need me, Sir?”

Seconds later, Doctor Vu cracks open the door. He gazes down at her with heavy-lidded eyes, opens his mouth, but a long, tired sigh escapes instead of an order.

“Do you need me to boil the mint leaves?” Maisie Watson asks kindly. “Let me bring some fruits for you.”

“No, it’s fine.” He says, waving his hand weakly. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, covering a yawn.

His frame blocks the whole view into the room, but she smells an ugly smell of burning that ancient Chinese prescription medicine always give off. He’s mixing portions again. His patients always claiming his portions are the bitterest, foulest solutions they’ve encounter in their whole life. He refutes that with a snort and a Thuốc đắng mới chữa được bệnh. Whenever she gets sick, Doctor Vu would give her a package of black dry leaves with a promise of swift recovery, but she politely declines the gift. She tried it once, as a dare from Man, and she vomited all over the floor the next second. It becomes a tiny secret between her and the patients that she would snuggle some sugar into the package, although that’s forbidden.

The sun peers from behind Doctor Vu’s bony shoulder, tendrils of hazy, lazy tandrin glistens the Doctor’s closely-shaved scalp, casting a long, thin shadow of him onto the wall and floor and her.

She suddenly notices the shadow of Doctor Vu warps. Part of her laughs, but the longer she stares at the shadow, the more convinced she becomes that Doctor Vu’s shadow is moving like a breathing thing. It’s like cicada nymphs struggle to free from its exoskeleton. First comes the skinny, spindle legs. Then the antenna and a round, small head with bulges represents the eyes. As the animal shudders, Maisie Watson begins to think that it’s not a cicada, after all, it’s a spider. Because, she counts, there are eight legs and a wider thorax than of a cicada.

“Here,” Doctor Vu says, taking out money from his wallet, his harsh voice hulls Maisie Watson back. “Errands. Get all of them before five.” He thrusts a folded page at her, and it takes her a full minute for her senses to kick in and propel her to grab the piece of paper.

She blinks back to Doctor Vu’s shadow and it was be gone. The cicada, the spider, the whatever. Gone. Only normal, linear lines.

She tells herself it’s a trick of the light. But when she glances up to the Doctor, beads of sweats collect at his temple and above his lips. There’s a slight tremble in his chin, and Maisie Watson wonders if any of it was real or it was just another product of her hallucination and untamed imagination.

She thinks it’s the later.

Shaking her head, Maisie Watson looks down at the shopping list, and frowns at the first item, a bucket of icy dread dumps over her head.

“A child’s eye?”

“Yes,” Doctor Vu explains mildly. “Another special client.”