It could have saved valuable time. Surely he knew more than anyone else that time was of the essence, not just with victims of kidnappings but with patients. It was very negligent of him to act like this and she began to feel that maybe he wasn’t the prestigious doctor she first believed him to be.

“Would you have believed me? The best knowledge is learned by experience as I have said before.” He knew that if he came out of the blue and announced such a thing that she would find him suspicious or think that he had something to do with Josephine’s disappearance and he wasn’t about to have that nest of problems on his shoulders.

That would cause problems with his field of profession, among other things. Besides, this girl was a skeptic. He thought it would be good to let her find things out on her own. That was what she wanted, after all.

“So you plan on showing me what you know? Was he the one who possessed her and caused me to have those nightmares?” Roana was intent on questioning him until he answered.  She wasn’t about to let him get away with saying nothing even more than he had.

“That other beaked doctor possesses a sharp mental prowess and cunning. It's how he’s able to evade evidence as a being that exists outside of an urban legend.”  The doctor knew that the mad one had his ways of evading controversy. He worked stealthily and wasn’t going to leave himself open to be caught in his nefarious activities. 

“If only Red knew about this. He’d probably pee himself with excitement.” Roana knew that this was right up the boy’s alley. It had all the makings of a great urban legend.  If Josephine wasn’t caught in the cogwheels of this machine, he’d be far more fascinated than worried.

“Red?” The doctor cocked his head in curiosity.

“Redway,” Roana used his full name. “He’s a friend of mine who has an affinity for stuff like this. He’s fascinated with urban legends.”

“Is he?” The doctor was intrigued. “Interesting.”

“He can be a pain sometimes, but I think that’s because he’s so passionate about his interests. I can’t really fault him for that,” Roana smiled fondly. Red was a dear friend to her and thinking of him made her feel a little better in this horror of a situation.

“The two of you share such attributes. It provides you with a commonality and mutual understanding.” He picked up that Roana was just as fascinated with the paranormal as her friend, even if she was a skeptic. Despite that, she recognized life after death and studied the nature of spirits.  It was more urban legends that made her skeptical.

“I enjoy his company. He is one of the reasons I want to find Josephine.” Roana held her hand and averted her gaze from the doctor. Worry befell her features and her tone shifted. “His guilt is immense because he prodded her to go explore the legend with him to see if it was true. They risked a lot in the process since he had to summon a spirit. They could have been killed for witchcraft.”

She couldn’t get Red out of her head.  When he came to her, he was at his wit’s end and it showed.  That look in his eyes, wild and frantic for any kind of sanctity she had to offer.  It was the most primal form of human fear.  He broke down to her and expressed his feelings.  His pain was so prominent that she could feel it resonating from him and everything from the pitch of his voice to his expression haunted her, driving her to seek out the truth and bring Josephine home.

“Did you carry that guilt as well?” The doctor could tell by how she spoke of it that she was distressed.  After all, Josephine was her friend as well.

“I didn’t encourage her, nor did I try to stop her. I wanted her to be the judge of her own issues and find out what was best for her. However…” She paused momentarily and gripped her hand tightly. “I did say that if she found anything to be true I wanted further information on what the happenings were. I am someone you’d call a skeptic and needed proof provided before me before I’d mindlessly validate anything Red spoke of.”

Her desire to have the truth displayed before her had caused her to disregard her friend’s situation and how dangerous it could have been.  Instead of giving Josephine some sort of definitive answer, or even telling her not to give into Red’s story and not go with him, she gave her the option on going or not and it resulted in her disappearance.  Roana couldn’t forgive herself for causing everyone around her so much pain and couldn’t help but blame herself for Josephine’s problems.

“The world is full of cynics and skeptics. It’s rare to find an optimist.” The doctor knew this, especially during such dark times where hysteria and grief saturated everyday life.

“Much like you, a certain event in the past keeps me from being too optimistic.” Roana had her scars, though they were not as severe as the doctor’s, but it didn’t make them any harder to deal with.

“And just as you long to know me, I also long to know you,” the doctor placed a gloved hand on her shoulder that reverted her gaze from the gently waving grass to his mask.  His voice held an odd sense of kindness to it and she couldn’t help but smile a little.

In this maddening world, he provided some sort of ground, despite it being unstable ground.  At this point she was just happy to have something under her feet.

“It will be nice to have a friend in you, doctor.”

--

‘It’s hard to sleep without thinking about him. People used to tell me that he kidnapped his so-called patients. I was always afraid that I would become one myself. We have many beaked doctors in this town and any of them could be him. I felt like I saw him out of the corner of my eye…and now I lay here in misery. ‘Some doctors use fake cures to make people think they’re being healed. Beware of the one who wishes to kill his victims, for he doesn’t seek a cure but an end to your suffering.’ I remember Red talking about them, even though he said he didn’t know what exactly he did to people after he abducted them, just that they ended up dead.

I took it for what it was, a silly urban legend…until people started to actually disappear and someone even supposedly died because of it. Supposedly because no one saw the doctor kill him…but I felt like he did. It’s what made me decide to investigate that ghost Red spoke of. If the legend of the murderous doctor came true…then what else about the rumors of Conversion Town were true? I feel sick to my stomach even now.’

Josephine slowly opened her eyes to darkness. The ground below her was dusty and cold; rock with a thin layer of sand topped it that clung to her striped dress and skin.  Everything smelled damp and wet and a faint dripping could be heard.  The cold was the same searing chill she felt in her nightmares. Ropes burned into her arms as she shifted to her side to see the shadowed figure of a beaked doctor who was sitting on a large rock a few feet away.  Taking breaths of oxygen mixed with dirt she struggled a little in an attempt to try and get her wrists free of their binds, but all she did was rub her skin raw.

“What are you doing? Why are you doing this to me?” Josephine knew that the doctor may not answer her, but she had to try regardless.

“Because I need you to fulfill my plans.” 

Stupid girl. 

That was a very obvious question. If she was going to ask him anything, she needed to make it meaningful.

“What?” Josephine didn’t like that reply.

“The infected are best left to rest. To kill the virus you must reduce the number that is infected to keep it from spreading. I save lives by sacrificing those with the disease. We don’t understand it enough to treat it. This is the only way.”  This doctor had a very grim view on the plague. His beliefs were enough to send chills up Josephine’s spine.

“Surely what the doctors do helps the patients. There has to be a better way than just murdering people.” There was no reason to murder people who were sick and knocking at death’s door. What kind of cruel man would do such a thing? She didn’t understand his depraved ideology.

“I know the truth of the situation. Why do you think more people are dying than being cured?” There was truth to his words, and he would show her through statistics.

“They aren’t. You’re delusional.” She refused to think that none of the doctors had found anything that at least lessened the effects of the disease.  People wouldn’t see them as such a blessing if they didn’t do some good at least.

“I am not. You merely choose not to open your eyes to reality. That isn’t my issue.” He worked in the field. He dealt with the lives of people every day.  This doctor had access to medicine beyond her understanding and none of it worked on his patients.  He wasn’t about to be shot down by some commoner who couldn’t distinguish cures from charlatan nonsense.

“I am not even infected. You have no reason to drag me down here in this cave,” Josephine protested.  She would have understood if he knew that she had the pestilence, but he saw no buboes on her.  She didn’t even look sickly! 

Why pick a perfectly healthy person to hold captive?

“You are,” he argued with his back still turned.  During their entire conversation he had not turned around even once. He didn’t even bother to look over his shoulder.  He merely sat there like an ominous shadow and spoke to her in a mechanical voice.

“I’m not!” Josephine shot back. Anger was apparent by her snappy tone.

“I know a patient when I see one.”

“You’re probably just a charlatan! If all of your patients are dying then that says something about your practice!” Josephine’s comment was cruel to the core. She wanted to dig into him.  She wanted to bruise his very soul.  If she were to die here, then she would go down fighting.

“It says a lot about this disease and so little they understand it. There are imposters, but I am not one of them. I in fact, do have training…quite a bit of it. If not I would be a dead man now.” The doctor’s voice turned cold before changing the octave to something more unstable. “If you can’t cure the plague you succumb to it. Can’t you see the bodies piling? This town’s foundation rests upon the dead.”

They were everywhere.  There were so many corpses that they had to be carried away in a cart.  The graveyard was nearly filled to capacity, to the point that it didn’t take victims of the illness. Instead, they were all cast into a pit at the end of town and burned alive to prevent the spread of death.  Loved ones were lost, relatives, children, mothers, the elderly and many more.  It had no bias, no preference to a demographic.  The rich, middle-class and poor all held equal chances of it spreading.  Those who were more susceptible to illness had higher chances, but he had seen it affect more than just them.

The fact that this know-nothing girl would dare write him off as a false doctor, given all he had done was enough to make his blood boil. However, he knew that he had to keep it suppressed beneath his shroud of black.  If he let her get to him, then he couldn’t continue with his plans.  Everything was meticulously plotted until this point and breaking character wasn’t in his set of options.

“That’s not true,” Josephine argued. “The town is just going through a hard time. Most everyone here is sick, but I’m not! I’m well! You are killing…not only someone who doesn’t deserve it, but someone who is well! Don’t you get that?”

This man needed to get it through his delusional head! He was harming far more people than he was helping! He was just someone contributing to the death and horror of their daily life!  Why did he feel that he had to act like that? If he truly was a medical professional of merit, then he should have been using his knowledge on medicine to help cure people. If there truly was no cure, he could help in the cause to find one. 

Anything was better than murdering people. There were alternatives! He only needed to try harder to seek them out.

There were enough people giving up on the situation. Doctors most certainly didn’t need to be added into that sickening mixture.

“You are most definitely ill,” the doctor pushed his point.

“I can’t believe you to be a true doctor when you’re making such fake claims.” Josephine was getting tired of this man’s insistence. 

Before she could utter another rebuttal, the doctor’s words sent chills down her spine.

“Don’t you wonder where it all comes from? The hot and cold flashes, the pain…it’s all the illness. It eats at you, slowly rotting you from the inside out. Is that a way to live?” 

Josephine paused for a moment.  Her heart beat escalated and she felt her breath hitch in her throat.  He was describing what she had felt in the graveyard.  What she had been feeling off and on for a few weeks.  How did he know that she dealt with those symptoms?  There was only one doctor who knew about her illness and it wasn’t him.  That doctor would have never told this man about her.

She was really freaking out, even though she tried not to show it.  Josephine had suspicions that someone was stalking her and possibly poisoning her, but she had no proof. She was certain that this man was the one who had been pursuing her.  He wouldn’t know such sensitive information otherwise.  Josephine was onto him, and she would let him know.

“Who are you to dictate my longevity?” Her voice was strong and unwavering. 

“I am saving your life.” Didn’t she see that she was ill? He held the cure in his hand. She only needed to take it.