Doctor Perry
by
Kirsten Mckenzie
Under the Hippocratic Oath, a doctor swears to remember that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.
Doctor Perry assures his elderly patients at the Rose Haven Retirement Home that he can offer warmth, sympathy, and understanding.
Doctor Perry assures his elderly patients at the Rose Haven Retirement Home that he can offer warmth, sympathy, and understanding.
Doctor Perry is a
liar.
Hiding from a
traumatic past, Elijah Cone wants nothing to do with the other residents at the
Rose Haven, content to sit at his window waiting to die. He’s about to learn
that under Doctor Perry death is the easy option...
Excerpt from
Chapter 49
Doctor Perry
by
Kirsten
McKenzie
Myra has just buried her old cat, who she found dead
in the garden, severing the last link to her old life. The twin boys she and
her husband, Doctor Perry, are fostering, have just made her some afternoon
tea. The twins aren’t as angelic as their little blonde faces would lead you to
believe, they may have had something to do with old Tom’s death. And now they’ve
got their hands on some of Doctor Perry’s very special tonic… the tonic he uses
on his patients at the Rose Haven Retirement Home…
The boys walked into the lounge, huge
smiles illuminating their angelic faces, and Myra smiled at the mess of jam
spread across a slab of bread, which no doubt they’d helped themselves to,
judging by the smear on one boy’s cheek.
“We made you a coffee,” said James.
“And an afternoon snack,” said Jesse.
The coffee had splashed over the rim
of the mug forming a muddy puddle on the wooden tray but leaving enough left
in the mug to satisfy. The sight of the rustic jam sandwich made her stomach
rumble, she hadn’t realised how hungry she was.
“Thank you, boys,” Myra replied with
absolute honesty.
The boys giggled, their high pitched
falsetto voices more at home in a church choir than her suburban home.
“Can we go outside to play now please,
Myra?” asked James, his hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“Yes but don’t pick the flowers in the
garden,” she said. As they vanished from the room she followed with, “Because
some of them are poisonous,” but whether they heard, she couldn’t be sure.
Myra closed her hands around the
coffee mug. The aroma toyed with her senses and she took a sip. The boys had
added too much cream in an attempt to cool the coffee, making it more
lukewarm than hot, but at least they’d tried. The horror of what had happened
to Tom would never leave her, but sinking into the cushions of the couch, she
tried to let go of the afternoon’s stress. So many nights she’d sat here on her
own, a baby in her arms and a bottle in her hands, the soft scent of the baby
filling the space left vacant by a husband never at home. But for now the
space was hers. She took another sip and felt the caffeine kick in — the
twins had made it stronger than she liked and the difference was noticeable,
she felt her eyeballs popping open and her heartbeat increasing. She hadn’t
realised how much she’d needed a fix until now.
Myra tried closing her brown eyes but
when she did, she imagined images of cats padding paw-less through her
garden leaving smudges of blood on the grass, and fancied she could hear their
exposed bones clicking on the tiles of the kitchen floor like a blind man with
a cane tap, tap, tapping his way closer and closer. Myra swallowed the
fear threatening to paralyse her. Shock, she was going into shock, and she gulped
back the rest of the coffee, cold enough to knock it back in one long swallow.
And then it hit her. It felt like she’d been pinned underneath a giant
fan, the cyclonic air flattening her skin, forcing it into undulating waves
over her tired cheekbones. Her eyebrows moved under their own volition, her jaw
clenching. It felt as if hundreds of cats were stabbing at her with their
crudely amputated bones as they clawed their way into her lap for blood-soaked
cuddles. She tried screaming but couldn’t find her tongue, her pulsating skin
made that an impossible task.
The nightmarish vision of the cats
vanished, leaving only the excruciating pain from their imagined amputations.
Myra watched as her fingers shrank into themselves, leaving stumpy shadows of
her formerly long tapered digits. Her wedding rings slipped off onto the tray,
sending up a tiny splash as they landed on the polished wood — the gold circles
an empty promise of something never delivered.
Myra’s head bobbed forward as she sank
into the cushions. No, she wasn’t sinking into the cushions, she was shrinking,
the couch threatening to engulf her diminutive frame.
Through a deep reserve of inner
strength, she reached up to touch her face, her tiny fingers pressing into her
rippling skin. It was as if she’d plunged her fingers into the breathing gills
of a shark — her cheeks, jaw, teeth, bones, muscles, and tendons pulsated under
her touch. Her face had taken on a life of its own. Then, it was as if someone
had filled her head with Fourth of July crackers, and then lit the fuse. The
pain so excruciating that she found her voice and as her adult-sized cranium
shrank and compressed her brain at an inconsistent speed with the other changes
to her body, Myra’s screams shook the house.
* * *
The boys laughed as they climbed
higher and higher up the tree in the garden, a pair of garden clippers tucked
into the waistband of Jesse’s shorts. What fun they would have now! Two little
boys doing what little boys did.
~
For many years
Kirsten McKenzie worked in her family's antique store, where she went from
being allowed to sell the 50c postcards as a child, to selling $5,000 Worcester
vases and seventeenth century silverware, providing a unique insight into the
world of antiques which touches every aspect of her writing.
Her historical
fiction novels 'Fifteen Postcards' and it's sequel 'The Last Letter' have been
described as 'Time Travellers Wife meets Far Pavilions', and 'Antiques Roadshow
gone viral'. The third book in the series 'Telegram Home' will be released in
November 2018 by Accent Press.
Her bestselling
gothic horror novel 'Painted' was released in 2017, with her medical thriller
'Doctor Perry' following closely in April 2018.
She lives in New
Zealand with her husband, her daughters, an SPCA rescue cat and a kitten found
in the neighbour's shed, and can usually be found procrastinating on Twitter
under the handle @kiwimrsmac.
Social Media Links –
Facebook: www.facebook.com/kirstenmckenzieauthor
Twitter: www.twitter.com/kiwimrsmac
Instagram: www.instagram.com/kiwimrsmac
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/kirstenmckenzieauthor
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