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Eldritch Horror? No, I'm A Doctor
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Sachiko paid for everything at first, because Marcus was a host at a nightclub and she understood that his income was modest. But over time, the expenses shifted. Groceries that Marcus picked up on the way home. Bills that came in and needed paying. A car repair that turned out to be more expensive than expected. Each one small enough to feel normal. Each one adding up in ways that Sachiko, who was busy running a company and trusting the man she loved, didn't bother to track closely.
Marcus was good at this. He had been doing it for four years, cycling through customers at different clubs in different cities. The pattern was always the same. Build the relationship. Earn the trust. Wait for access to finances. Then drain, quietly and patiently, over the course of several months, before disappearing.
It was a system. And systems, when properly maintained, ran without friction.
The problem started on a Wednesday evening.
Sachiko had been drinking more than usual when she came home. Not the relaxed, social drinking of their early days together. The desperate kind, the kind that came in a bottle she had clearly been working on since the afternoon.
Marcus was in the kitchen making dinner when she walked in and set a stack of papers on the counter in front of him. Bank statements. Six months worth. Several transactions were highlighted in yellow marker, and someone, probably her accountant, had circled the largest ones in red.
Marcus looked at the numbers. The missing money was obvious if you were looking for it, and Sachiko had clearly learned to look.
"Marcus," she said. Her voice was flat. Empty of the warmth it usually carried.
He looked up at her face. Whatever he expected to see there, anger or tears or betrayal, none of it was present. She just looked tired. Worn down. Like someone who had been carrying something heavy for too long and had finally set it down.
"How long?" she asked.
Marcus weighed his options in about three seconds. Denial might buy him a day. Tears and begging might buy a week. But Sachiko's expression told him the window was already closing. She would call a lawyer first thing in the morning. Freeze the accounts. The exit was shrinking fast.
So he did what he always did when the system stopped working. He moved toward the exit.
"Sachiko," he said softly, pulling up a chair beside her. "I can explain everything."
"Can you explain where my money went?"
"It's not gone. I moved it somewhere safe. There were people I was worried about, people who could access your finances if I didn't act. I was trying to protect you."
It was a weak story and they both knew it. But Marcus needed time. Just enough time to grab the emergency cash he kept hidden and disappear before morning.
Sachiko stared at him for a long moment. Then she laughed. It was not a happy sound.
"You know what the funny thing is?" she said. "I actually believed you loved me."
"I do love you," Marcus said, and for once in his life, something in his chest tightened a little when he said it. Sachiko had been kind to him. Patient. Generous in ways that had nothing to do with money. In another life, maybe things could have been different.
But this was the life he had.
"Get out," Sachiko said quietly.
Marcus nodded. He stood up and turned toward the hallway, heading for the stairs. He needed to grab the emergency cash from the guest bedroom, the forty thousand dollars in mixed bills he kept taped beneath the dresser for exactly this kind of situation. Five minutes, maximum, and then he would be gone.
He made it to the guest bedroom without any trouble. The cash was exactly where he had left it. He pulled it free, stuffed the bills into his jacket, and grabbed the small go-bag he had packed two days ago out of habit.
Then he turned around to leave.
Sachiko was standing in the doorway.
She was holding a bottle. Heavy glass, the kind used for expensive wine, the thick kind that didn't shatter easily. Her face was wet. Tears had been running down her cheeks for a while, judging by how far they had gotten.
"Sachiko—"
She swung.
The bottle connected with the side of his head. The impact was enormous, a white flash that swallowed everything for half a second. Marcus felt his legs give out instantly. His shoulder hit the edge of the dresser on the way down, a sharp burst of pain that registered only distantly, like it was happening to someone in the next room.
He hit the floor.
The world tilted sideways and stayed there. Blood was running down the side of his face, warm and fast, pooling against his ear and soaking into the carpet beneath him. He tried to push himself up but his arms wouldn't hold his weight. The room spun slowly, lazily, like a Ferris wheel running out of steam.
Sachiko stood over him. The bottle slipped from her hands and shattered on the hardwood floor, glass spraying outward in a wide arc.
"Oh God," she whispered. "Oh God, oh God, oh God."
She dropped to her knees beside him, pressing both hands against the wound on his head. Blood seeped between her fingers immediately, warm and fast and relentless.
"No, no, no," she kept saying. "Stay with me. Please stay with me. I didn't mean to. I'm sorry. Please."
Marcus tried to speak. The word "Sachiko" came out somewhere between a croak and a whisper. His heartbeat was slowing down, each pulse arriving a little later than the one before it, like a clock winding down one tick at a time.
The last thing he registered was Sachiko's face above him, tears and mascara running together down her cheeks, and her hands shaking against the side of his head.
Then nothing at all.
.
.
.
Sachiko didn't call the police.
The shock did what shock always does. It froze her in place for twenty minutes while the blood pooled and spread across the carpet and soaked into the edges of the hardwood floor. She knelt there, hands still pressed uselessly against a wound that had long since stopped mattering, and stared at Marcus's face until her brain finally caught up to what had just happened.
Then it pushed her into something animal and desperate that bypassed rational thought entirely.
He's dead. If I call the police, they ask questions. They find the bank statements. They find out what he did to me. They think I killed him on purpose.
Did I kill him on purpose?
I didn't mean to. I just wanted him to stop. I didn't know it would—
It doesn't matter. They won't believe me. A woman kills her younger boyfriend. They'll say it was planned. They'll put me in prison.
The thoughts came fast and tangled, each one feeding the next, building a wall of panic so thick that any calm thinking became impossible.
She needed to get rid of the body.
Moving a dead person was harder than Sachiko had expected. Heavier. The dead weight was literal, every muscle and bone suddenly inert, uncooperative, refusing to go where she wanted. She grabbed him under the arms and dragged him toward the hallway, his heels leaving two long parallel tracks through the carpet. Her back screamed. Her shoulders burned. But adrenaline carried her forward, step by grinding step.
She made it to the stairs. Going down was easier than going up would have been. She half-dragged, half-tumbled Marcus down each step, his body thumping against the risers with sounds that made her flinch every single time. Blood left a trail on the carpet, dark and obvious in the hallway lighting.
She had no real destination. No plan beyond moving the body somewhere it wouldn't be found immediately.
The garage. She could put him in the car and drive him somewhere far from here. The woods outside the city. Nobody would look there for months, maybe longer.
Sachiko dragged Marcus through the ground floor, through the kitchen, toward the door that led to the attached garage. Her arms were shaking badly now, her grip slipping on his jacket. Blood was everywhere at this point. On her hands, on her clothes, smeared across the kitchen tile in long streaks.
She reached the garage door and pushed it open with her shoulder.
The garage was dark. She fumbled for the light switch with one hand, not wanting to let go of Marcus's body with the other.
Her fingers found it.
The light flickered on.
Sachiko looked up.
Something was on the ceiling.
It was dark, pressed flat against the concrete surface overhead, and for a long horrible moment she couldn't make sense of what she was seeing. Her brain simply refused to fit it into any shape she recognized as real. It didn't look like a person. It didn't look like an animal. It looked like something that had no business existing in a garage in the middle of a normal residential neighborhood.
Then it moved.
It peeled away from the ceiling with a wet, organic sound, like skin separating from skin. Tentacles uncoiled first. Ten of them, long and blood-red, hanging down like the legs of something impossibly large. They moved with patient, unhurried grace, each one curling and uncurling in the air as though tasting it.
The body dropped from the ceiling silently, landing between Sachiko and her car. A black coat settled around it as it landed. A plague doctor mask caught the fluorescent light from overhead, white and featureless except for the long beak that pointed directly at her face.
Sachiko screamed.
The sound was raw and animal, torn out of her chest without her permission. Marcus's body slipped from her nerveless hands and hit the concrete floor with a dull, wet thud.
The plague doctor mask tilted slightly to one side. The tentacles behind it coiled once, settling into a relaxed arrangement.
Then it looked down at Marcus.
Nox studied the body on the floor for a moment. Handsome. Young. Healthy build, good bone structure, the kind of face that would pass through a front desk without anyone looking twice. He had been watching this household for the last hour, ever since he had tracked down the Golden Lily's employee records through channels he preferred not to think about. Marcus Webb fit every criteria.
The fact that Marcus was at the dead door but still barely alive was actually convenient. Face Assimilation worked on living targets. But a body that was in a comatose state, the body still warm, the cells still functional, was close enough. The Secondary Mask could work with this. It would have to.
Sachiko was still screaming, stumbling backward, her bloody hands clawing at the air behind her as she tried to put distance between herself and the thing that had just dropped from her ceiling.
Nox didn't look at her. She wasn't relevant anymore.
He reached into his coat and pulled out the Secondary Mask from his inventory. It materialized in his palm, small and round and porcelain white, featureless in every direction. It sat there like a coin, catching the fluorescent light with a surface so smooth it looked almost wet.
He set it down on the concrete floor beside Marcus's body, close enough to the dead man's face that it could reach him on its own.
The mask moved immediately. It skittered across the garage floor on legs that shouldn't have existed, tiny and precise and fast, covering the distance in less than two seconds. It climbed onto Marcus's chest, crawled up his neck, and settled against his face with a soft click.
Ten seconds.
Sachiko had stopped screaming. She was pressed against the far wall of the garage now, both hands over her mouth, watching the white thing on the dead man's face with the wide, unblinking eyes of someone whose brain had stopped processing information and was simply recording it.
The mask pulsed once. Twice. A faint white glow spread beneath Marcus's skin, visible for just a moment before it sank deeper, disappearing into the tissue like light absorbed into water.
Ten seconds passed.
Marcus's eyes opened.
They were his eyes. Same brown, same shape, the same way they caught the light and turned almost amber. But something behind them had changed. The person who had been looking out through those eyes was gone. What remained was something else wearing his face, and it knew exactly what it was.
Marcus sat up. The movement was smooth, unhurried, completely natural. He looked down at his own hands, turned them over, flexed the fingers. Then he looked up at Nox.
He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The connection was there, clean and immediate, the Secondary Mask feeding information back through the link. Nox could feel the new body the way he felt his own, every nerve ending mapped and understood in the space of a heartbeat.
Good, Ren thought, examining the body's capabilities through the link. Healthy. No chronic conditions. Normal human speed and strength. That's all I need.
He looked at Sachiko one more time. She was still pressed against the wall, trembling, staring at Marcus's body as it stood up on its own and brushed the concrete dust off its jacket with casual, unhurried movements.
Nox turned his plague doctor mask toward her. He didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that would make this better, and he wasn't interested in trying.
He just put an index finger on his his lip and say
"Shhh"
He walked to the garage door and opened it. The night air came in, cool and carrying the distant sound of traffic. Behind him, the avatar that had been Marcus Webb followed, stepping over the threshold with the easy stride of someone who had done this a thousand times before.
Sachiko stayed pressed against the wall long after the footsteps had faded and the garage door had clicked shut.
She stayed there until morning.