Speaker 1: The clinic always felt different at night. The fluorescence hung louder,
the stain of steel counters gleamed too sharply, and the
waiting room smiled faintly of antiseptic and wet fur. I
told myself I preferred the light shift, fewer clients, fewer crises,
But the truth was it always felt lonelier than it should.
I moved through the motions like any other night. A
golden retriever with a sour stomach had just gone home
with anti acids. A hissing tabby sacedated in recovery after
we'd lanced the knabsis, and in the corner a rabbit
dozed under a blanket as fluids dripped into its tiny leg.
Paperwork piled next to me, glowing blue under the desk lamp.
I was a year out of school, barely scraping by
on night differentials. But it was steady work, and after
the last clinic I'd burnt out of I needed steady.
The bell above the front door startled me out of
my thoughts. Clients weren't supposed to come this late. Are
after hours. Number rooted to an emergency hospital across town,
but a man stumbled in pale and wild eyed, clutching
a shoe box to his chest. He didn't wait for
me to greet him. It's not from here, he blurted,
thrusting the box onto the counter. His hands shook so
badly the lid rattled. I tried to be calm and professional.
All right, let's have a look. Inside. Was a cat,
or close enough to fool someone, glancing quick fur at
a gray eyes, too wide, chest rising with shallow, uneven breaths.
But the teeth were wrong. When it opened its mouth
to pant, I saw rows of them, thin and translucent,
like a vicious gill, sharpened into needles. The man backed away,
muttering something about finding it under his porch, about it
following him inside. I didn't hear most of it. I
couldn't take my eyes off the thing in the box.
It looked up at me and then made a sound,
not a usual mehaw or hiss. It sounded like words
strung together, and a garbled underwater slurry, like language itself
had drowned inside it. My first thought wasn't that I
was hallucinating. It was that the man was right. Whatever
this was, it wasn't from here. I carried the shoe
box into Exam three. Every muscle in my arm's rigid,
as though the thing might leap out. It didn't. It
just lay there, chest fluttering with shallow breaths, pupils contracting
and expanding like camera lenses out of sinc routine. First
stethoscope to the chest, except its heartbeat wasn't routine at all.
One second it thunder too fast, her humming bird trapped
in bone. The next silence as if its heart simply stopped.
I pulled back, waited, pressed again for the thud. Nothing.
I forced myself to move down the body, tracing its
spine with my fingers. A cat should have seven lumbard vertebrae.
This thing had nine, or maybe eleven. The spacing wasn't even,
as if someone had added extra bones without understanding how
they were supposed to fit together. Blood drawn, if nothing
else blood would make sense. I loaded the syringe, placed
the drop on the slide, and then slid it under
the microscope. It didn't look like blood, No red cells,
no plasma, just the shifting, dark smear that glistened like
spilleding threads of green filament drifted through it, curling and uncurling,
as if alive, like algae tased by invisible currents. My
stomach tightened. I logged every detail in the patient file anyway,
filling the screen with as much clinical language as I
could manage. Pulse, irregular spinal deformity sample, inconclusive recommend follow up.
I added my initials to the bottom, as though signing
my name made it real. I was still a junior
at the place, getting experienced during the night shifts. I
liked both the authority and the initiative to take extreme action,
so my idea was to wait for someone more experienced
to provide a second opinion and direction on what to do.
By the time I lugged up, the man who had
brought the shoe box was gone. He hadn't even filled
out paperwork. The next morning, when I came back for handover,
the record was missing, no patient number, no notes. Even
the placeholder file i'd started had vanished. I asked doctor Hella,
the senior vette, if you'd seen it. He gave me
that weary look he reserved for rockies with questions that
wasted his time. You've been running nights too long? Stress?
Does that? Write it off and move on? I almost
believed him, almost That was until I went to toss
the bio hazard been The shoe box was still there,
blood speckled cores, and all but the animal's body. The
not cat was gone. For a few nights after the
shoe box, things went back to normal, if you could
call it that. Sick dogs, cranky cats, rabbits chewing through
ivy lines. I almost convinced myself I'd hallucinated the whole thing,
that doctor Hella was right, and I was just too tired,
too ready to see something bizarre in an ordinary stray.
But then another came in. A couple brought their terrier
just before midnight, apologizing for the late arrival, swearing that
something was wrong with his eyes. Under the exam light,
I saw it, pupils curled in tight spirals, twisting slowly
like whirlpools, dragging at the edges. The dog wagged his tail, oblivious,
but I had to fight the urge to look away
before the spirals seemed to pull me in. Two nights later,
a teenager arrived cradling a cockatail. It looked fine until
it shook, scattering feathers across the table. They writhed on
the tile like a nest of beetles, twitching legs where
barbs should have been. The birds screamed a raw, rasping
sound I'd never heard from anything feathered. By morning, its
file was gone too. The worst was the hamster. A
kid brought it in after it stopped eating. The X
ray showed a normal skeleton at first glance. Then I
leaned closer. The skull held not tiny rodent incisors, but
rows of human like molars buried crooked in the jaw,
as though waiting to erupt. Every time the owners said
the same thing, It wasn't like this yesterday. Their voices
cracked with genuine confusion, fear, even and every time. By
the next morning, the patient files had vanished, no lab samples,
no radiographs, nothing but my own memory insisting these things
had been real. I stopped asking Hella about it. His
flat stare told me enough he knew, he'd always known.
The clinic was small, with a front desk, four exam rooms,
a cramped surgery suite, kennels and storage. After a month
of working night, I thought I knew every corner, every
squeaky hinge, every flickering bulb, which is why it rattled
me when I noticed Hella, disappearing at closing one evening
with a ring of keys I didn't recognize. Rather than
go out the back door, he went down past the kennels,
behind a supply shelf that scraped just lightly too easily
against the floor. I hadn't known there was a basement.
That knowledge sat in the back of my mind for
a week, festering until the hamster case left me staring
at its vanished X ray and realizing there had to
be somewhere those things were going, Somewhere Hella wasn't telling
me about. I waited until the clinic was empty, the
hum of the soda machine the only sound. The shelf
moved with a grunt and a shove, revealing a narrow door.
The lock wasn't difficult, just the brittle pad. Heller had
probably trusted more to secrecy than strength. I told myself,
I was just curious. I told myself I'd look, then
I'd shut it and never try again. The air that
hit me was colder, drier, stale. A stairwell of painted
concrete led down to a second set of heavier industrial doors,
and beyond them the freezers. Rows of them lined the walls,
taller than me doors sweating frost. The handles were tagged
not with case numbers or species, but with initials and dates,
some recent, some from the eighties, a few from before
I was born. I opened one. Inside were jars. Initially
they looked like ordinary tissue samples, the kind we kept
for pathology. For the contents weren't ordinary. Lungs that were
too smooth, like balloons pealing from their casing, a heart
with five ventricles, a coiled intestinal track that pulsed faintly
though the jar was sealed tight. I opened another. This
one held a body taxidermy I thought for a second,
until I noticed the stitch wise were too precise, the
eyes replaced by black marbles of resin. It might have
been a dog once, perhaps something that looks like a dog.
Its ribs branched upward, like slats of an umbrella. I
closed the door, fingers numb. My training told me what
organs should look like and how they should connect. These didn't.
They were close enough to fool someone panicked in an
exam room, but wrong in ways My brain couldn't smooth over.
Every freezer I opened told the same story. Decades of
cases cataloged, stored hidden not for research or learning, just contained.
At the end of the row stood one different from
the others. Older. Its door was chained and double padded.
I scrept thick across its seams. I leaned closer. From inside,
came the faintest scrape metal against metal, then again, longer,
like claws dragging slow circles against the frozen walls. I
let go of the handle, my breath fogging in the dark,
and realized whatever was inside that freezer wasn't dead. Two
nights after I found the freezers, a man came in
near closing. He wasn't like the other clients, not frantic
with explanation, nor tearful please or reassurance that it was
fine yesterday, just silence as he dragged a leash behind him.
At the end of it was something that had once
resembled a dog. Its body looked broken, joints bent at
angles they couldn't have healed from, skins stretched in ridges
over two many bones. But the eyes they tracked me
with unnerving precision, not the glassy panic of a suffering animal,
but something measured watching needs boarding. The man said. His
voice was flat, unremarkable. He didn't offer paperwork when I
asked for records. He shook his head. No collar, no microchip,
just the wad of cash pushed across the counter, thick
enough to quiet my questions. I forced the smile that
I used with difficult clients. At least the name for
the chart. He blinked, as if he'd never been asked before. Dog,
he said finally, and turned for the door. The number
he scrawled on the intake form didn't look familiar, but
when I dialed it after he left the phone at
the front desk rang I stood there, listening to my
own voice and the voicemail, a hollow echo bouncing back.
I tore myself to log it like normal, but when
I tried to create a new file in the system,
the cursor blinked against an empty screen. The patient wouldn't save.
That night, after lights out, I checked the kennels. The
dog hadn't moved from where I left it curled awkwardly
in the far corner. I closed the door, locked up,
and went home. By morning, I wished I hadn't. The
cage was open, latch undone, the thing was gone, and
the room stank. There wasn't the usual suspects of urine
or musk, like a normal kennel escape, but of sea water,
sharp and briny, clinging to the walls like a tide
had rolled through in the dark. The smell lingered for days,
long after I scrubbed the floor, like the ocean itself
had left something behind. But I couldn't help but think
about the man. Usually the strange anomalies were left by
families or those concerned about an injured animal, but this
one seemed deliberate, and from our interaction it felt like
I was the only one not in on what was
truly going on. Some shifts I was alone or with
other juniors, but some shifts were observed. Doctor Hella was
with me for a scheduled check of my progress and
the job never hands on, to see how I handled
routine and emergency situations. It came in just after midnight.
A woman carried it wrapped in a blank murmuring please
help him, over and over like a prayer. At first glance,
it looked like a stray husky, ribs visible and a
patchy fur, eyes wild, But when she set it down
on the table and peeled back the blanket, I saw
its legs bent wrong, each joint doubled back on itself,
as though it had been folded. It should not have
been able to walk. I took the poor thing into
a free exam room to run checks. The moment the
needle touched its skin, everything went wrong. It shrieked, not
an animal sound, but a pitch that rattled the windows
and knocked a tray of instruments clattering to the floor.
The over red lights flickered. The air thickened, pressing against
my ears, until every breath was a rasp. The dog expanded,
not in mass, but in presence. Its body blurred edges
and focus, like heat rippling off ashphalt. The cages in
recovery rattled every patient, howling or carrying. Get back. Hella barked.
His voice carried a weight I hadn't heard before. He
was already moving faster than I thought a man's age could.
From beneath the supply cabinet, he dragged equipment I didn't recognize,
metal canisters with faded hazard cymbals, syringes filled with liquids
so dark it looked black, a mask that didn't resemble
any veterinary kit I had ever been trained to use.
Hold the line, he muttered to me, to himself. I
couldn't tell. Then he plunged the syringe into the creature's neck.
It thrashed, eyes bulging in their sockets for the pressure
in the room broke all at once, the air snapping
thin and cold. Lights steadied, the cages went still. The
husky lay motionless on the table, chest rising only once
every few seconds, like the bare minimum of life was
being allowed to continue. Hella slumped into the chair by
the counter, sweat slick on his forehead. Despite the chill.
For a long time, the only sound was the drip
of sline from a line I'd abandoned. Finally, he spoke,
voice cracked. It's happening more often. The seals are failing.
He didn't look at me when he said it, but
I knew the words weren't meant for himself. They were
for me. We didn't speak until hours later. The husky,
if he could call it, that, was locked away in
an isolation kennel sedated into half life. I was still
shaking when I found Heller in his office, staring at
a folder thick with yellowed papers. He didn't tell me
to leave, He didn't even look up. They're not strays,
he said, Finally, his voice was flat. Not an apology,
not even a warning, just fact, fair breaches. I waited
for him to elaborate, but the silence stretched so long
I almost thought he wouldn't. Then he slid the folder
across the desk. Inside were patient records unlike anything in
the system, polaroids of animals with limbs bent in circles,
autopsy sketches marked with impossible notes, jars of organs photographed
in sterile light. The clinics affront, he said, always has
been one of dozens, maybe hundreds, janetor sides the called us.
Back in the fifties, after the first surge, someone in
a government office realized what was slipping through wasn't going away,
so they funded us quiet money, quiet contracts, put people
like me in place to keep things clean. He tapped
one of the pages with a trembling finger. A chart,
thin black lines plotted across decades, each spike taller than
the last, each decade worse. They told us half truths,
always enough to keep us working, not enough to scare
us off. But the breaches they're accelerating. He used to
be once a year, maybe twice. Now he shook his
head every week, sometimes every night, and when containment fails.
His hand tightened around the edge of the desk until
the wood groaned. I thought of the freezers downstairs, with
things in jars, the scraping behind the locked door. We're
not vets, Hella said, finally, looking at me. His eyes
were red, but there was no motion in them, just exhaustion.
Were filters, things slipped through, We clean em up. That's
the job. He clicked the monitor on security. Footage flickered
across the screen. Last night's kennel's still and silent for
a moment, nothing, then a single frame where every animal,
every patient blinked at once, perfectly synchronized. I recoiled. Hella
didn't even flinch. I'm near the end, he said, voice low.
Somebody asked to take over, and whether you like it
or not. He closed the folder with a soft thud,
it's you. The weight of it settled on me, with
the certainty of a death sentence. I wasn't just treating
animals anymore. I was inheriting a war. For a day,
I convinced myself I wouldn't play along. I wanted this work,
my whole life, to heal, to save, to hand animals
back to their families with tails wagging and purs vibrating
against my hands. Not to keep files in locked cabinets,
Not to drag cages into basements, not a silence living
things because they didn't belong here. So I told myself
I'd quit, I turn in my key card, erase every
late night horror as exhaustion and bad memory, and start
fresh somewhere that didn't smell of antiseptic and secrets. But
the next night a little girl came in with her mother.
She held a carrier and both arms, eyes wet, whispering, please,
he's sick. Inside was a cat, black, scrawny, pupils too wide.
For a moment, it almost passed for normal. Then it shifted,
its skin, pulsing like something inside was pushing to get out.
I'd seen enough now to recognize it instantly a breach.
The mother signed forms, wiped the girl's cheeks, and left
them both in the waiting room. They didn't know, they
would never know. In the back, Hella stood with his
arms folded, no tools this time, no intervention, just his
voice low and certain. Put it down, Log it filed away,
or walk out their door and pretend you never saw
what's under the surface. The words scraped against everything I
thought I was. I froze, hand hovering above the carrier,
My chest ached with the urge to run. I could
walk out. They never stopped me. Then the cat's back rippled,
vertebrae bending against skin. Its mouth opened wide, far wider
than bone should allow, and something inside flickered, a shimmer,
like the edge of a hole widening. I understood in
that second why Hella did what he did, Why the
freezers existed, Why the charts only climbed. I drew syringe.
My hands trembled, but I injected anyway. The breech let
out a thin hiss, like air leaking from a tire,
and collapsed into stillness. Not a traumatic death, not a
monster vanquished, just silence, unceremonious. I logged, it filed, it
moved on, and in that moment I understood the clinic's rhythm.
Horror became procedure, saving became disposal. Weeks bled together. The
clinic never really closed. The lobby stayed bright, The phones
kept ringing, and people came in with the same anxious faces,
clutching leashes, crates and shoe boxes. Most of them were
ordinary pets, of course, vomiting dogs, constipated cats, a parrot,
the broken wing, but not all, and I learned eventually
not to flinch when not all came through the door.
My hands moved without thinking. Now fill out forms, preps, syringes,
sterilized tables, and label jars, normal steps in a process
that had stopped feeling normal. I logged specimens the same
way I logged vaccinations. I cleaned instruments the same way
I had once cleaned up after dental surgeries on geriatric spaniels.
Horror dulled into muscle memory habit layered over revulsion, like
scar tissue. Some nights I still heard the scraping in
the basement freezers. Some nights I saw the charts in
my dreams, the line climbing higher with each decade, never flattening.
But I stopped trying to argue with it. They're not strays,
I caught myself thinking night or closing out files their breeches,
And we're not vets, We're custodians. This is just what
the world needs to keep turning. I believed it, or
at least I made myself believe it. It was almost
dawn when the bell of the door chimed. I looked up,
expecting another last minute emergency. It wasn't a frantic family
this time. It was him, the man with a flat voice,
the cash the least stragging behind him, the same one
who had left me a dog that reeked of sea water.
He didn't speak as he set the carrier on the counter,
just met my eyes with a kind of tired patience,
as if he knew I would take it without question,
and I did. I pulled on the gloves, reached for
a fresh chart, wrote nothing down. Whatever was inside the
carrier shifted once, just enough to scrape against the plastic,
and I carried it into the back without another word.