2019-07-14 - At least now we know who Billy is.

The hospital on a Monday morning isn't the worst place in the world, at least. Parking is a little bit of a bear, but Vivian probably has a parking pass? Anyway, she manages to get herself into the hospital, and Alex would have been pretty specific about coming in through the front entrance, not the emergency entrance, please. His office is on the third floor, which requires walking right by Marilyn, who is looking especially nosy this morning. She hangs up the phone into which she had just been speaking, and sits up straight at her desk. "Good morning, Doctor Glass!" she calls pleasantly.

Because she likes to see where head-shrinkers are going, so she can gossip about it.

"Good morning, Marilyn." Vivian replies on her way through, not seeming to be bothered too much by Marilyn and her desire to know things to gossip about them. That's almost as much part of the nature of hospitals as much as the sick and hurt individuals are.

It isn't until she gets to the proper office that she knocks on the door, "It's me." Me. Hopefully he knows who the me in question is.

Marilyn stands up, leaning forward across her desk, and watches Vivian go. "Have a wonderful day," she calls, then immediately sits down and starts dialing on her phone. Like, even before the elevator doors have closed. But the elevator doors close, and they go up three floors, and they open, and there's the hallway.

About halfway down, there's the door marked 'Alejandro Reyes MD.' The lights are on inside, and the door opens from within a moment after Vivian's introduction. But the person inside is not Alejandro Reyes. It is someone Vivian doesn't know. An old guy with the remnants of gray hair clinging to a bald head, thick glasses, an old sweater and slacks that look like they are about to puff into dust at the first sign of a stiff breeze. He stands in the doorway, smiling with tobacco-stained teeth, and he asks, "Doctor Glass?"

The fact that it isn't Reyes inside the office has her stop just inside the door, but she recovers fairly quickly, eyes shifting around the room to see if she can't spot any clue as to where the doctor has gotten.

"Yes. I'm sorry..." Vivian glances towards the man, moving further into the office, a hand absently unbuttoning the front button of her suit jacket. "Were we supposed to be having a meeting?" Seems reasonable, right?

Is it weird that all the other doors in the hallway are closed, and there don't seem to be any lights on in those offices? Like, should the entire floor be abandoned except for this one guy who looks like he's about ten thousand years old?

He seems harmless, anyway, and steps back to let her into what is kinda like Alex's office. The key components are there - the desk, chairs, the window (blinds are drawn), even a picture of a dark-haired man and a dark-haired young woman. But don't look too closely at that, because their faces don't make sense, blurred and eye-bothering in the way they look just a little bit off-human, falling right into the uncanny valley.

"I think so, yes," says the old guy that is not Alex. "My name is Doctor Marshall. I'm given to understand that you've been looking for me. Do you take coffee or tea or anything?" While he goes and sits down at the chair that doesn't belong to him, but admits him like it's fine, this is fine.

This is all fine. Fine. So much fine.

Vivian doesn't panic and run out into the hallway, at least. Although there is a moment of pause when she takes a whole five seconds to swallow back the panic that is consuming her. Every experience, to this point, there have been other people around, people that have experienced all this before.

Not so much now. "I have been looking for you, Doctor Marshall." She moves towards the desk, standing across from it, her hands tucking into the pockets of her jacket, "I wasn't expecting to find you here, though."

"Yes, I thought so." About her looking for him. He tips his knobby, old-man fingers to the empty seat across from his, showing tobacco-stains on those fingers, too. "Please, sit. I promise you, I'm completely harmless. Coffee? Tea? I'm going to have the girl bring me something." His smile is grandfatherly - assuming grandfather smoked a lot and was so old that he should probably be sitting somewhere in the sun with a wash cloth on his head, not in an office that doesn't have his name on the door.

"I realize this is not the normal channels for arranging a meeting, and I apologize. I often have to employ work-arounds. It's just the nature of my work. You know how it goes."

"Tea would be fine." Vivian replies as she moves towards the chair across from him, settling herself down, legs crossing before she adjusts her jacket. The mention of having the girl bring it causes her to look towards the door, almost like she's expecting the girl to be right there.

"No, I don't suppose that this is the normal channels." Vivian is well aware this is way outside normal channels, but she offers that polite agreement anyways. Then she glances at him, shaking her head, "Of course, Doctor Marshall. So since this is not going to be the usual meeting, perhaps we can get down to what we should be talking about?"

Like, what decade is this guy's phone from that it has actual mechanical buttons on it that he pushes with his knobby fingers?! "Marilyn, could you be a dear and bring us two cups of tea, please? Thank you so much." He smiles at the phone like that will carry through to the receptionist, then folds his hands on the desk in between them, looking across at Vivian pleasantly. "Yes, let's. You want to know about my facility, is that correct? May I ask, before we get down to brass-tacks, why you're interested? It's not exactly the kind of place that someone young and vibrant should look to for employment, if I may be frank with you. You're suited to the work, certainly, but it is not pleasant, not pleasant at all."

Marilyn? Vivian manages to not look too startled by that. Mostly. There's a fractional widening of her eyes, but she is doing her very best to not flail around like a chicken with her head cut off. It's not easy, not easy at all.

"Work there...yes." Vivian agrees with a nod, sitting up straighter as she grasps onto that, her hands pulling from her pockets to fold together and rest on her knee. "As you say, I'd be suited to it...I think that it would be fulfilling work, honestly. Isn't that what we're all looking for?"

Frankly, and for the first time with a tone that's other than pleasant, Marshall says, "It's not." Fulfilling work, he means. "It is consuming. All consuming. It will become not just your life's work, but your life entirely." There's a note of warning behind the rising pitch in his voice, and maybe... just maybe... this old guy is a little bit cracked.

"So if your interest is strictly for the purposes of gaining employment, then I regret to inform you, Doctor Glass, that we are not hiring." Back to kindly for that, paternal, pleasant. But also like he's doing her a favor here.

"What if I was interested for more than just employment?" Vivian leans forward, her focus centered on the man, her expression firm. "Look, Doctor Marshall....I'm sure that you're very aware of me, and what I do....and where I'm from. I'm not from here, so this? I've never experienced this."

There is a quick wave towards the room, then she drops her hands, "How could I not be intrigued by it?"

"All the more reason that you should let it go, my dear." He lowers his voice and leans forward across the desk, smelling of cigarettes and rum and general old-guy-ness - mothballs, faded cologne, bologna sandwiches. "You are rattling the cages of monsters you cannot fathom, child. They will gobble you in one bite."

Knock knock on the door, and he calls a pleasant, "Come in!" Like there's nothing wrong with having the receptionist come in right now.

"I want to see it. Before I make the choice." Vivian slides that in with force, hopefully before the receptionist manages to make it all the way through the door. If she's even coming.

Vivian isn't discounting anything in this place, and the weirder may be the more fitting, as it were.

The receptionist is the same Marilyn from downstairs. She carries a wholly anachronistic silver tea tray with pretty teacups on it, a little pitcher of cream, a little dish of sugar cubes, tongs for the cubes, everything just lovely. And she smiles at Vivian, then at Marshall, and she lets herself out quietly with him saying thank you, dear, thank you.

When the door is closed, he reaches for one of the two cups and starts putting sugar into it, saying placidly, "No, you don't. It is not for the faint of heart, dear girl. My work - my work is terribly important, terribly. But it is also terrible, terrible work. I am left wondering, how did you even find out about my facility? If you aren't from around here, as you say?"

"Your work is well known in the right circles." Vivian gives the departing Marilyn a very curious look, for a quick second before looking back at the older man. "Isn't that always the nature of these things, Doctor Marshall? Those who gravitate towards the same things always end up bumping up against each other?" She shifts her weight forward, on to the edge of her seat as she leans forward to rest her forearms on the edge of the desk, her expression earnest, "I really do want to at least see it before I make a decision. Wouldn't that only be fair?"

"Fair?" Marshall laughs quietly into his tea, shaking his bald, age-spotted head while he blows across the surface. "Fair is the last word I would use. Your tea, dear." He uses the little sugar-tongs to touch her cup quietly, clink-clink, just as a reminder that it's there. Looking across the desk at her with his faded brown eyes, old man eyes, he seems truly regretful when he says, "I can't vouch for your safety, Doctor Glass. I am very old now, and not so capable as I was years ago. If I take you..."

He sighs from somewhere deep down in his aged soul. "Were I to take you to my facility, Doctor Glass, I could not guarantee your safe return. Such terrible things could happen to you. Necessary things, yes. Necessary, but terrible."

"I would not hold you responsibile, Doctor Marshall." Vivian replies, reaching for the cup to pick it up, "But I really would be interested in seeing it...I'll assume the risk, and the only one that can be help accountable for what happens will be me."

She lifts the cup up to take a careful sip from the cup, then she sets it down on the desk, "Perhaps I can help you, Doctor Marshall."

He hasn't strictly said yes. But the lengthy, thoughtfully hummed sound that he makes into his teacup isn't strictly a no, either. He puts away the subject of taking her to this facility for now, swallowing his tea and asking, "Oh? How can you help me, Doctor Glass?" In a real 'praytell' tone, smiling an attentively listening smile.

Once upon a time, before he was the oldest person in the history of old people, the guy was probably not terrible at being a psychiatrist. Maybe this is a glimpse of Vivian's future!

"You said that you are very old now, and not as capable as you were years ago. Perhaps I can help you." Vivian shrugs her shoulders before she leans back in her seat, "If you take me, and if you think that I could be help to you, of course."

And if she can even handle it all, right?

"Ahhh, yes. An apprentice, you mean. Interesting. An interesting notion." Marshall thinks on it quietly for a spell, sipping, his eyes unfocused while they look through Vivian at whatever his old man mind is conjuring. "It's interesting work, if you have the stomach for it. Finding the patients. Diagnosing then. Working with them. We have had some interesting cases over the years. Some before my time. In my predecessor's era."

He sips again. "We had Billy the Ghoul for a time. Till he passed on. Very unfortunate, when we lose one we haven't finished with. Have you had that experience in your work, my dear? Unfinished business?"

There is a very slight stiffening of her shoulders when he mentions that name, but she covers it as well as she can as she reaches for the cup on the edge of the desk once more. "I've had my brush with unfinished business, yes. I think we all have, haven't we?" It's a rhetorical question, all things considered. "This Billy the Ghoul...what happened to him that you weren't able to finish your work with him?"

It's all very sympathetically asked. Seriously.

"He passed on. A hard life, his, and we had him only for the end of it. Sometimes, it's important to leave them in the wild for a time, to let them accomplish things. Other times...". He sighs again, putting down his teacup. "Other times, the things they do run contrary to what we need, what the facility needs. Those are always the hardest ones to bear. When we have to take - "

Mid-sentence, and there comes a sputtering gasp from him. He coughs, and a spray of bloody spittle leaves his old, cracked lips, speckling the desk and Vivian with it. Gasping hoarsely, he clutches both hands to his chest, and a dark bloom of red spreads a stain under his fingers, across his old sweater.

People are not supposed to do this!!

Vivian leaps to her feet, knocking the tea cup over on the desk in her momentary panic, then years of school and training kicks in, and she moves around the desk towards the old man, "Doctor Marshall..." She doesn't ask him if he's okay. Instead she starts to check to see what just caused the bleeding, "I'm going to get you some help, Doctor Marshall, okay? Just stay with me..."

Something happened to this man. Something awful. But Vivian sees only the results: the spreading stain of dark red blood seeping out from his heart and into his sweater, the blood in his mouth when he coughs and tries to speak. His words are broken and right on the verge of being unintelligible. "I - he doesn't - like us - talking - about - "

Those are the last words of Doctor Montgomery Marshall, who claws at his chest as if he would remove whatever it is that's stabbing him in the heart right now. It's just that there's nothing there, only blood. Briefly, he clutches at Vivian, leaving a smear of his own blood on her arm, then his old hand goes slack and flops down onto the desk, smearing blood there, too. It's a dramatic final gasp before he is definitely dead.

"Fuck."

Vivian isn't prone to cursing, but this moment seems to be perfect for it. She glances around, her eyes wild now that the man is dead, and tries to find who this mysterious 'he'' might be. She carefully checks Marshall's pulse, making sure that he is actually dead before she starts to slowly back up towards the door, her hands spread out to her side.

Oh, he's totally dead. Like, one-hundred percent corpse. He has a few things on him, if she wants to check? A set of keys - including a car key (like, a real car key, not a fob), and it belongs to a Cadillac; a sticky note in his pocket that says 'V Glass, AMH'; two packets of Sugar in the Raw; and a business card for Dr. Alejandro Reyes, MD, with the name 'Marilyn' and a phone number (that turns out to be hospital reception) on the back of it. If she didn't check, then never mind! No one will ever know about any of that stuff.

The door remains closed behind her. Just Vivian and dead Doctor Marshall in this off-kilter office.

Well if no scary boogey men sprout from walls....she can at least take a few moments to check. Presumably this man had a life before this, and maybe some very concerned people expecting dear old grandpa at home sometime. So maybe there's an ID! Or...keys and a business card. It's probably a bad idea to be taking things from a crime scene, but maybe this doesn't count?

Either way she pockets everything before finally taking it upon herself to exit the office for good, easily and quickly forgetting the man's blood on her.

No ID, alas, and no sign of little Bobby and Jane who might be missing Grampa Monty. Just the things Vivian finds in his pockets. When she opens the door - the door out of the office and into the hallway - there's what may be a dizzying moment. She's standing in the office that's just a little bit off, looking into the office that's exactly the way it should be. Behind her, at the desk with the pictures of the dark-haired people that have weird faces, next to the decades-old phone with the weird buttons, Marshall has bled out and is getting cold and stiff.

Ahead of her, through the open the door, at the desk with the pictures of the dark-haired people that have normal faces, next to the little Tiffany desk-lamp, Alex looks up from a perfectly normal modern computer and sees Vivian standing there. His brows knit confusedly, but he usually has all the composure. (Let's check...)

Yes, he's quite composed. "Hello, Doctor Glass."

There is a look behind her, then a look forward, "Doctor Reyes. Could I potentially ask you a very hypothetical question?" Spoiler: It isn't hypothetical at all. "If I were to tell you that there was an office behind me that looked like some strange mirror version of yours, and that there was a very dead psychiatrist in it, would you find that believable?"

Everything behind her is still the same. Everything in front of her is still the same. On that side of the doorway, the world is normal (y'know, for the world); on this side of the doorway, the world is askew.

Alex doesn't answer for whether or not she can ask a question. He just stops tapping on the computer, withdrawing his hands away from it and folding them on top of the desk. His desk. "Hm," is his initial response, and he does what anyone would do: he looks through the doorway to see if he can see what Vivian is talking about. Based on the raise of his eyebrows... he doesn't. But still, he looks back up to her eyes and nods. "Yes."

"Come here, please." Vivian isn't budging from this point, because if she's what is holding these two very different offices together she doesn't want to risk moving, and having someone else see what she's talking about.

So she waits, standing there, just in case there might be a better view from closer. Right? Vain hope, really, but she does at least offer a name, "Doctor Marshall...he was the one running the facility. Something...No. Someone killed him before I could get to see it."

Standing, Alex steps around the desk with a frown in place that makes perfect sense, under the circumstances. This is very odd, after all, and he's a very by-the-book sort of person. "I'm not familiar with Doctor Marshall," he starts, then repeats his earlier 'hmm' with a little more gusto this time. Not a tentative man by nature, he still approaches this possibly dangerous doorway cautiously, reaching out first to touch his fingertips to the frame of it - which feels very normal. He reaches a hand through the opening, and it looks perfectly normal. To Vivian, his hand enters the space of the off-office.

Abruptly, like what she's said about someone killing this Doctor Marshall just got through to him, he pulls his hand back and stares at her. "He's dead? Right behind you? Right this moment?"

"Yes." It dawns on her that he can't see it. If he saw it, he wouldn't be asking about it. So she reaches into her pocket to pull out the business card, she hopes that it's still there. She's heard over and over how things aren't supposed to be able to be removed. But the bones, right? So hoping beyond hope she's reaching for that card.

"I came to see you, like we'd agreed on, to share with you what I'd learned. I went into your office and ended up in this other one, and he was there. A older man, glasses, balding....We spoke about the facility, his facility."

As long as she's on that side of the door... all that stuff is still there. On this side of the door... yeah, those are the RULES. She can't just take things back out of wherever she is.

And Alex can't see the business card, either, just to complicate matters. All he sees is whatever his brain manages to conjure to make this situation make as much sense as it can. "You're in the office now, though?" Which is when Alex attempts to step into the office, too. And, from Vivian's perspective, appears to be standing in the empty space next to her in the office. But from Alex's... "No." The hallway. He goes back into his office, lessening the chance that a colleague overhears this conversation and, like, calls Doctor Glass on herself and himself, too.

"Yeah...I'm in his office too." Vivian glances behind her, then around, then back towards him. Thankfully there isn't anyone else but her seeing this very odd behavior, because it would be....odd.

So she comes to some decision, since she can't take things out, but she can talk out it. She pulls out the keys, holding them in her hand, "He drove a Cadillac. Not sure that'll help, but maybe we can find his car over there, I don't even know if it exists." She is not going to sound frustrated and helpless. She just isn't. There is time for that later. "I can look for cause of death, but I'm not sure I'd find anything useful."

"He drove a Cadillac?" Alex doesn't seem to know what to do with that information, so he just repeats it in a vaguely perturbed tone; there's no window in the real Alex-office, so he can't even go look out and see if there's a Caddy in the parking lot, curse it all. "I could ask Marilyn to ask security to look for a Cadillac in the parking lot." But he doesn't sound very hopeful about that. Instead, he focuses on problems he might be able to solve: "What happened when he died? Is that his blood?" On Vivian's arm.

"He coughed up blood...and blood bloomed from his chest." Vivian glances down at her arm, "Marilyn brought us tea in the office, he had her name written down on your business card." Which probably helps none at all. But she starts to stare down at the blood on her arm for a moment before drifting towards where Alex is standing in his office, still watching the blood like she's uncertain if it'll vanish or remain.

A brief tightening at the corner of his mouth is the marginal expression of how much Alex does not like Marilyn. That she brought in tea? "Mhm," is his version of I HOPE THAT BITCH DIES IN A FIERY INFERNO. But focus, Alex; hating on the receptionist won't help anything. "As though he was stabbed or shot. Can you - " Oh, never mind. Here she comes.

And there goes the office with dead Marshall in it. When Vivian steps through the doorway, she is in Alex's perfectly normal, perfectly tidy little third floor office. Behind her, the hallways is perfectly normal, too. There's even a busy-looking colleague rushing down to try to catch the elevator. He doesn't. Cursing ensues.

"Can I what?" Vivian wonders, checking to see if that blood remained on her arm, "I can try to do a number of different things, but I'm not sure that any of them are going to be very effective."

Especially considering the fact that she walked out of it, and she'll probably never end up there again. Whoops.

Alex shakes his head briefly, answering the question that he didn't finish. Nope, she can't! He takes a step back from Vivian, surveying her with a tense frown while he withdraws back toward the safety of his desk. His VERY NORMAL desk. With all his VERY NORMAL stuff on it. And no VERY abNORMAL dead bodies. "Are you all right? Nothing hurt you or," this word is a bit off the mark, but it'll do, "otherwise damaged you? While you were there?"

"No, not that I'm aware of." Vivian replies with a shake of her head as she moves towards the desk, "I came to tell you that I found the name Doctor Marshall in connection to your friend and the facility. Now he's dead because he spoke about someone that was once a patient there, something that was unfinished business. He never told me where the facility was, though, or how to get there."

Doctor Composure pretty much has his heart on his sleeve with this question: "Which patient?" If she says Alice Whitehouse, probably Alex is going to... uh... frown or something. Also, after drawing in a quick breath through his nose, Alex thinks to add, "There are horrible things there, wherever it is that you two were. Are you sure he wasn't one of them? Are you sure he was real?"

This is an awesome conversation to have with a psychiatrist.

"Billy the Ghoul was the one that he mentioned by name." Which is a frightening name to say, considering what just happened. "There are still patients there, though, ones that evidently have been there since before his time." She pulls up a chair across from his desk, dropping herself into it before she nods, "I found his name on this side of things...and although I guess they could have planted it, he was very alive and real feeling when I was speaking to him. He kept trying to warn me away from it....I didn't listen."

"Billy the...?" Alex's lips round into an unspoken O-shape, and his brows knit confusedly, but it's also easy to pick up on the fact that his shoulders untense a little, and he exhales through that O-shape. Relieved. Sitting, he doesn't have any tea or anything, but he thinks to add, "Would you like some water?" Hold on, he's floundering a little.

Deep breath. Let it out. There we go.

"He tried to warn you away from it. I don't understand. Why would he need to warn you away from it? And what do you mean, you didn't listen? You didn't go there, did you?" Alex has lots of questions. None of them are helpful. 🙁

"I didn't go there, but I tried to convince him to take me there, because it seemed like a fast track to finding out where it was. He thought I was looking for a job with the facility." Vivian shakes her head at the question of water, offering him a smile in thanks however, "But he said that it was all consuming, and that it was more than just a profession...That it took over your life. It felt like a warning."

"Interesting." Alex takes another breath through his nose, lets it out slowly through his lips, and looks at Vivian quietly for a long time in the aftermath of that steadying breath. "So this man happened to be here when you and I were supposed to have an appointment to discuss this asylum. And now he's dead. In that other place." His brows climb over dark eyes, one of them hiking up a little higher than the other and getting stuck there. "Perhaps he had good cause to issue a warning."

"Yes." Vivian appears to be very aware at how crazy that sounds. But she seems to be firm on this entire thing, the situation and how it happened, at least. "He had your business card, my name written on it...the number to something, and Marilyn's name." She smoothes her hands across her slacks, straightening them out.

Okay, last time... Alex passed that check marginally. This time, when he's reminded about the business card and Marilyn's part in all this, his nostrils flare and he shares frankly, "I despise that woman." He grinds his teeth for a second, then stops doing that - because it's not solving anything - and tells Vivian frankly, "I'm sorry this happened to you. I'm glad that you're not hurt, but I am truly sorry that we brought you into this. That place is awful."

Also - "We can't send Alexander wherever it is. Not if," he shakes his head in the pause between words, "They are killing people over it."

"I agree that Mister Clayton can not be sent there....especially since this Doctor Marshall was the man in charge, and now he's dead." Vivian reaches into her pockets, absently checking them one last time before she frowns, "As it is, he was my only lead on the entire thing, so I'm not sure where to go with this next, I'm afraid. Maybe something will pop up..."

"Mm." Alex probably juuuuust realized that the only lead is LITERALLY dead now. Hence the darkening of his expression even further. After a spell of frowning at Vivian - really, he's just pointing his face in her direction in frowning; he's not frowning at her - he finally asks, "Who is Billy the Ghoul?"

"I suspect it might be the Billy of the box of bones that Miss Whitehouse was present for the discovery of." Vivian is waiting now, like she almost expects one of them to get dead next. But she doesn't refuse to share, at least. Or maybe, that's bad.

Wow, Alex. Way to put that all together by yourself there, champ. Those Wits-4 are doing you a heap of good. "Of course he is. A box of bones gets found on the other side, and you meet a man who dies there and talks about the owner of the bones. Of course." Shaking his head, Alex stands from his side of the desk, suggesting, "Will you tell Alexander? I'll tell Violet. I imagine she will," sob her fucking eyes out, "be less than pleased."

"I will reach out to Mister Clayton, yes. And a few others that have been involved with the bones situation, they deserve to know as well." Vivian gets to her feet, reaching a hand out to give him a final shake before she makes her exit.