Zachary Pill, Of Monsters and Magic

with a broken arm and a few bumps on his head didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Zachary fought the urge to run when his father knocked.

  7) Dr. Gefarg

  “Come in,” a deep voice said.

  Bright and immense, Doctor Gefarg’s office had a high ceiling and room to fit at least fifty patients. Three for-real skeletons hung like unhappy clients against the wall to the right. One looked to be human but the other two were larger and might have been—what had his science teacher Mrs. Hawking called them: Neo-somethings? On the wall to the left, above three chrome seats with cream colored upholstery, hung a dozen framed certificates. They, no doubt, had to do with Doctor Gefarg’s education but Zachary didn’t bother to read them. He gave everything else in the room only a cursory glance because his eyes were immediately drawn to the massive man who sat behind an equally massive desk at the further end of the room. Dressed in a red tie and a white doctor’s smock, he had an extra-wide face and three chins that dropped like a set of upside down steps to his chest. The front of his head was bald, but patches of white hair from further back were combed behind unusually large protruding ears. His eyes were large gray pie pans with almost no white around the edges, and—as if Zachary needed any more reason to be nervous—they stared at him unblinking. Three men in blue clinic security uniforms stood to the right side of the huge man’s desk. There was something odd about the guards, but Zachary couldn’t quite place what.

  “You have your orders,” the large man said to the guards, never taking his eyes off from Zachary, “now leave.”

  “You sure, boss?” one of them asked, giving the patient and his father a wary glance.

  “I said GET OUT!”

  The lead guard shrugged; then all three hunched their shoulders and shuffled from the room. As the door closed, Zachary realized what struck him as so unusual about them: they looked and moved exactly the same, like triplets. And the way they moved, it was with an odd shuffling gait, as though their knees didn’t quite bend like everyone else’s did. Was it possible three brothers had all become guards and had gone to work for the same clinic?

  When his gaze returned to the massive man behind the desk, Zachary got the got the distinct impression the doctor was even taller and wider than he looked. It was the same sensation he’d had about Nurse Nightshade’s size and the x-ray nurse’s fangs. His head must have taken a worse pounding than he thought.

  “It’s been a long time,” Doctor Gefarg said to his father, finally shifting his eyes away from the younger Pill. His deep rumbling voice was like thunder.

  “I hoped it would be a lot longer,” his father said. “But my son got into a fight at school this morning. His arm is broken.”

  “A human school?” Doctor Gefarg asked.

  “What else?” his father said.

  “It’s hard to believe any human could have broken his arm,” the huge man said.

  Why did he say ‘human?’ Zachary wondered. Did all doctors refer to people as humans?

  “Enough with the questions,” Zachary’s father said. “Just take care of him so we can get out of here.”

  The doctor’s gaze made Zachary feel like an insect under a microscope.

  Suddenly, Doctor Gefarg’s skin turned blue!

  Zachary blinked and the blue was gone. He shook his throbbing head. What was happening to him?

  Just then a pretty young nurse hustled into the office and handed the huge man a folder before leaving. The doctor pulled out two x-rays, stood, and slid them onto a lighted panel on the wall behind him. Even from across the wide desk, Zachary could clearly see the damage Billy had done to his arm.

  “How long since this happened?” the doctor asked, staring at the x-rays.

  “Less than four hours ago,” his father said.

  The doctor tapped a thick sausage finger against image on the right. “Young, Mr. Pill, do you see how the breaks in both your ulna & radius bones have separated by a quarter inch or more?”

  Zachary wouldn’t have known which bone was which or what they were called, but he could see the gap in both of them. He wondered if the miserable old nurse in the x-ray room might actually have made them worse.

  “Will it take long to heal?” he asked.

  “That remains to be seen,” Doctor Gefarg said, pointing to the x-ray on the left. “Do you see the radix growing along both sides of the break?”

  “Radix?”

  “Sprouts or roots would be a better term in your case,” Doctor Gefarg said. “If we don’t do something soon, in another hour or two those little shoots will block your bones from coming together. Given four hours, some of those shoots would pierce your skin and ultimately form new limbs.”

  Disgusted but fascinated at the same time, Zachary asked, “How come I never heard of anyone growing extra arms before?”

  The big man glanced at Zachary’s father. “He doesn’t know?”

  “I’m not here for a child-rearing lecture, Gefarg. Just take care of his arm.”

  Doctor Gefarg let his bulk collapse back into his seat.

  “So how many arms would you like to grow today?”

  Zachary felt a lump slide from his throat down into his fear-cramped stomach. Had the massive doctor just threatened him? Not daring to say anything, he looked to his father who in the last few seconds had pulled the black stick from his pocket. It now pulsed with blue light and was pointed at Doctor Gefarg’s chest.

  “Relax, relax,” Doctor Gefarg said with a rumbling laugh. “I was just having some fun with the little half-breed.”

  Zachary made a mental note of the “half-breed” comment, one of an increasing number of things he intended to ask his father about as soon as they got away from this horrid man. His father jabbed the glowing stick at the doctor who, alarmed, shoved his chair back away from it. Zachary stared at the shining rod. Could this be what Nurse Nightshade meant when she said “wand arm?” How could something like that even exist?

  “Let’s not get carried away, Roger!” Doctor Gefarg rumbled as his chair rammed into the wall behind him. “What–what I’d like to do…is get your son straightened out before that break does any permanent damage.”

  Zachary’s father leaned forward, the magic wand held like a pistol in front of him.

  “That might be a wise thing for you to do, Gefarg!”

  His wide face sagging in relief, the doctor heaved his bulk from the chair and lumbered around the desk and to the door. He ducked his head under the doorframe and tried to push himself through sideways. His massive body stuck like a cork in the doorway for a moment before he grunted and made it out into the hall. Zachary and his father followed the enormous doctor several doors down. Once again the doctor ducked and thrust himself through the opening to another room.

  Hesitantly, Zachary went inside.

  “Hop up,” Doctor Gefarg said, patting a padded table in the middle of what was apparently an examination room.

  Zachary paused for a second in the entry as he again got the eerie sense that the doctor was even larger than he looked. He shook his head and tried to clear his double vision. He was starting to fear that his head, not his arm, might be most in need of x-rays—though, no matter what, he would never subject himself to the skeletal old nurse with fangs again!

  Trying to keep from jarring his broken arm, Zachary leaned sideways onto the padded table and, with his father’s help, slid the rest of the way up as gently as he could.

  “Nightshade,” Doctor Gefarg said, jamming a thick finger into a phone on the wall.

  “Yes,” her familiar voice came back.

  “What took you so long to answer?”

  “You’re lucky I picked up at all,” they heard the nurse say over the speaker phone. “Now, what do you want?”

  “I need one of those potted trees from the lobby. You know, the tall ones with pointy leaves.”

  “There are only two trees in the lobby,” Nurse Nightshade said, “And they’re both the same—ficus, in case you wanted to know.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t care what they’re called!” the doctor snapped. “Just get one down here—now!”

  “Since I assume it’s for the Pill boy, I’ll make sure it gets there.” She hung up.

  “We’ll be ready in a few minutes,” Doctor Gefarg said, clapping his thick hands together like two cymbals. He said something else, but Zachary didn’t catch it because the doctor’s hands had suddenly turned blue! Just as quickly, they returned to flesh color.

  Zachary reached up and gently rubbed the large lump at the back of his head and again got the distinct impression that his skull had grown. Was he going to turn into a freak with multiple arms and a gigantic head?

  “Let’s get a gander at that.” Doctor Gefarg said and roughly pulled Zachary’s fingers away from his wounded scalp. “Now cram your head down.”

  Zachary leaned forward so large fingers could painfully poke and prod his lump.

  “Does this hurt?” the brutal doctor asked.

  “Yeah!” Zachary blurted.

  “That’s a good sign,” Doctor Gefarg said. He jabbed Zachary’s scalp several more times, apparently just to torture him, then stepped back and looked at his father. “His head is fine. There’s a little cranial growth caused by the trauma, but rooting should take care of that.”

  Just then someone knocked on the door. One of the security guard triplets shuffled in carrying a potted ficus tree. Zachary had a smaller one on his windowsill at home. The plant looked happy, its leaves the exact green color of health.

  “On the floor right there,” Doctor Gefarg said gruffly,