Chapter 6: Dr. Petrova's Files

Chapter 6: Dr. Petrova's Files

The world had shrunk to the four beige walls of the central supply storeroom. Elara’s punishment, her “administrative duties,” consisted of counting boxes of sterile gauze. Ten packs to a box, twelve boxes to a case. The repetitive task was meant to be mindless, but for Elara, it was a battle. Each time she looked down at her hands, she half-expected to see the faint, crescent-shaped bruise of a smile on her own wrist. Each time she looked up, she feared catching her reflection in the polished metal shelving, wearing that other, terrible face. The blackouts were getting worse—slivers of time, five seconds here, a minute there, just gone. She felt like a house with a hostile squatter, one who was beginning to rearrange the furniture.

She was on case number thirty-four when her name crackled over the hospital intercom, a disembodied voice summoning her to Ms. Albright’s office. Her stomach clenched. This was it. The official end of her career.

But it wasn’t Ms. Albright waiting for her in the sterile, light-striped office. Seated opposite the Head of Nursing’s desk was a woman Elara had never seen before. She was in her late forties, with dark hair pulled back in a severe, no-nonsense twist that echoed Elara’s own professional style. She wore a crisp lab coat over a tailored blouse, and her eyes, magnified slightly by sharp, rectangular glasses, were the color of slate and missed nothing. They scanned Elara from head to toe, a quick, efficient assessment that felt more like a diagnosis than a greeting.

“Elara, this is Dr. Anya Petrova,” Ms. Albright said, her tone clipped. “She’s the Chief of Neurology. She’s been asked to consult on the… recent incidents.”

A neurologist. The official term for the person they brought in to tell you that the monsters were a symptom of a tumor or a seizure disorder. Liam’s word echoed in her mind: Help.

“Dr. Petrova will need to ask you some questions,” Albright continued, before standing. “I’ll leave you to it.” The door clicked shut behind her, leaving Elara alone with the inquisitor.

“Please, sit, Nurse Vance,” Dr. Petrova said. Her voice was calm, with a faint Eastern European accent that clipped her words into precise, analytical shapes. “I’ve reviewed the initial reports on Mr. Holloway and Mrs. Gable. I’ve spoken with Dr. Cohen. Now I need your account.”

Elara sat, perching on the edge of the chair. This was a minefield. One wrong word, one hint of the man in her hallway or the face on the operating table, and she’d be in a psych ward next to Carol Gable. She recited the events with the detached precision of a machine, sticking to the observable facts, editing out the impossible. Mr. Holloway’s pre-op anxiety. Mrs. Gable’s sudden, severe post-anesthetic delirium. She was a good witness—calm, logical, professional.

Dr. Petrova listened without interruption, her fingers steepled, her gaze unwavering. “And you, Nurse Vance,” she asked when Elara finished, her voice neutral. “How have you been feeling? Sleeping well?”

The question was a scalpel, probing for the weakness she was so desperate to hide. “I’ve been under some stress,” Elara admitted, the understatement of a lifetime. “The suspension has been difficult.”

“I see.” Petrova made a small note on a pad. “Dr. Evans mentioned a moment of… distraction during the trauma surgery yesterday. He also made a rather unusual observation about your expression.”

The blood drained from Elara’s face. You weren’t smiling… but you were.

“I was… focused,” Elara stammered, her carefully constructed composure beginning to fracture. “It was a high-pressure situation.”

“Of course.” Dr. Petrova’s expression didn’t change, but Elara felt seen. Not understood, but catalogued. Classified. The neurologist asked a few more questions about her personal history, her family’s medical history, each one a neat, clinical brick in the wall being built around her sanity. Finally, she closed her notepad. “Thank you for your time, Nurse Vance. That will be all for now.”

Elara left the office feeling flayed open, her every nerve exposed. Petrova’s scientific skepticism was a solid wall she couldn’t possibly breach with a story about a smiling shadow. She was more alone than ever.

But Dr. Petrova was, above all else, a scientist. And scientists are driven by anomalies. Two catastrophic, neurologically-bizarre events in one OR with the same staff was an anomaly that demanded investigation beyond interviewing a stressed-out nurse.

That afternoon, she wasn’t in her office. She was in the hospital’s sub-basement, in the Records Archive. It was a cold, silent room, smelling of old paper and dust, a crypt of forgotten medical histories. She’d requested the files of every patient who had experienced a severe, unexplained neurological event or death post-anesthesia in this hospital for the past thirty years.

She worked for hours under the hum of a single fluorescent bulb, a solitary figure surrounded by mountains of manila folders. She was looking for patterns. A shared genetic marker, a pre-existing condition, a link between surgeons or equipment. She found nothing. The cases were random, scattered across the decades, written off as one-in-a-million complications, statistical outliers.

But Dr. Petrova didn’t believe in outliers. She believed in undiscovered variables.

Frustrated, she pulled up the files for Holloway and Gable again, placing them side-by-side on the dusty table. She compared every single data point. Vitals, blood type, pre-op medications, duration of surgery. Nothing. It was a dead end.

She was about to pack it in when her eyes snagged on a single line item on the anesthesiologist’s log, buried deep in the technical jargon.

Anesthetic Agent: Cyclofane.

It was an older drug, a halogenated ether. Reliable, but largely superseded by newer agents like Sevoflurane that allowed for faster wake-up times. It was rarely used, typically only when a patient had a specific allergy or if there was a shortage of the preferred drugs. She scanned the rest of the report. Dr. Cohen had used it on both Holloway and Gable. A documented supply shortage of Sevoflurane on those days was the given reason. A plausible coincidence.

But it was a variable.

On a hunch, she turned back to the mountain of old files. She now had a specific query. She wasn't looking for a vague event; she was looking for a specific chemical. One by one, she began pulling the anesthesiology reports from the old folders. Most were Sevoflurane, Desflurane, Isoflurane. The standard agents.

Then she found one. A file from 2009. A forty-year-old man in for a simple hernia repair. Died on the table, post-op. Cause of death: unexplained cardiac arrest. Anesthetic agent: Cyclofane. The attending nurse had noted a period of "agitated delirium" just before induction.

Her pulse quickened.

She kept digging, going further back. A file from 1998. A thirty-two-year-old woman, shoulder surgery. Woke up screaming, suffering a complete psychotic break from which she never recovered. Diagnosed with sudden onset schizophrenia. Anesthetic agent: Cyclofane.

Another from 1985. An elderly man, hip replacement. Never woke up. Brain death. Anesthetic agent: Cyclofane.

It wasn't a long list. Just five cases, including Holloway and Gable, spread over nearly four decades. A small, forgotten constellation of tragedy. But the connecting line was there, blazing in the dusty silence of the archive. It wasn't the surgeon. It wasn't the nurse. It was the door. A specific, chemical key that unlocked something horrible.

Dr. Petrova packed the files into her briefcase, her movements sharp and decisive. The clinical detachment on her face was now overlaid with a new expression: the intense, focused curiosity of a researcher who has just stumbled upon an entirely new, and terrifying, field of study.

She found Elara back in the supply room, listlessly stacking boxes. Elara looked up, her expression wary, expecting another interrogation.

But Dr. Petrova’s tone was different now. The professional distance was gone, replaced by a tense urgency. She placed the files for Holloway and Gable on top of a case of saline drips.

“Nurse Vance,” she said, her slate-grey eyes sharp and serious. “I was wrong to focus on you. I was asking the wrong questions.” She tapped a perfectly manicured finger on the anesthetic logs, on the single, repeated word.

“We need to talk about the Cyclofane.”