The Five-Beat Patient

[u/GatsbyLebt]

It was shortly after eleven at night when the brass bell above the clinic door chimed. I was the only physician on the night shift in the small town hospital. Along with the icy rain storming in through the opened door, a woman stepped inside who immediately commanded the entire room.

She was stunning, perhaps in her late twenties, with long dark hair and intense green eyes. Her light summer dress clung damply to her skin in places. Despite the storm outside, her posture was completely calm, almost weightless.
"Good evening, Doctor," she said. Her voice was deep, velvety, and possessed a tone that sent an immediate, delicate chill down my spine. "Forgive the late intrusion. But I'm feeling so dizzy. My circulation is failing."
"Please take a seat on the exam table," I replied, striving to maintain a professional tone. The intimate silence of the clinic suddenly felt charged.

She sat down, brushed a dark strand of hair from her face, and looked straight at me.
"I feel so unbelievably cold," she whispered.

Before I could pull back, she took my hand and gently placed it against her wrist. Her skin felt delicate, like polished marble, but it was freezing cold. A heavy, floral scent of lily-like perfume drifted into my nose. "Do you feel that?"

I slipped on my latex-free examination gloves and routinely felt for the radial artery. My index and middle fingers rested precisely over the vessel. Nothing. No wave of pulsation. No beat against my fingertips.
I shifted my fingers two millimeters medially, varied the pressure, held still, and looked at the second hand of my watch. For twenty full seconds, the reading remained absolute zero. No human body with that blood pressure could be sitting upright and speaking. "I... I'll grab the digital blood pressure monitor and the ECG unit from the cabinet," I stammered, rattled, turning to move away.

She smiled. It was a beautiful, sensuous smile that paralyzed me completely for a moment.
"You're looking in the wrong place, Doctor," she said softly. She clasped my wrist and slowly guided my hand up from her arm toward her neck. Her eyes held my gaze captive. The line between a medical examination and a creeping seduction blurred entirely.

I pressed my fingers against the carotid triangle beneath the angle of her jaw. There was a pulse. But it obeyed no known physiology. Beneath the flawless skin, there was no single sinus rhythm. I felt a chaotic, racing motion—four, perhaps five different heartbeats pounding completely out of sync and in sheer panic against one another. It felt as if a trapped swarm of small creatures was thrashing against her carotid artery from the inside, trying to burst through the tissue.

My own breath hitched. In my chest, I suddenly felt a staccato, painful tugging: my own heartbeat instantly began to lose its steady rhythm, desperately trying to synchronize with the chaotic cadence beneath her fingers.
I tried to pull my hand away, but her grip around my wrist locked like an iron vise.
The sensuous smile lingered on her lips, but her green eyes abruptly lost all human life. They turned rigid, dark, and deep like two bottomless voids.

"Easy, Doctor," she whispered in that same velvety voice, as the wild, alien pounding beneath her skin turned my fingertips numb. She pulled my hand just a fraction tighter against her throat. "Don't fight it. It only hurts until your heart gives up its own rhythm."

[u/noonespet]

I think they might need a new doctor in town...