Chapter 9: The Widow’s Door

Thump.

Thump, thump.

No response.

The rain lashed the streets with a deafening roar, but if she focused hard enough, she could still catch the faint patter of footsteps behind the door—the cautious movement of some small creature across wooden flooring.

Troy pressed her ear against the slightly rotted wooden door, listened carefully for a moment, then stepped back and knocked again with her knuckles.

This time she knocked harder.

Thump, thump, thump.

The rustling footsteps grew clearer and finally stopped just behind the door. Then a woman’s voice spoke up, laced with obvious wariness.

“Who’s there?”

Troy quickly recalled in her mind what Perl had described about Helmut, the dockworker, and his family situation.

If her judgment was right, the woman behind the door should be Isabel—Helmut’s wife.

She took a deep breath and raised her voice to carry over the rain and thunder.

“Good evening, Lady Isabel! I’m Troy, working for the Bremer Clinic.” She tried to make her voice sound as friendly and trustworthy as possible. “You can think of me as Doctor Perl’s assistant.”

Though in reality, Perl had never formally assigned her any such role, and this entire operation was entirely her own initiative. But now wasn’t the time to get hung up on such details.

“Doctor Perl?” The voice behind the door sounded hesitant.

“Yes.”

The door opened a narrow crack, and a single eye appeared in the gap.

It was an eye swollen red from prolonged crying, full of wariness and exhaustion, like a caged beast sizing up a hunter drawing closer.

It quickly scanned Troy from top to bottom, assessing the danger level of this unexpected visitor.

By now, Troy’s cloak and felt hat were soaked through, turned black and heavy. Her face was pale from the grueling journey, and a layer of condensation had formed on her gold-rimmed glasses.

She looked just as exhausted as Isabel, but she still maintained a bright smile—the kind of radiant expression you’d see on a neighbor’s face when they invite you on a picnic on a weekend morning.

“What do you want? I’m no lady anymore.” Isabel’s voice turned cold. “My husband Helmut is dead.”

The moment those words left her mouth, Isabel began closing the door.

Troy reacted quickly, almost instinctively jamming her foot into the gap to stop the door from shutting in her face. She knew it wasn’t the most elegant solution, but in such a short span of time, she couldn’t think of anything better. Anyone else would’ve done the same.

The wooden door let out a grating creak, like something was on the verge of breaking.

“I’m not lying—this is truly important!” Troy maintained that friendly smile, even though Isabel clearly wasn’t buying it. “I hope you’ll cooperate.”

“You’re dressed just like her.” Isabel’s voice carried a suppressed anger.

Troy had no idea what had happened to make a patient’s family harbor such hostility toward the attending physician. But she clearly realized that if she didn’t take some firmer measures now, certain things would truly be too late.

For herself, and for this city.

Troy reached through the door gap, grabbed Isabel’s wrist as she tried to close the door again, and simultaneously forced her body through the opening.

Though she had already been through so much during this long night, physically speaking, the woman who had just lost her husband was clearly weaker than her. This allowed Troy to forcibly enter this rundown harbor tenement.

With a startled cry from Isabel, she stumbled and fell to the side. The moment Troy stepped into the room, the smile on her face could no longer be maintained.

From outside, this house looked shabby yet kept remarkably clean. The wooden floor had good texture, producing steady, solid thumps when Troy stepped on it—not the terrifying creaks of neglected, aged planks.

The sensation reminded her of the cozy cottages in the countryside—decades-old wooden boards couldn’t be in this condition without careful maintenance and proper dryness.

She could feel that the people living in this room had, at least at some point, been living with genuine purpose. As someone who spent her days cleaning and tidying, she could empathize with that most deeply.

But what truly made her frown was the pungent odor permeating the air.

It was a smell that had been masked by the torrential rain, fully exposed only once she stepped inside.

It was the stench of decay, so potent that Troy had to hold her breath and carefully breathe through her mouth instead.

Troy had read in books that human corpses and other species’ corpses decay with no essential difference in odor. The only difference was how humans, as the ones perceiving it, reacted to it.

The academic world had yet to reach a consensus, but many scholars leaned toward attributing this phenomenon to the scent emitted when human souls rot—though that sounded more like metaphysics than science.

She quickly estimated the time of death. Given the current climate conditions, roughly three or four days. And that would require outdoor exposure with countless flies helping the process along to reach this level of putrefaction.

“Madam, first allow me to apologize.” Troy’s face tightened, and her voice turned serious. “I think we need to have a proper talk about what’s happened. First of all, this smell…”

She unfastened her cloak and hung it on the coat rack, placing her felt hat and kerosene lamp on the entryway cabinet.

Relieved of that heavy attire, Troy appeared capable and efficient. She wore a fitted beige shirt beneath a small black vest, with a delicate pocket watch hanging at her chest that kept ticking steadily.

She carried a brown leather satchel across her body, filled with the various tools she thought she might need tonight.

Her emerald-green hair was tied high at the back of her head, twisted into a braid and pinned into a bun to ensure it wouldn’t get in the way during any strenuous movement.

“The corpse. You don’t need me to tell you that.” Isabel, slumped on the floor, let out a cold laugh. She seemed to have given up on the idea of throwing Troy out, slowly picking herself up from the floorboards. “It’s my husband, the one who died in that Bremer Clinic.”

“Helmut?” Troy murmured. “How could that be…”

But this clearly didn’t add up.

According to Perl’s account, Helmut’s death had only occurred half a day ago.

At most, the body would have just begun stiffening. How could it possibly emit such a severe stench of decay? It was too fast, completely defying common sense.

The rat disappeared. It disappeared too fast.

A random, out-of-context thought suddenly surfaced in Troy’s mind. It had no connection to the present situation whatsoever, yet it stirred a vague unease within her.

She shook her head, forcing herself to refocus.

From Isabel’s behavior, it seemed Perl might have hidden certain things from her. But Troy knew deep down that when it came to describing patient symptoms, on every matter involving medical research, Perl would never lie. That was her principle, and her bottom line.

“And I have nothing to say to someone who forces her way into a widow’s home.” Isabel’s voice was full of hostility. “Especially when she’s from the Bremer Clinic—one of Perl’s people.”

“What did the doctor do?”

The question about the corpse was temporarily set aside, because something even harder for Troy to understand now stood before her—this patient’s family member’s assessment of Perl, that tone full of resentment, as if Perl had committed some unforgivable crime.

Perl was the best doctor in the world.

That had always been a core belief forming the foundation of Troy’s worldview, as unquestionable as the Earth being round or the sun rising in the east.

Troy hadn’t had that dream in a long time.

In the dream, her father held a liquor bottle and roared at her, while her mother stood by watching coldly, like she was observing some spectacle that had nothing to do with her. Then the bottle would shatter against some part of her body with a crash, and she’d wake up, gasping, rubbing her arm that was bruising despite having no actual wound.

But she didn’t have that dream often anymore, because the dream was wrong.

She was no longer that family’s burden.

That’s right—she had once lived in hell, but she was grown now. She lived in the Bremer home, and she had a new life.

And her parents were dead. They couldn’t see her life now, and they could never say those things to her again.

Old Man Bremer had once taken her and Perl to see that couple’s corpses, showing her in the most direct way possible: the past was over.

For a long time, Troy regretted not having said anything to those two bodies.

She had even thought about digging them up from their graves, screaming at those rotting faces: “You were wrong! I’m not useless! Doctor Perl cured me!”

Then take a deep breath and shout those words with everything she had:

“I’m alive! I’m living well!”