Some time later, Our Intrepid Heroes approach the very large manor home of one of the complainants on the agency's list. "I swear," Dean begins with an aggravation indicating this is far from the first house they've visited, "if this is another freaking Pomeranian barking in a neighbor's yard...." He doesn't get to finish that thought, for Sam's knock has been answered by a tiny little woman of Asian descent. Guess what? She's the housekeeper. Oy. The LYING LIARS WHO LIE finagle their way through the front door by telling the housekeeper that they're from animal control, following up on Dr. Sylvia Perlman's report. Guess what, again, some more? Once the trio wanders back into the home's massive kitchen to kick-start the interrogation, a clock begins insistently tick-tick-ticking away underneath the dialogue. It's very subtle -- I had to crank the sound all the way up and listen for it specifically -- but it's there. Niiiice. Long story short, the good doctor (at 42, the youngest chief surgeon in the history of the local hospital, don't you know, and it's a position she scored ten years ago) has suddenly taken off for parts unknown for a couple of days, and the housekeeper herself never actually heard the dog the doctor lodged the complaint about. "I was almost starting to think the doctor was imagining things," she admits, "but she's not like that." Meanwhile, Dean's retrieved a photo from the fridge depicting three thirtysomething chippies hoisting a round of cocktails in a dimly lit bar. "Look at this," Dean offers, holding the photo in front of Sam's face. He then deliberately flips it around so we all might note the inscription on the back: "Lloyd's Bar, November 1996." Sam gapes as the camera pans slowly in on the middle chippie's unlined and smiling face until a set of police sirens yank us over to...

...the haggard-looking current version of the woman in the photograph. Correction: The haggard-looking, sleep-deprived, and intensely paranoid current version of the woman in the photograph. Doctor Sylvia's whipped her scraggly mane of brunette hair around to stare wildly at the police sirens' current location, which is apparently somewhere outside her tackily appointed motel room. "'Tacky' doesn't begin to describe the horror," Raoul interjects. "It is quite seriously an Edwardian bordello by way of 1975. Just awful!" In any event, the doomed Doctor Sylvia leaps to her feet from the almost fetal crouch in which we'd found her by one of the beds to pace restlessly and hug herself and scratch at her arms and drag her ragged nails through the brunette tangle on her head. The soundtrack's taken that subtle ticking from the previous scene, handed it over to a set of snare drums, amplified it to ear-splitting level, and mixed the result with tense strings and crazy, indecipherable, low-volume voices that sound almost as if they're coming through a hospital's public address system -- the latter of which is a neat little way of illustrating the effects of sleep deprivation on this doomed surgeon's mind. Suddenly, something pounds at the room's door three times in rapid succession. Doctor Sylvia stifles a scream as she spins around to gaze wild-eyed at the locks as the horns wail on the soundtrack for her. Three more booming knocks hit, and with each, the camera cuts closer and closer to the door until it gets itself all up in the knob's grille. "Ms. Perlman?" a man's voice calls. We leap outside to find the motel manager on the stoop. "I've been calling for hours. You need to vacate the room, or you gotta pay for another night." The doomed doctor shakily unlatches the door and opens it to agree to the additional charge. She turns away from him to rifle through her wallet for a couple of twenties, then turns back and shudders to a horrified stop when she sees what the manager's become: A sunken-eyed, ashen-faced ghoul in motel manager's clothing, wordlessly working his gaping maw as his pupils cloud over with cataracts. Whee! "I agree!" enthuses Raoul. "The nifty sound cues have been delightful, but good old-fashioned visual effects are just as welcome." Doctor Doomed bares her teeth in terror and flings the cash at the ghoul's feet before slamming the door shut once more. Outside, the manager tilts a little bit towards the camera, and while the ghoul's gone from his face, we're not quite sure if it's still lurking somewhere inside him. Inside, Doctor Doomed freaks again, some more.