Running with the Pack

ARE YOU A VAMPIRE OR A GOBLIN? GEOFFREY H. GOODWIN

Once again, Yvette startled awake from the nightmare where she was devouring the twelve-year-old boy from down the street. And the day-old daffodils on her nightstand had turned rotten. She checked the small clock above the room’s door. She’d been asleep for nineteen minutes.

The first few times, the recurring dream—and how it had the capacity to turn fresh-cut flowers into black lumps of rot in the waking world—freaked her out. The last few times, the dream was becoming a form of personal exploration. Yvette was uncertain whether this was good or not, but the transformation from freaky dream to prismatic memoir was worth noting.

She couldn’t shake the belief that if she paid enough attention, was observant and clever enough, she would solve her mysterious recurring nightmare.

The Institute let her stay for longer periods of time and she was grasping the basics of lucid dreaming. Yvette had accepted that controlling these bizarre dreams was the most important facet of her personalized treatment plan. She’d learned how to flip light switches, how to see colors that didn’t exist in nature and, a new favorite, she was learning how to cut off the fingers of her right hand, one by one with pruning shears, to prove she was having a dream and that the evil visions—like the boy from down the street, and the fork, knife and dinner napkin—were not real.

Or these events were real, but not occurring the way they did in dreams. Her doctors stressed that she’d make a better decision if she mustered a few granules of serenity and inner peace. Her recurring nightmare got in the way of most forms of mustering.

Yvette was afraid she’d cut off her actual fingers but hoped that the Institute wouldn’t leave dangerous shears lying around. Over time, through astute observation, she concluded that pruning shears were rarely found lying around in the waking world’s incarnation of the Institute.

The cannibalistic dream didn’t happen every night. That was the worst. Before proving that she really needed long-term professional help and thereby earning a free pass to stay in the Institute whenever she wanted, Yvette had tried everything: stuffing her face, exercise regimes, dozing on the couch, drinking a glass of warm milk, drinking seven glasses of ice cold brandy. She’d called psychic hotlines, worn a glowing lightmask over her eyes that was supposed to stabilize her beta waves but was pure quackery, and she’d even tried sleeping every other night to see if that would make her tired enough that she wouldn’t dream of eating the boy. It distressed her that she kept dreaming of chewing his flesh and couldn’t control her nightmares.

She didn’t know him at all well and sometimes couldn’t even remember that his name was Timothy.

She was certain that she’d never been particularly drawn to blood-drinking or soul-slurping. So the phenomenon, until these minor breakthroughs, had remained quite a mystery.

The process, of healing or of “learning to embrace her true preponderance of selfhood” or whatever it was she was trying to do—whatever it was she was trying to accept now that she was finally chipping through her grungy patina of self-resignation—began when she consulted the family physician at her yearly checkup.

Yvette hadn’t wanted to schedule a special appointment just to discuss her nightmare of devouring Timothy.

Dr. Burningheart squiggled several notes on his clipboard before eventually chuckling and saying, “I’ve known your parents for almost twenty-six years and we didn’t want to pressure you or tell you before you were ready, but you’re going to have to choose between being a vampire or a goblin.”

Yvette hadn’t liked the sound of either choice, but her dreams had cost her several jobs—including hostessing at a lovely supper club—so she asked, “Will that make the nightmare go away?”

“Probably not, but finding your true incarnation might help you learn to enjoy the nightmare . . . ”

“I’m not very familiar with all this.”

“None of us are. The last thing my patients want to find out is that we’re all responsible for our own wellness and that wellness has a rather healthy time commitment. Few, at first, are comfortable with the idea of killing in order to live. It takes time to make a thorough adjustment.”

“What’s the difference between vampires and goblins?”

“That reminds me of a joke that gets me slapped. We used to think they were quite similar, but recent research believes that the distinction is decided by motive: vampires eat people because they want darkness while goblins eat people because they want souls.”

“So I have to figure out why I want to eat people? That’s gross.”

“Everyone has to figure out what they want, not just you. It’s tough but that’s how it is. Anyone who says that life is easy is lying through their teeth.”

Yvette was certain she didn’t want to eat people for any reason, so she started screaming uncontrollably.

The police were kind. They took Yvette to the gothic halls of the Willis & Rothgate Institute, inaugurating her visits.

Yvette was getting used to visiting Willis & Rothgate too. Further episodes of uncontrollable screaming were why she was no longer hostessing at the supper club and why she’d lost most of her other jobs. She’d even been fired from a tobacconist’s shop. They hadn’t minded the screaming but—no matter how hard she tried—she couldn’t smoke enough to be a convincing saleswoman. Even hardcore tobacco fiends are put off by a saleswoman who coughs and gags frequently.

Because of her nightmare, the Willis & Rothgate Institution became her second home. She learned to adore how the orange gelatin tasted spicy like Mexico and the blue gelatin tasted like the planet Earth looked in satellite photos.

And the staff was carefully trained in non-confrontation. Non-confrontation, Drs. Willis and Rothgate believed, was the most caring approach for helping the clients they called bispecials. Yvette liked the idea of being special, just hated the consequences that came with it.

Her room at the Institute had a machine that could read her thoughts and play music that fit her mood. And they brought her fresh flowers every night. The methods of non-confrontation believed that the pleasant stimuli of flowers led to purer dreams.

The staff was exceedingly nice—even when they took away the horridly nasty flowers every morning—though, once, a few candystripers held their noses and commented that no one had ever blackened so many flowers.

Bispecials, she learned early on, in classroom sessions called Chalk Talks, were exceedingly rare. Most people were just people. They could no more become a vampire or a goblin than they could become a time-traveling wombat or an Oriental rug, but some people did become vampires—no need to bite the neck, you could bite the big toe or solar plexus if you preferred—and some people wanted to drink blood so badly that a stray force, unknown powers with an electric crackle of menace, just let them turn into a vampire.

Other people, for equally nebulous reasons, became goblins, and a truly rare minority manifested slight signs in both directions and then had to consciously decide whether they wanted to be a vampire or a goblin. Bispecials had to choose which characteristics they wanted to embrace, as difficult as the decision could be for more sensitive individuals.

The signs were sometimes so minor that they were overlooked. A penchant for doing a bad Transylvanian accent at parties or obsessing over the poems of Christina Rosetti and paintings by Pre-Raphaelites were classic indicators of impending transgressions.

Yvette learned that a bit of dander could be all it took to tilt a person’s scale. It amazed her that as little as a drop of blood could make a person irrevocably sick.

It wasn’t something people would volunteer for or want, more like being conscripted. Yvette detached from the process, understanding that purer brainwaves led to purer dreams, as if they were an attempt to get back to cleaner living. But she didn’t want this mission: the mood-reading music machine, going beyond flipping light switches in dreams to controlling the actual gradation of light, the sensory deprivation tank, orgone box, and vegan raw food diet.

Yes, Yvette saw the irony in avoiding meat and animal byproducts even though cannibalism was her likely end. She saw the irony and it made things worse. Veganism meant she had to give up the flavored gelatins that she’d liked.

Dozens of Chalk Talk sessions, some even led by the illustrious Drs. Willis and Rothgate, helped Yvette gain a greater understanding of her condition, but they never—because of their belief in nonconfrontation—urged her to come to her decision hastily. She was encouraged to take the time she needed to make up her mind.

Mutual-help groups had people who’d chosen to be goblins come in and talk about how they learned to enjoy soul-slurping. Some kept regular jobs and tried to keep their species a secret. An engaging presentation was given by a radical sect of attractive young women who were professional roller-skaters known, before an incident, as The Groovy Goblin Girls. Now, sadly, they were wanted by the police for eating audience members. Even the youngest one, who’d always been friendly and respectful, had stopped returning Yvette’s text messages.

A wealthy vampire from New Hampshire offered Yvette infinitely free room and board if she’d stay with him while she thought things over. Her various counselors and social worker considered it a dangerous idea and discouraged her from following up.

For Yvette, the hardest part was watching people from her various groups come to their deeply personal decisions, fill out the special permission slip and leave the Institute. She understood the loops of logic that people applied to their choices. She knew it wasn’t like Halloween. Being a vampire or a goblin wasn’t a vinyl mask you decided to don one day and could change later. Once you embraced a choice, actually sat down, drew the G or V at the bottom right-hand corner of the permission slip and signed it, that was it. The incarnation couldn’t be shucked or chucked; most people started to mutate, often first noticeable by elongating fangs or bulging forearms, within twenty-four hours.

You were stuck with your new incarnation, until undeath did you part.

One girl, Larissa Blackweight, had signed out from Willis & Rothgate on a day pass and leaped off a high bridge. She’d brought an indestructible cassette recorder with her to record her last thoughts and they’d been transcribed and posted all over the Net, but most bispecials ignored “The Gospels of Larissa the Leaper” claiming they were fraudulent and insane rantings. The gist was that everything in the world was a sham and that people blossom their own destinies, that nothing in life was a clear-cut binary choice. Dr. Willis told Yvette, privately, that he felt Larissa the Leaper’s issues were not related to her being bispecial. He told Yvette’s parents, at the last encounter group they attended before telling Yvette that they loved her but didn’t want to hear any more from her until she’d made up her mind, that Larissa had been a troubled girl who enacted a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Yvette could relate, maybe even see suicide as the appropriate sacrifice. Sometimes, to herself when no one was around, she’d kneel in one of the showers on a vacant men’s floor. She’d surmised that men, especially older ones, made their decisions hastily. Either that or the Institute had multiple men’s floors and this one was used less often. Gut instinct told her that men were macho about life and death, less interested in personal fulfillment.

She understood how Larissa could jump, how a conflicted young woman could crunch the variables and decide to plummet. Even though Larissa had been a brilliant painter. Even though they’d had one late-night chat where they’d considered becoming the same monster so they’d never be a species of one.

Friends made in institutions, Yvette realized, were different from other friends. Wishing she could talk to Larissa, in effort to sort everything out and resume some semblance of camaraderie, she kneeled in the shower, trying to hallucinate a conversation with the only kindred spirit she’d ever found.

“Larissa, I know you’re dead and that puts a damper on conversation, but I thought maybe I could pretend . . . ask myself questions, then imagine your answers . . . ”

At first, nothing happened.

“Seriously, I’m desperate.”

“Yeah, I know. But this is lame. Can’t you use a Magic Eight Ball or something?” said a ghostly voice that was barely audible over the shower’s hissing water.

“Just let me rant to myself, maybe interject a joke or a platitude near the end. I need room to talk to myself without thinking I’m crazy,” Yvette said.

“Okay,” the voice answered, noncommittally.

“See, red hot poker an inch from my left eye, I’m still unsure. I mean, Larissa, I know the distinctions as well as you did. And I understand how you could leap. With a goblin, you know where you stand—somewhere after nightfall, you’re going to be cuisine. They sup on people’s sins: no hand behind the curtain, no pretense or performance. Vampires, well, everyone knows that vampires drink their fill of sins early on, then become laconic and overly chatty. Their strength is kept up by the totality, like how a seasoned blood-drinker can chug a priest or a prostitute and barely taste the difference, finding a palatable measure of darkness in either . . . ”

“They both minister to the sick . . . ”

“Goblins and vampires?” Yvette asked.

“No, prostitutes and priests. I’d even hazard that they’re equally likely to endure distasteful things by squeezing their eyes shut and thinking about the good they’ll do with the money.”

“Zowie, self-induced hallucinations are confusing.”

Yvette splashed hot water on her face, trying to make sense of the situation.

“If you’re going to talk to me, please don’t do it in exclamatory asides.”

“I wanted this to help. None of this offers a doorway out.”

“You’re right.”

“Plus, and I know I’m whining, they go and call it bispecial, but there’s no way to combine them. I’m so fed up with this externally-imposed inertia that I’d consider the willowy grace of a vampire if it was coupled with the low center of gravity and brute strength of a goblin . . . ”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d still have to kill to live and you’d rather go splat from great heights than succumb to murdering innocent people. By the way, from two dozen stories, water does as much damage as concrete.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“You’re not locked here in the name of comfort.”

“They know I’m having trouble deciding. I can leave whenever I want.”

“Stuck in neutral isn’t a decision. And you can’t live whenever you want, so what’s the difference?”

The hot water suddenly went cold and Yvette mumbled about how much she disliked the bind she was in, how she’d rather be a prostitute or a priest, but the ghostly voice was gone. She was afraid her hallucination had gotten bored and decided to ignore her. Sometimes it felt that way with dead friends too.

Yvette wasn’t sure why her dreams were always about Timothy. No amount of pondering got things to make sense.

She barely knew the boy. Originally, the dreams had been about strangers she’d met during the day: someone who came by the supper club on a tall ladder to change the dead light bulbs in the ceiling, an elderly woman who played chess in the park, a stockbroker who fed pigeons on her break.

Timothy, she presumed but didn’t tell anyone, symbolized innocence. He was twelve, with longish hair and a quick wince of a smile. They’d had two conversations of less than three minutes but she considered him a good kid. A kid who shouldn’t be eaten by vampires or goblins, even if they were fastidious, using a silk napkin, fine china and antique flatware.

In short, problems filled her head by the cartload.

Yvette wondered if vampires or goblins could reproduce. The answer had to be no, because no one had photographed a vampling or a gobblekin, but there were rumors. Couldn’t there be a way to get darkness or souls without having to eat people? Even in her dreams, even with the decorum of napkins and cutlery, it was horrid to imagine. No amount of imaginary black pepper or imaginary hot sauce made the idea even remotely palatable or digestible.

Shivering, Yvette turned the water off and dressed in the shower stall just in case someone else entered the bathroom, putting her baby blue robe and matching flip-flops back on. Quietly, she went to her room and locked the door.

Her music machine read her mood and played a cacophony that sounded like she was smashing every smashable object in the room: mirror, bed, the clock above the door. Yvette heard the sound of her clothes being torn apart and then the sound of the music machine being destroyed.

Then the machine played silence.

A few hours later, Dr. Rothgate shook her awake and dragged her to his office.

Something was very wrong with Dr. Rothgate and it took Yvette a while to figure it out.

She was so sleepy, as the wild-eyed psychiatrist bade her rest on his couch, it seemed like she woke up mid-conversation:

“ . . . but I have no desire to eat people . . . ”

“Appetites grow over time, like tumors or allergies. Existence, be it breathing or pogosticking or wandering around trying to remember where you’ve lost your keys, requires extremely complicated machinery. Taken as a vast enough ecosystem, every sprig of existence needs predation. Everyone needs a twinge of momento mori, a reminder that we’ll eventually die.”

“Even monsters? I thought monsters lived forever.”

“Oh, well,” Dr. Rothgate said while adjusting the strap holding a strange pair of goggles to his face, “it’s one of those conundrums of negative capability. You have to keep two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. My research suggests that the best results come from a simultaneous belief that you’ll live forever and that you could die at any moment. It reinforces the Zen koan where you attempt to have both complete commitment and complete detachment. Then again, that’s only useful if you care about outcomes . . . ”

The sun coming through the shaded window seemed to grow brighter, forcing Yvette to squint her eyes.

“ . . . my dear, these conditions aren’t brought on by loveless marriages, solipsism, drug addiction or manic-depressive paranoia. Early on, before she freaked out, back when she babbled more and shrieked less, my first patient told me that, ‘Anguish was her prey.’ Now I know what she meant.”

“Was it Larissa?”

“Don’t say her name. It was far before her.”

“How long have you treated bispecials?”

“Since the beginning, quite a long and desiccated span of time.” Dr. Rothgate cleared his throat. “It was her mother. She was the first of the goblins.”

They both turned away from the bright window shade. Dr. Rothgate had a long draught from his brandy bottle, then handed it to Yvette.

“I thought it couldn’t pass to kids. And why didn’t Larissa choose goblin like her mom?”

“It can’t. Anastasia Blackweight birthed Larissa before she was afflicted.”

“Remember when we met? You wouldn’t have called it an affliction . . . ”

“I say many things.”

“What did she mean, ‘Anguish is our prey?’ Larissa said the same thing to me. Skip the hemming and hawing about how she was a suicidal lunatic. I know you want answers.”

“I want to help you, Yvette. It’s all I want, I think.”

He took the brandy bottle back.

“I’m the only way you can save yourself,” Yvette said.

“I’m beyond saving. Anyway, she hated her mother. I shouldn’t tell because you’re still trying to sort things out—we don’t believe in shock or confrontation here—but the anguish that twisted and tortured me has vanished now that I’ve succumbed, er, finally decided.”

“Yeah, you were like me, but I can’t figure out which way you’ve gone.”

“Good. I don’t want you to know.”

“This process has taken quite a toll on me. I just want to do what’s right.”

“In France, a sixteenth century judge sentenced six hundred shapeshifters to death. The Malleus Maleficarum has a section on how people change and that was written in 1484.”

“I’ve changed my mind again. I’m going to leap off a bridge if that’s the only way to keep from hurting people.”

“You know she talked like that, don’t you? Are my notes right, did you know her?”

“We talked a few times. Only one conversation stands out. I didn’t realize how momentous it would seem in retrospect. I try to hallucinate semi-lucid conversations with the imaginary version of her that I remember, but she’s dead.”

“If you only sleep once or twice a week for long enough, everything’s dead.”

“Dr. Rothgate, you’re freaking me out.”

“I’m sorry. We theorists aren’t good at forcing outcomes,” the doctor said, before thanking Yvette for her time and encouraging her to rest. He stumbled out the door, leaving her alone in his office. Yvette couldn’t tell if he was having difficulty walking because of drunkenness or because his back was changing shape.

Amidst shelves warped with arcane books, two paintings dominated the walls. One was an abstract and roiling sea of red purples and purple reds. A three-dimensional claw, presumably sculpted from modeling paste, reached out from the bloody waters, reaching out to grab the painting’s viewer.

The other showed a young goblin girl staring at a storefront window. The window displayed a pink chiffon dress fit for a fairy princess. Tears rimmed the eyes of the girl with pointy ears and green skin.

Rising from the couch, Yvette resolved to delay her decision until she liked one of the options before her. It seemed better to suffer and try to talk to the dead than become an evil creature. In the past, she’d chosen deadlines like Arbor Day or Oscar Night, but her self-imposed deadlines had come and gone, just excuses.

Conversely, Yvette had accepted that she and the rest of the world were going crazy and getting worse.

Over the next two days, she felt like she was sleepwalking. Dr. Rothgate didn’t come to find her, preferring to stay in hiding. She understood. Their talk had left her even more fragmented than she’d been before. If Yvette had possessed a belfry, it would’ve been overflowing with bats.

Another day passed, lethargic and soggy. Yvette dreamed of being a mother, envisioning her children as a bouncing brood of vamplings or gobblekins. The consequences were so dire. Why did it have to be binary? She imagined how pussy willows wiggled in the wind so they wouldn’t break. Was the process like having a totem animal? Perhaps body modification would help with her transition. Whiskers implanted, stripes tattooed and teeth filed to little points. And, suddenly, her nightmares weren’t always about being a vampire or a goblin. She felt less weird, occasionally picturing her dream self as a wolf-creature. She would need surgery to make her outsides as freaky as her insides, but it struck her as a splendid compromise. She fell back asleep, briefly.

When Yvette woke, she was licking her lips and horrified to be doing it. White roses had been delivered. And they were turned inside out, puckered by the rapid advance of her sorrowful condition.

It was still called Willis & Rothgate, even though Dr. Rothgate’s presence was barely felt. New crops of bispecials meandered in and crept out. Yvette stood still while the world of sickness, wellness and horrible compromises scrolled past her. Over time, it felt less and less natural, more and more artificial.

Even though they’d said they weren’t coming back until she’d made up her mind, Yvette’s parents did finally return. They spoke in harsh but hushed tones.

“We heard you’re considering vampire,” her father said.

“I’d rather die.”

“Then perhaps you’ve decided on goblin,” her mother said.

“Have I mentioned that it’s not like a costume party? I don’t know who I want to be. The whole thing’s permanent, you know. The last thing I want is to despise myself for choosing to be someone I shouldn’t be.”

“Permanency’s better than trickery. You’re going to have to live your consequences,” her parents said in unison.

Yvette called several candystripers and demanded that they show her mother and father out. Yvette pretended that her parents would’ve apologized if she’d given them enough time. But she knew it was pretense. She invented people inside her head because it was better than being let down, continuously, by everyone she’d ever met.

The flat sterility of the halls and walls had greater echoes of life than Yvette did. Every breath was drudgery. She shambled to her room. The mood music played one of the Berlioz symphonies about getting hanged then some mopey darkwave ballad that Yvette kind of liked. She thought she’d smashed the machine. For now it was okay, but she’d imagine smashing the stupid thing again if she had to, in dreams or reality or somewhere in between, whatever it took to scrabble together a half-pretty sense of place . . .

Yvette resolved to stay institutionalized, as long as it took. Anything to prevent herself from eating people.

What was there to do?

Tired, always sleepy, Yvette went back to bed. Dr. Rothgate came in the night and took her to his office again. He had trouble walking, his shuffling gait making double-footfall patters in the hallway. He’d lost the distinctive goggles of his last visit and seemed to be having problems with his vision.

“I’m here to warn you.”

“You sound like everyone else.”

“You haven’t been out of the Institute’s walls for quite some time. Things have gotten eerie and ridiculous out there. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that days are still their normal lengths or that maps lead people where they’re going . . . ”

A gooey dollop of blood was clinging to Dr. Rothgate’s forehead. She still couldn’t tell which way he’d gone. She wanted to clarify or crystallize her decision but wasn’t sure how knowing Dr. Rothgate’s choice would help. Yvette still hated both her options.

“You’re summing it up perfectly. I want to be a person who rescues people when they’re lost in those dark nights you described. I want to bring them a warm blanket and a candle, maybe a backup snack if they’ve been foolish enough to get lost without one. When the world goes creepy, everyone needs comfort and snacks.”

“Wait. What do you want?” Dr. Rothgate asked, his face gnashing and sliding sideways like he’d become a demon or something far worse than a vampire or goblin.

Yvette didn’t see any pruning shears anywhere. She decided she was awake, not having another nightmare.

“I want to be a giving and noble werewolf who wanders late nights when the walls between the worlds are thin. I’ll have a large framepack with lots of helpful supplies like: needle-nosed pliers, bandages, protein shakes, safety pins, extra batteries. You know, I could walk the night and have a ready array of supplies to give fellow travelers: new, accurate maps, clean, dry socks, small musical instruments, aspirin . . . ”

Dr. Rothgate interrupted, talking into an indestructible tape recorder, “I’m afraid the patient is not responding to treatment. Her politics are the politics of madness.”

Dr. Willis appeared from nowhere, head lolling from side-to-side like a weary jack-in-the-box. Dr. Willis shouted, “This isn’t about getting to do whatever you want. Life is a brutal, complicated, and messy adventure . . . ”

“Right! And I want to a be a considerate and helpful werewolf . . . ”

Now Yvette was of the opinion that she was dreaming after all. She used her hands to stop her chin from trembling.

“It’s understandable that you identify with victims. It was very hard for us to turn our backs on the Hippocratic oath and learn to stalk the humans. We were forced to choose a side. There is no such thing as a werewolf . . . ” Dr. Rothgate began. He grabbed his partner’s hand and raised their arms in a victory salute.

“But maybe there is! And maybe they don’t want darkness or souls. Maybe werewolves exist and they don’t eat people at all.”

Saliva oozed from Dr. Willis’s bottom lip and his lips were swelling. Dr. Rothgate shouted how Yvette would be sorry if she let her malarkey continue, how the monsters of the world were going to cause her never-ending torment if she didn’t surrender her malarkey.

With his green, liver-spotted forearms bulging and raised high in the air, Dr. Rothgate tore out into the hall so fast he could’ve been a punctured balloon and Dr. Willis snuck his pale, manicured fingers into the breast pocket of his pinstriped suit and, deftly, whipped out a syringe and poked Yvette’s arm.

She hoped this meant she’d wake up.

As she blacked out, she thought of how his pointy fangs were too big for his mouth. Dr. Willis had always enunciated well. Now he would be in trouble.

It hurt for Yvette to come to. She was down in the basement, where the strangest experiments had occurred. This was the room with the sensory deprivation tank and the orgone box.

“We have ways of making you talk,” Dr. Willis said.

“I thought you didn’t believe in confrontation.”

“No, our new tactics are all about confrontation. We’ve done a 180-degree turn. Now we hurt people for fun. It’s delightful and I’m willing to remove pieces of you to change your mind,” Dr. Willis said, picking up a scalpel.

“I haven’t signed my permission slip,” Yvette said, realizing she was bound to the operating table by some sort of nylon harness.

“It’s a symbolic technicality,” Dr. Willis said, waving the scalpel as if conducting an atonal overture.

Yvette set her jaw, her every fiber wanting to flee. Instead, she remembered what she’d learned about granules of serenity and whispered, “We’ve known each other a long time. How’s about you untie me from this bed and give me twenty minutes alone with the form and I fill it out?”

“I will find my partner and consult with him,” Dr. Willis said as he locked the door on his way out. Whatever he’d injected into her was having its effect. The room darkened and Larissa appeared in another visitation or dream.

“Yvette, may I call you Evie? I’ve always contracted your name in my mind.”

“No. Are you here to rescue me or are you just pretending to be nice?”

“I’m your stupid hallucination. I can babble with you—but I don’t think I can interact with the material world, it’d spoil the illusion and I’d vanish.”

“Okay. That’s not worth the risks. Tell me about your mom.”

“Freud’s a joke. Remember that scene in Blade Runner? Scope out Jung if you want real insight into consciousness.”

“No, I just want to understand you.”

“And biography’s a good place to start? My mom turned into a goblin. Never met my dad. It sucked. I swore it’d never happen to me. End of story.”

“Listen, please. I think you’re special, Larissa. And I believe in you, but you only got close. I think there’s another way out—one that’s tailored to me.”

“I’m not here to mislead you, you know. Everyone else has lost it. You need to cling to something or the world mutates into nothing but mischief and swerving alleys. Make your call, Evie. Maybe I was wrong to bail . . . ”

Yvette realized that the drugs were rearranging her thoughts so severely that she might be seeing things that weren’t there.

Drs. Willis and Rothgate charged back into the basement. Dr. Willis’ face was covered with blood-flecked saliva and Dr. Rothgate’s hair had turned ghostly white, but both were in better moods than when they’d left.

“We, silly little girl who doesn’t know what she wants, have brought you your permission slip,” Dr. Willis said, grabbing a lab coat off a wall hook and using it to wipe the bubbly blood from his cheeks and chin.

“But we don’t want you to be a baby about this. You draw a fancy-schmancy, stylized G or V and you’re gone within twenty-four hours. Vampires are snappy dressers and good with money. Goblins make great demo tapes for reality TV shows and leave riotous messages on your voicemail but have a tendency to become pear-shaped at middle age,” Dr. Rothgate said.

“Is it really that tough a choice? You’ve gone over and over it. Once you accept the change, you’ll love it like a new fetish, like psychic incisions have implanted an iguana under your skin. Sure, it’ll make you do things you don’t want, like controlling your eye and muscle movements even when you think you’re too tired to drink blood or slurp souls and would rather put your feet up, read from your antiquarian library, maybe puff a cigar—but, eventually, you’ll learn to pretend it’s a form of symbiosis, even though you’ll know deep down inside that it’s really a parasite.” By now, Dr. Willis had managed to get the blood off his face, except for a small spot on his neck.

Yvette fought the nylon straps. Why were these two going on and on about this? She didn’t want anything that either of their species were offering.

Dr. Rothgate tried a different angle, pulling up a chair and speaking slowly, “We’ve made our decisions. And, yep, we both eat people, even nice ones like that Timothy you used to dream about, but the rest of the world has crept right over the shadowy brink . . . ”

“ . . . everyone knows who you are now, Yvette. And they know that you’ve been here forever. You’re famous, on the news twice a day, revered just like their precious, dead Larissa . . . ” Dr. Willis said, joining in.

Yvette interrupted them with a quick but loud shriek.

“Have we all inhaled a truckload of ether? Is that it? Let’s stop monkeying around. You both idolize her. You have her paintings on your office walls and carry around indestructible cassette recorders because she was braver than you’ll ever be. I’ve figured out my middle path, something that keeps me alive and keeps me from turning out like you—but let’s not fool ourselves, okay? A truly brave person is willing to die for what they believe in, even if nobody’s looking. So here’s the gig: I read your musty edition of Malleus Maleficarum and it has a ton about werewolves. So that’s what I’m going with. I’m going to be a helpful werewolf, even if it kills me.”

Both doctors began to beat her, pelting her with various objects from the room. Eventually they used the orgone box, but the sensory deprivation tank proved too heavy, even with grunting.

Yvette lost consciousness or fell through another layer cake of dreams and alternate realities, one or the other. She wasn’t sleeping or dreaming or awake and her body hurt like she’d been beaten with a roomful of heavy objects. It took her twenty minutes to figure out who she was and where she was.

Much to her surprise, Yvette was on the floor of her room and still alive. The vase by the bed overflowed with pink carnations. They smelled like a ballerina’s smile.

Yvette grimaced and decided that she didn’t believe a word the doctors had said. The lights flickered and she screamed with all the pain her battered body was able to muster. The doctors were the ones who were full of malarkey, inmates in their own asylum, pervy lunatic fringers who demanded certainty because they vanished if they stopped claiming that they had everything sorted out and clearly defined . . . paranoia proven true, every stitch of inner peace unraveled . . .

Lumpy, swollen bruises coated her flesh. It was extraordinary that she could even rise from the bed, a painful challenge to crane her neck far enough backward to see the furry tuft in the rinky-dink institutional mirror. The tail she’d dreamed of was starting to form beneath the clustered bruises at the base of her spine.

Yvette thought she was mutating into what she wanted to be and it was enough to help her forget ninety percent of the heartache she’d been through. She wondered how hard it would be to get stainless steel whiskers implanted.

Lost and startled, the wolf coming to life under her skin, Yvette stumbled through the gothic hallways, finally finding metal double doors and exiting through them. She didn’t recognize the foggy and rain-slicked street. She had never been to this place before.

For the first time in a long time, she wanted a cigarette or two.

With grit and maybe blood in her mouth, she discovered a backpack on her shoulders and opened it. Several pairs of recently-sharpened pruning shears tumbled to the cobblestones. Eventually, she might take a moment to pack the bundle of supplies that she’d planned on preparing. At least she was a werewolf and not a vampire or a goblin.

Crawling deeper into the night, Yvette wanted to growl and make further use of her new teeth. She sniffed delicacies in the air and hoped she would never have to sleep again.

When she wasn’t gnawing people, prying their skulls open and drowning in the sustenance of their frail, futile and thwarted memories, she might attempt to help the endangered. Maybe, someday, she could spare someone as innocent as Timothy.

But for now, Yvette was too famished. If she had understood how hungry the transformation would make her, her choice wouldn’t have ever mattered. She was too ravenous to waste time wishing there had ever been another way.