By the Light of the Moon

minute.

Dylan's blurry vision had cleared, and his urge to vomit had passed. Ordinarily, those developments would be reason to feel cheerful, but good cheer would continue to elude him until he knew who wanted a piece of him – and exactly which piece was wanted.

The internal timpani of his booming heart and the rush of blood circulating through his eardrums, which produced a sound reminiscent of a cymbal softly beaten with a drummer's brush, masked any small noises the intruder might be making. Maybe the guy was eating their takeout dinner – or performing preventive maintenance on a chain saw before firing it up.

Because Dylan sat at an angle to the mirror that hung above the desk, only a narrow wedge of the room behind him was presented in reflection. Watching his brother, the jigsaw juggernaut, he glimpsed movement peripherally in the mirror, but by the time he shifted his focus, the phantom glided out of sight.

When at last the assailant stepped into direct view, he looked no more menacing than any fifty-something choirmaster who took great and genuine pleasure in the sound of well-orchestrated voices raised in joyous hymns. Sloped shoulders. A comfortable paunch. Thinning white hair. Small, delicately sculpted ears. His pink and jowly face looked as benign as a loaf of white bread. His faded-blue eyes were watery, as though with sympathy, and seemed to reveal a soul too meek to harbor a hostile thought.

He appeared to be the antithesis of villainy, and he wore a gentle smile, but he carried a length of highly flexible rubber tubing. Like a snake. Two to three feet long. No inanimate object, whether a spoon or a meticulously stropped razor-edged switchblade, can be called evil; but while a switchblade might be used merely to peel an apple, it was difficult at this perilous moment to envision an equally harmless use for the half-inch- diameter rubber tubing.

The colorful imagination that served Dylan's art now afflicted him with absurd yet vivid images of being force-fed through the nose and of colon examinations most definitely not conducted through the nose.

His alarm didn't abate when he realized that the rubber tubing was a tourniquet. Now he knew why his left arm had been secured with the palm up.

When he protested through the saliva-saturated gag and the electrician's tape, his voice proved no clearer than might have been that of a prematurely buried man calling for help through a coffin lid and six feet of compacted earth.

'Easy, son. Easy now.' The intruder didn't have the hard voice of a snarly thug, but one as soft and sympathetic as that of a country doctor committed to relieving every distress of his patients. 'You'll be just fine.'

He was dressed like a country doctor, too, a relic from the lost age that Norman Rockwell had captured in cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post. His cordovan shoes gleamed from the benefit of brush and buffing cloth, and his wheat-brown suit pants depended upon a pair of suspenders. Having removed his coat, having rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, having loosened collar button and necktie, he needed only a dangling stethoscope to be the perfect picture of a comfortably rumpled rural physician nearing the end of a long day of house calls, a kindly healer known to everyone as Doc.

Dylan's short-sleeve shirt facilitated the application of the tourniquet. The rubber tube, when quickly knotted around his left biceps, caused a vein to swell visibly.

Gently tapping a fingertip against the revealed blood vessel, Doc murmured, 'Nice, nice.'

Forced by the gag to inhale and exhale only through his nose, Dylan could hear humiliating proof of his escalating fear as the wheeze and whistle of his breathing grew more urgent.

With a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol, the doctor swabbed the target vein.

Every element of the moment – Shep waving to no one and blitzing through the jigsaw, the smiling intruder prepping his patient for an injection, the foul taste of the rag in Dylan's mouth, the astringent scent of alcohol, the restraining pressure of the electrician's tape – so completely engaged the five senses, it wasn't possible with any seriousness to entertain the thought that this was a dream. More than once, however, Dylan closed his eyes and mentally pinched himself… and upon taking another look, he breathed yet harder when nightmare proved to be reality.

The hypodermic syringe surely couldn't have been as huge as it appeared to be. This instrument looked less suitable for human beings than for elephants or rhinos. He assumed that its dimensions were magnified by his fear.

Right thumb firmly on the thumb rest, knuckles braced against the finger flange, Doc expelled air from the syringe, and a squirt of golden fluid caught the lamplight as it glimmered in an arc to the carpet.

With a muffled cry of protest, Dylan pulled at his restraints, causing the chair to rock from side to side.

'One way or another,' the doctor said affably, 'I'm determined to administer this.'

Dylan adamantly shook his head.

'This stuff won't kill you, son, but a struggle might.'

Stuff. Having at once rebelled at the prospect of being injected with a medication or an illegal drug – or a toxic chemical, a poison, a dose of blood serum contaminated with a hideous disease – Dylan now rebelled even more strenuously at the idea of stuff being squirted into his vein. That lazy word suggested carelessness, an offhanded villainy, as though this dough-faced, round-shouldered, potbellied example of the banality of evil could not be bothered, even after all the trouble he'd taken, to remember what vile substance he intended to administer to his victim. Stuff! In this instance, the word stuff also suggested that the golden fluid in the syringe might be more exotic than a mere drug or a poison, or a dose of disease-corrupted serum, that it must be unique and mysterious and not easily named. If all you knew was that a smiling, pink-cheeked, crazed physician had shot you full of stuff, then the good and concerned and not-crazy doctors in a hospital ER wouldn't know what antidote to apply or what antibiotic to prescribe, because in their pharmacy they didn't stock treatments for a bad case of stuff.

Watching Dylan wrench ineffectually at his bonds, the stuff-peddling maniac clucked his tongue and shook his head disapprovingly. 'If you struggle, I might tear your vein… or accidentally inject an air bubble, resulting in an embolism. An embolism will kill you, or at least leave you a vegetable.' He indicated Shep at the nearby desk. 'Worse than him.'

At the burnt-out end of certain bad black days, overwhelmed by weariness and frustration, Dylan sometimes envied his brother's disconnection from the worries of the world; however, although Shep had no responsibilities, Dylan had plenty of them – including, not least of all, Shep himself – and oblivion, whether by choice or by embolism, could not be embraced.

Focusing on the shining needle, Dylan stopped resisting. A sour sweat lathered his face. Exhaling explosively, inhaling with force, he snorted like a well-run horse. His skull had begun to throb once more, particularly where he'd been struck, and also across the breadth of his forehead. Resistance was futile, debilitating, and just plain stupid. Since he couldn't avoid being injected, he might as well accept the malicious medicine man's claim that the substance in the syringe wasn't lethal, might as well endure the inevitable, remain alert for an advantage (assuming consciousness was an option after the injection), and seek help later.

'That's better, son. Smartest thing is just to get it over with. It won't even sting as much as a flu vaccination. You can trust me.'

You can trust me.

They were so far into surreal territory that Dylan half expected the room's furniture to soften and distort like objects in a painting by Salvador Dali.

Still wearing a dreamy smile, the stranger expertly guided the needle into the vein, at once slipped loose the knot in the rubber tubing, and kept the promise of a painless violation.

The tip of the thumb reddened as it put pressure on the plunger.

Stringing together as unlikely a series of words as Dylan had ever heard, Doc said, 'I'm injecting you with my life's work.'

In the transparent barrel of the syringe, the dark stopper began to move slowly from the top toward the tip, forcing the golden fluid into the needle.

'You probably wonder what this stuff will do to you.'

Stop calling it STUFF! Dylan would have demanded if his mouth hadn't been