Selene’s song

by BRK   

Visiting a nearby carnival staffed by an array of very realistic “monsters” with his college buddies, film student William happens across a funfair movie-house just off the midway showing a selection of mysterious and obscure items—including an unknown horror-genre “found footage” werewolf short William knows he can’t leave without seeing.

Humble thanks to HairyandBurly, who commissioned this story and whose patience and feedback during its becoming are much appreciated.

“You need to get away from your screens, dude.” Playful hands gripped William’s shoulders as he hunched over his laptop, shaking him lightly. “C’mon, it’s Halloween! The one night a year dedicated to cutting loose and breaking the rules!”

“I thought that was New Year’s,” William muttered without looking up, a slight smile quirking his lips. The shoulder-grabbing hands rubbed a bit more and then disappeared with a quick, amiable pat. He’d’ve liked it if they’d stayed put, seeing how nice they felt there, but then when it came to his always-upbeat wrestler roommate there were a bunch of things William would have preferred.

William was aware of Jorge moving around their stark, rectangular freshman double behind him. His roomie, it seemed, was never comfortable staying in one place while he was awake, though cutely enough he was as still as a Greek statue when he slept. It had occurred to William more than once that his roomie had a lot in common with the beagle his parents had had when he was young. As soon as Rudy sat down anywhere there was someplace else he’d needed to be. He was all energy all day right up to the moment he’d dropped into a stone-cold sleep. 

“We’re not waiting until New Year’s to get you out there,” Jorge said firmly as he pulled open a dresser drawer and started sifting through it—looking for party duds to show off his wrestler-bro body, William assumed. “You’re the one who said he didn’t have a friend group here, Dub. ‘I’m from out of state, I don’t know anyone’—remember that?”

“Maybe that’s a good thing?” William teased distractedly, advancing up the scene he was analyzing at a few frames until he got to the next camera angle. “You know, fewer people bugging me about ‘going out’ and all.”

Jorge huffed indulgently as he tossed random clothes onto his bed, then put most of them back. “That is not a good thing.”

Inwardly, William was inclined to agree. He might be intently focused when it came to immersing himself in his studies and hobbies, but he wasn’t as introverted as people thought—just shy and a little unpracticed. His small high school had felt like a prefab, ready-made social environment, full of hundreds of people he’d known for ages and didn’t have to work to know—not that he’d managed to find a boyfriend or even anyone to kiss, but he’d had dozens of easy friendships. College was a far country full of strangers and strange people, and every interaction seemed to involve walls and hurdles he had to climb over just to have a conversation. It didn’t help when it came to kissing anyone, either. 

He’d lucked out on the roommate front, at least. Jorge had no barriers, and from day one had treated William like a combination of kid brother and best friend. The fact that Jorge was categorically straight had if anything made things less awkward, though the cute athlete’s cheeky “look all you want” policy was not always easy on William’s straining libido.

Fuck, the hottie in question was right behind him again, peering inquisitively over his shoulder. “And neither is being stuck to your screens like duct tape on a Space Shuttle,” Jorge persisted. “You’re either in the theater watching movies, in class watching movies, or you come back here and—guess what!—you’re watching movies, breaking them down, backwards and forwards. I’m worried about you, man. Time to bust free for a night.” 

Doggedly, as if to make a point of resisting Jorge’s cajoling, William jotted a few scribbled observations in his spiral-bound notebook, his eyes still on 1:45:18 of Advise and Consent. He wanted to object to the razzing remark about watching movies backwards, then guiltily remembered that they had done exactly that with a fifteen-minute chunk of Schindler’s List in his cinematography class a few weeks back, as a decontextualizion exercise relating to their discussion of lighting and composition. 

William’s lips flattened in chagrin. “This isn’t just for kicks, you know,” he reminded his roommate patiently. “This is work. Studying.”

Those strong, warm hands reappeared on his shoulders, squeezing once, twice, and then vanishing just as quickly. “You keep making my point for me, roomie,” Jorge said, sounding smug. William felt him crossing the room behind him and dropping onto the side of his bed with a squeak of the springs. “Lucky you’re not majoring in, I dunno, rhetoric or whatever.”

William unpaused his film and let it play silently for a few frames, observing the dissolve into the next scene. Was it a bit longer than the others? “Yeah, lucky me,” he agreed absently.

Jorge didn’t reply, just sat there, the bed creaking faintly under his butt as he shifted his weight, restless as always. To William the expectant silence felt more irksome and needling than the preceding conversation. He could practically feel his roommate sitting there, watching him. Probably with a little smirk on his boyish face, the bastard. Jorge was as relentless as he was tireless. Like that beagle, his constant supply of energy meant that once he got his teeth in something he could keep at it indefinitely.

Exasperated but knowing that his resistance was ultimately futile, William stubbornly dragged his defiance out another minute or so before blowing out a breath and tossing his pencil onto the notebook in defeat, finally turning in his chair to face his friend. “What did you have in mind?” he asked flatly. 

Jorge grinned.

“This is not what I expected to be doing for Halloween,” William grumbled as he navigated the well-worn forest path shortcut that led them away from campus toward the wilderness outside of town. The sun hadn’t yet fully set and the sky was still a cozy-looking ruby red, but here under the trees the shadows were gathering dark and deep. William’s night vision had never been great, and his battered sneakers were thin and wouldn’t offer much protection against a stubbed toe. The air was cool but not cold, and the woods around them offered a generic nature-noises soundtrack as they walked. “Why are we going to a traveling carnival fair again, of all things?”

“Because you, my friend, need distraction,” Jorge answered serenely from his vanguard position a few steps ahead on the path. 

William tsked, eyeing his friend’s attire. “It’s not the carnival that’s distracting me,” he said, only half teasing. Before embarking on their quest in search of Halloween fun, Jorge had elected to change into what William thought of as his social gear. The main component of this carefully constructed outfit was a gray-plaid lumberjack shirt with the sleeves ripped off, the frayed edges calling attention to what Jorge considered (not without justification) to be his best features: the striated, sun-bronzed swells of his deltoids merging into the sculpted curves of well-honed biceps and triceps. The shirt also did double-duty by calling attention to the taper of his torso, thanks to the tailored cut and the top buttons customarily being left undone to show off a firm, hard, lightly fuzzy cleavage. The sleek muscles thus displayed were the result of years of strength training; he’d been wrestling since middle school, and at some point had researched what he needed to do to hone his muscles to a defined, aesthetic perfection that also possessed the focused strength and agility he needed to dominate his weight class. 

Jorge was proud of his body and seemed convinced it was his hard-won arms, chest, and shoulders in particular that got him an in with the ladies, though William thought his bright brown eyes and warm smile had a lot to do with it, too.

A pair of work boots rounded out the ensemble, more to give Jorge an extra inch or two in height than for their inherent manliness. He’d also worked a bit more product into his dark-brown locks than was strictly necessary for hair shaved on the #6 clipper setting, giving his head a slightly spiky, tessellated look. William kind of wanted to mush it around and feel all the hardened gel give way, leaving nothing but soft, silky hair under his questing fingers.

Then there was the butt. For William, the eye-catching sleeveless lumberjack top also had the added benefit of having a relatively shallow shirt-tail in back, thus allowing any amount of attention to be lavished on what William considered to be the wrestler’s actual best feature: the high, pertly spherical ass that the snug jeans he usually wore with this outfit showed off to a treat. Like a lot of straight guys, Jorge didn’t seem to consider his athletically firm and rounded ass to be anything worth flaunting. Some days it took catching William staring it at for him to even remember it was there, or so it seemed. William knew for a fact that Jodie, Jorge’s current girlfriend, enjoyed this particular view just as much as William did, but it was almost as though Jorge only thought about his ass when it snagged another guy’s smoldering gaze. 

Jorge grinned over his shoulder at him. “Ogle me all you want, but keep your hands where I can see ‘em,” he teased. 

William grimaced. “Whatever, jock boy,” he said. He still hadn’t decided whether Jorge’s cheerfully taunting “look but don’t touch” policy toward his helplessly gay fellow freshman was any more or less torturous than the “don’t look at me, I’m fucking straight” vibe William usually got from hot hetero guys around here. William was just confident enough in his sexuality not to be intimidated either way, despite being more the quiet, average-built, shapeless-pocket-tee type than excessively extroverted, washboard-abbed, girl-crazy, carefully-dressed gym rats like the one he’d gotten paired with in the freshman housing lottery. At least Jorge was decent and fun, even when he was deliberately walking around in his underwear just to play around with him. William had hoped his pesky attraction to the man would eventually wear off with familiarity, but it hadn’t quite worked out that way. 

He ran a hand through his own messy, reddish-brown hair, reminding himself it was getting long and needed a cut. When his hair got too messy people tended to assume he was a poet for some reason, and ended up either trying to trade verses with him or offering him pot. “What are you getting out of this, anyway?” he asked Jorge glumly as they turned a bend in the path, signaling the approaching end of the woods they were traversing. “And why did we bring Doofus along?”

“I heard that,” Dwayne said cheerily from behind them. He didn’t sound angry—Dwayne just liked to remind them that he was there. William thought this was kind of funny. Jorge’s teammate was a few inches taller than William and Jorge, probably twice as wide, and so ridiculously blond his hair was more visible in this low light than the rest of his pale, chiseled form. Where Jorge was fit and well-proportioned, built but in the manner of a swimmer or, well, a well-trained, aesthetically-minded middleweight college wrestler, Dwayne had the solid, overstuffed brawn of a heavyweight MMA beast after a few judicious swipes from a Photoshop muscle-swell tool. He should have been the last person anyone would lose track of, but something about his flatness of personality made it so that people kept forgetting the 260-pound, 6-foot-4, wheat-blond hulk was there. It seemed impossible, but maybe sunspots or a faerie curse was involved, William thought with a twist of his lips. 

Behavioral upshots of this perverse unremarkability included assertive self-inclusion (likely explaining his presence on tonight’s outing) and an unfortunate tendency to get all alpha-competitive whenever an audience was to be had and a potential nemesis identified. Dwayne also tended to bring out Jorge’s jock-bro side when the two of them hung out together, which was not necessarily the aspect of his friend William was most fond of. Dwayne lived just the other end of the hall on the same floor as William and Jorge, so William got to see them acting all “brah this” and “brah that” with each other on a regular basis, though they were at least usually nice enough to leave the dorm room and go be jock-bros somewhere else.

So Dwight’s presence was explained, but not Jorge’s. “C’mon, answer the question,” William prodded his roomie, his curiosity piqued. “What’s the deal with you and this fair?”

Jorge turned and, to William’s thinking, rather imprudently kept walking backward, beaming at William the whole time. “It’s Halloween!” he said simply.

“And?” William said, baffled. Just then, a thought struck him. “Wait—Jodie canceled on you, didn’t she? You and she were going to this fair, but something came up for her and she opted out. That’s why we’re here. Am I right?” Jorge smirked, and William knew his guess was spot on. “Uh huh. Your girlfriend bailed and you couldn’t go alone like a normal person, so you dragged your roomie and your bestie out on romantic date instead. Am I getting warm?”

“She had another party to go to,” Jorge confirmed. “Don’t worry, I’m meeting her later,” he added with a wiggle of his sexy dark eyebrows. “If you know what I mean.”

“Okay, Casanova, calm down,” William teased. In his mind, he pictured the two lovebirds finding each other for that promised alone time and found himself wondering what it would be like to have an intimate encounter with a guy as fun and hot as Jorge. He shook the thought away. “So we’re your backup dates to the fun fair, huh?” he continued razzing his friend, grinning. “Placeholders until the real one comes along? Doing all the things dates do?”

“Cotton candy makes me barf,” Dwight put in. “You better not make me eat cotton candy.”

“C’mon, you’ll love it,” Jorge said. “The fair is all done up for the night. It’s amazing, I’ve already been out there once. You gotta see it! Like, it’s a carnival fair, so from the get-go it’s already all dark and creepy. And then, everything’s Halloween-themed. Fun house, hall of mirrors, bumper cars, Ferris wheel, the midway, everything! And all the carnies are—”

A tree loomed behind Jorge, the path swerving to the left just ahead. “Fuck, will you walk normal?” William broke in, stressed from watching Jorge walk backwards through the darkening forest.

Jorge humored him and turned back around but didn’t pause his extolling of their destination. “The carnies are all decked out—vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, walking skeletons—walking skeletons! It’s so rad, bro, they all totally look like the real thing! Spooky as hell,” he added happily. 

“I had no idea you were so… paranormally inclined,” William said drily. He was thoroughly entertained by his roommate waxing lyrical over a holiday that was more about transient symbols of cartoonified fears and the temporary indulgence of childhood greed than anything substantive.

“I love Halloween,” Jorge said happily. “It’s the one night the real world overlaps with the world of the strange and the fantastic, when Hekate walks the mundane boulevards of men…” he went on wistfully, half-chanting the words.

Behind William, Dwayne laughed. “Well, we got the ‘strange’ part already,” the bigger man called up to his friend.

Marginally miffed Dwayne had gotten the jump on him and stolen this (admittedly low-hanging) bit of snark, William joked instead, “Is that why you’re dressed like one of the hot dudes from Jeepers Creepers that have to show off how ripped they are before the monster eats them?”

Jorge just grinned, ignoring them both. 

A moment later the path abruptly exited the woods, opening out onto a large clearing, most of which was occupied by an extensive fairground, complete with big walls, a grand entryway, and beyond all kinds of tents, prefab buildings, trailers, and more. The sun had finally set behind the western trees, leaving the newly risen full moon in the east to lend an increasingly eerie, half-monochrome cast to the spectacle before them. At the middle, silhouetted against the darkening sky, was a slowly rotating Ferris wheel, the center axis emblazoned with what looked from this distance like the leering, stylized face of a Lugosi-style vampire, handcrafted in wood and painted in stark blacks and grays. Ephemera drifted toward them across the clearing—scents of hot peanuts and char-broiled chicken, sounds of people laughing and screaming in delight at whatever was going on within.

Jorge spread his bronzed arms wide, gesturing dramatically at the carnival before them. “Voilà! ¡Eso es! ¡La feria de diversiones!” he announced grandly, as though he were introducing them to the most memorable Halloween of their lives. William snorted, amused, and the three of them made their way toward the entrance, in a mood to have a night of mindless fun.

There were fewer people roaming the fairgrounds than William had initially guessed there would be; the wide, grassy avenues between attractions increasingly were being abandoned by the various knots of townies and college students headed toward parties in all directions as evening took hold. Even so, the Black Lagoon creature taking tickets at the gate had assured them the fair was open all the way to midnight, so the three young men wandered unhurried from booth to booth and tent to tent as the night deepened and the painted steel poles and canvas fabrics took on the silvered light of the round, rising moon.

The fair itself was delightfully creepy, and its denizens, while peculiar, were friendly and welcoming. As promised, all the staff were done up as various monsters, boogeymen, and hybrids, and the various makeup effects and costumes involved were surprisingly convincing. Jorge was ooh-ing and ah-ing at everything as he went, striking up conversations with hags and ghouls like they were exactly who they appeared to be, and William had to admit he had a point. Passing a cheery 7-foot minotaur snorting amiably at them from the entrance to a side-show tent, his deep-black fur rippling gently under a passing breeze, William found himself thinking the outfits almost looked too real to be costumes. They had to be, though, right? After an hour or so he let his film brain kick in and allowed himself to accept the illusion at face value, though every once in a while his brain would get caught on just how unnaturally real it all seemed.

Besides the Ferris wheel there were other rides, including a tilt-a-whirl full of shrieking kids and some other families enjoying some battered-looking bumper cars. Jorge hooted with delight when they found the ghost train, a short pretzel track heavily decorated with lurid, fantastical imagery inside and out, glowing unnervingly in the eerie blacklight. There was a haggard, zombie-like barker out front in what was left of the formal suit he’d presumably been buried in, calling on everyone to roll up and enjoy the best thrill of the night, his voice hale and strong despite missing a third of his face. Jorge dragged them in and they really did have a blast, not least from the well-timed jump scares the performers gave them leaping out at the three-man cars hurtling around the little track. The disconcertingly real specters and skeletons in particular sent cold shivers of delight up William’s spine as they sped past. Dwayne, who’d already had a few beers before the ride, looked slightly queasy at the end, matching the green pallor of the zombie barker outside.

It wasn’t just the crew that got to meld with the otherworld, as it turned out. In the midway, munching on funnel cakes and corn dogs, they found a shop that sold what appeared to be animal-themed prosthetics. You stuck them on the lower half of the face, and the way they fused with the skin was uncanny. The shopkeeper, a bulky Black guy wearing a bear muzzle, proudly demonstrated an additional feature of them masks when he let out a very convincing ursine growl, loud enough to carry halfway to the front gate. The three boys stepped back in dismay. Then the bear man grinned at them, and they laughed.

“This is awesome,” Dwayne said. “I wanna be a bear!” 

William paused in looking over the wolf masks and looked up at him with a smirk. “You wanna be a bear, huh?” 

Dwayne blinked at him, then rolled his eyes. “Not that kind, geez,” he said, giving William’s shoulder a playful shove. To the attendant he said, “Can I try?”

“Of course,” the man replied. His voice sounded oddly thick, like a grizzly who’d learned to man carnival booths and hawk monster masks to the rubes.

Jorge was looking at donkey masks. “I should get one for Jodie just to mess with her,” he said. 

“Telling your girl she’s an ass, good plan,” William teased. He’d met her only briefly a few times, but she seemed more grounded than the whimsical, excited-about-everything Jorge. He’d gotten the impression Jorge thought that her medical studies had made her a little more serious and fun-deprived lately, and characteristically his impulse was to try to lighten her evenings and help her find a moment of joy amid the stacks of books and double-length bio labs.

Too bad she didn’t come out with them, William thought. It felt good being here. William was suddenly glad his roomie had dragged him out to a place as charged with energy and excitement as this fair was. Even half empty as the night deepened and folks left for other gigs the carnival seemed latently alive, like a pocket of harmless unreality parked for a few nights in a mundane woodland clearing before vanishing to another never-where.

Jorge turned a donkey mask over in his hands and then slipped it on, and William watched in fascination as the gray-furred skin seemed to actually merge with Jorge’s cheeks and firm jaw. Jorge grinned a toothy donkey grin at him, then reared back and let out a bellowing hee-haw! that had William stumbling backward and plugging his ears with his fingers in dismay. 

“This is definitely coo-oo-ool, right? What do you thi-i-i-i-ink?” Donkey-Jorge said, his voice eerily lowered and roughened by the mask. 

“It’s so you,” William deadpanned. “All you need is a windmill to tilt at.”

Donkey-Jorge looked confused. “Huh?” he said, then shook his head and turned his attention to the bear attendant. “How mu-u-u-uch?” he brayed, pointing at the impossibly-real prosthetic.

“That one? Sixty bucks even,” the bear rumbled.

Jorge winced, quickly pulling off the mask. It had been so well attached, literally looking like a part of his head, that William had almost been afraid Jorge’s skin would be torn off when he tried removing it; but it separated easily. He set down the mask with the others and smiled at the attendant. “I’ll pick it up on the way out if I’ve got that much cash left,” he said politely. To William he added, “It’d be worth it just to give Jodie a laugh.”

“Sure, sure,” the bear said. He’d heard that one before, William guessed, though knowing Jorge he had probably been telling the truth. The man turned quickly back to Dwayne, who was trying on grizzly masks to see which ones were fiercer than the attendant’s. Eventually they left after Dwayne had parted with enough green to walk out with a seriously dangerous-looking black bear muzzle attached to the bottom half of his face. The mix of his still very human eyes and forehead and shock of yellow hair above and the black-furred bear parts below made him look like the product of some deranged ursine-human experiment. 

“Raaar! Raar!” he roared very realistically to the smattering of patrons passing by as they exited, sending a little boy laughing and shrieking back to his delighted parents. Dwayne was loving it. “Raaaaar!”

Jorge chuckled. “You having fun, bro?” he teased.

“Raaar!!!” Dwayne bellowed happily at them, flexing his big, chiseled biceps for good measure. William and Jorge laughed.

They got another round of beers at a nearby stand and strolled the midway a while, heading toward the tilt-a-whirl at the end—Dwayne had wanted to ride it, though the others weren’t sure if it was kid-sized and he wouldn’t fit. As they walked, William catalogued the various monsters they’d passed, all of them looking less like carnies in make-up and costumes than real supernatural beings they’d somehow lured onto the payroll for the night. It gave the place quite a spooky, encouragingly surreal air. Though there was nothing too inhuman or fantastical—no red-scaled mountain dragons or flying fairies had evinced themselves so far—they’d already met a representative array of famously scary creatures of film and legend. So far these included the piscine amphibious humanoid they’d met taking tickets; the giant, snorting minotaur at the sideshow tent; and the rot-faced undead gentleman in the disheveled suit working the ghost ride, not to mention the unnervingly real man-bear at the mask shop and various assorted skeletons, ghosts, hags, and ghouls. Particularly memorable was the seven-foot-tall Sasquatch they’d encountered earlier loping silently down the midway, glancing over her shoulder at them as they’d passed to give them a stone-faced stare in a truly spine-tingling Patterson-Gimlin moment before vanishing down a dark side-alley. The caveman-movie leather bra and panties were the only signs she hadn’t been an actual cryptid crashing the fair on business of her own.

As the night deepened and the fair-going masses thinned, the shifting crew-to-crowd proportions made it seem as though the supernatural creatures were gathering in force. It was like they were manifesting in every direction, though the juxtaposition of monster and occupation was often a bit jarring: Mr. Hyde glowering ominously from an abandoned ring-toss booth; Elphaba’s greener, even more hook-nosed sister creepily cackling while hawking biliously green helium balloons; a deathly pale Count Orlok vampyr pattering in a sibilant mutter as he tried to recruit players into the skee-ball tent. The three boys were having a great time pointing out the more famous or impressive ones like a monster version of punch-bug. 

Jorge and Dwight even let William nerd out a bit when he had a juicy anecdote about a particular creature’s most notorious appearance on the silver screen. As a film studies major with a guilty-secret predilection for crowd-pleasing black and white fare—Universal and Hammer horror, drive-in B-movies, trashy noirs of the sort later more or less successfully reclaimed as high cinema—William knew his monsters, and as they reached the center of the midway he said suddenly, “Isn’t it weird there’s no werewolves? On Halloween, too.”

“And a full moon,” Jorge added, playing along.

“Right?” William said. “You’d think tonight of all nights they’d make a point of stirring a bit of lycanthropy into the mix.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Dwight scoffed from behind them, his voice still slightly distorted by his new ursine features. “Werewolves can’t work the full moon! They’d eat all the customers.”

Jorge laughed. “He has a point. Oh, hey, didn’t you want to get a new hoodie?” He gestured toward a large stall with a marquee above reading “Talbot’s Red Riding Hoods & Sportswear.” It looked dark, though, like the owners had already shut the booth down for the night, and as they moved toward it a large, brawny figure in a straining blood-red long-sleeved tee shirt and equally undersized jeans emerged furtively from behind the stall and started yanking down and securing the canvas barrier, casting occasional hectic glances up at the full moon as he did so. 

“Excuse me,” William said. “Do you think you could—?”

The young man glanced toward them in alarm and quickly twisted away, the sudden motion apparently tearing open the shoulder seam on his tee shirt, exposing a few inches of noticeably hairy skin. 

“Closed,” the stallkeeper shouted gruffly, cutting him off. His voice was almost a growl, but William was distracted by the V-shape the man presented as he kept himself turned away. The stallkeeper’s delts and lats were looking almost as impressive as Dwight’s, and William was slightly overwhelmed at seeing the swell of his back in the skintight red top. “Closed,” the man said again. “Tonight, probably tomorrow. Come back Sunday!” Directing a final quick look up at the brilliant round moon he turned and darted past the ropes and stakes into the black shadows beyond.

“That guy had the biggest sideburns I’ve ever seen,” Dwight said, sounding awed. “They weren’t just sideburns, they were, like, all-over-burns.”

Jorge snorted, tossing an arm around his friend’s bulky shoulders. “You should not try to be funny, dude,” he said sagely. William grinned as they walked on, pondering the existential philosophy of jokes. If a joke was defective and terrible enough to be funny, wasn’t it still a joke in the end?

They were soon at the very center of the midway, a sort of noisy central plaza full of people, carnies, and music. There was a big popcorn booth in the center and a side road going off at right angles to the midway in both directions. To the right was the Ferris wheel, and to the left were more arcane shops, games, and booths. As they passed, he noted a stall full of crystals, the pendants, pyramids, and orbs all seeming to catch the moonlight oddly. Another seemed to be selling potions and various ampules, and next to it—

William stopped in his tracks. “No way,” he said. Was it real? Maybe he had finally lost it, and he was finally seeing his favorite thing everywhere he went. 

Jorge saw what he was looking at and made a face, grabbing his arm in a firm grip. “‘No way’ is right,” he said sternly. “You are not going in there.”

“But—but—” William stammered, staring longingly at the sign that read “M. Jakobson’s Curiosities Moviehouse” in splendid gilt prewar Opéra-de-Paris lettering on glossy sable. A cinema, here! There were one-sheets out front advertising the monster-themed flicks to be seen within, and the fact that they seemed to be not the famous ones he knew well but more obscure short films he was unfamiliar with only added to the magnetic pull. He caught the eye of the carnie out front, a short, compressed, bearded man who might almost be a dwarf from out of Middle Earth. The dwarf raised a brow and tilted his head toward the curtained entrance, inviting William to enjoy the splendors secreted within.

“No,” Jorge said, tugging at his arm. 

“Jorge—!” William whined.

“If we let you go in there, we’ll lose you for the whole rest of the night,” Jorge insisted—not without cause, William thought reluctantly. “Come on!”

Dwight got behind him and pushed, and together they led him away from the strange fairground cinema, William looking back over his shoulder at the filmhouse apparition until it was finally lost from view.

The tilt-a-wheel was indeed meant for tykes, not titans, so they rode the Ferris wheel instead, William and Jorge together and Dwayne in the next car behind. It was an interesting view. The fair was larger from the air, but also contained: a glowing, amorphous anomaly surrounded by dark, rolling forests. The college looked distant and strangely disconnected, like a smudge of light bleeding through from the next reality over.

As they were walking back from the ride it was suddenly Dwayne’s turn to stop and stare. “Oh! Oh!” he grunted, pointing. On a stand in an open area off the midway, a bare-chested strongman was demonstrating his mighty physique to a small crowd, lit by a circle of torches with oddly uniform flames. But it quickly became clear that this was no ordinary strongman. His skin was lime green, his ears were pointed, and two large tusks were protruding from his lower jaw. That is some expert orc make-up, William thought in awe. 

The three of them bundled closer, mixing into the crowd as the orkish fellow heaved a barbell overhead two-handed to the impressed murmurs of the audience. It was obviously heavy, going by the way his bulky arm and torso muscles were bunching and tensing, despite the barbell sporting cartoon-style lead spheres at the ends rather than the usual plates. Even his flat muscle-belly and tree-trunk legs packed into brown trousers showed the exertion. When the mighty tusked figure dramatically shifted his stance and took one fist away, supporting the weight one-handed, the crowd applauded, and William and the others joined them as the strongman smiled, a tusky grin that made him seem quite a jolly orc, for all his inhuman strength.

In fact, William was having trouble tearing his eyes away from the man-creature on the modest stage in front of them, barely ten feet away, as the strongman carefully lowered the weight to knee-height and dropped it with a loud thunk onto the presumably reinforced platform. Since his rather late sexual awakening in high school—and perhaps unconsciously before then—he’d been drawn to the beauty of trim, sculpted, classically proportioned muscle. He’d watched in rapt appreciation as delts and biceps shifted just from the swaying of someone’s walk or hefting a book-bag over their shoulder. He’d enjoyed just drinking in the physical artistry of a well-crafted male form in a sleeveless tee shirt or tank top, all wide shoulders, tapered lats, and strong arms. He’d already found opportunities to while away a few minutes on the benches in the quad just contentedly watching long, masculine legs and firm butts filling out snug jeans or suggesting their comely proportions in loose sweatpants as guys passed this way and that.

Now, watching as an attendant secured a chain around the wide-backed orc that he proceeded to strain and then snap through the sheer exertion of his hard-packed weightlifter’s muscle, William felt like he was experiencing a revelation. How superficial he had been, merely admiring the look of a guy’s body! Cooing to himself over how pretty someone’s biceps were, or how pleasingly proportioned a classmate looked in a navy compression shirt and a pair of 501s. He might as well admire a cherry, high-performance sports car for how darling it looked parked pertly in its driveway. 

This was thick, well-shaped muscle, but with purpose and power as well. Those bunching, inhumanly thick biceps weren’t just for show. This hugely-built metahuman had the strength to willfully reshape anything that came into his hands through the expenditure of sheer physical force. William found himself getting warm under his clothes, his mouth drying as he stared, amazed at himself for having missed this essential truth. The flame-light and mundane workman’s trousers and boots only served to underline the strongman’s primal nature. 

The orc wasn’t William’s new fantasy date or anything; the carnie’s vivid emerald brawn was more thick and beastly than beautifully shaped, and William liked kissing enough the tusks were probably a deal-breaker. But he now knew that what he wanted in an intimate partner wasn’t merely a panoply of aesthetically chiseled muscle to look at and mindlessly murmur, “That’s hot.” He wanted real, purposeful muscle. He craved the up-close exhibition of the limitless raw potency that could be found locked away in hard biceps, steel-banded chests, iron thighs. He yearned to feel that strength and power rippling under his hands, to sense it from the mere proximity of a lover whose manly, delectable brawn only hinted at what he was truly capable of.

“Any challengers?” the orc shouted over the applause, waving the broken chains in the torchlight and casting them down with a clank. His bellowing voice was deep but warm, and oddly comforting. “Who thinks they are as strong as Torrghen the orc? A free meal to the one who bests Torrghen!”

Dwayne, always competitive, was immediately triggered into full-on adversary mode. “Oh, I can show him!” he said angrily to William and Jorge. Without hesitation he leapt onto the platform and faced off against the orc, seemingly oblivious to how seeing the two of them face to face—or rather, face to chest—merely emphasized how Torrghen had a probably eleven inches and a good hundred pounds’ advantage on their suddenly meager-looking friend. 

William remembered all the beers they’d had and cringed, even as Dwayne peered defiantly up at the smiling orc. “I’ll challenge you, Beast Boy!” Dwayne roared. His full-on engagement with the proceedings seemed already to have gone past “barbarian warrior” and reached halfway to “berserker.”

“Brave fool,” Jorge marveled quietly, shaking his head.

“And he was never seen again,” William added solemnly.

The orc turned and retrieved what looked like two long steel bars from a table behind him, exhibiting them to the audience before handing one to Dwayne. “Try to bend the rod, if you can, challenger!” the orc commanded in that embracing, ultra-basso voice. Dwayne dutifully started shoving at the bar, seemingly to no avail. William’s gaze was all on Torrghen, however, as he began expending a crushing amount of strength—first twisting the bar, creating spiraling torsion ridges all along its length, then slowly bending it into a shallow U. 

What would that feel like, to be able to bend and twist raw iron like that? What was that orc experiencing, channeling some inner raw power as an exhibition of unstoppable physical strength?

“Uh oh,” Jorge said, eyeing William with a smirk. “I think my fan has found a new hero!”

“Fuck off,” William responded with an amused snort, still watching the orc. “You’ve still got plenty of people on campus to ogle you.”

Torrghen held up the bent and twisted rod, and the crowd cheered. “Wait! I’m not done! I got this!” Dwayne huffed, red-faced above his furry bear muzzle. His own rod belied him, seeming reluctant to budge even a little. “Yours was fake, wasn’t it!” he accused under his breath, grunting as he pushed and squeezed. Some in the crowd were catcalling him about his “rod” and how he couldn’t get it to do what he wanted. 

Torrghen took the rod away and casually bent it himself. “You were saying?” he rumbled, getting a laugh from the crowd. This enraged the partly inebriated, fully bull-headed Dwayne, who shouted an inarticulate battle-cry before abruptly lowering his skull and attacking Torrghen with a roar. The orc stood unmoving with a tolerant tusked smile on his wide greenish lips as Dwayne beat ineffectually on his chest and the crowd laughed and booed lustily, thoroughly entertained. Then the orc unceremoniously grabbed Dwayne and turned him upside-down, holding him by the ankles. 

Jorge still had half his attention on William’s appreciation of the orc’s innate power. “Yeah, but I like getting it at home, too,” he replied belatedly, as if they were on the couch watching a sitcom.

William finally tore his gaze away from the lime-green strongman and gave his friend an indulgent smile. “That’s how it is, is it? Vanity, thy name is Jorge Montenegro.”

Jorge grinned, looking very handsome in the wavering light. “I will totally own that.” He nodded toward Dwayne, who was still grunting away up on the platform, pounding uselessly on the orc’s shins. “Think he’ll be okay?”

“Probably,” William said. Dwayne tended to get fixated when he thought he had something to prove, so it might be a while before he cried uncle. William threw his arm around Jorge and started them walking away from the orkish exhibition of strength and muscle power. “C’mon,” he said. “Come watch weird movies with me.”

“Gasp! Anything but that!” Jorge pretended to balk in horror, dragging his feet, but William gripped him tighter and kept them moving.

“It’ll be fun,” William said. “You’ll see.”

“Famous last words,” Jorge said as they headed back up the midway toward the central plaza and the mysterious cinema of curiosities.

The dwarf was no longer positioned outside the moviehouse as he and Jorge returned, but there were low lights within seeping from under the black curtains at the entrance, telling them the venue was probably still open. William checked the framed one-sheets to either side of the curtains for a schedule. “No movie times,” he remarked. “I wonder—”

“Oh, shit!” Jorge said suddenly, pulling out his phone—the talk of movie times must have triggered his memory. He gave William a chagrined look. “Dub, I gotta bail,” he said. “I didn’t realize how late it was, and I actually did promise Jodie we’d meet up.”

“Really?” William said flatly, raising a brow.

The small, stocky proprietor of the moviehouse appeared suddenly through the black curtains, seating himself on a low stool next to the entrance. “Still movies tonight,” he said blandly. William wondered if there was any way to tell how old the compact man was—from his weathered face and thick brown beard he looked like he might be forty or four hundred. He was dressed in subtly old-fashioned clothes with what he wanted to call an Edwardian feel, including a dark jacket, waistcoat, white shirt, heavy blue and black striped pants, and open sandals. A thin gold watch-chain hung across his moderately plump belly.

“Hey, why’d you guys leave?” Dwayne said, trotting up to stand next to Jorge. His bright blond hair was mussed and his cheeks were still flushed, but he otherwise looked none the worse for wear from his encounter with the orc. Admittedly he didn’t look too steady on his feet at the moment, but William guessed that had more to do with the high-potency beer they’d been served than the unequal face-off with the tusked strongman. 

“You were obviously having fun,” Jorge said. “We left you to it.”

Unexpectedly, Dwayne smiled. “I was, kinda,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Jorge’s ditching me for a love connection,” William said. He jerked his thumb behind him. “Wanna watch spooky movies?”

“Oh.” Dwayne looked sheepish. “I, uh, didn’t bring my glasses,” he said. 

“Ah.” William might have dismissed this as an excuse, but he had seen Dwayne wearing the glasses in question, and Jorge had mentioned something about the big guy being bad with distances and needing them for chalkboards and in-class slides. “Well, I’m doing this.” His curiosity was solidly piqued, and unknown movies called to him.

“We figured,” Jorge said with a sigh. To Dwayne he said, “Come on, big guy. Walk me home and I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

“Yeah? What flavor?”

Jorge waved to William. “See you back at the room!”

“See you,” William said.

“Bye!” Dwayne said, then joined Jorge as they headed back toward the main gates. “Seriously, though, what flavor?”

William turned to the dwarf, who was watching him serenely, as if this outcome, William being the sole guest in the end, had been suspected. “One ticket, please,” the proprietor said in a lilting voice. William didn’t recognize the accent.

William handed the man the last of the attraction tickets he’d purchased at the gate. The dwarf tucked it away and nodded. “This way,” he said, leading William through the heavy curtains and into the mysterious space within.

Though there had been only room for two framed one-sheets outside the entrance, the main wall of the small, dark lobby directly behind the black curtains was festooned with posters and lobby cards advertising dozens of available films. “Choose your film experience,” read a small plaque in the center, hand-inked in the same lively old-style Opéra-de-Paris font as the marquee outside, “—or join in the choice of another. No children under 18 are to be allowed in any screening.” 

That explained why there were no movie times out front, William thought as he scanned the offerings in wonder. The films were shown on demand, to individuals or small groups. 

He wondered how many screening rooms they had. Was it like a Korean karaoke parlor, with lots of little rooms for groups to play in on their own? He reconsidered what he knew already. Maybe they didn’t need that much space. With most folks wanting to experience the open-air fun of the fair’s midways and rides, and the parking of kids to give parents a breather explicitly ruled out, they probably only got a trickle of patrons. Maybe it was all bored lookie-loos, non-thrill-seeker dissidents from groups of adrenaline-junkie ride-lovers, and the occasional stray incorrigible film obsessive, he thought with a crooked smile. Certainly (apart from the silent proprietor) he had the lobby to himself at the moment, and, from the feel of it, possibly the whole place.

As he always did, William first let himself be absorbed by the design of the posters before considering their content. They appeared to come from all assorted eras, some silent, some Technicolor, obvious drive-in B-movie filler alongside more arty or earnest films. Some of the films seemed related, their posters using similar striking designs, but mostly they were different from each other and reflective of their eras: some stark, some lurid, some urgently sensationalistic. Most featured a large, leering monster face, usually in monochrome or tinted to grab the eye, with the compulsory smaller screaming woman nearby; though a few featured a creepily atmospheric long shot of the terrifying creature in question, backlit by a queasy moon or a burning barn. 

As he looked William noticed that some of the posters seemed distinctly post-original-run, with black-and-white cut-outs from the film against red or black backgrounds, with excitable period-font text that called attention to the film having been discovered after years of languishing unknown. “The film that scared Antigua!”, one lobby card read. In fact, as he looked over the posters he started to doubt their authenticity in general. The sheets themselves were uniformly in mint condition, not worn or folded from years of storage and resale, and now that he looked closely they all seemed to be evoking certain periods and styles more than actually representing them. Few of them had the now-requisite cast and crew credits at the bottom, and if they did they were all unknown names and unknown houses representing the most minuscule levels of film production. 

Understanding what he was looking at, William was, if anything, more intrigued than ever. These were truly unknown creations, filmmaking in its rawest form. It didn’t matter if they were terrible in plot, cinematography, or sound design. The reels they had stacked somewhere in this moviehouse waiting to be shown to unsuspecting in-wanderers would be imbued with the energy and blood of the people that made them. Experiencing that would mean absorbing exactly what was on screen without artifice or hindrance.

Going by the posters and cards, the films on offer were all monster flicks of some sort, mostly shorts or short features, none of them familiar to him. The theme, and there did seem to be one beyond their shared obscurity, focused on mythical creatures across an impressive array of types. Various distinctive monsters stared ominously out at him from each of the posters: here a vampire, there a succubus; Sasquatch, chupacabra, mermaid; leprechaun, wendigo, troll. All were rendered with maximum menace and realism, as if such dangerous and fearsome distortions of humanity existed in truth for those that chose to see them. William shivered.

One in particular caught William’s eye. A werewolf film, by the look of the half-sheet, with the title “Selene’s Song,” quotes and all, in that shaky white extra-bold lettering common to mid-century horror films; though underneath that in tiny bold block letters was a French title, «La Mélodie Interdite», which William knew meant something different—a song that was disallowed, forbidden. 

The main character was painted, Hammer horror style, rather than a still. Depicted was a handsome young man in mid-transformation, shown from the chest up and looking over his shoulder in fear, filling most of the poster. The painting captured his terror as blushes of hair erupted from his face and his teeth started to grow—these presaged the meat-tearing wolf jaws he’d possess later, as hinted at in a bluish, more abstract vignette painted behind the larger image. 

Strikingly, the unfortunate man’s shirt was also tearing open dramatically at the neck as he metamorphosed, and William could see in that glimpse of swelling, striated, follicle-bristling brawn emerging from the victim’s failing attire both the kind of aesthetic muscular man-beauty he admired and the raw force and strength he craved. The painting in the poster was so real, it was almost as though the man were transforming right before his eyes, swelling with fierce power and barely contained need.

A twinge of excitement flittered up William’s spine. In an instant, his choice was made. He grinned and turned to the proprietor, pointing. “This one, please!”

To his surprise, the dwarf looked distinctly unhappy at his choice. “Not that one,” he said curtly. “Can’t show that one. Choose again.”

William frowned. He had the odd feeling it was more won’t than can’t, and that bugged him. “Why not?” he asked, feeling obstreperous. Well, he was still technically a teenager, and he hadn’t forgotten how to double-down when he wanted something. The beer helped, too, he would later admit, though he wasn’t thinking at the time about the full pint of unexpectedly potent midway ale he’d downed earlier. He didn’t feel toasted and wasn’t acting it, but his mental processes for dealing with other people were slightly looser than usual.

The proprietor looked evasive. “The… reel is damaged,” he said quickly. “Choose another, any other.”

William stared at him. A willingness to be confrontational sloshed over his normal inhibitions. His cheeks warmed. Was he being singled out in some way? “I don’t believe you,” he said coldly. “Why won’t you show me my film?”

“What do you like about them?” asked a calm voice.

William turned, startled. Standing next to him was a young man his age he hadn’t heard approach. He was good-looking, with brown hair a few tones darker than William’s own, a sandpaper five-o’clock shadow, and sideburns longer than William was used to seeing these days. His green eyes caught the weak sconce-light, lending an air of knowing interest to his steady gaze. He looked… strong, William thought, his gaze dropping down the man’s square-shouldered form and back again almost of their own accord. Not sculpted for show like Jorge or bulky like Dwayne, but like someone who used his body on a daily basis, having to buy the next size up in tee shirts and jeans because what he did over the months and years made him harder and stronger. He wasn’t much older than William, but he had seen and experienced a bit more, and it showed in the contours of his hard-worked body and in the steady confidence of his comforting gaze.

The man was dressed simply, with a plain, warm scent like loamy earth. His dark green heavyweight polo was worn around the edges of his collar and cuffs, but William appreciated the garment for how it dipped in front to reveal the upper reaches of firm, flat pecs and thick swaths of chest hair that seemed to want to curl right of the V of the unbuttoned placket. A small, inch-long white scar showed near his collarbone, and William kind of wanted to know the story behind it. The shirt also exposed, at the arms, a set of long, twisting tribal tattoos set in skin tanned by outdoor work. The blue-black ink wound around his hairy, corded arms from shoulder to elbow, and they, too, William guessed, told a tale. Overall he looked like everything about him was real, the product of experience, effort, and adversity. 

Their eyes met again, and William realized guiltily that the other man was aware of being scoped out and didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. He realized he’d lost track of what the man had asked and was further chagrined. “Sorry, what?” he asked.

“What do you like about them?” the tattooed man repeated. “Werewolves, I mean.”

“Well, uh—sorry, who are you?” The guy wasn’t acting like another patron, and William felt like he needed a better handle on this conversation.

The other man smiled. It was a friendly smile, one that instantly made William want to know him better. “I’m Atlas,” he said. “I work here.”

“Atlas, huh?” He looked away from the smile and was distracted by the eyes again. He wanted to make a joke about him having the night off from holding up the world, but stopped himself at the last second—he must have gotten that kind of thing a lot and was probably sick of it. Plus William didn’t want to call attention to the appreciation of the man’s shoulders, and everything else, he had just been exhibiting so shamelessly. Instead he offered his hand. “Uh, William.”

Atlas shook, and William could feel the strength in his grip, though there was no attempt to dominate the shake or crush his hand. William felt a rush of arousal and quickly disengaged. “Well, so. Werewolves? Honestly, they’re my favorite legendary creature. I hate that they’re so often unfairly depicted as blood-thirsty, mindless beasts. Lycanthropy… it’s used in films as a curse, right? But as a metaphor or a filmmaking conceit, I see it as more like a gift, a rare chance to truly embrace one’s primal side. You know what I mean? That part of you that’s raw and real and always gets pushed down and repressed, while we force ourselves to behave and conform.”

“Sure, I know what you mean,” Atlas agreed.

Always happy to talk about film, William warmed to his subject. “The movies have really missed an opportunity with werewolves. They’re shown as a deviation and a threat. If lycanthropy were real it wouldn’t be about going on rampages or, you know, having sex with everything that moves. It would be letting go of core inhibitions and exposing what one’s heart is made of. Like the Bacchanal, but even more primal. Plus it’s the rawest, purest evocation of masculine power, in a form that’s a genuine challenge to the character.”

Atlas seemed intrigued. “What do you mean, ‘a challenge’?” he asked.

“Well, I mean… most of the time in movies, when a character gains supernatural abilities, it’s not something that he has to master or control, it’s just there,” William said. “Like—like superhero films. They’re pure wish-fulfillment, but the strength never feels at all real to me. Not just because the digital trickery is obvious, but—the strength and power doesn’t come from anywhere. It’s just flat, there on the screen, not from anyplace real inside. No heft, no core, no power. Monsters get a better shake than heroes, because there’s more of feel of where the danger comes from. Like—like the T-800 in the original Terminator. You could sense where his strength came from, internally, because it’s the same place as his relentless drive and determination.”

“Is the Terminator a monster?” Atlas asked with a quirk of the lips. 

“Absolutely!” William grinned. “So, you see the problem. Werewolves should be the ultimate manifestation of raw masculine power and how men have to work to control something that is too wild and primeval to be fully suppressed or restrained. But the movies use them to depict the debasement of the human ideal, and the threat posed comes entirely from the external perception of what they’re not, not what it feels like to the werewolf himself.”

Atlas was watching him intently. “What do you think it feels like?” 

William shrugged. “Frightening. Thrilling. The unique thing about werewolves is, it’s ephemeral. The transformation is pure, but it’s also temporary. There’s a lot of appeal in letting your raw power free and becoming something strong and animal and uncontrolled for a while, if you know you’re coming back from it.”

Atlas was smiling, and William realized he’d been ranting about movie tropes again, and to a stranger at that. “Sorry for going on like that. I’m a film buff,” he admitted sheepishly.

Atlas glanced down William’s body briefly, as if evaluating whether the defined but unexceptional physique hiding under his loose sky-blue pocket tee counted as “buff,” and William blushed. Atlas then glanced over at his presumed boss, the laconic dwarfish proprietor. “I think we should show him the film.” It sounded like he knew the film, William thought. Perhaps from repeated viewings? That seemed like a good sign that it was worth seeing.

The proprietor was still hesitant. “Not wise,” he said stubbornly, scratching the side of his thick beard.

“I’ll watch it with him,” Atlas assured him. “Make sure everything goes okay.”

The dwarf narrowed his eyes at the younger man. “If there is a mess, you clean,” he said darkly.

“Of course.” William frowned. Why would there be a mess? Did he think William would be throwing nachos at the screen? There weren’t any concessions anyway, William realized, looking around the tiny lobby. Which was just as well. He always said popcorn and drinks were a distancing ritual, and this particular experience was not something he wanted distanced.

“Fine,” the dwarf grumbled. To William he said, “Go in,” then disappeared abruptly through a side door, presumably to fetch the film and get it rolling once they were ready. 

“Come on,” Atlas said amiably, guiding William through another set of curtains. William tried to ignore just how much he was glad he was that he was going to be watching this movie with a strong, handsome, entirely congenial man beside him.

The screening room was intimate, with matte-black walls and a movie screen just large enough William didn’t feel cheated of the experience of being at a “proper” cinema, rather than at home with a laptop screen. The seats, surprisingly, were actual movie seats, two rows of four. The rows were set well apart, as if to ensure plenty of legroom. 

Atlas took a seat in the by-default back row, third from the aisle, and William smiled. In a shoebox theater like this, back row middle was exactly where he would have picked. He dropped down next to him, pleased that the seats were reasonably comfortable. “Are you enjoying the fair?” Atlas asked.

“A lot, actually,” William said. He told him about the ghost ride and the encounter with the amusingly placid orc strongman, and Atlas chuckled. Torrghen’s act was quite popular, it seemed, according to Atlas as much for the unpredictable antics of the challengers as for the orc’s reliable feats of strength and reassuring demeanor. 

The lights lowered, and they turned and settled into their seats as the short feature William had chosen started to play. 

The film began without titles or preamble, jumping straight to old-looking 1.66-aspect widescreen color footage of a bland, inexperienced-looking male reporter talking to camera, apparently taping a report for a local news broadcast. Going by the suit jacket and narrow tie the nervous young journalist was wearing, and the marginally washed-out colors that seemed ever-so-slightly weighted toward the brown end of the spectrum, William guessed it was filmed sometime in the mid-1980s, though there was a lot of leeway to either side. 

Behind the speaker were dark deciduous woods not unlike the ones William and the others had walked through to get there, countless thick trunks receding endlessly from the camera light into the swollen night. A bit of inky sky above showed a glaring full moon behind the fringes of canopy just at the edge of shot—it was so intense William could almost feel it through the screen. Normal forest sounds filled soundtrack. 

Barely visible past the reporter’s left shoulder was a large, well-built rustic cabin, a weak amber light seeping through its heavy blinds. William smiled. A cabin in the remote forest—classic.

In spite of the reporter’s stick microphone (curiously lacking a station logo), the camera-mounted scene lighting, and his presentation of the story that had brought him out here—reports of missing hikers and “strange noises”—no effort was made to simulate actual news footage. Instead of the detail-smudging 4:3 color videotape one would expect for a vintage TV news report (or something mimicking it), everything was in crisp Super 16 widescreen. The faded colors of the stock hid nothing when it came to detail—William could count the freckles dotting the hapless reporter’s cheeks, and the stray hairs that had escaped down his forehead from his over-sprayed coif. William was excited, knowing everything to come would be vivid and unmissable.

“This is the cabin that from all accounts appears to be at the center of it all,” the reporter said solemnly. “What’s going on out here, deep in these mysterious woods? Are there supernatural forces at work? A community of predators—beasts from our worst nightmares? What evil has seemingly claimed the lives of at least eight people so far? I intend to find out.”

The shot cut to an old man sitting on a porch somewhere. It was in daylight and presumably meant to have been filmed earlier, though William wasn’t sure yet whether the idea was that the “found footage” being shown had the edits already included, perhaps made for broadcast by the reporter’s notional producers; or if the filmmakers of Selene’s Song (if that was what it was called) were meant to be understood to have assembled various related scraps of film and cut them into the finished product they were now viewing. Certainly the film stock and cinematography were the same here as for the forest shoot with the reporter—but that would fit with either scenario. William found he liked the ambiguity. He leaned forward, deliberately shutting out his peripheral awareness of Atlas watching him enjoy the film. 

The doughy old man , who sported an old-fashioned chest-mounted hearing aid and looked like he hadn’t moved from that bench on his front porch in living memory, turned out to be the absentee owner of the cabin. He spoke of having rented the place out for a whole week to “those hippies,” only to have them cravenly disappear without having paid anything past the deposit. He’d ended up sending his son to clean out the place for the next renters, if he could get any. Considerable consternation was expressed at how he couldn’t even get his money back selling the tenants’ clothing and gear, seeing as how it was all “ripped up and bloody and all” and he’d had to dispose of everything. “What a waste,” he grumbled.

Cut to a slightly upwards angle on a sheriff with a greasy mustache, clearly annoyed at being trapped on camera. A press conference might have been expected at this point in the report, but this particular lawman seemed to have been ambushed getting out of his cruiser in front of the local diner. He sounded as miffed as the old cabin owner as he confirmed three male missing persons—the “hippies,” evidently—and gave the rote promise the sheriff’s office was doing everything possible to find them. A voice—William recognized it as that of the reporter from the first scene—next asked him about the hikers missing from the same area only a month back plus two similar cases near or at the cabin within the preceding three years. What were they doing about all these other victims? What about the reports of “hairy figures and wolf-like men” in the area attacking wanderers in the remote forests? What did he have to say about that? The sheriff, out of patience, gave the camera a sour look and said, “That’s for the Parks Service to deal with,” before shoving past and out of shot.

Another cut, and now the reporter was inside somewhere enclosed and gloomy—a basement, maybe, going by the cement floor and walls, though the camera light revealed little. A bare unlit light bulb hung creepily from the ceiling a few feet behind the reporter over his left shoulder, the glass catching the light at odd intervals. 

The reporter stared hard into the lens, looking unsettled. “This is the cellar where—” he began, but before he could continue further he cut himself off and looked up. Faintly, sounds came from overhead, like the steady creaking of floorboards as something moved across it. The reporter looked at the camera, alarmed. “Was that—?” he whispered, then started to move.

The scene ended abruptly, and now the reporter was upstairs, in one of the main rooms, looking unsettled and, for the first time, uncertain. There was no sign of anyone—or, indeed, of anything. The cabin seemed, at least in the room they were in, entirely bare and unfurnished, the only accoutrements being a few cheap wall lamps and the heavy canvas roll-down window blinds. The floor was exceedingly scratched and worn, which might have been the result of decades of misuse, or something else. 

Still apprehensive but gathering his composure, the reporter walked around the room and then through the cabin, narrating what he saw. The camera followed him, and William’s pulse picked up. This was the first time the camera had moved, drawing attention to the fact that a second man, an unseen camera operator, was there in the scene. The previous stationary shots might have used a tripod, giving the impression the reporter was alone in the basement and the empty woods; but the viewer was now meant to be made aware that there was more than one potential victim present that night. 

The two of them moved through the rest of the cabin. There were a few other rooms, but, though the rest of the space was less obviously damaged by past use, there was nothing in the way of even basic amenities apart from the lights and the running water in the kitchen and bathroom sinks, which the reporter demonstrated. As they returned to the main room the shot passed over a pull-down hatch in the ceiling behind him, of the sort meant to provide access to an attic. William was certain he was meant to wonder just what might be up there. 

Suddenly the scene cut to a matronly woman seated at a desk somewhere, an unoccupied newsroom studio set visible in the background behind her. She was speaking to someone off camera, as though for a documentary. “Richie was one of our most promising young reporters,” she said, her tone brisk, as though she never slowed down even to eulogize her colleagues. “We were so sad to lose him. I told him it was a risky story, but he was the kind of journalist dedicated to finding the truth. As we all are,” she amended herself hastily. She shrugged. “Maybe someday we’ll find out exactly what happened.”

Back to the cabin. Some time seemed to have passed. The reporter—the doomed Richie, presumably—looked upset. The scene felt charged. William could feel it, almost viscerally, as though the tension were seeping under his skin. Richie, still narrating, spoke to camera about “furtive noises” and splotches that might have been blood, when suddenly his eyes widened and he cut himself off, raising his free hand in a loose “wait” gesture. Nothing was said for a moment, then—mixed in with the normal forest noises—William heard a distant chanting, indistinct and indecipherable. 

Richie looked around, hand still raised, then looked just past the camera to the operator. “Do you hear that? Are you getting it?”

“I’m getting it,” confirmed a disembodied voice. It sounded remote, the cameraman’s voice being picked up not by the camera but by Richie’s stick microphone. 

They listened anxiously. The chanting grew, stealing through the film and into William. It was meaningless, words incanted in a language unknown to man. William was rapt, utterly absorbed, energized. On screen, Richie looked alarmed. “What’s happening?” he said nervously. The chanting swelled further, all but saturating the soundtrack, and Richie dropped his microphone to grab his head, pushing his hands through his hair. “What’s happening?” he moaned again, almost inaudibly, the words more a movement of his lips than a sound that could be discerned.

William was having trouble concentrating on the screen. The chanting was filling the room, the sound resonating through him like a drug, saturating every part of him. He gasped, eyes ahead, feeling the itching of his skin but not understanding it. He saw—Richie was… breaking apart? The reporter’s clothes were tearing somehow, his pale skin darkening as his flesh was rapidly covered with hair…? Fur…? 

What was—? What—?

“William,” he heard a steady voice beside him say. It sifted through the all-consuming chanting. weaving through the gaps. It was a part of it, and separate from it. He knew the voice—calm. Calmness. It was a bit lower and slightly rougher than before, but it was calmness, and something more. Attraction. Connection. Need.

William’s mind twisted. He could barely focus. Richie was writhing around, holding his head and screaming. Screaming with two voices, it sounded like. No, there were—there was another victim. Cameraman. Two men screaming as the chanting changed them. Richie’s suit-jacket sleeves bulged as he gripped his head. Screaming—

William was screaming, too. Or moaning. His own sounds and the throat-tearing noises from the film wound through the chanting that somehow saturated him. All the sounds seethed in him like a pandemonium. He was full of sound.

“William,” the voice came again. Calm, but urgent. 

Something was pulling him. Scent. Rich earth. Attraction, almost literal. 

He turned.

He saw the green eyes first. They were bright in the darkened room, more teal than green now. Fixating on them helped. He stopped whatever vocalizing he’d been doing and stared, panting. 

“Look at me, William,” Atlas said. He was smiling as he held William’s gaze. “See me. Concentrate on me.”

William let his focus expand. Atlas’s handsome, lightly tanned face was the same, only there was more hair. The beard had grown out—was growing out, creeping up Atlas’s cheeks, covering his firm jaw, surrounding his lush lips. His walnut-dark head hair was lengthening out in slow motion, already an inch or two longer than the neat cut he’d had before. Even his eyebrows were affected, looking thicker and heavier. 

Atlas was watching him from under those dark hairy brows, eyes warm and unnaturally intent, and William liked that, wanted that. Atlas’s head tilted slightly, spilling hair over those sweet, light-catching eyes, and William couldn’t help reaching out and brushing it aside.

They were standing. William didn’t know how. Atlas’s hand was on his arm, as if he had guided them, but it also felt like the chant was raising them.

He stared at the face that was the same, but changing. More was happening below that face, that mouth, those eyes. The heavy green polo was filling with… more. More hard muscle, more thick chest hair, more hair swallowing the tattoos on his swelling, steel-hard arms. More Atlas, more everything. 

William’s skin itched unbearably. He shook his head, distracted from whatever was happening to Atlas. “I—no—” he stammered. His mind was like soap in a bathtub. “I—” he tried.

Nothing was right, nothing was real. Or everything. He couldn’t grasp it. The chanting filled him. 

From the screen there was no longer screaming, only growls and roars. That seemed strange, and terrifying. It was wrong, somehow. The camera had dropped, and Richie was crouched across the room, his howling, enraged transformation distant and blurred. In the foreground a dark-skinned arm was in crystal-clear focus, strips of torn sleeve flapping as a forearm swelled and grow out of control, every bundle and cord of the flexor muscles there thickening second by second even as the blue-black flesh flourished with dark, heavy hair. The hand tightened, expanding in length until it became inhuman, the fingers transforming into claws that could rip through anything. They yanked toward the camera, leaving fresh gouges in the already scarred hardwood floor as the two men’s agonized, full-throated howls tore into the all-consuming chant.

William shivered. They were doing it wrong. They were creating their own pain, their own screaming, mindless chaos. He knew that—somehow. How did he know that?

“At… las…” His body was straining, yearning to do something. He was trying to remember, but his consciousness was disconnected, like he was someplace in his mind other than where it was. And then he felt it in him. Animus. Animal power. Primal force. A him that was not him, a him that demanded to come into being. He couldn’t let it. Could he? Lose himself, free himself, undo his being—it was—it was too much—

“You wanted to see this.” Atlas’s deeper, rougher voice was soothing but forceful, pressing through William’s fear-thrown defenses. Patient but urgent. Time mattered. Atlas’s eyes held his, finding him, linking them, creating a connection between heart and soul. 

He was smiling, confident and certain. “You wanted to see this, William. You wanted this. You want this.” His mouth was pushing out, reminding him of the masks they’d seen before, but his words remained clear. Atlas’s animal was coming, was taking him over, but the eyes—the eyes and voice and earthy scent were him. Always him.

The green shirt was dangerously taut across newly heavy, fur-covered pecs. The sleeves were already ripping, pushed apart by stone-hard upper arms. Atlas watched William take it in, and William knew Atlas felt their surging arousal gathering in them both like a tropical storm. The chanting blurred, merging with the blood roaring in William’s ears.

“Yes,” Atlas said. “This. You want this.” His neck and throat had become thicker and more muscular, William noticed, his Adam’s apple bobbing and swelling as the man’s voice deepened almost before his very eyes. William could barely look away.

“I… want,” William panted, conscious of all he was admitting to with those two words. Want for Atlas, want for Atlas’s transformation. Want for his own becoming, if he could shed his self-consciousness and the last vestiges of his fear.

Atlas grabbed William’s hands and placed them on the straining V of his shirt. He gripped onto the fabric automatically and understood, staring. The dark hair on Atlas’s chest curled and grew against the skin of his fingers, visibly escaping from the V-shaped opening and past his already-hidden collarbone. William had never seen anything sexier, or more inspiring of his own bone-deep fantasy. He looked up into Atlas’s increasingly lupine face and grinned. 

“Do it,” Atlas growled, his voice still smooth and embracing as it deepened with potency and craving. 

William felt a burning strength he did not know he had well up in him, fueled by that primal animus flowering suddenly inside him, that red-hot chaotic fire that had sparked in his very core. With a grunt of pleasure he yanked Atlas’s shirt apart, easily exposing the magnified strength and feral presence of chest, shoulders, lats, and abs the shirt could no longer contain. The thick furred pecs swelled further on cue as if released, becoming hard and heavy right in William’s face. William let go of the torn fabric and slid his hands over the densely-haired muscle, his heated need like a fever that could not be measured.

Their eyes met, the two of them breathing low and hard. They pulled the remaining tatters of Atlas’s shirt off his bulging, hair-covered shoulders, and William drank him in with eyes and scent and the feel of Atlas’s own primal heat. Half-transformed, Atlas stood before him. William seemed to see everything about the other man, in phases and all at once. Everything was stronger and sexier. Everything stood out to him. His shoulder muscles, delts and traps, were rounder, harder, and deeply impressive and imposing. His brow had emerged, making him look more primal and primitive, though still primordially handsome. His dense sideburns were longer and thicker, merged with his heavier beard. William’s face itched looking at them, follicles of hair spreading under his skin, waiting like a seed-pod for the moment bursting. 

Atlas was taller, wider, heavier. Bigger, denser, hairier, a man of fur, and iron, and blazing heat. To William he was mesmerizingly inhuman—or, maybe, he thought, more human than he had ever been as a mundane man. This was Atlas freed from limitations, vivid and unbound.

It was just them, alone and isolated in the little room. With the screen dark and the lights down there was almost no light, but William could see. He grinned. The soundtrack was dead, too, though the eldritch multilayered chant seemed to linger self-willed in his mind, alive and twisting through his thoughts and senses. 

“You want this,” Atlas said to him, his huge chest heaving. 

“Yes.” William felt his muscles quiver, shifting portentously under his useless-seeming clothes.

“You want this,” Atlas repeated.

“Yes.” He was answering faster, their voices almost overlapping, as though they were creating their own chant.

“You—want—this!”

“Yes!” William shouted as he glared into those almost luminous blue-green eyes, his throat raw as if he had been screaming it. His body was in agony, dammed and begging. 

“Do it,” Atlas said again. “Do it now!”

William grabbed Atlas by the massive neck and pulled that beautiful, half-muzzled, ultra-masculine face into a ferocious kiss, his first ever. Any observer might have worried that William had missed the point of Atlas’s command, but he had not. He slid his tongue around Atlas’s longer, flatter one and unaccustomed pleasure flooded through him, their mouths transforming even in their passion, and as he did so William found his center and took control. 

His fear dissipated like mist in a hot desert, replaced with excitement and endless need. Now he could choose, only there was no choice to make. He let go, utterly and completely, finally freeing himself to become his beast. 

In a string of seconds, or tiny eternities, his body swelled and furred faster than Atlas’s steady growth. He burgeoned rapidly with muscle and potency, straining cotton and denim until it could not hold. The once-loose sky-blue pocket tee became full, then skintight, clinging to hairy shoulders and furry abs he had never possessed. For long moments the too-small shirt strained to the breaking point along every axis and measure, desperately clinging to the idea it might possibly contain him as he grew. Then it began gradually ripping along every seam, the pace and scream of tearing fabric increasing as his body swelled. His very bones were lengthening, the tiniest of muscles swelling and expanding, his sinews and joints reshaping with pulls and pops as he became the kind of creature others had feared becoming. He thrashed his arms wide, almost unable to bear the countless intense sensations slamming through him all at once; but Atlas was there, and he gripped the other man’s shoulder, steadying himself as best he could for more and more in every way, a thousand dimension of more.

His pants were next. He grunted as the button of his waistband snapped free, the teeth of his zipper wrenching apart. The seams of his pantlegs tore slowly open, loudly protesting his growth. Shoes burst open from feet grown and reshaped. In utter exhilaration he let the fabric rip and tear as long as he could bear it, then kicked the ripped sneakers away and used his clawed hands to yank the rags of his old clothes off of him and away into the dark. 

Could he do the same for himself, inwardly? Rid himself of all every restraint? He found Atlas’s eyes again, his beautiful animal form, and knew. He stood panting and naked before Atlas and unclenched the last knot in his chest, letting the change flood through him like lava, surrendering to whatever it made him and whatever it caused him to feel.

William’s consciousness flitted through him as he changed. Like the cameraman in the movie he saw his forearms, building and compounding with muscle, the power building within mirrored by the spread of thick, brown fur. Fingers became claws, and William stared at them in aroused wonder even as he felt his shoulders expand and his back stretch, the same heavy muscle and deep, rich fur spreading over him everywhere. He felt every bristle and follicle like a million pinpricks, power pouring out of him through an endless myriad of cells and hairs. He felt every muscle as it grew and hardened, becoming stronger and denser from his hairy, taloned, shoe-shredding toes, up through his calves and thighs and ass and lats and abs and amazing hard pecs and arms and shoulders covered in muscle, fur, and hair cascading from above. He groaned as his skull reshaped, brows thickening and ears shifting upward. A lupine muzzle pushed out, his nostrils flaring with a new capacity for scent, his mouth feasting on the sensations of lengthening tongue and emerging teeth and fangs. 

He felt intoxicated with the hot, lava-thick ecstasy of transformation. Every part of him wanted to roar and howl, not with the confused agony of the men in the film but in the empowering revelry of complete acceptance: knowing himself to be man and wolf, a thrilling synthesis than combined and surpassed them both. A furry tail he had not known he had seemed to spring free behind him, matching the one Atlas had grown, and William beat it back and forth, causing another rush of pleasure. It felt alien to have a tail, and yet, in this body, there was nothing more natural. Like his fangs and muscles and fur it felt utterly right and utterly real.

Atlas had completed his smooth and practiced transformation and was inches away this whole time, nuzzling and rubbing and stroking his increasingly feral form as William’s first-time wolf erupted more jaggedly from him. Bursting free from his initial inhibiting fears and resistance, he’d ended up blowing up all at once after being held back, ending up a few notches stronger and larger, he thought, than he might otherwise have been. Their clothing was all gone, torn apart and discarded. No barriers remained for either of them. In the space of a handful of thudding heartbeats they had become more, and the excitement of the change filled William with the drunk thrill of impossible strength and a core of unknowable power. 

Atlas was massive. His back and shoulders had expanded so impressively he was almost hunched over, a wide and looming horizontal and vertical expanse in the little space. To his ecstatic delight, William felt just as big and broad and full of power. They crashed their chests and bodies together, two creatures of fur and steel. As his becoming ebbed and stabilized, William’s riot of sensations steadied. He kissed and licked and held the strong, furry were-man who had chosen to transform with him tightly against him. The two of them enjoyed each other’s brawn and scent. There was also the binding hot euphoria of a shared metamorphosis that William felt between them, occupying them both—an aspect of the change William, at least, had not expected. 

He let his awareness descend fully, and he and his fellow werebeast dipped low into the sensate, instinctive world of his raw animus—the human William not so much left behind as melded into the wolf he now was, wound through his beastly need. They found the night and raced together through wood and valley, laughing and howling under the searing, liberating power of the round and perfect October moon.

William woke up slowly, his mind drifting in a pleasant haze. He knew he wasn’t in his bed back in the dorm. He wasn’t back home, either. Where was he? 

The light as he opened his eyes was faint and reddish, like night just giving way to dawn. The air was cool, almost cold, but he didn’t seem to feel the chill. Countess leaves waved overhead against an inky sky still speckled with stars. He was curled up under a tree, many more all around. There were smells all around him, too, stronger than what he could hear or see. He could smell those leaves overhead, even recognize the scent of leaf and bark as distinctive, different from some of the other trees nearby. With more experience he could probably tell the kind of tree just from the scent. 

He felt strong, still. Unfamiliar furry pecs bunched in front of him. He felt his left bicep with his other hand, flexing the unaccustomed meat into his palm, and a light shiver of lingering power surged through him. He felt different inside, as well. Some switches in his soul had been flipped, and the William he had been was not who he was now. 

There were other smells on the cool morning breeze, too. Animals, stirring for the morning or slinking home after a night’s hunt. Further away, people, and the aromas of barbecued meat and coffee and other scents he recognized from the fair. And close at hand—very close—was a scent he now knew very well: a plain, warm masculine redolence that spoke of rare loamy earth. 

William looked over his shoulder and smiled, his pulse rate picking up speed. Spooning up against him was a very handsome wolf-beast half-transformed back to his mundane human form. William turned against Atlas so that he was on his back, and the other man was sidled up close against him. Teal-green eyes looked up at him from a still mostly-furry face, his fuzzy-brown pointy ears twitching. Hairy arms once again revealed winding tattoos, as though the human in him were surfacing from within.

William’s smile widened. “A day ago,” he said fondly, stroking the furry shoulder blades protruding from a very wide back, “if anyone had told me I would be waking up this morning naked in the deep woods under a big beautiful maple tree, cuddling a sexy man I’d just met as we both languidly unshifted from a night racing through the woods as hulking bipedal werewolves, I would have told them they were drunk.”

“Would you?” Atlas said with a smile, nuzzling closer. There was nothing better about being a werecreature, William decided, than canoodling with another hot-blooded wolf under the sky on a cold, crisp morning. 

Atlas held his gaze. “Any regrets?” he asked after a beat.

William shook his head, feeling his hair brushing on the slowly receding fur of his nape and shoulders. It would be funny, he thought, if everything else finished returning to normal (or maybe almost-normal?), but he still had to go get a haircut to keep from looking like a modern-day Samson when he went back to the dorms. “Did the chant really do that to me?” he asked. “Better than a bite to the neck, I guess.”

Atlas nodded. “Just for the night, though,” he added, watching William carefully. “The spell embedded in the chant works for the space of a single full moon,” he explained, “and this one’s already started its wane.” 

“Oh.” William felt both disappointed and relieved his transformation wasn’t permanent. Mostly disappointed, he decided. Certainly his understanding of the world and what was real had changed forever. He cuddled the still-furry Atlas closer. “Is it like that for everyone? Or—”

“There are true werewolves,” Atlas assured him. 

“Yeah?”

Atlas smiled, showing his not-yet-receded fangs. “I’m not one,” he said, “but I know a few.”

“You’ve done it before, though,” William pressed. “Watched the film, I mean.”

Atlas pushed himself up onto William’s body, straddling him. William definitely no longer felt the cold, his blood having turned to liquid fire and all. “Many times,” Atlas rasped as he loomed over William, wide-backed and strong, his voice low and mesmerizingly deep. Behind him, his still-bushy tail swished low, brushing along William’s hairy legs.

William felt his own wolf-ears twitch. He swallowed, thinking of how he’d watched Atlas’s throat as he’d changed. “Yeah?” he said again. “Ever watch any… other movies your boss has tucked away?”

Atlas’s stare intensified. William’s breath caught as fresh arousal stole through him. Atlas moved closer, filling William’s nostrils with his scent. “I like being a werewolf,” he growled.

William couldn’t look away. “Me, too,” he heard himself whisper. “I—”

The rest of what he had been about to say was swallowed as Atlas moved in for a long, passionate kiss. It was a kiss that didn’t end until long after the sun had yellowed and risen to shine on the two naked, contented, fully-reverted human men alone in the woods under a sprawling maple tree—a spot to which they would return more than once in the months to come.

Jorge and Dwayne were grabbing a late lunch at the dorm cafeteria when William slid into the seat across from them, setting down a tray piled high with fresh steak fries, steamed broccoli, a couple of cold waters, and two of the caff’s signature hot roast beef sandwiches. “Hey guys!” he said as the two wrestlers stared at him. “Man, am I starved. Did I miss anything interesting?”

Dwayne was literally gaping at him. “Uh, well, William,” Jorge said meaningfully as William dug into his first sandwich, “as it happens you missed the part about the film nerd staying out all night and not coming home.”

“Yeah?” William swallowed thoughtfully, then gave them a cheeky wink. “Actually, guys, I don’t think I missed that one.”

Dwayne was looking at William like they’d never met. “Damn, bro,” he said softly, sounding impressed.

Jorge slapped Dwayne’s chest with the back of his hand. “See? I told you, all Dub here needed was to step away from his musty old vids and get out into the world.”

William swallowed another bit and twisted open one of his waters. “Oh, I’m more committed to film studies than ever,” he said. He took a long swig of the refreshingly cold liquid. “But getting out into the world is definitely my new thing.”

“Uh huh,” Dwayne said, his grin wide. “Or do you mean ‘getting in’?” 

William and Jorge looked at him. “What?” he said, looking between them. “You know…” He shoved his fist into his other palm suggestively. “…in!” 

“What my humor-impaired friend wants to know,” Jorge said, turning away from Dwayne to size up his roomie, “is whether your being out all night has a… sexy explanation.”

For all his new confidence, William still felt his cheeks warm at his friends’ teasing. “I may have met someone,” he admitted airily. 

“Nice,” Dwayne nodded, predictably jumping at the chance to press one of his bros to spill all their sex-related secrets. “Is he another cute movie nerd like you?” 

William flicked an eyebrow at him—he wasn’t used to being called ‘cute’ by the likes of big bruiser boy Dwayne, though in point of fact he did feel cute today. In fact, he felt sexy as fuck. He let it go. “In a way,” William told them. “We’re planning a film project together. A little werewolf mockumentary.”

“Yeah?” Jorge said with a wide smile, genuinely happy for his friend. “Sounds great. I can’t wait to see it.”

William just grinned at his friend as he took another gulp of his water. Jorge being Jorge was reassuring. William’s core being had been twisted and reformed, and the world around him was in some ways an intriguingly stranger and more uncertain place; but a few parts of his old life had ported over into this new existence, and that was good, too.

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