Vicky

The ladies readied themselves by adjusting their veils and smoothing out their black skirts, then they went inside.

At the chime of the bell in the doorway, you didn't immediately lift your nose out of the red tome before you. It had taken weeks to procure it for your collection; meanwhile, business had grown so drastically lately that you hadn't the chance to lay your eyes on it until now. Any customer with concerns worth addressing would be willing to wait as long as it took for you to get around to them.

"Ex-excuse me, are you the proprietor of this shop? We… aren't quite sure if we're in the right place," said one of the women, her voice lovely and soft around the edges. She was still unmarried and unspoiled by the world.

"Bah! Agatha, I told you we shouldn't have come here. I know a fraud when I hear of one! A place that performs miracles? Cures for all ailments? How could you believe such malarkey?" complained the other woman. Despite how confidently she spoke, this one resembled glass on the verge of shattering, with edges that would cut anyone in its path.

The women stirred excitedly when you raised your eyes from the tome, but only your eyes. Every other part of your face and body resisted motion, as if you were locked into that position and your only freedom were the white globes in your head.

Agatha moved her veil aside and stepped towards the desk. Her face was as youthful as you'd imagined, stiff with determination and uncertainty. "Please—please help me. My sister has fallen terribly ill and has not been out of bed for weeks. She has three small children, and she is a seamstress. She cannot work. Her husband, I fear, might abandon them all if she is not made well soon. I fear she might die."

"Agatha!" the other hissed bitterly, threading her arms through one of her friend's. "Come now, let's find a real doctor. We're wasting our time here."

"The doctor is in," you said, fitting a ribbon bookmark between the pages of your tome before slamming it shut. "I'll call him for you. Give me just a moment."

"You're… not a doctor, then?" asked the rude woman, incredulously. "Then, why the hell have we been talking to you this entire time? Are you a receptionist? You should know better than to keep customers waiting! That is how you lose good business!"

"My good lady," you offered her a derisive smile that made the skin around your eyes fold. There just wasn't enough time in the day to deal with people like her. "I am simply the apothecary. I run this shop and can compound any medicine asked of me, but the doctor has to request it first."

"Well, then!" The woman exhaled sharply through her nostrils, perhaps insulted by your explanation, though you thought you'd done a fine job tempering your annoyance while giving a sufficient answer. "Where is he? We've heard he is unlike any other physician in town. He's why we're even here."

You swiveled away from the women towards the door directly behind you. Beyond it was a large greenhouse made of blue-green panes of glass, rows of plants and buoyant flowers every color imaginable arranged in pots on top of wooden tiers. Something was moving between the plants, a black mass hunkered low, gently nudging them as it went.

"Faust!" you called.

The figure continued, unhurried through the vast greenery.

"One moment, one moment," you told the women, pulling the door open to stick your head through. "Faust! You have a new patient!"

This time, the sound of your voice struck hard, and the black mass jolted upright from the green. It always amazed you that he could shrink his true stature down so far to squeeze between the wooden tiers, as he seldom fit through most doorways unless he'd been hired by those true aristocrats who lived in mansions with double-leaf doors. Those were his favorite house calls to take, as he didn't need to whittle his shape down to mold into cramped spaces.

"My apologies. I am coming!" said the doctor, voice shockingly velveteen and light for his size.

The women were still there when you turned around with the doctor in tow, their faces fallen in amazement at the sight of him. It was a reaction that you were used to seeing, though it never evoked one of your own. Part of the reason why your business performed so well was because of Faust, something you'd been bitter about for quite a while before recognizing it as a boon.

Faust bowed neatly at the waist to the two women, one gloved hand laid across his right breast. Even as he lowered himself, he still towered over them (and you), but always performed the gesture as a way to prove his geniality, because without it, no one would ever have the courage to speak to him.

"Good day, ladies. I apologize for keeping you waiting. I was in the back taking inventory of our medicinal herbs, you see. It must be done every day, I'm sure you understand," said Faust with a cheerful bleat at the end. A single green leaf hung conspicuously from the corner of his mouth.

The women were gaping up at the head of a black goat with red eyes. Four large horns protruded from his skull. A pair of them curled inward sharply next to his bearded muzzle, while the other two speared outward diagonally and tapered to blunted ends. His body belonged to that of a tall, broad-shouldered man dressed handsomely in a red satin waistcoat, creamy white cravat tied around his throat.

Faust's entire existence was an impossibility; storied stuff passed around from city to city as part of drunken rattling told on stale breaths in dark, damp bars with bloated wood floors. But he was real and rather phenomenal in every way, which had earned him popularity among the upper echelons of society, as aristocrats adored having something different to stare at.

"You-you are the doctor?" asked Agatha, fingers kneading deep into one another like she wasn't certain what else to do with her hands. "I've heard rumors that you can cure any illness, is that true?"

"Hm." Faust stroked his long beard carefully, letting silence hang in the room for some time. Then, he said, "Dear Lady, I won't do you the disservice of making false promises because there exist afflictions that even my expertise cannot undo. However, if it is of a normal and natural origin, I assure you that there is nothing that I cannot remedy."

"'Normal and natural', you say?" The other woman tested those words in her mouth, chewed on them a bit, then puckered her face as though something sour coated her tongue. "What does that even mean? Are there illnesses of abnormal and unnatural origins that we should be worried about here?"

"I don't care!" cried Agatha, who came forward to the counter again and clasped her pale, thin hands together beneath her chin. Her eyes were earnest and glowed red with tears. If any part of her feared Faust, her desperation and her love for her sister cast those fears aside. "Good doctor, I beg of you to please see my sister as your patient. I fear she has little time left. I cannot bear the thought of losing her. I will pay any price you name. I will find a way!"

"Oho!" Faust chortled, reaching into his breast pocket for a handkerchief to give the lamenting woman. She took it graciously. "My apologies, again. I should have been more direct. I will see your sister, yes, of course I will. It would not do for I, a doctor of my caliber and capacity, to turn down someone in need. Please, kindly leave your sister's address, and we will visit tomorrow."

"Yes! Thank you!" She wept as she dabbed her scarlet cheeks. "Thank you!"

Agatha wrote with a delicate wrist, her movements across paper quick like flittering wings. The handwriting was practiced and beautiful, and after reading it through, it was agreed that to reach the sister's abode would mean a carriage ride across the city. An hour of clopping hooves with the malodor of human and animal waste sitting in your nose, nauseating you, was not at all appealing.

"I trust you won't need me in attendance?"

You waited to speak until the ladies had gone out the door and the little bell overhead quieted. It fascinated you to watch people go, as their manner of doing so was never the same. Agatha pinched her skirts above her ankles with two hands to avoid them being weighed down by the damp road, whereas the angrier woman lifted hers with confidence in one hand, letting a sliver of fabric drag across the ground. Well-dressed men fussed over their polished shoes, and the odd socialite never wore her most expensive skirts for a day out in the city.

"Nonsense," said Faust, adjusting the fit of his waistcoat by tugging the bottom with both hands. "You are the apothecary and the face of this shop. You are also the other half of me. Besides, without you there, who knows how the family will respond to my presence? I'd truly rather not be chased away with a knife or a gun, again."

"Fine," you relented, noticing the green leaf still dangling from the corner of his mouth. When you tried to pluck it away, Faust lifted his muzzle into the air. You let him have it. "Let's make it an early trip, then. The less people who see you, the less we have to answer for."

"Agreed," bleated Faust.

By the creeping dawn of the next morning, you stood alongside Faust outside the patient's residence. It was a somber row house with a left-sided lean, clearly visible in the way the slate roof tiles had shifted and overlapped with the tiles on the roof next door. The exterior of the house was gray-brown and barren aside from two planter baskets hanging from wire hooks on either side of the doorway. Whatever had once grown inside them had died and shriveled into brittle brown threads draping over the sides of the baskets.

Faust tutted at the sight, while you knocked on the door weakly so as not to be noticed by the neighbors at this strange hour. It was a man with a ragged face who answered, eyelids heavy like curtains over his vision, voice coarse and deterring as he asked what you wanted. It wasn't you who gave a response.

"Good day, sir," greeted Faust in a clever, pleasant tone. Just as he had done for the two ladies, he bowed to the man, but only with a slight forward lean. "We are an apothecary and doctor hired to look after your wife. I believe time is of the essence; would you please allow us inside?"

Sleep fell away from the husband's eyes and went bright white, his entire visage aghast. This was a look that you'd seen before; so many times, in fact, that you knew deescalating would be imperative to any hope of leaving unscathed. The men were always violent; the women always threw fits, and children were often so gobsmacked that all their little minds could manage was to gawk.

"Sir!" you intervened cheerily, putting your body directly in the husband's line of sight. "Your sister-in-law, Agatha, came to us yesterday expressing her concerns. We are simply fulfilling her request! Nothing more, nothing less."

"You're fibbin' me!" cried the husband, but the mention of the young woman softened his eyes, melting his terror into contemplation, as if coming to some realization. Perhaps he knew that his time with his wife was running out and this was the last chance he would get. "It… it ain't a very big house. I dunno if you'd be able to fit down the hallways to see 'er."

"My good man, I've fit myself into tighter quarters plenty of times before. This will be no different to me. Please, show us the way!" Faust's urgency prompted the husband away from the door, giving him access to the foyer where he had to stoop low so his horns wouldn't tangle in a dangling light fixture.

The husband had closed the door and stormed ahead of you both, down a narrow hallway. "This way! She's right down the hall. We wanted to keep 'er downstairs so she was easier to take care of. She used to be able to get up and do things fer 'erself. Now, she can't even lift 'er head up."

The spacious room afforded to you by the foyer shrank considerably into a tight corridor that made you feel like you needed to shrink into something diminutive like a rodent. Faust was quiet in his suffering as he moved along determinedly: cramped, crouched, and bent in strange ways to fit through the hallway without crushing the ornamentation on the walls.

Once finally inside the room, there came no relief. The husband held the door ajar for you to come through into a dark room with the curtains drawn and nailed around the window frame. Only skinny slants of early morning light fit through the gaps, illuminating next to nothing inside. The floorboards were terribly old and moaned under Faust's weight as he walked, stirring a gentle rustling from nearby.

"She's… she's been like this for too long now. I jus' want her to get better, or…"

The husband let his words fade into the darkness, filling the space with a different sort of sound: labored breathing. It was a dry sound that rose and fell from the chest, the body's attempt to compensate for something it used to do on its own without conscious thought. Now, she had to work hard to stay alive. What a miserable way to be.

"Tell me more of her affliction," said Faust, having located the bed by following her breaths and nudging around the floor with his foot until he struck one of the legs. "Is it of a natural origin? Or do you suspect something odd has happened?"

In the time it took the husband to shake his confusion, you had lit candles for Faust and placed them on the bedside table. He picked up one melting inside a chamberstick to hold over the dying woman's face, examining her features closely. One of his ears was pointed outwards at the man, twitching and listening.

"I-I don't understand what you mean. She works late at the factory. She's a seamstress. One night, she never came home. Showed up three days later actin' out of sorts, been gettin' worse ever since," said the husband in that kind of frustrated way that men do when they can't answer something easily. "It's jus' been me n' the oldest takin' care of her. The little ones don' need to see 'er like this. Can you fix 'er, doc?"

Faust made a rumbling in his throat, a sign that he didn't think that this was simply an issue of the lungs or body. "Would you mind stepping outside so that we may perform a more intimate examination? Even in this state, I am sure she would still like to have her privacy?"

The husband grumbled but did not decline, doing as he was told. You watched the shadow of his feet from beneath the door move as he swayed impatiently, perhaps anticipating a prognosis. This was a man who had tired of being a caretaker and dreamed of his old life just being a working man with a family.

"Come here, hold this light up so that I can check something." Faust handed the candle off to you and guided your wrist to where he wanted it to stay before touching the woman's face. "Hollow features. Sunken, dark eyes. The eyes themselves? Black. Skin? Originally, her complexion would've been very dark, perhaps a gold undertone, but now she is gray and dull. She is emaciated, but I cannot imagine that she has not been fed. Something else is at play here. Are you writing this all down?"

Of course, you were. You carried your recording journal everywhere you went because of his inclination to veer off-task when he spied someone in need (read: a drunk in the alleyway that he scares half to death).

"Go on," you urged. "Wait. Have you noticed that she doesn't carry any particular smell? I thought that this room would smell foul when we walked in, but that's not the case. If she were being fed regularly and she cannot get up, wouldn't she be defecating in the bed?"

"Perhaps, she's not being fed at all? Or, she's rejecting food being given to her?"

You were still writing in the journal while holding the light to the woman's face. Both possibilities he suggested were not uncommon. The dying often no longer have an appetite, whereas some relatives mistakenly believe that they are expediting death in a suffering loved one by withholding food.

"I don't think you believe either of those things, Faust," you said.

"Quite right."

He touched the woman's face again. You scolded him with a hiss when he hooked a thumb into her mouth and pulled her jaws apart to gain a better view. There, at the sight of her elongated teeth, he let out a disgruntled snort, then pushed her lips aside so you could see them as well.

"A vampire?" You slapped the journal shut and tucked your pen away into your breast pocket. This complicated things far more than you were prepared for this morning. "Well, what do you want to do about it? Knowing there's one here… we can't just leave her here. It's our responsibility to dispose of her before she can slaughter this entire family."

Faust, ever the gentleman, treated the woman kindly by gently pushing her jaws shut and tucking her sheets up to her neck. "She's a fledgling, which means we have some time. There is no cure for vampirism, but perhaps we can put her symptoms into stasis temporarily. Either way, we're not equipped to dispatch a vampire. It should be left to the hunters."

"The hunters will not be as merciful as you, Faust," you said, and you were right. Where there was a fledgling, a master was lurking nearby in the shadows. The hunters would know this as well and use her agony to lure him out. The ends justifies the means, after all.

"I suppose to handle the issue of a vampire, we should speak to a vampire, then," said Faust with finality. There would be no changing his mind from this course. He now had a patient he intended to care for until the very end.