By the light of the moon

demanded if his
mouth hadn't been crammed full of unidentified laundry.
    'Impossible to say what it'll do, exactly.'
    Although the needle might have been of ordinary size, Dylan
realized that at least regarding the dimensions of the syringe
barrel, his imagination hadn't been playing tricks with him, after
all. It was enormous. Fearsomely huge. On that clear plastic tube,
the black scale markings indicated a capacity of 18 cc, a dosage
more likely to be prescribed by a zoo veterinarian whose patients
topped six hundred pounds.
    'The stuff's psychotropic.'
    That word was big – exotic, too – but Dylan
suspected that if he could think clearly, he would know what it
meant. His stretched jaws ached, however, and the soaked ball of
cloth in his mouth leaked a sour stream of saliva that threatened
to plunge him into fits of choking, and his lips burned under the
tape, and greater fear flooded through him as he watched the
mysterious fluid draining into his arm, and he was seriously annoyed by Shep's compulsive waving even though he remained aware
of it only from the corner of one eye. Under these circumstances,
clear thinking was not easily achieved. Ricocheting through his
mind, the word psychotropic remained as smooth and shiny and
impenetrable as a steel bearing caroming from peg to rail, to
bumper, to flipper in the flashing maze of a pinball machine.
    'It does something different to everyone.' A sharp but perverse
scientific curiosity prickled Doc's voice, as disturbing to Dylan
as finding shards of glass in honey. Although this man looked the
part of a caring country physician, he had the bedside manner of
Victor von Frankenstein. 'The effect is without exception
interesting, frequently astonishing, and sometimes positive.'
    Interesting, astonishing, sometimes positive: This didn't
sound like a life's work equal to that of Jonas Salk. Doc seemed to
belong more comfortably in the
mad-malevolent-megalomaniacal-Nazi-scientist tradition.
    The last cc of fluid disappeared from the barrel of the syringe
into the needle, into Dylan.
    He expected to feel a burning in the vein, a terrible chemical
heat that would spread rapidly throughout his circulatory system,
but the fire didn't come. Nor did a chill shiver through him. He
expected to experience vivid hallucinations, to be driven mad by a
crawling sensation that suggested spiders squirming across the
tender surface of his brain, to hear phantom voices echoing inside
his skull, to be afflicted by either convulsions or violent muscle
spasms, or by painful cramps, or by incontinence, to be overcome by
either nausea or giddiness, to grow hair on the palms of his hands,
to watch the room reel as his eyes spun like pinwheels, but the
injection had no noticeable effect – except perhaps to make
his fevered imagination register a few degrees higher on the
thermometer of the unlikely.
    Doc withdrew the needle.
    A single bead of blood appeared at the point of the
puncture.
    'One of two should pay the debt,' Doc muttered not to Dylan, but
to himself, an observation that seemed to make no sense. He moved
behind Dylan, out of sight.
    The crimson pearl quivered in the crook of Dylan's left arm, as
though pulsing in sympathy with the racing heart that had once
harried it to the farthest capillary and from which it was now and
forever estranged. He wished that he could reabsorb it, suck it
back through the needle wound, because he feared that in the coming
nasty struggle for survival, he would need every drop of healthy
blood that he could muster if he hoped to prevail against whatever
threat had been injected.
    'But debt payment isn't perfume,' Doc said, reappearing with a
Band-Aid from which he stripped the wrapper as he talked. 'It won't
mask the stink of treachery, will it? Will anything?'
    Although once more speaking directly to Dylan, the man seemed to
talk in riddles. His solemn words required somber delivery, yet his
tone remained light; the half-whimsical sleepwalker smile continued
to play across his features, waxing and waning and waxing again,
much as the glow of a candle might flux and flutter under the
influence of every subtle current in the air.
    'Remorse has gnawed at me so long that my heart's eaten away. I
feel empty.'
    Functioning remarkably well without a heart, the empty man
peeled the two protective papers off the Band-Aid tape and applied
the patch to the point of the injection.
    'I want to be repentant for what I did. There's no real peace
without repentance.