The Ghoul
by Daniel Bayn

"If you're not human, what are you?" I shouldn't have asked during our first session. He didn't know and it drove him mad. Instead, I would ask, "Why don't you feel human?"

"I feel like there's something inside me and I'm the mask it wears. I'm the sheep's clothing." He loved that allusion. "Sometimes, the real me comes out and does... things. I want to stop it, but I can't because I'm not real. It's real... and it hungers."

"Humans are cannibals, too," I often reminded him, but his dissociative personality disorder ran deep. He claimed to not show up on film, so I taped a session and we watched it. He said that was just a picture of the mask. The real him wouldn't show up. Convenient.

Possession has a long history. Most claim something takes control from outside, but some say the Other was always there, waiting. There are online communities full of people who think they're not human, but they don't eat people.

One day, they found him gnawing on another inmate's ribcage. It took a dozen guards and 24 bullets to bring him down. I asked for the tapes, but the cameras weren't working that day.

The Stranger
by Daniel Bayn

I met a stranger in a dream. I'd been researching the Otherkin, people who claim to be elves, dragons, goblins, anything but human. Online, they are legion.

After a patient died, it became my obsession. What made him hunger for human flesh? Why didn't cameras record him? He said he wasn't human. The Otherkin knew why.

Oliver was a werewolf. "Therianthrope," he corrected me. "We're not all wolves." He only shifted astrally, in dreams. I asked him which was real, him or the wolf. "I am the wolf."

Sheep's clothing.

He wanted to meet in our dreams. I said I couldn't; I was wrong. I stood in a forest of impossibly tall trees. A wolf approached, but Oliver stood before me. "What a rush," he said with a feral grin. He ran off on four legs.

Then I was a wolf, realized I had always been a wolf. Dream logic. We ran for hours, through woods and mountains, over glaciers. I killed an antelope, felt its blood drip off my fangs. It was a rush.

Deep inside me, something had awakened. Something ancient and alien, yet familiar as my heart beat.

I was the stranger I met in my dream.

Yet to come... The Dragon