My buddy is a dentist. He said some concerning things.

We met on Craigslist of all places. It might seem like a strange way to meet a new friend, but my band was looking for a singer, and that’s where he found us. His audition was a surreal experience. He can’t sing for shit. But it turns out we’re into a lot of the same kinds of books, so he didn’t join the band but we hit it off in a different way.

He lives in a fancy gated community on the edge of town. These days I go there once a week for a sort of two person book club. We’re working through Bakker’s Aspect Emperor series right now, but that’s irrelevant. Other than the fact that I sometimes think he likes it for the wrong reasons, and maybe that was an early warning.

We almost never discuss our day jobs. Or night job, in my case. I’m a “guard”. But he’s a dentist, and he loves it. It’s not that weird to love your job, right? I’m sure lots of dentists love their jobs.

But the other week I got to his house, and he opened the door all smiling and said, “Got to pull some teeth today! A college girl needed four teeth pulled!”

“Okay…” I said.

“She hated it! Even with all the laughing gas, she was squirming as all those teeth came out! And she said she was going to have nightmares!”

“What?”

“Nevermind. How was your week?”

The rest of that meet up went as usual. No more talk of pulling teeth. No more talk of that poor girl. After we discussed that week’s chapters we played pool. He has a pool table in his basement, and he’s almost unbelievably good at it.

A week ago I showed up for another regular hang out. My friend opened his massive front door like normal, and greeted me like normal. “What’s up? Anything interesting this week?” Etc.

I told him about a weird gig the band had. He’s never had a problem with me talking about the band, even though he didn’t make the cut.

As he puts it, “Auditioning was just some strange whim. My real passion is dentistry.”

And that day, oh God did he talk about dentistry. I had asked him in return, “Anything interesting in your week?”

To which he laughed. “An old wrinkly grandpa. Needed six teeth pulled! And he was not happy about it.”

“Huh.”

My friend laughed harder. “But I was!”

You have to understand, in every way other than this weird teeth business, he is a good friend. Someone important to me died recently, and to be honest I don’t know if I’d still be here if it weren’t for his friendship. So, he tried to keep going about this old grandpa whose teeth he pulled, apparently with “no laughing gas or nothing”, and I just did my best to steer him toward the books.

The last he said on the old grandpa was: “I think he went to Hell and back! He was talking about demons and shit, man. Demons and shit.”

“Right… Uh, speaking of going to Hell and back…”

It was finally warm enough to swim in his pool that day. He has a damn waterslide. Imagine.

I’ll get to the point.

My visit yesterday was unprecedented.

At first it seemed like any other day. He seemed, at first, uninterested in monologuing about teeth. I told him about a date I went on. He acted genuinely interested, and gave me some legitimate good advice. We discussed a horrid chapter in the book and spent half the discussion laughing maniacally at jokes that would take too long to explain. Eventually he got out his chess board, and I saw that closet had so many games in it. We got through five tense games of chess with no issue.

But halfway through the sixth game, he interrupted something I was saying, to say: “A middle aged fat guy needed all his teeth pulled.”

“Excuse me?”

“All of them. I took out all of his teeth.”

I tried to let that slide. The sixth chess game kept going, almost like nothing happened.

My friend muttered something about a fairy, and the Devil.

And it was frustrating how easily he beat me. He threw me off-balance with all that teeth business. But he didn’t gloat. He is never a sore winner. He simply said, “I will be back,” which is what he always says when the bathroom’s about to smell, and I’ll have to wait a bit.

However. While I waited I couldn’t sit still. When he had opened his board game closet to get the chessboard, I saw he had a lot of different games. I was curious, is all.

I opened the same closet.

I thought it was the same one.

You know those butterfly things that some people have on their walls? The hanging frames with all the dead butterflies inside them?

This closet had dozens of the things. And each contained, instead of butterflies, dozens of human teeth. Was this where he keeps them? It was hundreds of teeth in total. I vomited in my mouth.

Then I heard the toilet flush, so I closed that horrible closet, everything as I left it, and went back to sit at the chess board.

My friend came back into the room, and said, “Oh. I forgot to mention. A date’s coming to pick me up tonight, so I’ll need you to leave a little early.”

“Oh, really? Nice, alright. When?” I was having trouble acting normal.

He frowned. “You know what? Now. Now is good.”

He walked me out.

“Uh, bye!” I said. “See you next week! How many chapters?”

“Yeah bye,” he said. Almost uninterested.

The door closed and I was outside in the dark, alone.

Does he know I saw it?

What did I see?

Who is he?

God, I can’t sleep.