Psychiatric Shady

“Excuse me?” The psychiatrist blinked. “Ashton, I really think…”

Shady’s dark skull-face slid into frame from below, rising beside my head like a submarine surfacing from the depths. Silver eyes, dilated to full moons, locked onto the camera.

On Elena’s end, and also on the small screen in the corner of the tablet showing my face a massive black dog’s head appearing beside mine. Pointed ears. Reflective eyes catching the morning light.

“Ah!” Elena startled slightly. “You have a dog?”

“Say hi, Xandy.” I grinned wide.

Shady opened her mouth, revealing way too many teeth. On screen, a very large dog was panting.

“Hi, Doc,” Shady said in a voice dripping with pure, murderous menace. “I’m THE hallucination.”

Elena frowned at the screen.

“Ashton, is there something wrong with your phone? I thought I heard another voice there.”

“Did you really?” I asked innocently. “Maybe you need to eat plenty of pills to feel better?”

For a split second, the massive black dog on the screen glitched. Then its snout elongated. The ears shifted position. Branching, sharp jagged bits seemed to protrude from the skull before snapping back to normal canine proportions.

“Ashton… Your dog looks…”

“Adorable? Majestic?” I suggested.

“…wrong.”

Shady grinned wider. The glamour rippled again, and for one beautiful, horrible moment, the screen showed a smoosh of a Black Shuck and a pure nightmare. Antler-shapes flickering in and out of visibility like bad reception on a haunted television set.

“Hiiiii Doc,” Shady sounded like Bugs Bunny for a moment, then deepened her voice so it came through as a low, resonant growl that no earthly canine could produce. “I’ve been watching your sessions with Ashy. Through the walls. Through the screen. Through the little gap under your office door.”

Elena stared, eyes wide.

“He’s not crazy, by the way,” Shady continued, the growl modulating into an eerie fuzz close to speech. The glamour pulsed, fought, gave up in patches. “I’m real.”

“Ashton,” Elena let out with barely concealed panic, “is this… some kind of a prank?”

“Nope.” I smiled.

The dog on Elena’s screen sprouted jet-black antlers, branching like dead trees. The snout stretched ten inches too long. The eyes ignited brilliant silver.

Elena’s chair rolled backward. Her back hit the bookcase and a framed diploma wobbled, tilting precariously.

“What the?!”

“Doctorrrr Marrrrsgrrrove,” Shady sharply enunciated each syllable, the glamour now stripped down to a thin, failing, fuzzy-static membrane. “My name is Commander Xandria. I am Ashy’s childhood bestie. The girl he talked to you about.”

Elena grabbed the edge of her desk. Her face became the color of a porcelain doll.

“This is… a d-deepfake,” she said, teeth chattering slightly. “AI generated. Mr. Clifford… this is extremely inappropriate! Y-you’re…”

Shady’s antlers grew another six inches on camera.

“Beep boop, I am an AI,” Shady monotoned. “Generating fake antlers. Very realistic. Much deep. Many fakes. Bork bork bork.”

I struggled to keep from laughing.

“You… you…” Elena stammered, looking between my face and the nightmarish beast at my side. “C-cant’…”

“Can’t what? Exist?” Shady tilted her head about forty-five degrees. Then kept tilting it. Past forty-five. Past sixty. Past ninety. Her neck rotated her skull to an angle no mammalian cervical spine should permit.

“A decade of antipsychotics, Doc,” Shady said, silver eyes unblinking from the depths of her dark, unnerving skull, feathers wobbling like a crown of death. “Ten years of ‘the hallucinations are persisting’ nonsense. A decade of you medicating my best friend with useless, human drugs. You wanna know what all of that accomplished?”

Elena’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly like a fish gulping for air.

“Made his food taste bad and made him miserable, confused, friendless and lonely. Great job. Really nailed the treatment plan there,” she huffed sarcastically.

“This… is a prank,” Elena whispered, grasping for rationality with both hands like a person drowning at sea. “AI v-video manipulation advanced significantly this year and…”

“Doc.” Shady snapped her head back to a normal angle with an audible crack. “Have you looked at the sky or even outside recently? Seen the big alien ships? The crystalline centipede tanks in the news? One of our Commanders executing your human President on live television?”

Elena’s face went slack.

“I’m one of them,” Shady stated, the vestiges of humor draining from her voice, sounding exactly like Admiral Evelithria from the moon-drop threat worldwide broadcast. “I’m a Wendigo Omnid Commander from the Third Celestial Starfall Fleet.”

The psychiatrist choked.

“Say, Doc… Did you perchance see some of my colleagues from the Fleet around town? Tall girls just like me, antlers, skull faces, the ‘destroyer of civilizations’ vibes? Because I’d LOVE to introduce them to your practice. I think Commander Sillicia would benefit greatly from cognitive behavioral therapy. She deffo’ has attachment and daddy issues. And a tendency to snack on lower races she disagrees with.”

Elena’s eyes flashed left and right, expression horrified.

“Go ahead, call for help,” Shady encouraged giddily. “When they arrive, tell them the dog did it.”

“Is…” Elena’s eyes darted between me and the skull-face Wendigo. “Is she really…”

“Real? Yeah, Doc. She’s real. You medicated me for a decade because you couldn’t conceive of the alternative, couldn’t possibly imagine that space Wendigos with magic powers exist out there in the greater cosmos. Isn’t this neat? Turns out, I’ve never had hallucinations. I was simply friends with one of the aliens, that’s all. Now my best friend is back and she’s annoyed that you didn’t believe me.”

Elena’s entire body trembled.

“I am going to eat you,” Shady announced with the casual warmth of a teenage girl commenting on the weather.

“SHE’S GOING TO WHAT?” Elena squeaked.

“Kidding!” Shady barked, laughing like a serial killer, teeth flashing like white-blue blades. “Depends. Maybe… I will simply come by and sit in your waiting room and… make all of your patients very, VERY uncomfortable.”

Elena’s professionalism staged a valiant last stand. She straightened in her chair, pushed her glasses up, and cleared her throat. “Mr. Clifford… Regardless of… whatever THIS is… I want you to know that my treatment decisions were based on…”

“Available evidence, prevailing diagnostic criteria, and sincere concern for my wellbeing,” I finished for her. “I know, Doc. I’m not mad at you. You did what you thought was right.”

Elena sagged slightly.

“I’m a LITTLE mad at you,” Shady corrected, leaning even closer to the camera until her skull-face filled the entire screen. “But since Ashy is being magnanimous, I’ll limit my revenge to occasional haunting. Expect eerie noises from your attic on Tuesdays.”

“My building doesn’t have an attic,” Elena stated weakly.

“It has a ceiling. I’ll haunt your ceiling then. Or maybe the walls.” Shady winked. On camera, a dog with the face of a Wendigo winking looked less cute and more like a jump scare from a horror movie.

Elena removed her fogged-up glasses, cleaned them on her cardigan with shaking hands, replaced them, and stared at the screen with the hollow gaze of a woman whose entire diagnostic framework had just been forcibly, thoroughly deconstructed by a talking cryptid.

“Mr. Clifford…”

“Yeah, Doc?”

“I think… I need to prescribe myself something.”

Shady threw her head back and cackled. “Doc, I recommend Risperdal! Ten out of ten, would prescribe to my worst enemy!”

“Sounds healthy,” I said. “Also, my name isn’t Ashton, it’s Ashcroft. Do try to get it right next time you speak to my parents or whatever.” I hammered in the final nail into the conversation. It felt good.

“I… I’m sorry,” the psychiatrist mewled. “I…”

“Take care, Doc.” I hung up.

The screen went dark.

Shady and I stared at each other for exactly one second.

Then we both erupted.

The laughter hit me like a dam breaking. I doubled over in the chair, wheezing, tears streaming down my face. Shady collapsed onto the sand beside me, rolling onto her back, limbs flailing, tail thrashing, antlers gouging furrows in the beach as she howled with laughter so hard her entire body shook.

“HER FACE!” Shady shrieked, kicking sand everywhere. “When I rotated my head! DID YOU SEE HER FACE?!”

“She grabbed the desk like it was a life raft!” I gasped. “Started calling me Mister!” Ha!”

“I AM GOING TO EAT YOU!” Shady mimicked herself and perfectly emulated the noises the psychiatrist was making, then collapsed into another fit of giggles. “‘SHE’S GOING TO WHAT?!’ GOLD! SOLID GOLD!”

“The Risperdal recommendation! You recommended she take the same meds she…”

“I KNOW! FULL CIRCLE! NARRATIVE COMPLETION!” Shady kicked her legs in the air, flashing dark paw pads. “Oh my Slayer!”

We laid there on the beach, laughing so hard and so long that Claire peeked out twice to check if everything was alright. Each time we’d settle down, one of us would mutter “bork bork bork” or “expect strange noises from your walls” and the whole cycle would restart.

By the time we finally calmed down, my abs hurt more than any gym session had ever accomplished.

“Best date activity ever,” Shady declared, still flat on her back, tail doing lazy victory laps in the sand.

“We totally broke my psychiatrist.”

“Yass!” Shady offered me her hand in a high-five gesture. “Together. As a team. Like Pippi and Peter! Just like we used to mess with dum’ kids in Cascade!”

I grinned at the Wendigo sprawled across the sand like a beached kraken, silver tears of laughter twinkling on star-freckled cheeks, and felt deep warmth ignite in a deep hollow in my heart, a new kind of fantastically wholesome feeling settling in my chest.

“Yeah,” I said, returning the high-five. “Like Pippi and Peter. Now we absolutely MUST find a way to Neverland, Shades.”

“Neverland…” My Wendigo best friend let out ponderously. “I can’t remember much of it. What was it like?”

“Like Darkfall, but warmer,” I mused. “Eternal autumn. Timeless too. I don’t think that we’ve aged a day inside it.”

Shady let out an amused noise.

“We spent what felt like weeks in there and came back to the mansion and Grandpa said that we’d been gone for an hour or two.”

“Weeks?” Shady’s ears wiggled.

“Maybe months,” I mused, recalling what I long presumed was just nonsensical dreams. “Time was a soup in Neverland. All the clocks we brought inside it stood still, it didn’t matter whether the clock was digital or analog. The violet, extra-starry sky on one side, a perpetual golden hour on the other. Autumn leaves forever. Oh! And… the sun never set. Because it… was alive.”

“What.” Shady stared at me.

“Alive,” I repeated. “It was… like this great, cosmic child. I think? Or maybe an adult with a really blank, round face. A radiant, blinding, featureless, child-like face wearing a golden mantle, looming behind the cloud ocean, wrapped in clouds. A million gold arms entwined in prayer.”

“Are you fucking with me?” Shady asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m describing Neverland as I remember it. The whole place was… Somewhat like Earth… Forests, mountains, islands. Everything recognizable enough at a glance, yet fucked up in sooooo many ways.”

“Like… how?”

“Smaller, I think. Like someone took a globe and compressed to a bunch of floating islands, each featuring incredibly specific biomes.”

“Biomes?”

“With weird stuff like giant moths and butterflies the size of a house and… talking caterpillars.”

Shady’s expression stated ‘what the fuck’.

“I could fly from the pirate cove to the mountain stronghold of our island in like thirty minutes. The horizon curved visibly. Like… a waaaay smaller planet.”

“Less mass, less gravity,” Shady murmured, squinting at me. “Makes sense for the flying, I suppose.”

“The flying!” I laughed. “God, the flying. I could ACTUALLY fly in there. Eat some stardust fruit sold by the talking caterpillars, then running start, think happy thoughts… feet leaving the ground. Peter Pan rules! I flew so much my arms got tired from steering.”

“You steered with your arms?”

“Arms out, lean left to go left, lean right to go right, tuck and dive, spread and climb. Aerodynamics of a nine-year-old who’d watched too many superhero cartoons.”

“And… I couldn’t fly?” Shady huffed.

“That’s right! You couldn’t fly for some reason!” I grinned. “And you were SO mad about it. The mighty Wendigo Princess, conqueror of many dimensions, earthbound while the scrawny human kid was doing loop-de-loops above the tree canopy.”

“I could jump really high at least, right?”

“Yeah! You could jump wickedly high. You’d launch yourself off cliff faces and grab onto clouds.” I laughed. “Oh! Yes we collected clouds too.”

“Really? How?!”

“Some clouds were solid. In Neverland, at least, this was the case! Clouds behaved like fluffy, bouncy, slightly damp trampolines. Jump on one hard enough and make it rain. We built a cloud fort once. Furniture and everything.”

“A cloud fort.” Shady’s tail swished faster. “Okay, that rings a bell. Kind of. Maybe. Did it have a drawbridge?”

“Made of rainbow!”

“A rainbow drawbridge on a cloud fort. We were the most extra children in any dimension. How did the rainbow bridge happen exactly?”

“I think that a fancy-ass glass prism we stole made it happen. Rainbow bridge,” I said thoughtfully.

“Stole it from whom?” Shady demanded.