Dentistry wasn’t Dr. Glomb’s first career choice. As a boy he was feverously interested in dinosaurs. He knew all the names; Tyrannosaurs, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Plesiosaurus, even Archaeopteryx and Quetzoquoatalas with perfect pronunciation. On career day at his old elementary school he stood beside future firemen, police officers and presidents of the United States, held his head high, and shouted, “I want to be a paleontologist!” In fact it was his interest in dinosaur fossils that lead him to become a dentist. It started with bones, which lead to anatomy class, which inevitably lead to the molars and bicuspids of the human mouth.

Besides, as fate would have it, his caucasin skin burned easily. Dr. Glomb was not a man born to hike through trenches in the Sahara desert.

For fifteen years he’d worked on every kind of mouth from children’s overbites to the disfigured dental wasteland of a man who shattered his jaw against the dashboard of his car. Even with all his experience, he still found himself caught unawares when at 3:35 in the morning his phone started ringing off the hook.

Half-awake, eyes not yet open, Dr. Glomb groped for the telephone while his wife groaned inaudible complaints. “Hello?”

“Eh-hello. Is this Dr… Glomb?” asked a discomforted voice on the other end of the line.

Dr. Glomb wrestled his eyes open, wetting his lips and fighting a yawn. “It is.”

“Yes, okay. You’re a… a dentist?” he spoke slowly, with constant dread befitting a man crossing a room where the floor was covered in shattered glass.

The yawn escaped. “Mm-hm… do you think you could call back some other time?”

“Oh, no. Please, please just hear me out. I’m desperate…”

“Its three o’clock in the morning.”

“I know, I know it is, but this really can’t wait. You know in the middle ages, when people had their limbs tied to four horses, all sent off running in different directions?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s happening in my mouth. It hurts so bad. I don’t think I’ve brushed my teeth in six months.”

Gradually, Dr. Glomb dragged himself out of his half-sleep. He sat up in bed, his wife groaning his name. She must have seen he was on the phone because she stopped there and went back to sleep. He rubbed his eyes furiously. “I’m not sure I understand... what’s the problem?”

“Shitty braces. I got them from this lycanthrope who thought he was a dentist.”

Suddenly Dr. Glomb was wide awake. “A what?”

“A dentist.”

He shook his head. “No; did you say ‘lycanthrope’? As in a wolf man?”

“No, I mean my dog, Sparky – yes a wolf man!” Static blew into the receiver; Dr. Glomb assumed the man was hissing through his teeth. “May we please get on with this? It hurts to talk.”

“Well there’s nothing I can do for you now. Why don’t you just stop by the clinic tomorrow and – “

“No!” screamed the phone. “No, I can’t! Would I call you at three in the fucking morning if I could just waltz right into your office and get this blasted iron maiden removed from my mouth any ol’ time?! No! Arg, damnit!” A sudden pause. The aggravated voice continued with a whimper. “I just cut my lip… they always cut my lips.”

Holding back a sigh, and already sensing this was going to be a long night, Dr. Glomb slouched out of bed and walked across the room. He took the phone into the adjacent bathroom so he wouldn’t disturb Clarice. “Okay, okay. Just take it easy.”

“It fucking hurts.”

“Why can’t you come to the clinic?”

“Because its only open six to seven. I can’t go out before eight o’clock.”

Dr. Glomb was used to dealing with children. When he was first starting at the Boston Dental Clinic all of his patients were under nine years old. Kids say the darnedest things, you know? One kid, he thought Sammy King was his name, asked if he was going to put a radio in his tooth. Assuming his patient was a full grown man with a stable mental state, it was odd for him to refer to the last dentist he saw with a fancy term for were-wolf. He’d have been more worried if he’d mentioned aliens, but since the man with the medieval braces seemed to be in so much pain Dr. Glomb played along.

“You shouldn’t have any trouble getting time off work if its as bad as you say it is, unless you’re a coal miner or something.”

“No,” replied the man with the medieval braced humorlessly.

“So what’s the problem?”

“Don’t you fucking hang up!”

“I’m not going to hang up.”

“The last guy hung up.”

“I won’t, promise. Its my job to help people, and you’re obviously in pain, so what else can I do? Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“I’m a vampire.”

Dr. Glomb nearly dropped the phone. He stared at the white tiles in the shower as though to ask a question of the bathroom. Am I really listening to this? “I didn’t catch that.”

“I’m a vampire,” he said again with growing impatience.

A droplet of water dangled on the edge of the facet. It fell and Dr. Glomb rushed to tighten the knobs with greater urgency than the situation merited, just to get a minute away from the phone. Maybe he should hang up after all.
He picked up the conversation again. “Did you say a… a free-lancer? Like an artist?”

“No!” the man with the medieval braces snapped. “I am a vampire! Lestat, Dracula, Nosveracto, Count Chocula! Vampire!”

“I can’t take this call.” Dr. Glomb started for the door. Just hang up the phone and go to sleep. On second thought, unplug the phone, too.
“Wait! You can’t hang up on me, you promised! You can’t hang up on a vampire—I’ll find you—I’ll find where you live! It wouldn’t be hard.”

Dr. Glomb hesitated at the door, feeling a knot of anger tying itself in his chest. He held his breath and convinced himself not to scream. “Just who he heck do you think you are? You call me, a professional in the field of dentistry, just to pull some stupid, immature prank at three in the morning! And for what? You’re wasting my time as much as you’re wasting your own.”
“I’m serious! Jeeze—“
“Get a job and a life.”
“Please! Look, I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you on the line! I-I’ll even pay you for this call, I swear! Please, please, these stupid fucking things are going to kill me if they don’t drive me mad first. I’ve got an awful long time to live, sir, and I don’t want to spend eternity with metal rusting in my mouth.”

There was desperation in his voice; genuine, heart-wrenching misery, the kind of pain you don’t experience when dealing with a routine tooth ach. Dr. Glomb was forced to stop at the door. You only heard that kind of voice from patients whose teeth were rotten from the inside out, patients who went through some kind of physical or emotional trauma that left their mouths mutilated, their teeth atrophied, and hanging on by a few frayed nerves. Dr. Glomb hovered at the bathroom door, staring listlessly at a plague Clarice bought for their bathroom door.

Painted on a bright red background, the Japanese symbol for Strength hung at eye level with Dr. Glomb. Japanese stuff was in this year, why Clarice insisted on mounting it in the bathroom he would never know. He sighed, “Jesus… Are you messing with me or are you just plain loopy?”

“No, sir,” the vampire answered solemnly. Dr. Glomb could hear the distortion in his voice from having to talk around the braces.

He shook his head at the ceiling. “Either way, there’s nothing I can do for you right now. If you really are a vampire couldn’t you just… get them off yourself?”

“How?”

“You know, aren’t vampires supposed to be really strong or something.”

“Fuck!” Dr. Glomb winced. “Are you kidding?! That would hurt!”

“I guess it would. Can this wait until tomorrow night? I’m just really mixed up right now.”

“Couldn’t you just come take a quick look? I swear this isn’t a prank, if you would just come see me you’d understand.”

Dr. Glomb hesitated and looked at himself in the mirror. Maybe a drive would help clear his head. “Alright,” he conceded at last. “I’ll have a hard time getting to sleep after all this nonsense anyway.”