Chapter #3Try possessing Caleb by: Seuzz   It's a long run back to town, but your wolf host, though lean, is tireless, and it is not long before you find yourself in Caleb's neighborhood. The dark houses look odd and even a little foreboding from your near-to-the-ground perspective, and it's awhile before you recognize the Ryerson house: a small, ranch-style abode with a small front yard and a low wall around the back. You clear the latter with a lazy jump and pad quietly up to Caleb's bedroom window. It's open, and you've no trouble resting your front paws on the sill so you can look in.
It's dark, of course, and you can barely make out the shape of the bed and its occupant. The thought of Caleb sleeping sweetly and soundly in his own room, while you're running around in a mongrel wolf, fills you with renewed, grim anger. You lower your head and bile rises in the back of your throat. Or is it bile? You become dizzy; everything fades; and you feel yourself being hurled forward. When your senses return, you find yourself back in your goo form, sitting on Caleb's cluttered desk. The wolf has disappeared from the window.
Cautiously, you slither to the edge and plop softly onto the floor. Caleb's bed is on the opposite side of the room, and the floor is thick with discarded clothes and books and papers, but you wind your way quickly over to it and snag a floor-trailing sheet. When you've hoisted yourself up, you find yourself staring directly into your friend's face. His eyes are closed, and soft snores buzz gently from his drooping mouth. Perfect.
You gingerly extend a very thin pseudopod past his lips and teeth and over his tongue, until you are touching the soft tissue at the back of his throat. It sticks as you touch it, and as you press gently it seems to give. Small waves ripple down your thread-like limb as the anchor you've lodged in your new host tugs at your mass and draws it into a new body. Before long, even as you are still sitting on his pillow, you feel a numbing, enlargening sensation that gradually warms into control of new limbs. You open your new eyes, and find yourself staring back at your transformed body. After that, it's a simple matter to open your mouth wider and sucking the rest of your real body into your new husk.
You turn onto your back and stare up at the dark ceiling. Though you are awake, you can sense that Caleb's mind is asleep: mingled with the darkness are visions of fires and sensations of running. These amuse you: So, he is dreaming of the afternoon's events. With a sense of spiteful curiosity, you reach out and tweak the dream, making the fires hotter and more encompassing; you root the dream-Caleb's legs to the ground and let the flames sweep over him. There's a lurching in his consciousness, and you realize that he is on the verge of waking up, so you dismiss the dream vision; he sinks back down with a mental groan.
The disappearance of the dream, meanwhile, unveils his mind: it's like looking into a wheeling, nearly infinite pattern of bright stars, arranged in complex constellations. You reach out to grasp one: you find it's not a thought or a memory that you've touched, though, only a fragment of one, something useless and dim. You reach out to touch more, and as you do so you feel your own consciousness swelling and unfolding—rising, almost—to envelop this mental universe. It is huge, though, and no matter how you strain yourself to take it in quickly, there are still more vast spaces to be swallowed. You don't flag, however, for even as you seem to make no progress, you feel the thin and fragmentary outlines of Caleb's thoughts and memories and desires and habits beginning to take shape within you. You are keenly conscious of the passage of real time—a clock ticks softly on the wall near the bed—and yet you are also aware of the passage of a different sort of a time: a swiftly flying time marked by your stroke by stroke conquest of Caleb Ryerson's innermost being.
It seems to take forever, and it also seems to go by in a flash. But by the time his alarm goes off, strong morning daylight has long since been spilling through his window, and your best friend's mind and personality have become second nature to you. You smile softly to yourself as you reach behind and hit the snooze button.
* * * * *
"I hope you had the sense to sit up straight when they were questioning you," Wanda Ryerson says waspishly.
You slouch down lower in the passenger-side seat of the car and stare out the window at the passing scenery. "You were there," you mutter in reply. "You should know."
"I'm talking about when they had you alone," she snaps. "I shouldn't have let them take you off without me," she adds, more to herself than to you.
You are returning home from Fort Suffolk, where you spent the better part of the morning and afternoon being questioned and grilled by the base staff about the explosion. It is to Caleb's credit, you suppose, that he did not actually run off and hide after he saw the warehouse go up in flames. He was outside the base by that point, and after his initial, panicked flight back to the car, he drove around to the front gate to alert the authorities that you might have been inside the warehouse when the explosion occurred. He had, of course, been held and interviewed before being released, but today's trip back to the base (in the company of Mrs. Ryerson) marked the official beginning of an investigation.
You scratch at the itchy dress slacks and shirt Mrs. Ryerson forced you to wear. "Did Dad say anything more about getting a lawyer?" you ask.
"That's for him and me to discuss," she says.
"But if I'm the one who's in trouble—" you start. Yes, you think gleefully to yourself, Caleb will be in a lot of trouble. It would have been a lot better for him if he hadn't gone back to the base, if the military hadn't known he was mixed up in your foolish prank. Of course, that would have left you an even freer field for getting even with him. But he's managed to put himself in danger of criminal charges, which is good enough for long-term punishment. You can still have some fun at his expense in the meantime, though.
Mrs. Ryerson hasn't replied to your challenge, so you renew it. "Shouldn't I have a say in whether we get a lawyer, if I'm gonna be the one looking at jail time or something?"
"What was on those videotapes they showed you?" she replies. You shrug.
Hmph. Yes, the videotapes. That had been when that Colonel Lord fellow asked Caleb's mom to leave the room: classified information, he'd explained. You were dismayed when you learned that surveillance cameras in the warehouse had captured you and Caleb entering the place, and had been sharply disappointed when their evidence supported Caleb's earlier assertions that he had left without fiddling with anything; you'd been hoping to confess to more heinous crimes, to get him into even more trouble. But it wasn't to be.
Afterward, when they let Mrs. Ryerson back into the room, you'd answered more of their questions in an offhand and slightly sulky manner, hoping to piss them off, but they hadn't risen to the bait. Your distracted manner, though, had given you the chance to review in your own mind what the tapes had shown. None of them showed your transformation—they had turned off the monitor before the explosion—and you wonder if there is any visual evidence of your transformation. Or did they turn off the monitors because they did capture something on tape, and don't want to disclose it? You were intrigued, and made a little fearful, by the fact that to the one blunt question you had put to them—"Is David dead?"—they had not given a definite answer.
"Your dad will be in Monday afternoon," Mrs. Ryerson says, and her voice pulls you out of your reverie. "We'll talk about it all then."
You give her a sidelong glance. It's odd that she keeps she keeps harping back to the imminent arrival of her estranged ex-husband; Caleb's mind tell you that she doesn't like mentioning him more than is possible. You can only guess that she feels in over her head, and is looking to foist all the problems off on him. Maybe she'll even try foisting Caleb off on him, too. Caleb actually gets along with his dad better than his mom; it's been one of his disappointments that the divorce settlement left him with her rather than his father, whom he looks up to and respects a lot more. Somewhere, in the reptilian portion of that mind you've devoured, feelings of dread well up: It will be hard for Caleb to face his father. You have to fight to suppress a smirk of satisfaction at the recognition of Caleb's imminent discomfiture.
* * * * *
Back at the house you hide out in Caleb's room. You ought to be laying on his bed, curled into a fetal position with worry and fear and remorse, but once out of his mom's sight you feel you can drop the "Caleb Ryerson" act, so you straighten your hunch-shouldered pose, dig out some of the porn magazines that he'd kept hidden even from you, and prop up on his bed to check his cell phone messages. It's the usual suspects: Keith Keighley and Matt Isaacs (two of your mutual friends). Brett Dutoit—what does one of the school basketball players want with Caleb? You feel Caleb's heart leap a little when he sees one of the messages is from June Platt.
You'd accused Caleb of harboring secret designs on Dana Pak, the girl that you're in love with, but he is actually much more interested in her friend June. June isn't the prettiest girl in the school, and she's a little on the plump side. But she has an open and friendly personality, and has a gift for making people feel liked. And Caleb, with his scrawny, undeveloped physique and scraggly attempt at a moustache—you scratch at it satirically even now—really couldn't hope for better. There's definitely a revenge angle to be played there. Before Caleb gets too deep in the shit you'll have to find a new home, and you could move into June and really break Caleb's heart before he disappears into the court system.
Thoughts of June naturally lead to thoughts of Dana, and you are seized by sudden desire to see and talk to her. The subject of your—David's—quick and untidy demise would be a natural subject, and you can't help believing that she would be delightfully sympathetic. Come to think of it, surely lots of people would be sympathetic. Like most people, you have had occasion to think about your possible death and the effect it would have on others; well, now you are dead, so far as most of the world is concerned. You find yourself strangely cheered by the thought of "attending" your own funeral, as it were, and luxuriating in the remorse and regret and sadness of your friends.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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