Chapter Two

Wensah vanished.

I was left all alone in this long and strange tunnel, which — if I could believe Wensah — was in a world other than mine. I shouldn’t have believed her. I shouldn’t have believed a word she said. All this? It just wasn’t possible. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. I shook my fist in anger and frustration, only to see one of my tiny tentacles shooting out and trembling almost invisibly. It was kind of cute. I sighed inwardly. It didn’t matter what I believed, or wanted to believe. I was looking at my own blueish, translucent tentacles — if the prospect of spending the rest of my existence as a ghostly hentai-monster wasn’t proof enough that Wensah spoke the truth, then nothing was. And to think my last meal was a ham and cheese omelette with chips before I got shot. Oh, that was just depressing.

But the biggest question was: what now?

I still couldn’t move, no matter how much I willed myself to. I did not move an inch. My tentacles wiggled and flailed all over the place, but that was it. I was stuck in this tunnel.

I didn’t think I was deep underground: there were lights coming through here and there, and I assumed there must have been holes in the ceiling, and that it was daytime outside. Well, it didn’t matter at the moment — it wasn’t possible for me to get out of here. I had to focus on the things I could do, and the only thing I could do was to move my five little tentacles.

Moving my tentacles independently from each other was like … drumming. So I drew on the few drum lessons I had taken during my high school days.

It took some time and some practice before I could move them individually without difficulty, making each of them doing something different than the others. I started to feel them as if they were my arms, I really did, but it wasn’t quite the same experience. There were no joints, and I had to do away with the notion of bending elbows or knees, or having wrists, fingers, or ankles. Instead, I had to get a feel for how I could coil, twist and turn the little buggers. Also, there were five of them, and they were … immaterial: I could stick a tentacle into the ground and it would just go through as if it was really a ghost. But even though it seemed I couldn’t interact with anything material, I could poke one tentacle with another and I would feel something like touch. It was weird, but by the time the lights disappeared and night fell on the world on top of me, I got the hang of it. And in the process I got a picture of what I was and what I probably looked like.

I saw in all directions: left, right, front and behind, up and down. All at the same time. It had been disorienting at first, but I got used to it surprisingly fast. As I learned to move my tentacles I realised that my vision was focused in whatever direction my tentacles were pointing. If I twisted one of them around and pointed it at myself, I could see the small ghost-ball I was. I could see everything else too, but where I had no tentacles pointing, it was more like peripheral vision — I was aware that I saw something, but if I wanted a clear picture, I had to move one of my tentacles that way. So I moved my tentacles around. It was almost like watching five different screens at the same time, while still aware of everything else that weren’t on the screens. As I experimented and practiced with this, the next discovery came.

Not only could I lunge my tentacles forward, bend and twist them, but as it turned out, I could shuffle them around my little ghost-ball of a body. Yeah. I was a ball with five tentacles that could slide around the surface and point in any direction I wanted them to. Interesting. Unsettling. Weird. I was like a plasma ball with tentacles instead of lightnings going around.

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Darkness came, and then it went, and I assumed it was morning again. I didn’t know how long days and nights were here — it could have been different from good old Earth, but I didn’t feel tired. I didn’t feel like I had to sleep. So I practiced until morning came, and I had five, fully functional, extremely weird and flexible arms I could operate at will and with ease.

I set a goal for myself: I wanted to somehow divide the end of one tentacle into five smaller tentacles, almost like a hand, like fingers. I swore that if I could manage that, I’d give Wensah the finger if I ever saw her again.

***

It was another day later, in what I supposed was the evening, when I saw the first living creature.

The tunnel rumbled as the worm burst forth from the wall at some distance in the direction I’d arbitrarily designated as front. Well, bursting forth was bit of an exaggeration. It lazily poked its head out the wall, earth crumbling, then it moved forward with the same, crawly locomotion earthworms used back home. In fact, it kind of looked like the worms you’d see in any garden, coming up to the surface on a rainy day. The difference was that this one was huge, it had a purple hue, and there were little hairs all over it. It almost completely filled the tunnel as it was crawling across it. It reached the opposite wall, stuck its head into it, into a crack or something, then it disappeared into a new tunnel of its own making, slowly crawling forward and leaving piles of earth behind.

As I watched the worm, I became aware of two … well, issues.

Firstly, I was getting a strange feeling that the giant worm wasn’t a giant worm. Rather, it was a regular sized worm, and it only seemed large to me because I was even smaller. This was a worrying thought, and I had no other basis for it than a feeling. But I couldn’t go around measuring things, and not just on account of not having a tape measure. So I left this thought to simmer somewhere in the back of my mind.

The second thing was that I saw the worm in more than one way. Sure, I saw it’s hairy, purple body, but at the same time, I also saw something like a faint, shimmering, white-ish phantom image of the creature, juxtaposed on its body. Apart from its color, it was almost the same my own tentacles: ghost-like.

This was… interesting. The roots that hang from the top of the tunnel didn’t have this ghost-image overlay of themselves. Only the worm did. Was it … a spiritual body? Was it the soul of the critter? Did worms have souls in the first place? Until the tragic evening of my own murder, it hadn’t even occurred to me to think about souls, or whether people or animals had them or not. Now, however, it seemed like a pretty important question to ponder.

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But I had other issues to fret about.

My tentacles didn’t seem to be able to touch, or to interact with the floor or the ceiling, or with the loose pieces of earth around, and I’d tried. There was no interaction whatsoever. I was made of spirit-stuff. Or soul-stuff. I wasn’t sure which was the accurate phrase, but I figured I wasn’t far from the truth. One thing was for sure though: I could touch myself. Oh. That came out wrong. Anyway, so I wondered if I could interact with the newly discovered spiritual body, or soul, of the worm. But unfortunately I was still unable to move, so I just kept hovering where I was and watched the critter disappear.

***

It was frustrating. The whole situation was frustrating. Existence was frustrating. I’d been here for almost three local days now, and there was nothing I could do, and it didn’t look like anything would change any time soon. Oh, I’d be better off dead for real than being condemned to immobility for all eternity. It was uncharacteristic of me, but I wanted to punch Wensah in the face, and I wanted to do it now.

Was this the first sign of despair? Or insanity? I wasn’t sure. What I was sure of was that I could kiss any hopes and notions I had goodbye. Such as returning to good old Earth, and even if I could, all I had was a body with a bullet in the chest waiting for me. I imagined my parents crying, talking to the police, arranging my funeral, talking to relatives… ah. Returning to Earth? I couldn’t even move from where I was. Not an inch!

I wanted to take a deep breath to calm myself, but even breathing was off the table for the foreseeable future. The only thing I could do was to call on and embrace the most fundamental tenet of classical stoicism: keep calm, and carry on!

And so I dropped everything from my mind that I couldn’t do and I turned my attention to the things that I could do.

Essence.

Wensah had said something about collecting Essence. I had no idea what this Essence-thing was or what collecting it meant, but she said I was doing it already. I didn’t think I was doing anything special apart from trying and failing to move, but then again I never thought doing things like breathing was anything special either while I was alive, so who knew?

I didn’t know how to go about this though: I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary — having more or less accepted that my spiritual tentacled body was part of the new ordinary. So I emptied my mind as much as I could, boxed away the many questions in there and I focused.

I let my tentacles hang in the air, as still as possible, and I was looking for something they might be doing that I hadn’t seen before. And I looked, I peered, I spied, and … there was nothing. That was disappointing.

I closed my eyes — mentally — and I concentrated even harder. Strangely enough, the world dimmed as I did that, as if evening had arrived already, even though it was midday in my best estimate. The world dimmed, and the tighter I shut my imaginary eyes, the darker the tunnel became. It seemed I could force myself to stop seeing, and that was good to know. I kept doing that, and my environment disappeared — I didn’t see any more, a matte blackness replacing the tunnel. However, I still saw the ghostly wireframe outlines of my tentacles, and if anything, they looked clearer and sharper. So I focused on them, and lo and behold, there was something they were doing. Well, the thing was, I didn’t really see them doing it, more like… I felt them doing it. My little, wiggly tentacles were indeed drawing something into them, and whatever it was, it flowed through them right into the centre of my body where it sort of disappeared, but not quite. I focused even harder, shutting everything out, even the sight of the tentacles themselves. There was only darkness and the feeling that I was filling up with something. Like when you were hungry, and decided to drink water until you couldn’t even imagine eating any more.

It was… Essence.

It couldn’t have been anything else. My tentacles were collecting this Essence-stuff from the air without any conscious effort on my part. No wonder that wretched Wensah said I didn’t need to do anything in particular to collect the stuff. Well, that blond wench aside, I was proud of myself for discovering this. I wasn’t sure if it was thanks to my own efforts, or I was simply gaining access to whatever instinctual knowledge the previous occupant had left here after being evicted, but it didn’t matter. I achieved something, however small, and I was happy with that. And I wasn’t going to stop there.

I couldn’t see or sense this Essence, not outside of my body, but once my tentacles drew some into them, I could follow its journey. I didn’t know what this stuff was — it sure didn’t feel like something physical or tangible. Maybe it was some sort of energy? Or magic power? Or the Force itself, and I was becoming a Sith Lord? Who knew? But it was there and when it reached the centre of my body, it flowed into something … like sort of a storage organ… or a pool. An Essence pool. I could feel the presence of this pool now. It was a part of me, but it wasn’t anywhere inside my body, or at least not in any part of it that I could see. It was very strange.

I could sense the Essence Pool filling up, then I sensed the level drop as if said pool was leaking, or the contents were being siphoned away. And that was right, wasn’t it? That thread? Wensah was siphoning my Essence from my pool, wasn’t she? She’d said so herself. But that was not all. I felt another … pool in my body, or outside of it, or both.

My newfound, internal sense told me this other pool was not like the Essence pool. It was somewhat smaller and it was empty, completely, utterly empty. As empty as my first girlfriend’s promises to stay with me no matter what. A pool couldn’t get emptier that that. I chuckled at the thought.

Now. Essence was only filling its own pool, the other one staying empty. I concluded that it was for something else. But what? I wondered if I could take some of the Essence from its own pool and put some or pour some over to the empty one? Well, no time like the present as the saying went, and I tried. I focused on the Essence pool, and — for the lack of a better word — I willed it to slosh some Essence over. To my utter shock and surprise, it worked.

Essence flowed from one pool to the other. My body shuddered for a moment, and my focus broke. The tunnel snapped back into existence around me — it must have been night already, for the meager sunlight was gone. Had I really spent that much time in my improvised, meditative introspection? Apparently I had. But it didn’t matter: even with my mental eyes open and even without specifically focusing on them, I felt the presence of both pools now.

My Essence pool was down to almost empty, but slowly filling again already. The second pool was suddenly half full and it stayed half full. How did I know this? Probably with the help of my inherited Tentacle Horror instinct. That was the only way I could put it — it was instinctual. Intuitive.

All that was left to do was to figure out what I could do with these pools and their contents. And since the need to sleep and rest was a thing of the past now, I got to it.