Talk about failing upwards!

I ran my gloved fingers over my left arm sleeve along the slender road-bump ridge of red wound resin Dr. Tenneson had applied to my frightful wound—though the word frightful didn’t even begin to describe it.

Once more, Ani popped her head in through the aquamarine holographic curtain enclosing me and the examination chair.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

I sighed. It was a big sigh. A long sigh. A sigh that desperately wanted to say more, but couldn’t.

No, Ani, I wanted to say, I’m not fine. I’m at the antipode of fine; if “fine” was a spot on the globe, I’d be on the other side of the world, and no matter how or where I move, the place where“fine” is copies my every movement so that I never get any closer.

I settled on an approximation of the truth.

“I want to be fine, Ani,” I said. I let my head hang down, shaking it as I closed my eyes. “I’m gonna to sit here for a minute or two.” I smiled meekly. “At least until the room stops spinning.”

She nodded. “That’s a good idea. You lost a scary amount of blood back there.”

I chuckled bitterly. “Please, don’t remind me.” But my laughs quieted into a whimper. I looked Ani in the eyes. “Thanks,” I said. “And give my thanks to Heggy, too.”

She nodded, and then departed once more.

Heggy and Ani had been the ones to rescue me—bless their hearts.

There I was, screaming bloody murder, flopping around the examination table like a well-oiled ham, when Drs. Marteneiss and Lokanok concluded that I was in the middle of a nasty panic attack. That gave me an out, and I milked it for all it was worth. I put the blame on the mountains of stress the past few days had brought us. I put the blame on Mrs. Elbock’s surgery’s catastrophic turn.

Praise the lucky bow-tie!

I didn’t even know if I was praising my bow-tie ironically anymore.

In my panic, I’d completely botched the Step Three oomph I’d put into my plexus. Instead of merely keeping the cut from closing, I’d torn it wide open. Combine that with the way Dr. Tenneson’s scalpel went off course as a result of my flailing around on the examination table, and the end result was that I’d received a wound that looked like the fluid-logged ruts a car’s tires might dig into wet mud.

I hadn’t intended to have a mock panic attack, but, then again, I hadn’t intended to be accosted by demons and corrupted ghosts. On the plus side, screaming in terror while trying to flick intangible monsters off my body really did help sell the whole panic attack angle. Demons, wraiths, nightmares, and hellish phantasms had been shrieking all around me, and I could only was scramble and roll, clashing cymbals in my head while winding my psychokinesis into a tourniquet to hold my wound open long enough to “prove” I wasn’t a transformee. My Second Self later informed me that the only reason blood came out at all was because of how much I was flailing about; there was barely any blood pressure—exactly what you’d expect from a guy whose heart had stopped.

More dumb luck: either none of my colleagues noticed that detail, or, that they did, but they chose to say nothing.

I rolled onto my right side, to take the pressure off my tail. That brought my head over the right side of the examination chair-table, leaving my face pointing toward the floor.

It was surprisingly comfortable.

I shuddered.

My second hypostasis disappeared at some point during my freak out. I wasn’t exactly sure whether this was because I’d managed to re-absorb my dopplegenneth all on my own, or if, like before, the sheer amount of stress I’d been under had caused me to spontaneously re-unify.

I suppose I could figure it out later. At the moment, I was just tired. All-around tired. Extreme displays of emotion like the one I’d just gone through could often leave a person feeling psychologically drained, and I certainly felt that. After all the chaos I’d been through, the mental numbness I felt was not at all unpleasant or unwelcome.

As I looked around, I noticed how normal everything was. No glacial crevasses ripping through the floor. No chain-wrapped columns or ruined cathedrals. No fungus-wrought demons phasing through the walls. My reality was no longer churning. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed peacefully. The machines beeped and whirred, patiently awaiting their next commands.

Leaning back, I stared up at the ceiling, and then sighed.

“It makes no sense. Where did they go?”

But then I looked down, my attention drawn by an unexpected itchy sensation on my arm. The red resin on the multiple long cuts on my arm snapped and cracked. Tiny wriggling cilia emerged from either side of the wound, piercing through the resin, forming tendrils that linked up with one another as they stitched the cut together from within. For a second, the wound looked like a mouth—the resin, its full, red lips—before the resin was subducted into my body and replaced by new growth. From a distance, you’d have thought my arm had just grown a tattoo: dark violet, and shaped not unlike a lightning bolt.

As I twisted my arm under the fluorescent light, I could see the minute scales glistening on my “tattoo”. Pulling down my sleeve in a hurry, I resolved to change my PPE as soon as I left the diagnostic center.

But then my mouth went dry. My constant, unnatural hunger was pestering me with a persistence that would have put even the most dedicated telemarketers to shame. I did my best to fight the temptation. As the saying goes: I had bigger fish to fry.

Like I said, at the moment, my surroundings were entirely normal. No ghosts. No demons. No air-windows to Hell. And this wasn’t like Kreston’s demon-ghost; my apparitions weren’t merely hidden behind a veil of air. No: they were gone. I was well and truly alone.

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The calm was downright unnerving.

Thinking back, I recalled the moment my torments had vanished. My surroundings blurred, and, suddenly, I was looking at freeze-frame shots of the scene from several minutes ago. I advanced the scene one frame at a time, just by thinking about it. I saw myself flailing on the floor. The sea of monsters was converging on me in every direction. Heggy and Ani were rushing to help me, even as Dr. Tenneson was getting down onto his knees to seal my wound shut with the red epoxy.

I felt my relief all over again.

Right there.

I stopped advancing through my memories.

Seconds after the red epoxy was on my arm—seconds after Dr. Tenneson said, “You’re in the clear”; that’s when the demons vanished. Right when I felt that sense of relief.

I rewound the memory a couple of frames back.

By the Angel…

Heggy, Ani, and Dr. Tenneson… they got my blood on them. Yes, it was on their PPE, but still.

I was infected.

“Oh no…” I whispered. “Please no.”

Suddenly, I heard noises in the distance.

Whispers.

I saw approaching ghosts flicker.

Sitting up straight, I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped down on the examination table-chair’s arm-rests. With no one else around, I felt free to take some deep breaths—I didn’t stop myself out of fear of spreading NFP-20, though I made a mental note to spray things down with one of my hand sanitizer bottles before I left the area.

Gradually, I calmed, and the whispers and the distant flickers disappeared.

“Gory glory!” I hissed. Frustrated and angry, I battered my fists on either side of my skull.

I should have realized it sooner!

The demons and the hellscapes had been appearing when I was stressed—and I’d been absolutely panicking back there. I’d been panicking on all three occasions when Frank’s ghost attacked me. When Aicken’s ghost appeared to me at Rayph’s play, I’d been stressed out beyond belief.

Stress made it worse.

And not just that!

It was more than just stress. It was negative emotions in general. My doubts, my fear of damnation. All the negative feelings that I’d carried after Merritt’s surgery took its disastrous turn.

They had opened the portal to Hell.

“Gosh darn it!” I grumbled. “It was my fudging subconscious all along!”

In hindsight, it should have been obvious.

As a working neuropsychiatrist, I was often flustered by how dense people could be when it came to understanding just how damaging stress could be. Like any other emotional state, stress was anchored in the brain’s electrochemical machinations, and, like any other emotional state, stress’ effects went far beyond mere mental anguish.

The brain wasn’t confined to just the inside of the skull. Bits and pieces of our brain—our nervous system—innervated every inch of the body. Emotion was a full-body process. The nerves simply mediated that process, sending and receiving the electrochemical signals that got our bodies and minds fully on board. Lustful thoughts pushed the body into a sexually receptive state. (Oxytocin was called “the cuddle hormone” for a reason.) Sorrow and depression dulled the body’s response times and could even impair muscle function. Stress flooded the bloodstream with a cocktail of hormones and other chemical messengers that had been sculpted by evolution to provide the body with the physiological edge it needed to overcome a challenge. But, when overused, those same processes could cause real damage—case in point: hypertension and heart disease.

I didn’t know if wyrms could suffer from hypertension, but I was now all but certain that they could suffer from damaging hyperphantasia.

I guess Reality really was slipping away from me.

On the one hand, I knew my ghosts could do real damage if they hijacked my powers. I’d gotten physical evidence of that on multiple occasions. On the other hand… how could I know if my visions were semblances of the truth, or mere distortions? Could the ghosts’ stress also contribute to this? Were my phantasms turning into monsters because that’s what I feared they would become? Was it happening because of their own pains, sorrows, and regrets? And, even then, just because it originated in my overactive imagination, that didn’t rule out the possibility that the fungus—i.e., Hell itself!—might be able to use my hyperphantasia to attack me or the souls stored within me—maybe even attack Andalon herself.

Then, there was the existential horror possibility: perhaps Dr. Skorbinka’s original theory was correct, after all. Might this all be part of the fungus’ attempt to control me—to steer me into serving its ends? That idea still made no sense, but… I was starting to worry that not making sense was no longer enough of a reason to dismiss an idea out of hand.

Even if Andalon was a creation of the fungus meant to manipulate me, it would be unable to coordinate its manipulations of me with its manipulations of others without having some kind of wireless communication mechanism. How else could it coordinate itself across so many bodies, other than by some basal, form of unthinking instinct? Yes, it would be foolish of me to dismiss that thought on the grounds that it was too preposterous; if psychokinesis was possible, then pretty much anything was. Unlike Andalon herself, who could read other transformee's thoughts at a distance, I hadn’t seen anything which suggested that the fungus had wireless communication abilities, or anything even close to it.

Or did that undermine my argument?

Fudge.

Well… regardless, there was no indication of any intelligence behind the fungus. Yes, the fungus was many things—an evil thing, a nightmare, an impossible anomaly that broke the laws of nature as we knew them—but, sapient, it was not, and I’d seen nothing which suggested otherwise.

Besides, there was a far more important issue in play.

The Law of Parsimony was one of the most powerful ratiocinative principles, up there with the Hypothetico-Deductive method—otherwise known as the Scientific Method. The Law of Parsimony, in short, was the idea that the simplest explanation was usually the best one. Was it always true? No. But, it gave us a place to start.

The more hypotheses and presumptions you brought to bear to explain a situation, the more difficult it would be to figure out where you’d gone wrong in the—incredibly likely event—that something went awry. To that end, there was a much simpler observation about my current predicament that needed to be acknowledged.

Suppose Andalon was a creation of the fungus, and one meant to manipulate me. What would be the point of that? Merritt hadn’t noticed Andalon’s presence even when she stood above her and sealed away her wayward ghosts. If there were any other transformees who were interacting with Andalon like I was, I had yet to meet them. So, either the supernatural nightmare fungus—which, regardless of what I did, was killing people left and right—either the fungus was concocting some intricate scheme designed to get me to save people from Hell (and that advanced the fungus’ interests how, exactly?), or the germ was as evil as it looked and Andalon really was some mysterious entity who had reached out to me for help. Granted, neither of these possibilities came with an explanation of why they involved a middle aged neuropsychiatrist prone to clarinetting, panic attacks, losing loved ones, obsessing over pop cultural minutiae, and being generally incapable of making up his mind, but I was fine with letting dumb luck take the credit for that.

I mean, it had already gotten me this far.

That being said, if I was a frightened spirit in the form of a forlorn little girl suffering from memory loss, abandonment issues, and possible abuse, I could do a lot worse than to turn to someone like me for help—though not by much.

It was just my luck: right when I thought I’d gotten a handle on what was happening to me, I got thrown for a whirl all over again.

Suddenly, my console pinged.

I pulled it out, tapped it awake, looked over the message, and groaned.

“Back to the grind, I go,” I muttered.

I got up from my seat and shuffled off to the battlefield once more, keeping my eyes peeled for ghosts, and stress, and darkness, and demons.

Andalon… where are you?