While I was still rising to my feet, Kurt swept a psychic blade through the bed sheet on Valentine’s body, flinging the cloth off him.
“He’s—” I shouted, “—He’s alive?!”
The wounds on his stomach had completely sealed up. Dark turquoise wyrm hide covered his chest and stomach like asphalt freshly laid. Valentine’s body spasmed uncontrollably. Saliva frothed on his lips, bubbling over his lightly freckled cheeks. His dark hair’s bangs swept across his forehead. Puberty had exacerbated Valentine's lanky, knobby-boned appearance, making him terribly thin, doubtless the effect of chronic malnutrition. You could see it in his flat nails and the splotches mottled over his teeth—and being dead certainly hadn’t helped.
Kneeling down, I tried to hold him still, but then his eyes fluttered open, pupils wide. In an instant, he went from a twitching wreck to a maddened beast, his eyes wide with wild hunger. He scratched and clawed.
“Kurt!” I yelled, scattering back. “Hold him!”
Glowing threads wove into a mat that pressed down on Valentine, pinning him against the floor.
Scrambling to my feet, I tugged at the nearby mattress, groaning as I pulled. My numb extremities and broken legs made for horrible traction.
“Dr. Howle! Out of the way!”
I stepped back. “B-Bethany?”
Waving her arm, Bethany lashed a gold-azure scarf of psychokinesis at the mattress, flipping it off the frame and onto the floor. Kneeling down, I pushed the mattress toward him, bringing one of its corners right up to the boy’s mouth.
“Eat the mattress,” I said. “You can eat the mattress!”
His eyes bulged as he stared at me.
I looked up at Kurt. “Let him go!”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded.
The spectral reeds holding Valentine in place vanished. The boy barely glanced at me before pouncing onto the mattress like a wild animal. He opened his mouth, impossibly wide. Bones cracked. Tears shot out from the corners of his lips. Blood flowed, but only briefly, and if it continued to flow, I couldn’t tell, because Valentine used his broken jaws to chew on the mattress, starting from the corner. Burns and acrid hisses blackened the mattress where Valentine’s saliva touched it. In seconds, the mattress took on the appearance and consistency of burnt marshmallows. He swallowed it with frightening speed, only to take another bite, slowly advancing into the mattress.
All the tension went out of his body. He stopped shaking. He stopped spasming. I could hear the sounds of him sobbing as he ate and ate. Gently, I rested my hand on him. His spine jutted out from his back like a monorail track. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re safe here.”
Last year, the Diet had passed food stamp “reform”, a word which here meant “make further cuts to an already austere anti-poverty budget by mandating food stamps be given only to people who did not have access to a refrigerator.”
Don’t ever let anyone fool you: laws made a difference.
Valentine ate and ate and ate; first, the mattress, then everything that had been on the bed, and then the metal frame. He was enraptured by his meal that it wasn’t until he finished his meal and released his hold on the bed frame—the metal of the bed frame’s remaining rear-third clattering to the floor—that he noticed the changes that had been reshaping his body since the beginning of his meal. It was difficult not to watch it. And, to tell the truth, I’d called for all the other transformees in the room to come take a look and see for themselves. Seeing something with one’s own eyes did more to open a person’s mind than words almost ever could.
The sight was captivating and horrifying all at once. It was hard to say which most rocked our world: the reality of it, progressing in front of us, or its intensity and rapidity, the way it stretched his body and molded it anew. Every bit of mass Valentine had shoveled into his mouth flowed into his lower body, inch by inch. He didn’t need to pull himself forward along the floor to get at more of the mattress to eat. With every bit, everything at and below the boy’s lumbar region slid out from beneath the hem of his bullet-riddled hospital gown. He grew like a creeping caterpillar, stretching out slowly but steadily, and soon his buttocks arrived at where his shins should have been.
Watching his tail grow in, you would have thought someone had rigged a time-lapse photographic sequence of a seedling sprouting, except here the soil was the base of Valentine’s spine and his tail was the seedling—dark, brilliant turquoise instead of chlorophyllous green. His legs rotted into crispy slabs mottled in necrotic black and melted yellows like ancient pages. His feet and toes were fully reabsorbed, the nails clattering softly onto the varnished wood floor. After the boy had finished the mattress—right when he turned his attention to the metal frame—there was an audible, stare-drawing crunch as his hips broke into pieces and decomposed. What had previously been his waistline melded seamlessly into the base of his tail. By the time Valentine finished his meal, his tail—his new lower body—was nearly twice the height of a full-grown man. What remained of the boy’s legs stuck out from his new waist like misshapen fins. All this transpired in a little less than ten minutes, and I knew that because there was no mistaking the moment when Valentine's hunger finally abated. You’d have to be blind not to notice it. All at once, the boy froze, as if he’d just heard a thunderclap, and then he flipped his upper body around to face me and screamed. He screamed so loudly, his own breath cut himself off.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
His eyes bolted down to the serpent’s body that had replaced everything below his human torso. He screamed again, tugging desperately at his gown. Sitting down beside him, I undid the ties on his gown and wrangled it up off him. He patted his transfigured body with his hands, as if he could find himself again if he just looked.
I wished it was that easy.
His reproductive and urinary systems were completely gone, not a single trace left; the same held for his rectum, buttocks, hips, and thighs. Everything had been swallowed up by dark turquoise scales that bloomed across the fungal tissue. We watched the scales spreading across his hide.
I spent a couple minutes like that, seated at Valentine’s side, and all the way through, I held the boy I didn’t know in an embrace. I stopped and looked him in the eyes only when his sobs had ebbed into sniffles and soft moans, and then, and only then, did I begin to explain what had happened to him, and what was likely going to happen to him in the near future. I wish I could have claimed success, but I was stymied by the horrible loneliness that weighed on his shoulders. Valentine was further along in his transformation than anyone else in the room, except for Werumed-san—and no one wanted to be compared to Werumed-san.
“You’re brave, you know that?” I told him.
“How?” Valentine stuttered. His jaw was permanently enlarged, opening all the way to his ears. He kept flicking his attention between me and his serpentine lower body—a body he could barely control.
“I’m,” he stammered, “I’m not—I’m—”
—I pointed to some of the other patients in the room.
“Look at the others,” I said, “and look how they look at you. Your presence shapes their reactions. You’re a lot more important than you give yourself credit for.”
It was true. Even after the others had stepped away to give the boy some dignity, most of them hadn’t taken their eyes off him. They glanced at him and regular intervals, with furtive stares webbed in awe and pity and guilt and fear.
I turned back to Valentine. “Most of them think they are turning into demons.”
His eyes widened. “Are we?”
I fought to hold back my tears. “I don’t know. I want to believe that you’re not.”
I really did. It was why I was so frightened. I was starting to believe it, myself.
Just look at Werumed-san.
The mascot now “stood” up against the wall, though it was more like a serpent rearing up than anything else. His stumpy mascot legs offered no support. Instead, most of his weight was supported on the thickness of his developing tail-body. Werumed-san’s body rose so far past the pipes overhead that his pancake head had bent and scrunched up because of how firmly it pressed up on the ceiling high overhead. He was like a bloated, crooked stovepipe, swathed in felt and fungus, with a tail tipped in useless, cartoon legs.
With a shudder, I looked away and turned back to face Valentine.
“How am I brave?” Valentine asked.
I let my hand come to rest on his scaly flank. To my surprise, it was warm, dry, and smooth beneath my gloves. “You’re further along than anyone else here. The others see you suffer like they do. They sympathize with you, even as they fear the implications of what you represent—of what you mean for them. But,” I smiled gently, “when they see you as you are now, with dignity and resolve… that gives them hope. Hope for salvation. Maybe things will take a turn for the better, or, at the very least, maybe they won’t take a turn for the worse.”
Valentine shook his head vigorously, wiping the tears from his eyes. Anger stuck out from his inflamed cheeks. “Dignity and resolve?” he hissed. “Are you crazy? I’m scared out of my mind.” He nearly started sobbing all over again. “I don’t want this. Pick somebody else.”
“No one wants this.” I nodded, briefly closing my eyes. “And I wasn’t trying to say that you weren’t scared, or that you actually were handling this with dignity—though,” I tried to smile, “I think you’re handling this better than”—I forced the next words out very carefully—“… better than I would handle it.” Shaking out my arms, I exhaled and then whispered into his ear, pressing my PPE visor against his head.
Had I turned to face the light at that moment, I knew my eyes would have glinted with tears.
“I’m going to try to do everything that I can to help you,” I said. “All of you. But…” My voice got caught in my throat. “If I can’t… what matters is that there are people like you and Kurt that others can look to. Even if you or I can’t help them, we can at least let them think we can. That’s why you’re brave, Valentine; that’s how you can be brave. Keep a stiff upper lip. As long as you don’t let them think you aren’t, they’ll think you are, and their eyes will make the world into what they wished it would be. That’s how you become brave. That’s how you become strong.”
“But if I’m not what they think I am,” he said, “that’s a lie.” His head quivered. “Dad always said lying was a sin.”
Nodding, I bit my lip. “Mine too.” My vision was blurry and bleary. Tears mixed with lassitude, making my eyelids heavy. “But… even if our miseries will never be resolved, isn’t it better to have hope in a promise that everything will turn out alright?”
In that moment, I was no longer trying to comfort just Valentine. I was trying to comfort myself.
“If false hope is better than guaranteed despair,” I said, “even if it is a lie… isn’t that enough to excuse it?”
I hated the idea of the noble lie, but… how could I avoid it? It seemed impossible. I didn’t want to inflict pain on anyone, but I also wanted to live in Truth. And when the two came into conflict… well, what could I do?
A scream shot out from across the room, startling me to my feet. I rushed over to the noise. Valentine’s serpent half writhed as he tried to right himself, but he failed and flailed, having yet to figure out how to move.
“My eye!” Lopé screamed.
The lengthened boy sat on his bed with a half-eaten pillow in his lap. Fungal growth wandered across his face, like sea urchins beneath his skin, darkening it with swelling lumps that roved and coalesced.
“My eye!”
His right eye was gone, eyelids and all. Only an empty socket remained, its interior coated by wyrm scales.
We watched helplessly as Lopé's left eyelids became husks—they dried, shriveled, darkened, and shrunk, flaking off his face as he clawed at them, desperate to keep them from disappearing. Fungal filaments needle up through the surface of his right eye in a mountainous growth. Then his eye crawled out of its socket and slipped down, digging underneath his skin, joining the other lumps wandering beneath his face. Slowly, the eyeball-lump flattened, roaming beneath his cheeks like ice on a hot grill, its mass fleeing elsewhere.
Lopé found a second wind. He screeched with fresh screams.
“I can’t see! My eyes—I can’t see!”
The boy who called himself Paul screamed again, but his words were mangled. His chin and jaw self-destructed with sickening crunches. Bone broke and crumbled as his face’s lower reaches joined his eyes in dissolution within his flesh. Fungal growth sewed his lips shut, muffling his screams. In a matter of seconds, it was as if his mouth had never existed at all.
Yet still, he screamed, blowing the sound out through his nostrils.
One by one, small perforations opened on his mouth and cheeks, in a pattern of bilateral symmetry. Thin, sphincter-like muscles twitched into being, contracting the holes, widening them, flaring them in synchrony with the boy’s panicked breath as his screams grew louder and louder.