The soul-therapy practice sessions played out pretty much as I’d expected them to do. Ibrahim and Yuth quickly noticed the intricacies that came with dealing with the souls, which made sense given their professional backgrounds—psychiatrist with a penchant for doodling, and nurse with a heart of gold, respectively. Larry did a passable job, and, well… let’s just say Dr. Finster ended up requiring a bit of assistance. Ibrahim stepped in to intervene, which led to us discovering that Mr. Murtent was flagrantly racist, and, after I took the reins, one thing led to another and we discovered Mr. Murtent’s bigotry was actually grounded in deep-seated resentment he felt toward racial and ethnic minorities because he felt he’d been cheated out of admission to his preferred law school due to financial assistance and affirmative action policies that benefited the same. This resentment in turn, stemmed from a deep-seated sense of inadequacy brought on by a childhood spent in destitution, a consequence of his father’s gambling addiction and the subsequent predation by loan sharks. Also, his mother abused opioids, which certainly didn’t help.
Eventually, we brought Everything full circle by recreating Rupert Murtent Sr. (Mr. Murtent’s gambling-addled father) as the nix vampire lord who ruled over the haunted house.
A nix was a traditional Trenton underwater spirit. They were supposedly ugly, fishy-froggy-looking humanoid beings.
Add in an enchanted mace that made the creatures of the night explode on contact—that was my idea—and when Murtent Jr. finally drove a stake through the nix’s heart, he vanquished the vampire lord and the sense of insecurity that he represented.
So, all in all, a pretty run-of-the-mill round of soul-healing.
If I had one complaint, it was that entering and exiting these linked mind-worlds was… well, gross, to put it mildly. Andalon happily informed me that, eventually, transformees would be able to engage in mental communion directly through wyrmsong, but because I wasn’t yet at the stage of my transformation, I had to use a more fleshy method.
Fascinatingly, a couple of the SHG’s most transformed transformees were able to corroborate this.
We sat down and held hands, and just like with my link with Greg yesterday night, the hyphae in our bodies intermingled in where we touched. Thousands of minute filaments wriggled out from our palms and put us into a trance-like state, freeing our minds to wander through the ether.
Breaking the link meant undoing all that.
As I did so, the first thing I noticed was the crusty gunk on my eyelids. For a second, I panicked, thinking I’d gone blind, but no, I just needed to put a little bit more force into opening my eyes, though, with most of my hazmat suit still on, that was easier said than done. I’d only removed the suit’s gloves, and, even then, it was only because I needed to make physical contact with the other transformees.
I managed to pry my eyes open after a couple of nerve-wracking seconds, only to immediately wish that I hadn’t.
Angel, it was awful.
Our hands were morasses of worm-like tendrils. In some places, they were so thickly wound around our hand and fingers and hands that it looked like there were oak galls at the ends of our arms, linking us together in unholy intimacy.
The tendrils snapped and popped as we pulled away from one another. Out of the group, I was the one causing the most fuss; it seemed the others were better adjusted to this than I was.
I put my suit’s gloves on as quickly as I could. I almost welcomed the suit’s discomforting heat, if only because it meant my mind and body were once again my own. Fortunately, I quickly forgot about the unpleasantness: I was the SHG’s newest “celebrity” transformee, and, after all that I’d been through, I was definitely enjoying the positive attention.
Actions come with reactions; that was basic physics. You know what else physics told us? Expect the unexpected.
Technically, this was a matter of probability, not physics, but at this point, I’m just pulling hairs.
Even before NFP-20, I’d been doing a startlingly good job of digging myself into a hole. I’d retreated from my family out of guilt and self-hatred for what I saw as my culpability in Rale’s death, which only exacerbated the negativity accumulating in Pel and Jules. I felt like Pel blamed me, and blamed me for not owning up to her anger at me not doing whatever it was she’d expected me to do after our son died. (I’d have done it if I’d known what it was! How could you set your own house in order when you didn’t know how to set yourself in order?) Jules, meanwhile, grew resentful at us and at Rayph, feeling like he was our attempt to replace—read, “erase”—the memory of her younger brother. Mentoring Ani through the early parts of her residency had been my way of trying to move forward—even as I actively looked backwards in composing my “I’m sad because everyone I love keeps dying on me” clarinet sonata—but, if you asked my wife, she’d intimate in that passive-aggressive manner of hers that I was using Ani’s residency as an excuse and a cover for having an affair with her. (That must have been her parents talking through her; a guy like me, who had a tendency to cry during or after sex, was not going to be most women’s idea of a “catch”.)
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My digging-myself-into-a-hole skills had grown by leaps and bounds with the coming of the Green Death. I’d lied to my colleagues about my medical condition and my fitness to continue working, I’d committed fraud by falsifying the results of my Type-Two infection diagnostic examination, and I’d lied by omission to my fellow transformees about some of the details I’d noticed and some of the insights I’d gained. I hoped that telling the SHG about Andalon would be my first step down the road to atonement. Of course, there was another part of me which said that partial atonement was an oxymoron; if it was only partial, you hadn’t really atoned, had you?
What I hadn’t expected, though, was how the SHG’s transformees started treating me once I’d finished my lecture/Q&A session.
I was now the object of their regard, a neurotic tutelary god, pre-packaged in a satiny capsule of electric green plastic, and gift-wrapped with a bow.
Before, I’d needed to elbow my way through the mostly incorporeal crowds. Now? They cleared before me like the waters of the Bay at the Lass’ feet, only for them to pool behind me in hopes of getting a chance to talk to Andalon—with me as the interlocutor. Their eyes glistened as they stared. Necks bobbed and tails lolled.
I’d come up with the idea of physical linkage as a means of showing the transformees how to work with their ghosts when it had occurred to me that the physical wyrm link would let the others talk to Andalon without me having to play the role of the middleman. I couldn’t begin to imagine how strange of an experience it must have been for Andalon, to finally get to interact with the transformees—her precious wyrms, in the making. Some of the transformees got down on one knee to pledge their loyalty to her—if they still had knees to get down on. Others just wanted to talk to her. Still others let loose raging invective, voicing their anger and their disbelief, much like I had done.
One particularly vehement transformee brought Andalon to the brink of tears.
“Why is he so angry? So mean?” she said, her voice cracking.
I glowered at the guy. “I don’t like repeating myself,” I said, “I’ve already given her the fire and fury. You’re just beating a dead horse. Stand down.”
I tore away from him, not wanting to see the girl suffer.
“Hey, get back here!” the transformee barked. He lunged toward me, only for Yuth to insert herself in between the two of us.
“You heard the man, Jeffrey,” she said, outstretching her arms.
It helped that she wasn’t alone; she’d brought Dr. Rathpalla with her.
“It’s enough, Jeff,” Ibrahim said. “Can it. This is stressful for all of us. Imagine what it’s been like for Genneth. Though I do think it was dumb of him to keep Andalon to himself for as long as he did,” he briefly glared at me, “with this latest news, I’ve got the feeling that something big is waiting for us on the horizon. Morale is rarer than hen’s teeth right now; stop rocking the boat.” Dr. Rathpalla narrowed his eyes.
It helped that he could curl forward like a cobra.
With a grumble, Jeffrey walked away, limping on his decomposing legs.
“Thanks,” I said.
Ibrahim waved a claw. “Don’t mention it.”
Speaking of claws, Yuth’s had grown in, as had other things. In terms of appearances, Yuth and Ibrahim’s transformations had converged on one another, somewhat. Nurse Costran now shared Dr. Rathpalla’s twelve-ish-foot-long lizard-person look, though her legs were much more diminished than Ibrahim’s were. The lower two-thirds of her body was almost all snake. Her shriveled legs splayed uselessly at the sides of her tail-waist, just waiting to be snapped off. On the other hand, even though Ibrahim’s tail was getting very big—though not as big as Yuth’s—Dr. Rathpalla’s legs still had a purpose to serve.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just one or two big meals away from looking like them.
A sobering thought, that.
“I’m sorry they’re being hard on you and Andalon,” Yuth added.
“So am I,” I said.
It was perfectly understandable that people would be angry, or even driven to despair when they learned they were transforming into an inhuman creature that most (including myself) would describe as a “monster”. That, I think, was the driving force behind the SHG’s relatively cold reception to Andalon. For what it was worth, I think it made a big difference that many of the SHG’s transformees had gotten lucky, and hadn’t had as many close calls with demons as I had. Some hadn’t had any demon encounters at all.
Indeed, after asking around, I discovered that I had the most demon problems out of anyone in the SHG. Some of the transformees there hadn’t had any demon problems whatsoever, and, unsurprisingly “having few demon problems” was very strongly correlated with feeling anger toward Andalon.
Though I had no verifiable explanation for why I seemed to be Hell’s Public Enemy #1, I chalked it up to my uniquely close connection with Andalon. Though I still had no idea why only I seemed to be able to interact with her, it certainly made sense that that ability would make me a higher priority target for the forces of evil. The fungus wanted to stop Andalon, and I was the one most closely linked to her, ergo, I was in its way.
“So, do you have a minute now?” Ibrahim asked, with a rascally smirk.
Earlier, he’d made a point of telling me there was something he wanted to discuss with me, as a fellow doctor of the mind.
“With Yuth, myself, Larry, and Dr. Finster, you’ve given your Paradise practicum to everyone here,” he added.
“Perfect timing,” I said.
A simple, old-fashioned face-to-face conversation between two people was just the respite I needed after the hustle and bustle of mentoring the transformees and being the go-between for them and Andalon.
I glanced at Andalon, and then at my nearest onlookers. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to take a rain check on doing interpreter work for Andalon. I need a break.”
Nodding, Andalon sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. “Andalon needs a break too…”
She was disheveled. That made me chuckle. I knew how much she’d wanted to talk to the other transformees, so it was amusing (to say the least) to see her tuckered out after having bitten off more than she could chew.
“Can Andalon go to the not-here-place now?” she asked.
I nodded. “Be my guest.”
She vanished with a relieved sigh.
I turned to Dr. Rathpalla. “Now, what was it you wanted to talk about?”
He grinned. “Wyrm psychology.”