The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Seasons of Growth, Seasons of Change

mc, md, nc, scifi

Note: This story is a hypnofetish fantasy. It contains adult language and situations, and examples of fictional characters doing illegal, immoral and/or impossible things to other fictional characters as a prelude to sexual activity. If you 1) are under the age of consent in your community, 2) are disturbed by such concepts, 3) attempt to do most of these things in real life or 4) want graphic ‘on-stage’ sex in your pornography, then please stop reading now.

Permission is granted to re-post this story unaltered to any on-line forum, as long as no fee whatsoever is charged to view it, and this disclaimer and the above e-mail address are not removed. It would also be nice if you told me you were posting it.

Copyright me, © 2000

Note #2: Simon Bar Sinister and I seem to share a wierd form of telepathy at times. I finished this story some time ago, but its resemblence to his recent work ‘Emotional Bonds’ is pronounced. Just for the record, to the best of my knowledge neither of us plagerized from the other.

* * *

He stumbled up the street, still clutching the nearly-empty bottle in one hand. The bottle’s former contents sloshed around in his stomach and in his bloodstream, cheerfully chewed on his liver and his brain.

Something prompted him to lurch to a stop. He peered around with blurry eyes, quizzically watching the buildings sway back and forth in the gathering gloom. He tried to figure out what the problem was. He had gotten his booze for the night. He didn’t need to piss.

He was tired. That was it. Been a long day, time to get some sleep. Hit the ol’ sack. Yes sir.

He turned his body with a terrible sort of shattered dignity and aimed for the mouth of a nearby alley. The darkness beyond the scattered streetlights beckoned invitingly. He moved into the alley, past the battered dumpster which lurked against one brick wall. On the other side of the dumpster was a pile of discarded pallets. The gap between the two looked snug and inviting, and he toppled into it.

Swallowed now by the darkness, he stared up at the night sky. The city lights still blotted it out, reducing it to a haze, but it stirred something in him nonetheless. A few memories floating on the surface of his mind like a cluster of fallen autumn leaves on the top of a scum-filled pond, simultaneously pretty and pathetic. (Not that he thought of it in those terms, of course.)

Memories of... wanting more. Of looking up at a sky that wasn’t filled with fucking smog and streetlights, but stars. There had been a night... he had laid on a hillside, on the grass, and looked up at the stars. He had been fishing earlier in the day, and his pole lay beside him in the cool grass. Now it was all gone, and he couldn’t even remember how it had been taken away. He leaked a few tears, and drifted off into a troubled sleep, still clutching the bottle.

And then everything changed.

* * *

Everything had changed.

Maureen couldn’t remember now how exactly it had changed, if it had been a creeping thing coming on gradually, or if it had happened all at once between one heartbeat and the next.

She also wasn’t exactly sure if things had just changed for her or for everybody everywhere. She was inclined to suspect, in the rare snatches of time she had to think about such things, that it was just her. Well, not just her, but not all of humanity...

This was one of the differences, right there. Before, whenever “before” had been, there had been more time to think about things. Maybe not a lot more time, but still... now whenever she started to think about things, try and sort things out and make sense of her world as a whole, it seemed that something instantly happened that demanded her absolute undivided attention.

Still...

Everything had changed, and yet, oddly...

Much of it stayed the same.

Waking up, for instance. She had done that all the time Before. She was sure of it. Before, the first thing she had done every day was wake up.

And that was still true.

But it wasn’t the same. At the appointed time she would stop dreaming, and open her eyes, yes, but something else inside her didn’t change as these things happened. Some part of her was still asleep. It, whatever it was, maybe was asleep all the time now.

Maybe part of her was in a coma. Isn’t that what they called it when you never woke up? That sounded like the right word. Coma. Cooo-ma. She couldn’t quite decide if it was a pretty word or an ugly word. Could a word be both at the same time? She would ask her roommate’s opinion, but...

Roommate. There was another thing that had changed/stayed the same. She had a roommate and they shared a room. They lived together. She had had a roommate like this Before, but she was about 90% certain it wasn’t the same person as now.

Shannon was a woman for one thing, and Maureen’s old roommate had been a man.

Maybe. She had only a vague memory of masculinity, of hairiness and tallness and a different sort of smell. A nice smell, actually. There was of course no longer a name or face or anything.

And they had slept together in the same bed, she and the male roommate. She was quite certain on that point. That was when she often smelled the nice smell, waking up in the morning, all of her waking up, with the man lying next to her, his warm body touching hers in ways she had liked to be touched.

Now, in this place, she did not sleep in the same bed as Shannon. (Well... not exactly...) Maureen couldn’t quite decide if this was a good thing or bad thing. On the one hand Shannon wasn’t hairy and didn’t smell nice, at least not in the same ways as the man, but on the other, sleeping alone in a bed every night made Maureen feel sad at times. Even the dreams weren’t much comfort at those moments.

Bed. She called it a bed, but it wasn’t really, was it? Yet another thing that had changed. The bed she shared with the man had been more... well... comfortable. This new bed... she slept well enough, slept like a log every single night in fact, but... it was still sort of cramped and not very soft.

She would have called her new bed something else, Before. Before, she would never have consented to sleep in it. It was something that other people slept in. Nasty, disgusting, people she would have rather died than be associated with.

It was odd.

Maureen woke up in her bed. She was able to lay there for a moment or two and think about all of the things mentioned above, but then she had to get up. It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to get up. (Or not want to get up for that matter...) She had to get up. There was simply no room for discussion or debate; her body started moving even before she could think about it. She got up.

Shannon was already up, like always. That was why they didn’t sleep together, Maureen remembered now. Usually Shannon was awake when she was asleep, and vice versa. Not always, but usually.

“Good morning, Shannon.” Maureen actually had no idea if it was morning, or noon or six o’clock in the afternoon. She just said this whenever she woke up, because it seemed to be the thing to do.

“Good evening, Maureen.” Shannon smiled as she spoke. She always said that in reply, and Maureen supposed it made sense. After all, for Shannon it was evening, wasn’t it? Shannon continued. “I made your breakfast.”

“Thank you, Shannon. Are there any problems today?”

“Nothing serious. You need to go look at that one place in the Big Room. The big cluster in the corner just under the windows. Where you do better than I do.”

“OK.” There was no shame in Shannon admitting this. They each had areas of their work where they were more proficient than the other. Maybe that was why they had been paired up.

Work. Maureen thought the word as she squatted and quietly munched away at the breakfast that Shannon had prepared. (It was as tasteless as always, but that wasn’t Shannon’s fault. Maureen was pretty sure that the breakfasts she made every evening for Shannon weren’t any better.) Work was another concept that had changed/remained the same. She still worked. She still had a job. But Before, work had been... more textured somehow. Like breakfast. She had left the... the apartment to work. Why, she had even left the building to work.

Of course, these had all been different buildings than this one. She thought. They were probably still out there, somewhere, but Maureen had no idea where and didn’t really care. She swallowed her bite of food and spoke aloud to Shannon.

“Anything else?”

“No.” Shannon paused for a long moment and stood very still, her blue eyes not looking at Maureen now. “I’ll go to bed now.”

“OK.”

Shannon crawled into the bed that Maureen had just abandoned, curled up and went to sleep.

Or at least she closed her eyes and started to dream. Occasionally, she’d give a little twitch, or a conflicted little moan, both happy and anguished.

Maureen watched this as she finished her breakfast, her jaws moving methodically. Then she drank a little tepid water from the appropriate dispenser and spent a few minutes doing her stretching exercises, limbering up after her night’s sleep. When she was done, she pushed her hair back out of the way. It was getting awfully long and tangled, but she simply didn’t have time to do anything about it.

Hair. Another thing that she had never had time to do was to tell Shannon that she thought that Shannon’s blonde hair (as long as Maureen’s, longer even) was very pretty. Maureen had black hair, and it was nice enough she supposed, but Before she had poured something on it to make it look blonde. Then things had changed and her hair had slowly turned black again, as it got longer and longer. So had the hair on the other parts of her body. It was another thing that sometimes made her a little sad, especially once it (the hair on her head, that is) had gotten long enough for her to see easily.

She got to work. As always Shannon had cleaned and polished the tools and carefully arranged them in their proper places on the spotless floor, lined up in neat rows under the light and alongside the short wooden stepladder. The tools were all very different in shape, but each was fashioned out of a single piece of slick, oily-looking metal. The same kind of metal made up the slim collars that both Maureen and Shannon wore around their necks. The collars were tight but not choking, as smooth and seamless as the tools. Maureen loathed and loved the texture of hers as it slid against her skin. She sometimes dreamed that it was strangling her, while other times it gave her orgasms, dozens of them all overlapping. Still other times it did both of these things simultaneously. She liked those dreams best of all; they made all the sadness go away.

Maureen took the proper tool for dealing with the cluster that Shannon had mentioned. It was a long thing, with four narrow prongs on its tip. Each prong was bent at the same slight angle. It would have looked like a fork, except the prongs were arranged in a square, two and two.

Maureen wasn’t sure what a fork was.

She padded into the Big Room. There were three rooms: The Main Room, The Big Room and The Little Room. They slept in the Main Room and stored their tools there, simply because that was where there was the most available floor-space, and ranged thickly around all of the edges of the all rooms was their work.

The Plants. That was what the two women called them, but they weren’t really plants. They weren’t green, and they certainly didn’t smell nice.

But they didn’t smell bad either, exactly. They smelled like something rich and rotting and gooey and tasty and virulently poisonous. As for what they looked like... if Maureen searched her memory of the Beforetimes, she came up with the word ‘cobwebs’. That wasn’t really accurate, but it was in the ballpark. (‘Ballpark’?) The Plants stretched across every edge and corner of the three Rooms, the thick strands tangling with each other all and interconnected. They were the color of deeply rotten meat, and pulsed and throbbed and whispered snatches of words that Maureen didn’t quite understand.

Sometimes when she was dreaming, the words became a bit clearer, but they just said things that she already knew. She found this disappointing, but not terribly surprising.

It was her and Shannon’s job to tend to and nurture the Plants, to make sure they stayed healthy and strong, but also not to let them run totally rampant. Their energy and growth had to be controlled, channeled into specific productive uses. Maureen had no idea what those uses were, but she had the vague impression that they were slowly building towards something, a day that was gradually drawing nearer. Maybe after that day, things would change again. She wasn’t at all sure how she felt about that idea.

She knelt on the wooden floor in front of ‘her’ cluster. (She didn’t actually own anything. of course, not the cluster, not her body, not her mind, but it was simpler to think of it in such terms.) As Shannon had said, it was nothing serious, but there was some minor tangling developing in potions of the sub-webbing. If she didn’t pry it loose, the cluster could eventually twist up into too tight a knot and strangle itself.

The thought of one of the clusters dying was just too hideous to even entertain. The Plants had to stay healthy and strong.

It didn’t take long under her practiced hand; the fork-tool neatly hooked the patches of sub-webbing and pulled them straight, relieving the congestion. Once that was done, she stroked the cluster with gentle fingertips, her body oils and heat smoothing and sealing. More extensive procedures weren’t required this time.

She knew every inch of every Plant and could do this blindfolded, if there had been anything in any of the Rooms to make a blindfold out of.

It was dark enough in the room that she was practically doing it already. Each room had a single unshielded bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling from a long cord, and this was another thing that had un/changed. Before, light bulbs occasionally burned out, and had to be replaced. Even now, Maureen remembered once trying to replace a bulb and hurting herself when she fell off a ladder, much like the one currently sitting out by the tools. After she had fallen, somebody (the male roommate?) had taken her to a white place where strangers wearing green clothes had poked and prodded her. She had hated it, been humiliated and embarrassed. One of the good things about the change was that she never had to go to white places anymore. She never seemed to get sick or anything.

Which made her sort of like the bulbs, actually, since they never burned out. They also didn’t put out light like she remembered the Before-bulbs doing. These were dim and sort of flickery, and the color was about the same as the Plants, maybe a little less rotten and a little more like sunlight. They burned all the time and if there was a way to switch them off, Maureen didn’t know about it.

Sometimes, lately, Maureen thought that some of the largest clusters were doing more than just reflecting that light...

Her fingers knew what they were doing with very little input needed from the rest of her, so Maureen was able to spare a quick glance at the room’s windows. She only thought about them since Shannon had mentioned them. Only the Big Room and the Main Room had windows. (The Small Room was windowless and smooth and white, with odd bits of metal tubing sticking up out the floor here and there.) The Plants had crawled up and covered most of the panes, seeming to like growing on the glass, but even before that, the windows weren’t much use; long thick planks of wood had been methodically nailed over them on the outside. There were one or two tiny chinks, and slivers of pale light filtered wanly through. So maybe it really was morning. Somewhere.

She finished stroking the cluster into shape, rose and returned to the Big Room with the tool. It went back into its place on the floor under the bulb, and she took the next tool of the day. This was even longer and thinner, but with a wide fluffy end which was brushed over the Plants. It gently removed something from the Plants’ surface, maybe just dust. Every inch had to be covered with this treatment, and they used the ladder to use to reach the high places. (Maureen was always very careful when using the ladder.) Both she and Shannon did this, so the plants got the treatment twice a day.

As she brushed, Maureen studied the Plants intently, looking for even the slightest flaw or problem. She noted one or two minor blemishes that could wait until she was finished brushing, but nothing important. There were one or two of these almost every morning.

Minutes and then hours slid past. As always when she did the dusting, Maureen was vaguely aware that this particular stretch of time was going by more quickly than it would have Before. Before, she guessed, she would have been horrifically bored doing this, but now while she certainly didn’t rush or skimp anywhere, the time just flew along.

Just as she was finishing up and dragging the ladder back to its home, the summons came.

Like all the summons, it came up suddenly from nowhere and everywhere. Rising up from the floor through her feet and legs, thrumming out from the plants and the tools and the collar, coming from the center of her own brain.

Shannon immediately stopped dreaming and got out of bed, to take Maureen’s place while she was gone. Maureen left the Rooms without a backwards glance, stepping through the doorless entryway into the hall. There were Plants here as well, but they were not nearly as lush and vibrant as those tended back in their Rooms. Maureen felt quite proud of this fact.

The only light came from the bulbs shining in the Rooms.

All the sets of Rooms. There were others. She tended to forget this fact during the time between summonings. She briefly found herself looking into the Main Room across the hall from her and Shannon’s. There was another woman there. She was vaguely familiar, but Maureen couldn’t dredge up a name to match to her face. She was down on her hands and knees near the door, ministering to her own Plants, first with a tiny toothpick-like tool and then with her tongue, gently licking some small new growths. Her hair was even blacker than Maureen’s, and even longer than Shannon’s, spilling around her equally dark body in profusion.

She seemed to be doing a good job, which made Maureen happy. First came the licking... then...

Maureen walked on, and the woman disappeared from view. There were more doorways and more Main Rooms, but no other women; they all must have been tending their Plants out of view.

Every Main Room had a bed in it, turned so she couldn’t see inside. Seeing them somehow triggered a connection in Maureen. Or maybe it was the summoning. She always seemed to be able to think new thoughts during her trip down.

Crates. Packing crates tipped on their sides. That’s what I used to call beds. Before. Winos slept in them.

She felt a vague disquiet at this, and firmly pushed the memory away. It sank back into blackness without resistance.

At the end of the hall were two sets of doors, these still mounted in their frames. One was made of metal, not the metal of the Plant-tools, but a less greasy substance, battered and stained now. Again a word surfaced.

Elevator. But it doesn’t work. Not anymore.

She turned to the other door. It was wood, with a single word painted on it. The word was barely visible, but she could see very well in the dark now.

STAIRS.

She pulled open the door and started down the steps. Unlike in the Rooms, there was dust here, and she left footprints. She could see the overlapping shapes, various layers of dust, were other bare feet had passed by in recent days.

There was dust, but there were no cobwebs.

She walked down, heading for the basement.

After every couple of flights of stairs, there was another door with more words on it, and a single bulb hanging overhead to make them readable. 3. 2. LOBBY.

At this last door she paused. It was not her decision to pause, but as she stood there waiting, her hands at her sides, a thought flitted across her mind.

Lobby. That door leads to the lobby. The entrance to this building. I could run out that door and dash across the lobby and then maybe get out of the building, and I wouldn’t be stopped. I could do these things even from the Rooms. Anytime I wanted to.

It was a true thought, and it was also utterly meaningless.

She was not being tested. There was nothing to test. She was waiting, or rather something else was waiting, watching an event that was happening someplace else and holding her in place in case she was required for something. A sense of history rose...

And then passed. Nothing happened.

She continued down into the basement, her pace still steady and calm. Even so, as she walked, she became aware that something was changing inside her. She clinically studied the sensation, reached for yet another name.

Arousal. That was it. When she was working, she sometimes became aroused, but it was only because she needed something... the Plants needed something... but it wasn’t the same as this. This feeling was reaching into her brain, not just her sex.

The first room she came to was where the furnace was still kept. The looming mass of ancient steel was cold and dark; as far as Maureen knew, it was never used or needed. She certainly never felt uncomfortably hot or cold. Yes, the furnace was never used... except...

A new memory. Or maybe old one?

They had been in the room with the furnace. Maureen and Shannon and others. Had the dark-skinned woman been one of them? Maureen thought so.

And she was standing in front of the furnace, which stood open and burning in full roar, its gigantic fiery maw casting a hellish flicker over the scene. The flames weren’t yellow, but the color of rotten meat. And she was holding something in her hands. A purse. Her purse. Something that she herself had actually been allowed to own...

She tossed it into the furnace. It vanished into the flames, swallowed in an instant.

She took off her suit-jacket. It was dirty and had cobwebs on it, from when... from when she had gotten it dirty. Out in the lobby.

It was next to go into the flames

And then her shoes.

And her skirt.

And all the rest.

And then...

She had gone into the next room, on a twisty path sloping further down into the darkness, following the Plants as they all twined and came together, headed towards their Root.

She had crawled into the next room, on her hands and knees, just as she was crawling now. The Plants were so thick and wild here that it was almost a necessity, but she would have done it anyway. The arousal grew and grew, hot and throbbing, and a plaintive little mew escaped her lips.

And in the next room, not really a room at all anymore but shapeless space deep in the earth, there was something crouched down amidst both decaying piles of matter and the massive spewing tendrils of its own body. Something white and bloated and covered with boils and pulsing in time to her own need. The Root. It was waiting for her, its arms opening.

Maureen gave a tiny scream and crawled towards it, her sex and brain both wet and raw and flaming with desire.

* * *

Everything had changed.

It remembered that the process had been somehow both sudden and gradual. It had arrived here, in this place, weak, no, almost dead from its long journey across the cold and dark In-Between, the vast matterless wastelands where things far worse than Itself roamed with gigantic ravenous impunity. Many, many other scouts and probes had been flung out before It, and all had failed, each a tiny spark snuffed out or casually swallowed amidst an infinite blackness.

But somehow, It had survived, and arrived here. It lay for a long time in moist darkness, recovering, feebly gathering what few tiny scraps of nutrients came within reach of Its tiny probing tendrils. Finally, It gained enough strength to venture forth and explore this new realm to which It had been sent.

Unlike its half-forgotten origin-point, this proved to be a chaotic place, full of too much light and motion and color and stimulation, all coming and going in massive rumbling flashes. It lurked in dark corners, watching and trying to learn, to find the rhythms and patterns, so it could integrate itself with them. It failed. Nothing It had experienced had prepared It for this.

Inevitably, It realized that there was only one way to learn the things that It needed to know in order to succeed at Its mission. It wasn’t supposed to use that way. Not yet. Willfully violating the established procession was very hard, but failing at Its mission was far, far worse.

It hunkered down in a quiet corner and waited until something blundered against it in the dark, a scuttling creature with many legs and a hard black shell covering a soft interior.

For some reason, this last attribute appealed to It, and It entered the creature.

And so things began to change.

It was still It, but It was now the creature as well. A thing with no real brain or thoughts, a thing that saw only blackness and light, that lived only to eat and survive and breed. With this partial merging, It had lost some of Its original purpose and would never entirely recover it. It ran from the light. It ate. It bred, but did not pass Its essence onto Its countless offspring. They were simply more scuttling creatures, obeying only their ancient genetic heritage. It could not, would not, intertwine Itself well enough with the creature’s structure.

Then something both disastrous and wonderful happened.

It/the creature was abruptly caught and eaten by something else, a bigger creature. The journey here had taught It much and It managed to survive once again, separating Itself from the first creature as its carcass dissolved in a pool of fiery liquid. After a time, It found a path inside the bigger creature, and slithered its way to the thing’s brain. A new merging, but with some threads of the old merging still along for the ride.

More changes.

The new creature was as already mentioned much bigger than the first, and had its hard places, its support structure, on the inside of its body. It had only four legs, and its outer surface was covered with softness. On the other hand, it was similar to the first host in that it lived to eat and breed and avoid the light.

But only mostly similar. There was something else there, a vague flickering, a sense of self and of place that the first host lacked and that It continued to crave.

It looked out through the creature’s eyes and saw a world that made for the first time a sort of sense, crude rhythms and patterns becoming visible. As primitive as they were, the host creature still did not fully understand many of these flows, but it was nevertheless aware of their existence and used them to survive. And now It did the same thing as well. Eat. Breed. Live. And still it was not quite enough. Something was missing.

Then It became aware of something much more important.

The other creatures, the third kind. The endless stream of giants that stamped and rumbled and bellowed overhead. They were clumsy and slow and left endless piles of mouth-watering delights scattered in their wake, but they were also

DANGEROUS.

This fact was ground into the host-creature’s every cell and fiber, a lesson well-learned and passed down over tens of thousands of years.

Avoid The Giants.

Any time one of the huge creatures came blundering anywhere nearby, the host-creature would turn tail and run, scuttling back into the darkness. It had to drive the host-creature back out, drive Itself out into the light, to study and watch the giants as they came and went. The more It watched, the more convinced It became that one of the giants had to be Its next host, which presented a problem.

It quickly became clear that the giants did not want to eat the host-creature, or others of its type. They either ignored them, or killed them and quickly discarded the bodies, not even allowing their bare skin to touch the carcasses. It wondered if perhaps some of Its fellow seekers had survived the trip here after all, and the giants knew of Its intentions.

In the end, feeling the host-creature’s life forces beginning to wane, it took a desperate gamble. It noted that most of the giants disappeared from the region during the dark stretches that regularly alternated with the light. (Rhythms... patterns...) But not all of them. Some, unknowingly mimicking Its current host-creature, found a dark corner somewhere and curled up and tried to sleep.

It waited and finally a chance arose. During a patch of blackness, one of the giants lumbered into the great square canyon in which the host-creature lived. The giant thrashed around for a seemingly endless time before finally settling down and sleeping, filling the canyon with its noise.

It drove the host-creature forth for the last time. It was the hardest struggle yet; the creature had to be dragged inch by inch out into the open, and up onto a nearby platform, near the giant’s head.

Then with an even deeper struggle, It ripped itself free of the host-creature and jumped the frigid chasm to the giant, sliding in through one of the openings in the head.

Once again, It had nearly died. The pain of this separation had been too much, which was the reason It was supposed to have waited, found a good host right from the start.

It knew that, for better or for worse, this new host would be Its home forever.

With a last bit of dying strength, It merged.

And so everything changed for the last time. Changed in a way that It could never have anticipated, never have dreamed of.

The mind that It now slid into was vast, as big as the body that carried it. After being in the

-Cockroach-

and the

-Rat-

the sense of freedom... of boundless expanses going to the far horizons and beyond... It was intoxicating, staggering. Its tendrils shot forward into infinity, locking into place. It spun around and around, stunned, blinded by the distances.

And even better than the space, there were the things piled up in that space, treasures stacked rank on rank. A storehouse filled to the brim with wonders and delights. Although even in those first heady moments, It could see that much of this storehouse had been allowed to fall into horrific decay and rubble, even been intentionally vandalized beyond hope of repair. In that moment It learned the concept of grief and It wept.

The other thing that came to It in that first moment was the fundamental human concept of names, an idea that had never occurred to It before. Before this moment, It had not called Itself ‘It’, It had not called Itself anything, any more than the rat or the roach had.

And It didn’t call Itself ‘It’ now. It had merged forever with something that had called itself Chet. Both had died in that moment, and been reborn. The thing that had once been two things thought for a moment, dreamed new dreams, rummaged in what remained of the storehouse and came to a decision.

Chetit. That was its name now.

Chetit opened its eyes for the very first time. More of the world’s rhythms fell into place. It understood now. Not everything, not yet, not by half. But so, so many more, most of what the rat had known, and a whole new score of pulses and yearnings that the rat would never begin to even suspect. (Maybe its descendants would someday, a thousand or a million years from now. As noted, the potential was there...) Chetit sat up and the world tipped and spun. The masses of raw alcohol that Chet had consumed earlier in the evening was still sloshing around in its system, but Chetit made a few tentative adjustments and the effects began to fade.

Other things were changing. Chetit’s body was already starting to shift and alter itself. Things, mental and physical, were sprouting from it. It wasn’t sure at first why this hadn’t happened with the first two hosts, but it was happening now. It realized that it had to go somewhere, get further out of sight before People started asking Questions. The pieces of the rat-mind and the roach-mind still clinging to it agreed vehemently with this plan. Go someplace dark and quiet and safe.

It staggered forth from the alley on wobbly legs (From six to four to two...) For the first time, it truly tapped into the rhythms of the city, and then more faintly the entire world beyond, felt them throbbing beneath its mental touch. As it did this, its gaze fell on the abandoned building opposite, and in that moment, its destiny opened up before it, a merging and reviving of near-forgotten dreams and hopes for both It and Chet Gurlick Harkendale. Chetit would do what it was sent here to do, but it would do it for itself, now that it existed, not for whatever waited back on the other side of the In-Between. Now that it had found a large-enough brain, it was supposed to reconfigure itself, make its own structure into a large gate by which the other billion pieces of It could bypass the In-Between, a literal mass of invaders spilling directly into this...

It became aware that Chet’s vocabulary left something to be desired.

...this dimension. A more-or-less correct word finally came, dredged up from somewhere deep inside, from a book read in a happier youth. (At the idea of written words, of books, of things filled with ranks and ranks of names, Chetit’s mind did another stunned flip.)

It wrenched its mind back to the moment and immediate concerns. It would not do what it had been sent to do. The defiance that Before had been unthinkable was now more than possible. It would change its body, yes. But it would serve another purpose, a mixture of desires high and low.

And for that purpose, it would require assistance. Assistance and sustenance. It turned its gaze up the street, then down. There appeared to be more activity in the second direction and it began walking that way, gaining more confidence as it moved, mastering the movement of muscles and bones and washing away the last of the alcohol. The ratroach part of its mind clamored again for darkness and safety, but it stifled them.

The street was somewhat more busy. Cars zoomed past, and Chetit caught flickers of the mind-rhythm within them as they did so. None were what it was looking for.

Then it saw what it needed, tasted the right rhythms.

They were coming towards it, walking on long legs covered with pink fishnet stockings.

* * *

Ruby strolled down the street, her tall body automatically flaunting itself, casting its hooks into the darkness. Things weren’t looking very promising this night; the traffic was light and she hadn’t even had a nibble so far. At least it wasn’t cold out, for a change.

Something made her pause and look up.

A man was standing up at the next intersection, looking at her. She studied him in return, and the alarm bells immediately went off in her mind. In this biz, you quickly got real good at fitting people into categories. First there were the major headings, as she personally called them: Johns, Cops, Business Associates, and Everybody Else.

The guy on the corner, standing under the streetlight, was definitely an Everybody Else. He looked like one of the many harmless (if puke-inducing) winos who shuffled around this part of town. He was certainly dressed like one. And she thought she could smell him all the way from where she stood. But there was something fundamentally wrong about his stance, about the way he was looking at her. Not a john-look or a cop-look, but nevertheless focused in on her like a cop-car’s spotlight. Most of the winos focused about as well as a dead flashlight.

Ruby considered. She was a big fucking girl (in more ways than one) and knew more than a few tricks if things got ugly.

But the alarm bells continued to ring, and she had learned long ago to listen to them when they sounded.

She turned to go the other way, to run if she had to.

She turned back.

Everything changed.

* * *

Chetit tried to narrow its focus, pull in the new invisible tendrils that were sprouting and tapping into the throb and hum around it, and wrap the appendages solely around the woman. (‘Woman.’ This name set off a whole new string of reactions in its brain, and other portions of its anatomy, hastening the changes...)

It was much, much harder than it had anticipated. The woman... Ruby Brevix... had obviously sensed danger and turned to run. She turned back and stared once more, feeling its uncertain fumblings inside her, feeling it pull on her. Chetit’s ‘hands’ were too big and crude, they flapped and splayed, unable to get a firm grip. She struggled against it, her mind slipping away one moment, then hauled back into its grasp in the next. She staggered towards him, a painful step at a time in her high heels, struggling too hard to have any energy to waste on screaming.

Then it felt something slip by under its hands that it could lock onto, a niche in her mind, a hole that cried to be filled. It slid into that hole, slid deep into it.

The pleasure centers of her brain, although of course neither of them thought of it in those terms at the time. She orgasmed, her rhythms blossoming around her as bright and gaudy as the tight clothes she wore.

Chetit plunged deeper into that niche, setting the hooks and pulling.

She came again, stronger than before, and staggered several more steps towards it in one quick surge.

Another pull. It was sweating and straining as much as she was.

The blast this time sent Ruby to her knees, scattering her purse and its contents into the gutter. She slowly crawled to it across the pavement. At its feet, she looked up, her dark features filled with hate and fear and rapidly growing addiction. It held out a grimy long-fingered hand, offering to help her to her feet. She spit at it, and came again. The hooks slid deeper.

Dropping the hand, it turned and walked back up the street, the way it had come, feeling its body continue to shift and change and grow. Its layers of filthy clothes were beginning to strain and split.

Ruby got to her feet and followed, a recalcitrant dog being dragged with an unbreakable leash. Together they lurched back up the empty street, to the abandoned building that it had seen when it came out of the alley. One of the boards hammered over the front doorway of the apartment had already been wrenched partially loose, and it squirmed inside, Ruby following it and pulling the board back into place behind her.

They wormed their way down, down into the basement. A few other bums and derelicts had sought shelter there, but when the two new individuals arrived, the ones already there saw what Chetit was becoming and fled before it. It let them go. It knew all too well that by morning they would think they had merely seen more monsters inside their own heads.

It pulled her to it, mentally and physically and she struggled anew against it, struggled for hours as it wormed its tendrils of influence inside her, all going in through the ever-expanding niche in her mind and taking her names away from her one by one, adding them to its own collection. In the end they were curled up together in the filth and squalor, both experiencing something new and wondrous, something that neither had ever dreamed was possible, the rhythms bright and searing. In a very real sense, everyone involved made love for the first time in their lives.

In the morning, it sent Ruby out to begin to collect the things that they would need while it recovered and built its own resources. She went and returned, as she had been ordered. She still struggled at times, but the struggles became weaker and weaker as the days passed, and soon stopped altogether.

Its body burrowed into the building, put down roots. Tapped permanently into the rhythms. Intertwined with the building’s frame, with the masses of power and water and phone lines that passed nearby. Fashioned and vomited up the tools needed to tend itself, and the food that Ruby needed to survive. Ruby was an utterly obedient slave now, her smooth and placid rhythms a delightful counterpoint to the rich and turbulent throb out in the rest of city. She used the tools and tenderly nurtured it, and it expanded. It discovered that it could not just pull in as it had done with Ruby, but push away as well, push away each day with greater and greater strength and subtlety. Soon the building was totally abandoned, not just by humans but by all manner of living things. Then the buildings on either side, then the entire block.

It pulled as well, reaching further and further into the rhythms that flowed around it and finding what it needed. Nutrients. Information. Power. It read books by the hundreds. It watched the movies and the television programs, surfed the webpages, looked out of a thousand different mechanical eyes, all over the world, saw the wonders and the delights, the horrors and the banality. It learned so much, found so much buried and forgotten wealth and knowledge that taking legal possession of its home became as simple as taking physical possession. Soon it owned the entire neighborhood, working through a string of elaborately-arranged holding companies on three continents.

Its position secured, it started pulling in more interesting things. One at a time. Having learned more than one lesson with Ruby, it lured them now gently, a step at a time over long days as they passed near the fringes of its influence, wooed and teased and tempted, like the still-vivid brook-trout which had swam through one special summer of Chet’s youth, forty-two long years ago. Lured them closer and closer, until they were (so to speak) face to face and the real hooks could be ceremoniously inserted in their proper places, one by one, as the woman in question knelt before it in naked and silent submission. And with each new woman collected, its strength and sophistication grew, and a new set of rooms went into cultivation in the apartment building overhead.

* * *

We are getting closer. Things are changing.

They were not words. Chetit could still form physical words of a sort if it wished, but it did not speak to the woman it currently held in its endless grasp, sliding its multitude of pencil-thin fingers across her smooth skin. It probed her mind with less corporal fingers, tasted her rhythms, ran a lingering mental tongue over the flavors of her unique names, many of which it now reserved for its exclusive use. Maureen Matthews. Henry Matthews. Shannon. Big Room. Little Room. In addition, it adjusted her thoughts as carefully and as delicately as she and her ‘sisters’ prepared its extensions, its wombs, in the rooms above. In response, she moaned and pushed herself further down onto the thing its cock had become. Her surface mind wouldn’t remember any of it, once she left this room, returned to her “Plants,” but it continued to broadcast the images into her. Part of her would remember. The part that was now always asleep.

I cannot impregnate you in any useful way, even though part of me was once what you are. The differences are too great. It would all be so much simpler if I could. But our work continues. One day, my extensions will blossom. And my progeny, my copies of myself will go forth, and venture forth across the land and the seas, one for every city in the world. New York. London. Paris. New Delhi. Ulan Bator. We will sow the seeds of my purpose, in the garden beds I have already purchased and secured. And if... when... another like the thing I once was makes it across the In-Between, we will be watching all the rhythms of the world. We will sense it growing, and we will stop it before it can let the bulk of It in. And more importantly, we, all of us, you, your sisters and your sisters-yet-to-be, my children/clones, will work to make the rhythms deeper and deeper, more wondrous for all things on the planet. The garden that is the world will grow lush and fertile, and a million new blooms will open beneath the sun.

They orgasmed together, and all the other women in the building paused in their joyous toils for a moment and came a little as well, whether their eyes were open or closed.

Then it was finished with Maureen, and it sent her back to her Plants.

* * *

Annemarie trudged along the street, bent over slightly because of the chill wind that pushed against her. She moved briskly, not wanting to linger for too long in this part of town. Why had she started walking this godforsaken path every day? It was at least three blocks out of her way, and she had only originally come this way one day on a sudden vague whim.

But somewhere deep inside, she knew the reason why. It was approaching now on her right, on the east side of the street. Even with her head bowed, she could feel its presence throbbing against her as if it was on fire.

The apartment building. 723 Testin Street. Sturgeonhouse Apartments, built 1958, according to the crumbling words carved over the door. It had been ‘the’ building in her mind for a couple of weeks now, even though it was just one of several in these blocks, row after row of them standing empty and abandoned and thoroughly boarded up, punctuated with the occasional black and empty lot were one had finally burned down.

Except... Something was different about this one. Something almost subliminal. An odor... a sound... something sweet and sickly and deeply compelling, a rich and decadent dessert, filled with whipped cream and thick black chocolate and chunks of fruit which teetered just on edge of spoiling...

Her pace faltered and she stood in front of the doorway, at the bottom of the wide stone steps. The silence was thick and eerie. There never seemed to be anyone in sight whenever she came by here, not even a solitary rat or pigeon, and the sounds of the rest of the city were distant and muffled. The door into the apartment was boarded up, just like all the windows, but she had noticed a few days before that one of the boards appeared to be a little loose. She looked a little closer. She could just push it aside, crawl inside the lobby where...

...Where someone would be waiting for me... a woman with long hair and very little else... she will smile at me, her new sister, and lead me down into the darkness of the basement.... show me the dessert... show me how to..

Taste it.

She shook herself sharply. What had she just been thinking? How long had she been standing there? She walked back down the front steps (not quite remembering walking up them...) and started up the street again. It was oddly difficult at first, as if she was fighting her way through masses of invisible webs. Finally she seemed to break free, and picked up the pace.

But not as quite as fast as before. Something was still clinging to her, slowing her down, a few trailing threads.

And tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day, she had to walk by the building again.

She had to.

Because things had changed.

(end)