NOVEL WEB Chapter 2
My head swam. My cheeks burned. Someone, something, had approached me and kissed me and turned my world and my brain inside out. What was she? Why had she approached me? There was a thing living in Alderberg and it had noticed me. It was terrifying. She’d stopped time as casually as she’d stopped the tram. She’d kissed me like a long-lost lover and it had been the most intense experience of my life. It had been like she’d pulled me out of my body with a single kiss and then left me for dead by the side of the road panting. What was wrong with me that I wanted her to do it again?
I realized I had trouble breathing and realized that I was still face-down on my pillow. It was hard to realize where I was. Everything felt strange. I was more in touch with every uncomfortable shift of my clothing against my body, and at the same time I was experiencing the most powerful sense of dissociation of my life. My shirt painfully burned against my skin. I rolled over, the ceiling proving to be a lousy distraction, and found that breathing wasn’t much easier than when I’d had a mouthful of down. To say that my lips tingled was an understatement. My lips tingled in the same way that your face tingled after you’d been slapped. My lips burned, and I found myself licking them as if I was trying to find that sweet taste again.
I reached up and touched my face and found that my fingers burned to the touch, and the tingling sensation slowly ran its way up my hand, up my arm, and I wondered for a strange moment if this was an allergic reaction. I tried to sit up and found that the whole world was spinning around me. I was in the middle of a reality-warping cyclone and I worried I was going to throw up. My room had a washbasin on the other side, with a dusty, dirty mirror I’d never gone through the trouble of cleaning, and wondered if I could make it that far. If I could splash water onto my face I’d feel better, I told myself, and tried to get up onto my feet.
I hadn’t been this unsteady since that time I’d gone for drinks with some of the guys from my last summer job. That had been miserable, but this was somehow worse. The room tilted forward and my arms windmilled as I tried to stay upright, to no avail. I almost fell the entire distance of the room, trying to steady myself on the sink and reaching for the faucet. What was happening? Why were my knees so weak? Why was my skin on fire?
My hand missed the sink completely. I slipped, stumbled and slammed my head into the front of the sink with a sickening crunch, and I knew that a sound like that meant that my face now probably had a dent in it, that I’d broken the front of my head. I fell to the ground and waited for the pain to come, for the shock to wear off, for my nose to start bleeding and my teeth to come out. But nothing happened. Well, nothing happened to me. A large chunk of the porcelain sink came down and hit me square in the face while I was still trying to catch my breath and wondered, as the white came tumbling down towards me, if this was how I’d die.
The sink bounced off my head and landed next to me with a clatter. I was still conscious. That was something, at least. I lay still on the ground, staring at the porcelain, and tried to process what was happening. Finally, I decided to take the plunge and touched my face. Well, everything seemed to still be there. My face was wet, and I assumed it was a bloody mess, but when I looked at my hand I couldn’t see the expected red splotches. I tried to get back onto my feet, slowly, and cracked the back of my head against what was left of the sink. More porcelain tumbled to the ground around me. Still no pain. My brain damage must have been severe.
I finally managed to stand upright. The sink was a mess. It was completely destroyed like someone had gone to town on it with a sledgehammer. There were pieces of it all over the floor. My face burned. My arms and legs burned and my skin was on fire. My shirt itched and the rest of my clothes felt simultaneously too tight and too big. What the fuck was going on? I wiped the dust off the mirror to see what the damage was.
There was no blood, which was still strange. But my face was drenched. I positively glistened with sweat. My hair was a wet mess. I reached up and ran my fingers through it. It was like I’d just come out of the shower. My usually shaggy, shoulder-length hair looked a little darker than usual. As I touched it and the hair ran between my fingers, it didn’t stop. It was like I was pulling at gum. I stared dumbfounded in the mirror as my hair grew like I was pulling it out of my head. It ran in rivulets down my shoulders like a liquid. I was hallucinating, I had to be. It kept growing longer in front of my eyes, in thick, black waves until it came past my midriff.
When I finally focused on my own face again, I nearly screamed. That was my face, but even on bad days, screaming felt like a bit of an overreaction. I didn’t enjoy my reflection, but this was something different altogether. My eyes had lost their usual light blue-colour. They were deep purple, although it was possible they just looked that way because they were so bloodshot. My lips looked inflamed and I wondered again if I’d had some kind of allergic reaction. They were full and red. The pain that came after did little to dissuade me from that thought.
It started as a sound, a crunching noise that vibrated through my skull and turned into a grinding horror in my mouth, what I imagined it would feel like to have your skin pulverized between two millstones. The pain was intense, shooting flares up into my skull like someone was shoving railway spikes up into my brain through the roof of my mouth. But it was the sound that horrified me the worst, like the slow shattering of wood. Or bone, I realized. I opened my mouth to scream and blood ran from my mouth as I realized I’d bit myself. Only when looking in the mirror did I realize why that had been. I thought that, perhaps, I’d bitten my tongue, but seeing my reflection, I understood that what had happened had been worse.
The face in the mirror had four long, sharp fangs, my canines elongated by a third of an inch. I’d bitten into my lips, but that hadn’t been the cause of the pain. The incisors stopped growing and I panted as I saw the blood stop running and the stabbing sensation quickly ebbed away. Why did I have fangs? What the hell was happening? I tried to formulate another thought, but it seemed like the nightmare wasn’t over yet.
Everything hurt at the same time after that. My skin well and truly burned, like I’d been thrown onto a hot stove, and I fell backwards, my sense of balance and my legs giving out at the same time. I clawed at my clothing, the burning sensation a thousand times worse where my skin touched cloth, and there was a small relief in finding that the clothing fell away easily where I tore at it. Relief that lasted for all of a few seconds as my forehead felt like it was splitting open due to the mother of all headaches, and with horror I realized that the sound of cracking stone was my skull. I reached up, in reflex more than conscious decision, and felt two protrusions from my forehead. I realized with terror that two horns were pushing through my skin, stretching it painfully until they tore through, and I felt the keratin force itself between my fingers as they curled up and sideways.
I rolled over as my back first ached, and the sound of tearing flesh became deafening as my shoulder blades cracked and shattered and then seemed to pull themselves out of my skin. I cried hot tears as I heard bone crack and groan. I tried to get up on my knees, in an attempt to crawl away from my own body, what it was doing to me, but found it almost impossible as the back of my shoulders felt like they were extending, far beyond what was normal, far beyond what I’d considered possible.
Slowly, the pain began to dissipate. I felt cool air against my skin, skin where I’d never had any, several feet behind me. I groaned and tensed up and felt something against my back and came to the realization that this feeling came and went as I tensed. I tried to lift my head and saw a black wing folding up and extending itself as I flexed my back. What the f--
I’d almost made it through a whole curse word as my hands were, apparently, next on the chopping block. It felt like my nails were being pulled all at the same time and I closed my eyes, my mouth open in a silent scream as tears ran down my face. I was in true and absolute agony.
When it was over, I was a sobbing mess in the middle of my room. I kept my eyes squeezed shut as I lay curled up on the floor. The pain had turned me inside out and nearly unmade me as a person, but what I’d half expected was for it to continue, for my being to be tortured until I begged for it to stop or, alternatively, death. But it had waned away and the pain was suddenly a memory. Not even my skin was sore anymore. I cried silently and fell asleep, exhausted.
I came to some time later. It was already dark outside. I was lying in the foetal position in the middle of my room. I couldn’t see much, but my eyes very quickly adapted to the dark. I blinked a few times and my room came into focus. A part of me had hoped that this had all been some fever dream, that I’d picked up a bug or something, but my clothes were shredded on the floor. There was porcelain everywhere. What had happened to me? Slowly getting to my knees and trying to get my feet under me, I felt very unsteady. It was hard to stand up; I was off-balance. I also swayed while I walked, like I was carrying a large backpack, and I found that, if I leaned into the sway, it was easier not to lose my balance.
I reached for the light and looked in the mirror again. In front of me was a woman, standing in shadows. That wasn’t right. I ran the tap for a second, not caring that, with most of the sink gone, most of the water splattered on the floor, and wiped off the rest of the glass. More and more of the woman on the other side of the glass became visible to me. I realized as I was cleaning the mirror that my hands were a deep red. My entire skin was. So was the woman on the other side of the mirror. She had ram’s horns. I tensed up when I saw her move the same way I did and suddenly her two wings extended far behind her. The sharp tips tore deep grooves in the ceiling and as I froze in panic, they retracted again.
The woman in the mirror looked… cute. Beautiful. She reminded me of the librarian. When she pulled her arms to her chest in surprise, she’d made a face that would’ve made me smile if the situation had been different. I also now realized that, as she pulled her hands to her chest, that she was stark naked. That I was. That I was holding two handfuls of… oh. I looked in the mirror and found myself covering myself up from my own gaze.
Finally, I dropped my hands. Oh. She was very naked. And so was I. The woman in the mirror was me, I realized, as her mouth fell open. It was one of the most attractive things I’d ever seen. I was distracted by movement just over my shoulder and realized there was a long, slender tail that had snaked itself upwards and its tip was wagging happily back and forth just past my left shoulder. Of course, I only realized after a second that this had been a tail. In the actual moment I thought it was a weird snake of some kind, screamed “Fuck!”, spun around, found that it was actually really hard to spin around when you had big wings and a tail to get tangled up in, and fell face first into the mirror.
