by Gord Rollo
Marcela reaches up and strokes the silver pendant. The bumps and dents have returned. Instead of a perfectly round ball, it has flattened out, sprouting several short appendages.
“What’s happening to it?”
“It’s becoming, child. Just like you…Just like you…like you…"
Mambo Ranice is starting to fade away, the smoke from the incense starting to seep through her insubstantial form.
“Wait!” Marcela shouts. “Don’t leave yet, I still don’t understand. This is all crazy talk, isn’t it? I mean, really, it’s just a dream!”
Mambo Ranice smiles.
“Is it, child? Are you sure?”
***
After returning from Costa Rica, Marcela spent days trying to get her head around everything she’d seen and heard. She still wasn’t sure what exactly had happened at Semma, the voodoo temple. When she’d woken up the next morning, she’d found herself all alone in bed. Mambo Ranice’s body was gone. Either Miguel had returned in the middle of the night to carry her away, or she had never been there in the first place. Perhaps the heavy incense in the air had been a drug of some sort and she’d inhaled enough of it to cause her to hallucinate. Or maybe she was just going crazy. There was always that possibility. Then again, when she’d checked her silver pendant that morning, it hadn’t seemed as round and unblemished as she remembered. It wasn’t flattened out, like in the dream, but something about it sure looked–and felt–different. Deep down, she wanted to believe that everything that had happened had been real.
One thing Marcela couldn’t deny; she was beginning to change, inside and out. Just as Mambo Ranice had said she would. The coming change she’d called it.
That weekend, returning from the corner 7-Eleven store with a bag of essentials–she went out only at night now–her body definitely felt different, not clumsy and sore as one might expect, still recovering from all the recent injuries, but actually strong and powerful. After putting the groceries away, she stripped down and stood naked in front of her dressing mirror, carefully examining herself. Her skin was kind of mottled. She had always been dark, tanning very easily, but now, her body was splotchy. But that wasn’t the strangest thing. No indeed. She smoothed both hands along the sides of her breasts.
They were shrinking!
At first, she’d thought it was her imagination. But now she was sure. Her breasts were growing smaller. She turned and looked over her shoulder, her entire figure seemed to be growing boyish–her hips for sure were losing the feminine roundness.
Strange.
Staring at herself in the mirror, Marcela thought, I’m losing my old identity, but growing stronger, feeling more powerful even.
“Jesus, maybe I’m becoming a male,” she said aloud and laughed. Dismissing the ridiculous speculation, she whispered, “but what’s really happening to me? Is it all in my mind? Actually, the body changes aren’t really that pronounced. Maybe–”
There was a rap at the door.
“Hey, Marcela, it’s me, Sandy,” the familiar voice called through the door. “You know, that weird lady across the hall, the one you seem to be avoiding like a STD. Saw you coming back with groceries. Open up.”
Pulling on a kimono-like bathrobe to cover the suspected body changes, Marcela went to the door, paused a moment, then opened it. “Hi, Sandy,” she said, forcing a smile.
“Hello, stranger,” the thin brunette said, smiling back. “You okay?” There was a puzzled, almost hurt, expression on Sandy’s face.
Marcela nodded, then explained, “My trip took a lot out of me. And actually, been having a lot of cramps since I got back, you know, that time.” She shrugged. Of course it was a lie. She hadn’t had a period since a month before the attack. And even though she got no more exercise than the occasional nightly walk to the corner store and prowling the apartment, Marcela felt in top health. Oh, she hadn’t been eating much, her normally vegetarian diet seeming kind of bland and unfulfilling.
“I understand,” Sandy said. “You probably aren’t interested in a movie after dinner, are you?”
Marcela smiled and shook her head. The mention of dinner made her aware of a smell, a wonderful smell. She poked her head out in the corridor, noticing that her friend had left her door ajar. The smell was coming from inside Sandy’s apartment. “Mmmm, what are you cooking for dinner? Smells great.”
Her friend eyed Marcela curiously before answering. “Nothing yet. I’ve got some ground chuck out thawing.” Sandy turned toward her opened door and sniffed. “I can’t smell anything.” She turned back to her friend. “You sure you smell something from my apartment?”
Marcela nodded. Shrugged.
“Thought you didn’t care for meat?”
“I don’t,” Marcela replied, feeling slightly confused, because something did indeed smell very good, even activating her salivary glands.
They chatted a few more minutes, Marcela not mentioning anything about her trip or the peculiar body changes, instead convincing her neighbor that she was fine except for a little PMS. They agreed to a movie early in the coming week. Then they hugged goodbye, Marcela finding the actual physical contact unsettling. She closed the door to Sandy, puzzled by her reaction to physical contact. She’d always enjoyed hugging and being hugged.
***
Running…
Running…looking for something that’s close but stays just out of reach.
The slick, muddy paths of the rainforest replaced by sidewalks of asphalt and stone, her hunt taking her into the concrete jungle now, but her quest unchanged.
Searching…
Always searching…
***
Marcela woke up just as it was getting dark, the night sounds of the city coming through her window, which she’d left open for some air. But she found it stifling in her apartment tonight. She got up and stretched, not bothering to dress, feeling unusually restless, but intrigued by the mystery of the dream. Running through the city instead of the forest had put an interesting new twist on things, but it didn’t answer any of her questions. What was she searching for? No matter how hard she thought about it, she had no clue.
Still naked, she again examined herself in the mirror. The skin mottling seemed much more pronounced; and there was no doubt now that her breasts and hip curves were disappearing. Marcela knew she should feel much more alarmed, should consider calling her doctor–perhaps the body changes related to some kind of undetected damage from the park attack. But she didn’t really believe that at all. No. For some intuitive reason, she felt no real deep anxiety about the changes, only a little curiosity. They felt right. She thought again about Mambo Ranice, and felt that somehow the mystery of the dreams were directly related to her body transformation.
What was she searching for in the city?
Later, on a whim, Marcela clicked on the TV, hoping to hear on the news that the heat wave was going to break soon. As the picture appeared, she realized she hadn’t had the TV on since coming home from the hospital. And the rape, over two weeks ago now. My God, it seemed much longer. Already the details of that night were growing fuzzy in her memory. In fact, unlike her old self, she was spending less and less time in the past, more concerned with the here and now. Everything present tense.
The anchorwoman had been interviewing a police department lieutenant. The detective was talking about specific episodes of violence within the general city chaos–gang behavior.
Marcela turned up the sound.
“…That’s right, Cheryl,” the policeman was nodding. “It has escalated, proliferating from the North Central projects. Laughing Death, the apparent dominant gang now apparently with hundreds of members, has spread out, muggings on the Muni, robberies in convenience stores in the northern suburbs, some members even moving down into the park. Several reported robberies and rapes.”
The anchorwoman used the police department spokesman as a lead-in to a reporter at St. Mary’s Hospital. He was interviewing an apparent gang victim. The young
man, a cyclist, was lying with a leg in traction, his face bruised and swollen. He’d been attacked along the Westside biking trail, not far from the site of Marcela’s attack. The reporter held out the mic as the victim painfully described the experience–they’d stolen his wallet, bike, and beaten him badly.
Then back to the anchorwoman, Cheryl, who summarized the new wave of terror by the Laughing Death Gang, showing a still shot of a gang member in colors. The boy was wearing a black bandanna on his head and a black windbreaker with a white caricature of a grinning skull over the right breast.
“They don’t care if their colors identify them,” Cheryl concluded. “They seem to want the notoriety.”
As Marcela watched the broadcast, she probably should have felt some anxiety after realizing who her attackers had been and the hazard they still presented in the park. But she experienced no fear, only a growing restlessness, an inability to concentrate on anything pertaining to the past. At the end of the newscast she switched off the TV, and despite the muggy temperature and obvious danger, she went out. But other than wandering about aimlessly in the steamy night, she saw nothing, encountered no one, returning home a little before daybreak, dropping down her bed and drifting off into an exhausted sleep, clutching her cool silver pendant for comfort. Her tired mind barely registered that the once smooth sphere had grown four tiny legs and the beginnings of a head and tail…
***
In the crotch of the tree she stretches for a moment or two, glancing about into the dark humid night, listening carefully and sniffing in all directions–deciding everything is normal before dropping to the ground eight feet below, landing lightly on all four paws. She begins to move quickly through the heavy undergrowth, slipping past large leaves extending out into her path, pausing every now and then to sample a specific, strengthening scent, before hurrying along quickly…searching, searching.
She follows the path to where it crosses a concrete path, a bike path, and she realizes she’s back in the concrete jungle–a park.
Then, she stops abruptly, sniffing the muggy, scented air and inadvertently her mouth waters with the recognition: prey.
Her lithe body seems to shrink as she hunkers down and begins to stalk seriously, sampling the air as she moves, but actively searching now with her amber colored eyes.
There, ahead on the bike path–three figures, all dressed in black.
Effortlessly she leaps up out of sight, up into a nearby tree, coming to rest above the prey, her tail twitching out of control as she waits for them to walk below, unable to suppress the joy of the hunt from rumbling up from deep in her chest, making the distinctive hoarse coughing sound of her kind.
The three figures are grouped closely in place, searching for the source of the odd sound, their fear smell thick in the moist air.
Still she hesitates for another moment, peering down through the leaves, making another coughing-growl as she tenses for her attack…
***
The evening news was full of the ferocious vigilante attack on the Laughing Death Gang members in the park–the three boys almost torn apart by their attackers–the authorities estimating at least half a dozen suspects armed with some kind of sharp knives.
Marcela, lying on the couch, watched, but was only marginally interested in the gruesome details of the apparent ambush of the three teenaged boys.
The phone interrupted the program.
It was Peter.
“I’ve been thinking, Babe,” the unfaithful bastard said, using the hated nickname. “Maybe we were too hasty. I’ve had second thoughts about our separation.”
Separation–a temporary state?
“Maybe we should talk,” he continued.
Marcela paused a moment before shrugging to herself. “Okay,” she agreed in a hoarse voice.
“Are you running tonight?”
“Yes, in a few minutes.”
“Good,” he said, his voice rising slightly in pitch. “I’ll meet you in the park. We can jog together and talk. You’d like that, right, Babe?”
Oh, she’d like that, yes, indeed. Marcela coughed, then whispered, “That will be fine, Peter. Can hardly wait.”
She looked down, feeling the vibration, an almost purring sensation against her chest where the silver jaguar pendant rested.
STORY NOTES
Time can heal all pain. Well, that’s how the saying goes, anyway. It’s a nice, happy little expression but not exactly true. Sure, physical pain will fade as the days, weeks, months, and years go by, but psychological pain usually doesn’t go away quite as easily and time really doesn’t have much to do with it. It’s people who heal themselves, I think. Humans are extremely adaptable and no matter what a man or woman goes through, their minds have wonderful survival mechanism that allows them to deal with the pain, anger, and grief and move on with life. We never forget though.
Never.
Marcella Transmuting is a story that I co-wrote with my friend and sidekick, Gene O’Neill and at its heart it’s a story about change. And revenge, I suppose. Bad things happen to people all the time and it inevitably changes them for the better or worse. Some can rise above the anger and turn the other cheek, while others can’t. Either way, they change and become different people from whoever they thought they were before.
When you talk about someone changing in a horror story, most readers and writers automatically think werewolves and full moons but Gene and I wanted to come up with something different. Gene doesn’t like to follow the rule or the familiar tropes of the genre so we settled on using Voodoo as our catalyst of change, thinking that was something strange enough for us to work with. After all, Gene and I are a little strange ourselves. They don’t call us the Butch and Sundance of Horror for nothing you know; but that’s another story for another day…
ALL THAT GLITTERS...
“Mr. Carson… my associate and I have a problem.”
Brad Carson, killer for hire for the Chicago Mafia, was five feet eleven inches tall, and two hundred and ten pounds of solid muscle. He had dark black hair cropped short on top, but grown long and tied up in a ponytail at the back. Dressed in a pullover gray sweater, black jeans and a brand new pair of high-top Doc Martins, he looked casual but undeniably tough. Carson had a real bad feeling about this meeting, and was in no mood to screw around.
“Hey, don’t we all,” he sarcastically replied. “Get on with it fella. I haven’t got all night.”
The man who’d spoken was in his late fifties, fat, balding, and had a flat face and a block-shaped head. He spoke with a slight German accent. The other man in the room was around forty, trim, had shoulder length sandy-brown hair and nervous shifty eyes that constantly roamed the room.
Without warning, the thin man suddenly bolted up and nervously blurted, “You won’t believe it, man… this’ll blow your mind. We found a gold mine, you see, but now everything’s all fucked up. Everything!”
“You found a what?” Carson asked.
“A gold mine, man. An honest to freakin’ God, gold mine. It’s worth a fortune. Millions, man… maybe billions.”
Carson asked the most obvious question that popped into his mind. “And this… is a problem?”
“No, that’s not the problem, man. I told you already. Everything’s all fucked up… aren’t you listening? We go and find a lake of gold and can’t get at it. That’s the freakin’ problem.”
“A lake of Gold?” Carson turned toward the fat man still sitting stoically on his left. “What’s he babbling about?”
The fat man ran his pudgy fingers through his thinning hair, then held up his hands as in mock surrender. He was clearly frustrated but trying to stay calm.
“Let’s slow down a minute. We should introduce ourselves. My name is Karl Stein and my rather excitable colleague here is Roger Bishop. Incredible as it may sound, Mr. Bishop and I have indeed found, for a lack of a better term, a deposit of liquid gold. Bear with me for a moment and I’ll get to all that. There are a few things yo
u need to understand first. Okay?”
This time Carson was too stunned to respond. Liquid gold? Were these guys fucking with him? Did such a thing even exist? Mr. Stein took his silence as a sign of compliance and carried on.
“This began about seventeen months ago, last May the tenth to be exact. Mr. Bishop and I are both geologists who were employed by the State of Illinois to do some research in an area known as the Lincoln Hills Karst. Karst is simply a Yugoslavian term describing an area with natural Limestone bedrock. These areas all have similar characteristics, such as sinkholes, underground caverns…”
“Tell him about the monster,” Bishop interrupted. “No, better yet, show him the pictures, man. That no good dirty rotten son of a freakin’…”
“Easy, Roger,” Stein silenced him. “Let me tell this, okay?”
“Whatever, man… whatever.” The thin man shrugged his shoulders and sulked back into his chair.
What was Carson supposed to make of that? Had Bishop really said… monster? And they had pictures? This meeting was getting weirder by the second. Carson wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest, but decided to stick it out a few more minutes. Stein carried on with his story, barely missing a beat.
“So we were working in the Lincoln Hills region, mapping some of the caves in the area, when suddenly we stumbled into every treasure hunter’s dream come true. There was gold everywhere we looked.
“Not gold nuggets, but something that nearly defies description. Liquid Gold! We believe a super-heated geothermal pocket lies directly beneath the cave floor. Maybe it’s something volcanic? Regardless… something in the immediate area is hot enough to have liquefied a rather substantial deposit of gold. We tested a small sample, and it’s not pure gold… there are a lot of other compounds mixed with it, but Roger was correct when he appraised its value earlier. It’s worth millions. If, that is, we can ever get our hands on it.”