Word Count: 35,027

 

Carpenter knew this fact, inside and out. And she hid it from view, less she be charged even further.
 
There was no further felony that she could convict, and it was now time to bring Walters into the game. She suspected something about him – a gut feeling that wrenched itself side to side in her stomach. It was comparable to what Walters himself had faced not much earlier, except magnified, not caused by something odd or unfamiliar, but by the ever-looming sense of guilt and self-destruction that Carpenter always had hovering over her, watching her every move, waiting for the moment that she would give out. Then the ominous cloud would strike with its horrible thunderous rage, mocking her, screaming her own fallacies in her face.
 
But there was no time for this. She had customers to deal with.
 
 
Walters could not shake the horrible feeling from his head, his stomach, and the rest of his body. It was spreading like wildfire, and no medication was stopping the pain. He wondered if it was unknown, his condition. It must have been, because he’d certainly never heard of it. Even if he had, he probably would have been unable to treat it. There was, however, a certain air of curiousness about his ailment that told him deep down that it couldn’t be cured by normal means, that it was something otherworldly. He struggled with himself to fall down in his bed, aching in pain. He saw, in his bedside mirror, that his hair had become completely black – the way it had once been, very long ago. The only problem was that it didn’t look like his old hair used to.
 
He lay there in pain until, as the middle of the night approach, a rain began to patter on the window of his apartment, and sent him to the realm of sleep along with his aches and pains.
 
When he awoke, it was all gone. The pain was as if a distant memory. That night he had dreamt the most odd of dreams. The rain fell harder and harder, the thump upon the window making a tempo for the most eloquent song, and he stood there in front of it. There was a giant spire, a stalagmite that rose to the heavens, like Mount Olympus, but even more heavenly. It was like the spire he had imagined himself on top of in previous times of helplessness, a spire that always lifted his spirits. But he was now below it, looking upon its top that was truly invisible. It rose so unimaginably high that it punctured the clouds and outer space itself.
 
Walters wondered, as he had stared at it, whether it ripped spacetime apart at its peak. That told him that he was a true scientist at heart –wondering about spacetime even in his dreams. But it was not him who was wondering about spacetime. It was someone else. His hands were different, his legs were different – he was not Walters. Whoever had stood there below the gargantuan spire had thrown out their own consciousness and accepted Walters as a parasite in their mind. He was under control of the body, but not of his own body, which he assumed to be at the top of the spire where it usually was.
 
It was not.
 
He looked into the distance, as far as he could see in the pounding rain, his – or rather, the other person’s – body becoming drenched in the pouring rain. There stood himself, looking back, looking around, looking for anything. Walters wanted to run to his body, but he hadn’t the strength to do so. He so wished that he did.
 
He was at the top, now, of the spire. There was no spacetime rip, nothing miraculous, just a point. On this point rested – or tried to rest – a teetering throne, and a crown, a crown which he had seen many times before inside his thoughts which, too, empowered him in times of dire need. He chose not to sit on the throne – or the other person’s body chose not to – but walk away, down the spire. He could not see below the storm clouds, anyway. But below the spire, that was a complication. He had no clue of how to get down, but by that time it was too late. He had never been standing on anything in the first place.
 
It would have been the skydive that led to his death – if it were real. This nightmare stopped short, becoming an infamous and repetitive “falling” dream. Walters, now out of his aches and pains, but still wide awake, wished it could have been more. For all of those hours of sleep, for finding a way to rest, he had been rewarded with only the shortest of dreams.
 
He had, at a point, kept a dream journal. The lucid dreams that always appeared were long and interesting, as well as a good topic of conversation for those never even interested in one’s dreams. Those dreams filled pages upon pages of the journal. Many times Walters had accredited the journal with his creative solutions to problems, or his own inventive solution to something that had never been solved before. He was proud of himself for these, but never become too proud. That was, perhaps, his fatal flaw, and led him to become the weak and powerless person he was.
 
That morning, he didn’t feel different. He didn’t look much different. He didn’t eat differently than he usually did, nor did he break the schedule he had been running straight for the past few weeks. And yet there was something inherently different about Walters. Perhaps it was his speech. No, it couldn’t have been his speech. What was so different?
 
He couldn’t work that day, even though the pain had ceased. He clutched the lapel pin Genome in his right pocket, keeping a tight hold onto it as though it were kin about to be stolen away from him and killed. It was not his most favorite act, witnessing people dying. He did not want to see the lapel pin die. In his mind, it was a precious child, or a dear relative, or a parent long gone, but back from the dead, and whose spirit should be duly honored. He continued to clutch it throughout the day.
 
“Hey, Greg – you look a bit different. Did you change your hair? Get a haircut?” One of his coworkers asked. ‘You dyed it black, too – good look for you, if I say so.” They waved good-bye, but in that one instant Walters had never been so frightened, not because he was afraid his hair looked bad, but because he had done nothing to his hair to make it look good.
 
There he was, in the middle of the laboratory again after lunch break, doing nothing, yet contemplating everything. He centered his focus on his sudden change in appearance. If his hair was the first to change, what next? It had to all be connected to the strange pain he was receiving – as long as he had denied it, there was no other explanation that seemed plausible. There was no type of disease that caused his kind of spontaneous pain, and he had not eaten anything strange to get food poisoning from. His lungs felt fine, so the pollution in the air couldn’t have been the problem, or the pain would still exist at this very moment – but it did not. He continued to rule out possibilities, looking for any excuse to say something other than what his heart was truly telling him.
 
It was the only option, but he still wouldn’t admit it. It was the one thing he would never admit to himself. Once he came to that conclusion, he immediately went back to work. His diligence from this point on was unsurpassed and his efforts great in comparison to others working their afternoon shifts. It was all to avoid saying that one thing to himself – the one thing he would never do, no matter how bad the situation, no matter how unpleased he was with himself. No matter how often he himself worked on it, he would never succumb to its powers over the human mind. He would never shapeshift.
 
His coworkers seemed to notice this sudden shift in attitude towards work. They asked if he was alright, if he was tired – one even asked if he was suffering a traumatic mental illness, though he well knew that he was not. He had thought that the pain could be all in his head, but he had never been an excessive hypochondriac.
 
His cell phone rang. He picked up the phone and got the second string of bad news – his wife was back. He didn’t hate his wife; in fact, they had been friends for many years previous before getting married. They had met in college, and their relationship was as strong as ever. It was simply bad timing that the day she had chosen to return was the exact same day that Carpenter, the perfect woman in appearance, was visiting the apartment. And now he had lied to her – he had told her that his schedule was open for her to visit in the afternoon. If his wife caught sight of this woman, she would lose her sanity for sure. Although she genuinely loved Greg, she was always a skeptic. Not just about their relationship, but about everything.
 
She even questioned his job, his friends, their own safety in the apartment. One would think that Walters would be peeved by this, but it only made her more appealing to him. The fact that he had the power to reassure someone and make them feel continually safe and sure of themselves was the type of power he wanted in life. It the courage he knew he always had, and it only showed when his wife was around, because she was one of the people whom he could guide without being afraid to let them know he was in charge. And at times he would not be in charge, but would enjoy the feeling of knowing that she, too, felt the same way about having power for a moment to influence someone.
 
But it was not a good day for her to arrive.
 
As he made his way home that day, the only thoughts on his mind were how awkward it would be seeing the two women in the apartment, possibly bickering, or even worse – getting along with each other. Yes, there was not much worse he could imagine than that, because he would then be dealing with Carpenter for the rest of his life. His wife had the ability to reel in woman friends like a skillful fisherman reels in a good dinner’s worth of fish in a short time because they are stranded on a desert island and much fish for their life. If she got a hold of Carpenter, there was no turning back.
 
Luckily, neither of the two women were present when he arrived at his apartment. He sighed in relieve and prepared the files for Carpenter. He was fully ready to hand them over to her in accordance with their agreement.
 
She would help him figure out what was going on. It didn’t matter that he already thought he knew what was going on in his body – he wanted another opinion; the opinion of someone who had sold so many multitudes of Genomes that she would know if he were being shapeshifted – God knew how it was happening – or whether he truly was that massive hypochondriac he didn’t want to be. The strange thing was that he would rather have been a hypochondriac than be shapeshifted, and that applied under any circumstance.
 
A knock came at the door, and he knew he had to answer it right away, or else whoever it was would be upset, whether it was his wife or Carpenter. He reached for the doorknob, or his hand reached for the doorknob for him, and opened the door.