Transformation

Serialised fiction | Horror, science fiction

Part 1

Keller sat, elbows on their crappy, fold-out Ikea table, one hand clutching its twin, staring into the MacBook monitor. He rattled off statistics as June lay on the couch.

“Total view time is down 1348% since this time last year. Subs are dropping like flies. There are no new sponsorships coming in and engagement is at an all-time low. In short, we’re fucked,” he grunted, “unless we find a new angle.”

“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “But I take your point.”

It might have been ok if not for the mortgage. The house was a dive but actually not too bad as a fixer-upper . The last few videos were designed to spark fresh interest in the project: bright, wide-eyed thumbnails of the two of them holding paint brushes with titles like, “We found our dream home!” Real aspirational Chip-and-Joanna-Gaines shit.

The whole thing had flopped. The videos were limping along in the low thousands, not sufficient to curry new sponsorship and certainly not enough to generate anything resembling livable revenue from AdSense. It was maddening. The project was good. The house was good. He had perhaps not accounted for the backlash being as strong as it had been. But that would all blow over, he knew it would. The million dollar question was, could they make the mortgage repayments while they rode out the storm?

Soot, their black cat and erstwhile fan favourite, leapt up onto the desk, mewing and brushing a tail past Keller.

He looked around. The house was cluttered, rammed with paraphernalia, flotsam and jetsam salvaged from their previous rental that now decorated the living room in the form of cardboard tea chests. The mess made him confused and irritable.

“I can’t think with all this crap everywhere,” he muttered and stood up.

“Where are you going?” June asked, frowning, “we’re still talking about this.”

“Gotta get this stuff into the basement,” he said, grunting as he lifted the first box into his arms. He walked over to the basement door. It was his natural impulse to move, to do something, anything, when he was at a loss. Get the blood flowing, get that dopamine going. He’d grab a few of the boxes, the ones with names like “knick-knacks” and “living room decorations” and put them in the basement. Then at least he’d have the mental space to think.

Having only moved in yesterday, Keller had not had an opportunity to look into the house’s decrepit basement. He threw the light-switch at the top of the stairs and the bulb sizzled into a dingey fluorescence.

It was a dismal affair. Dusty polished concrete flooring – the type that gave him the willies to touch with bare feet. A wheezing generator perched meekly in the corner and the usual basement detritus littered the rest of the square footage: old boxes that had not been removed when the last tenants moved out, a pile of mildewed Yellow Pages (when was the last time he’d seen an actual physical copy of the Yellow Pages?) as well as a load of other unmentionable garbage, moldering away in quiet resignation.

But there was something else. Something tucked into the corner, shadowed just out of reach of the bulb’s tired light.

Keller squinted at the unidentified shape. He could not quite make out what it. Just some dark clump affixed to the wall. A wasp’s nest maybe?

Yet as he moved closer to it, the shape revealed itself to be something else entirely. The object appeared to be something like a clamshell, built a few feet up on the place where the two walls intersected. There was a dark green, crystalline outer layer, giving way to a softer looking blue then a deep red layer. It looked cut away in the way one might if bisecting a jawbreaker. The middle was either painted with Vantablack or was a void. Keller scratched his head. The impression was vaguely yonic, like a psychedelic coral cave inset into the corner of their basement.

“Hey June? Junie come check this out.”

The both stood there, staring in the sickly, sputtering light of the basement.

“What the crap is it?” June said.

“Fucked if I can tell you. It’s weird though.”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of … pretty.”

“Pretty disgusting.”

June was seized with a kind of fascination. There was something about the shape of it, the way the various layers ebbed and flowed that reminded her of one of those little water creatures who moved by flapping the skirts of their bodies. Because if you looked closely, you could see that it was moving. Very slowly, those layers were undulating in and out.

“It’s breathing,” she breathed.

Without thinking, she walked over to it and lay a hand on the outer layer. She expected it to be cold and slimy but it was more like a snake’s skin. Firm to the touch and slightly warm.

“Aw Junie don’t touch it! It could be poisonous.” Keller was standing back, arms crossed over his chest like a ward. “It must be some kind of infestation. I’ll call the pest guys tomorrow.”

Precisely why she did what she did next she wasn’t sure, not at the time. Later she would become convinced that already there was a link, some nascent communication below the surface of conscious thought. It just felt natural. June reached down into one of the discarded boxes. Her fingers closed around the cool weight of a cat’s eye marble. She raised it up to eye height. It was black and red, the dye disseminated around the inside of the glass ball.

She popped the marble into the hole in the middle of the thing.

“June what the fuck?” Keller’s voice was high and strident. He strode forward, meaning to pull her away but stopped just before he could reach her. The wall-cavity-thing was making some sort of sound, a low gurgling, moaning sound.

“Shit, it’s about to blow,” he said.

“Shut up.”

The gurgling came to a head.

There was a little high pitched POP! sound and the marble flew out of the wall orifice. June caught it easily between her cupped hands. Looking down at it she gasped.

The cat’s eye marble had turned a beautiful liquid cerulean colour.