11-10-24
THE DARK OF THE MOON: JOSETTE'S STORY, Part One
By Christopher Leeson
AUTHOR'S NOTE: It wasn't possible to get the next chapter of TWILIGHT OF THE GODS ready for posting this week. But I didn't want to miss my accustomed posting day, and so I'm offering a sneak peek at a work whose first part was ready to go. It is the prequel of the story "THE DARK OF THE MOON," which was posted here at TFTGS years ago. I checked; it's still there. Hopefully I will be able to start posting "Josette's Story" in earnest after the posting of TWILIGHT is finished. I want to go back to TWILGHT next month. Here's hoping. By the way, I wanted to put this note into the ending comments box, because the box hasn't been working right for me all year. It beats me why Blogger.com doesn't fix it.
Loren Melford had time to kill, and the mall was his favorite place for doing that. "This is so unfair," the teenager grumbled inwardly. He stole a quick glance through the window of Amanda's Secret lingerie shop. He had to be careful because people were so unfair and judgmental.
They always supposed that a guy who was too interested in women's nighties must be either a sex fiend or a cross-dresser. So he would "casually" walk past the display window and roll his eyes over the window displays while pretending that nothing was catching his eye. In fact, he was was trying to see everything at super speed and store it away by photographic memory.
If only he had a photographic memory!
Life is crazy, it seemed to Loren. If this were a free country, he would have gone into the shop and looked everything over while taking his time about it. But that would have gotten him labeled a pest by the staff and a degenerate freak by the customers. He could only avoid that ignominy by taking a girlfriend into the shop with him, but he unfortunately didn't have a girlfriend, and didn't suppose he'd have one in the near future.
He wondered why should a guy be treated like a pervert just for acting on the natural male instinct. Weren't lingerie and party dresses created to attract men's attention to the girl wearing them? If men—even men of his age—were not supposed to ogle at scantily clad girls, who in hell was supposed to do the ogling?
The world was full of crazy rules; they were like a noose around every man's neck. But who had made up the rules? The preachers? That couldn't be. People didn't care about preachers opinions these days. And the even the preachers weren't all that big on morals. What they were interested in was preserving their tax-free status.
Was it women who were making the rules? If women were making up the rules for men to follow, that was so wrong! It never happened in the other direction. Men were called Neanderthals if they made even a small suggestion about how women should behave.
Being a male in 21st Century America was like being treated like an American Indian in the 19th Century. It was Washington politicians who decided that free-roaming Indians should live on reservations. Did that help society? Hell no! The crooked government Indian agents treated them like hell while they lived in miserable sheds. The way America treated innocent people were treated hadn't changed. The only thing that changed was which groups would going to be the fall guys for the current generation.
When younger, Lore had liked to lie on his pillow, imagining he had the superpower of invisibility. And the best place for an invisible man to go was someplace, any place, where the hottest-looking girls got together.
But he gave up on that fantasy after about ten years because thinking about doing the impossible depressed him too much. He started filling his time with "allowed" things – like grooving to movies, TV shows, concerts, the internet, games, books, and comics. But while he was doing those things, deep down he was wishing that he lived in an alternate where where the high school where the TV comedy "Unhappily Ever After" was set was a real place where he could attend. That school was hemline heaven!
He was frustrated. A lot of men worked off their sexual frustrations by watching sports, but the only sport Loren cared about was women's figure skating. He didn't notice the skaters' technique, but her sure noticed their costumes. For some reason those ice-skating babes liked to wear outfits just as hot as what Las Vegas chorus girls danced in. And what was wrong with that?
The lunacy of life could drive a man crazy. No wonder there were so many addicts and drunks. He thought that if society wanted to get rid of self-destructive people, it should stop treating people in ways that could make them suicidal.
Suddenly, Loren realized someone was standing behind the mall hall bench he was sitting on.
"You look like the sort of young man who needs what I can give him," said someone in an old lady's voice.
He looked back and found that the speaker looked about how he expected. She must have been pushing sixty-five and hadn't gone easy on the fattening foods. Whatever she had to offer wasn't what he wanted.
"Are you talking to me, ma'am?" Loren asked.
"I know what I'm talking about, because I have psychic abilities, and can see your blue aura," the stranger said.
"Do you mean my Lee jeans?" he asked.
"Oh, no! Do you even know what an aura is?"
"Oh, sure. They're colored lights, aren't they?"
"They are, yes. And your aura is blue. Blue-aura boys are very special. Whenever I see a blue-aura boy, I try to do them a favor."
"Don't bother. You're creeping me out. If it won't insult you, I'd like to take off for home right now."
"I won't take a minute of your time," the sag-jowled woman said. "And there is no reason to say more than I have. I have something for you to read. If you read it and do what it says, you might become a much happier person very, very soon."
She handed him a tiny box. He had thought she was going to hand him a religious magazine.
He frowned. "What's in there? Drugs?"
"Not at all. It contains a little bottle that comes with a page of instructions. It's like what you get when you pick up a drugstore prescription. The medicine will do you good, but if you don't follow the directions, there can be adverse side effects. Always be careful."
A prescription? Now Loren was sure that she was pushing drugs. "I don't trust gifts from strangers. And I don't have enough money to buy anything."
The woman chuckled. "It's not for sale. I only want to help people. This magic oil is just what a blue-aura boy needs. But don't take it until you read the directions. If you do, anything that happens will be no one's fault but your own."
She put the box on the bench beside him, turned, and hobbled away.
Loren sat staring down at the little box. He thought he should leave it there and walk away, but if the substance was harmful, somebody could pick it up, use it, and be harmed. He decided the best thing to do would be to take it to Mall Security.
Loren didn't know where to find Mall Security, so he checked the directory kiosk. It gave him a room number, so he went there directly and found a cramped office with a paunchy security guard sitting at a desk. Loren couldn't see what he was looking at, but he quickly punched a single key. It was probably a "boss button."
Loren told him about his encounter and the man took the box, shook it next to his ear, and listened. Maybe because he was less paranoid than Loren, he opened the box. Inside was something that looked the size and shape of a little perfume bottle. The security man squinted and peered through the tinted glass, and then set the vial on his desk. The box also contained a folded piece of printed paper, which the guard started reading. After a couple of minutes, he started shaking his head.
"It's some crazy stuff. The woman you talked to must have been one of those New Age mystical types. The paper talks about magic."
"What are you going to do? Send it to a lab?"
"No, we just throw silly things like this into the toxic waste disposal box."
"What does the letter say?"
"Like I said, it says that the oil in the bottle will work magic. I'm not paid enough to want to read the rest of its garbage."
"What if it's narcotics or poison?"
"That's the business of the people who work with the toxic materials box. If you're afraid it's harmful, just leave it with me and I'll get rid of it."
"I'm curious. My mom is a pharmaceutical scientist. If I showed it to her, I bet she could tell what's in it. And that will give me a subject to write a school essay about."
"Sure, sure, kid," the guard said. "Finders, keepers. Somebody gave it to you, so it's yours." He put the vial and the letter back into the box, closed it and then handed it back to Loren. "Just don't breathe it in and get yourself high unless your mom says it's safe."
Loren departed the security office with a worse opinion about big business than he'd had before. But it had been a dull day, and this was a kind of real-life adventure. Somehow, he wanted to read what the slip of paper said before he decided what to do with the bottle.
#
Loren sometimes wondered how his mom could work an important full-time job and keep the Melford house clean. He would have to spend the night alone again because Cantor Pharmaceuticals had sent her out of town. When he'd been small, his mom would put Loren in the back seat with the luggage and take her with him.
When he turned sixteen, he'd been allowed to stay home alone, since he no longer needed a sitter. Right now, he was thinking about calling his friend Darrell before bedtime. That would give him something to do for an hour.
Loren took the box to the living room table and turned on the chandelier light above it. He wanted to read the letter that had come with the little bottle.
The guard hadn't been kidding; the thing read like the plot of a fantasy story written in a concise, orderly way, without noticeable grammatical mistakes or misspellings.
What it said was a lot weirder than he had expected! The copy claimed the vial was a sex-change potion! It said, "This distillation will allow a young male to take on the physical attributes of the favorite female image he holds in his mind. But BEWARE. This is magic of the highest order, and violating the stated taboos may bring on undesirable and irreversible side effects."
No wonder the guard hadn't read very far! But somehow thought the idea of sex change was hot! One of the most memorable sf novels he had read was The Identity Matrix, by Jack L. Chalker. He continued reading.
"To commence a sex change, place a small drop of the oil extract upon the bare flesh of the subject to be transformed. The transformation will magically initiate at the start of the next dark moon. The shape-change shall be stable until the next dark of the moon, at which time the subject shall revert to his natural form without effort, and without ill effects."
What was the dark of the moon? A cloudy night? An eclipse? The new moon?
The youth checked his smartphone. A Net search told him that "the dark of the moon" was the period of the moon's cycle when its light was not visible from Earth.
That was too vague. He tried another link.
1: The period at the time of a new moon when the moon's light is absent from the nighttime sky
2: A period when the moon is not shining, or when it is obscured.
It also said that the magical effect would be almost instantaneous if the oil was applied during the three days of the moon's darkness.
Okay, so the dark of the moon was another term for "new moon."
He read on. "The transformed boy may develop emotional or psychological traits that mimic the behavioral traits of his ideal woman.
"The user will exist in an alternate world in which family, friends, and physical records will attest that the subject has been a female from birth. Also, the subject's physical environment will change to conform to the new reality. For example, a boy who becomes a girl may find that his closet is now filled with female clothing."
Wow! This wasn't just a sex change, it was a full-blown reality-warping spell. The concept was absolutely impossible! Even if there were magic, no magic could be that powerful! This stuff was nonsensical.
Somehow, that realization disappointed Loren.
The teen skimmed ahead, trying to find the term "blue aura" mentioned, but couldn't find anything. What he discovered was a paragraph entitled "Taboos."
"The spirits that enable the change of the boy's reality will abandon the spell if the subject seeks to expose their existence to the material world. Their abandonment results in making his alternate life as a female permanent. If the subject breaks the taboo while in male form, the magic oil will become inert for him and he will lose his ability to experience a female reality.
A second warning followed: "If one is already transformed, he must not reapply the oil to his body before reverting to his natural form at the beginning of the next dark moon. If this taboo is violated, the subject shall continue to exist in his female reality for the rest of his life.
Wow! If this silliness were describing something real, it was too dangerous to mess with!
And then he came upon a really nasty taboo. "If the subject in female form becomes pregnant, he will remain female for the duration of his life."
Loren could only imagine that the lady who gave him the box was off her rocker, or else she was doing it to frighten people. But Loren couldn't imagine anyone being frightened by something so obviously unbelievable.
Maybe this "magic" oil could be a hallucinogen, and reading the paper could somehow determine what the hallucination would be. In that case, the oil would produce something like an LSD trip.
Once he'd read everything, Loren put the bottle and the paper into a safe place and got up to make his lonely dinner.
He felt sad remembering his parents' divorce. Now his dad was living a thousand miles away with a new wife and child a thousand minds away, and he was lucky to see him as much as once a year.
But when he tried to stop thinking about his family life, he started thinking about the bottle again.
Loren realized he could do a simple experiment on his own. Mrs. Melford had a small lab in the house, and she kept a few white mice for her experiments. It was Loren's duty to feed the stock during her absences. He wondered what would happen if he exposed a white mouse to the oil. If the mouse died, well, he could pay his mom for a mouse replacement out of his allowance.
After a quick meal, Loren went to the laboratory and put on a pair of quality rubber gloves after carefully checking them for pinhole-sized leaks. Then he donned a high-grade breathing mask. Finally, he opened the vial, which was only conventionally sealed.
He used tweezers to remove the inner seal, and then carefully washed the tweezers without touching them, not even with his gloves. He avoided breathing deeply when the bottle was open, even while wearing the safety mask.
Loren placed the vial on a lab dish, which would capture any spillage should the bottle be tipped over. He unstopped the vial and wetted the Q-tip's cotton tip with the oil, which he then set down on an absorbent tissue.
The teen went to the mouse cage and randomly took a white mouse out. But when he saw it was female, he returned it and took a male instead. Since he was doing a sex-change experiment, he wanted to do every detail perfectly. The little beast didn't struggle, being used to being handled by Loren and his mom.
Loren carefully rubbed the wet Q-tip on the rat's belly, making sure the oil reached the creature's skin. Subsequently, he washed the Q-tip inside a tuna can full of soapy water. This presumably contaminated water he poured into the sink and turned on the facets to flush it far into the sewage system. Finally, Loren put the Q-tip into his mom's wall-mounted toxic waste receptacle.
Still wearing his gloves, Loren used a spray-on cleaner and Bounty towels to clean the bottle and every part of his work area thoroughly. He took the soiled towels to the backyard barbeque where he burned them, being careful not to breathe any of the smoke.
Though he was taking every precaution, Loren did not really believe in magic. But whether the oil was toxic or magical, he didn't want its smallest particle to contact anyone.
Finally, Loren examined the mouse, still wearing his gloves. He thought it was behaving normally. Of course, the paper had said that the magical effect would manifest only with the "dark of the moon." But when would that event occur?
Returning to his computer, the teen checked the date of the next new moon and found that it would happen in thirteen days and be most perfect at 11:51 pm.
His anticipation of the next new moon remained on his mind when he dropped off to sleep.
In the morning, Loren checked on the mouse and saw it was spry and active. After breakfast, he switched on his desktop and searched for "blue aura." There was a fair amount of New Age "teaching" about auras, even blue ones.
A passage said, "The presence of blue energy in a person's aura is linked to an openness to receiving or perceiving spiritual energy. People with a blue aura may have a strong sense of intuition, but be unaware of where their instincts come from. "Blue auras are often associated with calm, collected people who live a balanced life. In short, the meaning of a blue aura often reflects a relaxed, receptive energy that is aware of the bigger picture.
This was all very well, but it had said nothing about sex changes or femininity. Maybe the old lady's ideas about blue auras were crank, or they represented the thinking of a tiny cult that no one ever heard of.
Loren's mom returned from her trip, and Loren's summer days became humdrum, just as before. But the day of the next new moon finally arrived.
Loren wondered why he kept obsessing about this matter. He decided it was because it was a fun flight of the imagination.
At 10:30 pm, he next checked on the rat for the hundredth time. It still looked just fine, chipper and eager for his grain -- and it was definitely still male.
At midnight, and again at breakfast, he saw no change in the mouse.
#
Either the oil was a slow killer—like inducing cancer or heavy metal poisoning—or it was harmless.
A month passed, and Loren realized another new moon had come around. "Maybe I should leave bad enough alone..." he began thinking. But then...
All the next month, Loren mentally speculated about how beautiful girls experienced life. Beauty made a girl popular, he knew, and she was treated like royalty. Loren's life was very different. People seemed to forget he existed as soon as they looked away from him.
It was actually angry that the mouse hadn't changed sex. Just once he would have liked something to happen in the real world that wasn't dull and hum-drum. Maybe that was why that was the reason he impulsively wetted another Q-tip with the mysterious oil and dabbed it on his forearm. He had been promised magic, but there was no magic. This was his way of telling the world of phony magic-makers, "F* you!"
Seconds after the oil had touched him, a chill ran through Loren's body and suddenly everything went dark.
#
When Loren woke up, it was still dark.
It was obviously too early to get up, and he wanted to go back to sleep, so he just lay there. But something kept tickling his cheek and kept coming back after he repeatedly brushed it away. More wide awake now, he felt something like a web draped over his face. He took a handful and gave a yank to get rid of it.
Ouch!
Something had pulled his hair. What was this?
Sitting up, Loren swept his face with both hands, trying to brush the web-like stuff away. When he made a grab at the stuff and pulled it, his scalp hurt again. Flummoxed, he threw off the blanket and swung his legs off the be. Switching on the lamp, he stumbled still half asleep toward the dresser where he could check the mirror to find out what was stuck to him.
Blinking the blur from his eyes, he was surprised to see the dresser was loaded with unrecognizable things. When he glanced bemusedly at the dark window to the outdoors, he saw a girl looking at him.
And what a girl!
She had lots of pale blonde hair and had on a scanty and super-hot pale blue nightie with a white lace trim. His glance zeroed in on her cleavage, and he immediately wondered what her legs looked like.
It dawned on Loren that he was dreaming, that he hadn't really awakened at all. He took a second around the room and realized that it wasn't his bedroom. He was standing in a messy girl's room with plenty of feminine things cluttering it. Like, there were posters on the walls showing guys who looked like teenage rock stars.
Now that he realized he was having a lucid dream, he thought this was an opportunity to have some fun! He liked being alone with a beautiful girl his own age. In a lucid dream you could do anything you pleased and nobody could say anything about it. Nobody could blame him if he took a dream girl into his arms and smacked her down with kisses.
Loren at the girl again. She was really there and she was gorgeous. He stepped close to touch her, but his nose touched what felt like cold glass. His hands touched the glass, too. This was a bummer. Why was it that he couldn't get a break, not even in his own dreams? If he couldn't touch her, he could at least look at her, and what he most wanted to look at were her legs. Wow! Her babydoll pajamas were very short, and she had knockout thighs! Legs like that should be dancing on a stage!
Worried that he would soon wake up, he began speaking. "You're a pretty one! Why don't you come around to this side and get to know each other?"
He suddenly realized that the voice coming out of his mouth sounded all wrong. When he touched his throat, his lower arm rested on something that was soft, warm, and wonderful...
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2
