Chapter #8Possess Zach Vanderburg by: Seuzz   You linger for a long time in the gym loft, slowly and carefully doing Cooper's exercises, but Zach never shows up. But Andrew Claskey, another one of the soccer players, does. There's no one else around when he lays down to do some bench presses, so you seize that moment of vulnerability to drop a huge wad of goo onto his upturned face. You're not that interested in him, so you just curl up to sleep inside him.
The rest of the day passes uneventfully. You've seen Dana around, but you haven't mentioned "David," and she hasn't said anything to you either. This is a bit of a puzzle. Her kid sister and yours are best friends. (You've glimpsed them in the halls too.) Surely by now your family has figured out that something is wrong, and surely Joanna has said something about it to Sarah, who will have said something to Dana. But you've let things slide this far, so you just decide to keep watching to see if anything develops on that front.
You don't know anything from the lawyer either. As Caleb, you have to pretend to be depressed and fearful, which is an easy enough pretense to carry off, though it is a bit wearisome. After school you decide to skip going home for a bit, and ride over to Matt's with him and Kevin.
* * * * *
Meantime, your ability to use any body to reproduce any form of handwriting has got you thinking. You've settled in well enough into your three friends that you actually feel like you've got an intimate control of every aspect of their bodies. You've found, for example, that you are able to paralyze one of your bodies by turning off the brain's motor control over its limbs. So, in Matt's bedroom, you decide to see just how fancy you can get.
You start by shutting off Matt's motor controls, leaving his body rigid and unyielding. You then drop down inside Matt's subconscious mind, letting the real Matt Isaacs reemerge.
You've lost access to his sense, but you can still see his thoughts clearly as they rearrange themselves into patterns of confusion and fear. You've done nothing to his memories, and he knows all that he has done and heard and seen while under your influence. He doesn't know he has been victimized by "David Johnson," but he knows that he and his friends have been possessed by some kind of entity, and that his friends, who are now watching him with a cool and unsympathetic intellectual curiosity, are still under its control. His breathing becomes labored, and through Caleb and Kevin you can see the terror in his eyes.
Next, you turn off the motor controls in Kevin's body: you don't want anything bad happening when you launch the next phase of the experiment. You start by turning off Matt's access to his own eyes, and follow it by turning off his other sense, leaving him locked entirely within his own head. His terror increases.
You don't understand how you are able to control bodies that are not in contact with each other, but you're guessing that you can shift the sensory inputs between them. So you run your tendrils through Kevin's mind until you find what feels like the right "switch." Suddenly, the world vanishes from his eyes: now you can only see the room through Caleb's. Inside Matt you feel a corresponding sense of relief and then further confusion when you "hook" his mind up to Kevin's eyes. You then switch over the senses of hearing and touch and bodily location. Through Caleb you look at Matt: his body, still rigid, looks almost dead. You look at Kevin; in his frozen eyes you see the terror that Matt feels.
Matt is still inside his brain, of course, but you have now swapped all the bodily inputs and outputs, so that he is experiencing everything that happens to Kevin's body; and though you are still sunk down inside Matt's mind, you are once again in complete control of his body. You turn on the motors; you lift Matt's hand and run it through his hair, and grin. As far as Matt himself can tell, and so far as anyone watching could see, Matt has been swapped into Kevin's body, while you have swapped your control of Kevin's body for control of Matt's.
You press things to their final conclusion, releasing Kevin's body from its paralysis. Kevin—or Matt, since that is the person running Kevin's body—grunts, and gingerly raises his hands. His eyes wide with fear, he looks between Caleb and Matt. And then he jumps up and rushes for the door.
You tackle him in an instant with Caleb's body and Matt's. He twists and punches and gouges; and you've a hard time holding onto him, for Kevin's body is lean and wiry. But through sheer weight you are able to force him to the floor.
"Please," Matt gasps, and it's Kevin's voice he is forced to use. "Please, I—" But there's nothing he can say. He squeezes his eyes shut and bursts into tears.
That's enough; you've satisfied that what you thought was possible is possible. Matt has no access to Kevin's memories, even though he appears to be in Kevin's body; you, meanwhile, still are able to feel and think everything that Matt would feel and think. If you let Matt run off with Kevin's body, he wouldn't be able to act like Kevin, but you would still be able to pull off a perfect imitation of Matt with his body. You reemerge inside Matt's mind and shove your hapless victim's conscious, independent mind aside. You've no trouble disentangling the bodies; even though the sensory inputs are still switched around, it is your single mind and will in control of all three. Still, you put things back the way they were originally.
As Matt you go to the kitchen and fetch some drinks; back in the bedroom, you sit on the bed and with silent, shining eyes grin to yourself.
* * * * *
Your first thought with regard to Zach Vanderburg had been to just possess him. Now you've a more insidious idea: While still leaving his mind and will unmolested, you can "switch" him, so that he thinks he is the victim of a body swap with one of your other puppets. It hardly matters that Zach would probably ruin the life of that puppet; you don't particularly care if Caleb or Matt or Kevin alienates and alarms everyone by insisting that he is really Zach Vanderburg. The real fun would be in watching Zach go to pieces inside the body of a "loser."
But is that really the revenge you want to pull on him? Zach is not very popular; he's rather ugly, and no one likes a bully. No, Zach's position in the A-crew is mostly because he is such good friends with Kyle Lakewood, the soccer captain who has been Zach's good friend for many years. If you possessed Kyle and maybe a few more soccer players you could screw up that friendship even without possessing Zach. Or maybe—and here you really do grin to yourself—you could let Zach see the possession; you could let him see that Kyle is no longer really himself. And that would really horrify and terrify him.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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