Caution: This story contains references to prostitution, murder, and suicide, but there are no graphic depictions of any of them..
I’m George Walda. Shortly after I turned 17, some strange things started happening to me. First it was this recurring dream that I had turned into a pile of goo.
There wasn’t really much of anything to this dream, but I experienced this along with a sense of returning to my proper body shape just as I was waking up, for months on end. And I worried it was real because somehow, without fail, every night I had this dream, I managed to lose my underwear in bed. I mean, I was in bed and so were the underwear I wore to bed each night, just they weren’t on me when I awoke.
In March 2007, I started noticing stuff happening with the goo, like it was forming shapes, but I couldn’t tell what. Finally, one night, the goo formed into a body and climbed out of bed still within my dream, not under my control. There was only dim light in my room from a street light, but the goo body looked in my mirror, and I could see it was a girl. Her naked boobs were visible. Her appearance blurred briefly and she changed to a couple other girls and then back to the first one. I assumed by where she appeared in the mirror that she was about my height. She had dark wavy hair that reached to her shoulders. One of the other bodies had blonde hair, and one had dark, shorter hair and a tiny nose. There was at least one other one I didn’t catch a good glimpse of. All were young, somewhere between my age to mid-20s, as best I could tell in the dim light.
She explored my house, keeping quiet to avoid waking anyone and not turning any lights on. Once she was done, she climbed back into my bed and turned back into goo and I turned back into myself when I woke up.
The next night, my goo turned into the girl again. This time, she looked through my clothes until she found some sweats and put them on. And my shoes; they didn’t fit, and she changed her feet so that they fit my shoes. Then she seemed to change her mind, took everything off, opened a window, and tossed the clothes out, jumping out after them, turning into goo on the way down and landing with a splat. She quickly formed into the girl again, put on my clothes, and spent a while exploring. That night that was all she did. She came back to my house and did a trick where she turned one arm into a long tendril of goo stretching up until she reached my second-floor window, using it to pull herself up and inside. She shut the window, put my clothes away, and got back into bed. This was followed by my now-usual experience of turning from goo back into me when I woke up.
The third night she seemed more intent. She tossed my clothes and herself out my window quickly, walked to a place she had explored the first night, and took off, jogging a few miles down Main Street and turning into some other neighborhood. She located the address she was looking for, but didn’t go into the house. In the garden next to the house, she turned into the goo again, seeped down into the ground, and located a glass jar sealed with a metal lid which the goo pulled out of the ground, leaving a small hole behind. She turned into the girl again and opened the jar. Inside was a small change purse stuffed with cash - 10s and 20s, a few hundred dollars worth - and an ancient-looking ID that expired before I was even born but with a picture that looked like this girl. Shelly Peterson, her name apparently was.
She carried the jar and purse with her after she dressed again and took off again on Main Street. Another mile or so down the road was our 24-hour Wal-Mart. She left the jar on the base of a lamppost in the parking lot but took the purse and money with her. She seemed to know her way around here, and went straight to the women’s clothing department. She picked out a few things and tried them on. She had gotten different sizes of the same things, so I guess she was figuring out her sizes. She got it figured out, kept one of the dresses she had tried on, and picked out a couple bras, a pack of panties, a couple more dresses, a pack of socks, and a pair of shoes. Sneakers, but girly ones. She checked out and paid for all the stuff with money from the jar.
There were restrooms at the front of the Wal-Mart, outside the checkouts, and she went inside, changed into some of the clothes she bought, and put mine in the bag before leaving. After picking up the jar again, she went straight back to my house from there, but she stopped outside and went into the shed where we kept lawn tools and such stuff. She stripped, stuffed all her new clothes and the purse and jar into it, and hid it in a corner, putting on my clothes and repeating her trick to get back into my room.
I told my parents at breakfast the next day about the weird dreams I’d been having. They just thought I was having some elaborate dreams and didn’t seem to think it was important. But the dreams continued. I took my family’s digital camera up to my room, set it up to record video, and aimed it at my bed. I wasn’t sure how long it would record, but I hoped that it would simply stop if it filled up. I started it recording as I went to bed, and I left a desk lamp on so there was enough light for my bed to be visible on the camera.
March 17, 2007
The fourth night, she didn’t bother with my sweats. She went straight outside naked, to the shed. She retrieved the bag, dressed, and took her purse, leaving the empty jar and other clothes behind in the bag.
She went back to Main Street, turned on 33rd before reaching the neighborhood she’d visited the previous night, and went down a couple blocks to an area I wasn’t allowed into. There were bars and nightclubs and other places I wasn’t legally allowed to enter until I was 18. But this girl looked old enough. Was she going to get in? She had ID... ID that expired 30 years ago that, if assumed valid, claimed she was almost 60 now. Was the dream happening in the past? How could it if she put on my sweats and visited our shed which was built only a few years ago after we moved here?
She found the place she was looking for, which I think was a nudie bar, though of course I’d never been inside. But she didn’t go up to the front entrance. She went to a back door and knocked in a peculiar pattern. It apparently worked, because some guy answered the door, and they accepted her old ID there and let her in.
“Woot! Shelly, nice one. You actually look like your ID photo now!”
Where was she now? Of course I’d never been inside, but it was obvious she was not in the public part of the club people would normally use. At first I thought maybe it was the strippers’ entrance. The guy who let her in locked the door and led her upstairs to an office with a star on the door but no name. She went in and the guy went elsewhere.
There was another guy inside the starred door, and he was wearing an absurd amount of gold and gems. Like a Mr. T amount of gold, but he wasn’t a bodybuilder, and with diamonds and rubies in addition to the gold. Even gold caps with little diamonds on his teeth.
“Welcome back, Shelly.”
“Great to be back, Freddy.”
“What’s the story behind this body?”
“A boy turns to goo at night, and I can take over the goo while he sleeps. So I’m not going to be able to get here until 10:30 or 11, but I can turn a couple late tricks before things shut down.”
“That’s cool. Some is better than none. You say this is a boy’s body?”
“The goo is very malleable. I could look like anybody, probably, with practice, but I’ve only been practicing for a week and the only thing I can do easily is look like people I’ve lived as. This is actually what Shelly looked like at around 20 or so.”
“We’ll get you an up-to-date fake ID in case anybody asks, which’ll work as long as nobody tries to run it. You can only be here nights?”
“Yeah. I only get to use this body while he sleeps.”
“I’ll get you entered in the system tonight and you’ll be able to start tomorrow night. But I want you to practice looking like other people. If you can look like whoever your john wants, you can probably make double and make up for not being available earlier.”
“Thanks, Freddy. Sure. Let me try something.”
Freddy stared at the girl for a couple minutes while I couldn’t see what was happening, and then said, “Oh, that’s real good, Shelly!”
Freddy got up and stood beside her, and pointed to one side, where Shelly looked and there was a full length mirror. Shelly now looked pretty much like Freddy, but smaller, and she was wearing the dress she’d come in tonight instead of the shirt and tie and jewelry Freddy wore. The dress looked kind of silly on Freddy’s obviously male body.
“I could pass as you only to somebody who didn’t know you well and only if I took your clothes and chains. And it took me what, three or four minutes?”
“It would work if we get a request. I mean, if somebody asks for Marilyn Monroe, they know the real Marilyn Monroe isn’t going to be here, but if you have a passing resemblance you’d be accepted.”
Freddy printed out some documents on his computer, signed some things and had Shelly sign, and took a few pictures of her in her Shelly body, some clothed and some naked. She put her clothes back on, and they hugged and said goodbye, and Shelly started on her way back to my house.
I wasn’t really thinking during the dream, but in the morning I realized Shelly had signed up to be a prostitute. With my body. I had never had sex with a girl yet, but it sounded like possibly as early as tonight I was going to experience what it was like to be a girl having sex with a guy.
March 18, 2007
So that was the discussion at breakfast. I showed my parents the part of the video where the goo turned into Shelly. It was grainy and dim, but it was enough to show what I was experiencing was real. And then I told them what happened with Shelly. My parents were concerned this was getting too elaborate and dangerous.
“Did you catch the name on the front of the place Shelly went into?” Dad asked me.
“The Can-Can Club,” I answered.
“I’ll talk to the police and see if they have ever heard of there being a prostitution ring running out of there.”
That evening, Dad told me, “The police have had numerous reports of prostitution happening there, but they’ve never managed to catch anyone. Today they searched the whole rear of the building, confirming with measurements and everything there were no secret rooms on the ground floor nor in the basement, and they were convinced there was no sub-basement.
“Did they search the second floor? She definitely went upstairs from the door she came in.” I responded.
“He didn’t mention it. I’m not sure why he would have omitted mention of it if there was a second floor.”
He made a phone call, and I didn’t hear anything coming from it, but that night when Shelly went to start her job, when she arrived at the place there were police cars everywhere and she turned and left. She went to Wal-Mart and bought one of those pay-as-you-go cell phones, sat in the food court area outside the checkouts for a while charging the phone (but not actually eating or drinking anything), and then called somebody. She was apparently trying to set up another job, but she didn’t have any luck.
March 19, 2007
At breakfast, when I saw Dad I cheered.
“Yay, you got ‘em!”
“I did?”
“Yeah, they busted the place. When Shelly got there, they had a fleet of police cars in the parking lot and were loading people into them.”
He made a call, and then told me, “The police said they had never suspected a second floor. It doesn’t look like it has one from the outside, but since you had suggested a ghost might be prostituting borrowed bodies there, they thought maybe it was hidden with magic or something. And he’s coming over tonight to talk with us.”
I followed up with, “If you want to tip the police some more, after Shelly fled from there, she bought a phone and called some people. She plugged it into the outlet out in the shed to finish charging when she gave up last night. You should be able to get the numbers she called off of it.”
“Good idea. I’m on it.”
A police officer indeed came to visit at 7, just after we finished dinner.
“You folks only moved here a few years ago, right?”
“Yes,” Dad replied.
“So you don’t know about what makes Normal special.”
“Nope.” We all shook our heads.
“A long time ago, a meteor struck Normal. Ever since then, people living here sometimes develop powers.”
“What kind of powers?” Dad asked.
“You might think of them as comic book types of powers. They fly, get super-strength, are able to control fire or water or do magic, and other things. Sometimes their bodies change colors or adopt animal characteristics or other changes. Each person who gets powers gets a unique combination. There have been shapeshifters, so what your son described is possible.”
“I’ve never heard or seen anything like that in town.”
“We keep it secret. Outside of Normal it doesn’t happen, and we let the rest of the world stay ignorant of what happens here. We don’t tell newcomers until they need to know so that word doesn’t leak out. There’s actually a spell cast over the town that keeps people who don’t already know from seeing it, but it can’t keep your son from knowing what is happening to himself. Magic is only so strong. But you all know now and you’ll see the things I have mentioned. Don’t go talking about powers in public, but you can speak with the people who have them privately if you get the chance.”
“This would be hard to believe except for what my son recorded on video happening to him. It’s almost easier to believe this than some sort of scientific explanation for it. But thanks for letting us know.”
“If your ghost does anything more, keep calling it in. We’ve tapped all the lines you gave us so we can catch her, and hopefully keep your son from experiencing being a prostitute. Here’s a direct line to vice.” He handed Dad a card.
“Can you do anything about the ghost?”
“I can’t, no. But I can put you in touch with someone who might be able to.”
It was reassuring they were at least trying to do something.
Shelly kept calling around, and Dad kept taking down the numbers she called and feeding them each morning to the vice cops. Three days later, after another one of the places she was trying to get into got busted, word got around that Shelly couldn’t be trusted, and after that everybody was hanging up on her immediately. Or not even answering. They’d changed their numbers to avoid being tracked.
Once this happened, Shelly figured out I was hearing/dreaming what she was doing. To nobody in particular, she said, “Hey, punk, you listenin’ in on me? Rattin’ me out? You cost me and a bunch of other nice folks good jobs. I’ll find some other thing to do, but it won’t pay as well. Still, I’ll give you a cut if you don’t rat me out. Let me know.”
March 23, 2007
I told Dad, and he responded, “What do you think?”
I replied, “I think she’s going to keep at it until she figures out something I can’t stop her from doing.”
“Why? Why does she want money such that she’s going to do criminal things? Why does a ghost need money at all?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can ask her. But I’m definitely going to give her some ground rules. She can’t do anything that’ll get me hurt, infected, captured, or killed. Or pregnant. I don’t know if she can get pregnant and have me still be pregnant when I wake up, but it’s off-limits in any case.”
“Fair enough. Once you learn why she wants the money, maybe you can come up with better ways for her to earn it. I bet crime and prostitution is all she ever knew in her past lives.”
So that evening, I wrote out a note for her. I wrote SHELLY in big letters across the top of a page in Sharpie so she couldn’t miss it, and then I wrote the note normally on the rest of the page.
I don’t know why you want the money, but I will fight you doing anything that has a chance of getting me hurt, killed, infected with disease, captured, or pregnant. Not sure if you can get pregnant or if that will pass on to me, but don’t want to take the chance. But if you do something safe it’s OK.
So why do you want the money? Why do you need so much money that you need to resort to prostitution? You don’t pay for rent, food, or taxes.
George
I left the note at the edge of the bed as I went to sleep, so she’d have to roll across it getting out of bed when she took over my body.
Like the previous nights, she came and took me over, and quickly found and read the note.
“Hmm. Maybe. I feel like the goo body should be more resistant to those things. Like if somebody shoots or stabs you I just turn to goo and remake my body with no wound. Get pregnant, remake the body with no baby, not pregnant.”
She read the rest of the note.
“But why do I want the money? Good one, Georgie. Why do I want the money, anyway? It was to try to pay off Mama’s gambling debts, originally. Whatever happened with that? Heck, I don’t even know if she’s still alive. I’ve done this with four bodies now before I couldn’t use them anymore. You know, I can use cell phones to make calls but I never got this whole Internet thing. Georgie, I bet you can find out what happened to her easier than I can. Let me write down her information.”
She took the paper over to my desk, found a pen, and wrote down:
Etta Carmichael 225 Carlton Street Arlington, Virginia (703) 555-4646 Owed $60,000 in 1962 to Frank Stallone
Then she walked around my room naked for a while, looking at all my stuff, and occasionally picking something up and looking at it. Eventually she climbed back into bed and just went to sleep.
March 24, 2007
I reformed normally from the goo on this Saturday morning, and Dad wasn’t up at breakfast. But after I ate mine, I came back up to try to find this woman. It took less than half an hour of searching before I found her. Etta Carmichael, nee Jackson, of Arlington, Virginia died February 12, 1999 at age 79. I don’t know if she ever paid off her debt. I found a page I could print out, and there was a death notice in the Washington Post which some web site wanted me to pay $10 for a copy of. But Normal’s library claimed to have this paper, so I figured I’d get it there later.
Next, I looked up Frank Stallone. He was more notable, or rather, infamous, and there were many reports of his death I could read and print out for free. I printed one.
Finally, Shelly. I looked up Shelly Carmichael, but none of the people of that name lived in the right area or at the right time. And I tried Michelle also, but no luck. Then I remembered her name was Shelly Peterson. Did Shelly marry? Or did Etta marry other times? Anyway, I looked up Shelly Peterson as well. There was one who lived here in Normal, rather than in Alexandria, who committed suicide in 1977. Was that her? It did match her ID which expired in 1977, so maybe it was. I printed out that story as well.
Later in the morning I walked down to the library and got a copy of Etta’s death notice from a newspaper saved on microfilm, which cost me only a dime. And when I got home from that I discussed it with Dad.
“So, your body is getting inhabited by this ghost, the dead daughter of this dead woman from Virginia, every night. The death notice should pacify her - it’s clear that your ghost died young, and may not have had practical means of communication with her mother after death, but wanted to help her out nevertheless.”
“That sounds right.”
“And you think she used other bodies for prostitution for over 40 years? She didn’t have much in the way of her own expenses, so I’m guessing she sent most of this money to her mother, maybe even sent money after her mother was dead and who knows what happened to it. But she should have paid off the 60 grand a long time ago, even with interest, even with a bad pimp giving her a low cut. She might have been having to pay for other expenses - we know nothing about what else this woman might have been dealing with. But it agrees with Shelly not having communication with her mother. I’m no expert on ghosts, but I’m guessing she died trying to do something to help her mother, and her ghost was focused on that one thing and just kept doing it forever. I’ll try to find somebody who knows more about ghosts to confirm that.”
“Thanks, Dad. And I’ll leave these death notices for her tonight. I want her to not worry about the money, so I’m also going to tell her that rather than provide me with money, which she offered to do, that she should help me controlling my goo body. She obviously knows how to do it better than me.”
“That sounds good.”
I left the printouts in my bed the next night. At the bottom of Shelly’s printout, I wrote: Is this you? If not, what was your original name? Frank’s was a page and a half, so I wrote on the bottom half of the second page:
Instead of trying to give me money, show me how to shape my goo. Right now I form automatically into a boy when I wake up and apparently turn to goo when I fall asleep. Show me how I can make other shapes while I’m awake.
P.S.: My family knows about you now. No need to hide. You can go downstairs and walk out the door like a normal person.
March 25, 2007
Shelly read the page about Shelly Peterson’s death first and cried for a bit. “This is right, Georgie. Shelly isn’t my original name. It’s the name of the first girl I inhabited as a ghost. She didn’t turn into goo like you; I just used her real body. She figured out that she was going whoring in her sleep, though I don’t know that she ever figured out I was doing it, as opposed to her just sleepwalking or something. She committed suicide in 1977 just like it says here. She was the first one I took to the Can-Can Club and so they knew me by that name, even in the other bodies. My original name... Umm, I forget. I do remember that I kept going until 1967 when I was murdered by one of my johns. Throat slashed.”
Shelly next read Etta’s death report and cried some more. But then she said, “If she didn’t get it paid off, I guess it ain’t going to happen now. So I guess I don’t need that money. Just a little for some clothes so I don’t go around here naked. And don’t I have some?”
Finally, she read Frank’s report and the notes I left at the bottom. “Duh. Yeah, you had me marked good. Glad I can stop hiding. I should go get my clothes. If I don’t need to hide, might as well bring them in here.”
She walked naked out the door to the shed, got dressed, and brought all the rest of her clothes and her phone and purse inside and back to my room. She put the bag on the bottom of my closet with only socks and panties left in it, and tossed all the clothes which had been worn already in the hamper with my clothes.
“OK, Georgie, you did good. Just about everybody is dead now: Mama, Frank, and at least three of the girls I used to turn tricks. And I’m sorry.”
She stopped for a bit and she was crying, but it wasn’t obvious until she continued talking through sobs.
“I’m sorry for what I did to those girls, what I tried to do to you, for everything. I can’t help them now, but I do want to help you. I don’t know if I can explain to you how I shape the goo, though. I just do. And I get kicked out of your body when you wake up. You’d have to find some way to not kick me out, like accept me as a part of you.”
As always, I saw and heard all this in what I now know was not really a dream. Whether she was sincere or not, I needed the help. I tried to respond to her within the dream, “Shelly, or whoever you are! Apology accepted! Come, be with me. Become a part of me all the time so you can help me control my body.”
I didn’t say it out loud, but nevertheless, Shelly responded, “I hear you, Georgie.”
She did several things, and at one point turned back into goo and then back into Shelly.
“I don’t know that any of that did any good. I don’t feel any more a part of you than I did before. See if you can still reach me this way when you wake up.”
I had the familiar experience of being goo briefly and then my own body when I woke up, and Shelly wasn’t there. I shared this with Dad in the morning.
“Well, the expert the police arranged with us is coming over tonight.”
Meanwhile, I searched the Internet for stories of the original Shelly’s death. I could never have found it without the extra detail she provided. A search on girl murdered 1967 mother Etta Carmichael turned up a newspaper report. There was a picture of what she looked like before she ran away and started prostitution, and an actual story about the murder, not just an obituary. Samantha Carmichael, that was Shelly’s original name. I printed that story out, too.
The woman who came over had that whole “fortune teller” look about her, but supposedly she was legit. She introduced herself simply as Stephanie. I handed her the stack of printouts and spent a while telling the whole story, from me just having the dreams about returning to my body from goo (which I had since learned were real and only experienced as dreams), to Shelly taking me over, digging up money and buying clothes, trying to get a job as a prostitute, and the story about her mother’s debt and death, as well as her ability to stretch me into different shapes, and her difficulty of staying with me. Stephanie read through the documents and also examined me, seeming to put herself into a trance for a short while.
“It sounds like Samantha was very focused on repaying her mother’s debts. She died trying to do that, and her soul became a ghost dedicated to completing the deed. Such ghosts often have a one-track mind, and just keep doing whatever it is they were doing when they died. Since you’ve helped her see the task is complete, or at least as complete as is ever going to be possible, she’s going to be very compliant for a while, as she’s lost her purpose. It’s likely she’s sincere and will become completely loyal and obedient to you if you take her in now.”
Dad and I both nodded, but Stephanie went on after pulling out some notes.
“The goo thing is typical for some shapeshifters, especially if they haven’t learned to completely control their powers. But only certain people can host ghosts, and it’s uncommon for them to also be shapeshifters. What is more common is that the person only gets powers at all from the ghost.”
“Do you think I have any other powers? I haven’t noticed any.”
“I can run some simple tests. You can get formally tested to look for more subtle powers.”
After a half an hour of various tests, she decided I probably didn’t have other powers.
“OK, then, how do I open myself up for Samantha? I’m not actively blocking her, but it seems she’s only able to inhabit my body while I’m asleep.”
“I should give you a little background about ghosts. The creation of ghosts and spirit possession of living people are among the few elements of what people think of as the supernatural that commonly happen in the world outside Normal. Ghosts can be created when people die in certain circumstances, such as when somebody dies trying to complete a goal, or when a person with an especially strong soul dies, or when a child dies. Ghosts can enter only certain people, ones whose souls aren’t big enough to fill their... I’m simplifying here, but call it their body. They can enter when there is space left over. Everybody has a little space like this, but for most people it’s too small for a ghost to enter. When the gap is large enough, a ghost can enter, and there are different possible results depending on how much space there is.”
Stephanie drew two circles on a sheet of paper, one inside the other and almost filling it.
“When there’s only a little space, only a small, weak ghost can get in, and it can’t do anything. The person usually never realizes it’s there, but they sometimes get bits and pieces of the ghost’s memory, People who feel like they are reincarnated likely have this sort of ghost.”
She drew beside it another pair of circles, but with about twice as much distance between the inner and outer circles.
“If the opening is a little bigger, a larger, more powerful ghost can get in, but still can’t do anything to the person. If this sort of person realizes the ghost is there, they can use it to access the spirit world and communicate with other ghosts. These are the psychics and mediums out there in the world, at least the real ones, because there are a lot of charlatans who are faking the whole thing, or they have a ghost that has made them aware of the spirit world but they can’t really do more than detect ghosts and they fake the rest. Because of all the fakes, most people think they’re all fake. I have a ghost of this sort, and here in Normal I was able to work with people who actually do understand this stuff and learn how to work with ghosts for real, and safely. You could say this case is the happy medium, pun very much intended!”
We all laughed. Stephanie drew a third pair of circles that looked about like a car tire, with plenty of space between the circles.
“When the ghost and soul are of similar strength, there may be a battle for possession. Sometimes, as you experienced, the ghost may only have control when the person is asleep. But I think this isn’t literally true in your case, because I can see the ghost is not in you now. Usually the ghost hangs on, and only leaves if forced out by a more powerful ghost or an exorcism. Have you ever heard of an exorcism?”
I said “Yes.” Mom nodded, and Dad said, “I remember the movie The Exorcist.”
“There are a lot of inaccuracies in that film, and the spirit is portrayed as a demon rather than a ghost, but the essential idea of removing the ghost from the person it’s possessing is correct. Usually we would only attempt that if the soul and the ghost are in conflict, leading to violent reactions perhaps similar to the ones in the film. Usually the exorcism destroys the ghost, and outside Normal, these more powerful ghosts are rare, so the person may not experience this again, or may encounter a more benign ghost. It’s different in Normal, though.”
“How so?” Dad asked.
“The same thing that gives people here powers acts like a beacon in the spirit world, and ghosts from far and wide are attracted here. So we have to go on the lookout for people whose spirits do not fill their bodies. When such a person is born here, we usually detect it shortly after birth and bond the person’s soul to the ghost of a child who didn’t live long enough to develop any real goals or negative traits, and is the right size to fill the gap. This basically means that the person growing up is an amalgam of their own soul and the ghost, but they live in peace and have a normal life. Sometimes they can access the spirit world later in life, like the second case I described, but usually the bond severs the ghost from the spirit world. But the body and soul don’t always grow evenly, and the gap can grow later in life, and we can’t be checking every person all the time, so we still get these cases here sometimes.”
She drew an even more extreme pair of circles.
“In cases like this, a ghost can move in which is significantly more powerful than the soul. The ghost is going to take over the person entirely. If it happens when the person is very young, nobody will ever know and the ghost simply replaces the original soul. If it happens later in life, depending on the strength of the soul and the temperament of the ghost, the ghost may merge with the soul, usually continuing to live that person’s life. If it was the kind of ghost with a goal, it may redirect that person’s long-term goals toward the person’s long-term goals while keeping other aspects of the person’s personality. In other cases, the soul can be completely destroyed, and the person now controlled by the ghost may experience amnesia, or his or her personality may be drastically altered as it is replaced with that of the ghost.”
“So what about me?”
“Well, your case is confusing. I can see you have a very small gap like this first case or like the case where no ghost can enter you at all. It’s clearly different somehow when you are asleep and turn to goo, in order for a ghost to get in which is powerful enough to control your body and even use your powers. So with your permission I’d like to put you into a hypnotic trance similar to sleep, which I hope lets you turn to goo so I can examine you in the goo mode.”
“I’m fine with it,” I said. Mom nodded and Dad said, “Go ahead.”
She had me lie down on top of the table, and did the thing with the swinging pocketwatch you see on TV or in movies when someone is being hypnotized, and put me to sleep, and turned me into a pile of goo on top of the table, and went on with her examination.
“Oh, it’s huge! Somehow, when George’s body goes into this goo state, a much larger space opens up around the soul. I’ve never seen this before, but it explains a lot. There’s definitely enough room there for a ghost almost as powerful as George to fit in, right in that range where the ghost would only have control when he’s asleep. OK, I’m going to bring him out so we can talk to him some more, but he’s going to be naked because his clothes have fallen through the goo, so get a sheet or something to put over him.”
So I awoke a moment later, aware of what Stephanie had said and covered with a sheet.
“And there, the gap is gone. What I think is happening is that Samantha simply gets pushed out when George returns to his own body shape.”
“So is there anything we can do?” Mom asked.
“I can bond Samantha to George the way I have described. Then she wouldn’t be able to be forced out, and she’d be with George all the time. George’s body should expand spiritually to contain her, though she may sort of “stick out” for a short while until it finishes expanding, or he may be slow in actually changing to George’s body. I think as long as he holds his shape, this expansion should finish within the evening. When George is awake, he would have control. When he’s asleep, Samantha would have control. Would you like that?”
“Sure, let’s do it now. The sooner the better in terms of her being loyal to me, right?”
“Correct, George. If your parents are OK with this, we can get started.”
“It sounds like a good opportunity, to do this while George is on Samantha’s good side. I’m in favor,” Dad said.
“I’m sure we’ll all appreciate your body not getting up and roaming the streets while you sleep,” Mom said. “Let’s go.”
“There’s one thing. I am not actually detecting her. She probably hasn’t gone far, and she may be sleeping until George’s next regular sleep cycle. So the first step is to summon her. And I’m going to need the table.”
So I got down and covered myself with the sheet as I sat in a chair, and Stephanie set up some candles and a lot of the schlock popularly associated with a seance, but apparently if you knew what you were doing and had the power of a helpful ghost within you, this stuff was real. She wrote out some words for me to say on a card I kept in front of me, and we all held hands.
“Samantha, who also goes by Shelly,” she intoned in a low, drawn-out voice. “Samantha Carmichael, also known as Shelly Peterson. There is one here who would like to speak with you.”
It was less than a minute, before Stephanie finished her invocation a second time, that Samantha started to materialize above the table. She was somewhat transparent, but I could tell it was her.
That was my cue. “Samantha Carmichael, I welcome you to come, live in my body, bond with me, and become a part of me. I solemnly swear this on my name, George Walda.”
It seemed like she tried to move into me, but failed.
Stephanie said, “OK, she’s here. Probably not surprisingly, she still can’t get into you, George. Now you get back in the table and I’ll turn you into goo again, and perform the bonding.”
So I did, and when I turned to goo, Samantha jumped right in and I could tell, as my body assumed Shelly’s form. My parents covered me over with the sheet again.
“Is he going to be stuck in that form?” Dad asked worriedly.
“Samantha had good control over the goo, so I expect she’ll be able to change it. We don’t want her to change now, though, because George’s body doesn’t have enough space. I need to perform the bonding first.”
Stephanie performed another ritual, and after a few minutes I felt it work as I gained a closer connection with Samantha than I had before. I could actually feel her in my head in a way. Stephanie announced that was complete and then brought me out of the hypnotic sleep I was in. Surprisingly to me, I didn’t immediately turn back to my own body. I opened Shelly’s eyes and was seeing the room through them. I saw the tent the sheet made over Shelly’s breasts.
“Welcome, Samantha,” I said out loud.
“Nice being in here while you’re awake,” she responded, inside my head.
“You all didn’t hear her respond, did you?” I asked. I got three “no”s in response.
“OK, let me see, I should be able to...”
Talk to you like this. I finished the sentence by thinking a thought directed at Samantha, rather than speaking it.
“Yes, you’ve got it,” came the voice inside my head.
Good, I told her.
“OK, I can speak to her without speaking out loud.”
Stephanie responded, “That’s good, George. You are slowly returning to your own body. It’s forming slowly, because forming quickly would make it too small to hold Samantha. So talk with her a bit.”
“Fine. I’m going to get her story and I’ll repeat it for you all.”
How much of the conversation we had here earlier did you hear?
“I was sleeping. I didn’t hear anything until you and this medium called my name, my original name Samantha, which I haven’t heard or used in a very long time.”
We came to the conclusion that your original body died trying to help your mother repay her debts, and you became a ghost dedicated to that goal.
“That’s right. This guy Frank was threatening her if she didn’t repay the money she’d borrowed and wasted on gambling, and I ran away from home partly to avoid being around Frank and partly to help Mom. In the 60s we got 15 bucks a trick, two or three of those a night, 7 days a week, making $200 to $300 a week, which was pretty good money back then. These days, stiffs working at the grocery store make more than that and barely make ends meet. In the mid ‘60s, $300 paid my rent, bills, and food for a month, so I sent everything over $75 a week to Mom and, at least at the time, she was using it to start paying off the debt. We exchanged letters, and I never told her what I was doing, but I’m sure she suspected it.”
So about $175 a week, that’s seven hundred a month. The debt would have been paid off in 8 years, maybe 10 to 12 years with interest.
“Yeah, if I kept it up. Some john slashed my throat in ‘67 and that was the end of that. Except I became a ghost. I wanted to keep doing it, but at first I didn’t know how. But something attracted me to Normal, and once I got here, I was able to talk with other ghosts. They taught me a lot and hooked me up with that place you saw me visit. They’re all ghosts or people using powers to make temporary bodies or something like that in there, but the johns are mostly unpowered people and they don’t know no difference. They had somebody working for them who could do magic, advertise the place in the minds of potential customers while not letting the police know. By ‘71 I was taking over the other poor girl’s body, Shelly Peterson, while she slept, doing one or two late tricks a night, $20 a trick then, but the girl’s normal job paid her expenses so this all went to Mom.”
So about $200 a week.
“Yeah, only I told her don’t try to write back here, ‘cause I only had control of this girl at night. It was like you, she saw what I did with her body as dreams, at least some of the time. Shelly figured out after a while that all those dreams she was having about sex with so many different men were real after she got some bruises, ones she remembered getting when I had control. But still, she didn’t do anything about it, until about 6 years in, she committed suicide.”
I paused at this point to recap this part of the story to everybody before continuing to speak inside my head to Samantha.
And between the first set of payments and those 6 years, your mom had probably paid off the debt, assuming she was smart enough to stay out of more gambling.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t really thinking like that.”
‘One-track mind’ was how the medium here described it.
“It was weird, though. I could plan things out, go buy clothes I thought would look good, and figure out how to please each john, but I couldn’t think for myself that the debt should be paid off, or go visit Mom in person, even when the next body was some brain-dead girl I had control of all the time. I mean literally. She was in a coma before I found her and without me she would have stayed that way forever, or until they took her off the machines, anyway. I had her for about 12 years when she got too old for what most of the johns wanted, and so I suicided her and found another girl I could take over at night.”
Oh, that’s terrible.
“Yeah, I know, but one-track mind, remember? If I couldn’t do that, the body was worthless to me. And she didn’t have no mind left of her own, so if I left her, what would’ve happened? Either she died, or some other ghost would take over and do something else terrible to her. I thought it was better not to have some other ghost doing shit in a body people thought of as mine. Anyway, the third girl I only had nights, and she didn’t dream what I did with her. She never suspected nothing until the money orders started coming back. I didn’t know if Mom had died, moved, or if I just got so addled I couldn’t remember her address straight. But I kept doing it, promising myself I’d get the money to her some day.”
So you still have the money from the last 8 years?
“Well, she called in an exorcist and got rid of me, and I didn’t find another body for two years. That one suicided also after four years of it. But I kept all that money, $70 a trick, two a night, promising myself some day I’d find a way to get it to Mom.”
What did you do with it?
“Buried it in little jars like the one you saw me dig up.”
That’s a lot of money. $1000 a week, probably $200,000. How many jars?
“That first jar I buried my old ID in, it only had $400 because it was my first one with that girl, and I had to some stuff to set myself up. After that, every two weeks when they put out recycling, I snatched a baby food jar from one of the neighbors. Everybody around there was having babies, it seemed. I put all my money in it and buried it somewhere in her yard. There’s ten of them under her garden but I was worried she was going to notice her garden getting dug up so much so I switched to a dead spot in the far back of the yard where nothing grew. And as far as I know nobody ever found any of them. I was spelling out her name with the jars, ELIZABETH, but I only got halfway through the second E when she suicided.”
Four years, two hundred weeks. So there’s about a hundred jars out there with roughly $2000 each in them.
“Yeah, I guess that’s right,” Samantha replied.
By this time, I realized that I was back to my own body, or mostly so. No more boobs, at least.
“Can I get down from here now?” I asked out loud.
“Yes, it looks like your body has relaxed nicely to accommodate Samantha,” Stephanie said.
So I got down, keeping the sheet over me as I took my clothes into the bathroom with me and got dressed before rejoining the group at the table. And I recapped the story for everybody else that Samantha had taken control of four girls here in Normal to use as prostitutes, three of them dead by suicide, and one exorcised her out.
Then, I thought at Samantha again, Some time I’ll let you use that goo trick to go dig some of those up, but right now I want you make me taller.
My view of the room changed considerably as she made me a LOT taller.
“Nothing to worry about,” I reassured my parents and Stephanie. “Just having Samantha test out changing my body.”
Dad responded, “The silvery effect when you stretched was cool.”
“Silvery effect?” I asked.
“Yeah. When your stomach stretched it turned silvery, kind of like in Terminator 2, before settling into skin color in the tall, narrow stomach you have now.”
“Oh, I bet that’s the goo. I only ever saw it before in my dreams, in my dark room or outside at night, and I couldn’t really see the color.”
I had her change me into the Shelly body, and make a copy of Stephanie and of Dad before returning to my own body. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be a girl, but knowing I could was useful. Mom held up a mirror during some of the changes and I saw some of it myself, and confirmed it was my goo that was silver-colored.
“Well thanks, Stephanie. This is really going to work out, I think.”
“Good to hear, George, and Samantha for that matter. I should be going, but there’s just one more thing. Since you know you have powers now, you should register with NANA. They can help you verify whether you have any more subtle powers I couldn’t find in my quick tests here, and will help you with any difficulties. For instance, if you decide you want to live as that Shelly girl they can give you a female identity. You know, one who is not a dead girl.”
She pulled out a card with contact info.
“How soon do we have to do this?” Dad asked.
“We don’t have any hard and fast rule. But the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll be eligible for help.”
“Well, thanks, Stephanie,” Dad replied.
She gathered up her stuff, and Dad wrote her a check and showed her out.
“I should have figured out that you had to pay her,” I told him. “How much?”
“Five hundred. A small price to pay for you to get control of your life, and some pretty cool powers to boot.”
“OK. Not that much. I’m worried Samantha’s own worry about her mother’s debt might rub off on me, but five hundred is nothing. Still, she’s got some money buried where she got the money she spent on clothes and stuff, and she’s probably going to want to retrieve some of it to pay you back.”
“She didn’t send it all to her mother?”
“After her mother died, the mail started getting returned. She figured out that the address wasn’t good anymore, but she had convinced herself her mom had just moved and some day she was going to find her and give her more money. So she just kept burying it at the house of this other girl she was in before she found me.”
“How much?”
“About 200 grand.”
“And now somebody else lives in the house?”
“Maybe not. I remember there was a for sale sign there when Samantha visited, which was only a couple weeks ago. She dug up the jar that had Shelly’s old ID in it from there. And by dug up, I mean she used my goo form to ooze down into the ground and pull it out. That jar also had some money she used to buy the clothes and phone. The rest of the money is in other jars on the same property.”
“Well I’m not going to stop you. Heck, I’ll drive you there, and play lookout for you.”
March 26, 2007
For once, I didn’t have dreams about turning to goo and then other bodies. But when I awoke, I was in Shelly’s body.
Samantha, why are we Shelly? I asked her.
“Sorry. I lost concentration.”
I have school today, and I need to be George all day. Can you do that?
“Yes. Sorry.”
My body quickly turned into George, and I went about my morning routine.
After school, Dad tested out how he’d notify me if there was trouble when I went digging. I still had the phone Samantha bought, and Dad had his. Samantha confirmed there shouldn’t be any of her contacts calling; they’d all written her off as compromised.
I set the phone to vibrate and put it on the ground near where Samantha turned me into goo and oozed down into the ground in our own backyard for the test. And Dad called the phone and I heard it. So when we went out that was going to be his signal. One ring and a hang up meant hide, stay in the ground. If it kept ringing, I should answer it and he’d tell me what to watch out for as I came out.
March 27, 2007
That night, in the middle of the night, Dad got me up and drove me over there. He waited in the car for me, and Samantha gooed me down into the soil like she did with her ID jar, but we pulled up a whole letter worth of jars at once:
@@@@ @ @ @@@@ @@ @@@ @@@@
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@@@@ @ @ @ @@@@ @@@ @@@@
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@@@@ @@@@ @ @@@@ @ @ @@@
We’d brought with us a bunch of old plastic grocery bags and we put each letter in a separate one, except the L and I went in together because they were small. And there were ten individual jars in the garden up by the house that we had to go down in separately to get, the ones she had hidden first, and those went in one bag. In two trips I brought the 7 bags out to the car, and we never needed the phone signal; nobody came near. I was naked for the entire excursion from the car to get the jars because I was going to lose my clothes every time I went to goo anyway, but my clothes were in the car, along with some very welcome heat for the trip home.
We weren’t really sure what to do with the money. It was hard to explain having it. It was technically the proceeds from criminal activity, though that criminal activity was committed in the body of a now-dead woman by another dead woman. And it was technically stolen from property we didn’t own, so we didn’t want to be showing it off. But we could certainly spend small amounts of it once in a while. But when we got home I just shoved all the bags under my bed and got some more sleep.
In the morning, I paid Dad back the $500 he spent on Stephanie, and Mom called me in sick to school so I wouldn’t go on as little sleep as I’d gotten tonight. I spent about $200 more on a wall safe, one that fit inside a wall and we’d cover over with a picture. Dad and I spent a couple hours installing it that evening. It wasn’t very deep, but I could fit two stacks of bills side-by-side on each shelf, which gave me two stacks each 15 inches tall. I hoped it was enough.
Then instead of just having the money shoved under my bed, we sorted it neatly into stacks and counted it. There was $194,371 in all, mostly in 20s, 50s, and 100s, and it barely fit into the safe.
Mom and Dad agreed this was my money, with restrictions. If I wanted to spend a significant amount of it, I needed their approval. If I wanted to spend a couple hundred bucks on something nice for myself or the family, gifts for friends if not too extravagant, etc., then I could just do it. They gave me a cap of $500 for things that stay within the family and $200 for anything I was giving to anybody else before I had to ask for approval. Of course, anything I buy should be legal for me to buy.
April 7, 2007
Samantha had wanted to donate a good chunk of the money to the families of the girls she used to earn it. And while that sounds like a nice bit of altruism, I worried it would do more harm than good.
“Wouldn’t that creep you out? A family member committed suicide, and years later you get somebody coming by saying it was actually a ghost who caused her to commit suicide, and here’s some of the money the ghost earned using her body?”
Mom and Dad agreed that was probably not the right way to do it. And we’d contacted NANA about the girl who exorcised Samantha out. She had changed her name and moved out of Normal and we were expressly forbidden from knowing who or where she was now.
So what I suggested instead was to donate some of the money to charities.
It wasn’t unheard of for kids to run fundraisers for charities and then buy a money order to send the money off to the charity, and 10 grand wasn’t a crazy amount to earn this way, so I decided money orders were the way to go. I decided to give 5% of the money to each of five charities, 25% in total. I picked out the charities with Mom’s and Dad’s help, ones that helped the poor and homeless, people with mental health issues, runaways, and suicide prevention. I wanted to find one that helped protect people from malicious ghosts, and we ended up choosing NANA itself for this, even though they’d only managed to help one of the four girls Samantha had possessed here. Maybe with more money they could do a better job.
I made five piles of $9718 each plus a small amount of extra money for the money order fees, went to five different stores that sold money orders, filled them out and mailed them to the various charities. I was $49,000 poorer, but I was still $145,000 richer than I had any right to be.
Later in 2007
Afterward, most of the time Samantha was just a passenger unless I asked her to do something, but once in a while she asked me something and I replied to her in my head. Nobody else knew this was happening unless it distracted me from what I was doing, and Samantha quickly learned to wait for idle moments. She was actually being very good. She wasn’t a child, but she had never lived as a teen boy, and she only lived bits and pieces of lives in the world after the electronic and computer revolution, so there were just some things she didn’t understand. She understood cell phones, and cable television, but not computers or the Internet. I tried to answer her questions, and when they prompted more involved demonstrations or lessons, I found times to go through those. Any time was fine for Samantha - she wasn’t doing anything else.
I set aside some time, usually in early mornings and in evenings, to explore what shape-changing Samantha could do. She wasn’t changing me at night now, and in fact slept when I did, just having a small part of herself awake enough to hold my form, whichever form I was in when I went to sleep, which was usually my normal form, unless one of the evening shape sessions went so long I fell asleep during it in some random form. But during these lessons, we explored many forms. Samantha could make me into a dog, a cat, a horse, and other animals, though they were all my size instead of the size they were supposed to be. Samantha explained to me that she couldn’t change the amount of my goo and so was limited to my size. She demonstrated in detail by showing how when she made, for instance, an arm longer, it got narrower. We experimented by changing while standing on a scale. My weight was the same in any form.
We didn’t spend a lot of time in forms other than mine, Shelly’s, and goo, but we did experiment. And I kept the clothes Samantha had bought for Shelly’s body, and I was occasionally seen around the house in her form, enough that my parents weren’t surprised by it.
In May, I was finally able to do what I had seen Samantha do with my body many times, and control the goo myself. At first, the only thing I could do was become goo, and when I let up on it, the goo immediately re-formed into George. Even if I started as Shelly, going to goo and releasing it made me George again. So that was good. At least I’d never forget how to make my own body. But she suggested I learn how to turn myself into Shelly, one body part at a time, as an introduction to making other bodies. At the time, I hoped to make that a summer vacation project, with the idea that by the time I started school again in the fall, I’d be able to assume any shape on my own, without having to ask Samantha to do it for me. But it wasn’t that easy.
A first step was practicing extending one arm, making it longer and necessarily skinnier. Once I was able to do that, and reverse it gradually, rather than just turning it to goo and letting it snap back into my proper shape, Samantha worked with me on other changes. I changed my face and hair in front of a mirror, one piece at a time, changing each part of me to look like Shelly, and by early June I was able to change my whole face at once into Shelly’s face.
Then she started working with me on other body parts. It took a while, and some of the parts were complicated. I practiced making skinnier legs while making more muscular arms at the same time, or vice versa, so I wasn’t changing the length of my limbs, just their thickness, and so I could learn to move goo around to different parts of the body.
In June I was asked to testify in court about the prostitution ring. Or rather, Samantha was. No, make that Shelly was. Stephanie testified first, that she had bound the ghost Samantha Carmichael a.k.a. Shelly Peterson into “this person,” referring to me. I had let Samantha change me fully into Shelly for this, since I was clearly not practiced enough to change myself yet and it was Shelly and not George who they wanted to testify. I wore the clothes she had picked out for what would have been her first day prostituting my body, to be more fully in character. When it was Samantha’s turn to testify, the judge announced to the room what had been arranged already: Samantha and I were to be given immunity for whatever we had done related to prostitution in exchange for the testimony. I was a little worried about revealing the money; was digging that up covered by the immunity? But the questioning did not go that way. They really just wanted Samantha to identify people and describe what went on there, that she had had sex with various men for money. I had to stay there the rest of the day, but they didn’t call me up to testify again, and didn’t ask me to come back for the rest of the trial. I was glad for that. There was a whole row of defendants, including Freddy, other people who helped run the prostitution den, the people who ran the public-facing part of The Can-Can Club, people associated with the other locations Samantha had tried to go to after that one was busted, and three people with magical powers who’d been responsible for all the very effective concealment. Or, at least, they were accused of all those things; Samantha did not have first-hand knowledge of it all, and it probably took many days to get all the witnesses in to testify about all the crimes they were charging them with. For me, it was one day and I went home, and I rewarded Samantha for it by staying as Shelly and in those clothes for the evening.
It was well into July by the time I tried to make breasts on my own, and even though I’d been Shelly many times with fully formed breasts, I still had trouble concentrating when I tried to make them. Too often I was breaking down laughing before I even got started. But the arms and legs practice helped, because I was pulling in mass from my stomach and arms to go into the breasts. Still, what I got was clearly wrong.
After my clumsy attempt to make breasts the way I changed the sizes of my arms and legs, Samantha explained, “Female breasts are actually a lot different from anything you have as George and from what you were doing. The basic structure of the nipples is there, but there are a lot more nerves, milk ducts, and everything. Trust me; just reach into your memory and pull out your memory of Shelly’s breasts. Turn that part of your body into goo, combine it with the goo you pulled from elsewhere, and turn that goo into Shelly’s breasts.”
This was a totally different way of changing my body! It worked, but Mom suggested I buy an anatomy book to help me learn all the body parts, what they looked like, what they were called, and what they did. And that helped also. Shortly before school started in August I had finally mastered it enough to make the breasts and hold them long enough to put on Shelly’s bra over them. So the further elements of my transformation went more slowly since I was also having to deal with school.
In September, Samantha explained hips to me. I knew that as girls developed breasts they also got wider hips, but I didn’t fully understand the details until Samantha made me look at myself in detail in George’s form and in Shelly’s.
“It’s not just that your hips get wider, it’s actually that the legs get further apart. Everything down to the bone moves around to make it possible for you to give birth through there.”
Ah, yes, I remember. When I first started spending time as Shelly, Mom pulled me aside one day while we were Shelly, and she gave me the birds and bees talk a second time, from a girl’s viewpoint. Remember that?
“I certainly do. I could have given you that talk too, but I understood why your mother wanted to do so, so I just patiently waited through it. But right now, I don’t want you to worry about genitals. Just leave them like they are but practice on the shape of the hips. You’ll need to pull in some mass from your legs. Remember to focus on this aspect of Shelly’s body and recreate it. It’s too different from yours to just shift.”
I was getting better. With the shorter practice times available, by the end of September I had this part mastered to the point that I could not only do this but also do the breasts, arms, and face at the same time. I could put on Shelly’s panties (somewhat poorly because my dick and balls were there), her bra, and her dress over them and I actually looked like Shelly.
Naturally genitals were next, and Samantha told me not to worry.
“Unless you are planning on having sex, you don’t need to worry about making proper female genitals yet. They are pretty complicated. It would definitely be a copy job when you do, but it’s a whole lot to copy. Just do this for me. In that internal space inside Shelly’s pelvis, pull your balls inside, and pull in your dick just to where the opening is exposed to the outside. Make all the skin smooth and tight over it. You’ll just have the openings to pee and poop, and you’ll be able to do so the way girls do. And then Shelly’s clothes will fit you, and unless somebody else is seeing you naked, you’ll look right.”
When I thought about it, I realized Samantha was right. The space that would have held Shelly’s vagina and other internal parts was also big enough to hold my dick and balls.
But if I still have my dick, it’ll be possible for me to get an erection. What will happen then? I was worried about it because I had gotten erections three times in the last week while trying to be Shelly.
“That’s why you make the skin smooth and tight. The erection will just back further up inside you.”
I did that, and it was actually pretty easy. And it was also pretty easy for me to combine that with all the other stuff and dress as Shelly, including having her panties fit properly. For the first time, that weekend, I went out with Mom as Shelly to spend some of Samantha’s illicit money to buy some other clothes that fit Shelly, and then spent evenings for a whole week turning into Shelly entirely under my control. And I only lost control and snapped back into George’s shape once, ripping one dress. I was doing everything in Shelly’s form except going to school: My homework, eating, going to the bathroom, everything. I had erections frequently, but nobody could see them, even if I was only wearing tight clothes over my crotch that exposed my female shape there.
When we went shopping, Mom pointed out that I still sounded mostly like George. This pointed out another area I hadn’t fixed yet. So the next week I worked on that. I had made my neck and the parts within it slightly smaller for Shelly. I needed specifically to make the larynx, also called the voice box, narrower within my neck to both reduce the prominence of my Adam’s apple and to change my voice. I didn’t think it actually changed much, but Mom confirmed for me that I sounded a lot more like I had a few years ago before my voice started changing.
October 27, 2007
Saturday at the end of a second week of being Shelly every evening, I turned into Shelly first thing in the morning. There was one thing I hadn’t done as Shelly, and that was taking a shower. And it was pretty normal. But one thing surprised me. I hadn’t really played around with my breasts much. I knew they were sensitive, but it was only when I was trying to wash them that I realized just how sensitive they really were. Before I knew it, the erection hidden inside me came, and what squirted out of the opening meant for Shelly’s pee wasn’t pee. At least I was in the shower, and could just wash it off.
“Don’t worry about that,” came Samantha’s voice inside my head. “I’ll get you making female genitals later, and you won’t have that problem. They are even more sensitive than the breasts, but when you don’t have male parts at the same time, it’ll probably be easier to manage. You had them before when I made you be Shelly, remember.”
Yeah, but I wasn’t trying to shower.
“True.”
I went back to showering, and the “even more sensitive” comment caused me to come a second time, but I got through it after that, and could even feel my internal erection had gone down by the time I was drying off. Probably a good thing, or else I might have come a third time trying to dry my breasts. I put on the clean outfit I had brought into the bathroom with me, and went out to eat breakfast as Shelly.
Dad was there, and he commented, “Are you going to be Shelly all the time now?”
“No, not all the time. But I am practicing holding the form, and I want to do so across a variety of activities.”
Mom suggested, “If you want to try different activities, how about going trick-or-treating as Shelly?”
“Dear, you know what adult female Halloween costumes look like. Do you think our son-and-occasional-daughter is really ready to go out looking like that?”
“We can find one that’s not overly sexy,” Mom replied.
“I’ll allow it, only if George is OK with it. George, you get to pick the costume and if you can’t find anything you don’t think you can bear to walk around in for a few blocks one night, feel free to call it off at any time.”
“Thanks, Dad. I will try looking for a costume.”
“OK, George. Or should I call you Shelly when you look like that?”
“Um, maybe. How about you do, so that if I reach the point that I’m doing this while someone else is here, they don’t think it’s odd that George is a girl.”
“OK, Shelly.”
So that’s how I ended up going out with Mom and looking at girls’ Halloween costumes a mere 4 days before the big event. And Dad was right, most of them were more sexy looking than I was ready to go out in public, even though I’d arranged for Mom to take me several miles from here where nobody would know me.
Eventually, I decided on a Supergirl costume. There were knockoff sexy versions of this costume, but I stuck with the traditional one. It was skin-tight but completely covered everything above the waist out to the wrists and neck. The bottom was a cheerleader-length skirt over what turned out to be the bottom of the leotard, which I saw fastened in the crotch so I could pull it on like a shirt.
Mom suggested, “You should get skin-colored opaque tights. It could be cold Halloween night, and they will help insulate your legs a little. That’s kind of a girl secret. Samantha could probably tell you if you asked her about this sort of thing. Also, you should get a pair of panties the same color as the costume to help make sure nothing shows through.”
“Nothing, out of the nothing I have down there,” I joked. “Just kidding. I know you meant my panties of another color.”
Mom helped me learn to put those tights on when I got home, and I learned why they were called tights.
“They are really supposed to be this tight. Ideally nobody notices them and they just look like your legs,” she explained. “But you won’t be shivering.”
“Thanks, Mom. I remember shivering in what I thought was a dream one of those nights Samantha went out in Shelly’s body at the start of this whole thing. But it was starting to get warmer then, and not all the nights were cold.”
October 31, 2007
It turned out Halloween was a warm night and I could have gone without the tights, but I was determined to wear them after putting in the effort to learn how to get them on.
Nobody really had any chance of guessing who I really was, since on top of doing this outside of my neighborhood, also very few people had seen me as Shelly.
At one corner, a kid dressed as Mr. Mxyzptlk slipped and fell. A moment later I realized what surprised him as a second Supergirl accompanied by Superman coming up from the other direction. I and the other Supergirl helped him up, and Mxyzptlk thanked us and introduced himself, or as I then realized, herself as Robin. The other two were an apparently cross-dressed couple; Supergirt was named Freddy and Superman was Bella. I got so flustered I introduced myself as George, Shelly, and Samantha. I hope they didn’t think I was too weird.
I got a lot of candy, so I shared with Mom and Dad, each of us taking a piece or two after dinner and planning to do so every night for a while.
November-December 2007
The very next morning, Samantha wanted to get me going on copying female genitals, the ones from her version of Shelly, but I put a stop to it.
No, Samantha. Not yet. I’m satisfied now I can make myself into a convincing fake girl anytime I want. Well, as long as that girl looks like Shelly. You’re going to have me using tampons and dildos soon the way you’re going, but that’s your life, not mine. Let’s work on other bodies so I’m not restricted to only George and Shelly.
“I wasn’t going to do that to you, Georgie.”
You would have before I took control! You were one day away from having Shelly have sex with guys before I had Dad put a stop to it.
“I’m sorry, Georgie. You’re right. It’s your body. But I have to tell you something. I can only make Shelly in such detail because I lived in her body. When I copied Freddy, and your dad, and the other people you saw me copy, I was only faking.”
Faking? I thought you looked like a good Freddy, and Dad thought you did him well, too.
I mostly just copied their faces, and flattened the breasts. I was actually a girl in my crotch those times. It was only after you brought me in for good during the seance that I even learned how to make male genitals. Before that I only possessed you as goo.
Wow. Good fakes, then.
I can show you how to do these things, and it will be good to help you learn to copy anybody.
I went out to breakfast as George and explained to my parents.
“I’m done being Shelly for a while. Samantha wanted to get me started copying female genitals, but I think it’s more important to learn how to copy other people besides Shelly.”
“That sounds good, son,” Mom told me.
“I’m glad you are exercising some control over your relationship with Samantha. It is your body, after all,” Dad said.
“That’s what I told her. She explained these lessons are going to be harder, but I think they will be more valuable in the end.”
“I’m inclined to agree,” Dad replied. “The main thing you will get out of having female genitals is that you will be able to have sex as a woman, and that can wait, though I’m sure your mom and Samantha will tell you it is important.”
Mom just nodded.
“There is actually one other advantage. By not having concealed male genitals while I’m in a woman’s body, I won’t come in the male way if I accidentally arouse myself too much.”
“Couldn’t you just have no genitals?” Mom asked.
“Maybe.”
Samantha, how hard would it be to make me have no genitals?
“You’d have to improvise. I never tried taking away things, but see if you can make yourself have no pinky on your left hand.”
I tried to do this, but I couldn’t.
“Samantha suggested trying to see if I could have no pinky, and I couldn’t do it. That probably means I can’t have no genitals, either. But I can make it smaller,” I said, demonstrating the latter option. Then I had a brainstorm.
“I should be able to make the hidden male genitals those of a 10-year-old. Then I wouldn’t come.”
“Now that’s a good idea!” Mom, Dad, and even Samantha all said at the same time.
I had to look deep into my memory to recall 10-year-old George, but I did. I tested the 10-year-old genitals idea by putting them on George first, and confirming I couldn’t get an erection that way. Then every day for a week, I showered as my version of Shelly with the genitals this way, and never came during those showers. The idea worked!
The rest of the time, Samantha was mostly helping me work on faces. There were pictures of faces everywhere and lots of options to duplicate them. Mom had a great idea of buying a woman’s makeup mirror, which would give me a closeup of my face and allow me to compare with the face I was trying to copy on the computer next to it. Faces were such an important part of how people identified other people that Samantha was convinced if I could do the face well, I only had to do the rest of the body vaguely right to pass.
“By the way, you’ll never need makeup. Color comes easy with the goo. Did you notice, when I first started taking over your goo, that time I went to Wal-Mart, that I looked in a mirror by the makeup counter and adjusted my colors?”
No. Must’ve been too subtle for me to notice.
“It was mainly my lip color and the bit above my eyes representing eye shadow. I’d put in some color when I made the face, but I was checking how it looked. The basic colors representing Shelly are so ingrained in me that they came automatically when I was copying her from my memory, but I did different makeup colors at times.”
So can you explain how I do colors?
“Well you already made Shelly’s hair the right color. Just think about how you did that.”
Hmm. Yeah, got it!
Pretty soon, like a kid who has just discovered a new toy, I was giving myself blue hair, green skin, yellow lips, and other fun shades, before I got serious and tried making myself look like various ethnicities. I discovered one limit to my power, though. I couldn’t make part of my goo into clothes, weapons, or other objects. I could, to some degree, make an approximation of a sword or spear by shaping my arm and hand, but it was still my arm, and wasn’t any harder.
Samantha told me in my head, “I couldn’t make clothes from the goo either. That’s why I went out and bought some.”
December 22, 2007
Samantha continued giving me lessons in changing my body various ways, but I had a funny thought when I woke up this Saturday morning, the start of two weeks off school for Christmas break, and I tried to take all the color out of my body. What I intended to do was go invisible, but the actual result was that I kept my body shape but I was the silvery color of the goo. I stood in front of the mirror so Samantha could see clearly what I’d done.
Ta da!
“Hey, that’s really cool, Georgie! We look like some kind of robot or something.”
It’s just my body with no color at all. I guess the color of the goo shows through, even when the goo is formed into skin and organs.
“That’s interesting. That’s probably what happens when we stretch a lot, too. The color takes a moment to catch up and the silver shows for a moment.”
I changed it to Shelly’s body with my current modifications, and took out all the color.
“Ooh. That looks awesome!” Samantha practically shouted inside my head. “But try this. Make your nipples and areolae really small and the breasts slightly pointed.”
Specific changes like this were what we’d been practicing a lot lately. I did it, and I liked the look. I could see why Samantha suggested it.
“Now get rid of the pubic hair.”
I made that change as well.
“Awesome!” Samantha said to me in my head. “You could actually run around naked this way. People would either think you were a sophisticated robot or a girl in an all-over metallic bodysuit.”
Ha ha! You’re right! A solution to that problem of not being able to make clothes! I said to her as I looked at myself from various angles in the mirror. So I should go down for breakfast like this.
“Do it! do it!”
So I did. Mom and Dad were used to seeing me come down with a different look every day except on school days, when I stuck to normal George. Both of them laughed when they saw me. After I got my cereal and sat down at the table to eat it, Dad started singing.
She’s a... quicksilver girl
A lover of the world
She spreads her wings
And she’s free
“I have wings?”
“No, it’s just part of the song. It’s an old song, but it’s by Steve Miller, who I think is still performing after all these years. You can probably find it online. I haven’t heard it in a long time but you reminded me of it.”
Mom came close to me and whispered in my ear, “Are you naked?” and I whispered back, “Yes.”
I finished and put away breakfast and left the room without Dad ever commenting on my nudity. Not sure whether he noticed. But when I caught Mom alone I soon afterward I talked to her about it.
“I haven’t been able to make the goo into actual clothing, but Samantha suggested making my nipples really small and the breasts slightly pointed, which makes it look like something covering the breast rather than an actual breast. And then I hid the pubic hair, and my fake girl crotch is almost completely smooth already. And I had to test it out. I don’t know whether Dad noticed.”
“He certainly noticed you, but I also don’t know whether he figured out you’re naked. You’ve been making a lot of different looks and he doesn’t know all your clothes like I do. I noticed your nails, though.”
I looked at my hand. Yeah, you could totally tell my hand wasn’t covered by something.
“So what if I did something like this?”
I made my hands, feet, head, and neck normally colored and left the rest of me silvery.
“That actually looks a lot more convincing as clothing,” Mom replied. “You could also try coloring the other parts of you like more normal clothes. Make seam lines and everything.”
“Oh, God, seams? Let me go look at some actual clothes and I’ll find you later.”
I found it too difficult to make fake seam lines, but I made the top pink and the bottom royal blue split at the point where my pants would come up to, and Mom liked that. So then I stuffed an actual pink top I had similar to that and a pair of Shelly’s jeans with pillows and towels to make a makeshift mannequin, adjusted the color of the “pants” on my body, and used that as a model to work from in trying to add those seam lines. It was too much to try today, but I did manage to add the outline of a pocket on one butt cheek.
I was also able to memorize what I had done so far so that after spending time as George I could jump back to this body. That was one of the things I had been practicing with Samantha, memorizing whole bodies so I could recreate them quickly. Every time I add one thing I add it to the memorized version.
December 26, 2007
Mom and Dad had gotten me some Christmas presents, including Mom getting me some more clothes for Shelly’s body that I wouldn’t have considered but I admitted were actually nice. But they also gave me a card they said was a ticket to spend up to $500 of the money Samantha helped me recover on fun stuff. So I took some of that money and went out today.
I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I bought several different kinds of construction toys and clay which I thought might help me better visualize other bodies I wanted to make. And then I saw a comic book store.
I hadn’t really been buying comic books, but I was inspired by my experience as uncolored goo. Specifically, I thought I remembered there being some characters, fictional heroes, who were just made of something like ice or metal, and didn’t wear any clothes over it. I mean, everybody knew Donald Duck didn’t wear pants, but he’s a duck. These were human-looking people just made out of something other than flesh and bone.
I searched the whole shop, and sure enough, I found 8 comic books featuring 5 different characters who fit that description, and bought all of them to study later. Well, to read, but also study how those characters were depicted.
The comic books were disappointing. It turned out two of them actually wore skin-tight bodysuits and weren’t actually naked, including the only woman among them. But three of them, as far as I could tell, actually went around naked. The drawings simply never depicted them in poses where you could see anything between their legs. But you could see their chests all the time. None of them have nipples. For that matter, they usually depicted them in ways you couldn’t see their nails, either, and when you could see where their nails should be, they simply didn’t have any.
I’d been developing a clothed version of Shelly’s body and I’d already figured out how to shrink the nipples and the two openings in my crotch each down to the size of a hair follicle. I’d gone with rounded breasts rather than the pointed look Samantha had first suggested, which I thought looked more convincing, as if I had some bra on under what I wanted people to see as clothing.
But looking at this, I removed the color and I shrank the nails down, too, letting the skin close up around them. And it did now look like I had some incredibly flashy bodysuit on more than it did that I was naked.
But it was too flashy for practical use. The fake-clothed body I’d been making was better, and even then I didn’t feel like I’d use that in public except in emergency, if I was left without clothes perhaps after having gone to goo and lost them. But if I did, I’d be better off trying to fake-clothe Shelly. Boys didn’t usually wear such tight clothing and the look was much less convincing
January 3, 2008
Mom decided it was a good time before classes started again to go get me tested and registered with NANA, and last week she got me a Thursday appointment. I didn’t realize until she explained it that it was going to be an all day thing. They were going to do the tests like the medium Stephanie had done, but in a lot greater detail to test me for every known power.
A tall black woman came out and led me inside to run the testing. The first part was physical testing and they first had me put on an all-over bodysuit.
“I shapeshift, so is this suit going to be able to fit other bodies?”
“As long as you don’t change too much. It’s designed to stretch a lot to support most bodies. We’re not going to be testing your ability to warp outside of normal human shapes in this first part, so it should be fine.”
She had me try some other shapes for some of the tests, more thin and tall, more short and muscular, male and female, but except for the muscular forms being able to lift a little more, and the bodies farther from George’s and Shelly’s shapes being more awkward for me, I didn’t notice any difference in how I performed.
After a bunch of those tests, there was a chance for me to shower, change back into my normal clothes, and go eat lunch. Afterward, there were a bunch of tests where they quickly figured out I didn’t have certain other kinds of powers like magic. In one part of this they had a psychic who could communicate with Samantha directly. Samantha relayed to me inside my head what she was getting.
Then they focused on my shapeshifting. They had me put on something like a sports bra and skin-tight shorts for this part, made out of that same stretchable material, so most of my body was free to change shapes, and I could be male or female, and they could see the things I could do with colors on my skin. As before, I was unable to make clothes, tools, weapons, and such. Also, the goo isn’t actually liquid. It stays together in one semi-solid clump. I can’t turn into raindrops and rain down on somebody.
They did find some tricks that I could do with the goo. First, there was Samantha’s trick from very early on, stretching to reach a high window and pulling myself up by retracting the goo. I could use basically the same trick to go through a small hole, making a hand on the other side to hold on with and bringing the rest of myself through as goo. This worked even down a long straight pipe, to about 12 feet long, and around curves for shorter distances. Of course, I lost my clothes going through the pipe, but it was a chance to use the ability I developed to paint my skin with fake clothes. Another of Samantha’s tricks was to leap from a tall height landing as goo. The goo doesn’t have any bones to break, and it cushions itself, so I could fall any distance they had the facility to check easily, up to a 10-story building, land as goo, and then simply remake a body out of the goo. Between that and the ability to look like other people, they definitely thought they’d have some reason to call on me. And I’d get paid when called upon.
Finally, I had to choose a code name.
“Quicksilver,” I suggested.
“Sorry, that name’s taken,” the woman at the counter said.
“Quicksilver Girl,” I tried next, changing myself to have Shelly’s goo body to go with the name.
“Nope, sorry, that name’s taken too.”
Samantha, would you mind if I used your actual name in my codename? It seems like I need something more unique.
“Go ahead,” she told me in my head. “Nobody’s going to associate this with my original body. We aren’t even using the original Samantha’s shape.”
“Samantha Quicksilver.”
“That name’s available. Congratulations, you’re Samantha Quicksilver.”
Comments
Cool story. The birth of a superhero lol
This story was different but the protagonist carefully explained as they went along and he was never upset or afraid and as far as he was concerned everything was normal. So what will they do next? Sounds like new adventures are in store for our duo.
Thanks
Thanks. Samantha is actually the oldest of all the characters in my writings. Not because she was born in the 1940s; I mean that she has been in my head for the longest time, long before any of these stories started being written down about 10 years ago. I tried role-playing her once, but I just wasn't very much into it. Normal provided a framework to let me do something with her fragmentary story, and I hope to do a lot more. The next chapter, though, will be focused more on another character and provide a little more background in Normal.