The Corrupting Commission Pt. 01

...And a growl that sounded like a very big animal. But we didn't have predators that big in the area, did we? None that came in near human beings...

"Sara? I don't have any phone signal," Lara said quietly, clutching her phone to her chest, the device shaking in her grip. "I can hear them... It's... I don't know..."

I stood.

"Let's make sure all the doors and windows are locked, room by room. And turn off all the lights. I don't know what's going on out there, but we're sure as hell not going to be involved in any of it."

A screech sliced through the air, unwittingly close, and we jumped, scurrying to make sure that everything was locked up and sealed tight as the wind eased a touch and thunder rumbled in the distance. I tossed them torches from the kitchen, thankful that I had had the foresight to leave a few tucked away within the easily accessible junk drawer, and we went around the house, each going in a different direction.

Thankfully also, only the back door was unlocked and a bathroom window at the back of the house, which was just because we had taken separate showers earlier and the steam had needed to dissipate. Annoyingly, the extractor fan in there had not been working and I hadn't gotten around to calling someone out to fix it -- or digging into online videos to see whether I was capable of diagnosing just what the problem was.

We reconvened in the living room, closing the door, settling down with our backs to the sofa, away from the windows. Every curtain was closed and we knew everything was locked, though it, for some reason, didn't make anything any better.

Ciri kept checking and rechecking her phone, but even the internet connection was down, as if we had been completely cut off from the local area when the storm rolled in.

"There's probably a disruption," I said, more confident than I felt. "It's normal, seriously."

Ciri glared.

"And what do you say about those sounds though? It sounds like there's a load of fucking animals running around out there!"

She rarely swore and, when she did, I knew she was far gone, holding down her nerves with all the force she could muster deep inside her. I knew she was right too, as much as I was striving to hold on to myself, to stay fast, to be safe, to try to reassure them through any means possible. After all, if the doors were locked, even if something pretty bad had happened, we'd surely be okay in there and we'd find out what the hell had gone on in the light of the morning.

Right?

That was, at least, all I could hope for.

The animal growls continued and we crept close to the window, turning off the torches and peeking under the curtain. We had to see, one way or the other, even if we knew too that we should have shrunk back and away from everything that was happening, putting it down to perhaps tiredness and the storm. However, there hardly seemed to be any trace of the storm left outside, leaving a deadly eeriness cast across the street where the snarls and grunts and groans echoed across a stalemate of an expanse.

"What's that?" Lara hissed, jabbing me in the shoulder. "There... Past the gate?"

I had quite a wide gate set at the end of my path, but I rarely opened both sides. Something big and lumbering crossed our vision, the hedge shaking as if it was pushing up against it too from the other side. All I caught was a glimpse of thick fur, clothing hanging off its body, tattered and torn, a snarling muzzle that pulled back from sharp teeth.

Fuck. We really were in the thick of something there, weren't we?

"There's...lights," Lara pointed out, a little too bold, pressing forward, though there was a yowling cry like a big cat in the air too. "You... Can you see them too?"

I could. I just didn't want to admit to it, as if something was happening out of a sci-fi film that, really, I might have been into at another time. Or horror. It wasn't all that much better when horror was happening right in front of you, to be fair, but the lights floated and bobbed, each one roughly the size of my closed fist. They didn't seem to move with any sense of direction, floating down the street, some even coming into the garden and hovering around the flowerbeds.

"It's got to be an illusion," Ciri said, even if it was not quite like her to deny the truth that lay there right before her eyes. "Or a prank, right? Are any of your neighbours, like...kinda pranksters? Or what?"

Her voice shook and I hated that. Maybe they would never have had to be so scared if I hadn't invited them over. Then it would have just been me there, stuck in the house, even if I did not know at that time whether that would have been better or worse.

It was kind of a toss-up. No one wanted to be alone.

And then the strangest thing yet happened. Two balls of light condensed, flitting to the driveway, which was set to the left of the window and entered via another gate with a security code. I'd liked having that put in, because I always wanted to be able to make sure I was safe at home, stopping people from parking outside and making sure that things were nice and private for me. Maybe I got that from my grandmother too.

Yet the balls of light swelled, growing into small, human-like forms, crouched and hunched over like little goblins, though no features could be seen. Lara's hand gripped by shoulder and, despite the pain of her fingers digging in, I didn't do anything to stop her. It just didn't seem right, but nothing was right at all, not as the glowing figures came closer and closer and closer, ducking down, though it was not as if they didn't want to be seen.

Maybe everything would have been okay, if we hadn't been at the window. Maybe everything would have been okay, if we had just pretended that we weren't there until daylight, that we didn't exist and never had done in that house. But something big, like a wolf -- bigger than any dog that I had seen -- stumbled into the driveway gate with a resounding crash. Lara could not help but shriek and, even later, I could not blame her, for it took every ounce of control I had in me not to scream either. Ciri merely stiffened, but I could tell that she was barely holding it together.

The wolf-like mammal, whatever it was (did it have too many legs? I couldn't see, couldn't tell) stumbled away, tripping over its own feet, looking like it was half-clad in trousers. That was absurd, surely, yet I didn't have time to think of more as those two little glowing faces turned on us, our faces there in the window, half-hidden -- but not nearly hidden enough.

"We should get away from here," Ciri said, shaking Lara and me out of whatever stupor it was that we were in. "Come on -- we've got to..."

"Look!"

The figures strode up to the house, straightening up even though they still seemed shorter, maybe around four feet tall. They did not stop, moving quickly, with purpose, right up to the door with the clear pane set into the middle of it...

And they simply vanished. I cursed and ran through to the hallway by the front door, heart pounding, expecting to find something there, someone there, but there neither was anyone or any indication that there had been anyone there either. They had walked into the door...and disappeared. Like nothing had ever happened.

I gulped and turned back to my friends, their torches switched off. I could only imagine how they were feeling, their hearts pounding, palms slick with sweat, breath raking and catching in their chests. At the very least, it was a struggle for me to breathe, straining to take in a full breath.

It was wrong, all wrong.

"Let's..." I hated how shaky my voice was. "Let's go to the office, the little one with the library in it. The window has always been stuck in there, I've never been able to shift it or open it at all. I don't know what's going on, but we will surely be safe in there."

It was all I could say, slipping up into stranger word choices, trying to convince even myself too that I thought we were all going to be okay. Just who did I think I was to be trying to tell them that, hm? They knew as well as I did that something really weird was going on.

I didn't tell them what I saw next. I didn't tell them about the book sliding from the bookcase as we shut ourselves in the library. All I did was close the door a little harder than necessary behind us, to make sure that the sound of the book falling to the floor with a dull, soft thump was hidden. Mostly.

I picked it up, turning it over in my hands, swallowing hard. Yet that didn't do anything to settle the nerves all bundled up in my stomach, twisting all up into one another, churning, writhing, like my intestines had come alive and were all grumbled up inside me.

"What have you got there?"

Of course, Lara would have been the one to notice that, coming over with the torch to peer over my shoulder at it.

"Oh, just a book of myths and cautionary tales, stuff like that," I said, knowing that they were not into the stuff I was into. "I must have, ah...been reading it earlier."

"That's creepy."

Ciri plucked the book out of my hands and I let her, thinking that she could use the distraction. I wasn't all that sure that the stories in the book, however, were going to be any more comforting, considering what was going on outside. There were some quite disturbing tales in there, though, thankfully for me, they were on the cleaner side of what I usually read.

Ciri flipped through it as I fidgeted uncomfortably.

"You do read some weird things, Sara," she said. "But you do you. What's this one about a cat collector? Do you remember it?"

Of course, I did. It was one of my favourites for the felines that it contained and, well, I liked the animal transformation aspect too, even if it was not my favourite of all. I nodded, pretending to be a little distracted, but Ciri was not deterred. Maybe she needed something to fixate on right then, considering everything else that was happening outside. I had to allow her that, surely?

"Yeah..." I took the book from her, trying not to stiffen up as there was another wail from outside, one that we all, rather studiously, ignored. "The cat collector... It was, uh, weird, reminded me of a crazy cat lady down the street from me when I was younger, though this is a bit more twisted."

Lara and Ciri looked interested enough, so I shrugged and followed the story on the page with the tip of my finger, which was not at all like the claw of a cat, my nails kept short and neatly trimmed. Ciri, on the other hand, was quite feline when it came to her hands and I never had understood just how she managed to type as well as she did with nails as long as that.

"It's a cautionary tale about a sprite with a feline affiliation, one that often takes the form of a big cat, prowling forests and moorland. There're lots of different tales about them, but, in this one, the sprite walks down the road like a mature, elegant woman, flanked by a guard of exotic cats. They follow her, day in and day out, and no one interacts with her -- because they knew to heed the tales."

"Until, one day," she continued, "a young man, old enough to know better, stops her in the street. He asks her what she's doing, why she had so many exotic animals, the big cats...and all the cat collector does is smile at him."

Lara shivered and even Ciri made a face at that. I shrugged, not wanting to go too deep into it, for it was one that I had dog-eared the page of for a reason, a story that I liked to explore, time after time again, letting my lusts for transform rise. Ciri and Lara didn't need to hear or know about that, not right then, even if the book had proven to be a good distraction for them so far.

"The warning is not to speak to the cat collector, the woman guarded by exotic felines...unless one wants to join her guard, of course. And that is exactly what happens to this young man, fur sprouting all over him, out of the neckline of his T-shirt, huge paws filling his shoes and changing the shape of his feet until he can't even keep his feet inside them at all."

"Ugh..." Lara grimaced. "That's really gross. So, he, like, becomes a cat. Like when you got super into that story series where the protagonist turns into a cat and then goes the rest of the time trying to turn back. And then...stays like that. Weird."

I nodded, unable to help myself from finishing the story. So, they did know a little more of what I liked, though I had not made a secret of the clean side of things, the stories that could be found in the young adult aisle of fiction at the bookstores, some even in the fantasy sections too. Transformation stories had fascinated me, of course, even through our studies together and it had not been all that unusual for me to wind down on a Sunday with a good book. It made sense that they had paid enough attention to my likes that they had noticed what I was reading too.

"Yeah, pretty much. He transforms right there in the middle of the street, the embodiment of the cautionary tale, and becomes a beautiful leopard, with black spots all over. Of course, he doesn't want to be a leopard, his clothes falling off him, all naked except for his fur, but whenever he tries to plead with the cat collector to transform him back, all that comes out of his mouth are cat sounds."

Ciri barked a laugh.

"Oh, could you imagine that?" She laughed, though there was only a touch of humour in it, more disbelief. "All that...mewing and yowling and cat-screaming. You've heard them in the middle of the night, right, when two of them are roaming outside and get into a fight? And, what, this guy just gets stuck as a leopard then?"

I nodded, closing the book and passing it back to her. It wasn't needed and Ciri could entertain herself with it further if she wanted to, as I didn't want to go too deeply into things, not as heat built between my legs. And it very much was not the time for that. The sounds outside, at least, seemed to have dulled.

Perhaps we had imagined the small figures walking straight through the door of the house.

Perhaps.

"I don't know, I remember some transformation books, fiction stuff, when we were kids, but I never got into that, that was all my brother's side," Ciri commented, though she seemed interested enough in flipping through the pages of the book, taking a look further. "It was the horror show though, the gross one, the one that boys liked... Oh, I don't even remember what it was."

"Well, you've got plenty of time to remember," I joked, leaning back against the wall and grinning. "We're here all night and all of your vacation too! So, chill out, we'll get everything back to normal soon enough and I bet we'll find out that there was just something crazy going on like a wolf escaped from the local zoo. Maybe everyone is running around trying to catch it right now?"

"Hah... Yeah, that would be scary," Lara said, "but alright, I guess. It's not like a wolf could get in here."

"And those lights could have been searchlights," Ciri added, a look of strained relief on her face, tightness around the corners of her eyes. "That would make a lot more sense... We were just getting really freaked out back there, there's nothing out there."

We didn't mention the figures. We didn't talk about how they had walked, seemingly, straight through the door. We just let the lie stand, putting it all down to a trick of the eyes.

Still, it didn't distract me from the reminders of the stories that I had spent so long pouring over, following each word on the page as my lusts had grown. It was a good thing that I hadn't had my sexual awakening too early, for it would have been pretty awkward to explain, honestly, why I was as enraptured and as turned on by those books as I was.

Of course, what I didn't tell Ciri and Lara, despite them being my friends, was that I was, well... It was strange to even think of it, but I was jealous of the victims in stories like that one, people who had what was left of their humanity stripped from them, ripped away violently as if they had never truly deserved to be able to move around in a humanoid form to begin with. To be transformed into an animal was hot, though not my favourite transformation kink, for there was so much more to explore there that it was more the taking away of humanity that appealed there.

My thoughts drifted and I had to gulp, trying to drag my attention back to reality and the present moment. It was so easy to get swept away in fantasies sometimes, even when I was around my friends. Still, at least I did know and understand what curses, the transformation mutations, would mean for my life, if things did turn out like one of those stories... The characters in the stories had no choice and I still wondered if there were people in the world, where those myths and tales had originated from, who had been transformed like that, who were alive, even then, as their transformed forms.

I couldn't pity them, even if I was meant to. And I knew every tale by heart, all of my favourites.

If someone had walked up to me and offered for me to swap places with them, I would have done it in a heartbeat.

That wasn't something I was going to tell Ciri and Lara, however, even if they had figured out bits of the transformation stuff that I liked reading and re-reading. Never before had I detailed the true, sordid extent to which I would want to be transformed, if that had ever been presented to me. They certainly didn't know about my online accounts for transformation roleplaying and the sheer volume of decrepit transformation stories, for much more adult audiences, that I consumed.

And then everything shifted.

Continued in part two...