"Josette's Story" is a prequel to my story "The Dark of the Moon," here at Big Closet. That story introduced Josette Melford as a boy temporarily turned into a girl by magic. This novelette looks back in time and to tell the story of how Josette's strange adventure began months earlier. Read and enjoy.

[Author's Note: As announced last month, I have had to suspend the editing and posting of "Twilight of the Gods" featuring Mantra. My busy work load has prevented me from continuing my polishing of the rough draft. I hope I can go back to Twilight after I catch up on things. In the meanwhile, I have this alternate tale, "Josette's Story," ready to go. It will take little additional polishing to instead bring you a chapter of Josette each month for the immediate future.

By the way, with Twilight of the Gods I started putting up the best AI image illustrations that I could. I plan to present a monthly illustration for this story also. They are not always easy to get exactly right, but they are always fun to create using the amazing current technology.]

JOSETTE'S STORY

The Prequel to “The Dark of the Moon.”

By Christopher Leeson

The fluorescent lights of Westbrook Mall cast harsh shadows as Loren Melford wandered its corridors, killing time. At seventeen, he'd skillfully used the art of the casual glance when passing the display window of Amanda's Secret.

Though silk and lace beckoned, alluringly draped upon female manikins in the display window, Loren gave the sumptuous view only a passing glance. He wanted to stand and stare. He wanted to go into Amanda’s and feast his eyes on the lingerie, but society had its unwritten rules. And those rules dictated how young men had to behave around lingerie shops.

The injustice of the situation gnawed at him. In theory, this was a free country, but in reality a guy couldn't browse boudoir fashion without being labeled a deviant. Only when accompanied by a female could a man legitimately enter a lingerie store, an option not available to Loren. Not that he didn’t want a girlfriend. He wanted a top-draw girlfriend like the heroes of adventure movies always won just before the closing credits.

As far as girlfriends went, nothing else would have satisfied him. He felt embarrassed by decent-looking guys going around with un-hot girls. Where was the prestige in that? Inevitably, guys with no taste ended up married to ugly women. At least a male loner could swagger about pretending to be cool, but keeping company with a Plain Jane girlfriend would let out the truth that he couldn’t measure up, that he was a loser. Why was the world so irrational? The lingerie on display had been designed to capture men's attention and no one else’s. Yet men weren't supposed to go with the flow and luxuriate in the beauty of it.

He'd often wondered who made these rules. The preachers hadn’t. Preachers never talked about the important things. They had their minds fixed on behaving nicely so they could keep their tax exemptions.

Men could never make the rules for the women, not even to keep them from making a mistake. So how was it that women got off making rules for men? Where had this illogical consensus come from? Why did males, who had armies at their command, put up with unfair treatment? Persecution, really. Did this spineless acquiescence come from decades of media brainwashing?

Suddenly, as Loren stood there musing, he realized that someone was standing close behind him.

"You look like the sort of young man who needs what I can give him," declared a woman’s voice.

Loren looked back and found exactly what he expected: a woman pushing sixty-five. She was overweight, probably from eating too much chocolate. Whatever the lady was selling, she was talking to the wrong customer.

"Were you speaking to me, ma'am?" he asked.

"Yes, I was. I sense that you’re a boy who wants better than he’s getting," she said, her eyes agleam. "Let me explain. I’m a person with psychic abilities, and I can see you have a blue aura."

"Are you talking about my Lee jeans?"

"No, not that! Do you even know what an aura is?"

"Sure. Auras are colored lights."

"They are, yes. And your aura is blue. Blue-aura boys have special qualities. Whenever I see a blue aura, I try to do its owner a favor."

“Look, you're sort of creeping me out,” said Loren. “If you don’t mind, I have to be on my way."

"I want to give you something.”

“It’s not a kiss, is it?”

It’s something better," she persisted. "I have something for you to read. If you follow its instructions, all your dreams might come true."

“What dreams?”

“How would I know? Only the one who dreams can know what his dreams are.”

She held out to him a tiny box. Loren guessed he was being offered drugs.

"What's in there?"

"A small bottle with a sheet of instructions. It’s medicine and it will do you good, but mind the directions carefully. There can be... adverse effects...if you decide to take it in the wrong way."

"I don't take gifts from strangers. And I don't have money enough to buy anything."

The woman chuckled. "It's not for sale. I give it away free to help people. This magic oil meets the needs of blue-aura boys. But you absolutely must not take it until after you read the directions. After that, whatever mistakes you make are your own responsibility."

She set the box beside him on the mall bench next to them and shuffled away. Loren stood there alone, staring at what she’d left behind. Common sense warned him to walk away, but he didn’t want to leave something potentially dangerous out in the open for someone, maybe a child, to find. He thought he should take it to Mall Security.

He went down the corridor to the business offices and a cramped security office with a desk and a paunchy man who wasn’t even wearing a uniform.

“What brings you here, lad?” he asked.

Loren put the box on his desk and explained his encounter with the old lady. The security man picked up the box and shook it. Not hearing anything, he undid its latch it and saw inside a miniature bottle with a folded paper. He skimmed the latter with mounting skepticism.

"Just New Age nonsense," the guard said. "The lady must be some mystical kook, pushing crazy beliefs."

"Shouldn't you send it to a lab or something?"

"We just throw suspicious stuff into the toxic waste box."

"What does the letter say?"

"Something about the oil in the bottle being magic. I’ve read enough to know it’s drivel."

"What if the sheet isn’t telling the truth? What if the oil is a drug or a poison?"

"That's for the hazmat people to worry about. I’ll see that the packet is gotten rid of safely."

“My mom's a pharmaceutical scientist,” Loren said. “She could probably analyze it. If it’s not safe, I could write an essay about it for English class when school starts."

"Sure, kid. Finders keepers. It's yours." He returned the box. "Just don’t do anything risky with it unless your mom says it's safe."

Loren departed, bearing with him a low opinion of corporate security men. But this little mystery had at least enlivened a dull day. Despite his better judgment, he wanted to read that letter before deciding the bottle's fate.

#

When Loren got home, he took the box to the living room table, turned on the chandelier light overhead, and sat down to read. The security man hadn’t been kidding; the printed sheet read like a fantasy story. What it said was much weirder than he had expected! The text claimed the vial contained a sex-change potion! It said, “This distillation will allow a young male to take on the attributes of the favorite female image he holds most dearly in his mind. But BEWARE. Follow all instructions carefully. Misuse of the product may lead to undesirable side effects.”

No wonder the guard hadn’t read very far! Magical sex change was a fantasy idea. Loren was used to such ideas from his fantasy reading. Jack L. Chalker, had written a lot of sex-change novels. His favorite had been The Identity Matrix. The youth continued reading. “To initiate a sex change, place a small drop of the oil extract upon the bare flesh of the subject to be transformed. The magical effect will remain dormant until the start of the next dark moon. When the shape-change is accomplished, it shall be stable until the next dark of the moon. The subject will then revert to his natural form without ill effects.”

What was the dark of the moon? Loren wondered. A cloudy night? An eclipse? The new moon? The youth checked his smartphone. A net search told him that “the dark of the moon” was the period of the moon’s cycle when its light was not visible from Earth, ergo, the new moon.

He read on. “The transformed boy may develop emotional or psychological traits mimicking the appearance and the expected behavior of the strongest female image held in his mind. That image becomes the new reality for the user. Persons he knows will not remember him in a previous male form. All physical records will attest that the subject was born female. A boy who becomes a girl will see that many things in his life has changed. He may find that his closet is filled with female clothing.”

Wow! This could be a wild plot for a fiction book! It wasn’t talking about a mere sex change, but a full-blown reality-warping spell, an impossible concept! Fortunately, there was no magic, and even if magic existed, how could it be so powerful as to create an alternate parallel existence? If such a thing was loose in the world, dictators would use it for world-conquest schemes! Loren was disappointed to find not a bone fide mystery but a hack idea from fan fiction!

He scanned for some information about the meaning of “blue auras,” but couldn’t find the term. Instead, in a paragraph under the heading of Taboos, it said, “The spirits that enable the change of the boy’s reality will not tolerate the exposure of their existence to the material world. If the subject breaks the taboo of silence while in female form, his female existence will become his permanent reality.

“Also, if he recounts his magical experience to others while in male form, the magic oil will become inert for him, and he will lose his ability to return to a female reality. In either case, the subject’s allegations about the reality of magic will be left without proof.”

A second warning followed: “A boy in female form must not reapply the oil to his body until after he has reverted to his natural form, which will occur at the beginning of the next dark moon. Taking a second dosage while still female shall make his female reality permanent.”

Wow! That would be a disaster. It was a good thing that none of this was real! And then he came upon an even nastier taboo. “If a subject in female form becomes pregnant, his female reality will remain permanent.”

As he read along, Loren began to wonder if this spiel wasn’t meant to program a person for a hallucinatory experience, like LSD. Once he had finished reading, Loren put the bottle and the paper into a trunk inside his room and went back downstairs to make a lonely dinner.

His mom’s work in pharmaceuticals took her out of town a lot. As for his dad, he lived a thousand miles away and had a new wife and child. Loren was lucky to see his dad and his half-sister as much as once a year. To get his mind off his broken family, Loren preferred to think about the mystery of the bottle.

It called for experimenting, and he realized he could do a simple experiment on his own. Mrs. Janice Melford had a small lab in the house and kept a few white mice for experimenting. It was Loren’s duty to feed the stock during her absences. He wondered what would happen if he dabbed a little of the oil on a white mouse. If the mouse died, well, he wasn’t so badly off that he couldn’t pay his mom for a replacement mouse.

After a quick meal, Loren entered the laboratory and put on a pair of quality rubber gloves. Then he donned a high-grade breathing mask. Finally, he opened the vial, which had a taped turn cap. He used tweezers to remove the inner seal and then carefully washed the tweezers and the screw-on cap, concerned about any toxic effects.

Then, he replaced the cap. Still wearing the safety mask, Loren placed the vial on a lab dish to capture spillage should the bottle be tipped over.

He again unstopped the vial and wet a Q-tip with the oil, which he put into a small cardboard box from the trash, which he had stuffed with absorbent cotton wadding. Setting the Q-tip on an old newspaper, the teen went to the mouse cage and randomly drew out a white mouse. But when he saw it was female, he returned it and searched to find a male one instead.

Since he was doing a sex-change experiment, he wanted to perform every detail perfectly. The little beast didn’t struggle, being used to being handled by Loren and his mom. Loren carefully rubbed the wet Q-tip on the rat’s belly, making sure the oil reached the creature’s skin.

Subsequently, he washed the Q-tip inside a tuna can full of soapy water. This presumably contaminated water he poured into the toilet bowl and flushed it into the sewage system.

Finally, Loren put the washed Q-tip into his mom’s wall-mounted toxic waste receptacle. Still wearing the rubber gloves, Loren used a spray-on cleaner and Bounty towels to clean the exterior of the bottle and every part of his work area thoroughly.

He took the soiled wipes to the backyard barbecue to burn them, protected against the smoke by his breathing mask. Though he was taking every precaution, Loren still didn’t believe in magic. His concern was that even if the oil was not magical, it could still be toxic.

Finally, Loren examined the mouse, now in a cage of its own. It was behaving normally, though of course, the paper had said that the magical effect would manifest only at the “dark of the moon.” But Loren did not know when that event would occur.

Returning to his computer, the teen checked for the date of the next new moon and found that it would happen in thirteen days at 11:51pm. The upcoming new moon was till on his mind as he drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, Loren looked in again on the caged mouse and affirmed that it was spry and active. Re-donning the gloves and checked, he took it in hand to recheck its sex. Nothing about it had changed. Would it magically transform on the night of the dark moon?

After taking breakfast, he went to his desktop to search for “blue aura.” There was a fair amount of New Age “teaching” about auras, even blue ones. A passage read, “The presence of blue energy in a person’s aura is linked to an openness to receiving or perceiving spiritual energy. People with a blue aura may have a strong sense of intuition. Blue auras are often associated with calm, collected people who live a balanced life. In short, the meaning of a blue aura often reflects a relaxed, receptive energy that is aware of the bigger picture.”

This was all very well, but none of the information said anything about sex changes or femininity. Maybe the old lady’s ideas about blue auras were crank, or they represented the obscure thinking of a tiny cult whose ideas hadn’t spread far.

Loren’s mom returned that morning, and the rest of the week was humdrum. During that time, his sole social interaction involved a one-hour phone call to his best friend, Darrell. Days later, after the new moon had arrived, he checked on the rodent for the hundredth time. It still looked just fine, chipper and eager for his grain—and it remained male. He gave the beast a little more time to change and, at midnight, checked it again. The creature’s sex was undeniably male.

#

Now there was only a month before school recommenced. Loren hung around home, reading a lot. But passing time didn’t make the bottle of oil fade from his mind. He couldn’t shake his disappointment at his experiment’s failure. That failure dejected him because it proved that there was no magic in the world. On the evening of the next new moon, he took revenge on the world for being so despicably predictable and dull.

Just like Dr. Jekyll, the Invisible Man, and Dr. Franz Edelmann, Lore had nerve enough to experiment on himself. He could be bold because the chance of there being bad results had sunk to zero! He wet another Q-tip with the mysterious oil and put a tiny dab on his forearm. This action was his way of saying “F* you!” to a world that held no surprises.

Immediately afterward, his flamboyant challenge yielded no results. When his mom came home, they had supper together, but her current work assignment require a very early rising, so she went to bed early. The new moon was still hours away, and Loren didn’t feel like staying up late. He therefore went to bed right after his mother did and fell asleep quickly.

#

At Loren’s next waking, it was still dark. He lay there, hoping to fall back to sleep, but something kept tickling his cheek. When he swept his face with his hand, the tickling kept coming back. He reached into the dark to turn on the lamp, but his hand couldn’t find it. Getting up, he flipped the wall switch, and what the light showed made his brows go up in surprise.

This wasn’t his room; he didn’t recognize his surroundings. It was a stranger’s bedroom, and—from the clothes, novelties, and pictures around him—it was a teen girl’s room. The dresser top was loaded with unrecognizable girly nonsense. Bemusedly, he glanced at the dark window and jumped in surprise. A girl was standing outside it and looking in at him!

After the momentary jolt, he took a second look at her.

If he had to have a prowler, this was the best sort of a prowler to have.

What a girl! Her blonde hair was pale; she wore a short nightie, white topped with a light blue skirt. He couldn’t see much of her legs, but he absolutely wanted to see more!

Suddenly, it dawned on Loren that he was experiencing a “false awakening,” a lucid dream. He took a second look around the room. It overflowed with feminine belongings. The walls were covered with posters, some with fluffy animal pictures, but others pictured male teenage rock stars.

Loren had loved to dream lucidly since childhood. For a few months, he had taken health supplements that were supposed to stimulate lucid dreaming, but they never worked. The dream world was a place where he would have liked to live. A dreamer was a superhero. With unlimited strength and the ability to fly and wall through walls. Every lucid dream he experienced was an opportunity to have some fun!

In a dream, there were no rules, no social controls. Now, he realized that the ghostly girl outside the window was just a figment of his dream state. He wanted to get closer to the dream girl, close enough to put his arms around the comely maid and smack her with a hundred sizzling kisses!

He shuffled through the floor clutter and touched his nose against cold glass. The glass foiled his groping reach, too. Unlike his other lucid dreams of the past, he couldn’t walk through solid objects.

So he stood there looking at the girl, especially at her killer legs. These were shown off by the shortness of her babydoll pajamas, and such legs belonged on a dance stage! Yet he tried to keep his excitement down. From experience, he knew that a surge of emotion would make him wake, so he struggled for calm, babbling, “You’re a knockout! Why don’t you come inside? I’ll get you a Coke, and we can get to know each other.”

Some books said that a lucid dreamer could control what happened in a dream. Loren had a good idea where he wanted this contact to go. Concentrating hard, he said to the girl, “Repeat after me, miss, you think I’m the coolest guy you ever met….”

But the voice coming from Loren’s throat sounded all wrong. He reflexively touched his throat, only to find how smooth and warm it was...

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2