Chapter 5: The Glutton's Fugue

By Monday morning, Elias's phone had been ringing nonstop for three days.

He let each call go to voicemail—Stevey's worried check-ins, Cookie asking if he was coming back to work, even his landlord wondering about the strange smells coming from his apartment. The messages piled up like accusations, each one a reminder of the life he was rapidly leaving behind.

The truth was, he couldn't face them. Not with his eyes now fully transformed into those alien rectangles, not with chitinous growths spreading across his torso like armor, and certainly not with the hunger that had become his constant, demanding companion.

The crab had been a revelation, but it had also been a catalyst. Whatever biological mechanism his mother had suppressed for twenty-seven years was now operating at full capacity, and each meal accelerated the process. He'd tried to resist, tried to return to his liquid diet, but his transformed digestive system rejected the protein shakes like poison, sending him into dry heaves that left him weak and shaking.

His body demanded solid food now. Demanded transformation. Demanded more.

The grocery delivery had arrived Saturday morning—five bags of carefully selected items that the delivery driver had left outside his door with obvious haste. Word was already spreading about the strange man on Harbor Street, the one who answered his door looking like something from a nightmare.

Elias surveyed his provisions like a general planning a campaign: fresh salmon, a whole chicken, ground turkey, lamb chops, a lobster tail, even some exotic items he'd ordered online—ostrich meat, alligator steaks, things that might push his transformation in new directions. The refrigerator and freezer were packed to capacity with possibilities.

He started with the salmon, telling himself he could maintain some measure of control, some semblance of human eating habits. He'd cook it properly, eat it with utensils, savor it like a civilized person.

The first bite destroyed that delusion.

The salmon's essence flooded through him—cold northern waters, the struggle upstream, the ancient cycle of life and death that had brought this flesh to his plate. His human restraints dissolved as the familiar savage hunger took control. He devoured the fish with his hands, scales and all, feeling the omega oils reshape his cellular structure in real time.

By the time he finished, scales had begun sprouting along his forearms, iridescent patches that caught the light like captured rainbows. When he flexed his fingers, thin membranes stretched between them—vestigial webbing that whispered of aquatic possibilities.

The chicken came next, and with it, the first feathers.

They emerged from his shoulder blades like needles piercing skin, not the soft down of domesticated birds but the strong flight feathers of something wild. Each quill pushed through his flesh with a sensation that was part pain, part ecstasy, part profound wrongness. He tried to pull them out, but they were rooted deep, integrated into his muscle and bone structure in ways that defied human anatomy.

Tuesday blurred into Wednesday in a haze of consumption and transformation. The turkey brought more feathers, stronger ones, until his back looked like something from a taxidermist's nightmare. The lamb added a strange, rectangular quality to his teeth, better suited for grinding vegetation than tearing meat, though the hunger demanded both.

He caught glimpses of himself in mirrors and windows—a patchwork creature of scales and shells and feathers, his face no longer recognizably human beneath the rectangular eyes and the way his jaw had begun to elongate. His reflection was becoming something from mythology, a chimera cobbled together from a dozen different species.

The lobster tail was a mistake.

As the crustacean's essence merged with his own, the chitinous growths on his leg spread rapidly, hardening into genuine shell. His left arm followed suit, segments of carapace replacing skin from wrist to shoulder. When he tried to bend his elbow, it clicked with an arthropod's mechanical precision.

But worse than the physical changes was what was happening to his mind. The constant flood of animal essences was fragmenting his consciousness, filling his thoughts with instincts that weren't human. The salmon's memories of spawning runs. The chicken's dim awareness of pecking orders and territorial disputes. The lobster's simple predatory focus on scuttling across dark ocean floors.

He was losing himself, one meal at a time.

Thursday morning brought a moment of clarity when he glimpsed his reflection in the bathroom mirror and barely recognized the creature staring back. Feathers sprouted from a scaled neck. Compound eyes were beginning to form at his temples, giving him a wider field of vision but fracturing his perception into insectoid fragments. His mouth had stretched into something that could accommodate both the grinding teeth of herbivores and the tearing fangs of predators.

"What have I become?" he whispered, his voice now a harmonious blend of human speech and animal sounds—part growl, part chirp, part chittering.

The question echoing in his transformed skull brought with it a surge of human memory—his mother's face, Stevey's friendship, the life he'd built despite his limitations. For just a moment, the animal instincts receded, and he remembered what it felt like to be Elias Vance.

But the hunger was already stirring again, and his remaining food supplies called to him from the kitchen. The ostrich meat promised new possibilities, new transformations. The alligator suggested prehistoric strengths. Each item in his refrigerator was another step away from humanity and toward something that had never existed in nature.

He tried to resist, clinging to his moment of clarity, but his transformed body had its own imperatives now. The various animal essences within him were demanding completion, demanding balance, demanding the next meal that would add another piece to the biological puzzle he was becoming.

By Thursday evening, he'd eaten everything.

The ostrich brought hollow bones and impossible lightness to his frame. The alligator added armor-like scales to his back and a predatory patience that settled into his mind like sediment. Each bite was another thread in the web of transformation that was rewriting his DNA in real time.

When the last morsel was consumed, Elias—or what had been Elias—sat in his kitchen surrounded by empty packages and gnawed bones, his multiple sets of eyes trying to process a world that looked different through compound lenses and rectangular pupils and the heat-sensing pits that had opened along his jawline.

He was no longer hungry, but he was no longer human either.

The thing that had been Elias Vance stood on legs that were part mammal, part crustacean, part bird, and surveyed its domain with the cold calculation of a dozen different predators. Feathers rustled against chitinous plates as it moved through the apartment, its various sensory organs cataloging potential threats and opportunities.

Outside, the world continued its oblivious routine. Cars drove past. People walked to work. Boats returned to harbor with their catches. But inside the apartment above the marine supply store, something new had been born—a chimera of flesh and instinct and an intelligence that remembered being human but was rapidly forgetting why that had ever mattered.

The hunger was gone, replaced by something worse: a cold, analytical awareness that everything around it was either predator, prey, or irrelevant. And in its fractured consciousness, a dozen different species' worth of survival instincts were reaching the same conclusion.

The food in the apartment was gone. But the world outside was full of possibilities.

The chimera that had been Elias smiled with too many different kinds of teeth, and began to plan.