LADY ANN'S FOLLY: Chapter Eight - Part Eight

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Hattie felt the same oddness that had rippled through her when she made the connection to Nellie – not a pain but enough to be called a discomfort. Still lying under the covers, her father’s face frowned in sleep and his open mouth smacked closed several times to the unsavoury sound of chewing air. His eyes tightened slightly and then relaxed.

Hattie felt a thrill of exhilaration run right up the back of her neck.

She looked down, raising her skinny Nellie arms by forty five degrees but saw no change so far. She narrowed her eyes, thinking, then gaped them wide and urgently tugged her nightie up over her head and dropped it onto the floor.

“That was close,” she whispered. It would be far too small for in a minute or two. She climbed out of her underwear too, almost fearfully.

She hadn’t had time to examine herself in new maid’s body in any detail with Lottie present at bedtime and she thought she could see now, but there was already something happening. The odd pointy breasts she had as Nellie were getting smaller. Her arms were starting to thicken.

“Oh good Lord, it’s really happening,” she whispered, thrilling over it.

In the bed, her father still looked the same... on the whole, but her was somewhat... diminished, like he had shrunk a little. Hattie ignored him, more fascinated by her own changes.

She had been a pretty girl all her life and was blossoming into a beautiful woman – even her maid’s body was feminine in every way – but that femininity was falling off her by the second as her torso sunk inwards, the pot belly flattening. The fat she had carried as Nellie was all at the front. The Earl was robust for his age but still carried a fair amount of weight, however it was distributed all around: front, sides and back. That layer of fat was starting to build up around Hattie’s trunk as she turned her nose up in aversion.

She felt an unsteadiness and the room lurched. She staggered, queasy, then it lurched again and she realised that she had grown much, much taller. She was taller by far than she had been; taller than Ann or Richard or even Burt. She could never have imagined such a perspective on the room as she now possessed. She was as tall as her father had ever been.

She raised her arms again and now they really did look different. She’d thought her hands as Nellie had been rather mannish but she realised now how silly she had been. Her hands were like great slabs of flesh now with gigantic stubby fingers and blocky nails. Curly white hair was breaking out on her arms and the backs of her hands. It was breaking out on her now flat chest.

Hattie gave out a moan and was startled to hear it sound much deeper than it should have.

At her crotch, the little patch of fair pubic hair that had replaced the dark curls she’d had in her real body were turning silver and Hattie’s eyes gaped as she saw something fleshy start to protrude from them.

“Oh God.”

She covered her mouth with her hand and looked anywhere she could but down.

That was the last thing she had considered. She didn’t want to see her own father’s... thing! She certainly didn’t want to have it attached to her own body!

Slight movement on the bed caught her eye and, relieved to have anywhere else to look, Hattie turned to face her father. Except it didn’t look like her father anymore.

His hands were no longer visible. His arms had shortened and grown slender, withdrawing up the sleeves of his pyjamas. His neck was thinner, his face softer and more slender. His prominent chin had sunken in, blending rather into his neck. Curly blond hair was sprouting all over his bald head while his silver moustache withdrew.

And it was at that moment that Hattie felt the tickling under her fingers which still lay across her mouth. She reached up with her other hand and felt with both, gingerly touching the rapidly thickening moustache that was coming out of her upper lip.

“Good Lord,” she whispered, and the voice now was almost as deep as her father’s, a grating sound full of cavernous timbre.

In a sudden flash of panic she reached for her hair, but there were only tufts of it left. The front had receded high to the top of her head, thinning out and growing shorter and wiry, and even as she snatched at it, it pulled back into the scalp. It withdrew until she was snatching at bare skin across the top of her head. Only a crescent of short silvery hair remained over her ears and round the back of her head.

She looked back at the figure in the bed but it was almost completely Nellie now. Her father was clearly a woman and only a few differences marked his facial features from the maid he was assuming the likeness of.

Hattie started to smile to imagine how he was going to react but she got another queer feeling and, distracted, looked down at herself instead.

The transformation was complete. In every way she could discern, she had taken on her father’s shape. She had his thick long hairy legs, his broad chest and stocky torso. She had his long arms and manly hands. She had his... his... ugly, fleshy thing between her legs (better not even to look), and she had his face; his thick neck; his bushy moustache; his balding head. 

“Good Lord,” she said again, her voice exactly like her father’s now. “I’m Howard Neville.”

And as she said it she realised that that wasn’t the only thing.

Howard Neville, lying there in bed fast asleep, was now a simple lady’s maid named Nellie Barrow.