They laid me down on my face finally, since I was now about two feet long. Thick black-brown fur began to sweep across me, transforming me from mostly human to mostly mole in appearance.
My face just kept bulging outward, forming a fantastically long, ratlike snout.
But while most of me seemed to be shrinking, my hands seemed to be growing. Relative to the rest of me, anyway. I was growing hands like claw-tipped shovels. Big, flat, hairless, hard, with stubby claws on the ends of each "finger." My hands twisted as I watched, turning outward.
My eyes went dark. I thought I was totally blind. Then I realized, no, I could still see. But all I could see were vague lines between dark and light. I was practically blind, but not completely.
Almost blind. With hearing that was dim and distant, like listening through a door. Even scent was nothing special.
However, a new sense reared up to fill my brain. Touch! My nose was insanely alive and so sensitive to touch I could feel the air currents around me.
Deprived of vision and much of my hearing, I felt panic. I was supposed to go digging down in the ground like this? Blind? Half-deaf?
And yet ... I felt the earth beneath my shovel hands and my ratlike back legs, and scraping under my belly. My nose poked at the dirt and felt its texture, moistness, hardness.
It was certainly better underground. Safer. Oh yes, far safer underground.
Besides, I was hungry.
I began to dig.
From far away I heard a voice say, "Well, she's getting right down to business, huh?"
"It still looks like a rat to me."
I dug my claws into the dirt and shoved it back with my "hands." Then again. More. And now the desire to dig was very much stronger. I had to dig! I was surrounded by big, lumbering shapes of gray on gray. When they moved I could see the shifts in the light pattern.
Dig! I could feel the warmth of the earth calling to me. In some dim part of my mind I could almost form a picture of a cozy little hole, deep down, filled with comfortable grasses and twigs and scraps of garbage.
I could curl up there when I wasn't waddling through my tunnels. The tunnels where beetles might dig through and lay their eggs for me to eat. Where, in the absolute darkness, my sensitive nose would encounter the squirming squishi-ness of a plump, juicy earthworm.
Oh, yes, dig!
"You know, it occurs to me, maybe she's not in total control of this morph."
"Nah. Come on. You think a mole has strong enough instincts to take over Rachel's brain?"
"Look at the way she's digging."
"Hmm. Rachel? Hey, Rachel? How you doing down there?"
Dig and dig and dig. Now my upper body was down in the warm darkness of earth. Dig harder! Get all the way under. Darkness was safety. The safety of warm, moist earth pressing in all around.
"She's not answering. She's totally gone mole on us. I wouldn't have thought moles had that powerful a set of instincts. Okay, better grab her before she gets al! the way under."
Suddenly, I felt something grab me! It grabbed my tail. It was pulling me backward. I dug furiously with my shovel hands. I scrabbled at the dirt, but it was too powerful.
Up, up, up through the air! Exposed! Nothing around me but air, air, air! Emptiness!
"Hey, Rachel. It's me, Jake. Snap out of it. The mole brain has you."
I snapped out of it. It was a sensation like ... well, like emerging from a tunnel into daylight. I was back! I was me. Me, staring through those utterly useless mole eyes.
"Did not!" I said.
"Yeah, right," I heard Marco say.
"l was just trying to get on with it. Hey, I'm here to dig, right? So I was digging, jerk."
Jake put me back down by the shallow hole I'd made.
"Ooookay, Rachel. You were not having trouble. Everything was fine."
I went back to work. But now the earth didn't seem so inviting or warm.
Down and down I dug.
Till my entire body was in the dirt. And now I was no longer hiding beneath the mole's mind. I was a human being, digging blindly into the dirt.
Why should it have been terrifying? Why?
Was it the way the dirt pressed in all around me? The fact that I could not possibly turn around? I couldn't breathe! Only I could breathe. Yes, I was breathing. But that panic, that terror of suffocating in a dark place, kept rearing up. I could push it down, I could reason with myself, but that fear of suffocation was too strong.
I was buried alive.
Correction: I was burying myself alive.
Down I went, down and down. I knew I should be digging a vertical hole, but it was impossible. The mole couldn't dig that way. The best it could do was slope downward.
I dug. How long, I don't know. It seemed like a very long time.
And then, quite suddenly, I couldn't stand it anymore. I needed air! I tried to back up, but no! I couldn't move that way.
"Come on, Rachel. Get a grip, kid. Get a grip!" I said to myself. "Just dig a turnaround. That's it. A little more off the sides. Yeah. Hang in there."
No air! Oh, lord, I'm buried alive!
"No! No! Hold on. Keep digging out a turnaround." I scraped madly with my "hands," shoving the dirt back beneath my body to be shoved back by my hind legs.
And slowly a chamber began to appear. A hole a few inches wide on either side of me. I tried turning. Not yet. Dig some more. Dig in blind darkness.
Finally . . . yes! I could turn around. My sensitive nose felt the empty, open tunnel ahead of me. It was crumbly and far from perfect, but it was a tunnel.
I raced down it, squeezing through the tight spaces, desperate, desperate for air!
My nose emerged into light. It seemed blinding now.
"She's back," Cassie said. "Rachel, are you okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah. Fine," I lied.