ASTERWICK 09 - June (Patreon)

10.17.26 – 7:15 a.m.

June Park’s House – Southeast Asterwick

June Park – Previous: 5’3.5” 114 lbs | Current: 5’4” 120 lbs

Change since last recorded: +.5”, +6 lbs

Her phone was incessant; as was the pounding in her head. She had a few beers, and a few shots with Jake Dillenger last night at the Giant’s Rest and was now regretting the decision. June rolled over to get away from the buzz and ringer, which was as loud as a car alarm in a library. A warm body prevented her rollover, taking up half her bed. The night had dulled and gotten hazy at the edges around 11pm but now memories came creeping back like spiders, uninvited.

Jake was a good guy, handsome, reliable, and utterly forgettable. Her phone buzzed again, this time, she groaned and grabbed it, shoving the snoring Jake aside to give herself more room. He stopped snoring briefly but began the assault soon after. It was a text from Mira, We still doing this? It was then she remembered the cabin and the promise to go back and check it out with more bravery. They had a plan for how they were going to do it and hopefully, find some answers about what was happening to them.

June swung her legs over the side of the bed. Thighs reserved for those who trained regularly, watched their macros, and got plenty of rest greeted her. June was not that person. She wasn’t terribly surprised at this point, she had grown substantially at work the other day, that was a trip she wouldn’t soon forget but she was more accustomed to becoming different since the day of finding the murder cabin. She took a deep breath and slapped her face lightly a few times.

Her chest felt tight, restricted. She looked down again and this time noticed how her breasts were struggling for space inside her bra that once fit perfectly. The strap bit across her back and she unlatched the hasp, which popped apart, instantly releasing the pressure. She tossed the small garment to the floor. Her round breasts had red marks where they had, apparently, grew enough to rub and press into the edges of the cups. 

She gave them a brief rub, noting the fullness. A warming electricity formed deep and low in her pelvis. She looked back over at Jake, she could feel her walls getting slick and ready but now was not the time. She stamped down thoughts of him pushing deep inside of her. The vivid wanting of Jake surprised her, she had urges, sure, but this was something new and insistent. Still, June had a date with Mira and that weird fucking cabin, she had to find some answers. She jumped in the shower and did a quick rinse, leaving her hair alone.

She toweled off and fished out a workout top from her dresser, which was more restrictive than she remembered but not uncomfortable. Next, she donned her favorite sweatshirt, an old and faded white pullover with Pikachu on the front. A pair of jeans followed and those were less forgiving. She pulled them up and over hard calves and thighs, the kind she would have ogled any girl for having a year ago. She felt her glutes and hips resist the confinement of the denim.

She decided, after they found out what was up with the murder cabin, she would drag Mira to the Mall in Eugene for some proper clothes. June gave her hair a quick brush and grabbed her phone I’m on my way; you want anything from your corporate competitor? I’m stopping anyway, famished. The chat bubbles appeared: I should say no but I’m famished too, get me the egg thingys and a tall coffee? light and sweet.

June called over to Jake. “Hey, wakey wakey, no eggs and no bacy!” Jake murmured. June rounded the corner of the bed, “I’m leaving to meet Mira. Lock the door when you leave, K?” “No good morning kiss?” Jake replied lazily and stretched. “I can smell your breath from here, so no.” June gave Jake a playful poke in the thigh, “call me later Mr. Dillenger.” He grunted and she was out the door and down the stairs in a flash.

Her apartment complex was one of the older ones in town, but it was surrounded by mature trees and butted up against a hill, giving it a woodsy vibe. June’s sky-blue Prius sat under the assigned covered park. She jumped in and nearly knocked herself out by the door frame. “OK, I’m taller now.” She said rubbing the side of her head and sliding the seat back a notch. “No more sex for June if she wants to stay June-sized, just fucking great, thank you murder cabin in the woods.”  

About 20 minutes later, she pulled up to Mira’s house with a bag full of breakfast and 2 coffees bearing the infamous mermaid logo. Mira met her at the door, she was wearing proper hiking gear, pants, boots, and a sensible shirt. All of it clung to bulges in muscle when she moved and womanly curves when she did not. June couldn’t help but feel jealous for an instant, Mira was a 10 in her eyes, maybe an 11.

Even though Mira was still taller than her, it was not nearly the difference it had been just a week ago. Mira paused for a second after opening the door, a flash of understanding mixed with uncertainty crossed her face. “I know, I know!” June pushed passed her into the house and made her way to the kitchen. Mira trailed close behind her, “you’ve changed again, June.” She set the food and coffees down and turned.

Mira’s tone had a motherly vibe that annoyed her. She studied Mira for second and settled on her arms, specifically how her shirt sleeves pulled smooth and outlined easily rising muscles. “Nice biceps,” she said cooly. Mira looked down and rubbed her firm arms, redness blooming across her nose and cheeks. Her tone softened and she gripped Mira’s shoulders. “We’re both changing, still.” Mira nodded slowly and reached for her coffee, “thanks she said in a small voice.” June grabbed the other coffee and pondered. “You know what concerns me more than the whole getting bigger thing, it’s how quickly I’m getting comfortable with it.” 

Mira’s eyes went wide “I was thinking the same thing! Like, shouldn’t we be terrified? Instead, I feel great and might not mind even a little more size.” She gave her bicep a dedicated flex and grinned as the sleeve visibly stretched to its limit. June took a long pull from her coffee and said nothing. She wasn’t sure she wanted to get bigger like Mira, but she had made peace with the changes happening to her, maybe that was the same thing.

They ate standing at the counter, too hungry to bother with plates. By the time the coffee was gone, the rain had thinned to a silver mist. Mira checked the contents of her pack for the third time: water, first-aid kit, two flashlights, spare batteries, a coil of rope, protein bars, her mother’s map sealed in a freezer bag, and the tire iron June had insisted on bringing.

“You know a tire iron will not help if the cabin eats people,” Mira said as they loaded the Prius. June slid it beside the passenger seat. “It will help me feel included in the decision-making process.” “That sentence made less sense the longer it went.” “Hangover grammar.”

The drive west took forty minutes. Low clouds dragged across the Coast Range, snagging on the dark shoulders of the hills. June kept both hands on the wheel and talked too much until the pavement narrowed, then stopped talking altogether. The old logging road appeared where Mira remembered it, half concealed by alder and blackberry. The gate remained chained. Their tire tracks from the previous weekend had vanished beneath a skin of new mud.

They shouldered their packs and went around the gate. The first mile felt ordinary enough to be insulting. Wet gravel. Sword ferns. Water ticking from cedar boughs. June’s boots found an easy rhythm, and Mira had to remind herself that neither of them should have been moving uphill this quickly while carrying full packs. Their breathing stayed even. Their legs did not tire. The woods accepted the new versions of them without comment.

The first marker waited beside the trail where the gravel gave way to moss. The crescent carved into the cedar had filled with rainwater. Mira photographed it, then placed her mother’s map against the post. The hand-drawn line matched the bend in the trail. So did the small black X beside the crescent. “One,” June said. Her voice carried too far. Something answered with a soft splash deep in the trees.

They reached the carved hand twenty minutes later. It was open again, palm facing them, fingers spread. June crouched to inspect the grooves without touching them. “Last time it looked like a fist.” “I know.” Mira hated how easily the answer came. Past the post, the path narrowed and the forest pressed close. The air smelled of cedar and wet iron.

At the third marker, the carved eye had changed. Its pupil was no longer a simple circle. Three narrow lines had been cut through it, fresh enough that pale wood showed beneath the rain. Mira took out her phone. The camera refused to focus. June’s screen flashed 3:17 a.m., then returned to 9:42. Neither mentioned it. They stepped past the post together.

The hollow should have appeared after the next ridge. Mira remembered the slant of the ground, the fallen hemlock, the cluster of boulders shaped like broken teeth. All of them were there. The cabin was not. No roof sagged beneath moss. No porch leaned over weeds. No black windows waited between the firs. In its place, the forest opened into a clearing so wide and sudden that June walked three steps into it before stopping.

A hole occupied the center of the clearing. It was nearly a hundred feet across, perfectly round, and too deep for the gray morning to reach its bottom. The sides fell away smooth and vertical. No roots protruded from the exposed earth. No stones broke the surface. There were no loose piles, no shattered soil, no sign that anything had been dug out. It looked as if a cylinder had been cut from the mountain and lifted away.

Around the rim lay shallow pools of iridescent liquid. They collected in depressions among the ferns, bright as oil on rainwater, but the colors moved beneath the surface instead of across it. Green folded into violet. Blue gathered into thin luminous strands. One pool trembled without wind, and the others answered in sequence around the hole.

June took the tire iron from her pack. “I would like to formally revise my murder-cabin theory.” Mira could not look away from the cut. “To what?” “Murder-hole.” Mira crouched several feet from the nearest pool. The smell rose at once: cedar, wet iron, and something green buried under soil. The same smell that had waited behind the cabin door. The muscles along her arms tightened before she told them to. Across from her, June’s posture changed too, weight settling forward, body preparing to run toward danger instead of away from it.

Mira pulled out her mother’s map. Rain stippled the plastic bag. The line beyond the third marker ended at a small square she had assumed meant the cabin. Under the square, hidden in the fold, her mother had written one word in cramped pencil: MOUTH.

June read it over Mira’s shoulder. “That is not a comforting label.” From inside the hole came a faint sound. Not a voice. Not an animal. A low, almost sweet hum that Mira felt first in her teeth and then behind her ribs. The pools brightened. One after another, rings spread across their smooth surfaces toward the pit, as if something far below had taken a breath.

The hum faded, but the nearest pool kept moving. Its surface thickened into slow folds, more like syrup than water. Mira took an empty sample tube from the first-aid kit and fixed it to the end of a tent stake with medical tape. “We do this without touching it,” she said. “Excellent rule,” June replied. “A little late in our relationship with this forest, but excellent.”    

Mira lowered the tube until its rim touched the pool. The liquid drew back a fraction, colors dimming beneath a skin suddenly flat as glass. She waited. Nothing climbed the tube. Nothing reached for her hand. When she tilted the stake, a single luminous bead clung to the glass and then slid back into the pool with visible reluctance.

“It doesn’t like you,” June said. She eased closer, tire iron held across her body. The pool brightened before her boot reached the edge. Green and violet filaments gathered beneath the surface, converging on her shadow. “June,” Mira warned. June stopped. The color stopped with her. She shifted one foot back. The entire pool leaned after it.

A narrow tongue of liquid slid over the mud and touched the toe of June’s boot. It did not splash. It adhered. The luminous film raced over wet leather, climbing the laces in branching threads. June swore and scraped her foot against a stone, but the substance stretched instead of breaking, pulling into shining strings that snapped back against the boot.

“Hold still.” Mira reached for the water bottle, but June had already dropped the tire iron and wiped hard at the leather with one gloved hand. Most of the film came away in a viscous ribbon. Rain ran into June’s eyes. She brushed it aside with the same glove before Mira could speak.

A bright smear crossed June’s cheek from the corner of her nose to her jaw. Mira saw blue collect inside it, saw the color contract like a muscle. “Don’t move.” June looked at her. “What?” The smear slid. It crossed the corner of June’s mouth in one quick, purposeful line. She jerked back, lips parting in surprise, and the liquid vanished between her teeth.

June gagged and clawed at her tongue. “Spit it out,” Mira said. June tried. A thread of pale light stretched from her lower lip, broke, and soaked into the mud. Then her whole body locked. Her heels drove into the earth. The sound that came from her was not a scream but a deep groaning rumble.

Growth seized her from the spine outward. Vertebrae shifted in rapid, hard increments beneath the Pikachu sweatshirt, each adjustment lifting her head higher against the gray trees. Her legs lengthened first, knees jerking as bone found new proportions. The hems of her jeans climbed her boots. Her shoulders rose past Mira’s, then kept going. Five-six. Five-eight. Five-ten. June’s fingers opened and closed helplessly as her hands broadened and the glove seams split across her knuckles.

Height became mass. Dense weight packed onto her frame in visible waves. Her back widened until the sweatshirt drew flat across it. Muscle crowded along her shoulders traps, and upper arms, thickening faster than the sleeves could accommodate. Threads snapped in a dry series along the shoulder seams. Her thighs expanded against the jeans with brutal pressure, seams whitening, then tearing open along the outer legs while the stronger inner panels held.

June pitched forward. Mira caught her forearm and was nearly dragged down. New weight arrived faster than balance could adjust: Her chest became more broad as her pectorals surged with size. Her abdomen hardened into a thick brace, hips and legs widened to carry the load. June’s boots creaked around lengthening feet. One lace snapped. The reinforced toes held, but barely.

The sweatshirt tore from cuff to shoulder on the right side and opened across one flank, exposing the tiny workout top, which was also being ripped apart seam by seam. The yellow face of Pikachu stretched across June’s growing breasts until it looked comical. Her jeans split farther at both thighs and one knee, leaving ragged panels held in place by the waistband, belt, and unbroken fabric. She had grown mostly out of what she wore, not free of it.

At six-two, the upward pull stopped. The mass did not. For three more seconds, June’s frame filled with compressed strength until Mira felt the ground accepting her through the grip on her arm. June pushed past two hundred pounds and kept thickening, every new layer settling into shoulders, limbs, and torso built to carry it. Somewhere near two-twenty, the pressure cut off so suddenly that the clearing seemed to lurch into silence.

June remained bent over, palms on her knees, dragging air into a chest built on an entirely different scale. Every breath moved torn cloth over dense new contours. Mira kept one hand on her shoulder, though the gesture had become almost absurd. June now stood half a head above her, with enough new mass packed across her frame to make Mira’s steadying hand look ornamental.

They waited for the familiar retreat. Ten seconds. Twenty. A full minute. June’s shoulders did not narrow. The torn jeans did not loosen. The trees stayed lower around her. “It’s not going back,” June said, her voice a deeper velvet. Mira looked toward the pool. It had gone dark and still. The liquid left on her sample tube remained dull, almost inert.

“Can you stand?” Mira asked. June lifted her head. Rain ran down a face that was still hers but held at a different height, framed by shoulders broad enough to make the question seem foolish. She straightened carefully. Mud compressed beneath her boots with a wet crunch. Her right knee buckled, and Mira caught her wrist before the sudden pull reminded her just how much heavier June had become.

June steadied herself instead, one hand closing around Mira’s forearm. The grip was gentle. It still felt like a steel clamp choosing mercy. “Everything works,” June said. She flexed her fingers, then stopped when the torn glove tightened across her palm. “I think. My balance is wrong. My feet are wrong. My entire relationship with gravity is wrong.”

Mira checked her pupils, pulse, and breathing with hands that stayed useful because being busy delayed having to analyze what just happened. June’s pulse hammered but held a steady rhythm. Her skin was hot, not fever-hot but furnace-hot, as if the new mass had arrived already working. There was no blood beneath the torn seams. No swelling around her joints. No sign the transformation had injured her except for the simple fact that it had happened.

A soft ripple crossed the nearest pool. Mira looked up. The liquid had regained its color. Violet opened beneath the surface, followed by blue, then a thin green line that pointed toward June like a compass needle. Another pool brightened across the clearing. Then another. One by one, all of them turned their color toward her.

The hum returned from the hole. This time it carried a second note below the first, too deep to hear cleanly. Mira felt it through her boots. Loose needles trembled on the ground. June’s torn sweatshirt fluttered against her body though the air remained still. “Your pack,” Mira said. June bent for the tire iron, misjudged the distance, and closed her hand around it hard enough to leave four shallow dents in the metal.

A sound came from far below. Scrape. Pause. Scrape. It circled the smooth wall instead of rising in a straight line. Mira crawled close enough to angle her flashlight over the rim. The beam reached twenty feet, perhaps thirty, then narrowed into black. For an instant, something pale crossed it—too broad to be a bird, too quick to hold a shape.

“We are leaving,” Mira said. She hauled the sample rig from the mud and shoved it into the outer pocket of her pack. June took one step toward the trees. Every pool around the clearing answered. Their surfaces tipped without spilling, and narrow threads of luminous liquid began sliding over the ground toward the prints her boots had left behind.

June moved faster. Her first stride carried her farther than expected. She struck a cedar shoulder-first and the trunk shuddered, shedding rain in a sudden sheet. Bark split where she hit it. June stared at the damage. “I barely touched that.” “Learn later.” Mira grabbed the back of her belt and pulled her away as an iridescent thread reached the cedar’s roots.

They climbed out of the clearing without looking back. The woods no longer seemed silent. Small movements followed on both sides of the path: fern fronds lifting after they passed, salal leaves ticking together without wind, something heavy placing its weight carefully among the trees. Whenever June stopped, the movements stopped. Whenever she started again, they resumed.

The third marker appeared ahead. The carved eye was no longer scored by three narrow lines. Its pupil had been cut open into a deep vertical slit. Fresh sap gleamed along the groove, pale and luminous. June stopped several feet from it. “That was not like that.” Behind them, the scraping sound reached the top of the hole.

Mira shoved her forward. They crossed the marker together. The pressure in Mira’s teeth vanished. The deep hum cut off. Behind them, something crashed into the undergrowth and halted so abruptly that branches snapped inward around its weight. June raised the tire iron. Mira raised the flashlight. Neither beam found a body between the trunks.

Then June’s pack buzzed. Her phone, buried inside, lit the wet fabric from within. She pulled it out. The screen showed no signal, no time, no open application—only a recording camera view of the clearing they had just fled. In the image, Mira and June stood at the rim of the hole, frozen seconds before the liquid touched June’s boot. The picture drew back slowly, as if whoever held the camera were retreating into the trees. At the edge of the screen, a pale hand closed around a cedar trunk.

June dropped the phone into her bag and looked around. “What the fuck,” she whispered. They were alone and they were not, someone, something was definitely out there. Mira walked ahead, “June, we have to go.” “Y-yeah, you’re right.” The pair pushed back through the trees and shrubbery until they reached the Prius, cold and wet. June patted the pocket of her shredded jeans.

“Shit, Mira, I can’t get my keys out of my pants pocket.” Her hand had grown too large and the pocket was tiny, she couldn’t keep her hands steady, a heady mixture of adrenaline, fear, and whatever chemical cocktail had entered her body’s ecosystem were making things difficult. “I don’t think I can drive right now.”

Mira grabbed the pocket and fished out June’s car keys, unlocking the car with a soft beep. They each got in and cursed, sliding their seats back further. Mira slammed the car and reversed and mashed the gas. The morning fog had rolled in deeper and enveloped the vehicle like a blanket. Mira couldn’t see but she didn’t slow down until the outskirts of town broke over the trees.