An Occurrence at 441

Chapter 1
An Occurrence at 441

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Chapter Description: Complete story.

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She’s a lonely girl, lost in the world

Got love in her eyes for me

She’s a sweet young thing, brings me dreams

In a box she made for me

She looked at him with disgust.

Room 3746 had been pristine as recently as that very morning. The crown jewel of the Miami coastline, the Nautilus Hotel spared no expense in providing its well-to-do clientele with every imaginable luxury and comfort. An LCD television was big enough to dominate one wall, and the king-size bed that opposed it was outfitted with linens whose thread counts were in the quadruple-digits. Amenities were bountiful in such a suite, and they justified its price; no guest would want for anything. It was the unofficial motto by which the hotel’s employees worked.

But that had been nearly 12 hours ago. The sun had gone down, and what little moonlight spilled into the room illuminated a sordid scene. At the time, only a small, ornate desk lamp assisted the celestial body in drawing attention to the mess Room 3746 had become.

Brad Specter was hunched over a desk, weakly flicking the waste from his dwindling cigarette into an ashtray, but seldom making his target. Ashes slid silently along the desktop with every exhalation the 27-year-old gave. In his left hand was a tumbler, half-full of a decent 12-year Scotch whisky, though much of the two ice cubes Brad had sunk beneath the surface of the brown intoxicant had melted away and dulled the exhilaration of the spirit. And, in between the man’s outspread arms lay a scratched and scuffed mirror, a razor blade and half of a drinking straw resting on either side of four three-inch ridges of white powder. The other six had disappeared.

“I love you, Janet,” Brad huffed in a hoarse voice. When he raised his head to look at her, the line of blood that had dripped from his nose and caked his lips minutes prior had already crusted over.

“I love you too, Brad,” replied the 25-year-old woman, perfectly stunning in a red dress and a ludicrously expensive hairstyle. “Or... I did. But you’re sick. You’ve lost control.”

“I haven’t lost control.” Brad had to gasp for air with every few words. He tried, with moderate success, to keep it quiet. “I’m still in control if I can beat this. And I can beat this with you. I just need you. I just... need you.”

“You need more than me,” said Janet. Her face was as icy as the ovoid lumps dissolving in Brad’s Chivas Regal. “And I deserve more than this.”

She headed for the door. On the way, she took her car keys from the surface of the dresser and dropped them into her red sequined purse.

“I’m taking these,” she announced, somewhat redundantly. “Call a cab in the morning. Try not to look like shit. And don’t call me anymore.”

When the door to Room 3746 slammed shut, Brad was again alone. Two individual tears streaked either of his cheeks as he took another drag of his cigarette. He coughed, then realized he was sucking filter.

Brad flicked the butt towards the ashtray. He missed.

A shiver wracked his body as he took his intended last sip of the Scotch. Brad wanted so badly to vomit, but he could barely bring himself to move. He put the segment of drinking straw to his non-bleeding nostril and made another line disappear.

When did it all go so horribly wrong? When? Why?

They were questions Brad had asked himself a million times previously, and the answers were as elusive as any dragon. His heart picked up speed. Brad set down his glass immediately after considering his desperate need for fresh air.

I’m so full of love. So full of life.

Brad walked to the balcony door and slid open the glass. He stepped outside. The man could smell the ocean from that height. The odor was simultaneously salty and pure, replete with danger and yet full of promise.

Just like me.

He walked to the railing and leaned against the painted metal bar. The artificial lights of nearby hotels sprinkled the twilight like pixies. Cars sped along Route 441 over 400 feet below. They looked like insects. Ants, maybe, preprogrammed to run from point A to point B, never taking the time to smell the ocean.

Brad sat in a balcony chair and began to untie his shoes. A hard day of “partying,” if a one-man wallow could be called a party, had left his feet in a state of throbbing agony. Shortly after his shoes were off, his socks followed, and he stuffed them inside his sneakers.

He wiggled his toes. A cool breeze wafted between them, bathing Brad’s muscles and relaxing them. He felt better already.

Brad stood barefoot on the cold cement of the balcony, then climbed onto the chair, then onto the painted iron railing.

The bridges of his feet reflexively curled around the couple of inches they had been given. Brad was frowning as he looked out over far shorter buildings to the sea ahead of him. Occasionally, the light of a trawler or that of a blinking buoy would disrupt the phantom blackness of the water.

I’ll never let you down, this love I’ve found

It means too much to me

And I stand accused outside the law

But you are all I need

He stretched both of his arms out to either side, palms down. The thought of Christ occurred to him, but it was fleeting. Brad blinked and inhaled from the generous Atlantic air. He turned his palms upward.

So full of love. So full of life.

Brad Specter leaned forward and began his 400-foot descent.

He was surprised. He had expected to feel his heart drop into his stomach-- that sensation one gets just before one wakes up from a “falling dream.” But no such sensation greeted him. As he fell, wind whipped over him, buffeting him, attempting in incidence to slow him down.

The windows Brad saw as he sailed upside-down were beautiful. Many were portals into light; most weren’t. He thought of Christmas trees. As he picked up speed, the yellows of lit suites and the blacks of unoccupied ones began to blur together into a single, sickly, urine-colored line.

The honking of horns grew louder and the scent of exhaust assaulted Brad’s ruined nostrils.

He closed his eyes.

When Brad opened them again, he was standing in front of a bathroom mirror. He recognized it as the one from Janet’s house, at which he had spent many a night over the years. They had been college sweethearts. Their love blossomed and grew with an organic crescendo rarely manifested outside the minds of Hollywood screenwriters. It was a love that rushed into Brad’s bones, pumped through his veins, as he stood bolt upright in his ex-girlfriend’s bathroom.

But he still looked like shit. His black hair was scraggly and sticking out in a seemingly infinite number of directions, each strand attempting to grasp a different floating dust mote. His eyes were sunken and the pits beneath them were purple and wrinkled. Dried blood still connected his nose to his lips, and an unbecoming sweat stain formed an upside-down parabola on the front of his t-shirt.

Then something happened. As the memories of the environment swirled around him and sank into him, Brad began to change, and he bore speechlessly amazed witness to the event vis-à-vis the mirror’s crisp reflection.

Brad’s hair straightened out and styled itself, the oils of neglect and the ashes of flicked cigarettes disappearing into the aether. The wrinkles beneath his eyes smoothed out and his natural color returned. The blood on his lips and the line joining them to his nostril liquefied; the crimson fluid drained upwards, back into Brad’s nose, and into his veins for reoxygenation. The sweat evaporated from the man’s t-shirt, leaving a garment that looked and smelled fresh from the dryer.

The process accelerated, and with that acceleration came a paraesthesia that began in his feet and clawed upwards. Pins and needles assaulted Brad’s skin as the 27-year-old began to shrink. His clothes shrank with him, and, in fact, the garments themselves changed into whatever Brad had chosen to wear on any given day in his past, cycling through a variety of colors and styles like the camo suits from A Scanner Darkly.

It didn’t take very long for Brad to acknowledge that he was getting younger, and it took him only a few moments more to accept it. He wasn’t yet prepared to embrace it -- How young am I going to become? Am I really getting a do-over? -- but the frown that had been plastered across his face as he dove for the asphalt began to curl up into a smile as he reentered puberty.

Brad’s shoulders began to slump and the squareness of his jawline became slightly more rounded. Acne erupted across his face, then disappeared just as quickly. His Adam’s apple receded into his neck. Between his thighs, Brad could feel his limp penis shrink a few inches. Ironically, it felt almost like an orgasm.

When the tingling sensation came to an end and the boy reassessed himself in the mirror, he recognized himself as the Brad Specter just on the cusp of puberty, a crackly-voiced wide-eye with a libido the severity of which he scarcely recalled ever suffering. He wore a Miami Heat t-shirt, khaki cargo shorts, and the same style of ankle-socks and sneakers that had characterized the bulk of his childhood.

A knock at the door.

“Bradley?”

It was Janet! Of course it was Janet, a flustered Brad thought to himself-- it was her house, after all. But how would she react when she saw--

“Bradley, I’m coming in.”

The door swung open and Janet, dressed more casually than she had been at the Nautilus Hotel but equally stunning in every other regard, entered the room.

“Janet, I--” squeaked Brad.

The lady only laughed. “It may be your 14th birthday, big man, but you still have to call me by my name. Mom.”

Brad was dumbstruck. Smacked straight upside the head by the most volatile strangeness he’d experienced all day... and the day had already ranked among his strangest. Something was going on, something that defied explanation. For some reason, this 25-year-old woman -- his lover -- saw herself as the mother of the scrawny 14-year-old boy in front of her.

“Your friend Jared is already waiting at the dining room table. We’re about to cut the cake, then you can open your presents.”

Brad swallowed and nodded. Whatever was the best conclusion his mind could draw. If this was how it was going to be, then this was how it was going to be, and it was miles more pleasant than the toxic binge he had so recently escaped.

The teenager followed Janet Holliday out of the bathroom, through the halls of the lady’s one-story house, and at last arrived in the dining room. It was a modest and affordable home in the south of Florida-- wood paneling, unremarkable wall-to-wall carpeting, and a bay window in every room that deserved one. At the dining room table sat Jared Scheck, a 14-year-old Brad recognized as his best friend from junior high. They had had each other’s backs during the awkward transition to high school.

“Happy birthday, dude,” Jared smiled.

“Thanks!” The smile that had curled around Brad’s face in the bathroom had not abated.

The unlikely duo of Janet (whom Brad hadn’t met until many years later) and Jared singing “Happy Birthday to You” led directly into the climactic moment during which Brad managed to blow out all 14 candles with one exhalation.

He had wished for things to stay the same.

Brad opened the present Janet and Jared had chipped in to purchase for him: a Sega Dreamcast, which had been released the previous week. The birthday boy didn’t have to feign ecstasy. All of his past experiences were replaying in roughly the same manner... just in different places and under different circumstances. He wondered if there was even more to quantum theory than what he had read about during his compulsive reading benders.

After Brad and Jared had played Soul Calibur for a solid handful of hours, Janet informed the twosome that it was time for bed. Apparently Jared was sleeping over. After being led to the bedroom in which Brad and Janet had made love so many times in the past -- or was it the future? -- the regressed young man noticed that the queen-size bed had been replaced with a twin, and the room was decorated in a style that advertised the usual interests of a 14-year-old boy.

It was his bedroom. His de facto mother, Janet, had her own.

Though understandably bashful, Brad managed to force himself to strip down to his boxers before snuggling beneath the covers. Janet tucked him into bed and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

“Goodnight, Bradley, and happy birthday.”

“Yeah, happy birthday, man,” Jared said as he unrolled a sleeping bag on the floor, parallel to Brad’s bed. “Thanks for having me over.”

“Thanks for being here,” said Brad. “Both of you.” He looked rather purposefully into Janet’s eyes when he delivered the latter remark. The smiling woman walked to the door, flicked the light switch, and closed the portal behind her.

Minutes passed.

“Hey, Brad?” Jared whispered.

“Yeah?” Brad whispered back.

“You ever beat off?”

Oh, if you only knew, Brad wanted to say. Instead, he went with “Yeah, sometimes.”

“I can’t get to sleep if I don’t beat off.”

“Then beat off already.” Brad chuckled. He was fitting into his new mindset perfectly.

“I’ll beat off if you’ll beat off,” Jared proffered.

“Why do I have to beat off?”

“Because otherwise it would be weird.”

“Oh,” replied Brad, “and two guys beating off together is a perfectly normal thing?” He laughed out loud.

“Just do it,” Jared insisted. “I’m already fucking hard as a tentpole down here.”

“Fine, fine,” Brad conceded. He fished his dick out of the fly of his boxers and began to fondle it, switching up to a rhythmic stroking motion as blood continued to pump into the organ and stiffen it.

“Oh, yeah,” Jared breathed from the sleeping bag below. Brad assumed he was having a good time of it. Surprisingly to Brad, he realized that the mere thought of his best friend masturbating just a few feet away aroused him to full erection in record time. Soon it was Brad who was moaning weakly and breathing heavily.

Brad used his copious production of pre-cum to his advantage, employing the slick discharge as a lube as he brought himself closer and closer to orgasm. He used his left hand to play with his balls. And, when he heard his friend of many years climax on the floor beneath, Brad, too, shot his wad, coating his slight chest and abdomen in tiny ribbons of hot spunk.

But, with every contraction, with every fresh jet of semen splattered upon his bare flesh, Brad again felt the pins and needles that had earlier assaulted him in the bathroom.

Uh-oh.

The 14-year-old began to shrink just as he crossed into afterglow. All he could think about was that he had managed to ejaculate the very manhood out of his body as he felt the few wispy curls of pubic hair he had recede into the pad of adipose tissue protecting his groin. His dwindling, flaccid dick slipped out of his grasp. The last sensation Brad felt with his left hand before fearfully pulling it out of his pants was that of his testicles retracting to bind safely against his body.

And what a small body it was becoming. He had no method by which to watch the process himself, but Brad could feel it. He could feel it all over. The muscular definition of an older boy, a face that could be taken seriously, foot after foot of height-- they all escaped from Brad’s squirming form as he writhed with regression. The cum he had left coating his chest and abdomen evaporated with a chill, as if he’d never been able to make it in the first place. His pathetic whining went unnoticed by Jared, who, presumably, was struggling to catch his breath as he cleaned himself up.

Since all Brad was wearing at the time was boxer shorts, it was the only item of clothing that shifted and morphed with him, becoming whatever the boy wore at night throughout the course of his life. As the years of experience left him, replaced by further vitality and youth, Brad felt his boxers tighten up into the plain white briefs he wore every day to elementary school. Explorations with his hands revealed that the fly of his briefs was quickly sealing up. Brad’s thighs spread slightly as the clothlike texture of the outside of a pair of training pants greeted the ministrations of his fingertips.

No...

Brad’s training pants thickened and thickened. In no time at all they were fully prepared to accommodate the renegade bladder of a sleeping four-year-old.

But four-year-old Brad Specter wasn’t asleep, and the tingles showed no sign of attenuating. The little boy kept both of his hands pressed firmly to his crotch, hoping that the pressure he exerted on his training pants would prevent them from thickening any further.

It was worth a shot, but it wasn’t a good enough guess.

Brad started to cry as the clothlike exterior of his training pants mutated into a smooth, yielding plastic. The boy’s thighs spread apart still further as his underwear grew thicker with each passing moment. He flung his pudgy little hands madly around the front of whatever he was wearing and couldn’t help but notice the tapes... four of them, two on each side, securing the front of his Pampers to the back.

No!

Brad had become a baby. Rather, he had become Brad as he had been 26 years ago. And, through no volition of his own, he set about to proving it to himself.

The urine came first. Fast, hot, and uncontrollable. When the pins-and-needles sensation finally liberated itself from Brad’s tiny body, it was replaced by a spreading warmth in the front of the boy’s diaper. Brad sobbed as he helplessly peed his pants. His twin-size bed began to morph. It decreased in length, and, as if constituted from thin air, a sequence of wooden bars rose up from either side of the bedframe and clicked into place. A nightlight went on in the corner of the room, revealing that a mobile of glimmering colors and shapes had dropped from the ceiling, suspended only a few feet from Brad’s teary face.

Brad squirmed and kicked and soaked his diaper as his linens transformed into a soft, baby-sized security blanket. A teddy bear appeared inches from his face. He could hear crinkling beneath him as he thrashed, but it wasn’t his diaper; it was the waterproof sheet protecting the crib mattress from any of Brad’s unfortunate accidents.

That’s what it was. A crib. Brad was a baby, wearing a diaper, in a crib. He couldn’t even manage to keep his saliva in his tiny mouth as he cried, and much of it spilled down what was left of his chin. So distraught was he that he didn’t even notice when his torrent of urine came to an end.

But he noticed when the rest came.

Brad was lying on his stomach when the seat of his diaper began to flare outward. Try as he might, Brad couldn’t figure out a way to get himself to stop pooping. It seemed as if, with every attempt, with every motion, more warm, sticky mush leaked out of his bottom and spread across the back of his diaper. The smell was nauseating. Little Bradley began to bawl. Long, loud, ceaseless baby wails that could have woken up the neighborhood.

They were enough to wake up Janet, at least. The overhead light in Brad’s nursery flickered on, and a bleary-eyed Janet stood in the door frame. Fourteen-year-old Jared scrambled out of his sleeping bag and got to his feet.

“What is it?” Janet asked. “What’s going on, honey?”

Jared sniffed the air. “Smells like our little tiger had himself a big accident.”

Janet rushed to the side of Brad’s crib, reached inside, and lifted the despairing infant out of his impromptu prison. His diaper, soaked and loaded, threatened to fall from his hips; the tapes on his Pampers were holding on like Grim Death.

“Jared, grab the supplies. This little one definitely needs a change.” Janet hoisted her son into a cradle she had made with her arms, balancing his poopy butt atop her right forearm. As she bounced Brad against it, the baby seemed to calm down a bit. “That’s right, honey. It’s okay. Your Daddy is going to have everything set out for you so you can have a niiice diaper change. Won’t that be wonderful?”

Jared is... my daddy. And Janet is my mommy.

Even the infant Bradley had to admit that it almost all fell into place.

Janet laid Brad upon the changing table.

“Here you go, Tiger,” declared Jared, bringing over a fresh diaper, a bottle of powder, and a box of wipes. “Mommy changed you last time, so I guess it’s my turn.”

Well, fuck.

Brad remained mute and mortified as his best friend from junior high untaped his diaper, cleaned up his mess, and powdered his behind. The male teenager’s hands massaging powder over a tiny dinky at which Brad couldn’t even bring himself to look was a foreign sensation he wasn’t altogether eager to revisit.

But I could get used to it. He’s very gentle.

As Jared taped Brad into his diaper, the little boy closed his left fist and pushed its thumb into his mouth. He suckled noisily on the bony digit and giggled uncontrollably when Jared’s fingertips tucked in the legbands on Brad’s new pair of Pampers. As the saliva from his thumbsucking spilled down his chin and drained into his throat, Brad emitted the unmistakable sound of an uncomfortably empty tummy.

“Sounds like our tiger’s set to growling,” smiled Jared, lifting his son off the changing table and handing him to Janet. “Sorry, Bradley, but I’m afraid your mother’s the only one who can handle this part.”

Minutes later, Janet sat on the couch in the living room, her diapered son sprawled across her lap. He giggled as he looked up at her and pawed at her face with his pudgy sausage fingers.

“Ma-ma,” he said, and grinned.

“Very good!” replied Janet. She pointed to Jared, who was sitting across the room, smiling. “And who’s that?”

“Dat Da-da.”

“Good goin’, Tiger,” nodded the 14-year-old. “I bet you’re gonna be the smartest kid in your class someday.”

Brad giggled in unfettered glee and turned his attention back to Janet, who had already lifted her shirt and undone her bra. Her right nipple was engorged with milk. A tiny white droplet of it emerged, and Brad suddenly felt hungrier than he had ever been in his entire life.

He wanted to think, to consider, to enjoy... to marinate in what had happened to him and to rejoice in whatever cosmic force had brought him to this point in his existence. He wanted to come to terms with his impromptu infancy and his proverbial second chance. He intended on getting his life right this time and he was already endeavoring to put those plans in motion.

But, wearing only a disposable diaper, and with a leaking tit in his face, Brad found it difficult to wax philosophical.

Redemption comes to those who wait

Forgiveness is the key

And I wish you love, and I wish you hope

Please believe in me

With a smile beneath his nose and rosy cheeks to either side of it, Brad leaned over and latched on to Janet’s nipple. His eyes wide open and trained on her loving visage, he nursed from her, squirming with pleasure and relief as the warm, rich milk washed over his tongue and filled his stomach. He placed both of his tiny hands on either side of Janet’s breast and anchored himself to her as he reacquainted himself with a suckling rhythm he had never truly forgotten.

The two of them had been reunited. The three of them were a family.

So full of love. So full of life.

Content, and truly happy, Brad closed his eyes.

When he opened them, 27-year-old Bradley Specter saw windows, the yellows of lit suites and the blacks of unoccupied ones, blurred together into a single, sickly, urine-colored line.

He was smiling when he hit the pavement.

 

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