“Hypnosis therapy, you say? Never put much stock in that vague mumbo-jumbo, myself, if I’m being honest,” Richard said to her.

Nellie forced a smile. She’d had this conversation too many times to count. “It’s not nonsense, I can tell you that. It’s got a solid scientific foundation. The human brain is susceptible to suggestion, and if you know just where and how to push somebody, you can get them to go along with just about anything.”

Richard took a sip of his coffee. “Mm, if you say so. And you call it therapy? You’re a licensed therapist then?”

“Well, not as such,” she admitted. “It’s really more something I picked up as a hobby at first, and a lot of folks who’ve tried it were really impressed with the result. I have a money-back guarantee if the customer’s dissatisfied, and no one’s ever taken it, if that helps.”

“Ah, clever. You hypnotize them to think they’ve gotten what they wanted. Easy money,” Richard quipped. She could tell that this was all still a joke to him.

They had met in the park adjacent to Mammotham U’s campus, where he’d sat down to review his lecture notes. She had approached him there, asking if she could sit with him, and he had no reason to say ‘no.’

She had a bit of a mousey demeanor, small and demure, but Richard thought her appearance was eye-catching all the same. She wore a long, sleeveless dark green dress, the hem of which featured angular black patterns. Her shoulders were covered by a shawl the same color as her dress. She had an elaborate tattoo sleeve on her left arm, and several leather bracelets adorned with colored beads around her wrists. She wore her long auburn hair in a thick braid that reached all the way to her mid-back. What struck him most were her reddish-brown eyes—he couldn’t place it, but something about them captivated him, though he kept that to himself. All in all, her looks certainly made her stand out among the other students of the campus despite the inconspicuous way she carried herself.

She’d noticed him looking at her and struck up a conversation with him. They exchanged names, he told her he was in the Mathematics department, she said she was enrolled in the Humanities and following a program in occult studies (he visibly had to resist the urge to roll his eyes). It was immediately clear they had very little in common, but that just meant they had plenty to talk about.

And talk Richard did. Nellie had mostly just politely listened, occasionally asking a question here and there to show she was still interested. Eventually she had stood up and said she was going to get a coffee, and he was welcome to join her. Sure, why not, he’d thought, and so here they were. They’d broached the topic of their off-campus lives, and that’s when she’d mentioned that she dabbled in her own self-styled brand of ‘therapy.’

“Well, I can’t make you believe anything you don’t want to believe,” Nellie explained. “I just guide you to a state where believing is seeing, rather than the other way around. I give suggestions, and if your mind accepts them, you experience it as if it’s real. That’s the beauty of it, you can experience anything you like, even things that are… impossible,” she said with a whimsical flourish of her hand. Richard wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but it did pique his curiosity just a tad.

He wasn’t willing to admit that just yet, however. “So that’s all it is, just a play on the senses,” he said.

“Well, if that’s how you want to describe it. But your senses are all you have. Even if none of it’s really true, for a moment, you’ll be completely convinced it is. And that’s when you enter a world where anything is possible.”

“Not sure that’d work on me. I’m a man of science, I think I’d be too skeptical to fall for those mind tricks,” he boasted.

“Oh, I’ve dealt with your type before,” she replied with a devious smile. “You’d be surprised how easy it is, provided you’re willing to give it an honest try. It’s a bit like a magic trick, really—I let you fool yourself. You’ll convince yourself that you’ve got it all figured out, but the trick is in something else you never even considered. The smarter you think you are, the sooner I’ll have you right in the palm of my hand.”

She was taunting him now, never breaking eye contact as she sipped her coffee. Richard recognized that, but he took the bait anyway, interested to see where it would go. “Is that a challenge?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Tell you what, my schedule’s free right now. If you’ve got time, you can come with me to my place, and I can give you a demonstration. If you’re not convinced that it’s working for you, it’s free of charge. How’s that sound?”

“Well, sure, what the heck.” Even if nothing came of it, he’d have a great anecdote to tell his friends. What’s the worst that could happen? Normally he wouldn’t go with somebody he just met like this, but he was confident he’d be just fine.

She took him to her studio apartment not too far from the college campus. Richard tried to make some more small talk during the bus ride there, asking her what occult studies was like.

“The history’s not nearly as ancient as you’d think,” Nellie said. “It’s so fascinating. For instance, did you know that just a century ago, there was an underground society of sorceresses right here in Mammotham? That’s what today’s lecture was about.”

He raised his eyebrows, nonplussed. “Oh really? And what sort of sorcery did they get up to, then?”

“Not the fun kind,” she dryly replied. “They believed all people possess some sort of spiritual power they called ‘vim,’ which wanes as one grows older. They were also convinced that they could become something greater than a normal human by absorbing the vim of others to replenish their own.”

“Feh. The nonsensical tripe those spiritual types will convince themselves of,” Richard said with a scoff. “Let me guess, people got hurt because of their bullshit?”

“Worse than hurt, I’m afraid. Their believed that they could absorb people’s vim by consuming them alive. Young adults were their preferred targets, since they’d be in their prime, brimming with vigor. They claimed many victims before they were discovered,” Nellie recounted.

“Ergh. That’s disgusting AND horrible. What could be worth that?”

“Oh, well, they thought it was the secret to being immortal,” she explained. “Eternal youth in both mind and body, unparalleled beauty and vitality, the ability to bend the feeble thoughts of ‘mere’ humans to your will… With enough of it, the world’s at your feet. Or so they believed.”

“All they’d get from trying to eat people is severe psychological distress, plus a prion disease,” Richard said with a look of contempt. “And the electric chair, I hope.”

“Oh, yes. Once word got out, the police didn’t rest until every last one of the sorceresses was behind bars, and their crimes were considered plenty heinous enough for the death penalty. Everything they wrote down and their possessions were destroyed as well so that nobody could try to repeat what they did. That does make it harder for scholars like me to study their history, but that’s just the way it is.”

“Hmph. Well, I think it’s a waste of time and money, studying that vague mystic bullcrap,” Richard began.

Here comes the inevitable diatribe, Nellie thought to herself.

“What’s the use of dredging up those horrible, ass-backwards ideas? Just leave that in the past where it belongs. It makes me sick to think there’s still people like that out there doing who-knows-what to others because of their silly religious beliefs. I’ll be glad when the day finally comes that humanity leaves all that superstitious shit behind for good!”

Richard was so caught up in his rant that he didn’t even notice Nellie leaning back, a contented smirk on her face as she watched him pontificate. She congratulated herself for picking him out of the crowd, back when she saw him at the park. He was perfect. Just the guy she had thought he’d be. She looked forward to seeing the look on his face in just a few minutes…

She made sure to conceal her giddiness again when she spoke up, breaking him out of his spiel. “This is our stop,” she announced.

She led him into her small apartment, which was covered top to bottom with all sorts of trinkets Richard couldn’t hope to recognize. In one corner stood a contraption that reminded him of a small distiller from a chemistry lab. What was she trying to do in here, alchemy? Maybe it was all for show. It did give the place a certain vibe.

“Shoes off, please,” Nellie instructed. “Your socks, too. It’s an important part of the sensory experience.”

Richard shrugged and did as he was told while Nellie moved to the kitchenette on the far side of the room and turned on a water boiler. Smack-dab in the middle of the space stood a very quaint little table of sorts, one that reached barely a foot and a half off the ground. She returned a moment later with a teapot and sat down cross-legged on the rug surrounding the table, gesturing for him to do the same. The rug felt tickly under his bare feet.

“Here, have some of this tea,” Nellie offered as she poured him a cup. “It’ll help you relax. Can’t do much if you’re all on edge.”

He reached for the cup, but then stopped. “Hey, wait a minute, I get it,” he said. “You put something funny in this cup, didn’t you? Something that’ll make me see pink elephants. Is that how your ‘hypnosis’ works?”

“A reasonable concern,” Nellie replied. She remained unflappable. “But I solemnly promise to you, there aren’t any hallucinogens in this tea. Here, I’ll even have some myself.” She poured a second cup, paused to cool it with her breath, then slowly took a sip. “See? You can trust me.”

Well, alright. Richard wasn’t usually the type to trust someone he just met, but Nellie seemed harmless. He took a long gulp from the tea. It was quite sweet with a bitter undercurrent, which he enjoyed.

“Now then, are you settled in? I’m ready to start when you are,” she told him.

“Sure, lay it on me.”

“Alright, here goes. Please look into my eyes. Look closely, and tell me what you see.”

“Well, they’re pretty, but it’s not nice to fish for compliments like that,” he quipped.

She gave him an unamused look.

“Alright, sheesh. Uh, well, they’re a deep red-brown color.”

“Are you sure? Look even closer.”

Now that he did take another look… “Huh, I guess they’re more magenta than brown,” he corrected himself. And quite a vivid shade of magenta, at that. Huh, that’s weird, he thought, he could’ve sworn… But no, he must’ve seen it wrong. A trick of the light, perhaps.

“Very good. But it’s not just the irises I want you to focus on. Stare into my pupils, and tell me.”

She leaned towards him to give him a better look. He still had to squint. It struck him that Nellie hadn’t blinked at all, her maroon eyes boring into his. “I see… my reflection, I guess.”

“That’s right. It’s where the word ‘pupil’ comes from, actually. You see yourself as a little doll in another person’s eyes. I can see you for what you really are, Richard. And what I see is a very small man.”

“I’m six foot one,” he retorted. “Not what I’d call small.” He found that he couldn’t break contact, no matter how hard he tried to look away from those lavender eyes.

“Are you really, though? From where I’m sitting, you look like you don’t reach five feet. Four, even,” she told him. “And you’re getting smaller by the second. Why don’t you try standing up and seeing for yourself if you don’t believe me?”

He wanted to, but her turquoise gaze had made him dizzy, so he stumbled when he tried to get to his feet. His world grew fuzzy for a moment as a feeling of vertigo washed over him. It took him a little while to get his bearings. Once he felt well enough to try standing up again, he couldn’t believe what he saw. Nellie had told the truth—he was smaller. He was standing up and she was sitting on the floor, yet his eyes were almost level with her light blue ones. He felt the rug he was standing on tickle past his ankles. What on earth…?

“Still convinced it wouldn’t work on you?” Nellie teased, a pleased look on her face. “I told you. You’re under my spell now, and you can’t help but believe it when I tell you that you’re still getting smaller. But you have no reason to worry. After all, you know that it’s not real, right? No matter what your senses are telling you.”

Yes, that’s right, he reminded himself. It’s just hypnosis, just psychological trickery. He only imagined he’d stood up, perhaps. He was actually still sitting down, and that’s why his perspective’s off. That must be it.

Another dizzy spell hit him, so he braced himself against the table—already well above his hips—and looked up at her. Through his blurry vision, he could just about make out her bright aquamarine eyes staring down at him.

“You’d better climb onto the table, before you’re too short to,” Nellie said. “I’d hate for you to get lost in the carpet.”

He did as she suggested. The cold wooden surface of the table under his feet felt... real. But it looked so flimsy before! There was no way it could support his nearly 200 pounds of weight, it was clearly impossible… He struggled to think of an alternative explanation for what he was feeling. Maybe she had guided him to stand on some other wooden surface without him realizing?

“There, that’s better. I can see you properly again now,” she said. “And look, you’re only about as tall as your teacup now! How adorable.”

This isn’t real, Richard reminded himself. He refused to acknowledge that he indeed couldn’t look over the rim of the cup anymore. He kept his gaze focused on Nellie, who sent him patronizingly doting looks from quite a ways above him, as if he were a favorite pet hamster.

“Well, don’t just stand there. Come over here. Take a little walk across the table,” she said.

He could only do as he was told. Walking to the other side of the table was a brisk distance. He passed the teapot in the middle, which appeared the size of a small house to him now.

Soon he found himself standing before Nellie’s towering form. How had he described her before? ‘Mousey?’ ‘Small and demure?’ That seemed like a distant memory. He had left that world and entered one where he was utterly helpless before her.

He’d never dare use those adjectives now. He had to stare way, way up past her building-sized body to see her face. She seemed almost like an enormous statue of a goddess, overwhelming in both beauty and size. Unmoving, unblinking. Smiling down at him without caring about him. Her sinister yellow eyes were watching his every move from on high, her chin resting on her steepled hands.

“There you are,” she said. “Now tell me, do you still think my hypnosis is just a few cheap parlor tricks? Can you look up at me from all the way down there and honestly believe you’re just too smart to fool?”

This was a test, Richard thought. She’s trying to see if intimidating me will make me abandon good sense. Well, it won’t work.

“That’s right,” he yelled up at her. “This is all just an illusion. I’ll admit that it’s an impressive one, I’d love to figure out how you managed all this, but what you’re showing me is physically impossible. It can only be smoke and mirrors.”

“I can hear you just fine, no need to raise your voice,” she chided. “But I’m impressed. I thought for sure you’d be quivering in fear by now, fully convinced I’m a terrible giant plotting to do who-knows-what with you. Clearly, I underestimated your ability to see through my trickery.”

Richard couldn’t deny himself a victorious smirk. “So you admit defeat? Well, it’s been fun. What happens now?”

“Actually, I wanted to put you through one last test first,” she said, and lowered her left hand to lie flat on the table before him. “Climb on.”

“Alright then, if you insist,” he mumbled. Stepping onto the palm of a colossal hand felt really weird. Like standing on massive, warm, firm, slightly oily couch cushions that smelled vaguely of soap and various other things. He had just a few moments to get used to that feeling before Nellie raised her hand back up, knocking him off his feet.

He looked around a bit. The table seemed quite a ways down from up here, and seeing that the floor was even farther away made him anxious. The tattoo sleeve on her arm looked like an enormous mural decorating some oddly-shaped tower, one he was sitting on top of…

He was so engrossed with taking it all in that he briefly forgot all about his circumstances. When he finally looked up, he was met with the sight of Nellie’s titanic face, so close that it took up his entire field of vision. She was still giving him that knowing smile, a bit of a smug edge to it. He felt embarrassed: She must’ve recognized that, for a moment, he really did believe that he was sitting right in the palm of her hand.

But he couldn’t let her win just like that. He shook his head a few times to try and concentrate. Remember, this can’t possibly be real, he reminded himself. It’s just really strong make-believe. Even if he could feel her skin under his feet, even if her body heat and her scent permeated the air around him, even if he could feel the breath from her nose rush past him, it was all just in his imagination.

“Aww, just look at you,” she cooed. It was little more than a breathy murmur, but he could hear it loud and clear, as close as he was to her mouth. Her voice reverberated through his entire body. “I just wanted to say that you look absolutely precious, sitting there in the palm of my hand. Even if you don’t believe anything else I’ve told you today, you better believe that. It’s really a much better size for you than how you were before. I almost feel tempted to keep you like this, maybe as a pet… but I’d better not.”

Richard couldn’t respond. He was preoccupied with staring into her right eye, then into her left, each of them much bigger than he was, and so close that he could only focus on them one at a time. Gosh, they were so pretty and, and so alluring! They were vivid green and bright orange, a warm cream pink color one moment and icy gray the next, the color of the late afternoon sky and of the stormiest ocean, and as vast and deep as both…  Hazel brown and crimson red and pure white and vanta black, and all the colors he could name, and more. He was mesmerized, could sit there all day if she’d let him. His vision blurred again, but he never broke eye contact. He couldn’t if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to.

Nellie grinned as she basked in the feeling of absolute control for a moment. She never felt more alive than during these moments, when her mark was fully caught in her trap. But she couldn’t relish it forever. It was time to finish this.

“There’s just one final step before I break the illusion you’re under. In just a moment, I’m going to open my mouth, and you will climb inside. In doing so, you will prove that you have conquered your fear. Right now, your senses are screaming at you that you are in grave danger. The hairs on your teeny-tiny body are standing on end, and you can feel your little heart beating in your throat,” she said.

Now that she mentioned it, he did feel a cold sweat on his forehead. Something wasn’t right here, his gut told him. Something was very wrong, and he was about to find out what.

“But you are above those irrational feelings, aren’t you? You’re a man of science, right? You can’t trust your primitive instincts. There are only two things you place your trust in: Your own reasoning, and me. You remain convinced that you’re not in real danger, and you know that you have no reason to fear me. It’s only logical. You’d stake your life on it. Isn’t that right?”

Yes, that’s right. He was safe and sound, there was no reason to believe any different. Whatever he was feeling was only the result of his senses playing tricks on him, and he wouldn’t be played for a fool like that. He nodded to her in agreement, and she beamed gleefully in response.

“Excellent! Are you ready? Here comes the test.”

She brought her lips right up to her palm, took a moment to wet them, then slowly parted them, revealing the darkness they guarded. The tip of her tongue extended over the threshold, inviting him like a red carpet—one that writhed slightly, and that was drenched in saliva.

For a moment Richard faltered, if only out of revulsion rather than anything else. Was he really going to… do this? But his desire to prove himself won out. This wasn’t real, anyway. Logic dictated that he wasn’t in any real danger, and he had nothing to fear from Nellie. Nothing whatsoever. He wasn’t going to chicken out now—that’d be admitting defeat.

He stepped onto her tongue (he could feel it shudder in response!) and carefully traipsed into the cavernous mouth. His feet were instantly soaked, and hot breath saturated with spit washed over him. He smelled all sorts of things, but the most recognizable was the lingering scent of the coffee she had drank earlier, and a hint of that sweet tea. He ignored it all. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. And he was going to prove it.

In one swift motion, Nellie closed her mouth, tilted her head back, and swallowed.

Too easy.

She had dropped so many hints, too. Told him about the sorceresses and how they ate humans to gain vim, more specifically the power to control the thoughts of others… She’d explained that her hypnosis worked by manipulating what he already believed was true… Why, she’d practically given the game away, and he still fell for it. He was so consumed by the idea that it was all just a trick that he failed to realize what he was walking into.

She had been alive for well over a hundred years now. The city had changed a lot in that time. And yet, some things remained the same as always: The old confidence trick never failed. Let somebody believe that they’ve got it all figured out and they’ll willingly wander into their undoing.

She shuddered as a rush coursed through her body. Richard had reached her stomach. By then he must have realized that he’s been had—too little, too late. It didn’t matter how many she ate, the feeling of her vim replenishing itself was always exhilarating. If this was ‘severe psychological distress,’ it sure felt amazing. Her body stretched outward an inch or two and pulsed with renewed vitality. Good. She was feeling awfully shrimpy lately.

Her sisters hadn’t made it far before the trail of bodies in their wake led the police right to them. They had made such a mess of things; it was inevitable that they’d be caught.

Nellie, on the other hand… She was a clever one. She’d operated by her lonesome, luring self-assured, well-to-do college students by beguiling them before they got the bright idea of telling anybody where they were going. And then she’d swallow them whole, leaving no evidence behind… Well, except their footwear. Perhaps she ought to stop telling them to take those off, even if she’d have to miss the feeling of their tiny little feet climbing in her palm and stepping onto her tongue.

But it was so thrilling to make a fool out of them! That was the best part. To leverage their own arrogance against them, to make them willingly walk into their own doom. Of course, Richard’s fate was sealed from the moment he ingested the shrinking potion in his tea. (Hey, she hadn’t lied—It was not a hallucinogen. Of course, he couldn’t have known that she was immune to her own concoctions…) She couldn’t help but toy with him, though. It’d be so boring to just eat him right away. Besides, why waste the effort picking his tiny body off the floor when she could just have him come to her?

She’d been doing this for a hundred years, so she had to keep it interesting for herself. Watching those fools gawk up at her from the palm of her hand and dumbly throw themselves into her waiting mouth never got old. She’d racked up quite the body count doing this, but it would seem that nobody had traced all those disappearances to the same culprit, let alone to her. Really though, in a city of hundreds of thousands of people, who’s going to miss one or two idiots?

Slowly, that rush she felt whittled away. She was sated for now, but in only a week or two’s time she’d feel that craving again, that hunger that could only be stilled by devouring another sucker. She’d claimed at least two victims every month without fail. She had to: Now that she had given up her humanity to attain eternal life, she was fated to sustain herself like this. Luckily for her, there’s a sucker born every minute, so she never went hungry.

Sometimes she even managed to snag more than two in a month, and that meant she could do better than just survive. She’d gain a surplus of vim that slowly accumulated. One day, her control over the minds of others would be so overwhelming that she could dominate masses of people at once. Then she’d feast every day, exponentially empowering herself until none would be able to stop her… But that was a long way off.

Until then, she’d better get to planning her next move. The ‘occult studies’ story had worked wonders so far, none of her victims had suspected that there was no such program in the Humanities department. Still, it was probably best not to keep the same MO for too long. Maybe she’d hit the business schools next—those types all believe themselves to be invincible, she thought to herself. Perhaps next time she could try to lure two marks in one go. Then again, that might be too risky… But that also made it an exciting idea.

Nellie stood up, stretched, and rubbed her stomach. Goodbye, Richard, she thought. You were fun while you lasted… But I won’t miss you. Perhaps no-one will, at least, not too much— That’s what I’m counting on. And if anybody comes looking for you anyway, I’ll lead them right to where you went…