Swinging

"Swinging" is a short story by Cody Goodfellow that first appeared in Rapture of the Deep and Other Lovecraftian Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2016). The mind-swapping, time-jumping tragic love story is a sequel to H. P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time."
==Characters==
* Lorna Orchard (born c. 1987): A young woman (born c. 1987) who learned the Yithian mindswapping technique from her father, whom she killed when she was 15. As the story begins, she is a secret patient in Stockton State Hospital, part of California's mental health system. She goes on to found "the first doomsday cult to get everything right." She leads the cult from behind the scenes, manifesting as "One, the benevolent, bodiless sage of Celaeno."
* David Orchard (1959-2002): Lorna's father, born in 1959, who is possessed by a Yithian from 1992 until 1995. He is able to learn the mind-transfer technique for himself--which he calls "swinging"--and writes books about it, including The Mind-Snatchers, aka Beyond Time, Out of Mind. He works for a time at the Atwater Institute for Psychonautical Research. He is repossessed in 2002 "to stop me telling the world about them," at which point his body is killed trying to murder Lorna.
* Narrator: He meets Lorna (in a variety of other bodies) while in for a ninety-day observation at Stockton. He learns to swing from Lorna, and after he is released and she escapes from the hospital, he becomes the figurehead of her successful global cult. He describes himself as having a "creepy sociopathic charm."
* Adolph Sutro (b. April 29, 1830): A historical figure, an engineer who made a fortune extracting silver from Nevada's Comstock Load and later becomes San Francisco's mayor.Wikipedia, "Adolph Sutro." In real life, Sutro served only one term as mayor (1895-97), and died two years later, but in the story, he serves two terms, and "a year after his first term, he disappeared for nearly four years on a strange world tour"--during which time he was possessed by a Yithian. Upon his return to his body, he constructs the device known as the Sutro Lenses in an effort to reconstruct the secret of mind-swapping. 
==Setting==
The story opens at Stockton State Hospital, "the lowest tier of California’s public mental hospital system." When Lorna and the narrator get out, they open their first meditation center in the hills of Berkeley. The cult's main headquarters are at Aspen, Colorado, which doubles as a fallout shelter.
The cult funds archaeological expeditions to Australia to explore the "fossil remnants of the Great Race’s library city," and Lorna and the narrator later take a trip 50 million years in the past there to the time when the Yithian civilization is being destroyed by the flying polyps.
The Sutro Lenses are found at the De Young Museum, a real-world institution in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
==References==
Category:Cody Goodfellow works
Category:Novels
Category:Expanded Mythos Works