The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

It started when Ted died, and it ended when I died.

But no. It didn’t end even then. And now...

Well, we’ll get to that when we get to it, won’t we?

Ted’s death. To start with, I have to be honest here and admit that I wasn’t too broken up the day I came home from work and found that long white envelope waiting for me in my mailbox. Yes, Ted and I had been room-and apartment-mates at Greson for three and a half years, and we had gotten along well enough, but we never were exactly what you’d call close, even when we had been living under the same roof. In many ways when we had decided to pair up halfway through our freshman year, it had been a marriage of convenience, each of us shoring up the gaps in the other’s academic work. Ted the Science Geek and Will the Writingest Fool. First in one of Greson’s cruddy frosh dorms, then as soon as possible in a small and not-quite-as-putrid-but-still-pretty-cruddy apartment just off campus, we lived separate lives, kept separate hours, our paths generally only crossing when we needed to pass the latest batch of hints and study notes back and forth, in the manner of drug dealers meeting in some alley.

Still, he was a nice enough guy. We shared more than one round of beers at Clancy’s. We got drunk together on more than one occasion. We talked about women and life and the universe and women.

And when you’re still young, (well... yeah, OK, fairly young) learning that someone your own age has died is always unsettling, one of those first taps on the shoulder from the Grim Reaper as he comes up to stand behind you, taps that come along harder and harder, more and more frequently, as the years and the decades race by...

For that’s what the letter inside the envelope told me. It was from a law firm back east. Ted had died. After passing on this news to me, the letter further surprised me by informing me that I had been included in Ted’s will. I wasn’t the main beneficiary; while he had evidently still been a bachelor at his death, he did had a couple of younger siblings and they got the bulk of the stuff, whatever money there was, whatever furniture and real estate and domestic chattel.

I met one them once, one of the siblings, when she paid us a visit at Greson during our tenure there. Allison. I remember her now as a somewhat more attractive version of Ted, thin with that same messy black hair. (Of course at the time anything female moving under its own power was at least vaguely attractive.) They also shared the same regrettable taste in eyewear.

Not that it matters. What I had inherited, all that I had inherited, was a trunk. No, I take that back. Not just a trunk, but the trunk. I had completely forgotten about it in the intervening years, but standing there at the counter of my apartment kitchen, the gutted envelope laying to one side, it all came back to me.

You see, Ted had owned a old-fashioned traveling trunk, a really nice piece of work that he had inherited years ago from a relative, a great-uncle or somesuch, a somewhat shadowy and exotic figure (to me at least) who had evidently spent his entire long and quite eventful life in the merchant marine. God knows where Uncle... Hans... I think it was Hans...acquired the thing, but it was the absolute archetype of traveling luggage, a bulky rectangle with a high curving lid, well made of thick oiled slats of some exotic wood, and meticulously bound and cornered with pieces of hammered and polished brass. It sported sturdy handles on either end, a set of heavy latches and in the central place of honor, a stolid lock (more brass) that wouldn’t have been out of place if encountered on the door of an armored car. The interior was nicely padded, soft leather the color of old wine. As a finishing touch of perfection, there were even a few stickers slapped haphazardly on the lid, from appropriately exotic ports of call. Palau-Palau. Bali Hai. R’yleh. Wuldercan. Ted had it sitting at the foot of his bed all the way through college, and from the relatively little I saw, he kept a rotating assortment of junk in it. Well. I called it junk. Bits of machinery he had scavenged somewhere, half-finished and half-abandoned class projects, old bank statements and student loan applications, ‘interesting’ beer bottles, and so on and so forth. I liked that trunk, and I was vaguely annoyed at the time that Ted didn’t store anything more important in it. On more than one occasion I had commented on how I wished I had something like it, so when I was firmly established as a World-Famous Author I could live out of it while traveling the globe on my colossal book-signing tours, store within it the dampened panties of my screaming female fans, all the usual crap that a drunk horny college student dreams up at 3:00 AM on a Saturday morning, deep in the fetid but thrilling quagmire that is his freshman year. Finally I must have worn Ted down, and one night at Clancy’s he said he’d be sure and leave it to me in his will. We had both laughed, and I had then promptly gotten (more) drunk and forgotten about it. Ah youth.

Obviously though, Ted hadn’t forgotten.

But then Ted, Ted the Science Whiz, he sometimes had a habit of remembering the damnedest things. At the drop of a hat, he could recite the all scores of all the games played by his favorite baseball team, (some AAA outfit in Detroit, his hometown) back for ten years. All the scores, and who they played. Even though he displayed almost zero interest in politics, he also knew everyone who had ever been tapped to be shipped off to DC from his Congressional district, all the way back to whenever it was that the Detroit area officially joined the United States. Every winner of the Nobel Prize in the various science categories. Stuff like that.

Ah... I don’t want to give the impression that Ted was some idiot savant. The guy was bright, brighter than me by a long shot, and I can say without false modesty that I’m not exactly a knuckle-dragging cretin. Ted graduated fourth in our class, and could easily have been the big numero uno, if he had had just a little more dedication and stick-to-it-tiveness built into his makeup. But then I suppose fourth was good enough. He quickly got snapped up by one of those high-tech conglomerates that does vague and expensive things for the upper levels of the US military, and he left the corn and soybean fields for good immediately after graduation, following the path east that had been laid down by those fools from his Congressional district.

So why did he need The Writingest Fool (42nd in a graduating class of 1223, thank you very much) I hear you ask? Well, with some things, a lot of things, Ted’s mind was like a steel trap. He latched on if they were unlucky enough to flit past and he never ever let go. Others... substitute the words ‘a steel trap’ with ‘flypaper’ and you get the basic idea. He could glue this second sort of ideas into place just long enough to pass his English 101 test, or whatever, but ask him about them a month after that... poof. Gone.

Gone. Sort of like the rest of him, I suppose, ten years after we graduated, five years after we had last had any sort of contact. No more half-finished machines dripping oil on the floor by the sofa. No more stringy-but-bright girlfriends passing through the apartment at odd hours. No more horrific trombone solos greeting the dawn. No more sardine-laden pizzas.

A car, a sudden rainstorm, a wet spot on the road, a guard-rail that didn’t hold. Poof. No more Ted, leaving me and the Reaper reading a letter in my kitchen...

Hmm. Looking back on what I have so far here... I really didn’t intend for this to turn into the Theodore J. Capotosto Memorial. Let’s try and cut a little more to the chase here. The man lived, as far as I was aware his presence made the world a slightly better place, and then he died. He left me a trunk. After the ace legal minds at Summers, Austin and Goldstein tracked me down, I got in touch with them. There was the ritual of legalistic passwords and countersigns exchanged back and forth and about a month later, a burly delivery man with the name Hal stitched on his uniform in red thread turned up on the doorstep. Hal had a handcart and perched on that handcart was a good-sized crate. His burden was big and heavy, but somehow between the two of us, we wrestled it through the door and got it deposited in the living room. I signed the appropriate paperwork, gave the very last countersign, and like Ted before him Hal departed from my life.

I scrounged up a hammer from the tool/junk drawer, pried the crate open, and sure enough, there was the trunk, right side up and looking pretty much like I remembered it. Whatever journeys it and Ted had made together in the last ten years, he had obviously taken good care of it; as near as I could tell the only thing that had changed was that the travel stickers had been (carefully) peeled off it at some point. It looked like it could easily have been shipped sans crate and have arrived without so much as a scratch.

Ever since learning that I was going to get the thing, I had been trying to decide what if anything to store in it. To my utmost regret I didn’t have all that many female fans to contribute dampened panties, so I’d have to come up with something else... I found the long heavy key sealed up in a hemorrhoidally-neat little plastic baggy. I cracked into the lock. Said lock turned, the latches popped obligingly when I pulled at them, and the lid lifted itself up. And within...

Someone had beaten me to it. To the job of filling the trunk, I mean; I should have realized it from the weight. If only it had been full of gold bars or international barer bonds or something along those lines, but no such luck. What was there was not immediately obvious, as the contents were a jumbled mess.

My first reaction was one of... you know, I’m not sure now. Annoyance I guess. I figured that if there was anything remotely valuable or personal in there, I would have to try and track down Allison and/or Sibling Number 2 and return it to them. Before proceeding a step further, I found that first letter from Summers et al and carefully re-read it. No hint where they might be found. However, a particular line jumped out at me: the trunk and all of its contents had been specifically willed to me. I made a snap decision. It was all mine now. Unless there were gold bars underneath the whatever, I would be keeping it all.

Or maybe throwing it away, I thought, after I started sorting that whatever, pulling it out a piece at a time so I could savor the experience, a sort of Christmas in July. (Yes, this all happened in July, if you care.) Ted’s taste in trunk-contents had evidently not improved in the intervening years. There was a large pile of Detroit newspapers, of various dates and with no other apparent common theme, all neatly bundled and tied together with a long piece of black electrical cord. A large heavy pair of sunglasses that Elvis would have been proud to call his own, a fairly nice green sweater that was too small for me, and a really ratty purple one that was too big; the tattered sleeves were so long they made me look like a moth-eaten gorilla when I lost control of myself and tried it on for a moment. At least I had a good Halloween costume ready.

There were three trombone spit-valves. There were a couple of cheap-looking medals, tarnished metal disks on thin emerald ribbons, printed with some vaguely European language I didn’t recognize and mounted in flimsy black display boxes. There was half of a cracked coconut shell with a circuitboard-like pattern thickly traced on the inner surface, most of the parts from a cell phone (I think), a couple of truly interesting beer bottles, a large narrow-mouthed jug full of shiny Indian-head pennies, six marbles, and...

There was the other thing. The last thing. Even though it was bulky and filled a good portion of the chest, it seemed to lurk in the chest’s shadows, avoiding my gaze. I tried to pick it up, and was shocked at how heavy it was; it clearly had been what was slowing me and Hal down. Finally with a tremendous struggle, I hooked my fingers under it, lifted it out and staggered just far enough to deposit it on the coffee table nearby, which I half-imagined hearing groan under the weight.

So what was ‘it’? I’m afraid that I can’t really give you an exact answer to that, even now. It was a mechanical device of some kind, but beyond that it was very difficult to describe. It had a sort of blobby appearance, as if its birth had occurred when several smaller devices had been methodically welded together into one solid mass. There were spinners and gears and skinny light bulbs and I don’t know what all poking out through gaps and holes at odd angles. But at the same time, there was a definite finished air to the whole thing. It actually resembled its container in certain ways; there were tasteful brass fittings wrapped tightly around the outside, and all the various corners had been carefully rounded off smooth. It sat on four neat little legs, which even had bits of felt glued to the bottom of them. There were no sharp edges anywhere, and all the parts that appeared to need it gleamed with clear oil. I circled the thing a couple of times. There was no sign of labels or instructions or engravings. I had no intention at that moment of turning it on, but that evidently wasn’t going to be a problem since there also didn’t appear to be any sign of a power cord, or a battery compartment, or most vitally an ‘on’ switch...

Then I noticed the key. Not a key like the one that opened the trunk, but something you might find sticking out of the back of a mechanical windup toy, set into a recessed hole in the machine’s side and folded down flat on a set of discrete hinges. Almost against my will, I gingerly touched it. Nothing happened, and I hooked my fingers again and pulled on it. The metal was cool and slick. With only a gentle tug it snapped up and locked into place with a competent little snicking sound. I gave another tug, pulling out this time, but it was anchored firmly in place. I didn’t mess with that any further at that point, but went back to studying the rest of the Device. (It quickly acquired capital-letter status in my mind.) Studying the top closely, I noticed now that while there were no switches or knobs or anything, there were in fact two promising holes. The first wasn’t really a hole at all, but a socket of some sort, evidently not for a power cord, but for the sort of adapter that you find on the end of the cord that is attached to your average set of headphones. This hole was ringed with a narrow band of color, the color of pine needles.

Headphones. Cables...

My gaze was drawn back to the bundle of newspapers, and more specifically to what was holding them together. Sure enough, on closer examination I could see that yes, the cable actually had connectors wired on to both ends. I untangled it from the newspapers and examined those ends more closely. One was a fairly standard looking thing, something that you might indeed find on a set of headphones. It had a pine-needle marking ring around it. The other end of the cord... It wasn’t any kind of plug I was immediately familiar with; it looked something like a medium-sized three-pronged cocktail fork, each prong round and cut off smooth at its end. The center plug stuck out a little further than the one on either side. It had a marking ring the color of cooked salmon.

Again moving almost unwillingly, I plugged in the Device-end of the cable. It locked in place with another firm click. I flipped the free end absently. It brought irresistibly to mind the image of a rattlesnake’s tail shaking and finally I shook it from my grasp, letting the whole thing coil up in an untidy heap on top of the Device. Messing with this thing was stupid, even dangerous. Whatever it was, along with those pennies, it was no doubt worth some money, and my conscience wouldn’t let me keep it, without at least trying to get in touch with Allison and S#2.

I left it all there, and went to make some dinner.

Or at least I tried to. The thing sat there on the coffee table and nagged at me, like the holes left in your mouth after your wisdom teeth are extracted. Feeling its presence pushing against the back of my skull, I fished a frozen dinner out of the freezer and nuked it in the microwave, my shoulders hunched over. Ping and done. A fork waited for me in the proper drawer. As I chewed and swallowed, standing at the counter, I stared at the Device. It stared back. Finally I could resist no more, and abandoned my half-eaten burritos to their fate. Pulled back to the coffee table.

Maybe I was missing something, from the rest of the trunk’s contents. I again studied them, spread out now before me. Newspapers. Sweater. Gorilla costume. Valves. Jar of pennies. A few marbles.

Sunglasses....

I really looked at them for the first time, then picked them up. They were better made than they had first appeared, with large very black lenses, surrounded by almost-square metal frames. I opened them-

Oh, fuck it. Again I read back over what I have written, and again I have to say to myself, Will, let’s cut the crap here. You’re stalling, going into all of these blow-by-blow descriptions. Or maybe it’s the writer that I am? Trained by Professor Thunstone and all the rest back at Greson to try and build the suspense, maintain the narrative flow. But that’s not why I’m here, and that’s not why you’re reading it, I imagine. If anyone should ever happen to be reading this.

No. I’m just stalling. I should scroll back and cut out all of that crap about the Device, but since I’ve gone to the trouble of typing it all out, I’ll leave it now, in case there is someone out there who is interested. Let’s just summarize again.

I found a magical machine in a trunk. To this day I don’t know where the machine really came from, Ted or Hans or the trunk or the Device Fairy. It worked by winding a key in its side. You plugged a cable into the machine, and plugged the other end of the cable into a large pair of things that a first glance resembled some gaudy sunglasses. I plugged and I plugged and I wound up the machine. I put on the glasses and nothing happened. A lot more testing, a lot more poking and prodding, and I finally discovered that even after winding it up, the machine didn’t run until you stuck a marble into that other hole in the top of the machine. I mentioned the other hole, didn’t I? Yes. Just a plain glass marble, but it had to be one of the marbles out of the trunk; at one point in the process I managed to scrounge up one from somewhere else and it didn’t do squat. When the marble was dropped into place and the key was fully wound up, the Device came to life. As the gears turned and the lights flashed, the marble spun madly in its socket for a short time, a mad twirling eyeball staring at the ceiling, and then abruptly shattered into dust, shutting the whole damn thing back down again. It took a long time for me to figure all of this out, but finally...

I wound up the Device all the way.

And I slapped in a marble.

And I put on the glasses. I suppose it was stupid, but at the end of the day, I’m not sure I was actually given much choice in the matter.

How to describe what I saw? As the Writingest Fool, it galls me to have to say that I can’t. Not really. I’m a man who has been blind his whole life, gaining sight for a painfully brief time and then trying afterwards to explain the experience to a bunch of other blind people. I saw things, experienced things, but you can’t really understand it from my words.

For a moment there was nothing, nothing at all. Then there was a swirl of colors first clashing violently with each other, then sorting themselves out into neat rows and columns. And then... Then...

The world lit up and went pitch black. Things suddenly became sharp and distinct, and at the same time pale and hazy, objects seen from very far away through cold desert air. I could see the plants in the apartment growing, like a green spreading ooze, dripping endlessly from their leaves (Except for the couple that were dead, which dripped a sort of gray-brown). All of the electronic equipment turned transparent, allowing me to see the glowing swirling innards of the phone, the computer, the microwave, the TV... Naturally, I then had to look at the Device. It was glowing so bright and moving so fast that it bordered on the edge of pain. It wasn’t radioactive or anything. Somehow I just knew that. I knew that if I had seen something that was radioactive, I would have been able to identify it as such, instantly.

I said before I didn’t know what the Device was. Maybe that’s not really true. I’ve now had some time to think about all of this, and I wonder if the Device was some kind of... some kind of filter, allowing a tiny two-legged peon like myself to see a piece of the light that shines forever behind the curtain, a mirrored reflection of the most Holy of Holies...

At the time, I just looked away from that light, staggering and half-blinded. I had instinctively covered my eyes with my hands, and now I looked at those hands, and I could see all of the life there, the skin cells forever forming and flaking off, the hoards of tiny parasites and symbiotes that we all have in our systems, squirming around and forming obscene but vital words with the trails of their bodies. This made me curious what the rest of me looked like...

And so I discovered that while wearing the glasses made some things clearer, others were obscured. The most immediately obvious was that all other forms of glass became completely opaque (including mirrors; I never saw what my own head looked like while wearing the Elvis-glasses.) The best analogy I can come up with is that they resembled vertical slicks of oily water, or maybe a soap bubble waiting to be blown, but with depth to it, a sheet shimmering and swirling with a thousand different colors. I had discovered earlier, before actually turning on the Device, that the lenses could be independently twisted around, like on a set of binoculars. I now did this and I found could sort of see through glass, but it never was entirely clear; the view of the street two stories down from my living room windows was thin and hazy, a phantom, cars ghosting by, the clouds thick and black and choking. Mirrors never came close to working.

Then my gaze was pulled back to the TV.

Oh yeah. Forgot to mention about the TV. It was on during all of this. I usually let it run in the background while I worked on a project, writing or anything else. Usually had it tuned to one of those all-news channels; the resulting stream of utterly meaningless babble was always soothing somehow.

When I looked at the TV again though the glasses, I realized that I could now see the screen, floating in front of the interior parts as they churned away. I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was a blur of useless color, like all the rest of the glass in the apartment. Only... there was something different there... shapes moving that the rest didn’t have...

So I played some more with the glasses adjustments.. Just a little twisting, and suddenly the picture... well, it snalled into focus. If you want to know the meaning of the word ‘snall’, well... it’s what the picture did when I twisted the glasses. It’s simply the only word for happened, and the only definition I have.

It snalled up and up. Giant, vivid, 3D focus. At the same moment, the TV cabinet turned itself sort of inside out and collapsed to multicolored dust, followed instantly by the wall behind it. The resulting scene snalled up around me before I could even duck and scream...

All of the things that followed... despite the continuing evidence to the contrary, it still seems at times that I hallucinated the whole thing, watching the TV while those glasses nuked my brain like a burrito, filling the rest of the room with things out of my own subconscious, or maybe off of the TV screen...

But no. It was real. It was incredibly real. Especially one moment... but that came a little later.

At first, when the world stabilized, it was a moment before I realized that I was someplace else. A new apartment, much bigger and nicer than the one I had just left. More specifically, I was standing in the corner of that apartment’s dining room, with a kitchen on view behind a separating marble-topped counter. Unlike what it replaced, much of what was there in that kitchen was somehow flat and wrong. None of the electrical equipment glowed, everything was just empty shells. I only noticed this out of the corner of one eye because closer, in the room with me, there was something more important and interesting: a table. It was a nice wooden one and the scene was lit mostly by some candles sitting on it. I could see the streamers of heat rising from the flames, watch the wax flame and die, but again, it all seemed wrong somehow, stage-managed.

Seated at the table were two people I had never seen before, a man and a woman, both about my age, but (to be brutally honest) more attractive and wearing much nicer clothes. An expensive black suit with a narrow red tie, and a dress that matched the tie. They were eating dinner. Well... to be more accurate, there was an array of food and wine spread out between them, but it was all rather incidental to what was really going on in that room.

There was no sound, there was never any sound, the snalling had snuffed all of that out in a second. The man said something and the woman mimed laughter, showing white teeth and casually shifting her black hair into a new position. As she did these things, something flickered around her head, a half-seen butterfly. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to me. Even as part of my mind gibbered and ran in circles in panic, my hand went automatically to the lenses, and adjusted them again.

The butterfly became real, became part of a flock, and there was another around the man’s head...

I was seeing their thoughts. I wasn’t reading them, not exactly, not explicitly, but I could capture the general drift and pattern as it flickered and stormed along.

The drift, the pattern, and most of all the conflict. Those colors were reaching out of those two people’s heads, interacting with one another and making something new. But it wasn’t the connection of lovers, I could tell that right from the first. They were fighting like swordsmen, clash and clatter and bang.

Exactly like swordsmen. I was seeing not what the two people were pretending to be. pretending to feel, but instead what they actually though of each other. The colors, while glorious and addictive and nearly bottomless, still somehow on some level popped and fizzed tepidly. These two people were not in love with one other. If anything, they disliked one another. The woman laughed again at another comment from the man, and the colors behind her eyes shot daggers at the heart of his brain, which neatly parried them with a shower of splattering sparks. Suddenly they got up, intertwined their bodies and their lips, began moving towards the waiting bedroom, gracefully shedding clothes as they kissed. The colors did not grow any brighter.

I followed, I was dragged along in their wake, and still they ignored me. It was all flat. Dead. The last pieces of clothing fell away, revealing the woman’s excellent breasts and the man’s quite-impressive sex organ. The wide white bed enfolded itself around them as he slid into her...

I took another step, a step too far, and something snapped my head violently to one side. I had reached the end of the cord. Caught off-guard, I stumbled, and crashed into the nearest wall. It collapsed, pulling me an unknown distance and then reality re-snalled.

I was now standing beside a busy city street, with a steady stream of both cars and pedestrians going past under a row of elegant buildings and a cloudy sky. For a moment I looked at the cable that had snapped me, and I could just see it, a faint ghost, disappearing away from my head and into the wall of a nearby building.

But then my attention was dragged elsewhere.

The cars... Unlike with the electrical equipment in the second apartment, I could now see the engines churning away under the hoods. The multicolored pollution billowed out of their tailpipes, settling sickly over everything. The row of youngish trees along the street popped with color, greedily sucking some but not nearly all of the carbon dioxide out of the air.

And the people. Oh my god the people streaming past, ignoring me entirely. Real emotions now, all emotions. Laughing and yelling and dancing and fighting. And most of all fucking. Really, it was all sex, even when in-and-out physical sex had absolutely nothing to do with it. Men and women, infants and the elderly, gays and straights, they were all on display here, walking and driving, and they all had very different colors, and they would lash out and merge together, prongs sticking messily but tightly into waiting slots and the both instantly changing into something totally new and different. Particularly connections between the (heterosexual) men and the women. Yellow and blue did not mix to make green, but rocketing green and red plaid with enormous spinning lavender and yellow polka-dots that exploded orange and yellow a million times over... (And still you only have a fraction of an idea...) At a glance you could see the couples who were sexually attracted to one another, the ones that were deeply in love, the ones that had been married to each other for fifty years...

Then I saw the Man. One of the Men. At a glance he looked like all the other men, the ordinary men, that guy back in the apartment. Brownish-blonde hair, a neat little beard, sort of overweight, a decent but not exceptional suit. There was only one difference: There was this... thing... centered right in the middle of his forehead. Not an eye, an actual eye, but aware and seeing nonetheless, vivid and unblinking. It was small, but incredibly compact and... busy, a thousands squirming layers. Dense, a knotted bundle of a million black protons and electrons madly zipping and whirring, all leaving stinging multicolored trails. It wasn’t as bright and sharp as the Device had been, but it was far from pleasant.

There was a tall redheaded woman with him. They were walking arm and arm, talking and laughing like any other youngish couple, but that woman’s mindcolors... they were perverted. Corrupted. They were stretched wildly out of shape, wrapped and knotted tightly around that thing on her companion’s forehead, like a cheap shirt I once saw that had been ripped right off a man’s back and sucked into the spinning hub of a piece of farm equipment.

But that wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long shot. As they walked together up that busy street in a single eternal moment... that woman was riding the man’s penis. I can’t explain it, she wasn’t in two places at the same time, but as she walked up the street in her lime-green sundress and her matching heels and purse, laughing and smiling, she was also stripped naked and collared and folded over, pulling his massive cock down into her dripping snatch giving him a blowjob cracking her jaws to breaking taking it down all the way doing it doggie style with feverish intensity, her blue eyes draining muddy and then totally dry...

And there were other women there too, with her. They weren’t there on the street, they were off behind desks and walking hallways somewhere else in whatever town this scene was part of it, but they were with that man nonetheless, and they were all servicing him, all at once. A even taller blonde woman. A black woman with incredibly long hair. A busty brunette with very short fuzzy hair. Others maybe, not quite as clear, ones that he hadn’t fully pulled down into his mind, down into the bottomless poison of that third eye...

They walked on, passing out of sight around the corner. Neither of them never so much as glanced in my direction.

Just as they had rounded that corner, another Man appeared from the same place, moving in the opposite direction. I didn’t see their moment of actual meeting, and I would have given a lot for that. What would I have seen? Hostility? A casual nod between equals? Nothing at all? The newcomer was much older than the first, tall with a thrusting beak of a nose and a flowing white mane of hair, still handsome in a bony, even fossilized sort of way. He was walking alone, his pace slow and his expression thoughtful. He held a gold-topped cane in one hand, but didn’t use it. The thing on his forehead was a hundred times deeper, blacker, more rotten, and I couldn’t begin to count the number of women that were twisted over and shackled tightly to his cock. I caught a glimpse of some of the eyes of the older ones, the ones that had been trapped down there for decades...

I turned, fighting the urge to vomit, and deliberately crashed myself into the wall beside me.

It took a lot longer for me to regain myself. When I finally was in shape to look around again, I saw that I was in a dance studio, a wide wooden floor surrounded on all sides by mirrors (or windows, or something made of glass...) There were ballerinas there, several of them, but it clearly not a performance. Some kind of practice session. Some of them were limbering up around the edges of things, their legs up on those handrails you see lining the walls in such places, while others were flitting gracefully back and forth leaping high. I only noticed all of this tangentially. My gaze was drawn immediately to a thin hard-eyed woman shrouded in black stood off to one side. She was almost a female version of that second Man back out on the street, with even more extraneous matter slued away. She didn’t have a third eye like the Men, but there was something like it there, tight and hard and furious, wound up painfully and methodically year after year, decade after decade, and held in place with grasping claws. It wasn’t bottomless, but it went down a hell of a long way.

The crone suddenly glanced in my direction, sharp and black. She didn’t see me, I’m almost positive of that, but while snellside of the TV, she was the only individual who seemed even slightly aware of my presence. I started to back away from her

Then of the ballerinas did a spin, and something flashed there, catching my eye. She landed, her back was to me. Her bare back, her costume swooping low.

It was just like all the other dancers in the room. I guess until that moment I hadn’t really wanted to see.

Except for its larger size, the keys that stuck out there, spun with smooth deadly grace, were exactly like the one on the Device.

As I watched, one of the ballerinas ran down and stopped, her upper body tipped over, her eyes blank. The crone stopped looking in my direction, stalked over, and started winding the younger woman back up. The ballerina jerked as her key was turned.

The expression on their faces...

I turned and walked into the nearest pool.

I visited other places, several other places.

Some kind of stone-walled S&M dungeon run by a tall statuesque woman... a Woman... wearing a tight black leather outfit, flagellating the pale white skin of the naked man she had strapped into some bizarre metal framework. (Unlike the Crone, Her third eye was quite real, but also different than that of the Men. Opposite but equal, spinning the other way, all of the colors reversed, yin and yang...)

A bizarre temple-like structure filled with enormous pillars, where a tough-looking man (the flickerings of a third eye nestled in the crags of his forehead) was engaged in a running gun-battle with a group of hooded cultists, a naked blonde woman clinging to his arm.

An orgy-scene in a pillow-filled room, members of both sexes happily and vigorously intermingled. Either there was some bestiality involved as well, or some of those guys really need to shave. No third eyes in evidence anywhere.

A college dorm-room, much like the one I had occupied at Greson, with two male students having slow, almost grim, sex on the bed...

A long curving metallic corridor half-filled with debris and smoke where a large green slobbering monster was raping about six screaming earth-women, all at once, shooting its seed into them, impregnating them...

A man and a woman in an artist’s loft, painting a picture by fucking on top a giant paint-smeared canvas which lay in the middle of the floor...

A pixie-like queen sitting on her emerald throne, surrounded by adoring male subjects, most of them buffed and muscular, their physiques glowing and exposed and perfect...

A young pockmarked nerd with taped glasses and buckteeth, dangling a shiny gold pocket watch in front of the eyes of the two pretty girls, one white, one Chinese, who knelt naked at his feet, their eyes blank and worshipful...

I staggered on and on, somehow unable to turn back or aside, my mind stretched and pulled like taffy, there was just more, more, more...

And then there was the last room. The very last one, my legs were about to collapse out from under me and everything was going thin and stretched. I pulled my eyes into focus, and I realized I was standing on the set of a TV newsroom. But not just any newsroom. For the first time since my journey had begun, the room was one that was known to me. It was the set for one of the local network affiliates in the town where I lived. Call it KXES. There was the cityscape with the familiar green mountains tastefully arranged behind them. There was the equally-familiar gray-and-silver newsdesk with the KXES logo splashed across it, although I was seeing from an new angle, almost from the side. And seated behind that newsdesk...

There were two people.

The first...

I recognized the man. It was Dale Clark, one of the station’s two main weeknight co-anchors. The amazing plastic man, every piece of him smooth and synthetic and fake, teeth and suit and hair and sincerity covering the absolute vacuum within. The perfect paragon of the degraded age of TV ‘news’ in which we now live.

I walked closer, staggered really, and for some reason, I reached up and adjusted the glasses as I walked, something I had stopped doing as I had been blasted from place to place to place.

What I saw... even more than all the rest, I’m not sure how real it was, what I was actually looking at.

There was definitely something there, though.

At first glance, first twist, Dale looked just like he always did, suit, tie, blondish hair blow-dried then shallaced forever into place. Surprisingly, his colors streamed and flashed as brightly as all the rest I had seen; if nothing else, I had learned that the man actually had a brain lurking under all of that gloss. He did not have a third eye, for which I was profoundly grateful.

Then a final twist. The glasses hovered right on the very highest edge of snallsight, thin and bright and painful. The thick lead-lining of the newsdesk melted away, and I saw what was going on behind there, under there, forever and forever in the blackness out of sight of the camera. No wonder ol’ Dale was always smiling. Unlike with those Men I had seen back on the street, this woman was quite real and all the way there. (Or was she?) A brown-skinned woman, her curves perfect and smooth, her hair tied back into a very long tight ponytail. She had on a blindfold, her ears were plugged, her arms and legs restrained. I could see the electric glow of the small engines of the vibrators as they endlessly buzzed in her sex, in her ass, deep and hungry, everywhere...

Her lips were wrapped around Dale’s exposed penis, and she was pumping madly, wantonly. She would be there, doing that, without all of those restraints. The real blindfold and earplugs and vibrators were inside her skull, her colors all tightly under wraps, locked down, strapped down tight and blind and stimulated to furious buzzing. I stared at all of this, I don’t know how long I stared, and then I remembered that two people usually sat at that desk, and I looked on. She was there. There was the thing that was the most real of it all, the thing I remember most clearly of all.

Kari. Kari Torenza, the other of the two regular KXES newsanchors. She was a petite blonde woman, her hair swept up in a classy but professional style. She was very beautiful, and I had always sort of had a long-distance crush on her. I also thought that unlike the Dalester, she was far too good a reporter to be wasting her time doing the usual ‘If It Bleeds, It Leads’ crap that has long become the mainstay of all local news in this country. (Hell, all news in this country when you get down to it...)

I was expecting to see a mirror-image of what was going on with Dale, some chained hunk (like those back in that throne room, maybe) under the desk feverishly working on her sex with his tongue, his hefty penis caught up in some elaborate steel trap... But no. There was only Kari behind that half of the desk. She was entirely naked, her perky little breasts poking proudly into the air. Around her neck was a thin gold collar with the KXES logo sportily emblazoned on the front of it. (Her microphone was clipped to it as well.) She smiled her usual dazzling smile, and more vibrators buzzed deep inside her violated body.

And the colors in her head...

There are no words. They were the best I had seen, in all of the people I had seen. The brightest and the deepest and most perfect. And I don’t want to share my memory of them with you, not even if I could find the right words.

They were there. And they were being slowly destroyed, perverted, by what They... whoever ‘They’ were... were doing to her. She was fighting it, but already, all she could do was sit there and smile and read the words on the Tele-Prompter.

I walked to her, walked to her without thinking, and I yanked the collar from around her throat. Yanked away whatever it was that that collar was representing. It turned out I could touch objects; the thing burned and whipped against my hand and I tore away the vibrators and all the rest without hurting Kari without even breaking her skin and there was a howl and everything went away, the snallights closing in on me from allsides andpouncingand

I woke up, lying on the floor of the apartment, the very first apartment, the one where all of this had started.

The machine was still spinning away, although the marble was about to shatter, I was almost out of time, and it was my last marble. I didn’t remember putting the others in the slot, but they were gone, nonetheless.

I didn’t look at the TV. I didn’t want to look at the TV. I only remembered bits and pieces of what had just happened, and lot of it was bad. My hand hurt horribly, a line of fire crawling across it and down onto my wrist.

But my time was running out, and there was one thing I still had to do.

I crawled to my feet, picked up the Device (oddly it was light now, as light as a feather) and I stumbled slowly towards the front door of my apartment.

That door opened not into a hallway but rather a little fence-enclosed porch, with my welcome mat and a potted plant and stairs leading up to the third floor down to the first. Beyond that was the parking lot. So I guess it was really more of a condo than an apartment, wasn’t it? Not that it matters. I kicked the door open, I lurched out onto the porch. For the first time since all of this had started, there was a sound in the air, an unpleasant sound, but I didn’t really hear it then, not until later did I remember that I had been hearing it from the moment I woke up back in the apartment. I went on, out to the railing out to were I could see the sky and I looked up, my jaw hanging like an idiot.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The clouds had burned away and the sky was bright and blue.

And I could see the stars. They were huge, burning up there, burning so very incredibly far away. For the first and last time in my life, I truly understood how big and how far away those little white pinpricks are. I was glad they were so far away.

Which made me realize...

My gaze went on, dragged up and up and up to the sun, our own little pinprick in the infinite blackness. It was hovering off in the western side of the sky, just beginning its nightly plunge towards the ocean. I could look at it. I could look right into the heart of the sun without pain. Without physical pain, at least. It was only for a moment, the power-marble detonated with bang leaving me blind and stunned, but it was more than enough.

What did I see? Let’s just put it this way. If more people could see what I saw forever spinning up there, roaring and howling and leaving those gigantic searing trails... we’d have a lot more sun worshippers out there. Real sun worshippers. We’d be back to building stone pyramids and wielding sharp obsidian knives. The screams and smoke of the burning flesh would reach all the way to heaven.

I vomited and pissed and crapped in my pants all at once, falling backwards to land on my ass with a thud, still cradling the Device in my arms.

The sound was louder, and it penetrated my mind like an ice pick. My vision flashed afterimages of what I had just been slapped with, and I couldn’t get up.

Then the car came. I call it a car, but, well, in my more honest moments I have to say that it was just something shaped like a car. It had four wheels. Doors. Lights. Black-tinted windows. Tail fins. Really nasty tail fins that could slice you in half as they went screaming past.

And how they did scream, scream like a dive-bomber plunging for its target. The car-thing came into the parking lot, twisting around the corners, its tires leaving no black marks on the pavement. It slid to a stop directly below me at a wide angle, and the passenger door swung open. Chill foulness spilled out, followed by...

A man. I call it a man, but... hell, we’ve been over this already. You get the idea. Two legs. Eyes. Fingers. A gun on one hip, a sword on the other. It had all of these things.

And its face, you ask? As I said, I was running on fumes at this point, but, remember those Third Eyes? Well, that’s what this Man, the Last Man, that’s what his whole face looked like. He was a great big Third Eye wrapped up in a leathery scarred skin and wound tight with a really nasty key and set to forever walking across the wide world.

Sent out to enforce the law. Whose law? You don’t want to know. I don’t want to know. All I do know is, I had broken it. I knew this as soon as saw him. I was guilty, there was no appeal, and he had come to carry out my sentence.

He came walking, and he pulled the gun from its holster as he did, up the steps, the sounds of his boots thudding on the wood. He came into view, and the gun was waiting.

And so I died. The sound was very long and very loud.

And so...

I was reborn.

I almost wrote ‘and so I woke up and it was all a dream!’ Because for a time, I thought it was all a dream. For a time, I barely remembered any of it. But gradually, I came to realize and to remember. To remember that things had profoundly changed.

You may have noted that in the earlier parts of this little narrative, that while you learned all about the life and times of the late Ted Capotosto, I didn’t say a whole lot about The Writingest Fool. What I do for a living, whether I was married or living alone, whether there were any of my girlfriends passing through that college apartment. There was a reason for this.

Because everything has changed. My past has changed. I can remember, more or less, what my life was like before that trunk and its contents arrived, but now...

I wrote for a living before. I write for a living now. I get paid a lot more for the new stuff, but it’s still sitting all day and staring at the screen of a word processor. I’m writing another book, and everyone says its going to be the most popular one I’ve done to date. I suppose they are right.

I had girlfriends in college. That has not changed.

I had a girlfriend before. I have a wife now. The girlfriend was named Molly, and I had met her at the newspaper where I worked. She was a smart and fun-loving girl with gorgeous dark hair. We got along pretty damn well, and I think in a couple of more months I would have asked her to move in with me, and I think she would have said yes. Maybe some day after that we would have made the whole thing official. Now, Molly still exists, is still alive, she still works for that newspaper. She’s going with a nice guy named Herb Carlson, who works for a local radio station. I checked on her and him, and she seems happy enough. She doesn’t know I exist, even if she’s read one of my books. I use a pen name.

My wife? I suppose it comes as no surprise that my wife is Kari, the woman behind the newsdesk. We met five years ago when she interviewed me about one of my first books. Afterwards, we went out, we fell in love, we got married.

I had an apartment before, a condo. I have an apartment now, a penthouse. Again, I suppose its no surprise that it’s the same one that those two people were fighting love in, high up on the east side of the city near the harbor, with a lovely sweeping balcony view of the main downtown skyline and the green mountains beyond. We may be getting an even better one; Kari’s now working (has always worked) at KXES’s main competitor across town, the one station in these parts that still maintains a slight semblance of decency and good journalism. Her excellent work there has led her to being courted by one of the national networks, and we may soon be moving back east. It would help with my career as well, so while I would miss this town a bit, I don’t mind too much.

Ted was dead before. Ted is dead now. The Device is long gone, not a trace left behind, but the trunk arrived empty at our penthouse after Ted’s death. It now sits at the foot of our bed, filled with some of the most important things from our marriage, so that if we ever have to flee, we can hopefully carry it between us and save them. It seems only fitting.

It all sounds rather nice, I suppose, when I put it this way. Wasn’t I speaking earlier of punishment? Yes, I was. My crime was ripping that collar from around Kari’s neck. As I’ve already said ad nasuem I’m still not sure if it all was literal or symbolic, what I saw, what I did, while snalling over the rainbow, but that one impulsive act definitely upset someone’s plans, somewhere, and now I am paying the penalty.

The Last Man shot me right between the eyes, and he left... not a hole, but something else. Maybe the exact opposite of a hole. I stand in the bathroom in the mornings and I shave, and I can almost see what is there now, spinning and buzzing, leaving its little trails.

Kari’s been acting different around me lately. Alone at night in our bedroom. So has Viola, my literary agent. Alone in her office up on the tenth floor of the Bloy Building. And Ruby, the dark-skinned woman who comes in some days to do housework, alone in our penthouse apartment. She’s been coming up almost every day lately, actually.

They have all been acting very differently.

And I am writing a new book. It’s practically writing itself, the words stringing together, the patterns forming, page after page after page. The next time I go out on a book signing tour, I may very well be that World Famous Author after all. There may even be dampened panties.

And now we are probably moving back east, to mix with the very highest levels of society.

I look into the mirror, and I think maybe, for the first time, I begin to have a flickering of understanding and empathy about that older Man out there on that street.

I am beginning to understand what he was thinking about.

I am beginning, maybe, just a little, to understand why he was walking alone.