The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Fran remembered now and she smiled, feeling the movement stretch her face wide, too far, to the very rupturing point.

She smiled and she remembered the dream of the night before, all of it.

Floating naked, her toes just brushing the ground, amid the endless fields of wildflowers, then moving forward, up between the tall black stones.

-The stones with the ugly twisting shapes hacked in their sides.—

Floating giddily up, spinning slowly around and around, up the wide golden stairs to the Palace in the Clouds, everything looking exactly as Uncle Will used to describe it, in the bedtime stories he told Fran and Tyler.

In their snug little bedroom, up under the eves of the house, warm and safe and happy.

Exactly like, but even better...

She had passed through the emerald gates, and up, up inside the Palace, up at the very top of the enormous shimmering corridor of arched light, each piece and each section more gorgeous and perfect than the last.

But at the very end of it all, there was something that had never been in any of Uncle Will’s stories. Instead of the Goofy Pincher and the Fuzzlegrumps, there were angels, all the happy angels in their long shimmering robes and their shiny collars. (The Fuzzlegrumps weren’t there, but the robes had all been splattered again and again with the bright cheery colors from the Fuzzlegrumps’ Rainbow Paint buckets...)

And the angels themselves, she knew all of them. Suzanna. Eve. Holli. Martha. Irene. Aunt Alice. Her mother. Nina. Most especially Nina. She smiled at the memory of Nina.

-Hello my sister-

-I finally got your message-

And at the center of it all, Pincher’s sprawling Patchwork Throne.

-The throne with the (!!ugly!!) shapes hacked deep in the sides-

And sitting on the throne, the man,

The Man

As tall and wise and kind as both her father and his brother William, but also as sexy and virile as a dozen (??Harolds??), sparkling blue eyes and a full crop of thick wavy black hair and no stoop at all...

And he had smiled at her, and pulled her close, and he had taken her in his arms, filled her, filled all of her holes to overflowing, filled them until she was drowning in laughter and joy, the very last breaths bubbling up and out of her mouth, and...

He had told her what she had to do.

She remembered all of this, because she was finally back in those arms, and she remembered his name, and she remembered what she had to-

He pushed her away. Hard, and with surprising strength. The pain and the surprise stabbed her like a knife as she crashed backwards into one of the desks in His office.

But the stab came and went in a second, and the joy and the certainty came whooshing back and filling and healing the hole, the sea effortlessly swallowing a feeble pit dug in the sand of a beach by a small child. She stretched her face again, and reached out her talons to Him, to hook into him and never let go, ever again...

He slapped her.

Hard.

Right in the face.

The world stood still.

Tom stood now in a crouch, his hands curled, his breathing hard and heavy. The sound of his slap seemed to echo around and around the room forever, getting inside hollow things, bouncing around for a time before coming back out. The blow had snapped Fran’s head to one side, and he couldn’t see her eyes. Her hands were still out in front of her, the fingers curled.

The world stood still.

Then one of those hands came up, very slowly, and touched her cheek where he had hit her. The skin there was already turning red.

-I just slapped a woman in the face. In the freaking face. I haven’t done that since I was six, and that annoying friend of Harriet’s, Trizie Derkins, that was her name, came around to our sandbox and told me...—

The thought trickled rivulets of ice water through his stomach, then died away half-finished, because he saw that finally, finally, Fran was turning to look at him.

Her eyes...

The water warmed up, just a bit.

Her eyes were shocked, confused, almost human again.

But just almost. The bolts had been knocked loose for a moment, but they were still there.

And they were starting to tighten down again. He could see them, almost see them, catch the light as they screwed themselves back into place.

“Tom? What...” Blink. Click click click... “I know what...”

-Get out of here. Now.— It was that cold hard part of him. -You’re either going to have to kill her, fuck her, or run, you puling little moron, and you aren’t up to either of the first two. Not yet. So run. Figure out a damn solution later!—

He stepped around her, dashed to the door, scrabbled the lock open, slammed the door open and sprinted down the hall, almost bowling over Monty, who had the misfortune to be walking by at that moment carrying a precarious load of computer components. The lanky tech gave a startled yell, and both his long hair and his load went flying.

“Crap! What’s the matter with you, Tom! Tom? Hey, Tom, are you—”

Monty’s now-concerned voice faded away as Tom passed on into the lobby.

“Tom?”

A different voice, equally concerned. This time, he stopped and spun on his heels.

Eve stared at him from behind her desk, her dark fingers still curled over her keyboard.

“Is something... wrong...” She trailed off and stared at him. Not with those bolt-eyes, but something... similar.

Something familiar. Somehow he stifled the scream.

He turned without a word and burst out onto the sidewalk, not noticing the clouds that had rolled in, barely feeling the rain that had started to fall.

He ran to his car, the soles of his sneakers slipping a little as he pounded them down on the pavement.

He peeled out onto Beeker, and drove off into the rain.

-At least this time I remembered to bring my keys along...—

Eve was typing up one of the Boss Man’s countless letters to the Yankovich people (carefully polite tooth-grinding standing there behind every word...) when she heard the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. She looked up from her computer screen just as Tom came into view. He was moving fast, almost running, and headed for the front door.

“Tom?”

He jerked as if he had been zapped with a cattle-prod, and spun in her direction.

“Is something... wrong...” She trailed off as their eyes met. There was something about him today, now, that hadn’t been there before, something besides the near-panic... something...

Different.

He stared back at her, his expression one seemingly of horror. Then he turned with another jerk and disappeared out the door without a word. The door swung slowly shut behind him, its pneumatic levers scissoring themselves neatly shut. Rain had started to fall, pattering down on the shrubs that lined the sidewalk.

Dripping off, onto the raked beauty bark underneath.

Plop. Plop. Plop.

Something began to nag at her, buzzing and annoying like a mosquito banging relentlessly around inside her ear. A voice.

“Eve? Hey, Earth to Eve!” She shook herself with a small start. How long had she been sitting there, staring at that empty doorway?

Why had she been staring at an empty doorway?

She looked in the direction of the voice.

Monty. Seeing he had her attention, he went on.

“What’s gotten into everybody all of a sudden? What was wrong with Tom?”

Something prompted Eve to study him up and down. Long brown hair. (The Boss Man was always frowning and grinding his teeth about that as well, but Monty was just too valuable to the company to raise much of a stink, and whatever his other faults as an employer, at the end of the day no flies ever stuck to Mr. Kevin Harrison...) A smart-alecky but essentially good-natured face. A collection of faded but clean clothes: black T-shirt featuring the single dripping red word ‘CHTORR!!’ along with a drawing of a... giant purple caterpillar... or something... angled so that it appeared to be bursting directly out of the wearer’s stomach. Jeans. Sneakers.

In short, absolutely nothing different or new.

-Why should I be worrying about that?—

She opened her mouth, not at all sure what she was about to say.

“Nothing’s wrong with Tom Woodhue.”

One of her two phones chose that moment to ring. She dismissed Monty and answered it, slipping smoothly into professional mode.

“You have reached Harrison Manufacturing. This is Eve, how may I direct your call?”

“Oh-kay.” Monty, not the person on the other end of the line. “If anyone needs me, I’ll be hiding in my cave and updating my resume. This place is starting to get flaky.” He stalked out.

“Hi. Is Suzanna there?”

Eve didn’t really listen to or hear Monty, but instead replied to the voice’s query, automatically picking up a pen and poising it over the message pad.

“I’m sorry, but Ms. Taylor is out of the office today. Can I take a message?”

It had gotten away from her.

Fran turned around and around in the empty office. A glorified cubicle, really. Just big enough for two chairs, two desks with computers, and lining the walls, a collection of filing cabinets. No windows. Lots of paperwork and charts and supplier advertising flyers tacked to the walls in overlapping profusion. A jacket, a tan windbreaker, hung over the back of one of the chairs. An empty hook was screwed into the wall, awaiting another coat. On the wall behind the jacketed chair was a large black and white poster, a drawing of a staircase that circled up and up forever, impossibly merging back into itself. Over the other desk was a poster of a seascape, with some frolicking dolphins dancing across curling white and blue waves. Someone had carefully drawn curling cartoon-villain mustaches on all the dolphins with a black ink pen.

She looked down at her breasts, which where hanging out, exposed. The nipples were very hard. Only half-thinking about it, she absently stuffed them back out of sight, straightened up her garments.

She rubbed the side of her face, which still burned.

It had gotten away from her for a moment, but it was starting to come back to her.

She left the office, carefully closed the door, walked calmly down the hall to her own section of the building. Through the door. Kristen’s desk was empty, but Nina was behind hers, tapping away at her computer, bringing to mind the image of a small fussy bird pecking at a feeder. She glanced up as Fran entered. The short woman’s expression was very neutral, just like the rest of the time, and she said nothing. She didn’t seem to notice the slap mark, and turned back to her work.

Fran sat down behind her own desk. Her glasses were lying there, abandoned, and without really thinking about it, she picked them up, put them on. Then she just sat for a moment and listened to Nina’s typing.

Something went very tight in the back of her head.

She remembered the dream once again, and she started to smile.

She couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

-I know what I have to do.—

She looked at her hand. There was a diamond there, she saw, winking impotently at her.

She stripped off both of the golden rings and tossed them in the garbage can beside her desk. She considered for a moment going out on the shop floor and using one of the grinders or something to do a proper job of destroying the wretched things, or maybe clubbing someone over the head and stealing their blowtorch, maybe melt them down into...

A collar...

But she had more important things to do.

She yanked open the center drawer of her metal desk. She fished around in the very back and finally extracted the thin company personnel directory booklet.

She looked up Tom Woodhue’s address.

Her long lacquered fingernail scraped loudly down the page as she searched.

ClickAway was just about running full-tilt, and Raul rationed out to himself a small smile of satisfaction. The bank of espresso machines burbling away, bagels being toasted, pastries being served, people surfing the web for their baseball scores or their fetish-porn or their Early American Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society pages, or whatever the fuck it happened to be. Money rolling in on every side, and at the end of the day it was the money, the Money that mattered. The Janeys and Erika Johansons and Suzanna Sunshines of the world were fine in their place, quite fine indeed. But only in their place.

He shifted his lips into a new position and smiled his welcome smile to a customer, took the man’s order at the counter and moved to fill it, the long-ingrained actions barely taking up a quarter of his concentration.

The Money was all that mattered.

Still...

He had an interest in Erika Johanson. Looking at the whole thing coolly and rationally, the only way to ever look at things, he supposed that every heterosexual man of her acquaintance who still had something resembling a pulse and was vaguely upright had an interest in dear Erika. And all the others would at least twitch if she happened to walk by.

As far as he knew, she hadn’t slept with any of them.

None that had lived to tell Raul the tale, anyway.

-The most wonderful man in the world.—

She had toned the words as a joke, but...

He knew himself to be a very good reader of people. Nothing psychic, of course. While he had cheerfully cashed in on such things in the past when the opportunity presented itself, he didn’t for one moment actually believe in any of that mind-reading see-the-future crap. But there was something there, nevertheless, it always had been for him, and he used it. He ruthlessly squeezed that particular tit for all it was worth.

For it was, after all, what had gotten him this far in life. He glanced at the shapely ass of Janey, the blonde barista standing in front of one of the other machines, three down the row. Her back straight, her legs nicely aligned. Knowing just the right people to hire, knowing almost from the moment they first walked in for an interview. Janey there, for one, had put up the usual tough cynical front. But he had seen the soft interior behind the mask, seen it right away. And after hiring her, it had only taken two or three months of patient work on his part to chip away that mask and expose that interior.

He had Janey very well trained now, both behind the counter and in the bed up in his cramped apartment above the cafe, whenever he could be bothered with the latter.

He grabbed the cinnamon canister and sprinkled a dash over the top of the cappuccino he was preparing. He did not look over at 23.

Erika Johanson.

Before today Raul, who never gambled on anything, would have bet a hundred dollars that Erika Johanson would never, ever, be one of his employees. Not if she was destitute and down to her last dollar, freezing out in the driving rain. (Not that she’d ever let herself reach such a crisis, mind you, which was the whole point to begin with.)

-The most wonderful man in the world.—

She had spoken the words as a joke, and Erika was very good at keeping her mask firmly in place, one of the very best he’d ever met, in fact, but maybe, just maybe, there had been something else back there, in the very back, peeking around the edge...

Maybe just a hint of longing, yes?

Yes.

Sooo...

Little Suzanna Sunshine was spoken for by this Tom person. (Or whatever the man’s name really was, whatever it was that Erika had thought that ol’ Suzie was going blurt out.) He hadn’t needed Erika to tell him that. Suzie’s mask had been ripped off. She was maybe the most spoken-for person he’d seen; even more, far more, than Janey or one of his other... ah... pets.

And Erika...

Erika wanted to be spoken for by Tommy Boy?

He gave the customer his cup of bubbling caffeine, took money and made change. One last smile.

Erika Johanson, who if she wanted to could chew up and spit out a dozen Suzie Sunshines without even breaking a sweat or mussing a hair?

Raul started working over the already-spotless counter with a handy rag.

And then there was the fact that Erika was in here at all, at this time of day, using one of his Internet portals. She had come in before, of course, several times, usually with one or another of her friends, that Ursula Adams, with the mangy black hair and the chain-smoker’s laugh, like fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. (Smokers. Raul was most quite definitely not a Mormon, but in certain areas the respective belief systems happened to overlap. For one, while he heartily encouraged the habit in others, he disapproved of injecting any kind of unneeded chemicals into the temple which was his own body. He didn’t even drink his own coffee, except for the occasional sip to confirm that the taste was up to the proper standard...) Erika would come in, she would drink her double tall expertly fashioned out of Kona beans, and she would move on. Which made sense, really. After all, he knew she had her own computer; she did web-research for people sometimes. So why was she here now?

A broken computer was the obvious answer. But would she pay to use a computer, when she had friends, many friends, she could visit instead?

Maybe. Just maybe.

Or maybe she was here because...

He tossed the towel back where he had found it.

-My apologies, my oh-so-mysterious friend. No ‘Tommy Boy’ for you. No, not at all. Let’s try Mr. Thomas on for size instead.—

She was here because Mr. Thomas had told her to come here?

Maybe. Just maybe.

If so...

-What’s your secret, Mr. Thomas? Sheer overwhelming wonderfulness?—

Somehow, he doubted it. That attribute was actually not nearly as uncommon as people liked to pretend.

Raul formed a picture in his head, very slowly and carefully, striving to get every detail just exactly right...

Erika Johanson, standing dutifully in front of one of his espresso machines, her back straight and her legs nicely aligned. Wearing her little red-and-gold apron, a blouse with exposed shoulders and some skintight pants, making Raul’s coffee. Laughing her laugh (no blackboard nails there, oh no), smiling her smile...

That would really bring in the customers.

He did not move the picture beyond that point, not even up the stairs to his bed, even though much wider vistas beckoned tantalizingly in the distance...

Never gamble. One thing at a time. People who blindly went chasing after hazy vistas had a habit of breaking through mirages and landing right in bottomless pits of quicksand.

But still...

Just what exactly was it that Erika-would-be-of-Tom, or possibly Mr. Thomas himself, wanted to know about?

And didn’t want to use her own machine to look for...

Suzanna finished off the last of the chocolate and carefully placed the mug on the counter behind her back, not looking back but reaching with her arm and neatly dropping it into an empty space she had noted and oriented on before. Beside her, Erika had sat without doing anything for several minutes, but now she was typing again in short bursts, clicking with the mouse. Boooring.

Back to the textures.

Something, she now realized, was subtly wrong. There was Erika’s continuing low-grade nervousness, rolling off the red-haired woman in waves that sort of resembled that same hair, short and jagged, but that wasn’t it. Four of the other customers, three men and one woman, were covertly scoping them out, but only in the usual sexual sense. A bit more intense than Suzanna had experienced in the past, but without animosity she chalked that up to Erika’s presence. Nina had chosen very well in giving her new friend the Master’s wonderful book.

This wasn’t the problem, either.

Suzanna started quartering the room, methodically moving from face to face, texture to texture. It wasn’t any of the customers. She finally shifted her gaze behind the counter, to the employees.

Ah. The clouds parted and the thought-birds spiraled high.

There were some odd textures there, but the most important one was...

Raul.

He was watching them.

Not in a strictly literal physical sense, of course. One of the thought-birds expanded itself into a diorama which showed Suzanna that if she had happened to have a revolver in her possession, she could have pulled it out, loaded it one methodical bullet at a time, taken slow careful aim, and put a massive smoking hole through the felt of Raul’s hat (good riddance, another of the birds added off to one side) and then the brain behind it, and he would have never seen it coming. Well, apart maybe from everyone else in the cafe jumping up and screaming and flaring their textures every which way, and all that, but it was the principle of the thing.

But he was watching them, nonetheless, with his back turned to them, busy at his large espresso machine. Suzanna began to get that horrible feeling that she (and maybe, gosh, Erika, too) had Done Something Wrong, and that People Were Going To Be Upset.

-People?— She frowned slightly, ever-so-slightly. -Who is there besides the Master?—

Then a new bird came soaring up, bright and powerful, pushing the others quite rudely out of the way and spreading wide its wings.

-The man just runs a cafe. He is nothing compared to the Master, dust under the Master’s feet. What damage can he do?—

The other birds consulted and agreed. Nevertheless, she carefully filed away the matter in the appropriate niche before going back to watching the rest of the room. The young Hispanic couple at the nearest table were shortly going to go back to... wherever, the man’s apartment or house, probably... and have sex. What was truly interesting was that neither of them had exactly realized it yet...

Tom finally came back down out of his floating haze of panic, yanked himself down and clicked his mind back into place.

He took stock of his location and his situation. Cruising along... Kuttner Avenue, headed away from the harbor. Over the multilane freeway which neatly bisected the city along a north-south line. Towards the Eastside. Going ten miles over the speed limit. Not wearing his seat belt.

He slowed down.

He fastened his seat belt.

He turned off the company beeper he wore on his belt, killed the carphone (also company issued) by yanking the power plug out of the cigarette lighter socket.

He remembered what he had been running from, and decided, just for a moment, to not think about it. Not consciously, at least. Just let it slide down below and simmer for a while.

All of these things accomplished, he frowned, and slid his hands around the plastic of the steering wheel.

-Why—, he thought, -Do I have the sudden urge to go ask Suzanna what she thinks of all this?—

Erika, certainly.

Nina... maybe. If all other options were first exhausted.

But Suzanna?

He twisted his mouth, then came to a decision. It was just a delaying action, but at least it was a possibly productive delaying action, and he had been planning to do it at lunch anyway...

He drove on towards the Eastside.

Erika and Suzie Sunshine finally had finished. Kim was checking them out as they paid off their bill for the Internet usage fee and the drinks. (Non-regulars of the cafe, and not a few of the regulars when it came to that, had to pay cash in advance to use the machines, but Raul had known quite well that Erika would pay her bill. Erika always promptly paid her bill, at least here...) Raul was down at the other end of the counter, slicing up a couple of bagels in preparation for toasting. He watched the trio now, out of the very corner of his eye, as always his hands quite capable of dancing through the work without much direct input from the brain. Erika was her usual self, chatting with Kim, fishing money out of her fanny pack, laughing at some joke the petite Japanese barista made. Suzie wasn’t paying much if any attention to this transaction, instead studying the crowd, her expression oddly intent.

The two customers started for the exit, Suzie trailing along in Erika’s wake.

As they reached the door, suddenly, it was Suzie who suddenly snapped her head around in his direction. Raul dropped his gaze just in time.

Interesting...

When he looked up again, glanced casually in that direction, they were gone.

He turned and spoke.

“Janey?”

She came right over. Very well trained indeed.

“Yes, Raul?”

“Finish these up for me, would you? Toasted with garlic spread, both of them.”

“OK. Where are you going?”

“I have to check something out back.”

In other words, my pet, don’t come and fucking bug me unless the fucking building is on fire.

“Oh.”

He slipped through the Employees Only swinging doors, and passed down the tiled hallway. He wore all of his keys attached to his thick belt by a retractable metal chain, a chain that was thin but nevertheless a lot harder to cut than it might appear at first glance. He zipped them out, found the right one, and unlocked the heavy metal door which lead into the small dark alcove which housed the cafe’s central computer setup. Inside, and lock the door again. The heart of his domain. Well... one of them. Wires and cables were strewn everywhere, disappearing into holes in the walls. Five monitors were stacked in a rough pile on a table, and there were several keyboards laying around. Raul wiped his hands clean on the towel left here for just that purpose, dropped into a chair and tapped a key to clear his eye-in-the-pyramid screensavers. Four of the screens were computer monitors, but one was connected to a security camera mounted out in the cafe, and even now as he worked, he glanced at it occasionally.

He started typing. He typed fast, using just two fingers.

It only took a moment to pull up the log from 23. It was already in use again, somebody looking at a site devoted, it would seem, to an individual known as ‘Mange the Wonder Moose.’ He shuffled backwards, and there was Erika’s collection of visited sites. First up, unsurprisingly, was a search engine.

The log didn’t record exactly what she had typed, sadly. But he paged forward, and several page-names came up, the results of the search she had made. Most of them were in German, which he couldn’t read. (His Spanish was solid and his Japanese were coming along nicely; one had to keep up with times in this city, after all, and now that he had her thoroughly broken in, Kim was such a delightful tutor...) On another screen, he fired up his private line out of the building and he looked at each page on the list, or at least at the pictures. It took only a moment before a theme became apparent.

Lighthouses.

Lots of fucking lighthouses.

German lighthouses. Lighthouses that looked like the Empire State Building, like a medieval castle, like a giant lumbering robot from some bad science fiction film. If there was such a thing as a good science fiction film; Raul preferred porn and the occasional action flick schlepped over by Janey or one of the others from the video shop. (He really should dole out a little cash and buy out the rest of Martinelli’s share in the place. The moronic fucker was sitting on a real gold mine there, and didn’t begin to know it...)

He looked at Erika’s list again.

Among all of the German-language pages, one jumped out in English, and he went to it. It opened to reveal a large raked-back blue L, a corporate logo, and the words:

Leuchtturm International Shipping Corporation, Berlin-Hamburg-London-New York Followed closely by a large photograph that engaged in a valiant but utterly futile attempt to make the sight of some blocky cargo ships docked in a large city harbor appear to be exciting and vibrantly forward-thinking.

Followed by, in English:

“Welcome to the Leuchtturm International Shipping Corporation website! Since 1967, Leuchtturm Shipping has been offering expert and affordable bulk-cargo transport between Germany and points throughout Europe and the Americas. If you wish to learn more about our offered services, please click..”

Blah blah blah. The standard corporate website boilerplate. (At least they appeared to have hired someone who actually spoke fluent English to write their text...) Raul scanned the rest of the page with a quick jaundiced eye, then frowned and flicked back through the lighthouse pages, thinking there was something familiar there.

The lighthouse pages.

The leuchtturn pages.

Ahhh...

Dear Erika had looked up the word LEUCHTTURM. Should have realized it as soon as he looked at the list of pages...

Offering conformation for this, her next stop had been a Internet translator page.

Raul went there himself, and typed in the word. (Always be sure about such things...)

Yes, the translator confirmed it. “Lighthouse.”

Interesting, but for the moment, absolutely useless.

Back to the list to see if there was anything else.

There was, and this is where things started to get really interesting...

It had been another slow day, and the shop was nearly empty; a couple of people were drifting around in the very back of the shelves, where the really cheap paperbacks were stacked in slightly mildewy piles. Then the bell tacked up over the door gave off its familiar tired tinkling sound, and Gloria looked up from her desultory book-sorting, holding a well-thumbed paperback copy of Hawthorne’s ‘The House of the Seven Gables.’ The new customer, a curly-haired man, stepped into the shop and carefully closed the door behind him. It was raining fairly steadily now, and the water dripped off his shirt, and from his hair.

-Not wearing a jacket in this weather?—

He looked over, saw her and her piles of books, and the strangest mixtures of expression zipped across his face. Fear? Something cold and nasty? Whatever it was, it came and went real fast, but her well-honed ‘problem customer’ radar locked in and started beeping away. She studied what was left behind by the expression. Wet, obviously. Fairly tall. Losing hair, a little overweight, and he looked like he hadn’t slept in about a month, but underneath it all, he looked solid enough, not caved in like the really hard-core winos that occasionally drifted around the edges of the shop. Maybe even, with a lot of sleep and some serious exercise, he wouldn’t be half-bad looking, in a wimpy way.

The expression was gone, yes, but still he hesitated, as if considering turning right around and leaving. Finally, instead, he sagged a little as if losing some interior battle and came on into the shop. She spoke, polite, professional, smiling only with her mouth.

“Hi! Can I help you find something, sir?”

He approached the counter cautiously, as if expecting her to pick up a large book and hit him with it. He didn’t seem to have any place to hide a gun, and apart from the continual problem of shoplifters, used bookstores aren’t generally known as thief magnets. Still... you still had to be careful these days...

“Hi. I certainly hope so.”

“Is there some particular subject you’re interested in?”

He looked around at all of the towering shelves crammed with books, reaching back into the gloomy distance. He didn’t really seem to see them. Finally he answered, as if reluctant.

“Well, you see. I obtained a copy of this certain book, and then later... lost it. And now I hoping to see if I could score a new copy.”

“OK.” Still smiling, still polite, and relaxing just the tiniest bit. “What was the title?”

For the first time he looked her square in the eye.

“Secrets of Sexual Mind Control.”

“Secrets of... well, sir, I don’t remember seeing a title by that name in stock. But I can check the system. A paperback, I assume?” A fucking title like that, it probably came pre-laminated so the ‘reader’ wouldn’t get it all sticky.

If he noticed the edge in her voice, he ignored it, and replied quite seriously.

“No, actually. It was a very nice hardback, with leather covers. Old. I h- I think it would be long out of print.”

“Oh. Was it a first edition?” She tossed aside the Hawthorne, flipped her brown ponytail back off her shoulder and started tapping at her computer, grateful as always that she and other employees had finally talked that wheezy old fart Barrin into going over to a fully electronic filing system.

“I don’t know. Actually, I got it off a bargain rack. There was no real... um... publication data listed that I recall. Not even an author’s name.”

“Really? I think I’d remember seeing something like that on the bargain rack...” She gestured at the nearby row of locked, glass-covered shelves which held the rarer and older books in the store. “You did buy it here?”

“I...” He rubbed at his temple. “Here or Gila’s, I think. You know. That place over on 142nd.”

“Yes.” To her, this was all just a job, and not an exciting or fulfilling one, but to Mr. Barrin, Gila’s and the man who owned it were the absolute center of the world’s darkness and evil.

Gloria wondered, as she often did, if the people working for the center of darkness and evil got paid more.

After a couple of seconds, the computer spit back the results. Negative.

“I’m sorry, sir, but there doesn’t appear to be any record of it. I could put a search out for it at other stores in the system. It goes to stores all over the country.”

“Uh... no. No, thank you. That won’t be necessary. Thank you for your time.”

He turned to go.

“All right. Come again.” She didn’t make much effort to make the latter sound sincere.

He got as far as the door, then looked back.

“Miss?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Can I ask you something that may seem like... Let me put it this way. I’m not asking you out on a date or anything, but when you look at me, what do you see?”

She slid further back behind her smile.

“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

“Just that. What do you see? A hideous gargoyle? Someone interesting? Someone sexually attractive?”

“I think you’d better leave now, sir.”

He nodded absently, and to her vague puzzlement, looked relieved.

He disappeared out of the store. Gloria frowned, then on a sudden impulse clicked the mouse and transferred the title off into the search system anyway. Just for laughs. It disappeared into the electronic haze, probably never to return.

The doorbell tinkled again, and Gloria looked at the elderly couple coming in, the man fastidiously shaking out an old black umbrella as he continued a conversation with his wife that had started sometime in the last decade. Gloria groaned inwardly. Unlike the creepy wet man, the Hensens were all too well known to her...

-Well known? He did say he he’d been in here before, didn’t he?—

“I tell you, Martha, it used to be over on Fifth! They moved it back in ‘63!”

“Listen, you old goat, it was on Metzerky, next to Flint’s! I swear, If I wasn’t here, you’d get lost so..” The woman broke off upon seeing Gloria. “Oh! Hello, Gloria my dear..”

Gloria formed the smile for them.

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Henson. Can I help you find something today?” The wet man and his book vanished from her thoughts.

“Today, we’re looking for books on gardening.”

“You might be.” Her husband muttered the words.

“I would like to see your books on gardening, Gloria. I don’t know what this old fool wants.”

“A little peace and quiet would be nice.”

They rode back to her house. There was silence in the van, except for the steady squeaking of the windshield wipers. Erika mulled over what little she had learned in her first search. Lighthouses. She thought about the baby, as she found herself doing just about every other minute now. This prompted her to glance over at Suzanna, who was staring fixedly straight ahead. The blonde woman was again twisting the hem of her dress between her hands. Erika sighed.

“All right, Suzanna. What’s wrong now?”

Suzanna looked at her and spoke without preamble, almost before Erika had finished her question.

“I know it’s not important, Erika, and I’m sorry to bother you with my little problems, but Raul was watching us in the cybercafe.”

“Huh?”

“Raul. The silly man who owns the cafe. With the ugly hat and the weasel eyes.”

“Weasel... you know, you’re right. He does look sort of like a weasel. Especially when you talk about money.” Erika crinkled her forehead. “I never really thought about it before.”

“There’s a...” head tip “...70% probability that he has the natural ability to do what I can now do. To a lesser degree.”

“What you can do?” Erika frowned. “You mean like with seeing the baby?”

-And looking so radiant!—

“Yes, Erika. Like with the Master’s baby. I can see... I’ve started calling them textures, but there really isn’t a word for it. Not in English, anyway. Or Spanish; I took three years of it in high school. As I said before at your house, it’s not mind-reading or telepathy or anything. I can’t see thoughts. I just see... textures. The way people sit, the way they wave their hands in the air when they talk. What they’re trying to hide behind their faces. I see everything now, and I remember everything.”

“Can Nina do this too?”

“No. She could for a while, just after she read the book. But she’s changing too. She’s still the Master’s obedient slavegirl, in all ways and all things, but apart from that, she’s becoming different than me. She..”

“Yes?”

“We all have our duties to perform for the Master.”

-That’s at least twice now, Suzanna, you’ve started to say something about Nina and stopped...—

“What about me? What kind of person am I going to be?”

Suzanna studied her. She tipped her head.

“I don’t know. I won’t know unless... I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Erika, but...”

“Unless I’m enslaved. Actually read the entire book like you and Nina did. And now that won’t happen. The book is gone forever.”

“Yes.”

They rode in silence for a bit. Squeak squeak squeak.

“So. Raul was watching us, you say?”

“Yes. Even when he had his back turned, he was... he was watching us.”

“I thought you just said that... people like you... can’t read minds.”

“I can’t. He can’t. He was just...” Suzanna made a small helpless gesture. “...pointed in our direction. All the time we were in there.”

“Well, Suzanna, I don’t mean to blow my own horn here, but he does want to get into my pants. Well. As much as Raul ever wants to do crap like that. I think he probably usually sleeps with his daily profits.”

“Yes, there is that. He is attracted to you in a sexual way. But there was something more. We interest him. You interest him.”

For a moment, Erika felt a trickle of nervousness, then brushed it away.

-What can he do? It’s not like he’s some evil monster, like... like the goddamn Author. He’s just a money-grubbing little twit who owns a fucking restaurant...—

She spoke out loud, speaking very seriously.

“All right. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Suzanna. I’ll be more careful around him in the future.”

“OK.” Suzanna stopped fiddling with her dress, folded her hands and went back to looking out the side window.

They rode back to her house, and there was silence in the van.

Nina sat in the accounting office, her hands folded in front of her on the surface of her sterilized desk, staring at her computer screen. (‘Her’ desk. ‘Her’ screen. Not true, of course, but a useful simplification.) The screen was black and empty, the screensaver having kicked in several minutes ago. Even before being enslaved, Nina hadn’t bothered to set her screensaver to do anything clever.

She was changing.

She was still the Master’s utterly obedient slavegirl, in all ways and all things, but..

She was changing.

Her memories were... not vanishing, not yet, but rapidly fading back to roughly what they had been before, before being exposed to the Master’s wonderful book. It would seem that you just couldn’t maintain that level of clarity without making certain sacrifices. She would of course ecstatically sacrifice anything and everything for the Master, but it wasn’t necessary at the present time for her to do so. Suzanna had seen to that.

Still, as the memories went back out of focus, there was just a moment of light nostalgic sadness. At the height of the moment, she could have said exactly how many times, how many minutes, she had sat as a child at the round table in her grandparents’ cozy kitchen, swinging her legs back and forth in the air. Watching her tiny wrinkled grandmother stand in front of that enormous black stove, in her omnipresent kimono and cloud of cigarette smoke, cooking fried eggs and bacon. Watching her tall lanky grandfather sitting at the table next to her, in the equally-omnipresent checkered shirt and wide red suspenders, reading the morning newspaper and grumbling under his breath about the ‘polly tish anns.’

She had of course learned in later years what the word actually was, even gotten old enough before he died to have a few political discussions with the man.

She was mildly grateful that she was being allowed to remember these things at all.

Because certain other memories were being retained, honed to razor-sharpness, so that they practically glowed. She thought that maybe the rest of the thoughts might be crowded out in the end as irrelevant.

It was very possible.

Other memories.

For one, the fact that her father, the son-in-law of the man with the checkered shirt and the suspenders, had been a lifelong gun enthusiast. She had never shared his passion, at least not nearly to the same depth, but she certainly had never hated guns, or even disliked them. She had shot guns. She had disassembled and cleaned guns. She knew proper gun safety; that was one thing that Karl Hollenburg had religiously drilled into his only child.

Now those memories were all back, and locked firmly into place. She hadn’t picked up a hunting rifle in at least ten years, (sigh... ‘at least,’) but she could do it now. Load it. Aim it. Shoot something with it. All without hesitation or misstep.

-Shoot someone with it.—

There had been a pistol stored in ‘her’ house, that she had taken out to a local gun range on occasion and practiced with to keep her skill level fairly high, but she had done it all more as a tribute to her father after his sudden death six years ago, than any sense of real enthusiasm or worry about crime.

This had changed. The gun was loaded now, and in her purse. And on her way to work that morning, she had stopped at a gun store, and put down the money on a larger piece, something with a great deal more stopping power. She’d now have to sit out the mandatory waiting period, of course, but after she got it, she’d never let it out of her sight.

The Master would be protected, no matter what else had to be sacrificed.

Memories.

There were other memories. Things she had somehow picked up somewhere without even realizing it. How to hide and use a knife. Even how to strangle someone quietly and effectively with a piece of wire...

Where on Earth had she learned that? Certainly not from her locksmith father or her data-entry clerk mother, neither of whom had never gotten within fifty miles of a garrote murder in their entire lives. Not from the University; they had only taught creative adding and subtracting, and the simple quiet joy that can be found in a collection of well-organized spreadsheets and tally books.

Her grandfather, somehow, via some strange osmosis? Maybe. Very likely, even. He had never talked about it, but was an open family secret that he had been trained to do, learned to do, some terrible things during his (and the rest of the American army’s) long bloody march across the Pacific during The War. (As it was universally referred to in her family.) And after The War, it wasn’t nearly as bad, but the blood and death hadn’t finished intruding on John Stavely’s life...

-I’ll stop at the hardware store on the way home tonight. Buy a piece of the right sort of wire, and something to make the handle-loops out of. Like that bigger gun, the Master might need it someday.—

But it wasn’t just the memories. Other things were changing, too. While she still loved the Master with all her heart and soul, loved her sister-slavegirl Suzanna, even, sort of, respected and admired Erika... (She had always respected and admired Erika, but that treacherous little accompanying worm of envy was gone now, crushed under an iron heel and ground to dust) ...much of the rest of her was growing cold. Hard. Like her memories, she was being polished and honed to sharpness. The machinery behind the glass whirred on and on, bright and slick and heavily oiled in the blood of her Master’s enemies.

Whoever those enemies turned out to be.

-Erika.—

And now, something new was pricking at those cold hard thoughts. It was the ominous stuffiness before a thunderstorm.

She looked around the office. Her memory was fading back to normal, but she seemed to have retained an even stronger eye for detail than before. The desks were arranged in the shape of a rough U. Fran on one side, Kristen on the other, Nina facing the door, her back to the room’s one small window and the rather sickly fern that Kristen had put there a few months back and nobody ever remembered to water...

At the moment, she was the only one there. Kristen had been in for only a short time before disappearing somewhere. Probably off sleeping with someone. Fran had been there longer, then gone away, come back briefly, looking and acting strangely...

Both of their chairs had been left pushed back when abandoned, which was unusual.

Nina narrowed her study to Fran’s desk, keeping her hands folded. The desk was a bit more cluttered than Nina’s, but then so were most people’s, even before the Master’s wonderful book. The thing that really caught her eye now was the booklet laying there, flopped open. The company employee address directory.

Fran had torn one of the pages out, and left the rest lying there when she went off.

Nina unfolded her hands. She pushed back her own chair and got up. She deliberately pushed the chair into place against the desk, the wheels sliding smoothly over the thick plastic sheet that guarded the carpet. Then she moved into position and studied the booklet more closely, being careful to not touch it or the desk. She noted which page had been ripped out. She went back to the desk and took up her purse, slinging the straps over one shoulder.

She left the office, went down the hall.

To the Master’s office.

He had instructed her to act like nothing had changed, to not come in every five minutes and check on him. She had obeyed, of course, but this order had caused something of a split in her mind. Part of the machinery agreed that it was important not to attract attention to the Master.

At least not until that glorious and inevitable day when he assumed his rightful place as lord and master over all, reaching out his shadow and then his hand to all of the nations of the world...

But the other pieces of machinery wanted desperately to be near him. Not to bask in the orgasmic glow that was his presence, that as personal gratification was secondary, less than secondary, but to protect him, watch for threats with ceaseless vigilance. Smite down his enemies in bloody wrath. Gun and knife and twisting wire.

But now the thunderstorm was building. She would just stick her head into his office, risk the stabbing agony that was his displeasure, see if...

The door was closed. She screwed up her courage into a cold tight knot and knocked.

Nothing. No reply.

She slid her hand into her purse, opened the door and looked in. For a split second, Nina saw, she SAW the Master lying dead on the floor in a vast pool of blood, a tribute to her utter worthlessness and failure, but then her vision cleared.

The office was empty. She scanned carefully, as she had before, and she noted that the Master’s coat was still arranged over the back of his chair. That meant he was still in the building somewhere. But where?

She walked to the lobby. Eve was behind her desk, sorting files. Nina shaped her expression into the proper mold as Eve looked up at her.

“Hi, Nina. What’s up?”

“Hi. Where’s Tom?”

“Tom? He left.” Eve looked back down at her work, her movements and words strangely abrupt.

“When?”

Eve looked up again, appearing annoyed now. Her long earrings jangled a little.

“I don’t know. Not too long ago.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“What’s with the third degree, sister?”

“Was Fran or Kristen with him?”

“No.” Definite annoyance now. “He was alone. What’s your problem?”

Nina blinked, and realized she was leaning over the desk. She straightened up and looked out into the rain. She didn’t reply.

“I think Monty’s right. You all are going crazy.”

Nina didn’t spare the idiot woman a glance or a thought, but marched back to the accounting office. Dug out the Master’s cellphone number. Dialed it.

Bing bong bing!

“We’re sorry, but the SeaScan cellular customer you have dialed has moved out of—”

She hung up.

She folded her hands on the desk.

She looked at the black screen.

She began to wait.

Tom sat in his car, behind the wheel, and watched the rain patter down relentlessly, turning the world beyond the windshield splotched and wavery. An occasional pedestrian hurried past, most of them lurking under umbrellas.

The car was still parked at the curb, near Rodney’s Used Books. He had about ten minutes left on the meter; checking such things had long become second-nature with his job.

So. He could go over and try Gila’s, see if they had another copy of the book, The Book, but something told him, a gut-level clinching sensation, that it wouldn’t pan out. There weren’t copies of the thing just lying around everywhere to be picked up. If there were, some guy would have come along by now and be ruler of the damn Western Hemisphere. A chicken in every pot, a spiral on every TV screen...

-As I recall, you found a copy just lying around.—

-On the bargain shelf at Rodney’s or Gina’s or one of those places.—

-Yeah, well. That’s me. Mr. Lucky.—

-Maybe that’s what did happen.— He absently touched his pants pocket, which held a certain plastic baggie. -The plate is in German, or something similar. Maybe Hitler had a copy of the thing locked up in a wall safe somewhere. Hell, maybe he had your copy locked up in a wall safe somewhere. You may have destroyed a deeply historic artifact!—

“Hitler had the book. And the best he could manage was Eva Braun.”

The voice had no answer, at least for the moment.

It didn’t matter. When he came right down to it, Tom realized he didn’t want to find another copy of the damned thing. One had already caused so much trouble. And what would he do with a second? Have a copy of the spiral, at most, and Erika was already going to give him that, if all went well. He wouldn’t dare let any other woman, or man for that matter, read any of the accompanying text.

So.

He could just start the car and drive. Tom was not mechanically inclined, he had trouble changing a light bulb or switching on a computer without something breaking, but the actual driving, that had been his favorite part of this job, all along. Bombing around town, visiting all the weird nooks and crannies where the best deals on materials could be found... And he could just do that now. Go bombing. Drive straight down the coast to Mexico in one long shot. Find a beach somewhere, a beach with clean white sand. Lay on it for a few years. Eat bananas or coconuts or whatever the heck it was they grow in Mexico these days. Get a nice tan.

-And when the local senoritas start crawling up to you, on their hands and knees across that white sand, naked and mewling, their claws out and their eyes bolted down oh-so-very tight?—

And whether or not that happened...

Erika wouldn’t be there.

He sank lower into the seat, pushing his knees up under the dashboard on either side of the wheel. The car had always been just barely big enough for him.

He was going to stay, and somehow sort this whole mess out. One way or another.

But right now, right this very moment, he needed more hard data before going back to face what was presumably still waiting for him at Harrison. He had just acquired some, but just a nugget. It wasn’t nearly enough. He had to know.

He shifted in the seat, and looked over his shoulder at the building behind him. He could only see the large green letters RODN from this angle.

He came to a decision. He straightened up, fastened the seat belt and once again started the car.

Kristen hunched behind her own steering wheel, hiding her head between her shoulders, clutching at that wheel like a life preserver.

Her cunt was burning, red-hot and dripping. Passing on the... giving thethinginherpurse to Holli had helped a lot for a while. But it had all come back again. And then this current... pursuit... had started, an eternity ago back in the Harrison parking lot.

-I have to finish this. I’m going mad.—

Mad! Mad, I tell you! MuHahahaha!

(Along with cars, Kristen enjoyed movies. She rented them all the time from Martinelli’s.)

-And I can’t... I simply cannot stomach the thought of another night of sex with with with- Her head gave a little jerk with each of these before she could spit the thought out -that pathetic useless little dweeb Angus. This has to end today.—

-And it’s not just the sex. If I don’t do it...—

The car in question, his car, finally started up and pulled out of its slot again, leaving behind the usual swirl of black noxious evil, staining everything it touched...

She started her own car and followed, hanging back a little, just enough to allow another vehicle to get in between them. Some kind of paneled delivery truck with a violet spider web painted across the back. She vaguely remembered hearing this somewhere, another movie probably, that this was important when tailing someone. The extra car. Not the spider web. The spider web was irrelevant.

The Sharp Thing on the Floor snarled at her without a voice, angry and impatient. Her cunt blazed a little brighter, like the two were now bound together somehow, along tight invisible threads.

“Soon.” She wanted to scream at them both to be quiet, to pick up the Sharp Thing and throw it from the car, drive to the other end of the continent and hide forever under a rock, but instead she just whispered to it. To her cunt. To the universe at large. The words came out soothingly, but with a horrible earnest wide-eyed sing-songy edge to it all. “Soon now. I want it as badly as you. You know that. But I can’t get caught. Don’t you see? The parking lot back at Harrison was too busy, too exposed. This street too. If anyone catches me, if... if he catches me, it will all be over. I won’t be able to do it. To finish this. And I know. I know I know.” More twitches. “I know what I have to do.”