The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

1

After he returned from combat, Geoffrey Martin began to worry about what he was doing with his life. Ruth, his wife of three years, looked at him over dinner at a local family restaurant one evening and asked why he had seemed so distracted the last several weeks, since his return.

There was no denying that he was a different person. She felt it. His colleagues at iTL (Integral Technologies) felt it immediately when he returned to work. His mother felt it and had kept Ruth on the phone the previous evening more than an hour pressing her to get him to do something.

Do I seem distracted? he asked indifferently.

Yes, Geoff, you do. It’s apparent to everyone else if not to you. You aren’t yourself anymore.

Who do you suppose I am, then? he asked with a laugh which hardly concealed his irritation.

I don’t know that, but I’d suppose it was a question you’d be better able to answer than anyone else, she said, sensing the irritation and automatically giving it back.

I would have said I’m the same man I’ve always been.

Really? she said.

Really, he repeated, the edge in his voice no longer suppressed.

And then silence hung between them over the table as they ate until Ruth said she had only three payments left on her college loan and then it would be all paid off.

Then Martin said it did not matter, that what she had said was true, and that the things which had once made sense to him no longer did, and that the things which he had once desired, he no longer did, and that she had sensed this change in him before he had understood it himself, but her sense of it had made him realize it too.

She looked at him now that he had acknowledged what she had said without saying anything at first, but unmistakably angry.

She took her napkin from her lap and put it on the table.

I feel betrayed, finally she said icily.

This was not the understanding response he might have admitted to wishing for if he had gotten it. But it wasn’t unexpected.

Maybe you’re fortunate you’re able to feel anything at all, he said, pinching back the anger in his voice.

I’m sick of you feeling sorry for yourself, she said as the car took the exit ramp and turned on to their street.

And I’m sick of you, he said as he stopped the car in front of the garage.

Or maybe you’re just sick, period, she said.

Maybe you’re right, he said, almost triumphant, and it seemed to release something in him, and he felt easier.

He slept in the den that night and she expected he’d be conciliatory in the morning and she would forgive him, but only after a gentle sermon about how he was not going to be allowed to vent his frustration at her but would have to seek help; that he oughtn’t be proud about seeking help; that he should call up his V.A. adviser and see what could be done.

But the den was empty in the morning. His laptop was gone, and in its place was a handwritten note.

She read it and crumpled it up and threw it into the waste can.

She looked in his closet and saw that he had taken some clothing, too. Outside, his car was gone.

So much the better, she said, if that’s the way you want it.

2

It is a peculiar but common phenomenon that often the worse we feel the better we look. Such was the case with Martin. He saw it when he looked in the mirror over the sink in the lavatory in the rest stop on the Delaware Turnpike.

Not only because of how he saw his own reflection but because he saw another man’s reflection, too. A strikingly handsome young man, a few years his junior, still almost a boy, was looking at him, and when Martin caught him in the mirror, rather than turn away the young man smiled.

Where you off to?

New York, Martin said, addressing the reflection.

Boston, the young man said. My name’s Christopher.

Geoffrey, Martin said, turning around and extending his hand.

Just then the door of one of the stalls opened and a middle-aged man emerged.

Ready, Chris? he said, washing his hands.

Ok, Dad. Gotta go, Christopher said, pointing a thumb towards the man and grinning like a boy.

Till the next time. He made a half salute and disappeared with his companion.

Till the next time?

Now what did he mean by that? Martin wondered.

3

Geoffrey Martin had quit his marital home without a thought and, oddly enough—he sensed it but did not try to make sense of it—without a qualm. But he knew he was taking his life in his hands. And he didn’t care what happened.

He left South Carolina in the morning light and drove until he reached Pennsylvania at nightfall and stopped for the night at a motel. At the snack bar he got some machine food. Back in his room he stripped off his clothes and without a shower fell into bed and felt the road flying by underneath him and rolling on inside his arteries.

He woke up to twittering birds, had a coffee and a cigarette for breakfast, called Mathew at his office in New York, said he was on the way there and asked if he could crash.

Of course, Mathew responded. Is everything alright?

Too long to discuss. I’ll tell you what I can when I see you.

Sure, Mathew said.

Martin hung up and headed for New York City. It was dark again when he drove out of the Holland Tunnel and found himself, found himself, mind you, in lower Manhattan.

He made a few wrong turns but finally wound up on Mercer Street and before long found Mathew’s building. He found a parking spot without too much trouble, got his backpack and his laptop out of the trunk, locked the car, walked half a block, then up the few steps of Mathew’s building and rang the bell.

Mathew’s voice squawked through the intercom and Martin identified himself and immediately a buzzer sounded and the door clicked open. There was a freight elevator. Mathew lived on the top floor.

I’m glad to see you, Mathew said. Glad you made it back to the land of the living, if that’s what this is.

He was a tall, fit, bronzed man in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and flip flops. He looked like he belonged to an expensive health club, and he did. He answered the door with a martini in his hand, but put it on the side table before he took Martin in his arms in a bear hug.

Thanks, Martin said. It’s good to see you. He dropped his knapsack on the floor and placed his laptop in its protective case carefully on a side table.

Then he saw Lynn come into the long hallway that led to the first room of their loft.

Hey, stranger.

Hi, Lynn. It’s good to see you.

It’s very good to see you, Geoffrey. I hope things are alright. Ruth?

They are and they aren’t. It’s finished with Ruth.

I’m not surprised.

Lynn, Mathew interjected, admonishing her.

Well, I’m not. Geoffrey knows what I mean, don’t you Geoff?

I think I do. It’s ok, Matt. But still, before this gets any knottier, I think I ought to warn you two, if I seem different to you or strange, or not quite coherent, it’s something I’m going through. I’m not sure what. But it got me all the way here. I think I’ve got a handle on it. But I’m going slowly.

You’re scaring me, Mathew said.

I don’t mean to be. It’ll be ok. I’m ok, even if I’m strange sometimes.

You’ve always been strange.

Thanks, Martin said. But not like this.

Come on, Geoff, I’ll show you your room, Lynn said, taking his arm.

4

You can’t just walk out on your life, Mathew gasped after Martin told him some of what had happened.

I’ve done it twice.

And look at you.

Meaning?

Lynn joined them and lit a cigarette.

You’ve got nothing to show for it, Mathew continued.

The life I left had nothing in it.

Not Ruth? not the country?

I sacrificed my life, nearly, to…the country…and likewise to Ruth. Ergo it wasn’t my life that I walked out on. Now if I have nothing, it’s as much as I had before. Only this time the nothing I have really belongs to me.

And you’re content with nothing? Lynn asked.

From my own nothing I can make something.

What? It wasn’t a challenge.

That’s what I have to find out. And the first thing I found out is not to rush it. Time is illusory, and it’s really dangerous to start thinking it’s real. It can drive you crazy. I know. I spent a long time waiting.

Mathew was quiet. As was often the case with him recently, he seemed someplace else. Lynn saw it. It seemed to her it had become one of the burdens of their marriage that there were blank spaces between them which were best left empty, for whenever she tried to approach him, they only became filled with confusion. Now she kept her focus on Martin.

And now? she said, quietly.

Now I’m not waiting.

And he wasn’t, for he knew that whatever difficulties he would have, being without money was the controlling difficulty. Lack of it made every other real difficulty more difficult. Having it was having a tool to cope with other difficulties.

Aware of this, even as he fled his old life, Martin took into account the problem of money.

It was at five a.m. on the morning he left Charleston for New York City that he knocked on the glass door which led into Sam Harenbeck’s heated indoor pool just as Harenbeck was taking his morning swim before driving downtown to the iTL building.

He’d known Harenbeck since he was a boy and used to work on Harenbeck’s cars. Sam was glad to have him at iTL even before Martin graduated from high school, and he told him he’d always pay for college, if he ever wanted to go, but school didn’t appeal to Martin, and it wouldn’t really do anything for him except bore him. When Martin was called away to combat, Sam was worried. When he came back, naturally there was a place for him, and now, as Martin spoke to him, crouching at the edge of the pool as Harenback stood in the warm water, the older man said he understood.

You have my blessing, Geoff. And anything else, if you need it.

No, thanks, Sam. Congruence demands parity. It’s nothing all around. Pure emptiness to begin with. It’ll fill up quickly enough. As long as I can give you as a reference when I’m looking for work.

I’ll tell you what Geoff, Harenbeck said, hoisting his still trim and attractive body out of the pool and slipping into a terrycloth robe. Come with me.

They walked through a passageway which led from the pool to the his den, and he took a card out of a small filing cabinet on his desk and gave it to Martin.

When you give my name as a reference, do it at this place. I have some chips to cash in, and I’d be pleased if you’d take one.

Thank you, Martin said, like the kid he always felt he was when he was with this man.

They shook hands and held fast to each other a moment longer than a handshake requires. And then, with his arm round his shoulder Harenbeck took Geoff back through the pool to the driveway where he’d left his car.

5

It is difficult to say which is more important, money or health. It is generally taken as the truer wisdom to discount money in favor of health, but the practical advantage to those who have money when faced with similar health challenges over those without money seriously calls this formulation into question.

However the matter may be settled, if it may be settled at all, Martin was glad that he landed a job and that he’d quickly been able to find a place of his own, a small three room apartment in a brownstone on Commerce Street. There was something odd going on between Lynn and Mathew and he’d had enough of the unfathomable with Ruth to find it made him dizzy.

Harenbeck had not misled him. Sam’s name alone got him into ICTS, InterCulturalTechnologySystems. He had an office on Fifth Avenue in the ICTS Tower, but he was also free most of the time to work from home via the internet.

One Wednesday morning in March, on a day that suggested the advent of spring, he awoke from a fitful sleep and found that he had lost control of himself emotionally. The sign of the collapse was an onrush of tears and sobs which overwhelmed him without warning as he reached to part the curtains over the window which gave out onto the street where the tenderest green buds were just appearing on the branches of the trees.

He fell down onto his bed and sobbed for he did not know how long, bent double until the first storm subsided, and then he fell into a dream. He was walking dazed through London, confused about a meeting he had to get to at Number 10 Downing Street. He turned through tortuous streets unable to find the Prime Minister’s residence and could not fathom how London had become Prague or why Russian soldiers wearing fezzes and Stalin moustaches were shooting at him. With the explosive thud of a bursting grenade he sat up startled in bed. His heart was pounding fiercely and his head was heavy with a dull ache. He was trapped, lost inside a fog of desolation.

The emptiness he was seeking had begun. He was frightened.

1

The dirt road between Muffing’s Garage and The Sweet One Bar is, by the end of August, pitted and rutted and hellish. Scrubby bushes overgrow its margins; twistings and turnings define its path; it slopes down or winds up—depending on which way you’re traveling. Blazer Mountain road is a barren stretch and there is little traffic on it. The poor farms which look onto it are few and far between.

In the fading sunlight, Clifford Granger led his team of horses along this road on an uphill stretch, pulling a wagonload of newly felled logs.

After he’d finished unhitching the horses and tending to them in the stable, he sat down in his work clothes to supper.

His mother still wasn’t speaking to him, but it didn’t bother him. He knew she suffered more when she was angry at him because of her anger than he ever did. He’d been indifferent to her anger, in fact, and to her love, too, since Kate had died from the shaking that no one ever mentioned and his father had disappeared. He didn’t mention it himself, either; had almost forgotten it, but it had played its role in shaping him, even if he could not have told you so himself. But then, he wasn’t likely to tell you anything.

For an ornery boy he was damn good looking, and it could make you wonder what Mother Nature was about when she made him, what kind of tricks she got pleasure out of playing on mankind.

Elizabeth wasn’t as tough as her son. She’d gotten old. Age, loss, and a long acquaintance with poverty had taken a toll on her spirit, and she always broke down first.

Wind’s changing and there’ll be a chill in the air before you know it. We hardly get summer.

Nothin’ to complain about. I can use some cooler weather if I’m going to be logging the Huss property.

There was silence again, but she felt better for his having addressed a few words to her. And he didn’t mind because he understood that the victory was his if she spoke first.

He liked victory. It was reassuring. It made long days working by himself in the woods bearable. It was a victory when he felled a great old tree and cross cut it into sections with his chain saw and chopped it into wedges with the axe, and stacked it by the cord and watched it burn to ash bitter winters in the Franklin.

It was a victory when he took a girl despite her first reluctance, and it was even more a victory when he left a girl who showed an inclination for him to take her. He could see the desperation in her eyes. And sometimes he compounded his victory by seeming to come around, by flirting. He liked how he could get a girl to be obedient, to say yes, and know she was there to serve him, to be quiet when he spoke and to subdue her own inclinations and follow his, and then nevertheless after he’d leave her high and dry and wanting him, she was still unable to do anything but blush the next time she saw him and suffer the humiliation all over again. At worst she’d say, Granger you’re a conman. I know it, and I don’t know why I always fall for the con. But I do.

And he’d stare deep into her eyes and say, I know why you do, honey. It comes with being a female. Ain’t nothing else you can do when a man like me’s around.

Most of his girls hated when he said that but they also hated themselves because as unfair as it was, they believed it was true. It felt true while he was looking at them. Even if it oughtn’t be. Even if they knew enough to deny it.

And it was a victory when Harry came back to the farm from the war in one piece and Granger told his brother that he was going away and leaving him alone there to take care of their mother and Harry was powerless to object.

You’ve seen the world. Now it’s my turn, Granger said.

I sure as hell hope the world I’ve seen ain’t the whole world, Harry said, but didn’t argue with his brother or try to get him to stay. Nineteen years of being his brother had subdued Harry’s ambitions to Granger’s will. His one act of defiance, joining the Marines had shattered him for ever. The isolation of the farm was a haven from the turmoil that had become a storm in his very depth.

Everyone noticed he was quieter and that every one of his gestures was slower than what they’d been before he went away.

2

Finding a place in New York wasn’t easy. Getting an apartment by himself was prohibitively expensive, and while Granger searched for a share, he took a room in the Y across the street from the Chelsea Hotel. Pretty quickly, just from hanging around and walking back and forth between Twenty-third Street and the Village, he learned what life could be like in Manhattan for a handsome, well-built guy with a rural freshness and enough spunk for three.

He got a lot of backward, over the shoulder glances from guys he passed on the street, and he stopped in bars with them or went back to their places, always figuring he might find a place to live that way. Pretty quickly, too, he saw that not only his looks but his personality, his flirtatious contempt, were worth money, that he could earn a good living in the city doing for guys what he had done for only his own amusement to the girls on Blazer Mountain.

He knew how to make guys want him, to tease, and to withhold himself until when he said, with an innocence that was breathtaking, That’ll cost you another c-note, stud, the guy he was charming was so much under his control and so driven by pent-up desire that he gratefully would consent without even being able to think about what he was doing.

3

The hot needles of water in the shower, and then the flood of cold, beat against Granger’s body, first his back, then his chest, opening the flow of life in him after a loggish sleep. His body had been sore and his spirit tired in ways he never had felt even after a hard week’s logging in the woods with his team of horses.

On the farm, he knew what he was doing. In the city, something strange was happening. He had begun to follow prompts which suddenly arose as if from nowhere, but impelled him with an irresistible driving force. He became aroused as he never had. And arousal was knowledge. The desire to exercise power over men gripped him, aroused him sexually with a force that toying with women never had. And he never failed.

His last client yesterday afternoon had become one of his regulars, a very wealthy numbers cruncher, some kind of high class accountant named Mathew, Mathew Parker, Geoff Martin’s friend, but Granger did not know Martin, yet, or even that he existed, and Martin did not know that Mathew had a thing for male hustlers, yet. Granger met Matt Parker in a gay bar in Soho one night. They spoke, but Parker had to leave. He was meeting his wife to go to the opera. Granger gave him his card and told him to call his cell if he was interested. Mathew did the next afternoon from his office, and they began to meet regularly in a room in a fine, old hotel near Grand Central. Actually, Granger liked him. But that was beside the point.

You’re not going home tonight, Granger said quietly after they were both inside the room with a bottle of champagne. He turned the key in the lock and stuck it in his pocket.

Intuitively he sensed what to do, as much from an inner prompting as from his sense of his client. His intuition was guided by something like contempt, contempt he always felt for anyone who was attracted by him, and from a desire to torture which that attraction always excited in him. With Mathew it was special. The way he made great trees fall, he wanted to see this guy succumb to him.

It’s different this time, Granger said with a wicked smiled.

Mathew panicked.

That’s not what I’m paying you for, he said.

Be quiet. Do as you’re told and everything will be alright. Cross me, and… Granger stopped mid sentence and turned his palms to the ceiling.

The two men were facing each other as if they were about to kiss, except, they did not kiss. Instead Mathew was knocked off his balance by a surprising blow across his left cheek. He stumbled and fell backwards onto the bed. No sooner was he struck than Granger pinned him down, and fastened his hands to the bed posts with handcuffs and, holding his legs still in his powerful grip, pulled down his trousers and his black silk boxer briefs, exposing his hard-on. With the belt he pulled through the loops of the waistband of his trousers, he bound his legs together. Then Granger pulled Mathew’s shoes off and pulled off his trousers and his black silk boxer briefs the rest of the way.

What the fuck are you doing? I’m not paying you to do this, Mathew shouted, half into the mattress.

Granger took Mathew’s wallet out of the back pocket of his trousers, extracted five one hundred dollar bills, returned the wallet to its place, flicked a finger against his hard on and grinned.

Yes, you are, boy, he said. You just have. You don’t get something for nothing, and from the looks of things, Mathew, my boy, there’s no denying you got something.

Then he rummaged through the front pockets and took hold of Mathew’s key ring and stuffed it in the pocket of his jeans. He tossed the trousers across the room, pulled Mathew’s tie loose and ripped his shirt open, not bothering with the buttons.

He gripped Mathew’s nipples hard and hurt him. Mathew screamed.

Shut up, he said, and there was menace in the command.

Mathew shut his eyes and obeyed.

Mathew had worried, always, when he arranged these secret assignations with a street hustler that something like this would happen one day, but his sense of his own good luck always trumped his anxiety. And his anxiety had always fed his excitement. The need to triumph over odds, the act of confronting danger with steady nerves, of defying danger and of resisting fear constituted the gutsiness that made him a good gambler, a good trader on the exchange, dexterous with numbers. That’s what made him love his work and what accounted for his meteoric rise at Pinchon & Broadfells, and that’s what made for the excitement of these encounters. He always beat the odds.

But this looked like something else. Now he wasn’t sure what was going on, if he was in a rough game or if control had really been wrested from him and things would never be the same again, if this was a different kind of danger. He was frightened.

The worst of it was he was hard as a rock.

Granger bent over him and kissed him on the mouth with the hard assertion of mastery. He tasted of fear.

I like it, Granger said, stepping back. I like seeing you scared and hard at the same time. You know what it means, and you like it too. It means you belong to me.

Mathew didn’t speak. He was trying to think, to figure things out. He was searching for his next move, looking straight at Granger, trying to figure out what he was up against, but he kept drawing a blank.

That’s right, Granger said. Everything is different. And you don’t know what to think. And you know there’s nothing you can do. But it doesn’t matter anymore. From now on you belong to me because, scared as you are, you like this. You spend a lot of time bossing people around, telling them what to do, but what you really want to do is obey. So from now on, you’re going to follow my instructions. You can’t resist it. You know it feels right. You should be grateful to me, boy. You always wanted a master, and now you’ve got one.

It was true, and that Granger knew it only added to Mathew’s terror.

1

Alan Diamond leaned forward and looked at Geoffrey Martin quietly as he sat slumped, across from him, in the brown leather club chair just like the one he was sitting in facing him. Martin’s soul had moved to the edges of his body and was being drawn to him across the space between them. Even in his sleep, in this trance, he felt Alan Diamond’s power as the surge of his own energy rushing out of him.

He could feel it. The emptiness.

Can you hear me, Geoff?

Yes.

You are very relaxed, very relaxed and sinking deeper and deeper into the chair. You feel how heavy your body is. It is like a balloon that has been deflated. I have let out all the air. Your body is sinking deeper and deeper into the chair. It is so deep in the chair that it is becoming part of the chair. There is no difference between the body and the chair. You cannot feel the difference between the body and the chair. You feel nothing. You are a chair. You are a cushion of air. You are empty. You are emptiness. You are empty. You are empty space.

For nearly a year, since his breakdown, Martin had been seeing Alan Diamond once a week, and through these regular sessions of hypnosis he had become stronger, easier, more confident.

He had learned to put himself into a trance and often at times when he felt an inexplicable tension or the surge of panic about to reach over him in a dreadful arch, like a threatening wave rushing to engulf him, he transcended the illusion and entered a trance, from which it might be hours later he always emerged steady, sturdy, and easy.

Steady. Sturdy. Easy. Diamond chanted slowly, and slowly Martin woke in the chair, looked at Diamond and smiled.

At times like these he felt a childlike affection for his master, for to himself he had begun to refer to Alan as his master and he wanted to tell him that but did not have the courage to. As each session ended Martin’s affection was so strong that he wanted to kiss Diamond, but he was in awe of him and never would have presumed to do anything like that. He allowed himself to feel his desire as gratefulness, devotion, and tribute.

How do you feel? Alan asked him as he emerged from the trance.

Steady, Martin said, sturdy, easy. Empty. And he nodded his head, as if, after giving it a moment’s thought, he could definitely affirm what he had just said. Empty.

2

When the Securities and Exchange Commission began its investigation of overvaluation of certain stocks at Pinchon and Broadfells, Mathew learned about it from the story in The New York Times, which he read with the same anxiety a hypochondriac reads the obituaries, checking to make sure he hasn’t died without being aware of it. He knew he was still alive because of the icy chill of anxiety that began like a tremor in his belly and a sense of sexual arousal.

Later that morning, Old Pinchon leaned forward on the mahogany table in the boardroom with both elbows, cigar in his right hand, inches from his mouth, inches from the microphones, always at the ready. The board of directors were assembled around the table to his left and right, and the room was crowded with reporters and television cameras. Klieg lights gave a white intensity to the otherwise subdued mustard-colored grandeur of the room, which was lined with a burnished wainscoting and furnished with dark leather sofas, red plush chairs, several crystal chandeliers and a red carpet bordered by a band of gold fleurs-de-lys.

If there was an act of malfeasance, Pinchon said slowly and quietly, it is obvious that the malefactor will have to take the responsibility. Our company itself has too great a tradition as an upstanding corporate citizen to countenance such things and can only regret the misjudgments in personnel which have allowed someone whose ethical standards do not conform to the high standards of Pinchon and Broadfells to penetrate the radar, as it were, and gain a position of influence and of responsibility, from which position he was able to profit himself—or herself—and besmirch P&B.

He promised an immediate audit and an investigation, but refused to answer reporters’ questions and was ushered out the side door by uniformed Pinchon and Broadfells security officers.

Three days later, Pinchon himself was on the phone with the financial editor of The New York Times detailing the investigation and informing him that the overvaluation had been traced to reports authored by one of the men they had trusted implicitly, a Princeton graduate, that they were shocked and profoundly disappointed, and that they had terminated Matt Parker that morning and were cooperating fully with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the New York State’s Attorney General’s Office, and the independent prosecutor, and that one of the firm’s senior vice presidents, Morgan Howard by name, would be testifying before the grand jury impaneled to investigate the matter.

3

He ought to understand, Myra Daley, P&B’s lawyer, drawing on a cigarette through a black and silver holder, told Mathew, that things would go much better for him if he cooperated with the independent prosecutor.

He had tried to argue. He was acting inside a corporate culture. He had been given the figures to work with. He didn’t make them up. Depending upon how a sum was entered it might be interpreted as an asset or a liability. He had done nothing dishonest. He had made models and projections based on hypotheses. His work had been clean. The way it was used had been faulty.

But it was useless. The top tier at P&B was good. They were very good. They had played him for a sucker. They had cast him in a role which he couldn’t get out of. It felt eerily familiar. If he accepted the role he had been assigned rather than resist it, he’s get off easy. Daley assured him of that. Her steely demeanor momentarily gave way to a smile that was surprisingly warm and reassuring.

He was over a barrel, yes, she explained, but, again, if he made the best of it, it would be over in less than a year and no real harm would be done. After a few months on a prison farm, he’d be ready to make a comeback. With a financial mind like his, he’d never go hungry, certainly not if…well he knew.

But if he insisted on trying to make things complicated, to be vengeful, then…well, it would be foolish. He could be sure no one, or at least no one who mattered, would credit anything he had to say, especially—and here she took some glossies out of a leather portfolio and surprised Mathew—especially after pictures like these with him handcuffed, naked, to a bed in the company of, well, on television and in the newspapers they would call him a male escort had been published.

How did you get those? Mathew said almost without a voice. Granger, was he working for you?

Don’t be paranoid, Mathew. This is the information age. Your friend Granger doesn’t know anything about this and will be as surprised as you are. Perhaps you’d enjoy that—humiliating the man who humiliated you.

No, Mathew said, wistfully, for he loved him.

I thought so, Daley said. That’s just the reason why I think we can count on you, too, can’t we?

Mathew only nodded submissively.

You’re a good soul, Mathew, Myra Daley said and caressed his cheek.

He did not know why, but suddenly, unaccountably, he wanted her to embrace him. The tears welled up in his eyes.

4

It was raining and dark at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday in May as Granger came out through the revolving brass and glass door of the court house at Foley Square. He stood battered by the rain, paralyzed and fixated on the lowering sky, lost in his mind, wandering through an empty maze.

Are you ok?

It was Martin at his side. They had glanced at each other several times throughout the last week as they followed Mathew’s trial, but until now they had never spoken or even acknowledged each other’s glances.

What? Granger said, shaking himself out of a trance.

Are you ok? You’re getting soaked.

Martin opened his umbrella and with his arm round Granger’s shoulder, he pulled him under it.

You need a coffee, or maybe a brandy.

A brandy, Granger said.

Come on, Martin said pointing to a tavern he spotted across the square.

They stood at the bar. Granger was lost somewhere deep inside himself and Martin waited quietly for him to return. Finally, Granger lifted his glass, saluted his companion with it, and took a deep swallow. The burning essence of the brandy made fiery flames leap up inside him and grate against his inner skin like stinging needles.

Three years, he said, with a chance for parole after eighteen months, and his license permanently revoked.

Martin returned the salute with his glass, took a swallow of brandy, let a shallow breath out slowly, and shook his head.

The poor bastard, Granger said in a whisper, almost inaudibly.