Amissum Codex — The Book of Loss
Copyright A. Acer Custos © 2005, 2006
9. Quaestio — Inquiry — September 7th, 1993
While all this had been going on in my life, time had been passing. Angela had been in beauty school for a month by now. My family had been dead and buried for weeks. My heart felt like it had been hollow for an eternity.
The day of all the revelations was Labor Day, a holiday. I sent Angela home the next morning, the 7th, and had her come back with the mortgage on her trailer. I called her bank and mine, and I arranged for it to be paid off. Then she left for her mom’s place to see her kid and go back to beauty school.
I didn’t tell her, but I put $10,000 in her checking account and had my banker open a trust account in her kids name. I put $50,000 in that account, and hoped that by the time the kid was 18, she’d have enough for college. Why not? It’s not like money was hard to come by.
I also had Natalie open an account at my bank and accept $100,000 as a deposit. She didn’t want to take the money, so I made her... as a kind of foreplay. Then I had her make calls to find a dojo while I went out and bought her a car.
Did you know that it’s hard to buy a car with cash? It took some convincing on my part. Luckily, I’m good at that. I tossed Natalie the keys to a new 4-Runner as I came in and sent her off to the dojo she picked out to enroll in.
I took off for the city as soon as they were both gone. I left a note saying I’d be gone for a couple of days, and asked them to take good care of Marco.
I put the 10mm in a hide-away holster at the center of my back at the belt-line, and put on a sport coat to hide it.
I drove up into the city and parked off of Clarendon Drive, not far from the big ‘Sutro Tower’ that dominates the entire San Francisco skyline. It’s a giant broadcast tower built near the highest point in the city. I walked about a bit, on the campus of the University and off. Eventually, I was able to find a view that suited me.
From where I sat down, I could look over most of San Francisco, from the south-east side through downtown and the finance district, all the way north and west past Golden Gate park.
I leaned back against a tree and relaxed.
It didn’t take me too long and I was able to identify where Martine was, then after some work, Claudio. One by one, I worked through the unique mental feel of everyone from the Clique that I knew about.
One thing I had not done too much of, and Loris had chided me for it, was direct mind to mind communication. There’s something invasive and intimate about being in telepathic contact with another person, and until recently, I’d never been able to just communicate, there’d always been more in the ‘signal’ than I wanted there.
That was all altered now. So I reached out for Martine, and ‘spoke’ to her. She opened her perceptions to me, and quickly I ‘was’ where she was... in a cafe in the Castro, being bored by conversation between James, Claudio’s personal driver, and Sylvie, a French girl who was fascinated with James.
“Martine... here are the people from the Clique that I know of, the ones I can find. Who am I missing?” I listed out for her the people and places I had sensed.
“Carter, you’re searching for Lynn?”
“Yes... perhaps only by her absence.”
We ‘talked’ for a couple of minutes. Martine gave me a couple of new names and rough locations, as well as a rough ‘feel’ for what their minds were like. I withdrew from her.
It took me another half hour, but I soon had a good feel for where everyone in the Clique was. I closed my eyes and worked on tracking them all at once. I tried to keep an ‘eye’ on them all at once. I was far too exhausting and confusing after anything more than a minute or two.
I was frustrated. If I couldn’t track a large number of telepaths at one time, I was going to be in trouble in Las Vegas, and I’d have a difficult time sorting through every human being in San Francisco for my target.
I walked down the road a ways, where there was a house. There was a woman there. I had her make me a sandwich for lunch.
Unsettling isn’t it? A strange man walks in your house. You just happen to have an extra sandwich prepared. You hand it to him, and he walks out with it and a soda. And then you forget the whole thing ever happened.
If I had wanted to be a monster, it would have been easy. The woman was moderately attractive. I could easily, almost without an effort, have turned her into a panting slut. And then had her forget. Imagine a world that is your own private rape camp. I imagine such things. They wake me up at night.
I went back to my tree and sat down again. I knew that it must be possible to do what I needed to do. As always, it was going to be a matter of technique. As I looked out over San Francisco, I was daunted by how large it was.
And then I remembered altering Angela’s step father from miles and miles away, and also how I had sensed Loris’s presence all the way from Reno. It was not a matter of reaching out, it was a matter of letting in.
I leaned back, closed my eyes, and let my mind and my power expand freely. I relaxed and let the world in. It was like a kind of meditation. My eyes closed slowly and I drifted. As I drifted I could feel my sense of things slowly expand.
A drop of water landed on my forearm. I opened my eyes and the world was blurry. My nose was running. My eyes had been leaking.
I wanted to cry for my momma, for my sister, for my dad. I wanted to cry for everyone I’d hurt. I could feel it there, inside me, like a deep, deep well... full up of hurt and pity. I’d been stupid, naïve, ignorant. I’d gotten people killed. It hurt. It hurt like a raw, aching hole.
I wanted to cry for who I was becoming. For what I was doing, for what I had done. It hurt so bad. I wanted to cry and cry and just cry. I wanted someone to tell me that I could be okay again. I wanted to go back to my life before.
But I didn’t.
I choked it all off. Instead I let myself be angry. Righteous and angry served me. Maybe I had been an idiot, but I had also been hurt, and I was going to pay them back, all of them. I didn’t care who was in the way. Everyone I had ever cared about was dead, or lost to me. Sure, I had people in my life now... but it was all a shadow play now, wasn’t it?
I could walk down that hill there, and pick up a knife from that kitchen there... and kill that woman. And another ... and another. And no one, ever, would be able to find me. No one.
It was all a shadow play now. All that mattered was power. I was weak, and I got hurt and hurt people. As I got stronger, I was able to protect people. And now that I’m strong, very few can hurt me. And once I’d killed Vincent... I would be feared. And I could keep the people I love safe. Unless you had power you were meat. That was Vincent’s lesson to me.
So I choked it all off and I concentrated on killing. After a while, I could focus again. I was glad in a way that this had happened here. If I had been weak that way near my enemies, I would have lost. Weakness was for the dead.
Another slow, warm blossoming of power as I reached down inside myself and turned it off, straightened the path, cleared the way.
I slid down a little so I could lay all the way back. I closed my thoughts deep down inside me, quieting them, stilling the inner voice, until I was hollow and quiet inside. And then I opened myself, and let the city flood in and wash over me.
I was a hooker sitting on a bar stool in the Hustler Club, waiting for the afternoon trade to begin. I could feel a scrape against my heel from the cheap shoes and a gnawing in my stomach from the crank.
I was a bum in the tenderloin, collecting cans in an alley, fuzzy headed and feeling slow, waiting for the MD20-20 to warm me up. I gathered my coat into my shopping cart and moved to the next dumpster.
I was on the make in the financial district, waiting anxiously for this client meeting, hoping the commission would pay for a lease on a new BMW, wondering there, in my $2000 Nordstrom suit, if my wife was cheating on me.
A million dazzling lights, hoping, praying, working, running, fucking, sleeping, living.
And down there, in those lights, wrongness. People who shouldn’t be, people like me. People whose minds are a little unstuck, whose egos extend beyond their bodies. Some of them almost invisible, like Martine, with her careful, deliberate aura of normalcy... carefully crafted to feel like a human being.
But we’re not. Not anymore, are we?
People like Claudio. Almost aware of me, tendrils of danger spread out from his mind like the tentacles of a monster. Seeking, slowly searching for the unusual... ready to cling to it, pry it open, pull it closer for inspection. But he didn’t feel me caress his mind and move on. He, surely, is a monster.
Earl, Claudio’s assassin. His mind is powerful, trained, but not cunning like Martine or Claudio. Earl kills like a bear. He mauls his prey to the floor, and then bites. No one escapes Earl. Except. Except that Earl’s pattern, his life pattern, is altered, cut into, sutured closed to look whole. Earl has been turned.
Jessy. Jessy is pure nasty bitch. She’s Claudio’s muse, his foil, his beast. She thinks his evil thoughts and gives them voice. She’s powerful, distant, but ready to serve. She’s Claudio’s mind slave, awakened as his thrall and trained to his leash. No qualms there.
Other, lesser servitors and minions of the master. I felt them out there. I could feel their weakness, and I knew that they were no danger.
Did the city know that a monster lived in it’s heart? Does every city beat with the heartbeat of a dragon?
Down in chinatown, a powerful telepath. He is vaguely alarmed by me, but cannot sense me. He’s powerful, like Loris, or Claudio, but hides it. He doesn’t feel like a member of a Clique, and he quickly pulls his power down into himself and tries to hide.
My power flows outward. I sink down into myself. I think the thoughts of the sky, of the wind.
I know that there is a mind out there, that knows each of these people, but is none of them. Each mind is a pattern... Martine, Claudio, Earl, Jesse.. all of them feel a certain way, taste a certain way. Who is it that tastes like Martine but isn’t? Who smells like Earl but isn’t Earl? Where is Jesse’s lust but not where Jesse is?
Time passes. Afternoon chills into evening. Squirrels play over my head, but I am not home.
There’s a spice of Earl on Russian Hill. A thin tendril, like a warning bell, stretches from Earl’s living presence, from that hole in his aura.... to Russian Hill.
It’s tiny and thin, just a whiff of a connection. But it’s enough. I know where she is. I am there. I’m in the eyes of the Doberman trotting next to her master as he labors up the hill. I’m listening through the ears of a cat blinking lazily on a perch in a Victorian.
I can feel it.
Her neighbors are operated upon. Their minds are just ever so slightly truncated. Just a tiny bit curled. Oh, and yes... every mind is trapped. All of them are booby trapped, set to alert her. Funny, but she didn’t think of using the pets.
I do. I’d rather be in a dog than a human. It’s more sanitary.
I can tell from her work that she’s good. But she’s just powerful and talented. She’s not like me. One at a time, I work my way into her booby trapped neighbors and turn them to me. I put tracers on them, twist them slightly, and then turn them loose again... looking exactly the same to anyone but me.
Evening comes and I wake myself up. I’m tired, deeply tired inside. Fatigue washes over me. I drive to a hotel in the city.
When did this happen? My power is extraordinary. Not just extraordinary, but huge. Did it start when Vincent couldn’t kill me? Or when Loris trained me? Or in the fight with Ruby? Was it earlier?
Do I remember the white light?
What happened inside the light?
These things slip away, you know?
I park at the hotel. They just happen to have a suite available. I take it. I throw open the drapes and open the windows. The city comes in. I lay down on the bed and rest my mind. I come unstuck.
Down stairs in the hotel bar is a woman named Julia. She’s beautiful. She’s single. She’s flirting with Steve from accounting. Steve is interested and ready to go, ready to cheat on his wife. Julia is happy to flirt but undecided. She’s fully prepared to sleep with Steve, she just doesn’t know if it’ll help her career enough or not.
Julia turns to Steve. “Oh god, excuse me Steve. Those tacos at lunch are bothering me. Can I get a rain check? I need to go to my room.”
Steve looks concerned for a moment, but he’s mostly concerned about losing the blowjob. He opts for discretion. “Man, that’s too bad. Do you need me to get you some Tums or something? Are you gonna be okay?”
“Yeah, I just need to use the little girl’s room and lay down.”
He nods, disappointed. “Okay sure. See you tomorrow.”
They kiss, a small light kiss that promises more.
She takes the elevator up to her room. She strips, revealing her pretty, sensual body, then takes a warm shower. Returning to the bed, she dries off, puts on a tiny bit of perfume, and pulls her dress on over her head. No panties, no bra, no stockings. She slips into her shoes and grabs her room key.
She walks to the elevator and presses my floor. She waits for the floor and then gets off. She slowly walks down the corridor. She stands in front of 2114. She knocks lightly.
The door is ajar. She opens it and walks into the darkened room. She smells the smell of a man in the room. Her nipples harden. She pushes the door closed with her foot. She feels her pussy lubricate in a warm wet rush. A wave of heat passes over her skin. She takes off the dress and kicks off her shoes. She’s naked in the dark room. She turns to the bed. I can see the man’s body, my body, on the bed. His eyes are closed, is he sleeping?
No words are spoken. She feels me on the bed by touch. When her fingers touch my skin it’s like warm honey electricity up under her breastbone. She climbs on the bed and mounts me, immediately sliding me into her warm wetness. She thinks she might faint.
She moves on top of me. Slowly coming up, slowly sinking down, feeling every moment of my arousal inside her like an impaling light. She breaks into a sweat. Her eyes close, her second orgasm blooms.
I drift away borne on the scent of desire.
Room service comes. They bring me steak and desert. The woman on top of me smiles at the room service girl, who smiles back. They share a delightful secret. The room service girl feeds me tiny bites while Julia rides me up and down. They kiss.
I drift.
I open my eyes.
There are three women naked in the room now, licking me, sucking on me, touching each other. The woman from room service is in the bathroom, in the shower, naked, masturbating.
The couple in the room next door have been fucking for an hour. They’re lost in each other. She’s had ten orgasms and her stomach hurts.
Down the hall an eighty year old Mormon man opens the window and masturbates, he watches the traffic below and dreams of his lost wife. Soon a beautiful woman will knock on his door and and beg him to fuck her in the ass. He’ll betray his god for her.
I drift.
It’s late night. Julia is still moving on top of me, breath ragged, thighs shaking, her clit rubbed raw and swollen. She’s had orgasm after orgasm, and she cums again, sobbing. Five other women are touching me, holding me, stroking me. One of them pushes Julia aside and mounts me.
In the bathroom the girl from room service is being eaten out by the couple from the room next door. They take turns whispering their undying devotion to her. Someone puts a finger in her ass.
All around me, every where near me, people copulate. Ones and twos and threes and fours. Slapping and moaning. Flesh on flesh. Moisture, lubrication.
I drift away.
I can hear people stop in the street below. They stop, argue, and begin to fuck each other on the hoods of cars. Sirens. Moaning.
What happens in the light?
SLAP
SLAP
I open my eyes.
From a million miles away, I can see Martine. She’s leaning over me. Her mouth is moving. I can think of better uses for that mouth.
SLAP
She’s there again. Talking to me, trying to catch me.
SLAP
She’s fighting me. ‘Carter’
SLAP
“Carter”
SLAP
“CARTER!”
SLAP
“CARTER!”
“Martine?” I open my physical eyes.
“CARTER! STOP IT!”
She shakes me, roughly. There’s this long, long moment. I try to decide whether or not I like it out there. Then I see her tears.
I pull myself back inside my head. The people in the room stop moving.
I look at Martine. “Sorry.”
She cries and holds me.
I send the people away. They forget. I pull myself in from a million miles. I keep pulling. It’s tiny in here.
I hold her back. We lay on the bed together. I’ve scared her. It makes me sad. I sleep.
I whisper in her mind as she sleeps. “We’re monsters, Martine.”
“Ssh, Carter. Sleep.”
Martine kisses me and slips out of my grasp. I open my eyes to the devastation of the hotel room. Clothes everywhere. Dropped food, mashed into the floor. The shower curtain is on the floor in the entry, covered in some kind of oil. I can see hand prints on the wall paper.
I find my clothes and shower while Martine is gone. She returns with three maids who ask no questions. They clean up the room as Martine and I exit.
We go down to the buffet in quiet.
“Want to tell me what happened last night, Carter?” She asks as we sit down to our food. The morning is still early and there are few people in the restaurant.
“I’m not sure. I was searching the city for Lynn...” I start.
“Searching the CITY?” Martine looks at me.
I wonder for a moment just how much to tell her. “Not just the city, Martine. San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto... maybe San Jose... I don’t know... maybe a hundred, two hundred miles.”
She looks at me in shock.
“Maybe more.”
“How, Carter?”
“I don’t know. I just know that something has come ... unstuck. That, and I have this sense of power. Huge power.”
“Claudio sent me last night. We could feel you all the way across the city. We didn’t know it was you... it didn’t feel like you.”
“What did it feel like, Martine?”
“It just felt like a wave of power, like sex... like passion.”
We ate for a couple more minutes.
“I didn’t plan on that happening.” I moved some eggs around on the plate.
“People were humping the statuary in the lobby.”
“I don’t know what happened, Martine. I came loose from myself. I just felt myself grow stronger and stronger. Right now, I can almost feel it... if I just ... I don’t know how to say it... If I just ‘let go’ in the right way, I’ll come loose and all this power will be there, come rushing... Oh.”
She looked up from her food. “Oh?”
I blushed. I felt a little dirty, ashamed.
“What is it?”
“I think I understand now, Martine.”
“Yes?”
“I think it’s my knack. I can feed on people’s sexual energy. Use it to power me. The more I grew, the more I could feel the sex under their skin... and the more I turned it loose, the stronger I got. And stronger and stronger.”
She put down her fork and frowned. “I’ve heard of such things. But I thought they were old tales, like body jumping. Or reverse aging.”
“But why do you think it happened, Carter?”
“Because of what I did up on the hill, searching the city... I think my mind needed to ... I don’t know... feed. I think I needed the power after what I’d done.”
We kissed at the end of the meal. It was a small thing, but the barrier between Martine and I was growing thinner daily, and I didn’t know where it was leading. I knew she didn’t either.
I’d been in her mind, and in spite of myself, I knew that she was no more comfortable with our attraction to each other than I was. It confused both of us, so we didn’t talk about it.
I told her not to trust Earl, but not why. She just looked at me for a long moment, and nodded.
I drove over to the Russian Hill area and parked in a driveway where I happened to know that the owner would not mind. I walked around a bit, taking in the steep hill, the beautiful houses, the feel of the place. I knew Lynn was around here somewhere. I found a small cafe and sat for a bit, letting my mind roam. She was no where near by, I could tell, even though I didn’t yet ‘have’ her mind, or at least the feel of her mind.
After a long time of walking around, looking people over, investigating the feel of things, I’d settled on my target being one of three buildings. All three were in a row, in the 2100 block of Hyde, near the corner with Filbert. The buildings in this area were some of the most expensive apartment and condominium properties in the city, famed for their view. It told me a lot about her.
I could tell that she was not around yet, probably off somewhere else in the city. So, I made myself busy. There was a trick Martine had told me about that I was meaning to try, so I found myself a pay-phone. I used the yellow pages to get a locksmith on the line, and then, as I talked to him, I looked for the resonance of my words in his mind, out there in the city.
There’s no correlation between mind-space and geographic space. If I can ‘see’ you, or identify your mind, I can reach for you. This is apparently almost unlimited in range. Practically though, it’s easy to connect someone you’re looking directly at, or that you know is in the next room to the feel of their mind. It’s much more difficult to find someone when you’re not near them or connected to them.
In any case, I had a conversation over the phone with a locksmith, and after about a minute, I was able to locate the resonance of my words in his mind — out in the real world, and connect his mind to him in mind-space. Then I was able to reach into him and convince him to meet me.
A few minutes later he drove up in a service van. We shook hands out in the street and he grabbed his tools.
I was careful not to perform any actual re-programming of the people around me, in the city, in mid-day, mid-week. It would be too obvious to her. Instead, I simply pushed outward with my mind, and had them just not be interested in me or the locksmith. No one would look at us in particular. We’d just be more people who went unnoticed throughout their day.
He picked the locks on the houses and let me in. I didn’t want to even take the risk of having someone come down and open the door for me in any of the buildings, I wanted to remain unnoticed and unremarkable.
I walked through the three buildings slowly. In the third building I was certain. The locksmith let me into a tastefully decorated apartment, a small two bedroom with a view to kill for. And there, in that room, I could tell that she had killed.
The room stank of fear and the residual effects of a mind being destroyed. I walked through the apartment and listened to the story that the remaining aura had to tell. I doubted that she even knew it was there.
The owner had been a man, and he’d brought her home. His arousal was evident. He expected to make love. Instead, she made him make several phone calls to his broker, attorney, and friends. Then she had him go in the bathroom and sleep in the bathtub.
Her touch was lighter, I could not quite tell what she’d done during that time, but she’d allowed his mind to feel all the fear and concern. She toyed with him for several days, making sure he was able to transfer title of the apartment to him, and then she took him into the bedroom, played with him, and then wiped his mind clean. She let him feel his mind dying. Then she let him go walk into traffic.
That was all the story the apartment told. Except that there was a scent of Earl here. She’d had him up here at least once, and they’d had sex. Maybe that was when she turned him.
I paid the locksmith and sent him on his way. I scanned the occupants of the building carefully to make certain that I had not been observed or noticed, and then settled in to wait.
I picked an overstuffed leather chair in her living room and watched the afternoon give way to evening. I watched the fog roll slowly in. The view really was amazing.
About seven that evening, I could feel a ripple in the world. Imagine a blank sheet of paper, from which you cut out a small circle and then you carefully put it back in place. On first glance, even on the second glance, everything appears intact, but when you look closely, you can tell that it’s been disturbed.
That’s what Lynn’s mind was like. She appeared to be a talented normal. She felt, for all the world, like one of those completely normal people who has a slight connection to the world of the telepath, perhaps empathic or even slightly attuned, but not awakened, and not capable of being awakened.
Even when you looked closer, her mind felt that way. But I knew what I was looking for, and I knew it was there. I even had some sense of how she was hiding it, having felt the work she’d done. And when you knew that much, her disguise was obvious.
Lynn walked up the three flights of stairs, stopping to say hi to a neighbor and just coincidentally scanning him for any of her traps or alerts being set off. Reassured, she finished her climb and used her key to open the door to her place.
She came in, bearing a single bag of groceries from a corner store down the hill. She was dressed in a simple white blouse with half sleeves and a pair of pleated black pants. She scanned the apartment for intruders, perhaps more out of habit than caution, missed me completely... in fact was unable to even notice me, and went into her small kitchen.
Lynn Harkness was beautiful. A full head of long red hair attracted your attention, but her body kept it. She was near six foot tall, willowy and thin, but fit looking, not anorexic. Her face was angular and striking, not classically beautiful like Natalie or maturely sexual like Martine, but a tiny bit distant, aloof looking. High cheekbones, long neck, lovely small breasts and a flat stomach all made you turn your head when she went by.
Lynn was proud of her beauty. Although much was given to her through genetics, she had worked hard to maximize what she’d been given, and she’d done that well and truly. Her eyes were green, her skin pale, a classic redhead.
Her power lurked inside her, hidden. She kept it well damped down inside, stoked for use, but deeply repressed and forbidden. She smelled of sadism to me. Not the happy kind of sadism where your girlfriend cries and cums at the same time as you cane her cute ass, but the kind of sadism that fucks a man while she eats away at his mind and cums when he’s nothing but a hollow shell, aware of what he’s lost.
I got up out of the chair, my mind made up. She had one phone in her apartment, in the bedroom. I went in and removed the cord from it. Then I went back into the hall and opened her purse and removed her flip phone, took out the battery and tossed it back in.
Then I walked into the kitchen. She was holding a knife in one hand and standing stalk still, eyes wide. I’d let her hear my footsteps in the apartment.
I could hear her breathing, her fear, from several feet away. I slowly, fixedly pushed through her mental defenses and let her feel me go into her mind.
“Oh Jesus.” She said. Tiny beads of sweat formed on her forehead.
I did not let her know what I was doing in her mind, but I let her feel it happen, and then I removed myself.
She dropped the knife and it clattered to the floor. She put out her hands and swept them through the air, trying to find me. I didn’t let her.
She ran for the front door, and threw it open. The moment it opened onto her hallway, the stink of fear bloomed over her and she slammed it shut again, panting.
She kicked her bag over, panting with the exertion of her fear and grabbed for her phone. When it didn’t work she screamed and ran into the bedroom.
She came back out, looking wildly around, holding the disconnected phone like a weapon.
I admired how she hadn’t collapsed in fear, but was trying to methodically work through her options. Soon she reached the conclusion that she was overpowered, and tried to reach out with her mind for help. It was then that she panicked. I had removed her ability to do that. I had rerouted her memory of how to access that part of her power, and she couldn’t find the way.
She knew I was in her apartment with her. She couldn’t make herself go outside. She couldn’t call for help. So she tried screaming. She pounded on the walls and screamed for help.
No one listened. The sound waves were there, but there was no one listening to them. For the people in the neighborhood it sounded like the grinding of a garbage can being dragged loudly up a concrete driveway, or the howling of cats or the screech of the bus brakes on the hill. Her screams were a normal part of the urban landscape.
While she screamed uselessly for help, I carefully removed most of the mental damage she’d done to the people in her building, those I could find, and her neighbors nearby.
After a few minutes, she was calmer, pressed up against the door to her apartment, breath coming in gasps.
I went through her closet, taking out everything. I made two piles. One of everything I didn’t like, and one of everything else. The second pile was much smaller. I wadded up everything in the first pile, dragged it into the kitchen and began stuffing it in garbage bags. She could see it all happening, and she tried to stop me.
I slapped her across the face, left to right, so hard that tears formed in her eyes and she slipped and fell. She didn’t try that again. Instead, she went back to trying to find and stab me with the knife. I used a small part of my attention to make sure she looked in all the wrong places.
I finished bagging up all but a small part of her clothes and put them down her garbage chute in the hallway. She ran away from the door when I came back into her apartment with a new gasp of fear.
I took the clothes that were left, her only remaining clothes, her only remaining shoes, and stuffed them into a small suitcase and threw it out into the building’s hallway.
Over the next half an hour she watched as her knives, scissors, everything sharp, or breakable, even her mirrors, went out of her apartment.
This whole time, I’d said nothing.
Imagine her situation, if you will. She knows that there’s someone in her place that she can’t see. She’s terrified, irrationally terrified, of walking out her front door. She can see her things, her clothes, her stuff, get dragged out of her place, and she can’t do anything to prevent it.
Imagine how helpless she must have felt.
When I was done, when her apartment was ready, I wondered. I wondered if she felt as helpless as the guy who used to own this place had. I wondered if she felt as helpless as I had, in that car, in the desert, with that fucker holding that phone up to my ear as I listened to my family die. I wondered. I intended to make certain that she did.
She was backed against the wall in the kitchen, a knife in one hand and a phone in the other, wide eyed.
I reached out and slapped the knife out of her hand. Then the phone. When she went to pick them up, I slapped her across the face again, so hard she fell down and I took her toys away.
Then I pulled her to her feet by the blouse and leaned in so she could feel my breath on her. She started to hit at me with her hands, but she wasn’t very strong. She went for the knee strike to the groin, but I knew it was coming and slammed her into the wall.
Her left eye was bruising now, and she was beginning to make small crying noises in the back of her throat. I ripped her blouse open, tearing it, ripping down on it, grabbing the sleeves and tearing them off, then tearing the collar and then down the back. I stripped the remnants of it off of her and threw it to the floor. A lacy blue satin bra was revealed, already somewhat stained from sweat and fear.
She screamed. “WHO ARE YOU???”
I answered very quietly in the ringing silence of her kitchen. “I’m your victim.”
“WHAT?? WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN??” She looked around wildly, screaming again.
When she turned, looking for me, I grabbed the back of her bra and ripped it open, ruining the clasp. She shrieked again and tried to hold it to her chest. Reaching in under her arms, I tore the bra off of her. It left red, angry marks on her arms as the fabric scraped her. She threw up her hands to hide her breasts and pushed herself back into the corner.
“Oh god.” She panted. “You’re going to rape me.”
Again I was quiet as I replied. “You had your turn first.”
I could feel the fear building in her, choking her, making her irrational and stupid.
I grabbed the hem of her pants and ripped at it as hard as I could. The fabric and clasp didn’t part on the first attempt, so I had to do it again. Her pants gave way with a loud ripping noise and I stepped back as she grabbed to hold them up, tears in her eyes.
After a second I grabbed them again and tore them open some more. I could see her matching panties. They were bikini briefs in blue satin.
“NO!!” She shrieked as I ripped the pants again. She fought to hold them, but as she did, she revealed her breasts to me. I slapped her across the tits, hard, and she fell to the floor crying.
I put a foot in the middle of her back and finished stripping off her ruined pants. Holding her there, I ripped her panties off as well. I left her there on the floor, curled up, shaking, as I walked out of her apartment and threw the scraps and broken phone away.
As I said, her thinking had become irrational by this point. When I went back in the apartment, she was trying to hide from me in the closet of her second bedroom.
I dragged her out of the closet by the hair and threw her across the room into the wall. She bounced off of it with a thud and landed hard on the carpet. She didn’t move for a long time.
I sat on the edge of her guest bed, watching her lay on the floor, stunned and sobbing. When enough time had passed, and I knew that she’d regained her senses, I dragged her onto the bed by her hair.
Her lower lip was swelling, she had a black eye, there were several cuts on her hips that were bleeding slightly, and one cut over her left eye was bleeding a bit heavier.
I pushed her back on the bed. She didn’t resist me, staring up at the ceiling.
She said. “Just don’t kill me please...”
I spread her arms and legs out, spread eagled, and let her feel me paralyze her limbs in that position temporarily.
I took my clothes off and got on the bed. My cock wasn’t hard, and left to it’s own devices, it wouldn’t get that way. There was nothing about this that was erotic to me, nothing, but I could fix that too. I made a small adjustment inside myself, and my cock quickly rose and got hard as hell.
I gathered a mouthful of saliva and spat on her exposed pussy. She was a natural redhead, and had a bush of pussy hair neatly trimmed back into a delta. I spat on her cunt again. I could see her tears drain down her cheeks.
I lowered myself on top of her, and she gasped as the weight came down, pinning her in place. With a shove, I got my cock up to the lips of her cunt and let her feel it there.
I lowered my mouth down beside her ear. Then I whispered. “Because of you, my family is dead. I have a memory I’d like to share with you.”
I removed the mental block that prevented her from seeing me and I lifted myself up slightly. She shrieked when she saw my face.
With a huge shove, I forced the head of my cock up her dry cunt. I lunged again. She screamed in pain. I battered my cock into her. I could feel her tear inside. I fucked into her harder, until my cock was buried in her to the hilt.
Then I grabbed her by the hair, looked her in the eyes, and pushed a memory into her.
I Slapped her, hard. “You fucking piece of shit. Fuck you.”
I hit her again.
“No one fucking takes me, no one takes Vincent.”
Another hit to her face.
“You think you can walk into my fucking town and fuck with me? Huh, you fucking piece of shit? You can fuck with me? You can FUCK with ME?”
She couldn’t think or speak. Natalie sat in her seat and stared out the window, smiling at something. She wanted to ask her to do something, but she couldn’t.
“FUCK YOU, punk. Then you fucking steal this nice piece of ass from me and fuck her head up? You think you can ruin one of my girls and walk away? Your time is up, asshole.”
I slapped her a couple more times. I was red faced and sweating in the hot desert sun. Somewhere distant a bird cried. I paused and collected myself. I took an expensive silk handkerchief from my pocket and mopped my mottled red face with it. I looked at her and smiled a sick, nasty smile.
“I’m a generous fucking kind of guy though, asshole. All those movies, when the fucking punk dies, what does she always do? A punk, she calls for her momma, doesn’t she?”
She couldn’t move or reply. She knew something really, really bad was about to happen.
I took a cell phone out of my pocket and waited a moment. It rang. I looked at her. “It’s for you.” I handed the phone to one of my goons.
“Clean this up when it’s over, Manny. My money is here somewhere. Bring it with you when you come back.” The other guy and I walked back to my waiting helicopter. As Manny leaned in over her with the phone, holding it to her ear, she could see the helicopter rising in the distance, headed back east.
“Lynn baby, this is your momma calling, sweety. I was just calling to let you know that God spoke to me. Jesus woke me from a dream baby. Jesus had a message for me. I got everyone here with me to hear the message baby.”
“Daddy’s here, with Charlotte and Bill and the babies. Everyone came right over. Your brother Mike is flying in, but I don’t think he’s gonna be here in time for Jesus’s message. Pastor James is here with that pretty wife of his too. I’m so happy sweety. I wanted to give you Jesus’s message first. Here it is, here’s what our sweet Lord said to me.”
“Welcome to hell, you piece of shit.”
“I’m taking us all to heaven now, Lynn. Bye Bye sweety, see you in the arms of sweet loving Jesus.” She could hear her drop the phone but it didn’t hang up in the cradle. There was a moment of silence, and then she heard distant screams and gunshots.
Some time later I stopped crying, resting up against the wall of Lynn’s bedroom. I felt filthy, disgusted with myself, fouled. I looked over and saw her staring at the wall. Dry remnants of mascara and tears lined her bruised face.
I took a shower in her bathroom and dried off. I walked back into the bedroom and dressed in my sweaty clothes. I sat down in a chair in her room and looked at her. Then I released her from the immobility compulsion.
She curled up on the bed, looking at me.
I reached out with my mind and healed the cuts on her face and hips. She still looked battered though.
“I should kill you.” I said.
“Fuck you.” She said.
“I should tear your mind into shreds and leave you a vegetable like you did the guy who owned this place.”
“Go ahead.” She looked at me steadily. “Go ahead. You think this is bad? Vincent’s my Inceptor. My fucking Inceptor. He raped me for a month. Every day. In my mouth, my ass. He gave me to his goons. Just to teach me who was in charge.”
“I’m going to kill Vincent.”
“He’ll squash you.”
“No, he tried. Once. And I’m much more powerful now. I’m going to kill him.”
“He played games with my mind, made me want him, made me a whore, made me kill for him. He made me kill a kid. Just to make me hate myself. Just to make me his.”
She spat at me.
“You can’t do anything to me that I won’t welcome. And when you fuck up... he’ll destroy you.”
“There’s one thing I can do.”
“Idiot... there’s nothing. Nothing.”
“I can make you a weapon.”