The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Early Saturday evening, at the same time Emma and Tanya were reconciling after their fight, Jay Chen was receiving the final report from the crime scene tech, Lazic. The news was not as good as he would have liked.

“Where’s the other guy?” Lazic said. “Thought Dick Bureau always traveled in pairs.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Chen said. As far as he knew, O’Reilly was still in the back, examining the dead stage light.

“Blood in the dressing room is all the same type,” Lazic said. “B-negative.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Chen said. “Killer and victim can have the same blood type.”

“Spoken just like a defense attorney,” the tech replied. “But only about one-and-a-half percent of Americans have B-negative blood. Don’t get me wrong, we’re DNA testing every drop we found, we’ll know for sure in a day or two. But the odds that more than one person was bleeding in that room are about one in five thousand.”

They were standing by the bar. The body had been taken away, most of the uniforms had cleared out and gone off shift.

“Stabbed in the neck in the dressing room, and he staggered out into the alley under his own power,” Lazic said. “No doubt about it—shoe prints in the blood, B-negative blood on the soles of his shoes.”

“Someone was in the room with him,” Chen said. “You don’t stagger out into a blizzard unless you’re trying to get away from something.”

Lazic said, “Two chairs set up in there, facing each other. All of the blood was on one chair.”

“So give me the physical evidence from that other chair,” Chen said.

“Lotta hair in there, lotta fibers,” Lazic said. “Think about how many people have been in and out of that room just in the last week.”

“Did you get any brown hairs from in there?”

“Why, Detective? You gotta thing for brunettes?”

“Just tell me.”

“I got brown hairs, blond hairs, red hairs, neon green hairs,” Lazic said. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Prints,” Chen said, ignoring the question.

“Infinite,” Lazic said. “No answers tonight.”

“The weapon.”

“Knife was from the bar, like you thought, Detective,” the tech said. “Found it a couple of feet from his hand, buried in the snow. Blood spatter in the snow suggests he dropped it himself.”

“Fuck outta here,” Chen said.

“I told you, we’re gonna test every drop of blood we got,” the tech said. “Maybe some of it belongs to the killer, an accomplice, whatever. But I’m telling you, I’ve seen spatter like this a thousand times, from suicides that drop the knife they just used.”

“Suicides don’t stab themselves in the neck. It’s too much violence to do to yourself.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Lazic said.

“Look,” Chen said. “I have every reason to believe he had someone in this room with him last night. I have her on video. So do not even try to say the word suicide to me.“

“I’m just telling you what it looks like, Detective.”

“From what the owners and the video camera are telling me, he just destroyed the entire room with his show, then hooked up with a woman after. That looks like suicide to you?”

Lazic shrugged. “Depends on the woman.”

Sunday morning saw Emma Williams and LaTanya Marsh undergo a rare role reversal. Tanya slept poorly and stumbled into the living room to see her roommate wide awake and ready for chatter.

“Wow,” Emma said, from the kitchen. “When was the last time I beat you to the coffee? What happened?”

The real answer was, Tanya had laying in bed for the better part of the night pondering the question, Tell her or don’t tell her? She had not arrived at an answer until that very moment, when she said to herself, Don’t tell her.

“Research,” Tanya muttered, pulling her hair out of the ponytail she kept it in while she slept. “Gotta be ready for everything you haven’t thought of yet.”

“Speaking of things I didn’t think about yesterday,” Emma said, “Should I get a lawyer?”

“Not until the cops talk to you,” Tanya said. She didn’t explain her reasoning, not until she’d had a little coffee in her. Like, a gallon of it.

“Good,” Emma said. “All of my Virginia West money went to the U of C anyway. I’m not sure I could afford the sort of lawyers you would put me in touch with.”

Tanya clicked on the television, tuned to CH1 just like yesterday. She only remembered that it was Sunday when she saw that instead of a news show, they had some kind of interview show. She clicked it back off.

“Snowy Sunday,” Emma said. “I feel like we should be out doing something, but I don’t even know if the Red Line is running.”

Tanya took a long swig of black coffee, feeling the warmth all through her body. She said, “You hear back from your agent about the psychologist?”

“Not yet.”

“How are the roads?”

Emma shrugged. “I haven’t heard anything driving by outside. Weather.com says we might have more snow tonight.”

Tanya’s insides nosedived. “How much more?”

“Nobody’s sure. It’s a fast-developing storm.” Seeing the look on Tanya’s face must have worried her, because she next said, “Do you think that I should call the cops myself? Tell them that I’m a witness?”

Tanya made a face. “No. Absolutely not. First, we have no idea what you’re even witness to. You don’t remember anything. But second, we don’t even know who the bad guys are. For all we know, the cops killed him.”

“Why would the cops kill a kinda hacky stage hypnotist?”

“I’m just saying, we are not telling anyone anything until we have something useful to say.”

Emma sighed. “So I’m going to have to get hypnotized again, aren’t I? I don’t expect I’m going to remember the normal way.”

Tanya drained her coffee. “Yeah, I think so.”

Emma knew the tone in her roommate’s voice. “And we’re going to have to do it ourselves.”

“Well, it’s Sunday and there’s a foot and a half of snow out there. You got a better idea?”

Emma sighed. “How about we just move to a warm country with no extradition treaties?”

“When you find one that has no hypnotists, get back to me,” Tanya said. “Until then, we’re doing this.”

Saturday Night.

Jay Chen stood outside the front door of the Laugh Riot, freezing his ass off, so that he could have some privacy on his phone call.

“Give me the short version,” Arthur Adams said. Adams was the Chief of the Detective Bureau, what rank-and-file police referred to as the C of D’s.

“Stabbed in the throat in his own dressing room, bled out in a back alley,” Chen said. “Weapon was a kitchen knife from the bar, for slicing limes or whatever.”

“Shorter,” Adams said. He was fond of one-word sentences.

“I got video of a woman going to the back with him,” Chen said. “Three people with possibly female names left their credit cards at the bar last night. Next step is to see if she is one of ’em.”

“Motive,” the C of D’s said.

“We’re weak there,” Chen said. “He travels around too much to have many enemies. Doesn’t sound like anyone reacted badly to his show last night. Even if the doer is the woman on the camera, she might have a strong self-defense case.”

“Why am I not hearing this from the Dee Icy?” This was Adams-speak for the DIC, the Detective In Charge at the scene.

“Well, sir, that’s why I called you at home,” Chen said. “Detective O’Reilly has been behaving erratically. I think you need to get him off the case and away from this scene.”

“Explain,” Adams said.

Chen told him the story that he had been told by Torelli, and followed with the oddities that he himself had seen. As he relayed each additional detail, becoming more and more aware of the absurdity of what he was saying, the silence on the other end of the line seemed more and more like a tangible thing, a bludgeon that the C of D’s was about to hit him with.

Adams sighed harshly, air blowing hard against the microphone. “Ray O’Reilly is the longest-serving cop in the Detective Bureau,” he said. “He’s the only man under my command to solve a serial case.”

“I know, sir,” Chen said. “I know. The only thing I can figure is, with all that experience he’s just seen too much shit. He’s cracking.”

“The Justice Department just recommended that CPD double its number of detectives,” Adams said. “How do you think we’re going to train and partner up all those new hires? With men like Ray.”

“Not if he acts the way he’s acting at this scene,” Chen said. “This guy can’t teach a dog to sit.”

Another loud sigh was blown into the microphone. “Are you done at the scene?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine. You and Ray are off shift. I’ll go over to his place and give him the news. You work the case tomorrow, alone, until I can partner you up again.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me yet. All of Ray’s friends on the force are going to blame you for him getting taken off duty.”

“I’ll live with it, sir.” Chen broke the connection.

When he went back into the Laugh Riot, Ray O’Reilly was standing at the bar, looking down at the box of credit cards. His hands hung down at his sides. He looked like he had fallen asleep standing up, until Chen got close enough to see that his eyes were open.

“We’ve got all we can get from this scene, Ray,” Chen said. “It’s Saturday night and we’re off shift.”

Ray had offered post-shift drinks a few times before. Chen had planned to say to him, No thanks, go home and hug your kids. But instead Ray simply said, “She left her card here.“

Chen was glad Ray was talking business, at least, but listening to him was alarming nonetheless. He spoke slowly, in a sluggish voice. He wondered if Ray had had a stroke; he would have thought the other man too young for that, but what did he know about medicine?

“Yeah, Ray,” Chen said, taking an evidence bag out of his jacket pocket. It held the three cards he would need to look at tomorrow. “Got the possibles right here. Gonna log ’em at the station. You go on home, I got this.”

“She left her card here,” O’Reilly said.

Chen reached out and put his hand on O’Reilly’s shoulder. With his opposite thumb, he flicked the snap on his service weapon, but did not put his hand on the gun. “Ray,” he said. “Go on home. I got this.”

Ray looked at him. His eyes were three-quarters open. “Home,” he muttered.

“Yeah,” Chen said. “It’s Saturday. No reason for us both to lose our entire weekends. Go home.”

“Home,” Ray said again. He trudged past Chen and exited the Laugh Riot through the front door.

When he could not see O’Reilly through the front window, Chen sighed loudly. “Jesus,” he muttered, as he re-affixed the snap on his weapon.

He found the owner of the Laugh Riot, gave him his card and the card of a good forensic clean-up firm, and left.

Sunday, mid-day.

Emma Williams sat on the couch in her living room. Her laptop was open, on the coffee table in front of her. On the screen was a spiral, bands of black and white curving toward in the center of the screen. The spiral was not in motion, and Emma was in no hurry to push PLAY on the YouTube video that would set it moving. She looked up to the kitchen and said, “You’re sure about this?”

LaTanya Marsh was standing in the kitchen, arms folded. It was the best place she could be, where she could not see the spiral, but also was not a distraction in Emma’s eyeline.

Tanya was not sure about this. But, in her research last night, she’d found an article about stop-smoking hypnosis which had contained the line: Hypnosis is all about confidence. If you don’t want it to work, it won’t work. “Yup,” she said, as cheerfully as she could manage. “We’re not doing anything risky yet. First, we just need to see if we can get you into trance by ourselves. Then, we wake you up and figure out what we need to to next.“

“That sounds too simple,” Emma said doubtfully. “If it were that easy, there wouldn’t be all those hypnosis-certification classes we saw ads for when we were searching for a spiral video.”

You don’t know the half of it, Tanya thought. She’d lost track of the number of disclaimers she’d seen during her research last night, talking about how hypnosis should only be done by trained professionals. She said, “Look, we know that you go under easy. Michael Night said it himself: your subconscious remembers how hypnosis feels. It’s not like we need to be trained professionals here.“

Emma just looked at her. Tanya said, more somberly, “You need to remember what happened last night before the police knock on that door. This is the way. Trust me, I’ve got your back.”

“Okay,” Emma said. She slipped in her noise-canceling wireless earbuds; the gentle pinging sound in her ear told her that the Mac had recognized them and connected to them. Then she reached for her keyboard and hit the space bar.

“Hello,” a woman’s voice said in her ear. It was a soft contralto, American, from that part of the Midwest which seemed to have no accent. She spoke slowly, in an odd sort of sing-song tone. “If you’re watching this file, it’s because you would like to experience a deep hypnotic trance.”

The spiral was moving now, the curved black and white panels appearing to swirl together into a point at the center of the screen. Emma’s eyes went to that point and fixed there, instantly.

“If you would like to experience a deep hypnotic trance, please make sure that you are not driving, operating heavy machinery, or doing anything else which requires your full waking concentration,” the voice said. “Very soon you will be in a deep hypnotic state, too relaxed to give your full waking concentration, so if you need your full attention, stop the video now.”

Emma did not stop the video. We can only wonder what might have happened if she had.

“Relax, make yourself comfortable, and allow your mind to drift,” the voice said. Emma shifted slightly on the couch cushions, which could barely be called comfortable even on their best day. She wasn’t sure what allow your mind to drift even meant in this context, but she let her eyes stay on the spiral and listened.

“That’s right,” the voice said. “Breathe in, feeling the fresh air fill your lungs. And exhale, letting the air carry away all tension in your body.”

Emma let herself sink back into the couch a little more as she exhaled. Watching the center of the spiral was an interesting sensation; there was no precise point to put her eyes on, but whenever her eyes would try to wander, the swirling colors would pull them back, closer and closer to the point where the lines receded to infinity.

“Breathe in and out, letting your body relax,” the voice said. “Feel your chest relax. Feel your legs relax. Feel your arms relax, growing as heavy as lead.”

Emma had a familiar sensation fill her body: I can’t move. She could not remember when she had felt it before, she could not even remember saying I can’t move before, and she did not care that she could not remember.

“Take a deep breath in,” the voice said, “and as you let it out, feel the relaxation move up to your eyes.”

Her eyes began to blink, finding the center of the spiral again each time they re-opened. It was not more than three blinks before she found her eyelids nearly impossible to lift.

“Letting all of the tiny muscles around your eyes relax more and more,” the voice said. Emma’s eyes closed, and she could not reopen them.

The voice had more to say. Emma vaguely understood a countdown from ten to one. But she had already drifted into a fog before she heard the first number.

Tanya watched Emma’s eyes flutter closed. God, she goes under so fast, she thought. Michael Night had needed twenty-odd minutes to get all of the other volunteers into trance during the show, and her research had implied that actual hypnotherapy inductions often take far longer.

Tanya glanced at her phone. Just three minutes, even though the length of the video was twenty-two. The video promised “Hypnosis For Imporving Your Memory,” and although Tanya believed the author should work on their spelling before they worked on another person’s memory, she believed it to be safe.

A flash of light caught Tanya’s eye. She glanced up, looking for the source, and saw nothing. The only thing in the space where she’d seen the glint was the faucet. Although maybe the faucet had been the light she had seen; its chrome surface reflected the front window, through which they could see nothing but gleaming snow.

The faucet’s surface was not even close to a mirror, but the oblong white glow in its surface was unmistakable, and getting brighter. It was a weird thing, how bright the snow could get on the day after a blizzard. You got so used to earth tones underneath your feet, a thick enough layer of snow could catch the daylight like a second sun. She remembered a ski trip to Wisconsin, one of the white girls on the trip had mocked Emma for wearing sunscreen, and ended up with the worst sunburn despite wearing a wide-brimmed hat...

Tanya’s coffee-colored eyes glazed over as her breathing slowed and deepened. “So bright,” she murmured.

Sunday morning.

Ray O’Reilly sat in the husk of a burned-out car. He had chosen the passenger’s seat, because the last driver of this car was now a charred corpse.

The car had belonged to the fifth victim of the Crimson Cross killer. O’Reilly didn’t know her name the first time he had sat in this car, but he knew it now, remembering without being aware that he was stuck in a memory. Julie Ann Lambert, her name had been, a freshman at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Red hair, like all the others. O’Reilly did not need to look at her to know that the hair had been shaved on one side before the body had been burned, and a cross cut into the skull on that side: the calling card that had earned the killer his nickname.

In reality, Ray was sitting in the driver’s seat of his unmarked department car, parked two blocks down from the Laugh Riot comedy club. He had not moved from this spot since being told by his partner to leave the crime scene. The key was not in his car’s ignition, and the heat had not been running at any point overnight; if Ray had been aware enough to check, he would have found that the toes on both feet were severely frostbitten. The little toes on each foot were well beyond saving.

When Ray had sat in the car, the Chevrolet logo in the middle of the steering wheel had seemed to be glowing, as though lit from within by a lightbulb. He had watched it carefully, until, without even realizing it, he had found himself in Julie Ann Lambert’s car.

Some part of Ray knew who the Crimson Cross killer was, and where he could be found. Hadn’t he himself shot Daniel Stanislav in his basement apartment on the West Side all those years ago?

He knew that he could drive over to that shithole row house right now, knock on the door of the basement apartment, and shoot the first person he saw, but somehow that didn’t feel right. He was looking for—

(The Locus)

—something else.

“I’m out there, Ray,” Julie Ann Lambert said. O’Reilly, who had only met the real Lambert after she had died, was fascinated to listen to her voice now. It was sultry, but friendly, the sort of voice that came on the radio to tell you about the Black Friday sale at Target. “I’m out there and you need to find me.”

“Yeah,” O’Reilly muttered.

“You can feel me, Ray,” Julie Ann Lambert said. “I’ve touched you and you can feel it. Can’t you?”

“Yeah,” O’Reilly muttered. He could feel her touch: a tingle at the nape of his neck, right by the intersection of brain and spine.

“Drive, Ray,” Julie Ann Lambert said. “Drive until you feel my touch get stronger.”

“Yeah,” O’Reilly muttered aloud. He reached into his pocket for his keys. His fingers were protected by gloves thicker than his socks, so while they were beginning to feel the effects of frostbite, they could still function well enough to fish the key out and get it in the ignition.

Ray drove through Lincoln Park, his path determined by which roads had been best plowed. At one point he turned left onto Halstead, without thinking about doing so, and the tingle at the base of his neck intensified. He drove on, now heading south.

Emma Williams was walking through the Laugh Riot’s bar, arm in arm with the hypnotist, Michael Night.

She could not quite remember what had happened to lead to this moment, but she was not troubled by this state of affairs. She’d told Tanya that she would have liked him to hypnotize her, after all; that must have been what happened. It was so much more relaxing not to think about it at all.

She did not clearly remember entering the dressing room. All she became aware of was his voice, telling her, “Sit down, Emma. Sit down and make yourself so very comfortable.”

She sat down in the most comfortable chair she’d ever used in her life. She did not know how the dressing-room chairs in a rinky-dink Chicago comedy club could be more comfortable that the chairs at the Four Seasons in L.A., where she’d once done a location shoot for the show, but at that moment she was sure it was true.

Her vision was still somewhat blurred, but she knew that the shape seated facing her was Michael Night when his voice said, “Look here.”

His index finger was in front of her face, less than six inches away. It was pointing at her forehead, forcing her to roll her eyes upward to a slightly uncomfortable degree to look at it. The finger was in sharp focus, every line clear and distinct. She could tell that he chewed his fingernails.

The finger moved slowly, counter-clockwise, in a circle the size of her face. Emma found her eyes rolling to the bottom of her vision to follow it, the eyelids drooping. As the finger moved back to the top of its arc, she tried to lift her eyelids and found that she could not. Her rolled into the dark space behind the heavy eyelids.

A finger’s pad touched her forehead and he said sleep—

LaTanya Marsh walked through the bar, not quite able to believe what had happened to her, but feeling strong and powerful all the same.

It was her junior year at the University of Chicago. The Organization of Black Students had recruited her for a debate against the lone black man in the College Republicans. The Republican lieutenant governor of Illinois had recently made some comments that he admitted were “indefensible,” and the OBS had found an opponent willing to try to defend them. She hadn’t even participated that much in OBS events, but as a lawyer-to-be she relished the chance for exactly that sort of debate, and she had enough friends in OBS who knew it, that she had proved an easy get.

She had thought she’d wiped the floor with the poor guy. Later, she would learn that James Steele had thought he’d scored an equally decisive win, and that each of them had thought they were taking pity on the other when they retired to an on-campus bar after.

Instead of continuing the debate at the bar, they had bonded over watching Fresh Prince of Bel Air reruns on TV as kids. After the third round talk had gotten decidedly flirty, and now she was headed back to The Spot, a small nook behind the bathrooms where some quality making out could happen and the bar staff would look the other way as long as no actual fucking occurred.

She turned into the nook, and James was there, sitting down, looking up at her. Tanya hesitated for a moment, which she had not done the first time around, but he hadn’t been sitting down the first time. He’d been standing up, as tall as she was, and she had learned for the first time how nice a level kiss could be.

Him sitting down wasn’t quite right, but she’d had enough drinks that her hesitation only lasted a second or two. She bent down, palmed his cheeks, and kissed him as hard as she knew how. He did not respond, lips slack and unresponsive, and that was all wrong, as was the fact that he tasted like—

(LIPSTICK?)

Emma was deeply relaxed and thinking of—

(The Locus)

—things she could not remember. Then, Michael kissed her, forcefully, pushing her back into the soft cushions of—

(Couch my couch our couch)

—the chair. She was too relaxed to kiss back, but every muscle south of her belly button seemed to clench at once, warm and tingly.

Emma moaned with pleasure, trying to will her tongue into kissing back and finally succeeding. Her tongue caressed the lips, putting just the lightest touch on them, teasing them forward, tasting...

“Lipstick?”

Hearing her own voice mutter the word roused Emma from the trance. She opened her eyes to see long, silky dark hair every where, rising away from her. She knew it was Tanya, but was too relaxed and confused to say so.

Tanya broke the kiss and stumbled backward. Her leg hit something and she sat down hard on the floor. It wasn’t the hardwood bar floor under her, but a rug, and the room was as bright as day, and...

“Tanya?”

She looked up at Emma, who was just rising from the couch, rubbing the heaviness out of her eyes.

“Tanya, did you just... kiss me?”

“Uh ... maybe?” Tanya muttered, rubbing her own eyes. “I think we need to talk about it.”

Jay Chen arrived at the station. He was supposed to be off today, and he wasn’t happy about working on Sunday. Even though he didn’t have a family to be pissing off via his absence, he planned to have one soon, and once you got in the habit of chasing down corpses at all hours of the week, you never got out of it. At this rate he would collect a couple of ex-wives before he ever had a wife.

At the evidence locker, he collected the credit cards that he had deposited the night before. There were three, and he planned to simply pick them at random. But as he walked back through the station, he heard a familiar voice calling to him.

“Chen! In my office!”

Chen crossed the detectives’ bullpen and entered the C of D’s office. Arthur Adams had been standing in his doorway when he called to Chen; as Chen entered and closed the door, he sat on the edge of the desk and crossed his arms.

Chen immediately knew this was going to be bad news. Adams was not a desk-sitter. Either he sat in his desk chair like a normal chief, or he came out into the bullpen and talked to you like a normal human being. But this high-school-principal routine was not his style. “What’s going on, Chief?”

“I couldn’t reach Ray last night.”

“He turned his phone off?”

Adams spoke even quieter. “I called his land line at home. His wife answered. He never came home last night. She’s scared just about out of her mind.”

Chen thought of that spacey look in Ray’s eyes as he left last night. “Oh, shit.”

“We low-jacked all department vehicles after that uniform on the West Side got caught dealing drugs last year,” Adams said. “Ray’s car was in the same spot all night. Two blocks from the comedy club where you caught that homicide. Then, an hour ago, it started driving around again. It’s heading south on the Near West Side, by UIC. Whomever is driving, they disabled the radio.”

“’Whomever is driving’?”

“There are a lot of possibilities here,” Adams said. “Ray may be injured or dead out there somewhere.”

“Or maybe Ray is driving the car,” Chen said, his voice dark with dread.

“We need to resolve this in the building,” Adams said. “If Ray has been assaulted, or we have to declare him a missing person, it gets out of our hands. Internal Affairs will be involved. The Chief will want updates; considering the amount of commendations Ray has, the Commissioner too. The mayor will get questions about it in his press conference tomorrow. A story like this, the President might tweet about it.”

“Give me an order, sir,” Chen said.

“I’ve sent a patrol car to tail his car,” Adams said. “I need you to be there when they stop it. Whoever is driving, whether it’s Ray or someone else, get them back in this building ASAP.”

“Yes, sir.” Chen left the office. The idea of running down the names on the credit cards never even occurred to him.

“So you made out with me just now,” Emma said, “and you think it might be related to me dry-humping you last night in my sleep. Is that about right?”

Tanya nodded. Emma felt like just getting that much out of her was like pulling teeth. Tanya seemed strangely muted about this entire affair.

“Because you had a dream that it wasn’t me, it was a guy.”

Tanya nodded again. “That guy from my debate, junior year.”

“But why were you even dreaming? What happened to you watching out for me, having my back and all that?”

Tanya said, “I was watching. I did have your back.” Emma, however, noted the distinct lack of protest in her voice. Normally, Tanya would have argued that one to the rooftops: I DID have your back!

“You didn’t start watching the spiral over my shoulder, did you?”

“No, of course not,” Tanya said. “I was in the kitchen. I couldn’t see what you were seeing or hear what you were hearing. And then...”

Tanya looked away, out the living room windows. Their street had not yet been plowed, and the white blanket over the pavement was pristine. The snow glittered in the sunlight, like stars in the sky at night, except each twinkle seemed brighter, so much brighter...

“And then what? Tanya?“

“So bright,” Tanya murmured.

“Tanya!” Emma whacked her roommate on the arm, and not playfully, as she often would do when Tanya made a good joke. She swung hard, hard enough to leave a bruise.

Tanya started with a gasp. She blinked her eyes rapidly, before looking at Emma, confusion clouding her face. “What was I saying again?”

“Tanya, you are freaking me out here. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Tanya said. “I was watching you from the kitchen, and I guess I just ... zoned out.”

Emma did not think Tanya even realized that something similar had happened just seconds ago. But that was not the most pressing question in her mind. “Tanya, you could not have ‘just zoned out.’ People don’t make out with their roommates—and hallucinate that they were with a hot guy instead—when they zone out. Right?”

“Yeah,” Tanya said vaguely. She looked away, and was soon staring fixedly out of the front window.

“Tanya. Tanya.” She thought about hitting Tanya again, but it hadn’t helped too much last time, and she didn’t want to hurt her. Tanya’s lips were parted, her eyes blank and glassy. Obviously Emma did not know what she herself had looked like while watching the spiral video, but it seemed like Tanya was doing a hell of an impression.

Holy shit, it’s catching.

Her voice of reason, which often sounded like Tanya in her head, knew this was ridiculous. Hypnosis is not the flu. It doesn’t “catch.” But what other inference could she draw? Tanya had never been hypnotized in her life and had refused to participate in the Michael Night show. How could she go into a trance so fast, if not because Emma had just done the same, in the same room?

Well, why don’t you ask her?

That made as much sense as trying to wake her up. Emma shifted on the couch, so that she could lean in close to Tanya’s ear. “Tanya,” she said, speaking softly but trying not to whisper. For some reason, whispering would have made her feel ridiculous. “Tanya, can you hear me?”

“So bright,” Tanya said.

Wait, does that mean she heard me, or she didn’t hear me? Whatever, just go with it. “What is bright, Tanya? What do you see?“

“The Locus,” Tanya murmured.

“What is the Locus, Tanya?”

“It’s ... so bright...”

“Yes, it’s bright,” Emma said, trying to avoid sounding impatient. “But what is it?“

“The Locus.”

“And what is the Locus doing to you?”

“So bright,” Tanya said.

Emma tried a few more angles of questioning, but none helped. Tanya was looking at something called the Locus, which was very bright. That was about it.

Well, if she’s hypnotized, can I make her do things?

She imagined Tanya cocking a cynical eyebrow, as if to say, What kind of things?

Emma thought, I don’t want to make her dance like Britney Spears. Well, maybe later. But right now I just want to have a conversation with her for five goddamn minutes without her zoning out.

“Tanya,” she said, “I know the Locus is very bright.”

“So bright,” Tanya said.

“But I need your help, Tanya. I need you to stop looking at the Locus.”

“So bright,” Tanya said.

“Tanya, I need you to be able to listen to me. I need you to be a lawyer for me. I need you to stop looking at the Locus. If you find yourself wanting to see the Locus, you can just say to yourself, Emma needs to talk to me, and the Locus will be gone.“

Tanya said nothing. Her face was still blank, but as long as she wasn’t going on about how bright it was, Emma was encouraged.

So how do I wake her up, and be sure that it sticks?

There was only one way that she knew would work, because it had just happened. Emma palmed Tanya’s cheeks, turned her face away from the window, and kissed her with all of the passion she could muster.

It was her first time kissing another woman; or, based off of what she could remember from the last twenty-four hours, the first time she had ever kissed a woman while awake. It was a surprising sensation, soft and gentle compared to guys, who tried to drink her up like they were dying of thirst. Although, Emma thought, that might just be due to Tanya being entranced. This might be a feeling worth studying further.

After a few seconds, Tanya pulled back—not roughly, but with some surprise. She blinked her eyes rapidly, before finally focusing on the woman sitting next to her on the couch. “Emma? Did ... did you kiss me again?”

“Yeah,” Emma said. “But I swear, I had a really good reason.”

Sunday Afternoon.

Ray O’Reilly was driving. At no point did it ever strike him as odd, that he had been talking to Julie Ann Lambert in the burned-out car where he’d found her, and was now driving his squad car, without ever having gotten out of one car and into another. Everything seemed perfectly natural to Ray O’Reilly.

O’Reilly was able to drive safely, but a big aspect of this was that he stuck to roads which were well-plowed, and that very few cars were out on those roads, due to it being a Sunday after a giant blizzard. On three occasions he neglected to slow down for a red light, in a situation where he would have rear-ended the car in front of him at the light.

On each of these occasions Julie Ann Lambert would say to him, “Red light, Ray,” her tone gently chiding, like a sitcom wife mocking her husband in time to the laugh track. O’Reilly would slow the car carefully, stopping at the light like a teenager during his first on-road lesson. While he waited, O’Reilly would look at

(The Locus)

the Chevrolet logo on his steering wheel. Sometimes he would mutter, “So bright” as he looked, other times not. Then Julie Ann Lambert’s gently mocking voice would say, “Green light, Ray,” and he would be able to drive again.

O’Reilly followed the tingle on the back of his neck. It did not speak perfectly to him. Twice he turned, expecting the tingle to grow stronger, but instead the tingle turned into a shiver colder than the weather outside. Both times O’Reilly laboriously found a way to turn around and go back the way he had come. (It was these odd detours, more than any other evidence, which made Arthur Adams wonder if O’Reilly had been assaulted and his car stolen.)

It did not occur to Ray to ask Julie Ann Lambert for directions. Somehow his brain was able to entertain the simultaneous contradicting facts that, A, Julie Ann Lambert was dead, and could give no directions; and B, that Julie Ann Lambert would talk to him only when she wanted to, and would not answer questions.

Ray had lost almost all ability to process time. He had no idea how long he had been driving when he saw flashes of light in his peripheral vision. He looked into his rear view mirror—the existence of which he had all but forgotten about up until that moment—and saw red and blue lights flashing from the top of a police cruiser.

“They’re trying to stop you, Ray,” Julie Ann Lambert told him. “They’re trying to keep you from finding me.”

“They’re ... cops,” O’Reilly muttered into the empty car. “On my side.”

“I thought you were on my side, Ray,” Julie Ann Lambert told him. He never considered her to be Miss Lambert, or even Julie. The three names held some sort of totemic power in his mind.

“Yeah,” O’Reilly muttered.

“I need you to find me, Ray,” Julie Ann Lambert said.

“Yeah.”

“They’re trying to stop you from finding me, Ray.”

“Yeah.”

Julie Ann Lambert’s voice said, “Don’t let them stop you, Ray.”

“Yeah,” Ray O’Reilly answered, speaking to an empty car. He fingered the catch on his holster, without even realizing that he was doing so.