The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Jay Chen’s conversation with the dispatcher was brief, and delivered to him nothing but bad news.

Chen pulled into the Chinatown market’s parking lot, next to the Three-Charlie-Twenty-Two cruiser. According to the dispatcher, the cruiser had not moved for several minutes. Its driver-side door stood wide open, with no one inside. Chen pulled a hand-held radio (what the old-timers still called walkie-talkies) out of its clip and went to see what he could see.

Chen first checked the car’s armory. The Benelli combat shotgun was still in its clip under the dashboard, and all of the spare ammunition for police-issue pistols was still in the trunk. This reinforced his belief that O’Reilly was the man he was looking for. Any car thief willing to steal a cruiser and shoot at police surely would have tried to re-arm himself upon leaving the car, but the disoriented and barely-there guy that had been on the crime scene yesterday could have easily forgotten to do so.

There were footsteps in the snow, leading away from the cruiser’s driver-side door. Chen followed them past a bubble tea cafe, but then they merged with a sidewalk that appeared to have been traversed by several people.

“Shit,” Chen whispered. Part of him wanted to think, Ray can’t have gone far. Otherwise he would have stayed in the cruiser. But the cop part of his brain knew that trying to infer logic in the actions of a man who was clearly losing it would be a fool’s errand.

Chen glanced up the sidewalk. He had some experience tracking people through urban areas; it hadn’t been part of his Army training, but you learned that sort of thing in a combat zone.

To his right, there was the rest of the Chinatown Market, then the Engine 8 fire station, then the entrances to the Dan Ryan Expressway and the Red Line subway. If whatever was motivating O’Reilly had driven him to mess with the firefighters, he would have already done so, and Chen’s radio would be jumping. If O’Reilly tried to cross the Dan Ryan off-ramps in the state he’d been in yesterday, he was unlikely to survive; if he tried to board the subway with two cops’ blood on him, 911 would be ringing off the hook.

Any and all of those things were possible, but they were unlikely. If Chen was going to stop his former partner, he would need to play the odds a little, and the odds did not suggest a path to his right.

Chen turned to his left, and began jogging toward the nearest intersection, hoping O’Reilly’s trail would warm up.

“I don’t understand,” Emma said.

“I am broken,” said the thing with the bizarre voice, that was speaking from the cop’s mouth. “You can fix.”

“Fix what?” Emma eyed the cop’s sagging mouth. Wasn’t that supposed to be a symptom of a stroke? “I can’t fix you. I’m not a doctor.”

“I am broken,” the not-cop said. “You can fix.”

“You were in my head,” Emma said. “Richard Harrison. You were in his head, then he passed you on to me.”

“I,” the not-cop said. He squeezed his eyes shut, hard, furrowing his brow. “Do not.” When the eyelids re-opened, the eyes were still gazing at an awkward angle which normal people never stared at. “I am broken.”

Like a malfunctioning robot from a movie, Emma thought. It’s trying to tell me something, but it doesn’t have the words. She needed a more logical brain on this one than her own.

She looked over at Tanya. Her roommate was still standing at the front door of the apartment, her hand lying open on the knob. Her eyes were open and glassy, as though studying the door’s upper hinge. Her lips were slightly parted, and Emma could hear her softly mouth-breathing. “Let Tanya go,” she said to the not-cop. “You don’t need to control her. I need her help with this.”

“I do not control,” the not-cop said. “You do.”

“You’re the one who told her to open the door,” Emma said. “I’m not controlling shit.”

“I do not control,” the not-cop said. “I am broken.”

“Well, then put down the gun,” Emma said. “I can’t think if I’m afraid of being shot.”

The not-cop said nothing, blank green eyes continuing to point at their bizarre angle.

“Come on,” Emma said. “Help me out here. Give me the gun.” She put her hand on top of the cop’s gun hand—

Emma had auditioned for a TV commercial at age six, an ad for a children’s cereal that was in the shape of lightning bolts. In the commercial, she was supposed to swallow a spoonful of the cereal, and get hit by lightning. It was intended to be a comical thing, cartoon lightning hitting her in the same way that it might do to Snoopy or Kermit the Frog, but the director had the most absurd demands. In his Australian accent, he had demanded, “Do it like you’re being electrocuted!” Emma, who had only the vaguest idea of what the word electrocuted even meant, had tried gamely, once, standing on her tiptoes with her mouth wide open. Then her mother had intervened, saying, “Forget it, we’re not doing this.“

What Emma felt now, was what she had imagined then: she was galvanized by a force that she found impossible to describe. Emma, who had never taken a ballet class in her life, stood en pointe for ten full seconds. Her mouth was wide open, trying to scream, but her lungs had vapor-locked and she had no air. Her fingers clenched into her palms hard enough that the fingernails drew blood. Her eyes saw nothing but a blinding flash of light, although no one else in the room would have seen anything at all.

After ten seconds, Emma broke the contact. She staggered backwards, collapsing in a heap on the living room rug. The not-cop remained unmoved; to look at him and Tanya both, nothing at all had just happened.

After gasping for breath a while longer, Emma looked at the hulking body in front of her. “Oh my God,” she said, her voice wavering. “You’ve killed people.”

“I am broken,” the not-cop said.

“I saw you murder two police officers!“

“I am broken.”

“You used a cop to kill two other cops! On top of the two dead people, you’ve ruined that man’s fucking life!“

“This body fails,” the not-cop said.

“And just what in the hell does that mean?” Emma knew that she was not going to get a sensible answer from the not-cop, but she couldn’t help but argue anyway. “You’re going to kill him too? Just use him up until he drops dead?”

“I am broken. This body fails.”

With tears in her eyes, Emma shouted, ”Why should I fucking care!?”

“I hunger,” the not-cop said. “I am broken. I hunger.”

Emma put her head down in frustration. The thing’s answer had no meaning for her, but she knew why she should care about its plight anyway: the thing might use Tanya’s body in the same way it was currently using the cop. Perhaps it had already started doing so.

Think, she told herself. What would Virginia West do?

The character’s catchphrase had been, there’s always a clue. But of course there was always a clue; it was a TV show, and the scripts demanded that there be clues. This was real life ... or, at least, she had thought it was real life, up until the talk of a Locus controlling people’s minds.

Emma looked up. “You got broken when I got hypnotized,” she said.

“You can fix,” the not-cop said.

“I don’t remember what happened,” Emma said. “I don’t remember anything about it.”

“You can fix.”

“I don’t know what you are,” Emma said. “I don’t know why you are in that cop’s body. I don’t know why you care about me. I don’t remember anything useful from Friday night.”

But, Emma realized, that wasn’t quite true. She had remembered going back to Michael Night’s dressing room, arm in arm with him. She had remembered his finger, hovering about a foot in front of her forehead, and moving in a slow circle until he had said sleep.

“You can fix,” the not-cop said.

“You’re right,” Emma said thoughtfully. “Maybe I can fix, after all. But I’m going to need to work on it.”

Jay Chen jogged up the sidewalk, behind the Chinatown Market. It was the less-traveled side of the block; tourists visiting Chinatown always wanted to take pictures of the Market from the other side, down on Cermak Road. Still, enough people had been on that sidewalk over the course of that day, that it was impossible to be sure if O’Reilly had gone that way.

Frustrated, Chen jogged back to his car, figuring he could simply cruise through the neighborhood, covering more ground on wheels than on foot. But as he put as hand on the keys, he stopped.

You drive the wrong way, then you lose him. You lose him, then more people die (and you probably lose your job for not calling in those two dead cops the first minute you found them). Think.

When had he seen O’Reilly last?

The Laugh Riot, yesterday evening. He remembered casually flipping the snap on his pistol holster, Torelli’s warnings fresh in his mind. And before that, Ray had said...

She left her card here.

“Jesus, Ray,” Chen muttered to the empty car. “You’re still trying to solve that murder, aren’t you?”

He couldn’t go back to the C of D’s with that explanation. It didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Especially when you factored in the shooting of the two uniformed cops; if nothing else, one would think that if O’Reilly was still trying to solve the crime, then he would appreciate the help.

But Chen knew something that a lot of people who might make that argument would not know. He had seen people lose it in Iraq. And in his experience, when people who carry guns for a living snap, they snap differently than the average person. Some part of the training sticks around, and you could never predict what part it would be.

Chen realized that he still had the credit cards from the bar on his person. He reached for them, intending to ask the dispatcher to run the names. Maybe one of them lived nearby. It was a long shot, and he knew it, but a long shot was better than driving around in his car aimlessly.

The last card he pulled out of the evidence bag belonged to Emma Williams.

Emma did not particularly want to use the same video as before. There was just something so absurd about putting her, and Tanya’s, lives and sanities in the hands of Ms. Memory Imporvement. But it seemed even more absurd to sit around Googling for the perfect hypnosis video while an armed killer stood impassively in her living room.

Emma sat at the generic IKEA table they used as their dinner table, and looked up at the not-cop. “Can you come over here?”

The not-cop slowly crossed the room to where she was sitting. His leg, on the same side of his body as that obscenely sagging jaw, dragged badly as he walked. I’m not a doctor, Emma thought, but if he hasn’t had a stroke or some kind of brain damage, I’d be shocked. That must be what he means when he says, “This body fails.”

“So, when I touched you, I remembered some of the things you did,” Emma said. “And when I used this video to hypnotize myself, I remembered some of what I did on Friday. So I think, if you touch me while I’m hypnotized, maybe we can piece it all together.”

The not-cop stared at a corner of the ceiling, impassive. After a few seconds, it said, “You can fix.”

Does he even fucking understand what I’m saying? “Yeah, I can fix, but you have to help me. When I close my eyes and my head goes down, put your hand on my neck. Touch me, skin to skin, you understand? Like when I touched your hand.“

“You can fix.”

God, it’s like getting therapy from the Marx Brothers. “Right, just like this,” Emma said, and put a hand on the back of her neck to demonstrate. She had considered telling the not-cop to touch her hand instead, but he would have to bend over to do so, and in his current state he looked like he might fall over if he tried. “Like picking up a cat by the scruff of its neck.“

The not-cop did not respond. Emma looked over at Tanya, who remained at the door, staring blankly at one of the door hinges, hand still on the knob as though she were just about to leave. I’m so sorry about this, T, Emma thought. You didn’t ask for the Secret Psychic Roommate From Hell. If we get in trouble, accessory to murder and whatever else this thing has done, I’ll take the fall.

Emma pushed the Play icon. “Hello,” the Midwestern contralto said. “If you’re watching this file, it’s because you would like to experience a deep hypnotic trance.”

You bet I do, Emma thought.

“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 contralto said. Emma remembered this part of the video from before, and she found herself thinking, Come on, get on with it! “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 put her eyes on the center of the spiral as the voice talked about breathing slowly and relaxing. Almost immediately, she noticed something different: her eyes were not blinking. She did not quite remember how long she had listened to the video before, until the contralto reached the section about the countdown.

“In a moment, I’m going to start counting down from ten, to zero,” the contralto said. “With each number, feel your relaxation double. With every number, feel your eyes get heavier and heavier. And now, the count of ten. Letting your relaxation double. Nine. Eyes growing heavy. Eight. Breathing slowly and deeply.”

Emma exhaled, noticing that her eyes still were not blinking.

“Seven, letting all of the tension dissolve in your shoulders. Six. Letting all of the tension dissolve in your hips. Five. Letting all of the tension dissolve from your eyelids.”

Emma’s eyes remained open and fixed on the center of the spiral, searching for the infinite point where the black and white panels would meet.

“Four. Mind completely focused on my voice. Three. Body completely relaxed. Two. Eyes completely heavy. One. Almost there.”

Emma’s eyes remained open, focused on the center of the spiral. I don’t know if this is working, she thought. Maybe I should pause the video.

Then she found herself unable to move.

“Aaaaand, zero. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.”

Emma’s eyes dropped shut. She felt her head nodding forward. There was no feeling of, Wow, it worked! There were no feelings at all. Time became irrelevant. It might have been seconds or hours until the heavy fleshweight landed on the back of her neck—

Michael Night studied the entranced woman sitting in front of him. He did not know how thin the walls in these dressing rooms were, but he heard no one next door. That was promising.

“Emma, can you hear me?”

“Yes.” Her voice was low, but clear.

Michael took a lime and a knife, both of which he had “borrowed” from the bar. He cut the lime into sixths over a bar napkin, and took a slice into one hand. “Emma, you look hungry. I have a wonderful orange slice for you, sweet and juicy. Would you like a sweet, juicy orange slice, Emma?”

“Yes.”

He gave her the slice, and she bit into it without hesitation. Her eyes remained closed as she sighed with contentment. Her face showed no signs of the sourness in her mouth. For her, the lime had become an orange.

When she was done, Michael Night said, “Emma, tell me why Travis hypnotized you.”

“I dunno.” Her voice was that of a grown woman, but something about it, perhaps the tone or the rhythm, suggested immaturity. “He said I passed out on set, but I don’t remember.”

“Emma, tell me how Travis hypnotized you.”

“He asked me to close my eyes and imagine I was playing asleep in a scene. It was so important to listen, and breathe slow, and go completely limp. He kept repeating those words over and over. And then he asked me to try to open my eyes, and I couldn’t.”

Using her acting instincts against her, Michael Night thought. That’s interesting. I’ll have to remember that.

He had less than a half hour to live.

From there, the psychologist had used an Elman induction, using eye opening and closure to fractionate her, then arm drops to deepen her. As Michael asked Emma to remember the arm drops, she slumped forward in her seat until she was bent over double, arms hanging toward the floor, her knuckles nearly touching the carpet.

“Emma, I’d like you to take a deep breath in. And as you let it out, you will REMEMBER—

Jay Chen sat in his car, looking up at the building where Emma Williams lived in a first-floor apartment.

If the man who killed those cops was O’Reilly, he was probably up there. If it was some random car thief, then Chen was wasting valuable minutes while he made his getaway. Chen had felt sure that he was chasing O’Reilly on the way here, but once he knocked on that door, there was no going back.

He might have to shoot Ray.

He might be throwing his job away.

He might stumble onto a crime scene so horrific that it would make the Laugh Riot murder look like a dinner party.

During his time in combat, Chen had been more afraid than he was right now. But he had never had so much doubt as now. At some point, combat always came down to someone using guns and explosives to try to kill you and the guys next to you. But this whole affair with O’Reilly, it seemed ... bigger than that.

As though more than just people’s lives could be lost. As though the entire planet was wobbling on its axis.

Chen opened his car door, and took the long walk up to the building’s front door. He pressed the button marked 1A, which listed the name MARSH (a roommate, he assumed). The apartment was close enough that he could faintly hear the buzzer through the walls.

No answer. No sounds of footfalls. No voices. Chen buzzed again, and a third time a few seconds later.

Inside the apartment, the YouTube video had ended. Tanya still stood in front of the door, her hand resting on the knob. Emma and the Thing that inhabited the remainder of Ray O’Reilly’s brain had not moved since the YouTube video had started. None of the apartment’s three occupants took notice of the buzzer, though it created vibrations in the air which struck their eardrums.

Emma was standing on a cliff at dawn. She knew this cliff was in Oregon, from that episode where Virginia West had gone to England. There was a rope line in front of her, blocking off a chunk of cliff space on which they would actually shoot the scene. No one was allowed past the rope line, because the director did not want the grass trampled for the scene itself.

She looked down at herself and saw a grown woman. There was no script in her hands, even though she had always gotten up this early to go over her lines for the day. Always know your lines, her acting teacher would say. You’ll have plenty of time to learn all those other acting tricks later. First, always know your lines.

“You are here,” a voice said. It was that same bizarre harmony which Emma thought of when she looked at the cop in her living room, but when she turned to look at the voice’s owner, she saw Richard Harrison.

“Richard,” she said, on instinct, even though she knew that she was not speaking to a human. She’d had to tell herself many times as a kid: Call him Richard. He’s only Dad when the cameras are on.

“You know who I am,” the not-Richard said.

“The Locus,” Emma said.

“No,” the not-Richard said. “I am Bright.”

The sun came over the tree line in the east, its rays hitting the not-Richard for the first time. His skin began to glow, the sort of color that Emma associated with the sun: not white, not yellow, not orange, but some combination of all three. Emma remembered Tanya murmuring, So Bright, and began to understand what her friend had been ... seeing? Imagining? Who could say?

Emma whispered, “What are you?”

—Flash of an image in her mind: a fish, swimming in the ocean, a background of mottled blue haze. Her point of view swung sickeningly, like a real-world camera trick, and she saw that the mottled blue haze was in fact the skin of a whale, immense and inattentive to the tiny creatures all around it...

(In the real world, Emma’s breath catches in her throat for a full fifteen seconds, before she gasps in her next air.)

“You,” Emma said. “You’re a god.”

“This word means nothing,” the Bright said. Emma was glad that the Thing was more talkative here than when it spoke using the cop’s mouth, but it could still be just as cryptic, when it wanted to.

“What do you want with me?”

“We hunger,” the Bright said. “I and Others.”

“You eat ... people?”

“The flesh is nothing,” the Bright said. “We hunger.”

“Emotions,” Emma said. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she did. “You feed on our emotions.”

“We hunger,” the Bright said.

“I still don’t understand what I have to do with it,” Emma said. “I don’t ... I can’t even understand something as gigantic as you are.”

“I and Others,” the Bright said. It was now glowing with such intensity that Emma should have found herself blinded by it, but she did not. It was quite easy to stare at. “There are rules. There are rules, or...”

—Flash of an image: the golden goose, lying split open at a farmer’s feet. Growing horror on the farmer’s face, only now realizing that a resource which could have fed him for the rest of his days is now dry, and that his children would surely starve.

“Or you’d destroy us,” Emma said quietly. “You’d burn down your only restaurant.”

“There are rules,” the Bright said. “Others make Agreements. Others find Points.”

—Flash of images: Harry Potter’s wand, Dorothy Gale’s ruby slippers, Doctor Strange’s cape, the Ark of the Covenant.

“Points,” Emma murmured. “Totems. Symbols. Any kind of ... Locus.”

“Others have stones,” the Bright said. “Others have tools. Others have homes. I have you.”

“I’m the Locus,” Emma said. “First Richard, then me.”

“One point,” the Bright said. “This is my rule.”

“And when I got hypnotized, it ... broke the rule?”

“I and Others,” the Bright said. “No two sleep the same Waking Sleep. The Blue One is always in the Waking Sleep. I am never.”

“That’s why you’re broken,” Emma said. “Michael Night said the wrong thing while I was under, and I became a bad Locus.”

The Bright said, ”YES—

“Richard spoke to me,” Emma murmured. She was still bent double at the waist, and Michael Night had to do the same, leaning in close to hear what she was saying. “He spoke to me and I passed out.”

Michael Night knew he was close. There was a secret locked away in that mind, something that would help him understand hypnosis in the way he needed to do. He no longer cared about having sex with her, getting her number, or even seeing her again. All he cared about was the Perfect Trance: she had experienced it once, and he would learn the secret before the night was out.

“What did he say to you, Emma?” Michael said.

“Can’t,” Emma murmured. “Can’t.”

“You can, Emma.” Michael no longer tried to keep the urgency out of his voice. She was too deep to be made nervous by his tone of voice. A bomb could have gone off in the room, and she would not have been made nervous. “You can remember. What did Richard say to you?”

“Can’t.” Emma gave her head a slight shake.

Michael Night leaned forward, and without realizing that he was doing so, took his own life. “Emma, I want you to let go completely. It would help me so much if you let go completely. Take a deep breath in, and as you let it out, let go of everything but the words that Richard said to you.”

The words began pouring out of Emma’s mouth, nonsense words in a nonsense language as far as Michael could tell. In fact they were like listening to an internet transmission over a phone line. Michael’s vision flashed over white as it hit him, eons of data, universes of data, all of it painting a picture that his brain was beyond understanding, a picture of a Titan that straddled dimensions, who was not a physical presence in the room only because matter itself could not describe its immensity, whose size could not be measured by any mathematics in a thousand millennia.

Michael Night grabbed the lime knife off of the dressing table and drove it into his own neck at the same moment that nearly three-quarters of his brain tissue spontaneously combusted. What was left of him staggered out of the room, blindly feeling its way to its final resting place in the back alley.

Emma Williams spoke the words for a full two minutes. No one entered the room during that time, which was fortunate, as any entrant’s mind would have been instantly annihilated. Then, Emma sat peacefully in trance for about a half hour, before rising to her feet, trudging out of the bar, and beginning the hunt for a phone that she could use to call the police. She was so deeply entranced that she had forgotten about her own cell phone; a few hours later, her subconscious realized she could call the police with it.

Emma lurched out of the chair as though every muscle in her body was in spasm. She screamed, a horror-movie firebell that she had spent her entire college theater career practicing, with the hope of getting a Drew-Barrymore-in-Scream sort of role after graduating.

At the front door, Jay Chen heard this scream and drew his service weapon. He began buzzing every apartment in the building, until he could find one which would respond to the phrase, “Police emergency!”

LaTanya Marsh said and did nothing. Her mind remained completely blank.

“Oh, goddamn it,” Emma sighed, when she felt like she could talk again, and she realized that she was back in the living room with the not-cop and Tanya. “How do I fix it? How do I fucking fix it?”

“I am broken,” the not-cop said. She now knew what had happened to him: nothing but dumb luck. It could have been any cop investigating the crime scene, but the shard of Bright that still inhabited the crime scene had picked him, had turned him into a malfunctioning Locus. She also knew that physically, he was a disaster; on top of the fact that he would surely lose at least eight of his ten toes, his efforts to resist the command to shoot the cops had done significant damage to his brain.

She knew all of this, but could not fix it. Tanya would be next, then one of her co-workers, or one of their neighbors, or one of their other friends.

Wait, what about Tanya? She hasn’t been back to the crime scene since the breaking. How’d she get like this?

Tanya had been acting weird ever since Emma had first used the “Imporvement” video to trance herself. It was the hypnosis which did it, that caused the Bright to escape. It had been worst for Michael Night because he had made the foolish suggestion to “let go completely,” and bad for the cop because he had been close to the place where it had happened. Tanya had gotten off relatively easy.

Does that mean I just turned another person into a crappy Locus just now?

Someone pounded on the front door, closed fist against the wood. This happened from time to time, a UPS or FedEx driver would get let in by someone leaving at the same time, and Emma never failed to jump out of her skin when a person knocked without using the buzzer. This time it was even worse, the sound booming through the apartment like explosions, and Emma kicked divots into the rug with her heels, trying to get away from it. “Jesus!”

“Police emergency!” A voice shouted on the other side of the door. “Open up!”

Emma looked at Tanya, still standing by the door. On top of the sound, the door was rattling in its frame with each knock, and her hand was still on the knob. But she did not move, nor show signs of noticing anything at all.

“Police emergency! Open up NOW!”

If he kicks in that door, Tanya’s going to get hurt bad, Emma thought. And judging from how the not-cop is acting, she won’t much care. This thought finally spurred her into motion. She jumped up and went to Tanya, moving her slowly and gently away from the door and into the small hallway that led to the bedrooms. Tanya made no acknowledgement of her presence, but Emma murmured to her anyway, “There we go ... just over here ... while I fix this thing...“

In the hall, Chen had decided that, if he was wrong about O’Reilly being in the apartment, it no longer mattered. ”Open the fucking door, Ray!”

“Ray,” Emma echoed, looking at the not-cop standing like a statue. “You’re Ray.”

The not-cop did not answer. The Bright probably did not know the name, and even if she could get the Bright out of him, the man might not have enough brain power left to remember it.

With Tanya standing in the hall, Emma ran back to the front door. She attached the chain, and opened the door four inches. “Stop pounding on the door! You’re fucking freaking me out!”

“Detective Chen, Chicago Police, ma’am,” Jay Chen said. He spoke in a low, urgent voice, leaning close to the door gap. He was gripping his pistol in both hands, the barrel pointed directly at the floor. “I have reason to believe—”

“—There’s a cop in my apartment right now,” Emma cut him off. “He ... told me ... that he killed two other cops. I think he might have had a stroke or some other brain damage. He’s armed, but not pointing the gun at anyone, so come in quietly, you understand? I don’t want anyone to get shot by accident.”

“Uh...” Chen was at a loss for words. The PD had actually trained him for situations like this. Citizens are going to try to negotiate with you, the instructor had said, but you can’t let them. Nine times out of ten they’re just trying to buy time for their friend to get away. You enforce the law, you set the terms.

But this woman didn’t look like she was aiding a getaway. The look in her eyes was one that he had seen in a lot of terrified Iraqi grandmothers: the fear that she was caught up in something much bigger than herself, and how easily that behemoth could kill her or her loved ones without even meaning to.

Chen holstered his gun. “Okay,” he said. “Let me in. I need to see him.”

Emma closed the door, removed the chain, and re-opened the door. Chen entered, and as soon as he saw the not-cop standing by the dining table, made a bee-line for him. “Give me the gun, Ray.”

Emma saw that Chen was bare-handed. Like a lot of ex-military cops, he was distrustful of gloves and thought they could fuck up the handling of one’s weapon. “Don’t touch him!”

Chen took the gun from Ray’s hand, putting it into his coat pocket. “Why?”

Emma stared at him. The ... shock, or whatever it was, that happed to me. He didn’t get one. “Uh ... no reason, I guess. I was worried that he would get violent.“

“What the fuck, Ray?” Chen said, moving around the not-cop’s body until he could look the taller man in the eye. “What the fuck have you done?“

“I am broken,” the voice of Bright said.

Chen staggered backward as though punched in the face. His back hit the wall, hard. He said, “Wha?” After gasping in a few breaths, he said it again. “Wha? Wha?”

“I told you,” Emma said. “His brain is damaged.”

“That’s not brain damage,” Chen said. One hand was on his pistol, but he had not drawn. He was looking at O’Reilly as though he was about to, though. “That’s ... I don’t know what that is, but it’s not brain damage.”

“If I told you what it actually was, you’d never believe it,” Emma said. “But trust me, his brain has been damaged by it.”

Chen looked at her. “You’re Emma Williams.”

“Yes.”

“I was coming here to question you about a murder in Lincoln Park on Friday night,” Chen said. “I think, in some way, Ray came here for that, too.”

“It wasn’t a murder,” Emma said. “It was suicide. I was there.”

“People don’t commit suicide by stabbing themselves in the neck,” Chen said.

“He did,” Emma said.

“Explain,” Chen said. “Tell me something I can give to the Chief of Detectives. Something that explains how you supposedly know what’s wrong with Ray.”

Emma sighed. There was too much to say. “I think I’m a sort of psychic,” she said. “But I can’t control it. When Michael Night hypnotized me in his dressing room, whatever energy I’m in touch with, it just lashed out at the first person in the room. It destroyed his mind. He killed himself just to end his misery. Then, when that cop investigated the scene, some remnant of that energy hit him too.”

There was more she could have said—for example, that Ray’s strange actions, including the murder of the police, were driven by the Bright’s single-minded desire to reunite itself with its Locus—but she could already tell that the stripped-down version of the story that she was telling was not going over well with the detective.

“Look, I’ve talked to a lot of liars,” Chen said. “I think that you think you’re telling the truth. But two police are dead. If I go to my boss with ‘a sort-of psychic had an accident,’ I’ll get fired and you’ll go to jail.“

“The evidence is going to back me up,” Emma said. “I never touched the knife the hypnotist used to kill himself.”

“You could have been wearing gloves.”

“I’ve never met this man in my life. Why would he kill two cops and then come here?”

“Just because Ray lost his shit while investigating your case, doesn’t mean you’re not a murderer.”

“Michael Night had a major stroke, just like your friend Ray did. You do some kind of medical exam, you’ll see it. How would I know that?”

“It’s a coincidence. You’re not going to walk on a coincidence.”

Marsh’s Law, Emma wanted to say, No coincidences. But of course Tanya was in no condition to back her up. And then Emma realized what she was going to have to do.

“Look at my roommate,” she said, gesturing towards the hallway. “What happened to this cop happened to her, too. She’s lucky it was at a smaller scale. You want to throw me in jail, fine. But I need to fix this, first.”

“You can fix,” the voice of Bright said.

Chen jumped to hear that eerie voice. Emma, used to it by now, did not. Chen looked back to her and said, “Fix it? How do you plan to fix it?”

“Michael Night said something to me, while I was tranced. It caused me to lose control. And Tanya started acting strangely after I tranced myself again, to try to remember what happened. But just before you came in here, I was in trance again, and I remembered more. You were the closest person, and you didn’t get weird.”

“So?”

Emma walked over to the hallway. “I was touching your partner when it happened.”

“Wait, what are you talking about?”

Emma, from where Tanya was standing, looked back at him. “This is not going to make sense to you. So either arrest me and him both, or come over here and help me.”

Emma began guiding Tanya from the hall over to the dining table. “That’s right, just a few more steps,” Emma murmured. She did not know that Tanya had tried the same thing with her the night before, when she had been sleepwalking, but she would not have been surprised to find out. She positioned Tanya on the other side of the chair where she had been sitting for the trance. Tanya and the not-cop were now flanking that chair, knights guarding the throne of the King of IKEA.

“I’m going to sit down, and put myself into a trance,” Emma told the detective. “It shouldn’t be difficult. I’ve gone under like a half-dozen times in the past three days. When I stop counting, take their hands and make them touch me. Skin to skin, you understand?”

“I can’t believe I’m participating in this,” Chen said.

“Are you going to arrest me?”

Chen just looked at her. None of the physical tells of the liar were there. And he remembered the crime scene tech saying, I’ve seen spatter like this a thousand times, from suicides that drop the knife they just used.

“Then watch, and wait,” Emma said. “Remember, wait until I stop counting.”

Emma did not want to play the YouTube video again; she was concerned that the video, combined with the power of being the Locus, would put Chen under as well. Instead, she sat in the chair and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath in, and let it out slowly. You’re playing a character, she thought. And your character is asleep.

She remembered seeing classmates nod off during college classes. Their heads always bobbed gently. She took another deep breath in, and as she let it out, she let her neck muscles loosen up. Deep, sound sleep. No one should be able to tell that you’re awake.

Deep breath in, and out. She’d played asleep a few times on the show. She imagined a director saying, Entire body limp and loose, June’s just going to carry you off to bed.

Deep breath in, and out. Emma’s head sank down as she thought, You’re fast asleep as June carries you up the stairs. How many stairs are there?

“Ten,” she murmured aloud.

Emma could feel the thump as June took the step. She had always gone slowly when carrying Emma; June had not been the athletic type, certainly not a weight lifter, and dropping the show’s namesake would be a good way to get drummed out of show business. “Nine.”

Limp and loose. Thump. June’s grip was so comfortable. Unlike Richard, June was not a smoker, so her skin was always warm and she always smelled good. “Eight.“

Everyone thinks you’re asleep. Thump. “Suh. Seven.“

You think you’re asleep. Thump. “Sssssix.“

Emma did not feel the next step. She was sound asleep, after all. And then two warm hands were laid against the sides of her neck—

Chen saw all three of the other people in the room react to the flesh contact, almost instantaneously. Emma sat bolt upright, throwing her head back, as though studying the light fixture in the ceiling. The two figures next to her snapped to, like soldiers saluting, except their free hands remained at their sides, clenched in fists so tight that the cords and veins in their wrists stood out. All three of them made agonized grunts, as though they were trying to lift something impossibly heavy.

Hearing their painful-sounding exertions, Chen stepped forward to break the contact. A large, warm hand seemed to palm his face and chest, lifting him off his feet and throwing him across the room. His head connected with the side of the coffee table on the way down, and his lights went out.

Emma was on the cliff again. The Bright was there, the same height and build as Richard Harrison, but glowing so intensely that it was impossible to tell who the supernatural creature was impersonating.

“Okay,” Emma said. “I’m here. I’m ready. How do we fix it?”

—Flash of image in her mind: a brick being thrown through a plate-glass window. The glass turned into a thousand shards and pebbles, scattered across the floor, impossible to reassemble even with all the glue in the world.

“I don’t accept that,” Emma said. “There are only three shards here. We can put them back together.”

—Flash of an image: a sledgehammer coming down onto the brick, exploding it into dust, the largest particle no larger than her little fingernail.

“No!” Emma shouted. “We gather up the fucking dust, water it down, turn it into clay, shape it and heat it up until it’s a brick again! Whatever you have to do, I’ll do it! Anything!”

“I hunger,” the Bright said.

“That’s more like it,” Emma said. “What do you need from me? What do I feed you with?”

“I do not remember,” the Bright said. “I am broken.”

Emma looked away in frustration. The Pacific Ocean waved back, stretching off into infinity. “Shit,” she said. “How the hell does someone forget how to eat? Just go to a restaurant and watch...”

She looked at the Bright again. “You said there were Others,” she said, unconsciously giving the word proper-noun status in the same way that the Bright had done. “What do they eat?”

“No two are the same,” the Bright said.

“Come on,” Emma said. “If I’m gonna be your Locus again, you gotta work with me here. Last time you talked about a Blue One, he’s always in trance. What does he eat?”

“His is the Power of Possibility,” the Bright said.

Emma was flummoxed by that. How do you eat possibility? But time was wasting; she couldn’t spend all day down the rabbit hole of that question. “Okay,” she said instead. “So is there one who is just like you, but the opposite? A Night One or a Black One or...“

“The Dark One.”

“Yeah, okay.” Of course there would be no guarantee that the Bright fed on the exact opposite emotion as the Dark. It seemed like Saturday morning cartoon logic. But she didn’t have any better plan. Might as well take the shot. “And what does the Dark One feed on?”

“His is the Power of Resentment.”

“Resentment, okay,” Emma said. She was lucky, she had landed on an emotion that had an opposite, more or less. “So what about, uh, contentment? The Power of Contentment? Sound yummy to you?”

“I do not remember,” the Bright said. “I am broken.”

Well, you’re no fucking help, Emma thought. I guess that’s why you were just hiding out in my mind for ten years. “Look, if I tried to feed you with contentment, how would I do it?“

“I do not remember,” the Bright said. “I am broken.”

“God damn it,” Emma muttered.

Just think of a time when you were really content. No, not just you. That’s a small meal for a giant like him, not enough to put himself back together from being broken. Give him a banquet. Think of a time when you made lots and lots of people feel content.

The show, of course. Emma closed her eyes (in the metaphorical sense; in the real world, her eyes had remained closed this entire time) and imagined stacks and stacks of envelopes of fan mail. She would sign a hundred headshots at a time, to be given to girls her own age that she would meet at conventions and shopping mall events. Facebook had been too young to be a thing in those days, but she’d seem the e-mail account for fan mail once; it had ten thousand messages, despite being cleaned out daily.

Eyes still closed, Emma asked, “How’s that?”

“I feel nothing,” the Bright said. “I hunger.”

“Shit!” Maybe it doesn’t feed on contentment after all, Emma thought, as she opened her eyes again. But if that’s the case, we’ll never figure it out, because I could just go on naming random emotions until Chen arrests me, and never hit the right one. No, stay with contentment for now. Why would the show not work?

Well, for one thing, she had never personally witnessed all those people being content with the show. Maybe the Bright needed some of that personal touch. Then it occurred to her that she hadn’t been connected to the Bright until right before the show ended. Maybe it could only be repaired with contentment from the time she had been the Locus.

My college graduation? There were lots of content people there, even if I wasn’t personally responsible for them...

In realizing that her graduation was the wrong choice, Emma knew immediately what the right one would be. She was linked to Tanya, and between what Tanya had witnessed and what her own subconscious had recorded, the memories flooded back.

Emma walked up to the Bright, said, “Try this,” and took its glowing hand—

Emma sat in her chair, on stage at the Laugh Riot. Her eyes were closed, her chin resting on her chest. She thought she was as deeply relaxed as she had ever been in her life, but now she knew that was because she had forgotten her previous experience with hypnosis.

A weight landed on her shoulder. “Speaking only to the woman I’m touching on the shoulder,” Michael Night’s voice said. His voice was the only sound in the room that mattered. “In a moment I’m going to count to three. On three, you eyes will open and you’ll be able to talk to me, but you won’t be able to remember your name.”

Just like the episode where Virginia West had amnesia, Emma thought dreamily.

“On three, it will be like your name is on the tip of your tongue but you can not remember it. Eyes opening in one, two, three.”

Emma opened her eyes. The room seemed odd, as though filled with a light haze. Her arms and legs were still heavy as lead.

“Hey there, sleepyhead,” the voice said, and at once Emma’s entire consciousness seemed to tunnel in on where that voice had come from. Michael Night was standing near her chair, looking down at her, and she looked up at him, a student eager to please the teacher. “How are you doing?”

“Good,” Emma said.

“Feeling really relaxed?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well,” Michael Night said, “You’re going to be up here for a little while, let’s give the audience a chance to get to know you. What’s your name?” He stuck his handheld microphone in her face, as though punctuating his question with it.

Emma’s mind went blank. She did not look confused, like the guy who had been told to forget the number seven; she looked like her brain had stopped working. Several audience members began to laugh.

“Sorry, I missed that,” Michael Night said dryly, and more audience members began to laugh. Emma ignored them. The hypnotist’s voice was all that mattered. “What’s your name?”

Emma almost remembered it—she knew that she had written it on her college application, for God’s sake—but her mind went blank again. “Can’t,” she murmured.

“Cant? Your name is Cant? Or is it Kant, like the philosopher?” The audience laughed harder.

Emma murmured, “Dunno.”

“I have it on good authority that your name is Emma,” the hypnotist said. Tanya had told him, speaking into the microphone after he had first told Emma to sleep. “Does that sound right?”

Emma’s mind remained blank. Thinking was like trying to drink a frozen milkshake through a straw. “Dunno.”

“Let me make you a deal, Emma,” the hypnotist said. He reached into a jacket pocket and produced a one-dollar bill, which he held up so that the closest tables to the stage could see it clearly. “I’ve got a one-hundred-dollar bill right here for you.”

Emma blinked, and saw that the bill was in fact a hundred, one of the new ones with the weird design. Benjamin Franklin smiled back at her.

“I’ve got a hundred-dollar-bill here for you, Emma, and all you have to do is tell me your name, Emma. How much money could you get for telling me your name, Emma?”

“Hundred bucks,” she said, so slowly that even the word bucks seemed to have many syllables.

“Yup, you got it. So what’s your name, Emma?”

Emma stared at the bill for a full ten seconds. Benjamin Franklin looked back at her, with a smile as mysterious as the Mona Lisa’s. The audience laughter swelled the entire time, while Emma ignored them. Finally, she shook her head slowly.

“Come on, Emma. Tell me your name and you get this bill. Don’t you want this bill, Emma?”

Emma nodded, slowly. Who wouldn’t want a hundred bucks?

“So tell me your name, Emma.”

In mid-nod, Emma switched to shaking her head slowly. The audience roared.

“Well, that’s too bad,” Michael Night said, returning the bill to his pocket. “I guess you should SLEEP—”

Instead of plunging into darkness as she had before, the stage lights seemed to explode, brighter and brighter, like stars going into supernova, until Emma’s vision had washed over with white, the light in her eyes and brain and spine all at once. A great Voice, hers and not hers, said, “I AM BRIGHT.”

When LaTanya Marsh opened her eyes, it was nighttime outside, and there were only two other people in her apartment.

One of the two was Ray O’Reilly. He was dead. The autopsy would reveal that he had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, one so severe that police-watchdog activists found it impossible to believe that he had traveled anywhere in the city after having it, as the CPD claimed he had. Ballistics proved that O’Reilly had fired the gun that had killed the two uniformed cops at the gas station, and in death he was utterly disgraced.

The other was Jay Chen. He had woken only a few minutes before Tanya did, and was calling for backup. Though he would be cleared of wrongdoing in the events of that day, he quickly became a pariah in the department; he had significant gaps in his story, to avoid having to talk about the supernatural things he had seen, and many police assumed he was trying to cover for a significant fuckup. Less than a year passed before Chen quit the department and joined a non-profit that tried to assist former police and military with the effects of mental illness.

An autopsy would reveal that Michael Night had suffered some sort of cataclysmic cerebral event just prior to his death, as Emma claimed he had. Conspiracy theorists would try to blame several people, particularly Emma Williams, for his death, but in the end it was ruled a suicide.

The disappearance of Emma Williams proved to be the biggest story from that day. It was not exactly a missing-persons case, because her roommate insisted she had left the apartment of her own volition. But Emma had packed no belongings, and spoken to no police other than Jay Chen, prior to leaving. These facts, plus the fact that there were so many connections between a child star and a high-profile murder case, became like catnip for the internet. To this day there are stories on Reddit of random meetings with Emma Williams in places like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or Reno, Nevada. These stories often claim that Emma hypnotized the storytellers, leaving their memories of the encounter vague, but also leaving them as content as they had ever felt in their lives.

When Tanya was able to get to her feet, and walk on wobbly legs into her bedroom, she found a hand-written note waiting for her on her pillow. She read it, and then tearfully burned it. It said:

T.

I fixed it, but I still have to live with what happened. Four people will be dead by the time this is through. And it was a part of ME that killed them. I am its Locus, and I know how it sees us. We’re very small, in its eyes.

It could have been you. It could have been Travis, when he hypnotized me all those years ago. Both of you heard the words. It was just dumb luck that enough power wasn’t behind them at the time. I can’t live with you, knowing how close you came.

That’s why I have to leave. I need to figure out how it works, having this thing in my head. Tell my parents that I love them.

I want you to know one thing: None of this is your fault. You were as good a friend to me as I could have asked for.

E.

The whereabouts of Emma Williams remain unknown.