The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

She stood at the sink, scrubbing some carrots for dinner and staring out the window, over the ruthlessly pruned green shrubs of the landscaping.

Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed. Footsteps came clicking slowly closer, along the tiles of the duplex’s hallway. She turned, still holding one of the orange vegetables.

Penny came into the kitchen, saw her and flashed a quick smile.

“Hey, Vi.”

“Pen. How was the date?”

Penny put her purse down on the round kitchen table and shrugged off her long coat before answering. She slopped the garment over the back of a chair and absently rubbed her temple.

“Um... fine. It was fine.”

“Great!” Vi tried to sound sincere even in light of Penny’s obvious lack of enthusiasm. She decided not to probe any further and went back to her scrubbing. There was a long silence, filled only with the sound of the running water, then...

“Vi?”

She turned again. Penny was still standing in the same place, looking at her with a strange expression.

“Yes?”

“You...” Penny shifted her gaze to the frosted overhead light, her rather thin pale hands absently fiddling with each other. “...You dated Larry a couple of times... didn’t you?”

“You know I did.”

“And you’re not mad that now I’m...”

“No, of course not. You’re welcome to him. That’s over and done with.”

“Good. I mean, I’m glad you’re not... What I was sorta wondering is... when you and he were dating, did he... did he ever...” She trailed off and swallowed. Vi waited with raised black eyebrows. “...you know...”

“No, Pen, I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Did he take... take you back to his place... and... you know... show you his etchings?” The blonde woman was nearly whispering these last words.

Vi’s eyebrows went up a couple of notches and she gave an incredulous laugh.

“Etchings? ‘Show me his etchings’? Pen, are you asking me if Larry and I ever fucked?”

“NO!” Penny shook her head, a crinkly fizz of hair. “I’m asking if he ever took you back to his place... and showed you his etchings.” Her cheeks flushed a little.

“No. Pen, I don’t have a clue what the hell you are talking about.”

“You’re sure?” There was almost a note of pleading in this.

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Oh. OK.” Penny passed a hand in front of her eyes. “I’m... I’ll be taking a bath. I’m dirty.” She left the room.

Vi watched her go then went back to work, shaking her head.

A minute or two later she stopped and put down the carrot. Again she stared out the window, listening to the water spiral down the rust-webbed drain. Outside a robin-sized bird flew into view and landed on the chain-link fence that separated their half of the duplex from the Eastside Apartments next door. A thrush or something. Her eyes rested on the creature as it perched and sang, but she didn’t really see it. Her ears didn’t hear it. She absently drummed her fingers against the steel of the sink.

-Etchings.—

Sure, Larry had been an artist of sorts, presumably still was, and she had of course seen some of his work. Endured some of his work, really, before they had broken up. Before it had been over and done with. But she couldn’t recall seeing any etchings.

-Hell. I’m not even sure what an etching is.—

Etchings.

Endured.

Some of it really had been pretty bad, hadn’t it? This time, she almost snatched up the carrot. Not bad in the ‘poorly executed’ sense, but gruesome. She twisted the carrot in her hands. Larry definitely had a morbid streak. She started scrubbing furiously. Especially those ones that he kept over at his place...

His place.

Did you see his etchings?

She hurled the carrot down, turned off the water with a vicious twist and stomped out of the kitchen into the hall. The bathroom door was open, and the room beyond was empty. Next to it, Penny’s bedroom door was closed and Vi hesitated for a moment before lifting her hand and tapping on the wood panel with her knuckles.

“Pen? You in there?”

After a moment the door opened and Penny stepped out, now wearing her faded blue bathrobe. Her apartment-mate could get un- and re-dressed faster than anyone Vi had ever known. Penny smiled.

“Yes?”

“Look, Pen, about those... um...” She rubbed the side of her forehead absently with her fingertips... “...etchings of Larry’s...”

“Etchings?”

“The ones... the ones that... you know... you said he showed you.”

Penny stared blankly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Vi stared back.

“Pen, you just asked me about them. Not five minutes ago. In the kitchen.”

“I don’t know anything about any etchings.” Penny moved past her, heading for the bathroom. Vi grabbed her upper arm, maybe a bit harder than she had intended.

“Penny! What the hell is going on here?!”

“Let go of me, you bitch! I said I don’t know anything about any etchings!” Penny tore free and almost ran into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind her. Vi stood there, her hand clutching empty air like a bird’s claw.

“Penny?” She tried to say the word, but nothing came. The door to the bathroom swung slowly open again; it never did latch properly unless you pushed it shut just right... Penny was bending over the bathroom sink, holding its porcelain sides with both hands and trembling, as if she was vomiting into it, or had been, or was about to... Vi shuffled closer, reaching out with both hands now. “Penny?”

Penny slowly looked over at her, her anger gone as quickly as it had come, replaced with something new.

Fear?

Something worse?

“I don’t know anything about any etchings.” She almost chanted the words, like a mantra.

Somehow Vi forced a smile.

“OK, baby. No etchings.” Why was it such an incredible relief to say that? “But something’s wrong. Something’s horribly wrong. What did that bastard do to you?”

“Bastard?” Penny’s tear-stained eyes went blank with puzzlement again. Frighteningly blank. “Who? What bastard?”

“Larry! He did something to you. On your date. Penny! He didn’t rape you, did he?”

“Of course not!” Penny’s voice had a strange and ghastly earnestness to it. Above the mouth that put out the words, the eyes were doing, saying, something else entirely. Not a denial, not exactly... “The date was fine.”

Vi took a slow careful step closer, both physically and mentally. She was wading through molasses.

“But the two of you went back to his place?”

Back to my place.

In the back.

See my etchings.

“Yes. I...” Penny frowned. “... yes.”

“And what... what...” Vi’s throat seemed to be closing up on her; she had to fight to get the words out. “... what did you do there?”

“Nothing. He didn’t show me any etchings.” She rubbed her temple.

Vi had to fight down a sudden almost irresistible impulse to smile widely, say in a sincerely chipper voice ‘Great!’ and stroll briskly back into the kitchen to finish making dinner.

The sound of running water. She looked around and she screamed.

She hadn’t fought it off at all. She was standing in the kitchen, at the sink. She stood very still for a very long time.

Etchings.

Lovely etchings on all of the walls.

Memories came back, not all of them, but some. Enough to begin to piece them together in ragged broken chains.

She remembered Larry’s etchings, and she thought about them for quite a while.

Finally she moved with careful deliberation, walking slowly into the living room and sliding open the glass door to their small backyard patio. She stepped out onto the concrete, into the light drizzle of the evening. She circled the bare picnic table, walked to the very edge of the concrete and came to halt, the white toes of her sneakers sticking out into the clipped grass. Another long pause. In a single vicious movement, she hurled away the carrot she was holding with all of her strength. It sailed through the air, hit the fence with a small clanking thud and fell out of sight behind the shrubs.

Vi turned and walked slowly back inside the house, holding her clenched hands at her sides. Leaving the door standing open behind her, leaving the water running in the sink, she marched down the hallway, which stretched endlessly before her. The sound of additional running water now came from the bathroom. She made a sharp right turn into her own bedroom, moving to the oak end-table sitting beside her bed. She yanked open its top drawer and she fumbled around inside, pushing aside the old receipts and the ointment jars and the bits of torn white wrapper. Finally, her grasping fingers closed around something cold and slick.

Vi pulled the gun into the light. Her hand trembled only a little; the feel of the weapon’s metal was both soothing and empowering. She remembered buying the gun in a nearby shop, remembered her long sessions down at the local firing range, punching clusters of neat holes in black paper targets. She smiled. Other memories came, filling in more of the holes in the chains. A dark room, in the back, with a heavy door...

Back out into the hall. Back to the bathroom. This time, she kicked open the door.

Penny looked up with a start, her eyes wide. She was bent over the tub, adding her usual healthy glop of bubble-bath fluid. The white tube slipped from her hand and disappeared beneath the foaming water.

“Vi? What’s wrong?”

Don’t have to show the etchings at all.

They’re all over the walls.

Another urge. A horrible all-consuming urge to smile and reply ‘Nothing!’ and put the gun back in the drawer and go back to her fucking stupid carrots yet again. Maybe taking time to vomit herself. This time she overrode it, really overrode it. With a sort of feverish casualness, she shifted the gun and the hand holding it behind her body so that both were out of Penny’s sight.

“We’re going for a little drive.”

They rode together in absolute silence through the moderately heavy traffic. Penny huddled in the corner of the passenger seat, still in her bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. She stared at Vi like a doe on a freeway, pinned down by the lights of an oncoming semi. Vi drove hunched over the wheel, her knuckles white. She held the gun between her long jeans-clad legs. Finally, tremulously, Penny spoke:

“Vi?”

No answer.

“Vi? Where... where are you... where are we going?”

A single quick glance, then back to the street and the bumper of the small yellow car trundling along in front of them. Through the rain and the intermittent flick of the windshield wipers, Vi read the license plate and the bumper stickers. 423 FRD. CTHULHU FOR PRESIDENT. DOCTOR FANG LIVES.

“We have a little errand to run.”

“But what? Vi, you’re scaring me!”

No answer.

Penny huddled back further, her eyes glazing over a little.

It had been a long time since Vi had been by Larry’s place...

-has it? How long has it been, really?—

Etchings. Etchings all over the walls, in the back, in the dark room.

-How did we come to break up?—

-How did he come to meet Penny?—

...but she was able to remember the route. He lived in an older part of the city, somewhat south and west of their duplex, which was currently undergoing a rapid yuppification process; block after block of large old warehouses being turned into upscale loft-apartments and disgustingly trendy little shops. There was lots of construction and scaffolding and flapping blue plastic everywhere, giving everything a slightly surreal, even arty, appearance as the last of the day’s light faded away.

Not all the memories were back.

-Did we ever break up?—

-How did we meet in the first place?—

The last turn, onto a short dead-end street. Larry’s place was the last in the row. Vi pulled the car to a stop in one of the few empty slots outside the building, between another drab econobox and a large maroon van with a silver spiderweb painted on the side. The cracked concrete structure was one of the last holdouts of the older times in the area, and Vi wondered for a moment how Larry was able to hang onto it.

But maybe that wasn’t so hard to figure out after all.

He had his etchings.

A dark room, beyond the door.

Penny looked around and came back to life as if a switch had been thrown somewhere.

“Are we visiting Larry?”

“Yes.” Vi pushed open her door and got out of the car.

“Oh! Why didn’t you just say so?” Penny got out as well, cheerful and smiling again.

Passing through the front door of the building, they silently climbed the wide shallow steps side by side. Larry lived up on the second floor.

-We’ve walked like this before. Up these stairs together.—

Beyond the stairs, a hallway. The hallway terminated by a large metal door, which slid on oiled rollers. There was an electronic lock attached to the door, complete with a keypad and a microphone/loudspeaker. Without hesitation, Vi yanked on the stained door handle, and to her only vague surprise, after a momentary click it slid smoothly open; the lock wasn’t engaged.

“What are you doing? We have to knock!”

Vi marched in, dragging Penny along in her wake as a large riverboat would pull a spinning leaf.

“I want to surprise him.”

The room beyond was exactly as she remembered it, as if she had only been there yesterday.

-And maybe... No. Don’t think that. Not now.—

It was a large space with a wild array of items cluttered under a high ceiling. It was as if the whole thing had never stopped being a warehouse and Larry was just squatting there, living around the fringes. Square wooden crates of various sizes were stacked everywhere in sloppy piles like giant building blocks, while half-painted canvases leaned against them at drunken angles, showing slivers of thin tall men in dark suits and giant mushrooms and red-eyed skulls. Along one wall under the high painted windows stood a neat row of enormous steel drums, like those used for the storage of toxic waste, all tightly sealed. At one end of the drums and shoved tight against the wall was a cot, with a single gray blanket neatly folded. Numerous large constructions of wood and paper, elaborate kites perhaps, swung from thick black wires overhead. Opposite the drums was ranged an extensive computer setup with multiple screens, hooked into among other several things a large video camera on a tripod. The camera’s glass snout was pointed at an enormous black painting which sat on a wooden easel. Beyond all of this stood shelf after grey metal shelf, all filled with videotapes, each plastic case marked with a neat red spiderweb logo. In the very center of the room loomed an enormous piece of stone sculpture, a highly polished gray sphere, rippled with thick streaks of white.

A woman, much more slender than either Vi or Penny, abruptly emerged from between two of the crate-piles, silent on the worn wooden floorboards in her bare feet. She had long kinky hair, even darker than Vi’s. In addition to carrying a broom, she wore the ragged remains of a T-shirt and a tattered pair of denim cutoffs. She and her clothes and the broom were heavily splattered with several different colors of paint. Seeing the two of them, she started to say something, then caught sight of Vi’s gun. Her brown eyes widened, and her words died unspoken. Vi’s voice filled the resulting space, very flat and grim.

“Where is he?”

She didn’t even wait for an answer, but marched on, effortlessly brushing the staring woman and her broom aside. As she had been doing ever since stepping away from the sink for the second time, she was running headlong down a narrow unlit tunnel, just ahead of some rumbling torrent which lapped hungrily at her heels. If she stopped now, she would be instantly sucked under and drowned.

Besides, she already knew where Larry would be.

He would be with his damn etchings.

In the back.

Yes. In the back. The room was in the very back of the maze of crates, tucked away in a remote corner/dead end, much like the building itself.

Behind a door.

She remembered it very well now, it was all coming back to her as she unerringly threaded her way through the mess. Inside it was dark and warm and thickly padded, the walls and the floor and the ceiling heavy and soundproofed. Inside... inside was...

She was there.

Without hesitation she yanked open the battered wooden door, and the light and the sounds came pouring out, along with the wet cloying warmth, eager intangible tentacles wrapping themselves around her body. She gagged a little and stepped in, raising the gun and clicking off the safety.

-You’ll only get one chance. Don’t let him talk. Don’t let him even look at you...—

Like always in this room, 24 hours a day, it was darkest midnight and the etchings were flashing and twisting on all of the walls and the ceiling, projected in from somewhere. Swirls and loops and blotches, giant bloody fingerprints, blossoming up from nothing and smearing themselves all over everything, draping their nets across surfaces and then cutting into them, leaving behind pus-filled grooves that slashed themselves deeper and deeper.

Etchings.

Further in, and there was a woman kneeling in the very center of the floor, inside the blood-red ring, her sweater and jeans and underclothes and the rest stacked in a neatly folded pile beside her, her knees spread apart, her arms clicked back in a way that was almost painful, her head tipped all the way back, her dark hair spilling down in a sweaty wave. She stared up at the shapes disfiguring the ceiling, her mouth hanging open, her flesh crawling and burning and her wide hazel eyes rapidly glazing as the etchings cut deeper and deeper into her mind.

She was utterly naked and paralyzed. The tattooed spiderweb brand glowed poison-red on her hip.

She tried to scream, tried to remember where the gun had gone, tried to remember why she had ever decided to come to this place.

The door swung itself shut and slid shut its collection of heavy steel bolts. Click click click.

A long moment of crimson-streaked silence. Then there was cool sardonic laughter from somewhere far overhead, in the endless blackness that was the heart of the spinning gore-soaked strands, and the nameless woman on the floor trembled all over, otherwise remaining quite motionless. She truly remembered everything now. She remembered that it had been Larry’s idea that she buy the gun. Vi had hated guns. It had been his idea to buy it, along with the garotte and the knives and the sex toys, and then learn how to use them all... And more then just learn...

But most of all, she remembered now that the owner of all of this never ever came into the room with his lovely, hateful etchings. Only his women, his sluts, looked at the etchings. He was off in his heavily fortified control room behind layers of cameras and mounted guns and securely locked doors, as he always had been when she had brought him new women to enslave, as she had been brought to him so long ago by a friend with long kinky hair. He was there now, she could see him clearly, sitting in his comfortable high-backed leather chair in front of his wide multitude of monitors and controls, a tall cool drink in his hand, a naked slavegirl who had once been named Penny kneeling down in the specially-shaped space between his legs, ecstatically taking his wonderful thick warm cock in between her lucky, lucky slut-lips.

The woman trapped inside the red ring whined in the back of her throat. She had been that woman, had filled that space. Not nearly as much or as often as she had wanted, had desperately needed and craved, but she had been there, oh yes, endlessly sucking and licking and sucking and swallowing while he smiled and casually chopped yet another one of her friends’ mind to tiny bits with his computerized razors.

He finished laughing. He spoke. She didn’t understand the words, wasn’t allowed to understand the words, but they sliced all the way through her, cutting new pathways in her brain.

New etchings, the same old etchings, a thousand times deeper and more complex than ever before.

She screamed. She screamed and screamed until the voice she couldn’t understand told her to stop.

Etchings.

She was standing at the sink, washing the last of the carrots. The faint sound of bath water ran musically in the background, mingling itself with the flow from the kitchen sink. She paused for a moment, staring out over the ruthlessly pruned hedges of the landscaping.

-What just happened?—

It was an endless period of time before an answer came scuttling into view for a moment. It came, then vanished back into the darkness like a spooked cockroach.

-We went to Larry’s place.—

-We went to the master’s palace.—

-and. and. and.—

-He consented to show this worthless slut his etchings. To expose her to them.—

The nameless slut moaned and gave a little twitch.

A new, much worse thought. Had she actually gone anywhere? Had she just dreamed it all in a second, after her fellow slave-slut had spoken certain trigger words and passed her hand in front of her eyes? Was she just a lab rat, running around and around in mental mazes with deep shiny walls, staying rigidly between the lines laid down for her, cutting off her own resistance before it could begin, keeping herself busy and trapped and enslaved? Automatically carving the paths of her own obedience deeper and deeper?

Did she always follow that same yellow car? She thought maybe that she did. Maybe it was the car of someone she had once known, before the master had swept his way into her life...

And then it just stopped mattering. The slut looked down into the sink and she ran inventory on what lay there. She couldn’t remember now if she had started with six or seven carrots. She could go outside, and see if there was a carrot lying in the bushes beside the fence, but what was the point? Either way, it would change nothing. The master would still be in charge. The master had engraved his webs of etchings deep inside her slut-brain, permanently cutting her neurons into his new and endlessly scintellating patterns. True artistry. Poor little Penny was being pulled in as well, if she wasn’t already totally enslaved. (And surely the slut’s roommate, of all people, would have been the very first to be taken to the master’s domain?) If the slut struggled any more, they would both just end up back here again. Or maybe someplace worse. The master had many places, many hideous places...

The slut sighed a little, and picked up the first of the potatoes. As she did this, she reinstalled the carefully-constructed Vi mask over the front of her mind. It fit snugly and warmly into place, its multitude of textured bumps and ridges fitting perfectly into the deep grooves in her real mind. A collection of bolts clicked.

A single trickle of warm moisture etched a path down the inside of Vi’s leg as she resumed scrubbing.