The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Haiku: Part 2

* * *

The doorbell rang.

Ashe opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. She was laying flat on her back, her arms by her sides. Crisp morning light came through the east window. She’d been dreaming that she was the CEO of a section of sidewalk near where she’d grown up, then that she’d been captured by a snake that made her its pet and turned into a woman, then that her apartment was filled with Halloween gifts but she kept forgetting everyone’s name when she tried to put on the labels.

The doorbell rang.

She sat up and looked at the clock, her head thick and heavy. Almost eight. That would make the impatient ringing at the door Gwen, looking for her ride to work. And it would also make Ashe herself late for work unless she could somehow get into the car five minutes ago.

She leaped up and sprinted to the door (a light pain shooting through her shoulder and ribs as she did, which she barely even processed). It was indeed Gwen.

Gwen looked pissed. Then she looked surprised. Then she looked embarrassed. Then she looked away.

“Would you like to maybe... get dressed?” she said.

Ashe looked down at herself. Buck naked. Her nipples poked out like pencil erasers in the chill morning air.

A little gah! noise escaped her throat and she slammed the door.

A naked Native American woman was standing behind it.

“There you are,” she said, and a rush of intense deja-vu swept over Ashe, and she stepped back in shock, but the woman was faster, snaking one coffee arm forward, around the back of Ashe’s neck, and pulling her forward into an embrace that made her thoughts melt like so much chocolate.

* * *

“What the fuck,” Gwen said to the door. She tucked her hair back (nails: black, hair: black, lipstick: black, eyeliner: black) and checked the time, then crossed her arms over her Starbucks uniform and glared at the door.

After a few minutes it opened again. Ashe was wearing an oversized T-shirt, her bare legs poking out below. Her green eyes were fixed in a thousand-yard stare, seeming not to look Gwen in the eyes, but rather at a point between her eyes. It was a trick Gwen herself had once used to piss off her teachers when they lectured her.

“Sorry about that. I thought you were someone else,” Ashe mumbled.

“Who else?”

“Someone you don’t know.”

“Oh I see.” Gwen grinned. “You tramp. You should have told me.”

“I’m sorry. I was busy. I can’t give you a ride to work today. Can you take the bus?” It was like she was reciting lines. Her eyes never moved.

“Yeah, I guess. No one cares if I’m late. You got a real job, though.” She paused. “You all right? You look pale. Er.”

“Yes. I stayed up too late. I think I’m coming down with something. I forgot to set the alarm—” She opened her mouth to continue then blinked, stopping cold as if she’d been slapped by an invisible hand.

“Uh huh.”

“I have to go now.”

“Uh huh.”

“Bye!” The door closed.

“What the fuck,” Gwen said to it.

* * *

like she was floating down a dark tunnel, whispers that felt like the wings of tiny birds fluttering up her sides, a pleasant warmth spreading through her stomach, her mind a clear glass of ambrosia that was draining slowly, like a well had opened up inside her and she was sinking into

“Good girl.”

The voice, low and smooth like an underground river. A thrill ran through her at the sound of it.

She’d done well, she’d gotten rid of Gwen. She’d—her thoughts stuttered. Why was that good? There was a strange woman in her apartment, doing something to her, she was being kidnapped, Gwen could have—

Fingers in her hair. The thought dissolved into tingles of pleasure.

She was docile.

“Take that shirt off. I feel silly walking around naked if I’m the only one.” All harshness had gone out of the woman’s—if that what she was—voice. It had been replaced with the kind of simple tones one might use with a child or animal.

Ashe pulled off the oversized T-shirt. It fell into a pool at her feet and she stood naked, goosebumps rising briefly all over her thin frame. Her body had the kind of slight roundness that is particular to a certain breed of redhead: almost baby fat, her curves curved just a little more. Freckles ran down her arms, and a bright red bush, much brighter than the hair on her head (which was closer to copper) hid her cleft.

A hand on the back of her neck.

Tame.

Her eyelids fluttered.

The woman began stroking her hair, touching her ears, her arms—petting her. She was being pet. The knowledge did things to her insides. She leaned into the touches, stretching like a cat.

The woman looked her up and down as she groomed her. Ashe got the sense that she wasn’t being ogled; it was more like she was being appreciated, like a prize steed. The thought filled her with an irrational pride and she stood straighter, and tried to make herself stop leaning into the caresses. Prize steeds could control themselves. Their knees didn’t almost buckle from being touched on the arm.

“So I’ve been thinking about it, and I decided that I can either go through your entire company one person at a time until I find the right one, or you can help me do some detective work. Even if you can’t find out who kidnapped my sister, maybe you can lead me to someone who can.”

Kidnapped her sister? It seemed like an important detail, but the woman’s hand was on her stomach, rubbing wide, slow circles—brushing the bottoms of her breasts at the top of the circle and her bush at the bottom—and she couldn’t think of anything else. She wished the hand would go lower.

“To do that, I’ll need to leash you. And to do that, I need your consent. Not just your consent: you need to want it.” And now the hand squeezed her ass, and she whimpered. “I know it’s not really fair to ask you right now. You’d probably do anything.” Lips against her ear: “But may I leash you, Ashe?”

Leash you. Ashe didn’t know what it meant but the word had weight. It conjured up images of restraint, willing and unwilling, passive and of thrashing things tied to trees.

The woman’s hand crept into her bush and paused there, maddeningly close. Yes, she wanted to be leashed.

“Yes,” she breathed.

The woman slipped her other hand through her hair and held their heads together, nose to nose. She was breathing heavier as well. Her eyes were like wells, deep and dark.

“Look into my eyes.”

Ashe did. She was

losing herself, slipping down a long slow slide, little bits of almost-imagined things bubbling around her, tickling her, she was coming unplugged at the base of her neck while faint pleasure seeped in through the side of every idea, her head turning smoky like an opium den, her limbs like water, then all of it drawn upwards into

The woman’s fingers within her, rubbing, sliding, and she felt herself tense and let go, once, quick like that, and then they moved slower, not teasing or being gentle, they meant business and she felt her hips rock, involuntary movement.

The eyes held her.

Her mind narrowed; everything seemed to be under a microscope, magnified, her vision tunneling at the woman before her:

Olive skin. Dark eyes. Dark hair. Teacup breasts. Her body unmarked like she had been wallpapered the perfect shade of light brown. Her dark brown bush. Her belly button. Symmetry.

Ashe wanted to get down on her hands and knees and rub against her ankles. She wanted to tear apart the couch, dive into it, throw the cushions across the room, bite the arm rest, roll around in the bits of stuffing and then offer them to her. An animal electricity ran through her, red and feral.

“Do you feel it?” The woman’s eyes had lit up; they sparkled, twinkled with danger.

“Yes,” she breathed.

“It’s like everything comes unwound then comes back clearer then before, isn’t it? I’ve felt it. I envy you right now.” The fingers slowed almost to a stop and Ashe moaned, sinking forward, her chin dropping against the woman’s chest. The dark eyes held her.

“When I send you to work, you’re not going to try to run away, are you?”

Ashe shook her head. She would never dream of doing such a thing.

“Good girl.”

And then she got her reward, and it was like lights went off all over her body.

* * *

Later.

Ashe was sitting on the edge of the bathtub. The woman was behind her, dabbing at her shoulder with a damp cloth.

“I hurt your shoulder when I bit you,” she said, seeming to sense that Ashe had drifted out of whatever reverie she’d drifted into. “It’s not bad. An anaconda’s teeth aren’t made for piercing or chewing. Just holding.”

So she was the snake. Ashe thought this idly. The knowledge didn’t seem particularly special.

“Yes,” the woman said.

Did I say that out loud?

“No,” the woman said. Her voice was smiling. “What I did, when I leashed you, was to form a sort of link between us. I can hear your thoughts when you’re nearby, and if needed, communicate with you even over great distances.”

Keep you tame even over great distances. The thought wasn’t a bad one, not close—it was warm and, if it had to have a color, sort of pink.

“I’m sorry to have... commandeered you like this. It was just luck that I ended up with you. I was waiting outside the place you work, looking for the man who took my sister. I was there all day but I never saw him. You were the last one out, and I knew if I didn’t take someone, it would be another twenty-four hours before I got any answers, assuming he showed at all.”

“Prolly not, if he’s a big wig,” Ashe murmured. The antiseptic stung her shoulder for a moment, then faded. “Some of them have separate offices. Some just don’t bother to come in most days.”

“That’s good to know.” There was a pressure on her back: a bandage being applied. “Now, how can we go about finding my sister?”

“Call the police,” Ashe said. “It’s what they do.”

“She’s a lion.”

“Oh.”

“And taken from the African savanna. I’m not sure the local police would be interested.”

Ashe thought. She thought she wanted to rub on the pretty lady. Then she thought that the woman could hear her thinking that. She focused, trying to narrow her mind to a point, like when solving a riddle.

“Well... if he brought her here... there’s bound to be lots of red tape. He may have had someone in legal cut it away for him.”

“Good. What else?”

“Accounting. If he used a company jet there’ll be a record of it. Though it might have been his own. Plenty of people at the top can afford it.”

“Good. What else?”

“Janice in billing is a big fat cunt,” Ashe posited. “A gossip, I mean. And there are others. Anyone who talks a lot might know something, even just a rumor. It’s probably not even a secret. I mean, if someone collects wild animals, that’s not something you do so you can keep it secret. That’s something you show off. At parties and stuff.”

A sensation hammered through Ashe’s chest and extremities; the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. It was not a pleasant sensation. It felt like adrenaline mixed with battery acid. She realized that due to her choice of words, the woman was now imagining her sister, in a cage or on a leash, being shown off at parties—and that she, Ashe, was picking up on her anger, like radio static, like feedback from a microphone placed too close to a speaker, just from being so near her.

“I just mean it’s good because we can find her fast,” she added quickly.

“Yes.” One tight syllable and the sensation ended. “Good. You go to work and find me the names and addresses of these lawyers, accountants, and cunts. I’ll go to the local zoos and see if she has been sold to one of them.”

“Ok.” Ashe paused. “If she’s there, though... will they let you just walk out with her? Take a lion through the front door and out onto the street?”

“I’ll persuade them.” She finished the bandaging and turned Ashe to face her, smiling as she stroked the copper locks. The feeling up the back of her neck turned pleasant again. It made her insides feel soft.

She was this woman’s pet and she didn’t even know her name.

“Haiku,” Haiku said.

“What?”

“My name.” Her eyes flicked down for a moment in an odd expression. It looked so out of place on her that it took Ashe a moment to realize that it was embarrassment. “My parents were hippies,” she explained.

“Understood.”

* * *

Gwen turned the corner just in time to see the bus pull away.

“Super,” she said to it.

She trudged back to her apartment building, which was in the same neighborhood as Ashe’s but looked like it had been accidentally planted on the wrong side of town: it was shabby, clapboard with flaking white paint instead of brick like most of the other buildings, small. A rusty charcoal grill stood in the overgrown front yard like a tiny forgotten water tower. Gwen flicked her cigarette at it as she passed and it ricocheted with a hollow ping.

Inside was dark. The walls of her room were lined with horror movie posters: over the computer it was John Carpenter’s The Thing, over the bed it was Bram Stoker’s Dracula (she didn’t like that particular version of the movie, she just liked the poster), on the door it was Dawn of the Dead (the original). The background of her computer screen was an image from The Descent.

She dropped into the computer chair and leaned back, staring at the screen like a shaman in a trance.

The screen said NIGHTWATCHERZ COMMUNITY at the top and, below it, The Truth Is Out There. It was a message board. It was old-fashioned, threaded style, the kind that showed the first line of each post; it had been hand written by the site’s owner around 1997 and never changed. It said

Topic: Our Slogan

-I think we should have a new slogan because “The truth is out there” was from the X-Files and it’s kind of a ripo...
—That’s the point, it’s an homage to...
—i think we should homage less and be original mo...
—“Homage” isn’t a verb. Dipshit Americans don’t know th...
—im from iceland u fuk
—To great love Britney xoxo visit www....
—Guys don’t fight, that’s what the governemnt wants us to...
—[MOD] Locking this thread. Get a grip.

It had been a more productive day than most.

She went to the news section. A two-headed calf had been born in Iowa. Some hikers claimed to have seen Bigfoot, or possibly a yeti, in Utah. Another Bigfoot article, this one an account from a family traveling through the Rockies. She scrolled down. More Bigfoot. She clicked the button to filter out everything with the word “Bigfoot” in the title and looked at the clock. Two hours till the next bus.

“Hell with that,” she said to it.

She got her bag and stalked back to Ashe’s apartment.

Ashe’s Prius wasn’t in the lot.

“Super,” she said to the empty parking space.

She lit a cigarette and leaned against the building. The brick felt nice, solid and rough on her shoulder blades, and she took a drag, her black hair hanging in her face, thinking on some level below conscious that she should keep it shoulder-length because it was nice to be able to hide in broad daylight sometimes.

Nothing to do for hours. Maybe the comic store. She liked to scare the owner by pretending she was stealing things.

Or maybe walk all the way to work. She tried to calculate how long it would take her at walking speed, 4 miles per hour, and discovered that, since she always got there in a vehicle, she had no concept of the actual distance, just vague markers of the things she saw on the way.

She got so engrossed with mapping the city in her head that she almost didn’t see the naked woman walk out of Ashe’s back door.

When she realized what she was looking at she froze, watching through the strands of her black hair from the corner of the building.

The woman was Native American. She padded down the steps into the grass, naked as a naked person and clearly unconcerned about it. Her hair was long, almost down to her ass. It flowed out behind her. She walked with quick, purposeful steps, even though she seemed to be walking to nowhere: she was headed straight towards wooded area at the back of the lot.

When she reached the edge of the lawn she looked up at the sky, turned into a hawk, and flew away.

Gwen’s cigarette fell out of her mouth. It left little burn marks as it traveled down her Starbucks uniform.