Talent
by Mr. House and Her Son, the Amazing Dog Trumpet
© 1999 FacistsInHeaven
Chapter the Twenty-seventh: Wheels...
“Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.”
I had become used to ‘reading’ people. Not really deeply, not the details of everything they were thinking, that required more concentration than I usually fancied using. Their general ‘aura’ however, was something that I could see without really having to think. It was more than the ‘first impression’ feeling we all get, but only a bit more. Cathy now glowed like a new-born baby.
I always thought she was a bright, beautiful person but this was like repainting your kitchen ceiling and seeing the difference between old and new white paint.
Nickie, completely ecstatic and exhausted spent the rest of the day with us. She was bubbling over with praise for the way she had felt so ‘controlled’ it was such a turn on to be forced into such blatant submission. The afternoon and early evening wasn’t the sex-fest that you might imagine. We spent a long, long time just laying together. Both women tickled each other to another couple of orgasms more for the sheer hell of it than anything else. It was like I had just been married again for the first time, and I told Cathy as much. She cheerfully replied that although I was a bigamist at the very least, she loved sharing me with Nickie.
“What do you feel has happened Cathy?” I asked, propped on one elbow next to her and helping Nickie brush her pubes into a neat fan on her mound. She looked thoughtful for a moment and then replied that it was as if she had been given a new pair of glasses and could see things clearly for the first time in years. Not since she was a young teenager could she remember feeling so weightless.
Much as I was overjoyed to see the new woman in front of me, the fact that she could pinpoint a particular time in her life and that there had been an element of something that had been ‘wiped off’ her; piqued my interest as to the cause of the original ‘dirt.’
I decided to use another of the connections that Chrissie and I had enjoyed. Nickie sat with Cathy’s head in her lap, stroking her face gently as she watched me feed my stiff cock into her pussy. I began to set-up the interfaces and soon the two of us were completely enmeshed in each other. I could feel Nickie with us too, but still outside us as a couple.
This time, there was no need to filter through the memories. I was looking for something.
I was beginning to recognise something familiar about the way I saw Cathy. The breakthrough I had made could be seen as the removal of a false skin that had lain over her psyche. Like the crinkled dead skin of a snake after it has been shed, there was an ethereal ‘appendage’ that I could detect. It hung like a half-discarded sock from the heel of one foot. In the nether realm that we now found ourselves, her ‘self’ stood before me as a perfect being; a clean, pink, elegant woman in her full magnificent beauty. The thing she had shucked off was ugly. The evil oily scab was very much like what I had seen on Debbie and Chrissie and even myself when I fell into Shaw’s trap in the office stock cupboard. But this was subtly different. It wasn’t something of Cathy’s doing, someone else had smothered her with this; but Shaw couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. It was too old and his touch was too hateful, too brutish. This spell had been cast by someone else and many years ago and was of a much more insidious nature.
With a command similar to a scalpel I sliced the dead thing away and held it up to look at it.
Cathy’s beauty was unblemished, the fluttering of her sex around mine tipped us into small spirals of pleasure, the bad thing had been taken away and she was free to drift where she liked.
The malignant bundle held no clue as to it’s creator, it dissolved in my fingers and was gone. Cathy began to thunder towards a climax and I followed close behind, only pausing to ensure we avoided the feedback loop that had been so painful before for Chrissie and me.
Nickie was kissing Cathy deeply when we arrived back in the ‘real’ world. Her hands had been all over the both of us, pleasuring and finding pleasure in our lovemaking.
I fell into an embrace with her and soon found myself performing the same ‘surgery.’ Both women possessed, or had been possessed by the same filthy sheen. Nickie to a far smaller extent but it was there nonetheless. There was a definite difference though, between her and Cathy’s level of coverage. And when revealed, Nickie could not hold a candle to Cathy’s brilliance. This was a major puzzle. I would have to discuss this with Bran.
Nickie left for her house as the time was getting late. Her husband was due home soon and she needed to shower and change to ‘be ready for him.’ Whatever had been missing from her love life up until now, she was going to have some fun trying to get it back.
Cathy and I sat at the dinner table and talked whilst we ate. She was no longer the antagonistic harridan who had asked for a divorce, rather she was eager to find the cause of her adult lifetime of disappointment. I had allowed her to see the full extent of my life too, she knew and accepted it all.
This clue was significant, the coating she had been wearing had been covering a being which was very compatible to my own new existence. Between the two of us we developed the germ of an idea as to the way things could be resolved. I couldn’t remember a time when we’d found each other so well. When we’d split up, my attitude had been that Cathy and I had found ourselves together by force of habit. She had her circle of friends and her career and I had mine. Our spheres of influence had barely intersected if at all. When she had left her job as a journalist to raise the kids I could almost feel the palpable resentment she harboured against me. No matter how much I tried to follow the textbook methods of supporting her, it was never enough. She had always been unable to forgive the fact that she felt trapped by our relationship; but we both now saw it as some sort of anger that my true potential wasn’t being realised. She was still able to feel that she was being cheated but not able to identify why. With the real root cause of the problem uncovered and removed we found ourselves almost as some sort of new species. Not just husband and wife, but two people who loved each other, and also loved our other partners equally, without bias. The new-found liberty was wonderful, it allowed us to concentrate on what needed to be done.
I even found myself quite admiring Simon, he had been pretty decent to her. I found out that he had actually insisted on a purely platonic relationship with her. He stood by her even with the coldness that she couldn’t help but display. And I knew he doted on the kids. His was a friendship that allowed her to live with the sort of freedoms I realised I should have allowed her. Of all the shortcomings I knew I had, the fact that I had let the sparkle drop from our relationship was the least defensible. It made me realise how Simon was actually the decent beneficiary of my own bad fortune.
It was nearly ten-thirty that night when we reached a decision. I first telephoned Amy at the school residence and then contacted Aileen and Aiden at the farm. I put in a call to Karen and Jennifer at their apartment and left a message on their machine asking them both to meet us there.
By the time the teapot was filled for the second time in the farmhouse we were all there, even Jon and Suzanne from my old office. Suzanne, a very large engagement ring on her left hand, was showing signs of a definite thickening of the waist and Jon was beaming. They were expecting the event sometime in the Winter, Suzanne was hoping it would be a Christmas baby. She grinned at Jon’s sheepish admission that the wedding was going to be a ‘fat affair.’ I assured them that a pregnant bride was a long established tradition. Aileen even admitted that most of the wedding dresses in the village in her day had been in need of careful altering by the time the day arrived.
Each of the arrivals were checked by me. Some of my friends Aiden, Aileen and Jon for example, were without magic of any great understanding. Aiden’s wisdom seemed to gleam around him but he was not of our group. No discernible outside spell was on them and they were left the same as before. I was pretty swift now at identifying and removing the remnants of the spells we had been under. Each removal was accompanied by a metamorphosis of the person into someone immediately recognisable as a free human. Suzanne and her unborn baby were glorious and her radiance glowed around the room.
She and Jon, luxuriating in each other’s embrace, sat in one of the large rocking chairs next to the stove. She closed her eyes momentarily and then said with a note of surprise; “It’ll be December the Twenty-first. I don’t know how, but I just realised how sure I am of that date.”
Aileen smiled at her in a motherly way and sipped her tea thinking that new young mother’s always had such fanciful ideas. Jon just buried his head in the crook of her neck and nuzzled her. They didn’t realise just how sure she was of herself. She had, what would have been called in the old days; ‘The Knowledge.’
I began to have my suspicions as to who it might have been who placed the spell that covered us all in the first place and I knew who might be able to give me an explanation. I called...
Bran appeared to one side of the fireplace in the most theatrical manner I had yet seen him use. The fire roared and crackled, died almost to embers and then flashed back up to the colour of blasting flame in a blacksmith’s forge. When the pyrotechnics had died down, there stood the queen’s advisor in the same robes of state he had used at our first meeting. Aileen was frenziedly crossing herself with the shock and everyone but Amy and me jumped back in their chairs.
Bran was brusque in his manner as if he were (I had the thought) someone who has been caught cheating at cards. I just stared him down. “Care to tell me what this all means Bran?” I asked.
He breathed in heavily and then smiled wryly with a sigh.
“I will tell you the history of the early times.” He spread his hands and began, as if he were telling a bedtime story.
“You have no idea how close the Sidhe came to being expunged. How surprised we were when we first arrived on Earth. The land was a paradise. Your science today cannot imagine how much older the world really is, and in the ‘before time’ when we first arrived this world was a Eden. It was so much like home that we knew we were destined to stay.” He chuckled ironically. “Of course, we didn’t realise exactly how much like home it all was. The humans we began to meet were as you are now that you have been ‘revealed.’ They were beautiful as we were and just as many of them were as powerful in their abilities as our magicians. It is my belief that we were both created from the same, even older stock. Our advantage was that we had travelled, we were able to conceive of different ways that worlds could exist.”
Bran eased himself into a sitting position at the end of the kitchen table. I had often wondered where the Sidhe had come from in the first place but then, thinking the same about humans too: This was a bit of a revelation to be sure!
“I apologise, I feel no great pleasure in admitting that we took advantage of you. If there is a root cause of our conflict, it is our doing.” I could tell this was a difficult thing for him to do, apologies were not in his usual repertoire.
“At first, we tried to keep ourselves separate. To turn our backs on the humans, but they were lovely, kind and generous and inquisitive. Ever eager to help.” He seemed to be describing us as some sort of Labrador puppy. “We simply couldn’t help ourselves. The temptations grew, the rivalry amongst our own people began to surface and soon the blame was placed on the humans. They, for their part began to learn what it was to see inequality. To have to compete. When the first human was killed during a Sidhe love match, the effect was terrible. The Sidhe saw the humans as disposable, the humans learned resentment and more than that, they began to display the powers they had. Little by little, the battle was joined. It frightened the Sidhe to see the way that the humans could bring their beauty so quickly to war. Their power was great, all the more so because they had not learned the restraint that the Sidhe had learned over the years. We began to escalate the conflict. Lands were ruined and the casualties were great.” Bran was stony faced. He knew that we understood that he was talking about our own ancestors. We sat and waited for him to continue.
“At last, the first war was won by the Sidhe. We had managed to develop a weapon. A sort of cloak. Something that interfered with the awakening human magic. Once infected, every woman passed it on to her child. The humans were left as you were before tonight. Magic was lost to all but a few of them. Over the centuries the humans remained locked away from our powers, but their hearts grew colder and more cunning. Eventually the second war was started. Not magic this time, but human weaponry prevailed. The results were worse than devastating. The whole fabric of our universe was shredded. Sidhe had to take refuge in our own realm and humans were left to rebuild their own. We were left with the status you see now.” Bran put his fingers together at his lips, and continued pensively. “The cloak infection was forgotten by even the Sidhe, only a few of us know the history of the first era and even we are unable to understand how to reverse it.”
I interrupted, “Am I right in assuming that the humans with ‘second sight’ are the ones with weaker cloaks then?” He nodded. “And the magic attracts one to another?” Again he nodded.
“So, that explains the fact that all the people I have befriended have the power close enough to the surface for the spell to be broken.”
“It’s more than that” Bran said. “Over the years, the original spell has changed. Most human branches have become completely unable to use magic. Others have had each generation distil the effect. Some humans have shown brief flashes of their original brilliance, only to have their children born with no abilities. You call them ‘Geniuses’ but they simply see things more clearly.”
I thought about Mozart and Einstein and DaVinci.
“People with the ability to breach their cloaks, even to a small degree have always seemed to gravitate to each other. We simply tried to organise the meetings we thought would be most favourable. Your car ‘accident’ was precipitous. It allowed queen Mab’s plan to come to fruition faster than we had hoped.” He leaned on the end of the table and continued more like an history professor, enthusiastically teaching his students. “We had begun moving events as carefully as we could as soon as we found out about the dark plot to start the third conflict. The brave souls who died at that place had been trying to wound him so that you could gain the upper hand when you met that day. His defences were too good however, and so we needed to, how shall I put this? ‘remove’ you from the scene before he realised who and what you were. The proximity of Shaw’s evil caused the rupture in your cloak that we had hoped for, a kind of overload. From there you have surprised even us with your suitability for your position. Your fellows have all been with you or found by you because of the natural propensity for adept humans to find each other.”
A thought immediately sprang to my mind. “If we have all removed our cloaks, is the group here all as powerful as me?”
“Not in the same way. You are a true Magi. There are many levels of ability and yours is a fermentation of many generations. Just as some Sidhe are more suited to some magic than others, you shouldn’t be surprised to see the same in humans. The years have brought their own added changes to the human psyche, so the powers are still more muted than they were originally.”
“But together, we might be more than each individual alone?”
Bran looked at me, it was obvious that the idea was one that he was not keen to confirm. Cautiously her replied: “It is possible, the Sidhe have never been able to mix their ethereal and physical selves in the same way that you have done. If it is done, yes, you may be very powerful indeed.” It was clear that this was a tactical point that the Sidhe didn’t want widely known.
A sudden inspiration caught me, Chrissie might be saved yet! I grabbed Amy and Cathy and pulled them to stand. “We’ve got to go, I know what to do.”
We left the kitchen, those behind us smiled at each other in bemusement and set about formal and less formal introductions in their new-found incarnations.