The second voice was countering that if I didn’t watch what was being offered, everything I had risked would be for naught. It was telling me I might miss a vital clue that would allow me to stop her. While that had once been a valid point, I wasn’t so sure if I believed it anymore.
The real problem was the second voice’s partner in all this. It was the one that worried me most. It came to me as little more than a murmur of support for the heretofore failing argument; however, I wasn’t completely fooled. I could sense that it had its own agenda with a horribly dark intent. But, even more frightening than its intent was the power it seemed to carry with it. I only wished that I had recognized that fact a bit sooner because it wasn’t until it had all but assumed control that I realized the source-it had joined forces with the sickeningly pleasant tickle that had been set loose in my body, and together they were drowning out all good sense and reason. As I had feared, Miranda was trying me on for size.
Even as I fought to maintain control, my tenuous grip on my perceived reality faltered, and the vision stepped in to take its place.
Though I can see her only in profile, I swear that my wife is in front of me at this very moment, sitting astride the bound man. She is positioned such that she is pitched backward; her arms are outstretched behind her, straining and rigid. Her hands are clamped firmly to his thighs as she supports herself. Her back is arched, and her chest is rising and falling at a quickened pace. I can hear her panting just as I can hear the man’s muffled squeals of agony.
She has one stocking-clad leg extended in front of her, bent slightly at the knee, and I see the muscles of her calf flexing as they keep a tight rhythm with her panting breaths. Her foot is pressed against the man’s upper arm, pinning it against the headboard. Her calf is flexing because she is slowly twisting her stiletto heel into the flesh of his bicep. The end of the spike disappears into the deep depression it has created, and blood is oozing from the wound.
Colors bloomed as realities once again shifted, and I found myself back in the motel room alone. The roller coaster ride of channeled visions was tossing me haphazardly about and depositing me wherever its whim desired. Not particularly unusual as such ethereal events go, but I didn’t think I would ever get used to it.
I blinked.
I remembered Ben telling me before I ever boarded the plane to come here that he was looking at a picture of Annalise and that she was a dead ringer for Felicity. I suppose, however, that simply hearing someone say something like that makes it easy to discount their opinion. Even though I hadn’t seen the picture myself, I was positive that I, of all people, would have no trouble telling the two women apart. After all, I had been married to one of them for almost fifteen years, so surely I would know my own wife.
However, at this moment my personal perception was no longer crystal clear on that point.
Without thinking, I muttered aloud, “Felicity?”
Her name tumbled into the room wrapped in a question. I knew the woman I had just seen in front of me couldn’t possibly be my wife, but the image was truly beyond uncanny.
As if triggered by my question, the light overhead bloomed, and I once again found myself with at least one foot in a different plane of existence.
I can hear my own voice echoing in the room as I utter my wife’s name.
Though her breathing never alters from its frantic pace, the woman suddenly jerks as if startled. Pushing herself forward, she sits up, still straddling the man. She stops twisting her heel then drops her foot down to the bed, and her victim is given a momentary reprieve from his agony. Cocking her head to one side, she appears to be listening intently, as if she hears my voice as well.
Slowly she turns toward me.
I study her face as she looks through me, creasing her brow. I can begin to see the differences in her features, but not at first glance, or even the second for that matter. I takes a long moment before I am certain that I am not looking at my wife.
I remember hearing it said that everyone has a doppelganger somewhere on the planet. Whether or not that is a scientific fact I cannot begin to say, but given the vision now staring me in the face, I am inclined to believe it. This woman can almost pass as Felicity Caitlin O’Brien’s twin.
She turns, and showing little concern for her victim, she drags her now bloody heel across him as she climbs from the bed. She slowly saunters toward the window at the front of the room and stands there, still listening for a repeat of the sound.
Though not fully nude as is her victim, she is scantily dressed. What little of her wardrobe there is consists of black lace and patent leather. Her red hair cascades in a loose spiraling fall down her back. It feels hot in the room, and I can see that her exposed ivory skin is damp with sweat. It glistens in dim light as she remains still except for the rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathes. On her left shoulder, I can see what appears to be a tattoo of a stylized triskele.
I have seen it before. It is the mystery veve from the previous crime scenes.
After several minutes she reaches out and slips a finger between the slats of the blinds. Slowly, she presses down, opening a small gap through which she carefully peers.
I watch her as she tilts her head from side to side until finally she is satisfied that no one is there. Turning, she saunters back to the bed and looks down at the bound victim.
“Don’t worry, little man. It was nothing,” she says to him in a sweet drawl. She takes a moment to flip an errant shock of hair back over her shoulder then adds with a feigned pout, “Of course, that nothing interrupted me, so I guess we’ll just have to start over.”
Sliding one knee onto the bed, she dips forward and scoops something into her hand before bringing the other leg up. Kneeling next to him, she smiles sweetly and holds up a stun gun.
“Ready?” she asks.
He begins to buck against the bonds, a scream caught behind the duct tape gag and diverting to exit in the form of a short, nasally whine through his nose before being unceremoniously cut off as he chokes.
“Good,” she giggles. “So am I. Just remember, I love you.”
With a wicked grin, she leans forward and presses the business end of the device against his bare genitals and squeezes the trigger.
I buckle and begin falling backward as I feel his pain.
But what’s worse is that I also feel her pleasure.
In that moment everything shifted, and the three-dimensional quality of the vision flattened then faded in a bloom of light. I could instantly sense that I had stepped back into my own world, but both the sensation of pain and arousal remained.
Though I had felt myself falling, I found that in reality I hadn’t moved at all. I was still squatting next to the bed, staring directly ahead, just as I had been at the beginning. I did notice, however, that I was holding my breath. I let it out with a heavy sigh. My eyes were itching and dry, so I closed them, but the moment I did so I feared I would regret the action. It seemed that blinking was getting me into a lot of trouble right now. Still, I knew that sitting here forever with my eyes closed wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I steeled myself in preparation for the onslaught of another round and allowed them to flutter open.
This time, the vision was still gone.
Letting out another sigh, this one of a semi-relieved nature, I rocked back on my heels and stood upright. Reaching to my face, I removed my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Slipping the spectacles back on, I gazed around the room. Everything was just as it had been when I entered. Nothing had changed, no matter how real the things I had just witnessed may have felt.
Making a slow half turn exactly where I stood, I finally wandered back to the small room housing the vanity. Removing my glasses once again, I twisted on the faucet and cupped my hands beneath it. Bending over the sink, I first pressed one handful of water against my face and then another. After a third, I turned the water off and leaned forward with my knuckles on the vanity as I stood there dripping into the basin.
“Gods, Gant…” I muttered to myself. “Just get the hell out of here while you’re still sane.”
“Gant?” her honey dipped drawl floats into my ears. “So that’s who you are.”
I am still standing at the basin, and I know the voice has come from behind me. Without bothering to dry my face, I pick up my glasses and slip them on then turn to look out into the main room.
She is perched on the edge of the bed, on the side nearest me. But, she has changed. Her hair is dark auburn and piled atop her head in a soft swirl reminiscent of a long ago era, which matches the high-necked Victorian dress she now wears. What I see of her face is stern, and far more oval shaped than before.
She is seated next to the headboard, and I can still see the man sprawled out behind her. He appears the same although there seems to be far more wounds on his body than there had been before.
She flickers like a frame jumping on a movie at the theater.
Her hair is once again fiery red and long. She is back to being a scantily dressed mirror image of my wife. She uncrosses her legs and re-crosses them in the opposite direction, stretching one out as she does so. She smoothes her stocking carefully then regards it with little emotion.
“Damn,” she says, her voice flat. “A run.”
She still hasn’t looked in my direction, and I begin to think that perhaps I was simply hearing things. I begin to turn away.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
I stop and furrow my brow.
“Yes, I’m talking to you, little man,” she continues, still without looking at me. Instead she seems to be intent on the items she has piled on the small table next to her.
“Me?” I ask calmly.
“Yes, you.”
“How? You aren’t even really here.”
“You tell me,” she counters. “It’s your vision, now isn’t it? Ah, there it is…”
She smiles and holds up a scissors-style cigar cutter.
“Right now I think I would prefer to believe you’re a figment of my imagination,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “If you want to believe that.”
“You left it up to me.”
She counters with a question. “Yes, I did. But you aren’t that stupid, now are you?”
“No.” I shake my head. “Unfortunately, I don’t suppose I am.”
She giggles. My answer is obviously amusing to her. Canting her head to the side but still not looking in my direction she says, “You belong to her don’t you?”
It is a statement as much as a question, however, I ask, “Her who?”
“The her who is taking what is mine,” she spits. “Felicity, I believe is what you said.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She carefully trims the end from a cigar then sets it alight. Silence flows between us as I watch her. A thin stream of blue-white smoke comes from between her pursed lips as she blows on the glowing tobacco and inspects to see that it is burning evenly. Placing the lit end in her mouth, she then exhales slowly through it, sending a cloud of pungent smoke billowing from the end. I know all too well that she is “smoking it” for her Lwa.
After a moment she pulls it from her mouth and rests it on the edge of the table.
Again, there is a theatrical flicker, and the stern, auburn-haired woman is in her place.
“You’re lying. I think you do know,” she says as if there had never been a lull in the conversation.
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you feel it.”
“Feel what?”
She finally looks up at me and smiles thinly, her dark eyes piercing. Reaching to the side, she takes hold of the victim’s hand. He is securely bound so he is unable to pull away, but a horrified squeal begins behind her as he struggles, only to be interrupted by her careful method of bondage. I hear a metallic snick and watch as she slips the cigar cutter over his pinkie finger at the second joint.
“The same thing we are going to feel when I do this,” she says and punctuates the sentence by bearing down and squeezing the cutter closed.
The stir that had been wriggling deep inside my body flared in that exact instant. No longer was it simply extreme arousal; it was now tickling nerve endings I didn’t even know I had. The result was a pleasure so intense as to be literally excruciating in its scope. I now knew the true meaning of having something feel so good that it hurt.
The room began to spin and then everything went completely black.
I opened my eyes and the acoustically textured ceiling filled my field of view. I felt spent in a way I had never experienced before, and to say I was confused wasn’t doing my current state any justice. I was completely addled. I was in agony deep inside, but it was a pain born of emptiness. An ache that called out, begging to be filled by the pleasure once again.
With a groan, I started to sit up but felt a firm pressure pushing me back down. I fell back and my head thumped against the floor.
I blinked.
Now I not only saw the ceiling but Annalise as well. She was leaning over me, one high-heel encased foot pressing down on my chest and holding me to the floor.
“Tell Felicity I want it back,” she said. “All of it.”
In that moment everything shifted, and the three-dimensional quality of the vision flattened then faded in a bloom of light. I was still squatting next to the bed, staring directly ahead as I had been at the beginning. I did notice, however, that I was holding my breath. I let it out with a heavy sigh. My eyes were itching and dry, so I closed them, but the moment I did so I feared I would regret the action. It seemed that blinking was getting me into a lot of trouble right now. Still, I knew that sitting here forever with my eyes closed wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I steeled myself in preparation for the onslaught of another round and allowed them to flutter open.
The vision was still gone.
I stood up, rubbed my eyes, then turned and started back toward the small room housing the vanity. I had only made it two steps when I caught myself and came to a halt.
An unbelievably intense feeling of deja vu overwhelmed me as recent memories flooded in. Though the hollowness still ached deep inside, my rational brain pushed through the fog and assumed control once again. I decided not to bother with a repeat of the trip to the sink that I wasn’t even sure I had really made. I simply needed to get out of here before leaving became impossible.
Turning, I headed toward the front of the room, skirting around the end of the bed then reaching the door in two quick steps. Any sense of stealth and caution to which I had earlier subscribed was now depleted. I pulled the door open and stepped out into the night, almost forgetting to tug it closed behind me. Starting up the walk, I broke into a jog, trying to put distance between the scene and me as fast as I could.
I gave my watch a quick glance and figured that I’d only been in the room for a little over twenty minutes. It had seemed like much longer, but that was the way of things with ethereal visions. They seemed to run by a clock all their own.
Nearing the office, I fished the room key out of my jacket pocket and popped it through the mail slot, barely stopping as I did so. Turning, I started on an angle across the lot toward my car.
I had only made it a few steps when the authoritative voice hit my ears.
“FREEZE! POLICE! LEMME SEE YA’ HANDS, RIGHT NOW!”
CHAPTER 7:
My arms were starting to go numb.
Of course, since my hands were still cuffed behind my back, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised by that fact. I shifted slightly forward in the metal chair then rotated my shoulders as much as I could manage in an attempt to jumpstart the circulation. While I was leaning, I extended two fingers on my right hand, grasped them w
ith my left, and held tight. It was a trick Ben had taught me long ago to relieve the pressure of the cuffs on my wrists. At the time, I hadn’t really understood why he assumed I would need such knowledge. It wasn’t like I had a tendency to get myself arrested. However, I was grateful for the arcane tip now since it afforded at least a small amount of relief from the biting restraints.
I glanced around at the blue-green walls in search of a clock. I was guessing that I had been warming this chair for better than an hour, but my sense of time was so screwed at the moment it might have been no more than fifteen minutes. By that same token, it could easily have been half a day. I simply didn’t know. Twisting slightly in my seat, I looked back over my shoulder to inspect the wall behind me and found nothing but another sea of nauseating blue-green. I’d already engaged in this futile exercise more times than I could count, so why I was bothering again I had no idea. There was nothing for me to see, other than the sickening color and the one-way mirror across the room in front of me. For all I knew, someone was on the opposite side of it watching me. In fact, I would bet hard money on it.
Settling back in, I hung my head and spent some time staring at the worn, grey carpet. It was patterned with more than its share of stains, the origins of which I didn’t even want to speculate over. But, when you have little else to do, your brain will tend to entertain itself however it wants, so it set about trying to identify the oddly shaped splotches of its own accord, regardless of my feelings on the subject.
As I sat staring at what I had decided was most likely the fossilized remains of a coffee spill, I could hear one of the ballasts on the fluorescent light fixture above me humming toward extinction. It wasn’t terribly loud just yet, but I suspected it would be in the not too distant future. Hopefully, I would be out of here by then and wouldn’t be around to hear it when it finally died. Of course, given my current predicament, there were probably worse places I could be.
The End Of Desire argi-8 Page 6