LifeGames Corporatoin

by Michael Smorenburg

  “Caution is the better part of valor, Catherine. We’ll have to take it slowly, but don’t you worry we’ll get this bastard. God knows how, but he’ll get his just rewards, darling.”

  David was his old bearish self again.

  Chapter 35

  Nancy started with a gasp, coming up onto her elbows as she awoke to see a tiny woman standing half way into the room with a peculiar smile and her finger on her lips.

  Nancy turned to Catherine and saw that she was in a dead sleep. She looked back and the diminutive form had retreated impossibly quickly to the doorway’s threshold where she beckoned for Nancy to follow her.

  The gesture was conspiratorial in a gentle, kind and irresistible way… before Nancy could take a hold of her senses she had risen and begun to follow, spellbound by the midget.

  Standing upright, Nancy realized how minute the stranger truly was, estimating she stood only navel tall. There was something mesmeric about the woman, a potent magnetism that Nancy could not resist as she continued to traipse after her.

  The dwarfed figure was descending the sweep of stairs, looking back with each step to ensure that Nancy was still following.

  Nancy became confused; was this some member of Catherine’s family who had let herself in with a key? The woman seemed to pose little risk and was very engaging.

  She couldn’t decide how to react; to be irritated by this un-speaking intruder, to follow, to challenge or to wake Catherine. Regardless, Nancy felt unable to halt. Her feet seemed to have a purpose of their own.

  When the woman reached the front door Nancy suddenly felt a chill run up her spine. Something is wrong, she thought, and she tried to halt, but she realized she was drifting, not walking. She tried to talk but could only croak.

  She was well through the doorway of the bedroom, about to go out of sight of the King sized bed, and she looked back for the first time; there, lying prone alongside Catherine, was her own body.

  Horror struck her an icy blow and her surroundings exploded into a blur.

  Thinking back on it, she would describe the sensation as, “the view an arrow must have as it flies into its target.”

  She bounced back into her body with a mighty hypnagogic jerk and felt Catherine startle awake too. And then she drifted out of her body again and slammed back into it, bouncing out and back in again.

  “Nancy! What’s wrong? Wake up! Wake up!” Catherine was shaking her, yelling.

  “I am awake… I am awake,” Nancy was repeating in a groggy non compos mentis slur.

  “What’s wrong? Did you have a bad dream?” There was terror etched across Catherine’s face.

  “Yes… No! I… I don’t know Cath, I don’t feel well.”

  “Do you want me to call the doctor?”

  “No… no. I’m fine, physically I’m fine. I don’t know how to describe it?”

  Catherine had taken the gun out and was holding it. It gave them both courage.

  A few moments later the bedside phone rang and they jumped in unison.

  “Hello?” Catherine answered.

  There was a moment of silence before a voice inquired. “Who’s speaking?”

  Catherine despised callers who apparently did not know who they had dialed; and at this hour of the morning, under these circumstances, that type of a call took on phobic proportions.

  “Who would you like to speak to?” She parried, her voice brittle with venom in her tone.

  “This is Home Alarm Services, ma’am, your unit has activated, could I have your secret code please?”

  “Sorry I didn’t realize, just a sec,” she held the earpiece away to listen for the siren or at least a trigger tone; nothing…

  “Sorry… my code is three two five six. But my alarm isn’t activated? Could you hold a moment?”

  She shrugged to Nancy as she moved across the room to check the alarm status panel. There were two circuits broken, three and seven. The legend read that three was the kitchen’s infrared detector; seven was the magnetic monitor on the front door. She relayed that information to the service caller.

  “I’m sorry Ma’am, but you must be mistaken. Only one circuit can break at a time, once it’s broken the alarm activates and the unit can only be triggered when the alarm re-arms itself. There must be a fault on your line.”

  “There must be,” Catherine agreed, “…because my siren definitely isn’t activated.”

  “That’s very strange. The only way it could happen is due to a power failure. When the power fails, the signal is automatically dialed through to us as the unit goes to auxiliary battery power. That’s the only reason that the siren wouldn’t work. Unless the wires have been cut?”

  The affair was becoming more chilling by the moment.

  “…Have you possibly had a power failure?”

  Catherine checked at her bedside electric radio alarm. Its display read 01:39. If the power had failed, then the time would be flashing 12:00… her wristwatch correlated precisely with the display.

  “No, power’s good.”

  The service caller came up with another possibility.

  “Perhaps your unit’s power circuit has tripped. Or it’s accidentally been turned off at the power socket.”

  “Hang on a moment, I’ll go and check.”

  Catherine moved from the bed and, gun in hand, cautioned Nancy to stay in bed. She made her way cautiously down to the kitchen. Even after all her chilling encounters she refused to be cowed on her own turf. Nobody nor anything was going to subjugate that attitude.

  It was an oath of self-confidence. On each occasion that she’d taken a blow, she’d found the strength to blossom back to self-confidence by reminding herself of the oath.

  For the umpteenth time in the past few weeks she was taking her oath as she moved through the darkened house, teeth gritted, her ever sense on high alert.

  She checked that the front door was still securely bolted and chained. Everything within the house was as it should be.

  The electricity board’s trip switches were all in a neat row, indicating their on status, and she was about to return to the phone when she remembered to check the alarm unit’s power lead.

  With some horror she found that the plug was removed from its socket, a plug low enough for a midget to unplug; the auxiliary power’s light was flashing.

  “I’ve about had enough of this!” She growled, ramming the prongs of the plug back into their sockets. The auxiliary light immediately winked to charge.

  Before returning upstairs, she took note that circuit three covered the area over the offending and now restored electrical plug.

  “Ok, I’ve found the problem. The socket somehow spat the plug out,” Catherine spoke in a worn, weary and sarcastic voice.

  She was back on the bed with Nancy and furious that another mind-twisting mystery had been heaped onto her already overburdened load of inexplicable occurrences.

  “…Sorry, before you go, just one more thing,” she asked. “Did this just trip right before you called?”

  “Yes Ma’am, about seven minutes ago. The time was one thirty six on our computer.”

  “Thank you,” Catherine signed off.

  “Well?” Nancy queried.

  Catherine filled her in, concluding the summary with a simple question of her own. “Any guesses…? What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Perhaps I was sleep walking and tripped the circuits and pulled out the plug,” Nancy offered, reluctant to recount her strange dream about the midget to Catherine, not wanting to inflame their already jagged emotions any more; but she could hardly avoid recounting it forever.

  “You must be pretty quick in your sleep to have tripped two circuits simultaneously!”

  “A circuit fault? One of those surges or spikes? They happen in the early hours when the demand diminishes on the electricity grid.”

  “The technician sounded dubious and besides a surge couldn’t explain the plug kicked out of the wall and two circuits tripped. I’ll have th
e alarm company check it out tomorrow.”

  “I must tell you, I did have the weirdest dream…”

  Nancy recounted her waking experience to Catherine as if she thought it a dream… when she knew full well that it wasn’t one.

  “Creepy!” Catherine observed, not wanting to verbalize more detailed suspicions; not in the dead of night with their nerves already jangling. It was a supreme understatement of her emotional state and she patted the gun, “I normally hate these things, but tonight… tonight it made me feel a thousand percent more confident.”

  “Me too,” Nancy paused, “You know… it had to be a dream… if I’d been awake, I’d have thought of the gun with someone in the room… Surely?”

  “I’d have woken up if you got off of the bed. I’m not the deepest sleeper these days,” Catherine added.

  “Well… what do we do now?”

  Neither of them wanted to continue speculating on the evening’s bizarre occurrences any further. They knew that it would only create a vicious circle, accelerating their individual fears into a feedback loop, siphoning ever more fear from one to another, and end with another sleepless night of neurosis.

  “Coffee?” Catherine suggested.

  “At this hour? I won’t sleep a wink!” Nancy remained on constant health alert.

  “A little nip of whiskey in it? Irish coffee? Tomorrow’s Saturday…” Catherine was a real temptress.

  “Ok,” Nancy succumbed. “Why not?”

  Catherine was in desperate need of some Dutch courage. Their coffees would be very Irish.

  After several doses, they sat watching music videos on the big screen down in the lounge.

  It was after four in the morning when Nancy succumbed to the dosage and slipped into a cheek-clapping relaxed slumber.

  The coffee was having the opposite effect on Catherine; she was experiencing odd palpitations of her heart and breathing.

  She kissed Nancy softly on the cheek, “Thank you for being with me,” she whispered before slipping upstairs to take a shower, hoping it would do the trick of calming her nerves. When she was done, she would bring a duvet and two pillows down, they could both sleep the morning away in her lounge.

  Since Nancy was accustomed to the TV’s sound, Catherine left everything as it was, the sound would serve to mask any possibility of the running water seeming loud in a deathly quiet house.

  Chapter 36

  The man monitored the woman’s breathing, making sure she was asleep, then he signaled for his colleagues to follow him.

  The trio slipped silently up the stairs, toward the sound of running water. The leader halted his comrades short of the bedroom door. They were his backup, their task would be to remain hidden and maintain watch until their assistance became necessary.

  Alone, he slipped into position.

  She was a thing of unusual beauty and he lingered a moment, taking in the streams and rivulets cascading and meandering over her flesh, baptizing her in clouds of steam.

  He quickly cased the room, considering all obstacles.

  The shower enclosure was the focus of the bathroom, standing as it did away from any wall, right in the middle of the room, a most unusual design. Like a nautilus shell, a single transparent sheet of glass wrapped concentrically into an ever-increasing coil, making redundant the need for a door.

  As she lathered soap into the nooks of her body, the man calculated the distance he’d have to cross, satisfying himself that when his moment came he would have plenty of time to make the move.

  There would be no need to rush the attack so he relaxed, enjoying the private show. Inevitably the shampoo trickled down the woman’s forehead and over her tightly sealed eyes; this was his moment and he ambled out across the short divide, his two assistants taking the liberty of position themselves for the show.

  He’d thought the attack carefully through and decided that she would receive the most dramatic shock if he were standing right before her as she washed the soap from her eyes.

  His timing was perfect.

  The rush of the water had covered any sound of his approach, but Catherine had sensed Ken’s presence an instant before he reached her.

  As her bellow of terror began, the sound was pinched off. His hand shot out and gripped her windpipe, his thumb crushing her already bruised esophagus, making starbursts of light explode behind Catherine’s lids.

  The strength of his hand was freakish as it guided her out of the snail design, backward across the bedroom and toward the bed. Catherine was on the very tips of her toes, trying to steal a tiny suck of breath over the hand’s upward lift. Her eyes burned with the residue of soap, but through it she saw other figures moving through the room.

  “Finally my sweet Catherine, I’m going to teach you to stop fucking with me. Now you’re going to fuck me,” Ken’s voice was calm and sadistic.

  Catherine was groping to feel for his fingernail, her hands conducting the investigation all of their own accord. Securing that clue was an obsession that her body seemed to remember independently of her mind, and as she fumbled, she prayed that it might again trigger the bolt of super-human strength as it had done in the previous attack.

  She was wet, soapy and wriggling like a slippery eel. Her struggles for life were so violent that even this phantom from another realm battled to hold her down onto the bed and spread her legs sufficiently.

  “Give me a hand, Boys,” Ken called cheerfully over his shoulder to his henchmen. “Let’s all have a little fun!” Then he turned and spoke to Catherine in the sweetest tones.

  “I’ve brought someone who has a crush on you. Remember Craig, Cath.”

  Catherine looked directly into the face of the long dead man, recognizing his features but not his eyes. The eyes that she starred into were not human at all, their pupils a bar of heartless black.

  The strength from deep in her soul blasted through her like an express train. She bucked, rolled and kicked in one movement.

  Breaking their grasp, she bolted for the door, the stairs and Nancy.

  Her terror loaned her feet wings.

  Ken gave a halfhearted chase to the top of the stair flight where her soapy feet lost traction as they hit the marble. Over and over her body cartwheeled, her skull ringing against the stone before a final limp somersault onto the marble ground floor below. There she lay unmoving, a lifeless carcass.

  For the first time Ken saw the identity of the startled sleeper on the couch opposite.

  Nancy was looking directly into his eyes, he backed away into the shadows.

  The unexpected image of seeing Nancy, jolted him and with a shudder he gasped awake from the reality of the nightmare.

  As if he’d actually fought the struggles of the illusion, he was breathless, his body saturated with sweat.

  “These godforsaken fucking nightmares. I’m sick and tired of it…!” Today I will erase that recording, he promised himself.

  Erasing them was the only option he felt he had left; as long as the recording was be available to watch, he knew that he would not be able to resist.

  “The flesh is weak,” he remarked to himself, “…especially my flesh!” He thought it a rather charming aspect of his character.

  Within ten minutes of the desperate call going out, the paramedics came howling down the driveway with the wailing police in hot pursuit.

  Catherine still lay exactly where she had come to rest, she was breathing, barely breathing.

  With a supreme effort of will to overcome her terror, Nancy had leapt into action, her mind racing to prioritize the tasks that might clutch together the last evaporating whispers of Catherine’s life.

  Everything had bottlenecked into a delirious flurry of elastic time—her every action had been deadly urgent.

  Grabbing the portable phone she’d seen in the lobby, she had called the emergency operator who had assured her that the call was being relayed onward to the paramedics and the police.

  The connection had been uncharacteristically
poor with deafening static and scales of tones running and oscillating through every pitch.

  Not satisfied to rely on emergency services, she’d called both police and paramedics directly to verify that they were inbound. She’d run into the nearest bedroom and snatched the bedcover off to cover Catherine’s nakedness.

  She’d then crouched over Catherine, too terrified to cry; the deep sobs of fear and terror quaked to her skeleton. She’d seen the fucker and she cowered hard against the wall, her eyes an ever sweeping beacon, scanning the stairway above and the surrounding room with its dancing blue light from the television licking demon shadows into every corner.

  Upstairs lay blankets and probably a first-aid kit of questionable usefulness under the circumstances, but any thought of venturing to retrieve them had been dashed away with the specter of Ken she’d seen lurking in the shadows as Catherine had made her last tumble down to the bottom step. Their eye’s had locked for a fleeting moment before he’d fled back into the shadow’s with Nancy firing three furious rounds from the revolver in the direction of his retreat.

  With only two live rounds out of the five left in the chamber, she’d reined her trigger finger in, knowing they were too precious to waste with a madman loose somewhere above.

  The deathly hush from above and a maniacal cackling from a television advertisement had been the only distractions away from Catherine’s shallow clutches at breath.

  It was then that the vicious doubts had begun to creep stealthily into Nancy’s mind;

  Would the weapon be effective if she needed it? Would it jam? Could she control the dance of her shuddering hand?

  But effective or not, competent or not, in those endless minutes of her most severe test, she had become keenly aware that those two rounds were the only things she could hang her hopes on.

  Nancy had also been forced to make other dreadful decisions. She’d realized that Catherine might have sustained neck or skull injuries, and had judged her own actions within the situation by the insight she’d gained from watching television dramas;