It was bad enough that the dream kept recurring, scaring the shit out of him each time, but what was worse was the intense sexual excitement and release he felt. It left him feeling dirty and perverted, but he couldn't help it. And he couldn't get it out of his head. He tried not to remember it and think about it, but the images would come unbidden, bringing a raging erection.
Before long, though, he discovered that if he masturbated before he went to sleep each night, he had no sexual dreams and no nocturnal emissions. So nightly jerk-off sessions under the covers became the routine-the one problem was that the only image that could bring him to an orgasm was the one from his dream about torturing the little boy tied to the chair.
After her initial rush of awareness she finds it even harder to stay afloat than before. Like white blood cells attacking an invading virus, the boy's mind senses her invading presence and, independent of conscious thought, attacks her psyche, trying to push it so far into the black hole of his deepest subconscious that she will never be able to reach the surface again. It takes all her will and strength to fight her way back. Slowly, she is able to maintain a balance and gain ground.
Tentatively, testing her strength, she searches for indication that her psychic powers-what her brother and she had dubbed "the Machine"-are still intact. At first, she barely senses it-a whisper, an echo; she cannot feel that overwhelming and reassuring sense of power she had always felt. In despair, she nearly sinks into thoughtless oblivion, but then she senses a tiny spark, weak but still there.
It is still working!
She senses it functioning, all on its own, much the way it had during her entire life, which had prompted Edmund to nickname it "the Machine" in the first place. She senses its hand in the bestial wet dream that ends the boys innocence, and again whenever the boy masturbates, remembering that dream. She cannot control it yet, consciously, but she knows it is still connected to her, acting on her last conscious thoughts of survival. It will be some time before she can exert conscious control of it again, but she is confident that it will happen.
But not right away.
First, she must try to link to her host's conscious mind, which remains separate from hers except for brief flashes at moments of arousal and orgasm. But, not so with the subconscious. There, as exampled by the wet dream, the Machine continues to do subtle work for her, which slowly brings her strength.
After a while, with a great deal of exertion, she finds she can control when she sees through the boy's eyes but only for a few seconds at a time. Though each effort leaves her exhausted and susceptible to attacks from the boy's mental defenses, she continues to work on strengthening that ability.
Before too long-she has no concept of time in this weightless, mostly lightless existence-she discovers she can send the boy dream images and bring him to a nocturnal emission each night, during which time she feels her strongest. She soon finds that the more she does so, the stronger she and the Machine become. But the boy discovers masturbation as a means of warding off his wet dreams, and like a victim of quicksand losing her grip on hard ground, she slips back into the mind muck.
But there is a silver lining to this cloud: the more the boy masturbates, the weaker his defenses to her become. With every orgasm, she gains strength. She notices small things at first; she glimpses an image from the boy's mind like a holographic picture suspended in the blackness around her, or shares an emotion. Eventually, with much effort, the power to actually see through his eyes for a few seconds at a time returns to her.
Slowly, methodically, ploddingly, she exercises her willpower.
For the firstt time, she senses that full control of her host is possible. Though the spell was fractured thirteen years ago, she can salvage this. She must be patient; wait for the Machine to get stronger, and with it, she, too.
And they do.
Thanksgiving Day dawned a brilliant, crisp, sunny fall day; the kind of day where the air feels so clean that breathing it deeply feels like having your lungs wiped clean; the kind of day that was meant for the scent of burning wood in the air. It was not to last. A storm front moving up the Connecticut River Valley brought tall, dark thunderheads that erupted into lightning and rain by noon.
Chalice spent the night before in Jackie's dorm room since his roommate had gone home for the holiday earlier in the week. Awake early, she and Jackie remained in bed, making love, napping intermittently, and then making love again, until 11:00. With the dorm suite-not to mention most of the building and the campus-empty, they took a shower together and dressed. In the dorm lobby they got candy bars and Cokes from vending machines for breakfast and were on the road tojen's house just as the storm was breaking over the area.
It wasn't far to Jen's from the UMASS campus in Amherst, but the storm threw down such heavy sheets of rain that Jackie had to drive much slower than normal. Passing along Route 116, up and down the hilly landscape, Jackie was reminded, as he always was on this road, of the first time he had come this way thirteen years ago with his family on the day that they moved into the house on Dorsey Lane. He'd had no idea then what lay ahead of him; none of them had. Amherst, Sunderland, Deerfield, and Northwood had seemed like the quietest, safest places on earth. Who knew a monster lived there?
The sign for Dorsey Lane brought Jackie back to the present, and he made the turn, slowing to show Chalice Magaret Eames's house and the one he had lived in during Eleanor Grimm's reign of terror. Chalice pointed out a lightning-blasted tree in the side yard ofJackie's old house. It had once been tall-Jackie remembered it as being spiderlike with its web of branches forming a thick canopy, but now it had been cut in half, leaving the top part toppled over. The crown, its many branches now broken, lay against the ground just a few yards from the side of the house, while the rest of it leaned against the still standing base of the tree. Where the tree had snapped, the wood had exploded outward in bizarre clusters of splinters that resembled ribbons frozen in a stiff wind. But what was most remarkable of all was that on top of this eruption of wood sat the biggest crow either of them had ever seen. Despite the heavy wind and rain, not to mention the blazes of lightning followed by frequent booms of thunder, he sat there like a sentry.
Or an omen, Jackie thought.
"Nevermore!" Chalice croaked and giggled.
He smiled weakly.
Steve Nailer was antsy. He'd gotten up at 5:00 a.m., and after masturbating once before breakfast and twice after, he was ready to go to Jen's. By 9:00, before his mother had even had her morning coffee, he was nagging her so much about getting ready and when were they leaving that she finally sent him to the variety store a mile away to get two gallons of ice cream to bring tojen's for dessert.
Despite the cold, Steve took his bike, pedaling furiously to the store, racing as if his life depended on it. He felt such an overpowering sense of anticipation about going to Jen's; he hadn't seen either of his siblings since before Halloween and the Barbra Waters broadcast. But his strongest sense of anticipation was for finally going to the scene of the crime-the place that used to be the Grimm Memorials Funeral Home.
Since the Halloween broadcast Steve had thought a lot about the story of what had happened at Grimm Memorials. The best thing (maybe the only good thing, Steve often thought) to have happened since the TV show was that he discovered that Randy Gaste was a true friend, not like Jimmy Walsh and other kids who teased him. In fact, two days after the incident at Jimmy Walsh's house, Randy went with Steve and Randy's dad for a field trip to UMASS to see a new art exhibit and Randy apologized profusely for exposing Steve to Jimmy's ridicule. It was the first time in Steve's life that he felt like he had a true friend, and it was a moving experience.
Riding his bike back from the store, steering lefthanded while hugging the plastic bag of ice cream in his right arm with his hand tucked in his jacket for warmth, Steve wondered why he was so anxious to see Jackie. Though they had never been really close because of the age difference-though, curiously, Steve was closer tojen, wh
o was older-his brother was the only person in the family he thought he could trust to finally answer his questions and tell him what his father had been really like. Maybe he could even tell Steve why his father had done the things the TV show said he did. But there was another, darker, reason Steve needed to talk to Jackie-he wanted to know what Eleanor Grimm had really been like, too. He didn't know why he needed to know this, he just did.
He had to find out what his father had been like and what Eleanor Grimm's real powers had been.
His brother Jackie was cool. He'd give him answers, Steve was sure of it.
Diane Nailer's feelings about going to her daughter's hadn't changed by Thanksgiving morning. Since Halloween she'd been racking her brain trying to come up with a believable, irrefutable excuse to get out of going; only an excuse of magnitude would suffice this time, for she had used far too many excuses already. She'd been unsuccessful. Now with Steve off to the store she had a moment to sit back and try one more time to come up with something, but it was a weak attempt. She resigned herself to the fact and turned her mind to what lay ahead. She and Dr. Gibbons had been working hard toward getting her ready for this. Dr. Gibbons believed it was a good thing and another big step on the seemingly endless road to recovery that she'd been on ever since her last visit to the house in the woods behind Dorsey Lane in Northwood.
Thank God Jen had been blessed with amnesia about the whole thing, she thought, sipping her coffee. At first, Diane had been convinced thatJen's memory lapse was not a good thing. She thought her daughter needed to face and come to terms with what had happened; at least that's what every shrink and counselor Diane had ever talked to had told her, except for Dr. Gibbons. She was the only one that said that Jennifer would face it if she ever needed to and only when she was ready. She added that she might never be ready, but that was not necessarily a bad thing. It was her mind's way of protecting her and it was a healthy thing for her to do.
Over the years, Diane had come to envy her daughter's selective memory. Jen hadn't suffered the nightmares that Jackie and she had after, or the post-traumatic stress. At one point Diane's paranoia had grown so bad she had started seeing a dark figure lurking nearby, always out of the corner of her eye, only to disappear when she looked. Dr. Gibbons saved her sanity when she told Diane it was a common symptom of post-traumatic stress in people who have been victims of violence. There was even a name for the figure-the Villain-used by therapists. Knowing what it was still didn't make it any less scary. Dr. Gibbons eventually had to use hypnosis therapy to help break her of the hallucinogenic syndrome. It had been years since she'd seen the Villain, but to this day, whenever she was feeling overly stressed, she worried that he would return to the edges of her vision and stand there, fleeing when looked at directly, but usually coming back, as if waiting for her to lose it completely so he could jump out and scare her into complete insanity.
Surprisingly, the latter thought brought a pleasant memory and she smiled thinking of the first time she and Little Steve's father had made love. Kissing her neck, licking her ears, pinching and sucking on her nipples, arousing her beyond anything she'd ever felt before, he'd made her cry, "You're driving me crazy!" To which he had calmly replied, while continuing to exquisitely torture her with his hands and mouth, "No need to drive. I think we can walk there from here. It's not that far."
She giggled at the memory, but it faded quickly, as did her smile, saddening into a frown. At the sound of Little Steve (You have to stop calling him that!) opening the porch door, she rose from the table and went reluctantly into her room to get ready.
Jennifer was up early and in the kitchen. She couldn't wait to have her family all together in hers and Jeremy's home. She never thought it strange that she should think of the place as her home and never once think of it as what it used to be-a place of death and torture. Thus, it was hard for her to understand her mother's and Jackie's sense of trepidation at returning there for the holidays.
Though she had seen them just a few months ago, just before Labor Day when she and Jeremy had closed on the Grimm property, it seemed a lot longer. She'd been busy, but despite all the work, she'd never lost the conviction-which she interpreted as hope-that her mother and Little Steve would come visit, and stay; maybe even move in and help with the bed-andbreakfast. She knew it was too soon to spring that on her mother, but she felt a compelling need to do so as soon as possible. She was certain she could convince her mother; Diane just needed to see the place first, see how much it had changed and how warm it could be.
Jackie might be a little harder to bring around. Putting a rack of cranberry muffins into the oven, she thought fondly of him. One of the few memories she did retain of life before Eleanor Grimm was of how much she had teased Jackie and tormented him with scary stories. Jackie had always had a wild imagination, and she had played the typical rotten big sister and tortured him at every opportunity. After their rescue from the clutches of Old Lady Grimm, however, everything had changed. After that, it was almost as if Jackie were the older one. He acted toward Jen the way an older sibling should act-protective, understanding, caring, and nurturing. It still caused Jen a great deal of shame and regret to think of what a little bitch she had been to him.
It was endearing how protective he became of Jen over the years, even going so far as to, behind her back, interview boys who dated her and check them out to make sure they were safe for her. After screening Jeremy he had told her, "Keep this one," and she had followed his advice, which was the same as what her heart had given her. Once she was with Jeremy, Jackie had seemed ... relieved. It was then that Jen had realized just how much her brother had been looking out for her and worrying about her over the years. It was also when she realized what a failure she had been as a big sister, at least to him. Looking back, she realized that must have been the spur that had driven her to be so nurturing and caring of Little Steve-she had been trying to make up for the way she'd treated Jackie.
Jeremy came into the kitchen, wearing his torn blue flannel bathrobe that she had been wanting to throw out from the very first moment she had laid eyes on it. He wouldn't let her touch it; he'd had it for years and Jeremy was the type of man who liked things that he had a history with. It wasn't that he disliked change as long as it was applied to something that needed change. As far as he was concerned, his robe was still highly functional and, even more important, comfortable.
"You're not going to wear that around our company this weekend, are you?" she asked teasingly.
"Nope," he promptly replied, kissing her cheek and grabbing a mug off the wooden tree on the counter. He went on in a hillbilly voice: "Ah'm a-gonna run aroun' buck nekkid!" He grabbed the Mr. Coffee carafe and filled his cup, leaving the coffee black, the way he liked it. He took his cup to the table and sat, holding the steaming mug under his nose with his eyes closed, for several moments.
She laughed and shook her head. Though Jeremy took a long time to wake up in the morning, he was not a grumpy type. Once he had a cup or two of coffee and a shower, he was ready and raring to go, but before that he could be goofy and funny in a sleepy, almost drunken way that Jen found incredibly endearing.
"Smells good in here, "Jeremy said, eyes still closed, referring to the rich mix of odors from the cranberry muffins, coffee, and the turkey thatJen had gotten up for at 3:00 a.m. to put in the oven so that it would be ready for 1:00 p.m.
"The muffins will be done in a minute. You can have one hot and fresh from the oven,"Jen told him, sitting at the table and taking his hand.
"You're gonna make me fat," he said, opening his eyes and lifting her hand to his lips. He kissed her knuckles one by one.
"M-m-m-m," she sighed, "I'd like a nice, big, jolly, fat man to keep me warm in the winter."
"We'd save money on heating bills," he joked along.
"Sounds like a plan-me and the fat man!"
They laughed and he pulled her to him, kissing her so passionately that she almost forgot about the muffins. He was ta
king her back to their bedroom when she remembered, ran back to the kitchen, and pulled them from the oven, leaving them on the counter while she hurried back to a naked Jeremy waiting for her on their bed. She wasted no time in shedding her clothes and joining him.
In the afterglow of their intense lovemaking Jen lay in her husband's arms and had the pleasure of feeling that her life could only get any better if her whole family were living with her. She found herself wishing fervently that they could all live there in perfect bliss forever. If she could have that, she would always be happy and nothing bad could ever touch her life. She felt foolish for the intensity of emotion behind the wish-it was little-girlish-but couldn't help thinking it anyway.
"Oh my God! Look at you! "Jennifer squealed, running across the front porch and down the steps despite the rain. She swept Jackie into her arms before he could even close the car door. She immediately bustled him out of the rain and onto the porch where she held him at arm's length to appraise him.
"You're huge! My God!" she cried, looking up at him. "You've grown at least three inches. What are you, six-one now?"
"No, just five-eleven," he replied sheepishly. She brushed at his unevenly chopped, green-tinted hair with her fingers and touched the silver stud in his left nostril. She flicked the dangling skull-head earring in his left ear.
"And what's with the green hair and all the jewelry? The last time I saw you, the most you had was a little mascara and a bad haircut. I knew you liked the Goth look, but this is ridic-"
At that moment Chalice came up the stairs from the car, and Jen got a good look at her for the first time. Jen's abrupt silence was replaced with an expression of smug understanding. Why else would her brother change his look so radically?
Grimm Reapings Page 7