Warren latched on to it. One wild hope for human connection today. Human kindness. “Yes.” He clapped his hands. “Absolutely. The back. I’ll even hide my car down the street. You’ll never hear a peep from me. Just one night. Please?”
He had taken Joan’s hands into his own, pressing them together.
But an evil little smile arrived on Joan’s face. She stepped away, shaking her head no.
“You have to go, Warren. This is my house, and you’re not welcome in it.”
His heart sank to the floor. Past it.
“Please. Joan, really. I’m begging you. This isn’t a time for...for cruel jokes. I need you. I really do.”
“I’m sorry, Warren. But I’m not sorry. I’ve never wanted you in my life. Now, splayed out at my feet, is a perfectly good chance to show you that for a fact. Maybe now I won’t have to suffer any of your ridiculously stupid life any longer.”
Somehow—and Warren wasn’t sure how—he ended up outside. Had they tossed him out? Had he left of his own accord? His mind felt like it was skipping time. He only bothered to move from their walk when he noticed guests arriving.
He’d have to stay out of their way, yes. Or else Joan would be angry with him.
Warren stumbled. He felt drunk from isolation. All ties to the world lost. Eventually he made it back to his car.
Down the road there was a pharmacy with a large parking lot. He could drive in there and sleep for a while.
* * * * *
The most morning he woke with purpose. Simple enough. He had next-to-no possessions, and his wife was set to take all he had, no matter what she might have said. The only thing to do was to sell whatever he could before she got a mind to take the clothes off his back and the stuff in his car as well.
He drove over to his workshop and began to stuff it full of what supplies he thought might fetch a fair price.
Alder City was a small city, but a city nonetheless. It had a population of just over a hundred thousand people. The winters were cold and the summers hot, and in between the months fluctuated between warm and cool. It was fall now, and being fall, all the women had started to wear fetching tights and sexy tall boots, and Warren could not help but wish he had known this was all coming. He would have given Melinda more to be angry about. An affair right now would be a hell of a thing—any human kindness at all.
Certainly, a partner who wasn’t bringing in money wasn’t doing their fair share. But it was a good partner’s duty to stand by someone through the thickness of poverty, wasn’t it? The lean times of struggle, when nothing felt like it was going to end well. By god, if you could depend on one thing, wasn’t that it? Wasn’t it marriage?
Marriage, he thought, or family. At least Joan couldn’t divorce him. Last night, though, she had done all but that. He did not know when, if ever, he would be able to work up his will to talk to his beautiful sister and her delectably shapely lover again.
God, even now, knowing what they had done to him—all of these women—he could not help but find them furiously attractive. His curse was to want beautiful things around him.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe he objectified them all too much. Forgot about what they wanted. Put himself first.
But, dammit, if only they’d worked with him some, given him just a little more time, maybe he’d have been able to really, truly get himself off his feet. Then he’d treat them however they wanted. However they needed.
And dammit, didn’t he support Melinda in getting her degree? Her job at that firm downtown? And where had it gotten him?
She was probably sucking off some fucking architect right now. The thought made him sick to his stomach.
From his workshop he managed to gather a number of possible supplies to sell. There was always gadgetry and machinery to have as an illusionist. He had a printer, two computers, office furniture and filing cabinets. He had all manner of wiring and gears. Several dozen books on the craft of magic.
He stopped in front of the white room. God, how much had he sunk into that? And never being able to make it work. Not truly.
The white room was an experiment of his back when he still moonlighted as a hypnotherapist.
The subconscious was like a swamp full of mines. If it didn’t suck you in and cover over your life, it would blow you to bits. No one was safe from it, not really. Everyone acted on subconscious impulses. Warren knew that he did, even. He knew that his obsession with his sister—no matter how much he denied it—was part of some desire to feel some form of feminine love in his life after his mother steadfastly refused to show him any.
And there had been a time, a very brief time in his childhood, when he and Joan were close. Some part of him clung to that, trying forever after to recreate that blind, simplified liking that just appreciated someone else for being nearby during a struggle.
Anyway. Everyone had their own problems. Warren tried to remind himself of that. To absolve his guilty feelings, perhaps, of never quite being able to convince his sister that he was worth her time. If only he had somehow been good enough—
No. Down that road was madness, he knew. Her displeasure with him was her problem. As was Belle’s. As was Melinda’s.
But damn. If one person wanted you out of their life, then that person was just disagreeable. If every person wanted you out of their lives, though...
Maybe it was all bad timing. God, what he would do for a round in the white room right then. It was too bad he didn’t trust anyone but himself to operate it.
He opened the door. Inside the air was sterile, flat. The assistants didn’t know about it, he was almost sure. Not even Melinda did.
The idea was that if you could empty someone’s mind completely, then you could relieve them of all that subconscious junk that stuck with them from childhood. Disarm all the mines. Clear away all the gunk. Leave only a simple, easily traversable grassy plain full of life and light.
But it worked...well. It worked a little too well. He’d put one woman in it for an hour, and she couldn’t remember her name or how she had gotten there for more than six. And afterward, she showed no signs of improvement. No response to any triggers or suggestions that Warren implemented.
He'd always thought if he increased the frequencies slightly, he could have really produced some interesting results, but it was, frankly, too much to experiment with. A person's mind was at stake. He couldn't just wipe someone out and reprogram them.
After that—his trial run, his first attempt—he gave it up. Oh sure, he still tinkered with it from time to time. Changing the frequencies, altering the notes, experimenting with different intonations and trance patterns. But he never put another human in there.
It wasn’t that the woman had minded. God, no. She had actually loved it. All that empty space in her head was a major stress reliever. But she hadn’t remembered that she’d already paid him. She hadn’t remembered her terrible mood before arriving. She hadn’t remembered that her children had needed someone to pick them up from their football game; her cell phone had seventeen frantic messages waiting on it when she was done.
It was too powerful a tool. It worked in dynamite when all Warren had been looking for was a chisel.
So he put it away.
Maybe this was an opportunity, he thought mildly. To bring it back.
No. Best not. He was in enough trouble as it was.
An hour of packing and stuffing his car later, he drove into the pawn shop down the street. Across the way was a grocery store where someone was shot every few months. It was a heavily afflicted part of town, and Belle had always told him she never felt safe walking around. She was too pretty to be seen in such an area without a gun in her purse or a big, massive hulk at her side keeping her steady. Warren was fairly muscular, and kept in regular shape, but he didn’t think he was the hulk she was speaking of.
Inside, the shop seemed more like antique store than pawn shop. There were a great many chairs everywhere, chairs and tables, all of them overfull with trin
kets and baubles, figurines and small signs with sardonic sayings like “A Happy Wife is a Wife Drinking Wine.”
Behind the desk was a tall, woman with jet black hair and with gorgeously caramel-colored skin. She was hunched over on the desk, poring over some sort of record with a red pen in her hands. Her hair fell in a delicious mound to one side of her face, highlighting the statuesque nature of her beautiful face. For a moment after entering, Warren just stared at her. She was like some ancient Egyptian goddess of lust. Her lips pouting just so in her confusion as she looked at her documents.
Eventually though, he approached the desk, knocking it softly. The woman rose up, as if from a deep sleep even though her eyes had been open.
“Hi.” She shook her head, appearing perhaps to shake away the problems she had been working at. “Sorry. Hi. I'm Tasia. Welcome. Please, have a look around.”
“Actually,” said Warren, “I’m more interested in selling.”
“Selling? Oh, no.” She shook her head. “No, no. We can’t take anymore inventory right now. None at all, I’m sorry.”
“Really?”
He looked around. Most of what was there looked like it had just come in, no dust on it at all and all unsorted, which implied to him that there was a great deal of traffic happening.
“Really. We’re...I mean, I am going out of business. Sort of. I mean, not going out? Not like, we failed? Or I failed? But just...done. Giving up the shop. So I can’t possibly take any more. I’m sorry.”
“What happened?”
Warren was curious now. Perhaps it was just because she was so beautiful when she talked.
“My husband.” Her face contorted. “He died. He ran the shop. He was going to convert it into an antique shop. You know the kind. With the bookstore doing so well up a few blocks, East Side Pages? We thought we would try to emulate their success a little bit. Gentrify, all that. Get out of the pawn store game. But I was...I am a student. And I just don’t have time to run a shop. I don’t know the first thing about it.”
She smiled self-indulgently, as if suddenly realizing how much of herself she had revealed. Warren smiled back, showing an appropriate amount of concern.
“That’s too bad about your husband. I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was sudden. He didn’t feel a thing. Don’t worry yourself.”
Warren turned and looked at the shop. “God, you know, I’ve only just come in here the first time, and now you’re leaving.” He laughed. “It was the one thing I had thought worked out for me. My workshop is just up the road. I’m clearing it out.”
“Another business closing?”
“Sort of. I had a falling out with...everyone, really.”
But he wasn’t truly paying attention to the conversation anymore. There was a watch on the table across from the beautiful shopkeep, hanging down from a jewelry stand. Swaying just slightly, catching the eye. It was a gunmetal gray except for the deep silver trim across its edges. A beautiful piece. There was a sun engraved on one side, with an eye inside the shape of the sun.
“My husband,” he heard the shopkeep say. “He bought all this stuff from some vendor. It just arrived yesterday. But I can’t find out the name of it for the life of me. Nobody stayed behind to help me load it in. It was just there in the loading bay all of a sudden.”
He approached the watch, lifting it up slightly.
“How much for this?”
Her steps were light, barely there. Tall as she was, she was slender, too. Her blouse clung to her tiny waist like spandex. Her denim pants were so tiny they fit like tights. Her panties were visible just over the edge of her belt line.
“I’m not sure,” she reached over his shoulder, trying to touch it.
For whatever reason, the thought of her touching the watch at the same time as he filled him with fury. He couldn’t allow it. He wouldn’t. It was inhuman, abomination. He spun away from her, gripping the watch tight by the chain. As he did, a great, blinding light flashed outward from the watch as it swirled through the air.
“Just back up and let me have a look, all right?”
She nodded slow, turning dumbly and striding back into the counter. She bumped it several times, unable to work her way around. It was only after looking up again that Warren noticed she was actually walking backward.
Odd.
“Hey,” he said. “You don’t have to get snotty about everything.”
Her face was distant, serene. “Don’t get snotty. 'Bout everything.”
“I’m...I’m serious,” he said. “You don’t have to joke.”
“So serious.” She sighed contentedly. Her demeanor entirely shifted from the hunched, stress-balled form he had just seen her as—now her posture was relaxed. Laid back. Almost...empty. “Won’t joke. Okay.”
Her smile was languid. Blissful, almost.
“Holy shit,” said Warren, looking at the watch in his hands.
It couldn’t be. Could it...could it really be?
“Jump on one foot,” he tried.
She did. Her heavy tits bounced merrily.
God in heaven.
“Smile. With teeth. Like you’re posing for a picture.”
She tossed her hair back and smiled wide, her eyes flashing glee at some invisible camera.
His cock pulsed against his jeans. This was a discovery, he thought dumbly. This was...this was the discovery of a hundred lifetimes.
The door rang—another customer walked in. An old woman. Luckily, somehow, she was distracted by some piece right in front of the door. A plate, he thought.
Quickly, Warren stuffed the watch into one pocket and then moved Tasia back into the small office behind the counter. Her face had started to smile less, her movements less and less easy to coerce.
He stepped back out, a smile on his face. The customer in question was a small old woman, perusing calmly between the aisles.
“I’m terribly sorry, ma’am, but we have to close.”
“Close?” she looked around. “It’s the middle of the day.”
“I know!” He smiled amiably, nervously. Part of the act. “It’s a shame, isn’t it? But I’m the only one who works here, and I’ve just gotten a call about a family emergency.”
“I’ll only be a moment,” said the woman, returning to her browsing. “You know, you can just leave me here. I can lock up. I won’t take anything, my boy.”
“Ma’am.” Warren’s voice gathered a hard edge. “You have to leave. Now. Please.”
The old woman huffed. Her hands and arms gathered around her side like she held groceries.
“No reason to become indecent about it.”
He pushed the door open. “All the same.”
“You can bet I won’t be coming back here! And I won’t be recommending it to my friends, either! They buy this sort of thing!”
“Good afternoon, ma’am.”
He closed the door and locked it tight.
* * * * *
The shopkeep was still in trance in the back, if not quite as adamantly so as before. It seemed as though allowing her to relax and just feel what she felt was a good way to let the trance—if that’s indeed what it was—last longer.
The office was small. Long rows of binders—presumably full of accounting and inventory records—filled one wall. On the back wall, on a shelf, were pictures of the shopkeep with her husband and their dog. Several of the photos had been turned down or pushed away. He took a moment and turned the rest down. Nothing and no one looking at him now. He wanted no witnesses.
Finally he sat down in front of the shopkeep. They were both in front of a hard, old oak desk that looked much like an antique itself. Her face was gorgeous and he had to resist the urge to kiss her as she smiled so serenely.
“Tasia,” he said. “I want you to tell me what you’re feeling.”
Slowly, she stretched her neck, laughing softly.
“Calm. Warmth. Trust.”
“Good. That’s so good.”
“Yes
. Good.”
“I want you to unbutton your top, Tasia.”
It was a thin, blue blouse. Her tits hung heavy in it. They looked gorgeous from the outside. He wanted to see what color her bra was. And more than that, if she did that, then she would definitely be completely hypnotized. Somehow. He could figure out the mechanics later.
“Un...button?” Her hands came to her shirt. She fiddled with the top button, fingers sliding over one another in doubt. “But...” She shook her head. “No. I don’t...want to.”
Warren felt panic shuddering through his body. Stomach knotting up. Palms sweating. She was coming out of the trance, and fast. But...why? What was different?
He reached into his pocket and held onto the watch.
The watch! Yes! Something with that, of course.
“How did...how did we get back here?” she asked. Gaze clearing. “Why are you in my office?”
Her head was in her hands, rubbing as if she had some tension headache.
He traced back his steps. He had told her to back off. He’d told her to calm down and relax, to go into the office.
“I think you should calm down,” he said, posturing with the watch in front of her face.
“What?” Her look was harsh. “Don’t you tell me to calm down. You’re in my office. Why are you holding that? Do you want to pay for it? You better. I’m going to call...someone.”
“Wait!”
As she reached for the phone on her desk, he did too, and the watch dangled down from his hand. It swung from side to side, and the dark beauty’s eyes flashed with vibrant, filling light. Slowly, she stopped. Transfixed now by the easy pendulum motion of the watch.
It was the swing, he thought triumphantly. The swinging motion was the key. Of course. Just like an act. How had he missed that?
“Sit back. Relax.”
“Yes,” said Tasia. “All right.”
Warren licked his lips. Everything about her, ripe for the taking. Just waiting for his will. God, what a feeling!
“You’re going to be very attentive now, and very open-minded. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
How deep was she, truly? He had to know.
“You should say ‘Sir’ when you address me, Tasia. It’s only natural. It’s a sign of respect. And you respect me deeply.”
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