Dreams and Desires

by Paul Blades

  Professor Lanier's assets had been somewhat limited and the cash had run out fast. He could have easily transferred millions of dollars to himself by invading online banking records in spite of their ridiculously simplistic security precautions. That would have created a trail he did not want, and, perhaps, complications, as the financial institutions would undoubtedly recruit specialized governmental agencies to trace the stolen money. And, it would make it that much easier for the jumper sent to track him down to find him. So, when the cash was almost exhausted, he sold the pretty, cooperative, pert breasted Nadine to a pimp in East St. Louis for $25,000. The fast talking black man had been somewhat reluctant to make the deal, but when he saw how enthusiastically and joyfully Nadine serviced himself and his friends, and how pleased she was at the prospect of becoming his property, he jumped at it.

  Afterwards, Jonathan, as he learned to think of himself (having decided to abandon his prior ‘name’ as a symbol of his determination never to return), desirous of making his trail harder to follow, moved his center of operations west, to Denver, Colorado. There, he converted several other, young, attractive disciples who would be more useful than the sometimes bubble headed younger sister of his familiar. He actually found it more efficient to have the enthralled Diane serviced and handled for his benefit by females strange to her, eliminating all ties to her former existence.

  Another thing Jonathan had abandoned was the strict ethical code of the Whole. It had been easy for him. He had learned to despise the limitations on his ‘personality’ inherent in life as an aspect of the Whole. He realized that had he not hidden his yearnings for a more personal, individualized existence, he would have been considered what we would call mentally ill. Although lust was the fuel that connected him to the other universe, for he still needed to maintain that connection, he had found fear greatly enhanced its potency. To instill fear meant to inflict pain. He personally found physical violence abhorrent. Psychic pain was another thing. He often made the lovely, blond Diane writhe in acute distress as a reminder of her duties to him. He had felt a great wave of it when he let the former biology professor know of her baby sister's fate.

  The conversion of Nadine to a whore had been so easy and so profitable, he had quickly enthralled and sold four more delectable young women. Cruising the streets and parks of the city for appropriate candidates, he would, by the simple expedient of touching their arms or their hands, entrance them and have them follow him back to the small apartment he had rented. He enjoyed breaking the pretty girls in before selling them. They cried and whined when he forced them to undress themselves in his naked presence and that of his other servants. He fed off of their fear and terror, as well as the passion he had stoked in them. One, a black haired, petit beauty who was in Denver just to visit some friends, begged and pleaded to be spared when he informed her of her impending fate. Unlike Nadine, whose memories of her prior existence he wiped out, he left these unhappy young women's memories intact, yet made them unable to disobey the commands of their new ‘employers’ or to resist the demands of the intense lust he instilled in them.

  The money had been useful in setting up the computer equipment he needed and securing quarters where he could more easily keep his familiar in bondage. His education in this universe's laws and the basics of its technology and science increased exponentially. Meanwhile he built his powers through the lust and fear of his familiar and the servants he recruited. He knew the Whole could not terminate his bond to it. It was bound by its own morals and could not do anything to violate its taboo against taking any form of life. Cutting him from its flow of essence between the dimensions would mean the termination of his existence. And once he had access, the only limit on the amount of energy he could “pull through” was the capabilities of his familiar.

  Every morning he would drain the female of the energy she had obtained through her dreams. During the day, he would repeatedly drive her into frenzies of lust. She could not resist him even though he could not use his direct forms of mind control on her. He was her dream man, the epitome of her desires. He had been imbued with the physical form of her ideal. His servants, three appealing, young, now insatiably passionate women, all had regular employments and, after their conversions, had severed all other social relationships and moved in with him. They contributed their salaries to his needs but for the small allowances he permitted them, made sure the isolated house he had rented in a rural suburb was properly supplied with the necessitates of life and, in spite of the deep seated fear he had inculcated in them, adoringly and energetically complied with any and all of his sexual demands.

  It was in his third month that he had his stroke of luck. He had just left the law office of a bright, up and coming, business attorney one of his servants had located for him and was in the elevator on his way out of the building when Dolores Marjoram, the 33 year old former trophy wife and now widow of prominent industrialist, Philip Marjoram, stepped in. Jonathan had recruited the handsome and well connected young female attorney because he had designed some improvements on existing technology and needed to establish a commercial entity to exploit them. This was in accordance with his second goal: wealth. Naturally, he wanted to enjoy and partake in the most refined and pleasurable experiences his new world offered. These things, he realized, cost money. More importantly, he needed access and use of the finest, most advanced laboratories and technology to build tools that would help him avoid the fate of prior rebels from conformity to the Whole. That would take great amounts of money. And quickly too.

  The improvement of the primitive local technology had been simple. The hard part was to develop refinements subtle enough that they did not raise eyebrows as being sudden, miraculous breakthroughs. He did not want to draw untoward attention to himself. And he could not just walk into a company and plop an invention on their desk and receive cash in exchange. He would need to found a corporation, set up bank accounts, pay taxes.

  Jonathan had left the pretty, street smart attorney disheveled and exhausted in her office after fucking her three times on her desk during their hour long interview. He had sat in her office chair while she suckled his cock fervently, kneeling between his legs, his hands on her head, redirecting her life's goals to serving him.

  Mrs. Marjoram was an attractive 37 years old. She had taken advantage of all of the resources available to her through the wealth of her older husband to maintain her youth and vigor. Her thick, blond hair was stylishly cut to just below her shoulders. Her breasts were round and firm, filling the bodice of her Givinchy “little black dress” enticingly. Her long, well toned legs were shown off provocatively up to just above mid thigh. She was wearing killer black pumps and dark, sheer stockings. Dolores had been a moderately successful, aging, fashion model when she infatuated the much older, just divorced Philip at a party. She had been just 27 when they had married and he had been a spry 76. She hadn't expected him to last more than a few years. He had, to her dismay, lasted ten. Now, she wore her well tailored, stylish and revealing widow's weeds with aplomb, ecstatic at her new freedom and planning a long vacation in Acapulco. She had been visiting her attorneys, the ones whose firm name was too long to fit on a single line on an envelope and whose 75 associates and junior partners occupied the top three floors of the building, to discuss details of her husband's estate and how best for her to assume control of it. She and his 22 year old daughter by a prior marriage, a girl whom she detested virulently, were Mr. Marjoram's sole heirs with Mrs. Marjoram left a controlling 62%. The estate was worth over 300 million dollars.

  Jonathan had developed the habit of probing the minds of women he came across while out in the world and had immediately sensed her usefulness. By the time the elevator had reached the bottom floor, Dolores had invited him to lunch. When lunch was over, they went to one of the first class hotels in the business district and rented a room. When she left at 9 o'clock that evening, she was his.

  Jonathan realized his conquest of the heart of the beautiful w
idow would have to seem appropriately gradual and respectful to her dead husband's memory in order to avoid unacceptable public remonstrance. Consistent with his desire to live a low key existence, he didn't want their marriage to become grist for the scandal sheets. And so over the next six months, while he developed his cachet as a moderately successful entrepreneur from back east, his public courtship of the beautiful widow progressed gradually. Privately, he took every opportunity to cement her to his will. The day after their tryst in the elegant, downtown hotel, he took her, on the pretense of a trip to a mountain spa, to his rural homestead, where he taught her the meaning of fear and uncontrollable lust for four days.

  They were married in Aspen, a huge affair that was the social hit of the season. Jonathan had realized he would not be able to squelch the publicity surrounding their union. However, the splash was just temporary and when they settled down to married life on the 2500 acre Marjoram estate fifty miles northeast of Denver, the public's interest in them quickly faded. Jonathan had the guest house converted to his private domain where he installed his familiar and his three randy acolytes. Dolores spent most of her days energetically serving him or them, popping out on the social scene under his strict psychic control from time to time, just enough to stifle any rumors.

  Cathy Marjoram, Dolores's stepdaughter, who had boycotted the nuptials, had been convinced to pay them a visit when he had met her at a stockholders meeting for Marjoram Industries about a month after the wedding. Jonathan had voted all of Dolores’ shares by proxy, and placed himself on the Board. He didn't need to elect himself Chairman. It was too soon for that anyway. From his vantage point as a Board member and representative of the majority shareholder he would be able to quickly assert authority over the direction of investments.

  Cathy was a sweet, thin wisp of a girl with big brown eyes. She was shapely, but not voluptuous. She had looked lost in her prim business suit. Her hair was a light brown, long, almost to her waist. She had delicate hands that he remarked upon when they were introduced. Her handshake was soft, almost tender. She had earnestly expressed her hope she and her “father's former wife,” as she put it, could live in relative peace. She had no real interest in the money. She merely wanted to be assured an adequate income so she could pursue aspirations as a concert pianist. She was slated to begin study in Paris in a few weeks. When Jonathan invited her to visit at the estate, holding her hand gently in his, the girl seemed dazed for a moment and then agreed. Two weeks later, she cancelled the Paris trip, signed an irrevocable power of attorney in favor of Jonathan and came to live with him and his dutiful wife permanently.

  Jonathan had taken care of the servants right away. He had let go the butler who had served the Marjoram family for fifteen years and brought in and converted a 40ish, attractive and efficient former hospitality manager from one of the downtown hotels. She had weeded out ‘unacceptable’ staff immediately, and the Blackthornes were now served by pretty, compliant, mostly illegal Latina girls. The renegade had adapted them to his use one by one. They had been recruited from a business agent who operated out of San Antonio and had been brought directly there. No one would ever miss them, no one who counted that is.

  In fact, he had developed a very helpful tool for his future endeavors when one of the nervous maids had been escorted into his presence in the large, well appointed library on the main floor for her ‘interview'. Jonathan had begun learning Spanish a few days before and was not yet well versed, but he understood the girl's horrified, whispered ejaculation when she first felt the tendrils of his control wending through her mind. She had fallen to her knees and crossed herself and said, “Mi Dios, el Diablo!” in a soft, desperate voice before crawling naked between his thighs and receiving the essence that would bind her to his will. When he realized how useful the concept would be, Jonathan had immediately adopted it.

  All the Hispanic girls who worked for them now believed they had been captured by a demonic power. And, for all practical purposes, they had. Jonathan had had a special design based on a pentagram made for him. He had mounted it on the wall of the library and a larger one in the servant's dorm. All of the servants now carried a tattoo of the pentagram on their bellies, just above their now hairless sexes, marking them, in their horrified minds, as the property of the devil. All of the other women now wore it too. It was to be the signifier of his control over them and all his future female servants.

  The alien rebel had now achieved his second goal: comfort and luxury. He now needed economic power. He needed access to world class laboratories and high tech manufacturing facilities where he could conduct research and make prototypes with no questions asked. It had taken the equivalent of seven years of Earth time for the technicians to isolate the emotional emanations of his familiar over the dimensional barrier. It was not like fishing where you just put your hook in and hope for the best. The emotional emissions of billions of people crash against the barrier daily and tens of millions of them break through. He calculated that, even under emergency conditions, it would take the technicians of the Whole at least three earth years to isolate the lusty needs of another female sufficiently bright and passionate to cast her emotions across the divide strongly enough to facilitate a pursuer.

  Three years was a blink of an eye when you considered that he needed to make what would be revolutionary discoveries in the sciences of this dimension in order to fully accomplish his ultimate goal: to either free himself of the restrictions of dependence on the Whole or to find new ways of access to it that would liberate him from the necessity of maintaining his familiar. She would be a stone around his neck as long as his existence was dependant on her. And she would eventually wither and die. With his abilities to manage and rejuvenate his own flesh, he had estimated he could live 300 years or more before his physical powers diminished in any appreciable way. He could, conceivably, live in this dimension until he was 500 years old. By then, he might be able to find a way to develop and occupy a new male, human body. If he did, he could theoretically live forever.

  So, he would need to replace his familiar many times. Although she was in the prime of health, his devoted female acolytes took good care of her in that respect, and he had planned to add a highly skilled female physician to his coterie of servants as soon as he could, Diane's body would eventually burn out from its state of continuous stress, especially with the intensity of his use of her. It might take two years, three, five or ten, but her usefulness as a conduit to the other side would diminish, slowly at first, and then rapidly until she finally lost the ability to draw energies from the Whole. At that point, he would be finished. And if it happened, it happened. The years he would enjoy as a virtual god on this planet, wallowing in its sensual delights, would be well worth it. If there was a chance he could live many hundreds of years, he would go for it.

  So, Jonathan needed to be able to do more than just influence policy. He needed to be able to run Marjoram Industries as a virtual fiefdom, allocating millions of dollars to research, first on how to detect the dimensional barrier with the primitive skills and technologies of this world and then how to exploit it. He was familiar, of course, with the principals that had led to the discovery and overcoming of the dimensional barrier on his side. You could not compare earthly science with the manner that the Whole absorbed and stored knowledge. Everything was different; the laws of science did not translate between universes. On this side he was dealing with whole new concepts. If you made a watch in London and brought it to the deepest darkest forests of Africa, it would still be a watch. It would tell time. If you brought that watch over the dimensional divide, it would, if you were lucky, be no more than a lumpish, unrecognizable object, assuming it didn't just break down into its constituents and vaporize into dust in your hands, if you had hands.

  Jonathan patiently built up his influence in the corporate structure of Marjoram Industries. It was a challenge because most of the decision makers in the company were men and he although could influence them with his
mind, he could not control them. Not like he could with females.

  A few weeks after his assumption of his duties as a Board member, he invited Charles Conway, who had taken over from Philip Marjoram as CEO a year before his death. Conway, a 43 year old, athletically built, up and comer, had believed he could easily deal with Mrs. Marjoram after Philip's death and saw himself with a bright future managing a Fortune 500 corporation. Now that Jonathan was on the scene, he saw the handwriting on the wall. He was on his way out. Jonathan was already on the Board and Conway expected that by the time next year's stockholders meeting rolled around, Blackthorne would be ready to take the helm. He had the strange man with a seemingly mesmerizing hold over Dolores Marjoram investigated. His people came up blank. And it was really a blank. They could find out nothing about him. It was if he had appeared out of thin air. If Conway had been able to get dirt on the suave, good looking interloper, he might have been able to push him off of the Board, even get Mrs. Marjoram, who was now known as Mrs. Blackthorne, to dump him and take back his control of her shares. Having failed in his efforts, Conway already had feelers out for a new position elsewhere.

  Blackthorne had invited Conway and his lovely wife, Anna, to Sunday lunch at the vast Marjoram Estate. They had eaten on the southern veranda, at a table covered with a large, multicolored umbrella to keep off the worst of the sun's heat and served by the fawning and obsequious Latina servants dressed in pleasing, little, short skirted servant's uniforms. It was a pleasant, early summer day, slightly warmer than seasonal. Anna Conway, a sociable, well educated woman, about 32, looked appealing in her light, flowery sun dress. She had jet black hair down to just above her shoulders, a thin, long nose, and a narrow face. She was just short of what you would call beautiful, but her face was alert, and her intelligence and attentiveness to Dolores and her cheery disposition, conveyed an attractiveness all its own.