altar of sorts against the back wall. Upon it is the nude body of a middle-aged man. His chest is sunken and his ribs are visible through yellow, papery skin, the way plastic wrap might look stretched over a skeleton. His ankles and wrists are bound with lengths of rope, a measure that seems unnecessary-nothing about this obviously doomed man suggests “flight risk.”
The man is awake.
And resigned to his fate-no pleas of mercy issue from his mouth.
But the dreamer senses something more than mere resignation; the man on the altar seems almost… eager.
Yes, that’s it.
He’s eager to die.
He eagerly awaits deliverance from a long period of suffering.
The dreamer-who maybe isn’t really dreaming-is horrified by the revelation. Not for the sake of this man, who is obviously beyond help, but for himself. Because he knows how easily he might embrace a similar fate. It is all too easy to imagine that sense of serenity, of blissful acceptance, in that last moment before death.
There is a small crowd in the room. A dozen people. All there, the dreamer supposes, to bear witness to this man’s death. Witnesses are an essential part of the ritual. He isn’t sure how he knows this, but it is fact, as immutable as the tide. He can’t make out their faces, and none of them speak. They are waiting for something. This is a reverent silence, a silence of solemn anticipation.
They wait.
And wait.
The dreamer wills his sleeping body to open its eyes. His concentration is so focused the intensity of the scene in his head wavers just a bit, goes soft-focus. His eyelids flutter. Once. And then the scene snaps back into focus. There is a flashing moment of utter despair and frustration. Then the mute witnesses drop as one to their knees. The dreamer is on his knees in the same instant, not at all sure how he knew the precise moment to genuflect. But the same mysterious impulse causes him to bow his head in the next moment. His peers in worship do the same. That sense of anticipation remains, but it is more intense now, and there is a collective holding of the breath.
Footsteps.
Someone has entered the room. A presence of authority. The footsteps draw closer. The sound is the thump of boots on wood, and there is something ominous about it. The dreamer begins to shiver and experiences symptoms like the onset of a cold, a headache and chills, a dull throb at the back of the throat. The clip-clop of the boots is like a hammer in his head as the person wearing them passes by him on the way to the altar. The person ascends the few steps to the altar, stops, and turns to face the small crowd. The worshipers, if that’s what they are, look up now.
The dreamer shivers again.
It’s her. Giselle. His tormentor. The awful mute woman who tied him up and tortured him. The candlelight seems to grow brighter. No, the dreamer realizes, it’s not just a matter of perception. The light actually is brighter. Giselle has somehow willed it. She is capable of such things. Magical things. She is not as adept as the one who taught her, The Master, but he thinks her power should not be underestimated. This knowledge appears fully formed in his head, intact from nowhere, like a file added to a computer’s hard drive via a floppy disk.
Giselle looks more beautiful than ever. She is wearing an ankle-length black skirt over black boots and a burgundy top that exposes her arms and breasts to stunning effect. Her long black hair is pulled back and gold hoop earrings dangle from her delicate lobes. The light from the candles seems to lick at her porcelain flesh. Her eyes are alive with the raw power of dark magic. She is the most striking female he has ever seen.
She smiles.
And extends a hand.
A person near the front of the crowd stands, extracts something from the folds of a robe, something that glints in the light, and walks with her head knelt down to the altar. She proffers the shiny object. Giselle takes it from her and the robed woman returns to her kneeling position. Giselle’s gaze takes in each person in the room, one by one, seeming to linger longer on the pale face of the dreamer.
The dreamer swallows hard.
Giselle’s smile broadens. The object in her hand is a wedge of razor-sharp steel. A knife with an ornate handle. Ceremonial knife. She turns away from the crowd. The dreamer has a side view of her slender figure now. She walks over to the bound man and kneels beside him. She brings the blade to her lips and kisses it. All a part of the ritual. The dreamer knows this, but the purpose of the ritual eludes him-a missing floppy-disk file?
The next phase of the ritual becomes apparent when another member of the crowd-the dreamer himself, actually-stands up and approaches the altar. Dread fills him like a fast-acting poison. The last place he wants to be is anywhere closer to Giselle or that altar. But he continues his approach on damnably steady feet. There is an object in his hand. A thick, leather-bound book. He wasn’t aware of it before, but here it is.
An image flash. Giselle nude. Standing over him.
Standing on him.
He wants to be far, far away from this sadistic bitch, but here he is ascending the steps to the altar, turning to face the crowd, opening the book, opening his mouth to intone lines written in a language he doesn’t know.
Except that he knows it now. Words swollen with madness emerge from his mouth. Repetitive and rhythmic, blocks of strange verbiage form like passages in a song. This is a chant. An invocation. The dreamer speaks the words with the rote familiarity of one who has spoken them many times before. A possibility occurs to him, a notion imbued with enough unexpected hope to cause his physical body to grunt with surprise.
What he’s witnessing is real. Or very nearly real. He suspects any exaggerations supplied by his own mind are minimal. Slight embellishments. However, he’s now certain he isn’t actually in the candlelit room. Instead, he’s a visitor in someone else’s head, an unseen voyeur. His host, this sentient conduit between his own sleeping brain and this strange place, is unaware of his presence. He shares some of this person’s store of knowledge, which is how he knows this strange language. But there are gaps in the interweaving of the two minds, places where the synapses don’t quite mesh. The dreamer knows his host is a male. He knows the man once had a normal life in the world outside The Master’s domain, but that all ended more than seven years ago.
And that is all the dreamer knows of his host.
He stops reading. The book snaps shut. There is utter silence in the room again. Another phase of the ritual has concluded.
Only one phase remains.
Giselle grips the bound man under the chin with one hand, forcing his mouth open. The other hand, the one gripping the knife, moves with practiced deliberation toward the gaping orifice. Moisture leaks from the corners of the doomed man’s eyes. Helpless tears. The dreamer experiences a surge of anger that nearly-but not quite- overrides the terror he’s feeling. This just isn’t right. Hell, it’s a fucking travesty. Things like this should not happen in the modern world. But, hey, this isn’t really a part of that world, is it? That place, though still subject to the forces of random chaos and violence, is a world that has achieved some degree of civilization. Of enlightenment. This terrible thing would not happen in that place. …
Here, on the other hand …
Giselle slides the knife into the man’s mouth with the same unhurried precision. The man’s body jerks as something in his mouth gives way beneath the pressure of the blade. There is pain, sure, lots of it. Like all other sentient creatures, he remains a prisoner to the instinct of nerve endings. His mouth tries to close around the blade in a desperate effort to halt its progress, but Giselle merely tightens her grip around his jaw. She works the blade up and down while gouts of blood jump out of the man’s mouth. The look on her face is one of rapt concentration as the blade continues its inexorable excision.
Her eyes sparkle with nearly orgasmic joy as she springs to her feet and holds the blood-flecked knife high above her head. Impaled on its tip, almost unrecognizable beneath a coating of gore, is a small flap of flesh. The mutilated man on the altar has rolled onto his side and is coughing up blood. He is choking on it. Someone should help him.
Someone…
Be careful what you wish for, the dreamer thinks.
His host is moves toward the bound man. A moment later, he is kneeling beside him. The book is set aside as
