onslaught of another round and allowed them to flutter open.
This time, the vision was still gone.
Letting out another sigh, this one of a semi-relieved nature, I rocked back on my heels and stood upright. Reaching to my face, I removed my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Slipping the spectacles back on, I gazed around the room. Everything was just as it had been when I entered. Nothing had changed, no matter how real the things I had just witnessed may have felt.
Making a slow half turn exactly where I stood, I finally wandered back to the small room housing the vanity. Removing my glasses once again, I twisted on the faucet and cupped my hands beneath it. Bending over the sink, I first pressed one handful of water against my face and then another. After a third, I turned the water off and leaned forward with my knuckles on the vanity as I stood there dripping into the basin.
The phantom pain in my groin had faded away, but the sense of arousal had only grown stronger. It was still distinctly feminine, however, and was as odd to me as it was pleasant. Of course, it also made me feel terribly ill.
“Gods, Gant…” I muttered to myself. “Just get the hell out of here while you’re still sane.”
“Gant?” her honey dipped drawl floats into my ears. “So that’s who you are.”
I am still standing at the basin, and I know the voice has come from behind me. Without bothering to dry my face, I pick up my glasses and slip them on then turn to look out into the main room.
She is perched on the edge of the bed, on the side nearest me. But, she has changed. Her hair is dark auburn and piled atop her head in a soft swirl reminiscent of a long ago era, which matches the high-necked Victorian dress she now wears. What I see of her face is stern, and far more oval shaped than before.
She is seated next to the headboard, and I can still see the man sprawled out behind her. He appears the same although there seems to be far more wounds on his body than there had been before.
She flickers like a frame jumping on a movie at the theater.
Her hair is once again fiery red and long. She is back to being a scantily dressed mirror image of my wife. She uncrosses her legs and re-crosses them in the opposite direction, stretching one out as she does so. She smoothes her stocking carefully then regards it with little emotion.
“Damn,” she says, her voice flat. “A run.”
She still hasn’t looked in my direction, and I begin to think that perhaps I was simply hearing things. I begin to turn away.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
I stop and furrow my brow.
“Yes, I’m talking to you, little man,” she continues, still without looking at me. Instead she seems to be intent on the items she has piled on the small table next to her.
“Me?” I ask calmly.
“Yes, you.”
“How? You aren’t even really here.”
“You tell me,” she counters. “It’s your vision, now isn’t it? Ah, there it is…”
She smiles and holds up a scissors-style cigar cutter.
“Right now I think I would prefer to believe you’re a figment of my imagination,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “If you want to believe that.”
“You left it up to me.”
She counters with a question. “Yes, I did. But you aren’t that stupid, now are you?”
“No.” I shake my head. “Unfortunately, I don’t suppose I am.”
She giggles. My answer is obviously amusing to her. Canting her head to the side but still not looking in my direction she says, “You belong to her don’t you?”
It is a statement as much as a question, however, I ask, “Her who?”
“The her who is taking what is mine,” she spits. “Felicity, I believe is what you said.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She carefully trims the end from a cigar then sets it alight. Silence flows between us as I watch her. A thin stream of blue-white smoke comes from between her pursed lips as she blows on the glowing tobacco and inspects to see that it is burning evenly. Placing the lit end in her mouth, she then exhales slowly through it, sending a cloud of pungent smoke billowing from the end. I know all too well that she is “smoking it” for her Lwa.
After a moment she pulls it from her mouth and rests it on the edge of the table.
Again, there is a theatrical flicker, and the stern, auburn-haired woman is in her place.
“You’re lying. I think you do know,” she says as if there had never been a lull in the conversation.
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you feel it.”
“Feel what?”
She finally looks up at me and smiles thinly, her dark eyes piercing. Reaching to the side, she takes hold of the victim’s hand. He is securely bound so he is unable to pull away, but a horrified squeal begins behind her as he struggles, only to be interrupted by her careful method of bondage. I hear a metallic snick and watch as she slips the cigar cutter over his pinkie finger at the second joint.
“The same thing we are going to feel when I do this,” she says and punctuates the sentence by bearing down and squeezing the cutter closed.
The stir that had been wriggling deep inside my body flared in that exact instant. No longer was it simply extreme arousal; it was now tickling nerve endings I didn’t even know I had. The result was a pleasure so intense as to be literally excruciating in its scope. I now knew the true meaning of having something feel so good that it hurt.
The room began to spin and then everything went completely black.
I opened my eyes and the acoustically textured ceiling filled my field of view. I felt spent in a way I had never experienced before, and to say I was confused wasn’t doing my current state any justice. I was completely addled. I was in agony deep inside, but it was a pain born of emptiness. An ache that called out, begging to be filled by the pleasure once again.
With a groan, I started to sit up but felt a firm pressure pushing me back down. I fell back and my head thumped against the floor.
I blinked.
Now I not only saw the ceiling but Annalise as well. She was leaning over me, one high-heel encased foot pressing down on my chest and holding me to the floor.
“Tell Felicity I want it back,” she said. “All of it.”
In that moment everything shifted, and the three-dimensional quality of the vision flattened then faded in a bloom of light. I was still squatting next to the bed, staring directly ahead as I had been at the beginning. I did notice, however, that I was holding my breath. I let it out with a heavy sigh. My eyes were itching and dry, so I closed them, but the moment I did so I feared I would regret the action. It seemed that blinking was getting me into a lot of trouble right now. Still, I knew that sitting here forever with my eyes closed wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I steeled myself in preparation for the onslaught of another round and allowed them to flutter open.
The vision was still gone.
I stood up, rubbed my eyes, then turned and started back toward the small room housing the vanity. I had only made it two steps when I caught myself and came to a halt.
An unbelievably intense feeling of deja vu overwhelmed me as recent memories flooded in. Though the hollowness still ached deep inside, my rational brain pushed through the fog and assumed control once again. I decided not to bother with a repeat of the trip to the sink that I wasn’t even sure I had really made. I simply needed to get out of here before leaving became impossible.
Turning, I headed toward the front of the room, skirting around the end of the bed then reaching the door in two quick steps. Any sense of stealth and caution to which I had earlier subscribed was now depleted. I pulled the door open and stepped out into the night, almost forgetting to tug it closed behind me. Starting up the walk, I broke into a jog, trying to put distance between the scene and me as fast as I could.
I gave my watch a quick glance and figured that I’d only been in the room for a little over twenty minutes. It had seemed like much longer, but that was the way of things with ethereal visions. They seemed to run by a clock
