Mindkiller Read online

  “He’ll graduate Mama Cum Loudly,” he assured her, and she pinched him.

  “Seriously, Norman…” She drew on her cigarette, and her face and one shoulder reappeared briefly and ectoplasmically. “I don’t make a habit of bolstering my lovers’ egos, but that was extraordinary.”

  “Wasn’t my doing. Wasn’t even our doing. We were both privileged to be present at an extraordinary event.”

  “Bullshit. It may have taken me till five-thirty in the morning to seduce you, but it was worth waiting for. You’re a very good lover, don’t you know that?”

  A flip answer died on his tongue and left a strange taste. “No,” he said finally, “I didn’t.”

  “Well, then, let me tell you: in the last hour or so you fulfilled just about every fantasy I had left, and showed me at least one erogenous zone I didn’t know I had. Listen, I’ll be honest: I’ve had better. But I’ve never had a better first time, and I doubt I ever will.”

  He could think of nothing to say.

  “Hey, look, I don’t want to belabor this. I didn’t mean to make you self-conscious. I just…I guess I just wanted to say thanks. It’s…well, there’s been a long line of guys who couldn’t have cared less if I’d been awake or not.”

  It startled him. “Why the hell would anyone want to have fun alone? Given an alternative like you?”

  “The ultimate test of cool. Maintain independence even in the ultimate sharing. You, now: you’ve got more guts than that. You’ve given me a piece of yourself, and for all you know I might rip you off.”

  “Phyllis,” he said gently, butting out his smoke, “my checkbook and credit cards are on the bureau. Clean me out and we’ll be about even. You’ve done me a world of good.” He sat up, and she hugged him.

  When they separated again, he realized that he could dimly see her outlines now; a warm glow was faintly visible at the edges of the window shade. “Jesus. It’s come morning.” All at once, and for the first time in many hours, he was immensely tired. He lay back down and closed his eyes.

  “Norman?” she began, and from the tone in her voice he knew at least in general where she was going, and started to protest his fatigue, but she kept on talking, saying, “Do you have any unfulfilled fantasies?”

  Fatigue gone. “Uh…sexual fantasies, you mean?”

  “Chicken. Come on, be honest. Aren’t there any secret wishes I can make come true for you?” Her hand found him, began working gently.

  “Well…”

  “Come on, you’re stalling, trying to think of something else plausible to ask me for, in place of whatever you first thought of.”

  Even Lois had not pushed all his buttons. He made his decision. “How do you feel about being tied up?”

  Even in the semidarkness he could tell she was frowning; her hand stopped.

  “Further than you wanted to go?” he asked after a while.

  “You know,” she said slowly, “I’m not sure.” She lit another cigarette, cupping it so that all the light was reflected down away from her face. “I had a friend, once. She and her husband were into master-slave stuff, I mean they were incredible. She wore a collar around her neck, had whip scars, and I swear to God she was as proud and happy as hell. I thought it was sick.”

  “Jesus,” he said, “so do I.”

  “I used to ask her how she could stand to be degraded like that. She said it was like the ultimate proof of her love for him. I asked her if he ever proved his love, and she said it didn’t work that way, that she gave him what he needed and he gave her what she needed.”

  “Christ on a skateboard. They still together?”

  “Of course not. After a while she had no more proofs to give him, so he dumped her. I haven’t seen either of ’em in years.”

  “Uh…that’s considerably stronger than what I had in mind. I don’t think I’d go for bullwhips and pain and abuse.”

  It was light enough now to see her grin as her hand squeezed. “But hearing about it got you hard, didn’t it?”

  He could not deny it.

  “I’ll tell you something. I think she was off the wall, I mean industrial-strength crazy…but once in a long while I think about it and I get wet myself. Isn’t that sick?”

  “First tell me what ‘sick’ means when applied to a normal condition. Nobody leaves the TV for a snack during the rape scene. That does not necessarily mean that anybody wants a rape for Christmas.” He took another cigarette himself, and she lit it for him with hers. “Look, my subconscious is as screwed up as anyone’s. Just from the little I’ve told you about Lois and me, you must be able to see that there’s probably a lot of hostility towards women buried in me right now, certainly towards one woman. But—well, I don’t know if this will make any sense or not, but a fantasy is not necessarily a wish.”

  “All right, then,” she said, and began gently stroking his penis. “Tell me about your wishes.” He could make out her features now, and she was looking him square in the eye. He could not look away. Involuntarily his back began to arch, his buttocks to clench.

  “I would like to tie you down to this bed,” he said thickly, “and tease, tantalize, and otherwise titillate your fair young body until you scream for mercy. The only kind of pain I have in mind—beyond the occasional pinch or scratch we’ve already tried—is the sweet agony of wanting to come so badly you can’t see straight or remember your name.”

  Her busy hand paused, and she grinned suddenly. “That does sound more interesting than scrambled eggs and coffee. I just don’t know if I understand the tying-up part.”

  He disposed of his cigarette and she followed suit. “Well, partly it’s the symbolic trust, of course, which is fairly heady stuff. But most of it is a sheerly muscular thing. I mean, sex is a process of allowing tension to build to a peak and then release, right?”

  “When you’re doing it right.”

  “All right—but ordinarily there’s a certain point beyond which your subconscious will not let you build that tension—because if you did, the sheer intensity of the climax would break your partner’s back, or nose, or whatever. But when you’re restrained, you can exert total effort safely. Every muscle in your body can turn into steel cable, and it’s okay.”

  She was looking thoughtful. “You sound as if you’ve had it done to you.”

  “Once, a long time ago. A woman I lived with.”

  “You enjoyed it?”

  “Very much.”

  “How come only that once, then?”

  “She didn’t want to talk about it afterward. I think she was deeply disturbed by how much she enjoyed it. Which was her privilege; I didn’t push it.”

  “But you’d try it again?”

  “Well, I have to admit that these days it’s not what I’d call one of my premier urges. I guess I just feel like I’ve had my fill of being helpless, this last year. But if you wanted to, I guess I could get behind it.”

  “Another time, perhaps,” she said softly, and lay down spread-eagled on her back. “Right now I’m yours on toast. Bring on your ropes.”

  He used neckties, and was careful about circulation.

  “Norman,” she said as he was securing the last knot, “can you see my handbag?”

  “Sure, what do you need?”

  “In the inside compartment there’s a vibrator.”

  “Oh.” He fetched it, stopped on the way back to the bed. “You know, this is a hell of a first date.”

  All the tension blew away in their shared laughter.

  He opened the shade, and it was well and truly morning now, an impossibly rosy dawn from some Tourist Bureau postcard. He spared it only a glance, then brought his gaze back to her vulnerable nakedness.

  “You know,” she said, “there is something thrilling about being helpless…when your subconscious is convinced that there’s nothing to be really afraid of.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He tried the vibrator: it sounded like an alarm clock buzzer. He grinned at her. “Never tried one of the
se.”

  “The single mother’s home companion. It’ll be a learning experience for both of us.”

  “That it will.”

  After fifteen minutes she begged for a gag. “Honest to God, I’ve gotta scream so bad, I’ll wake up the whole building.” He insisted that they work out signals first by which she could communicate the concepts “stop doing that” and “I need a breather.” Half an hour later he still had not allowed release to either of them. His penis was iron-hard and uncharacteristically standing completely upright against his belly, and she was in a state somewhere beyond babbling incoherency, when the doorbell rang.

  He ignored it, of course. It penetrated his attention only just far enough to cause him to tuck the vibrator under a sheet, muffling it, and continue manually. Phyllis was beyond noticing anything external.

  Of course the bell rang again; he was expecting that, and paid it no more mind than he had the first time. From somewhere Phyllis had found the strength to begin whimpering again.

  But the third time it rang, long and hard, he began idly wondering who it could be that was not going to get access to Norman Kent’s attention that morning. Certainly not Lois. From nine at night to two or three in the morning was her visiting range—one reason it had taken Phyllis so long to seduce him. Not Spandrell, he’d have given up after the second ring. Little George could scarcely be imagined ambulatory before noon, and the Bobcat was gone south for the summer. Some stranger? Norman’s rhythm faltered slightly.

  The fourth time it rang it didn’t stop.

  Anger welled in him, and his hands ceased work altogether. In ten or twenty seconds Phyllis’s eyes had unrolled and she heard it too. By that time he had found his slippers. He was blazing mad, but he did not want the first thing she saw to be an angry face, so he made a terrific effort and produced a fair smile. “It’s all right, darling,” he said, caressing her cheek. “Some impertinent idiot. I’ll blow him out into the hall and be back in thirty seconds.”

  She nodded and he rose and left the room. He stuck his head back in, said, “Now, don’t go away,” and closed the bedroom door carefully and firmly behind him. As it clicked shut, her leg spasmed; the vibrator dropped to the floor and lay buzzing.

  Norman went to the door naked and fully hard, fervently hoping that whoever was on the other side would prove to be shockable. Already composing his opening blast, he slipped the locks and flung the door open, and his breath left him.

  Lois took her finger off the bell. “Good morning,” she said brightly.

  “God damn it,” he said, and lost his voice again.

  She glanced at his erection and grinned. “Got you up, I see.” She gripped it briefly, in a proprietary way, and stepped into the apartment, starched whites rustling. “You always did wake up hard.”

  Somewhere in his highly educated brain were the words he wanted now, needed now, but all that came to mind was “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you now,” and he could not say those words to Lois. Moreover, he knew she would not obey them.

  “God, this place is a wreck. That’s not like you, Norman.”

  “Lois—” His throat and mouth were too dry to produce speech; hastily he went to the fridge and threw orange juice past his teeth. “Lois, listen to me—”

  “Jesus Christ, you must have been on some binge last night, you’ve slept right through your alarm. I hear it buzzing.”

  “NO!”

  Too late, she was already halfway down the hall, he dropped the orange juice and ran flat out but she was already opening the bedroom door.

  “Lois, God damn it—”

  She screamed.

  Through the door came the muffled sound of Phyllis screaming too, and with weirdness incredible the screams harmonized. As Norman crashed into his ex-wife he roared himself, a great bellow of unendurable frustration, and when they had landed in a mock-obscene tangle on the hallway floor and the last of his bellow had left him, in that moment of stillness before the world could come crashing down around all of them, the doorbell rang again.

  Lois heaved him off her and headed for the door in a stumbling, scrabbling run, nurse’s cap askew. For an insane moment he wondered why she should want so badly to answer the doorbell, why anyone would ever want to answer a doorbell. Such was not Lois’s intention. To her the door was not a gadget for letting people in; it was a gadget for letting them out. Norman heard a loud crash, Lois’s war cry ascending the scale, sounds of violent body contact, an astonishing chorus of voices expressing shock and/or indignation, and Lois’s footsteps rapidly receding in the direction of the elevator. By then he was on his hands and knees, shaking his head in a perfectly futile attempt to clear it.

  “Time out,” he said plaintively to the universe in general.

  “It’s okay,” one of his unseen callers told the rest. “He says he’ll be right out.” Thus reassured, they began entering the apartment—perhaps a dozen of them, by the sound.

  Norman had started this overtired. He yearned most to race to Phyllis, but he did not want to leave a large number of strangers alone in his apartment until he had at least examined them and learned their business. On the other hand, he was loath to greet them naked. In a few seconds they would have progressed far enough into the apartment to command a view of the hallway. If only the God damned vibrator would stop buzzing…

  All human brains have a component that takes over problem-solving when the conscious mind is stunned. Often it does as well or better. Norman’s had gotten him out of the jungle alive six years before, and it did its best now.

  “Hang on, Phyllis,” he said urgently, and got to the bathroom a split second before the first uninvited guest came even with the hallway. It should have been the work of a moment to deploy a towel, but incredibly he was still erect. Cold water, he thought wildly, and raced for the sink, but halfway there he decided that the noises coming from the living room sounded somehow technological in nature, and he recalled that there was a two-thousand-dollar sound-and-video system in the living room. He whimpered, spun on his heel, and left the bathroom, doing the best he could with the towel.

  There is no way to evaluate a dozen people quickly. They looked like a dozen people. The first thing that registered was the source of the technological sounds. Three golf-cart-type video packs with appropriate color cameras, four still cameras, and five audiocassette decks. Every outlet in the room was in use, and two people were setting up high-intensity lights.

  Norman stared at the people, and the people stared at him.

  An extremely fat lady with a single eyebrow recovered first. “You were expecting us?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, dear. I am Alexandra Saint Phillip.”

  He had never heard of her. It was obvious that he had never heard of her. She could not believe he had never heard of her.

  “Alexandra Saint Phillip,” she explained. “And this is René Gérin-LaJoie.” She indicated a short dapper man with a monocle. “And Harry Doyle, of course, and Gloria Delemar, and—”

  Norman had never heard of any of these people, and every second he left Phyllis alone lowered the already-low probability of his ever seeing her again. “What do you want?”

  “The story, of course,” Gérin-LaJoie said impatiently. “Today, if possible. There’s a fire over on Spring Garden Road we could be covering.”

  Is that so? Norman thought. “What story? Hold it,” he added as a bearded man began to walk down the hall in search of another outlet. The man paused expectantly.

  “You are the young man whose sister has disappeared?” Saint Phillip asked in astonishment.

  In the two and a half weeks since Maddy had failed to come home, there had literally not been a waking hour in which she was absent from his thoughts—until ten o’clock the previous night. Being reminded was like being slapped in the face with a two-by-four.

  “Oh,” he said weakly. “Oh, my.” Pain twisted his face.

  “This kitchen’s all over orange juice,” complaine
d a dwarf with a fake Oxford accent and a Nagra stereo deck.

  “He’s the one, Alex,” Gérin-LaJoie said. “And we couldn’t all have gotten the appointment wrong—so MacLeod must have failed to reach him.” He turned to Norman. “Obviously our names ring no bell, Monsieur. Perhaps it is more helpful to say that I am ATV News, and Alex is CBC. These other people are the other major Halifax media. We have come at the behest of your department chairman to publicize the disappearance of Madeleine Kent.”

  “Wait here,” Norman said suddenly. “Please, wait right here. I must go, I’ll be back in a moment. Make coffee if—” The phone rang. The new picturephone in the bedroom. “Oh, slithering Jesus.”

  “I’ll get it,” the technician in the hallway said helpfully.

  “NO!” Norman screamed, stopping him in his tracks. Alexandra Saint Phillip’s single eyebrow became a circumflex, and Gérin-LaJoie’s ears seemed to grow points. “Please wait here.”

  Norman hurried to the bedroom, losing his towel just as he got the door safely shut behind him. Phyllis was bright red; whether with fury or shame was unclear. He saw at once that it was MacLeod on the phone, in the process of recording a message.

  “—concerned after our last conversation,” the department chairman was saying, “and then your estranged wife came to see me. She told me a bit more about your situation, and—well, I called in a few favors. I hope you’re there, Norman, they’ll be arriving any minute now. Lois said she’d drop by and warn you on her way to work, but I wasn’t—”

  With what was intended as a reassuring smile at Phyllis, Norman spun the phone carefully away from her, adjusted the camera to show him only from the collarbone up, and activated his end. “Yes doctor they’re here right now I have to go thank you very much,” he said, and cut the connection.

  He expected MacLeod’s image to look startled as it faded out of existence. But: that startled? Instinctively, Norman glanced over his shoulder. There was the bureau mirror, perfectly angled to catch Phyllis’s reflection.

  He literally fell down laughing.

  The horror fed the laughter in the vicious feedback loop of hysteria. He made a last massive effort and beat at his head with his fists, barely succeeded in disrupting the loop. Even before he had his breath back he was hunching across the floor toward her like a brokenbacked snake.