The Time I Died
Chapter Six
Kate here again.
I’m an impulsive girl. Always have been. I blame my aunt, although my aunt used to blame my mom, so who knows? I bet that somewhere up in the branches of my family tree you’ll find some wild Irish girl who rode horses bareback and drank whiskey by the mugful, a girl who lived just long enough to become the start an entire line of pretty, green-eyed, impulsive redheads. I wonder if I’ll have a daughter someday, and whether she’ll be like that.
It’s a little terrifying.
I lost a lot of things when I lost Old Kate. Her life, her memories, and a little bit of her impulsiveness. James—who I should mention agonizes over things all the time, do not listen to him when he says he doesn’t—James will sometimes make that cute little side-eye face he makes when he thinks I’m waffling too much. “It’s just ice cream, Kate!” I laugh, I swat at him, I smile back, but it also makes me a little sad every time. Because Old Kate would have known what flavor to order. She never would have second-guessed herself. I ire that about her.
But, let’s be real. Old Kate tended to fuck up. A lot. Just because you can choose quickly doesn’t mean you choose wisely. Whenever I make a hasty decision, whenever I fuck up, I also think of Old Kate, and then I’m reminded of how glad I’m not her. Boring New Kate can’t decide between Rocky Road and Strawberry, sure, but she’s pretty damn good at managing everything else.
Usually.
Freeport
“Yes, sisss… uh.. Kate? Sister?”
“No.” Kate’s voice was surprisingly firm, in contrast to her nerves, and her hands, and the rest of her body. She didn’t feel anything close to firm. “No sisters today. Right now, I am just Kate, and you are just Michelle. We’re Master’s obedient slaves first, sisters a distant second. And I will be Master’s voice until he arrives. You will always obey Master’s voice.“
“I will always obey Master’s wonderful voice,” said Michelle. The way she gushed at the word ‘wonderful’ made Kate cringe. Had they all been like that around him?
You already know that answer, Kate, her brain told her, and for not the first time, she wished for a little dose of amnesia to wash the answer away.
Instead, she soldiered on. “So you have your orders,” she said, gently poking a finger into Michelle’s sweater. “You will take off all of your clothes. Master commands it.”
“Yes! Obedience is the purest form of Truth,” Michelle chirped, a sleepy smile on her face. Her leather jacket was on the floor in moments. She struggled more with the sweater, wiggling her arms and upper body until it finally came free with a crackle of static sparks.
“Wow.” Kate ired Michelle’s body. “I wasn’t wrong. You really do work out, don’t you?”
“Yes, Kate.” Her bra was lacy, expensive, a lighter shade of blue than the sweater. It landed on top of the jacket. “It’s the least I can do to make Master happy.” She slid her leggings down to her ankles in one smooth motion, breasts dangling, ass skyward. Watching her, Kate vaguely recalled doing something similar for someone—Michael, Decker, a target, another woman, maybe even for Michelle herself—but the memory was buried too deep in the muck to pull out. She let it sink away, most likely for good.
She snapped back to reality to find that Michelle was naked and patiently waiting for her next order.
“Oh boy. I guess this is commitment, huh? In for a penny, in for a pound… Michelle?”
“Yes, Kate?”
“I want you to look at the TV screen. Your eyes see only the screen, and you hear only my voice. Both the screen and my voice relax you completely. You can feel your body sink into a state of total relaxation. Just strong enough to stand, but nothing more. Feeling more and more relaxed with each and every breath. Each and every slow, calm, relaxing breath. Breathe slowly. Deeply. You are feeling very relaxed.”
“Relaxed…” Michelle’s attention left Kate and turned to the television, which was turned off. A pair of glazed, empty eyes stared back at her. “I am ready for The Truth, Massssster…”
The remote for the television was sitting just beneath it. Kate swept it up and made a show of pointing it at the screen, pretending to operate both. “The TV is on, and it’s showing you The Truth. You can see the spiral on the screen. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Let it draw you in, deeper and deeper. Fall into the spiral for me. For Master.”
Michelle sagged. She began swaying back and forth, as if Kate had slipped her something powerful earlier, and it was just kicking in now. Her mouth fell open, her chin dragging the rest of her head down with it, her eyes rolling upwards to stay even with the screen. “Sssspiral… I’m… in the… cen… center…”
“Do you see The Truth?”
“Yes. See only… only The Truth. The Truth fills my mind. It fills my soul. I know nothing but The Truth.”
“I want you to keep looking at the screen. I want you to repeat the following until I tell you to stop. You will say ‘I obey our Master’s voice. Kate is Master’s voice. I obey Kate.’ Do you understand?”
“I obey our Master’s voice. Kate is Master’s voice. I obey Kate…”
Kate left her standing there, and headed for the bathroom.
April, 2014
“Where are you, Kate?”
“I… I don’t know.”
She was somewhere, anyway. A place that wasn’t part of the Mansion, or anywhere on campus. The air was much drier here than in Owl Cove, with its cool and humid ocean breezes. Wherever she was now, it hurt to breathe.
She attempted to turn her head, to check out her surroundings for clues, only to yet again that they had her locked into a restraining device. Kate couldn’t see it—she couldn’t see much of anything in here—but in her head she pictured herself tied down to a pool table turned on its end, her feet bound by two corner pockets, and her hands similarly fixed above her head. It might have been a pool table, for all she knew. Whatever it was had that same sort of scratchy felt covering, felt that dug into her bare shoulders and ass whenever she took advantage of what little movement she was allowed.
Beyond Kate and the pool table was blackness.
There were figures hidden nearby, humanoid shapes that were slightly blacker than black, figures whose movement Kate caught only now and then, in quick glimpses. Aliens, maybe. Pool-playing aliens with a bondage fetish.
“Where are you, Kate?” One of the humanoids had a rough voice, scratchy from the dry air. It kept asking her questions. She didn’t have any answers.
“I told you… I don’t know,” she responded. “You… you would know, right? Where we are? What have you done to us? Why are you keeping me in this thing? Why won’t you just talk to me”
The blackness said nothing.
“Please.” Her voice quivered. “Please, help me? You don’t understand… my Master’s in trouble. Someone called... the police came to the Mansion. They came and they took Master away with them… I have help him! Please, you have to let me help him!”
Clunk. Something heavy and mechanical fell into place. A high-pitched whine followed, growing in intensity until Kate’s ears began to ring. She winced.
“P-please, we don’t have m-much time, if I can find my sisters, we can save Master! He needs us. I need him! He means everything to me! I would just die without Master!”
whine whine whine “Your Master is gone, Kate. He’s gone forever. There is no Master. This is what you know and believe.”
“No, you’re lying! You’re… get…” she began to buck against the pool table, muscles squeezing and convulsing with frustration. “Get… get me OUT OF THIS FUCKING THING! MASTER! MASTER, HELP!”
“That’s enough. Trance her.”
Whatever was winding up reached its peak with a sudden pop, like an old-fashioned flashbulb, only a million times more intense.. The blackness turned to blinding white, and Kate’s eyes rolled back into their sockets. She slumped against her restraints.
“Run it again,” the voice growled, although by now Kate was far too deep to hear it.
May 13
“We can talk about anything you’d like to talk about, Kate. If you want to stop, I will not judge you in the slightest. I’m here to discuss what you want to discuss.”
“You’ll do anything I say, huh? Sorry, little mind controller humor there.”
“I think you’ve earned that one.”
“Can I confess something?”
“Therapy is often a good place for that, yes. Sorry, little therapist humor there.”
“Well played.”
“What were you going to confess, Kate?”
“I really, really thought about skipping today’s session. I was making excuses in my head the entire time I was in the car. When I got down to Taft Street and ed Finnegan’s… did you know they open at ten in the morning now?”
“I have two pieces of good news for you, Kate. One is that you made it here in one piece safe and sound. The other is that Finnegan’s was shut down by the health department last week, so they can’t tempt you with those pre-noon mimosas.”
“Oh my God, I’d rather drink cleaning fluid than drink a dollarosa from Finnegan’s! Come to think of it, they’re probably one and the same. Old Kate? She would have fucking loooooved Finnegan’s. She would totally be there right now, getting shitfaced on dollarosas and dollar drafts. They’d all know her face and they’d all be happy to serve her, the sassy drunk girl with an inheritance. God, I was… that feels like a million years ago.”
“In many ways, it was.”
“You know what’s funny?”
“What’s funny, Kate?”
“I met my husband there. At Finnegan’s. Of all the fucking places, right? But I was too drunk to it. Of course. James had to tell me the story later on. Well, and then he had to tell me the story again-again, because I fell off that stupid ladder and erased the happiest months of my entire life from the blackboard.
It bugs me that some of those memories won’t resurface. Doctor Kapoor thinks it’s because of what Decker was doing to me at the time, that it gets in the way of ing things, because my brain was ing three Kates worth of memories at the same time. Stuff with James, my programmed orders, and my fake cover memories. How’s that for layered, huh?”
“Well, at least you can be proud of yourself today, Kate. You drove straight past the bar and you came in, even hough you didn’t want to.”
“Oh, you’ve seen nothing yet! I swore to myself when I left the house that I would finally be a big girl and talk about… you know who. And, and… I told James that if I came home and I hadn’t talked about you know who today, he could make frown-y, judge-y faces at me all night. Which he’s very good at, I should add.”
“So you’re ready to talk about Decker?”
“Hoo boy. Ready is a strong word, Doctor Straud. A really, really strong word. And the answer is probably ‘no.’ But… let’s give it a shot anyway.”
Freeport
Kate sighed.
The reflection in the bathroom mirror sighed along with her. “This is so dumb,” it told her. “Kate… Kate Kate Kate why can’t you just live a normal life like a normal housewife? This is crazy. This is batshit crazy!”
“But,” she conceded, “I’m good at this, right? I like hypnotizing pretty girls. And I did! So let’s see if this works and if it does, good deed for the day, right?”
She winced at that one. Good deed like she was picking up litter or holding a door open. “Fuck it. Let’s do this. It… fuck, I hate this zipper!”
She briefly considered calling for the mesmerized woman in the next room to come help unzip her, but she needed Michelle to drop as deep as possible. Instead, she did what James like to call the ‘dress dance,’ a contortionist ballet that included plenty of bending, unnatural angles, grunting, a hard-to-locate zipper, a stuck zipper, more grunting, and a head twist that bordered on The Exorcist. It ended with the dress finally, mercifully sliding down her body until she could wiggle and step her way free of it. She nudged it with her bare foot until it was nestled against the sink. After a moment of reconsideration—she still had a dinner to go to, after all—she scooped it up and folded it over the shower door frame.
“Okay. We go in, we brainwash the girl, we get out. Right?”
Mirror Kate nodded.
“Right!”
She opened the bathroom door.
May 13
“Decker detained you during the raid on Golden Dawn.”
“It was chaos. Or at least I imagine it was chaos. That’s one of the days that’s mostly empty space in my head now. I don’t seeing Decker or know how he grabbed me, but you’ve got all of these cops running around, women in bikinis getting rounded up and taken away… who’s going to notice if couple of them end up in an unofficial, unmarked van?”
“Why do you think he chose you and Nikki? Or was it random?”
“Oh, God, I have no idea. Given how much he liked to plan things out, I’m guessing he chose us on purpose? But on the other hand, the only really important thing is that we were cultists, and our brains were supposed to be mushy clay that he could mold and shape to his heart’s content.
But that’s not how the Machine worked. It’s not how our minds worked. And it’s definitely not how I worked.”
April, 2014
“Where are you, Kate?”
“I’m…” She attempted to turn her head, to check out her surroundings for clues, only to yet again that they had her locked into a restraining device.
“You kidnapped me. W-what do you want?”
The blackness did not respond.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She meant it, even if she wasn’t sure what to be sorry for. “Whatever I did to you, I’m sorry! Please, I just want to go home. Master is going to miss me. I miss him!”
“There is no Master.”
“W-what?” Her stomach turned. Something nasty—bile, probably—crept into her throat. She choked it back down. “Of course there is! And he loves me! He’s wondering where I am and I need to know that he’s okay!” She bit her lower lip, praying to Master and God and America that they would answer her next question. “Can… can you tell me that? Is… is he okay? He was so scared when they took him away and I know I can make it right if you’ll just let me see him, even for just a minute…”
“There is no Master, Kate. There is only obedience. You will obey.”
“Why are you doing this to me? Why do you keep saying those lies? I don’t understand! We didn’t do anything wrong! I just want to go home. Please take me to Master.”
“There is no Master, you stupid little cunt! He doesn’t exist, and he doesn’t matter! All that matters is obedience. To us. To me.”
Another dark, formless lump ed in. “Are you tired of the Weltschmerz, Kate?”
“I… whoa… what’s… huh?”
The figures ed together, repeating the same nonsense words, as if taunting her. She had no idea what a Weltschmerz was. But it was making her incredibly tired all of a sudden. The room was so dark. All she had to do was close her eyes and sag against the scratchy felt. She could drop into a deep, mindless, obedient trance state right here and now.
She closed her eyes. “Deep, mindless, obedient trance,” she sighed.
None of this is normal, Kate. They’re trying to trick you. You have to fight! I need you!
The voice was Master’s voice. She was certain of that, and she clung to it with all her might. None of this is normal. Master was right. Of course he was!
“Kate. Try to focus. Focus on my voice. Are you tired of the Weltschmerz?”
“No.” She pictured Master standing before her, towering above her as her knees dug into the carpet, a beautiful smile of approval on his beautiful face. That’s my Kate. Good girl. “No. I’m not tired at all. I don’t know what you want from me, but you’re not going to get it until I. See. My. Master!”
Pop. The room exploded in white fireworks. Kate’s eyes rolled into her head, and she slumped against her restraints. A thin line of drool dangled from her lips.
“She’s strong.”
“Strong, my ass. If she were strong she never would have ended up in a cult in the first place. No, the word you’re looking for is ‘needy.’ So needy for cock and control that she crawled up that fuckwit Oliver’s ass and refuses to let go. I will break her.”
“How’s the other girl doing? The model?”
“Her leg is healing nicely and she’s been in final conditioning since Wednesday. You can start sending her out next month. You can have this one, too, if she ever stops crying about Jim Jones Jr.”
“Good luck. The investors meet on Friday, I’ll need a progress report from you.”
“Tell them that it’s five down, one to go.”
Freeport
Kate found Michelle right where she left her, lost in the TV’s invisible spiral, the mantra of I obey our Master’s voice, Kate is Master’s voice, I obey Kate spilling from her lips.
“You can stop chanting now, Michelle,” she said, and the brunette did as she was told.
“Of course, Kate.”
Michelle’s earlier spunk was gone. Gone, too, were the leftover bits and pieces of Conference Attendee Michelle Simmons. To nearly anyone else, the only difference in Michelle was that she was now zoned out and very much naked, but Kate noticed what they couldn’t. The parted, pursed lips. The mechanical rise and fall of her chest. The contrast between her placid face and her swollen, eager sex. Michelle was about as deep and as horny as she was ever going to get under these conditions. It was now or never.
Never, please.
Shut up. We’re doing this. You like hypnotizing pretty girls, right? How about brainwashing them? You like that? Thought so.
“Are you ready, Michelle?”
“Yessss, Kate. I am ready for Master to do as he wishes.”
“Good. Very happy to hear that! I turned the TV off. The screen is black. The spiral is gone. I need you to look into my eyes, and to stay as deep and aroused as you are now.”
“Mmmmm… yes, Kate. You are Massss… Master’s voice. I obey.”
Kate let her voice drop into hypnotist mode with an ease that would have frightened her just a few hours ago. She stared into her subject’s pretty, vacant eyes. “You will listen carefully and obey without question. Every word I speak is part of the Spiral. It is part of The Truth. It is The Truth. You will fall into my eyes just like you fell into the Spiral earlier. There’s no need to feel anything but the warmest warmth, so sexy and arousing, Michelle.”
“Your eyes…” Michelle licked her lips. Those beautiful, blowjob-giving lips. “It feels so good, sis… Kate…”
“Every new truth you learn today will make you feel more aroused than ever. But you won’t come until I say so, understood?”
A whimper. Withholding orgasms was Mind Control 101. All of Michael’s girls seemed to understand that on some basic level, but they were still human beings, so they whimpered. Michelle desperately needed sex, but she wouldn’t get it unless she played along.
Which… crap.
Something else from Mind Control 101. The best way to soften up a subject was by getting them nice and horny, punch-drunk and stupefied on sexy endorphins. And the best way to cement those new suggestions in place was to fuck the subject senseless, the heat of the orgasm fusing everything together. That was how Michael did things.
Except that Michael was thousands of miles away rotting in a prison cell. If Michelle Simmons was going to get fucked into obedience, he wasn’t the one who was going to do it.
Kate looked down at her left hand. At the pretty gold ring that circled her finger. Crap. How would I even explain…
It was too late to think about it, too late to change course, too late to run.
“Michelle,” she said. “You’re going to learn a few new truths today.”
May 13
“What is your earliest memory of Decker?”
“The brainwashing. But it’s just hints. Flashes. Nightmares. When Doctor Kapoor tried to take me back… well, I’m sure you read my file. It… um… it didn’t go well.”
“That session ended early?”
“You could say that. Disha was being kind. What actually happened was that I came out of trance, grabbed my purse, and ran. Ran for the exit, ran to my car, sped home and… we have a garage. It’s attached to the house. I parked inside, but I was too afraid to leave my car and go into the house. Decker had been inside my house! In my house!
I know he’s dead but… all I could think of was Decker getting back inside. Waiting for me. Waiting to take me away. So I couldn’t… I went a little crazy, Doc. I locked the doors of my Honda and I crawled into the back seat, keeping my head below the windows. And I hid there curled up and crying until James got home.”
“What you ed really frightened you. It’s understandable, Kate.”
“No, no… it was worse than that. In the session, I couldn’t form any clear memories. I couldn’t tell you where I was, or what I was doing, or whether anyone else was with me. When Doctor Kapoor asked me what I could see, I opened my eyes, and it was just… black. Not dark, but black. Pressing in on me, like I was being smothered. And there was screaming, and it wouldn’t stop. It just wouldn’t stop! It was the kind of scream someone makes when they go down the roller coaster, or when Jaws swims up to eat them. Just pure, naked terror. And it wouldn’t stop.
And then I realized who was screaming.”
“It was you?”
“It was me.”
May, 2014
“Where are you, Kate?”
“I’m…” She attempted to turn her head, to check out her surroundings for clues, only to yet again that they had her locked into a restraining device. “I’m… um…”
“You are in a trance.”
Behind the voice, television monitors blazed to life, each one blinking the same word at her. “HYPNOTIZED.”
She was hypnotized.
She was in a deep, mindless, obedient trance.
“I am in a trance,” she agreed, as the bank of monitors winked out one by one.
“What is your purpose?”
“To be hypnotized.”
The monitors bombarded her with the correct answer. “OBEY. OBEY OBEY OBEY.”
“What is your purpose you stupid twat?”
“I’m… I’m sorry, it’s… obey. I have to obey. Must obey. Must…”
“Who is your Master?”
Kate hesitated. She decided to let the monitors do the thinking for her again. It was better that way. After all, she was in a deep, mindless, obedient trance. Hypnotized girls didn’t need to think.
“DECKER IS YOUR MASTER,” the monitors told her.
“Decker…” she began, but it didn’t feel right to her. Were the monitors wrong? They had to be. Decker wasn’t Master’s name. Master had a real name, he needed one just like slave Kate still had to be Kate sometimes, but it wasn’t ‘Decker.’ She would have ed that. No, no! Master’s name was-
“Michael Oliver! My Master is Michael Oliver! That’s his name!” She grinned, feeling extremely pleased with herself. Isn’t he just wonderful?”
The monitors snapped off. Something loomed close to her head. A someone, who smelled like sweat and Chinese food. Someone who was sucking in each breath through their teeth, making little angry whooshing sounds and sending clouds of stinky, hot air towards Kate’s head.
“Let me show you,” the Someone snarled, “what happens to you when you disobey.”
Kate’s arms were strapped above her head. She couldn’t see the restraints. She couldn’t see the black and red wires attached to them, either. Her body suddenly seized up, her back arching, shoulders digging into the felt. It felt like someone was throwing handfuls of gravel at her, handful after handful, the stones digging into her skin and her eyes and everywhere else. She wanted to scream, and found that she couldn’t. She wanted to breathe, and found that she couldn’t do that, either.
It went on for thirty seconds. It felt like thirty hours. When it ended, her damaged nerves all cried out at once, a million broken and charred tips begging for relief.
She found her voice again, and screamed.
And screamed.
May 13
“With Golden Dawn, they got you by tricking you. They’d drug you so you couldn’t think straight, and then they’d trick you into thinking that being a bikini slave girl was the best thing that could ever happen to you. Like you’d just won the lottery! And that’s why there was always at least one Bikini Girl in the room with the Machine. Something to remind you of the awesome slave you were about to become.
Before my session with Doctor Kapoor, I think I expected that Decker had used the same tricks on me. Because that’s how brainwashing works, right? It’s all the same candy bar, just different wrappers. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t even close.”
“He tortured you.”
“Pretty sure he did. He told me I ‘fought the machines.’ I didn’t give it a lot of thought at the time. Turns out that his idea of fighting the machines was a lot different than my idea. But it’s how a lot of people are brainwashed, isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately, it is. I’m so sorry, Kate. He used torture to break you, and to crush your spirit. I think you’re spot on with your guess, that he thought it would be easy to turn you. When that didn’t work, he did what many people do. He turned to violence.”
“I was so scared. I know you like to think that I’m super brave and plucky but, when I was peering into that memory, I’ve never felt more alone or more scared.”
“Would you like to talk about something else?”
“No! No no, I promised myself that I wouldn’t run this time, I wouldn’t let him scare me. I just… it’s just… I feel stupid even saying this, because we’ve talked so much about how awful Michael was and how awful Golden Dawn was, but at the core of it, at least it felt like love. At least the lies were about love. And… and about sisterhood, and unity, and girl… power, you know? It was just a guy who wanted hot girls to fuck him. That was it.
And with Decker, that… that asshole! That rotten, evil son of a bitch! Do you have… um… where are the…”
“Tissues? They’re on your left. Yep, please take the entire box. There’s plenty more where those came from. Can I offer you a therapist suggestion?”
“God, thank you. Hang on, lemme blow my… I’m sorry. Fuck, I knew this would be the worst day. What did you suggest?
“Some therapist advice.”
“Oh, heck yeah. Please. I’m all ears.”
“What you’ve been through is something that no human should ever have to experience in their lifetime. For now, for the near term… I would gently suggest that you can safely quarantine that part of your past. As frightening as it can be to not a traumatic event, we at least know that the details ultimately won’t change the story.
Just as with Golden Dawn, you had no free agency under Decker. You didn’t make any wrong choices, because you weren’t able to make any choices. We both know what the outcome of that torture was, and we know that you’re not responsible for either the torture or what comes next. That’s not to say you have to be Claire and let the past forever be the past, just that it might be a good idea to put that part of your past aside for the moment.”
Freeport
The Freeport Hyatt had good beds. Firm, but not park bench-firm like some hotels. Their springs had a little bounce to them that James and Kate had put to very good use. The sheets were crisp and smelled nice.
Kate tugged at those sheets now, pulling them halfway down the bed. She’d left the comforter on the floor. She took the pillows and fluffed them as best she could. The Freeport Hyatt did not have very good pillows.
Satisfied, she beckoned Michelle with a curled index finger. “Come over here, Michelle. Lie down on the bed.”
Michelle did as she was told, crawling up from the bottom of the mattress on her hands and knees, then flipping over and stretching out her sexy body. She made a point of spreading her legs. For Master.
“I might have to take Claire up on that foursome after all,” said Kate, mostly to herself. Michelle didn’t respond. It wasn’t a command, so there was no need for a “Yes, Kate.” The brunette folded her hands across her stomach, like an R-rated Sleeping Beauty. She was smiling.
“Before we go any further, Michelle… I… I just want to tell you how sorry I am. For this. For all of the things I’ve done to you, and for all of the things Michael and Golden Dawn did to you. I’m just glad it stopped then, and that you were able to go on with your life. But that wasn’t because of me. In fact, I would have stopped you if you’d tried to get away. And even though that never happened, I’m sorry for that, too. I was a monster to you. To a lot of people, actually.”
The dopey smile remained firmly, stubbornly in place.
“I hope you’ve had a good life. I hope it didn’t come back to bite you in the ass the way it did with me. Have… has anyone tried to hypnotize you since college, Michelle?”
“No, Kate.”
Kate’s stomach unclenched. “Not even a… stage hypnotist or anything like that?”
“No, Kate. We saw a stage hypnotist on a cruise but Tom wouldn’t let me go up on stage.” Her smile broadened enough to show teeth. “Whenever I am in trance, I will how much I love being hypnotized. I’m very susceptible to being hypnotized. Being hypnotized feels wonderful.”
Thanks, Tom, wherever you are. “Did you meet your husband at NU?”
“No, Kate. I met Tom at wok. He was my first boss.”
The words authority figure inserted themselves into Kate’s brain. She found it difficult to shake them back out. What if Michelle had simply replaced a literal master with a figurative one? Someone who could make her pussy ache just by making her carry out orders like a good little slave? Kate couldn’t entirely shake the post-hypnotic desire to hypnotize girls like Michelle. Perhaps the brunette carried her own share of forgotten compulsions in her head.
“Do you love him?”
“No, Kate.”
The smile never left her pretty lips.
May 13
“When Golden Dawn brainwashed me, at the end of the day, I was still me. A corrupted, delusional version of me, but I was still… you know, me! I was still Kate Thomas. I still went to school. On the surface, the only that changed about me was my grades, and for the better!
Being in a cult… you believe all sorts of things. You tell yourself that having a Master is a fantastic idea. Everyone should have one! Which means it’s totally okay for me to hypnotize these pretty girls, because it’s for their own good! And I’m helping my Master, paying him back for that time he helped me! It all makes total sense!
But with Decker, everything was the complete opposite. There was zero free will, zero thinking, zero Kate Thomas. No sex, no love, no joy, not even the suggestion that there should be joy. Just cold, hard obedience.
I was madly in love with Michael. Every second of every day. With Decker, I barely knew he existed. And when I ed that he did, I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
June, 2014
“Where are you, Kate?”
She knew the answer. “I’m asleep.”
“That’s very good, Kate. Even though your eyes are open, you are asleep. A deep, dreamless sleep. Tell me what room you’re in right now?”
She attempted to turn her head, to check out her surroundings for clues, only to that she was deeply asleep, in a deep and obedient trance, sinking into an impossibly comfortable mattress that threatened to swallow her whole.
“I’m in my bedroom,” she replied. Her voice sounded so sleepy to her. For some reason, that seemed to excite her in all sorts of ways, and she smiled. “I’m safe, and warm, and deeply asleep in my own comfortable bed.”
“This is just a wonderful dream you’re experiencing. And like any dream, when you wake up, all of it will fade away into nothingness. This won’t concern you.”
“It won’t concern me.”
“When you are asleep, you are mindless and obedient.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Have you ever heard of a man named Michael Oliver?”
“No,” she responded. She felt compelled to add “That name means nothing to me. It elicits no response or feelings of any kind.”
“It’s about time you figured that out. Who is your Master?”
“Decker is my Master.”
“Good. And what is the most important thing in your world?”
“Total obedience and dedication to my orders.”
“And total obedience to me.”
“Yes.” She wanted to shout the answer, but she hadn’t been told that she could.
“Are you tired of the Weltschmerz, Kate?”
She had no idea what that was, but just hearing it seemed to suck al of the energy out of her body. “Yes,” she said. “I am alone, and I am ready for instruction.”