Black Jack (15 page)

‘Daddy?’

‘How are you?’

‘Very good, but I’ve missed you very much, Daddy.’

‘Of course you have. Now, be a good girl.’ He patted her knee. ‘And tell me about the boy.’

‘The boy?’

‘Yes, the boy.’

‘I think he is shy and lonely. But he is also very powerful…although I cannot say why because it is only an impression and strange because he is about my age. His name is Black Jack. Which is quite funny because he’s black.’

Schooner Klaus stared at her with surprise. ‘Black, did you say?’

‘Yes, with cornrows on his head that end in colorful beads. They are quite beautiful.’

Schooner Klaus narrowed his eyes dangerously. He had never before heard her offer an opinion on anything. It was another sign that the mind control was breaking down. He must remind her ‘do not wish’ alters about the grave consequences of wanting.

‘Did you do your job?’

‘Yes, I think he likes me.’

‘Likes you?’ Schooner Klaus’s tone was scathing. ‘Is that the best you can do?’

Tears gathered in Winter’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She had done wrong. She had disappointed Daddy. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m so sorry.’

‘Sorry? What good is that to me?’ He stood up and walked away from her, his back ramrod straight with fury. When he turned back, his eyes were black ice. ‘Here is what you will do. You will do whatever is necessary so that you can come back to me and report that he is head over heels in love with you. That there is nothing he will not do for you. He would stand in front of an oncoming train in your place. Do you understand what is expected of you?’

Winter sniffed and nodded miserably.

‘And stop that sniveling right now,’ he hissed.

‘You will do everything in your power to make him fall irretrievably in love with you. First you must bring forth his protective instinct. Make him pity you. And when he has had your flesh then you will teach him to love what shames him. What he cannot find anywhere else but from you. Make him enjoy hurting you so much that he becomes an addict, unable to function without such depths of perversion. Taunt him to go further and further until one day he goes so far that you are irreparably damaged. That is the day you will have succeeded in your task. Do you remember your goddess training?’

Winter nodded. Her face was blank.

‘Good. Do not fail.’

‘I won’t. I’ll be good, Daddy. I promise.’

‘All right then. Come here.’ Instantly she leaped up and ran to him. She sat on his lap and, lifting her tear-stained face up to him, kissed him passionately on the mouth. He opened his mouth and let her kiss him deeply.

‘Good girl,’ he said, looking at her small, red mouth coldly. There was already a swelling and a trickle of blood flowing from where he had bitten her hard on the inside of her lip.

‘Pain is love,’ he told her and watched approvingly when she licked the blood with her tongue. He put her away from him with firm hands, and sent Winter away. When he left, Dakota was fast asleep on the sofa.

We cannot desire that we know not.

 -
Voltaire, Zaire (1732)

‘Hey, remember when you asked me to find a girl I’d like to kiss?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will it be the same sensations no matter whom I choose?’

‘No, the experience will mirror exactly the reaction you would get from a real encounter with your chosen subject.’

‘In that case I’ve found her.’

All the dancing, ever-moving fractals in Green’s face disappeared suddenly. Their return was slow, the colors murky. ‘Be very careful treading this path. She could be very dangerous to you.’

‘I thought it was only a simulation.’

An indecipherable expression crossed Green’s face. It made him look almost human. ‘Passions open energies.’

‘Even if they do, I can never really have her, can I?’

‘Not her, no.’

Black looked surprised. ‘Is there someone else that I could have?’

‘Perhaps. The future is fluid and mutable. Are you ready for your experience now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is it only as far as a kiss, or do you desire to go further?’

Black’s eyes smoldered. ‘How far can I go?’

‘As far as you like; it’s a simulation.’

‘Do I have to decide now?’

‘No, choices can be made during the simulation. Although when you are in the simulation you will be completely unaware that you are in one, and could get carried away by the moment.’

Black thought for a minute. ‘It won’t harm either of us if I do, will it?’

‘Not her, but maybe you.’

‘I guess I’ll decide during the simulation.’

Green nodded gravely. ‘Have fun, Black,’ he remarked, but there was no attendant wink or encouragement.

Black found himself in a walled garden on a hot summer’s day. He was barefoot, shirtless and lying on a patch of grass under a tree. Winter was sitting beside him in a pair of miniscule red shorts and a white T-shirt. The grass was cool under him. Behind her he could see the house, a large, white bungalow. She smiled at him. He looked at the golden rope that snaked around her neck and hung down to her waist.

‘Will you let your hair loose?’

He watched her fingers make pretty little movements to release the thick plait of spun gold. She fluffed it out and swung her head from side to side like a shampoo advert. Where the dappled sunlight caught it, it turned to yellow light. He reached out to touch it. Pure silk, it was. From there his hand gravitated to the warm, silky skin of her face. He caressed it, so new and yet so familiar and dear. He could feel the excitement coursing hot and fast through his veins. But he would not rush. Slowly, his finger slid to her mouth, lingered on her bottom lip. The softness surprised him.

‘Kiss me,’ he said huskily. His mouth was dry.

She leaned forward, her thin body hovering over his. He put a hand out and tugged her down so she was lying on top of him, her narrow hip bones, as if made to order, fitting perfectly between his. Suddenly: something he had never experienced; an erection. That part of him that belonged to him, but he had never taken any notice of, took on a throbbing life of its own. Hard, heavy, insistent, and with a mind of its own. He savored the exquisite rush. Strange and yet wonderful. Never had he imagined that it could feel this good.

She brought her lips to his. Gently, a feather. Then her tongue was urging his mouth open. Warm, slippery, seductive, sure. The kiss deepened. He felt her hands entwine themselves around his neck. It felt as if she was melting into him! He could hardly tell where he ended and she began. It shocked him intensely when her little mouth greedily captured his tongue and began to suck it. His mind went blank, and he gave in to the waves of pleasure. One after the other, better and better. There was nothing, but him and her and his erection in the middle of that sunlit ocean.

He thought it would never end.

But she moved, pulling away from him, and lay on her side looking down at him. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes, dilated and urgent. Her breath was hot against his cheek. He looked down with fascination and something akin to pride at the bulge in his jeans. Her fingers moved to cup it carefully, precious cargo that he had never suspected he carried. He watched her. How expertly she handled him. She had done this many times before.

‘It’s your first time, isn’t it?’

He nodded, embarrassed in the wake of her experience.

‘I want to show you something, but you have to come into my world for it. Will you come?’

‘Yes.’

She took him by the hand into the house. Through an open door, down a corridor and into a dim bedroom with a high ceiling and many windows. Through the tall windows he gasped at the sight of the Taj Mahal.

‘I won’t be a minute,’ she called, and disappeared somewhere into the house. There was music playing in the background, a haunting Indian melody. He walked to a tall window and stared at the building that seemed to rise majestically out of the ground. No television image he had seen had done it justice. It was an awe-inspiring sight. He guessed it looked so grand and imposing because successive governments had taken care to ensure that no other building around it would ever dwarf it.

He heard a sound and turned around. She was dressed in a skin-tight, leopard print dress and black high-heeled boots. The child-woman was wearing make-up. Her mouth was blood-red. He felt a thrill of excitement run through his body, a growing in his loins. A gentle wind lifted the white curtains.

‘He put out the eyes of the architect to ensure that his great monument to his dead wife would never be copied.’

‘I know. Sort of spoils the beauty, doesn’t it?’

‘I disagree. I think it’s the most beautiful part of the story. No sense of fake decency or morals stood in the way of his grand obsession. And he was right. There should only ever be one. For whom nothing is taboo and everything is sacred.’

Surprised, he looked into her eyes, made startlingly beautiful by the paint she had applied.

‘I long for a love that has no limits. If I told you that I belong body and soul to you, and that there is nothing you can’t do to me, even hurt me, what would you say?’

Black looked shocked. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘Maybe I want you to. Maybe I want to prove to you that you own me. And the only way to do that is for you to hurt me. If I cry out stop, then I don’t really belong to you, do I?’

‘That’s just plain crazy. I don’t need that kind of sick proof. Besides I’d never hurt you.’

‘Let’s see if you can resist, then,’ she challenged.

And she began to strip. Not enough breast and possibly too thin by his reckoning, but he could not take his eyes off her. She was mesmerizing in a way he could not understand. When there was not a stitch left on her she walked to him and led him to the bed. Her eyes were hot and wild. She lay on the bed and slowly opened her legs, so his entranced eyes would latch upon her exposed sex, juicy and glistening. Then she rolled to her front and rose to her elbows and knees. Turning her head to him she whispered fiercely, ‘Fuck me. Fuck me hard. I like it to hurt.’

When he pulled his eyes to hers he saw that they were changed beyond all recognition. It was as if she was under some sort of demonic possession. From those incredible eyes evil thoughts and instructions were flowing into him, summoning dark forces of sexual desire buried deep inside him. He felt almost electrocuted by the intensity and vibrancy of her call. Instinctively, he knew that her occult lust would create an irresistible thirst that would urge him to more and more depravity and perversion until it would be near impossible to stop after a while. Heart and mind he would be its slave.

He had come to her on a romantic impulse, but now his entire being had become a throbbing, clawing need to grab those snake-narrow hips and ram into her, so hard she screamed.

‘Don’t tease yourself with doing it, do it,’ she taunted, a devilish glint in her eyes.

The voice urging him to submit to her corruption was alien and hurrying away from his sight, but finally, he saw that it was living inside him, in the vast and mostly undiscovered world that was his mind, at a depth where his consciousness had never thought to penetrate. Yet, at that moment there seemed to be nothing more important than the aching, undeniable craving in his loins and the secret pleasure of the addict; abandoning himself to the worst excesses of the parasite, just this once. Just this once he would be like everybody else; he would take.

He unzipped his jeans.

But when he put his hand on her body he was suddenly confronted by her past. He saw
all
the men who had used her. Oh, the shame of it! Grown men who should have known better, forcing themselves upon the poor innocent, her mouth, her tiny openings. Such unspeakably cruel and vile things they did. And the child confused, bound, frightened, suffering, screaming, crying, bruised, bleeding, battered, and finally, one day - liking it. Her only savior - to be a better sex slave. He saw a dirty wall scratched with the words: Winter was here.

‘No,’ he shouted.

And suddenly the world exploded around and all was gone. The girl, the kiss, the erection, the mounting excitement, the depraved thoughts, the shocking images of her abuse. Black felt shaken to the core.  It had all been so astonishingly authentic that he had been totally fooled into believing it was real. For the first time he appreciated how easily the human mind could be manipulated, but, more worryingly, how very nearly he had succumbed to wickedness and evil.

‘Well done,’ Green congratulated, his eyes dancing. ‘You passed your first test.’

‘I want to help her. How can I help her?’ Black responded unhappily.

‘She is not who you think she is.’

‘I don’t care. I want to help her all the same.’

Green faced him with a look of resignation. ‘Of course you do. I am in the timeline where you reach out and help. Very well, let’s see where this takes us. After all there are timelines in which she is victorious; perhaps we are in one of them. An ordinary therapist will kill her before they help her as she has more than one suicide alter. And all are programmed to self-destruct if it appears that the core personality is beginning to remember. The only way to help her is to find the core personality, get her to come out of hiding (difficult in itself), reclaim all the other personalities, and own all the horrors and atrocities. I must warn you the re-gathering process is a long, painful one. She will not like what she finds.’

‘Her core personality is not Winter?’

‘No.’

‘Will you help me find her core personality?’

‘I’m sorry, Black, but if I am not very careful then without understanding exactly how, for such is the power of the illusion, I will become entangled in this world, and become trapped like a bird in a cage. I cannot even fight for what is right. What you fight you become. See the trap?’

‘Can you at least tell me how I can find her?’

‘Use your imagination and creativity. It is the most powerful tool at every human’s disposal.’

‘My imagination and creativity. How?’