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Message-ID: <33370asstr$1005372606@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
From: "Voyer" <hypnovoyer@hotmail.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} <THM> "Chest of Wonders" (mf mc md fd nc) Voyer
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 01:10:06 -0500
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Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
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Chest of Wonders
mf, mc, md, fd, nc
hypnovoyer@hotmail.com

    General disclaimers: This story is a hypnofetish fantasy. It
contains adult language and situations, along with examples of
adult fictional characters doing illegal, immoral and/or
impossible things to other adult fictional characters as a prelude
to sexual activity. If you 1) are under the age of consent in your
community, 2) are disturbed by such concepts, 3)
attempt to do most of these things in real life or 4) want graphic
blow-by-blow sex in your online pornography, then please stop
reading now.
    Permission is granted to re-post this story unaltered to any
on-line forum, as long as no fee whatsoever is charged to view
it, and this disclaimer and this e-mail address
(hypnovoyer@hotmail.com) are not removed. It would also be
nice if you told me you were posting it.
  Copyright Voyer, 2001.

   Specific disclaimers: Among other things, this story is my
contribution to the Alt Sex Stories Text Repository's 5th
anniversary celebration, in which I was assigned the theme
`Behind the Newsdesk'. Please consider supporting the
ASSTR's continued good work with a donation. If you like this
story and want to read more of my work, you can find the bulk
of it at the ASSTR-affliated site The Erotic Mind Control
Archive, located at http://www.mcstories.com. I also have my
own website, currently to be found at
http://www.geocities.com/hypnovoyer.


************

   It started when Ted died, and it ended when *I* died.
   But no. It didn't end even then. And now...
   Well, we'll get to that when we get to it, won't we?
   Ted's death. To start with, I have to be honest here and admit
that I wasn't *too* broken up the day I came home from work
and found that long white envelope waiting for me in my
mailbox. Yes, Ted and I had been room- and apartment-mates
at Greson for three and a half years, and we had gotten along
well enough, but we never were exactly what you'd call
*close*, even when we had been living under the same roof. In
many ways when we had decided to pair up halfway through
our freshman year, it had been a marriage of convenience, each
of us shoring up the gaps in the other's academic work. Ted the
Science Geek and Will the Writingest Fool. First in one of
Greson's cruddy frosh dorms, then as soon as possible in a
small and not-quite-as-putrid-but-still-pretty-cruddy apartment
just off campus, we lived separate lives, kept separate hours,
our paths generally only crossing when we needed to pass the
latest batch of hints and study notes back and forth, in the
manner of drug dealers meeting in some alley.
   Still, he was a nice enough guy. We shared more than one
round of beers at Clancy's. We got drunk together on more
than one occasion. We talked about women and life and the
universe and women.
   And when you're still young, (well... yeah, OK, *fairly*
young) learning that someone your own age has died is always
unsettling, one of those first taps on the shoulder from the Grim
Reaper as he comes up to stand behind you, taps that come
along harder and harder, more and more frequently, as the years
and the decades race by...
   For that's what the letter inside the envelope told me. It was
from a law firm back east. Ted had died. After passing on this
news to me, the letter further surprised me by informing me that
I had been included in Ted's will. I wasn't the main beneficiary;
while he had evidently still been a bachelor at his death, he did
had a couple of younger siblings and they got the bulk of the
stuff, whatever money there was, whatever furniture and real
estate and domestic chattel.
   I  met one them once, one of the siblings, when she paid us a
visit at Greson during our tenure there. Allison. I remember her
now as a somewhat more attractive version of Ted, thin with
that same messy black hair. (Of course at the time anything
female moving under its own power was at least vaguely
attractive.) They also shared the same regrettable taste in
eyewear.
    Not that it matters. What I had inherited, all that I had
inherited, was a trunk. No, I take that back. Not just a trunk,
but *the* trunk. I had completely forgotten about it in the
intervening years, but standing there at the counter of my
apartment kitchen, the gutted envelope laying to one side, it all
came back to me.
   You see, Ted had owned a old-fashioned traveling trunk, a
really nice piece of work that *he* had inherited years ago from
a relative, a great-uncle or somesuch, a somewhat shadowy and
exotic figure (to me at least) who had evidently spent his entire
long and quite eventful life in the merchant marine. God knows
where Uncle... Hans... I think it was Hans...acquired the thing,
but it was the absolute archetype of traveling luggage, a bulky
rectangle with a high curving lid, well made of thick oiled slats
of some exotic wood, and meticulously bound and cornered
with pieces of hammered and polished brass. It sported sturdy
handles on either end, a set of heavy latches and in the central
place of honor, a stolid lock (more brass) that wouldn't have
been out of place if encountered on the door of an armored car.
The interior was nicely padded, soft  leather the color of old
wine. As a finishing touch of perfection, there were even a few
stickers slapped haphazardly on the lid, from appropriately
exotic ports of call. Palau-Palau. Bali Hai. R'yleh. Wuldercan.
Ted had it sitting at the foot of his bed all the way through
college, and from the relatively little I saw, he kept a rotating
assortment of junk in it. Well. *I* called it junk. Bits of
machinery he had scavenged somewhere, half-finished and
half-abandoned class projects, old bank statements and student
loan applications, `interesting' beer bottles, and so on and so
forth. I liked that trunk, and I was vaguely annoyed at the time
that Ted didn't store anything more important in it. On more
than one occasion I had commented on how I wished I had
something like it, so when I was firmly established as a
World-Famous Author I could live out of it while traveling the
globe on my colossal book-signing tours, store within it the
dampened panties of my screaming female fans, all the usual
crap that a drunk horny college student dreams up at 3:00 AM
on a Saturday morning, deep in the fetid but thrilling quagmire
that is his freshman year. Finally I must have worn Ted down,
and one night at Clancy's he said he'd be sure and leave it to me
in his will. We had both laughed, and I had then promptly
gotten (more) drunk and forgotten about it. Ah youth.
   Obviously though, Ted hadn't forgotten.
   But then Ted, Ted the Science Whiz, he sometimes had a
habit of remembering the damnedest things. At the drop of a
hat, he could recite the all scores of all the games played by his
favorite baseball team, (some AAA outfit in Detroit, his
hometown) back for ten years. All the scores, and who they
played. Even though he displayed almost zero interest in
politics, he also knew everyone who had ever been tapped to be
shipped off to DC from his Congressional district, all the way
back to whenever it was that the Detroit area officially joined
the United States. Every winner of the Nobel Prize in the
various science categories. Stuff like that.
  Ah... I don't want to give the impression that Ted was some
idiot savant. The guy was bright, brighter than me by a long
shot, and I can say without false modesty that I'm not exactly a
knuckle-dragging cretin. Ted graduated fourth in our class, and
could easily have been the big numero uno, if he had had just a
little more dedication and stick-to-it-tiveness built into his
makeup. But then I suppose fourth was good enough. He
quickly got snapped up by one of those high-tech
conglomerates that does vague and expensive things for the
upper levels of the US military, and he left the corn and soybean
fields for good immediately after graduation, following the path
east that had been laid down by those fools from his
Congressional district.
   So why did he need The Writingest Fool (42nd in a
graduating class of 1223, thank you very much) I hear you ask?
Well, with some things, a lot of things, Ted's mind was like a
steel trap. He latched on if they were unlucky enough to flit past
and he never ever let go. Others... substitute the words `a steel
trap' with `flypaper' and you get the basic idea. He could glue
this second sort of ideas into place just long enough to pass his
English 101 test, or whatever, but ask him about them a month
after that... poof. Gone.
  Gone. Sort of like the rest of him, I suppose, ten years after
we graduated, five years after we had last had any sort of
contact. No more half-finished machines dripping oil on the
floor by the sofa. No more stringy-but-bright girlfriends passing
through the apartment at odd hours. No more horrific trombone
solos greeting the dawn. No more sardine-laden pizzas.
   A car, a sudden rainstorm, a wet spot on the road, a
guard-rail that didn't hold. Poof. No more Ted, leaving me and
the Reaper reading a letter in my kitchen...

*   *   *

   Hmm. Looking back on what I have so far here... I really
didn't intend for this to turn into the Theodore J. Capotosto
Memorial. Let's try and cut a little more to the chase here. The
man lived, as far as I was aware his presence made the world a
slightly better place, and then he died. He left me a trunk. After
the ace legal minds at Summers, Austin and Goldstein tracked
me down, I got in touch with them. There was the ritual of
legalistic passwords and countersigns exchanged back and forth
and about a month later, a burly delivery man with the name Hal
stitched on his uniform in red thread turned up on the doorstep.
Hal had a handcart and perched on that handcart was a
good-sized crate. His burden was big and heavy, but somehow
between the two of us, we wrestled it through the door and got
it deposited in the living room. I signed the appropriate
paperwork, gave the very last countersign, and like Ted before
him Hal departed from my life.
   I scrounged up a hammer from the tool/junk drawer, pried the
crate open, and sure enough, there was the trunk, right side up
and looking pretty much like I remembered it. Whatever
journeys it and Ted had made together in the last ten years, he
had obviously taken good care of it; as near as I could tell the
only thing that had changed was that the travel stickers had
been (carefully) peeled off it at some point. It looked like it
could easily have been shipped sans crate and have arrived
without so much as a scratch.
   Ever since learning that I was going to get the thing, I had
been trying to decide what if anything to store in it. To my
utmost regret I didn't have all that many female fans to
contribute dampened panties, so I'd have to come up with
something else... I found the long heavy key sealed up in a
hemorrhoidally-neat little plastic baggy. I cracked into the lock.
Said lock turned, the latches popped obligingly when I pulled at
them, and the lid lifted itself up. And within...
   Someone had beaten me to it. To the job of filling the trunk, I
mean; I should have realized it from the weight. If only it had
been full of gold bars or international barer bonds or something
along those lines, but no such luck. What *was* there was not
immediately obvious, as the contents were a jumbled mess.
   My first reaction was one of... you know, I'm not sure now.
Annoyance I guess. I figured that if there was anything remotely
valuable or personal in there, I would have to try and track
down Allison and/or Sibling Number 2 and return it to them.
Before proceeding a step further, I found that first letter from
Summers et al and carefully re-read it. No hint where they
might be found. However, a particular line jumped out at me:
the trunk and *all of its contents* had been specifically willed to
me. I made a snap decision. It was all mine now. Unless there
were gold bars underneath the whatever, I would be keeping it
all.
   Or maybe throwing it away, I thought, after I started sorting
that whatever, pulling it out a piece at a time so I could  savor
the experience, a sort of Christmas in July. (Yes, this all
happened in July, if you care.) Ted's taste in trunk-contents had
evidently not improved in the intervening years. There was a
large pile of Detroit newspapers, of various dates and with no
other apparent common theme, all neatly bundled and tied
together with a long piece of black electrical cord. A large
heavy pair of sunglasses that Elvis would have been proud to
call his own, a fairly nice green sweater that was too small for
me, and a really ratty purple one that was too big; the tattered
sleeves were so long they made me look like a moth-eaten
gorilla when I lost control of myself and tried it on for a
moment. At least I had a good Halloween costume ready.
  There were three trombone spit-valves. There were a couple
of cheap-looking medals, tarnished metal disks on thin emerald
ribbons, printed with some vaguely European language I didn't
recognize and mounted in flimsy black display boxes. There was
half of a cracked coconut shell with a circuitboard-like pattern
thickly traced on the inner surface, most of the parts from a cell
phone (I think), a couple of truly interesting beer bottles, a large
narrow-mouthed jug full of shiny Indian-head pennies, six
marbles, and...
  There was the other thing. The last thing. Even though it was
bulky and filled a good portion of the chest, it seemed to lurk in
the chest's shadows, avoiding my gaze. I tried to pick it up, and
was shocked at how heavy it was; it clearly had been what was
slowing me and Hal down. Finally with a tremendous struggle, I
hooked my fingers under it, lifted it out and staggered just far
enough to deposit it on the coffee table nearby, which I
half-imagined hearing groan under the weight.
   So what was `it'? I'm afraid that I can't really give you an
exact answer to that, even now. It was a mechanical device of
some kind, but beyond that it was very difficult to describe. It
had a sort of blobby appearance, as if its birth had occurred
when several smaller devices had been methodically welded
together into one solid mass. There were spinners and gears and
skinny light bulbs and I don't know what all poking out through
gaps and holes at odd angles. But at the same time, there was a
definite *finished* air to the whole thing. It actually resembled
its container in certain ways; there were tasteful brass fittings
wrapped tightly around the outside, and all the various corners
had been carefully rounded off smooth. It sat on four neat little
legs, which even had bits of felt glued to the bottom of them.
There were no sharp edges anywhere, and all the parts that
appeared to need it gleamed with clear oil. I circled the thing a
couple of times. There was no sign of labels or instructions or
engravings. I had no intention at that moment of turning it on,
but that evidently wasn't going to be a problem since there
*also* didn't appear to be any sign of a power cord, or a
battery compartment, or most vitally an `on' switch...
   Then I noticed the key. Not a key like the one that opened the
trunk, but something you might find sticking out of the back of
a mechanical windup toy, set into a recessed hole in the
machine's side and folded down flat on a set of discrete hinges.
Almost against my will, I gingerly touched it. Nothing
happened, and I hooked my fingers again and pulled on it. The
metal was cool and slick. With only a gentle tug it snapped up
and locked into place with a competent little snicking sound. I
gave another tug, pulling *out* this time, but it was anchored
firmly in place. I didn't mess with that any further at that point,
but went back to studying the rest of the Device. (It quickly
acquired capital-letter status in my mind.) Studying the top
closely, I noticed now that while there were no switches or
knobs or anything, there were in fact two promising holes. The
first wasn't really a hole at all, but a socket of some sort,
evidently not for a power cord, but for the sort of adapter that
you find on the end of the cord that is attached to your average
set of headphones. This hole was ringed with a narrow band of
color, the color of pine needles.
   Headphones. Cables...
   My gaze was drawn back to the bundle of newspapers, and
more specifically to what was holding them together. Sure
enough, on closer examination I could see that yes, the cable
actually had connectors wired on to both ends. I untangled it
from the newspapers and examined those ends more closely.
One was a fairly standard looking thing, something that you
might indeed find on a set of headphones. It had a pine-needle
marking ring around it. The other end of the cord... It wasn't
any kind of plug I was immediately familiar with; it looked
something like a medium-sized three-pronged cocktail fork,
each prong round and cut off smooth at its end. The center plug
stuck out a little further than the one on either side. It had a
marking ring the color of cooked salmon.
  Again moving almost unwillingly, I plugged in the Device-end
of the cable. It locked in place with another firm click. I flipped
the free end absently. It brought irresistibly to mind the image
of a rattlesnake's tail shaking and finally I shook it from my
grasp, letting the whole thing coil up in an untidy heap on top of
the Device. Messing with this thing was stupid, even dangerous.
Whatever it was, along with those pennies, it was no doubt
worth some money, and my conscience wouldn't let me keep it,
without at least trying to get in touch with Allison and S#2.
   I left it all there, and went to make some dinner.
   Or at least I tried to. The thing sat there on the coffee table
and nagged at me, like the holes left in your mouth after your
wisdom teeth are extracted. Feeling its presence pushing against
the back of my skull, I fished a frozen dinner out of the freezer
and nuked it in the microwave, my shoulders hunched over.
Ping and done. A fork waited for me in the proper drawer. As I
chewed and swallowed, standing at the counter, I stared at the
Device. It stared back. Finally I could resist no more, and
abandoned my half-eaten burritos to their fate. Pulled back to
the coffee table.
   Maybe I was missing something, from the rest of the trunk's
contents. I again studied them, spread out now before me.
Newspapers. Sweater. Gorilla costume. Valves. Jar of pennies.
A few marbles.
   Sunglasses....
   I really looked at them for the first time, then picked them up.
They were better made than they had first appeared, with large
very black lenses, surrounded by almost-square metal frames. I
opened them-

*   *   *

   Oh, fuck it. Again I read back over what I have written, and
again I have to say to myself, Will, let's cut the crap here.
You're stalling, going into all of these blow-by-blow
descriptions. Or maybe it's the writer that I am? Trained by
Professor Thunstone and all the rest back at Greson to try and
build the suspense, maintain the narrative flow. But that's not
why I'm here, and that's not why you're reading it, I imagine. If
anyone should ever happen to be reading this.
   No. I'm just stalling. I should scroll back and cut out all of
that crap about the Device, but since I've gone to the trouble of
typing it all out, I'll leave it now, in case there is someone out
there who is interested. Let's just summarize again.
   I found a magical machine in a trunk. To this day I don't
know where the machine really came from, Ted or Hans or the
trunk or the Device Fairy. It worked by winding a key in its
side. You plugged a cable into the machine, and plugged the
other end of the cable into a large pair of things that a first
glance resembled some gaudy sunglasses. I plugged and I
plugged and I wound up the machine. I put on the glasses and
nothing happened. A lot more testing, a lot more poking and
prodding, and I finally discovered that even after winding it up,
the machine didn't run until you stuck a marble into that other
hole in the top of the machine. I mentioned the other hole,
didn't I? Yes. Just a plain glass marble, but it had to be one of
the marbles out of the trunk; at one point in the process I
managed to scrounge up one from somewhere else and it didn't
do squat. When the marble was dropped into place and the key
was fully wound up, the Device came to life. As the gears
turned and the lights flashed, the marble spun madly in its
socket for a short time, a mad twirling eyeball staring at the
ceiling, and then abruptly shattered into dust, shutting the whole
damn thing back down again. It took a long time for me to
figure all of this out, but finally...
   I wound up the Device all the way.
   And I slapped in a marble.
   And I put on the glasses. I suppose it was stupid, but at the
end of the day, I'm not sure I was actually given much choice in
the matter.

*   *   *

   How to describe what I saw? As the Writingest Fool, it galls
me to have to say that I can't. Not really. I'm a man who has
been blind his whole life, gaining sight for a painfully brief time
and then trying afterwards to explain the experience to a bunch
of other blind people. I saw things, experienced things, but you
can't really understand it from my words.
   For a moment there was nothing, nothing at all. Then there
was a swirl of colors first clashing violently with each other,
then sorting themselves out into neat rows and columns. And
then... Then...
   The world lit up and went pitch black. Things suddenly
became sharp and distinct, and at the same time pale and hazy,
objects seen from very far away through cold desert air. I could
see the plants in the apartment growing, like a green spreading
ooze, dripping endlessly from their leaves (Except for the
couple that were dead, which dripped a sort of gray-brown). All
of the electronic equipment turned transparent, allowing me to
see the glowing swirling innards of the phone, the computer, the
microwave, the TV... Naturally, I then had to look at the
Device. It was glowing so bright and moving so fast that it
bordered on the edge of pain. It wasn't radioactive or anything.
Somehow I just *knew* that. I knew that if I had seen
something that *was* radioactive, I would have been able to
identify it as such, instantly.
   I said before I didn't know what the Device was. Maybe
that's not really true. I've now had some time to think about all
of this, and I wonder if the Device was some kind of... some
kind of *filter*, allowing a tiny two-legged peon like myself to
see a piece of the light that shines forever behind the curtain, a
mirrored reflection of the most Holy of Holies...
    At the time, I just looked away from that light, staggering
and half-blinded. I had instinctively covered my eyes with my
hands, and now I looked at those hands, and I could see all of
the life there, the skin cells forever forming and flaking off, the
hoards of tiny parasites and symbiotes that we all have in our
systems, squirming around and forming obscene but vital words
with the trails of their bodies. This made me curious what the
rest of me looked like...
   And so I discovered that while wearing the glasses made
some things clearer, others were obscured. The most
immediately obvious was that all other forms of glass became
completely opaque (including mirrors; I never saw what my
own head looked like while wearing the Elvis-glasses.) The best
analogy I can come up with is that they resembled vertical slicks
of oily water, or maybe a soap bubble waiting to be blown, but
with *depth* to it, a sheet shimmering and swirling with a
thousand different colors. I had discovered earlier, before
actually turning on the Device, that the lenses could be
independently twisted around, like on a set of binoculars. I now
did this and I found could sort of see through glass, but it never
was entirely clear; the view of the street two stories down from
my living room windows was thin and hazy, a phantom, cars
ghosting by, the clouds thick and black and choking. Mirrors
never came close to working.
   Then my gaze was pulled back to the TV.
   Oh yeah. Forgot to mention about the TV. It was on during
all of this. I usually let it run in the background while I worked
on a project, writing or anything else. Usually had it tuned to
one of those all-news channels; the resulting stream of utterly
meaningless babble was always soothing somehow.
   When I looked at the TV again though the glasses, I realized
that I could now see the screen, floating in front of the interior
parts as they churned away. I wasn't surprised to learn that it
was a blur of useless color, like all the rest of the glass in the
apartment. Only... there *was* something different there...
shapes moving that the rest didn't have...
   So I played some more with the glasses adjustments.. Just a
little twisting, and suddenly the picture... well, it *snalled* into
focus. If you want to know the meaning of the word `snall',
well... it's what the picture did when I twisted the glasses. It's
simply the only word for happened, and the only definition I
have.
  It snalled up and up.  *Giant*, *vivid*, 3D focus. At the same
moment, the TV cabinet turned itself sort of inside out and
collapsed to multicolored dust, followed instantly by the wall
behind it. The resulting scene snalled up around me before I
could even duck and scream...
   All of the things that followed... despite the continuing
evidence to the contrary, it still seems at times that I
hallucinated the whole thing, watching the TV while those
glasses nuked my brain like a burrito, filling the rest of the room
with things out of my own subconscious, or maybe off of the
TV screen...
   But no. It was real. It was incredibly real. Especially one
moment... but that came a little later.
   At first, when the world stabilized, it was a moment before I
realized that I was someplace else. A new apartment, much
bigger and nicer than the one I had just left. More specifically, I
was standing in the corner of that apartment's dining room,
with a kitchen on view behind a separating marble-topped
counter. Unlike what it replaced, much of what was there in
that kitchen was somehow flat and wrong. None of the
electrical equipment glowed, everything was just empty shells. I
only noticed this out of the corner of one eye because closer, in
the room with me, there was something more important and
interesting: a table. It was a nice wooden one and the scene was
lit mostly by some candles sitting on it. I could see the
streamers of heat rising from the flames, watch the wax flame
and die, but again, it all seemed wrong somehow,
stage-managed.
   Seated at the table were two people I had never seen before, a
man and a woman, both about my age, but (to be brutally
honest) more attractive and wearing much nicer clothes. An
expensive black suit with a narrow red tie, and a dress that
matched the tie. They were eating dinner. Well... to be more
accurate, there was an array of food and wine spread out
between them, but it was all rather incidental to what was really
going on in that room.
   There was no sound, there was never any sound, the snalling
had snuffed all of that out in a second. The man said something
and the woman mimed laughter, showing white teeth and
casually shifting her black hair into a new position. As she did
these things, something flickered around her head, a half-seen
butterfly. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to me.
Even as part of my mind gibbered and ran in circles in panic, my
hand went automatically to the lenses, and adjusted them again.
   The butterfly became real, became part of a flock, and there
was another around the man's head...
   I was seeing their thoughts. I wasn't *reading* them, not
exactly, not explicitly, but I could capture the general drift and
pattern as it flickered and stormed along.
   The drift, the pattern, and most of all the conflict. Those
colors were reaching out of those two people's heads,
interacting with one another and making something new. But it
wasn't the connection of lovers, I could tell that right from the
first. They were fighting like swordsmen, clash and clatter and
bang.
   Exactly like swordsmen. I was seeing not what the two
people were pretending to be. pretending to feel, but instead
what they actually though of each other. The colors, while
glorious and addictive and nearly bottomless, still somehow on
some level popped and fizzed tepidly. These two people were
not in love with one other. If anything, they disliked one
another. The woman laughed again at another comment from
the man, and the colors behind her eyes shot daggers at the
heart of his brain, which neatly parried them with a shower of
splattering sparks. Suddenly they got up, intertwined their
bodies and their lips, began moving towards the waiting
bedroom, gracefully shedding clothes as they kissed. The colors
did not grow any brighter.
   I followed, I was dragged along in their wake, and still they
ignored me. It was all flat. Dead. The last pieces of clothing fell
away, revealing the woman's excellent breasts and the man's
quite-impressive sex organ. The wide white bed enfolded itself
around them as he slid into her...
   I took another step, a step too far, and something snapped my
head violently to one side. I had reached the end of the cord.
Caught off-guard, I stumbled, and crashed into the nearest wall.
It collapsed, pulling me an unknown distance and then reality
re-snalled.

*   *   *

   I was now standing beside a busy city street, with a steady
stream of both cars and pedestrians going past under a row of
elegant buildings and a cloudy sky. For a moment I looked at
the cable that had snapped me, and I could just see it, a faint
ghost, disappearing away from my head and into the wall of a
nearby building.
   But then my attention was dragged elsewhere.
   The cars... Unlike with the electrical equipment in the second
apartment, I could now see the engines churning away under
the hoods. The multicolored pollution billowed out of their
tailpipes, settling sickly over everything. The row of youngish
trees along the street popped with color, greedily sucking some
but not nearly all of the carbon dioxide out of the air.
   And the people. Oh my god the people streaming past,
ignoring me entirely. *Real* emotions now, all emotions.
Laughing and yelling and dancing and fighting. And most of all
fucking. Really, it was all sex, even when in-and-out physical
sex had absolutely nothing to do with it. Men and women,
infants and the elderly, gays and straights, they were all on
display here, walking and driving, and they all had very different
colors, and they would lash out and merge together, prongs
sticking messily but tightly into waiting slots and the both
instantly changing into something totally new and different.
Particularly connections between the (heterosexual) men and
the women. Yellow and blue did not mix to make green, but
rocketing green and red plaid with enormous spinning lavender
and yellow polka-dots that exploded orange and yellow a
million times over... (And still you only have a fraction of an
idea...) At a glance you could see the couples who were
sexually attracted to one another, the ones that were deeply in
love, the ones that had been married to each other for fifty
years...
   Then I saw the Man. One of the Men. At a glance he looked
like all the other men, the ordinary men, that guy back in the
apartment. Brownish-blonde hair, a neat little beard, sort of
overweight, a decent but not exceptional suit. There was only
one difference: There was this... *thing*... centered right in the
middle of his forehead. Not an eye, an actual eye, but aware and
seeing nonetheless, vivid and unblinking. It was small, but
incredibly compact and... busy, a thousands squirming layers.
Dense, a knotted bundle of a million black protons and
electrons madly zipping and whirring, all leaving stinging
multicolored trails. It wasn't as bright and sharp as the Device
had been, but it was far from pleasant.
   There was a tall redheaded woman with him. They were
walking arm and arm, talking and laughing like any other
youngish couple, but that woman's mindcolors... they were
perverted. Corrupted. They were stretched wildly out of shape,
wrapped and knotted tightly around that thing on her
companion's forehead, like a cheap shirt I once saw that had
been ripped right off a man's back and sucked into the spinning
hub of a piece of farm equipment.
   But that wasn't the worst of it, not by a long shot. As they
walked together up that busy street in a single eternal moment...
that woman was riding the man's penis. I can't explain it, she
wasn't in two places at the same time, but as she walked up the
street in her lime-green sundress and her matching heels and
purse, laughing and smiling, she was also stripped naked and
collared and folded over, pulling his massive cock down into
her dripping snatch giving him a blowjob cracking her jaws to
breaking taking it down all the way doing it doggie style with
feverish intensity, her blue eyes draining muddy and then totally
dry...
   And there were other women there too, with her. They
weren't there on the street, they were off behind desks and
walking hallways somewhere else in whatever town this scene
was part of it, but they were with that man nonetheless, and
they were *all* servicing him, all at once. A even taller blonde
woman. A black woman with incredibly long hair. A busty
brunette with very *short* fuzzy hair. Others maybe, not quite
as clear, ones that he hadn't fully pulled down into his mind,
down into the bottomless poison of that third eye...
   They walked on, passing out of sight around the corner.
Neither of them never so much as glanced in my direction.
    Just as they had rounded that corner, another Man appeared
from the same place, moving in the opposite direction. I didn't
see their moment of actual meeting, and I would have given a
lot for that. What would I have seen? Hostility? A casual nod
between equals? Nothing at all? The newcomer was much older
than the first, tall with a thrusting beak of a nose and a flowing
white mane of hair, still handsome in a bony, even fossilized
sort of way. He was walking alone, his pace slow and his
expression thoughtful. He held a gold-topped cane in one hand,
but didn't use it. The thing on his forehead was a hundred times
deeper, blacker, more rotten, and  I couldn't begin to count the
number of women that were twisted over and shackled tightly
to his cock. I caught a glimpse of some of the eyes of the older
ones, the ones that had been trapped down there for
*decades*...
   I turned, fighting the urge to vomit, and deliberately crashed
myself into the wall beside me.

*   *   *

   It took a lot longer for me to regain myself. When I finally
was in shape to look around again, I saw that I was in a dance
studio, a wide wooden floor surrounded on all sides by mirrors
(or windows, or something made of glass...) There were
ballerinas there, several of them, but it clearly not a
performance. Some kind of practice session. Some of them
were limbering up around the edges of things, their legs up on
those handrails you see lining the walls in such places, while
others were flitting gracefully back and forth leaping high. I
only noticed all of this tangentially. My gaze was drawn
immediately to a thin hard-eyed woman shrouded in black stood
off to one side. She was almost a female version of that second
Man back out on the street, with even more extraneous matter
slued away. She didn't have a third eye like the Men, but there
was something *like* it there, tight and hard and furious,
wound up painfully and methodically year after year, decade
after decade, and held in place with grasping claws. It wasn't
bottomless, but it went down a hell of a long way.
   The crone suddenly glanced in my direction, sharp and black.
She didn't see me, I'm almost positive of that, but while
snellside of the TV, she was the only individual who seemed
even slightly aware of my presence. I started to back away from
her
   Then of the ballerinas did a spin, and something flashed there,
catching my eye. She landed, her back was to me. Her bare
back, her costume swooping low.
   It was just like all the other dancers in the room. I guess until
that moment I hadn't really *wanted* to see.
   Except for its larger size, the keys that stuck out there, spun
with smooth deadly grace, were exactly like the one on the
Device.
   As I watched, one of the ballerinas ran down and stopped, her
upper body tipped over, her eyes blank. The crone stopped
looking in my direction, stalked over, and started winding the
younger woman back up. The ballerina jerked as her key was
turned.
   The expression on their faces...
   I turned and walked into the nearest pool.

*   *   *

   I visited other places, several other places.
   Some kind of stone-walled S&M dungeon run by a tall
statuesque woman... a Woman... wearing a tight black leather
outfit, flagellating the pale white skin of the naked man she had
strapped into some bizarre metal framework. (Unlike the Crone,
*Her* third eye was quite real, but also different than that of
the Men. Opposite but equal, spinning the other way, all of the
colors reversed, yin and yang...)
  A bizarre temple-like structure filled with enormous pillars,
where a tough-looking man (the flickerings of a third eye
nestled in the crags of his forehead) was engaged in a running
gun-battle with a group of hooded cultists, a naked blonde
woman clinging to his arm.
  An orgy-scene in a pillow-filled room, members of both sexes
happily and vigorously intermingled. Either there was some
bestiality involved as well, or some of those guys *really* need
to shave. No third eyes in evidence anywhere.
   A college dorm-room, much like the one I had occupied at
Greson, with two male students having slow, almost grim, sex
on the bed...
   A long curving metallic corridor half-filled with debris and
smoke where a large green slobbering monster was raping
about six screaming earth-women, all at once, shooting its seed
into them, impregnating them...
   A man and a woman in an artist's loft, painting a picture by
fucking on top a giant paint-smeared canvas which lay in the
middle of the floor...
   A pixie-like queen sitting on her emerald throne, surrounded
by adoring male subjects, most of them buffed and muscular,
their physiques glowing and exposed and perfect...
   A young pockmarked nerd with taped glasses and buckteeth,
dangling a shiny gold pocket watch in front of the eyes of the
two pretty girls, one white, one Chinese, who knelt naked at his
feet, their eyes blank and worshipful...
  I staggered on and on, somehow unable to turn back or aside,
my mind stretched and pulled like taffy, there was just more,
more, more...

*   *   *

  And then there was the last room. The very last one, my legs
were about to collapse out from under me and everything was
going thin and stretched. I pulled my eyes into focus, and I
realized I was standing on the set of a TV newsroom. But not
just any newsroom. For the first time since my journey had
begun, the room was one that was known to me. It was the set
for one of the local network affiliates in the town where I lived.
Call it KXES. There was the cityscape with the familiar green
mountains tastefully arranged behind them. There was the
equally-familiar gray-and-silver newsdesk with the KXES logo
splashed across it, although I was seeing from an new angle,
almost from the side. And seated behind that newsdesk...
   There were two people.
   The first...
   I recognized the man. It was Dale Clark, one of the station's
two main weeknight co-anchors. The amazing plastic man,
every piece of him smooth and synthetic and fake, teeth and suit
and hair and sincerity covering the absolute vacuum within. The
perfect paragon of the degraded age of TV `news' in which we
now live.
   I walked closer, staggered really, and for some reason, I
reached up and adjusted the glasses as I walked, something I
had stopped doing as I had been blasted from place to place to
place.
   What I saw... even more than all the rest, I'm not sure how
*real* it was, what I was actually looking at.
   There was definitely something there, though.
   At first glance, first twist, Dale looked just like he always did,
suit, tie, blondish hair blow-dried then shallaced forever into
place. Surprisingly, his colors streamed and flashed as brightly
as all the rest I had seen; if nothing else, I had learned that the
man actually had a brain lurking under all of that gloss. He did
*not* have a third eye, for which I was profoundly grateful.
   Then a final twist. The glasses hovered right on the very
highest edge of snallsight, thin and bright and painful. The thick
lead-lining of the newsdesk melted away, and I saw what was
going on behind there, under there, forever and forever in the
blackness out of sight of the camera. No wonder ol' Dale was
always smiling. Unlike with those Men I had seen back on the
street, this woman was quite real and all the way there. (Or was
she?) A brown-skinned woman, her curves perfect and smooth,
her hair tied back into a very long tight ponytail. She had on a
blindfold, her ears were plugged, her arms and legs restrained. I
could see the electric glow of the small engines of the vibrators
as they endlessly buzzed in her sex, in her ass, deep and hungry,
everywhere...
   Her lips were wrapped around Dale's exposed penis, and she
was pumping madly, wantonly. She would be there, doing that,
without all of those restraints. The real blindfold and earplugs
and vibrators were *inside* her skull, her colors all tightly
under wraps, locked down, strapped down tight and blind and
stimulated to furious buzzing. I stared at all of this, I don't
know how long I stared, and then I remembered that *two*
people usually sat at that desk, and I looked on. She was there.
There was the thing that was the most real of it all, the thing I
remember most clearly of all.
   Kari. Kari Torenza, the other of the two regular KXES
newsanchors. She was a petite blonde woman, her hair swept
up in a classy but professional style. She was very beautiful, and
I had always sort of had a long-distance crush on her. I also
thought that unlike the Dalester, she was far too good a
reporter to be wasting her time doing the usual `If It Bleeds, It
Leads' crap that has long become the mainstay of all local news
in this country. (Hell, all news in this country when you get
down to it...)
   I was expecting to see a mirror-image of what was going on
with Dale, some chained hunk (like those back in that throne
room, maybe) under the desk feverishly working on her sex
with his tongue, his hefty penis caught up in some elaborate
steel trap... But no. There was only Kari behind that half of the
desk. She was entirely naked, her perky little breasts poking
proudly into the air. Around her neck was a thin gold collar
with the KXES logo sportily emblazoned on the front of it.
(Her microphone was clipped to it as well.) She smiled her
usual dazzling smile, and more vibrators buzzed deep inside her
violated body.
   And the colors in her head...
   There are no words. They were the best I had seen, in all of
the people I had seen. The brightest and the deepest and most
perfect. And I don't want to share my memory of them with
you, not even if I could find the right words.
   They were there. And they were being slowly destroyed,
perverted, by what They... whoever `They' were... were doing
to her. She was fighting it, but already, all she could do was sit
there and smile and read the words on the Tele-Prompter.
   I walked to her, walked to her without thinking, and I yanked
the collar from around her throat. Yanked away whatever it was
that that collar was representing. It turned out I *could* touch
objects; the thing burned and whipped against my hand and I
tore away the vibrators and all the rest without hurting Kari
without even breaking her skin and there was a howl and
everything went away, the snallights closing in on me from
allsides andpouncingand

*   *   *

   I woke up, lying on the floor of the apartment, the very first
apartment, the one where all of this had started.
   The machine was still spinning away, although the marble was
about to shatter, I was almost out of time, and it was my last
marble. I didn't remember putting the others in the slot, but
they were gone, nonetheless.
   I didn't look at the TV. I didn't *want* to look at the TV. I
only remembered bits and pieces of what had just happened,
and lot of it was bad. My hand hurt horribly, a line of fire
crawling across it and down onto my wrist.
   But my time was running out, and there was one thing I still
had to do.
   I crawled to my feet, picked up the Device (oddly it was light
now, as light as a feather) and I stumbled slowly towards the
front door of my apartment.
   That door opened not into a hallway but rather a little
fence-enclosed porch, with my welcome mat and a potted plant
and stairs leading up to the third floor down to the first. Beyond
that was the parking lot. So I guess it was really more of a
condo than an apartment, wasn't it? Not that it matters. I
kicked the door open, I lurched out onto the porch. For the first
time since all of this had started, there was a sound in the air, an
unpleasant sound, but I didn't really hear it then, not until later
did I remember that I had been hearing it from the moment I
woke up back in the apartment. I went on, out to the railing out
to were I could see the sky and I looked up, my jaw hanging
like an idiot.
   It was four o'clock in the afternoon. The clouds had burned
away and the sky was bright and blue.
   And I could see the stars. They were huge, burning up there,
burning so very incredibly far away. For the first and last time in
my life, I truly understood how big and how far away those
little white pinpricks are. I was *glad* they were so far away.
   Which made me realize...
   My gaze went on, dragged up and up and up to the sun, our
own little pinprick in the infinite blackness. It was hovering off
in the western side of the sky, just beginning its nightly plunge
towards the ocean. I could look at it. I could look right into the
heart of the sun without pain. Without *physical* pain, at least.
It was only for a moment, the power-marble detonated with
bang leaving me blind and stunned, but it was more than
enough.
   What did I see? Let's just put it this way. If more people
could see what I saw forever spinning up there, roaring and
howling and leaving those gigantic searing trails... we'd have a
lot more sun worshippers out there. Real sun worshippers.
We'd be back to building stone pyramids and wielding sharp
obsidian knives. The screams and smoke of the burning flesh
would reach all the way to heaven.
   I vomited and pissed and crapped in my pants all at once,
falling backwards to land on my ass with a thud, still cradling
the Device in my arms.
   The sound was louder, and it penetrated my mind like an ice
pick. My vision flashed afterimages of what I had just been
slapped with, and I couldn't get up.
   Then the car came. I call it a car, but, well, in my more honest
moments I have to say that it was just something shaped like a
car. It had four wheels. Doors. Lights. Black-tinted windows.
Tail fins. Really nasty tail fins that could slice you in half as they
went screaming past.
   And how they did scream, scream like a dive-bomber
plunging for its target. The car-thing came into the parking lot,
twisting around the corners, its tires leaving no black marks on
the pavement. It slid to a stop directly below me at a wide
angle, and the passenger door swung open. Chill foulness
spilled out, followed by...
   A man. I call it a man, but... hell, we've been over this
already. You get the idea. Two legs. Eyes. Fingers. A gun on
one hip, a sword on the other. It had all of these things.
   And its face, you ask? As I said, I was running on fumes at
this point, but, remember those Third Eyes? Well, that's what
this Man, the Last Man, that's what his whole face looked like.
He was a great big Third Eye wrapped up in a leathery scarred
skin and wound tight with a really nasty key and set to forever
walking across the wide world.
   Sent out to enforce the law. Whose law? You don't want to
know. I don't want to know. All I do know is, I had broken it. I
knew this as soon as saw him. I was guilty, there was no appeal,
and he had come to carry out my sentence.
   He came walking, and he pulled the gun from its holster as he
did, up the steps, the sounds of his boots thudding on the wood.
He came into view, and the gun was waiting.
   And so I died. The sound was very long and very loud.

*   *   *

   And so...
   I was reborn.
   I almost wrote `and so I woke up and it was all a dream!'
Because for a time, I thought it was all a dream. For a time, I
barely remembered any of it. But gradually, I came to realize
and to remember. To remember that things had profoundly
*changed*.
   You may have noted that in the earlier parts of this little
narrative, that while you learned all about the life and times of
the late Ted Capotosto, I didn't say a whole lot about The
Writingest Fool. What I do for a living, whether I was married
or living alone, whether there were any of *my* girlfriends
passing through that college apartment. There was a reason for
this.
   Because everything has changed. My past has changed. I can
remember, more or less, what my life was like before that trunk
and its contents arrived, but now...
   I wrote for a living before. I write for a living now. I get paid
a lot more for the new stuff, but it's still sitting all day and
staring at the screen of a word processor. I'm writing another
book, and everyone says its going to be the most popular one
I've done to date. I suppose they are right.
   I had girlfriends in college. That has not changed.
   I had a girlfriend before. I have a wife now. The girlfriend was
named Molly, and I had met her at the newspaper where I
worked. She was a smart and fun-loving girl with gorgeous
dark hair. We got along pretty damn well, and I think in a
couple of more months I would have asked her to move in with
me, and I think she would have said yes. Maybe some day after
that we would have made the whole thing official. Now, Molly
still exists, is still alive, she still works for that newspaper. She's
going with a nice guy named Herb Carlson, who works for a
local radio station. I checked on her and him, and she seems
happy enough. She doesn't know I exist, even if she's read one
of my books. I use a pen name.
   My wife? I suppose it comes as no surprise that my wife is
Kari, the woman behind the newsdesk. We met five years ago
when she interviewed me about one of my first books.
Afterwards, we went out, we fell in love, we got married.
   I had an apartment before, a condo. I have an apartment now,
a penthouse. Again, I suppose its no surprise that it's the same
one that those two people were fighting love in, high up on the
east side of the city near the harbor, with a lovely sweeping
balcony view of the main downtown skyline and the green
mountains beyond. We may be getting an even better one;
Kari's now working (has always worked) at KXES's main
competitor across town, the one station in these parts that still
maintains a slight semblance of decency and good journalism.
Her excellent work there has led her to being courted by one of
the national networks, and we may soon be moving back east. It
would help with my career as well, so while I would miss this
town a bit, I don't mind too much.
   Ted was dead before. Ted is dead now. The Device is long
gone, not a trace left behind, but the trunk arrived empty at our
penthouse after Ted's death. It now sits at the foot of our bed,
filled with some of the most important things from our
marriage, so that if we ever have to flee, we can hopefully carry
it between us and save them. It seems only fitting.
   It all sounds rather nice, I suppose, when I put it this way.
Wasn't I speaking earlier of punishment? Yes, I was. My crime
was ripping that collar from around Kari's neck. As I've already
said ad nasuem I'm still not sure if it all was literal or symbolic,
what I saw, what I did, while snalling over the rainbow, but that
one impulsive act definitely upset someone's plans, somewhere,
and now I am paying the penalty.
   The Last Man shot me right between the eyes, and he left...
not a hole, but something else. Maybe the exact opposite of a
hole. I stand in the bathroom in the mornings and I shave, and I
can almost see what is there now, spinning and buzzing, leaving
its little trails.
   Kari's been acting different around me lately. Alone at night
in our bedroom. So has Viola, my literary agent. Alone in her
office up on the tenth floor of the Bloy Building. And Ruby, the
dark-skinned woman who comes in some days to do
housework, alone in our penthouse apartment. She's been
coming up almost every day lately, actually.
   They have all been acting very differently.
   And I am writing a new book. It's practically writing itself,
the words stringing together, the patterns forming, page after
page after page. The next time I go out on a book signing tour,
I may very well be that World Famous Author after all. There
may even be dampened panties.
   And now we are probably moving back east, to mix with the
very highest levels of society.
   I look into the mirror, and I think maybe, for the first time, I
begin to have a flickering of understanding and empathy about
that older Man out there on that street.
   I am beginning to understand what he was thinking about.
   I am beginning, maybe, just a little, to understand why he was
walking alone.

(end)






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