Chapter 3

It wasn’t the sound of wind buffeting the window that drew Kerry’s attention from the computer screen, it was the growing realization that something had changed. There was no sound at all, not even the staccato click-clicking of his fingers on the keyboard. He stopped typing and opened his mouth wide, trying to clear his ears against the sensation that the air pressure had changed. Kerry opened his mouth again, stretching wide and racking his jaw side to side, but his ears wouldn’t clear. He reached absently for the half-empty pack of Dentyne gum on the desktop when an unmistakable glow caught his eye.

Metal edging surrounding the desktop shimmered a cobalt blue. Bright threads of energy danced and sparked along the steel. Kerry shoved his chair backward, toppling it to the floor as he stood.

“Shit! What the hell…!”

Blue flames arced between his fingertips. He slapped his hands to his thighs to quench the fire. Around him, everything metal surged with color and crackling power. His watch and buckle, the faucets, pots and pans on the counter, knives in the butcher block, all was enveloped in a surreal St. Elmo’s Fire.

Kerry turned to the window and gasped, the hair on his neck prickled. Every bobblehead on the sill shone brightly, each coil spring clearly visible through the plastic, lit like filaments of incandescent lamps. The superheroes jittered violently, bumping into one another, some teetering on the edge. The window reflected the undulating heroes with a backdrop of elongated lights flickering and twisting on the frosted pane. The figures seemed alive, sycophants appeasing some voodoo priest in a crescendo of ritualistic flailing.

A corona of light, too bright to look at, pierced the space around the edges of where the door should be, leaving an intensely dark nothingness within.

She formed slowly a few feet inside the room; sprigs and tentacles of swirling vapor emerged from the blackness, coalescing into the naked form of divine womanhood, yet nothing about her came into perfect focus. She was beauty viewed through water, shimmering and elusive.

It was happening again.

“This isn’t real, none of this is real.” Kerry whispered, his thoughts racing faster than his heart. Hallucination, that’s all this is! You know it’s all in your head! But these thoughts couldn’t dispel the terror that gripped him.

Kerry desperately wished now that he had taken the Zyprexa earlier, that he hadn’t been so stubborn. He willed that the vision would stop, but the girl was no longer in transformation and now stood before him, voluptuous in her perfection.

Her waist-length hair draped over one shoulder, obsidian black in stark contrast to her glacial blue-white skin. Black runes were tattooed in concentric circles around the areolas of both breasts. The marks were sweeping and bold, elaborate and intertwined. Memorizing.  She was a black-and-white apparition except for the vibrant pink of her raised nipples and slightly parted lips.  Kerry avoided her eyes, afraid of what he would see.

She moved toward him.

He stumbled back two steps and hit the bed. The girl--no, he could no longer think of her as a girl--the woman, walking slowly across the room, held out her hands, and he saw the barest smile form on her lips. To his horror, he found himself reaching for her hands and jerked back. The smile left her lips. Kerry looked into her pupil-less eyes for the first time and couldn't look away.

“Come to me.”

Her voice, a silky-smooth whisper, belied the force the words produced.  Kerry felt his will at war with an enemy within, a slithering feeling of invasion as real as if worms were in his blood.  Somehow he found strength enough to push the feelings from his mind and stepped to the center of the room.

“No.”

“You still don’t want me?”

“You’re not real.”

“Can you remember last night and say that I’m not real?”  She stroked the fingers of both hands up from her waist and cupped her breasts. She took one fluid step and then another, her body lithe, her manner predatory. “I would have thought you enjoyed my attentions. I’m hurt.”

She didn’t sound hurt.

“Hallucinations only last so long. This will be over soon, and you’ll be gone. I’ll take my meds, and never see you again.”

“Ooh, spoken with such conviction! But you don’t really believe that, do you? Why would you argue with your imagination? No--I can hear your heart beating from here. Pitter-patter! You know I’m real. I can smell your fear--and delectable as that is, I would rather you had different feelings.”

“Like loathing?”

“Like reverence!”

She opened her mouth and violently huffed strands of vapor that corkscrewed into Kerry’s face and up into his nostrils. The effect was an immediate numbing of all his senses and he sagged, ready to topple. She closed the distance between them in a pair of strides and with one hand around Kerry’s throat, raised him upright. She slowly brought his face to hers, first brushing her lips lightly against his cheek. She then trailed her tongue along the line of his jaw until reaching his gasping mouth. She relaxed her grip and let him catch a single breath before thrusting her tongue deep inside. Kerry bit down.

Enraged, she flung him across the room and into the kitchen as if he were weightless. He slid into a trash can, sending soda cans across the floor with a clatter. Spewing guttural animal sounds, the specter flung her hair back, her eyes wild. She raised her arms and the intensity of power surged throughout the apartment until every surface suffused with crackling blue fire.

“This could be so much more enjoyable for you, if you’d let it. Playing hard-to-get isn’t as attractive for a man, or didn’t anyone ever tell you that? But who are we kidding?  It doesn't really matter what you want, only what I need. So,--we’ll just have to do it my way.”

A score of smoke-tentacles emerged from behind her and roped across the floor. Kerry tried to stand as the first tentacle pierced his left arm below the elbow. It wrapped around his bone and Kerry cried out in agony. His other arm and both feet were speared in the next instant and Kerry stiffened, his cry burst into a full-throated scream. He could feel muscle being torn from his bones as their grip tightened.

“Shush, my darling, you’ll wake the neighbors. And that just won’t do, will it?”

She blew a kiss in his direction, releasing an ethereal wisp that floated slowly until sucked deep into Kerry’s lungs. His screams died out as he faded into unconsciousness. 

He awoke to find he was naked and held spread-eagle on the bed.  The overwhelming feeling of blood-worms filled his mind and stole the last of his will; he was no longer in control of his body.  He watched her manipulate an erection that he could not stop.  She mounted him and took him inside, thrusting forward and back.  She was on him, and in him, and he could do nothing but watch as the runes flashed rhythmically before his eyes.

Hulk and his crew of superheroes watched and danced with fervor as the she-devil raised her head and began her familiar cries.

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