The Stone of Idris: What the Future Holds.

Over the last few days, I had found myself looking for excuses not to go to bed. My dreams since receiving the stone had not been pleasant, even though I’d had numerous orgasms. I didn’t want to orgasm to visions of raping someone or experience killing someone. I feared these dreams were coarsening me.

I was afraid they were starting to make me believe doing rape and murder was justified because I could and had a magical stone to make it easy.

I didn’t want to become like my Great-great-great grandfather, delighting in human misery.

Around 2.00 am, I had to sleep. My eyes slid shut.

This was the worst night so far. I watched myself, helpless to do anything, as my behaviour became increasingly lecherous. The things I made my students and other random lovers I had taken became increasingly depraved and debaucherous.

Simple penetrative sex was not enough for me anymore. I needed them to debase themselves more and more wholly for me to derive any pleasure. I watched myself in disgust as I forced the random strangers I had gathered with the power of the stone to do unspeakably despicable things to themselves and the others I had collected. Things that made me sick to my stomach and that I cannot bear to describe, even if I was allowed to.

I watched as I was called before a senior University lecturers and staff disciplinary committee. I watched weeping as I was stripped of my honours and tenure and dumped out of the University I had spent my entire adult life working in.

I watched Katey, Jasmine, Tina, and all of the lovers and friends I had made turn their backs on me in disgust.

I watched in tears as Janela tore me down in front of Beatrice and took her granddaughter back to the Philippines.

I watched in despair as the bank foreclosed on my mortgage and took the only house I had ever lived in.

Crying, I saw everything I was and everything I had, destroyed because of how I had been using the stone.

“Is this my future?” I demanded of the stone. “Is this what I am doomed to do, to become? Show me there’s a different path. Show me this isn’t all there is.”

The stone relentlessly ground my future into my face. I watched as I became homeless and a drunkard. I wailed in despair as I was shown myself dying alone. Unloved, unlamented, and unmissed.

“You okay, Mr Muzz?” A soft voice asked at my elbow. “You were crying out in your sleep.”

Beatrice had heard me from downstairs and at the other end of the house.

I sat up as Beatrice flicked the bedside lamp on. She saw my stricken face and tear-filled eyes.

“What’s up, Mr Muzz?” She asked concernedly.

“I was shown my future in a dream, Bea,” I told her. “My future is to die alone, unloved and unlamented. It scared me, is all.”

“I believe there are many different futures, Mr Muzz,” Beatrice said, sitting on my bed. “The choices we make today change the future every day. I have to believe that. Otherwise, there’s no point. I thought my destiny was to be a massive Hollywood star. I was going to be a famous model and then star in many romantic movies.

Yet here I am, 27 years old, living with my grandmother and working as a maid for a man who thinks I’m a child and pays no attention to me.”

She was referring to me, I realised, in wonder

“But I believe this isn’t my future. I believe in love, marriage, and children, Mr Muzz. I believe in a full life with a man I can love and respect. I believe in growing old with him and delighting in grandchildren as they appear.

Isn’t that nice, Mr Muzz? Isn’t that a great future?”

“It sounds perfect to me, Bea,” I told her. “I once hoped for that dream myself.”

Beatrice sighed. “As mammy says, ‘you men are all so stupid’,” she said. “I respect you, Mr Muzz. You’re a good man. Kind to mammy and me. Now you’ve lost weight, you’re physically attractive. We could build our dream together. All you have to do is stop being so blindly dense.