Chapter 2

Bob Winkle returned to consciousness in much the same manner as a man who has been sleeping through a thunder storm, and suddenly awakes to find a tornado is in the process of ripping his house to shreds. There was a lot going on, and his mind couldn't seem to center on any one thing. Among the various different stimuli vying for his primary attention were thoughts, some unconscious, such as the fact that he was twenty-three years old, that Valerie had said she was going to fix meatloaf tonight, and that his Barca Lounger was so comfortable that it felt like he was actually lying in bed.

He was also aware, on some level, that he was in the act of making love, though the circumstances were strange. He felt his penis ejaculating, which was something that couldn't be mistaken for anything else. But the woman on top of him - that, in itself was strange ... no woman had ever been on top of him before - was a complete stranger. That didn't bode well for him at all. No wife has the capacity to understand why, on her third wedding anniversary, her husband has sex with a complete stranger.

He remembered hearing the word "Daddy" as his consciousness returned, and he knew he was a father, with three children, but the voice hadn't sounded like that of a child.

He was also hungry. Famished, in fact. And thirsty too, so much so that his mouth felt like cotton.

As his mind began to disregard some things and tune in to others, the woman sitting on top of his just-finished-spurting prick got top priority. Not unusual, under the circumstances.

"Hello." said Bob thickly. To be honest, he couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Daddy!" squeaked Betty. To continue being honest, she couldn't think of anything else to say either.

"Daddy?" rasped Bob.

"Daddy!" Betty repeated. Her mind still hadn't adapted to the situation. Her statement was both a simple repeat of what she'd said, in answer to his question, and a shout to herself that this really was Daddy... her Daddy ... her awake Daddy. At the same time, while part of her mind was telling her to do something!, another part of her mind simply said: "Okay, we have an emergency here. We're not trained for this kind of emergency. Shut down all systems and restart to see if that does anything."

Bob was still trying to figure out what "Daddy!" meant, coming from this woman's mouth, when her quite lovely blue eyes rolled up in her head and she flopped limply down on top of him. He had fleeting thoughts that her breasts were warm and soft on his chest, and that her hair smelled good, and that she was heavy.

He had another fleeting thought that Valerie might walk in at any moment, and that she would not understand or appreciate what was going on here.

Then his mind screamed "What is going on here!?"

He pushed the woman off of him and she flopped bonelessly beside him on the bed.

On the bed.

He was in a bed ... not in his Barca Lounger. His head swiveled as he sat up. The woman's right leg was still lying across his thighs and they acted as ballast to help him sit up in the soft bed. Yet another part of his mind whispered that he needed to get a little more exercise, since it shouldn't be that hard just to sit up. His muscles felt slightly weak for some reason.

He could tell he was in his bedroom. Or at least it was very like his bedroom. The bed was the same ... his bed ... and some of the furniture was exactly the same, though it had been moved from where it had been when he'd decided to take a nap ... fully dressed ... in the living room ... in his Barca Lounger...

Bob looked at the woman curiously. He moved her leg and it plopped down as she rolled the rest of the way onto her back. She looked to be about his mother's age and there was something eerily familiar about her. He examined her face, and was sure he must know her from somewhere, though he couldn't for the life of him remember seeing her anywhere. Women her age didn't travel in his circles all that much. His eyes strayed to her breasts, which were trying to fall off her chest, but were held there by tightly stretched skin. They had more the appearance that they were slightly drunk, leaning, but not quite falling to her sides. The nipples stuck up as if they were erect. He had the sudden urge to pinch one, to see if it was as hard as it looked, but didn't. His eyes went naturally downward to a smooth patch of brown pubic hair that lay flat on her mons above full sperm-covered labia.

Sperm-covered labia.

His mind remembered the feeling of orgasm as he awoke and he looked in his own lap at his shrunken, messy penis. It was sperm covered too. He had just had sex with this woman.

It was obvious, but crazy too, in that insane way that jars the mind and makes the world twist suddenly ninety degrees off true. He couldn't remember getting into bed with her, much less having sex with her. It was like a dream. Like his mind was playing some trick on him.

His mind began to play more tricks on him. He had vague, gauzy memories of this happening before ... many times before ... of orgasms while he slept ... of voices speaking to him ... telling him things. As the memories swirled in his brain he tried to pin them down and examine them. He had fleeting images of stories being read to him, of people asking him questions ... and telling him that they loved him. The only thing he could center on was that all the voices were female. One memory popped in his mind like a soap bubble and the suddenly remembered voice of a woman saying "June! Again?! You're insatiable!" and another female voice responding "I can't help it. He's so hard and it feels soooo good. Oooooo he's cumming Martha! He's shooting in me Martha!"

Then that memory vanished and he was left to wonder who June and Martha were. He had children named June and Martha, but these had been the voices of women, not toddlers.

His eyes returned to the naked woman's face. She looked vaguely like Valerie, his wife. He looked longer. Yes, the jaw, the eyebrows and the cheekbones! They were what his wife might look like if she were older than she was. He stared, seeing his wife's face suddenly aged twenty or thirty years.

He shook his head. This was insane. Something was wrong. He had to find Valerie and find out what was happening to him.

Leaving the unconscious woman on the bed - he was so distracted that he didn't even cover her up - he swung his legs down off the edge of the bed. He felt weak and staggered as he stood, having to help himself up by pushing on the bed with his hands. He stood, weaving drunkenly as he got his bearings, and looked around for his clothing. Not seeing anything in plain sight, he stumbled over to the dresser and opened his underwear drawer.

It was full of T shirts.

He held one up. It was obviously too small to fit him.

He opened other drawers, finding all kinds of women's clothing, but nothing of his. His brain was beginning to hurt from the strangeness he was experiencing. He'd find Valerie. She'd know what was happening. He began stepping toward the bedroom door.

Francine breezed through her great aunt's front door as if she lived in the house. She'd spent enough time in this house that she knew it up and down. Sideways too, for that matter. It had developed as a hangout for her and her cousins, when they wanted to get together, but not under the eyes of their parents. Great Aunt Martha (sometimes just Aunt Martha) was pretty cool for somebody her age, and left them alone, for the most part. Fran and her cousins, Becca and Val, had spent hours and hours together in this house. When they were younger they had played, sometimes with dolls, sometimes board games, sometimes other more active games, like hide and seek. As they grew older they spent more time talking. They talked about everything from their favorite TV shows to fashion, to why the man called their great grandfather, but who looked about twenty, slept in that bed in the other room for all these years.

At first they hadn't believed that the man had slept for years. But as their own years piled up, and they never saw him wake, he became another fixture in the house. They watched their grandmothers read to the man, sitting beside the bed with their reading glasses on, reading a chapter or two from some book to the sleeping man. Eventually they took turns reading to him too, the only difference being they read things they thought were good, rather than things they thought their sleeping great grandfather might like. It was difficult for them to believe that he would ever awaken, or that he could hear them.

Still, there was something calming and nice about reading to him. That led eventually to saying other things to him, and asking him questions. All three girls began to think of him as some mysterious power who heard their complaints, and dreams, and wishes and somehow could do something about them. After a camping trip all three young girls would troop in and tell him all about what had happened, and what was fun, and what was not. Individually, as they grew into adolescence, they told him other things, secret things, things they didn't even tell each other.

Then one day, while Val was fourteen, Becca was twelve and Fran was ten, they were playing hide and seek in the house where their great grandfather lay sleeping, something happened that changed their lives. They didn't think about it that way, but it changed the way they thought about things ... so it changed their lives.

As the youngest, Fran was "it" first, of course, and had to hide her eyes in a corner and count to a hundred slowly while Val and Becca hid somewhere in the house. It was a big house, with both a basement and an attic, so their games were both long and instructive.

On this day, Val, whose grandmother owned the house, decided to hide in the attic. She had hidden there before, and there was one place she'd eyed for a long time, but had never used. There was an old roll top desk against one wall. It was rumored to have belonged to the very first Winkle who came to America way back in 1899 or some such thing. It was made of some dark, almost black wood which was very hard, and beautiful in a dusty sort of way.

The girls didn't know it, but this had been Bob's favorite piece of furniture, the very same one in which Valerie had found the insurance policy ... the desk that was a gift from Bob's aged great grandfather. Bob had used it as a home office, with its myriad of cubby holes and little drawers and slots in which a whole life's worth of bills, correspondence and important papers had been stored. It was his very attachment to it that caused it to end up in the attic. Valerie, when her husband refused to wake, went through several phases of grief. During one of them, she moved everything that reminded her of her sleeping husband's normal life to the attic. Some of it had come back out again, over the years, but the desk, weighing hundreds of pounds, sat there, still full of papers that were now thirty or forty years old.

There was a hole under the desk, for a person's knees, and a bulky old wooden desk chair that filled that hole. It was Val's opinion that, if she removed the chair, got in the hole and then pulled the chair back in behind her, no one would think to look for her there.

She was right in that. She was so right that she sat in the hole, under the desk, for almost forty-five minutes, once seeing Fran's skinny legs walking right by where she was hiding. The stakes in this game were high, since whoever stayed hidden the longest would be exempt from the next session of helping Great Grandma Martha, or Great Aunt Martha, depending on who you were, wash dishes. The admittedly sweet, but also slightly odd old woman seemed to have this equally odd idea that washing dishes together by hand was a bonding experience that all young girls should participate in frequently.

So Val sat patiently, waiting for Fran to come around and announce defeat to the room in general, before going on to announce it all over the house. And, as she sat, trying to get out of more "bonding" with her great grandmother, Val got bored. And, as she got more and more bored, she did the only thing she could. She examined her surroundings closely. And, as she examined things around her closely, she observed something singularly odd.

She knew there was a drawer in the desk that was right above a person's lap when they sat there. She had been in that drawer numerous times, looking for treasure, and at the odd things that were in there. For instance, there was an odd silver thing that looked like pliers, but was used to punch a single hole in a piece of paper. She and her cousins had figured out that much, but couldn't figure out why anyone would want to do that in the first place.

There were other interesting and strange things in that drawer too, but that wasn't what got her attention. What got her attention was the fact that that drawer was only about a foot deep. Yet, as she looked at the underside of the hole, she could see that the drawer could be ... should be ... twice that long. And ... there was a square of wood visible, with four edges, in the space that wasn't being used by the drawer. It looked a little like a trap door, with a slot in it, and a little metal bulge in the middle of the slot. She reached up and fingered the little metal bulge, more out of idle curiosity than actually trying to make anything happen, but the results were both interesting and surprising.

Chapter 3 »