Chapter 5

"Studly," I heard through my sex-deepened sleep.

"Go away," I muttered. I turned over and wrapped my arm around my naked wife's waist.

There was an insistent hand shaking my shoulder.

"Come on, Jase," some annoying bitch was saying. "Wake up."

I popped open an eye, staring at the redheaded beauty I was spooning in the motel bed. Slowly I looked back over my shoulder, only to see the same woman standing next to the bed.

"Come on," Karen said again. "Wake your girlfriend up and — wait a minute, that's me. Why would she turn herself into me? You told me that you never fucked me as a doll."

Uh-oh.

Sandy had woken up herself, and very helpfully turned over to sit up in the bed, letting Karen know that the version of her that Sandy had reproduced was in fact eighteen years old. And very perky.

"June 21, 2006," she chirped up.

"June 21?" Karen asked. "2006? Two days before our wedding? Jason Thompson, tell me that you didn't make me the stripper at your bachelor party. Because I will be extremely fucking disappointed in you if I find out that was true."

I was sitting up as well by now.

"I summoned you to practice," I said.

"Practice what?" she asked.

"Sex," I said, as if the answer were obvious.

"We'd been having sex for the previous year and a half," she correctly pointed out. "What did you fucking need to practice?"

"I, um," I began.

Sandy took over for me.

"He told me he found a new technique on the internet, and he wanted to try it out," she smiled.

"Oh my God!" Karen yelped. "That thing you did on our wedding night, where you put your hand on my —, and then you —"

I suddenly found myself surrounded with Karens, as my wife of fourteen years jumped into bed with her earlier self and began kissing me on the face.

"Sandy," she said as she suddenly sat up and began peeling off her clothes. "Go tell Mr. Richardson that Jase and I will be a little late getting to breakfast."

Her shirt hit the floor, followed quickly by her bra.

"Oh, and Sandy? He's really a nice guy now, okay? Don't slap him again, huh?

Her pants joined the pile of clothes.

"Oh, and Sandy? Don't go over there as me, huh? And put some clothes on, sweetie."

While Karen was peeling her panties off, I watched a naked 18-year-old redhead metamorphose into a clothed sixteen-year-old brunette as she walked toward the door. By the time she closed it behind her, my 32-year-old redhead had finished her own, much slower but much more satisfying metamorphosis.

Karen and I were sitting in the Shoney's across the street from the motel for a good fifteen minutes when a disheveled Andy shuffled in and a grinning Sandy bounced in beside him.

"You were right, he was pretty nice," Sandy winked at us as she sat down next to me in the booth, leaving the other seat across from her for Andy.

"Coffee," Andy said. "I need coffee. I can't believe I made love to Julie Pinsky."

"You made love to me," Sandy reached over to punch him in the shoulder.

Karen smiled at her.

"Honey, I hate to do this to you," she said softly, "but we need to know what happened to you after you left Jason's. How much do you remember?"

"Pretty much everything," Sandy said after a pause during which she toyed with her food. "I was with the Tuttles, and the father, Dan, found out that he could channel me. So I did a couple of performances each week for his friends, and then he set up a little pornography business and I did a couple of videos for him to sell over the internet. And then his friends sort of started taking over, the same guys I was with when you picked me up. And then — then I think he must have died."

"You don't know for sure?" Andy asked.

"Once I'm channeled," she told him, "—when I have another woman's body? — I have a compulsion to obey my master, the man or woman who changed me. At one point, I was — what was her name? Keira something — I was this Keira woman, waiting for Dan so we could finish a video. And all of a sudden the compulsion was gone. It was like lifted out of my head. But his friends came in and ordered me to finish the video. So I did, 'cause I didn't really know Dan was dead, and I figure that's what he would want. But then — then they tried to change me into someone else, and they couldn't do it. They weren't my masters, you see? That's when I knew that I didn't have a master anymore."

She looked down at her breakfast as it started getting colder.

"And then they started hurting me," she said quietly.

"Hurting you how?" Karen asked.

"It started with slapping," Sandy said slowly. "But when that didn't work they started using their fists, and then they got knives. They were convinced that I just didn't want to work for them, and they were going to make me."

She paused a little longer, before looking up at us with tears in her eyes.

"They cut off my nipple," she whispered.

"Oh my God," Karen's eyes were wide.

"And so I changed, right then," she said. "That's when I found out that I could do it myself. I changed into a woman I'd done before, that Angelina whatever her name is. But they wanted somebody different, um, Katie Couric, from like 1994. So they cut me again, and finally I got her.

"All they had to do after that was threaten," she continued, "and I would change. I started doing, like, four videos a day. And in the meantime, at night, I started to remember all the girls I'd channeled before, like Julie."

She smiled at me, and I tried my best to return it. She put a hand on my arm.

"Every night I'd channel Julie again, from that night you made love to me as her," she smiled at me.

"Anyway," she sighed, "they gradually allowed me a little more freedom, like the jogging. One of my other girls, back in the eighties, had been a jogger, and it gave me a way to get out of that hole for a while."

"Can you just turn yourself back into a doll?" Andy asked.

"Sure," Sandy said.

"So why not do that?" he asked.

"'Cause she'd lose all her memories," Karen smiled at her. "Some of them happy, some not. And she'd give them total control over her, instead of just the partial control they had."

Sandy smiled back at Karen.

"Well, hell, this isn't going to work," I said.

"What?" Andy asked.

"Well, the idea was we'd snatch her and then trade her for Julie," I said. I turned to Sandy. "Your friends have kidnapped the real Julie Pinsky so that Andy here will back off trying to find you.

"But we can't give her back to them now," I said. "They're a bunch of animals. And besides, Sandy is now our guest."

I looked over at Karen with a prim nod, and she burst out laughing.

"I once slapped Jason for not treating one of the dolls — I think it was Julie," she explained to Andy, "with respect. I told him that she was a guest in our house, doll or not."

"So what do we do?" Andy asked.

"We do have Carrie," I said. "How did Carrie know last night how to channel herself?"

"It's kind of a touch thing," Sandy said. "I can touch her and tell her things, just like she can do to me."

"Huh," I said. "Anyway, we can turn Carrie into Julie, and give them Carrie."

"But then they'll just treat Carrie like they treated me," Sandy said, "and since she'll have a master, she won't be able to turn herself into anybody else."

"Huh," I said.

"If Jason ordered her to change in accordance with their orders, would she do it?" Andy asked.

"Probably," Sandy said. "Yeah, I think so."

"Suppose she dies?" Karen interjected.

"Who dies?" I asked her.

"Hush, Jason," she said. "Suppose you're channeling, like, Britney Spears, and you're killed. Do you, the doll, die?"

"No," Sandy scoffed, as if it was the stupidest question in the world. "As long as my master is still alive, he can just change me back into a doll and go on channeling me."

"So there," Karen was exultant. "We trade Carrie, as Julie, for our Julie, little Carrie does her little porn thing for a couple of days or so, and then she commits suicide. We get her back, nobody's the wiser, we win."

"How do we get her back?" Andy asked.

"Yeah," I added with more sarcasm than was probably necessary, "I don't think the monks are going to put her out on the curb with the regular trash pickup."

Andy snapped his fingers.

"A subcutaneous GPS transmitter," he smiled.

"Yeah," Karen turned to me, "a subcutaneous GPS transmitter."

"What's that?" Sandy asked my question.

"It's a device I put under Carrie's skin, to let me track her," Andy explained. "We'll be able to find the body, and turn her back into a doll."

We tried to pick apart the idea for another hour, and then spent another hour after that turning it into a full-fledged plan.

Three days later, I was freezing my ass off on a godforsaken piece of Outer Dakota that looked like it would actually be improved by a nuclear accident. I could understand why they had been so eager to change their name from North Dakota, because they thought it implied they were too cold. But Outer Dakota? The only other Outer I knew was Outer Mongolia. How did that help? And as far as I was concerned, this particular part of Outer Dakota resembled nothing so much as Outer Mongolia anyway.

Andy had assured me that he had spent hours finding a site for the exchange that would guarantee our privacy and our security. Of course, he was sitting back there on a bluff in a car with Sandy, scanning the horizon with powerful FBI field glasses to ensure that we hadn't been double-crossed. Karen was in a rental car about a mile back. I was the one standing out here holding Carrie's hand.

Our exchange of "prisoners" had been arranged in a series of phone calls after Andy had visited the monastery late one night and tossed in a cell phone he'd purchased from a Missouri Wal-Mart. The next morning he called it and when someone answered it, he told them he'd like to speak to the person in charge of fundraising. He set the phone into a speaker cradle, and we waited.

"This is Brother Tomás," said a very sophisticated voice, rich with Latin American vowels and consonants.

"Brother Tomás, this is Mr. Richardson," Andy said.

"Mr. Richardson," his voice grew darker quickly. "I believe you have our property."

"And what would that be, Tomás?" Andy asked.

"Our changeling," the man hissed. "And I suggest that you bring her back here, before your friend Ms. Pinsky has some sort of accident."

"Tomás," Andy said, his own voice hardening, "if Ms. Pinsky is hurt even a little bit, not only will you never see your 'changeling' again, but I will personally hunt each and every one of you down, and do to you exactly what you've done to your 'changeling' over the past couple of years."

There was a long pause, and finally the voice asked, in a more reasonable tone, "And what is it you would like, Mr. Richardson?"
"That should be obvious, Tomás," Andy said. "Just as it is obvious to me what you want in return. Let me know how long it will take you to set it up."

He hung up quickly. The phone rang two hours later, and the meeting was on.

The buzzer on my watch indicated that it was one o'clock, and a tone from Andy on the cell phone I was carrying let me know that the coast was clear. Dressed as I was in a parka, wool hat, and scarf, I was probably lucky to hear the tones. But Andy had impressed on me that I shouldn't give them a chance to identify me, which was one of the reasons he'd set the meeting up for here. I looked over to see poor little Carrie shivering in the track suit that Sandy had been running in when we'd grabbed her five days earlier.

"You're not cold," I told her.

She stopped shivering and smiled at me.

"Thank you, master."

"Sure," I said. "Sorry it didn't occur to me before. Let's go."

Carrie and I began walking eastward. After a quarter of a mile, I could make out two figures walking towards us. Julie was one of them, and she obviously had no idea why she was there. The guy with her was dragging her along with an iron grip on her upper arm. I saw her eyes widen as she realized it was me. Finally, when we were about 20 feet apart, we stopped as if we were gunslingers from the Wild West.

I turned to Carrie.

"You remember your instructions," I said rather than asked.

"Yes, master," she nodded. "Four days."

"You have my changeling," the man called out, putting a sneer into that South American accent I'd heard over the phone a few days before.

I have a changeling, asshole, I thought. But she ain't gonna be yours.

I nodded.

He released his grip on Julie's arm and I nodded at Carrie to begin walking. Julie broke into a run, and jumped into my arms.

When Carrie reached the other guy, at a much more sedate pace, I turned and began walking Julie back toward Karen in the car.

"Oh, God, Jase," Julie started, "what the fuck is happening?"

"It's okay, baby," I put my arm around her. "Everything is going to be fine."

"Jase, I'm gonna be sick," she said.

I let her go, and she threw up into the snow. Finally, she got back up and tucked herself back under my arm.

Julie and I were both freezing when we finished walking the one and a quarter miles back to the rental car. We both climbed into the back seat where Karen had hot coffee waiting in a thermos. As Karen took off for the trip back to our hotel room in Minot, Julie downed hers in one gulp and I poured her another. She took a smaller sip, and we relaxed into the seats, enjoying the car's heating system more than anything.

Finally, after still another cup, Julie was ready to talk.

"Why do you keep looking in the rear view mirror, Karen?" she asked. "Oh, God, they're not following us, are they?"

She whipped around in the seat.

"Oh my God, they are," she started trembling. "They're following us!"
"Relax, honey," Karen said," that's our car. Those are the good guys."

In the meantime, though, Julie had grabbed up the binoculars that Karen had thrown on the back seat.

"I know him," she said, looking at the car. "Who is that? Fuck, that's Andy Richardson! Why is Andy Richardson driving your car?"

"It's a long story, Jules," I began.

"And who's that little slut, his girlfriend?" she asked caustically. "She looks about seventeen! God, what a perv!"

"She's sixteen," I chuckled. "And you have a lot in common."

"Yeah," Karen said, "you're gonna love her. She's a doll."

"Jason Thompson," Julie put the glasses down and looked at me. "Does this involve your fucking dolls?"

I nodded.

"All right," she sighed. "One more refill and then I'll be ready to listen."

She listened in silence to the whole story. The only emotion she displayed was when I explained why she had been kidnapped, and why the "bad guys" thought that her disappearance would have some influence on Andy Richardson. Even then she only raised her eyebrows. Finally, just before we reached the outskirts of Minot, I finished.