Chapter 3

"He didn't wake up for a while. Courtney really did a number on him. After I pulled her off him, he just lay there. I thought he might be dead. And I remember that I really didn't care that much if he were.

"We both tried to help Lisa, but she just... gone. She had stopped screaming but she was just sort of huddled on the floor next to the bed, hugging her knees and shaking her head. She wasn't going to budge. So Courtney and I found our clothes and got dressed. And talked. We traded stories. She was caught almost exactly the same way I was. She was coming out of her building and he came up to her and said something to her, and she just forgot everything else and followed him. She had been there for about a week. She was the first. He brought Lisa in after three days, and me... well, I was the latest pet in the cage."

She continued to talk, the words coming faster and more sure.

"The only light was coming from some kind of electronics gear off to the side. We explored the room and found that the bed was on a raised, circular area of the floor. There was a table there too, piled with fruits and crap, like it was for a Roman emperor. I said that's what it looked like and Courtney told me that one of the things he had her do was feed him just like he was a Roman emperor.

"There was only one door that we could find, and it was like a bank vault door. We both tried turning the wheel and pulling on the door, but we may as well have been trying to move a building. The ceiling was at least forty or fifty feet high, and it was too dark to see it and there was no way to reach it anyway. After a few minutes we had seen everything that was there and found no way out. The gear that had some lights on it was like a computer screen and keyboard with panels of lights, and each panel had only one light lit up. They all said 'Hibernate.' We tried pushing some buttons but nothing happened. There was also a phone on the side of the console, no dial, just the hand part, and we picked it up and yelled into it, but it was dead too.

"Courtney stopped then and sold me something about how every horror movie she's ever seen, they hit the bad guy and knock him out and then run away, and he always comes back. We both ran back to the bed but he, whoever he was, was still out. She had the idea we should tie him up. I had some nail clippers in my purse and we used those to cut the sheet on the bed into strips and tied his hands behind his back and his feet together. He started to kind of wake up as we were finishing and she was all set to start beating the crap out of him again but I stopped her.

"It was weird — not that this whole thing wasn't weird. He opened his eyes and saw us standing there and the first thing he said was totally bizarre: 'Hey, hey, hey. Safe mode execute.' He said it really fast all strung together, like: 'Hey hey hey safe mode execute.' Then he said it again a little slower. It was weird, like a prayer or a chant or something.

"Courtney and I looked at each other like, 'What is this guy doing?' Then she went over and kicked her heel into his chest, and he started gasping and she asked him what he was doing. He looked around and said something like, 'Is this a power failure? A fucking power failure? How can there be a power failure? We're tied directly into the grid.'

"I yelled something at him like never mind the fucking power failure, what did you do to us? Where are we? At first he said he didn't know what we were talking about, but then Courtney came back with my little nail clippers in her hand and started poking him, and then she said she would start on his eye if he didn't tell us what was going on.

"Then he said to calm down, that he would tell us what we wanted to know. He said he was seventh son of a seventh son and had the power to influence minds, and this was the first time he got carried away and used his power in a bad way. He was really sorry and he understood if we never forgave him, but right now he was our only chance of getting out of here because he was the only one that could open the door and let us out, so how about we untie him and he would open the door and then he would even call the police himself and turn himself in.

"Courtney and I were just sort of looking at each other when we heard a 'Bullshit!'

"It was Lisa. She was still sitting on the floor but now she had her head up and was looking at us. 'That man's talking some bullshit, ' she told us. "If he can control minds like he said you'd be untying him right now and kissing his ass for letting you do it — just like we all were. Remember?'

"Courtney looked at him and said, 'Well? What about that?'

"And he just lost it. He called us all fucking bitches, and said if we didn't untie him right then we were gonna be the sorriest bitches that ever lived. I said something about how he better be more polite because he was tied up and we weren't and he laughed at me and said that didn't matter, and then he said something about how I didn't act so high and mighty last night when I was... well, he just said some ugly things to me.

"And while he was telling me... uh... what he was saying about what I did, it was then that Lisa got up and came over to him. And she looked down at him and said something really weird. She said, 'What about the fur, asshole?' I didn't know what she meant but I saw Courtney get really pale really fast. You know how you read about someone getting white as a ghost? That's what happened to her. She just got completely white and put her hand on her mouth and then her feet just gave out and she sank down on the floor. And I looked back from her to Lisa to the man on the floor and she was hitting him, slapping his face almost with each word, like 'What —SLAP — about — SLAP — the fur — SLAP'. And he started saying you'll pay for this you bitch and then he switched to 'OK, OK, enough, huh? Just enough, OK' and she kept hitting him until I stopped her.

"And I said, 'What fur?'

"And she said, 'Motherfucker made me grow fur all over, like a cat'.

"And I didn't understand her, and I said, 'What? What?' And she screamed at me, Motherfucker made me grow fur all over, like a cat!'

"And then I looked at Courtney on the floor, and she was nodding her head violently with her hand over her mouth like she was gonna throw up, and she said 'Oh God, oh God, he did, it's true, ohmigod, he did that too.'

"And... after a while... we made him talk. That's how I got the blood on me. I don't want to talk about what we did to him any more. Except that the fucker deserved it. But he said... near the end, he said that he had a machine and that it could fix everything we did to him and he wouldn't have to die, if only the power would come back on. And we asked what this machine was and he said it could do anything, that all of reality was just a set of equations and this machine could reach out and touch the equations and make them different. He said that just like in algebra when you cancel something on both sides of the equation, then poof! It's just gone. And you could change equations too, and then make something happen that didn't happen before. And then he told us that we were all erased, that we didn't exist anymore, and that he could bring us back but only if we didn't kill him, he was the only one that could tell the machine what to do.

"He said that even if we got out the door now it wouldn't do us any good, that we were erased, that no one in the world knew about us any more, that the only memories anyone had of us were inside the circle, the 'Op-sphere, ' he called it. And he could make it so none of this ever happened, we just had to let him live and he would fix it so all of us were rich, and we could all share the machine, and we could have whatever we wanted.