Chapter 63: More Complications

We had long ago determined that distance did not pose a significant obstacle to my gift. Tonight I learned that there is a difference between distance, and proximity.

In my life I had really only ever been close to a few people that I shared dreamspace with; first Allison, then Shannon, and shortly after that Bob and Rebecca. My first indication that something had changed was waking up next to Lizzy instead of Allison. Usually I either awoke alone or cuddled with Allison, tonight I transitioned directly from spooning Christine in the big hotel bed to spooning Elizabeth in the comparatively tiny twin bed in her dorm room. I don't know if she was expecting me but she greeted me almost immediately, grabbing the arm that was draped across her waist and pulling me close against her back.

"Mmm, this is nice," she said. "I was wondering if maybe you weren't coming." She giggled and added, "But then I guess maybe that's what you were doing. Were you nice to her?"

"I was practicing my control," I said. Something was wrong, like the room was out of focus, but that wasn't it either. There was a feeling of unseen motion all around. "Mostly by keeping Jamie reigned in."

"Ooh, girlfriend wanted to play?"

"Christine likes it a little rough, nothing serious, just the illusion of force and a good slap on the ass to keep her focused. Jamie asked me to keep her from pushing too far. Plus making sure neither of us pushed her over the edge."

"Yeah, I can see where that would be a problem, so you gave her what she wanted, satisfied her but didn't overload her?"

"Tried to anyway."

Shadowy shapes seemed to be roaming the walls of the room.

She rolled into my arms, "I'm sure you did your best and I proud of you. That was very... ," she sat up suddenly, "what's wrong?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "It's like I'm sensing movement all around us. Do you see anything?"

"No, but I don't see like you do. What do you see?"

"I can't really make it out, I'm not even sure I'm really seeing it."

"Allison!" she called.

Moments later the door opened and Allison walked in saying, "It's about time you... , whoa! What the hell is going on here?"

"So you do see it?" Lizzy asked. "Can you describe it?"

"I don't know, it's like ... you know how you get that sense of motion sometimes, like out of the corner of your eye? Oh wait, you probably don't get that."

"Actually I do, hold on a second. Jimmy, I want you to put us in white room, round, no windows, no furniture, no direct light source, just like we're in one of those panoramic three-sixty movies, like at Epcot."

"I've never been there, but I think I know what you mean, something like this?" I changed the room and now we were surrounded by an eight foot tall wall of white. Immediately the shadows began to resolve themselves against the starker backdrop. There seemed to be a lot of them, overlapping and merging together.

"Wow!" Allison said, staring around the room. "They're people, but it's like they're ghosts. Lizzy, can you see anything now?"

"No."

"I'm not surprised. Okay, I think I know what's going on," Allison said. "Jimmy, close your eyes."

I knew better than to ask questions at this point, I just did it.

"Now concentrate," she said. "What you're seeing is a lot different people's dreams all at once. Picture the space where you saw the killer's visions of the girls before; make this space like that one, make us invisible so there are no distractions, and then see if you can break these into their separate pieces, try to focus on one at a time."

"Okay, I know where you're going," With my eyes still closed I looked at the scene with different senses, and instantly the images were sharper.

"Cool, it worked!" Allison said. "They got clearer."

"They did?" Lizzy asked.

"Yeah, they did," I answered. In my mind I put up a bank of projectors and began assigning a different vision to each one. "Okay, let's see if this works." I flipped them all off.

"What did you do?" Allison demanded. "They're all gone..."

"I know, I know, just wait a second." I picked a projector at random and turned it on. Suddenly an image appeared.

"Oh shit," Allison said.

I turned that one off and another one on, another image appeared. In rapid succession I went through all the projectors and while there was a lot of variation the visions all had something thing in common.

"These are the girls in Vegas," Allison said. "All of these girls are on the chart."

So were the adults. Some were blatant recreations of encounters, others were of the girls watching other girls, twice there were visions of someone being 'punished'. Once it was 'the chair' that Samantha had described, but from the girls perspective. 'The chair' was shear abuse, just a girl suspended in the air being fucked in every available orifice practically non-stop for several days, with only the occasional break while someone mopped the spendings up and she was given food and water.

The other was ... Samantha had mentioned one of the trainers, a man she called 'the Snake' because his dick was so long; they used him for oral and anal training. She had mentioned he seemed to be able to go for hours and when he came it seemed to go on forever and you felt like you were swallowing gallons. Someone, it may have been Shannon, had asked why she didn't just spit it out.

"Waste seed!" Samantha had exclaimed. "Are you crazy?" She went on to mention that her sister, Amanda, had told her about a girl that had been punished for 'wasting seed' and Sam had actually shuddered at the thought, refusing to give us any details. Now I knew why.

Imagine living on it. Imagine being locked in a transparent box and your only source of nourishment was a man sticking his cock through a hole so you could suck him off.

At first she had resisted, but that didn't last long as starvation set in. By the end of the first week she was begging for it. Four, five, six at a time, anything to get that tiny bit of protein into her body. As part of the process they would let her get them right to the point of orgasm then pull themselves away from her and spray the precious fluid on the outside of the Plexiglas enclosure where she would have to watch her only source of nourishment flow away onto the floor, just out of reach. It wasn't long before she was crying and begging them not to take it away. Sometimes they would have several men masturbate and the ones she couldn't reach would shoot off through the holes onto the floor and her only choice was to lap it up.

At first bottles of water were provided to keep her hydrated, but after a few days, when she started to come around, these were taken away and her only source became streams of warm urine. By the end of the second week she would suck on anything that came into the enclosure without hesitation. It didn't matter what it was. A cock, a finger, the handle of the mop they used to clean the floor with. If it fit through one of the holes she sucked it. You can joke about protein content all you want, she was slowly starving to death.

I thought Allison was going to be sick.

I thought Jamie was going to explode.

The scene changed and showed her emaciated form lying in a hospital bed with tubes stuck in her arm pumping nutrients directly into her blood. At first her body rejected the solid food they tried to feed her and they had to retrain her system using baby food and thin soups. These later visions showed her being held by strong arms as she alternately sobbed, slept, or sometimes threw up. I didn't recognize the girl but I now knew whose vision this had been.

"Hendricks," I said.

"Hendricks?" Lizzy asked. "He's the other doctor, right? Rachel's father, the one that helped Amanda and Samantha, what did you see?"

I faded the two of them back into the scene.

"Yes," Allison said, wiping away tears. "It was his dream we were watching, and trust me, you don't want to know. Just be grateful you didn't have to watch." She turned to me, "I think she may be one of the girls they had killed. I don't recognize her from the chart and I don't think it's because we missed someone. We would've had to miss a whole group or someone would have known her." She wiped away the last of the tears and moved on. "Samantha said that Amanda told her about someone who had been punished for wasting seed so it was before her time, otherwise Samantha would have known her and she'd be on the chart."

She turned to Lizzy.

"This is happening because he's in Vegas isn't it?" she asked. "Because there are so many of them so close?"

"I think so, yes." Lizzy said, turning to me, "Have you ever been so close to this many people that you have touched before?"

"No," I said. "I don't get it though. This sort of thing never happened with anyone else, not my mom and dad, Bob and Rebecca, not even Shannon or Allison, and I'm a lot closer to them."

"She's right, Jimmy," Allison said. "As for the rest of us, you specifically set up barriers in your mind for the people you are close too. You notice Sam isn't in any of these? That's because long ago you put up a wall in your mind; a wall with a door that you knock on before you enter her dreams. You made a conscious decision to not see what was happening with the rest of us, you didn't want to intrude. With them, she waved her hand around the room, you wanted information. And now that you are so close, you're getting it whether you want it or not. You can stop it if you want, you already found a way or we wouldn't have been able to view them one at a time where before they were just sort of rushing in. Stop blocking them and see what happens."

I found I couldn't completely reverse the process. Once I had tied them to the projectors my mind didn't seem to want to give up control again. I ended up switching from projectors to an image of television broadcasts and they all rushed together again, the scenes jumbled and blurred together once more. I added a tuner system and now I could run through them like changing channels. It was very interesting to see how my brain forced them into ordered patterns and then seemed to lock them in to that pattern. Now by varying the 'bandwidth' of the tuner I could see as many or as few as I wanted.

"Well, this has all been fascinating, but it's not really getting us anywhere," Allison said. "You went there for a reason, so what's the game plan?"

"Into the lion's den," I said. "I probably should have waited because now I've got two days to kill, then I'm going to church Sunday morning."

"Jimmy, are you sure you want to just walk in like that? I mean, you don't know how open they are to new people, it could be something you can't just walk in to."

"I'm no legal expert," Lizzy began, "but in order to be recognized as a legitimate church I don't think they can have a closed door policy. I think they have to be open to whoever wants to go. They can encourage or discourage actual membership but I think they have to let you in if you show up. Besides turning people away would attract attention that they probably don't want. Are you going to throw down?"

"No, not yet, this is just a scouting trip, but I'm not going to be hiding either. Let's see if I can make them curious."

"Jimmy, these people tend to be a little drastic in their responses," Allison warned.

"I know, but they also just lost two guys in the police department so they have to be more careful. I promise not to attract too much attention, but there is one thing I plan to do while I'm here that may worry them if they find out about it."

"What's that?" She asked nervously.

I pulled out my phone and waited for Bob to answer, "Hey Bob, how's it going? Listen, can you do me a favor. See if you can get Phoebe's pawn ticket from where she hocked all her stuff to get out of Vegas ... Yeah, most of it I don't care about but I'd like to surprise her with her mom's necklace. I'd rather give it to her in person but ... Anyway, send it to David Malcolm, care of the Bellagio Hotel ... Yeah, you should bring Rebecca up. Okay, thanks, talk to you later."

"You're at the Bellagio!" Allison accused.

Uh oh!

"Well yeah, I had to stay some place and... ," I couldn't resist, " ... and it's so awesome! I just reserved a regular room, you know, but the girl at the desk spotted my card and told the manager..."

"What card?" Lizzy asked.

"My family has a special ... arrangement with a particular hotel chain that I'm not allowed to tell you the name of. We evaluate hotels and resorts, both theirs and their competitors. The card is just in case and we're not supposed to show it to the hotel people unless something really goes wrong. Anyway, I wasn't paying attention and she spotted it, the manager upgraded us to a two room suite. God, you have to see this place to believe it. The furniture probably cost more than our whole house."

"Well?" Lizzy interrupted.

"What?"

"Show us the room!" Allison said, exasperated.

"Oh! I get it, duh!" I materialized us just outside the door with Sanders opening it up and walked the girls in.

"Holy ... shit!" Allison whispered.

"Wait, it gets better, check this out." I walked us through the 'his and hers' sink area and back into 'Her' bathroom, the one with the tub.

"Oh yeah baby!" Lizzy said. "Now that's what I'm talking about. Jimmy, you have to bring me here. Allison too if you can sneak her out."

"Did she like it?" Allison asked innocently. She tried to make it conversational but I caught it. I glanced at her and sure enough, there was that smile.

"Now Allison, I want you to know that he was the perfect gentleman," Lizzy said.

"Really?" She asked with a distasteful look, then added sarcastically, "Yeah, I'll bet she loved that."

"Drove her crazy!" Lizzy laughed, then she went into girl-talk mode, "Okay, so first he calls me and tells me he's got this girl to take him around town shopping — some hot flight attendant that Jamie spotted, and he's worried that she'll think it's all part of this big seduction scheme and he wants me to reassure her that he's not like that and she can trust him. You know, he's my fiancé and I trust him, yada-yada."

Allison looked at me, "You picked her up just because Jamie was interested? That's so sweet of you."

I didn't have time to answer as Lizzy kept going. "Yeah, I thought so too. Anyway, by the time he called back things had gotten seriously out of hand and ... well, you know Jimmy, he just can't not be sweet and charming..." she mimed gagging on her finger and Allison cracked up. "Apparently the suite was just too much, and seeing it now, I can understand why. God, just walking on that carpet would make me horny. Can you imagine spending a night in a place like that and not getting laid? I'd never forgive myself. But, you know Prince Charming here ... he's still trying to be Mr. Nice Guy. By the time he called me to bail him out she was ready to kill him. She was nervous at first but I told her I was his sister and she started gushing girlfriend-talk to me. Told me how he originally booked them separate rooms and all that but now he won't let her touch him. Apparently he made her promise to behave herself until after dinner ... what brought that on anyway?" she asked, turning to me. It was nice to see they still remembered I was there.

"She was up to her neck in bubbles and wanted me to get in the tub with her. I didn't want her to rush into anything she might regret later so I was trying to stall things off to make sure she didn't."

"Oh, that makes sense. Anyway, girlfriend was getting desperate, said if she had to wait until after dinner she was just going to order herself a small salad and him a six-pack of Viagra and he damn well better be worth the wait. I assured her he was."

"What I didn't tell you is I had an ace up my sleeve for after dinner," I interrupted. "Special Services got me tickets to the nine o'clock show; I figured that would buy me some extra time. Didn't really work out that way, she found the tickets when she went for the room service menu. I thought she was going to risk breaking her promise so I told her that the promise was she would behave, not me, and I let Jamie at her while I kept things from getting out of hand."

"Jamie wanted to bury the bone?" Lizzy asked.

"Oh yeah, big time. Anyway, it was a really nice night. 'O' was incredible..."

"O!" Lizzy exclaimed. "You took her to see "O"! I would die to see Cirque du Soleil."

Now Allison jumped in, "You took her to a Cirque show! Jimmy, how could you?"

"Well, we were right there!" I said defensively. "I needed to buy some time, I figured that would kill a few hours, she had to be at the airport first thing in the morning. I thought if I played it right I might be able to get out with my virtue intact. I wasn't planning any of this, really."

They both cracked up at that and then Allison said, "Oh yeah, you're going to do all that and she's just going to sleep in the other bedroom. Like that's going to happen. I wish I could be there in the morning, I bet you can't walk. And you said she's a flight attendant? Poor girl has to be on her feet all day."

I started to say something but she held up a hand, "Don't worry, she'll forgive you. Now the important questions? Did you behave yourself?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean you and Jamie didn't put her in a coma!"

"Oh that, no, I was really careful and Jamie had me keeping an eye on her to make sure she didn't go too far."

"Good, now the really important question, does she like girls?" Allison asked, sounding hopeful.

I rolled my eyes, "I don't know, it didn't come up. She was a little weirded out that my sister, Lizzy, seemed to know so much about my sexual habits though. I told her Lizzy liked girls and we'd done a former girlfriend together."

"Perfect, are you going to tell her the truth?" Lizzy asked, changing the subject.

"Yes, in the morning when I take her to the airport. I don't want her leaving on a lie."

"You don't think telling her she just spent the night screwing someone else's fiancée will be harder for her to take than a little white lie?" Allison asked. "Oh wait," she turned to Lizzy, "You told the lie, so basically you gave her permission. Never mind."

"Hey," Lizzy said. "I have a better idea, don't tell her, but give her my number before she leaves, maybe she'll want to talk. If she calls then I'll tell her, and then I can find out if she likes girls or not. If you try to explain she'll assume it was all part of some plan, but she'll listen to me."

"Because you're girlfriends?" I asked.

"Heck yeah, I helped her hook up with my brother and he fucked her cross-eyed, we're tight! So show us the bedroom, before and after shots!"

I showed them both beds, first the master bed, the one we were actually sleeping, and would be, waking up in. It looked like something out of fairy tale. The other room was nice but a little smaller. Then I showed them the 'after' view.

"Damn!" Allison exclaimed. "Looks like a war zone! Let's see ... one, two ... I count three condom wrappers; you guys are going to be sore. What's that all over the bed?"

I blushed, "Chocolate syrup."

"Whoo-hoo!" Lizzy exclaimed. "Par-tay!"

"So how did you explain all this to her?" Allison asked. "Didn't she wonder how you could afford it?"

"I told her I was a bounty hunter."

"A bounty hunter?" Lizzy asked. "And she bought it?"

"Well, when she asked it made me I realize that I was going to need some kind of cover story. The way I explained it to her was that I find people, and things, then let the authorities do the actual work."

They thought about it for a few seconds and then Allison said, "You know, that has possibilities, you could totally play on that. Maybe set up a dummy company to run your reward money through, yeah that could ... Oh my god," she suddenly exclaimed, pointing. "Is that was I think it is?"

I followed the line of her finger and saw Christine's vibrator poking out from under a pillow.

"Toys too?" Lizzy said. "Cool! I like her already. Not every girl is willing to break out the hardware on the first tumble; it tends to scare guys off. You go girl!"

"What do you mean, 'toys too'?" Allison asked.

"Oh that's right; you weren't here for that part. Christine likes a little spank-me when she's being naughty." She looked at me, "She want you to pull her hair too?"

I didn't answer, but the blush pretty much said it all.

She changed the subject again. "Did you get a hold of Jasmine?"

"Yeah, she's..."

"You're not meeting her are you?" Allison asked, alarmed.

"No, I wanted to get something for Amber so I called her to make sure it was the right thing to do and see if she had some suggestions. She's sending May to take me ... David that is, shopping."

"She's sending May?" I got it in stereo as they were both just as awestruck as I had been.

"Yeah, that's what I thought too. So where do you think I should go next, should I check on some more of the people here and see if Lord Dickhead has laid more traps?"

"Probably a good idea," Allison said. "Lizzy, do you think you could spot one of those, things before it tried to kill him."

"No, if Bob's right then it's a hypnotic compulsion and until it's triggered it's like it doesn't exist. But it might be fun to have Jimmy just disarm them all and see what he tries next."

"I don't know about fun," I said. "But I think it would be a good idea to clean them up so these people aren't walking time bombs. These sorts of things have a tendency to break down over time, kind of like dynamite that's been sitting. At first it needs a reason to explode, but the longer it sits the less it takes to trigger it. What if we solve this little disaster and five years from now they 'think' they met me. They could slaughter an innocent person without even realizing what they were doing until it was over. They'd be sitting in prison for the rest of their lives with no idea why they did it. I think we should spring the traps and see what he does next. If it's a test then we've already either passed or failed with Sam, so there is no reason not to clean up the rest of the mess. He already knows there is a new player in the game so there is no sense in hiding."

"That's why you're going to the church isn't it?" Allison asked. "You want to get a look at him so you can bridge him."

"Yeah, we've gone as far as we can with the chart, it's time to see about shutting this thing down and that can only be done from the top. I'm pretty sure he's the only one who knows everyone involved, and that he's the one with the goods on people like Hendricks. I'd like to be able to take these assholes down without destroying the ones that are being blackmailed. If I can find whatever it is that he has on them, get it away from him ... I don't know, maybe I can save a few of them."

"Jimmy, the court isn't going to let them off because they were set up and trapped into it, even if Hendricks' wife set him up the first time, they'll still consider everything after that an act of free will. They are still going to say he should have come forward and taken the consequences, or at least given the system a chance to deal with it."