JUDE

OTHER-WORLDLY INTERLUDES


Judging by the vibrations of the floor, we're in some kind of ship. No artificial grav, so not a spaceship. No swaying, so not an ocean liner. Must be an airship. Dirigible probably. She and I are in a room alone together but the door is slightly ajar so I can still hear meandering cocktail party outside. The ghost of Bob Dylan, summoned and bound, is woefully singing for the entertainment of idle rich and their bored of-age offspring. That's how you end up keeping track of the versions of the worlds. Details. On this one, Bob Dylan existed but he's dead.

Here she's called Anna. She not Jeef, the girl from my childhood. Just like Gretchen, she's just this world's version of her. Anna's frame is petite, slight. Her hair is a darker, more vibrant shade of chestnut brown cut to a short bob. And her eyes. There is real intelligence there. Cunning. And something else I can't quite define because it won't hold still long enough for me to pin it down. Something moving, coiled, ready to...

She steps in close to me suddenly. Normally, I'd reach for my knife if anyone did that, even her, but getting close to me does something to her. She swoons, like the drugs are just hitting her. This version of Jeef, this Anna, is an empath. Probably naturally but I see in my mind covert organizations that subject her to enhancement drugs until she's too powerful to control and all burn down to fine ash in her wake.

It's me. She is reacting to the lust I have for her. And she likes it.

She steps closer to take a deeper hit off of me and her arms encircle me exactly where I want them. She is sucking me in, taking in all my want and radiating them back at me like pure heat. The hotter she gets the more I want her. The more I want her... well, you get the idea. We're like kerosene and paper. I'm certain we're just going to burn up, even though to the casual observer, nothing's happening. We're not even really doing anything sexual. It's all just so damned... intimate.

I guess your really do covet what you never had. All my life I had the fast and hard, the easy in and out. No shortage of willing flesh, especially in my line of work. But this. I'm pouring every honest, unadulterated indecency I have into her and she's soaking it up. Drinking it in like warm sweet milk. And turning it into the light of complete acceptance. I'm inside of her in a way I've never been in a woman before (and I've been in more ways than most) and she's receiving me in a way no man ever has before, voiding herself of anything that would be just her so that now there is only an inseparable “we”. Her silken arms hold me like the strongest armor against the world around us. The feathery touch of her cheek dances in tiny mystic circles on mine. I would do anything to keep her hot soft breath forever whispering in my ear no matter what it is she's saying.

But, oh, gods below, what she's saying. The things she wants me to do. Trivial evils, meaningless malevolent tasks. Senseless individually but as the steady stream of neither requests nor demands (orders? Yes, royal decrees, I think) continue, I began to see hints of an infrastructure. A complex latticework of potential horrors so far reaching in scope that for a moment I almost fight free of her.

It fades quickly. “Anything. Everything. Whatever you want, I'll do it.”

She pulls away for a moment and the inches of distance from her are painful. “Anything? Everything?”

Oh. I get it. She's controlling of me, kind of like the way I control other people. She's found what I want more than anything else and will let me have it in exchange for my absolute loyalty.

Slick. I can live with that.

“Anything and everything.”

“Will you swear this to the Shadow of the Crawling Chaos?”

“If you want, I will lay waste to this world and carve your throne from its cold, dead core. I will snuff out the stars and tear down the empty nighttime sky to make a black gown to wrap you in. His Shadow? The Crawling Chaos? Pathetic, meaningless outer gods. I swear to you!”

I wake up shaking. Gretchen stirs beside me. I take two deep breaths and lick a fresh coppery-tasting scar along side her right breast to calm down. Control is very important to me.

Gretchen dreamily opens her eyes. “Bad dream?”

She knows me. Even though we've only been together a handful of days, less then what this world calls a month, she knows me better than any woman I've ever been with. But I look down into her eyes and the intelligence, the cunning and that other illusive moving thing that I'm now officially going to call evil, aren't there. Not like her. The same face but she's not Anna.

“No. I don't dream.”

“Never?”

“Never. I do something like it. Memories usually. Playing back over and over again like a recording.”

“Bad memory?”

“No. They're something kind of new. Ever since I started moving through alt-cons-- you know, alternate continua, other worlds-- I sometimes dream of worlds I haven't been to. I guess they're worlds where there's another me and I'm seeing a glimpse of his life.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Go back to sleep, Gretchen.”

“There's a lot you don't tell me.”

Some intelligence. Some cunning. “There's a lot you don't tell me.”

“That makes us even. Which is a nice way of saying no one's gained anything. Why don't we negotiate for further information?”

“Go back to sleep.”

She takes her favorite razor blade down from the headboard, the one she had soldered to a silver ring sized for me. “Make me. Come on and tire me out.”

It's slick with her. She knows me. She's great in bed. She doesn't scar easily and she's a fast healer. It's slick with her. Better with her than it's ever been for me. But she's not Anna. Anna's out there lost amid an infinity of worlds. Brilliant, conniving, boundlessly evil. My equal? No. My superior. Why do we covet what we never had?

But oh, how I do love the gasp Gretchen makes the first time the blade slides across her.



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