Captured Souls (22 page)

Once she was finished, I put headphones on her and played some Linkin Park/Jay-Z
Collision Course
for her. She watched me with those pretty green eyes. Well, they weren’t so pretty and green anymore. They had a milky film over them, much like cataracts. I would have to get my beauty some colored contact lenses.

I went over to the bag and brought it back to her. I smiled as I opened it and could almost see my men zip out in joy and home in on her newest implants. I put my own implants into a tiny vial. I would be needing them again very soon, once Specimen 1 was ready for the next phase.

As Specimen 3 lay strapped to the table, the ghosts sending her into ecstasy, I breathed a sigh of relief. For the first time in nearly two years, I was free of each and every one of them. I’d forgotten what it was like, to not feel them constantly with me.

Her moans and sighs filled the room and I turned away, bittersweet, as my specimens all played together.

But now I was free at last to explore the final Specimen. Number 5. I could take my time to decide what her future would include. And this time I won’t be swept away by idle folly.

Specimen 1

Late at night, I creep down to the lab where his body floats in preparation. I bring with me a book of poetry and a bottle of wine. He is still very handsome as he floats in his tank. I’m filled with excitement at how we’ll be together again, just he and I, as it should have always been.

I’ll drink the wine and read the poetry to him, dreaming of the future when he will wrap his arms around me once more and speak to me with that wonderful voice. How we will talk of all the strange ideas in life, how we will watch the sunsets, how I will take him on trips to places he’s only dreamed about. I dream of a marvelous future for Specimen 1 and me.

If the calculations work out correctly, if the flesh can withstand the process, if the electrodes will function correctly when all placed together in one perfect container…so many ifs for my perfect future with the man who I realize now is my perfect mate.

Specimen 5

Yet while time needs to pass, I could never be bored with someone who had a mind as brilliant as mine. I would be her mentor and teach her everything. I can groom her to follow in my footsteps and encourage her to the greatest of heights. Every day would be a new mountain to climb as we spurred her on to the top.

Specimen 5 (written on torn up scraps of paper)

Well, that didn’t go as planned. I didn’t second-guess her own pathological nature.

I am in a cage. A foul-smelling, cement-floor, basement cage in some horribly dank house somewhere.

I don’t know where. I presume I’m in a city because I hear rumblings on a pretty regular basis that might be streetcars or subways.

(scrap)

There is an air bed, yes, and I pray the rats don’t gnaw through it one day, but they will.

The other day I felt one run up my leg, under my covers, in the middle of the night.

(scrap)

I am locked like a rat in a cage and yet the rats willingly join me. It’s rather hilarious. Kind of like that Smashing Pumpkins song.

Anyway, before I go completely mad from the drugs she slips me, though I try to avoid what I can detect by spitting it out or holding it til she’s gone, I need to make notes, no matter how illegible they may become.

(scrap)

My body shivers and jitters, she has put implants in me, but they are not soft and calming. They hurt like a bitch and no matter what throes of arousal I may achieve; the pain is excruciating.

(scrap)

My head aches as she flips around my brain waves through her computer just outside of my cage and even from her cell phone when she leaves me. I know it’s her. I can feel the switches being turned on and off.

I wonder if my specimens ever felt them, my manipulations in their brains. I always wanted to ask, but never did. I didn’t want them to know that I knew something was “wrong”. Instead, I wanted them to believe they were going crazy.

And now I’m the one going crazy.

And despite going crazy, one thing I know: the specimen never gets returned to its former life.

(scrap)

I should have known not to trust her, back when she asked me why I hadn’t conducted experiments in the past five years. My studies had abruptly stopped, yet I continued to get grants.

I didn’t answer her directly, of course, I just fudged some babble and she passively took it.

But that should have been the first red flag that the hunter was being hunted.

(scrap)

The weeks that have passed, it’s been hell. I’m surprised I can hold a pen or even formulate coherent thoughts at all.

Journal

At last I’ve regained control of my journal through a series of events that will be explained.

For many days, she had me shackled to a wall, spread-eagled and naked. Now and again I’d be turned over to be flogged, tenderized for the feast. I was in pain where there were pussing, gaping gashes that marked the incisions for her clumsy implants. I had so many of them too. I couldn’t figure out what theory or method she might be using for her choices.

“What do you want from me?” I’d cry out to her, but she’d never answer, just whip me harder. I was being punished, but I didn’t know my crime.

At times I wondered—was she following the model for perfection?

Throughout it all, she herself was still perfection. Who couldn’t admire the brilliance of such a scholar, a real Svengali and a genius with theories that might be proving true? Her body was pure poetry, her eyes hypnotic; anyone would do what she’d ask. I did.

The days and nights melted together in agonizing slowness, yet I still had no concept of how long I was there. She humiliated me in every way imaginable, demanding that I urinate and defecate into a bucket and flogging me if I dared say a word. She pulled my hair, kissing me, and mocking me, and I cast my eyes down, trembling under the touch of this beautiful mistress.

She’d get into moods where she’d sexually arouse me. Licking and fondling and using an assortment of toys on my body. I was helpless under her touch, her beauty mocking her evil as she led me into orgasm after orgasm.

And each time I felt something shift in my brain. Turn the channel. Surf a frequency.

I guess she grew bored of me at some point. I’m not sure what experiment she was conducting at that time—maybe pleasure and pain, and need and orgasm? At any rate, one day I was ordered back into my cage and that’s where I stayed for a very long time.

That time I wasn’t alone in the cage.

In my absence, she had brought in Specimen 3. Poor Specimen 3. She was truly falling apart. No mud baths would help that sad, sorry face now. It was pretty much sliding off her skull and the stink of her rotting flesh overwhelmed the room. I wasn’t much better off, with my weeping, infected sores, along with the scars from the whip.

Specimen 3 had been glad to see me. Oh how she had missed me. She threw her arms around me, trying to kiss me with those foul swollen lips. I pushed her away, knowing it was in vain if the new implants worked at all.

It was hellish. Eventually it was easier to succumb to her desires than to lead her on a rotting, fetid, exhausting chase around the room, especially when technology was in charge. The implants buzzed and clicked, and it saddened me that Specimen 5 had used such primitive technology when so much better stuff was available.

And how can you kill something that is already dead? Specimen 3 was not really Beauty anymore, just a walking infected pus bag with electrodes. Even if the body was gone, the electrodes lived on.

So I let the creature “live” and feast as she wished on her desires.

I patted her head, my hand trembling as I stroked her hair, but not from desire.

“It’s okay,” I’d reassure Specimen 3. She grunted and pushed her face against mine. The smell was too close and my stomach lurched. Sourness filled the back of my throat but I swallowed down the bile. She kissed me, her swollen, broken fingers rummaging between my legs until they filled my pussy. The electrodes stimulated me, but the vileness of the smells and textures made me wish for anything but sex with this creature.

However, she was unrelenting. Every day. All day. Pushing her fingers into me, smashing her face to mine or to my crotch. Sensations so dreadfully unpleasant, yet still filling me up and satisfying my cravings.

Specimen 5 was right there, watching this vile creation defile me, writing notes in her notebook while she grinned.

Journal

I found out more—why she was observing me and Specimen 3 together. Why she kept reprogramming the lust higher and the cravings for me deeper when it was clear that Specimen 3 was not much more than a rotting corpse.

Specimen 5 loved making Specimen 3 want to love me all the time. It gave her great joy, a bit of a respite, and sort of revenge.

For what was likely the thousandth time, I called out from my cage, “What do you want from me?”

And for the first time ever, she put down her pen and answered me, “Do you remember Leonard Penny?” she asked me in a soft voice. It took me a while to go back in my brain.

“Leonard Penny…”

“Yes, Leonard Penny,” she said. “Do you remember him at all?”

I sighed. Yes, I did.

“He was my brother,” she said coldly.

It turned out that Specimen 5 was the little sister of Specimen C6. I conducted a round of experiments in the early 2000s and her brother was one of the guinea pigs. I did remember C6 fondly, as I do all my specimens. I always pick them for a reason. It’s so odd how human nature lets the lust and love wear off, no matter how perfect something is. I can only be grateful that I didn’t use electrodes back then, more of a concoction of chemicals that might trigger pheromones and such. So primitive. Anyway, C6 was a tall, thin art student at the local college. I had seven specimens over the course of that set.

“Your brother,” I said.

“Yes, you used my brother as one of your experiments. I remember how excited he’d been the day he’d signed up for an experiment from a note posted on a campus board. I was just a kid back then. I barely knew what science was, let alone experiments. And, certainly, I would never have guessed what would happen to my big brother.”

“I don’t believe your brother was in my experiment,” I lied.

“Oh yes, he was. He described you so perfectly. He was a student in one of your classes. He went to sign up for the top-secret experiment. And then…one day…he just disappeared. Just like that. Gone.”

She sighed and looked at me. I said nothing. I let no emotion cross my face. She couldn’t prove anything at all.

“I’ve been following you for years. Only in the past couple of years did I come to realize what it is you do and how you destroy other people to satisfy your own lusty cravings.”

“Oh please…scientists have to conduct experiments. You know that. And I had nothing to do with your brother’s disappearance.”

“Ah, but you did. I’ve explored and dug through your life, your files, your computers. I’ve had PIs on your ass for years. I know more about you and your motives than you likely do.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” I said, pacing in my cage. I wish she would burn some incense or spray some air freshener around, but she never did. She enjoyed me living in the filthy stench of the cage with my bloated, maggot-infested roommate. She enjoyed waving a vanilla-scented handkerchief in front of her own nose every few minutes.

“Your lust is your downfall. Why couldn’t you just be happy fucking all your friends and be done with it?”

“There’s so much more…”

“No, there isn’t. You keep trying to discover a soul mate, soul-mate connections, lust connections, love, dependency… It doesn’t exist. Don’t you see? You keep chasing an illusion, which is why you always fail.”

I thought about Specimen 1. What would have happened if we’d just dated like normal people?

Well, nothing, really. He’d have left me that first weekend to go back to his girlfriend and it would have ended there. The nights of wine and poetry, of orgies and sex clubs, none of it would have ever happened at all.

“You can’t make someone love you, Doctor.” Specimen 5 laughed at me.

“I didn’t want anyone to love me.”

“You wanted full, unconditional love from the perfect mate with qualities of brains, beauty and strength. And what have you now? Your Beauty is right there… You ruined her yourself, but she still loves you. Yet now you don’t love her.”

I had no answer.