Shudder Read online

  The rate of burnout was quite high, since all of the team members were constantly subjected to a bombardment of very particular types of information. They also had to watch out for hidden links between the different patterns of information, hidden links that any normal person would be doing his damn best to ignore.

  They had to take down the murders, the rapes, the break-ins and the suicides, the children that were molested and the children that were molesters, and they always had to write down in what manner the news was presented. They had to know what books, movies and songs were the best-sellers of the season; they had to be up to date on fashion in clothes and in sexual behavior; they had to monitor the changing trends in pornography and erotica; they had to watch the political language used in the media.

  Although Anton always stressed that it was up to him and him alone to work out the possible data correlations upon receiving the weekly reports from the junior analysts, naturally they all couldn’t help themselves but go ahead and draw their own conclusions.

  In the last two years alone, two monitoring team members had total nervous breakdowns, and while cocktails of antidepressants had stabilized them, one fellow, young Andrew, had completely snapped just three months after beginning work, and had shaved his head and joined a neo-Buddhist cult.

  Anton knew that the monitoring team should in fact number at least twenty people, not these measly six, in order to adequately sift through the circulating information streams and not get squashed by overload, but the Interior Ministry officials always cited tight budgetary constraints, especially for projects of such suspiciously innovative nature.

  The second room housed the two junior analysts, Michelle and Chen, both in their early thirties, but already with the slightly mad gazes of people who know far too much.

  Their job was to summarize into possible trends the information submitted by the monitoring team people, and present their summaries to Anton. They also participated on some occasions in his brainstorming sessions concerning a staged event, or a subtle influence plan for the city authorities.

  The latter approach Anton believed to be in the long run more effective than the occasional bursts of choreographed social solidarity, like today’s miraculous saving of the suicidal girl. It wasn’t easy to convince the mayor’s office of the need of playing early Mozart instead of commercials in the subway, or of using specific color combinations in official posters announcing city events, to counter the influence on the mass psyche of the existing color trends.

  Even when the relevant city authorities were convinced, it still took far too long to achieve far too little.

  The third room in the office was the ‘conference room’, where Anton would meet the junior analysts, the visiting officials, where presentations were made, and where staff birthday parties took place. A huge oblong desk took up almost all the space there.

  The fourth room was Anton’s private office. His lair, where he could hole up and chew over the gathered impressions.

  On the desk was the half-inch thick monitor of his PC, lying face down, which began emitting signals of waking a second after Anton straightened it to work position.

  He opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out an ashtray in the shape of a six-inch long Viking longship. Lighting a cigarette, he turned to the corner near the door, to the small metallic table, on top of which was his personal coffee machine, and below which was his retro stereo system.

  Anton pressed the power button and the stereo lit up in a myriad of small bluish and yellowish lights, and after a lag of about two seconds, the music started playing. It was a collection of jazz-funk pieces from a little before he was born.

  He took another intense suck at his cigarette and left it in the longship in order to not spread the smell all over the office. He exited his room, remembering to close the door. Taking his empty plastic bottle, he filled it up from the office mineral water container. He then quickly returned to his room, his cigarette having only grown half an inch of ash, poured the water into the coffee machine, and switched it on.

  Five minutes later, he filled his personal coffee mug to the brim—his personal coffee mug was the size of a serious beer mug—and sat down in front of his computer.

  It took him forty minutes to write his report, twelve minutes to edit it, and then it was time to surf.

  Anton got down to his knees and felt for the small package that he had stuck to the underside of his desk. There was his stash of ersatz marijuana, called this season ‘buzzers’.

  When circumstances had forbidden him from using illegal drugs, after a period of mourning and dullness of the mind, Anton had discovered a gray industry of substitute drugs.

  The entrepreneurs in question were providing products that looked more or less like marijuana and had an effect more or less like marijuana, but did not contain in themselves even a single molecule of anything illegal, thus circumventing the impassioned attempts of the majority to stamp out the smoker for his own good.

  Mixing up to twenty obscure but legal herbs achieved the effect of the substitute pot, and in their interaction, they brought about a buzz similar to that of pot proper.

  Every year or two the media would make a big deal out of it, and the statesmen would react indignantly and ban the currently popular concoction. The ‘legal high’ enthusiasts would just reshuffle the ingredients, and maybe add another obscure weed from Guinea-Bissau, to escape the formulas deemed illegal. Meaning, for another season, people like Anton, who worked in places with random drug checks but did not want to forfeit clarity of thought, could escape the humiliating return to the common levels of perception.

  Although legal, or rather ‘still legal’, the legal pot looked close enough to illegal pot, to make Anton devise the precaution of keeping it in his office and in his home, but try to have it as rarely as possible with him, when out between these two safe havens.

  Everything was possible, and if the cops ever stripped and searched him, it would be an impossible task to convince them that what they had found in this small packet was not actually anything illegal.

  Even if in the end, the law proclaimed him innocent and turned him loose, working in his position, he could not afford an incident like that in the first place. It had taken years of begging the administration to officially deem him ‘clean’ and remove him from the list of drug offenders and after having finally achieved this, he wanted to keep his name off that list forever.

  Anton poured out a small pile of his ‘buzzers’ on the desk, secured the rest back into its hiding place, then took a cigarette from his pack and held it above the wastebasket. He squeezed and rolled it in his fingers, until a third of it was finally empty of tobacco.

  He then smoothed out the crumpled empty part of the small white tube and sucked up the faux weed. He now had a cigarette the first third of which was marijuana substitute and the other two thirds—tobacco for dessert.

  He went to his window and opened it. The view from the fifth floor was uninspiring. All he could see was the backs of the other buildings, which made up the perimeter of the inner yard, and a small slice of the bleak autumn sky.

  Anton lit the cigarette and stood at the window, looking absently into the walls of the buildings, taking mighty swigs of coffee from his mighty coffee mug. In four minutes, as he felt his body and mind relax, he was finally really ready to submerge into the information patterns offered by the web.

  He opened a new document and named it with the day’s date. There he would copy links and make comments for future reference.

  He then opened two news sites and two gossip sites, and a porn site, and very soon forgot the outside world.

  Chapter Six

  Natalie wished Rafael and Shane good night with a trembling and hoarse voice, closed and locked the door, pulled off her green wig, walked back to her bed on shaky legs, and prostrated herself on it.
<
br />   The special sheets were now crumpled and covered with cold wet stains made by various bodily fluids, most of them discharged by herself.

  Although she didn’t Kangaroo in either way, she did do Pelican. Layers of her own saliva covered her face, dried semen knotted her hair, and her whole body was sticky with hers and theirs sweat. Bits of semen also constricted the skin on her breasts, like small torn pieces of cling foil, but she couldn’t yet muster the strength needed for the taking of a shower.

  Her hands shook when she tried to lift them into the air and a foggy weakness had crept into her brain.

  She breathed in small shallow inhalation and exhalations, as if the very air itself still held the imprint of the situation that had just ended, an imprint that she did not yet wish to let go.

  She also breathed shallowly because now that the anesthesia of sexual excitement was wearing off, her throat felt far too sore to let in substantial amounts of air.

  Her delicate hands slid slowly down her brown stomach and after lingering for a while on the inner sides of her thighs, settled on both sides of her vagina.

  The small tremors going through her hands initiated in answer almost perceptible electric reactions in the tenderized skin.

  Through no conscious decision did Natalie start stroking herself, it seemed to happen by itself shortly after she started replaying in her mind the sex with the two gigolos. In hindsight, they did everything as they should have, although at first she had felt short-changed.

  The new man, Shane, turned out to be an Afro. They hadn’t warned her. She herself was disturbed at her racist reaction, she had never respected that in her Dad, but it took her some effort to ignore the color of his skin.

  Anyway, she couldn’t go on being a black girl who only has sex with white boys forever. One had to start somewhere.

  In the end, she had managed to suppress her involuntary revulsion, or rather, what was even better for this specific situation, had succeeded to convert it into arousal.

  After ‘loosening her up’ by kissing and licking her body for more than five minutes, the two gigolos had laid on both sides of her and had simultaneously pushed their tongues deep inside her ears.

  A new technique, which had taken her quite by surprise. She had hoped that they would surprise her with something.

  This outlandish sensation of a strong wet presence filling up her whole field of hearing with soft squelching, together with the increasing outside control on her body’s movements, were enough after a mere minute to override her mind.

  After that, by gradually increasing the stress laid upon her body, from caresses to gentle slaps, from gentle slaps to harder slaps, tugs of hair, and pinching of skin, but always very professionally, the two prostitutes entered their dominatrix roles and had used her for the remainder of the two hours she had paid for.

  When they had taken their positions working on the orifices at the both ends of her body, they had managed at not too few moments to achieve harmony in their respective rhythms of movement, and in these moments Natalie’s very self had retreated to a tiny glimmer of perception surrounded by a turbulent ocean of sensations.

  It was as if she had regressed to being just a tube of flesh, at the two ends of which, synchronized vibrations produced waves that canceled out the whole human world.

  Even before that, at the moment in which her brain had started shutting down as the two tongues slobbered on her eardrums, nothing any longer stopped her from contorting her face in the most uncontrolled grimaces and letting her mouth emit the most uncontrolled sounds.

  Freedom?

  As her brain relinquished responsibility of the situation, so had the inner controller relinquished control of the maintenance of the persona.

  Years of standing in front of the mirror and years of practice in controlling the voice and the face had produced a certain Natalie, who had to be subdued by outside means, if she was ever to allow the body to go insane.

  It was precisely this insanity that Natalie was after; this is what she learned to crave after the first tastes of it some years back, because as her body lost control and her mind retreated, so did yesterday and tomorrow retreat and disappear in the sensual haze which pulsated in her skull. With yesterday and today gone, she herself disappeared as well. Where there was no Natalie, there were also no pressures, demands, or responsibilities.

  No plans, no obligations, no expectations… Not only was there no one to evaluate or judge, there was, more importantly, no one to be evaluated or judged.

  Natalie was already building on top of her memories, adding and rearranging details in order to bring her solitary orgasm to fruition.

  She no longer cried or moaned with abandon. She moaned now with a much more calculated voice. Without the outside influence to overload her senses, she was back in control, and in fact had to be in control, because solitary orgasms do not happen by themselves.

  Instead of breathing deeper and deeper as she neared orgasm, Natalie almost stopped breathing at all. She let out small sobs as she felt the climax approaching.

  After half an hour, after eleven orgasms of various intensities, she let her body take a breather. She dreamt intensively for about a minute and a half, before waking up with a start, and slowly going to the bathroom to finally wash herself.

  Standing barefoot on the yellow tiles, she looked at herself in the mirror. The heavy makeup she had deliberately put on for the sex, looked as messed up as she wanted it to be; her mascara all over her cheeks, with black tendrils projecting down to her chin; the glistening hardened remains of real semen, not the imitation gel, knotting up her hair; the puffy dark bags below her eyes.

  She didn’t recognize herself.

  On a whim, she tried to make a face in the mirror, which would feel like the faces she knew she made during the intensive paid ravishing.

  She crooked her open mouth like an angry baby and wrinkled her nose; slowly took in the image—the bloodshot eyes shining from the slightly bloated, twisted black face—and suddenly, for no reason she could point out, she started to cry.

  A strong feeling of regret and for some reason of futility, all that tinged with a flavor of general injustice, made her howl and cry as a baby cries, without restrain, but shuddering with adult denunciations. This continued for about five minutes.

  “Never, never, never, never again.” She spoke aloud as she washed her hair, no longer grimacing but tears still trickling down. “God, why does this happen, I don’t want this to happen...”

  With a towel turban on her head, somewhat calmer, she drank another half glass of red wine and changed the sheets of her bed.

  She climbed into it, the new linens stroking her sensitive skin as she turned and twisted, still upset, her stomach knotted, overcoming her pride and no longer asking but directly praying: “Please God, look at what I do, look at what has happened to me, please help me.”

  By three in the morning, Natalie managed to go to sleep. She dreamt of swimming in a lake and of things with tentacles that lived in the deep grabbing at her legs and pulling her down.

  She tried to get away, but at the same time did not want to get away, and once under the surface of the oily liquid, the more she didn’t breathe, the less she struggled to free herself.

  Suddenly she was awake, feeling a presence in her room.

  Two figures were standing by the window. She did not dare turn her head to see if they were really there, but she knew for certain that they were. She felt them looking at her, edging closer ever so slowly.

  Then she heard a sound from the corridor between the living room and the kitchen.

  Steps.

  Someone was walking but feet were not creating that tap-tap.It sounded like hooves.

  A thing with hooves was walking about in her home.

  Natalie heard it quite distinctly, as di
stinctly as she felt the presence in her room.

  She lay there, daring not breathe audibly, her muscles tightened, her nerves on edge, trying to look only at the wall next to her face, to avoid accidentally glimpsing something that would bring the whole world down.

  She only managed to sleep a little in the morning, as the sun rose, before it was time to go to work.

  Chapter Seven

  After the pleasant talk yesterday with Andy Fortham in the precinct’s cafeteria, Dave now had in his inbox the statements of all three victims of the ‘toy-basher’, as he had named the unknown perpetrator for his own convenience.

  Surprisingly, only one of the toy owners was a bachelor, the other two were married men and had apparently been keeping their toys secret from their spouses.

  Until the toy-basher had struck, that is.

  Dave closed his eyes and rubbed his face. Then his left hand went back on the desk, while his right one remained in the vicinity of his head, hanging from his lower lip. He pulled at his lip some more, scratched his nose, and made a funny noise by sucking air through his lower teeth.

  What were the first things to check in such a case?

  Three areas of inquiry fermented slowly in his mind for some time now: did the owners of the destroyed cyber dolls know each other; what specific type were the dolls themselves; had the owners purchased them in a shop, or ordered them online.

  Naturally, the police had neither included the exact types of the dolls in their report, nor had they asked how they were purchased. Then again, what can one expect from badly paid amateurs like them? Evidently, it was up to him to hunt down the details of the case.

  He was now in possession of the coordinates of all three victims and so he picked up his phone and dialed the first number. The phone on the other end of the line rang for about ten seconds before someone picked up.