Missing Pieces
It was still quite early, and I expected that they would not have moved Mister Bouchard from his room yet, so I headed to the nurses station to ask for his room number. Unfortunately they were not allowed to share that information with anyone who was not connected to his care, so I headed up to the dining room to wait for him to arrive for breakfast. I decided to wait on the patio, and was surprised to see him sitting in his usual place. I pulled up a chair and sat opposite him. I did not bother with niceties, but got straight to the point. “Ben finally told me about you visiting him that night.” For some reason I felt the need to whisper. I knew what I needed to ask him, but I couldn't help but speak my heart. “Can you heal him? Why did you stop short of a full recovery?” I found myself choking back tears as I reached for his hand and begged, “Please...If you can do anything...”
Mister Bouchard did not respond, nothing seemed to change. Yet a wave of sadness and pity washed over me, as if he were saying “I've done what I could, the rest is up to him.”
I sat back, releasing his hand and collecting myself from that rather unexpected emotional outburst. “I understand,” I sighed, recognizing that the hope of an instant cure was not realistic. After a moment, I began again. “Sorry about that...umm...no, the real reason I'm here is that Ben seems to think you need me to help you in some way. I still don't quite understand, so I'm asking you to fill in the missing pieces.” I leaned forward, putting my hands on the arms of his wheelchair, and asked. “How can I help?”
Without hesitation, he lifted one hand and gently placed it on mine. The effect was instant. I was bombarded with a series of images and feelings that were quite overwhelming. First, I found myself walking on the deck of a large military ship. I was happy and felt free for the first time in months. I had thrown the dog tags into the ocean the night before, and was looking forward to a respite from the constant need for sexual voyeurism that had defined the previous few weeks since we left the island.
Suddenly it was night and I was climbing into my billet. The last few days had been uneventful and I was looking forward to a peaceful night's sleep. But something was off. I noticed a small damp spot on my pillow, and when I looked for it's source, I saw that the dog tags had returned, and were hanging in the exact spot where I used to keep them. Not only were they wet and dripping, but small fragments of seaweed were caught in the chain from which they hung. I didn't know what to think. I knew I had thrown them far enough from the ship that they couldn't possibly have gotten hung up on something, and besides, it had been the dead of night and no one really knew I even had them. I decided someone had seen me and was playing a twisted joke on me, so I ignored them, flipped my pillow over, and went to sleep.
As the next few days progressed, my desire to watch the other men taking pleasure in each other's bodies grew. But now it was different. No mater where I was men were sucking each other off, fucking each other, or just masturbating. I didn't even need to wish for it anymore. It was like my mere presence was enough to incite anything from a brief flash of hard dick, to a full fledged orgy. While it was exciting, I knew it would quickly become tedious. I knew what I had to do. This time I would make sure. I dented both dog tags in a very distinctive way, broke the chain, separated the various parts, and threw them from different parts of the ship at different times. I would know if it were the original, because I made sure no one saw me do any of it. Then I waited.
Three days later they were back. Again they were wet. Again there was seaweed on the chain. I looked closely and could see that one of the links of the chain was bent, but had been somehow restored. But most telling, the deliberate dents I had added were exactly as I remembered. No one could have duplicated that. I didn't know what to think. As I clenched my fist around them in anger, squeezing tightly and wishing I could just crush them into oblivion, I felt something squeezing my balls with the same fervor. Shocked, I released them, and immediately felt my balls set free. I looked down at the dog tags in amazement, and while I could see nothing unusual, I felt as if they were mocking me., telling me that I was not in control. I knew that there was nothing I could do, at least not yet, but I also knew I wouldn't stop looking until I found a solution. It was only a matter of time.
Suddenly I was at the cottage, congratulating myself on finding such a remote parcel of land. The building was nearly complete, just awaiting a few finishing touches on the interior. I had long resigned myself to the sexual influence of the spirit that had followed me home, and over the last couple of years had learned some strategies to minimize it's power. Isolation helped. If there were no men around, there was little more than my own sexual appetite to feed the beast, and I didn't mind spending my days masturbating for it.
I also discovered that not only my sexual appetite, but my natural psychic ability had been amplified by the spirit. I had always had some modest gifts, but now I found that when I did encounter others I could bend them to my will. This was proving to be very useful. With the spirit demanding a constant diet of orgasms, I had little time or focus to hold down a job. But money wasn't really a problem as long as I could influence others. I found this somewhat distasteful, and did my best not to burden any individual beyond their means. When I grew bored with pleasuring myself, I would issue a general invitation to all the men in the area, and wait. It never took long before the first would arrive, quickly followed by others. I mined their memories for sexual fantasies and shared in their past experiences, before offering them my dick or ass. Each one brought a different flavor with them, and over time, I singled out a few that were particularly tasty.
But I knew this was a temporary fix. The spirit wanted more. I knew he wouldn't be satisfied with such fleeting meals for long. I had only seen him do it once, and that was enough. I wanted to see what would happen if I didn't reign him in, and let him have full freedom with one of my partners. All I could think of were the stories of mice who had their brains wired to trigger an orgasm when they touched a specific lever, and how they would do that continually until they either died of starvation or fatigue. This guy fucked, and sucked me for hours. Finally I couldn't take it anymore, and willed him to leave me alone. But without blocking the spirit, he continued to jerk himself off over and over again, until he collapsed with exhaustion. I managed to get him home before anyone missed him, but I later heard that he died of a massive heart attack the next day while trying to fuck his wife against her will.
So Isolation it was. With no real neighbors except the mental health facility, I felt fairly safe. Or more precisely, I felt the larger community was as safe as I could manage. I knew I could influence prospective buyers away from settling in the immediate vicinity pretty easily, so I began to build. The house itself was part of my plan. Over the years I had also discovered that if I took the dog tags off their chain and kept them separate, the spirit was much less powerful. So I built a secret cavity under the floorboards of the front room, a small stone lined box buried under some large granite slabs and at least two feet of dirt. The dog tags themselves were already buried there, but the chain remained where I could see it. I used it for the pull chain on the light in the bedroom closet. That way, if the spirit tried any of that weird supernatural reconstruction stuff again, I would know immediately. With these precautions in place I resigned myself to a lonely future, punctuated by the occasional back porch suck fest for relief.
The final image Mr. Bouchard showed me left me with more questions than answers. It was not an image of his life, but of mine. He showed me the moment Joey and I overcame the ghoul in the basement of the boarding house. Then a brief snapshot of the shadow figure being forced into his grave by the brilliance of our kiss. Finally a series of faces flashed in front of me, Ben, Helmut, Phil, and Kevin. Then as suddenly as the visions had begun, I was back on the patio. Mr. Bouchard's hand was back in his lap and he was again serenely staring at the ocean in the distance, as if nothing had happened.
I sat back in my chair, trying to make sense of the jumble of images and feelings I had just experienced. I knew I would have to go over them all with Ben. Right now he seemed to be more clear headed than me, but I was certain of one thing. Mr. Bouchard now felt he had told me everything I needed to know to solve this puzzle. I didn't really know how that would happen, or what part each of us would play, but I had my instructions on how to set the stage. I thanked him for his insights, and headed back up to Ben's room to give him a progress report.
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