“Then… there’s the mask.” I gulp as the image flashes in my mind. “It’s expressionless and smooth. And that’s where my imagination starts playing tricks on me. There aren’t eyes behind the sockets, only two black holes that seem to stretch out to infinity. They hold me there as he does his dirty work on Tom and the others.”
“Does he ever hurt you in these dreams?”
I shake my head. “Never.”
She writes down my answer.
“Why do you think this dream is significant?” she asks.
Calling them dreams instead of nightmares was Dr. Rice’s suggestion, during one of our earliest sessions. She said it would take the power away from them if I used kinder language. Said I’d be able to come to terms with it more easily, if my viewpoint wasn’t purely negative.
I don’t buy it myself. Dreams, nightmares, sleepy time hallucinations; call them whatever you’d like, they terrify me all the same.
“I don’t. Not usually, anyway. But it ended differently this time,” I say. Honesty in therapy is the only way to overcome the problems, even if it means saying things you’d never say otherwise. “It didn’t fade to black when Tom fell over. I didn’t wake up in a cold sweat or feverish panic. This time he crawled onto the altar with me still on it. Started touching my thighs, my hips, my breasts.”
The part I find most fucked up is how much I enjoyed it. Not only in the dreamscape, but even after I woke up. My pussy tingled with a hot throbbing want, and I had a hand halfway down my pants to satisfy it.
“Am I broken, Doc?” I ask, leaving out some of the details of the dream. I painted a good enough picture without having to tell her it ended with his mask between my legs.
Dr. Rice smiles. “No, you’re not broken, Lilith. Consciously or not, you’ve been fixated on this for years. In some circles, dreams are considered a way for us to process trauma and consolidate memories. In your case, they’re one and the same.”
I can’t imagine what my cheeks look like as I process my next question, and if the scorching heat radiating off of them is any indication, I’d have to guess two big, juicy tomatoes. “But why was it a sexy dream? With him…”
She opens her mouth and I regret the question immediately. No answer will change how crazy I sound.
“It goes back to what I said earlier about fixation.” She’s incredibly calm when we talk about serious topics. It’s one of the reasons I like her so much.
Another is that her office has become somewhat of a safe haven over the years. It’s the only place in this godforsaken city where I can speak freely and not feel judged. Dr. Rice has spent years in this room with me, and she’s the only person who has heard my side of the story and didn’t jump to the conclusion that I’m batshit crazy.
It shouldn’t have been hard to convince the rest of the world about that, either. But somehow, the man in the mask made it so. News outlets reported on it in the weeks following my visit to the Henderson mansion. I’d spoken to two of them to get my story out, but I got brushed aside and labeled an attention seeker because of it.
What they want people to believe is that Tom and his frat buddies were abducted. Boys being boys and all, they were messing around in the trees around the mansion, when some terrorist cell snatched them. This, even though no proof was ever brought forward about the claim and no ransom was ever asked.
I remember one time that Maxwell Henderson appeared on TV for an interview. He looked awfully stoic and not sad in the slightest. It was almost as if he knew that Tom hadn’t been kidnapped. His matter-of-fact language reaffirmed that,to me at least. Right at the end of the interview, his face started twitching. The reporter wassaying something along the lines ofit’s a real tragedy, the way reporters do. But Maxwell’s face just couldn’t stay still.
Then he turned directly to one of the cameras and started shouting at it. He didn’t demand anything, just started yelling threats at whoever the person was who was responsible for his son’s death. It was a short rant, directed at the man in the mask, saying he was going to use every resource at his disposal to get justice for Tom.
I felt bad for him.
Funny how that works, isn’t it? Being sad for the dad, knowing his son was a total piece of shit.
Nothing ever came of it after that. The searches continued for a while but, just like everything else in Midnite City, Tom’s disappearance became old news in a matter of weeks.
“The man who saved you—“ she starts up again, noticing I’m drifting off to my own little world inside my head.
“If murder counts as being saved,” I say, not thinking much about it before I speak.
“He stopped the assault and pulled you away from danger. Whatever his motives and methods, he saved your life.” Even given the rude way I cut her off, Dr. Rice’s tone stays calm and reassuring.
She’s right, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
“He didn’t hesitate,” I say, as if it’s going to change her mind about him saving me. “Not for a second. Cut them down like he was mowing his lawn on a Sunday morning.”
“Does that worry you?” she asks. “That you were spared and they weren’t?”
I shake my head, burying my face into the cushion. “What scares me is the reason he let me live. I wonder why I’m a special one who deserved to be spared from his slaughter.”
“A fear of the unknown then?” She writes and speaks in tandem.
