But then if Robin really wanted to win me over to her side, she wouldn’t hurt me. Not too badly, anyway. So it couldn’t really hurt anything to follow this AFF lead, whether it was legit or not. I’d just have to be on guard against anything that seemed fishy.

The fishiness, though, started as soon as I walked into the apartment.

After I walked in, the door closed and locked behind me. It seemed strange that “freedom fighters” would use such features of the very system they were trying to free themselves of, but no matter. I turned to see that there was no one behind me, shrugged, and continued walking in.

An ornate metal tray floated into the room, carrying a glass of iced tea and a pitcher. I started to say aloud that I hoped the tea wasn’t poisoned, then thought better of it. I was thirsty, anyway… I took the glass and drank the tea in two gulps. It was still a bit warm, which means it had just been made, or at least that whoever was behind this wanted me to get that impression.

I really wanted to sit down, but I figured that in such a formal-looking setting, it would be better to wait for a host or hostess to greet me. Besides, where would I sit? I didn’t see a chair anywhere, which was fitting, since I was still in the lobby of this impressive mansion.

It was only then that I realized that the room was full of artwork. The wall itself was painted with artistic patterns, and in unpainted areas there were framed paintings and pencil sketches on display. I was busy noticing the detail in one particular sketch when I heard the sound of someone clearing their throat. The voice was female.

I turned around and didn’t know whether to laugh or bolt for the door.

Descending the stairs was what appeared to be, based on her size, a young girl in her mid-to-late teens. Olive skinned, in a white tube top and matching white capri pants. But — but she was missing her head!

This shapely… headless female body?! was descending the stairs, and I couldn’t help but stare at something that wasn’t there, hoping that my eyes were playing tricks on me. Or something.

I was a few steps away from the door, so I wasn’t exactly right next to the stairs, but it was plain to see that the body’s (girl’s?) neck did not appear to have been chopped — her neck stump was rounded. Which means that either whatever process had removed her head happened a long time before this, or… or she was born without it?

*Game, Bryan,* I reminded myself. *You’re inside a game. Whatever is going on here, this isn’t real.* But it also occurred to me that if I did what Robin probably expected me to do — assume that this was just some mindless body that would happily get freaky with any other warm bodies that crossed its path — she could use that against me later. How she might do that, I didn’t have any idea, and I didn’t want to find out.

The girl was now at the bottom of the stairs, and I was now staring at her tube top, which was now stretched out quite a bit more than when she started down the stairs. Not only was the top itself stretched out more by breasts that had clearly grown a bit on the way down the stairs, but they also spilled out over the top of the tube, giving the impression that they might pop out at any moment.

As she began walking slowly towards me, making little side-to-side movements that resulted in much jiggling, I began backing up towards where I thought the door was. When I got there, it was actually open, though I know for a fact it had closed and locked itself behind me when I came in. I grabbed the doorknob, only for the door to yank itself out of my grasp and slam shut again! When I tried to open it a second time, the doorknob came off in my hand.

By this time the headless girl was still about halfway across the room. I still wanted to leave rather than participate in what might be a trap, but I had no idea how else to get out of there. So when the girl began beckoning to me, I didn’t see how I had any choice but to play along, at least for awhile. Not that I was given one, because when I didn’t immediately begin moving over towards her,  I was shoved roughly in her direction. I turned around to see that, again, there was no one there. And again, as soon as I was facing the girl, I was shoved her way again.

This time she began walking towards a side room, and I followed, hoping the unseen hands would not keep shoving me. When I entered the side room, the young lady was standing a few feet away, facing me. She motioned towards a couch along the far wall, then ducked into what had appeared to be a walk-in closet in the few seconds I’d been able to see inside it before the door closed behind her.

When she emerged from the closet, she had changed from capri pants to a pair of white shorts. And of course that drew my attention to what was now visible — her shapely legs. She walked a few steps towards me, then turned back towards the closet to pull the door closed. I wondered briefly why the door hadn’t closed on its own, like the outside door had done when I came in (and when I tried to leave). But when she made a show of closing the door, at one point bending at the waist as if inspecting the doorknob, it was obvious she — or someone – wanted me to check out her butt.

*Game, it’s a game,* the warning voice in my head said again, but I was barely paying attention. When she turned around, I had to stifle a grunt of disappointment — it was a nice booty — but of course I was treated to a view of her boobs still sheathed tightly in a tube top, jiggling slightly as  she made her way towards me. When she was in front of me, she leaned towards me a bit, no doubt confident of where my eyes would wander to as she drew nearer. I didn’t get a chance to gawk too long, though, because she actually turned around and sat in my lap, leaning into me as she began to let out what sounded very much like a contented purr. For half a second I wondered, *Is there actually enough of anything inside her throat to make that sound?* and then I remembered the throat-clearing earlier. A game, it’s a game.

I looked down at the well-endowed impossibility sitting in my lap and leaning back against me, noticing that her neck stump was so well rounded that there was no hint that there had ever been a head there. There was also no way she could breathe, at least not through conventional means. This was looking more and more like Robin had set a trap to gather ammunition against me should I ever get free from the game. It was possible that I was wrong, though I couldn’t see how. I could also see only one way, at that moment, to find out.

“Nice rack,” I said, more-or-less directly to it, since I was staring down at her boobs when I said it. “And nice butt, for that matter. Too bad there’s no way to know which side you’re on.”

She shrugged, which in my mind sealed it. She was on Robin’s side. A real AFF agent or proxy would have tried to reassure me in some way that they were on my side. Yet, again, this was Robin’s game, and I was stuck in it at the moment. I had to play along.

My hands had been around her waist almost from the moment she sat down but now I began to rub my fingers up and down her sides and around her navel. At the same time I began to nuzzle against the crook of her headless neck. She let out a contented moan and I had to wonder how was that getting out when she had no apparent breathing orifice?

A passing thought caught my attention — in stories by guys who get turned on by the idea of living headless women, the neck stump is portrayed as some kind of erogenous zone. This might have been just a game, but no doubt this headless girl was there in the first place because Robin knew that I had followed such stories and had even attempted to write one. I was pretty sure I’d never get another chance like this one, game or not, so…

I began to flick the tip of my tongue against the rounded end of her neck stump. At first contact her whole body tensed up so much I thought I had done something wrong, but then she went through the motions of sighing deeply, and the accompanying movement of her boobs of course grabbed my attention. I had to wonder how she was able to breathe, and audibly at that, when there was no visible breathing aperture — and when such opening, had it existed, would have been completely engulfed by my mouth?

I kept staring at those heaving boobs as their movement increased in time with her breathing, which itself had sped up as my tongue played with her neck stump. I wanted to get at them but I didn’t want either of us to have to shift our positions even an iota. I pulled away from her neck just long enough to whisper a quick, “If you want to you could take off your top,” before returning to the task at hand. I got a surprising response.

“Nn-nnn.”

Although I wanted her to comply, I actually felt a slight tinge of relief at her response. Sometimes it’s funny how the human mind works — as unreal as this situation was, a part of my mind had been crying out, Underage forbidden trap no get-out, practically since I first laid eyes on her.  I knew I was stick inside a game, and thus a headless woman was probably just a character in the game, but yet my eyes were telling me this was a situation I didn’t want to get into. With no facial, vocal, or verbal cues  all I had to go on to estimate who I was dealing with was, well, measurements, and the dimensions I had seen when she was at the top of the stairs suggested that she might have been underage. And of course it was the part that first noticed those dimensions that was relieved at her negative response to my request.

Only that part. The rest of me, including the little soldier who had been standing at attention practically since the girl first cleared her throat, was extremely disappointed. I was gonna say let down, but, well, let’s say that hadn’t quite been let down just yet.

I had to know why, though. It was plain to me that her whole purpose was to turn me on. It was equally plain that she herself had been turned on, or at least had been working hard to give that impression, ever since the little soldier had snapped to attention.

“Why?” I asked. She responded by reaching for the top of her tube top and attempting to roll the top downwards. She had moved the top edge down maybe a half-inch before I saw the problem — the seam that attached the tube top to her body. I was caught so off-guard that I flinched, pulling my mouth from her neck stump and causing her to start to raise herself from my lap.

She was not a woman, not even a headless one at that. She was — what was she? A balloon? A mannequin come to life? Some kind of doll? In retrospect I can remember the Unreal! warnings, but at that moment I was totally oblivious to them.

My arms were still wrapped around her, though, and provided just enough resistance as she tried to raise herself from my lap. “Wait a minute,” I said. She may have been some weird something-or-other but she was close enough to female that enough… parts of me didn’t want her to move. My rational mind scrambled for something to say.

“Are you…  like that all over?” I said. She motioned towards her crotch with both hands. See for yourself, more or less.

I undid the crotch button to her shorts and unzipped. She was wearing white  panties that were more there than a thong, but not nearly as much so as “granny” panties. Rather than simply pull them away from the skin, I tried to ease my fingers below the waistband and found the same result as with the tube top — a hidden seam that corresponded to the visible seam just below the panties’ waistline. Basically, the outwardly visible seam was the seam that held her panties to her body.

I heaved a sigh. I searched for words and wound up sighing again.

“OK,” I finally managed to say. “OK,” I repeated. “So… you’re not really a woman. What are you, a mannequin? Some kind of balloon? A doll? What?”

Obviously I wasn’t gonna get a concise answer to that, since there were too many options, and she wasn’t exactly able to verbalize an answer. At least I hadn’t expected a concise answer, so I was a bit surprised when she raised one hand, holding up three fingers.

Three? What does that mean? Three… third… wait, the third option — a doll?!

“You’re a doll?” I asked for confirmation.

She replied with a “mm-hmm” and a thumbs-up. Figures. Robin probably figured I’d get all hot and bothered only to find out I wouldn’t be doing any thumbs-upping. But I already knew that if I wanted to keep from agreeing to her plan out of desperation, I’d have to keep my wits about me  — however tempted I was to do otherwise…

MORE TO COME

On my day off, I hook up the machine and spend the better part of a day in the company of invisible people, complete with an especially affectionate invisible girlfriend. The next day, I get lazy and use the machine’s Internet capabilities to download some VR scripts from “vr.com,” not knowing that the machine has some “undocumented features” when used while its Net connection is open. I start the simulation, only to find that instead of “sucking me into the machine,” the simulation seems to be running outside the machine, as if my house is the simulation.

Here, though, I don’t seem to have as much control over situations. Everyone in this sim, like the other, is invisible, even on television!, but this time anyone I interact with is dressed (PLENTY of *fine* invisible women). But this simulaton seems overlong, which, I find out, is because I’m *trapped* in it.

When the simulation started, the live Net connection caused the machine to basically upload my mind to the “vr.com” servers, which is where the simulation is actually unfolding. As it turned out, one of the technicians who developed the machine was planted by a “lobbying group” (actually a terrorist organization) called Industrial Strength, which blames the US government and the technology industry for the loss of manufacturing to overseas companies. The machine connected to their servers as soon as it went online, making it easy for them to trace the machine’s Net connection to “vr.com” and to me.

The military is also very unhappy about the “misappropriation” of what they consider their property, and they send agents to vr.com and to my house to confiscate the offending hardware. But when they get to my house, the unit is gone, and the agents sent to “vr.com” offices findout the computer running the simulation I’m trapped in is at some unknown location.

At this point, a company technician contacts me in the simulation via television (Emergency Broadcast System, saying “this is NOT a test”) while I’m watching with my invisible simwife, who doesn’t know she’s a simulation, though she knows I can’t see her. The TV announcer notifies me that, for the time being, I’m stuck in vr.com’s servers, because the Federal agents sent to retrieve the VR unit *said* that when they reached my house, my body wasn’t there. Vr.com can’t even say for sure whether my mind was moved or copied onto their servers, meaning I (the real me) could be in a coma or worse. Or “he” could be going about “his” normal routine, unaware that a copy of “his” mind is trapped in a Net server. My invisible simwife, of course, wants to know what in the world kind of wacky Emergency Broadcast System message was that, so I tell her everything…

In the meantime, I’m advised to keep myself busy somehow, leading me to use the nested VR unit (do you think I’d run a simulation and not have a VR unit there) to unfold some of my yet-unused story scenarios (so in a sense I’m using this story to catch up on my story idea backlog).

HOME

Anyway, on my way to the general fiction section I pass a machine with a sign across the front that reads “Literate Lucy.” It looks kind of like those racing video arcade games that you actually sit inside. I ask a library staffer about it, and she tells me that it’s the latest thing — a hologram operated by the machine reads to children, pointing out words so they can sound them out and learn to read for themselves.

It’s officially “out of order” because one of the maintenance people got a friend of a friend who’s into hacking machines to make the machine, or rather the hologram woman, a little more adult-user-friendly. She says the machine still does what it’s supposed to do, but it’s out of service until the “custom” program, as she called it, can be removed.

“Holographic teachers,” I think. “What will they think of next?” Anyway, I’m walking down a rather long aisle when I pass a cart loadd with books on their way to being reshelved. I’m looking through the L’s for anything by Rosaleen Love, if the library carries her stuff.

Suddenly I spot movement to my left, but when I turn to look, I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Up to this point I haven’t been paying special attention to the book cart, so I don’t know if there’s anything unusual about it, so I turn back to the shelves and resume my search. After a few minutes I see motion again, so I turn to look.

Immediately I notice a book lying open on top of the other books on the cart. I know for a fact that the book was not there when I saw the cart before. Moving towards the cart, I find that the book is a collection of stories by Brian Aldiss, one of the authors on my lists. Naturally, I’m anxious to check out this book, but someone else is evidently reading it, or was reading it anyway. I turn to resume the search for Love, since I know that Aldiss’ books and stories are much easier to find than Rosaleen Love’s, even online. I’m especially interested in one book, “Total Devotion Machine,” and I don’t want to give anyone the chance to get to it before me. I resume my search.

I don’t find anything by Love, but I do find one by Edward Ludwig, another author on the lists. As I flip through the book, I spot movement to my left again. This time, when I turn to look, the Aldiss book is gone from the rack.

With the Ludwig book in my hand I walk toward the rack to see that the Aldiss book has not been filed with the books on the cart or on the shelf. When I look around I don’t see anyone walk away with a book in their hands. In fact, I don’t see anyone else period.

What I do see, however, on a nearby table is a small pile of books. The names catch my eye: Gardner Dozois, Algis Budrys, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, Thomas Berger. All names from my lists. What really throws me for a loop is the open book at the top of the pile: the Aldiss book from the cart.

Now, I wasn’t exactly scoping out that book cart, but I know for sure I never saw anyone come up to that cart and take that book. I have no idea how the book could have gotten there by itself (I’m sure it’s not possible) but I decide to look through the book to see what’s so special about it.

I move to sit down at the table, but just as I’m about to sit down I hear what sounds like a muted gasp. I assume I’m hearing things. After all, there’s no one sitting at the table. But when I actually sit I DO make contact with something… or someONE… soft and warm under me. All at once:

1. I look down to see what I’m on, but all I see is the chair several inches BELOW whatever I’ve come to rest on;
2. I reach below me with my left hand and I kid you not, I feel, but don’t SEE, a LEG below me; AND
3. An agitated-sounding female voice coming from directly behind my head calls out in a VERY loud voice, “HEY!!”

In my surprise at making contact with… an invisible leg and being screamed at by some phantom female voice, I scramble from the seat. In my haste to retreat my left foot hooks around a table leg, sending me tumbling onto the floor just as a dozen or so people come running to see what all the commotion is about.

They’re looking for the woman they heard, and of course all they see is me, sprawled out on the floor. “Are you OK?” a man in the group asks me.

“Yeah, I’m alright,” I answer, more embarrassed than hurt. All of the people in the group, except one girl, are looking at me like I’m some kind of weirdo. The girl, who is very pretty and looks to be in her late teens or early twenties, is smiling like she’s in on some huge joke.
“Are you sure you’re OK?” she asks, fighting to keep a straight face. Before I can answer, she notices the books on the table. “Interesting,” she says. “You like sci-fi?”

“Yeah, but those aren’t my books,” I answer as I pull myself back up on my feet. “They were piled on the table, and I was just about to–”

“Ooh — Budrys!” she says excitedly. I can’t believe a young girl reacting like this to sci-fi. Maybe it’s a stereotype, but I wouldn’t have expected a girl to like sci-fi at all. But she’s talking. “I love Budrys’ stuff, but it’s hard to find. I like the way the science revolves around the story, not the other way around. So what kind of sci-fi do you like?”

“Um…” I start, not sure I want to be having this conversation. “Stories about invisibility, androids, virtual reality, nanotech, artificial intelligence, and even some… (*I might as well say it,* I thought) … gender-change stories if they’re not graphic or anything. But whatever the story is, it has to BE a story, not a bunch of specs and made-up names. I can’t get into that kind of ’story.’”

“Gender change?” she says, eyeing me thoughtfully. “You don’t seem like the type… Anyway, you said you like invisibility. Do you think it could happen for real?”

“Invisibility? For real?” Not the kind of question you expect to be asked by a stranger, especially an beautiful stranger you’ve met in a library. It presents me with a dilemma. I have to pretend I think the idea is silly, but in fact what I had always fantasized about is having an invisible girlfriend, or at least an invisible female friend. How do I tell a stranger that? After a pause, I tell her, “I’m sure it will happen, but I wouldn’t want to be invisible myself.”

She looks at me with what looks like genuine surprise. “No?” she says. “I’m surprised — I would have thought guys would kill to be invisible.”

“Maybe some guys, but not me,” I reply. “By the way, my name’s John.” She introduces herself as Yvonne. I decide to spill the beans.

“What I would like, though, is an invisible girlfriend.”

Whatever madness that had gripped me earlier when I sat at the table is at it again, because right after my revelation to Yvonne I hear a gasp behind me, but there is no one there. What’s more, Yvonne nervously glances in the direction of the gasp, then quickly looks back at me. Before she can react to my statement, I speak.

“You heard that too, didn’t you?”

Yvonne frowns at me. “Heard what?” she says.

“Don’t play dumb with me; I saw you glance behind me at wherever that noise came from. What’s going on here, anyway? Is there… something about this table I should know?”

“What’s going on?” she repeats flatly. “You really wanna know?” She pauses for effect. For a second I think something’s about to happen. I picture something really stupid, like maybe she’s gonna burst into flames or something.

When I open my mouth to ask what she’s up to, she raises her hand and motions for me to wa
it. “What would you say if I told you there was one here in the library right now?”

“One what?” I ask.

“An invisible woman,” she says, smiling.

“If you told me that, I’d probably say that you were c–” I start, before something brushes against my right cheek. I yelp, since there is no one there that I can see, and yet what I felt was not an itch or a pain. It was a touch from a finger, a finger I didn’t see. In one fluid motion I jump up on the table I’ve been standing beside, drawing the usual curious crowd. In the front of the group is a fiftyish woman who seems to be in charge.

“Sir! Please come down off that table at once,” she says crossly. As I do, she continues, “This is your second incident today. One more and I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

I start to explain feebly, but the woman will hear none of it. “I really don’t want to know, sir. But do you think you can use the library quietly?”

I look at Yvonne, who’s snickering fiercely behind a bookcase. Somehow what I’m hearing seems like an awful lot of noise to be coming from one person. Without looking back at the librarian, I reply, “Yes, ma’am. I’ll be quiet.”

She turns and glances at Yvonne, who’s trying to compose herself, but says nothing to her. Only after the crowd disperses does Yvonne return to the table. She’s making all the motions of cracking up laughing, but making almost no sound.

“How did you do that?!” I ask.

“Actually, I didn’t,” she says, struggling to compose herself again. “That’s my friend, Lisa. You can’t see Lisa because… well, because she’s invisible.” Yvonne sees the look of disbelief on my face. “Lisa,” Yvonne says, looking around our general vicinity, “would you shake his hand so he knows I’m telling the truth?”

A smallish hand with moderately long nails takes hold of my right hand and shakes it firmly as a voice whispers, “Nice to meet you, John.”

“Y-y-you were telling the truth… there really is an invisible woman,” I say, more to myself than to Yvonne.

“Oh, I’m real, all right,” the voice says. “I kind of wish I wasn’t like this, though.”

“Um… I hope you don’t mind me asking,” I say, “but how did it happen?” Quickly becoming embarrassed, I add, “I’m sorry if I’m being nosy, but–”

She cuts me off. “You’re not being nosy,” she says. “It mean, if a voice was speaking to me out of thin air claiming to be an invisible man I’d want to know how it happened. ” Taking a breath, she continued. “Actually, it’s my crazy ex-boyfriend’s doing. He was doing antimatter research and stumbled across what he called an ‘anti-photon’ formula.”

“Anti-photon?” I repeated. “Sounds like something you’d have to use in complete darkness.”

The voice chuckled. “It does sound that way, doesn’t it? Anyway, he came up with this… this STUFF, in pills, ointment, and liquid. What this jerk did was get me drunk, gave me a shot of his liquid anti-light stuff, and then gave me some knockout pill that put me under for two days. Now I’m stuck like this.”

“Stuck? What do you mean, ’stuck?’”

“After twenty-four hours, the effects of the antiphoton formula are permanent. Yvonne here was helping me see if we can find any kind of antidote. We’ve checked out what science textbooks we could find, so now we’re looking through the sci-fi stuff to see what we can find.”

“I see,” I said. “Then I’d better let you get back to work.” I start to walk away when a question pops into my mind. “Um, Lisa, when I sat on you, not knowing you were there, I felt…”

“You felt clothes,” she says, completing my statement, with a smile in her voice. “When I woke up in his lab, I searched and searched but couldn’t find an antidote or any notes about how to undo what he had done. The formulas were clearly marked, so I figured the best thing I could do was make sure I didn’t have to go around exposed to the elements. I sprayed the clothes I was wearing, which means now I can’t wear anything else without giving myself away. So, as you can see, I REALLY have to find my antidote.”

“Humor me, Lisa,” I say. “What are you wearing?”

She laughs. I would gladly listen to that laughter for the rest of my life, but it’s plain she has her work cut out for her. “A red… well, it used to be red, sleeveless column dress. I’m about Yvonne’s build, if that helps.”

Yvonne is a fine specimen herself, so it helps immensely. I picture what Lisa must have looked like before her crazy ex got to her as I leave her and Yvonne to their work. Somehow it seems like there must be more to the story than she told me, but it is HER story, after all, and she didn’t have to tell me anything.

I leave the table, and as I approach the “New Fiction” section, my eyes are graced by a vision that at once lifts my spirits and boggles my mind.

LISA.

*That’s crazy,* I think. *How can that be Lisa when I was just shown that she’s invisible?*

But this woman was wearing exactly the outfit Lisa had just described to me. A red, sleeveless column dress, kind of like a tube top that extends all the way down to just above the knees. She has wavy light-brown hair that curls around her shoulders, and caramel-colored skin.

At least her arms are. She’s not facing me. She has her back to me, so all I really see is a red dress framing a NICE rear end. I can’t help smiling, and evidently someone notices me smiling, because a voice whispers in my right ear, “I guess you like what you see.”

I know for a fact that there’s no one standing next to me, and I whip my head around and at the same time rear back from whatever the source of the voice is. So violently, in fact, that it’s a wonder I don’t break my neck in the process.

When I see there’s no one beside me, I look over at Yvonne, still at the table. Beside her a book is opened on the table, its pages flipping of their own accord. So right away I know it can’t be Lisa. “Maybe I’m cracking up,” I mumble.

The woman in front of me laughs right on cue, but without once looking at me.

“No, you’re not cracking up,” the voice whispers back. “You’re seeing what you think you’re seeing. You didn’t really believe that load of crap I gave Yvonne about being stuck invisible, did you?”

“No, I thought it was some kind of trick,” I whisper. “Now I’m sure I must be dreaming, or cracking up. I mean, that can’t be Lisa there in front of me, and I have no idea who or what you are.”

“I’m Lisa, silly,” says the whisperer, with a smile in her voice. “Who else would I be?”

“Impossible,” I answer. “How can you be whispering in my ear, and standing twenty feet away from me, and visible at that, and sitting at that table with Yvonne?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of being in more than one place at a time?”

“Yeah,” I say, “but it’s not possible.”

“Maybe not for you,” comes the reply, “but just watch this.”

Right after that, I feel a hand holding my right hand. I turn and look, and another Lisa is somehow standing there, holding my hand and smiling at me. Then another hand takes my left. I am not terribly surprised to see that it’s still another Lisa.

“Still don’t believe?” says the Lisa to my left.

“I do now,” I say to the one on the left, taking her hand and raising it to my lips to kiss it. When her hand is only inches away she disappears, along with the Lisa on my right.

“Sorry,” the voice whispers in my ear, “but I don’t want anyone to see me like that; it’s likely to cause a scene.”

“Why are you playing with me like this? And for that matter, why are you playing with Yvonne there?” Another glance at Yvonne finds her still flipping through a book, with another book flipping pages by itself beside Yvonne’s book.

“I don’t mean to toy with anyone, it’s just that I don’t have enough to do in here,” she says.

“You don’t have enough to do? Who are you, anyway? I mean who are you really?”

“You already know who I am, but if you want to know more you have to talk to me in person,” the voice says.

Another look at Yvonne finds her still at work at the table. Two of the books from
the pile on the table are floating back towards the cart they came from.

The woman claiming to be Lisa then turns to me with a huge beaming smile on her face. I am so dazzled by that smile that all my joints seem to have locked. I cannot move. I’m not even aware of breathing, though that doesn’t distress me like it should.

“Last chance,” the voice whispers in my ear. I manage a smile, but otherwise I’m still unable to move.

“Oh well,” the voice whispers, as the woman smiles and shrugs. “I tried. I’ll give you another chance… one day.” Unseen lips kiss me on my right cheek as the woman turns and walks slowly away. Only when she’s gone from sight am I able to move.

I immediately run to the last spot I saw her. When I turn the corner, I’m face to face with the Literate Lucy machine. The idea that the machine has something to do with what has just happened occurs to me but I put it quickly out of my mind.

The librarian sees the bewildered look on my face. “Something wrong, sir?” she says.

“Um, no. I don’t think so, anyway…” I decide to go ahead and ask the question that won’t go away. “Has anything… strange happened since you put that machine in here?”

“All kinds of strangeness, sir,” she says. “That’s why I didn’t throw you out of here the first time. The other patrons may not know about it, so I had to put up a front. As for that machine… I just don’t know. It works and then it doesn’t work. We’ve heard stories about ghosts, about some phantom woman that appears and disappears at will, about all kinds of things. It’s almost like the thing has a mind of its own.”

Comment reposted from my old blog:

Cor said…

Smooth and deft. I love the detail – creating a firmly grounded setting in which “impossible” things happen.I love the mysteries. Lisa’s whims, Yvonne’s role…The verification provided by the librarian, at the end, was a very good choice. We’re not allowed to presume that what we’re reading about is merely a daydream. That last sentence is a terrific chapter-closing line – the right words in the right place.

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Bryan said…

Thanks. I’m glad you liked it. It popped into my mind one day when I was actually at the library (then two blocks from where I was working) for the first time in years. There was some kind of machine just inside the library itself, outside one of the librarians’ rooms, and I started thinking “what if”… Of course, that can lead to trouble (did you see “The Time Machine”?) but in this case it was fun.

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Cor said…

It seems most people aren’t as willing to indulge that “what if…” thought, and see where it leads.

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