Behind Enemy Lines

  

The war-games had been raging hard for about a month now...only it wasn't a game anymore.  The battles had become heavy artillery fire, and there was little rest in between exchanges.  Although she could feel her strength been drawn out in certain ways...she feel a heightened awareness and an invigoration that she hadn't ever experienced and she began to trust it.

It had started as a Dance.  Long ago, a Dark, Romantic, Enticing encounter with a stranger hiding behind a screen.   And he hid So Well.

She gave him Every metaphysical key she could possibly have turned over to him.  She almost sent him her actual house key...but it turned out that wasn't even necessary...he had his own means of obtaining keys in the material world when he needed them.

She wanted Love.  She was dumb....she was stupid for believing Lies.   And now she was embroiled in Battle for her Life.

It wasn't just his charm.  She had known him from her childhood.  She re-”cognized” him...she was already cognizant of him because she had spoken to a little boy with the same first name through a knot of wood when she was a little girl .  So when she met a Man whom she only spoke to over computer cables and telephone waves, and he felt and spoke the same as that little boy on the door whose face was a knot in the wood....he felt absolutely familiar to her.  Otherwise, she wouldn't have indulged her friend for so long when he got scary.

Because this was Never a Dance.   Unless she wanted to admit she had been willing to Dance with Death for a chance at Love.  

It had always been a Deadly Game.   And now, it was War.

His last ploy was that he wanted to change.  This had been followed by a week of confessions so salacious and horrific that she  had to maintain some disbelief.   The possibility that he was just trying to impress her with how Dark he could be because he knew how much she really dug the spooky stuff had to remain at least a logical improbability.

He fancied himself a collector a fine things.   Therefore he would think of his women as flowers, or birds, butterflies or gemstones.  He would photograph them in exquisite baroque masks and present himself as a Gentleman of a Higher Nature.

But he was really just a Hunter...always seeking out new prey...and always...Stalking.

When he came back into her life after a 5 year hiatus, she was immensely flattered.  By then of course, she had forgotten how miserable it had been to get over him, and how extreme the highs and lows of the rollercoaster ride that he provided could get.

She had said, “Never Again”....yet here she was.  

He swooped in when she had fallen, when she was grieving the end of a two year relationship.    He offered Love this time.  The one thing that would have done it for her....plain, simple declarations of “honest to goodness” Love.

Little did she know at the time, it was just a Collector, bending down for a moment to pick up a wounded bird.

Lucinda Nightingale couldn't have dreamed at the time that her surname could have damned her to this fight.  

But as this man challenged and manipulated her over a span of 4 months, and the healthy routine she had built for herself changed into something resembling a prison sentence...she finally put it together.

And, Of Course...he confirmed it...Of Course.

He wanted a Nightingale in a cage.

He wanted to control the Horizontal, he wanted to control the Vertical.  And when dangling a lovely carrot of a Dream Date at the end of a stick ceased to work anymore on her...he turned to tactics of terror and impending violence.

When she thought she had shut him out for good, he came back with a new approach.  He wanted to change...be Honest, become a Good Man.  That's when the confessions started. 

She had known he had some “different” kinds of kinks.  Tease and denial being a favorite, especially with his online fare.   Promise a Beautiful Date, make the girl work really hard cleaning her house, losing weight, getting ready...and then he would back out at the last minute.   Either something Really Important would come up, or the girl would inevitably fail some tiny part of the preparation, and lose the privilege.

But he also tipped his hand at a couple of other things in recent times.  He enjoyed sneaking into her apartment when she was sleeping  and “doing things”.  Like Santa Claus's dark alter ego, Krampus, he would creep in during the night, and make mischief while visions of fairytales danced in her head.  He would mis-match her socks...a task she was so careful with when she actually took the time to do it.  Suddenly different pairs were mated together...like someone had been messing with the internal workings of her life....individual socks were akin to atoms, the pairs of socks were the molecules and someone was reaching in and trying to play God by rearranging things on such a basic level.

He left other “gifts” as well.  The tissues that would appear in the morning were like Holy Relics to her at first.   Later, their meaning, and her motivation for keeping them, changed greatly.

He also had told her about his “voyeuristic fetish” as he liked to call it.   He liked to put hidden cameras in the houses of people and Watch.   Everything that they did throughout the day was eye-fodder and made it's way into his fantasy life.

His talents as a computer hacker fit well into all of his “fetishes” as he preferred to think of them.  He could make any of his correspondences with her disappear at will...some to reappear when he felt appropriate...some gone down the memory hole forever.   This made his malevolence extremely difficult to prove to the police, once she finally got the balls to attempt to stop his harassment.

And then one night, her eyes were opened to the Real Man she had thought she was in love with.  The one she had believed in for so long, despite everyone telling her he was just “too good to be true”,... didn't exist after all.

Truth be told, this man made a promise to himself somewhere in his younger days to do the Most Despicable things anyone could do on the planet....and he had nearly accomplished his goals.  Since he was 17 he had pretty much fucked, obliterated, consumed, desecrated, and made into Unholy Art...just about every creature on God's green planet.   All that was left was his Magnum Opus.  His final Grand Work.

You see, this Nightingale had a song.  She didn't really think it was that much of a song in the long run...it was heavily laden with cliché, metaphor and way too-colorful imagery.  It was derivative and droning in parts....and was ripe for parody on SNL if it Ever became a hit.  

But this man wanted to steal the Nightingale's song...and kill the songbird so that she could never sing again....or profit from the song.

He had already isolated her from her friends and community and admitted to adopting some of her phrases, and even writing down some of the more poetic ramblings that seemed to tumble out of her mouth from time to time.  He even had a title...”Angel Wings”. 

At some point, they no longer needed telephone wires, or cell phone waves, or wifi to communicate.  Their brainwaves just “connected” one day.  And suddenly, they could talk to each other all day...and all night long. 

For the man rarely slept.

But oh, the exquisite nightmares he would send his little caged bird.   But those were just the hors d'oeuvres.

There was the “you can't masturbate because it makes me want to kill you” ploy.   The, “you shouldn't go to the store right now, because you know I am renting the apartment right across the street and I am feeling like I want to attack and kill you on your way and I just don't care what happens to myself right now” ploy.  The “every time you fall asleep, I jack myself off thinking about screwing your headless body” ploy.  (The couple of times her web cam had mysteriously gotten “stuck” on stills of her sleeping in very death-like poses, made that last one seem Very Probable)

The latest installment of these tactics was the threat of 15lbs of explosives underneath the floor of her bed, attached to the ceiling of the boiler room in the basement below her.  She was told that when the explosion hit the water pipe of her toilet, that too would explode.   Her landlord with a gambling debt would profit from the insurance and all would be right in the world.

It was amazing how much knowledge she had picked up from having her brainwaves engaged and entangled with this man.  He was of genius level intelligence, after all.   Most of it was stuff she wished she could “un-know”.  Too Much Information. 

But he had also done something amazing for her.  In the landscape of her mind, which was completely pastoral...she discovered a huge city with no electricity.  And while she had been content to just run around in the countryside...the offices of her brain housed in castles and keeps scattered willy-nilly across the moors and valleys....he gave her Light.

In one of the moments where they had connected at a Real Human Level...brother-sister, friend-friend....he told her excitedly that he knew how she could turn on the lights in the city...and he showed her the Power Grid on the edge of town and showed her how to flip the transformer switches to ON.  And one by one....some of them took a couple of tries....but one by one the switches sent Huge

throms of electricity over sturdy cables and it brought the darkened left hemisphere of Lucinda's brain to fullness of life.  Her life-long struggles with mathematics suddenly had a bright new promise of coming to a victorious conclusion and she would finally be able to finish her design degree.

Such were the gifts that they had given each other in former times.  But now was a Different Day.  Choices were hard.  Rest was uneasy.  

She remained constantly armed and maintaining a warrior stance. She was aware of Every Step of the Responsibility that walked her to this place in Time, but there was nothing to do but to keep walking and living to fight another day.

That he would actually take her out if he had the chance, she had no doubt whatsoever.   They had both had Enough of this constant conversation.

Any sweetness that was leftover from the Lies of the past, was flung at her in pitiful attempts to garner her empathy once more...trojan horses as it were.

But it was still difficult not to fall into old habits when they were communicating, smile at a shared memory or former private joke.  

But remembering old times just brought the anger now.  Provoking coincidental loud banging in the apartment above her...keep your enemies close.   That he still had money to rent her neighbor's apartment from him with all the drugs he was currently doing was astounding to her.   But that was a huge part of why he could not change.   Exactly like the tarot card of the Devil, he was Chained to his addictions.

The police had been little help.  Because it had started out with her consent, there was little they could do, even though she had now changed her locks and he was still getting in when she would have to leave to go grocery shopping.   If he was stealing things of value, it would be one thing.   Leaving tissues with DNA that the crime lab had no time to test, was not considered serious enough.   He would have to commit a crime before they could do anything.

It came down to Fate now.  They were going to have to meet and fight like Mahishasura and Durga in middle of their shared street, which now felt like a River of Blood, that flowed between them. 

All she wanted was to get in that one Killshot...that coup de grace when she is at full strength.  Then she will know that her death was worthwhile.

He had plans to make her into some kind of martyr.  Leave her fouled body in some sort of ghoulish tableau...such as a crucified Virgin Mary with her severed head at the top of the cross.  Or he had entertained her headless on the X-looking St. Andrew's Cross, with her head between her spread bound feet.   But she would not let him get close enough.  Curtains drawn wide open, nine inch combat blade always at her side, if not in her hand...and phone dialed to 911 with a trigger-happy finger set to go.

The battle continued because he could not bring himself to end the life of the only person who had ever truly befriended him.  She had seen most of his darkness, and still somehow found a way of accepting him for who he was, and even seeing some spot of goodness inside of him.  That belief of hers, that he had any goodness in him whatsoever made the murderous rage boil inside of him to temperatures worthy of Hell.

They had tried negotiating Peace Treaties but nothing could last because what it all came down to was that the Hunter had set his sites on his prey long ago...and had been Stalking for a long, long time, and was all kinds of Hungry.  

The problem was, the prey had become a Warrior.

And now they eyed each other suspiciously from this stalemate position.   She with her blade and her cellphone poised to call the police.   He with his weapons and his own disposable cell phone, and his own trigger-happy finger, ready to detonate the explosives affixed to the ceiling of the utility room beneath her pretty princess bed. 

But she was ready for whatever was coming.  Any direction he came from, she was ready for combat.  As for being blown up, she had been practicing not bracing herself when she walked past her bed...because as she had learned from her experiences in a couple of minor car incidents...when you tense yourself ...your muscles, molecules....against an impact you absorb the wave of energy instead of being hit by it, the particles of energy pass through you.  You may still get some bruising from coming in contact with molecules of other objects being thrown by the blast, but the impact will still be lessened with this technique.

Or, simply put....”Nothing shields like an Open Heart”.  

When she got one “revelation” too many about his psyche, he threatened to cut out her tongue.  It seemed appropriate since she spoke in tongues from the time she was a 13 year old girl at Pentecostal church camp.   She had spent a lot of time praying at the altar after service when the other kids were at the pop stand having hamburgers and flirting with each other.   Then she had to go and to be whatever  God wanted her to be when she was 20 years old...Open Up and become a “God-Tube” as her friend Bill used to say.

That's how she got entangled in the mind of a Charlatan who was in reality trapped in a web of his own making.   She had given his name to many of her friends and family members, as well as 2 different police departments in recent days, and in the event of her death, he would be The Hunted.   And he had crimes on docket that could either make him Notorious or turn him into a Laughing Stock, depending on the Media Spin.  

She had one last trick up her sleeve.   She wrote her story and posted it on the website that she knew they both had friends on.   The writing was difficult, with much interruption from her foe.  

Of course, there was always the possibility that he would end up doing the Honorable thing, and just fall on his sword.   He'd said he'd “had a good run”.   It was a chance at some possible redemption.   It was the Utilitarian solution...so many lives had already been cut down by this man, and so many more could be affected...and he didn't think he would be well-suited to prison life.

Her story finished, she still needed to battle the internet to post it.   He was an elegant hacker, but God and luck had been on her side so far and she was certain she would be able to get her missive through.

Nothing to do then, but take off her clothes and walk past the lethal bed once more to the shower.

Nothing Shields Like an Open Heart.

But of course, she would be carrying her Blade.

Of Course, she would.

(In Real Life....JP claims to be the “Tot-Mom Killer” from Florida...and that is the reason he came up to Minnesota.  The mysterious “boyfriend” of Casey Anthony's mom...who molested and then assisted in getting rid of the body after he murdered the little girl)