Dominion

  DOMINION

  Greg F. Gifune

  First Edition

  Dominion © 2014, 2007 by Greg F. Gifune

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR

  Deep Night

  Judas Goat

  Long After Dark

  Midnight Solitaire

  Rogue

  The Bleeding Season

  The Living and the Dead

  Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:

  http://www.darkfuseshop.com/Greg-F.-Gifune/http://www.darkfuseshop.com/Greg-F.-Gifune/

  For Carol

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Shane Staley, to all my friends and family, and to you, the fans and readers, for your enthusiasm, kindness and unwavering support.

  “I did not die, yet nothing of life remained.”

  —Dante

  ONE

  The temptation to be God had always existed for the living, the dead, and those that had never been either one. Men had died and killed for it. Lucifer and his angels had fallen and sacrificed paradise for it. Countless wars had been waged and oceans of blood had been spilled in pursuit of it. Divine providence had been rewritten because of it, and without exception, all who fell victim to its lure had failed in their quest.

  Yet, the temptation, and those willing to surrender to it, remained.

  The crumpled sock was a reminder of his affliction, an example of his need, and an odd testament to the depravity and darkness to which he had descended in recent months. There on the floor, just inches from him, untouched since the evening prior, it decorated the space between his chair and the door like a trophy awarded for his own weakness. An ornament with the appeal of rancid fruit dropped from the spindly branches of a long dead tree, it lay there, taunting, while the diseased voice within him whispered his name and recounted his sins.

  Still slumped in his desk chair, he moved closer on plastic casters and poked at the sock with his bare toe. It had been bright and clean once, like him, but now lay wrinkled and soiled and crusted with filth. His eyes slid shut, releasing the images. They burst forth, flooding his mind like water escaping a crippled dam, until a single image transcended all others. His body, begging for sleep, weak, drawn and needing nourishment, hunched over in the chair. Dead eyes peering straight ahead like a woodland creature caught in the glare of oncoming headlights—seeing everything in that oddly calm moment—one hand clutching the sock, positioning it while the other worked furiously to grant him the release he so desperately required. Shame and glee and light and dark merged into a single writhing entity—much like the act itself—and the memory dissipated, rippling into oblivion the way a reflection in water dissolves with the intrusion of a tossed stone.

  As he spun away, the chair squealed as if in agony, returning his aim to the desk where the remaining tools and evidence were scattered about in haphazard piles of clutter and waste. Madly scribbled notes mixed with photographs and transcripts previously vomited from his printer at various points since the relationship began. An ashtray brimming with spent butts and caps from beer bottles sitting on the floor, arranged into tidy little rows, one stacked atop the other to form a pyramid of brown glass and shredded labels, an abstract sculpture gone bad. Everything remained.

  He lit a cigarette, smoked it, his mind finally coming to some semblance of rest and tranquility. His eyes followed the course of dark hair across his chest that trailed in a narrow line beyond his stomach, circling his navel before continuing on to a thick pubic tuft. Somewhere in the distance, in some other room, pipes rattled behind walls as a shower surged to life.

  She was awake.

  Forcing himself from the chair, he waited for his legs to adjust to the weight, and then moved closer to the desk, eyes darting from one picture to the next. Each time he looked at them the experience seemed new, even though the images they contained were things he had seen countless times before. Studying them was not merely a visual encounter, rather something of far greater depth and significance.

  He ran a hand through his scalp. Perspiration and oils from unwashed hair collected between his fingers. Bathing seemed irrelevant now. He wiped his hand on his chest, transferring the sticky residue, returned to his chair and positioned himself in front of the computer.

  With a flick of the mouse, the screensaver gave way and his eyes quickly processed the information before him. He’d read this message hundreds of times since he’d originally sent it, and with each subsequent reading he felt the darkness growing in him, changing him, making him more and more powerful.

  You’re mine.

  Deftly controlling the mouse, he closed the saved email and opened a new one. Fingers tapped at the keyboard like the drops of steady rain clicking against the windows, and within seconds the new message was completed. He sat back, read it again. After a final drag on his cigarette, he crushed it in the ashtray, forcing it between the piles of nicotine-stained filters already residing there. One renegade ember burned his fingertip. He glanced down at it with disinterest, the pain barely registering.

  In the past twenty-four hours he’d typed this identical message many times, only to cancel it before sending. But this time his finger moved over the mouse, the pointer locked on the SEND button. The voice in his head had won. Not only was he now capable of sending the message, he was capable of bringing to fruition the things it promised.

  You have no idea what you’ve done. You’ve opened doors that can never be shut.

  His finger dropped, the mouse clicked and the message was sent.

  Those weren’t really his words, he thought, and yet he’d written them.

  Sometimes the confusion was nearly too much to take. All these months spent talking with her, listening to her views and beliefs, listening to her describe a struggling marriage, sexual desires unfulfilled, her sorrow, and eventually, her uncontrollable attraction to him, seemed little more than vacuous rambling now. He had fallen in love with words on a computer screen, a faceless phantom somewhere in cyberspace that had somehow tapped into all the things he’d been feeling. All the shortcomings of his own character had been touched, none of his weaknesses and fears, desires and longings left undiscovered, exploited. And now something else had been unleashed in all this, awakened. Something close, he could feel it, as if unseen forces were touching him, caressing him, luring him to…to what?

  Unlike hers, his had never been a particularly happy marriage. He’d always felt unloved, so he had fallen into the trap easily, reading the passion and power of her words, the emptying of her soul, and eventually, the lust she felt for him. And there, in the seclusion of his small room, he had embraced that lust and released his own, making love with a shadow while his wife puttered about downstairs, unaware he was quite sure, why he suddenly felt compelled to spend so many hours at his computer. Like lying in bed, draped in darkness, caught in a web of sexual frenzy and masturbating just inches from a sleeping lover, the ex
perience wielded tremendous power, a fantasy transformed into reality, yet still shackled to the safety of anonymity.

  He turned from the monitor and rifled through the stack of e-mail transmissions he had printed out over the last several months.

  I love my husband, but I need more. Sometimes I feel so guilty I can’t stand it, but I can’t stop. I need both, do you understand? But I could never leave my husband and our life together, and I never will. We can be together, you and I, and we can be happy, but only here, never for real.

  And yet, as intrigued and addicted to this woman as he’d become, he’d begun to feel an unhealthy degree of aggression in his daily life away from the computer. Still, she provided him with something he had not experienced with his wife in a long time—excitement, risk, sexual freedom and expression—but there was no truth behind it, no substance. The intensity and ultimate satisfaction of release was all that remained, along with a beckoning, all-consuming darkness that lured him deeper and deeper into the sovereignty of fantasy, and ultimately, degradation. It had grown within him, festering like an open sore, and together they had pushed the envelope, carrying their relationship to new and dizzying heights. Now, it was as if something else had joined them. Something he could no longer completely control.

  He shut the computer off, thumbed through the pictures again then gathered them, along with the printed transcripts and every other bit of tangible evidence, and returned it to the folder. Excerpts of their first encounter in a chat room tickled his memory. He had opened a phony e-mail address, using one of the companies that offered a free and anonymous account. Closing it out and deleting it would be the equivalent of vanishing into thin air, a missing person wandering off into oblivion, as if he’d never really been there at all.

  The shredder came to life with a dull buzz.

  He put that folder aside but like each time before, it would not let him go. It continued to taunt him, to lure him back. He’d been through it all numerous times now, but it still angered him. Just the same, over the last few months he had learned something else during this transformation of his. Anger wasn’t such a bad thing. In fact, it was good, powerful, something he could use to his advantage. It didn’t have to cripple him. If he was willing to use it as a weapon, it could make him stronger.

  After another quick read-through, he dropped the contents of the folder through the shredder one sheet at a time, watching the hidden blades slice the information into neat little pieces of confetti. He imagined being able to fit through the narrow opening himself, screaming as he watched his feet and legs shred, the mechanism bucking as it attempted to swallow him, to pull him deeper through its metal teeth. He chuckled softly. If only.

  The job was finished. But for the rain, the house was quiet. She had finished her shower.

  He left the room, moved carefully down a flight of stairs. The early morning sun had yet to fully rise, and clouds and thick rain masked what little light dawned. A soft patch of artificial light bled from the open doorway of the adjacent bathroom.

  The aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the kitchen, and his parched mouth constricted, demanded caffeine. The windows next to the sink offered a blurry view of the street and houses beyond. What a dismal little neighborhood, he thought. Coffee trickled into his mug, and as he drew it closer and took a sip, his eyes panned the area before focusing on the bathroom.

  Steam rising from his mug was absorbed by lingering remnants from the hot shower, forming a cloud of mist through which Natalie became visible. Drying herself with a large white towel, she glanced at him and smiled blandly, unconvincingly. He felt his face twitch in response as his eyes dropped the length of her body.

  The ease with which she moved about when completely nude in front of him had always been annoying, if not insulting. The way a sister might change in front of another, with no regard for what her nudity might be doing or causing to occur in him, as though he were a eunuch, or perhaps only an extension of the machine he spent so much time in front of. But then, he and Natalie no longer possessed shared feelings. Her love for him had been modified by years of marriage and familiarity born of routine. As with most other things, she didn’t understand his passion for her, its power, and now she’d finally killed it, destroyed it like she’d destroyed him. Had she really thought he’d assume the role of distant, easily ignored roommate indefinitely and without consequences? He’d spent such a long time hoping things might change, but was no longer naïve enough to think a rebirth of their union possible.

  “Good morning,” he said quietly.

  Natalie looked at him, tossed the towel aside and reached for underwear on the sink counter. “You look tired,” she said.

  He watched her step into her panties before maneuvering into a bra, adjusting first the cups and then her breasts. Her hair was still damp, hanging just above her shoulders in small wet ringlets, and he detected the faint smell of talcum powder wafting about each time she moved. “I’m exhausted.”

  “Go back to bed and get a little more sleep. You don’t look like yourself.”

  “Funny you’d say that.” He put the mug aside and stepped into the bathroom, standing behind her as she rolled a pleasant-smelling antiperspirant across her underarms. “I don’t feel like myself.”

  “You’ve been staying up until all hours on the computer locked away in that room, what do you expect?” She put the antiperspirant aside, took up a comb and ran it through her hair. “I woke up at one point and heard the strangest sounds coming from there last night. Sounded almost like growling, what the hell were you doing, watching a movie?”

  “Understanding,” he whispered; the rapid cadence of his breath obvious against the back of her neck and bare shoulders.

  “Understanding what?”

  When he didn’t answer she offered no visible reaction, only silent indifference, the ever-widening valley that separated them even when she was within reach more evident with each new day. His hands extended, coming to rest on the soft flesh of her tiny waist. “Steven, please.” She sighed dramatically and continued to comb her hair. “I have to get dressed and I’m running late.”

  He leaned closer, tightened his grip and pressed his erection between the satin covered halves of her ass. His heart rate accelerated as his hands yanked her panties down then returned to knead her buttocks. “You can’t imagine the things I’m going to do to you.”

  “Do I stutter? Knock it off.” She rolled her eyes, mocking him, and continued to comb her hair. “And why are your hands so dirty?”

  “I went playing in the woods last night.”

  “What?”

  Locking his fingers in her hair, he spun her toward the sink, keeping her in front of him as he lowered his shorts. “Just do what I tell you.”

  Natalie braced herself against the sink, allowing him to bend her forward until her face nearly touched the cool porcelain. “Steven, for God’s sake—”

  “You used to like this.” One hand slid upward, across her spine and onto the back of her neck. The other guided his erection.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” She struggled to the extent that she was able to turn and look back over her shoulder at him. “Get off me. I mean it.”

  “I know everything now,” he said. “You used to do it with him.”

  “I’ve never done that with anyone but you,” she said, spitting the words at him. “And I never liked it.”

  “I know what’s inside you, Natalie.” He stifled a nearly maniacal laugh, still holding her tight. He pushed deeper, and eventually began to feel the beginnings of forced penetration. “I can hear it moving in there.”

  Her steely expression did little to mask her confusion and fear. “Hear what?”

  He pushed his lips against her ear. “Your blood.”

  “Steven, stop it, this is—”

  “Russell,” he said, leaning his full weight against her. “It’s Russell now.”

  Her face fell, and for a moment she froze, as if willing to c
onsider the possibility that this could somehow be someone other than her husband. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He tightened his grip as a single violent shiver pulsed through her. He wrestled the convulsion into submission, reached up higher and tore her bra away. Grasping her breasts, he pulled her tight against him and ground himself deeper.

  Thunder growled overhead, releasing a heavier, driving rain and diverting his attention, if only briefly, from her screams.

  * * *

  Some time later, still nude, still stained, he found a pair of jeans and a shirt Natalie had left for him draped over the back of a kitchen chair. Without allowing his eyes to stray toward the nearby bathroom, he dressed in the kitchen, straightened his hair with surprisingly steady hands then fumbled a cigarette from a pack on the table. Pacing near the refrigerator, he puffed away awkwardly, as if it were a new experience, something he had imagined but never actually done. His bare feet stuck to the inexpensive tile, the rain continued to fall, and the silence of the house grew stronger, tearing at his mind like the clawed feet of a small reptile trapped inside his skull and furiously burrowing its way out.

  Ignoring the pain firing through his temples, he finished his cigarette, grabbed a large trash bag from beneath the counter and finally returned to the bathroom.

  A gradually widening crimson puddle nearly reached his toes, as the sounds—the memories—of Natalie’s skull smashing against the sink in time to his rhythmic thrusts dripped from his subconscious mind. His fingers, still slick with an array of bodily fluids, curled around a handsaw he’d left on the counter earlier.