PART THREE

Chapter 4

Two days had gone by, but I still couldn’t believe it.  Jess... she was just this super sweet young lady.  She had a very sweet heart, if a few little insecurities, and she loved me for who I was.  She enjoyed indulging me, enjoyed the amount of pleasure she was able to bring me by giving to me the way she did.

Moreover, Jess was an innocent in all of this.  Well, she knew I was married, so maybe she wasn’t completely innocent, but she didn’t deserve the uncelebrated execution she got.

Mary, with great malice, and only to get at me for cheating on her, had carried out that execution.  Worse, she had crushed Jess like a bug - the message clear: “Anybody who gets between me and what I want, gets stepped on.”  Jess was a flower in an often very selfish world.  Mary would trod on flowers with the same indifference and malice.  She gave a fuck only about what was important to her.  Everybody else was just scenery to her, and bugs to be scraped off of her shoes if they didn’t move out of her way fast enough.

The hubris required to be able to do something like that without feeling, had to be monumental.  And Mary had executed Jess without any feeling at all.  Except to explain to me the depth of her feelings of property rights over what she wanted.

Jess lacked completely in hubris.  She took pleasure in life, gained self esteem by making other people happy by doing things for them.  Saying thank you to her lit her up the same as if you’d given any other woman a dozen roses.  She honestly found self-worth in making other people happy.  While my wife (god-damn her), found happiness in only herself.

If the bitch could ever be accused of being happy.  If she ever was happy, it would be only when she was placing her foot firmly on the next rung of the ladder, and likely only if that “rung” got crushed as she used him or her to get up to the next rung.

Chapter 5

Those two days, needless to say, went by in bitter tears.  I was bitter at the way Jess had been killed.  I was bitter at Mary for doing it.  I was bitter at being too weak and helpless (and cowardly) to stop it.  To give myself credit, there was no way I could have stopped it, but my mind raced with all of things I could have done differently leading up to the event, which might have prevented it.

And that was what I was most bitter about of all.  My fucking foot fetish.  My fucking obsession with feet!

If I’d not been so obsessive, I might have planned better.  I might have chosen better places for our rendezvous.  I might have seen Jess less often.  I might have used cash more, and my credit cards less.  I might have been a much less traceable idiot had I had not such an overwhelming obsession with Jess and her fucking feet!  Getting my face stood on by Jess’s soft feet!  Being able to lick her feet, being allowed to jerk myself off on them.  I was such a self-absorbed and careless asshole!

Sitting in the corner of my fish tank prison, my knees hugged to my chest, these questions and self-recriminations raced around in my head and tormented me.  I tormented myself.  My list of crimes could fill any ledger in Hell, rightfully dooming me to eternities of all the shame and punishments equaled by the crimes of none other.

Mary, for her part, ignored my withdrawn sullenness.  For those two days, she made sure my water bottle was full, and laid a Petri dish of baby food in my place of incarceration.

Yeah, I hadn’t mentioned the water bottle.  Mary had hung one on the side of the fish tank not quite half an hour after she had murdered Jess.  It was a fucking hamster job, which of course, was insulting.  But it also had the quality of long-term planning about it.  We’d never had any pets (God forbid Mary’d ever deign to have any), so it must have been something Mary had picked up for this occasion.  That sent me to wondering how long Mary had known about my affair.  Could it have been weeks?  A couple of months?  Mary could be keenly observant when something caught her attention.  So it was likely she had known about it not long from the start.  She had planned to shrink me.

If that was so, why wait until now?  Maybe she was using the excuse of the affair to do something to me – something like use me for a laboratory experiment?  It jived as something she would do.  She was honestly that callous – to take and use her husband to try out some new idea her and her colleagues had cooked up at work.

But I was getting ahead of myself.  Mary knew, and that was that.  That she had acted upon the knowledge was what was important.  How she had acted upon it... it still begged that very nagging question.

Either way, not ten minutes after cleaning up the mess she had made of my Jess, Mary had hung the water bottle on the side of the tank.  She hadn’t gone out and bought one after my capture.  She had had one ready.  Mary had likely decided to kill Jess the way they had, too, as part of a larger plan.  The water bottle, for one, suggested more than just the decision to use one as opposed to something simpler, but the killing, and especially, the way she had done it, struck me as her setting something larger into motion.  Or had she had other reasons for killing Jess the way she did?

God, one’s head could spin for hours trying to make sense of it.  But then, that was my Mary.  Einstein wouldn’t be able to figure her out.  Hawking would be at a loss.  Fucking Sigmund Freud could be on the best cocaine high of his life, but never understand the height of Mary’s cold, calculating cunning.  I considered myself doing well if I remembered the difference between marinara and spaghetti sauce!  Mary and I were so many leagues apart it was laughable.

I puzzled on it and puzzled on it, until the second day, when these questions began presenting themselves.  They weren’t questions I much liked, either.  Any reasonable person would be disturbed by them.

But knowing Mary like I did, me making her refill my water wasn’t her only motivation.  It was too simple for what I knew of her.  And did the water have a somewhat odd flavor?  When I first drank from it, I had noted a somewhat medicinal aftertaste to the water, but had dismissed it as “new water bottle” taste, and was just feeling fortunate that she was giving me water to drink at all.

The food was just plain baby food.  Simple, easy-to-digest goop that I had to scoop up with my hands to eat.  The food didn’t trouble me, but the water bottle... it did.  So much so that I felt a sense of dread every time I drank from it.

Chapter 6

Then came the third day.

Without a word, Mary came into the room and picked up the fish tank.  With me in it, she carried it through the house and finally down the stairs.  Then finally into a room we had set aside for the storage of our travel gear, our luggage and other such travel-related items.

I noted with some alarm that all of the luggage had been removed.  Alarm bells really started going off in my head, when I noted a respectably large hamster habitat had taken the place of several suitcases on one of the larger shelves.

Sliding the fish tank onto an adjacent shelf, Mary simply reached in for me and grabbed me.

“You even think of biting me, Greg, and you’ll get the same fate your little bimbo did.”

I wouldn’t have dreamed of trying, the threat of a body-bursting stomp from one of her stilettos or not.  She didn’t need to make the threat.  I knew she would do it.

And so, meekly surrendering to her hand, I let her pick me up and transfer me over into the hamster cage.  Once inside, the lid closed, I started watching her, an odd sense of security with me with the thick, amber plastic walls of the habitat between me and my wife.

Mary started messing with something she took down from another shelf.  It was an iPad, or something very like.

This, she turned on, fiddled with it for a few minutes, and then slotted it down into one of the walls of my new prison, running a power cord to it and plugging it in.  Looking at it, but afraid to approach it, I noted with confusion that its screen was blank.  I looked back out at Mary, noting that she had taken up another of the pads.

Placing her pad under an arm, she pinned what looked like a small brooch onto the lapel of her suit.  Accomplishing this, she took up the second pad again and started doing something with it.

I blinked, and returned my attention to “my” pad.  It had just come to life.  I really stared when the pad was showing me four separate camera views, the views segmented into four panes on the pad’s screen.  I gaped when I registered that the four views were of four different views of this room – Mary standing in the middle of it with her pad, my big hamster habitat on its shelf.  And squinting, I could just see myself leaning against the plastic wall of the habitat, my head turned to look at the pad.

Then, still without a word, carrying her pad, Mary strode from the room.  Watching her leave, I turned to my pad and then approached it.

And then froze.

As Mary left the store room, the images in the four panes changed, they showing four new views of Mary striding through the room adjacent to this one!

And then the next room, the next one after that, and then the next one after that!  And then up the stairs, then finally up to the kitchen’s landing.  Through the kitchen and then down the hall – Mary’s staccato footsteps audible only because I could hear them through the ceiling above my habitat.

The cameras were following her!

“What the fuck?” I breathed, truly bewildered by this development.

But then I knew.

Earlier, I mentioned that we had a house.  Well, house, in our case, was a misnomer.  We had a mansion.  Complete with roundabout driveway, huge swimming pool out back, an apple orchard, and sitting in the center of it, was a five-story house that occupied over an acre.  We even had one of those two-mile-long private roadways that served as our driveway.

With a house this big, and with the kind of money Mary made, security was pretty high on the list of priorities.  In this of course, just like everything else Mary sees things done that are important to her, she spared absolutely no expense.

It had taken two months for the system to be installed, and then another week to program it all.  Among a myriad network of motion sensors, heat detectors, pressure-sensitive floors, there were hundreds of cameras around the house and on the grounds.  And there were exactly four cameras in each room!

Also, it was all automated.

That brooch!

It wasn’t a brooch at all!

It was a special tag that one of us could give to contractors, so they could move about the house without setting off alarms.  It could be programmed and everything, to for instance, set off an alarm if a contractor strayed into a room he wasn’t supposed to.  And most importantly of all, tracked his movements through the house with cameras!

But why had Mary done this thing?  More importantly, why had she set it up so that I could watch her movements?  When compared to everything else she had done so far, this was completely the most bewildering!

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” I breathed.  I couldn’t touch the pad.  It was slotted down on the other side of the plastic wall.  I nevertheless laid my hand on it.

“What the fuck are you doing, Mary?” I continued.

My guts had turned into ice and had frozen me solid in the truest sense of dread and fear I’d felt since all this began.  I couldn’t say what I was afraid of, exactly, but this had a feel about it that was truly diabolical.