Part Five

Chapter 10

That next morning, I awoke to whole new activity on my panel of camera views.

Mary was in the kitchen.  She was talking to six men, a set of plans spread out on the table between them.  The men were wearing contractor’s uniforms - jeans or work pants with white shirts and ties and work boots.  There were clipboards and iPads, Android pads and tape measures on belts.  One of them, evidently the other mens’ bosses, had his pad out and was typing stuff on it as Mary spoke to them.

I would have given my left arm to know what they were talking about.  Damn Mary for not letting me have sound.

This was because of the logos the men had on their shirts.

Two of the men were wearing Johnson Control logos.  Johnson Controls was the nation’s leading automation and facility security firms.  They made automated security and control systems - from automated gates, to card readers for access points, retina scanners and everything.  If it had anything to do with security, especially automated security systems, particularly on government instillations, it was a good bet Johnson Controls was involved.

The next two men of the six were wearing Lockheed Martin logos on their shirts.

Lockheed Martin!

Whatever could Mary want with Lockheed Martin in whatever she had planned?  Moreover, these guys looked like engineers.  Not jet-liner or flight engineers, but specialists engineers.  (Don’t ask how I knew that.  Just take it on faith when you have lived for long with someone who works in Mary’s field, you just get to know these things.)

Still puzzling over this, I moved onto what the last two guys were wearing.  And stared!

The last two guys were wearing Bechtel logos!

Bechtel was a world-leading construction firm who was usually sought for the construction of power plant extra-structure!  They built things like those huge catwalks, massive girder-crane assemblies and equipment-lift elevators.  Why were they at our house?  What the fuck could Mary be planning that she needed Bechtel for?!

Johnson Controls, I could almost see.  Our security system was installed by them.  Oh no.  No run-of-the-mill consumer-grade security systems for my Mary.  She had to have the best.  She spent over a million dollars on our security system.  If it was only Johnson Controls who was here, I could have taken it as Mary wanting install extra precautions against my being discovered.

But why could she have wanted them here with a world-leading engineering firm like Lockheed Martin and a world-leading construction firm like Bechtel?  It surely couldn’t be to beef up our security system!  Not unless she planned to have a giant monster robot out back of the house patrolling while she was gone!  If the idea was to protect against my discovery, then we were definitely going over into the realms of overkill!  The presence of the engineering and construction firms made no sense at all!

My pad had really good resolution.  And so I moved closer to get a better look at the plans they and my wife had spread out on the table.

I realized at once, that they were plans of our house.  All right, that much made sense.  One of the men was sketching lines through areas of the plans with a pencil, talking with the five other men.

I peered closer.

It looked like they were sketching some kind of pipe system in the plans.  I got vague impressions of notations of diameters and materials.  “5-inch” and “Stainless steel”.

I had no idea what it any of it meant.  So for a lack of anything better to do, and frustrated because I knew would get no answers from Mary, I just slumped back against a nearby wall of my habitat prison to watch.

Soon, all of the men had left.  Mary did too.  I watched her car pull out of the driveway, go down our private road and then turn out onto the highway, following three company vehicles.

*****

Two days went by.  My only respite from complete boredom, was when Mary came to check on the level in my water bottle, and to give me a new Petri dish of goop.  Beyond that, I just followed her around the house on the cameras, watching her in the mornings as she got ready for work, to return 10 or so hours later the next night, to go through her usual evening routines before going to bed.

As I predicted, I got no answer from Mary about the people who were at the house.  I asked only once.  The answer I received was enough to let me know that asking again would mean trouble.  She stared at me hard enough to freeze my guts into a knot of ice, me backing away, staring back in abject terror.

I didn’t ask again.

On the morning of the third day, I was awakened.  Not by Mary, not by any bad dreams.  (Lord knew I was having plenty of those.)  But by a horrendous amount of noise coming from upstairs.

The loud screeching of power saws.  The throb-ob-botting of sawsalls, and hammering and heavy boots thumping around all over the place upstairs.

When I got up to go look at my cameras, I stood gawking at a scene from some absurd “Money Pit” movie!

There were over a dozen men, wearing tool belts kneeling in the floor over saws, hammers and wrecking bars, men pulling up wood, others pulling up carpet, pulling the paneling off of walls, others moving furniture, while still others carried wood out of the house to stack it in the garage!

Just what the HELL was going on up there?  Had Mary chosen NOW to begin a renovation of the house?!

But then I remembered the plans.  This had something to do with the men who were at the house a couple of days ago.

And they were sketching pipe.

Why was Mary having pipe installed in the floor?

Mary could be damn eccentric at times, even bizarre, but this made no sense, even for her!

Either way, I stood and watched for a while, then sat and watched for a while.

In eight hours or so, the men had gone.  But by the time they had left, every room above me had been stripped down to bare floor joists and every wall down to its bare frames!  There were no floors or walls upstairs!

I sat and brooded about this all that night.  Completely poleaxed by what I had witnessed all during that day, I wracked my brains to make any kind of sense of it, failing miserably.

Finally, in frustration and needing some way to get it out of my system, I turned to a hamster wheel that was in the habitat.

The habitat had all of the usual accoutrements.  It had the wheel, it had tubes leading to all of the areas of the habitat - these being modular sections to which the tubes led.

Find the wheel too damned demeaning to want to go to it before, I had never even looked twice at it before tonight.

Finally, I made my way over to it.

It turned out to be a lot harder to get going than I thought.  Finally, though, I had the thing going at a pretty good clip, me running in its bottom like a treadmill.

As I ran, I thought.

I was never a very talented man.  Well, I was in one area, and I was good at what I did, exceptionally even, but nowhere as good as in the field of work Mary occupied.

I my previous life (previous to being shrunk by Mary), I was a cellist - a guy who plays a cello.    I was a passably good player, too.

It was how Mary and I had met.  She loved classical music and I played in a local orchestra.  After a show one night, she got a backstage pass and came looking for the person who had played that cello solo that night.

It had been me.

She wooed me and wowed me, taking me out to dinner on several occasions, and we eventually started to fall in love.

I have to admit that I fell in love with the money Mary represented more than I did her.  From the start, Mary was a hard-edged, distant woman.  But she loved how I played, and so had to have me as her lover.

I knew not long from the start that I was little more than Mary’s very own pet cellist, but I didn’t care.  I started driving nice cars, had a fabulous place to live, and Mary, through her connections, got me bigger and bigger gigs at increasingly well renowned orchestras and for private sessions for the truly rich.

I had hit the big time.

Through Mary.

It was also made well known by her, that if I ever left her, my moment of fame would dry up and I would wind up playing my cello for the homeless.

I believed her.

All through all of this, sex with Mary was listless and lacked utterly in adventure or sense of love.

She let me make love with her on occasion, but it was when she had the itch to scratch, not out of any kind of feeling of giving me time with her.  She’d get off, then put me out of her mind until she needed me again.  If I asked for sex with her, I was usually summarily rebuffed.

The night I finally worked up the courage to ask to play with her feet, I got this robotic stare from her, followed by a roll of her eyes, and some kind of comment about me being just fucking weird.

That was when I had turned to an extra-marital relationship.

I’ve already described how that ended...

All these thoughts running through my head as my bare feet ran on the hamster wheel, I finally slowed the thing down and got out of it, not feeling any better than before I decided to use the thing.

I did feel better physically though, so at least the run hadn’t been a complete loss.

Taking one more look at my panel of camera views and through them, at the destruction to our home, I finally curled up in the nook I had made for myself in the habitat and went to sleep.

Chapter 11

The next morning, I awoke the sound of Mary’s approaching stilettos.

Entering my room, looking as stunning but as dangerous as ever, she had brought her pad with her when she came this time.

She glanced at me once, smirked a little, then started doing something with her pad.

I watched, but then found myself turning to look at my pad.  A sound was coming from it.

It was the sound of an audio channel popping open.

“You get sound from now on,” said Mary in with a business-like announcement, and then left the room.

I boggled at this, but soon, I was to learn why.

An hour later, a police detective arrived.

All four of my camera views focused on the detective, Mary walking up to him to greet him.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Carter.”

Mary shook hands with the detective.  “Not at all.  You said over the phone that you may have some news regarding my missing husband?”

I was hearing all of this over the new audio channel afforded me through my pad.

“Well, we do, and we have some questions.”

I saw Mary’s brow raise.

The detective went on.

“Witnesses place you at the hotel on the day of your husband’s disappearance.  Can you tell me why you had gone to the hotel?”

“I’ve already filed a statement with the police to that effect,” Mary told him.

“I went to the hotel to confront my husband, but he and his floozie were not there.”

“I see,” said the detective.  “Well, we have two witnesses who said they saw you shouting and banging on the door to your husband’s hotel room, and then you barging into his room.”

Mary nodded, appearing exasperated, as well as I knew my Mary could.

“And he wasn’t there.”

She rolled her eyes at the detective again.  “If the police suspect me of foul play, keep in mind it was broad daylight, there were people around, but there were no bodies in the hotel room after I left.  How could I have moved the bodies with people around and under broad daylight, detective?  It was like I told the police in my statement.  Greg had cleared out his bank account and has likely absconded with his bimbo abroad.”

The detective nodded.

“No!” I shouted at my pad.  “I’m down here!  Dammit!  She shrunk me and my girlfriend and now I’m down here!

“Yeah, that’s what the preliminary team said,” the detective agreed, scratching the back of his head and consulting his notes.  “It’s just strange.  We’ve seen no passport or credit card activity from Mr. Carter.”  He shrugged.  “It is like your husband has just up and disappeared.”

Mary shrugged.

“Well, if you manage to find him, tell him to not bother coming home.  I plan to file for divorce within the next few weeks, right after I finish my renovations.  Once the divorce is done, he can stay with his little bimbo where ever he wants.  In the mean time, detective, if the police have nothing useful to add, please stay the hell off of my property.  I have no clue where Greg has gone, and frankly, I couldn’t give a damn.”

With that, Mary turned on her heel and marched back into the house - the camera views breaking up once more, to their four disparate views.

I slumped against the wall behind which the pad was contained and began crying.  Tears of frustration wetting my cheeks and me pounding an impotent fist on the wall, I cried “No,” very softly, feeling well and truly lost, and truly in this murderous woman’s horrible control.