Perceptions (4) I frowned. ‘I’ll take a look around the house, just to be sure.’ ‘Okay. Call if you need us.’ Perturbed, but not unduly anxious, I left the pair of them to it and I conducted a quick search, starting with the double garage housing the two cars. It was below ground and had two tiny windows along its length that purchased light via twin grates installed outside the house in the ground above. I switched on the garage strip-lights and scanned the place from the doorway. Everything seemed normal. So, satisfied, I continued into the adjoining rooms. My workshop, as I called it, was an adequately sized room for my tools and other bits of equipment. I was never big on DIY, but I could manage when need be. And need would certainly be if I had no professional on earth to call in case of repairs, or whatever. The dire thought came and went quickly, as I strolled out and back through the garage to the exquisitely named Garden Room. It had an exit to the rear garden and was storage to the lawn mower and other garden tool accessories. The door was securely bolted. Nothing untoward. Everything quiet. Literally. I unbolted the door and glanced furtively outside. I hadn’t heard the noise again since I’d descended, and now I was beginning to think I really had imagined it. Stepping further towards the garden, the sound came again suddenly, on cue. Startling me. I looked around with trepidation. There were voices, too, this time, or so I thought. Nothing discernible and nothing for certain, but something was happening. Now I was getting annoyed, primarily with myself. Was I hallucinating? Were the vanished millions calling to me, and moving iron crates? I looked towards the sky, the brilliant blue, lightly clouded sky. It was as if the noise had come from all around me, yet strangely from only one direction. Okay - Mark Draper was going nuts. That was it. The facts fitted nicely. Millions of people couldn’t vanish, but one person could believe they had. Lizzie and Teri could be figments of my derangement, and none of this was real. I had gone totally off my trolley. If not, then maybe these were the first signs of things going back to normal - or about to get worse. Either way, why was I alone in hearing it? Disturbed and puzzled, I hesitated to ask the girls again if they’d heard anything, because if they had they would surely have said something. I couldn’t start to believe that they’d keep anything as strange as this secret. How paranoid was that? I’d made us all a cup of coffee and we were together in the kitchen. Insulated within my mind, I was paying little attention to the two women who were chatting like old schoolmates. I was on another plane, focused on bigger things. My eyes closed as I sipped from my mug. When they opened I was alone. My heart missed a beat. ‘Lizzie? Teri?’ Where the hell had they gone all of a sudden? I put the mug on the table and stood up, the legs of the chair scraping the floor tiles. ‘Lizzie? Teri? Where are you?’ With my pulse rate rising sharply, I tried hard not to get frantic. They’ve gone! They’ve disappeared like all the others! I dashed out into the hall. ‘Lizzie? Teri? Where are you?’ I started to shake, losing control. My legs felt like jelly, but I made myself go upstairs to the bedrooms. I’d never feared being alone, but this was different. Unnatural. I gripped the doorframe of the main bedroom as darkness consumed my vision and panic swept through me. I was fainting. Going down. I could see blinking stars and I couldn’t stop it. My head hit the base of the door, a knock that jarred me. My eyes opened. ‘Are you all right, Mark?’ It was the sound of Lizzie’s mug hitting the wooden kitchen table that I’d heard, and she was sitting there, regarding me with a worried look. She glanced to my right and my eyes followed. There was Teri, too! Both of them were watching me. ‘What?’ I said, as if nothing had happened. The sound of my own voice surprised me. What had just happened? ‘Is your coffee too hot?’ Lizzie asked, as if she was repeating herself. Had I missed something? Had I fallen asleep in the middle of drinking coffee? Had I heard any noises at all, or had I imagined that as well? What the fuck was wrong with me? I needed to get out. ‘How about we go out for a walk, get some air?’ I asked. ‘Great idea,’ agreed Teri. Lizzie nodded, swiftly finishing her coffee. Our house was in the middle of a sparsely built street over-looking the valley and the main road to town. It ended in a No Through Road and was approximately 2 kilometres in length. There were just fifteen well-spaced houses and a couple of new ones that had just begun construction. They would never be finished. All the back gardens faced trees, fields and meadows. The view was lovely, consoling on a stressful day, and relaxing any day. Lizzie and I had bought the house specifically for its out-of-town location. Respectfully isolated, it was never what could be termed "out in the Styx." In the summer it was great; in the winter, it could be a bit of a bastard, as the snowploughs were slow in coming. Hence the reason I’d bought the 4x4. We could have our cake, and eat it! Perfect. Teri was envious as we ventured out in the hot air and she could look back at the house in its proud entirety. She wished for one just like it. And now you have one, I thought. The three of us walked casually towards the end of the road with a light breeze in our hair. We were silent as we strolled, each of us observing the uninhabited homes with our private thoughts. It occurred to me that we now had the opportunity to be as nosey inside as we’d been for a long time from the outside on our previous outings. We knew our immediate neighbours, but the others further along, except by name, remained strangers. It couldn’t hurt to take a look inside some of the houses. I was curious. It was hardly an invasion of privacy any longer, given the circumstances. ‘Christ, why didn’t I think of that?’ was Lizzie’s response to my suggestion. ‘I’ve always wanted to take a look inside The Robert’s place.’ ‘Not like you not to think of it.’ ‘Must be getting old. Let’s go.’ Lizzie was dead keen. Teri glared at both of us. ‘You can’t do that, surely!’ ‘Why not?’ asked Lizzie, with a laugh. ‘Mr and Mrs Robert won’t mind.’ ‘I suppose not.’ I was already at the door. I guessed that it would be locked, but I gave it a try anyway, and I was correct. ‘How about the back?’ suggested Lizzie, leading on. Teri and I followed her via a gate that separated the two gardens of their property. She pushed the door, but it appeared to be also locked. ‘Shit.’ ‘Lots of it about,’ I said. ‘Shit.’ The three of us chuckled like a bunch of kids. ‘Let’s break in,’ Lizzie declared, checking the thickness of the pane in the wooden door. ‘How about a brick?’ ‘You thug,’ I said. ‘Vandal. Isn’t there another way?’ Lizzie shrugged, scanning for possibilities. ‘Can’t see anything. No open windows. The garage door?’ ‘Electric, if I remember correctly. Too heavy to lift manually, even if I could get a good grip.’ ‘I can’t believe you two!’ cried Teri, chastising us. I looked about me with deliberation. ‘Who’s going to complain? Must admit, though. I don’t fancy breaking in like that. If the door was unlocked, fair enough, but to smash a window -’ Lizzie winced. ‘What about number 10, then? Maybe they’ve forgotten it in a hurry?’ ‘What hurry?’ Teri remarked. ‘True, maybe. But if you don’t know you’re about to vanish you don’t think to check security first, do you?’ ‘Good point,’ I added. ‘Let’s check their neighbours, then.’ Our walk had suddenly become a campaign. We started from the last house and tried the windows and doors of every one. It took well over an hour, but all of them, every bloody house, was - ‘Locked up like a virgin’s fanny,’ I announced, crudely, intending the pun. ‘Unbelievable!’ ‘Shit,’ said Lizzie again. ‘We could always try again tomorrow.’ ‘Why tomorrow?’ ‘Just in case Teri was right and everybody miraculously re-appears.’ ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’ I shrugged. ‘What do I know?’ ‘You’re the local X-files expert! We’re relying on you to solve this case!’ I didn’t know whether Lizzie was serious or joking, but the weight of expectation suddenly came down on top of me. I felt curiously exhausted when we returned to the house. In the kitchen I looked up at the clock on the wall. ‘Four o’clock!’ I exploded. ‘It can’t be!’ I glanced at my wristwatch for confirmation. It showed 5pm. ‘What time do you have, Teri?’ She was standing at the fridge with a glass of water in her hand. ‘I’m not wearing my watch,’ she said. I grimaced. ‘Lizzie?’ She stood by the sink, seemingly calm and content. ‘Me neither,’ she replied. ‘What? You always wear your watch. How can you not be wearing your watch?’ Lizzie shrugged. ‘I must have left it in the bathroom earlier.’ I mumbled and entered the dining room where another clock hung on the wall. It showed 6.15, but that could have been day or night. Further miffed, I went to have a look at the clock in the study. That one showed 5.30, and that could have been day or night. The clock on the oven! That was a 24-hour timer! I returned quickly to the kitchen and found that both women had gone. The clock showed 17:02. I check my wristwatch again, and that was now showing half past four! ‘What the fuck’s going on!’ I yelled to myself. Time had suddenly gone nuts. Or else all our clocks were malfunctioning at the same moment. I cursed some more just as Lizzie returned, her watch in the palm of her right hand. ‘What are you yelling about?’ she asked. ‘All the clocks are showing a different time!’ ‘The kitchen clock shows the same as mine,’ she said, comparing the two with a glance. ‘What?’ ‘It’s 6.30.’ ‘Hey?’ I looked up the wall clock and dashed to check Lizzie’s wristwatch. ‘You don’t believe me?’ I looked at my own. ‘6.30! Now it’s the same! What the fuck is going on here!’ Lizzie regarded me like a nurse sympathetic to a schizophrenic patient. ‘Why don’t you go and lie down for a while? I’m going to take an early bath.’ My frown was deep, and I was angry. But Lizzie ignored me and walked away. ‘Where’s Teri?’ I enquired, as she departed. ‘I’m not sure. I think she went upstairs.’ ‘Fine.’ I slowly drifted into the living room and dropped onto the sofa. I buried my face into my hands and remained in that position as my strains were quietly absorbed by the passing of time. How much time? I wondered. What’s going to happen next? After a while, when nothing ensued, I kicked off my shoes and swivelled round to take up the length of the sofa. I closed my eyes and began to think, desperately attempting to figure out what was going on and what had occurred overall. From the beginning: the entire population was gone, excluding us three, and I’d heard some ghostly creaking metal and now, to top the lot, the fabric of Time was somehow getting screwed. Yet, at the last instance, I was the only one getting worked up over it. Neither of the two girls seemed particularly bothered by what just had just apparently transpired and, as my frustration grew, their calmness, in direct contrast, also increased. I couldn’t take it for much longer. So I knew I had to calm down. Drowsiness took control and the dull banging headache brought on by all this fearful nervous tension dissipated. Perhaps I fell asleep for a while, because the next thing I knew, daylight had faded. The living room seemed suddenly, eerily dim. I rose, looked around, and stood up. Twilight had arrived, and with it, that strange feeling of something not being right had come back again. It was a good idea, I told myself, to find Lizzie and Teri and make sure that they, at least, were all right, because I sure as hell wasn’t. Sometimes I was my own worst enemy, I knew that, but in most bad situations I could cope. Of course, that was when logic itself hadn’t gone to pot, as it seemed to have done now. The first thing I noticed as I entered the hallway was how quiet the house was. I expected to see or hear Lizzie and Teri somewhere around, but it seemed - and suddenly I became afraid again - that I was alone. Taking the first few steps up the stairway in my socks, I moved slowly and carefully, listening for sounds, hoping that one or both girls were upstairs. Lizzie had mentioned an early bath, but as I’d lost track of time I wasn’t sure if she had finished or not. I don’t know why, but I resisted the temptation to call out, as if something was telling me it would be against my better interests to do so. At the doorway of our main bedroom, I held my breath and put my ear to the closed door. Not a sound emerged, and I pushed it gently, peering round at the same time. A shock hit me as I saw a naked body in the dimness lying on top of the duvet, chest down, legs apart and bent slightly at the knees, head facing the en suite across the room from me. ‘Lizzie!’ I breathed. Asleep? She hadn’t moved, even as I entered the room, drawn by an irresistible, strangely erotic, compulsion. The room in this light, the nude form before me, induced me to reach out and fondle the alluring skin, to stroke her sensuous body. Now she turned, aware, a smile illuminating her face. It was Teri. My heart missed a beat. Impossible. How could I have made that mistake? How could I have confused the two? Even in the partial light I could have sworn it was Lizzie! ‘Hi,’ Teri whispered, rolling right round to grant me a long deceased wish: the view of her licentious naked body, her pert breasts, the furry triangle between her luscious inner thighs; I’d always regretted missing this fleeting opportunity that late evening just the two of us at work. Deliberately, she crossed her legs with tantalising intent. Her hand rose to touch the bulge in my trousers, fingers tenderly squeezing, exploring, rendering me speechless. The door to the en suite opened, and I jumped back in a start. Lizzie stood in the doorway, a murky light emanating from somewhere behind her, clear enough to reveal that she, too, was naked. I was totally stunned. My mouth fell open. ‘This isn’t…this isn’t what it looks like,’ I managed to relay, whilst trying to comprehend what I was seeing. ‘Relax, Mark,’ Lizzie said, softly, approaching the bed. Teri was still lying on it looking at me. She hadn’t even turned to acknowledge Lizzie’s brusque presence. ‘We’ve talked about it, Teri and I. We know what you want, what you need.’ ‘Come to bed,’ added Teri, in that same, enthralling tone. ‘You must relax. We’ll help you.’ I frowned, trying to understand. They weren’t toying with me, surely? Lizzie would never behave in this bizarre manner and stand naked in the same room with another woman whilst both of them made sexual advances. Never. But here she was, gliding round the bed to my side, a smile firmly planted on her face, coaxing me to share myself. I had to be mad not to tear my own clothes off and jump into bed. Not many men were offered a threesome in their own bedrooms with the sanctity of their wife. Embarrassed, and just a little scared, I held off. ‘What exactly did you two talk about in my absence?’ Lizzie took hold of my arm and turned her body around me to end up standing behind me. Her other hand came up to caress my chest through the shirt I suddenly realised I’d been wearing all day since I’d dressed to go to work. The feel of her breasts, the jutting nipples on my back, realigned my train of thought. My head was reeling. Teri had slid closer now and started unbuckling my trouser belt as Lizzie’s smouldering lips went to work on the nape of my neck. Operating in unison, the women wound themselves about me, stripping me, thrilling me. Depriving me of my self-possession. They might have practised this session, for their disarming twin-driven seductive prowess was so smooth and polished. I was powerless to fend them off, even if I wanted to. My trousers fell to my ankles at the same instant my shirt left my body. I felt a tug at the waistband of my underpants and fresh air brought an immediate response to my penis, already enlarged by the initial enticement. An inflamed tongue blew out my brains, and I hardly realised the manipulations that laid me flat on the bed with both naked sirens engaged at each end. Teri kissed me with sultry lips and Lizzie sucked my erection with the dedication of a horny mistress. When she came up for air, she lifted from the bed, leaving Teri with me to herself. At once Teri jumped astride, staking her mount swiftly, and pounced at my vulnerable neck with delicious nibbling to keep me on a high. Still unable to believe this was happening, I looked at her through narrowed eyes, my heart racing with exhilaration. I realised the distraction when I felt the second ankle being tethered to the end of the bed. Teri’s flirty eyes shot me a wicked look, but I was too late to cry out before Lizzie had snatched my left arm and secured it by the wrist to the headboard. Teri grabbed the right and fastened my other wrist also above my head. The two women raised their arms in victory. Gaping at their nudity, I was struck dumb. ‘So, now we’ll see how much you really like bondage,’ Teri said, grinning broadly, glancing at her shoulder as Lizzie put an arm around her. ‘You little bitches,’ I retorted, hardly able to contain myself. Teri’s neck craned round and much to my astonishment, Lizzie kissed her full on the mouth, a lingering kiss that set my penis throbbing on the verge of detonation. While I watched, Teri rose from the bed to take Lizzie in full embrace as Lizzie’s arms slid to Teri’s waist and circled her buttocks, clenching them tightly. With passionate abound, bodies pressed closely, the two kissed as if they were lovers instead of strangers who had only met this morning. Anchored to the bed, I watched them, helpless, jealous, stunned, and relatively redundant. Then, as if they suddenly remembered I was there, they turned to me. Teri leapt up and headed for the bathroom. Lizzie mounted me. I heaved a sigh of pleasure as she sunk the full length of me. The heat of her shaft had never felt so good. I could have ejected my load right into her, but she somehow delayed me. Her face lowered to mine and she licked my lips in a circle, ending it with a languorous kiss. ‘Do you really love me, Mark?’ she whispered. I was surprised. ‘You know I do.’ ‘Then tell me. Remind me.’ ‘I do love you, Lizzie. I love you very much. But what -?’ She smothered my question with her fingertips. ‘No more talking. Teri and I are going to give you the best fuck of your life.’ She looked up at Teri who had just returned to the bedside, taking from her a long piece of dark cloth or towel. ‘Just so you enjoy it further, I’m going to blindfold you. Then we’ll play with you until you erupt like a frothy volcano.’ Her breasts touched my nose as she leaned forward to position the blindfold. I just had time to suck a nipple before I was plunged into complete darkness. ‘Now don’t speak, or we’ll gag you as well,’ warned Teri, the thought of it increasing my pulse rate further still. Luckily my heart was in good shape or I should have been dead by now with all this excitement. I didn’t want to fight my bonds, but I made a token effort to struggle as they set about me with kisses and touches all over my body. And the added spice was not knowing which of them was doing what. Masterfully they kept me charged as their game immersed me with the most scintillating sex I’d ever experienced. When I finally came it was the most rewarding and satisfying sensation in my life. I shuddered violently with all the glorious pent-up energy restrained in me. I was exhausted.
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