The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Rachel Detwhiler hit the alarm almost as soon as the clock began to beep... It was a Saturday, no need to disturb Melanie who was still asleep beside her. Slowly she rolled sideways and swung her long legs out over the side of the bed before standing and stretching to her full six foot two. She glanced at the mirror and pulled a face at the sight of her long red hair in total disarray. The morning was already warm, the early morning sun chasing way the cold night air. She glanced out of the window at the cloudless sky and knew that it was going to be another hot day, but then it always seemed to be in Arizona.

Then it was shower, dress in her khaki shirt and pants, breakfast and out after pulling on the black riding boots that she habitually wore and fastening her equipment belt. She drew the Smith & Wesson .44 and checked it... Six chambers, five rounds loaded: it was her habit to have the firing pin over the empty chamber as an extra safety measure. Then she glanced in the entrance hall mirror as she grabbed her stetson... Her sheriff’s star seemed to wink back at her.

“Okay, Rachel,” she said to herself, “let’s go catch them bad guys!” And then it was out into the warm morning air..

The Sheriff exhaled sharply through her nose, watching the dust swirl around her boots as she kicked at the loose gravel outside the home that she shared with her wife Melanie and her ten year old step daughter, Mari-belle. Okay, so they weren’t formally wed but as far as Rachel was concerned, Melanie Porter was her wife.

She climbed into her cruiser and fired up the engine and the electronics and looked out of the windshield at the town of Wide-Awake which was laid out at the bottom of the hill... It didn’t sprawl: there wasn’t enough of it to do that... But it was her town and she had been elected to keep it safe—the town and the surrounding county of the same name...

She grabbed the mike and called in to the office: a woman’s voice answered. “Mornin’ Sheriff, ain’t a lot happened over night: just a couple of chicken thefts, nothin’ else.”

Rachael chuckled. “Thanks, Wendy, more ’n likely coyotes again. I’ll take a cruise around town... should be in in half an hour,”

By the time she had arrived at the sheriff’s office the heat had built up and was relentless, even for Arizona. The air shimmered like water over asphalt, and Wide-Awake seemed half-asleep which was hardly fitting, given its name. She adjusted her Stetson, squinting against the glare as she scanned Main Street. Nothing out of place. Not yet, anyway. She pushed her way in and nodded to the three deputies who had seen her arrive and so were trying to make out that they were busy. She went over to the desk that Wendy was manning, exchanged pleasantries and read the log... Nothing but the chickens...

She glanced up at Deputy Binning who was over by the water cooler. “Ed, can you do the rounds and check up on these missing chickens? It don’t hurt none to show the flag.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff, ain’t much else to do!” The deputy said as he headed towards the door to the accompaniment of clucking noises courtesy of Deputy Kaywaykla.

“Thank you for volunteering to go with him, Waya,” Rachel chuckled, “after all we might need your legendary Apache tracking skills to find them chickens.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff.” The bronzed wiry deputy said with a grin as he headed for the door. “I kinda asked for that, didn’t I?”

As it was a Saturday there was no school but Melanie, the town’s fourth grade teacher had gone in to catch up on a few things and Mari-belle had tagged along, bored and looking forwards to the promised ice cream. Melanie was in her classroom grading papers while Mari-belle wandered the hallways humming to herself and kicking pebble she’d picked up outside. She wasn’t supposed to be in the school on her own, but she’d done it often enough, just walking the halls, that she wasn’t worried by the odd noises that there always are in an empty building. And the school was empty except for herself and her mom, everyone else was at home... Besides, it was a lot cooler here than outside or at home.

Then it happened: she rounded a corner and caught a glimpse of someone tall and blonde, wearing what looked like a tight-fitting silvery dress: she was standing at the end of the hallway. Mari-belle froze, startled. The woman, if it was a woman, was far too tall, her proportions just slightly off, and her hair seemed to glow faintly in the dim light. Before Mari-belle could say anything, the figure smiled at her, turned shimmered and stepped through the wall like it wasn’t even there.

She had gone but Mari-belle suddenly knew things...

The girl blinked hard, rubbed her eyes, and crept forward. The hallway was empty. No doors nearby, no alcoves, nowhere to hide. She pressed her palm against the spot where the woman had vanished. Solid drywall. Her heart pounded. “Mom?” She called, her voice wavering.

Melanie heard the fear in her daughter’s tone and dropped her pen, rushing into the hallway. “What is it?” She asked, scanning Mari-belle’s pale face.

The girl was clearly distressed as she stammered out the story, pointing at the blank wall.

Melanie frowned, and touched the spot herself: it was cold... strangely cold, as was that end of the hallway. She pulled Mari-belle close. “Probably just a trick of the light.” She lied smoothly. But her grip on Mari-belle’s shoulders was too tight, her gaze darting toward the windows. Outside, the sky was clear. Too clear. Like something had scrubbed it clean.

Later that morning, Rachel sipped bitter coffee at the the diner when Deputy Vernon slid into the booth opposite her. “Another chicken coop vanished.” He said. “Only it was more than just the chickens that have gone. Wooden posts still in the ground, wire fencing intact. Just... no coop. No birds.”

Rachel grunted, flipping open her notebook. The third one today. Across the room, Melanie sat with Mari-belle, who seemed to be ignoring her ice cream and drawing wide-eyed figures with elongated limbs in her notebook. Their eyes met and Rachel saw the tension there, the unspoken something’s wrong look made her uneasy... She had listened to the girls story... Another strange event on what should be an ordinary quiet Saturday.

Deputy Binning entered the diner a short while later, it was a sort of unofficial extra Sheriff’s Office and besides, the coffee was better here. He spotted the booth where the sheriff and Vernon were discussing the odd happenings and walked over.

Rachel looked up and said. “Please tell me that it was coyotes.”

“If it was then the must ’a used a helicopter, Sheriff, an’ a big one at that. Close on five hundred chickens taken from a locked pen... Old man Langer’s livid: he reckons it must be a gang from Tuscon or somewhere...” He bit his lip and hesitated.

“Okay,” she said quietly, noting his reluctance, “what else did you boys find?”

“That’s just it Sheriff, we din’ find nothin’! Waya scouted around like he was on the warpath, but there was nothin’: no tracks, no feathers, no blood. Just hundreds of chickens... gone, an’ the enclosure still locked. Waya’s rattled... I mean really rattled!”

Deputy Ed Binning said quietly.

Rachel could tell that he was rattled, too. “Okay, son, get yourself a coffee, an’ then do your report.

She looked across at Vernon who was frowning. “What d’ you make of this, Steve?”

The deputy, who was the oldest man in the department, shook his head slowly. “I ain’t never come across anything like it. You’d need a pretty big truck to get five hundred chickens into and it would be a messy and noisy operation to drive them into it: yet young Kaywaykla couldn’t find nothin’. That lad’s a full-blood White Mountain Apache: if he couldn’t find nothin’ then there ain’t nothin’ to find! Believe me, Rachel, this one is weird!”

The Sheriff nodded. Steve Vernon had been Sheriff himself over twenty years back... What he didn’t know about Wide Awake County wasn’t worth squat. Yet here he was, as baffled as the rest of them!

That afternoon, Old Man Langer’s prize rooster strutted back into his yard. Alone. Unharmed. But its eyes, no longer mean, beady and black, but a sort of amber color. It made as if to crow, but it didn’t, instead it hunkered down and laid an egg.

Rachel, who had taken this job personally and was there when it happened, examined the egg, which was smooth, pale blue, and slightly translucent: not like any chicken egg she’d ever seen.

Langer’s rooster stared at her with those uncanny amber eyes, head tilted as if waiting for her reaction. She swallowed hard and slid the egg into an evidence bag. “I’ll take this to Doc Pritchard,” she muttered, though she already knew his veterinary expertise wouldn’t explain this.

Slowly the rooster rose to its feet straightened up and once more made as if it was going to crow... Once more it didn’t: instead it clucked like a hen.

After the incident with the rooster things became quiet again and Rachel headed back to town and a quiet Saturday afternoon, She signed off and headed home early as she had a nagging feeling that things would liven up over the next few days... It was a sixth sense that all experienced cops develop... Something was off and it was only going to get worse.

That night she lay in bed, half awake... Mel was lying in her arms but it was for comfort not for sex. Oh, they’d kissed but that was as far as it went... They were both concerned... Both involved, but in what? Eventually she drifted off to sleep with Melanie’s soft body pressing against her... Tomorrow will bring whatever it brings... She ed thinking as she drifted off too sleep.

While outside in the town and the surrounding area things were quiet... No owls... No crickets... No coyotes... Even the breeze blowing through scrub and long dry grass didn’t seem to make any noise... Things were very quiet.

That in the small hours of Sunday morning, Melanie woke to the sound of Mari-belle’s ragged breathing. She found the girl sitting upright in bed, clutching her knees, sweat beading on her forehead. “She was in my dream,” Mari-belle whispered. “The tall lady. She said she was coming and that she wanted to show me something... pretty.” Melanie smoothed her daughter’s hair, but her own hands trembled.

Rachel was up too and was standing at the side of the girl’s bed: her gray tee-shirt and shorts a contrast to her wife’s cream lacy night dress. She forced herself not to look concerned when Melanie stroked her daughter’s hair and reassured her that it was just a bad dream.

Outside, the desert wind was no longer silent. It now carried an odd, metallic hum rather like distant machinery vibrating through the air: a hum that over the next few hours, gradually and imperceptibly grew louder.

By dawn, the hum had spread. Half the town reported hearing it, a low frequency thrum that seemed to cause their bones to vibrate. Rachel headed to work expecting to be swamped by inquiries and complaints about the noise instead, she was met by Deputy Vernon.

The old timer was pacing up and down outside the station, his usual calm shattered. “Rachel,” he blurted, “we got us a beauty this morning.”

“Oh?” Rachel asked, expecting the worst.

“Yeh,” He said, “our water tower’s empty. No leak, no breach. Water’s just... gone.“

The Sheriff climbed the ladder to check: dry metal greeted her, not a drop left. When she touched the interior, her fingertips came away dusted with something iridescent, like crushed pearl. It was going to need cleaning before it could be refilled.

Over at the diner, where she headed to grab a cup of coffee, whispers had replaced small talk. A rancher claimed his prize bull had given birth to a six-legged calf during the night... Perfect otherwise except for the six legs and its amber eyes. This raised guffaws but the rancher looked serious.

Betty-Lou swore her reflection winked at her from the coffee pot.

Rachel sipped her coffee, watching a woman trace nervous circles in the spilled coffee on a tabletop. Neither spoke. No need. The sky outside was too blue, too still. Something was coming. And it wasn’t coyotes.

A few minutes later Melanie brought Mari-belle into the diner, they headed over to the booth that many jokingly referred to as Rachel’s Office. “I thought you’d be here.”

“Just takin’ the temperature of the town.” Rachel said quietly.

“And?” Melanie said as she took the seat opposite.

“Seems to be runnin’ a fever.” The Sheriff said slowly

Mari-belle, kicking her heels under the booth, suddenly stiffened. “She’s here,” the girl whispered, crayon snapping in her grip.

Rachel followed her gaze... just empty sidewalk baking in the sun.

But Melanie sighed. “Your tall lady?”

Mari-belle shook her head, eyes huge. “No, the cat-lady.” She said quietly.

The sheriff’s hand drifted toward her revolver, an automatic reaction, before she relaxed and used the same hand to raise her coffee cup. The cat lady? She thought. Now who in tarnation might that be?

Later that afternoon Rachael was walking around the town, something that she tried to do every day: the people had elected her to keep the peace so they deserved to see her doing just that. Now, as she watched, the empty school parking lot shimmered. Not heat haze but actual ripples in the air, like melted glass. Rachel’s boot heels crunched gravel as she approached, her pulse loud in her ears. The smell hit first: ozone and something sweet and metallic. Then there was the sound, the hum so low it vibrated her molars.

Behind her, Melanie hissed, “Rachel, don’t...” But the sheriff stepped forward... and her shadow stretched unnaturally, thinning toward the distortion like pulled taffy as something she sensed was there, but couldn’t see, was distorting it some.

Suddenly she heard Melanie’s footfalls approaching rapidly. She half turned. “You too, love?”

Melanie grabbed her arm and nodded, adding. “Be careful, there’s something here, I can feel it.”

“Where’s Mari-belle?” She asked, suddenly concerned for her step-daughter’s safety.

“She’s still in the Diner, Ma’s looking after her and feeding her on ice cream.” She said.

Rachel relaxed some: Mrs Barker who everybody called Ma for obvious reasons, would make sure that the girl was okay and heaven help the tall lady if she put in an appearance. She might have the same name as a nineteen twenties gangster but that was as far as the similarity went.

Suddenly the Sheriff felt things change: the pressure against her skull, gentle but inexorable suddenly intensified... It was almost as if something else was trying to insert itself in there. Then she heard it: a voice, honey-thick and amused, purred inside her mind: “Ssuch a sstubborn alpha two leg mon-key aren’t we?”

Rachel snarled, shaking her head like a dog shedding water from its coat. The distortion pulsed, revealing a split-second glimpse: cat-people in iridescent bodysuits, restraining, vacant-eyed women. Then they were gone, if they had ever been there at all. She knew pretty well everyone in town by sight but she hadn’t recognize any of the women as townsfolk.

Melanie dragged Rachel back by her black leather equipment belt, panting. “Did you see...?”

Rachel nodded grimly. Recalling Mari-belle’s words about the cat-lady being here and about them fighting the sky-ladies in her dreams. The sheriff spat dust and wiped her mouth, tasting copper.

The evening service at First Baptist hit record attendance, not for faith, but because that morning as Reverend Cole had been preaching his sermon about Sodom and Gomorrah, which he for some reason compared with Tucson, he had been interrupted by his own reflection stepping out of the stained glass window. The translucent doppelganger floated gently down to the ground while pointing upward with a beatific smile before exploding into prismatic mist. Half the congregation fled; the other half stayed to pray harder, but even then their words drowned out by a sudden rhythmic thud of something massive that seemed to be moving underground.

Back at the Sheriff’s Office, reports were still coming in, except that now it was dark people were phoning in to report mysterious colored lights performing a ballet in the sky above the mesa. The desk officer logged them and sent a deputy out to investigate but by the time they got there, the lights were gone... Only to reappear somewhere else in Wide-Awake County.

Suddenly the desert lit up like a war-zone. Rachel and Melanie watched from the porch as streaks of crimson and cobalt light collided above the mesa, casting jagged shadows. The sheriff’s revolver felt useless in her hand: she couldn’t for the life of her drawing it... Feeling slightly embarrassed, she checked that the hammer was still over the empty chamber and re-holstered the useless weapon.

“Aerial combat,” Melanie murmured.

Rachel nodded because that was precisely what it looked like.

Somewhere in the darkness inside the house, Mari-belle whispered, “They’re choosing.“

Once again the wind carried the faint scent: only this time it was of burnt sugar and wet fur.

The following day, at the Thompson farm, ducks erupted into panicked flight as three tabby cats cut through their pond like otters, their fur repelling water in gleaming droplets. Mrs. Thompson swore they’d looked directly at her, their eyes glowing green just like they did when looking into a flashlight beam. Suddenly the cats, who Lily Thompson had never seen before, swam to the edge of the pond before vanishing into the cornfield, running in a perfect line with precisely a yard between each identical cat.

By sundown, every feline in town had gathered on the courthouse steps, tails twitching in unison as they watched the sky. Even the tom cats who normally fought on sight were there ignoring each other as they stared up at the stars...

By dawn on Tuesday, Wide-Awake was unraveling. Vehicle engines coughed to life in locked garages, radios blared static-laced opera, and Deputy Steve Vernon radioed in from Coyote Flats, a little town in the middle of the county. According to him, every vehicle in the town square had simultaneously started up and then revved to red-line before engines had exploded into clouds of iridescent steam: even the handful of electric cars had done it too.

Rachel’s desk phone rang nonstop:—

Ma Barker reported the jukebox in her diner was playing a melody that made teeth ache.

The Baptist choir’s hymnals now displayed swirling glyphs that induced nosebleeds.

Wendy, the Deputy on the desk, who also acted as switchboard operator and was usually unflappable, sobbed into the headset: “Sheriff, the phones are laughing at me!”

The UFO nuts arrived at half past ten; led by a gaunt man wearing the compulsory tinfoil hat. They gathered in the town square outside City Hall and waved placards. They weren’t happy and seemed to think that the mayor was conspiring with The New World Order and The Vatican to keep the facts from them.

They began to chant monotonously: “Yo, Yo, UFO, the people have the right to know!” They repeated it over and over again, ad nausium: the gaunt man leading them using a bullhorn.

But this wasn’t much of a chant as there were only fifteen of them. Suddenly the chant faltered when the courthouse clock, which proclaimed the time as ten forty-five, suddenly chimed thirteen times. Each strike vibrating through the ground like a depth charge exploding beneath everyone’s feet.

Rachel watched from the station steps as one of the protester’s cardboard signs, which read “I ? ET” suddenly burst into blue flames. The man dropped it, screaming, but the fire left his fingers untouched, although the sign was completely destroyed. The crowd gasped as the ashes swirled upward, forming a perfect helix before dissolving into the hot summer air.

The gaunt leader raised an arm and bellowed through his bullhorn. “Do you SEE? They’re speaking to us!” His voice cracked with the intensity of religious rapture.

Meanwhile the man whose sign had spontaneously combusted was staring at his fingernails in disbelief: for they were now coated in varnish that was the exact same shade of blue that the flames had been: varnish that he would later find was impossible to remove and did not grow out.

On the steps of the Sheriff’s Office on the other side of the square, Deputy Siobhan Nolan gripped Rachel’s elbow. “That wasn’t pyrotechnics, Sheriff.”

Below them, something rumbled but it seemed to be the ground itself and not just something underground. The protesters’ shoes began sinking into the asphalt as if it were quicksand. A young woman shrieked, clawing at her vanishing sneaker laces as the black surface flowed over her feet.

Rachel rushed forward, vaulting the rail of the station’s veranda as she did so, but the ground solidified instantly and she was able to sprint across it. When she reached the protesters she could see that they were trapped and helpless: their feet encased in asphalt except that its surface was now smooth and hard as obsidian and just as reflective.

Overhead, the sky split. Not with light, but with absence that looked like a tear in reality revealing a blackness so total that was painful to look at. From it drifted a scent like singed fur and over-ripe peaches. Deputy Siobhan Nolan, watching with glazed eyes from the station window, was heard to whisper. “They’ll send for the loud ones.” Although she had no recollection of saying it.

The protesters’ mouths moved in unison as they produced a soundless chant, their eyes rolling back. Then, pop, their irises turned the same amber as Langer’s egg-laying rooster’s. The gaunt leader smiled beatifically. “No need for signs,” he announced, voice suddenly melodic. “ET is here.”

Suddenly a ripple ed across the surface of the town square and everyone of the protesters pulled their feet free, with a series of sucking ‘pops’ leaving behind hollow, shoe-shaped pits in the surface. Then in five ranks of three, they strode toward the near-by mesa, humming a discordant tune that made Rachel’s fillings vibrate.

Deputy Vernon, who had returned form Coyote Flats, crossed himself. The sheriff holstered her revolver with slow certainty. “If I had any sense I’d pack the Jeep,” she muttered. “and git outa here ’cause as sure as Hell I’m dreadin’ whatever comes next.”

Across town, every cat arched its back and hissed at the same moment. The air tasted like licking a battery. Somewhere, a child giggled at one hundred and thirty decibels.

At one, the UFO believers shuffled back into town, their eyes normal and blinking too fast, as if waking from a dream. Their tinfoil hats were crumpled, shirts misbuttoned. The gaunt leader kept touching his own face like he wasn’t sure it belonged to him. “Dunno what got into us...” He mumbled to Rachel’s boots when she confronted them. The pavement had healed: no cracks, no shoe-shaped pits. Just black asphalt which was, if anything, smoother than before.

Melanie ed her in her office shortly afterwards with Mari-belle in tow. “We’ve had to shut the school: every air-con has stopped working and the place is like an oven!”

Rachel logged that one too before turning to her wife. “Okay, let’s go get something to eat.”

On the way out Deputy Wendy Gomez looked up from her desk. “The Mayor’s been looking for you, Sheriff.”

“Let him look,” Rachel growled, “if anything important happens I’ll be over at Ma Barker’s place havin’ lunch; as far as His Honor is concerned I’m out on patrol.”

Some time later over at Ma’s Diner, the air con was working much to everyone’s relief. Everything seemed normal and the jukebox crooned a Patsy Cline single without incident. Melanie stirred sugar into her coffee and waited for the granules to dissolve. Mari-belle sat unusually quiet, doodling spirals in her notebook. Rachel flipped open the incident log, blank since the school air con entry. The pen hovered over the page. She didn’t trust the calm. Calm before the storm was one thing; calm after the storm when you hadn’t seen no lightning? That’s worse.

She glanced across at Mari-belle’s notebook, there were two complex spirals drawn there, one on each page and they were identical. Suddenly something struck Rachel about the spirals... They weren’t just scribbles, they had structure, they had been drawn by shading the paper with the side of a pencil lead and the both looked familiar.

“Hey, Missy,” Rachel suddenly murmured, “ain’t those galaxies?”

The child looked up and smiled. “They’re the Milky Way, Auntie Rachel.”

The Sheriff reached over and pulled the notebook to her so that she could get a better look. There were two dots on the arms of each spiral... One dot was in the same place on both, but the second one was in a different place on each. She nodded. “Very good, Mari, but what are these dots for?”

The girl pointed at the blue dot that was in the same place in both pictures. “That’s where we live... The Sun, the Earth... All of the other planets and things...”

“And the other dots?” Melanie asked, already knowing what her daughter was going to say.

Mari-belle smiled. Oh, Mommy...” She pointed to the purple dot on the left hand page. “This is where the Cat ladies come from.”

“And this...” Rachel drawled pointing at the orange dot on the right hand drawing of the Milky Way... “Is where them thar tall ladies come from.”

Mari-belle smiled and nodded. “That’s right, Auntie Rachel, only it’s farther away so there’s not many of them here yet. But they are our friends.”

“How do you know all this, Honey?” Melanie asked, uneasily.

Mari-belle looked a little sheepish. “I just know, Mommy, I’ve known things ever since I saw the tall lady in school last Saturday. I don’t know how I know... I just do. The Tall lady is really nice, her friends will protect us from the cat-ladies. She says that they are really bad.”

Mel looked across at Rachel who shrugged and frowned. “Them putting things into her head ain’t no weirder than everything else that’s bin happenin’ ’round here.”

Melanie left to drive her daughter home shortly afterwards leaving Rachel to ponder just what was going on which left her with the distinct impression that she wasn’t going to get home tonight.

She was not wrong.