When she entered the room, my teacher left the door open a quarter-way. A sudden wind blew through the window and slammed the door shut, alarming both of us, and whoever else might have been living in her bedroom at the time. Seeing me, she shrugged her shoulders, and set down her handbag and parcels on the bed. Now was the time to unburden myself of everything, and to vent some of the misgivings I had concerning Holly’s most recent exploits. I felt that, possibly, she was endangering herself and forcing the denouement before its time—although how great a judge I was of the proper time of the Event I couldn’t say, not being part of her inner circle, whoever and wherever they might be. 

From the dresser-top across the room, I called to her: “Holly," I said. "I want to ask you something.”
She looked at me, stopped, and then bent back over her things, arranging clothes and accessories. “Go on.”
“This morning, I was cleaning downstairs, and I heard a noise coming from the end table.” 
I waited for her answer, but she went on packing and arranging. “There were two kids, a boy and a girl, inside. They’re still there.”
“Good.” She circled around and met my gaze. “Do you know who they are?”
"No, I don't.” 
“You don’t? I do.” She pulled in her skirts and, facing me, sat down on the bed. The bed springs groaned under her weight.
“Who are they?”
“Did you hear anything else last night, slave?”
This caught me off-balance, and for a moment I even felt guilty—though there was no clear reason why I should have felt so, because I wasn’t hiding anything from her. I heard myself say “Yes.”
“You did? Then why didn’t you tell me when I woke up?”
I remembered my reflection in the mirror, and had to force myself not to turn around to face that ghastly figure. “I had something else on my mind.”
“You did?” She chewed this over for a moment. “I want to talk about that later. What did you hear?”
“Voices. Men, it sounded like.”
“Saying what?”
“I couldn’t make out. I only heard them for a few seconds. Then they left, or stopped talking.”
“You didn’t hear anything they said?”
“No.”
“And you wonder whether they’re still in the house.”
“That, and—honestly—I don’t know what happened last night. It’s not my job to know, but my conscience is uneasy about it.”

Holly sneered at the word "conscience," but she told me everything I wanted to know. The kids—they were the darling children of the mayor. It was in our interest to distract for a few days the television stations and media, and all the upright, honest, citizens of the village with the news of their kidnapping.

The beating on the door last night, a half-hour after the deed itself, was incidental to the shrinking and abduction. It wasn't meant to happen. Neighbors eating dinner that night across the street had witnessed the two kids enter the house, and just happened to notice that they never came back out. Already with some cause to be suspicious of Ms. Holly and her daughter, they decided—a little buzzed from drinking on Halloween night—to pay a visit on the lady. If the kids were unharmed, they could pass it off as a Halloween prank, a scare in jest. If they were in there against their will, the men would threaten to summon the police in earnest. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t know what sort of outfit they were getting involved in, and the plan blew up in their face. Holly shrunk all four of them, and bottled them in an old milkbottle, a liter in volume, and buried them under the floorboards. I had, most likely, heard them talking during the night.

To show me, Holly got a screwdriver from the bed, and walked over to the edge of the carpet beside the dresser. She turned the handle a few times, and pried up a loose plank. Inside the hole, four men blinked against the daylight, and one by one, as their eyes adjusted, scrambled back to safety at the bottom of the bottle. Holly raised the thing up, and walked back to the bed. She twisted off the top, and then joggled the four men out. The last two were smart and, holding hands, pulled each other back against the glass sides, wedging themselves in. But Holly only had to poke her finger inside and twirl it around a little, and soon they too were dislodged. When I saw those four men on the bedspread, I realized—more clearly than I ever had before in the month leading up to that moment—I was partnered in a work I couldn’t back out of. Regardless of who started the work, it was now something that had taken on its own momentum, something that was pushing itself, and all of us with it, toward the end. 

After Holly had dropped them back in the jar, and sealed the lid, I told her that I had a strange dream the night before. I confessed to the thoughts that were troubling me—and shaking my trust in her—as I worked around the house that morning. The sight of a worn, half-starved, bone-white man in the mirror had almost shattered my confidence (and even my hope and resolution) in the whole enterprise.

She walked over to the dresser and picked me up. I wanted her to say, “I know I’ve been hard on you, and I’m sorry,” and then promise to change some things in the way we lived, alter the routine here and there so that I would come to resemble my old self—but she didn’t say that. 

“I can’t do anything for you,” she said. “We’re at a stage, now, where there is no turning back, and I’ll need your cooperation every inch of the way.” She sounded just like a business executive, and I’m sure that I had a pretty glum and disappointed look on my face. The look was involuntary, and  it was contagious: she caught it even before I realized I had it. But then her own lips creaked out something exactly between a grimace and smile. I saw the vast effort it took her to move her jaw muscles into that position. But she did it. She cranked out that look, and said: “Martin.”
“Yes.”
“How would you like to walk to City Hall with Adela and Meredith next Tuesday morning?”
“City Hall?”
"Tomorrow and Monday we’ll move some of our possessions, money and effects to a safer location, nearby. I won’t need your help with the moving—we don’t want others trailing us, so it will be a three-step process—but on Tuesday we force the issue here.”
“Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do,” I said, although I’m sure that my confusion showed in my face.
“Good. Tonight we’ll talk further,” she said, stowing the glass jar under the bed. “Now, about your job this afternoon.”

I released all of my pent-up frustration, that afternoon, in pleasuring my old teacher. Holly lubricated me in her mouth while fingering herself, and then jammed me into her twat, where I twisted around until she had her first orgasm. Then she took me out, and for the next half hour I did my accustomed work with new vigor and gusto. 

I’ll admit that it was the first time I took real pleasure in the task through all the time I was living with Holly as her slave. In fact, I enjoyed myself so much, that halfway in I was disappointed she didn’t restore me to my full height. Perhaps I loved it that time because, in both of us (but especially in me, because I was never privy to Holly’s plans, and all this information was fresh in my mind), there was a thrilling sense that the task was nearing its end. That the story was drawing to a close. It wasn’t, but it felt like it was.

When we were finally done, Holly napped for a little, and I settled down against her stomach and soon fell asleep. She breathed, calmly, in and out, and the warmth of her body, the motion of her breath, like the wide ocean under a tiny raft of palmwood, took me with her. If I had any dreams, I don’t remember them.

It's strange (on reflection) how sex has the power to transform violent and destructive impulses into something totally different, harmless, unhurried, something that feels like the huge void at the beginning of life itself. Yes, we would wake up, and the illusion of being early and new to everything in life, like all the peace in the world, would pass. Knowledge and memory always come back, but I think that this illusion in life is probably the best illusion of all. Unless that dream is the only reality, stolen by knowledge, in a few brief and fleeting moments of contentment, for life. 
 
When we woke up, it was late afternoon, and Holly swiveled off the bed to find her slippers under the bed with her feet. She pulled on her robe and left the room, while I stayed there, gazing absently at the dark orange glow of the sinking sun, coming through the window. Then everything began to crowd back into my mind: the horrors I’d seen and experienced firsthand, the plan, the kids, Meredith, and the four men in the bottle under the bed. My old, familiar mood returned as all these thought surfaced, and I tried to control my feelings. I was like a man in hell who dreamt for a while of some other eternity that wasn’t everlasting torment. Heaven, maybe. But I was in this for the long haul. 

As I was mulling over these things, Adela stalked in and flipped on the light. She crossed the room to the bed and dropped Meredith down beside me. She got on her knees. Cupping my head between her hands, she whispered one word, “Tomorrow.” Her breath was humid, and its warm condensation formed tiny droplets on my skin. She stood up and snapped the elastic of her panties sharply against her ass. A loud ‘flick’ echoed in the room, and stirred Meredith from her sleep. When I looked up again, Adela was at the door. She pivoted around, and stretched out the fabric between her asscheeks, turned to me over her shoulder, and sauntered out of the room. One forefinger to her lips, she shut the door behind her, silently.

Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turned around. Meredith had seen the end of the performance, and her eyes looked into mine with sympathy. We never even saw Holly come into the room.