SidaivaRevaso
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At 3:03am on December 25th, Nadia Ramirez woke to the sound of her phone buzzing on the nightstand. Only one person would call at this time, and it wasn’t Santa. With a groggy groan she reached for the phone and swiped right, putting it on speaker.
“Merry Christmas, Chief,” she said, swinging her legs out of bed and slipping her socked feet into slippers. If the Chief was calling at this hour, Nadia knew she wouldn’t be going back to bed.
“I hate to call you so late at night,” said the Chief, ignoring Nadia’s festive salutation, “but I’m afraid it’s urgent.”
“It always is,” said Nadia, sighing. She rubbed at her eyes and then grabbed for her watch. Her badge and gun were in a lockbox in the closet. In a moment she’d grab those too. “What is it this time?”
Even through the phone, the Chief’s voice retained its deep velvet resonance. “She’s struck again.”
Nadia felt a sudden surge of adrenaline. She was fully awake now. “You’re sure?”
“Positive. It’s the exact same… scene.”
“Nobody touches anything until I get there,” said Nadia, beginning to put her long brown hair into a ponytail. “Text me the address. I’m heading out now.”
“There’s one more thing, Ramirez.” The Chief paused for a beat. “We have a name. Not a real one, of course—not yet. But it’s the name she wants to be called, apparently.”
“How’d you get it?”
“It was left at the scene,” said the Chief, clearing his throat. “We found it written in Sharpie on the body of the victim. A signature, basically.”
“Well, what is it? What’s the name?”
“Lady Spectare. S-P-E-C-T-A-R-E. It’s a Latin word, I’m told. Means ‘to look at, to see, to watch.’ Assuming the spelling’s intentional, of course.”
Nadia responded immediately. “It’s intentional, Chief.”
“How do you know?”
“I can just sense it. I’ll know more when I get there, but if this second scene is anything like the first, I’m confident in saying this isn’t a woman who does things unintentionally. She’s more…” Nadia paused a moment, looking for the right word. “She’s more… particular.”
“Well, we’re already assuming she is a woman, so adding ‘particular’ to the description may be too hasty by half. But I’ll admit,” said the Chief, clearing his throat again, “whoever this Lady Spectare is, she certainly was particular about the location of her signature.”
Nadia had a feeling, but she asked anyway. “Where was it?”
“She wrote her name,” said the Chief, “on the soles of the victim’s feet.”
__________
Nadia stamped her boots, shaking loose the snow that clung to them. She had just arrived at the address the Chief had given her, and now she was surveying the building. It appeared to be a novelty shop of some sort, perhaps a costume store, decked out for the holidays.
Christmas lights twinkled in its window and the snow fell gently beyond the awning above it, hushing the city’s ambient noise. All manner of yuletide accoutrement were on display for the potential shoppers passing by, from artificial-spruce wreaths to candy-cane elf leggings and gaudy green jerseys, from Santa hats to Krampus masks. Someone had cut out paper snowflakes and pasted them to the window, and in the shadowed distance, deeper within the shop, stood a tree covered in streamers and ornaments. Strange place for Lady Spectare to strike, thought Nadia.
Upon walking inside, she was greeted by Isaiah Underwood, the forensics expert, who acknowledged her with a nod. “Detective.”
“Season’s greetings, Isaiah. Where’s the body?”
“In the back room. Looks like it used to be an office, but the furniture’s been rearranged.” Isaiah pulled pensively at his goatee. “It’s an odd scene, just like the one before. No traces, no discernible violence to the victim.”
Nadia remembered speaking with the coroner after the first incident, baffled to hear him claim the victim had died merely from fatigue, or from what he called “endorphin overload.” Isaiah seemed to be suggesting something similar had occurred here.
“Thanks, Isaiah. I’ll take a look now, but give me a few minutes in there alone, will you?”
Isaiah pulled again at his goatee. “Sure thing, Detective.”
Once he had asked his team to step outside, Nadia walked in and was treated to an immediately unnerving sight. Everything had been pushed to the walls except for a single table in the middle of the room, which was far larger than expected, allowing for ample space around the isolated table at its center. Upon this table lay a woman, spread-eagled and unmoving. Her wrists and ankles were bound by a complicated assortment of knotted ropes, and she was fully clothed—except for her feet, which were totally bare. Her boots and socks had been neatly arranged on the floor, under the base of the table.
Nadia felt a faint chill as she looked upon the woman’s helpless bare feet, so exposed to the world—and she suddenly recalled her quinceañera two decades ago, remembering the heat of embarrassment she’d felt during the ceremonial changing-of-the-shoes, when she had been forced by custom to sit and have her favorite sneakers and socks removed, replaced by gaudy sparkling heels. Nadia had never liked the princess treatment anyway, but in that moment she especially loathed having her feet out for all her friends and family to see. Thankfully, following the shoe-change, her long, many-layered dress had been sufficiently concealing, swishing along the floor as she danced the night away.
Now, gazing upon this bound, barefoot woman, Nadia felt a sharp spike of vulnerability, as if she herself were tied to the table. She winced and looked away, her cheeks reddening slightly. It was a childish reaction, she knew, and she could recall crime scenes far more distressing than the one before her now. Yet for some reason this particular scene had bypassed her hard-won defenses and rendered her sensitive as a rookie. She chided herself for this moment of weakness and turned back to the woman on the table, then walked up for a closer inspection.
She was a woman of South Asian descent, her brown skin dim under the faltering backroom lights, her face oddly beautiful in a rictus of curtailed exertion—and was that a smidge of delight lingering there on its surface? The mouth was agape, but Nadia had known mouths to take this shape in pleasure as well as in pain, and whether due to some play of light, or perhaps her own passing fancy, she found the woman’s nostrils to be flared, even now, in a decidedly titillated way.
These impressions unnerved Nadia but were logged quickly, and before long her eyes were drawn unavoidably to the woman’s bare feet, which stuck out as elements of this strange tableau for being so obviously the focus of her tormenter as well—for why else would Spectare have singled them out for unveiling, leaving the rest of the woman’s clothes undisturbed?
They were long slender feet with meaty soles and toes, and her nails were painted white, a color Nadia couldn’t help but admire for contrasting so nicely with her brown skin. Meanwhile her soles, slightly paler than the tops of her feet, had been signed with a black Sharpie in an elegant cursive script, with “Lady” on one foot and “Spectare” on the other.
It was as if Spectare had wanted to stake her claim on these feet, while also encouraging whoever found the woman to consider the implications of her doing so. Spectare obviously wanted the police to know her criminal kink was related to feet. She wanted to confront them with this fact.
So blatant an insight into Spectare’s purposes and desires was, to Nadia, destabilizing. She was accustomed to criminals hiding their motives. She was used to searching for them. But Spectare was broadcasting hers. Why? To what end?
Again, as during her phone call with the Chief, Nada had the instinctual sense that Spectare operated always with intention—but if the criminal’s focus were so immediately discernible in this room, it could also be a red herring. Or perhaps an altogether unsuspected desire motivated the baring of and attention to this woman’s feet—a desire that Nadia could only guess at, or could discover only by plumbing the depths of her own psychological frailties and idiosyncrasies.
Nadia’s head swam with possibilities, and as she mulled things over, she was forced to give considerably more attention to the subject of feet than she cared to, or normally would have. She was thankful to be distracted from the subject by Isaiah’s sudden return to the room, along with his team.
“Sorry, Detective,” he said. “It’s all the time I could give you.” He looked back to the doorway before continuing. “Chief’s here,” he whispered.
As if on cue, the Chief swept into the room. Despite the hour, his uniform was pressed and pristine, as always. He cleared his throat and all eyes turned his way, though when he spoke, he addressed only Nadia.
“Ramirez,” he said, not so much greeting Nadia as acknowledging her presence. “The woman’s name is Freida,” he continued. “… was Freida. Owned the shop. No none enemies. Upstanding member of the community.” He turned to survey the scene. “What do you make of it all?”
Nadia took a quick breath. She had some ideas, but they weren’t all ready for airing. Most of them were quite strange, in fact. She decided to keep them to herself, at least for now. “With most crime scenes,” she offered, “you have the obvious and the not-so-obvious. This one seems to have only the obvious. And that’s what concerns me.”
“You’re not paid to be concerned,” responded the Chief. “I need more than that.”
“There’s only one thing I know for sure.”
“What’s that?”
“The next time Spectare strikes,” she said, “we won’t be able to keep it quiet. I think she’s beginning to develop a taste for the dramatic.”
__________
When Mayor Lucine Valharian finally came to, she realized she couldn’t move her limbs.
What followed was a futile frenzy of fear, a desperate straining, but quickly her fear turned to self-recrimination as she chastised herself for banishing her security detail to go for a solo night run. Stealing away in this fashion had become one of her recent, rebellious pleasures, a rare luxury to be cherished when possible, and she had jumped at the opportunity on this particular night, a Friday at the end of a particularly straining week.
But now look at me, she thought. All too vaguely did she recall the hand wrapping around her face as she ran in the secluded city park, the cloth enclosing around her mouth, the scent of noxious fumes. Where am I?
Her head was mobile but her mouth was gagged, and in time she realized she lay spread-eagled on a table, her wrists and ankles bound by ropes tight against her skin.
She was not blindfolded, so she looked around and tried to take in her surroundings. She was in a bare, shadowed room, with a number of more substantial shadows positioned in a circle around her, but her eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness enough to see them clearly. She could, however, move her head enough to peer down the length of the table and spot the tips of her white running shoes, which stood out a bit more in the darkness. Recognizing these shoes, this familiar image, seemed to goad her perceptive faculties into working a bit more assertively, and soon she realized that the substantial shadows around her were people, and she was about to scream when she heard a velvet voice slink through the air and into her ears.
“Tsk, tsk, Madame Mayor. A figure of your station shouldn’t be running alone. What would we do if our one of most precious representatives suddenly… disappeared?”
Lucine couldn’t see where the voice was coming from, but in looking for it she realized that the people around her, standing stiffly in a circle, comprised a cadre of unsmiling women, all of whom wore dark sunglasses and held mobility canes. But the voice wasn’t issuing from any of these women, for none of them had opened a mouth or even moved at all.
“Though I do enjoy women who keep in shape. They struggle so deliciously.”
Suddenly, as if materializing from the ether, a woman emerged from the shadows, slipping between two of the unsmiling sentries and then finally into view.
Lucine was floored by what she saw, and she tracked the woman as she made a slow circuit around the table, seemingly modeling for her captive.
And she was certainly a vision: slender with curves, clad in an elegant, open-back, high slit white gown with a plunging v-neckline and halterneck styling. She wore long black boots, black gloves, and—most eye-catching of all—a Venetian mask made of black resin, with what appeared to be a metal breathing apparatus around the mouth. The apparatus consisted of two fan sections with a grate on the chin and red wiring in between, so that she looked like a wolf still dripping blood from a recent kill. An ornate design ran around the edges of the mask, down the forehead, and around the eyes, and the mask itself seemed to be held to her head with a pair of rubber straps, attached around the back with metal buckles—and when Lucine spotted a small silver lock dangling from the buckle of the top strap, she wondered whether it secured the mask or served a purely decorative purpose. The woman wore a black balaclava underneath the mask itself, so that Lucine could not see any of her head or hair, and while the eyes of the mask were made of some dark, transparent acrylic, the woman had added an odd element to the whole ensemble: a gleaming silver monocle, placed over her left eye.
She moved with easy feline grace and her boot heels clacked against the floor, giving her slow circuit an underlying rhythm and causing Lucine to fall into something of a trance, even as she felt the surround-sound of palpable dread beginning to suffuse the room.
Lucine was therefore startled when she felt the satin of a gloved finger as it delicately grazed her cheek. She hadn’t realized the woman now stood directly to her right.
“Let’s get rid of this, shall we?” The woman undid Lucine’s gag and tossed it to one of her henchwomen, who caught it and hid it from view, behind her back. Were the henchwomen actually blind or merely dressed that way?
Rid of her gag, Lucine’s first response was to cough and sputter. Then she screamed as loud as she could. It was a piercing, desperate noise.
The masked woman made no movement to stop Lucine’s wailing. In fact, her posture indicated a degree of amusement, and Lucine actually wondered if she might be smiling underneath the mask.
“Make as much noise as you like,” the woman said. “The room is soundproofed and nobody will hear you. Actually,” she continued, “it was you, Mayor Valharian, who directed it to be soundproofed. You did so upon taking office. We are, after all, in one of the conference rooms down the hall from where you signed the contract.”
Lucine looked around again and this time could discern that the room was indeed one of the many on the same floor as her office in city hall. Aside from the table on which she lay, all of the furniture had been removed, however, and the walls seemed to have been painted black. Some of the overhead lights had been removed as well.
“Though for reasons of feng shui,” said the masked woman, “we did made a few adjustments. Appearances are important, after all.”
Upon saying this, the woman stroked Lucine’s cheek with the back of her hand. Lucine twisted her head violently and tried to bite the woman’s hand, but it was pulled away before Lucine could succeed in imparting any pain.
“The gag,” continued the woman, seemingly unbothered, “was a capitulation to appearances as well. I like to at least see my victim’s gagged, however briefly—even if, in the end, I do wish to hear their cries of agony.”
Lucine screamed again—a vicious, wordless, feral yell.
“Moreover,” continued the woman, calmly, “I wish to hear not only the sound of your pleas but also their substance. Articulations of anguish can be so beautiful, sometimes. I do wonder what you have in store for us. Thus far your noises have been far from literate, but the night is still young.”
Lucine was beginning to feel the desolation of her situation, and the masked woman’s nonchalant attitude toward her screaming had been sufficiently unnerving to move her toward another tactic.
“What the hell do you want, lady?” Lucine snarled through gritted teeth. “This isn’t gonna end well for you once my security detail gets wind of my disappearance. In fact, they’re probably already on your trail. And you brought me here? To city hall? You’re obviously not so bright, lady. In a moment this place’ll be swarming with police and you’ll be trapped. The way I see it, your best—your only—option is to let me go and pray for the mercy of the courts.”
“It’s Lady Spectare, if you please,” responded the masked woman. “And I’m always so bored by this stage of things. The bluster. The bartering. The rationalizing. Shall we proceed to the next stage?”
At once, two of the henchwomen stepped forward and moved to the base of the table. They reached out and, with remarkably adroit fingers, began unlacing Lucine’s running shoes.
“What the hell are you creeps doing?!” Lucine tried twisting her feet away from the women but failed to achieve her goal. Meanwhile, they continued their work as Spectare looked on. In moments the shoes were unlaced and being tugged from Lucine’s feet.
“Don’t you dare take my shoes off! Hey—what?! What are you doing?!”
The women were now gripping the tops of Lucine’s socks, fingers gaining purchase on the elastic bands. Slowly, the socks began to slide off her feet. Her pale heels were soon exposed, followed by her subtle arches and the delicate balls of her feet. She scrunched her toes and tried to cling to the socks as they were pulled off, but it was to no effect, and with a final tug the socks were gone and Mayor Lucine Valharian’s bare feet were totally exposed, her toes left wiggling in the air.
For Lucine, a woman of power and self-possession who had risen through the political ranks through aggression and savvy, it was a humiliating experience to find herself so incapable of influencing events in any way. For someone accustomed to taking action and directing others to do her bidding, having her feet bared against her will was embarrassing not only on the face of it—as a brute fact of her reality—but also for its implications. Indeed, it forced her to confront the possibility of an abiding impotence lurking beneath her life of competence and control.
But she had long ago learned the importance of projecting confidence and rejecting weakness—and so, falling back on her training, she responded to the situation by adopting the comfortable guise of combative bravado, directing it at Spectare.
“What are you, some kind of foot freak? You get off on looking at feet, is that it? Well get a good look while you can, and think back to this moment when you’re rotting in a jail cell!”
The two henchwomen stepped back into the circle, and Spectare walked over to the base of the table, where they had just been standing.
“Yes,” said Spectare, mildly. “I am a foot freak—though I prefer the term ‘connoisseur.’ Words matter, Madame Mayor, just as appearances do. And I believe you understand my meaning, judging by the appearance of these feet.” She took a deep breath and exhaled audibly. “Exquisite, simply exquisite.”
Exquisite? The word threw Lucine for a loop. She was, to be fair, vaguely aware that her feet might be attractive, at least in comparison to those of other women, though she had never put much stock into the notion. None of her lovers had paid inordinate attention to them, and she had only ever treated herself to regular pedicures because it seemed befitting of a woman in the public eye. Currently her nails were painted a gleaming silver, and having just yesterday been to the spa, she knew the pillow-softness of her feet—but also how warm and aromatic they must be from being enclosed in socks and shoes during her run. It disgusted her to think of Spectare getting off on this.
“You really are a freak… and by the way, that’s not a good thing. I can’t wait to read what they write about you in the papers. You’re gonna get absolutely—”
“Excuse me,” said Spectare, cutting Lucine off. “Before we go any further,” she declared, “I must pay tribute to the beauty of these feet,” and with that she bent down to kiss the soles before her.
When she did, Lucine felt the bracing sensation of cold metal against her sensitive skin, for Spectare had not removed her mask to kiss her feet.
Lucine was shuddering long after Spectare had pulled away, still reeling from the unwelcome experience of contact with the mask’s peculiar breathing apparatus.
Then she felt Spectare’s gloved hands run softly along the tops of her feet, a satiny sensation that unnerved Lucine greatly, though she couldn’t ignore the curious quickening within her.
“Don’t you DARE touch my feet, you weirdo!” She tried to bend and curl her feet away from Spectare’s touch, but her bindings made this impossible, and the masked woman continued to run her gloved hands ever so lightly over Lucine’s sensitive skin. The fabric of the gloves was unfamiliar enough to cause small spasms of involuntary movement, and Lucine wished the woman would stop touching her. She bit her lip and unsuccessfully tried to keep still. The struggle seemed only to encourage Spectare, and before long Lucine was openly flexing her feet and splaying her toes in a fitful attempt to evade the gloved hands of her captor.
The effort amounted to very little and became more unmanageable by the moment, and soon she was desperate. She wanted to yell at Spectare, to belittle her, but she suspected that, if she opened her mouth, all that would come out would be little girlish giggles—totally undermining her pose of bravado. She knew she had to keep playing tough.
“Get away…from my feet… you creep! Who… the hell… would be into FEET?!”
This she screamed at Spectare, and though she struggled to get the words out without breaking into peals of laughter, it seemed to have some effect, for the woman suddenly straightened and drew her hands back.
“Oh, Lucine,” said Spectare. “If only you could see your feet as I do,” and as she spoke she ran her index finger gently along the edge of her monocle. Through some sort of mystic conduction, Lucine felt the passage of Spectare’s finger as if it were running along the arch of her right foot, which she involuntarily flexed and wriggled.
Spectare observed this with interest, slightly tilting her head. “Ticklish, my dear?”
It was a rhetorical question, of course, since Lucine’s feet had already proven to be deeply sensitive to Spectare’s touch. But when Lucine heard the word ticklish spoken out loud, she experienced a newfound dread. It seemed to confirm a fate until then unsecured, and she felt at once a sinking sensation, as if the table were slowly wilting in response to the added weight of her foreboding.
Then, seemingly unbidden, or perhaps responding to some obscure signal, one of the henchwomen strode forward, producing from her pocket a long blue feather. She cupped the feather in her palm and offered it to Spectare, who took the feather and held it up to the feeble light. She seemed to be inspecting the object, determining its viability. Then, with precious little ceremony, she brought it down and began to run it over the soles of Lucine’s feet.
Lucine jerked as if she’d been electrified, her sensitive skin tickled unbearably by the wispy fibers. She could barely move due to the bindings, but she thrashed as much as she could, tittering and cursing as she did.
Spectare’s response was only to tickle her harder. Her masked face remained expressionless, impassive to Lucine’s desperate wriggles and muffled pleas for mercy. Lucine squealed “Oh god, oh god no no no!” as Spectare’s gloved fingers swished the feather up and down the soles of her flailing feet. The feather scurried and skittered along Lucine’s narrow arches and in the soft areas under her toes, which she curled and uncurled, causing the soles to wrinkle beautifully. Ticklish tremors wracked her body as the feather caressed her flesh.
“Please!!! Stop tickling my feet! I can’t take it! I’m begging you!”
Yet Spectare continued to drag the feather along Lucine’s soles, doing so without respite or pity. For unending minutes she tested her captive’s endurance, seeking the limits of her will.
Eventually, with unexpected suddenness, she relented. She raised her gloved hand and dropped the feather to the ground, not deigning to look as she did. It began a slow, winding descent, and a henchwoman stepped forward to collect it gingerly in her palm.
This choreography complete, Spectare looked upon her heaving, gasping captive, her gloved hand still lingering effetely in the air. Lucine’s eyes were drawn to that raised hand, enraptured by its subtle shape and conspicuous poise, and all too late she determined the import of this gesture, this pause.
Keeping that hand raised, Spectare brought her other over, and began with luxurious slowness to pluck each finger of the glove until it had loosened discernibly; and then she began to pull it off with maddening delicacy, allowing the soft fabric to drift along her skin and off her long fingers, which she fluttered in the air once revealed. Lucine felt a small gush of fearful arousal as she viewed this unexpectedly sensual display, imagining the fabric dragging against her own sensitive skin while noting the comely shape of Spectare’s fingers and the glossy black of her elegant nails. At the same time she experienced a pang of anxiety, suspecting what these lovely fingers intended.
And then, without any further preliminaries, Spectare brought her hand down to Lucine’s feet and set her fingers scurrying and skittering along Lucine’s arches, tracing intricate patterns of ticklish torture, generating gales of wild laughter and full-body buckles.
Lucine’s utterances were hilariously distressed and inarticulate. “NOOOOOOOO GOD NO NO, AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO!!!”
Words caught in her throat, spit dribbled down her cheek, tears streamed from her eyes. Her pretty feet juddered in all directions, obeying an imposed movement of spirit.
Spectare presided over it all with a quiet serenity, being a seasoned conductor of such tortuous symphonies. Yet she leaned ever farther forward, bending almost imperceptibly toward the quivering feet below her, and her fingers danced more and more rapidly along the pillow soft soles, even as they delved into unexplored crevices between each of the silver toes.
Lucine had never felt so vulnerable, so exposed to the guiding forces of a wicked cosmos. She felt at the mercy of some god, one eager to remind her of her meager place in the scope of things. Hopelessly she submitted to this god, and as her will drained away she felt a strange and unexpected ecstasy welling up from deep within. Strands of sweaty, matted hair stuck to her face now, and her breathing had quickened to a throbbing, shuddering pace. There was a warmth developing inside her, spreading from her pussy outwards, and she began to twitch and moan. She began to imagine Spectare’s fingers as tongues lapping against her soles, pressing against and in between each toe, finding her most precious spots and applying pressure to each, until she was drenched in cascading waves of tingling pleasure.
The force of this fantasy was such that Lucine failed to realize that Spectare had long ago ceased her tickling efforts, and was now crouched by Lucine’s left ear, and was whispering into it sonorous incantations. These succeeded in carrying Lucine to a fever-pitch of delectation, but a final gesture was needed to push her fully over the edge.
And so Spectare removed her silver monocle and placed it over Lucine’s left eye. “May your pleasure be prolonged,” she whispered, and then she drew away.
When Lucine looked through Spectare’s monocle she experienced an immediate, dizzying fall, a sudden lurching descent, and soon the unendurable, ticklish sensation at her feet had transferred directly to her left eye. Phantom fingers swept across its delicate surface, sending it into hysterics of visual hallucination. She witnessed a series of irrepressible images, each passing by with convulsive rapidity: fitful stars bursting into reams of scattered white light; broiling plasma being poured down into dark cosmic clefts; hybrid monsters of the psyche loosed from her own private absorptions and petty compulsions. This phantasmagoria stroked the tender surface of her eye, and she began to feel a desperate yearning for release; and yet the phantom fingers continued to swim and ripple, tease and tickle; and soon they were discovering her secret joys and horrors, rendering her utterly exposed and helpless; and then she felt a searing surge of physical heat; and she was weeping now, dissolving in intolerable pleasure; and finally a great dark nothingness overwhelmed her, and she saw no more.
__________
The mayor’s mysterious death sent shockwaves through the city, but within the police ranks there was additional consternation—for they had discovered, at the crime scene, a thumb drive containing a single recording. Along with the digital forensics team, Nadia and the Chief were the first to view it.
When it began, Nadia had been immediately struck by the strange tableau on screen: a masked woman, clad in an elegant white dress, sitting with her black boots planted on a desk in the mayor’s office, surrounded by a group of women in dark sunglasses. This was obviously Lady Spectare and her retinue. Nadia felt a chill of recognition, and perhaps something else besides.
“Do not look for me,” spoke Spectare to the camera, her voice a sibilant coo, a tender caress. “Avoid even the urge to glimpse what you so desperately seek.”
At this point she swept her boots from the table, bringing them to the floor. “Do not pursue what you wish to see. The very urge gives your eyes to me.”
As she continued to speak, the camera zoomed in slowly to center her cleavage, bare shoulders, and masked visage. For someone so against vision, thought Nadia, she sure goes to great lengths to attract attention. Yet what a striking woman…
“Sight is a burden,” continued Spectare. “Only the damned are beholden to vision. It holds us in thrall. Release yourself from its clutches. Cease to look. Abandon sight. Pleasure lies not in seeing but in its prohibition.”
Nadia heard Spectare’s words but only faintly; she was too enraptured by the woman’s appearance—by her mask in particular. Why did she wear it? What might it hide?
“Look no further,” Spectare advised. “You are unprepared to witness what a visionary like me is given to see. It would bring you to your knees. Your instinct would be to flee. But by then it would be too late, for you will have seen what never should be.”
Nadia recalled Freida, the South Asian woman’s face, the vague pleasure frozen on its surface. Was that really the face of someone who had regretted seeing what she did? Surely not. Surely not. Surely. Not. Surely… not…
Unwillingly, Nadia found herself slipping into a shallow oblivion of mingled impressions and inchoate feelings, carried along in a lazy stream of Spectare’s enigmatic exhortations and her own mental foibles. In this gently coursing water she floated, feeling immersed in a fluid, connected world, on the verge of some great insight, but then she experienced the sensation of being tossed to and fro between the banks of the stream, thrust suddenly from one side to the other— and as she careened she realized with a start that she was being shaken, shaken not in this wispy dreamworld but in reality.
It was, she discovered, the Chief rousing her from this strange reverie.
“Ramirez!” he exclaimed, his hand gripped on Nadia’s shoulder. “Look alive, Ramirez. What’s up with you?”
Nadia blinked several times and slowly re-adjusted to her surroundings.
“Uh, sorry, Chief. Not sure what happened there,” she said, shaking her head and rising from her seat. “I think I just drifted off or something.”
He looked at her questioningly. “I need you sharp, Ramirez. Go home and get some sleep. Come back tomorrow. We’ve got a lot to unpack here with this video. If Spectare can get to the mayor, damnit, who knows who she’ll target next!”
__________
On her way back home, Nadia passed by a women’s clothing shop and had the uncanny experience of seeing her reflection in the window briefly superimposed on the image of a stylishly garbed mannequin. The mannequin had been dressed in a sultry white gown and long black boots, and its face was featureless and blank. For a moment, just a fleeting moment, she felt a tug toward blissful vacancy, toward a featureless world of unseeing advance.
But then she steadied herself, violently shaking the superimposed image from her head, and as she continued down the street, still somewhat dazed, she tried to make sense of this odd occurrence.
By the time she reached her front door, she had decided to read the moment as a sign of some strange, developing kinship with Lady Spectare—a connection yet to be fully ratified or even vaguely understood, but one that would need to be accepted and explored if the masked woman were to be brought out of the shadows and into the all-seeing light, exposed to the world just like her victims.
And this, Nadia realized, had become her goal, what she now desperately craved: Spectare’s revelation, a glimpse at the woman under that carefully arranged veneer.
“Merry Christmas, Chief,” she said, swinging her legs out of bed and slipping her socked feet into slippers. If the Chief was calling at this hour, Nadia knew she wouldn’t be going back to bed.
“I hate to call you so late at night,” said the Chief, ignoring Nadia’s festive salutation, “but I’m afraid it’s urgent.”
“It always is,” said Nadia, sighing. She rubbed at her eyes and then grabbed for her watch. Her badge and gun were in a lockbox in the closet. In a moment she’d grab those too. “What is it this time?”
Even through the phone, the Chief’s voice retained its deep velvet resonance. “She’s struck again.”
Nadia felt a sudden surge of adrenaline. She was fully awake now. “You’re sure?”
“Positive. It’s the exact same… scene.”
“Nobody touches anything until I get there,” said Nadia, beginning to put her long brown hair into a ponytail. “Text me the address. I’m heading out now.”
“There’s one more thing, Ramirez.” The Chief paused for a beat. “We have a name. Not a real one, of course—not yet. But it’s the name she wants to be called, apparently.”
“How’d you get it?”
“It was left at the scene,” said the Chief, clearing his throat. “We found it written in Sharpie on the body of the victim. A signature, basically.”
“Well, what is it? What’s the name?”
“Lady Spectare. S-P-E-C-T-A-R-E. It’s a Latin word, I’m told. Means ‘to look at, to see, to watch.’ Assuming the spelling’s intentional, of course.”
Nadia responded immediately. “It’s intentional, Chief.”
“How do you know?”
“I can just sense it. I’ll know more when I get there, but if this second scene is anything like the first, I’m confident in saying this isn’t a woman who does things unintentionally. She’s more…” Nadia paused a moment, looking for the right word. “She’s more… particular.”
“Well, we’re already assuming she is a woman, so adding ‘particular’ to the description may be too hasty by half. But I’ll admit,” said the Chief, clearing his throat again, “whoever this Lady Spectare is, she certainly was particular about the location of her signature.”
Nadia had a feeling, but she asked anyway. “Where was it?”
“She wrote her name,” said the Chief, “on the soles of the victim’s feet.”
__________
Nadia stamped her boots, shaking loose the snow that clung to them. She had just arrived at the address the Chief had given her, and now she was surveying the building. It appeared to be a novelty shop of some sort, perhaps a costume store, decked out for the holidays.
Christmas lights twinkled in its window and the snow fell gently beyond the awning above it, hushing the city’s ambient noise. All manner of yuletide accoutrement were on display for the potential shoppers passing by, from artificial-spruce wreaths to candy-cane elf leggings and gaudy green jerseys, from Santa hats to Krampus masks. Someone had cut out paper snowflakes and pasted them to the window, and in the shadowed distance, deeper within the shop, stood a tree covered in streamers and ornaments. Strange place for Lady Spectare to strike, thought Nadia.
Upon walking inside, she was greeted by Isaiah Underwood, the forensics expert, who acknowledged her with a nod. “Detective.”
“Season’s greetings, Isaiah. Where’s the body?”
“In the back room. Looks like it used to be an office, but the furniture’s been rearranged.” Isaiah pulled pensively at his goatee. “It’s an odd scene, just like the one before. No traces, no discernible violence to the victim.”
Nadia remembered speaking with the coroner after the first incident, baffled to hear him claim the victim had died merely from fatigue, or from what he called “endorphin overload.” Isaiah seemed to be suggesting something similar had occurred here.
“Thanks, Isaiah. I’ll take a look now, but give me a few minutes in there alone, will you?”
Isaiah pulled again at his goatee. “Sure thing, Detective.”
Once he had asked his team to step outside, Nadia walked in and was treated to an immediately unnerving sight. Everything had been pushed to the walls except for a single table in the middle of the room, which was far larger than expected, allowing for ample space around the isolated table at its center. Upon this table lay a woman, spread-eagled and unmoving. Her wrists and ankles were bound by a complicated assortment of knotted ropes, and she was fully clothed—except for her feet, which were totally bare. Her boots and socks had been neatly arranged on the floor, under the base of the table.
Nadia felt a faint chill as she looked upon the woman’s helpless bare feet, so exposed to the world—and she suddenly recalled her quinceañera two decades ago, remembering the heat of embarrassment she’d felt during the ceremonial changing-of-the-shoes, when she had been forced by custom to sit and have her favorite sneakers and socks removed, replaced by gaudy sparkling heels. Nadia had never liked the princess treatment anyway, but in that moment she especially loathed having her feet out for all her friends and family to see. Thankfully, following the shoe-change, her long, many-layered dress had been sufficiently concealing, swishing along the floor as she danced the night away.
Now, gazing upon this bound, barefoot woman, Nadia felt a sharp spike of vulnerability, as if she herself were tied to the table. She winced and looked away, her cheeks reddening slightly. It was a childish reaction, she knew, and she could recall crime scenes far more distressing than the one before her now. Yet for some reason this particular scene had bypassed her hard-won defenses and rendered her sensitive as a rookie. She chided herself for this moment of weakness and turned back to the woman on the table, then walked up for a closer inspection.
She was a woman of South Asian descent, her brown skin dim under the faltering backroom lights, her face oddly beautiful in a rictus of curtailed exertion—and was that a smidge of delight lingering there on its surface? The mouth was agape, but Nadia had known mouths to take this shape in pleasure as well as in pain, and whether due to some play of light, or perhaps her own passing fancy, she found the woman’s nostrils to be flared, even now, in a decidedly titillated way.
These impressions unnerved Nadia but were logged quickly, and before long her eyes were drawn unavoidably to the woman’s bare feet, which stuck out as elements of this strange tableau for being so obviously the focus of her tormenter as well—for why else would Spectare have singled them out for unveiling, leaving the rest of the woman’s clothes undisturbed?
They were long slender feet with meaty soles and toes, and her nails were painted white, a color Nadia couldn’t help but admire for contrasting so nicely with her brown skin. Meanwhile her soles, slightly paler than the tops of her feet, had been signed with a black Sharpie in an elegant cursive script, with “Lady” on one foot and “Spectare” on the other.
It was as if Spectare had wanted to stake her claim on these feet, while also encouraging whoever found the woman to consider the implications of her doing so. Spectare obviously wanted the police to know her criminal kink was related to feet. She wanted to confront them with this fact.
So blatant an insight into Spectare’s purposes and desires was, to Nadia, destabilizing. She was accustomed to criminals hiding their motives. She was used to searching for them. But Spectare was broadcasting hers. Why? To what end?
Again, as during her phone call with the Chief, Nada had the instinctual sense that Spectare operated always with intention—but if the criminal’s focus were so immediately discernible in this room, it could also be a red herring. Or perhaps an altogether unsuspected desire motivated the baring of and attention to this woman’s feet—a desire that Nadia could only guess at, or could discover only by plumbing the depths of her own psychological frailties and idiosyncrasies.
Nadia’s head swam with possibilities, and as she mulled things over, she was forced to give considerably more attention to the subject of feet than she cared to, or normally would have. She was thankful to be distracted from the subject by Isaiah’s sudden return to the room, along with his team.
“Sorry, Detective,” he said. “It’s all the time I could give you.” He looked back to the doorway before continuing. “Chief’s here,” he whispered.
As if on cue, the Chief swept into the room. Despite the hour, his uniform was pressed and pristine, as always. He cleared his throat and all eyes turned his way, though when he spoke, he addressed only Nadia.
“Ramirez,” he said, not so much greeting Nadia as acknowledging her presence. “The woman’s name is Freida,” he continued. “… was Freida. Owned the shop. No none enemies. Upstanding member of the community.” He turned to survey the scene. “What do you make of it all?”
Nadia took a quick breath. She had some ideas, but they weren’t all ready for airing. Most of them were quite strange, in fact. She decided to keep them to herself, at least for now. “With most crime scenes,” she offered, “you have the obvious and the not-so-obvious. This one seems to have only the obvious. And that’s what concerns me.”
“You’re not paid to be concerned,” responded the Chief. “I need more than that.”
“There’s only one thing I know for sure.”
“What’s that?”
“The next time Spectare strikes,” she said, “we won’t be able to keep it quiet. I think she’s beginning to develop a taste for the dramatic.”
__________
When Mayor Lucine Valharian finally came to, she realized she couldn’t move her limbs.
What followed was a futile frenzy of fear, a desperate straining, but quickly her fear turned to self-recrimination as she chastised herself for banishing her security detail to go for a solo night run. Stealing away in this fashion had become one of her recent, rebellious pleasures, a rare luxury to be cherished when possible, and she had jumped at the opportunity on this particular night, a Friday at the end of a particularly straining week.
But now look at me, she thought. All too vaguely did she recall the hand wrapping around her face as she ran in the secluded city park, the cloth enclosing around her mouth, the scent of noxious fumes. Where am I?
Her head was mobile but her mouth was gagged, and in time she realized she lay spread-eagled on a table, her wrists and ankles bound by ropes tight against her skin.
She was not blindfolded, so she looked around and tried to take in her surroundings. She was in a bare, shadowed room, with a number of more substantial shadows positioned in a circle around her, but her eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness enough to see them clearly. She could, however, move her head enough to peer down the length of the table and spot the tips of her white running shoes, which stood out a bit more in the darkness. Recognizing these shoes, this familiar image, seemed to goad her perceptive faculties into working a bit more assertively, and soon she realized that the substantial shadows around her were people, and she was about to scream when she heard a velvet voice slink through the air and into her ears.
“Tsk, tsk, Madame Mayor. A figure of your station shouldn’t be running alone. What would we do if our one of most precious representatives suddenly… disappeared?”
Lucine couldn’t see where the voice was coming from, but in looking for it she realized that the people around her, standing stiffly in a circle, comprised a cadre of unsmiling women, all of whom wore dark sunglasses and held mobility canes. But the voice wasn’t issuing from any of these women, for none of them had opened a mouth or even moved at all.
“Though I do enjoy women who keep in shape. They struggle so deliciously.”
Suddenly, as if materializing from the ether, a woman emerged from the shadows, slipping between two of the unsmiling sentries and then finally into view.
Lucine was floored by what she saw, and she tracked the woman as she made a slow circuit around the table, seemingly modeling for her captive.
And she was certainly a vision: slender with curves, clad in an elegant, open-back, high slit white gown with a plunging v-neckline and halterneck styling. She wore long black boots, black gloves, and—most eye-catching of all—a Venetian mask made of black resin, with what appeared to be a metal breathing apparatus around the mouth. The apparatus consisted of two fan sections with a grate on the chin and red wiring in between, so that she looked like a wolf still dripping blood from a recent kill. An ornate design ran around the edges of the mask, down the forehead, and around the eyes, and the mask itself seemed to be held to her head with a pair of rubber straps, attached around the back with metal buckles—and when Lucine spotted a small silver lock dangling from the buckle of the top strap, she wondered whether it secured the mask or served a purely decorative purpose. The woman wore a black balaclava underneath the mask itself, so that Lucine could not see any of her head or hair, and while the eyes of the mask were made of some dark, transparent acrylic, the woman had added an odd element to the whole ensemble: a gleaming silver monocle, placed over her left eye.
She moved with easy feline grace and her boot heels clacked against the floor, giving her slow circuit an underlying rhythm and causing Lucine to fall into something of a trance, even as she felt the surround-sound of palpable dread beginning to suffuse the room.
Lucine was therefore startled when she felt the satin of a gloved finger as it delicately grazed her cheek. She hadn’t realized the woman now stood directly to her right.
“Let’s get rid of this, shall we?” The woman undid Lucine’s gag and tossed it to one of her henchwomen, who caught it and hid it from view, behind her back. Were the henchwomen actually blind or merely dressed that way?
Rid of her gag, Lucine’s first response was to cough and sputter. Then she screamed as loud as she could. It was a piercing, desperate noise.
The masked woman made no movement to stop Lucine’s wailing. In fact, her posture indicated a degree of amusement, and Lucine actually wondered if she might be smiling underneath the mask.
“Make as much noise as you like,” the woman said. “The room is soundproofed and nobody will hear you. Actually,” she continued, “it was you, Mayor Valharian, who directed it to be soundproofed. You did so upon taking office. We are, after all, in one of the conference rooms down the hall from where you signed the contract.”
Lucine looked around again and this time could discern that the room was indeed one of the many on the same floor as her office in city hall. Aside from the table on which she lay, all of the furniture had been removed, however, and the walls seemed to have been painted black. Some of the overhead lights had been removed as well.
“Though for reasons of feng shui,” said the masked woman, “we did made a few adjustments. Appearances are important, after all.”
Upon saying this, the woman stroked Lucine’s cheek with the back of her hand. Lucine twisted her head violently and tried to bite the woman’s hand, but it was pulled away before Lucine could succeed in imparting any pain.
“The gag,” continued the woman, seemingly unbothered, “was a capitulation to appearances as well. I like to at least see my victim’s gagged, however briefly—even if, in the end, I do wish to hear their cries of agony.”
Lucine screamed again—a vicious, wordless, feral yell.
“Moreover,” continued the woman, calmly, “I wish to hear not only the sound of your pleas but also their substance. Articulations of anguish can be so beautiful, sometimes. I do wonder what you have in store for us. Thus far your noises have been far from literate, but the night is still young.”
Lucine was beginning to feel the desolation of her situation, and the masked woman’s nonchalant attitude toward her screaming had been sufficiently unnerving to move her toward another tactic.
“What the hell do you want, lady?” Lucine snarled through gritted teeth. “This isn’t gonna end well for you once my security detail gets wind of my disappearance. In fact, they’re probably already on your trail. And you brought me here? To city hall? You’re obviously not so bright, lady. In a moment this place’ll be swarming with police and you’ll be trapped. The way I see it, your best—your only—option is to let me go and pray for the mercy of the courts.”
“It’s Lady Spectare, if you please,” responded the masked woman. “And I’m always so bored by this stage of things. The bluster. The bartering. The rationalizing. Shall we proceed to the next stage?”
At once, two of the henchwomen stepped forward and moved to the base of the table. They reached out and, with remarkably adroit fingers, began unlacing Lucine’s running shoes.
“What the hell are you creeps doing?!” Lucine tried twisting her feet away from the women but failed to achieve her goal. Meanwhile, they continued their work as Spectare looked on. In moments the shoes were unlaced and being tugged from Lucine’s feet.
“Don’t you dare take my shoes off! Hey—what?! What are you doing?!”
The women were now gripping the tops of Lucine’s socks, fingers gaining purchase on the elastic bands. Slowly, the socks began to slide off her feet. Her pale heels were soon exposed, followed by her subtle arches and the delicate balls of her feet. She scrunched her toes and tried to cling to the socks as they were pulled off, but it was to no effect, and with a final tug the socks were gone and Mayor Lucine Valharian’s bare feet were totally exposed, her toes left wiggling in the air.
For Lucine, a woman of power and self-possession who had risen through the political ranks through aggression and savvy, it was a humiliating experience to find herself so incapable of influencing events in any way. For someone accustomed to taking action and directing others to do her bidding, having her feet bared against her will was embarrassing not only on the face of it—as a brute fact of her reality—but also for its implications. Indeed, it forced her to confront the possibility of an abiding impotence lurking beneath her life of competence and control.
But she had long ago learned the importance of projecting confidence and rejecting weakness—and so, falling back on her training, she responded to the situation by adopting the comfortable guise of combative bravado, directing it at Spectare.
“What are you, some kind of foot freak? You get off on looking at feet, is that it? Well get a good look while you can, and think back to this moment when you’re rotting in a jail cell!”
The two henchwomen stepped back into the circle, and Spectare walked over to the base of the table, where they had just been standing.
“Yes,” said Spectare, mildly. “I am a foot freak—though I prefer the term ‘connoisseur.’ Words matter, Madame Mayor, just as appearances do. And I believe you understand my meaning, judging by the appearance of these feet.” She took a deep breath and exhaled audibly. “Exquisite, simply exquisite.”
Exquisite? The word threw Lucine for a loop. She was, to be fair, vaguely aware that her feet might be attractive, at least in comparison to those of other women, though she had never put much stock into the notion. None of her lovers had paid inordinate attention to them, and she had only ever treated herself to regular pedicures because it seemed befitting of a woman in the public eye. Currently her nails were painted a gleaming silver, and having just yesterday been to the spa, she knew the pillow-softness of her feet—but also how warm and aromatic they must be from being enclosed in socks and shoes during her run. It disgusted her to think of Spectare getting off on this.
“You really are a freak… and by the way, that’s not a good thing. I can’t wait to read what they write about you in the papers. You’re gonna get absolutely—”
“Excuse me,” said Spectare, cutting Lucine off. “Before we go any further,” she declared, “I must pay tribute to the beauty of these feet,” and with that she bent down to kiss the soles before her.
When she did, Lucine felt the bracing sensation of cold metal against her sensitive skin, for Spectare had not removed her mask to kiss her feet.
Lucine was shuddering long after Spectare had pulled away, still reeling from the unwelcome experience of contact with the mask’s peculiar breathing apparatus.
Then she felt Spectare’s gloved hands run softly along the tops of her feet, a satiny sensation that unnerved Lucine greatly, though she couldn’t ignore the curious quickening within her.
“Don’t you DARE touch my feet, you weirdo!” She tried to bend and curl her feet away from Spectare’s touch, but her bindings made this impossible, and the masked woman continued to run her gloved hands ever so lightly over Lucine’s sensitive skin. The fabric of the gloves was unfamiliar enough to cause small spasms of involuntary movement, and Lucine wished the woman would stop touching her. She bit her lip and unsuccessfully tried to keep still. The struggle seemed only to encourage Spectare, and before long Lucine was openly flexing her feet and splaying her toes in a fitful attempt to evade the gloved hands of her captor.
The effort amounted to very little and became more unmanageable by the moment, and soon she was desperate. She wanted to yell at Spectare, to belittle her, but she suspected that, if she opened her mouth, all that would come out would be little girlish giggles—totally undermining her pose of bravado. She knew she had to keep playing tough.
“Get away…from my feet… you creep! Who… the hell… would be into FEET?!”
This she screamed at Spectare, and though she struggled to get the words out without breaking into peals of laughter, it seemed to have some effect, for the woman suddenly straightened and drew her hands back.
“Oh, Lucine,” said Spectare. “If only you could see your feet as I do,” and as she spoke she ran her index finger gently along the edge of her monocle. Through some sort of mystic conduction, Lucine felt the passage of Spectare’s finger as if it were running along the arch of her right foot, which she involuntarily flexed and wriggled.
Spectare observed this with interest, slightly tilting her head. “Ticklish, my dear?”
It was a rhetorical question, of course, since Lucine’s feet had already proven to be deeply sensitive to Spectare’s touch. But when Lucine heard the word ticklish spoken out loud, she experienced a newfound dread. It seemed to confirm a fate until then unsecured, and she felt at once a sinking sensation, as if the table were slowly wilting in response to the added weight of her foreboding.
Then, seemingly unbidden, or perhaps responding to some obscure signal, one of the henchwomen strode forward, producing from her pocket a long blue feather. She cupped the feather in her palm and offered it to Spectare, who took the feather and held it up to the feeble light. She seemed to be inspecting the object, determining its viability. Then, with precious little ceremony, she brought it down and began to run it over the soles of Lucine’s feet.
Lucine jerked as if she’d been electrified, her sensitive skin tickled unbearably by the wispy fibers. She could barely move due to the bindings, but she thrashed as much as she could, tittering and cursing as she did.
Spectare’s response was only to tickle her harder. Her masked face remained expressionless, impassive to Lucine’s desperate wriggles and muffled pleas for mercy. Lucine squealed “Oh god, oh god no no no!” as Spectare’s gloved fingers swished the feather up and down the soles of her flailing feet. The feather scurried and skittered along Lucine’s narrow arches and in the soft areas under her toes, which she curled and uncurled, causing the soles to wrinkle beautifully. Ticklish tremors wracked her body as the feather caressed her flesh.
“Please!!! Stop tickling my feet! I can’t take it! I’m begging you!”
Yet Spectare continued to drag the feather along Lucine’s soles, doing so without respite or pity. For unending minutes she tested her captive’s endurance, seeking the limits of her will.
Eventually, with unexpected suddenness, she relented. She raised her gloved hand and dropped the feather to the ground, not deigning to look as she did. It began a slow, winding descent, and a henchwoman stepped forward to collect it gingerly in her palm.
This choreography complete, Spectare looked upon her heaving, gasping captive, her gloved hand still lingering effetely in the air. Lucine’s eyes were drawn to that raised hand, enraptured by its subtle shape and conspicuous poise, and all too late she determined the import of this gesture, this pause.
Keeping that hand raised, Spectare brought her other over, and began with luxurious slowness to pluck each finger of the glove until it had loosened discernibly; and then she began to pull it off with maddening delicacy, allowing the soft fabric to drift along her skin and off her long fingers, which she fluttered in the air once revealed. Lucine felt a small gush of fearful arousal as she viewed this unexpectedly sensual display, imagining the fabric dragging against her own sensitive skin while noting the comely shape of Spectare’s fingers and the glossy black of her elegant nails. At the same time she experienced a pang of anxiety, suspecting what these lovely fingers intended.
And then, without any further preliminaries, Spectare brought her hand down to Lucine’s feet and set her fingers scurrying and skittering along Lucine’s arches, tracing intricate patterns of ticklish torture, generating gales of wild laughter and full-body buckles.
Lucine’s utterances were hilariously distressed and inarticulate. “NOOOOOOOO GOD NO NO, AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO!!!”
Words caught in her throat, spit dribbled down her cheek, tears streamed from her eyes. Her pretty feet juddered in all directions, obeying an imposed movement of spirit.
Spectare presided over it all with a quiet serenity, being a seasoned conductor of such tortuous symphonies. Yet she leaned ever farther forward, bending almost imperceptibly toward the quivering feet below her, and her fingers danced more and more rapidly along the pillow soft soles, even as they delved into unexplored crevices between each of the silver toes.
Lucine had never felt so vulnerable, so exposed to the guiding forces of a wicked cosmos. She felt at the mercy of some god, one eager to remind her of her meager place in the scope of things. Hopelessly she submitted to this god, and as her will drained away she felt a strange and unexpected ecstasy welling up from deep within. Strands of sweaty, matted hair stuck to her face now, and her breathing had quickened to a throbbing, shuddering pace. There was a warmth developing inside her, spreading from her pussy outwards, and she began to twitch and moan. She began to imagine Spectare’s fingers as tongues lapping against her soles, pressing against and in between each toe, finding her most precious spots and applying pressure to each, until she was drenched in cascading waves of tingling pleasure.
The force of this fantasy was such that Lucine failed to realize that Spectare had long ago ceased her tickling efforts, and was now crouched by Lucine’s left ear, and was whispering into it sonorous incantations. These succeeded in carrying Lucine to a fever-pitch of delectation, but a final gesture was needed to push her fully over the edge.
And so Spectare removed her silver monocle and placed it over Lucine’s left eye. “May your pleasure be prolonged,” she whispered, and then she drew away.
When Lucine looked through Spectare’s monocle she experienced an immediate, dizzying fall, a sudden lurching descent, and soon the unendurable, ticklish sensation at her feet had transferred directly to her left eye. Phantom fingers swept across its delicate surface, sending it into hysterics of visual hallucination. She witnessed a series of irrepressible images, each passing by with convulsive rapidity: fitful stars bursting into reams of scattered white light; broiling plasma being poured down into dark cosmic clefts; hybrid monsters of the psyche loosed from her own private absorptions and petty compulsions. This phantasmagoria stroked the tender surface of her eye, and she began to feel a desperate yearning for release; and yet the phantom fingers continued to swim and ripple, tease and tickle; and soon they were discovering her secret joys and horrors, rendering her utterly exposed and helpless; and then she felt a searing surge of physical heat; and she was weeping now, dissolving in intolerable pleasure; and finally a great dark nothingness overwhelmed her, and she saw no more.
__________
The mayor’s mysterious death sent shockwaves through the city, but within the police ranks there was additional consternation—for they had discovered, at the crime scene, a thumb drive containing a single recording. Along with the digital forensics team, Nadia and the Chief were the first to view it.
When it began, Nadia had been immediately struck by the strange tableau on screen: a masked woman, clad in an elegant white dress, sitting with her black boots planted on a desk in the mayor’s office, surrounded by a group of women in dark sunglasses. This was obviously Lady Spectare and her retinue. Nadia felt a chill of recognition, and perhaps something else besides.
“Do not look for me,” spoke Spectare to the camera, her voice a sibilant coo, a tender caress. “Avoid even the urge to glimpse what you so desperately seek.”
At this point she swept her boots from the table, bringing them to the floor. “Do not pursue what you wish to see. The very urge gives your eyes to me.”
As she continued to speak, the camera zoomed in slowly to center her cleavage, bare shoulders, and masked visage. For someone so against vision, thought Nadia, she sure goes to great lengths to attract attention. Yet what a striking woman…
“Sight is a burden,” continued Spectare. “Only the damned are beholden to vision. It holds us in thrall. Release yourself from its clutches. Cease to look. Abandon sight. Pleasure lies not in seeing but in its prohibition.”
Nadia heard Spectare’s words but only faintly; she was too enraptured by the woman’s appearance—by her mask in particular. Why did she wear it? What might it hide?
“Look no further,” Spectare advised. “You are unprepared to witness what a visionary like me is given to see. It would bring you to your knees. Your instinct would be to flee. But by then it would be too late, for you will have seen what never should be.”
Nadia recalled Freida, the South Asian woman’s face, the vague pleasure frozen on its surface. Was that really the face of someone who had regretted seeing what she did? Surely not. Surely not. Surely. Not. Surely… not…
Unwillingly, Nadia found herself slipping into a shallow oblivion of mingled impressions and inchoate feelings, carried along in a lazy stream of Spectare’s enigmatic exhortations and her own mental foibles. In this gently coursing water she floated, feeling immersed in a fluid, connected world, on the verge of some great insight, but then she experienced the sensation of being tossed to and fro between the banks of the stream, thrust suddenly from one side to the other— and as she careened she realized with a start that she was being shaken, shaken not in this wispy dreamworld but in reality.
It was, she discovered, the Chief rousing her from this strange reverie.
“Ramirez!” he exclaimed, his hand gripped on Nadia’s shoulder. “Look alive, Ramirez. What’s up with you?”
Nadia blinked several times and slowly re-adjusted to her surroundings.
“Uh, sorry, Chief. Not sure what happened there,” she said, shaking her head and rising from her seat. “I think I just drifted off or something.”
He looked at her questioningly. “I need you sharp, Ramirez. Go home and get some sleep. Come back tomorrow. We’ve got a lot to unpack here with this video. If Spectare can get to the mayor, damnit, who knows who she’ll target next!”
__________
On her way back home, Nadia passed by a women’s clothing shop and had the uncanny experience of seeing her reflection in the window briefly superimposed on the image of a stylishly garbed mannequin. The mannequin had been dressed in a sultry white gown and long black boots, and its face was featureless and blank. For a moment, just a fleeting moment, she felt a tug toward blissful vacancy, toward a featureless world of unseeing advance.
But then she steadied herself, violently shaking the superimposed image from her head, and as she continued down the street, still somewhat dazed, she tried to make sense of this odd occurrence.
By the time she reached her front door, she had decided to read the moment as a sign of some strange, developing kinship with Lady Spectare—a connection yet to be fully ratified or even vaguely understood, but one that would need to be accepted and explored if the masked woman were to be brought out of the shadows and into the all-seeing light, exposed to the world just like her victims.
And this, Nadia realized, had become her goal, what she now desperately craved: Spectare’s revelation, a glimpse at the woman under that carefully arranged veneer.
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