He felt for the light switch on the wall and nothing happened. The room remained in darkness. Michael cursed and felt his way down the steps into the kitchen, banging into the pots and pans that hung on hooks from the wall on his left. Mora’s idea for keeping them easily accessible, but out of the kitchen. They clattered in the still of the house. There were more light switches at the foot of the steps. None of them brought light to his world. The house stayed stubbornly dark. And for the first time ever, Michael felt less than secure in his own home.
Faint, flitting moonlight, and the reflection of streetlights drifting up from Balboa Island below suffused the kitchen and living room with almost enough light for him to see by. He felt his way across to the black marble breakfast bar and laid down the pizza box. The fuses were at the other end of the house. For a moment he wondered how there had been light in the garage. And then he remembered that the electrician had wired the garage door and lights to a separate breaker box in the garage itself.
He waited by the breakfast bar and listened. There was no sound, not even the hum of the refrigerator. At the far end of the hall he could see that the lights were also out in the fish tank. The house was completely without power. An airplane passed overhead, its engines vibrating in the warm night air, and after it had passed, the same silence filled the house once more.
But in spite of that silence, Michael had the sense that he was not alone. He was not sure why. Was it some sixth sense? A faint, unfamiliar scent in the air, or some sound that he was not even conscious of hearing? He waited until his pupils were dilated enough to make full use of all the available light and began moving cautiously through the front hall. Normally light would be spilling into it from the courtyard, but that, too, was in darkness.
At the end of the hall he glanced to his left, toward the office. The door stood open, but the room was mired in the deepest shadow. There was no movement, no sound. The breaker box was in the bedroom at the far end of a corridor that ran behind glass the full length of the courtyard. He turned along it, passed the open door of his bedroom, pausing only briefly to listen, before carrying on down. Soft footsteps on thick-piled carpet. He climbed the three steps at the end of the corridor and moved away from what little light filtered down from the open skies above the courtyard, into even deeper shadow.
Now he knew that he smelled something. Something disconcertingly familiar. Some scent that hung in the air, a low note of something musky, almost sweet. There was someone here, of that he was certain. All his pain was forgotten as fear filled every available space in his body and mind, pushing everything else aside. And now he heard something, too. Someone breathing. A shallow, rapid breath. He held his own to listen more intently, and heard the soft scuff of a shoe on carpet.
He reached out to touch the wall, a guide to help him keep his bearings, and moved cautiously along it, inching toward the bedroom door. The breaker box was set into the wall just inside the doorway. He could tell that it was open, and as he felt for the door jamb he heard the click of a switch, and the house was suddenly flooded with light.
“Surprise!” Janey stood grinning at him, wearing a crimson basque and fishnet tights, her hair tied up in red, silk bows.
“Jesus Christ, Janey!” Michael’s legs almost buckled under him. “What the hell are you doing!?”
Her face shone with amusement. “You wanted to know how sex worked in Second Life. I thought I’d dress up as Doobie Littlething and give you a real life demo.”
“For fuck’s sake! You just about gave me a heart attack!” He went storming off back along the hall. Janey teetered after him on perilously high heels.
“Oh, come on, Mike. It was a joke. Where’s your sense of humour?”
He growled back at her over his shoulder. “Janey it wouldn’t have been funny at the best of times, and this is not the best of times.”
“Aw, hey Mike, it was a little funny, wasn’t it?”
“No!” He spun around. “First of all it was a mock murder at your place. Now this. Where do you get off thinking scaring the shit out of people is funny, Janey?”
She frowned and peered at him more closely. “What have you done to your mouth?”
He turned into his bedroom and switched on the light above the mirror. A rectangular area of skin covering his mouth, an inch above and below and two inches on either side, was red and raised like a rash. He touched it and felt the sticky residue from the tape that had gagged him come away on his fingers. Then he heard Janey gasp.
“Oh, my God, Mike, what’s happened to you? You’ve got blood all over your collar and the back of your neck.”
He turned around and held out his open hands, heel to heel. “Yeh, and you might like to take a look at the rope burns on my wrists. I’ve probably got them on my ankles, too.”
She looked at him in disbelief, for once at a loss for words. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ve been drugged, bound, gagged, beaten up, and threatened by a bunch of thugs who figure I stole their money.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, God, Mike. The three million?”
“Three million, one hundred and eighty-three thousand — and a few extra dollars thrown in.”
“What did they say?”
“They said if I didn’t pay it back within twenty-four hours they would kill me.”
He pushed past her and out into the hall, heading for the kitchen.
“Well, pay them back, then.”
“How? I used the money to pay off the debt on the house.”
“Take out another loan.”
Michael’s laugh was entirely devoid of humour. “Janey, the reason the bank was about to foreclose was because I couldn’t keep up the payments. They’re not going to give me another loan when I still can’t afford to pay it.”
“Go to the cops, then.”
“And tell them what? That I took money that wasn’t mine and spent it. Besides, if I do go to the cops these people will probably kill me anyway. You weren’t there, Janey. These were very serious people, and I have no doubt that they will very seriously kill me.”
He took a wad of cotton wool from the medicine cabinet, ran it under cold water and started dabbing away the blood from his neck.
“Here, let me do that.” Janey took the wad and began carefully washing away the blood from his skin and hair, working carefully through it to the cut on his head.
He winced. “Ouch.”
“Hold still!” She poured disinfectant on to the wad and pressed it to his scalp.
He nearly went though the roof. “Jesus Christ, Janey! That hurts!”
But she continued to hold it firmly against him. “Don’t be such a baby.” Then, “So what are you going to do?”
“Somehow I’ve got to get the money back and make that transfer. Though I have this really bad feeling that they’re going to kill me anyway, even after I’ve done it.”
“Transfer?
“They want me to put the money into another SL account.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled sheet of paper that the man with the red hair had stuffed into it. “That’s the AV name they want me to transfer it to.”
She snatched the paper from him and looked at the name. “Balthazar Bee. Hah! They’re not as smart at they think they are, Mike. They just made their first mistake. Come on.”
By the time he looked around, she was already halfway along the hall, still teetering on her ridiculous heels, and he thought how absurd she looked in her outfit, breasts and butt bulging out of her basque, holes in her tights, and too much make-up smeared across lips and eyes. He knew that she had meant it that way. As a laugh, not a seduction. And as she wobbled past the fish tank, he found a wry smile creeping up on him unexpectedly. In spite of everything. He was glad that she was here, that he wasn’t facing this alone.