Journey to Mirage Ch. 10

"Dallas? Rest?" Rick muttered stupidly.

"Dallas is Billy's fantasy, not yours, Rick. You've got a day off."

Oh, yeah, Rick remembered. The cityscape fantasy. On the roof of a city building. That was Billy Dan's chosen scene.

Rick was virtually carried into the hotel room and set to soaking in the tub until the others had to go downtown. Groton, through his network of acquaintances through the country's close-knit gay community, somehow had managed to conjure up satisfactorily hunky men to play the superintendent and the cop and had gotten permission to use the roof of a low-lying building in the middle of the city's skyscrapers.

Rick slept the sleep of the dead all day—panicked whenever he drifted up into consciousness that he was, in fact, dead.

At one point in the afternoon he woke, thinking of Phil, needing Phil. He pulled his duffle bag to him from where it had been thrown on a chair beside the bed and, after much effort and cursing, managed to pull out the slip of paper that Phil had given him with his cell phone number. Rick reached for the telephone on the nightstand and tried, unsuccessfully, to dial through on the number. The telephone dial was all a blur to him in his weakened state. He finally gave up in frustration, laid his head back on his pillow with a sob, and sank quickly into almost drugged sleep.

When he became fully conscious much later that evening after the film crew had returned to the hotel, it was to the sight of Groton sitting on the side of the other double bed in the room, waiting for Billy Dan to shower and come out of the bathroom. The first thing Rick saw was a mean-looking hunting knife that Groton had out of its sheath and was moving in slow circles at eye level, catching the light reflecting off the metal from all angles and clearly enjoying the experience. Next to him on the bed was an assortment of different anal toys—dildos of different thicknesses, lengths, and colors; teardrop shaped butt plugs, also of different sizes; and a string of graduated balls.

Rick came up on his elbows in panic—still mentally back on top of the tomb.

"Go back to sleep, Rick," Groton said in a low voice as he resheathed the hunting knife and placed it, almost reverently, on the nightstand between the two beds. "None of this is for you. I have told Lefty Billy will be trained before I return him. We will be busy tonight."

Rick did go back to sleep, but he wasn't totally unconscious. He heard all of the groaning and grunting and crying Billy Dan did in response to his "training" that night. But this was the best of what Rick dreamed and what went through his mind during that night before they left for Amarillo, Texas, on the ongoing journey to Mirage and the film festival.

His dream was horrific—of Groton taking him, not Billy Dan, and using the knife as a dildo as well, slicing Rick up inside, an image undoubtedly surfacing because of the sharp fingernails Rick had endured from the vampire in his own channel. He dreamed of Groton telling Rick that he no longer was of any use to him and that Groton didn't want him ever making movies for anyone else. Rick only assumed the knife was working inside him. Since it was a dream, the sequences were all hazy and nonsensical and he felt no pain at all—at least from the dream. But the sweat and fear it pulled out of him when he woke were quite real.

This led, as he briefly came back to consciousness in the middle of the night to hear nothing but soft moaning from the other bed and Groton's quiet snoring, to reliving the sequence on the tomb in the New Orleans cemetery. Was someone really coming? Was that what led Groton to stop the assault—seemingly in the nick of time? Or had Groton preplanned the cut-off point and had the scene completely under control? Or, worst of all, did Groton intend to let it go to termination—Rick's termination? A snuff movie. Increasingly, Rick was being moved to the side and Billy Dan was being brought into the footlights on this movie. Was Groton, in fact, orchestrating a snuff film as a means to ease Rick out of the movie and out of life? If so, he certainly knew how to make money out of his opportunities. Rick instinctively knew that a snuff film would sell for far more than a Mirage film festival winner would.

Whatever the case, Rick knew he couldn't just drift along any longer—that increasingly his very life was being endangered. There no longer was anyone around him that he could trust. And no one from his old life had a clue where he was. He could disappear off the face of the earth and no one would know what happened to him. Worse, probably no one would care. Then the visage of Phil floated across his mind. Perhaps there was someone who would care after all.