Chapter 3: The Stage, Again
The fluorescent lights of the hotel hallway buzzed like angry insects. Derek walked. One foot in front of the other. His body felt alien, a borrowed vehicle that had been wrecked and hastily returned. The ache was a deep, persistent throb, a physical receipt for a transaction his mind couldn’t reconcile. He had scrubbed his hands raw in the restroom sink until the skin stung, but the feeling of the man’s suit jacket, the pressure of his grip, lingered like a stain.
He should leave. Get in his car, drive home, pour bleach into his memory and call it a day.
But the phrase. Bambi, blossom.
It lived in his skull now, a dormant parasite wrapped around his brainstem. The terror of its return was a cold, immobilizing vapor. He couldn’t live with this. He wouldn’t.
He found her near the main convention hall. The stage was dark now, a hollow, velvet-draped monument. Simone stood in a pool of shadow beside the podium, reviewing something on her tablet, the glow painting her face in a spectral blue.
“You.”
The word ripped from him, gravelly and frayed.
She looked up, not startled. A slow, feline smile touched her lips. “Derek. You look… disheveled.”
He strode forward, stopping a few feet from her. The space between them crackled. “Undo it. Whatever you did. Fix it. Now.”
“Fix what?” She tilted her head, feigning innocence. “The bet was three commands. You performed them admirably. We’re square.”
“Don’t,” he snarled, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. He could smell the cheap hotel soap on his skin, overlaying something fouler. “Don’t play stupid. That thing in the bar. That… that word. You said it and I…” He couldn’t finish. The memory of his own voice, begging, thanking, made his stomach lurch.
Her gray eyes held his, unblinking. “A word has power only if you give it power, Derek. You of all people should know that. It’s just suggestion. Imagination.”
“It wasn’t fucking imagination!” His voice echoed in the empty hall. A few people milling near the exit turned to look. He lowered it to a furious whisper. “It was real. He… I…” The humiliation was a live wire, sizzling through his veins. “Take it out of my head.”
She studied him for a long moment, seeing the panic beneath the anger, the cracks in his cynical armor. Her smile widened, not with warmth, but with the pleasure of a chess player spotting checkmate.
“You want to be fixed?” she said, her voice dropping to a silken murmur. “Prove you’re still a skeptic. Prove logic prevails.” She gestured to the dark stage. “Get up there. Sit in the chair. Let me try a simple, standard induction. Let me prove to you it’s all in your mind. If you’re as strong-willed as you claim, nothing will happen. You’ll walk away, and this… phantom feeling… will fade.”
It was a trap. Every primitive instinct screamed it.
But the alternative was living with the bomb in his brain. He needed proof—proof she was a fraud, proof his breakdown was a fluke, proof he was still in control. He needed it so badly he could taste the desperation, metallic and sharp.
“Fine,” he spat. “But no tricks. Just a basic thing. And then you say the words to turn it off. Permanently.”
“Of course,” Simone purred. “Just a demonstration.”
She stepped onto the low stage, her heels silent on the thick carpet. After a heartbeat of sheer vertigo, Derek followed. The chair from her earlier show sat center stage, a plain, high-backed thing. It felt like an electric chair.
“Sit.”
He sat. The dark expanse of the empty auditorium yawned before him. A handful of conventioneers, seeing movement on stage, began to drift closer, forming a loose semi-circle in the front rows. Their murmurs were a low, inquisitive hum.
Simone stood before him, blocking his view of the growing audience. “Comfortable?”
“Just get it over with.”
“Close your eyes.”
“No.”
“Derek,” she sighed, as if addressing a stubborn child. “You want to prove it’s fake? Then participate. Close your eyes. Listen to my voice. It’s just a voice. It can’t make you do anything.”
He swallowed, his throat tight. He let his eyelids fall. The world went dark. He concentrated on the logic: sound waves, vocal cords, semantic meaning. Nothing more.
“Good. Now, just listen. Pay attention to your breathing. In… and out.”
Her voice was different now. Not the velvet mockery from the bar. It was smoother, rounded at the edges, a sonic balm. It wrapped around him in the darkness.
“Feel the weight of your body in the chair. The support. Notice the air on your skin. The sounds drifting in from the hall. They’re just sounds. They don’t matter.”
He tracked each statement, dissecting it. Yes, weight. Yes, air. Yes, sounds. Simple sensory observation. This was nothing.
“With every breath out, feel yourself settling deeper. Deeper into relaxation. It’s a pleasant feeling. A choice you’re making. To let go of tension. To just… be.”
The words were a gentle, relentless drip. His analytical mind began to tire of parsing them. It was easier to just… listen. To let the cadence wash over him. The sharp, painful edges of the last hour began to blur. The ache in his body softened, becoming distant.
“Your mind is so clear. So focused. Just on my voice. Everything else is fading away. Fading… fading…”
He felt a strange, buoyant detachment. The chair beneath him seemed to dissolve. He was floating in the dark, tethered only to that calm, guiding sound. It wasn’t scary. It was a relief. A relief from the terror, the pain, the memory. He leaned into it.
Simone watched the subtle changes. The tension bleeding from his jaw. The slight, loose droop of his shoulders. The even, slow rhythm of his chest. A perfect, pliable medium.
Her voice softened further, almost a breath itself. “And in this calm, this quiet, it’s so easy to remember. To remember how good it feels to let go. To be free. To be… pretty. And pliable. And so, so empty of all those complicated thoughts.”
A faint, dreamy smile touched Derek’s lips.
“The word is a key,” she whispered, leaning so close her lips were almost at his ear. The audience leaned in, straining to hear. “The key to a beautiful, simple place. A place where you are just a blossom. Waiting to bloom. My lovely, needy… Bambi Blossom.”
The trigger phrase slid into the deep, receptive stillness of his mind and turned.
His eyes flew open.
But they weren’t his eyes. The hazel irises seemed to blur, their focus turning inward and vapid. A long, shuddering sigh leaked from his mouth, transforming midway into a high, girlish gasp of delight.
“Ooh! Hello again!”
His body moved, a languid, uncoiling stretch. His back arched, thrusting his chest out as if offering non-existent curves. His hands slid up his own torso, cupping the flat muscle, fingers pinching at his nipples through the fabric of his t-shirt. A giggle erupted, shrill and out of place in the hushed hall.
The small crowd froze. A few phones were lifted, screens glowing like hostile eyes.
Simone took a graceful step back, ceding the stage. “Hello, Bambi. You’re back on stage. You have an audience. They’re all so… skeptical.”
Bambi’s head swiveled, taking in the twenty or so people below. The grin that spread across Derek’s face was blindingly vacant. “Hiya, skepticals!” he trilled, wiggling his fingers in a wave. His other hand trailed down, grabbing at his own crotch, squeezing. “Don’t you just wanna… debunk me?”
A shocked laugh came from the crowd. Then another.
“She wants you to prove how real she is, Bambi,” Simone said, her tone conversational, clinical. “Why don’t you show them how much of a needy little toy you are?”
Bambi’s face lit up with obscene glee. “Yes! Mommy! I’ll show them!”
He slid from the chair, landing not on his feet but on his knees with a jarring thud. He didn’t wince. He began to crawl, a clumsy, hip-swaying creep toward the edge of the stage. The rough carpet bit into his knees. He reached the lip, looking up at the nearest man—a guy in his fifties with a conference lanyard and a gaping mouth.
“See?” Bambi breathed, his voice a parody of a whisper meant to carry. “I’m real. I’m so real and so ready.” He leaned precariously over the edge, his fingers fumbling with the button of his jeans. “You look like a real man. A man who knows how to handle a stupid slut. Don’t you wanna use me? I’m so empty. Just a hollow little doll.”
The man took a step back, horrified and fascinated.
“Go on, Bambi,” Simone urged softly from the darkness upstage. “Entertain them properly. Show them your purpose.”
Moaning, Bambi yanked his jeans and briefs down to his mid-thighs, exposing himself to the cool, conditioned air. He rolled onto his back, legs spreading wide, knees up. The stage lights, half-on, cast a cruel, glaring spotlight on the vulnerable splay of his body.
“This is what I’m for!” he cried out to the ceiling, hands flying to his own body. One hand clutched and pulled at his hair, the other snaked down between his legs. “I’m just a fuckhole! Look! See how open I am? How stupid?”
His fingers found his entrance, still tender from the brutal bathroom encounter. He jabbed them inside himself with a rough, grinding motion. A sharp cry tore from him—a mix of real pain and Bambi’s performative ecstasy.
“Yeah! Feel how dumb it is! It doesn’t even need lube, it’s so desperate!”
He fucked himself with his own fingers, fast and nasty, his hips bucking off the floor. The sloppy, wet sounds were amplified in the quiet hall. His back arched, his free hand pawing at his own chest, pinching and twisting his nipples.
“Someone come up here!” he screamed, his voice cracking. “Someone put a real cock in this idiot cunt! Fuck the brains right out of me! I don’t need ’em! Please! Pleeease!”
The audience was a tapestry of reactions. Most stared, frozen in voyeuristic shock. Several filmed, their phones steady. A woman turned and hurried out, face pale. Two men in the front exchanged a look—a look of raw, opportunistic hunger. One of them, bulky with a buzz cut, licked his lips.
Simone watched it all, her arms crossed. The power was not just over the man writhing and sobbing on the stage, but over the room, over the social contract that had just evaporated. This was the chaos she had planted. This was the flower in full, grotesque bloom.
Bambi’s movements became more frantic, his self-violation more aggressive. He was chasing a climax that was part punishment, part programmed response. “Gonna come! Gonna come like the brainless bimbo I am! Watch me! Watch Bambi be a good little nothing!”
His body tightened, then shuddered violently. A thin, choked wail escaped him as he spent himself onto his own stomach, his fingers still buried deep, working through the tremors.
Then, he went limp. His chest heaved. Tears, real this time, carved tracks through the sweat on his temples.
The trigger, having burned through its programmed sequence, released.
Awareness slammed back into Derek like a physical blow.
The first sensation was the cold, rough carpet against his bare back and thighs. Then the sticky, wet cooling on his stomach. Then the raw, throbbing pain between his legs.
Then the silence. A profound, awful silence, broken only by the faint, electronic whir of a phone recording.
He turned his head. He saw the legs of the chair. The dark curtains. The faces.
The faces looking down at him from the front row. He saw the disgust. The laughter. The unabashed hunger. He saw the phone screens, pointed at him.
His gaze found Simone. She stood perfectly still, a silhouette against the dim work lights. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Her expression was one of pure, appraising satisfaction. A scientist observing a definitive, catastrophic result.
He scrabbled, pulling his clothes up over his filthy, used body, his movements frantic and graceless. He couldn’t stand. He crawled backwards, away from the edge, until he hit the leg of the chair.
The crowd began to murmur, the spell breaking into a dozen hushed, excited conversations.
Simone finally moved. She walked to the center of the stage, her heels clicking with definitive authority. She looked out at the audience.
“Suggestibility,” she said, her voice clear and professorially calm, “is a spectrum. And sometimes, the strongest skeptics are simply hiding the deepest desire… to break.”
She didn’t look back at him. She stepped off the stage and walked up the aisle, the crowd parting for her, leaving him alone under the lights.
Derek curled into a ball behind the chair, making himself small, trying to vanish into the floor. The phrase was no longer a dormant threat. It was a prophecy. And it had just come true in front of an audience. The video was already, he knew, spreading. There was no fixing this. There was only before the stage, and the endless, horrifying after.