When he was twenty-two, Arthur Bowman had gone to see a stage hypnotist on a work trip to Las Vegas. It had all been good fun. Two women – plants, he had no doubt – had been called on stage, where an entertainer whose name Arthur no longer remembered proceeded to work his so-called magic. With bushy eyebrows twitching, pale eyes piercing, diamond ("diamond") pendant swinging, the two women had fallen under his trance. They had raised their arms without realizing it; they had made animals noises, right down to the clucking chicken; and of course, they had stripped down to their underwear.
None of it had been very believable, but even as a bit of performance art, Arthur had been entertained enough not to demand a refund. It was for quite some time his first and only introduction to hypnosis. Now, twenty years later, on the recommendation of a branch manager hoping to impress the boss, he was attending his second.
The Witch Doctor Dega Ualu.
Technically, claimed the ingénue introducing the talent, this was not hypnosis. What they were about to see was something far more ancient and powerful than any mere Svengali mesmerist. What they were about to behold was true magic.
The lovely young woman bowed – deeply, making sure none could miss a glance at her bounteous cleavage – and stepped aside as the self-described witch doctor took the stage. Arthur hadn't known what to expect, but it hadn't been this. Bald and clean-shaven, it was hard to pin down his age, though he would have guessed between 30 and 50. Too leisurely to be young, but too erect to be old.
Beyond his composure, Dega Ualu was surprisingly ordinary. He was dark-skinned but ethnically hard to pinpoint. If he was calling himself a witch doctor, Arthur supposed he must be Creole, but that could just be an assumption he was meant to make. Dressed in dark jeans and a lighter denim shirt, a worn-looking pair of loafers and a bolo tie, he looked more like he'd wandered in off the street than come to perform. The audience applauded politely, but plainly wasn't that impressed. Clearly they had more fervor for the attractive ingénue than the night's unremarkable main act.
"Dance for the people, girl," he said in a deep voice thick with a cajun accent. Dega Ualu didn't even look at her, but the spotlight that suddenly pointed at her made the audience do so. There was a pole there, one that hadn't been apparent before it was lit up. By the time Arthur looked over the buxom blonde was already spinning on it, her knee hooked to keep her aloft. As she leaned backwards, breasts sinking down to her chin and very nearly bursting free from her skimpy garments altogether, she was still spinning.
Arthur was no stranger to pole dancing; too many clients were the sort who preferred meetings in a gentleman's club to those in the boardroom. This girl was pretty good, he decided. Maybe a bit too energetic – the way she was whipping her body around, she was going to burn out in minutes. Still, she had the basics down cold: beauty, grace, and the willingness to be watched doing it. Her emoting could use some work; whenever she slowed enough that he could see her face clearly, there was nothing erotic about it. No feeling at all.
The spotlight dimmed on her as another brightened back on Dega Ualu. "You. Woman. Come here." Arthur frowned at the lack of stagecraft, the absence of theatricality. The man said the minimum number of words to convey his meaning, and pointed. The audience in the dimly lit club strained their eyes to follow his finger, but even as a silhouette, it was clear who he meant. The woman looked around as if unsure, but quickly stood up and approached the stage.
His first instinct was that it was another plant. Probably just some prettier-than-average brunette with believably commonplace underwear to reveal that he'd paid a hundred bucks to come up and go through the motions. Once the stage lights illuminated her, Arthur saw she was just that – prettier-than-average and brunette, though he couldn't attest to her underwear – only he quickly realized she was no plant. He recognized her.
"Tell them your name, woman," Dega Ualu instructed.
Arthur expected her to provide an alias, but she leaned toward the microphone and confirmed her identity clearly. "Mary Ellen Paige." She glanced awkwardly at the half-naked girl (who had evidently removed her skirt in the brief time Arthur had looked away), high-kicking and gyrating her hips to a song only she could hear.
Mary Ellen Paige was a lawyer at the city prosecutor's office. Arthur only recognized her because she worked specifically with the financial crimes office, and once in a while someone crossed him or one of his subordinates got caught taking a shortcut. And because she was a prettier-than-average brunette. She'd gotten her hair cut shorter since he'd last seen her, one of those lopsided pixie cuts, but he'd have been sure who it was even if she hadn't confirmed it.
Arthur watched in rapt fascination as Dega Ualu went through his variation of the same routine he'd seen before. There was no clucking like a chicken, but when the witch doctor told her to "take in the spirit of the rat", Mary Ellen started twitching her nose, cleaning her whiskers, and scurrying about the room. Instead of the usual take-control-of-her-limb routine, he told her that her arm belonged to the waitress now, and Mary Ellen spent several minutes going around the room filling drink orders and carrying trays, all the while frowning and muttering to herself as if unable to resist her arm's impulses.
All the while, the blonde girl on the pole danced unrelentingly.
Most interestingly of all, Arthur watched as Mary Ellen turned beet red while "offering the people her body," as Dega Ualu put it. She had come in a woman's business suit, but one after another she shed the jacket, blouse, skirt, stockings, and even the pedestrian bra he'd suspected she was wearing. She had an utterly blank look on her face, but Arthur knew women. The color in her cheeks either meant arousal, humiliation, or (in rare cases) both. He didn't know the woman well enough to guess which.
"Keep those on," Dega Ualu instructed as she began to lower her panties. Some men in the audience voiced their disappointment; Mary Ellen Paige was that sort of girl whose body, once revealed, more than excused any minor defects of the face. They might have groaned anyway. Some men didn't care.
"Would anyone like to fuck me?" she said suddenly. She wasn't standing near the microphone, but she raised her voice to a near-shout without quite forsaking her plaintive tone. She asked like it was a call for help. "I'll do it. Or could I go down on you? You can use me however you want. Anything."
The audience was shell-shocked. Considering this was billed as an adult hynotism show, most had probably expected to see someone stripped, at least partially. Nobody had imagined they'd see a woman debase herself as such. This was taking the routine to a new level.
Naturally, it only took a moment before some of the men in the audience recovered and began responding to her offer. As Arthur watched in fascination, Dega Ualu took control of the situation, bidding Mary Ellen to count the money in her purse – sixty-three dollars – then give it to him. The witch doctor clenched his hand around the bills, gesturing at it with the other hand in mystical-looking ways. Arthur thought he could see a shimmer in the air around it, and for the first time he was unsure if this was more than a mere trick.
"This money is imbued with your freedom," Dega Ualu told her. "And I keep that freedom for you. Until someone makes me a better offer."
Four men rushed the stage at once, shoving each other roughly enough that Arthur didn't think they were part of the show either. Only when they got there did they realize they needed to reach for their wallets. One of them backed away, howling that he'd been an idiot not to have more cash on hand. Another raised up a handful of bills to the witch doctor, only to have it slapped away by a third, who firmly placed his own money in the dark hands of the night's entertainment.
"You go with this man now. He buys your freedom – you negotiate it with him now."
Mary Ellen's feet began moving toward him while her face still seemed to be processing the shock of it. The audience was riveted by the sight of this woman following a stranger to his seat, where, after he patted his thighs, she seated herself on his lap and proceeded to allow him to paw at her in ways that were wildly inappropriate in public, even had this been an actual strip club.
"Stop dancing girl. We go now."
Arthur had forgotten the girl was there. He hadn't even noticed she'd gotten naked. Before he could do more than appreciate the exquisite shape of her ass, Dega Ualu and his assistant had vanished backstage.
