Double Switch

The second story of the Dolly Apocrypha, Double Switch introduces the reader to the world of the Center. The story follows Dolly and Drummond through personal trials that begin on the morning of ( they think) an ordinary day that turns out to be anything but.

Book One, The Origin of Gabrielle Dolly, TATAS
Chapter One

Cincinnati, April 23, 1999, 05:00

Mitchell Cary Drummond let the elastic waistband of his sweatpants snap over his belly. Not good, he thought, inspecting his sad figure in the bedroom's full-length mirror. Too loose and flabby. He sucked in his gut and turned sideways. Then he sighed.

I'll never get back to that thirty-two-inch waist, he thought. But it would be nice to lose a few inches. I wonder if she regrets choosing an old has-been like me instead of a buff athletic type like MacDougal.

The redheaded professor of thaumaturgy kept himself in pretty damned good shape for a being of nine hundred years. Drummond, at 45, felt positively geriatric by comparison.

Shrugging into a tee shirt, he turned in the predawn darkness to gaze at the recumbent form of his lover, sprawled half-uncovered on the waterbed. Gabrielle Francesca Dolly was a pale shape on the dark blue sheets. Her red-gold hair floated in a cloud on her pillow, framing her angelic face. Her bow mouth hung open in a graceful curve. Just the right amount of tooth showed behind her perfect lips. Despite the total relaxation of sleep, her shape was undistorted. Her breathing was soft and regular, with an occasional lady-like, adenoidal burr. Even her snoring was cute.

It was magic; she was magic. It was more than a little scary how magic she was. He was surely the luckiest man in the world to have been given this chance.

The elephant in the living room of their relationship was that he adored her 'way more than she did him — if what she felt for him could even be called adoration. They never talked about it, never even acknowledged it to each other. Dolly was too nice a person to take advantage of it, but the bottom-line truth was that she could walk and never miss him, but he... if she ever left him, it would break him, sure.

The beginning of the affair — the real affair, not the tepid relationship they had had before her Genesis — had resembled the explosion of Krakatoa. When she had finally dropped the mask behind which she had been hiding from the Gods, almost her first action toward him had been to attack him with a katana.

Ten years in a time loop had not improved her temper. She was mercurial, tempestuous, fiercely proud, violent, and moody. She was loyal and giving, yet possessive and tended to jealous rages. She was intensely private but at the same time a rampant exhibitionist.

She had moved into his settled, middle-aged, professional-tenure world and turned the whole thing... more than upside-down or inside out; she had warped his world like a klein bottle to where there was no inside or outside, no up or down, or in or out, only the leading edge of the propagation wave of an infinite sequence of unexpected and unpredictable events. Dolly was a human singularity.

She made him feel like a teenager again, living in a constant state of anxiety. He had already had his season on the edge: twenty years before he had cut a swath through the jet set of Europe wielding the power of his position in the inner circle of a God like a magic sword. But that was ancient history and he had grown up since. Now here she was, and he was living that all over again. And even though he knew better, he found it punitively seductive. The woman-child consumed him.

And yet, there was a small core of herself that was reserved and held aloof from him. It was easy for him to give himself wholly to her and still reserve the painful bits of his own past, preferring to live in the present moment with no thought or care for yesterday or tomorrow.

But she was too young to have such depths and it rowelled his heart to know there was a part of her he would never touch. He knew better than to try to wholly possess her, though, as much as desire and his own nature drove him that way. There lay only heartache. He would hold on loosely, knowing he must. But he would not let go, not even if it killed him.

He sighed and settled on the edge of the bed to pull on his socks and shoes. Dolly shifted in the bed and, as if realizing that she was alone, rolled onto her back and peered into the gloom. "Cary? Lover?" she called, her husky voice sandy with sleep.

"Here, Love. I'm going for my run. You want to join me? Or is your shoulder still bothering you?"

Her hand moved in a reflex motion toward the bandage that covered stitches and a healing bullet wound less than a week old. "It shouldn't, but I just feel... lazy."

"It's OK," he said, moving around the bed to lean down and kiss her. "Kairn did say to take it easy."

"Yeah, but if I neglect my conditioning, I can get flabby real fast." She slapped his gut, (which, to be fair, was diminishing and tightening as his exercise program progressed). Then she smiled to take the sting out of it and pulled his head back down for another kiss. She made appreciative noises in her throat and chest and sighed a little as they broke apart. Then she gave a playful little growl of passion. "If you want to get a run in this morning, you'd better go before I decide I have other plans for you."

"Um..." he began, intoxicated and tongue-tied by her evident desire, "I can..."

"No, Love. You go ahead. You need your exercise. I'll be alright. Gonna get another hour's sleep." She rolled over and buried her face in the pillow, squirming and burrowing under the covers. He reached out and drew the comforter over her shoulders, kissing her hair tenderly before heading out for his run.

Outside, running in the silent, predawn streets of the city and along the river, he contemplated the stars, the rising moon, the sleepy songs of cardinals, the soft, moisture-laden wind that swept up the valley from the West.

There are worse places in the world to live, I guess. I could wish this town were a little more tolerant of odd relationships like mine with Dolly, but all-in-all, it's livable. I have a good job with the Center, working with people I like, doing important work. And the love of a good woman. It always comes back to that. She makes me whole. Life is good, he decided.

It had only just become good. Not so long ago, he and his team had been cast adrift on the breast of the outer darkness by the demise of their divine sponsors.

Sure, the Enterprise found him a sinecure at their facility in Ohio, but when you've lived so long so close to the flame, any distance will chill you. Crawling from the wreckage of HEAE and his former career, he threw himself into his new work with a vengeance. He retreated from much of his former life — there had been betrayals. Who had betrayed whom was a question Drummond almost didn't want answered, though he knew his safety demanded it. But he couldn't escape the feeling that incuriosity could shield him. He became a monk, living in his Over the Rhine loft and dedicating his life to the mission of the Center.

Then there came the singular moment when he discovered himself to be the owner of a living doll — a 12-inch-tall plastic figure with dreams as big as the world — and having to deal with shifting concepts of ownership and self. Somehow his ability to take the strangeness of it in stride persuaded her to trust him. She confided her dreams to him, and, in service of his admiration for the bold spirit that inhabited the little toy, he betrayed her.

He had his own doubts about his motives, comparing himself to Pygmalion and her to Galatea, with all the tragic implications of that, but thrust them aside. He had, without her knowledge, approached the Center's thaumaturge, Jonathan Redpath, and gotten a commitment from the wizard that he could help the tiny doll achieve her greatest dream — that of becoming a real grrl.

When her wish was granted and she became a woman complete, he was with her. He stood at her side and with her faced the maelstrom of the Genesis storm that cast her spirit into her autoclone body. His was the first touch she felt in her new body. His were the arms that cradled her when she collapsed, drained, in the aftermath. His hands stroked her hair, his voice crooned soft comfort to her in her awakening to the pain that is life for the living.

And, in the moment of their betrayal, his were the arms that could not protect her from vengeful Gods.

For her, who could not remember ever having been sensate before, all was pain. Every stimulus set fire to new, raw nerves, and, in those first moments of life, it was only his presence and caring that kept her sane. Of course Murphy's Law kicked in and she was yanked away from him and thrust into an alien milieu, far from her home — in time, if not in space — and left largely on her own, to struggle with facts of existence that the entire rest of humanity has a lifetime to become accustomed to — and still does a lousy job with.

For his part, the separation was the least of it. For too long a time, he thought her dead. One of those vengeful Gods — Marduk — had staged a bit of street theatre in the lobby of the Babbett Center involving a knife in the heart of a young girl who very much resembled the newborn Gabrielle. It was months before the fraud was revealed and Dolly's masquerade could end. And, when she no longer needed to hide, she came out with a vengeance.

In retrospect it was, perhaps, predictable that, in that first flush of life, coming into existence as it were fully-formed with the aspect of a woman grown at the moment of her birth, she would go a little feral with hunger for the sensations of life. He, in his sedate and settled existence, held no thrill for her. There was no place for him in her new life, and he was left behind.

Her erstwhile plastic partner, Xe Dolly, (she still allowed herself to be called "Dolly" back then), had followed her lover into the world of corporeal life — typically facing the Genesis storm alone and taking a soul-deep hurt thereby. The two of them engaged in a reign of terror — literal and figurative — over the Center's main campus that was characterized by epic drinking bouts and running sword fights with all and sundry... armed or not.

They engaged in low pranks and occasioned high tragedy. Many besides they two were injured in the cruel games the two women played with one another, with the gods, with Fate. The two of them used their new bodies like weapons — as weapons — sowing chaos, confusion, jealousy, and discord among the staff and students of the Center. The Center's Director was wounded by a thrown chakram in a vicious attack that appeared to have been the outcome of a drunken bet between the two of them. That there were no deaths from the whole sad mess was due more to good luck than good management.

For Drummond, the low point came when she attacked him with a sword. Gabrielle snuck into the classroom of Rennie MacDougal, the Mad Scot, coach of the Center's fencing team and head of the Thaumaturgy Department since the death of Redpath in the carnage surrounding Gabrielle's Genesis. From a glass display case holding priceless arms and armor from around the world, she had stolen a seventeenth-century katana — the long sword of the samurai.

Despite the bitter cold of an Ohio late winter, she dressed in baggy harem pants and a turban, her yellow silk shirt left brazenly open to flaunt her breasts and untucked to flare around her in response to her movement, her waist-length coppery hair flying in like gyrations, she spread terror on the Center's grounds, using the wizard's katana to wound a half-dozen people and terrorize dozens more.

Drummond, in reality, got off the lightest of any of those whom she actually cut, but he felt it most keenly of them all. To the others, she was a golden blur, an apparition of the night. None of them really knew her as he did.

When she came at him in the parking lot of the Center's Admin. Building, he reached out to her, spoke gentle words, tried to calm her. She feigned a response, turning his involuntary reaction to her body against him in order to get closer to him only to strike out with the razor-sharp blade. Only the fact that he stumbled on a curbstone saved him from decapitation.

Holding a hand to his wounded shoulder, where the blade had sliced him, he scrambled to his feet and fled into the building.

Even then, he could not betray her. He lied to the Center's administrators and security staff, making light of his own wound — pretending anger at the destruction of a prized leather jacket. He sneaked into the Center's medical suite and was standing shirtless in the dispensary, bandaging the cut on his shoulder when a small figure blocked his light.

She stood there in the doorway, backlit from the room beyond, the turban gone, her glorious mane of red-gold hair falling wild around her shoulders, a halo in the half-light, a contrite expression on her face in the shadow. She threw the sword aside and rushed to him. She encircled his waist in a fierce desperate hug. They just stood there for a long time, holding each other, whispering in the dimly-lit dispensary.

She was lost and confused, feeling ill-used by all of the older, more-experienced people around her. Everyone wanted to use her and she had no one to succor her. Her encounter with MacDougal had been typical. Though he was normally a kind and considerate lover, it had not, for some reason, crossed his mind that a beautiful young woman could reach the (apparent) age of 28 in these modern times and yet still be a trembling virgin. Since her identity had been kept secret from all, he could not have known that, at that time, she was less than ten years in this life, and all of that in a virtual cloister. He had expected more of her than she was prepared to give. (Though, to be fair, she had given him the impression she was more experienced than she was.)

The naked face of his lust — stoked by 900 years of life — was more than she could take, and it had driven her to flee weeping and only half-clothed from his penthouse to run the night time streets back to her own apartment. Then, when she sought comfort from Xe Doll, instead of giving it, the other's reaction was to explode in a jealous rage and go hunting MacDougal's head.

The two — Scot and dolly — had collided and, in the collision, had begun a tempestuous affair of epic proportions, shunting poor Dolly aside. So, in a desperate bid for attention, she had stolen MacDougal's katana and had gone on her own rampage across the campus. But even though her blood was up, something stayed her hand, and she did not kill anyone.

Then she had hurt Drummond, her first friend and seemingly the only person in the world who loved her unreservedly and did not want to use her for his own ends. He admitted that he did feel ardor toward her, that he wanted her very badly, but professed that what he wanted most of all was her happiness and he was willing to give up everything to ensure it. Her acceptance of that was final and complete. After such an emotionally exhausting dialogue, they collapsed together onto the leather couch in the Medical Director's office and simply held each other.

Then they kissed.

They pulled apart, startled, senses inflamed: a speeding pulse, a shortness of breath. Careless of their surroundings, they explored each other's bodies with fervent passion, consummating their love suddenly, in a wild, primal act that ended with Dolly belly-down over the rolled arm of the Doc's leather couch, screaming her climax as Drummond spent himself in her.

The sweat of their coupling made her henna tattoos run and left the imprint of the pattern from her belly on the arm of the couch. That accidental transfer was to later give the two of them much grief at the hands of the Center's administration, but in that moment, Dolly gloried in it. It was a public declaration, like spray-painting their names on an overpass. She paraded her new-found randy nature and flaunted it in the face of convention. When Drummond would have tried to remove the marks from the couch, she prevented him.

"Let 'em know we fucked here... "

And faced with her wild joy in it, he had to acquiesce.

As they lay on the couch in afterglow, heedless of the approaching day and the stirrings of life in the office suites of the building, they talked a little about the future... what they meant to each other and where it could lead. When they left the building, it was together.

They went to the crusty little apartment Dolly shared with Xe. There they packed up her meager possessions, then drove through the winter dawn to Drummond's loft in Cincinnati, where they set up housekeeping — much to the great consternation of Drummond's brownie housekeeper, Mab.

Drummond rounded the corner off Eastern Avenue and ran up Eggleston toward Over the Rhine.

That drive in the February dawn, down Interstate 71 was frozen in his memory, a crystalline moment he would treasure forever. There was none of the tristesse he usually felt after sex. The woman next to him in the car energized him, enervated him in ways he had never thought possible. Her excited talk of the possibilities inherent in their life together, her eagerness to take it all into her in large bites, to digest it, to make it part of her being...

He had not been so hopeful of the future since, it seemed, almost the dawn of time... back in high school when a universe of infinite possibilities had beckoned and the world was his oyster. Somehow, those dreams had been leached out of him over the years. Now they were coming back to life. Slowly, reluctantly, with the promise of great pain, but with a certainty that was stunningly absolute.

Now she waited for him in their home. Their home: the words thrilled. They entitled the private world the two lovers built together. It was a numinousness he'd never thought to know.

I love you, Gabrielle Dolly, he thought as he ran, projecting his thoughts toward her.

He pounded across the boulevarded Central Parkway and headed up Walnut to the industrial warehouse he owned for the sole purpose of having the loft on the top floors as his living space. As he ran up the north-south artery, he looked up at his building and could see that the kitchen lights were on. Dolly must have gotten up. Maybe they could shower together. That was always a superb way to start a day. They'd both go out into the world and pass through their day suffused by the warm glow of their early-morning touch loving.

He ran in place in the freight elevator, then let himself in through the back, shedding his shoes, socks, and T-shirt in the mud room and walking into the kitchen bare chested, breathing hard, his skin slick with the sweat of exertion.

Dolly was in his hooded terry cloth robe, almost lost in the huge folds of it, sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, a cup of coffee cradled in her hands and held under her nose. She was drawing deep breaths of the aromatic vapors pouring out of the black liquid.

"I would have got you up," he said as he leaned down to kiss her hair.

"Terry called."

"Terry." Terence Hallow Britten, the Center's Director. "Not Dispatch," the office that routed all communications to, from, and between the Troll Action Teams.

"Right. Terry. She's calling all of the operation team leaders in for a meeting in Columbus at 10:30 this morning."

"Just the team leaders?"

"That's what she said. But if she thinks I'm letting you out of my sight, she's got another think coming."

He covered her mouth with his fingertips. "It's OK, Dolly. You're my number two. They'll let you in. Honest."

"It just... She made it all sound a little... ominous."

"And what we had to deal with last week was... what, Sunday in the Park with George?"

"Well, no." She grinned. "Sorry. Just nerves, I guess."

"Come on and take a shower with me. I'll scrub your back," he offered.

She unfolded from the chair and leaned against him. "Twist my arm," she purred.

Instead, he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her along as he headed toward the bathroom, ushering ahead of him.

Continued...

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