SIDE Nancy lavender surprise

Day 72

Nancy Torres looked at the stack of paperwork on her desk and sighed. She was a real estate agent in a town that was slowly dying. It had only three-quarters the population that it had 50 years ago. And 150 years ago when the Winchester family owned half the land in the county it had been the largest town in the area. But as the lumber industry owned by the Winchester family slowly chewed through the old timber in the area it had slowly become less of an area hub and more of a quaint old town. Of course, there was still enough business for Nancy to have made a good life for herself over the last 20 years as her older sister's partner. But it was still a pain since her sister Alison hadn't spent more than thirty minutes at a time in the office in the last week.

Alison had gone out on a typical showing and didn't return to the office afterward. Nancy had found some paperwork from the showing on her desk the next morning but all Alison did was call her around noon to let Nancy know that she had some issues at home and might not be in for a day or two. Nancy had wondered what the issue might be at the time and as the days wore on she spent more time trying to figure out why her sister was so distracted. Her daughter had been living at home for about a year now. She had gone to college and then moved to New York City for a year. But after that, she returned, broke and spiritually bruised by life in the big city. But Alison's daughter had never been a real issue in the past. Dave, Alison's husband was another story. Dave and Alison probably should never have married. They had Theresa their daughter right after getting married and it was quickly apparent that once the passion of romance wore away they didn't actually like each other. The two managed to stay together for Theresa and had just gotten so used to each other that splitting up wasn't a priority. With Theresa's return to the nest, the idea of breaking up was again on hold.

The phone rang and Nancy looked at the caller ID, it was Dave. Dave rarely talked to Nancy because about 10 years before they had had an affair together. The affair never exactly ended and as few as 3 years ago they had ended up in bed together. As a result, they actively avoided each other whenever possible.

"Hello, Dave?" Nancy said picking up the office phone.

"Hey Nancy, can I talk to Alison? Have you two sorted things there yet?" Dave said.

Nancy was a bit perplexed and just said, "She's not here right now Dave."

"Well can you ask her to call me? Sleeping at the office four days straight is not ok. You two need to get whatever the problem there is solved. Theresa's birthday is next week and we never decided what to get her. Just have her call me." With that, Dave hung up the phone.

Nancy sat staring at the phone in her hand. If Alison wasn't at home or the office, where was she? Nancy put down the phone and opened her desk drawer. She removed a package of lavender cigarettes and a lighter. She had tried to quit smoking for years and a friend had suggested this as a way to stop. Just lighting the cigarette made Nancy breathe a sigh of relief. What could Alison be doing? Besides her family and her business, all she ever did was what she had to do on the town council. Over ten years that had only ever meant meetings and occasional parties. Never anything that caused her to leave the office or not sleep at home. Was Alison having an affair? Had she met some new man and was shacking up with him?

"Nah," Nancy said out loud and laughed. She picked up her cell phone from its place on her desk and dialed Theresa. She probably wouldn't know what was going on but Nancy was determined to find out and knew Theresa could help.

"Hello Theresa, do you have a minute to talk?" Nancy said as she heard the phone pick up.

"Sure Aunt Nancy, what's up?" Theresa answered.

"I just talked to your father about your mother. Did she tell you what is going on?" Nancy asked.

"Just that there was a big problem at the office, but no details," Theresa said.

"I see, when was the last time you saw her?" Nancy continued.

"Maybe four or five days ago," Theresa said after a pause.

"Did she seem normal to you? She wasn't depressed or happy or anything?" Nancy probed further.

"Not then, she was a little out of it for a day or two before that, kind of quiet," Theresa replied.

"Do you know if she has any town business lately? Or met someone or went somewhere new?" Nancy asked.

"Umm... she did drop me off at work a few days ago. It is on route 17 at the edge of town. When she left she went out of town rather than back towards work or home." Theresa answered.

"Ok, thanks for helping out. Do me a favor, the next time she comes home and then leaves borrow your dad's car and follow her around a bit. See where she goes." Nancy said.

"You mean you don't know where she is either?" Theresa said with some worry.

"It's ok dear, I just want to confirm something. Nothing is wrong, I promise. Just let me know the next time you see her. Thanks, bye," Nancy said hanging up.

Nancy set to work on her stack of papers. She would stop by town hall at the end of the day but until then there was little else to do than run her sister's business and worry.

Another day and not a sign of Alison. Nancy was kicking up her feet on the couch pondering what to watch on the TV. Her phone buzzed, it was a text from Theresa. "Mom is home, she and dad are fighting about something." Nancy stared at the message for a minute and typed in "Thanx, keep me informed as to what she is doing."

What was Alison doing? Nancy had pondered it all day and had no real conclusion. All she knew was that over a week ago Alison had gone out on a routine showing and not returned to the office till two days later. Even then she claimed that there were problems at home and she only peeked her head in to check on Nancy twice since. Her husband and daughter had no idea what she was doing and no one at town hall could think of any reason for her to be doing any of this. The only clue was that she headed out of town on route 17. It was 20 minutes to the next town with no place worth going to on the way. Besides a few sparsely populated roads the only place of note Nancy could think of on route 17 was the Winchester Mansion and no one went there unless old lady Winchester paid them to.

After half an hour Nancy's phone buzzed again, "She stormed out, I told dad I wanted to follow her, getting in the car now." Nancy set the phone down and unpaused her TV show, she fell asleep waiting for another text from Theresa.

The next morning Nancy woke up with a sore neck. She looked at her phone and saw no new messages. After getting up and doing her usual morning routine she texted Theresa, "What ended up happening?" Nancy then hurried out to an open house she had to host since Alison was still missing.

Several hours later the open house was over and she still hadn't heard from Theresa. She decided to call her and find out what was going on.

After a few rings, Theresa answered, "Hello?"

"Hello, Theresa, where have you been? I tried to text a few times and you never replied," Nancy said a bit annoyed.

"Oh, well... I was... busy, sorry," Theresa said with much hesitation.

"So what happened with your mother last night?" Nancy asked.

"Well, she... went to the Winchester place and..." Theresa's voice just seemed to drift off.

Nancy could hear talking in the background but couldn't make any of it out.

"My battery is running low, can I call you back later?" Theresa said with a hint of panic.

Before Nancy could say anything the line went dead. "What the hell?" she thought to herself. She gathered up her paperwork from the open house and headed to the office to drop it off.

Once there she dropped the fresh stack of papers onto her desk and then went straight to the drawer with her cigarettes. Picking up the lavender cigarettes she thought about how she should buy just one pack of her old brand of real cigarettes for really stressful times like these as she lit up the lavender cigarette.

It was getting dark when Nancy reached the gate of the Winchester mansion. She expected it to be closed but it was open when she arrived. As she got to the house she noticed that several cars were parked off to the side where they would be hard to notice unless someone got close to the house. Just like Theresa the night before she hadn't noticed the new security cameras at the gate or on the path to the house watching her.

Nancy knew that someone in the house could have seen her drive up but as she walked up the steps to the front porch she was as quiet as possible. Rather than knocking on the door she walked along the porch and started looking in the windows. She had seen quite a few run-down houses in her time as a real estate agent. This house looked like it was ready to show. Everything was clean and neat and looked like it had been recently tended to. This was not the home of an octogenarian hermit, it was alive and ready to be lived in. Except she didn't see a single person as she peeked in the rooms.

Eventually finding her way back to the front door she tried the handle and found that it was open. Once inside she could hear sounds of life coming mostly from upstairs but also from below. There must be even more people in the house than the cars parked outside suggested.

Nancy cautiously crept around the first floor of the mansion. It had been 15 minutes from the time she drove up until she encountered someone. The young woman was dressed in a summer dress and looked at Nancy as if she was a bug of some sort, strange but harmless. The young woman turned on her heel and walked down a hall and then up a flight of stairs. Nancy had been avoiding the upstairs but decided that if she had been seen there was no longer a reason to hide.

Nancy was used to simple single-family homes, this was not like any of them that she had ever been in. Many of the halls and stairs made little sense in placement and some of the halls just came to dead ends several feet after the last doorway. Getting to one of these dead ends she decided to peek into a closed room on her way back. Opening the door she saw a simple bedroom with a full-sized bed. On the bed lay three naked women asleep and intertwined. One looked to be Nancy's age, the next looked to be younger than Theresa and the third was old enough to be Nancy's mother.

Nancy closed the bedroom door and headed back towards the first floor. She could hear the sound of women's voices and laughing as she passed another door and picked up her pace. Whatever was going on here she wasn't going to solve it alone. She was thinking of the situation she may have sent Theresa into when she convinced her to follow her mother as she caught a view of the driveway to the house, a police car was headed up it. Nancy was in the room just outside of the foray and froze trying to decide what to do, was she about to be arrested? She heard the sound of feet as they came up the stairs of the front porch.

Nancy looked around quickly figuring she had a minute for the cop to knock and someone to answer. But the cop just opened the door and walked right in. Nancy couldn't hide her shock and worry as the cop looked right at her. Nancy knew everyone on the town police **** but did not recognize this woman. She was quite young, pretty, and Hispanic and she just stood in the doorway. The young cop pulled out a cellphone and spoke into it, "I'm at the front door now, I think this is her," she said.

A voice answered, "Keep her there, we will be right up."

The cop stood in the open doorway with one hand on her taser she said simply, "Stay right there and you will be great."

Nancy heard a door open behind her. Four women came down the hall she had just come from. They were all around Theresa's age and Theresa was among them. One of the women said, "Come with us," and the four headed back the way they came.

Seeing Theresa among them Nancy knew she had to follow to rescue her. Nancy also looked at the cop who just nodded as she slowly walked towards Nancy and followed her to where ever she was being taken. The door they had come from led down into the basement. Warning signals flashed in Nancy's brain but the cop was behind her, the taser now in her hand. The stairs ended in a large room with several doors, blue gym mats covered much of the floor.

"Take her," said the woman who had led them down. Theresa and another woman grabbed her arms but she managed to push them away. Nancy heard a loud voice shout "clear" then the muscles in her body tensed and she fell onto a mat. The cop was standing above her, spent taser in hand.

"Good job Grace," said the leader. Then she simply said, "strip her." The women were themselves stripping off their clothes, including Grace and Theresa. Within a few minutes, they were all naked, and soon after Nancy found out what had happened to her sister and niece.

Theresa had gone home the next day and so had Nancy but Alison was deemed too important to the collective and stayed at the mansion unless there was town business to attend to. It had now been several days since Nancy and Theresa had joined the collective and they were fulfilling their duties to cover for Alison. Theresa kept her friends informed on why she couldn't see them and Nancy kept the business running smoothly. The only problem was Dave.

Several days later he was standing at her desk in the real estate office. "I don't care if she is showing a house, just tell me where she is," Dave said, his face was beet red.

"You know I can't do that Dave. Not only can I not let you spoil a possible sale but I'm not going to let my sister's reputation get ruined when you make a scene in a client's home. Nancy's Master still wasn't able to act exactly as Nancy would. But Dave was so upset at that moment that he couldn't see that Nancy was acting just as oddly as Alison had before she disappeared and Theresa now was. He knew Nancy quite well, intimately even, but at that moment he missed all the cues that Nancy wasn't really Nancy anymore.

Dave threw up his hands in disgust and began looking around the room. A part of him wanted to break or throw something but he knew it wouldn't sway Nancy. "Fine, I'll just wait then," he said taking a seat at Alison's nearby desk.

An hour went by and of course, no one showed up. Dave had calmed down quite a bit by then but he didn't seem like he would leave anytime soon, which made new Nancy nervous. The Master searched Nancy's brain for remedies to this feeling and found itself opening the desk drawer and pulling out the lavender cigarettes and lighter. "Last one," a tiny voice said in the back of Nancy's head, her Master knew this meant it was time to buy more. As it lit the cigarette Dave suddenly got up and looked at Nancy.

"I'll be back," he said waving a finger. Nancy just took a long drag off of the cigarette. It did make the creature feel a little bit better. Dave leaving was a real relief but the Master was curious about this strange habit of smoking and continued smoking the cigarette.

Suddenly Nancy froze in place, neither the old nor new Nancy could move its body. After a minute of being frozen in place, she felt a horrible headache and mild abdominal pain. Nancy found herself in control again and the voice in her head had stopped. Feeling the abdominal pain increase she rushed to the tiny office bathroom and squatted down. She of course had on a loose dress and no panties. Moments after sitting she felt something pass out of her and after a few minutes, she got up and looked down into the toilet. There she saw what had been her Master. In this setting, it just looked like a long black turd as it floated lifeless in the bowl. Panicking Nancy flushed it down and ran back to her desk. She gathered up her things and ran out to her car. She didn't know how but she was free. She knew that the town was crawling with Masters and at that moment just wanted to find a good place to hide from Alison, Therese, Dave, and everyone.