The Kid (Part 3): Damsel in Distress
Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2018 7:53 pm
The Kid: A Semi-Autobiographical, Somewhat Tongue-in-Cheek Journey of Self-Discovery
(Or, What Happens When I Write a Quicksand Story and Cast Myself as the Hero)
by Jason Sample
August 2017-November 2018
(If you haven't already read Part 2, it's at viewtopic.php?f=14&t=19513#p125668.)
In Part 1 our protagonist Jason briefly encountered the pivotal character of our story, the unidentified, faceless young woman pleasuring herself in the mud, whose subsequent fall into quicksand and cries for help summon his antagonist the Kid, the "monster" in Jason's brain who personifies his combined sex drive and quicksand fetish. After much autobiographical, self-referential, and sometimes ridiculous debate and argument between Jason and the Kid in Part 2 over what to do and why to do it regarding the helpless damsel sinking in the quicksand, along with some "fatherly" advice from Jason to his young twin, the two of them are now racing toward the mudflat, Jason doing so in the hope of rescuing the trapped girl before it's too late, while the Kid probably just hopes that he hasn't missed watching her go under. This brings us to Part 3 below, where we finally meet the young woman in her peril... and Jason begins to wonder if there is more to this story than just a quicksand fetish fantasy come to life.
Standard disclaimer: As the full title above indicates, this story is "semi-autobiographical"; in the course of it I touch on certain aspects of my own quicksand fetish, both positive and negative, that pertain solely to myself. I do not presume or pretend to speak to or about others' experiences of their quicksand fetishes, nor about quicksand fetishism in general. Your mileage may vary.
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The Kid (Part 3): Damsel in Distress
Each turn in the path led to another, and after going around several of them as he continued racing downhill Jason was beginning to wonder if he would ever reach the place where the trail bottomed out when one last turn finally opened onto the level area alongside the river and the mudflat with its accompanying bank of vegetation that he had passed earlier between the trail and the water, where he had first encountered the young woman pleasuring herself in the mud. The afternoon sun reflected brightly off the wet skin of the flat, forcing him to raise his hand to his eyes and squint as he approached the edge of the muddy area and quickly scanned its surface. He could make out nothing in the glare except for a medium-sized rock in the middle of the miry expanse, a dozen feet or so away from where he stood, just rising above the surface. Maybe she got out on her own, or someone else helped her, Jason wondered hopefully as the Kid ran up next to him, panting from his sprint.
Jason’s hopeful wondering suddenly vanished as passing clouds overhead obscured the sun, dimming the glare as his younger twin pointed toward the object in the mud. It moved ever so slightly, and Jason realized to his horror that what he had perceived through his scrunched eyelids to be a “rock” was in fact all that now remained of the young woman above the surface of the flat. Only her mud-spattered face and forehead were visible as she held her head back, her ears almost submerged in the ooze that had climbed over her chin and was now threatening to creep between her firmly closed lips. She had sunk so deeply into the mire that she was now afraid either to move or to speak.
Oh, shit, Jason berated himself as he started removing the rope from his belt, this is bad... this is really bad. He should have just let the Kid be and hurried his sorry ass down here sooner instead of playing head-shrinker with himself. “Hey!” he called out to the trapped girl, “Are you okay?” Stupid question, he thought as he asked it.
The young woman’s frightened face jerked toward his direction, utter terror reflected in her eyes. “Oh, god!” she cried out in a trembling voice, trying to keep the mud out of her mouth, “Help me!”
“You’re gonna be okay,” Jason called back, trying to sound reassuring as he held the rope in his hands while he assessed his position on the edge of the mudflat relative to her, “I’m going to help you.”
“Please!” the young woman begged him, tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t want to die!”
“You’re not going to die,” Jason replied, trying even more so to sound sure of himself, “I promise.” He hoped desperately that this was a promise that he would be able to keep. “I’m Jason,” he said to her as he stepped tentatively around the edge of the mud pit, carefully eyeing where the solid ground gave way to yielding muck. “I’m the guy who passed by here earlier when you... um...” he paused, unwilling to add embarrassment to the girl’s dire predicament, “when you... weren’t in this trouble,” he finally concluded his thought. “And this is...” he added, pointing to his left and then catching himself as he realized that he had been about to introduce the girl to a figment of his imagination — Boy, wouldn’t that be reassuring to her! he thought — “um... and this is... quite a sticky spot you’ve gotten yourself into.” The enmired girl could only whimper quietly in reply.
“Nice save, Jay-man,” the Kid chided him, rolling his eyes as he crossed his arms self-importantly over his chest, “we wouldn’t want her to think that you were using her deadly peril as an opportunity for you to engage in reflective debate with a mental projection of your darkest desires during a journey of self-discovery while she sinks to her doom in the quicksand… and, boy,” he added, gazing lasciviously at the helpless damsel in her distress, “does she ever look fucking hot sinking to her doom in the quicksand!”
Jason ignored his doppelganger’s lecherousness and pulled out several feet of rope to toss toward the girl, stepping as close to the edge of the flat as he could without risking getting stuck in the mud himself. Rescuing the young woman from the clutching mire was going to be difficult enough without his lustful, sarcastic, fourth-wall-breaking younger self constantly reminding him of his fetish for this very kind of situation, he realized; now he really wished that he’d been able to keep his monster bottled up in his subconscious at the girl’s first cry for help.
“What’s your name?” Jason asked the young woman as he prepared to throw the end of the rope to her, hoping that ordinary small talk would help to calm her nerves.
“Angela,” she replied tearfully.
Jason blanched at her unexpected response. Noooooo, he said to himself, she… couldn’t be. The Kid was certainly a mental projection of his memories of himself, Jason thought, but this girl was unquestionably real, and besides, she couldn’t be “his” Angela from college, who would now be in her mid-fifties.
“Her eyes are green and her hair is auburn, in case you hadn’t noticed through all the mud,” the Kid muttered quietly in his ear as Jason threw the end of the rope toward her, “and even money says she’s twenty years old.”
“How old are you, Angela?” Jason asked, hoping at least to shut the Kid’s smart-ass mouth as the rope landed in front of her.
“Twenty,” she answered, her voice catching as she wept.
Jason grimaced and exhaled irritably over his young counterpart’s smart-ass assertion having been proven correct. “Okay, she’s twenty,” he whispered angrily to the Kid, “and yes, her eyes are green and her hair is auburn, but she’s not our Angela from college.”
“Is someone there with you?” the girl asked haltingly. “I thought I heard you talking to someone.”
“Just talking to myself, Angela. Helps me stay focused,” Jason replied truthfully on both counts, waiting for her to take hold of the rope that he had tossed to her. Several seconds went by before he realized that she wasn’t trying to grasp it at all but was only staring at it as it lay on the surface of the mire a couple of feet in front of her face.
“Angela, honey, I need for you to grab the rope so I can pull you out,” Jason said encouragingly.
“I can’t!” she cried forlornly, her voice rising in despair. “Every time I try to raise my arms I go deeper!” Her pitiful weeping grew louder as the rope lay mockingly before her face. It was easily within her reach, Jason thought, but hopelessly beyond her nerve.
“It’s okay, Angela,” he said, trying again to sound reassuring, “let me try something else.” As soon as I think of something else, he grumbled to himself. How was he going to overcome her fear?
Jason felt a tap on his shoulder as the Kid sidled up to him. “Just look at her, Jay-man,” his mental doppelganger whispered lewdly, shaking his head and grinning as he pointed toward the trapped girl. “Doesn’t the sight of her frightened face framed by the muck, her eyes streaming with tears and her lips quivering in dread as she feels herself slipping deeper into the ooze, just give you a charge down there?”
“I’ve already told you I’m more interested in helping her,” Jason grumbled impatiently to his younger self even as he became aware of the stirrings of a developing hardness at the base of his pelvic region. “Can’t you put your own fetish-level lust and self-centeredness on hold for a moment and think about her?”
“Oh, I am thinking about her, Jay-man,” the Kid replied with a salacious smirk, “and how good it’s going to be when she goes under!”
“You know what I mean, Kid,” Jason muttered indignantly. “Think about some way to help her!”
“So… you really wanna play the hero, huh?” the Kid said mockingly to him. “Okay, how’s this? You could try getting closer to her,” he suggested, a sly smile coming over his face. “Of course, that would mean actually going into the quicksand, which we’ve...”
“Which we’ve... um, which I’ve never actually done before,” Jason responded quietly. He had fantasized about being in quicksand, of course, and even about sinking all the way under in it; in his youth he had sometimes pretended that the running sand in the surf at the beach was quicksand as his feet would sink into it while the waves receded from the shore, and once as a teenager he had stepped into the foot-deep mud at the edge of a shallow pond in his neighborhood when no one else was around and had again imagined that it was quicksand, but he’d never actually gone into the real stuff. Now it looked like he would have to, in order to—
“In order to save the damsel in distress from a horrible fate!” the Kid exploded, anticipation in his voice, reveling in Jason’s fetish for the life-or-death scene before them and in the fact that only Jason could hear and see him. “Oh, boy, this is it!” the Kid shouted as he spun around like a… well, like a kid in a toy store, his hands pushing his hair back from his forehead in excitement. “There she is, Jay-man, just as you’ve always imagined her! The helpless damsel, trapped and sinking in the quicksand, waiting and hoping for you to be her hero, her shining knight!” he exulted, pointing at the girl and poking Jason in the ribs. “The sucking mire is pulling her down, maybe even all the way under to her doom, but you’re gonna save her… if you can! And if you do, boy, oh, boy...” the Kid enthused gleefully as he pumped his fists expectantly, “is she ever gonna want to reward you!”
Jason grumbled at the Kid’s self-absorption and immaturity as Angela continued weeping softly in the middle of the mudflat. Whether she lived or died, Jason realized, his monster was intent on getting what it wanted. Was it possible that the legally-of-age-but-just-barely version of himself was still emotionally a twelve-year-old? That he was still feeling the first pangs of pubescent sexuality combined with a childhood fascination with quicksand but with no concern for a young woman’s fear or fate? And what was worse, had Jason himself been this monstrously immature and self-centered when he had been a teenager? Regardless of what weirdness was going on in his own psyche, he realized that the Kid was going to be of little if any help in saving this poor girl. Jason was on his own.
If he were going to have to go into the quicksand to help her, Jason considered quietly, he certainly wasn’t going to blunder into it without any means of getting himself back out. Better safe than sorry. He pulled the rope back to himself, taking its fifty-foot length into account as he surveyed his surroundings. The tall, leafy vegetation that grew alongside the mudflat was mostly water and little else, far too flimsy and utterly incapable of withstanding the force that would be required for it to be an anchor for the rope so that he could pull Angela and himself back out of the mire. There were rocks embedded here and there in the dirt path that went past the muddy area, some of which poked above the dusty ground in places, but none around which he could tie the end of the rope. The nearest substantial tree stood on the other side of the path, its trunk a good foot or so in diameter. That just might work, he said to himself. “Wait here, Angela,” Jason called to her as he sprinted across the path, “I’ll be right back!”
“‘Wait here’?” the Kid called after him derisively. “Where do you think she’s gonna go? Besides under, that is.”
Jason reached the tree and went around it with the rope, ignoring the Kid’s black humor while tying the best knot that he could without wasting length. Four feet around the trunk, Jason calculated quickly, plus a bit more to tie the knot, leaves about forty-five feet of rope. Given how poorly he’d proven to be with ropes and knots long ago in Boy Scouts, he hoped that his effort here would hold. He looked back to where Angela’s face hovered above the surface of the mire and swore silently as he realized that it was about to reach her tightly-closed mouth. She’ll go under for sure if I can’t pull her out, Jason thought sickly as he finished cinching the knot. He quickly raced back to the edge of the mudflat, the rope playing out of his hands as he went. Damn! It was nearly forty feet from the tree just to the edge of the flat, leaving so little length of rope that he didn’t know if he would be able to reach her even if he did go into the quicksand himself. But he had to try; she was doomed if he didn’t. “It’s okay, Angela,” he called to her, trying again to sound reassuring, “I’m going to come in after you.”
“But then we’ll both... ulp!” she spluttered as the muck tried to get past her vigilant lips, “We’ll both be trapped!”
“I’ve tied off the rope on a tree back there,” Jason replied. “I’ll be able to pull us both out,” he added, secretly uncertain of himself. At her current depth, the quicksand’s grasp on her body would be considerable, and the suction that would be created by his efforts to pull her free, to say nothing of himself as well, might be insurmountable. He pushed such thoughts aside as he removed his wallet, car keys, and dead cell phone from his pants pockets and his Fitbit from his left wrist before sitting down at the edge of the mudflat and beginning to unlace his shoes.
“Hey, what gives?” the Kid pestered him, impatient to experience the quicksand vicariously through Jason’s attempt to help the girl. “I don’t wanna smell your stinky feet, and I’m sure she doesn’t either!”
“I’m going to try to come closer to you, Angela,” Jason said as he pulled off his shoes, directing his words more toward her as an explanation of what he was doing than as a reply to his bothersome “friend.” “I once read that it’s easier to keep your feet free in deep mud or quicksand when you’re barefoot than when you have shoes on, so I’m taking them off.”
“But I’m barefoot and I can’t get out!” Angela whimpered in a shaky voice, trying not to burst out crying again. Jason removed his socks and looked at her with pity as tears seeped from the corners of her eyes, her face hovering precariously low in the quicksand. Wow, he thought as he stowed his keys and Fitbit in one shoe, his wallet and phone in the other, and his socks in both before reaching for the rope, as voluptuous and alluring as she appeared earlier when I first saw her, she’s barely more than a frightened little girl in fear for her life. Jason stood up at the edge of the mudflat before the despairing young woman, who at twenty was about the same age as his own daughters, as a sense of paternal protectiveness swelled in his heart. A quiet resolve permeated his being: He was going to save her, no matter what.
Jason grasped the rope a couple of feet from its end and looped its remaining length loosely around his left hand to better maintain his grip on it when he began trying to pull the girl out of the quicksand, assuming, of course, that he could reach her in the first place. “Okay, Angela, I’m coming in,” he said, trying to mask his own uneasiness over the challenge before him as he stepped out into the muck. Angela could only look on from where she was trapped the middle of the mudflat as he slowly began making his way toward her. I’m actually doing this, he thought as his right foot and leg sank a good foot or so below the surface before reaching the slippery bottom. Already this deep so close to the edge, he thought as he took a few more trying steps forward through the clinging mire. There was no time to think about how the sticky ooze felt around his bare lower legs as he extended his left arm behind himself and pulled the rope taut in his hand while tentatively stretching his right arm toward Angela while he assessed the distance between himself and the young woman. As he had feared, he could already tell that he wasn’t quite close enough to reach her.
Jason looked back toward the tree, making sure that the rope hadn’t hung up on anything between it and himself, and then turned again toward Angela. She was slowly sinking before his eyes, and the expression of fear and anguish on her face broke his heart. Is this some kind of cosmic, karmic test? he wondered uncertainly as he checked his footing in the mud. Having imagined in his youth a real girl named Angela sinking to her doom in quicksand in a fetish fantasy story of his own creation and for his own pleasure, was he now being compelled as an adult to participate in the playing out of that same fantasy with a girl of the same name in real life and with real consequences? Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Jason muttered silently as he tugged again on the rope. He was about to try to move closer to the young woman when his right foot suddenly slipped out from under him into deeper mud where the bottom dropped off abruptly in front of him, sending him down awkwardly into the muck and causing the loose coils of rope to slip away from his left hand. Angela gasped in dismay as she watched him fall before her into the quicksand, certain now that all hope had been lost as her tears began to flow again.
Dammit! Jason cursed his clumsiness as he momentarily floundered waist-deep in the muck just beyond the drop-off before finding the loose end of the rope and then strenuously heaving himself back onto the submerged ledge after several seconds of labor while Angela wept helplessly in the mire behind him. Shit! he thought as he struggled to his feet in the shallow part of the pit, it won’t do either of us any good if I lose the rope while I’m trying to pull her out. Besides the obvious need for him to maintain his grip on the rope, his two-handed effort to free himself made it clear that he would need the strength of both his arms to rescue her from the quicksand’s grip… if indeed he had the strength to do it at all.
How the hell am I going to hold on to the rope and have both arms free at the same time to pull her out? Jason worried as he looked back at the distance that separated himself from the young woman. The weight of the muck coating his shorts from his spill in the quicksand had caused them to drop a couple of inches from their usual position at his hips, and as he grasped his belt to pull his pants back up he found the answer in his hands. My belt, he thought as he began fumbling with the end of the rope. I’ll tie the rope to my belt in back. Then I’ll have both hands free and I won’t have to worry about dropping it.
Angela watched him intently from her perilous position in the middle of the mud pit as he coiled the end of the rope two or three times around his belt behind him and tied a knot in it, pulling it as tight as he could. It wasn’t the most elegant of knots, quite amateurish in fact, he thought as he yanked at it, but it would hold. And with the rope tied this tightly to him right near its end instead of having a couple of feet of it looped loosely around his hand, the little bit of extra length might be enough for him to reach Angela and pull her to safety. Feeling more confident now that the rope was secured to his belt, Jason stepped toward her again, his right leg now sinking close to his knee as he brought his left leg forward to join its mate. Mindful of the drop-off that had surprised him earlier beneath the surface, he carefully leaned forward as far as he could, extending both his arms toward the trapped girl as the rope pulled taut behind him.
For some reason he didn’t seem to be any closer to Angela now than he had been before as he stretched his arms in her direction, and after a moment’s puzzlement he understood why. When he had held the rope in his left hand during his first attempt to reach her, his arm had been extended behind himself as he gripped the rope a couple of feet from its end. However, now that the end of the rope was tied to his belt, Jason realized that the extra length of rope that he had hoped to have had vanished in the difference between where his hand had been stretched behind him earlier and where he was standing in the mud now. Grimacing over his faulty math, he turned his body slightly sideways and again reached out with his right arm as far as he could toward the young woman.
“Angela, I really need for you to try to lift your arms up and out of the mud and take my hand,” Jason said with a note of urgency in his voice. “I can’t come any closer; there’s no more rope.” If she could free her arms from the mire, he thought hopefully, she might be able to stretch toward him closely enough for him to grasp her hand and pull her free. For a moment he saw the surface in front of her rise slightly as she began lifting her arms from beneath it, but then she suddenly sank deeper with the effort, her mouth going completely under as her eyes widened in terror. For a few seconds she whimpered fearfully through her nose until she finally lowered her arms, her face rising again just enough for her lips to emerge. She coughed and spat muck and ooze out of her mouth as she began crying in earnest, her mournful wails echoing across the width of the river.
Jason knew that they were both running out of time. He looked back at the Kid, who was standing at the edge of the mudflat and had been strangely silent for the last several minutes. Had he been enjoying Jason’s futile efforts so far to save the girl, secretly gloating at him? He certainly hadn’t been much help to this point, Jason thought, aside from his suggestion that Jason go into the quicksand after her, which, to be honest, sounded like just the sort of thing that the Kid would propose anyway. Jason was about to turn back toward Angela when his younger double gestured toward him. “Pull off your shirt, Jay-man,” he offered quietly. “It’ll give you a couple more feet of reach.”
Jason stared back at the Kid in astonishment. Damn, why didn’t I think of that? he fumed as he began fumbling with his shirt tail. Wait a minute, he then realized, I just did. The Kid’s suggestion seemed reasonable, and Jason wondered if what they had discussed back on the trail might have had a positive effect after all. Taking the Kid’s idea to heart, Jason straightened up and turned back to face Angela as he began pulling his shirt up and over his head to reveal... well, in all truthfulness, to reveal that he really didn’t exercise as much as he should, and maybe he could do some pushups and lift some weights on a somewhat regular schedule to build up his upper-body strength, and perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to cut back on the Guinness Extra Stouts that he had come to enjoy in the evenings, and...
“Quite the Adonis, Jay-man!” the Kid called mockingly from behind him. “Don’t you think you could exercise more, and maybe do some pushups or lift some weights every once in a while, and... hey! Is your belly really supposed to pooch out farther than your chest like that?!” the Kid groaned. “Lay off those Extra Stouts, man! Geez! That’s gonna be my body someday!”
Jason would have told off the Kid, except that he knew that he was right. Decades of sitting at a desk building and fixing computers as a career had resulted in Jason’s leading a somewhat sedentary lifestyle, with walking around his neighborhood being the usual extent of his exercise, aside from his trail-hiking earlier that day. He hadn’t done much in his life to build up his upper-body strength, yet that was now precisely what he would need to free Angela from the quicksand. He finished pulling off his shirt and once more leaned forward, extending it as far as he could toward the weeping girl. For all the grief that the Kid had given him since he had popped up earlier from his subconscious, Jason considered, it seemed that his younger self had been right about his shirt; it looked to be within her reach.
“Angela, you’ve got to try to grab hold of my shirt,” Jason insisted to her. “I know you’re scared, but I can’t come any closer. You’ve got to help me to help you.” If she could only overcome her fear for just a moment and raise her hands clear of the mire long enough to take hold of his shirt, he thought, he’d be able to stop her from sinking and rescue her from her peril. “Please, Angela, trust me,” Jason begged her. Angela nodded, and once more the surface before her started rising as she sought to lift her arms out of the muck. Again her face began descending into the ooze, and Jason could see that panic was starting to overtake her.
“Angela, don’t give in to your fear!” he shouted as her mouth and nose disappeared beneath the muddy surface, leaving only her terror-stricken eyes and her forehead visible. “You’ve got to trust me!” Jason cried again, not even sure if she could still hear him, “I’m not going to let you die! I promise!”
Angela’s hands finally broke the surface as her eyes and forehead disappeared beneath it, leaving nothing of the young woman’s head visible except for mud-soaked locks of her auburn hair. Jason thrust his shirt toward her, seemingly close enough for her to grasp if she only would... but after several seconds he realized that something was wrong. Very wrong. She wasn’t trying to take hold of his shirt at all. Instead, her hands began clawing wildly at the muck from beneath as she tried to pull herself back above the surface, the miry expanse heaving and swelling around her with her convulsive efforts, and Jason realized to his horror that she was going into a struggling frenzy in the quicksand, the very thing that could spell her doom once and for all.
“Angela, no!” Jason shouted toward the place where she had vanished, holding out his shirt impotently as she floundered violently beneath the surface, desperate for one more breath. After several seconds her hands disappeared again into the mire and her mud-covered face and mouth reappeared, barely clearing the fluid skin of the quicksand as she coughed and spat while her tortured lungs insistently filled themselves with air. But her reemergence had done nothing to calm her terror; if anything, it had only exacerbated it. Having gone completely under once already, the poor girl was now beyond reasoning, beyond persuasion, as she flailed her arms and legs within the muck in an id-driven, instinctual panic.
She’s going to die! Jason shouted in his mind. She’s really going to die, and I can’t do anything to help her! He cursed himself again as he stood in the shallow mud on the submerged ledge, still leaning forward stupidly against the rope’s restrictive grip on his belt as he held out his flaccid shirt toward her. If only the rope had been longer, he grumbled, or the tree had been closer, he could have reached her. For that matter, if he’d gotten here sooner, while her arms and hands had still been free, instead of wasting time trying to talk sense into the Kid, into that damned monster in his head, he could have saved her. Instead, she was about to be wholly engulfed by the choking mire despite all his efforts to help her. Maybe the Kid had deliberately delayed him, Jason wondered resentfully, to make it more likely that things would come to this; it was just the sort of thing that the Kid would want to see, and it occurred to Jason that the Kid’s proposal that he take off his shirt hadn’t been for the sake of aiding Angela at all but had been meant merely to mock his attempts to save her by making him look like an oafish, overweight fool while the quicksand drew her irretrievably beyond his reach. Jason angrily threw his shirt behind himself, wanting no reminders of the Kid’s pointless, self-serving suggestions, and reached out again with his right arm toward the drowning girl, knowing that it would make no difference.
Angela continued to struggle desperately in the quicksand, her frenetic movements causing waves of ooze to roll and flow over what remained of her face above the surface, while inarticulate cries and moans escaped her lips as with each gasping breath she sank deeper into the quag, her eyes shut tight against the blinding muck that was now thickly caking them. Jason looked on in anguish, feeling sick to his stomach as he watched what were surely another human being’s final, fearful seconds of life. Angela’s mouth again slipped beneath the surface, leaving her nose as the only means by which she could still breathe... and scream. Terrified vocalizations exploded through her nostrils loudly and repeatedly until the ooze closed over them as well, and Angela opened her eyes for the last time. Her pupils locked with Jason’s, and for endless, agonizing seconds each held the other’s helpless gaze as she gradually settled further into the muck. “I’m sorry,” Jason whispered uselessly, his eyes filling with tears as he watched the frightened girl’s despairing face slowly disappear into the consuming mire.
Angela squeezed her eyes shut against her inevitable fate, tilting her head back to try to take one final, futile breath as the quicksand drew her into itself. After a few seconds of struggling her mouth cleared the surface one last time, and Jason steeled himself to bear witness to her final moment.
He wasn’t ready for it.
“You… promised!—” she choked bitterly at Jason... and then she was gone.
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To be continued in Part 4: “Man in the Mirror.”
(Or, What Happens When I Write a Quicksand Story and Cast Myself as the Hero)
by Jason Sample
August 2017-November 2018
(If you haven't already read Part 2, it's at viewtopic.php?f=14&t=19513#p125668.)
In Part 1 our protagonist Jason briefly encountered the pivotal character of our story, the unidentified, faceless young woman pleasuring herself in the mud, whose subsequent fall into quicksand and cries for help summon his antagonist the Kid, the "monster" in Jason's brain who personifies his combined sex drive and quicksand fetish. After much autobiographical, self-referential, and sometimes ridiculous debate and argument between Jason and the Kid in Part 2 over what to do and why to do it regarding the helpless damsel sinking in the quicksand, along with some "fatherly" advice from Jason to his young twin, the two of them are now racing toward the mudflat, Jason doing so in the hope of rescuing the trapped girl before it's too late, while the Kid probably just hopes that he hasn't missed watching her go under. This brings us to Part 3 below, where we finally meet the young woman in her peril... and Jason begins to wonder if there is more to this story than just a quicksand fetish fantasy come to life.
Standard disclaimer: As the full title above indicates, this story is "semi-autobiographical"; in the course of it I touch on certain aspects of my own quicksand fetish, both positive and negative, that pertain solely to myself. I do not presume or pretend to speak to or about others' experiences of their quicksand fetishes, nor about quicksand fetishism in general. Your mileage may vary.
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The Kid (Part 3): Damsel in Distress
Each turn in the path led to another, and after going around several of them as he continued racing downhill Jason was beginning to wonder if he would ever reach the place where the trail bottomed out when one last turn finally opened onto the level area alongside the river and the mudflat with its accompanying bank of vegetation that he had passed earlier between the trail and the water, where he had first encountered the young woman pleasuring herself in the mud. The afternoon sun reflected brightly off the wet skin of the flat, forcing him to raise his hand to his eyes and squint as he approached the edge of the muddy area and quickly scanned its surface. He could make out nothing in the glare except for a medium-sized rock in the middle of the miry expanse, a dozen feet or so away from where he stood, just rising above the surface. Maybe she got out on her own, or someone else helped her, Jason wondered hopefully as the Kid ran up next to him, panting from his sprint.
Jason’s hopeful wondering suddenly vanished as passing clouds overhead obscured the sun, dimming the glare as his younger twin pointed toward the object in the mud. It moved ever so slightly, and Jason realized to his horror that what he had perceived through his scrunched eyelids to be a “rock” was in fact all that now remained of the young woman above the surface of the flat. Only her mud-spattered face and forehead were visible as she held her head back, her ears almost submerged in the ooze that had climbed over her chin and was now threatening to creep between her firmly closed lips. She had sunk so deeply into the mire that she was now afraid either to move or to speak.
Oh, shit, Jason berated himself as he started removing the rope from his belt, this is bad... this is really bad. He should have just let the Kid be and hurried his sorry ass down here sooner instead of playing head-shrinker with himself. “Hey!” he called out to the trapped girl, “Are you okay?” Stupid question, he thought as he asked it.
The young woman’s frightened face jerked toward his direction, utter terror reflected in her eyes. “Oh, god!” she cried out in a trembling voice, trying to keep the mud out of her mouth, “Help me!”
“You’re gonna be okay,” Jason called back, trying to sound reassuring as he held the rope in his hands while he assessed his position on the edge of the mudflat relative to her, “I’m going to help you.”
“Please!” the young woman begged him, tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t want to die!”
“You’re not going to die,” Jason replied, trying even more so to sound sure of himself, “I promise.” He hoped desperately that this was a promise that he would be able to keep. “I’m Jason,” he said to her as he stepped tentatively around the edge of the mud pit, carefully eyeing where the solid ground gave way to yielding muck. “I’m the guy who passed by here earlier when you... um...” he paused, unwilling to add embarrassment to the girl’s dire predicament, “when you... weren’t in this trouble,” he finally concluded his thought. “And this is...” he added, pointing to his left and then catching himself as he realized that he had been about to introduce the girl to a figment of his imagination — Boy, wouldn’t that be reassuring to her! he thought — “um... and this is... quite a sticky spot you’ve gotten yourself into.” The enmired girl could only whimper quietly in reply.
“Nice save, Jay-man,” the Kid chided him, rolling his eyes as he crossed his arms self-importantly over his chest, “we wouldn’t want her to think that you were using her deadly peril as an opportunity for you to engage in reflective debate with a mental projection of your darkest desires during a journey of self-discovery while she sinks to her doom in the quicksand… and, boy,” he added, gazing lasciviously at the helpless damsel in her distress, “does she ever look fucking hot sinking to her doom in the quicksand!”
Jason ignored his doppelganger’s lecherousness and pulled out several feet of rope to toss toward the girl, stepping as close to the edge of the flat as he could without risking getting stuck in the mud himself. Rescuing the young woman from the clutching mire was going to be difficult enough without his lustful, sarcastic, fourth-wall-breaking younger self constantly reminding him of his fetish for this very kind of situation, he realized; now he really wished that he’d been able to keep his monster bottled up in his subconscious at the girl’s first cry for help.
“What’s your name?” Jason asked the young woman as he prepared to throw the end of the rope to her, hoping that ordinary small talk would help to calm her nerves.
“Angela,” she replied tearfully.
Jason blanched at her unexpected response. Noooooo, he said to himself, she… couldn’t be. The Kid was certainly a mental projection of his memories of himself, Jason thought, but this girl was unquestionably real, and besides, she couldn’t be “his” Angela from college, who would now be in her mid-fifties.
“Her eyes are green and her hair is auburn, in case you hadn’t noticed through all the mud,” the Kid muttered quietly in his ear as Jason threw the end of the rope toward her, “and even money says she’s twenty years old.”
“How old are you, Angela?” Jason asked, hoping at least to shut the Kid’s smart-ass mouth as the rope landed in front of her.
“Twenty,” she answered, her voice catching as she wept.
Jason grimaced and exhaled irritably over his young counterpart’s smart-ass assertion having been proven correct. “Okay, she’s twenty,” he whispered angrily to the Kid, “and yes, her eyes are green and her hair is auburn, but she’s not our Angela from college.”
“Is someone there with you?” the girl asked haltingly. “I thought I heard you talking to someone.”
“Just talking to myself, Angela. Helps me stay focused,” Jason replied truthfully on both counts, waiting for her to take hold of the rope that he had tossed to her. Several seconds went by before he realized that she wasn’t trying to grasp it at all but was only staring at it as it lay on the surface of the mire a couple of feet in front of her face.
“Angela, honey, I need for you to grab the rope so I can pull you out,” Jason said encouragingly.
“I can’t!” she cried forlornly, her voice rising in despair. “Every time I try to raise my arms I go deeper!” Her pitiful weeping grew louder as the rope lay mockingly before her face. It was easily within her reach, Jason thought, but hopelessly beyond her nerve.
“It’s okay, Angela,” he said, trying again to sound reassuring, “let me try something else.” As soon as I think of something else, he grumbled to himself. How was he going to overcome her fear?
Jason felt a tap on his shoulder as the Kid sidled up to him. “Just look at her, Jay-man,” his mental doppelganger whispered lewdly, shaking his head and grinning as he pointed toward the trapped girl. “Doesn’t the sight of her frightened face framed by the muck, her eyes streaming with tears and her lips quivering in dread as she feels herself slipping deeper into the ooze, just give you a charge down there?”
“I’ve already told you I’m more interested in helping her,” Jason grumbled impatiently to his younger self even as he became aware of the stirrings of a developing hardness at the base of his pelvic region. “Can’t you put your own fetish-level lust and self-centeredness on hold for a moment and think about her?”
“Oh, I am thinking about her, Jay-man,” the Kid replied with a salacious smirk, “and how good it’s going to be when she goes under!”
“You know what I mean, Kid,” Jason muttered indignantly. “Think about some way to help her!”
“So… you really wanna play the hero, huh?” the Kid said mockingly to him. “Okay, how’s this? You could try getting closer to her,” he suggested, a sly smile coming over his face. “Of course, that would mean actually going into the quicksand, which we’ve...”
“Which we’ve... um, which I’ve never actually done before,” Jason responded quietly. He had fantasized about being in quicksand, of course, and even about sinking all the way under in it; in his youth he had sometimes pretended that the running sand in the surf at the beach was quicksand as his feet would sink into it while the waves receded from the shore, and once as a teenager he had stepped into the foot-deep mud at the edge of a shallow pond in his neighborhood when no one else was around and had again imagined that it was quicksand, but he’d never actually gone into the real stuff. Now it looked like he would have to, in order to—
“In order to save the damsel in distress from a horrible fate!” the Kid exploded, anticipation in his voice, reveling in Jason’s fetish for the life-or-death scene before them and in the fact that only Jason could hear and see him. “Oh, boy, this is it!” the Kid shouted as he spun around like a… well, like a kid in a toy store, his hands pushing his hair back from his forehead in excitement. “There she is, Jay-man, just as you’ve always imagined her! The helpless damsel, trapped and sinking in the quicksand, waiting and hoping for you to be her hero, her shining knight!” he exulted, pointing at the girl and poking Jason in the ribs. “The sucking mire is pulling her down, maybe even all the way under to her doom, but you’re gonna save her… if you can! And if you do, boy, oh, boy...” the Kid enthused gleefully as he pumped his fists expectantly, “is she ever gonna want to reward you!”
Jason grumbled at the Kid’s self-absorption and immaturity as Angela continued weeping softly in the middle of the mudflat. Whether she lived or died, Jason realized, his monster was intent on getting what it wanted. Was it possible that the legally-of-age-but-just-barely version of himself was still emotionally a twelve-year-old? That he was still feeling the first pangs of pubescent sexuality combined with a childhood fascination with quicksand but with no concern for a young woman’s fear or fate? And what was worse, had Jason himself been this monstrously immature and self-centered when he had been a teenager? Regardless of what weirdness was going on in his own psyche, he realized that the Kid was going to be of little if any help in saving this poor girl. Jason was on his own.
If he were going to have to go into the quicksand to help her, Jason considered quietly, he certainly wasn’t going to blunder into it without any means of getting himself back out. Better safe than sorry. He pulled the rope back to himself, taking its fifty-foot length into account as he surveyed his surroundings. The tall, leafy vegetation that grew alongside the mudflat was mostly water and little else, far too flimsy and utterly incapable of withstanding the force that would be required for it to be an anchor for the rope so that he could pull Angela and himself back out of the mire. There were rocks embedded here and there in the dirt path that went past the muddy area, some of which poked above the dusty ground in places, but none around which he could tie the end of the rope. The nearest substantial tree stood on the other side of the path, its trunk a good foot or so in diameter. That just might work, he said to himself. “Wait here, Angela,” Jason called to her as he sprinted across the path, “I’ll be right back!”
“‘Wait here’?” the Kid called after him derisively. “Where do you think she’s gonna go? Besides under, that is.”
Jason reached the tree and went around it with the rope, ignoring the Kid’s black humor while tying the best knot that he could without wasting length. Four feet around the trunk, Jason calculated quickly, plus a bit more to tie the knot, leaves about forty-five feet of rope. Given how poorly he’d proven to be with ropes and knots long ago in Boy Scouts, he hoped that his effort here would hold. He looked back to where Angela’s face hovered above the surface of the mire and swore silently as he realized that it was about to reach her tightly-closed mouth. She’ll go under for sure if I can’t pull her out, Jason thought sickly as he finished cinching the knot. He quickly raced back to the edge of the mudflat, the rope playing out of his hands as he went. Damn! It was nearly forty feet from the tree just to the edge of the flat, leaving so little length of rope that he didn’t know if he would be able to reach her even if he did go into the quicksand himself. But he had to try; she was doomed if he didn’t. “It’s okay, Angela,” he called to her, trying again to sound reassuring, “I’m going to come in after you.”
“But then we’ll both... ulp!” she spluttered as the muck tried to get past her vigilant lips, “We’ll both be trapped!”
“I’ve tied off the rope on a tree back there,” Jason replied. “I’ll be able to pull us both out,” he added, secretly uncertain of himself. At her current depth, the quicksand’s grasp on her body would be considerable, and the suction that would be created by his efforts to pull her free, to say nothing of himself as well, might be insurmountable. He pushed such thoughts aside as he removed his wallet, car keys, and dead cell phone from his pants pockets and his Fitbit from his left wrist before sitting down at the edge of the mudflat and beginning to unlace his shoes.
“Hey, what gives?” the Kid pestered him, impatient to experience the quicksand vicariously through Jason’s attempt to help the girl. “I don’t wanna smell your stinky feet, and I’m sure she doesn’t either!”
“I’m going to try to come closer to you, Angela,” Jason said as he pulled off his shoes, directing his words more toward her as an explanation of what he was doing than as a reply to his bothersome “friend.” “I once read that it’s easier to keep your feet free in deep mud or quicksand when you’re barefoot than when you have shoes on, so I’m taking them off.”
“But I’m barefoot and I can’t get out!” Angela whimpered in a shaky voice, trying not to burst out crying again. Jason removed his socks and looked at her with pity as tears seeped from the corners of her eyes, her face hovering precariously low in the quicksand. Wow, he thought as he stowed his keys and Fitbit in one shoe, his wallet and phone in the other, and his socks in both before reaching for the rope, as voluptuous and alluring as she appeared earlier when I first saw her, she’s barely more than a frightened little girl in fear for her life. Jason stood up at the edge of the mudflat before the despairing young woman, who at twenty was about the same age as his own daughters, as a sense of paternal protectiveness swelled in his heart. A quiet resolve permeated his being: He was going to save her, no matter what.
Jason grasped the rope a couple of feet from its end and looped its remaining length loosely around his left hand to better maintain his grip on it when he began trying to pull the girl out of the quicksand, assuming, of course, that he could reach her in the first place. “Okay, Angela, I’m coming in,” he said, trying to mask his own uneasiness over the challenge before him as he stepped out into the muck. Angela could only look on from where she was trapped the middle of the mudflat as he slowly began making his way toward her. I’m actually doing this, he thought as his right foot and leg sank a good foot or so below the surface before reaching the slippery bottom. Already this deep so close to the edge, he thought as he took a few more trying steps forward through the clinging mire. There was no time to think about how the sticky ooze felt around his bare lower legs as he extended his left arm behind himself and pulled the rope taut in his hand while tentatively stretching his right arm toward Angela while he assessed the distance between himself and the young woman. As he had feared, he could already tell that he wasn’t quite close enough to reach her.
Jason looked back toward the tree, making sure that the rope hadn’t hung up on anything between it and himself, and then turned again toward Angela. She was slowly sinking before his eyes, and the expression of fear and anguish on her face broke his heart. Is this some kind of cosmic, karmic test? he wondered uncertainly as he checked his footing in the mud. Having imagined in his youth a real girl named Angela sinking to her doom in quicksand in a fetish fantasy story of his own creation and for his own pleasure, was he now being compelled as an adult to participate in the playing out of that same fantasy with a girl of the same name in real life and with real consequences? Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Jason muttered silently as he tugged again on the rope. He was about to try to move closer to the young woman when his right foot suddenly slipped out from under him into deeper mud where the bottom dropped off abruptly in front of him, sending him down awkwardly into the muck and causing the loose coils of rope to slip away from his left hand. Angela gasped in dismay as she watched him fall before her into the quicksand, certain now that all hope had been lost as her tears began to flow again.
Dammit! Jason cursed his clumsiness as he momentarily floundered waist-deep in the muck just beyond the drop-off before finding the loose end of the rope and then strenuously heaving himself back onto the submerged ledge after several seconds of labor while Angela wept helplessly in the mire behind him. Shit! he thought as he struggled to his feet in the shallow part of the pit, it won’t do either of us any good if I lose the rope while I’m trying to pull her out. Besides the obvious need for him to maintain his grip on the rope, his two-handed effort to free himself made it clear that he would need the strength of both his arms to rescue her from the quicksand’s grip… if indeed he had the strength to do it at all.
How the hell am I going to hold on to the rope and have both arms free at the same time to pull her out? Jason worried as he looked back at the distance that separated himself from the young woman. The weight of the muck coating his shorts from his spill in the quicksand had caused them to drop a couple of inches from their usual position at his hips, and as he grasped his belt to pull his pants back up he found the answer in his hands. My belt, he thought as he began fumbling with the end of the rope. I’ll tie the rope to my belt in back. Then I’ll have both hands free and I won’t have to worry about dropping it.
Angela watched him intently from her perilous position in the middle of the mud pit as he coiled the end of the rope two or three times around his belt behind him and tied a knot in it, pulling it as tight as he could. It wasn’t the most elegant of knots, quite amateurish in fact, he thought as he yanked at it, but it would hold. And with the rope tied this tightly to him right near its end instead of having a couple of feet of it looped loosely around his hand, the little bit of extra length might be enough for him to reach Angela and pull her to safety. Feeling more confident now that the rope was secured to his belt, Jason stepped toward her again, his right leg now sinking close to his knee as he brought his left leg forward to join its mate. Mindful of the drop-off that had surprised him earlier beneath the surface, he carefully leaned forward as far as he could, extending both his arms toward the trapped girl as the rope pulled taut behind him.
For some reason he didn’t seem to be any closer to Angela now than he had been before as he stretched his arms in her direction, and after a moment’s puzzlement he understood why. When he had held the rope in his left hand during his first attempt to reach her, his arm had been extended behind himself as he gripped the rope a couple of feet from its end. However, now that the end of the rope was tied to his belt, Jason realized that the extra length of rope that he had hoped to have had vanished in the difference between where his hand had been stretched behind him earlier and where he was standing in the mud now. Grimacing over his faulty math, he turned his body slightly sideways and again reached out with his right arm as far as he could toward the young woman.
“Angela, I really need for you to try to lift your arms up and out of the mud and take my hand,” Jason said with a note of urgency in his voice. “I can’t come any closer; there’s no more rope.” If she could free her arms from the mire, he thought hopefully, she might be able to stretch toward him closely enough for him to grasp her hand and pull her free. For a moment he saw the surface in front of her rise slightly as she began lifting her arms from beneath it, but then she suddenly sank deeper with the effort, her mouth going completely under as her eyes widened in terror. For a few seconds she whimpered fearfully through her nose until she finally lowered her arms, her face rising again just enough for her lips to emerge. She coughed and spat muck and ooze out of her mouth as she began crying in earnest, her mournful wails echoing across the width of the river.
Jason knew that they were both running out of time. He looked back at the Kid, who was standing at the edge of the mudflat and had been strangely silent for the last several minutes. Had he been enjoying Jason’s futile efforts so far to save the girl, secretly gloating at him? He certainly hadn’t been much help to this point, Jason thought, aside from his suggestion that Jason go into the quicksand after her, which, to be honest, sounded like just the sort of thing that the Kid would propose anyway. Jason was about to turn back toward Angela when his younger double gestured toward him. “Pull off your shirt, Jay-man,” he offered quietly. “It’ll give you a couple more feet of reach.”
Jason stared back at the Kid in astonishment. Damn, why didn’t I think of that? he fumed as he began fumbling with his shirt tail. Wait a minute, he then realized, I just did. The Kid’s suggestion seemed reasonable, and Jason wondered if what they had discussed back on the trail might have had a positive effect after all. Taking the Kid’s idea to heart, Jason straightened up and turned back to face Angela as he began pulling his shirt up and over his head to reveal... well, in all truthfulness, to reveal that he really didn’t exercise as much as he should, and maybe he could do some pushups and lift some weights on a somewhat regular schedule to build up his upper-body strength, and perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to cut back on the Guinness Extra Stouts that he had come to enjoy in the evenings, and...
“Quite the Adonis, Jay-man!” the Kid called mockingly from behind him. “Don’t you think you could exercise more, and maybe do some pushups or lift some weights every once in a while, and... hey! Is your belly really supposed to pooch out farther than your chest like that?!” the Kid groaned. “Lay off those Extra Stouts, man! Geez! That’s gonna be my body someday!”
Jason would have told off the Kid, except that he knew that he was right. Decades of sitting at a desk building and fixing computers as a career had resulted in Jason’s leading a somewhat sedentary lifestyle, with walking around his neighborhood being the usual extent of his exercise, aside from his trail-hiking earlier that day. He hadn’t done much in his life to build up his upper-body strength, yet that was now precisely what he would need to free Angela from the quicksand. He finished pulling off his shirt and once more leaned forward, extending it as far as he could toward the weeping girl. For all the grief that the Kid had given him since he had popped up earlier from his subconscious, Jason considered, it seemed that his younger self had been right about his shirt; it looked to be within her reach.
“Angela, you’ve got to try to grab hold of my shirt,” Jason insisted to her. “I know you’re scared, but I can’t come any closer. You’ve got to help me to help you.” If she could only overcome her fear for just a moment and raise her hands clear of the mire long enough to take hold of his shirt, he thought, he’d be able to stop her from sinking and rescue her from her peril. “Please, Angela, trust me,” Jason begged her. Angela nodded, and once more the surface before her started rising as she sought to lift her arms out of the muck. Again her face began descending into the ooze, and Jason could see that panic was starting to overtake her.
“Angela, don’t give in to your fear!” he shouted as her mouth and nose disappeared beneath the muddy surface, leaving only her terror-stricken eyes and her forehead visible. “You’ve got to trust me!” Jason cried again, not even sure if she could still hear him, “I’m not going to let you die! I promise!”
Angela’s hands finally broke the surface as her eyes and forehead disappeared beneath it, leaving nothing of the young woman’s head visible except for mud-soaked locks of her auburn hair. Jason thrust his shirt toward her, seemingly close enough for her to grasp if she only would... but after several seconds he realized that something was wrong. Very wrong. She wasn’t trying to take hold of his shirt at all. Instead, her hands began clawing wildly at the muck from beneath as she tried to pull herself back above the surface, the miry expanse heaving and swelling around her with her convulsive efforts, and Jason realized to his horror that she was going into a struggling frenzy in the quicksand, the very thing that could spell her doom once and for all.
“Angela, no!” Jason shouted toward the place where she had vanished, holding out his shirt impotently as she floundered violently beneath the surface, desperate for one more breath. After several seconds her hands disappeared again into the mire and her mud-covered face and mouth reappeared, barely clearing the fluid skin of the quicksand as she coughed and spat while her tortured lungs insistently filled themselves with air. But her reemergence had done nothing to calm her terror; if anything, it had only exacerbated it. Having gone completely under once already, the poor girl was now beyond reasoning, beyond persuasion, as she flailed her arms and legs within the muck in an id-driven, instinctual panic.
She’s going to die! Jason shouted in his mind. She’s really going to die, and I can’t do anything to help her! He cursed himself again as he stood in the shallow mud on the submerged ledge, still leaning forward stupidly against the rope’s restrictive grip on his belt as he held out his flaccid shirt toward her. If only the rope had been longer, he grumbled, or the tree had been closer, he could have reached her. For that matter, if he’d gotten here sooner, while her arms and hands had still been free, instead of wasting time trying to talk sense into the Kid, into that damned monster in his head, he could have saved her. Instead, she was about to be wholly engulfed by the choking mire despite all his efforts to help her. Maybe the Kid had deliberately delayed him, Jason wondered resentfully, to make it more likely that things would come to this; it was just the sort of thing that the Kid would want to see, and it occurred to Jason that the Kid’s proposal that he take off his shirt hadn’t been for the sake of aiding Angela at all but had been meant merely to mock his attempts to save her by making him look like an oafish, overweight fool while the quicksand drew her irretrievably beyond his reach. Jason angrily threw his shirt behind himself, wanting no reminders of the Kid’s pointless, self-serving suggestions, and reached out again with his right arm toward the drowning girl, knowing that it would make no difference.
Angela continued to struggle desperately in the quicksand, her frenetic movements causing waves of ooze to roll and flow over what remained of her face above the surface, while inarticulate cries and moans escaped her lips as with each gasping breath she sank deeper into the quag, her eyes shut tight against the blinding muck that was now thickly caking them. Jason looked on in anguish, feeling sick to his stomach as he watched what were surely another human being’s final, fearful seconds of life. Angela’s mouth again slipped beneath the surface, leaving her nose as the only means by which she could still breathe... and scream. Terrified vocalizations exploded through her nostrils loudly and repeatedly until the ooze closed over them as well, and Angela opened her eyes for the last time. Her pupils locked with Jason’s, and for endless, agonizing seconds each held the other’s helpless gaze as she gradually settled further into the muck. “I’m sorry,” Jason whispered uselessly, his eyes filling with tears as he watched the frightened girl’s despairing face slowly disappear into the consuming mire.
Angela squeezed her eyes shut against her inevitable fate, tilting her head back to try to take one final, futile breath as the quicksand drew her into itself. After a few seconds of struggling her mouth cleared the surface one last time, and Jason steeled himself to bear witness to her final moment.
He wasn’t ready for it.
“You… promised!—” she choked bitterly at Jason... and then she was gone.
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To be continued in Part 4: “Man in the Mirror.”
