She removes the confining material from around the bottoms of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, drops the red half-bra to the floor next to the see-through blouse. She watches Alex's eyes widen in surprise and fascination as she slips her fingers through the golden rings dangling from her pierced nipples and yanks. An unsuppressible groan escapes her lips as exquisite thrills rip through traumatized nerve endings in both nipples, adding fuel to an already fierce fire blazing between her legs.

Bunching the short leather skirt up around her waist, Cindy slowly opens her thighs and allows a solitary fingertip to explore her moist crease from one end to the other. She licks her lips and imagines her finger has now become a tongue.

Despite strict orders not to move a muscle or she'll stop the show, she sees Alex can barely control himself. His hand goes to his lap and grips his erection like a vise. She can tell he is right on the edge.

She walks quickly to the bed, her fingers opening herself wide.

"f.u.c.k my brains out," she orders, lowering herself atop his hard-on.

Alex awakens to bright morning sunlight spearing his eyes, temporarily blinding him. He also has to pee something fierce. Without realizing that he's not at home in his own room, he tries to roll out of bed and instantly discov-rs he can move no more than an inch or two in either direction. Then he remembers: Both hands and both ankles are firmly cuffed with police-style steel handcuffs; the handcuffs chained to iron eyelets anch.o.r.ed to ceiling beams above the bed.

He dimly recalls allowing Cindy, at some low point during their nightlong lovefest, to shackle and chain him like a criminal. Though it did seem a bit kinky at the time, he didn't voice an objection because beautiful Cindy had him so turned on, he would have agreed to almost anything.

Then she proceeded to test his s.e.xual stamina until he fell asleep with the cuffs still fastened to his hands and feet.

Now, as he looks around for Cindy to free him, Cindy is nowhere to be seen.

Alex struggles with his bonds for what seems like hours, rattling the chains, rubbing his wrists raw, but neither set of cuffs wants to budge. He begins to panic. He shouts for help until he's hoa.r.s.e. No help comes. His bladder lets go and he wets the bed.

Finally, when he's given up hope anyone will hear him, the door opens and an older womana"old enough, by the looks of her, to be his own mother or grandmothera"enters the bedroom carrying a bundle of clean sheets. She walks to the windows and closes the blinds.

At first, as his eyes try to adjust to the changing light, Alex is absolutely certain this woman bears no resemblance to Cindy. This woman's hair is short and gray. Cindy's hair is long and blond. This woman appears old, tired, worn-out. Cindy is young and vibrant. Supers.e.xy. Cindy, he's sure, would never dress in a frumpy pale green housedress that obscures her figure from neck to knees. Nor would she house her feet in brown, well-worn penny loafers a size too big. Nor wear ornate eyegla.s.ses and no makeup.

"Where's Cindy?" Alex demands, thinking he's addressing a maid or cleaning woman. "Did she send you in here with the key to unlock these d.a.m.n things?"

"Cindy . . . went. . . away," the woman replies, each word deliberately drawn out as if she has to think twice about what a word means before voicing its sound. "My . . . name's . . . Marsha. I'm Cindy's . . . mother. And . . . no . . . she didn't give me any key."

"You can't be Cindy's mother," Alex objects. "Cindy told me both her parents were dead."

"But I am her . . . mother . . . and I'm certainly . . . not dead," the woman insists, her voice beginning to sound more and more like Cindy's. "What's the . . . matter? Don't I look like Cindy's . . . mother?"

Despite her aged appearance and weird speech patterns, Alex now thinks he can recognize a certain familiarity in this woman's demeanor. Merely a family resemblance? Or is it possible he may be talking to Cindy in disguise?

"No," he decides. "You look more like Cindy in a cheap, gray wig than you look like Cindy's mother." He rattles his chains. "C'mon, Cindy, stop playing games. Get me out of these things."

"Oh, no. I couldn't... do that," says the woman, "even if I . . . wanted to. Cindy has the only key."

"Can the c.r.a.p, Cindy," Alex shouts, angry at feeling toyed with. "Unlock these d.a.m.n cuffs right now! I want to take a shower and go home."

"I can tell by your . . . lack of clothes, young man," the woman says sternly, glancing disapprovingly at Alex's nakedness, then quickly averting her eyes, "that you and my daughter have been very, very . . . wicked. I'll just have to . . . punish her for that . . . when she returns. I can't have Cindy bringing strange . . . men into my house and doing heaven knows what. . . with them without. . . punishing her. Can I? I always punish Cindy when she's been wicked."

"You're . . ." Crazy, Alex starts to say, then quickly bites his tongue before the word can slip out. What if she really is crazy? Do crazy people turn violent, he wonders, when you tell them you think they're crazy? Alex is afraid to find out.

"What would be a suitable punishment for . . . my daughter. . . this time?" the woman asks herself aloud, momentarily ignoring Alex. "Should I beat her again? Lock her in a dark closet and feed her nothing but. . . prunes? Or should I make her lick the bathroom spotless . . . with her tongue? I've tried all those things, you know, and . . . none of them works. What can I do to make . . . Cindy obey me? What? What?"

Alex says nothing.

"Maybe I should punish you, "the woman suggests, returning her full attention to Alex. "Cindy seems to like you. Maybe if I were to punish you, it might hurt her worse than if I inflicted the same punishment on her directly. What do you think?"

"This isn't funny anymore, Cindy," Alex says, traces of fear edging into his voice. "Please. Just unlock these cuffs and let me go home. Play your mind games on someone else."

"I a.s.sure you, young man, this is no game," the woman says, laying the clean sheets at the foot of the bed and stepping to the doorway. "When I get back, I'll show you just how real all this can be."

"Oh, no," Sandra says when she opens the door to her bedroom and discovers a naked man chained to her bed. "Not again."

"Cindy?" the man asks hopefully. "Thank goodness, you're back, Cindy! Get me out of these cuffs before I go crazy!"

"I'm Sandy, not Cindy," Sandra quickly corrects the man, switching on overhead lights, casting out encroaching early evening shadows so the naked man can clearly see her raven-colored hair and baby blue eyes. "Cindy was my younger sister. Who the h.e.l.l are you, mister? And what, pray tell, are you doing chained to my bed without any clothes on?"

"Alex," the man answers, hope draining from his voice when he sees that Sandy isn't Cindy. "I'm sorry. I thought you were Cindy. You look a lot like Cindy, except for the hair and clothes. And I thought this was Cindy's bed."

"It was Cindy's bed. Before Cindy died in it."

"Cindy died? In this bed?"

"Four years ago. I was away at college at the time, but when I came home for spring break, I found my father chained to the bed, Cindy tied up next to him, and my mother on the floor at the foot of the bed. All dead. According to the autopsy, Cindy and my father both died of starvation and dehydration after weeks without food or water. My mother died from a self-inflicted overdose of sleeping pills."

"Jesus," Alex says.

"I don't cry for them anymore," Sandy says. "I don't have time to cry, what with running my father's businesses and maintaining the house."

"I don't suppose you do," Alex says sympathetically. "And I really don't want to impose on your precious time at all, but do you suppose you might take just a little time to look for the key to these cuffs? I'd really appreciate it."

"I don't know where to start looking," Sandra says, wondering how this man got chained to her bed in the first place. Especially since the police took all the chains and cuffs away when they took her father's decomposing body away. Where did these new chains and handcuffs come from?

"Please," begs the man with tears glistening his eyes. "Look for the keys. Please."

"Oh, all right," agrees Sandra. After all, it certainly wouldn't do if Mother were to come home unexpectedly and find a naked man chained to Sandra's bed.

It wouldn't do at all.

Can all three women be the same person? Alex wonders as he watches Sandra's shapely backside sashay from the room.

Is it possible?

Racking his brain for answers, he recalls something he learned during an intro psych cla.s.s the spring semester of his soph.o.m.ore year. "The victims of multiple personality disorder," his instructor had informed the cla.s.s, "are almost always women, very often young and pretty women, usually in their mid-to-late twenties by the time symptoms manifest themselves for clinical observation.

"MPD is one of several mental disorders believed to be caused by severe emotional trauma during the ident.i.ty realization phase of late childhood develop-ment or early adolescence. When a fragile undifferentiated preadolescent ego suffers an intolerable conditiona"such as repeated physical, s.e.xual, or mental abusea"over an extended period of time with no end in sight and no possibility of escape in the real world, the human psyche's unconscious defense mechanisms take over and the damaged ego sometimes splits into separate personalities in a desperate attempt to fool itself. 'This isn't really happening to me,' the mind tells itself, 'it's happening to someone else.'"

So which personality is the someone else in Cindy's case? Sandra? Marsha? Cindy?

Which woman is real, Alex wonders, and which two women are figments of a warped imagination?

Sandra is obviously just Cindy with medium-length black hair, dressed casually in loose-fitting blue jeans and a patterned blouse, looking like your average graduate student or maybe someone's third-grade teacher. Marsha, too, is Cindy, shrouded in a shapeless shift that hides her figure, wearing ornate eyegla.s.ses to disguise her face and a short gray wig to make her look twice as old as she really is. But Cindy herself is, he realizes too late to escape being trapped by the handcuffs, too fantastic to be real. Her long blond hair, fabulous body, and voracious appet.i.te for kinky s.e.x make her every man's wet dream come true.

While her Marsha personality is every man's worst nightmare!

And Sandra, who appears as nice and normal as the typical girl next door, is probably as crazy as an ax murderer.

Alex smells his fear. Tears run down his cheeks as he realizes the precarious predicament that thinking with his b.a.l.l.s instead of his head has placed him in.

Next timea"please, G.o.d, let there be a next time!a" he promises he'll know better.

What are you thinking now, my beautiful blue-eyed boy? Have you figured it out yet?

Do you know what's going to happen next?

Cindy swivels around in her executive office chair, punches a b.u.t.ton on an electronic control panel in front of her, and is able to view Alex's terrified face simultaneously in six live television monitors mounted on the wall. The hidden camerasa"one concealed in the ceiling, one on the floor, and one in each of the bedroom wallsa"can zoom in on any part of Alex's anatomy she wishes to focus on at the flip of a switch.

A dozen other video monitors on another wall replay highlights from last night's hours-long f.u.c.kfest, more than enough footage, Cindy is certain, for three or four feature-length films. When she has time, she'll edit the tapes for content, develop a cohesive story line for each feature presentation, dub in additional dialogue as needed, then add scripted footage of herself in the roles of Marsha, Sandra, and Cindy to round out production values. After tightening each feature to ninety minutes, reproducible masters, digitally enhanced, will be distributed via modem and international phone lines to business a.s.sociates in London and Bangkok. There her a.s.sociates will inexpensively ma.s.s-produce videotapes for the booming billion-dollar p.o.r.n markets of South America, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific Rim, where snuff filmsa"real snuff films, not phony reenactmentsa"are currently very much in demand.

Cindy expects to gross half a million dollars or more per feature, a mil and a half to two mil for the bundle. Not bad for a single night's work. Especially since her costar won't be alive to see a penny of the proceeds.

"The key to operating a successful business," her father taught her, "is to keep overhead low. Occupy a market niche that can command a high price for goods and services, and slice costs to the bone."

Her father had been her first costar, and she'd certainly sliced him to the bone.

Her mother had costarred in Cindy's second film.

Of course, Cindy isn't her real name. Nor does her real name appear in the phony credits of any of her feature films.

Cindy sees the growing fear on Alex's face in the monitor and knows it's time to end the charade. After all, it wouldn't do to have him die from sheer terror and ruin the bang-up ending she has planned, now would it?

Cindy picks up a twelve-foot braided rawhide bull-whip from her desk, coils it over her arm. The bullwhip is always a crowd pleaser. She'll start the next scene with the bullwhip biting into Alex's backside.

She slips on a pristine pair of white pumps with six-inch-high stiletto heels. The heels have been honed to fine points much sharper than nails. She'll end the scene by walking over Alex's groin, stomach, neck, and face with stiletto heels.

On her way from the office back to the bedroom, Cindy stops by a mirror, checks her makeup, and adjusts Marsha's wig so several strands of her own hair are visible at the edges.

The incongruity of the relatively young and well-proportioned naked female body in high heels she sees reflected in the mirror and the gray-haired granny wig slanted c.o.c.keyed on her forehead nearly makes her laugh.

But laughing is for later.

First she has to attend to business.

THE BEAST.

Larry Tritten.

Lewis woke to the sound of the animal breathing heavily, the gasped exhalations of its breath like those of someone sobbing, and they became steadily more excited as he lay alone in the darkness listening. It had reappeared again, after an absence of several nights during which he had dared to hope that the nightmare had finally come to an end, and as he lay quietly, paralyzed with fear, the familiar menacing sound overwhelmed him once more with a threat of terrible violence. As he listened, the gasping grew louder and more uneven and then broke as always into a protracted howling, the cry of a wounded or agonized thing.

The beast had returned. In a way it was a relief to have the tenuous thread of hope broken. There were times, now and then, when the beast would leave him alone for several consecutive nights, but after such an interim, it would always return, twice as fierce as before, growling and keening with such savagery that he could clearly picture for himself the manic gleaming of its eyes and the flashing of its teeth. He had only seen it once, a quick glimpse, but would never forget the sight, just as the beast would never let him rest. Except for its occasional absences, it prowled through the house each night, stalking him, endlessly, its presence a threat that dominated his thoughts by day as well as night. One day he was certain it would kill him and devour him, and on those nights when it didn't wake him with its wild cries, his dreams gave him dark visions of how this would happen, with the beast tearing the flesh from his struggling body. He had been born, he knew, to live indefinitely with this fear and to die after a seeming eternity of it when the beast decided it was time to feed. Perhaps a thousand nights from now, perhaps tonight.

Lewis began to weep, but soundlessly so as not to attract the beast to his door. Yet it was not that hard to cry soundlessly for someone who cannot even speak. Words were obstacles his tongue could not surmount, and his thoughts were themselves like tiny animals he had to struggle to control. What he perceived was a blurred and shifting montage of ideation illuminated by certain basic words and fragments of concept and guided by intuition. It was how he knew that his only real friend was dog, the good animal they allowed into his room sometimes to play with him. That was his only pleasure other than the customary one of eating and sometimes watching a little television. Beyond that there was only fear, his life an endless sequence of fear evolving into terror and devolving back into fear as he lived through blank days and dark nights waiting for the beast to come for him.

One night it would open the door, would come to feed.

Lewis wept soundlessly, his body shuddering with repressed sobs, and watched the door in the darkness, waiting. After a long while he finally slept again, and so descended into a nightmare in which the beast devoured him alive and screaming.

Then it was morning and the cell of his dun room was bright with sunlight. He got out of bed and sat on the edge of it, staring at the pink bunnies on the sleeve of his pajama top. Good animals. In time Mother came and dressed him, neither of them speaking because neither of them had anything to say, and in any case Lewis knew that this quiet and gentle (if not loving) woman was something more than she seemed to be. It was why every touch of her fingers as she dressed him filled him with coldness, why he could never trust her. She was part of the conspiracy.

Father came and stood in the doorway. "Hey, Lewis," he said in a monotone. He was carrying a blue book. "Elaine," he said to Mother, "I'm going to be late if I don't haul a.s.s. I've got to give that Chaucer exam anda"" he glanced at his watch "a"I don't want to emulate the White Rabbit."

"But you are rabbity in some ways," Mother said to him with a smile.

Father smiled back at her and crossed the room and put his arms around Mother and kissed her, and she put her arms around him and pressed her face to his throat. "I love you," she said. "Ummmmmmm, you're so good ..." She reached to unzip his pants, but he pulled away, laughing.

"No more than thou," Father said. "As for Love ... his wings will not rest and his feet will not stay for us; Morning is here in the joy of its might; With his breath has he sweetened a night and a day for us a" but I must now haul a.s.s ..."

"Swinburne?" asked Mother.

"To a point," Father said. He kissed Mother again. Lewis saw the tip of Mother's tongue, like that of a serpent, wet with light, slip from her mouth to ordain a kiss unlike any she had ever given him before she stopped the charade of kissing him. "See you, love," he said. '"Bye, Lewis."

After Father was gone, Mother took Lewis into the kitchen and fed him. No communication pa.s.sed between them and their eyes never met. Sometimes a vague sense of warmth emanated from her, but it was not even a flickering of the glow that she and Father exchanged, and Lewis sensed that it was because he knew her secret. He knew the horror that lurked within her. He lived in fear of her. He froze at her touch, and because of that, she cared little for him and he believed that she knew what he knew.

When Mother had fed him, she put him back in his room and closed the door. Lewis sat alone in the silent room with his brooding fear. A fly circled the room listlessly in the summer heat, returning again and again to the window to bounce buzzingly against the gla.s.s.

Lewis did nothing all morning and afternoon. It was his task. Nothing. He could hear Mother moving about in the house and his fear simmered within him. His thoughts moved like glacial ice floes in the deep gray tide of his consciousness. Could she know that he knew the evil she possessed? Or did she even know of the evil herself? Still, even in his fear, he relaxed somewhat because he doubted that she would kill him in the daylight. Only at night.

Early in the afternoon Mother fed Lewis again in his room and then admitted dog to play with him. She went away for a long while and when she came back the room was cooler, the sunlight had disappeared, and the sky through the window had gone from bright to gloomy. Now he believed that Mother was changing, too, by subtle degrees as the day waned and night, which was the habitat of the beast and the setting for his death, approached.

Mother smiled at Lewis and he cringed inwardly. She gazed at him but seemed to look unseeingly through him, and he could sense, the way an animal senses a subtle change in its environment, that she was beginning to change. The scent of it came from her like a warm fragrance. She looked at her watch.

"Lewis," she said, "I just don't know what to say. This way it's no good for any of us. I love you as much as I know how, but you're lost in darkness, we can't reach you, you can't reach us . . . We're going to take you to a place where you'll probably be more at home, if not happier, where there are others like you . . ." Her voice faltered and then she was crying the way Lewis did at night, silently, tears running down her cheeks. She came to him and embraced him, kissing the top of his head as her sobs became more audible, then burst from her in a welling up of stifled and confused love. But he couldn't discern the love and she couldn't see the look of terror on his face.

That night, after supper, Lewis sat alone in his room. Outside he could hear them talking and then the sound of their voices was absorbed by a lyrical stream of music that flowed through the house. Lewis saw that the fly was still at the window, its attempt to get outside reduced to a feeble straggling movement and intermittent buzzing.

He fell asleep, and when he woke the beast was in the next room, snarling, sounding crazed, and for some reason he was absolutely certain that tonight was the night it would come for him and would kill him. It had something to do with the speech Mother had made. He doubted that she understood this thing that happened to her any more than he did, and Father was just a helpless part of the terrible process.

In time the beast began to utter a loud cry that would normally have driven Lewis to the brink of collapse, but tonight to his surprise he discovered that his fear, so long pervasive and uncontrollable, metamorphosed suddenly and unexpectedly into a sort of wild anger. Uncaged, his fear, b.e.s.t.i.a.l in its own right, ran rampant. He found himself moving swiftly from the bed and into the hallway, an action so bold that he could never even have contemplated it on other nights. But this was different. This night was the night everything would be resolved.

Lewis half expected the beast to catch him in the hallway, but he could hear it behind the door of the room he ran past on his way to the kitchen. His thoughts reeled in a wet red medley in his maddened brain.

The knife, the knife! Lewis knew what it would do, had seen the way it cut smoothly and easily through a roast or a loaf of bread. He found it in its drawer and took it out.

Lewis opened the door quietly and firmly and looked into the room where, once before, late at night, he had glimpsed the beast, and there it was again. It reared up, staring at him with Mother's face, demonically transformed.

Like cutting bread, but wildly, fearfully . . .

At the end of a long tunnel of time the solemn men came for Lewis and found him triumphantly red with blood, the beast slain, Mother and Father freed from the bondage of b.e.s.t.i.a.l transformation, himself saved. But they were not pleased, these men like his father (teachers, they called themselves) who had been at the house before. Never at a loss for big words, they momentarily lost their gift of language and wailed and howled instead, acting like beasts themselves.

Lewis sensed that he would never understand. His perceptions of the things people did were constantly undermined by the paradoxes of their enigmatic behavior. An ape probably would have understood a play by Shakespeare as well as Lewis understood the world he had been born into. Shakespeare. There was a word, reiterated continually in Lewis's presence, that had no meaning whatever to him. He barely understood simple words and concepts. Beast. Animal. Bad. Good. Mother. Father. He sensed that Mother and Father were broken now, like many of the moving dolls they had given him and which he had eventually broken, but on the dim stage of his mind he would always see them, again and again, turning into the raging and screaming beast with Mother's face, and would always hear Father's harsh words as he pinned her to the bed, biting her and being bitten in turn until they moaned and writhed, "Come, now, milady, animal, sweet animal, let us make the beast with two backs, let us make the wild beast and howl at the melting moon!