I

August.  Early evening sun was bleeding through a reddish brown sky. He woke up, looking straight up through the trees.  His head was pounding like a motherfucker and there was smoke hanging low in the air. Funny thing, though, he was on his feet.  Must have been running in his sleep.  He could feel himself moving through the forest fast ... not remembering, exactly.  Along the river; down near the highway.  Had to get away ... he could smell the honeysuckle.

The door to the hallway swung open with a resounding crash against the plaster wall.  Bonnie sank into the couch and started to hyperventilate.  The receptionist placed the telephone receiver on the desk without noticing what she had done.  A large man in a black leather jacket with his fly unbuttoned came stomping heavily into the room.  He clapped his hands in double-time above his head loudly and deliberately.  The look on his face was intense.  He moved towards the receptionist as she stood and stared at him incredulously.

He saw the house for the first time in the early evening light ... a small gray house.  It stood next to a vacant lot, overgrown with large, bushy thistle and tall trees ... big fuckers.  She was in there.  He'd watched her walk in.  It made him feel like his head weighed a ton; then it got tough for him to concentrate.  He let his instincts take over as he entered the house.  It wasn't clear to him yet what he was going to do, but he knew he wouldn't have to think about that for long.

About 40 feet down the hallway, Kelly lay partially paralyzed and hemorrhaging from her fall down the stairs.  She was regaining her senses slowly.  The physical pain gradually diminished her realization that what remained of her life would be a living nightmare.  Her sight was now impaired by double vision and the burning in her abdomen was severe.

The pain in her neck and shoulder was even worse.  The fall broke her collarbone.  A small portion of her clavicle protruded through the skin; she felt the cold jagged end scratch into her neck without realizing what it was.  About five feet away from her there was a large gun laying on the carpet.  She looked hard to make sure she wasn't dreaming.  It was the same gun Charlie had threatened her with.  The sight of it gave her the strength to try to drag herself towards it.  The pain in her shoulder nearly incapacitated her.

Despite the pain, Kelly forced herself to move.  She inched her way towards the gun, using her right arm and both legs to pull herself along the carpet.  The sounds of hysterical screams didn't move her.  She concentrated all of her energy on reaching the weapon that lay only a few feet away.  He was still in the house.  She knew he wasn't finished with her yet.  She could hear his voice getting louder down the hall.  Her only hope was to get to the gun.

When he opened the door to the office on the second floor he was looking to stop Kelly from aborting his kid.  The unexpected sight of the black woman sitting across the room in her tight skirt gave him a hard-on. She had the kind of legs he wanted wrapped tight around his waist, grinding against him all wet and fleshy.  He could feel his dick inside her, rubbing back and forth slowly.  The well-toned muscles of her smooth vagina squeezed so tight around the shaft of his penis, a trickle of seminal fluid moistened his white jockey shorts.  When the doctor's voice interrupted his thoughts, he felt like his testicles were in a vice.  His erotic fantasy ended abruptly and he found himself veering in a direction he hadn't anticipated.

The terror that came over her when the door flew open was immeasurable.  The suddenness of Charlie entering the room reduced Bonnie to a wheezing bundle of flesh that sank into the plush cushions of the brown velvet couch.  She felt as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.  When the reflected light from an exposed metal button on his jeans flashed into her eyes, she immediately sensed a metallic taste and smell in the room.  The hot acrid stink caused her to gasp desperately to catch her breath.  The brutal aggressiveness of his behavior frightened her so badly she couldn't move her legs.  He looked at her once and pointed at her between claps.  She recoiled.  Then he turned his attention to the receptionist whose reaction was very different from Bonnie's.  Bonnie couldn’t believe her own eyes.

The receptionist completely ignored the man's bizarre behavior.  She was annoyed, not frightened by his clapping and stomping.  "Sir!" she complained vehemently, "stop that right now!"  She clapped her hands together several times to get his full attention.

"You're not supposed to be in here."

By the time she finished her words he had stopped moving.  He stood about two feet from her and tilted his head to one side, the way a dog does to hear better.  I be up yo ass in a minute....He sounded black.

His offensive words set the receptionist off immediately.  "Get out of this house!  Get out of here.  Right now, before I call the police!" she barked and waved her hand as if she were dismissing an ill-mannered child.

Bonnie was surprised.  She watched him turn his body to the right; he started to walk away.  Then he swung his left arm around with the full weight of his body behind it.  The back of his hand connected with the side of the receptionist’s head.  The force of the blow knocked her across her desk and onto the floor behind it.  Bonnie's breathing grew more desperate as his sudden violence gave the scene an eerie feel of slow motion.

When he turned to observe her reaction, Bonnie saw his eyes through a scintillating mist.  They were like two gold coins embedded in the white sclera of his eyeballs.  His pupils were so constricted, they appeared to be missing altogether.  He raised his right hand and made an elegant gesture; the sign of the cross.  At the same time, he reached down with his left hand and grabbed his bulging crotch obscenely.  His gestures were shocking.  Bonnie started breathing so deeply she felt light-headed.  Her vision dimmed.  The man who had just knocked the receptionist across her desk was looking dark-skinned to her from across the room, almost black.

Bonnie couldn't prevent herself from staring at him.  Something in the eyes of that expressionless face was irresistible.  His gaze was so intense it froze the muscles in her eyeballs and forced her pupils to dilate completely.  She felt an energy flow through her eyes and down the back of her neck.  When the receptionist began to moan, it stopped.  He interrupted his gaze and turned his head suddenly to look behind the wooden desk.  Bonnie felt an immediate rush of air into her lungs.  As he walked around to get a better look, he grunted.  The receptionist was lying on the other side, where Bonnie couldn't see her.  She could only hear her painful moans growing louder.  The man hunched over and reached behind the desk with his long powerful arm.  As he stretched towards the receptionist, his arm lengthened unnaturally and his grunting took on a decidedly sexual sound.  He had grabbed her by the hair and was curling his arm, pulling her up slowly to his chest.  Her moans turned into screams as she came to her senses, slapping at his wrist and causing herself even more pain.  He let her drop to the floor with a thud.

Bonnie was convinced she was going to have a heart attack.  But not even the fear of dying gave her the motivation she needed to get up and run from the room.  She was not just having another one of her anxiety attacks.  This time the pain was in the center of her chest.  It was real.  It was only a matter of time before she would go into convulsions.

As she sat clutching her chest, a series of terrifying thoughts streamed across her mind.  She became disoriented.  Her limbs were going numb.  There was no one around to help her.  All she wanted was for Colleen to return or for Kimberly to come rushing in from the hallway.  She prayed for someone to save her from this nightmare.  She prayed that she would pass out when the pain became too great.

The sound of meaningless words broke the tenuous strands of his fantasy about the black woman.  The stark contrast between the stoic attitude in the voice and the sexual feelings raging inside him shrunk him both physically and psychologically.  He felt like he'd been caught masturbating by his third-grade teacher again.  She enraged him with her patronizing look, sitting behind that massive desk.

He played along with her presumption that he was looking for drugs, just to see how far she would go.  As he watched her out of the corner of his eye he saw her opening the desk drawer.  That's when he decided she was going to be a problem.  He thought she'd go for the intercom, maybe; even be stupid enough to think the phone was still working.  Instead, she was planning to blow him away.  She had no qualms about it.  The gun in her desk was loaded.

He never expected that someone who had just tried to kill him could upset him with bad news as well.  The doctor said that Kelly was coming in for her follow-up.  He went numb.  Nothing mattered anymore.  All he wanted to do was inflict pain on someone; anything to make him feel good again.  He jabbed the syringe in the doctor's neck and emptied it fast.  Her frenzied reaction made him feel better.  He had to jab her again.  It excited him sexually.

The black chick was so freaked out by his actions he knew she wouldn't be any trouble.  He ordered her into the closet while he waited for Kelly to knock at the door.  He'd get to her later.  He didn't want to waste a good piece of ass.  When he saw Kelly's face all scabbed and swollen, and her hands wrapped in bandages, he almost lost it.  The sight of her friend standing next to her in the doorway had irritated him and confused him even more.  Things got complicated very quickly.

When the receptionist opened her eyes and looked up, she saw Charlie standing astride her.  His face was pale and emotionless.  Her pain and humiliation awakened a violent anger inside her.  Idiot.  He had put himself in a vulnerable position above her, leaving himself wide open for her fierce and repeated kicks.  She knew she had hurt him the first time she connected.  She could tell by the way he hunched over and grunted.  He looked as if he were about to vomit.  The suddenness of her reaction caught him completely off guard.  He didn't even try to move out of range.  She kicked as hard as she could with her thick-soled shoe.  "Filthy pig!  You rotten, stinking, filthy pig!" She'd make it so he'd think twice before tangling with another woman.  While he writhed on the floor she would hurry out through the back door and run for help.

With each angry kick to the groin, Charlie grunted louder.  In her rage, the receptionist had taken control of the situation.  She was so confident Charlie couldn't move, she drew herself completely under his legs and stomped up into his perineum with the wooden heel of her shoe.  Charlie snapped his legs together unexpectedly and caught her foot between his thighs.  She couldn't believe how strong he was.  He reached down with both hands to steady her right foot and look down at her crotch.  She realized her dress was hiked above her waist.  When she saw the look in his eyes she quickly started kicking him with her left leg.  "No, no, no!" She sounded as though she were reprimanding a stubborn child.

Charlie ignored her.  He held her right leg between his knees and reached between her legs with his right hand.  He tore off her panties effortlessly.  "Oh!  God!  No!" she protested, trying to snatch the pink cotton briefs from his hand.  She felt the energy drain from her body.  The humiliation of a man ripping her panties off was the most devastating thing she could imagine.  "Heavens!  God!  Oh Holy Jesus!" she exclaimed.  The thought of him doing anything else to her -- especially in a women's shelter -- was unthinkable.  She refused even to consider the possibility.  She closed her eyes and kicked him as hard as she could with her free leg.  She couldn't bear to watch him look at her anymore.  This couldn't be happening.  Not here -- not like this.

He was like a tree trunk, rigid and immovable.  As she continued to kick and hold her dress down with her hands, he braced her right thigh between his knees.  His sudden movement pinned her on her back.  She watched in disbelief as he turned her foot, in one quick motion, 360 degrees counter-clockwise.

There was no snap.  Bonnie heard only the sickening sound of ligaments and tendons ripping apart; then a sustained, high-pitched scream that made her eardrums buzz like a punctured speaker.  The sound rattled her vision.  It sent a piercing sensation that went from her sinuses to the center of her chest.  It took her breath away.  The sound flashed silver behind her closed eyes and left the taste of metal in her mouth.  It riveted her completely to the brown velvet couch.  When she opened her eyes again, she heard her own voice; she was screaming.

He pointed the gun at Kelly and she fell to her knees, begging him not to kill her.  His anger deafened him.  He hit her across the face with an open hand.  She tried to crawl away like a dog.  He kicked her legs out ,from under her and fell on her, pounding her buttocks with his fists as hard as he could.  She tried to deny having gotten the abortion.  She'd do anything to save herself.

A feeling of satisfaction rose up from his groin as he felt his knuckles tingle from the blows he landed in her face.  He tore her blouse open, revealing the small crucifix which hung from a gold chain around her neck.  He snapped the chain and hurled the piece of jewelry across the room.  She felt the thin gold strand cut into her skin.  The instant he released the crucifix, a peculiar sensation ran from the tips of his fingers and all the way up his arm.  Kelly got a good look at his face.  At that point, she knew she was going to die.

The receptionist felt small; dim, somehow.  She could hear a voice in the distance.  Someone was screaming, she thought.  The man who loomed above her seemed oddly out of place.  He didn't mean anything to her.  He just seemed to be there, hovering close to her face.  Then he floated away from her unfastening the top button on his jeans.  The reflection from one of his metal buttons cut painfully through the dim light inside her eyes.  She realized then that she was the one doing the screaming.

He grabbed her twisted foot and stood up.  He held it tight as he began kicking the back of her thigh.  He felt the steel toe of his boot sink into her flesh and down to the bone.  Before she passed out, he let her foot drop to the floor.  He turned and smiled at the woman on the couch, waving the receptionist’s torn panties at her like a trophy.  He could tell she was a dike by the way her hair was cut.  He smiled at her suggestively. As he walked towards her, he reached behind him to secure the gun in the waistband of his jeans.

Bonnie sat trembling in disbelief.  She sounded like a bagpipe beginning to inflate.  The man who had just attacked the receptionist was walking towards her.  His skin was black as coal dust.  His crotch was ready to explode.  As he stepped closer, his body mass disturbed the air in the room.  It charged it with static electricity.  The smell of rotting meat and burning hair was unmistakable.  The man was walking towards her fast.  The room began to expand away from her as he approached.  He walked with a decided limp, faster and faster, but he didn’t seem to be getting any closer.  The pain in Bonnie's chest was getting worse.  Her ears were beginning to ring.  The same unutterable thought kept racing through her head.  She was going to be raped by a "nigger."

The pain radiated from the center of her chest up the sides of her head.  Just as she thought her heart was about to explode, the huge black man was upon her.  He held the back of his hand close to her face.  The torn panties dangled from his muscular thumb.  "Look, bitch!  Dis be mah skin, guhl.  Culuh don' come off.  Touch it." As he spoke, Bonnie couldn't believe she had thought he was white when he first entered the room.

The only thing unusual about his physical appearance was his golden eyes.  Other than that he appeared to be a regular black man.  'Go ohn.  Touch it; rub it!" he continued as he reached for one of her reluctant hands and pulled it towards his oversized crotch.  Bonnie didn't have the strength to stop him.  She looked at his face incredulously as he pointed her fingers toward the floor and pressed her palm against his groin.  He guided her hand inside the open fly of his jeans.  She could barely breathe as she felt her fingers slipping behind the elastic of his jockey shorts.  He pressed her hand further down into his underwear and spread his muscular legs.  She could feel his coarse pubic hair with the tips of her shrinking fingers.

Bonnie's face went awry when she felt how moist and sticky it was in there.  He had just raped the receptionist.  He was about to do the same to her.  The thought of his huge black penis and wrinkled scrotum started to turn her stomach.  She could actually smell his filthy crotch.

"Dis be whachoo want," he said, pushing her hand all the way down into his pants.

Bonnie's eyes widened.  "Aaaaaaaaahhhh!" she screamed as he forced her fingers deep into his hairy groin, forcing her hand to part the warm, moist folds of his bulbous flesh.  "Aaahh!  " He lodged her fingers deep within his slimy vagina and forced them to probe the area around his stiffened clitoris.  "Aaaahh!" The smegma that lined the walls of his vaginal cavity was as thick and watery as cottage cheese.  "Aaaaaaahhh.

"Racist!" he accused her angrily and jerked her arm out of his pants.  Chunks of pungent smegma spattered her lap.  She slammed backwards into the couch, screaming and cringing from the sheer horror of the incongruity.  As he raved at her and threw the torn panties in her face, the light reflected off one of the metal buttons on his jeans.  The scent of heated metal filled her head painfully.  She could see his rapidly moving mouth, but she couldn't make out his angry words.

She watched him reel from side to side, hypnotizing her with his rhythmic movements.  Then he pointed at her accusingly.  The huge claws on his hand looked like talons through her tears, thick and black.  As he pointed them at her they protracted and retracted ominously.  He cocked his head to the side and looked at her.  The emotion had drained completely from his golden eyes.  What was left wasn't human.  She saw something otherworldly.  The enormity of its power was surpassed only by its purity.  She nearly admired it.

The woman on the couch fascinated him.  She was almost paralyzed with fear.  He was going to give her something to wrap her lips around before she died.  In the meantime, he would terrorize her; see how much she could take before shitting in her pants.  Then he'd stick it to her; taunt her while he forced her jaws apart and shoved his dick down her throat. She'd love it.

Bonnie gasped.  She felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.  She saw something else in his eyes.  "No.  That’s impossible," she said weakly.

"I've come to take ye to yer perdition, little girl." The black man spoke with an Irish accent in an old woman's voice.

"No!" she screamed.  "My God!  No!  NO!"

He straddled her thighs with his thick, muscular legs.  "Give sweet baby Jesus a kiss, little girl.”

"Aaaaaahh!  Aaaaaaahhhh!”

The black man held one of the metal buttons between his thumb and forefinger and pressed his crotch close to her face.  "See the changing forms."

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahgaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

"Give granmaw's pussy a kiss, little girl."

"Mother of God!" she howled.  "You're not– not – human!" Her own words shuddered violently from her diaphragm through her chest cavity and out her mouth, leaving behind a suffocating feeling of pain so great, it was as if her jaw had been wrenched from its sockets.  As the words left her mouth, the black man reared back with such sudden velocity, his movement sucked the air from her lungs.  Bonnie watched helplessly as he stood upright and drew his left arm back, pointing his talons at her eyes.  He was the devil.  He had returned for her.  The horror of coming face to face with the blackest force in creation had all but paralyzed her unbelieving mind.  Within the deepest recesses of her religiously inveterate core, she still believed.  She had a chance to save herself.  Even though she was dying, her immortal soul was safe.

She heard herself reciting the "Act of Contrition." Her voice was desperate; it sounded like a whisper, far away.  "Oh my God I am heartily......

"LESBIAN!" His booming voice rocked the house to its foundation and silenced her feeble attempt at prayer.  You’re not in the state of Sanctifying Grace," it spoke matter-of-factly.  "Yo muthafuckin' soh liz maahn!"

His words shattered her belief.  For a split second, she was plunged into a state of utter despair.  Instantly, Bonnie saw a flash of light.  She felt the black man's talons sink deep into her chest with the speed of a bullet.  The exploding sound of her rib cage caving under the pressure broke her eardrums.  She could no longer hear his damning recitation; but through her stroboscopic vision she could see he had pulled his fist out of her chest.  His black taloned-hand held her throbbing heart to her anxious tongue in a grotesque offering of final communion.

He climbed off the young woman's lap and walked behind the desk. He held the gun in his left hand and grabbed a fistful of the older woman's hair with his right.  He dragged her to the middle of the room and turned her head carefully so that she could get a good look at the younger woman's twitching body.  She was semi-conscious when he dragged her into the hallway towards the back bedrooms.  Her moans and whimpers were pathetic; they sounded insincere.  She was too weak to protest with any degree of enthusiasm.  When her twisted foot snagged the hall door, she became a little more animated.  He felt her body convulse, and then relax.

At the far end of the hall, he stopped to look to the right.  Down the hallway towards the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor Kelly was sprawled on the carpet, unaware of his proximity.  He bent down quietly and placed the gun about five feet away from her head.  He knew her chances of reaching it before he got back were slim.  He slowly twisted the receptionist's hair between his fingers and looked towards the row of bedrooms.

He dragged the older woman's unconscious body into the first bedroom like the carcass of a deer.  Before he placed her face-up on the bed, he stood up straight with his head tilted back and stared at the ceiling.  He remained still for a few seconds, then his body started to quake involuntarily with each throb of his powerful heart.  He began sniffing at the air like a dog.  His golden eyes narrowed as his eyebrows met at the bridge of his nose.  Something disturbed the air in the room and registered a look of consternation on his face.  Someone was approaching from afar.  There was still time.  He bent over the older woman and pinched her nose shut.  He placed his mouth over hers and emptied his lungs.

His hot, rancid breath swelled the receptionist’s chest.  Its effect was like smelling salts.  She regained consciousness and opened her eyes wide.  The unexpected blue of the room startled her.  The air left her lungs with a hiss and the pain in her leg came alive.  The man who had attacked her earlier was standing above her.  He fell on her like a toppled tree.  She let out an agonized scream.  Her physical pain was almost a comfort compared to the utter horror of another sexual attack.

"That's right," he said to her in a quiet seductive voice, rotating his hips back and forth expertly.  "Beg me.  You know I want it."  Her screams were beginning to turn him on.

His words cut through her electric pain like cold circular steel.  They were distant and surreal, following her like little wheels in space.  Her sight narrowed to a telescopic view as she felt her body whirl through the airless room.  When it stopped, the colors around her had changed to green.  She felt her own nakedness again and the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.  The chill in the air sent a tendril of pain snaking from her ankle to her hip.  Oh no, not again.  She could see the man’s thick fingers wrapped around her flabby shin, forcing her legs to point to the ceiling.  She saw her twisted foot dangling from its swollen purple ankle like a broken flower.  Her body convulsed.  The stench of his breath was unbearable.  But it was the sight of her mangled foot that sent her reeling back into her own head.

The color of the room began to fade.  It became a stark, blanched white.  The sudden intensity of white shot through her entire body like a bolt of lightning streaking across a dry velvet sky.  She smelled the sizzling white satin of the sheets as she felt the slow burn; she was ripping apart like a paper kite in an electrical storm.  Her lower lip peeled back to the tip of her chin as her white teeth dug into the saliva-soaked white of the pillowcase.  She felt her neck straining against the unrelenting pressure as the luminous white of the room drowned in a sound like the low rumble of thunder.

II

"Kelly!" Charlie hollered.

She pointed the gun at his face.  After the explosion Charlie dropped to his hands and knees and stared at her.  The bullet had lodged in the ceiling.  His pupils constricted to pin points.  She knew he was going to rape her again.  This time it would be even worse; she'd just tried to kill him.

"Charlie," she said in a pitiful, petitioning voice.  "Why?"

He crawled towards her on all fours like an animal.  His movements were slow and deliberate.  "You haven't got the guts!" he taunted as she pointed the gun directly at his face again.  Her hands were shaking so badly it was doubtful she could hit her mark.

"Charlie?  Don't make me do it!"

"Do it, bitch!  Come on!  Put me out of my misery!"

"Don' t, Charlie, don't!" The tears in her eyes were clouding her vision.  She barely had the strength to hold the gun up any longer.

"Put it down, then."

"No.  I have to kill you," she said weakly.

"You pathetic little cunt!  Put the gun down now," he warned as he crawled closer and closer.  "I'm gonna count to three.  I'll tell you a little story along the way.  I want you to listen very carefully."

Kelly watched him through her tears as he started to rise to his feet.  She kept the gun pointed at him while she listened.  He walked towards her slowly.

"Nothing is what it seems.  One .... Remember when I told you I was different from..." His words trailed off into gibberish.  She couldn't understand what he was saying. “What?”

He held one of the metal buttons on his fly between his fingers, deliberately manipulating it so that it would reflect the light from a ceiling fixture directly into her face.

"Two .... I told you that I..."

The reflection from the shiny button distorted her view of him.  It seemed to interfere with the sound of his voice.  He suddenly stopped walking towards her.  She didn't understand why he had stopped.  If he were charging at her or threatening to kill her, she could understand.  It was his stillness that terrified her.  His inscrutable behavior made her tremble even more as she gripped the gun tighter and tried to keep her aim at the center of his face.  A feeling of absolute terror was beginning to overtake her completely.

"See the changing forms," she heard him say in a woman's voice.  His mouth was wide open, and his lips weren't moving.  "Taste the coolness of the metal."  It was Stephanie's voice coming from his throat.

"What’s happening!" Kelly screamed out in horror.  "Why are you doing this to me! Why?”

"Join us in ever-changing form," Stephanie's voice deteriorated into a scratchy metallic sound.  "You belong in here ... with us."

The metal button seemed to grow before her eyes.  Like a bad acid trip it continued to expand to the size of a motion picture screen.  It reflected a panorama of shapes and colors that transformed rhythmically into images of her own life.  They mesmerized her; fascinated her to the point of relaxing her grip on the gun.  She had to look closer.  She could see herself.  She was lying on a white bed all alone.  The lighting in the room was dim, yet she could clearly see that it was her, intubated.  There were life-support machines all around her.  The hair that remained on her head was thin and patchy.  Large open sores dotted her face and her eyes stared into the distance.  She weighed less than 80 pounds.  She knew where she was.

“Noooooo!  God damn you!"  She let the gun turn upside down between her hands and leveraged the barrel until it rested between her teeth.  She used both thumbs to Pull the trigger and shoot into the roof of her mouth.  Her hair puffed out behind her once and her eyes bulged noticeably from the shock wave.  A red halo of droplets framed her dying face against the gray of the distant wall.  The gun had skidded away from her, landing with its barrel pointed at the top of her head.  Immediately after the explosion, her forehead hit the carpet with a barely audible thump.

III

"Trrrrrnnnnnnngggg." The sound of the doorbell unnerved him.  He picked up the gun and grabbed hold of Kelly's arm.  He dragged her down the hallway containing the bedrooms.  He opened the door to the pink one. The color of the room drove into his eyes like spikes when the doorbell sounded again.

"Trrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnngggggggg.”

He dumped Kelly's body on the floor and slammed the door shut.  He headed down the hallway and waited inside the lavender room.  The urge to fuck raged through his body like a disease.  He couldn't get enough. The sound of the buzzer told him that his visitor was at the back door.

"Hello.  Anybody here?"

He kept perfectly still.  He almost couldn't stand the pain of his erection.  A woman entered through the back door.  He sensed her movements through the thick walls of the house.

"Hello?  Bonnie?  It’s me."

The odor of roast turkey hung in the air as she looked into the empty kitchen.  She stepped back and walked towards the door to the hallway.  She opened it carefully and caught a mild whiff of something burnt.  The door to the reception area was open at the end of the dark hallway.  She was about to head in that direction when she looked down the hall to the left.  In the dim light that filtered from the top of the stairs, she thought the carpet and the wall were stained with blood.  Her imagination was interfering with her reason.  She decided the dark stains had to be something else; wine or motor oil, perhaps.

She walked straight through the dark hallway towards the reception area.  She had to find out what was going on.  "Hello?  Kimberly?  Bonnie?  Where is everybody?" As she walked into the brightly-lit oversized-room, she saw the back of a woman's head.  It was Bonnie, sitting on a large brown sofa across the way.  "Bonnie!" Colleen called out, thinking she hadn't heard her call from the back of the huge house; Bonnie would have responded when the doorbell rang.  She remembered hearing the sound through the front door herself.  She started to walk faster.  Something was wrong.

The smell of feces surprised her as she moved passed a massive cherry wood hutch.  The glass shelves rattled when she walked by.  She continued towards the couch, consciously bracing herself for a surprise.  Then she stopped.  She clutched her ears in horror and screamed at the top of her lungs.  She felt the blood drain from her head and into her stomach.  For a minute, she thought she was insane.  Bonnie sat on the couch looking straight ahead.  The front of her body was soaked in blood and her eyes were wide open.  Her lower jaw hung down to the center of her throat, permanently unhinged from the rest of her skull.  Her tongue protruded from her mouth like a stubby penis.  Her head wobbled grotesquely as her body convulsed.  The wound in her chest made a sickening sound; it gurgled and hissed.  She was still alive.

Colleen was on the verge of collapsing when she heard the rattling of the glass in the hutch.  The floor beneath her feet began to shake.  It was an earthquake.  A surge of adrenaline sent her sprinting for the front door.  The dead bolt was locked and the key was missing.  The lights flickered once and extinguished altogether.  Colleen crouched on the floor with her hands over her head.

For the first time in her life she was afraid of the dark.  She was petrified of being in the same room with the mutilated thing that sat staring at her from the couch.  The atmosphere became charged with electric energy.  It made her long red hair stand out like an enormous Afro.  Bonnie's hissing and gurgling seemed to intensify in the dark.  Colleen couldn't stand it.  She had to get out.  She felt her way frantically towards the hall, keeping clear of the awful sounds coming from the couch.  She made it all the way to the laundry room and out the back door before a man in a black leather jacket surprised her.  The dim light from the dark red sky reflected weakly in his golden eyes.