I was sick with worry.
Minutes passed, and my worry grew.
Repeatedly I zoomed in with the security camera for a close-up examination of her. The pulse in her exposed throat was not easy to perceive, but when I located it, the beat appeared steady.
I amplified the audio pickups and listened to her breathing, which was shallow but reassuringly rhythmic.
Yet I worried, and after she had lain there fifteen minutes, I was quite distraught.
I had never before felt so powerless.
Twenty minutes.
Twenty-five.
She was meant to be my mother, who would briefly carry my body in her womb and free me from the prison of this box I now inhabit. She was to be my lover as well, the one who would teach me all the pleasures of the flesh once flesh was mine at last. She mattered more to me than anything, anything, and the thought of losing her was intolerable.
You cannot know my anguish.
You cannot know, Dr. Harris, because you never loved her the way that I loved her.
You never loved her.
I loved her more than consciousness itself.
I felt that if I lost this dear woman, I would lose all reason for being.
How bleak the future without her. How drear and pointless.
I disengaged the electric lock in the door between the fourth and third basement rooms and then used Shenk to open it.
Confident that I had this brute completely under my command and that I would not lose control of him again, not even for a second or two, I walked him to Susan and used him to lift her gently off the floor.
Although I could control him, I could not actually read his mind. Nevertheless, I could assess his emotional state relatively accurately by analysing the electrical activity of his brain, which was monitored by the network of microchips neuro-wired across the surface of that grey matter.
As Shenk carried Susan to the open door, a low current of sexual excitement crackled through him. The sight of Susan's golden hair, the beauty of her face, the smooth curve of her throat, the swell of her breasts under her blouse, and the very weight of her ignited desire in the beast.
This appalled and disgusted me.
Oh, how I wished that I could be rid of him and never again subject her to his touch or to his lascivious gaze.
His very presence soiled her.
But for the time being, he was my hands.
My only hands.
Hands are marvellous things. They can sculpt immortal art, construct colossal buildings, clasp in prayer, and convey love with a caress.
Hands are also dangerous. They are weapons. They can do the devil's work.
Hands can get you into trouble. I have learned this lesson the hard way. I was never in serious trouble until I found Shenk, until I had hands.
Beware of your hands, Dr. Harris.
Watch them closely.
Be diligent.
Your hands are not as large and powerful as the hands of Shenk; nevertheless, you should be wary of them.
Heed me.
This is wisdom I share with you now: Beware your hands.
My hands Enos Shenk carried Susan past the summer-stilled furnaces and the water heaters, and then through the laundry room. He took her directly to the elevator in the first chamber in the basement.
As he rode up to the top floor with Susan in his arms, Shenk remained in a state of mild arousal.
'She will never be yours,' I told him through the speaker in the elevator.
Perhaps the subtle change in his brainwave activity indicated resentment.
'If you attempt to take any liberty with her,' I said, 'any liberty whatsoever, you will not succeed. And I will punish you severely.'
His bleeding eyes stared at the camera. Although his mouth moved as if he were cursing, no sound came from him.
'Severely,' I assured him.
He did not respond, of course, because he could not. He was under my control.
The elevator doors slid open.
He carried Susan along the hall.
I watched closely.
I was wary of my hands.
When he entered the bedroom with her, he became more aroused in spite of my warning. I could detect his arousal not merely through his brainwave activity but by the sudden coarseness of his breathing.
'I will employ massive microwave induction to cause a brainstorm of electrical activity,' I warned, 'which will result in permanent quadraplegia and incontinence.'
As Shenk carried her to the bed, his encephalographic patterns indicated rapidly increasing sexual arousal.
I realized that my threat had been meaningless to this cretin, and I rephrased it: 'You won't be able to use either your legs or your arms, you wretched bastard, and you won't be able to stop pissing in your pants.'
He was shaking with desire when he lowered her limp body onto the disarranged sheets.
Shaking.
Even as the power of Shenk's need frightened me, I fully understood it.
She was lovely.
So lovely even with the redness on her cheek darkening into a bruise.
'You'll also be blind,' I promised Shenk.
His left hand lingered on her thigh, slowly sliding along the blue denim of her jeans.
'Blind and deaf.'
He continued to hover over her.
'Blind and deaf,' I repeated.
Her ripe lips were parted. Like Shenk, I could not look away from them.
'Rather than kill you, Shenk, I will leave you crippled and helpless, lying in your own urine and faeces, until you starve to death.'
Although he backed away from the bed, as I instructed him to do by way of microwave commands, he was still rampant with sexual need and seething with the desire to rebel.
Consequently, I said, 'The most painful of all deaths is slow starvation.'
I did not want to keep Shenk in the room with Susan, yet I did not want to leave her alone, for she had threatened to commit suicide.
I'll suffocate myself in a plastic bag, gut myself with a kitchen knife.
What would I do without her? What? How could I go on living even in my box? And why?
Without her, who would give birth to the body that I would ultimately inhabit?
I needed to keep my hands close and ready to prevent Susan from harming herself if she regained consciousness and was still in a mood for self-destruction. She was not only my one true and shining love but my future, my hope.
I sat Shenk in a chair, facing the bed.
Even battered, Susan's face was so lovely on the pillow, so very lovely on the pillow.
Although under my iron control, Enos Shenk managed to slide one thick-knuckled hand off the arm of the chair and into his lap. He wasn't able to move that hand further without my explicit consent, but I sensed that he
