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.
'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 class the spring semester of his sophomore year. 'The victims of multiple personality disorder,' his instructor had informed the class, '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 identity realization phase of late childhood development or early adolescence. When a fragile undifferentiated preadolescent ego suffers an intolerable condition — such as repeated physical, sexual, or mental abuse — 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 eyeglasses 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 appetite for kinky sex 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 balls instead of his head has placed him in.
Next time — please, God, let there be a next time! — 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 button 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 cameras — one concealed in the ceiling, one on the floor, and one in each of the bedroom walls — 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 fuckfest, 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 associates in London and Bangkok. There her associates will inexpensively mass-produce videotapes for the booming billion-dollar porn markets of South America, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific Rim, where snuff films — real snuff films, not phony reenactments — 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
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 back side.
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 cockeyed 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
