Survivor: 1 (14 page)

Animal continued the narrative, shattering the image in her mind, replacing it with something more gruesome.
Her first earth-shattering orgasm with me was when she
introduced me to blood sports. V were at her place one
night, and she opened a slim mahogany case that was
lined with red crushed velvet and showed me a scalpel.
She told me exactly what to do, coached me exactly how
to cut through the top layer of skin on her lower back.
First I tied her up, then I inserted a ball gag in her mouth.
I flogged her back and she got wet instantly even as she
bled. Then she cried out for me to cut her. I drew the
blade across her back and finger-fucked her. She had the
most earth-shattering orgasm I'd ever seen anybody have
before. She actually cried afterward, and at first I thought
I'd really hurt her. I actually apologized to her! Can you
imagine that?

Of course, I didn't have to apologize for anything. She
wasn't crying because I had hurt her ... she was crying
out of sheer joy! Sheer ecstasy! And even better, what
we'd done together had really turned me on more than I
ever imagined! I actually came! It was the first time I had
come without having my dick stroked or sucked or stimulated by a clenching pussy."

Animal began pacing the room again, and Lisa
watched him, hands tied behind her back, legs lashed together, sitting on the bare mattress in the shabby little
room. She took in what Animal was telling her, and she
supposed if she hadn't been in the position she was in
now, that if this were a scene in a movie and she were
watching it, she'd turn the TV off, unable to watch any
more. Not able to listen to the atrocities this man was
claiming to take part in. But now she listened intently,
part of her deeply afraid, another part of her searching
for a way to escape, to find a way out of her predicament.

'That cut on her back was the first I put on her, but it
wouldn't be the last," Animal continued. "Susan told me later that she had been into the pleasures of pain for as
long as she could remember. Her family background was
similar to mine. Her parents didn't abuse her, Daddy
never tried to have his way with her, she never had abusive boyfriends. She just liked pain. She told me about
the people she met at the underground parties like the
one she took me to. That they were just feeding off of
each other, like they were willingly carrying out this symbiotic relationship. She had to get what she needed from
the more hardcore freaks, though, the people that were
into mutilation. The more she played out scenes with
them, the more hardcore it got for her. She showed me
this huge scar that ran from her belly to just below her
breasts; it was from a burn. She told me that most people
who are into heat playing won't burn the skin due to the
medical consequences, but she wasn't getting anything
out of a simple first-degree burn. She said she had to actually scream at her partner to hold the flame to her skin
until she orgasmed " Animal smiled. "Aside from the night
I first cut her, that had been her most intense sexual experience."

Lisa thought about some of the S&M imagery she had
seen in the kind of magazines one found among the
fetish racks at newsstands; images of men and women in
skintight black leather or rubber clothing, their faces and
heads covered in black leather masks, only their eyes and
nostrils exposed slightly, a small opening along the
mouth with a zipper to allow for closure; half-naked people in leather and chains and bondage harnesses;
women tied up to racks with ball gags in their mouths,
their eyes wide open and pleading, No don't, please don't
hurt me, but at the same time saying, Yes, do it to me, do it
to me doittome-

Use me, hurt me, abuse me. Do whatever you want
with me.

"1 thought about the people I had met at the underground parties we attended! Animal stopped pacing; he
stood by the boarded-up window, peeking outside between the nailed up two-by-fours and strips of plywood.1
thought about the scenes I had seen them play out. I remember watching a man in a black leather hood draw
blood from his slave with a syringe and then feed it to
her. I fantasized about being him at that moment, wielding such incredible power over this person. I remember
watching a gay couple, the dom cutting his slave with a
scalpel and then sucking the blood from the wound as
his partner writhed in pleasure, and I wondered what the
blood tasted like. I got hard watching all these scenes being played out before me. I thought about the extreme
hardcore films that were screened at these parties,
watching women and men scream in pain as their doms
pulled at pierced labias and scrotums, stretching the fragile skin to the point that it began to bleed and they began
begging for mercy. I imagined myself doing that to those
people, and the more I thought about it the more excited
I became. I thought about the first snuff film I saw at the
last party Susan and I attended, in which a young black
girl who looked like a homeless junkie was fucked to
death with a baseball bat in an abandoned warehouse. I
remember watching it with bated breath-1 don't think
anybody breathed while we were watching that thing. I
couldn't take my eyes off the screen. All I could do was
imagine myself doing what her killer was doing, working
the fat end of the baseball bat in and out of her as she
screamed in pain and died."

Animal turned to her, and Lisa felt her stomach crumble into crushed ice. There was no sense of guilt or sorrow in his face over what he had witnessed, no sense of
horror at watching other human beings being tortured
and abused, thrown away like trash. She didn't know what to say-how does one respond to somebody who
relates such things as pleasurable, who now has your life
in their hands?

"Do you understand what I'm telling you? When I cut
her skin and she screamed in a mixture of pain and pleasure, it made me feel good. When I branded my name
into her flesh with a piece of hot metal and she passed
out from the intensity of the orgasm, I felt an extreme
sense of power. I'd never had power over anything in my
life before, and with her giving me blanket permission to
indulge in her freely, knowing it pleased her so much,
gave me a sense of empowerment I never thought I
would have. Susan changed me, and at the same time
what we did during the last month of our relationship
was to spell the end of it as well."

He stopped, turned toward the boarded-up window as
if he was looking outside. Lisa waited, heart thumping in
her chest, her stomach churning in grave anticipation to
what was coming next.

"She finally told me what her ultimate fantasy was," he
whispered. "She told me because she could tell that I was
ready to hear it, and she felt that I was the only man who
could give it to her. She could tell I was ready. When she
told me . . " He paused, as if trying to search for the right
words to continue. "... at first I didn't want to do it. I
thought we ... that she ... was going too far. She tried to
convince me that it was okay, that it was what she really
wanted, and I got angry. I got dressed and she chased after me in the apartment, pleading for me to stay. What
she was asking ... I never thought I could do it, especially to her. I thought if I went through it that it would be
over for me, that I would no longer have an outlet for my
pleasure."

Lisa couldn't take it anymore. "What did she want you
to do?"

Animal turned toward her, his features pensive, reflective. "She wanted to be tortured and killed in a snuff film;
he said, the words rolling off his tongue as nonchalantly
as if he were telling her about a family get-together or a
weekend golf game. "She wanted me to be the one to do
it to her, to share with her what was to be her ultimate
pleasure.... her greatest orgasm ever, achieved at the instant of death. Eros and Thanatos, sex and death. And
she wanted it captured on videotape so that her greatest
pleasure would live on."

The crushed-ice feeling in Lisa's stomach churned. She
could tell from Animal's tone of voice, from the look in
his eyes, that the story was true.

"1 wouldn't do it," he said, walking back to her casually.
in a way, I suppose you could say I was afraid to cross
that line. But then I did some thinking. I did love Susan,
in a way most people don't seem to understand that
word. And I realized that turning her down had hurt her
in a way most people would never imagine. Knowing I
had turned her down, rejected her, hurt me. Yes, I didn't
want to lose her, but I realized the only reason why I
didn't want to lose her was because she brought me so
much joy, so much pleasure when I ravaged and mutilated her. I'd have no outlet for this again-at least that
was my thought. But then I realized that perhaps introducing me to the scene was her way of showing me that
there were others out there like us. She had opened up a
whole new world for me. Yes, there were more like her.
And if I liked what I did to her for her final pleasure, there
were more outlets for me to ... indulge in, shall we say."
He grinned. "After all ... that snuff film I saw had to have
come from somewhere, right? I made a call to Alex Pressman first and casually asked him where he had gotten it.
He wouldn't tell me, and I don't blame him. When I
asked if there was any way for me to appear in his next production, his voice changed. He became excited. He
told me he could always use people like me.

"That decided it for me. I knew of a place in Orange
County, a mental facility that had been abandoned for
years. I did some discreet investigating and got a very detailed map of the hospital. I also did some more checking, found out when security was more apt to be absent,
which was most of the time. Then I called Alex back and
offered him a job. When I told him what it was, he agreed
immediately, especially when I named my price. We settled on a date, and I gathered together some tools, then
called Susan and told her to meet me at such and such a
time, at such and such a place for her birthday present. I
think she could tell by the tone of my voice what I had in
store, and she showed up like I knew she would." Animal
smiled, the memory of the incident replaying in his features. "When she saw me in that large run-down room in
a dilapidated wing of what had once been a mental hospital, she smiled. I was wearing a pair of black leather
chaps, my ass exposed to the wind. I wore a black leather
vest over my shirtless body, a black leather bondage
hood over my head. There was an old mattress placed in
the center of the room, laid out on top of a large roll of
plastic tarp. I had set up a table with knives. Alex was
waiting with his camera and lights. And when she saw us
standing there, she smiled. And she thanked me."

Lisa looked up at Animal. "You killed her."

"Yes" Animal looked triumphant; proud. "I still have
that tape. Her final, most pleasurable orgasm ever. I paid
Alex ten thousand dollars for his work and his secrecy. I
take the tape out every once in a while and watch Susan
and me play out our scene. And the more her screams of
pain echo in my ears, the more I realize that she was responsible for my breakthrough. Without her I would have
lived in torment. Now? I live for nothing else but fulfilling my desires. I still have my job, though not with the same
company. Its mostly to maintain a front for sheep like
you, society at large. Susan's life had been similar. After
we disposed of her body, I went to her apartment and
found her letter of resignation on her computer and
knew that she had prepared it in the hopes that her fantasy would someday come true. I printed it, dated it,
forged her signature on it, and mailed it to corporate
headquarters. Then I took care of her things. To everybody at the office, she had just suddenly quit for no reason and moved to the Midwest. To her parents, she
moved and left no forwarding address. In a way, wiping
out her existence was great preparation for what we're
going to do with you' He grinned.

Lisa forced herself not to look scared, wondering if Susan's parents still missed her. Or did they even care?

"As for me," Animal said, shrugging his shoulders and
walking toward the doorway that led to the rest of the
cabin. "I became hooked. Alex saw that I had the kind of
potential that he and his clients needed. Finding somebody like me in our circle is always hard; the majority of
people in the S&M scene are what you would think of as
good, decent people. Everybody consents to what they
do. But the extreme hardcore scene? It's run by ruthless
people who don't give a shit about anything except
money and getting their dicks sucked every now and
then. They don't know the meaning of the word consensual. Finding people like me to appear in extreme hardcore films and snuff films, thats even tougher. Nobody
wants to get caught, for one thing. That's why it's so
dosed, so insular. I assured Alex that as long as we kept
things within the circle, we were safe. Six months later,
they received another job. Somebody in Virginia commissioned a film, something basic. Alex tapped into his
contact, whom you've already met in the form of Tim, and he gave us a sixteen-year-old runaway. She was perfect; a heroin addict from a broken home. Nobody would
miss her. The woman that commissioned the film paid a
nice fee for it."

"Woman?" Lisa felt her stomach sink.

"Oh yes," Animal said casually. "It's not just men that get
off on watching the suffering of other human beings, although they do outnumber the women. Females get off
on it, too. Ever been to a boxing match? The audience for
boxing is primarily made up of men. Most of the women
in attendance are there because their boyfriends or husbands are into it, but there is a sizable portion who are
into it as much as their male counterparts. They get off
on the violence and bloodlust in the same way. Of
course, the analogy between a so-called civilized and legal sport and the snuff underground is extreme, but in a
way the same rules apply.