Lisa could only imagine what it must have been like… Animal abusing his consenting girlfriend, getting off on it, Alex filming it, recognizing something in Animal that he could use…
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.
"Anyway, where was I? Oh yes! The first snuff film I did after Susan. Tim brought us a worthless piece of shit that had run away from her foster home. She was a prostitute, a junkie. Tim's good at finding talent from the ranks of losers like that. He has contacts all over the country that give him insights on the background of some of these people. That first one was a local girl… or I should say, she had run away from home somewhere in the Midwest and come out to sunny California, Hollywood to be exact. She got hooked up with the wrong crowd, started doing drugs, started walking the streets, and the rest is history. Tim had hired her for some bondage sessions with one of his private clients to get her initiated; he does that to let them think that when they come on my set they're going to be in just some regular porn film. If they're already junkies, he lets them get high on the set so they don't resist when we tie them up, and they're al most always junkie fuckups. He brought her to the location I had done Susan in, and I let loose on her as she came off her binge. I raped that bitch until she was bleeding out of orifices you wouldn't even think of. I kept her alive for a full hour before she finally expired." He laughed. "It's only gotten better since then. Now, thanks to Alex and Tim and our contacts among the more financially secure in the circle, people who live all over the world, I'm in big demand. I make good money doing this. And I get immense sexual satisfaction from doing what I do. I also get something else." He stepped forward, his grin wide, evil. "1 get a strange sense of… power."
Thirteen
When Animal was finished Lisa was too stunned to say anything. She could feel Animal's stare, like that of a hungry beast, and she immediately met his gaze and asked the first question that popped into her mind. "How many snuff films have you been in since then?"
Animal shrugged. "I don't know… over the last five years I'd say eighteen or so, as well as numerous extreme hardcore films." "
Eighteen or so snuff films. Eighteen or so bodies. Used and discarded like trash.
*1 still don't understand why you do it," Lisa said, Animal's story pulsing in her brain. "You told me how you got into it, but… I still don't understand."
"I do it because I like it," Animal said, and the simplicity of his answer chilled her to the bone. "1 get extreme pleasure from inflicting pain on other people!
"Pleasure…" Lisa was looking at him, trying to understand. "Sexual pleasure? What, do you come? Does your dick get. hard? Is it like sex? What is it?"
Animal shrugged. "I haven't had normal sex in five years. What I do here… He gestured at Debbie's prone, bloodied form on the bed. "It's the most ultimate pleasure I've ever felt. That's the only way I can describe it. When I… when I don the mask and wield the knife, I feel like a god. I get to choose whether they live or die. They cower at my feet, they beg me for mercy. I completely rule them. I have power over their lives… their death. It… fuels my fantasy and then… then I can go to work on them." He looked so calm explaining this to her. "Then when I cut them with a knife..-. it's like ecst
asy. Feeling the blade slice through their flesh, hearing them scream as I cut them, seeing the expression on their faces as the knife slices through… it… it's even better than sex."
The sound of footsteps returning from the side of the cabin interrupted her thoughts, and Animal turned toward it. Lisa's breath was shallow, her mind racing. Al and Tim were coming back; she could hear them talking. Then they would finish what was started yesterday and then it would be her turn. Her turn at a starring role in the grindhouse of death.
"Debbie and I are the first, then," Lisa said, the question coming unbidden. "We're the first people who aren't junkies or homeless people. Right?"
Animal nodded as he stood up to his full height. "Yeah!
Lisa's mind was racing. Tim and Al entered the house, and as they crossed the living room into the bedroom the idea sprang to Lisa's mind full-blown; she was desperate. "Listen," she said, looking up at Tim. "Please let me go. If you let me go, I can get you somebody that could take my place-*
Tim traded glances with Al and laughed. "Who you kidding, lady?"
'Please, just listen to me! Before Brad and I stopped at that rest stop, we stopped for breakfast in North Hollywood. There was a woman there that we gave money to. She had just been kicked out of her home and-"
"They ain't looking for homeless chicks," Tim said, scowling. "I thought I told you that yesterday? That's why I was scoping that rest area out. The group we're shooting this film for, they were gettin' tired of the same kind of chicks. That's why-"
"But this one's difkrent!" Lisa said, her nerves on edge. "She's only been on the streets a few days and she's gorgeous! She's-"
"Forget it' Tim said, dismissing her with a wave of his hand. "I don't give a shit if this chick's a supermodel. I ain't-"
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