"My dear Beth. As much as I'd enjoy squiring you around, it would nevertheless create, shall we say, certain social difficulties. I'm quite accustomed to people giving me a hard time, but I couldn't in good conscience let you suffer on my account."
"You're so easy, Arnold. I'll pick you up in my car at 7:00 tonight in front of your apartment building."
The eggplant lasagna was delicious, but the ambience left a bad taste in her mouth. The whispering around them had become quite audible.
"What is this, a freak show?"
"The fat lady and the dwarf. Now, where's the sword swallower?"
Arnold tapped a knife on the side of his champagne glass, then climbed up onto his chair.
"I would like to express my appreciation to all you good people for the entertainment you are unintentionally providing. When I brought my sweetheart here, little did I know that we were intruding on the annual convention of simpletons, scoundrels, reprobates, social outcasts, moral lepers, diseased souls, and all-around losers. I beg your indulgence if we do not fit in and have offended you by our presence here. Thank you for your patience and understanding. You may now resume spinning malicious rumors and fomenting poisonous gossip."
There was dead silence, and a few persons got up to leave. Beth and Arnold enjoyed the remainder of their meal undisturbed, and the headwaiter came over to apologize.
"You handled that quite nicely, Arnold. I had no idea you were an orator."
"You mean a demagogue, my sweet."
"Beth, this isn't the way back to my apartment."
"That sounds like a line from a grade B melodrama. Surely you can do better than that, Arnold."
"Milady, I do believe I am in the process of being kidnapped for your, ah, harem."
"You have . . . unmasked my insidious plot, Chief Inspector Arnold. Curses, foiled again."
The remains of the coffee and home-made fudge lay on the dining room table. The two of them sat in silence, staring into each other's eyes.
"And now?" Arnold asked.
"What's to become of us?" she asked in turn.
"We're lost. Lost souls. Could I possibly interest you in a discount membership in the Legion of the Lost? For you, a special deal."
"For both of us, Arnold." Beth reached out and took his hand.
"You're beautiful, you know."
"I was about to say the same thing."
They had just finished undressing each other. He smiled, limped over to her, and kissed her nipples -- left, then right. His hand gently caressed an ample buttock. "Mm, I just love cantaloupes."
"And I love celery." She was holding his erection in her fist.
He was still inside her as they fell asleep cuddling each other.
"So, Beth, what have you learned from the personal ad experience?"
"Prof, I've learned perhaps more than you intended. I discovered a new way of looking at myself, and found I don't have to compromise my standards for the sake of companionship."
"You found someone, then?"
"Yes, a noble soul. A shining hero in an age of cowardice and mediocrity. And, to boot, by far the handsomest and sexiest man I've ever seen."
* * *
HONEYPOT
I ripped open the door when I heard the screams. Tanya was wailing hysterically. She had an ugly bruise under one eye and deep abrasions on her bare breast. Her bathrobe was in tatters.
"What in the hell happened, baby? Did you fall and hurt yourself?"
"He tried to rape me!"
What?
"Rape? Rape you? Who? There's nobody here but the two of us."
I looked for signs of forced entry, but the bathroom window was shut tightly, locked, and its glass was intact. And anyhow, up here on the 26th floor of our wing of a secure apartment complex, it would be rather difficult for an intruder to break in. Under ordinary circumstances, that is.
"But, he was here! Right here! Just a minute ago. Right before you opened the door and came in. Oh, Jeremy, I'm so glad you're with me."
She collapsed into my arms, sobbing.
It was flat-out impossible. Someone had materialized out of thin air, assaulted my girlfriend, and then vanished. But, how?
I've known Joe Bellamy for quite a number of years. He and I get together to play chess sometimes and he's even had occasion to consult me professionally. He's a hell of a nice guy, even if he is a cop.
"Look, Joe. I can't make sense of it either. But, unless she staged the whole thing, and her injuries were self-inflicted . . . "
"Funny thing, Jer. We've had a flurry of similar reports in the past couple of months. A perp mysteriously pops up in a place where there's no access, the victim gets raped, then the scumbag somehow vanishes without a trace. In one case, it was inside a locked bank vault, for crying out loud. No way in, no way out. And no damn way to explain it."
"So, what do you think?"
"I think . . . I think possibly we've got something out of the ordinary here."
People usually listen to me. They ought to. I've gotten something of a reputation as a problem solver over the years. But, hey, I'm an engineer, and you know what they say about guys like me -- that we have clockwork ticking inside our skulls.
Joe and I set up a "honeypot" -- a baited trap to catch a predator. And the bait was a beautiful woman.
Delora had been a professional model at one time. She had been considered one of the most beautiful of the Beautiful People, well, in our little corner of the world anyway. Then she got hooked on hard drugs, turned to crime to pay for her habit, and her life took an abrupt turn downward.
She had mostly cleaned up her act, but still hadn't fully paid her debt to society. Joe gave it to her straight.
"Sure, Lora, it's dangerous as hell, even with half a dozen videocams on you and a squad of detectives ready to jump to your aid. This guy we're after is damn slick -- so slick he scares me. And, he seems to be able to even get in and out of closed rooms. So, if you don't want to take this one on, I wouldn't blame you a bit."
"You don't understand, Captain Bellamy. I've learned to live with danger. In fact, I positively relish it. You're telling me I'm risking rape and physical injury, even death. Is that all? Well, then, bring it on!"
We put her into a locked cell. There were electrified steel bars on the doors and windows. Besides the cameras hidden in the ceiling and walls, there were acoustic sensors.
The word was out. It was a challenge to the Phantom Rapist. We were actually taunting him to get at what carefully orchestrated rumors in certain underground circles called "the world's finest piece of ass." The Rape Challenge. Sounded like a Reality TV show.
"All right, Lora, it's showtime. We're cutting the lights." The cell went dark.
According to the script, she was to remove her clothes now. All her clothes. We watched that voluptuous greenish-white silhouette on video monitors. Military type infrared nightscope pickups give human flesh a distinctly ghost-like cast.
Nothing. After three hours, we were getting bored watching the proceedings, or rather, the lack of them. Lora was asleep and snoring softly on the cot in her cell.
What was that? There was a blur of motion. Lora was struggling with someone or something. Alarm bells were shrilling and the audio pickups amplified her angry screams.
My fist slammed down on a red-lit toggle. Sleep gas! Lora's movements slowed, then stopped. There was a dark figure at her side, still thrashing about, but then all movement ceased and there was stillness.
"Yeah, we had a trick or two up our sleeves, that we did." Joe chuckled. "Thought he could just disengage from her and vanish, like he did all those other times. Well, it seems that the perp's own flesh did him in this time. The same raping dong that raped all the other victims wouldn't let him loose."
A Chinese "finger trap" -- one of those clever little woven wicker tubes that you stick both index fingers into, but that tightens up and clutches the fingers in its grip when you try to pull them back out. Lora had a bio-silicone versi
on implanted into both her vaginal and rectal orifices. It allowed entry, but not exit. The rapist had been trapped in a Chinese penis trap.
"Why, yes. He's been debriefed, all right. What procedures were used? Well, you needn't concern yourself about that. We didn't . . . torture him, if that's what you mean. Well, not any more than necessary, anyhow."
"Come now, Joe, we've known each other for how long now? You can tell me the rest."
"Well, you do have a security clearance and all. And you did help catch the fellow. But, this is strictly highest priority Ultra Secret."
"Understood. Now, give."
"First of all, we couldn't ID the guy. No, not even with state of the art high-tech methods. The odd thing was that we did get a bingo, a 99.8% DNA match. But, the match happened to be to a guy already in the slammer. Serving a life sentence, in fact. For rape."
"So, the Phantom Rapist has an identical twin in prison? Big deal."
"No. It turns out that the fine fellow in lockup had no siblings. And -- and this is what's terrifying -- their fingerprints are an exact match. And so are their retinal patterns. In fact, the Phantom is an exact physical duplicate of the jailbird. What's known in the literature as a doppelgänger."
"Which literature?"
"Well . . . science fiction. We think the subject is an intruder. A visitor, so to speak . . . from a parallel reality."
Joe let me read the interrogation transcript. The implications were bizarre, all right, but there was little possibility of error. The Phantom had been "softened up" with a week in the "blank tank" -- the sensory deprivation chamber. Then, he'd had a hole drilled in the top of his skull and an electrode inserted directly into his pain center. No, there was no way anyone could withstand that kind of "debriefing."
Mr. Phantom came from a world very much like our own. But, he'd been born with a rather special talent. He could escape into an imaginary fantasy world. Not a world he himself could conjure up, mind you, but someone else's creation. He could translate himself bodily into a fictional realm -- a story -- but it had to be a story written by another person. He was, it seems, totally lacking in imagination.
He had become an avid reader of erotica when he reached adolescence. But only one particular flavor of fuck fiction rang his chimes -- rape stories. Because he could physically enter into the story, participate in it, touch the lives of the characters in it, rape the women in it -- it fully satisfied his peculiar needs. These were only made-up stories after all. Fiction. So what did it matter if he had his way with characters in a story? Porked them, banged them around, maybe even cut them up a little. No one got hurt. Not real persons. These weren't real people, were they?
A story is a doorway. It's a doorway into a world -- a world of the imagination. But, what if . . . what if there exist an infinity of possible worlds, of alternate realities? What if for every figment of the imagination, for every imaginable fictional world . . . there exists a real world that exactly corresponds to it? And what if it were possible to visit these worlds, to see the sights, smell the smells, taste the foods . . . and possess the women?
"So, what are you planning for this guy, Joe? A bullet in the head and an unmarked grave? Or, maybe just keeping him buried in a forensic lab someplace and picking him apart, piece by piece?"
"Jer, you're forgetting that the scumbag has committed multiple crimes. Despicable and violent crimes. And, he's a non-person. He has no identity. He has no rights. He doesn't even exist so far as the law is concerned."
"Well, that sort of leaves you in a dilemma, doesn't it? You can't exactly bring a nonexistent person to trial, but then you can't very well release him either, can you?"
"Not only that, but there may even be others of his buddies who have access to our reality frame. It could be that some of them are smarter than our John Doe here, and that they wouldn't content themselves with rape but might do things that cause incomparably greater harm. Say, committing espionage . . . stealing critical industrial or military secrets. Or, and this possibility scares the bejesus out of me, what if one of these guys decides to assassinate a couple of heads of state because he wants to start a war or two. Just for his own sadistic amusement maybe. Or because he'd have all these marvelous opportunities for looting and mayhem in the aftermath of a catastrophe. . . ."
"But, what can we do, Joe? Sounds like we're helpless."
"No. Our phantom rapist here has given us the means to prevent any further intrusions into our reality. He has the capability to travel back and forth between our world and his home world. And so . . ."
Of course, I volunteered. It was the adventure of a lifetime. Travel across the time stream. Save fair damsels from the depredations of depraved villains. Protect our reality from tampering by unauthorized personnel. . . . And, the pay was pretty good.
John Doe Rapist (his real name, it turned out, was Marvin Hootihound -- what the hell kind of a moniker was that?) would serve as my time-stream transport. The technicians had embedded miniaturized control circuitry inside his braincase, so all I had to do was to press the right sequence of buttons on the hand-held remote to jump the both of us back to his home world. And then . . .
And then it would be time to kick butt. Or, rather, ride butt. I was going to literally fly Hooti through the space-time labyrinth, and this required both of us to be at the exact same electric potential, and in the most intimate possible physical connection. I rode astride my steed -- this naked and spreadeagled rapist, with my electrode-gel coated erect member embedded deep in his hind aperture -- as the reality frames flashed past in rapidly flickering, polychromatic succession.
The transnational Datanet in Hootihound's version of reality was called the "Internet," or "Worldwide Web." It was primitive and clumsy compared to what I was accustomed to, but it had given Hooti and his buddies the means to communicate and get together. And, these guys weren't just rape enthusiasts. Paedophiles and predators of every variety were part of the wider circle. In this ugly, twisted version of reality, people were considered nothing more than commodities to be used and discarded, and sex was just another means of exploiting them. Small wonder that crime and perversions of every sort were so common here.
Tracking down the physical locations of Hooti's "associates" turned out to be far less difficult than anticipated. These sterling examples of humanity actually expected to remain anonymous behind the Net aliases they had adopted. Stupid!
A simple knock on the door was all it took. "Open up! Police!" The startled evildoer would be greeted by a man in official-looking uniform -- myself -- wielding a "zapper" that Joe's tech people had put together for the purpose. A quick flash into the guy's eyes should suffice to expunge any possible cross-reality teleport potential by sending a massive shock along the optic nerve that would permanently deactivate parts of the forebrain. Just to be absolutely certain, I had adjusted the "zap" intensity a wee bit higher. ("Don't even think about playing with that dial, Jer, you'd risk burning out their entire brain! Remember that the purpose of this venture is deterrence, not punishment.")
Done! I had knocked out Hooti's entire rape fantasy network. Time to return to my own reality, to a more civilized world, and to Tanya's waiting arms. But, my faithful steed, Hooti, wouldn't take me back. Couldn't. The trip cross-timestream had burned him out. Burned him to a crisp. I was marooned!
What to do? Give up and wallow in self-pity? Resign myself to living in this primitive and depraved universe? No!
Revenge! I'd track down every single man who had ever entertained thoughts of rape. Everyone who fantasized about committing violence on a woman. Everyone who read and enjoyed rape stories. Everyone who committed rape, even if only in his own mind. Everyone who played out rape fantasies, not knowing and not caring that what he imagined mirrored actual events in another reality frame. Every one of the scumbags who had helped set in motion the chain of cauality that had stranded me in this ugly place.
Hey! Rapists, rape readers, and rape dreamers . . . listen for that knock on
the door. I'm coming after you.
* * *
ADVICE FOR THE BRIDE
October 4, 1894
My Dear Abigail,
I have dispatched you this note by hired messenger, lest it fall into the hands of Mr. Anthony Comstock and his zealous minions in the Postal Service.
I assume that by now you have seen Ruthie's article in the Fall issue of the Hamilton Foundation Journal. Guidance and advice for the young bride, indeed.
Morally upright matrons are always attentive to clever and inventive methods of thwarting and discouraging the amorous advances of the husband.
The Syntax of Seduction Page 18