For the summer months, She had shown me a small cave, just a short hike from up behind the Snowson Hotel. It seemed to excite them, my friends, my lovers, to be led by the hand up through waist-­high grass by moonlight to a cave in the mountains. Many times the talk turned to the famed Seven Slopes murderer. The idea of meeting up with him in the hills added excitement, added tang. The walk gave us both time to savor the anticipation, to feel the exhila­ration of the physical exertion in the hike, heightening the senses, honing the appreciation, keening the edge between pleasure and pain.

Indeed, I received an extra bonus, as the taste of adrenaline is much like tart honey. I became as a sorcerer, who controls his realm so totally that he need merely raise his arms and the tides leap to his command. I controlled the tides of fear, and my sweet tooth savored the taste of it.

The cave was always clean when I got there; I assumed the wildlife in the area was well fed, a fortunate by-­product of my habits. I enjoyed being merely another convenient link in the food chain.

In one of my more lucid moments, however, when the odor of plasma was not throbbing in my nostrils, when my mind was not crazed with the thought of the hunt, or of the kill, or of the reward beyond, when I was not sleeping the drugged sleep of the sated beast, when I was not reveling in Her wallowsome pleasures, I had an occasional thought that I was the last to be seen with too many missing persons.

I knew I would soon be leaving Seven Slopes.

I pushed these thoughts away. They were cumber­some and unpleasant.

The time came, however, when they would not be pushed away.

The night was young, the kittens had grown to gangly adolescent cats, and they frolicked with each other around my feet, wide-­eyed and hunter-­wary, as I sat at the table, reading.

I perused the newspaper once each week to discern the popular gathering places, events, socials, and the like—anywhere I could meet new people, find new friends. I had before me a steaming cup of tea, my cape soaked in the sink, and my world was at peace.

I turned the page, feeling the little smile on my face, my body remembering the intense flooding of pleasure from the night before, when I felt the eleva­tor feeling in my stomach again. It lurched, as if one floor, then stopped.

I knew that feeling. It was the dropping through, it was the fall into the void that could not be con­trolled. It was meeting Boyd face-­to-­face and shame-­to-­shame.