'Watch this,' Sam said, as though she were a seven-year-old about to do a bicycle trick. Her form moved, spilled like sheeted snow, converged with Neil's darker shadow. 'Watch, professor. There… There it goes… that feels good. Can you see it, professor? Imagine Nora… Imagine?

'Please,' Thomas said.

'Fucking wild,' she mumbled. 'Oh, God,'—surprised laugh—'I'm gonna come already. Watch me, professor. Watch me, unnngh…'

The running blood had become acid. His eyes screamed, yet he couldn't tear them away from the slurry of light and dark jerking before him. Sam cried out, a primal voice for primal ears, then everything became still, save for the fluttering of anguished eyelids.

'Intense,' she gasped. 'Fuck me. Did you see that? Bammo, and he's still so fucking hard. No wonder Nora couldn't get enough!' For an instant, he thought he glimpsed her looking up, searching the ceiling with her eyes. 'Oh, yeah… I think I got another one. How many times did your wife say she usually came? Three? Four? What do you say, professor? Wanna watch me toss another load?'

'No.'

Laughter. 'But of course you do! I can see your boner from here. You guys are made for this stuff. Sex and violence. Juice and penetration. Horror versus fantasy, and fantasy wins! Christ, even Gerard's got a fucking hard on…'

Another gunshot.

More blood he couldn't wipe away, pooling in the spoons about his eyes. Little more than a thicket of overgrown color, Sam and Neil began rocking again. The chair creaked. 'Just so fucking wild,' he heard her murmur. 'So hot! No fucking wonder so many men are rapists…' Though he couldn't see her, she became Cynthia Powski sucking on her bottom lip. 'But it's not the same, is it? I mean, if I were a guy and you were chicks, it would be more, wouldn't it? The buzz would be bigger…'

An oval appeared like light from beneath ice, and he knew she was watching him, her eyes vacant, lethargic. 'Maybe,' she said without a whisper of self-consciousness, 'when I start with the knives…'

Shadows behind a widow's veil. Breaths, a male and female counterpoint, wheezing between the creak of floorboards.

'Even so,' she gasped, 'it's unfuckingbelievable…' Her voice was doped with pleasure, her words bunched like flannel between compulsive breaths. 'I mean before… I was… well, not a prude… but, you know—like everyone else. Stuff like this… like murder and fucking just freaked me right out. So guilty I couldn't pass a fucking bum without digging through my purse! I just… just wasn't built for this job. And I wanted it. I wanted it so badly. To be a spook. A real world Lara Croft… I wanted to be strong!'

The sound of wood complaining beneath rocking bodies, air puffing through slack lips.