Chloe gave up on screaming. She wanted only to crawl away, to cry and huddle, to be left alone. But she couldn’t move. She lay on her back, staring up at the faint light from the basement of the store that she hated working in, the store that she wanted with all her soul to be back inside right now, standing on sore feet and nodding with fake enthusiasm.

No, no, it makes you look sooo thin. Really …

Then the light grew dimmer yet as her attacker, the yellow-face insect, climbed into the hole, pulled the access door shut behind him, and came down the short ladder to where she lay. A moment later a piercing light filled the tunnel; he’d pulled a miner’s lamp onto his forehead, clicked it on. The white beam blinded and she screamed, or didn’t scream, at the piercing brilliance.

Which suddenly faded to complete darkness.

She awoke a few seconds or minutes or a year later.

Chloe was someplace else now, not the utility room, but in a larger room, no, a tunnel. Hard to see, since the only illumination was a weak light above her and the focused beam from the masked insect man’s forehead. It blinded her every time he looked at her face. She was on her back again, staring upward, and he was kneeling over her.

But what she’d been expecting, dreading, wasn’t happening. In a way, though, this was worse because that – ripping her clothes off and then what would follow – would at least have been understandable. It would have fallen into a known category of horror.

This was different.

Yes, her blouse was tugged up but only slightly, exposing her belly from navel to the bottom of her bra, which was still chastely in place. Her skirt was tucked tight around her thighs, almost as if he didn’t want there to be any suggestion of impropriety.

Leaning forward, hunched, intent, he was staring with those calm eyes of his, those insect eyes, at her smooth, white belly skin the way somebody would look over a canvas at MoMA: head tilted, getting the right angle to appreciate Jackson Pollock’s spatter, Magritte’s green apple.

He then slowly extended his index finger and stroked her flesh. His yellow finger. He splayed his palm and brushed back and forth. He pinched and raised peaks of skin between his thumb and forefinger. He let go and watched the mounds flatten back.

His insect mouth curved into a faint smile.

She thought he said, ‘Very nice.’ Or maybe that was the smoke-ring caterpillar talking or the bug on his arm.