It's their fault if they failed to see that!

When I was ready, I nodded to him and he threw the switch. I snapped against the straps as the current slammed through my body. This time I noticed how the metal table groaned and squealed under the load my tortured muscles put on it. Also, this time my screams were just as loud and just as piercing and just as heartfelt, but there was a note of something else in them, too, something of exultation at feeling myself driven past pain, past agony and past human endurance. Perhaps other girls could take this amount of torture, but I would have been willing to bet anything you could name that not a one of them enjoyed it like I did.

This time when he shut it off, I felt positively rejuvenated. There was still the twitching and cramping and I still had the impulse to keep on screaming my lungs out, but I knew the effects were only temporary. I had lost all fear of the electrocutor. It was now just a great way to experience absolute sensory overload. And it didn't have the unfortunate aftereffects that being fucked with a branding iron would have. I was having a hard time putting that out of my mind. I suppose I was scared that I still might weaken and ask him to do it to me.

He pried the gag out of my jaws and I immediately asked another question, "Does that thing go any higher?"

"No. I didn't think it would be this popular, so I didn't provide for adjustments," he said. He sounded disappointed. I wondered if it was because he hadn't foreseen the possibility that someone might like it or if he were just stung by the criticism that he should have done a better job with it. I decided that, since I had him in a talkative mood, I would say what was really on my mind. He seemed to think I had earned the right to speak.

"Listen, there's something I need to know — would you really have put that hot iron in my pussy?"

"Well, I... why do you ask that?"

"Because it made me so... excited to think that you were going to really do it. I can't stop thinking about it. Did you really do that to the other girls?"

"No. I never did that," he confessed, reluctantly. "It might have killed them, you see? I wanted to teach them a lesson. I wanted to teach them they could be better than they were. I wanted them to live. The injuries were accidents. I wasn't as careful as I should have been. Some of my equipment wasn't fully perfected. But no one was seriously hurt. The vacuum pump doesn't really suck hard enough to draw blood, but it does feel that way. The piercings will heal if you take them out — even your tongue. The clitoridotomy is the only permanent thing I did to them. And that only to those whom I felt deserved it, like you.

"No, the branding iron was a way to frighten them, to make them comply with my instructions. Some of the others reacted to it as you did, driven to lustful seizures by the thought of being ruined by the hot iron. Some of them went crazy and begged me to do it to them. They pleaded with me, and offered me all kinds of things if I would burn them. I'm afraid some of them were never able to get over the desire for it, even after I released them."

That was both reassuring and frightening. It helped to know that I wasn't the only one who had self-destructive urges. It also told me the reason why many of his victims would not testify — they could not risk anyone finding out that they had such perverted desires, or they were grateful for having their sex organs upgraded and didn't want to have to declare that publicly, either. The unfortunate ones would have to have been put into straightjackets to keep them from hurting themselves. Some might not have been diagnosed quickly enough. Those might have succeeded in some form of self-mutilation. That was the real horror that the police report kept secret and that had bothered Gail so much — that they could be made to do want to do things like that to themselves.

Everyone's worst nightmare is to be turned into the thing that they fear most. In this case, they had become their own torturers. I found myself sympathizing with the torturer as well as the victims.

"Time to go, now," he said, clamping the noxious cloth over my face again. "You were the best. No one could be as perfect as you. Certainly no one ever enjoyed this as much as you... or at all."

He thought he had caught me unawares again, but he was wrong. This time I didn't suck in a lungful of the vapor right away. This time I held my breath and worked furiously to run my metabolism up to a high pitch. When I was almost burning up from the fire I had built in my body, I took a deep breath.

I rolled my eyes, slumped back on the table and let myself go limp as the vapors saturated my brain, making me woozy. This time, though, my head cleared as soon as he took the cloth away and I burned off the soporific drug almost immediately.

I lay there and played possum while he cranked the table back down. He had a hard time with it, since it had been warped by my attempts to escape and especially from my electrically-induced convulsions. When it jammed before reaching its original position, he picked up a wrench and bent down to try to free it. He must have realized that it would take too long to repair, because he dropped the wrench back into the box and then undid the straps holding me down and stepped away from the table. I almost jumped up then, but a quick peek showed me that he had just gone to get my clothes.

He dressed me gently and carefully, treating me as if I were an antique doll that might break if he handled me too roughly. I thought that was so sweet that I started to have second thoughts about turning him in to the cops. He even refastened my fanny pack, which he had apparently never opened, or he would have seen my badge and I might have woken up in a ditch the first time. It wasn't until he had picked me up to carry me to wherever he intended to drop me off that I gave any hint of being awake and aware.

"It's too bad," I said, startling him so badly that he almost let me fall. "If it had been just me, I might ask if you could see me again next week at the same time. But there are all those other girls, you see. You said yourself that none of them enjoyed it as much as I did and I am afraid that some of them are very unhappy with what you did to them."

He released me and I dropped to my feet. He made no move to attack or to escape.

"But it was for their own good! I did it to make them perfect. I did it for them! It's their fault if they failed to see that!" he whined, too wrapped up in his rationalization to think of trying to get away. Still, I watched him closely. Even the meekest of beasts will fight when cornered.

"I understand," I told him reassuringly. "Really. But you know what they say about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions. You took a chance and it didn't work out. Now you are going somewhere where they will keep you from doing this to anyone else. I hope they let you have a workshop. You are very good at making those toys. I really like the electrocutor and the mechanical fucker. Those are real works of art."

"Thank you. It's good to hear compliments on my work. None of the other girls understood, you know. They all struggled and screamed and cried, and that was fun for a while, but none of them appreciated what I was trying to do for them."

"I know. It's tough to do something that you think will help someone when they fight you every step of the way. People can be so ungrateful, can't they?" I was scaring myself. I was starting to understand him. He had started off hating girls for rejecting him when he was younger. He had got into playing Torturer as a way to take his revenge on them, but he never actually stopped liking girls. Being in contact with them, even in this perverted way, had brought out those good feelings. The problem was that he couldn't change himself. He could only change his justification for what he did, and in a small way, how he went about it. The little bells were certainly not something your average torturer of girls would think of.

"It's a shame. If you had put an ad in the paper, describing what you wanted, you probably could have had girls lined up around the block waiting to have you try some of this stuff on them. Some of it, that is." I looked askance at the brazier with its load of hot irons. Those would never be really popular. It was certain that they would not generate as much repeat business as the unique piercings or the other things.

"Really? I never considered that."

"Yeah. Look, if they let you off on some technicality or psychiatric grounds or something, you might want to try that. There are a lot of people who are into this sort of thing nowadays. I guess I must be one of them."

"OK, I'll give it some thought."

"Good. Now I'm going to have to tie you up or something while I go for the police."

"I'd rather you didn't. That would be embarrassing, to have everyone know that I had let myself be tied up by a girl."

He was shifting his feet like he was thinking about resisting. I had to think of a way he could save face so I wouldn't have to hurt him. I spotted just what I needed lying in a corner of the room. I picked up a six-foot length of the iron bar stock that he had used to make the irons that he heated in the brazier.

"How about if I tie you up with this?"

"You're kidding. That's half-inch iron. You could drive a truck over that and not bend it."

"Right." I bent the bar into a big circle, leaving a small gap between the ends. I put it around his waist and ran the end of the bar behind one of the support braces under the table. Then I pushed the loop closed and snugged it tight so he could not slip out.

His eyes bugged out behind the mask. I thought I might have made the bar too tight.

"Is that too uncomfortable?" I almost laughed at the absurdity of the question. He had been torturing me for several hours and now I was concerned for his comfort.

"Can you get out of there?" I asked, changing my mind about his comfort.

He struggled convincingly, pushing on the ends of the bar and twisting in the loop. It looked like it would hold him for long enough. He settled down when he was satisfied that no one would think he had submitted to a weaker opponent.

"Thank you," he said. "That was very considerate of you."

"I'll go you one better," I said. "I won't be here when the police come. You can tell them anything you want about how you were overpowered and tied up and no one will be able to say anything different. The police will make the case without me and you will never see me again."

"That's terribly kind of you. But may I ask you something before you go? You obviously aren't a normal girl. I guess I should have realized that while I was... well, I should have suspected. Who are you?"

I debated whether to spin him some yarn or maybe to just not answer the question at all. I decided that since he was being cooperative, I owed him something. I stepped close to him, so he could see me clearly in the dim light and I showed him my best face. The fire-breathing monster must have been especially convincing in the flickering, reddish light of the room. When he shrieked and tried to jerk away from me I said simply, "I'm The Dragon."

I turned and walked out of the room briskly, to leave him with the best parting impression I could. The crude-looking wooden door opened into an ordinary kitchen, filled with ordinary appliances and cabinets. He had built his dungeon in his garage. The rock walls were most likely painted Styrofoam over several layers of soundproofing. It had looked pretty real, and I hadn't had any idea where I really was. Now that I was no longer a prisoner in it, I could appreciate it for an excellent bit of set-decoration.

I walked through to the short hallway and then out the front door of a house that looked perfectly ordinary as well. Standing on the front steps, I could see the trees by the edge of the park at the end of the street. Even though it was mostly dark by this time, I could also see the street sign.

"Neeka?" I called. "Would you come to 104 Garden Way? It's a street running away from the park to the south, I think. I'm finished here."

"On my way," she said.

I went back inside and used his phone to call Sgt Adams on her cell. She sounded happy to hear from me. She sounded even happier when I told her she was about to get the credit for arresting The Torturer. I gave her the address and said I hoped we could get together sometime and talk shop. She said she'd buy me a drink. When I told her I didn't drink, she couldn't think of anything else to say and I had to hang up before I giggled and ruined her respect for me completely.

Neeka announced her arrival by revving the engine on the bike. I went back outside and hopped on.

"Let's go home. I'm bushed," I said and put my arms around her waist and hung on tight as she roared off down the street.

-------

Neeka had just shut off the bike when Bambi came through the door to the back stairs like she'd been launched from a catapult.

"Honey, are you all right? And don't give me any BS about how you can't be hurt, either. You've been gone all day and I've been worried. If Monique hadn't called to let me know you were on a stakeout and wouldn't be back for a while I would have been worried sick. You are all right, aren't you?"

"Yes, Mom. I'm fine. I just spent the afternoon being tortured and mutilated by a lunatic, but I'm OK, really."

"Well, that's good. I'm just happy you're home in... ah, what did you say?"

"I said I'm OK, really. I'm just tired and pretty hungry, too. It was a tough day at the office, that's all."

"No, the other part."

"I'm fine."

"The part in between, smarty-pants. The part with the words tortured and mutilated."

"Well, these things happen. You spend your day fighting crime, you have to expect that, at some point, crime will fight back."

Bambi looked to Neeka for more information than she was getting out of me.

"Don't get me into the middle of this," Neeka said. "She just spent all day on the rack. I doubt you will be able to coerce any details out of her until she thinks you have calmed down enough to hear it. She's also giddy with fatigue. I doubt she'll be awake much longer."

"All right. I know when I'm beaten. I'll go warm up your dinner, honey. We didn't know when you'd be back so the rest of us have already eaten. You get cleaned up and when you come down I'll serve you a plate of the nice leg of lamb with mint jelly and scalloped potatoes. I think there is some green bean casserole left as well and maybe there's still a piece of chocolate mousse pie. Of course, if you are too tired to eat..."

"Stop! I'll talk! I'll talk! That lunatic has a thing or two to learn about torture from you, Mom."

"I'm glad you've decided to be reasonable. Now let's hear it."

"Well, it may be a good thing that soup is not on the menu."

"Intriguing, but not informative. Why no soup?"

I wanted to try to break things to her in stages. I didn't want her going ballistic on me. That's why I was trying to stretch out the story as far as I could, so she could get used to it in small bits. I was still wondering what part I should leave for last. It was obvious what part I could never tell her.

I picked up a wooden pencil from the desk and started tapping my lips with it. I had an idea.

"Watch this," I said.

"Uh oh," Bambi said. "This is going to be bad."

"What? Why?" I asked.

"You know the most common last words of a redneck, don't you? It's 'Hey y'all, watch this!'"

Even though I had heard that one before, it still made me laugh. Laughing made me feel better and it was something I could sure use at the moment. I was sore, tired, hungry, and I had been abused for hours by a man who had had some bad life experiences and just couldn't handle them. He wasn't evil, he was just very, very sick and I hoped he would get the help he needed after the hooraw calmed down over his capture.