Survivor: 1 (13 page)

They looked at each other and for a moment Lisa was
too stunned to say anything. This is the man they call Animas This is the man that almost killed Debbie yesterday.
This is the man that is going to kill me either today or tomorrow in a snuff film.

Her mind was reeling; she couldn't get over how normal he looked.

"Why?" The question came unbidden, her voice
sounding strong to her for the first time in days.

Animal blinked; he seemed surprised by the question.
He's probably expecting me to beg for my life right now,
she thought.

"Why ... what?" he asked, his lips curling upward
slightly in a grin.

"Why do you do it?" She gestured at the room; the
bloody tarp, the bed with the worn mattress, Debbie lying
in a bloody stupor. "Why do you do this? Snuff movies ...
kill people ... ?"

"Why do you want to know?"

Lisa looked at him, meeting his gaze. "As long as you're
going to kill me, I think I would like to know the reason
why before you do it."

For a moment, Lisa didn't think Animal was going to
answer her. He looked at her in silence. Then he glanced
behind him into the living room-the sound of Tim's
footsteps had receded-and then took a step into the
room. For the first time since laying eyes on him, Animal
looked human-he looked like the kind of guy that she
would pal around with at the office. "You really Want to
know?"

Lisa nodded, trying not to appear too desperate. "Yeah,
I would."

Animal shrugged. "Guess it can't hurt." Then he
stepped into the room and began to tell her how he acquired the taste for hurting and torturing other human
beings.

"I used to work for a large, international consulting firm,"
Animal began. "It was through my employment there that
I met a woman who I became involved with. She introduced me to the scene. Even then, to look at her you
wouldn't have guessed she was into the painful arts. She
looked like she could've been a cheerleader in high
school. She was pretty and incredibly sexy. At work she
had a bubbly personality-lively, free-spirited, fun to be
with. But she was sharp. When it came to her work, she
was a real professional.

"It started innocently enough. We became lovers. We
had a good time, but I could sense that for her she was
just going through the motions. At first I thought that perhaps she didn't want to get emotionally involved with
me, that she only wanted me for a fuck toy or something.
That was the furthest thing from my mind. I only wanted
her for the sex. See..." He began pacing the floor, his
brow furrowed in concentration as if he were trying to
think of a way to express himself most clearly. "I was
never much of a ladies' man. I'd always had an inferiority
complex around women. I'd only lost my virginity two
years before and I was pretty much racing to catch up, if
you know what I mean."

Lisa nodded, accepting his confession but finding it
hard to believe that a man as handsome as Animal
would have lost his virginity well into his twenties. Physically, he was a hunk. But the more she watched him, the
more she listened to his speech, the way he carried him self, the more she began to get the sense that he was
something far different.

Anyway," he said, stopping his pacing to look at her. "It
was a sexual thing. It always was. And the more we got
into it, the more she started ... demanding certain
things!

"What kind of things?"

"It started with biting," he said. "We were having sex
one night and she begged me to bite her while we were
fucking. I was so into it that I did, and she loved it. At first
I thought I had hurt her ... my teeth had actually broken
the skin and drawn blood, but she'd been ecstatic. She
actually came. It was like that night was the happiest day
of her life. And it was then that I learned the first lesson in
the painful arts." He took a step forward, regarding her as
a teacher would a student. "Pain and pleasure are two
sides of the same coin. Pain tolerance goes up during
sexual arousal. The brain also produces endorphins during sex to compensate for pain. It gets you high. It's the
same rush you get while eating chili peppers. It comes
from that same center in the brain where pain and pleasure come from, and that's what makes it enjoyable for
S&M players being whipped or spanked or whatever. It
isn't pain to them. It's pleasure." He smiled.

Lisa felt a shudder run through her body, along with a
slight stab of guilt. The mild bondage she and Brad had
participated in-tying each other up, slipping into the
role of the naughty girl and begging Brad to spank herwas nothing compared to this.

"That was the first step toward my initiation," Animal
said, still smiling. "When I first saw her naked body, I was
shocked. The skin along her back and her torso and
breasts was like one big puckered scar. It was so bad she
looked like a burn victim. I thought she had been in an
accident. When I learned that they were self-inflicted or from others, I felt ... a combination of revulsion and attraction. And the more we talked about it, the more she
told me that she really enjoyed pain and being abused,
the more I saw that she was serious. And seeing that she
was serious, that she was willing to put herself through
such scenes, turned me on."

"I don't understand," Lisa said, choosing her words
carefully. "What does being a willing participant in an
S&M scene have to do with what you're doing with me?"

"It has a lot to do with it, if you'll listen."

"I am listening."

"No, you're not." He was standing in front of her, menacing even-in his Gucci loafers and polo shirt.

"Okay," she said, shifting gears. "Okay, I'm listening."

"You're just like all of them," Animal said, looking at
her with a sneer of contempt. "All the whiny, pitiful little
yuppie fucks who think they can be hip and cool by
dressing in rubber and leather at underground fetish
clubs at night and be corporate rats by day. You don't
know shit. You don't know the first thing of what it's like
to feel power over another human being."

"Then tell me!" Lisa said, trying not to sound too demanding.

Animal stepped forward, and at first Lisa thought he
was going to strike her. Instead, he hunkered down so
that he was looking at her eye to eye. "Let me give you a
little bit of my background. I may look like a yuppie fuck
to you, and maybe in a way I am. I came from a normal
WASPish family. My mother was Miss Susie Homemaker;
Daddy worked his nine-to-five like a good boy and came
home every night to a home-cooked meal. Mommy and
Daddy were also repressed shits who did their best to repress their children. All I heard from them was that sex
was wrong, that it was only for procreation. Hearing that
warped me, especially when I saw the exact opposite happening at home. My dad coming home drunk after
having gone out with the boys from the office, getting
fresh with my mom and her slapping him away, and then
hearing them fighting over it. The fucking bitch wouldn't
put out for my dad, and it pissed him off, you know? Then
at the same time both of them are telling me that sex is
wrong no matter what, even if it's between two people
who love each other."

Lisa didn't know what to say. She met his gaze, not daring to drop it.

"Don't get me wrong," he said. "They never beat me,
they never physically abused me in any way, but they
did have their way with getting their message across.
They were also both extremely domineering. I could
only wear the clothes they wanted me to wear, have the
kinds of friends they approved of, choose the kind of career path only they approved of. Anything I did on my
own, from the people I chose to associate with, to jobs
I've had, if they didn't like it they would let me know
they were disappointed in me. It was beat into my head
at an early age that disappointing my parents was something that was unacceptable with not only them, but to
society at large. To disappoint those that had given birth
to you, who had created you, was the worst thing a
child could do to their parents. For them to be disappointed in me created such a feeling of guilt. And when
it came to sex, it was hardwired in me to not disappoint
them in that area. Could you image what it would have
been like if I had gotten a girl pregnant? My God, they'd
go off the deep end and I couldn't live with myself! It
was that fear of disappointing my parents, of getting a
girl pregnant, that kept me from indulging in whatever
normal sexual feelings I had." He snorted back a laugh.
As you could probably imagine, I jerked off a lot
through high school."

Lisa didn't laugh; it really wasn't funny to her. If anything, it scared her.

"I never felt in control of anything in my life," he resumed, standing up. He turned around and began pacing the room as he talked. "I let all this frustration bottle
up inside me, and it wasn't until I began my relationship
with Susan that I realized I could let them out. I was with
somebody who was encouraging me to act on my fantasies. She didn't disapprove. In fact, the more I told her
about them, the happier she got. They were fantasies I
wanted to indulge in for real."

"What were they?"

"I thought you'd never ask," he replied. He turned to
her, counting them off on his fingers. "Let's see ... dominating every single woman or girl that had ever turned
me on in high school or college or in the few years after
obtaining my MBA. Sometimes I had fantasies about doing similar things to men, but men don't excite me sexually the way women do; the only way I get turned on by
hornoerotic thoughts is if I'm torturing another man."

Torturing another man. Obviously torturing women,
too. Lisa licked her lips and swallowed, her throat dry,
and nodded.

Animal continued. "I tried to deny I was having these
thoughts. I thought I could never act on them-normal
people don't give in to such urges, much less have them.
So for ten years I would occasionally think about what it
would be like to strangle the head cheerleader of the
high school football team, or castrate the homecoming
king and stuff his cock down his throat, or cut my secretary's fingers off with a paring knife and force-feed them
to her. And then I would deny that such thoughts excited
me. I didn't realize that inflicting pain on these people
would be like music to my ears.

"Obviously, when Susan found this out our sex life be come more intense. She encouraged me to get rougher
with her, to hurt her. She enjoyed being tied up and
whipped. She enjoyed having her ass slapped with a
leather belt until I drew blood. She was with me the
whole way, and I knew that as long as she was there I
could do it. I knew I was safe with her, that our secret
would only be between us. I later learned that this is
what true S&M is: It is the complete surrender and trusting of your body and emotions to another person. I no
longer saw it as something deviant practiced by perverts.
Of course, what I'm going to describe to you ... if a regular S&M practitioner were to hear this they'd be horrified.
Basically, the entire extreme hardcore scene is a very
brutal, very underground subculture that lurks within the
S&M world. Most S&M participants are either ignorant of
the more forbidden aspects of the extreme hardcore
world or they don't want to admit it exists. But it's there.
The more you get into S&M, the more you get into a local
scene in a big city like NewYork or LA, the more you dig
into its various subcultures, you'll soon start finding
some people that are into some pretty extreme shit."

He paused, his features appeared reflective, then he
continued. in a way, I guess we loved each other. We
were the perfect partners for each other. We were friends
and lovers in the extreme sense. Our sex life accelerated
into something I had never experienced before and
never knew existed. Previously, I was merely content to
play my part in a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am role. I
suppose most guys are. With Susan, I was becoming
more confident in myself in dealing with my fantasies;
she encouraged me to act on them. Our sessions accelerated rapidly until we were getting into some heavy
stuff, things I wouldn't have even imagined participating
in. She demanded that I hit her harder, bite her harder,
whip her harder. And I complied. The harder our ses sions became, the more I would feel that I shouldn't be
doing this, that what I was doing was wrong, but then Susan would encourage me." He looked at her. "And the
more she pulled me in, the more I found myself liking
what I was doing to her."

Lisa looked into his eyes, and what he said next made
the skin along the back of her neck erupt in gooseflesh.
"We began having regular intercourse less and less. It
never really did much for me anyway." He stepped closer
to her. "But what we did together? Me playing the sadist
to Susan's masochistic fantasies? 'That's what got me off.
It's what still gets me off."

Lisa swallowed, and tried not to look away as Animal
stared at her. His gaze was penetrating, cunning, predatory. She forced herself to meet it head-on, even as she
fought to control her rising fear.

"She introduced me to the underground extreme hardcore scene," Animal continued, not breaking his gaze
from hers. "It was at such functions, usually held in private homes, where she told me she often had to go to be
completely satisfied sexually. I was a little nervous at my
first party, but that didn't last long. As soon as I saw that
there were others who shared my fetish, I relaxed around
them. Susan introduced me to an underground hardcore
porn filmmaker named Alex Pressman-he's the guy that
filmed yesterday-who sometimes filmed the parties for
private video collections. He asked us that first night if he
could film Susan and me in a scene, and ... well ...I
suppose he recognized talent when he saw it." He
grinned.

Lisa could only imagine what it must have been
like ... Animal abusing his consenting girlfriend, getting
off on it, Alex filming it, recognizing something in Animal
that he could use ...