They went for prepubescent targets who could be dressed up as foxy little cheerleaders, virginal 4H girls, rosy-cheeked homecoming-queen fantasies from either sex. But they usually had to make do with tired hookers playacting, divorcees on the third bounce, doltish hash-slingers. They lusted for the animation and thrills of a yet-to-be-vanquished but vulnerable recipient for their gifts.
They were spoilers. It began with words, always. Scathing sarcasm that could puncture and deflate with surgical precision or pummel the target with crude bludgeons; devastating onslaughts of mockery and derision. Mercilessly savage rancor designed to cripple and maim. And Tiff wore the designation VICTIM like a banner.
They used Tiff in some of the lower-budget affairs. Customized specialty orders where the camera might need to see the angry, red welts appear, or even a little blood dotting the skin in a "pincushion" movie. But the mainstream stuff called for pros. They used models for the tormented tit titillation, the fantasies catering to the clothespin-and-rubber-band crowd, the teen stewardess spanking sessions (See Patty paddled by Tara in this steaming bestseller featuring the stars of Teddy Torture). Tiff was okay for the untitled junk. The hardcore work went to a grossly overweight dominatrix in Pennsylvania, who regularly sent them Polaroids of her guilt-ridden hubby, a weight hanging dumbly from his flaccid cock-ringed dong. Custom jobs for the whackaroonies.
One physical act held unique appeal for Charlie and Bobbie. DBC was a subcategory of discipline and punishment that rivaled even the boundless thrills of creating an emotional basket case. It was a bizarre tangential tributary of S & M called Disfigurement by Consent. A young and soft victim would be drawn into this with sufficient drugs and time and the proper increments of humiliation and force. "But the fun was in getting the child to want it herself.
"Do you know what we keep in here, slave?" Bobbie asked Tiff in her sexiest, most dangerous contralto.
"Hmm-mmm." Tiff shook her head in the negative.
"Get those eyes off of me, you freak," Bobbie hissed, and Tiff cast her eyes to the floor obediently. "There, you cunt. That's much better. Now. In this little rosewood box your mistress keeps her silver branding iron. If you want us to keep feeding you all that dope, you greedy little bitch, you'd better show us you want to become one of the family. Soon you'll be begging your mistress for the privilege of wearing our brand on your ass." Tiff appeared to be nodding off and Bobbie slapped her somewhat absentmindedly. "If you could only learn to behave more like Ginger. Junkie cunt."
They were always talking to her about Ginger. She should try to act more like Ginger. Ginger Deaton had learned to really like it, they assured her. She had been extremely plain, with a personality still embryonic, but Charlie and Bobbie had brought her along with all the artifice their collective perversion could muster, gentling this quiet, passive creature further into their nightmare swamp because they smelled the strong scent of victim on her. She became a favorite protegee in time.
One cannot be hypnotized against one's will. But Ginger's own needs were such that a notoriously unscrupulous hypnotist was able to further enslave her on the Freunds' behalf. Once Bobbie heard a noise in their bedroom closet, to illustrate the extent of their dark proclivities, and jumped out of bed in alarm. It was Ginger, unable to control a sneeze, for which she was later whipped to the edge of her pain threshold, the girl's head visible from hair down to upper lip. The rest of Ginger Deaton mummified in four and a half feet of tightly wrapped bandages.
Charlie remembered then that Ginger had requested discipline "a few days ago," and he'd forgotten about the quiet little slave who was silently dehydrating to death in their closet. Devoted Ginger bore cruel Freund brands on both legs, the inner thighs, the cheeks of her ass, her armpits, tits — the rest of her a living dart board of disfigurement from cigarette burns, pin and needle holes. God knows what. Why can't you learn to be more like Ginger? they'd taunt Tiff. Learn to serve us.
But Denise was their piece of least resistance. Their masterwork of depravity. They had spent over two years working their magic on a gay, twenty-year-old boy named Dennis Majors. They were ardent, persuasive, and very cunning. Their love affair with Dennis would survive the test of time only if he would be willing to meet them halfway. By which they meant if he would allow the woman within him-her to finally, fully emerge from the cruel joke that life had played on him-her-it.
It required the greatest concentration, effort, and planning on their part, not to mention personal risk, while they scammed their victim for the eighteen months Dennis spent under the observation of a reputable psychiatrist and a physician. But Dennis-Denise, who had been living as a woman for years, now with the benefit of a year and a half of hormone injections et al, was allowed to go under the scalpel.
Several weeks later, to the Freunds' great amusement, the youth committed suicide after they unceremoniously dumped her in a scathing, derisive, blistering attack by telephone. They had informed her, with never a second's hesitation or moment's remorse, that his-her gender reassignment surgery had been the punch line of a hilarious practical joke. They had reached a level of vituperation and scorn that surprised even them, and Denise's self-immolation was an exciting payoff.
These were the hands into which Spain's daughter had been placed for care and feeding.
Later, with seldom if ever a tender moment, Spain's daughter, branded and fully hooked, was working "love shows," the euphemism for live sex acts, having celebrated a birthday by performing in a particularly nasty S & M show in which she was listed as "golden shower-receiving."
But the quality of mercy droppeth as the gentle rains. Tiff's addiction and crippled body they could accept. Her stubborn streak was a continual irritant to the Freunds. Her owners now regarded Tiff as worthless chattel, fast becoming a tiresome liability. When the Freunds are approached by some mob-connected people who need an untraceable live target for a snuff movie being shot out of the country, she is sold for what will be the last time.
Maybe it was around the time his daughter disappeared that the bad dreams began, he thinks. Or was it earlier — when he came home from the trip to the coast and discovered Pat and Buddy Blackburn were sharing his bed? Spain cannot recall the precise instant the nightmares began. Only the dreams themselves, which are bloody real and etch themselves into his memory banks.
The large picture window framed a vista of falling autumn leaves that dropped from the tall oak, maple, and sycamore across his landscaped lawn. The leaves and grass appeared to have lost all chlorophyll content overnight, the lush look becoming sparse as the dead, brittle leaves floated down to turn to mulch. The Archilochus colubris had long disappeared, and it was just as well, since there was no longer anyone to tend the feeders.
All the losses were building deep within Spain, and about the time he thinks the awful, aching hurts have become a dull, throbbing pain, some new shock wave of recognition hits his core. Ever the realist, he senses that his child is gone for good.
One day she'd been buying Cabbage Patch dolls and Care Bears and the next day she's hitchhiking and getting birth-control pills. Why couldn't he have spotted all of this coming and done something to ward it off? Over and over he makes himself look at things that had happened between himself and Pat, between father and daughter, the harshness and coldness that had alienated a wife and then a daughter.