Marcus often wondered what might have been had Pam not misconstrued his interest and called the sheriff's office. They could have had something nice together. He had pictured it a thousand times: the two of them living a quiet, suburban kind of life. Friends and lovers. Husband and wife.

In the last few months Marcus had developed a strong dislike and disrespect for the sheriff's office and officers. Except Annie. Annie wasn't like the rest of them. Her heart was pure. The politics of the system had yet to corrupt her sense of fairness.

Annie would look for the truth, and when she found it he would make her his.

Victor rose at midnight, as he always did. He hadn't slept well. Fragmented dreams had driven into his brain like shards of stained glass. The colors disturbed him. Very red colors. Red like blood and black too. Dark and light. Light the color of urine.

The colors were too intense. Intensity was painful. Intensity could be very white or very red. White intensity came from soft and coolness; from certain feelings he couldn't name or describe; from specific visual images- semicolons and colons, phrases in parentheses, and horses. White intensity also came from a collection of precious words: luminous, mystique, marble, running water. He especially had to steel himself against the words. Luminous could produce such white intensity he would be rendered speechless and immobile.

And just a fine degree to the right of white intensity was red intensity. Like a circle with Start and Stop together. Very red intensity came from heaviness, pressure, the smell of cheddar cheese and of animal waste-but not human waste, even though humans were animals. Homo sapiens. Red words were sluice and bunion and sometimes melon, but not always. Very red words he couldn't verbalize, even in his own mind.

He pictured them as objects he could allow himself only glimpses of. Jagged, erect, slab, mucus.

Very red intensity squeezed his brain and magnified his senses a hundredfold until the smallest sound was a piercing shriek and he could see and count each individual hair on a person's head and body. The sensory overload caused panic. Panic caused shutdown. Start and stop. Sound and silence.

His senses were full now, like water goblets lined up on a quivering, narrow ledge, the water moving, lapping at the rims and over them. Mask, he thought. Mask equaled change and sometimes deception, depending on red or white.

Victor stood in his room near the desk for a long time and listened to the fluorescent bulb in the lamp. Sizzle, hot and cold. An almost white sound. He felt time pass, felt the earth move in minute increments beneath his feet. His brain counted the passing moments by fractions until the Magic Number. At that precise instant, he broke from his stillness and let himself out of his room.

The house was silent. Victor preferred silence with darkness. He moved more freely without the burden of sound or light. He went down the hall and stood at the door to his mother's hobby room. Mother forbade him access to the room, but when Mother was asleep her thoughts and wishes ceased to exist-like television, On and Off. He counted by fractions in his mind to the Magic Number and let himself into the room, where he turned on the small yellow light of the sewing machine.

Dress forms stood here and there like headless women garbed in the elaborate costumes Mother had made for past Carnivals. The forms made Victor uneasy. He turned away from them, turned to the wall where the masks were displayed. There were twenty-three, some small, some of smooth shiny fabric, some large, some covered with sequins, some stitched like needlepoint faces with a protruding penis where the nose should have been.

Victor chose his favorite and put it on. He liked the sensation it gave him inside, though he couldn't name the feeling. Mask equaled change. Change, transformation, transmutation. Pleased, he let himself out of the room, went down the stairs and out into the night.

21

Kay Eisner had learned to hate men at an early age, courtesy of an uncle who had found her too tempting as a seven-year-old. No man she'd known in the thirty years since had caused her to change her opinion. She scoffed at the book that claimed men were from Mars. Men were from hell, and how every woman on the planet didn't see it was beyond her. War was a bloody game played by men. Politics was a power game played by men. Crime was a cancer in society, perpetrated and spread predominantly by men. The prisons were overflowing with men. Rapists and killers prowled the streets.

It pained her to have to work for a man, but men ran the world, so what were her choices? Arnold Bouvier was her foreman, but every hand doing the dirty work gutting catfish in his plant belonged to a woman. They were working extra shifts and overtime these days, on account of Lent coming up. Catholics all over America would be stocking up on frozen fish.

Kay had worked the Saturday second shift, thinking all the while that the overtime pay would bring her that much closer to her dream of going into business for herself. She wanted to sell collectible dolls by mail order, and deal with as few men face-to-face as she could.

She double-checked the locks on her doors-front and back-before going into the bathroom. Her work clothes went immediately into a diaper bucket with water, detergent, and bleach to combat the stink of fish. She turned the shower as hot as she could stand it and scrubbed her skin with Yardley lavender soap. The room was thick with steam by the time the hot water ran out.

Kay cracked open the window to cool things off. She dried her curly hair with a threadbare towel, never looking at herself in the mirror above the sink. She couldn't stand looking at the body that had betrayed her time and again throughout her life by attracting the attention of men.

Men were the scourge of the earth. She thought so no less than ten times a day. Thinking it now, she pulled on a shapeless nightshirt, went out of the bathroom and down the hall to her bedroom. She remembered the open bathroom window just as she lay down to sleep, her body aching with fatigue. She couldn't leave it. A rapist was prowling around the parish.

As if Kay had conjured him up from her nightmares, he emerged from the darkness of her closet as she started to rise. A demon in black, faceless, soundless. Terror cut through her like a spear. She screamed once before he struck her hard across the face and knocked her backward onto the bed. Twisting onto her stomach, she tried to pull herself across the mattress. But even as her instincts pushed her to escape, a fatalistic sense of inevitability filled her. The tears that came as he grabbed her by the hair were as much from hatred as from pain. Hate for the man about to rape her, and hate for herself. She wouldn't get away. She never had.