Chapter 1

Morning.

He woke slowly, reluctantly, trying to claw his way back into the dream. He woke up in a lonely room. The paint on the walls was peeling like sunburnt skin, and the sheets on the sagging bed were damp with his own sweat. The dream was there, just a few yards away from him, and his mind raced after it hungrily, but the dream was too fast for him. It slipped off like a thief in the night and left him alone, and uncomfortably awake.

Traces of the dream stayed with him. There was a girl in it, her body a symphony of fleshy curves, her mouth a red raw wound in the torment of her twisted face. Her eyes flashed hate and lust at once, and her breasts pointed him out and sang a weird, painful song to him, and-

And the rest was lost. Gone, run off, lost. The girl's face grew distorted and the girl's body ceased to be familiar and turned swiftly into the dimmest of memories. There had been a dream, and during that dream he had not been alone, and now he was awake and the dream was gone and he was lonely again.

And empty.

And dimly afraid.

He sighed, heavily, and rolled over, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. His legs were thin and wiry with taut muscle, strong legs, fast legs. He reached down now, scratching absently at one thigh with his dirty fingernails. His fingers flexed, scratching. He sighed again, and yawned, and raised his free hand to stifle the yawn. He sighed a third time and stood up, turning around like a caged cat, orienting himself in the small and empty room.

His name was Lee Fallon. He was thirty-two years old, five foot ten, black hair, high forehead, brown eyes, long nose, rough stubble of beard. Weight-one fifty-two. No permanent address. In case of illness or serious injury notify: Nobody.

His name was Lee Fallon.

There was a crumpled pack of cigarettes on the nightstand at the side of the bed. He picked up the pack and thrust fingers into it, fumbling for a cigarette. There was one cigarette left and it wouldn't come out. He tore the pack in half and put the cigarette between his thin lips, then hunted for a match. He found three books of matches, all empty. He cursed flatly and began opening drawers-in the nightstand, in the ancient dresser. There were no matches. He picked up his slacks, tossed across an unsteady wooden chair. In a pocket he found a pack of matches, yanked one out, scratched it, lit the cigarette. He sucked smoke into his lungs and coughed a dry cough, then leaned back a little and blew a thin column of smoke at the ceiling. His eyes followed the smoke. It hung together in the still air of the room until it reached the ceiling then broke up and crawled along the ceiling as if in search of a place to hide.

That's what we all want, he thought sullenly. A place to hide. A refuge. That's what we all want, that's what we all spend a lifetime hunting for. And we never find it.

So why look?

A good question, he thought. A hell of a good question, a damned hell of a damned good question.

Why look? Why run, why hide, why try? It was easier to relax and let things happen than to try and make them come out right, and it did as much good. He knew that. If you worked hard, if you really sweated up a storm trying to make things break the right way for you, you wound up in the same boat with the guy who didn't try at all. Either way, you lost. Either way, you struck out.

Strike one, strike two, strike three. And that, he thought, was the ball game.

He stood up quickly, stubbing out the cigarette on the top of the nightstand. They didn't bother giving you ash trays at Rooms, he thought. Because they figured that the type of slob who would stay at Rooms wouldn't know what an ash tray was if he saw one, or it fell and hit him on the head. Rooms wasn't a particularly classy place. Not at all.

He wondered if the rooming house had a name. It had a sign, a tacky cardboard sign, fly-specked, that said Rooms with perfect simplicity, and that was what he called it. There was something nice and basic about the idea of living in a place named Rooms. It made its own kind of sense, and that was as much sense as he expected of anything.

Let it all work that way, he thought. Let the whole world get orderly and sensible for a change. If he had his own way, he would live all his life in a building named Rooms, and he would eat all his meals at a restaurant named Food, and spend his afternoons in a theater called Movies, and his nights in a bar called Drink, and, now and then, blow himself to a swift bang at a joyhouse called-Well, he thought, figure it out for yourself, world. But don't bother me, please don't bother me.

He got dressed. This was no problem for him. Other men had to face a little moment of decision every morning when they rolled out of bed. They had to decide what to wear. But Lee Fallon didn't have this little complication. He wore everything he owned, put on his sole pair of underpants, his only shirt, his one pair of slacks, his two socks, his two shoes. When his clothes were too dirty to wear he would face a problem, all right. The underwear and the socks he could wash out in the sink, but that wouldn't do with the pants.

Come to think of it, what the hell would he do? Buy a new pair of pants and throw the old ones away? Probably. There wasn't a whole hell of a lot else to do, was there?

The hell with it. He would worry about it when the time came, and not until then, and to hell with the world.

He left his room, not locking the door because there was absolutely nothing inside to steal but the furniture, and the furniture belonged to the ugly old witch who owned and operated Rooms. He went down two flights of creaking stairs, passed two people who said hello to him and one who didn't. He did not say anything to any of them. He went outside into a warm and sweaty morning and blinked at the sunlight. It was much too bright for him.

Brooklyn. Nostrand Avenue; shops, Little diners, here and there a branch bank and a loan company and other things. This, that. Brooklyn.

He walked along Nostrand Avenue until he came to a diner and went inside. He ordered scrambled eggs and toast and sausages and black coffee, and he ate the eggs and toast and sausages and drank the coffee and smoked two cigarettes. The eggs weren't bad, but the toast was soggy and the sausages were greasy and the coffee was terrible. He finished everything anyway, eating automatically, filling his belly as though he were stoking a furnace. Then he went outside and walked until he came to an intersection with a few benches, and he sat on one of the benches and smoked another cigarette, the third from the pack he had bought at the diner. That left seventeen, and then he would have to buy a new pack.

Everything was money. Two bucks a day for the rotten room. Thirty cents for every pack of cigarettes. A buck or so for a meal. Half a buck a shot for blended rye.

He took a breath. He liked and hated Brooklyn, both at once. He liked it because you could get completely lost in it. You could dig down and bury yourself in it like a worm burying itself in the earth, and everybody left you alone and pretended you didn't exist, and sometimes that was good. He hated it because it was cold and ugly, and everything cost money and he had hardly any money, and one day came after another and all he did was Live in that room and eat at that diner and smoke cigarettes and drink rye and sit on benches, and that was nothing but a hang-up, like jail. But better than jail.

Fallon had been in jail. Maybe a dozen overnight stands for drunk-and-disorderly. Thirty days for driving while intoxicated. A year for grand theft auto. Six months for mopery with intent to gawk.

If he had stayed in Ohio, he would be in jail again, maybe. It was fifty-fifty, he decided. They might have got him and they might not have, depending. It was hard to say, because they didn't know his name and they might or might not get him from the girl's description. For that matter, the girl might or might not have reported the whole thing to the local cops. You could never tell. He had read somewhere-he didn't remember where-that half the time the girls didn't report it, that they were scared or ashamed or something.

But it had not been worthwhile staying in Ohio to find out. Because it would have been a long stay in jail if they had caught him. No overnight, no thirty days, no sixty days, no six months, no year. A good long time.

Because this wasn't drunk-and-disorderly, or driving while intoxicated, or grand theft auto, or mopery with intent to gawk. This was something which, in the eyes of the law, was a good deal more serious than all those lesser charges put together.

This was rape.

He settled on the bench and closed his eyes. It was funny, he thought, how you remembered some things and forgot others, how some incidents which happened yesterday dissolved and evaporated while others which happened a week or a month ago were crystal clear in your mind, every detail as sharp as if it were happening now. The rape was one of those crystal-clear things. He remembered all of it, and all he had to do was close his eyes and think about it and every detail came into brilliant focus.

It had happened a little more than a month ago, in a town called Colver City. He had been living there for almost half a year, earning enough money to live on, slinging hash in a drive-in on Route 68 and sleeping in a little room off the main stem. The night it happened was a cloudy one, with the clouds blotting out the moon and most of the stars. It was an aimless, pointless night for him. He finished work at eight o'clock, drove his '63 Chevy into Springfield and watched a movie there, left in the middle of the second feature and drove back toward Colver City.

On the way, he passed a roadhouse named Harold's. A very ordinary sort of place, just across the county line from Colver City. There was a barn-like bar, and there were a handful of tourist cabins which tourists never stopped at, and that was Harold's.

He didn't quite pass Harold's. He started to, and then he hit the brakes hard enough to make the wheels of the old Chevy squeal in painful protest. He swung the wheel and the car scurried off the road into Harold's parking lot. He braked to a stop, cut the ignition, got out of the car.

He had never been to Harold's before. Mostly he did his drinking in a bar in Colver City where they knew him. They didn't much like him, but they knew him, and they served him drinks and tried to cut him off before he got too thoroughly smashed. When he drank too much they called a cop and he slept it off in the tank, which was neither too good nor too bad.

But now he was in Harold's, and they didn't know him. Nobody looked up when he came in, and the few people who saw him forgot him quickly. Lee Fallon had that kind of a face, the kind you look at and look away from, the kind you forget because there is nothing very remarkable about it, being neither ugly nor handsome and possessing no special feature that serves as a tag.

They looked at him and they looked away. And he went up to the bar and sat on a not-too-comfortable stool and ordered whiskey with water on the side. The bartender gave him a shot of a cheap blend and set a glass of water on the top of the bar next to him. Fallon drank the whiskey and pointed to the shot glass and the bartender filled it up again.

The rye was just forty cents a shot there, and Fallon decided that the price was about right. It was rotgut, probably distilled close to home by some penny-ante bootlegger across the West Virginia line. Or did West Virginia border Ohio there, or was it Kentucky? It didn't matter, he decided, any more than it much mattered how good or how Lrad the blended rye was. After the first three shots you couldn't do much tasting anyway. All that mattered was that it contained alcohol. It might as well be hair tonic, after the first three drinks. Just so long as it did its work and got him smashed.

It was better when you were smashed. Things didn't bother you, didn't get on your back. He drank the second drink and pointed to his glass again. The bartender filled ft. He sipped the water and tossed off the third drink, and pointed to his glass, and accepted the refill, and the fourth drink didn't taste good or bad, didn't have any taste at all as far as he could tell. It was there, and it was working on him, and that was all that mattered.

Somebody played the juke box. Rock and roll stuff, twist music, hillbilly crud. Fallon smoked a cigarette and drank off another shot and sipped water and listened to the music. His eyes moved over the room, quick and sharp as the eyes of a clever rodent. He saw men and women, drinking, sitting, talking, getting ready for a trip to one of the tourist cabins or just killing time.

More liquor. Into the shot glass, down the hatch, into the gut, spreading warmth through the body.

Then he saw the girl.

She looked just a little too good for Harold's. It was hard to decide just what it was about her that looked better than the rest of the place, but it was there. Her clothes were not expensive, but they were somehow more tasteful than those of the other women. Her figure was better, too, but in an intangible way. Some of the women may have had large breasts, but this girl's breast seemed to hold more life, more spring, more bounce, more vibrancy, more of a suggestion of prospective pleasure. The other women might have had slimmer waists, but hers was more in keeping with the rest of her body. The other women might had had lusher hips, or more tautly muscled legs; they might have been more attractive in one or another particular, might have displayed one or another part of themselves that was better than one or another part of the girl.

But she was better than any of them. Something about her, something about the way all the parts of her added up. She was the only horse in the race, when you came right down to it. She made the rest of them look like dogs.

She was young, for one thing. That was easy to tell, even in the half-light of the bar's interior. One look at her was all Fallon needed to know that Harold's was breaking a law. The girl was not twenty-one and did not come within a few years of being twenty-one. Seventeen, he guessed. Eighteen at the outside. No more than that, and he would bet on it.

Young and fresh and pretty, and promising. And alone, too. All alone at a table down front sitting and drinking beer and looking at nobody and playing the juke now and then. All alone, and young, and the blood rushed through his veins like a hungry river on its way to the sea.

The rush of passion surprised him. He hadn't been aware of the need for a woman, hadn't recognized the ache for female flesh, but now that he saw the girl he realized how much he needed her. It wasn't even a matter of realizing-the blood rushed through his veins and arteries and boiled in his brain, a naked bubbling mass of want, of need. And it was no general need, either. It was a damned specific need, a need for this one particular girl. No other woman could take the need away. He had to have this one, this special one, this young and all-alone one.

Now. Now.

He had another drink and threw it down in a hurry. For a brief moment a bolt of raw fear shot through him, fear of himself, fear of what he might do and of what might happen to him. At times in the past he had known this same special sort of fear. At times he would see himself as a man who did whatever had to be done, a man who could not control himself when something demanded doing. He felt very weak all at once, and felt very strong at the same time. It didn't make much sense, but not many things did. not when you stopped to think them over.

The fear went away. The weak-and-strong feeling went with it. Something had to be done, something which he could not control, and all that he had to do was ride with it and see what would happen. That was all.

He looked at her again. She was almost blonde, her hair a very light shade of brown. She wore it down, and it was just a little less than shoulder length. It framed a soft, sweet sort of face.

She was wearing a skirt and a sweater. The sweater was yellow, and moderately tight, and her young breasts thrust out against the front of it, pushing against it as if trying to break loose. It didn't look as though she was wearing a bra. He wasn't close enough to tell, but he had the feeling that she wasn't. Once, on her way to the juke box, they had bobbed like apples in a barrel on Halloween, and breasts in a bra did not usually display so much enthusiasm, so he had the feeling that she was not wearing one, but he could not honestly say with any certainty one way or the other.

He did know that she wasn't wearing a girdle under the black skirt. The skirt was tight, and the view thus displayed thoroughly negated the possibility of a girdle. In his mind he also dismissed the possibility of underwear, though with no real reason. He just liked to think of her that way, all soft and lush and nude, all happily naked under skirt and sweater.

His mind stripped off the skirt and sweater. His mind saw her utterly naked, a symphony of lustful flesh. His mind pinned her on her back and his mind positioned him with her, and his mind swam in hot waters with the image of his lust.

Another drink.

Another drink.

He knew better than to go to her table. Some men could manage that, but Fallon was not one of them. He knew himself well enough to realize that he was not good with women. They didn't find him attractive. The hookers would go for him, if he paid them, and sometimes a drunken woman would let him have her when she was too nearly stoned to care much one way or the other, but outside of that women left him fairly well alone. If he went to this girl's table, she would just ask him to leave her alone.

And that would ruin everything.

So he took his time, drinking just enough to retain the glow of alcohol without pushing himself over the edge. He drank, and his eyes kept returning to the girl, stripping the skirt and sweater from her fresh young body and imagining the perfection of her naked flesh. He took his time, and he was very clever. He saw the girl signal for her check. He picked that moment to toss off his last shot and slip almost unnoticed from the bar.

The air outside had a slight chill to it. Fallon walked over to his Chevy, opened the door. He slid behind the wheel and lit a cigarette, his eyes on the glowing red tip of it. He waited, and tie front door of Harold's came open, and the girl slipped out of the door and walked through the parking lot toward Fallon's car.

She was alone.

Completely alone.

She was almost at the car before he spoke. She was just drawing abreast of it when he rolled down the window and began talking to her. She almost jumped.

"Get in the car," he said. "I'll drive you home."

She stared at him.

"Do you have a car?"

"No."

"Then get in. I'll give you a ride." Her mouth worked but no words came out at first. Then she said: "I just live down the road a ways."

"Riding's better than walking."

"It's not far, though."

"Get in," he said. "It's dangerous, walking alone at night. A girl like you."

He could tell she didn't want to go with him. But the look in her eyes showed that she was more afraid to refuse him than to go in his car. He told her once more to get in, that he would give her a ride, and this time she gave a soft short sigh and walked around the car and got in. She sat far over on her side of the seat, as if she was afraid to get too close to him. He smiled quickly, a brief private smile that the girl did not see.

Afraid of him.

He liked that.

He turned the key in the ignition, got the car going. He could smell her perfume, some cheap dimestore stuff that she had used a little too much of. It stank, more or less, but at the same time it did what it was supposed to do. It excited him.

The liquor bubbled in his system now, a perfect lubricant for the machinery of lust. His hands were tight on the steering wheel. He swung the car around, moved out of the lot and onto the highway. She told him she lived off to the left, and he drove that way.

He said: "What's your name?"

"Sally."

"Sally," he said. He didn't ask her what her last name was and he didn't tell her his own name. He wasn't sure yet just what was going to happen, but he already had the feeling that it might be better for him if she did not know his name. The idea of rape had not yet come, not in so many words, although he knew intuitively that he was going to do something, that he was in one way or another going to have this fluffy blonde thing. At any rate, it would be better if she did not know his name.

"It's the next left turn," she said.

"Sure."

"Just past that cutoff," she said. "You turn left up there."

"Sure," he said.

A car passed him coming the other way, a big Thunderbird with the convertible top down. The T-Bird did not bother dimming its lights and the lights blinded Fallon for a second. As the car shot by, he caught a glimpse of four people, a boy and girl in front and a boy and girl in back. The girls were laughing.

Sure, he thought. Rich guys, a big car, a flashy car, they don't have to go dimming their lights if they don't feel like it. They get the girls, they take that Thunder-bird and park it down by some creek, they get those girls to put out for them easy as pie. Rich guys, good-looking guys. Louses.

He would show them.

All of them.

"You missed the turn," Sally said.

He hadn't even realized it. Thinking about the Thunderbird, thinking about the girl beside him, he had managed to miss the turn. He looked over at her now, a quick glance. She seemed frightened. She didn't know what was going to happen and she looked good and worried about it.

"You missed the turn-"

"Yeah," he said. "I guess I did, didn't I?"

"Look-"

"Here's another turn," he said. "We'll try this one."

"But it goes the wrong way-"

"Shut up," he said.

Her mouth snapped shut. He swung the Chevy to the right and off onto a narrow twisting dirt road, unlighted, empty. The girl was gripping the car seat with both hands. She looked very upset now, but there was not very much she could do about it. He drove a hundred yards off the road on the dirt path and cut the engine and let the old Chevy coast to a stop.

She said: "Please."

Her hand was on the door handle. She moved slowly, though, as if afraid to make him angry, and that ruined it for her. "If she had just jumped from the car as soon as it slowed down she might have had a chance, but instead she waited, hoping, and that was where she made her mistake.

She didn't get another chance.

He moved across the seat, quickly now, his head throbbing and his vision cloudy. One hand caught hold of her shoulder and fastened on it. The other reached across to the hand that gripped the door handle, opening her fingers and easing her hand away.

"Now you just take it easy," he told her. "You just take it easy and it's a lot better for the both of us."

"What-"

He hauled her over to him. She struggled, but he was tough and wiry and she was soft and weak and her struggling didn't do any good. He pulled her mouth closed and kissed her on the mouth, tasting the flavor of her red lipstick. She squirmed in his arms and he got one hand over one of her full breasts and gave a squeeze. She made a frightened, violated sound and tried to get away, but he squeezed harder and she stopped trying to escape.

No bra. He had been right.

With other guys she wouldn't fight, he thought. With other guys she would be panting up a storm, the way the professionals panted when he paid them for it. But not like them either-because they only pretended, only put it on, but she would be panting and moaning her lust into the cold night air and she would mean every bit of it, her body churning with the fury of raw passion.

With other guys.

Not with Fallon.

He kissed her again, tangled one hand in her mane of blondish hair, bruised her soft lips with his hard and hungry mouth. Her eyes flashed fear. He let her go. just for a moment, and she shrank into her seat and stared out in terror.

She said: "What are you going to do to me?"

And he said: "I'm going to rape you."

He hadn't known it until then, not so you could put it into words. It had been inevitable all along, of course, perhaps from the moment he first saw her, but he hadn't admitted it to himself until he heard the words as he spoke them. But now he knew and she knew and there was not a thing either of them could possibly conceive of doing about it. It was going to happen and that was absolutely all there was to it.

After that everything happened very quickly. She made a grab for the door handle again and this time he did not stop her. She shoved the door open and stumbled out and he came out after her, a tiger making a leap for its prey. She took three or four steps before his arms caught her around the waist and they went sprawling to the ground together. She kicked and squirmed and he fell full force upon her, rolling her over onto her back and spinning her to the ground. She opened her mouth to scream and he covered it with his hand. She tried to bite his hand. He pulled it back and slapped her across the face, hard. Her head rocked from side to side and her wide eyes rolled.

He got the sweater off first. She tried to fight him, tried to push him away, but every time she offered any resistance he would hit her. He slapped her face, drove a knee into the pit of her stomach. Before long she stopped fighting. She was crying as he tugged the sweater over her head, her soft body racked with sobs. He barely noticed this. He was too busy. No bra. Just the girl.

Her breasts were incredible. Two firm cones of flesh, utterly firm without a bra. Even now, with the girl pinned on her back, the breasts had not the slightest trace of sag to them. Their tips were pink rosebuds not yet ready to open. The flesh was soft and clear.

Fallon cupped them in his big hands, gave them a squeeze. The girl gasped. He stroked the breast flesh, took the nipples between the thumb and forefinger of each hand and began to tug at them. She whimpered and tried to get away from him. His hands cupped them again and squeezed, harder this time, harder, until every bit of his strength was devoted to the task of squeezing her to pulp. A scream tore from her throat, hung in the air and died there. He doubled up a fist and sank it into the very pit of her soft stomach and the air rushed from her body like air from a blown-out tire. She coughed and saged and then, suddenly, passed out.

He undressed her, took off her skirt and the underpants which, contrary to his fantasy, were under the skirt. Then, while she lay unconscious for a few seconds, he let his hands have their fill of her body. He stroked her almost tenderly, ran his hands over her shoulders, her breasts, and her legs. He felt the soft skin high on her legs, smoother than satin and softer than feathers.

He touched her, fondly. She was sott all over. And warm.

He rolled her over onto her stomach and cupped her buttocks with his hands, feeling the soft firmness of them, rubbing the backs of her lush legs. He rolled her over onto her back again and played with the delicious contours of her body. She was soft all over, everywhere soft and firm and perfect. Not like any of the women he had had. Much better, much softer, much warmer, and infinitely more to be desired. Before now he had slept with pigs, and now he was going to have a goddess.

The beads of sweat rolled down his forehead and onto his face. He was sweating profusely now and his body was trembling with lust. He waited, his hands busy with her body, while the girl slowly but surely regained consciousness. Because it wouldn't do to have her while she was out cold. He wanted her alive and awake, struggling and hating him and making it all that much better for him.

He watched her when her eyes opened. There was a split second during which time she did not know where she was, and then she remembered, and the shock and terror came back to her eyes. He laughed at the expression on her face.

And then, without any more preliminaries, he took her.

Fiercely.

Viciously.

Magnificently.

His body crashed down against hers. He had undressed while she was unconscious, had dropped his pants in preparation, and now he was fulry prepared. His eagerness knocked on the door to paradise, and she fought him and moaned and screamed, resisting him. His teeth found her breast and bit down hard, and tears flooded from her eyes and she screamed, and his teeth bit harder and the fight left her and he took possession of her.

Harder.

Faster.

She was crying but he could not even hear her now. He pounded at her, driving against her. She screamed and moaned but she did not fight any more because he had taken the fight out of her.

Harder.

Faster-

Then faster and faster, with his heart locked up tight and his brain flaming, and faster and faster, and better and better until he thought he would die from the sheer joy of it, and better and faster and harder and faster and better, more, more, more, until the bubble broke and the world fell apart and the whole earth dissolved completely in a furious jet of smoky steam.

For a moment it was as though he had died Everything was gone. His heart struggled to keep pace with the world and his lungs gasped for air and he lay beside her inert body, too weak to move, too thoroughly and overwhelmingly sated to feel or to think a thing.

Then, bit by bit, reality returned. She was crying. He looked down at her, saw the tears staining her cheeks, saw the agony in her eyes, heard the moans she made.

He pounded her head against the ground, once, twice, three times. The third time her eyes clouded and she went limp. He checked her pulse to make sure that he hadn't killed her. She was still alive, just unconscious.

He took a very deep breath. He stood up and began to dress, pulling on clothes. He took another breath, fumbled for a cigarette. He got it lit and smoked silently, thoughtfully. The drunkenness was wholly gone now, gone with the fury of his lustful climax. He looked at the girl's bare body and a smile came unsummoned to his thin lips.

He moved her knees again. He kicked her once, full force. There was a sound of something breaking, as though the kick had fractured her pelvis. His smile spread.

He threw his cigarette away and got into the car and drove back along with the winding dirt road, leaving her there.