When Feldman stepped inside the front door, he knew something was wrong. Walking from the foyer into the great room, he saw the stuffing from his sofa and loveseat spilled out on the hardwood floor. His glass coffee table and matching end tables were shattered into a thousand pieces on the accent rugs. His 55-inch TV had a gaping hole in the center of the screen. His face was a mask of fear and trepidation, not because of the state of his personal property, but something far more serious.
Without pausing to assess the damage to the living area, he walked briskly to the kitchen. Stepping over two expensive, ruined wall hangings, he crunched across the broken china blanketing the ceramic tile floor. Arriving at the closed door to the basement, he put his ear to it and listened. What if the culprit is still in the house? Even worse, what if he’s in the basement?
He saw a butcher knife protruding from under a dinner plate in the rubble on the kitchen floor and picked it up. Calling the police was not an option at this point. If the intruder were still here, he’d have to deal with him personally to continue his secret life as a serial killer he’d enjoyed for so many years.
He’d kidnapped fifty-two women over a ten-year period and had his way with them in what he called his love room and never been caught. His MO always remained the same. Just like the woman he’d captured last night, he’d lured her to his van under a false pretenses in a less traveled part of the parking lot at dusk when visibility was poor. Just like the others, she believed the female dummy in the front seat was his sick wife. When they approached the van, the stun gun took her down. But, to his amazement, this last woman needed a double dose. After that, she seemed to be unconscious when he dragged her into the van and took off.
Feldman opened the door, turned on the light, and strained to hear the slightest movement from below. He heard nothing. He descended the fourteen steps with wary apprehension. When he reached the bottom, his greatest fear was realized. The door to the soundproof room stood wide open. Looking inside, he found the young woman he’d abducted the previous evening gone. The fear that had caused him so many sleepless nights had finally come true . If the bitch had gone to the authorities, he would spend the rest of his years behind bars.
Feldman, a well-respected member of the community, was president of the local savings and loan and a deacon in his church. He lived on a five-acre estate a mile from the main road in the middle of nowhere. Once inside the garage, he carried each victim to the basement and tied them down on an operating table in his love room. After that, it was all fun and games until he got bored of sodomizing and torturing the same bimbo for too many weeks. Or, the bitch finally succumbed to the blood loss of too many mutilations. Even with all the practice, he’d never mastered the application of tourniquets.
When he turned on the light and entered the love room, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The leather straps that held the woman the previous night had been ripped to shreds, He saw the pieces strewn about the floor.
He knew it would have taken superhuman strength to sever the straps. No human being could have done it. He was even more astounded when he turned and saw the heavy steel door to the room hanging askew on one hinge. Looking more closely, he found a gaping hole in the doorframe where the deadbolt had been, indicating the door had been opened from the inside.
He stood with his mouth agape, trying to get his mind around the ferocity of the damage before him. Feldman could only arrive at one mindboggling conclusion. Whatever he had captured last night looked like the typical piece of ass he normally abducted, but it was far from that. It couldn’t be human. It had to be a robot or some superhuman, cyber-woman. He gripped the butcher knife tighter and listened to the silence.
Nothing.
No one had broken in as he had initially thought. The she-beast had trashed his house in a fit of rage when she regained consciousness. He hoped the outburst had satisfied the thing, and she would not seek additional payback. Thankfully, she didn’t appear to be here now. If she were still here, she would have pounced on him as soon as he walked in the door. He was certainly no match for her.
Suddenly he heard a sound upstairs. His hands began to shake, and his lower lip started twitching uncontrollably. He left the love room and ventured farther into the expanse of the remaining basement. He looked at the window he’d painted black at the top of the cinder block wall and knew he couldn’t crawl through it. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He could only wait for the thing to come for him if it had returned.
Then he heard a loud snap in the furnace room. The lights went out and plunged the basement into complete darkness. The thing had tripped the circuit breaker only ten feet away.
He started stabbing the butcher knife into the blackness as he backed toward the stairs.
“Boo!” said an emphatic female voice in the dark.
Feldman jumped backward and continued to stab the air wildly. He felt something touch his face and recoiled backwards away from it.
The side of his head thumped against a column that felt like a brick wall. The knife slipped from his hand, and he fell hard on the concrete floor with a nose-cracking thud and lost consciousness.
When he awoke, he found himself on his back with his arms and legs tied with what felt like leather straps to a table. He assumed he was in the love room, but in the pitch-blackness, he couldn’t tell.
A female voice whispered in his right ear, “You are a very unlucky person.”
Startled, Feldman recoiled away to the left and cried out, “Let me go! I’ll make it worth your while.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
He tried to remember the question and groaned, “Why am I so unlucky?”
“Of all the women you could have abducted, you chose me,”
“Who are you?”
“It’s not who I am. It’s what I am.”
Feldman said nothing and continued trying to free himself.
“Did you see what I did to the leather straps?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see what I did to the steel door?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know I’m not a normal woman.”
Feldman’s throat tightened with the words, “What are you?”
After a long pause, a fiendish, cackle emanated from the graveyard stillness of the black basement. Feldman squirmed in horror under the leather straps. A sharp fingernail dug into his cheekbone just below his right eye. He felt her hot breath on his neck.
“My name is Marlo,” she hissed. “You might say I’m like the bride of Frankenstein, but I’m a lot prettier and a lot stronger.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Doctors created me from body parts taken from cadavers in a laboratory at a military compound.”
“That’s bullshit,” he shrieked. “Turn on the lights. Let me see you. We need to work something out. I’m a rich man. I’ll pay you an obscene amount of money if you’ll untie me and go your own way.”
“I really can’t do that. I know what kind of monster you are. I found your scrapbook. You raped, tortured, and murdered fifty-one women over a period of almost ten years. I found the videos you shot of what you did to each one of them. I can tell from watching several of them you are particularly fond of chainsaws.”
Feldman kept silent still trying to free himself.
“Cat got your tongue? I also found a map of where you buried what was left of each of them in the septic field out back.”
Feldman squirmed, but couldn’t budge the straps binding him. The leather had already cut off his circulation.
“What do you want?”
‘I want you to suffer just like the women you tortured. While you were unconscious, I thought of something so diabolical, it would even make the Marquis de Sade blush.”
“Please, call the police. I’ll tell them everything. Turn on the lights. Let me see you,” he pleaded.
“You saw me when you zapped me with the stun gun.”
“What are you going to do?”
“It just so happens I have some of the white powder the doctors who created me used to animate my body parts. I combined it with a canister of Spanish Fly I found in your love room. I can’t wait to see the results.”
Feldman grimaced at the thought.
“Do you remember Belinda Wilson?”
Feldman said nothing and continued struggling.
“Do you remember her?” she screamed in his ear.
“No. I don’t remember.”
“She was a strawberry blonde with freckles. Thanks to you, she has no ears and no nose. According to your records, she went to the septic field on April 3 of this year. You must have a short memory. That would be seventy-one days ago. She should be a ripe candidate to be your first lover of the evening. I’m sure a−−”
“You fiendish bitch! You can’t be serious.”
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Yes, Howard. Can I call you Howard? About an hour ago, I sprinkled a mixture of the animation powder and Spanish Fly on the space where your journal says she’s buried. Shortly afterward while you were out, I injected you with a triple dose of Viagra I found in your medicine cabinet. There’s absolutely no doubt you will have an erection lasting more than four hours, and you’re going to need it since I’m sure a long line of ladies can’t wait to get their hands on you over the next month.”
Feldman heard a sound like someone dragging a foot across the tile floor upstairs, and then a low moan increased to a shriek. In the pitch-blackness, he heard something shuffling down the stairs, one agonizing step at a time.
“Listen to me. I‘m a rich man, I tell you,” Feldman kept repeating this like a broken record until Marlo found his mouth in the blackness, and grabbing his tongue, yanked it out by the roots.
Belinda reached the basement floor and oozed toward the open door to the love room. An unbearable stench quickly filled the space and grew more intense as the putrid, decomposed corpse from the septic field climbed the table and crawled on top of Feldman.
Then when he thought nothing could get any worse, Marlo turned on the lights.
