The v.a.g.i.n.a. Whatwas it, really? Depended on whom you asked, and their agenda. Site of pleasure? Pa.s.sageway for a newborn child? Means by which to dominate a man? Perhaps. All in the point of view. But always,always , a channel to the soul. Ironic that a simple cleave in the flesh could be rife with such complexity.

And the knife. Figure out.i.ts role as surrogate.

As she began to imagine how Bart would appreciate one last tattoo of his own, this time a huge v.a.g.i.n.a, from breastbone to beltline ... Artfully rendered in all three dimensions.

The Endless Masqueradeby Brian A. Hopkins Brian A. Hopkins has published more than fifty stories in such magazines as "Aboriginal Science Fiction," "Dragon," and "The Adventures of Sword and Sorcery." A collection of his short stories, "Something Haunts Us All," published in 1995 as a limited edition trade paperback, is now impossible to find. Recently, Brian's Bram Stoker nominated short novel, "Cold at Heart," was published as a trade paperback. Brian is also the Science Editor at "The Fifth Dimension."

WHEN AMY WAS eight, old Farmer Brandt sold his southern cornfielda"the one that would flood every four or five yearsa"to some big city carnival people.

Amy's mother said carnival people were trash and if Amy's father were alive he'd have talked Brandt out of selling them that field. Amy was told to stay away from the carnival, but like most of her mother's orders, this one was ignored. As long as Amy showed up for lunch, her mother was too busy cleaning at the bed and breakfast all day to notice where Amy spent most of her time.

The carnival people came in trailers and buses, erected tents and plywood booths, shaping a midway there in the soggy bottoms along the Illinois River. The tents were dark canvas, round and bulbous. When they went up that first summer, Amy thought they looked like ticks on the back of some vast, foul-smelling hog. Ticks on the back of the Earth. Earth as an odious pig rooting through the cosmosa"she liked that image. The shaven stalks of corn were its bristling, porcine hide. The mud and muck of the field were the effluvia in which the beast had rolled for so long that they had become the predominant components of its const.i.tution. When the tents shuddered in the wind, the canvas billowing in and out like the heaving sides of some ravenous beast, it was as if they were sucking the lifeblood from the Earth.

The image was perhaps a bit excessive, but Amy was obsessed with parasites that summer. She had just become the victim of one.

The rides came next: great metal octopi, skeletal wheels, abrasive music, and lightsa"more lights than in all of Tahlequah. Kiddy-car tracks were laid. Dunk tanks were filled. Gantries and gears were a.s.sembled to form apocalyptic leviathans from whose pinnacles could be seen the city people in their canoes and rafts on the river.

On a good weekend there were thousands of people on the river. Men with gymnasium muscles and blow-dryer hair.Women with French-cut bikinis and tans that could have only come from a booth or a bottle. The city regurgitated them every weekend, and they swarmed on the little river community like maggots in roadkill. By the thousands, the river brought them in. The carnival only made it worse.

One, or both, brought Kevin. He worked the river by day, hauling canoes and tourists up to the drop-off point, and by night he worked the carnival. Oh yeah, heworked the G.o.dd.a.m.n carnival.

She was attracted to him at first. No way for her not to be. She, an impressionable Okie who'd never been any further than the great metropolis of Muskogee. He, a suave college soph.o.m.ore whose military parents had taken him around the world and back, settling finally near the Air Force base in OKC. They were the proverbial moth and flame. And by the time Amy was burned, Kevin had already convinced her that everything he said was true.

"I'll slit your throat if you tell anyone, Amy." He showed her the skinning knife he'd use to do it.

She was eight. She was as terrified as she was humiliated and hurt, more so perhaps. And she believed him. So she never told. It was, after all, only a summer. Come fall semester he'd be gone and she could put it behind her. Now, almost thirty years later, she knows that problems are never resolved that easily. She knows that those who prey upon others never justgo away . But the child she was that summer had never met the likes of Kevin.

When Amy was nine, the Illinois swelled in the spring rain and the carnival was forced to delay its opening by two weeks because of water standing in Brandt's field. Three tourists drowned on the river that spring ... and Kevin came back. College had disagreed with him. What had been a summer job was to become permanent.

That summer the carnival opened a makeup booth. For a dollar they'd paint your face. You could be a cat or a dog or a mouse, a mime or a superhero, even a hideous monster if that's the sort of thing you were into. Amy discovered that if she had her face painted, she could step outside herself while Kevin panted and shoved and tore at the tender parts of her body. With her face painted, it was someone else suffering the pain and indignation. She could watch: repulsed, but not really implicated in the events; disgusteda"sick to her stomach evena"but not filthy, not soiled with Kevin's s.e.m.e.n and sweat like that caricature of a little girl with her painted face pressed against the vinyl seat of his car.

She stole the money from him. It took very little secrecy to slip a buck from his jeans while he lay gasping afterward, wiping at his flaccid p.e.n.i.s with tissues from the box he kept in his car. She took his money and she used it to buy a mask so that pitiful girl who he used so savagely could hide her face. She took the risk because she felt sorry for the little girl; though perhaps it was not so great a risk after all. Kevin may have known where the money was going. Kevin seemed to enjoy the painted faces.

When Amy was ten, the makeup booth expanded, adding colorful carnival masks with sequins and feathers and beads. They were hand-made and exquisite, with died hair and painted smiles. For three bucks you could own one. There wasn't a masquerade or Mardi Gras to be found in the backwoods of Oklahoma, but Amy acc.u.mulated quite a collection of the bright disguises.

That August the Illinois flooded again and, as a river will sometimes do, it changed course. North of Brandt's field was a bend known as Slippery Shoals. For a hundred years, Slippery Shoals had kept the Illinois River from taking the easiest route south, the route through old Farmer Brandt's cornfield. That year the shoals collapsed, sinking under the weight of raging river, washing downstream to join the billions of other pebbles that had once been part of some greater whole.

There was very little warning. The carnival people had time to strike their tents and load their trailers. Within an hour, the field was under three foot of water. The Ranger's Station said the river would rise another six feet before it crested late that evening. The Ferris wheel, the roller coaster, the Tilt-a-Whirl and others were a total loss. Abandoned and deserted, they sat in the pouring rain like the half-submerged skeletons of some mythical sea-serpents.

Amy arrived that afternoon. She was a strong swimmer; she had, after all, lived on the river all her life. Though the swift current and pelting rain may have turned back someone from the city, Amy wasn't scared. She knew the field was clear of stumps and submerged branches that could pull her under. She knew to enter the water upriver so the current would do most of the work. When she reached the Ferris wheel, she scaled the slippery metal frame like a monkey. Just moments after she'd first plunged into the water, she sat in the wheel's topmost seat where she could see everything. This was the top of her world and, for that moment, she was its ruler.

Despite the rain and the treacherous current, there were actually a few canoes on the river. She guessed that they were locals looking for lost tourists or canoes that had been swept from the river's bank. The original course of the river was still opena"probably would be until the water level dropped and the river settled into its new path. The canoeists stuck to the original route, bypa.s.sing the flooded carnival grounds. Except for one.

When she saw Kevin coming, she realized too late that she didn't have a mask for the poor girl he was so fond of abusing. While Kevin tied off his canoe below, she slid down the spokes and collected black soot and grease from the hub of the wheel. By the time Kevin caught up with her, she had scrambled back to her seat. She huddled there, awaiting the inevitable, hidden behind her black war paint.

When it was over, they lay naked in the warm rain in an oddly tender moment, his arms around her, stroking her hair and back. "I think," he said after several long minutes, "that I have fallen in love with you, Amy." He tilted her head so that she was looking up at him. "Can you believe that? You're a kid, not even in high school yet, and I think I'm in love with you."

She realized at that moment that he was about to steal the very last thing she owned. He was about to take away her hatred of him. Lying there in the downpour, she could only pity him, this poor sick pedophile who'd not only failed at college, but at life. She was only ten, but she saw clearly her future from that point on. She saw how her pity would in time become compa.s.sion. How compa.s.sion would in turn lead to affection, how the rest of her life would be spent in service to him. Worse, she saw how the rest of her life might be spentwanting to serve him. She saw the masks eventually coming off. And she saw her face beneath the masks.

What she didn't see was the need which had already formed within her. The need to be possessed. The need to wear the masks. When she slammed the lap bar down over Kevin's head, both stunning and pinning him in one fell swoop, she didn't know she'd miss his touch, his ownership.When she slipped home the bar's locking pin and jumped, she didn't know he had already shaped her life as surely as if she'd let him live.

Because the Ferris wheel was one of the many rides she'd watched Kevin operate over the years, she knew about the hand crank used to turn the wheel when power was lost. It was hard to turn, especially with Kevin screaming like that the whole time, but she kept telling herself that it wasn't her murdering him, it was the girl in the mask. As Kevin's hands strained in vain to reach the bar's locking pin, she kept remembering the thing's he had done to that poor little girl in the mask. And she thought of the things he would do yet if she let him live.

Kevin's screams stopped when the seat that had been at the top became the seat at the bottom. He thrashed about for a few minutes because the water wasn't quite deep enough to cover more than his head. But, in time, he was still.

She unhooked the bar and let him float free. She capsized his canoe. He was a city boy, they'd say. He shouldn't have been out on the water in that kind of weather.

Amy still has her masks, quite a collection of them actually. They fill the walls of one whole room in the house she inherited when her mother died. She's found that most of the men she picks up don't really mind her wearing them. It adds a sense of mystery to the evening, an extra element of spice to the s.e.x.

They're not so sure about the old cornfield and the rusted carnival rides though.

And she's had to cut back. The Illinois has been tossing up some of the bodies lately.

Generation Whyby Nancy Kilpatrick Nancy Kilpatrick is more recently known for her work writing as Amarantha Knight. Skillfully, she blends together the two strongest elements in humankind to instill a sense of sheer terror coupled with erotic thrill. She helps us to understand the joining of these elements in her article, "Archetypes and Fearful Allure" in "Writing Horror" edited by Mort Castle. Her published books include "Child of the Night," and "The Darker Pa.s.sions," a series of books as Amarantha Knight among others. Her work also frequents in several magazines.

"I'MNOT *MENACING'!"

"Rand, I'm sure he didn't mean to upset you. I think he just meant that, well, under the circ.u.mstancesa"" The Psychiatrist turns her palms up, and scans the prison's interview room. "Your statement about being a sensitive maleis odd." The Psychiatrist crosses her short legs and leans forward, resting both forearms on her thigh, clasping her hands together as if she is pleading.

Rand likes the shape of her thigh, the way the pastel silk skirt clings to the taut skin and just lies there, pa.s.sive, resting, waiting for fingers to reach out and separate fabric from flesh.

"Can you elaborate?" The Psychiatrist asks. "How do you see yourself as a sensitive young man?"

"There's lots of guys like me. Regular guys. Sensitive. Decent," Rand says.

"Yeah. A regular, sensitive, decent serial killer!" The Reporter's remarks are aggressive. Hostile. Violent.

Rand focuses on The Reporter. "A lot of guys are serial killers. More and more every day. You see it on TV. In the news. Guys like you write about guys like me. Guys who are trying to help."

"Help? Right!" The Reporter stabs symbols into his notebook, barely glancing down. The carved lines of his face deepen under the glare of brilliant TV lights.

"You created me."

The Reporter looks disgusted. His skin is tight, but with no appealing insulation beneath his cheeks. Just bone, nothing but bone. Hard, not subtle. Holding up a face with limited flexibility. He starts to say, "Look, you little sha""

"Rand, I think what you're trying to get at," The Psychiatrist interrupts, "is that the media portrays violence and that in turn encourages violence in young people like yourself, with a predisposition."

"f.u.c.k!" The Reporter mutters under his breath, low enough that the microphone will not pick it up. Rand watches him glance at The Guard by the door, whose eyes are non-committal, but whose moutha"the one that spits saliva when he talks, that opens and closes like the jaws of a vice, that utters sound bytes that Rand breaks into chunks and swallows wholea"whose mouth twitches at the left corner. Nice touch, Rand thinks. But too far in the background to be effective.

"Well, Rand?" The Psychiatrist says. "Do you see yourself as a victim of media violence?"

"Oh, come on!" The Reporter says. "Tell us why you mutilated all thosea""

"Let him answer the question," The Psychiatrist interrupts again.

The Reporter crashes back against the chair. Rand knows The Reporter would love to jump to his feet and punch The Prisoner in the face. The Reporter is violent by nature, that's clear. His turn to ask the questions is coming. They are supposed to take turns. Politely. That's the way it's supposed to go.

"I love television," Rand says. His voice is not as sincere as he wants it to sound, so he concentrates on lowering his eyes, dropping his head down a fraction. He looks up through his long lashes at The Psychiatrist. The dark eyelid hairs cut her body into strips. "And newspapers. It's important to know what's going on in the world around you."

Her face softens. She reminds him of The Teacher, and The Minister's Wife. The Others in the room wouldn't notice that her face has changed, but Rand does. She understands. "Tell us about your childhood," The Psychiatrist says gently.

This script is familiar. He has repeated these lines many times and knows them by heart. He wants to sigh, but that would not be the right thing to do. In a moment of inspiration, he tilts his head and looks away. If only his hands were free, but the chain keeps them six inches apart, which means he cannot rely on his hands to speak for him, and they speak eloquently.

"I had a very normal life," he says matter-of-factly, repeating by rote what he has said so often. Why won't they believe him? "My parents were divorced, but that wasn't a problem. Mom was great. She took real good care of me."

"How so?" asks The Psychiatrist.

"From when I was a baby. She had a monitor in the nursery and everything. So nothing bad would happen."

He remembers the monitor, even when he got old enough to go to school. His mother hovered just in the next room, always listening, waiting, as if for a sign.

"And there were home movies, then videos," he adds. Many. Endless tapes. She recorded them from before he could walk: Rand strapped into his cradle, the television set ona"he still remembers his favorite show, the cartoon with the blood-red lion that chomped off the heads of its enemies; moving images of Rand eating meatloaf with his hands in front of the TV in a highchair; wandering the mall in his toddler harness, so he wouldn't get lost, or be stolen or be violated by some sick man. "She liked to shoot me. She said I was a natural on tape."

The Psychiatrist smiles.

The Reporter scribbles more notes.

The Guard shifts his weight to his other leg.

This room is small, like the set at a television station Rand saw once on a school tour. They had been broadcasting the news. The set, the size of a bathroom, consisted mainly of a plywood desk, the front veneered so it looked like real wood on tape. Two cameras. A control room with a bank of monitors before The Reporters. The Cla.s.s visited the control room. The Technicians sat at the panels of switches and b.u.t.tons and levers,wearing headsets, sending and receiving instructions as directed, zeroing in on The Female Reporter, then The Male Reporter. Back and forth, back and forth. Then The Weatherperson. The Technical Director controlled how everyone looked, what they said and how they said it. It was just like a movie.

"I'm sorry," he says when he realizes The Psychiatrist has asked a question.

"I asked if you would try to explain your motivation.Why you did what you did, to all those people ... You must have felt very angrya""

"I never feel angry."

The Reporter leans forward.

The Psychiatrist sits back.

"Who's the first person you killed?" The Reporter demands.

"I never killed a person."

"Your DNA matches the DNA found at the scene of six murders. Six mutilations. And the jury found you guilty ofa""

"They were wrong. I'm innocent. DNA can be wrong, you know. I saw a show on60 Minutes a""

"Yeah, kid, I know the stats. If you're not an identical twin, it's one in a milliona""

"Two million. One in two million, depending on the tests used. But two million and one could be a matcha""

"How did it feel to just tear offa""

"Please!" The Psychiatrist grips The Reporter's arm, tempering him. Reluctantly, he moves back in his chair. His face tightens. The Psychiatrist moves forward. This is her territory.

"Rand, I read the reports and evaluations. What you told the court. What you told the other doctors.You said you never felt the slightest bit of anger toward anyone."

"That's right," Rand agrees." I don't believe in getting angry. That's how Mom raised me."

"But you must have been angry at your mother now and again. And your fathera""

"Nope." He knows he's answered too quickly. It sounds like he is trying to hide something, but he isn't. Not at all. There's nothing to hide. "My father wasn't around, so why would I get angry at him?"

"He was around until you were ten."

"I didn't notice. He was always at work."

"Rand, there's a history of domestic violence, your father a.s.saulting your mother, anda""

"Yeah, well, she divorced him. Besides, she protected me. I didn't know about it until later. I was busy."

"You played a lot of video games," The Reporter says, struggling to get with the program at last.

"Sure. Some D and D stuff, then Nintendo when I got older. Doesn't everybody?"

"Yeah, but everybody doesn'ta""

"I mean, doesn't everybody like video games? All the kids at my school did."

"Rand..." The Psychiatrist searches for another avenue, as though if she keeps probing he'll split apart, spill what's inside him. Bleed for the camera. But there is nothing to say that he hasn't said before. "Some of those games get pretty violent, don't they?"

"I guess."

"After you played them, you went out and played them in real life, didn't you?" The Reporter interjects, blurring the picture again.

"No."

"Sure you did!"

"Why should I? I had the games."

"And the urgesa""

"Nope."

Rand looks up, presenting the face of The Innocent to The Videographer, a slim-bodied young woman with the head of a camera. How many hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people will watch this drama unfold? he wonders. Most, he is certain, will understand. Most are against violence.

The Lawyer sits beside him, prepared to nip any compromising questions or answers in the bud. So far she has said nothing. Now she does. "My client's answers to these questions are a matter of record. It's all in the trial transcripts."

"What's the basis of your final appeal?" The Reporter asks.

The Videographer shifts the camera to the left, to capture The Reporter's profile.

"Evidence that should never have been admissible," The Lawyer says.

"The video tapes?"