**An abuser torments his past victim over the phone by reminding her of her past suffering and humiliation

The Devil's Star (2003) by Jo Nesbø. A policewoman struggles to keep up appearances at work despite having been put through an ordeal of rape, sexual abuse and humiliation in the hands of a higher ranking officer. And despite still having to work with her abuser.

CHAPTER 20

Beate Lønn enjoyed her work. She like the routines, the security, the knowledge that she was competent, and she knew that the others at the Forensics Institute at Kjolberggata 21A knew that too. Since work was the only thing in her life she considered important, it was reason enough to get up in the morning. Everything else was a musical interlude. She lived in her mothers house in Oppsal and had the whole of the top floor to herself. They got on extremely well. She had always been Daddys girl when he was alive; she assumed that was why she joined the police force, like him. She had no hobbies. Even though she and Halvorsen, the officer Harry shared his office with, had become a sort of couple, she was not convinced about it. She had read in a womens magazine that this kind of doubt was natural and that you should take risks. Beate didnt like taking risks. Or being in doubt. That was why she enjoyed her work.

As she was growing up she blushed at the thought that anyone could be thinking about her and she spent most of her time devising different ways to hide. She still blushed, but she had found good places to hide. She could sit for hours inside the worn redbrick walls of Forensics studying fingerprints, ballistics reports, video recordings, comparisons of voices, the analyses of DNA or textile fibres, footprints, blood and an endless number of technical leads which might resolve important, complicated, controversial cases in total peace and quiet. She had also discovered that working was not nearly as dangerous as it seemed. So long as she spoke loudly and clearly and managed to repress her panic about blushing, losing face, her clothes, standing there exposed and full of shame, for what reason she didnt know. The office in Kjolberggata was her castle; the uniform and her professional duties her mental armour.

The clock showed 12.30 a.m. when the telephone on her office desk rang, interrupting her reading of the laboratory report on Lisbeth Barlis finger. Her heart began to quicken with fear when she saw on the display that the caller was ringing from an unknown number. It could only mean that it was him.

"Beate Lønn."

It was him. His words came out in a flurry of blows.

"Why didnt you ring me about the fingerprints?"

She held her breath for a second before she replied.

"Harry said he would pass on the message."

"Thank you. I received it. Next time, you ring me first. Is that understood?"

Beate gulped. She didnt know whether out of fear or anger.

"Fine."

"Anything else you told him that you didnt tell me?"

"No. Except that Ive got the results from the lab on what was under the finger we were sent through the post."

"Lisbeth Barli's? And it was?"

"Excrement."

"What?"

"Poo."

"Thank you very much. I know what it is. Any idea where it came from?"

"Er, yes."

"Correction. Who it came from."

"I dont know for certain, but I can guess."

"Would you be so kind."

"The excrement contains blood, perhaps from a haemorrhoid. In this particular case, blood group B. Only seven per cent of the country has this blood group. Wilhelm Barli is a registered blood donor. He has --"

"Right. And what do you conclude from this?"

"I dont know," Beate said quickly.

"But you know that the anus is an erogenous zone, Beate? In men and women. Or had you forgotten?"

Beate squeezed her eyes shut. Please dont let him start again. Not again. It was a long time ago, she had begun to forget, to get it out of her system. But his voice was there, smooth and tough, like snakeskin.

"Youre good at playing the very ordinary girl, Beate. I like that. I liked it when you pretended you didnt want to."

You know something, I know something, no-one else knows anything, she thought.

"Does Halvorsen do it to you as well as I did?"

"Im putting the phone down now," Beate said.

His laughter crackled in her ears. She knew it then. There was nowhere to hide. They could find you anywhere, just as they had found the three women where they felt safest. There was no castle. And no armour.

**Sexual harrassment scene (no rape though)

From Open Season (2001) by C. J. Box. A game warden's daughter is threatened and harrassed because she's harbouring endangered animals which some people want dead. The excerpt is from an eBook.

PART FOUR, CHAPTER 18

She knew the area around their house so well that she was certain where she would find her pets: under the foundation of the garage.  There were some large cracks in the concrete where the structure met the ground, and the cracks led to a large dark space under the floor of the garage.  She had once probed the space with a long stick and had not been able to find the sides.  That, she was sure, was where she would find them.

When she emerged from the bushes, the first thing she saw was Lucky sticking his head out of the crack and then vanishing under the garage.

"Boy, am I glad to see you," she said, emptying her pockets into the hole. "That ought to keep you guys full for a while."  The relief she felt made her giddy.

"I'll be back as soon as I can be, you can count on that."  She felt as wildly good as she had horribly bad a moment before.  "You guys are pretty smart."  She smiled, pulling her pockets inside out to get every last sunflower seed. "This is a much safer place for you."

Rather than crawl through the bushes again back into the yard, Sheridan skipped down the length of the lilacs toward the end of the fence and the corner of corral.  She planned to turn and enter the yard through the same gate the monster had used. As she turned toward the corral, she saw the face of a man in the window of the pole barn, and it stopped her cold.

The man's face withdrew from the window into the shadows of the barn and then reemerged in the doorway, so that she could now see all of him.  He stood in the light but didn't step outside into the corral. He was motioning to her to come to him.  He was smiling.  She had been right about being watched.

Sheridan couldn't move.  She was terrified.  She didn't know whether to scream for her mom, run for the gate, or run back toward the garage. If she ran back to the garage, the man might follow her and maybe see the animals.

"Sheridan, right?"  The man asked softly.  He spoke just loud enough for her to hear him.

"I need to talk to you for a second.  Don't be afraid," the man said. "I know your dad."

He did look familiar, Sheridan thought.  She had seen him before with her dad. She didn't know his name, and if she had been told what it was, she had forgotten.  There were a lot of people who came to their house because it was Dad's office also.  There had been a lot of men at their house when the dead man was found.  She knew she shouldn't talk to strangers. But if he knew her dad and her name, was he really a stranger?  She weighed going to the man against screaming or running to the house.  If the man saw her feed the animals, he might tell her mom.  If she ran screaming, she might embarrass her dad.

The man kept smiling and motioning for her to come. She walked toward him on stiff, heavy legs.  Her eyes were huge.  She walked past the gate and ducked through the poles of the corral. Still, the man stayed in the pole barn.  Sheridan suddenly realized that he was standing there so he couldn't be seen by anyone in the house, and she knew she had made the wrong decision.  She turned to run, but he was on her in an instant, and he jerked her back roughly into a dark stall with him.

He swung, her around and pressed her against the hay bales, and her scream was smothered by his hand.  His face was so close to hers that his hat brim jammed against her forehead and his breath fogged her glasses.

"I'm sorry I had to do this, darling," he whispered when she had stopped struggling.  "I really am.  I wished you hadn't come around the yard that way.  I didn't expect you and you saw me."

He kept his hand, massive and rough, crushed against her mouth.  Her breath came in quick little puffs from her nose, and he didn't intend to let her answer.

"Before I take my hand down, there is something you have to understand, Sheridan.  Are you listening?"

She tried to nod her head yes.  She was trembling, and she couldn't make herself stop.  She was suddenly afraid she would wet her panties.

"Are you listening?"  he asked again.  This time his voice was very gentle. "Are you listening?"

She said with her eyes that she was.

"You've got some secrets, don't you little girl?  You've got some little friends in the woodpile, don't you?  I've been watching you.  I saw you feeding them."

The big hand did not move from her mouth. "Do your mom and dad know about them?"

She tried to shake her head no.  Even though he pressed her to the hay, he could tell what she was trying to say because he smiled a little. "You're not lying to me, are you, Sheridan?"

As forcefully as she could, she tried to say no.  He pressed his face even closer to her.  His eyes were all she could see of his face.

"Okay, then.  That's good.  We both have a secret, don't we?  And we're going to keep it our secret, just between us.  Just between us friends. You just keep this to yourself and don't you ever say a word about this to anyone.  Look at me."

Sheridan had averted her eyes toward the door, hoping her dad would be there.

"Look at me," he hissed. She did.

"If you say one thing about this to anyone, I'll rip those pretty green eyes of yours right out of their sockets.  And I won't stop there."

With his free hand, Sheridan felt him reach back.  She heard a snap and a huge black gun filled her vision. "I'll use this on your dad.  I'll shoot him right in the face.  I'll do the same thing to your pretty mom and your itty-bitty sister.  I'll even kill that stupid dog.  I'll blow her head right off.  Keep looking at me," he said.

She had stopped shaking; she was beyond it.  She was absolutely calm, and absolutely terrified.

"I'm going to take my hand down now and let you go as soon as you can smile," he said. "Then you take that smile right into the house and never, ever tell anyone what happened here.  Your little animals in the woodpile are going to heaven, do you understand?  Your family won't have to go to heaven or anywhere else if you keep your little mouth shut."

He eased his hand down.  Her face felt cold as the air hit it.  Her lips had been crushed against her teeth, and she tasted a drop of salty blood from inside her mouth.

"Are you listening, Sheridan?"

"Yes."  Her voice was thin, and it nearly cracked.

"Then smile."

She tried.  She didn't feel like smiling.

"That's not a smile," he chided, his voice gentle again. "You can do better than that, darling."

She tried.

"Closer," he persisted. "Keep working on it."

Her mouth smiled.

"We can live with that," he said, stepping back.  His crushing weight was now off of her.  She stood up.  She winced as he reached over her shoulder, but he was just brushing the hay off of her dress.

"Don't be scared of me," he admonished.  He sounded like a normal person now.  She was as confused as she was frightened. "Nothing bad will ever happen because we've got a deal.  I won't break it if you don't.  Shoot," he said, "we might even turn out to be friends someday.  That'd be nice, wouldn't it?"

"Yes," she said.  But she was lying.

"You might even get a little older, and I'll take you to a movie.  Buy you a Coke and some popcorn."  He smoothed her dress across her bottom, pressing his hand more firmly than he needed to. "You might even like it."

They both looked up when they heard her mom call her name.

"You had better go now, darling," he said.

S** An insane killer drugs his bound and gagged victim and rapes her in a forest

Kiss the Girls (1995) by James Patterson is an especially sick detective novel about two competing serial kidnapper-rapist-killers. Lots of twisted scenes about them with their victims but here I stick to the rape scenes of which there are three. This one’s the first. The excerpt is from an eBook.

CHAPTER 3

Click! Casanova popped the trunk latch of his car and peered into the wide, shiny-wet eyes staring out at him. What a pity. What a waste, he thought as he looked down at her.

"Peekaboo," he said. "I see you." He had fallen out of love with the twenty-two-year-old college student tied up in the trunk. He was also angry at her. She had disobeyed the rules.

She'd ruined the fantasy du jour.

"You look like absolute hell," he said. "Relatively speaking, of course." The young woman was gagged with wet cloths and couldn't answer back, but she glared at him.

Her dark-brown eyes showed fear and pain, but he could still see the stubbornness and spunk there.

He took out his black carrying bag first, then he roughly lifted her one hundred twelve pounds out of the car. He made no effort to be gentle at this point.

"You're welcome," he said as he put her down. "Forgotten our manners, have we?" Her legs were shaky and she almost fell, but Casanova held her up easily with one hand.

She had on dark green Wake Forest University running shorts, a white tank top, and brand-new Nike cross-training shoes. She was a typical spoiled college brat, he knew, but achingly beautiful. Her slender ankles were bound with a leather thong that stretched about two and a half feet. Her hands were tied behind her back, also with a leather thong.

"You can just walk ahead of me. Go straight unless I tell you otherwise. Now walk," he ordered. "Move those long, lovely gams. Hut, hut, hut." They started through the dense woods that got even thicker as they moved slowly along. Thicker and darker. Creepier and creepier. He swung his black bag as if he were a child carrying a lunch box. He loved the dark woods. Always had.

Casanova was tall and athletic, well built, and good-looking. He knew that he could have many women, but not the way he wanted them. Not like this.

"I asked you to listen, didn't I? You wouldn't listen." He spoke in a soft, detached voice. "I told you the house rules. But you wanted to be a wiseass. So be a wiseass. Reap the rewards."

As the young woman struggled ahead she became increasingly afraid, close to panic. The woods were even denser now, and the low-hanging branches clawed at her bare arms, leaving long scratches. She knew her captor's name: Casanova. He fancied himself a great lover, and in fact he could maintain an erection longer than any man she had ever known.

He had always seemed rational and in control of himself, but she knew he had to be crazy. He certainly could act sane on occasion, though.

Once you accepted a single premise of his, something he had said to her several times: "Man was born to hunt ... women."

He had given her the rules of his house. He had clearly warned her to behave. She just hadn't listened. She'd been willful and stupid and had made a huge, tactical mistake.

She tried not to think of what he was going to do to her out here in these bewildering Twilight Zone type woods. It would surely give her a heart attack. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing her break down and cry.

If only he would un gag her. Her mouth was dry, and she was thirsty beyond belief. Perhaps she could actually talk her way out of this of whatever it was that he had planned.

She stopped walking and turned to face him. It was draw-a-line-in-the-sand time.

"You want to stop here? That's fine with me. I'm not going to let you talk, though. No last words, dear heart. No reprieve from the governor. You blew it big time. If we stop here, you may not like it.

If you want to walk some more, that's fine, too. I just love these woods, don't you?"

She had to talk to him, get through to him somehow. Ask him why. Maybe appeal to his intelligence. She tried to say his name, but only muffled sounds made it through the damp gag.

He was self-assured and even calmer than usual. He walked with a cocky swagger. "I don't understand a word you're saying. Anyway, it wouldn't change a thing even if I did." He had on one of the weird masks that he always wore. This one was actually called a death mask, he'd told her, and it was used to reconstruct faces, usually at hospitals and morgues.

The skin color of the death mask was almost perfect and the detail was frighteningly realistic. The face he'd chosen was young and handsome, an all-American type. She wondered what he really looked like. Who in hell was he? Why did he wear masks?

She would escape somehow, she told herself. Then she would get him locked up for a thousand years. No death penalty let him suffer.

"If that's your choice, fine," he said, and he suddenly kicked her feet out from under her.

She fell down hard on her back. "You die right here." He slid a needle out of the well-worn black medical bag he'd brought with him. He brandished it like a tiny sword. Let her see it.

"This needle is called a Tubex," he said. "It's preloaded with thiopental sodium, which is a barbiturate. Does barbiturate-sounding things." He squeezed out a thin squirt of the brown liquid. It looked like iced tea, and it was not something she wanted injected into her veins.

"What does it do? What are you doing to me?" she screamed into the tight gag. "Please take this gag out of my mouth."

She was covered with sweat, and her breathing was labored. Her whole body felt stiff, anesthetized and numb. Why was he giving her a barbiturate?

"If I do this wrong, you'll die right now," he told her. "So don't move." She shook her head affirmatively. She was trying so hard to let him know that she could be good; she could be so very good. Please don't Ml me, she silently pleaded. Don't do this.

He pricked a vein in the crook of her elbow, and she could feel the painful pinch there.

"I don't want to leave any unsightly bruises," he whispered. "It won't take long. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, you, are, so, beautiful, zero. All finished."

She was crying now. She couldn't help it. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. He was crazy. She squeezed her eyes shut, couldn't look at him anymore. Please, God, don't let me die like this, she prayed. Not all alone out here.

The drug acted quickly, almost immediately. She felt warm all over, warm and sleepy. She went limp.

He took off her tank top and began to fondle her breasts, like a juggler with several balls.

There was nothing she could do to stop him.

He arranged her legs as if she were his art, his human sculpture, stretching the leather thong as far as it would go. He felt down between her legs. The sudden thrust made her open her eyes, and she stared up at the horrible mask. His eyes stared back at her. They were blank and emotionless, yet strangely penetrating.

He entered her, and she felt a jolt like a very powerful electric shock running through her body. He was very hard, fully aroused already. He was probing inside her as she was dying from the barbiturate. He was watching her die. That's what this was all about.

Her body wriggled, bolted, shook. As weak as she was, she tried to scream. No, please, please, please. Don't do this to me.

Mercifully, blackness came over her.

She didn't know how long she'd been unconscious. Didn't care. She woke up and she was still alive.

She started to cry, and the muffled sounds coming through the gag were agonizing. Tears ran down her cheeks. She realized how much she wanted to live.

She noticed that she'd been moved. Her arms were behind her and tied around a tree. Her legs were crossed and bound, and she was still tightly gagged. He had taken off her clothes. She didn't see her clothes anywhere.

He was still there! "I don't really care if you scream," he said. "There's absolutely nobody to hear you out here." His eyes gleamed out of the lifelike mask. "I just don't want you to scare away the hungry birds and animals." He glanced briefly at her truly beautiful body. "Too bad you disobeyed me, broke the rules," he said.

He took off the mask and let her see his face for the first time. He fixed the image of her face in his mind. Then he bent down and kissed her on the lips.

Kiss the girls.

Finally, he walked away.

S** A neighbor rapes a girl in a secret hideaway underground

From first chapter of Lovely Bones (2002) by Alice Sebold.

    "I got to go, Mr. Harvey. This is a cool place, but I have to go."

    He stood up and did his hunchback number by the six dug- in steps that led to the world. "I don't know why you think you're leaving."

    I talked so that I would not have to take in this knowledge: Mr. Harvey was no character. He made me feel skeevy and icky now that he was blocking the door.

    "Mr. Harvey, I really have to get home."

    "Take off your clothes."

    "What?"

    "Take your clothes off," Mr. Harvey said. "I want to check that you're still a virgin."

    "I am, Mr. Harvey," I said.

    "I want to make sure. Your parents will thank me."

    "My parents?"

    "They only want good girls," he said.

    "Mr. Harvey," I said, "please let me leave."

    "You aren't leaving, Susie. You're mine now."

    Fitness was not a big thing back then; aerobics was barely a word. Girls were supposed to be soft, and only the girls we suspected were butch could climb the ropes at school.

    I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close, and I was soon lying down on the ground, in the ground, with him on top of me panting and sweating, having lost his glasses in the struggle.

    I was so alive then. I thought it was the worst thing in the world to be lying flat on my back with a sweating man on top of me. To be trapped inside the earth and have no one know where I was.

--

    Mr. Harvey started to press his lips against mine. They were blubbery and wet and I wanted to scream but I was too afraid and too exhausted from the fight. I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half-closed lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn't. He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under his picture he had answered the standard "My heart belongs to" with "Susie Salmon." I guess he had had plans. I remember that his lips were chapped.

    "Don't, Mr. Harvey," I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot. Don't. And I said please a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone begged "please" before dying.

    "I want you, Susie," he said.

    "Please," I said. "Don't," I said. Sometimes I combined them. "Please don't" or "Don't please." It was like insisting that a key works when it doesn't or yelling "I've got it, I've got it, I've got it" as a softball goes sailing over you into the stands.

    "Please don't."

    But he grew tired of hearing me plead. He reached into the pocket of my parka and balled up the hat my mother had made me, smashing it into my mouth. The only sound I made after that was the weak tinkling of bells.

    As he kissed his wet lips down my face and neck and then began to shove his hands up under my shirt, I wept. I began to leave my body; I began to inhabit the air and the silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel. He ripped open my pants, not having found the invisible zipper my mother had artfully sewn into their side.

    "Big white panties," he said.

    I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat. I felt the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out, like in cat's cradle, which I played with Lindsey just to make her happy. He started working himself over me.

    "Susie! Susie!" I heard my mother calling. "Dinner is ready."

    He was inside me. He was grunting.

    "We're having string beans and lamb."

    I was the mortar, he was the pestle.

    "Your brother has a new finger painting, and I made apple crumb cake."

    Mr. Harvey made me lie still underneath him and listen to the beating of his heart and the beating of mine. How mine skipped like a rabbit, and how his thudded, a hammer against cloth. We lay there with our bodies touching, and, as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth surrounding us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where worms and animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.

    I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an animal already dying.

    "Why don't you get up?" Mr. Harvey said as he rolled to the side and then crouched over me.

    His voice was gentle, encouraging, a lover's voice on a late morning. A suggestion, not a command.

    I couldn't move. I couldn't get up.

    When I wouldn't —was it only that, only that I wouldn't follow his suggestion? —he leaned over to the side and felt, over his head, across the ledge where his razor and shaving cream sat. He brought back a knife. Unsheathed, it smiled at me, curving up in a grin.

    He took the hat from my mouth. "Tell me you love me," he said.

    Gently, I did. The end came anyway.

** The happenings of a violent novel she’s translating start leaking into a woman’s life

Transgressions (1997) by Sarah Dunant. The excerpts are mostly taken from Amazon book preview but I had to supplement with chapters of my own translation as the preview doesn’t contain every single page of the book and I had access only to the Finnish book. The parts between # marks are those I’ve translated and will thus probably differ from the original English text.

CHAPTER 3. A drug mule abused during delivery.

    She slid both hands slowly up her legs and under her skirt, shimmying her ass down to help her reach the top of her panties. She teased them loose, letting them slip down onto the floor and stepping carefully out of them. She pushed a lock of hair back from her face and lifted her right foot onto the chair, the skirt pulling up high over her thighs to reveal a line of naked leg right up to the curve of her buttocks. Then, slowly, she slid the fingers of her hand up into her crotch.

    She moved her way inside for a moment, probing, playing, all the time keeping her eyes fixed on the man who was sitting opposite. Her face showed no signs of pleasure, no emotion at all, just a cool expressionless stare.

    He kept on looking. He was thin and sallow-skinned, a man who hadn’t seen the sun for so long he had started to feed on darkness. His eyes flicked between her face and her fingers, lips parted in a half-smile, his breath an echo of sound.

    After she had played for a little longer she slowly removed her fingers. Between them she held up a thick plastic tube, six or eight centimeters long, glistening, its covering slightly wet. She tossed it across the room. The man caught it neatly, lifting it briefly to his nose before peeling off the wrapping. Released from its covering, a heavy little bag unfolded, packed with white stuff. He held it up, weighing it casually in his palm.

    “Ninety percent pure,” she said softly, as if amused at the ritual, both his and hers. “A thank-you from Jerome. He says to remember who it came from.”

    “Tell him I already have,” he said quietly. “I’ll also remember from where.”

    She nodded, then sat back down and reached for her panties: the gesture this time more ordinary, more self-absorbed–a woman getting dressed after the show, regardless of who was watching her.

    “Uh-uh.”

    She glanced up at him, as if surprised to still find him there.

    “Why don’t you open your legs again,” he said quietly.

    She gave a shrug, her hand already under the chair, the white lace curled up in her fingers. “Sorry. I’m not part of the free gift,” she said coolly.

    “I said open your legs.” This time the voice was harsh. “Or I’ll open them for you.”

    She sighed slightly, as if threats bored her, but she did as she was told, moving her knees just far enough apart to show the pubic bush under her skirt.

    He sat staring directly at her snatch. She let him stare. She almost seemed to like it. Slowly she shifted her buttocks forward on the chair, spreading her legs farther apart, so the view was better and more insolent. He laughed, tossing the bag down onto the table and walking lazily over to her. With one hand he lifted her chin up and held it cupped in his palm, a little too high for comfort. Then he slipped his other hand up into her. “Just checking that everything that’s mine is out of there,” he said slyly, his fingers working overtime.

    She sat absolutely still, apparently oblivious to his touch.

    “Satisfied?” she said after a while, and this time the voice dripped with scorn.

    He slammed a finger farther in and up, savagely deep, and this time she cried out. “Bastard,” she said between clenched teeth.

    “And what other kind of men do you know?” he said as he used his other hand to unzip his fly. “Let’s get on with it, eh?”

    “Yeah, well, you’d better get your finger out if you want to fit anything else in. Unless, of course, it’s even smaller than I think.”

    “Bitch, he said, as he hit her hard across the face. “That’s not where I’m going to put it.” And he hit her again.

    Her eyes glazed over, the look of a woman on automatic pilot. “Shit,” she said under her breath as the skin around her right eye began to swell.

    “You got it, sweetheart.”

CHAPTER 13. X complies with her rapist during a night time home invasion to save her life. The man has seen her translations of sex scenes and imagines she’s gagging for it.

    “Why don’t you put down the hammer?” she said at last, and to her amazement her voice sounded almost loving. “You don’t need it, you know, I can’t go anywhere and I swear to you I won’t try to escape.”

    She felt rather than saw his fingers twitch, then tighten further around it. She counted to ten in her head, then slowly, so slowly that he could see her every move, she lifted her finger to his face. He let out a kind of growl, and his right hand whipped up and grabbed her wrist, forcing it down onto the bedspread, twisting the skin savagely as he did so. She registered the pain, but also the fact that the hammer had been left behind.

    “Bitch,” he hissed under his breath. “Bitch.”

    “You’re hurting me, she said between clenched teeth as the burn worsened. “You’re hurting me. Let me go.”

    He was breathing hard now, too hard to speak.

    “Please,” she said, and they both heard the way the words came out, as much a quiet command as a plea. His response was to squeeze even tighter, his hand shaking with the force of the grip. She let out a small yelp of pain, though she didn’t take her eyes away from his face. The burn made her want to cry, then, just at the point where she couldn’t hold out any longer, she felt the pressure reduce, until gradually his fist relaxed and her hand was almost free. It took all her courage not to snatch it back, but instead to let it lie limply in his, both of them registering the touch without violence.

    This time, as she moved her hand to his face, the air between them was alive with anticipation. And this time he let her touch connect. Her fingers fluttered over his cheekbone. She held them there till they were steady, then slowly traced the line of his cheek down to his mouth, and, after a beat of hesitation, played across his lips. His mouth fell open slightly. She took a breath, then with her forefinger she pulled down his bottom lip, feeling the moistness, exposing the fleshy bit inside. He made a sound, halfway between a moan and a growl, and bit backward. At first she thought he would take her fingers with him, crush and break them between his teeth, but it was more by reflex than design, like someone recoiling from a flame.

    Relax, she thought. Relax. Maybe she said it out loud. It was meant for both of them.

    She waited, then began again, now pushing her fingers inside. She encountered the edge of his bottom teeth, uneven and jumbled, as if they had grown crooked and never been properly corrected, then moved further in to find the tongue. The flesh was alive with muscle, rough and quivering, almost like the feel of her own vagina. It sent a shudder through her and she had to steel herself not to pull out. No time for the fainthearted now.

    She lifted herself up from where she was sitting on the bed and moved toward him. Their joint breaths sounded huge in the night. As if neither of them could get enough air in their lungs. She felt his hand clutch at his side, searching instinctively for the hammer, his fingers closing over it.

    “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t need it. You don’t have to hurt me. That’s not how it has to be.”

    She waited, counting off her heartbeats. At ten she moved again.

    Where she had first used her fingers, now she used her tongue. His lips trembled, then parted to let her in. Slipping in through the portcullis of his teeth, she made herself think of all the lovers she had known who could turn a kiss into making love–teasing and catching at your lips, pulling them into theirs, making the kiss its own act of seduction, a kind of devouring that made you want to take off your clothes and guide their pricks into you. Making you ache for them, all from a kiss.

     Remember it now, she thought. Remember it now because your life depends on it. She pushed her tongue in. His mouth was limp. “Kiss me back, “ she whispered. “Use your tongue.”

    She could almost hear his heart beating. The tongue fluttered, then whipped out, like a lizard. She could feel the tension in him, like some uncontrollable seismic buildup, and she felt the hammer hand jerk across the coverlet. The kiss continued, his tongue darting, still lost but still trying. God help me, she thought. God help me here to know what to do.

    She brought her hands up to cup his face. “That’s better,” she murmured. “Again.”

    This time he did as he was told and the kiss connected. They both felt it. As it went deeper, she slid her hands over his neck, then slowly down his back. The wool of the sweater he was wearing was coarse and prickly and damp to the touch. Under his clothes he would be sweating. Who says it’s only the woman who feels the fear. She pulled up at the sweater to discover a shirt underneath and some kind of vest. Too many clothes. He was dressed as she had been, smothering the desire, hoping it might go away. As her hands finally reached his bare skin he let out another noisy breath. She stopped, waiting, reading the signs, then slowly continued the caress. Again he relaxed. She let her hands linger, then slid one of them down over the edge of his trousers onto the bed and toward his right hand. At her touch the fist clenched. She kept her hand cupped over it, waiting, then slowly the fist opened itself, the hammer slipping onto the bedspread. She slid it as far away as she could without risking the noise of its falling on the floor. She took his hand in hers, entwining their fingers, using her thumb to play with the inside of his palm. The skin was surprisingly soft, almost like a girl’s, soft and wet with sweat. She felt a sudden shaft of power.

    And as she did so she thought of the woman in the Prague apartment. And the girl in the attic. And she knew that there had to be another way, a female way, where redemption is as powerful as violence.

    This time when she moved away from his lips, he came toward her, his mouth messy, greedy. For a second the taste of him repelled her, the saliva and the smell making her want to puke. She pushed away the thought and sucked his lips back into hers.

    She had released the rest of the clothing from his trousers and was exploring his chest. The skin underneath was rough and dry, with wiry little curls around small nipples. Not cared for. Not loved. How does it happen to some people? she thought. How do they miss out? If you’ve never been touched, how do you know how to touch? If you’ve never felt, how do you know how to feel? So unfair. So dangerous. She brought his hand up and guided it slowly to her body, cupping it over her breast.

    The first contact made him shudder. Before he could pull away she moved her body into his hand, pushed the weight of her flesh against his palm and heard him groan, a dark, painful sound dragged out from a long way down. To her astonishment the noise delighted her, as if the control she was feeling really did contain its own sexuality, the pleasure of her control. Don’t show it, she thought. Whatever you do don’t let him know.

    She was about to help him further when his fingers found her nipples, hard from the cold and the fear and a sudden muddied, confused kind of desire. The first squeeze was too tight, it made her draw a breath too quickly. “Gently,” she said in a whisper. And this time he heard her and did as he was told. Slowly they toppled from sitting to lying on the bed. And as they did so she brought up her right leg and used the bottom of her foot to locate the hammer on the coverlet and push it gently toward the edge.

    It hit the floor with a thud.

    The sound, or maybe the sudden weight of him pinning her down onto the bed, brought back a flash of fear. They both felt it, both sensing the change and tensing themselves away from the other. She recovered first, reaching up to kiss him again, maneuvering herself half out from under him, at the same time moving her hand to the top of his trousers, fumbling to free the button. She used the ball of her palm to push down the zipper, then slid her hand inside, slipping under the frayed elastic of the underpants until she found his penis, limp and curled. You’re not ready, she thought with a sudden panic. Is that your problem? Or is this what you need the hammer for, to get a hard-on?

    Maybe he heard the thought. At her touch he pulled back violently, and for a moment she thought she had lost it, could feel him trashing around in search of some way back into control. In search of a weapon that would give it to him.

    “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “It’s all right.”

    She kept her hand over his softness, holding it there almost tenderly, as she pulled her T-shirt farther up her body and over her head, rubbing herself against him, letting him feel her nakedness underneath him. Instinctively his hands went out to touch her again, moving down from the breasts to her stomach, clumsy, urgent caresses, until his fingers slid into the tangle of pubic hair. And as he did so she heard herself moan.

    The sound had not been deliberate. In fact, if anything it was more a release of fear than anything to do with pleasure. But somehow it helped. Both of them.

    He hesitated and she knew he was frightened to go further. Knew that at that moment he was more frightened of her than she was of him.

    I am here, she said to herself, although the thought didn’t make sense. This is me doing this. Here. Now. It’s not someone else.

    “I’m here,” she said, this time out loud. “And I’m not pretending. Anything you want to do to me is okay.”

    And as she said it, his penis took a jerky leap in her hand, and he let out a sharp groan of pain and pleasure. At the same time his fingers slid into her, pushy and overeager, a sudden haste to everything, the onslaught of a frenetic kind of lust. To her amazement she realized she was wet. The discovery sent its own shock wave through the pit of her stomach. She ran her hand gently up and down his prick, her own breath coming quicker now, teasing him into further erection. Then, registering the sudden urgency of his need, she slid herself underneath him so she could guide him into her. It wasn’t that easy, as he was still only half erect, but as he moved inside the mouth of her he stiffened further, then slid in all the way, letting out another shattering groan. She heard her own voice join his. And so, almost without giving her time to move, she felt him rise up, and, with two or three thrusts, come inside her, a juddering, jerky orgasm that was too hurried and crude to bring any lasting pleasure.

    AIDS, she thought, in a sudden blind moment of panic. AIDS, and the clap, and a million other diseases that will rot me slowly for my sins. But even as she recited the litany, those thoughts were overwhelmed by another. The realization that he was crying.

    He had fallen heavily onto her body after the orgasm. Now he tried to pull himself off, the sobs clutched and angry, searching frantically around him, groping for something that she knew would be a weapon. But this time, rather than his violence, all she could feel was his pain.

    “It’s okay. You’re all right,” she said fiercely, pulling herself up with him and putting both her arms around him, hugging him hard to her and holding on to him, despite his attempts to wrench her off. “It’s all right,” she said again. “Really. You don’t have to do anything more. It’s done. You did it. It was fine.”

    And slowly, as she clung to him, reading the battle in his body between the rage and the release, she felt the fury diminish and the crying win out.

    So it was that she sat there in the winter night, her body shivering with the cold and the adrenaline, holding on to a man sobbing his heart out for the fact that the rape he had planned had turned into an act of lovemaking.

    Time passed. And eventually the sobbing subsided so that now when he started to pull away she knew to let him go. she stood up and took a robe from the door to cover herself, as she did so feeling the cold trickle of his semen running down the inside of her thigh. Cold, she thought. Why is it always cold when it has just erupted from such hot depths? She used the inside of the robe to wipe it away, and then, as she tied the belt around her, she felt about the floor with her feet until she came across the cold edge of the hammer and slid it farther under the bed.

** A young woman is sexually abused by her new legal guardian

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, chapters 11 to 14. Exerpts from an eBook. The original Swedish book Män som hatar kvinnor (literally: men who hate women) was published in 2005.

She sent evil thoughts to Herr Bjurman, but then she bit the bullet and called her guardian to explain that she needed money for an unexpected expense. Bjurman’s secretary said that he had no time to see her that day. Salander replied that it would take the man twenty seconds to write out a cheque for 10,000 kronor. She was told to be at his office at 7:30 that evening.

--

    Bjurman came round the desk to show her the statement of her bank account – which she knew down to the last öre, although it was no longer in her disposal. He stood behind her. Suddenly he was massaging the back of her neck, and he let one hand slide from her left shoulder across her breasts. He put his hand over her right breast and left it there. When she did not seem to object, he squeezed her breast. Salander did not move. She could feel his breath on her neck as she studied the letter opener on his desk; she could reach it with her free hand.

    But she did nothing. If there was one lesson Holger Palmgren had taught her over the years, it was that impulsive actions led to trouble, and trouble could have unpleasant consequences. She never did anything without first weighing the consequences.

    The initial sexual assault – which in legal terms would be defined as sexual molestation and the exploitation of an individual in a position of dependence, and could in theory get Bjurman up to two years in prison – lasted only a few seconds. But it was enough to irrevocably cross a boundary. For Salander it was a display of strength by an enemy force – an indication that aside from their carefully defined legal relationship, she was at the mercy of his discretion and defenceless. When their eyes met a few seconds later, his lips were slightly parted and she could read the lust on his face. Salander’s own face betrayed no emotions at all.

    Bjurman moved back to his side of the desk and sat on his comfortable leather chair.

    “I can’t hand out money to you whenever you like,” he said. “Why do you need such an expensive computer? There are plenty of cheaper models that you can use for playing computer games.”

    “I want to have control of my own money like before.”

    Bjurman gave her a pitying look.

    “We’ll have to see how things go. First you need to learn to be more sociable and get along with people.”

    Bjurman’s smile might have been more subdued if he could have read her thoughts behind the expressionless eyes.

    “I think you and I are going to be good friends,” he said. “We have to be able to trust each other.”

    When she did not reply he said: “You’re a grown woman now, Lisbeth.”

    She nodded.

    “Come here,” he said and held out his hand.

    Salander fixed her gaze on the letter opener for several seconds before she stood up and went over to him. Consequences. He took her hand and pressed it to his crotch. She could feel his genitals through the dark gabardine trousers.

    “If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.”

    He put his other hand around her neck and pulled her down to her knees with her face in front of his crotch.

    “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” he said as he lowered his zip. He smelled as if he had just washed himself with soap and water.

    Salander turned her face away and tried to get up, but he held her in a tight grip. In terms of physical strength, she was no match for him; she weighed 90 pounds to his 210. He held her head with both hands and turned her face so their eyes met.

    “If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you,” he repeated. “If you make trouble, I can put you away in an institution for the rest of your life. Would you like that?”

    She said nothing.

    “Would you like that?” he said again.

    She shook her head.

    He waited until she lowered her eyes, in what he regarded as submission. Then he pulled her closer. Salander opened her lips and took him in her mouth. He kept his grip on her neck and pulled her fiercely towards him. She felt like gagging the whole ten minutes he took to bump and grind; when finally he came, he was holding her so tight she could hardly breathe.

    He showed her the bathroom in his office. Salander was shaking all over as she wiped her face and tried to rub off the spots on her sweater. She chewed some of his toothpaste to get rid of the taste. When she went back to his office, he was sitting impassively behind his desk, studying some papers.

    “Sit down, Lisbeth,” he told her without looking up. She sat down. Finally he looked at her and smiled.

    “You’re grown-up now, aren’t you, Lisbeth?”

    She nodded.

    “Then you also need to be able to play grown-up games,” he said. He used a tone of voice as if he were speaking to a child. She did not reply. A small frown appeared on his brow.

    “I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to tell anyone about our games. Think about it – who would believe you? There are documents stating that you’re non compos mentis. It would be your word against mine. Whose word do you think would carry more weight?”

    He sighed when still she did not speak. He was annoyed at the way she just sat there in silence, looking at him – but he controlled himself.

    “We’re going to be good friends, you and I,” he said. “I think you were smart to come and see me today. You can always come to me.”

    “I need 10,000 kronor for my computer,” she said, precisely, as if she were continuing the conversation they were having before the interruption.

    Bjurman raised his eyebrows. Hard-nosed bitch. She really is fucking retarded. He handed her the cheque he had written when she was in the bathroom. This is better than a whore. She gets paid with her own money. He gave her an arrogant smile. Salander took the cheque and left.

--

    The plan began to go wrong almost from the start.

    Bjurman was wearing a bathrobe when he opened the door to his apartment. He was cross at her arriving late and motioned her brusquely inside. She was wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, and the obligatory leather jacket. She wore black boots and a small rucksack with a strap across her chest.

    “Haven’t you even learned to tell the time?” Bjurman said. Salander did not reply. She looked around. The apartment looked much as she had expected after studying the building plans in the archives of the City Zoning Office. The light-coloured furniture was birch and beech-wood.

    “Come on,” Bjurman said in a friendlier tone. He put his arm around her shoulders and led her down a hall into the apartment’s interior. No small talk. He opened the door to the bedroom. There was no doubt as to what services Salander was expected to perform.

    She took a quick look around. Bachelor furnishings. A double bed with a high bedstead of stainless steel. A low chest of drawers that also functioned as a bedside table. Bedside lamps with muted lighting. A wardrobe with a mirror along one side. A cane chair and a small desk in the corner next to the door. He took her by the hand and led her to the bed.

    “Tell me what you need money for this time. More computer accessories?”

    “Food,” she said.

    “Of course. How stupid of me. You missed our last meeting.” He placed his hand under her chin and lifted her face so their eyes met. “How are you?”

    She shrugged.

    “Have you thought about what I said last time?”

    “About what?”

    “Lisbeth, don’t act any more stupid than you are. I want us to be good friends and to help each other out.”

    She said nothing. Advokat Bjurman resisted an impulse to give her a slap – to put some life into her.

    “Did you like our grown-up game from last time?”

    “No.”

    He raised his eyebrows.

    “Lisbeth, don’t be foolish.”

    “I need money to buy food.”

    “But that’s what we talked about last time. If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. But if you’re just going to cause trouble…” His grip on her chin tightened and she twisted away.

    “I want my money. What do you want me to do?”

    “You know what I want.” He grabbed her shoulder and pulled her towards the bed.

    “Wait,” Salander said hastily. She gave him a resigned look and then nodded curtly. She took off her rucksack and leather jacket with the rivets and looked around. She put her jacket on the chair, set her rucksack on the round table, and took several hesitant steps to the bed. Then she stopped, as if she had cold feet. Bjurman came closer.

    “Wait,” she said once more, in a tone as if to say that she was trying to talk sense into him. “I don’t want to have to suck your dick every time I need money.”

    The expression on Bjurman’s face suddenly changed. He slapped her hard. Salander opened her eyes wide, but before she could react, he grabbed her by the shoulder and threw her on to the bed. The violence caught her by surprise. When she tried to turn over, he pressed her down on the bed and straddled her.

    Like the time before, she was no match for him in terms of physical strength. Her only chance of fighting back was if she could hurt him by scratching his eyes or using some sort of weapon. But her planned scenario had already gone to hell. Shit, she thought when he ripped off her T-shirt. She realised with terrifying clarity that she was out of her depth.

    She heard him open the dresser drawer next to the bed and caught the clanking sound of metal. At first she did not understand what was happening; then she saw the handcuffs close around her wrist. He pulled up her arm, placed the handcuffs around one of the bedposts, and locked her other hand. It did not take him long to pull off her boots and jeans. Then he took off her knickers and held them in his hand.

    “You have to learn to trust me, Lisbeth,” he said. “I’m going to teach you how this grown-up game is played. If you don’t treat me well, you have to be punished. When you’re nice to me, we’ll be friends.”

    He sat astride her again.

    “So you don’t like anal sex,” he said.

    Salander opened her mouth to scream. He grabbed her hair and stuffed the knickers in her mouth. She felt him putting something around her ankles, spread her legs apart and tie them so that she was lying there completely vulnerable. She heard him moving around the room but she could not see through the T-shirt around her face. It took him several minutes. She could hardly breathe. Then she felt an excruciating pain as he forced something up her anus.

--

    Salander was allowed to put on her clothes. It was 4:00 on Saturday morning. She picked up her leather jacket and rucksack and hobbled to the front door, where he was waiting for her, showered and neatly dressed. He gave her a cheque for 2,500 kronor.

    “I’ll drive you home,” he said, and opened the door.

    She crossed the threshold, out of the apartment, and turned to face him. Her body looked fragile and her face was swollen from crying, and he almost recoiled when he met her eyes. Never in his life had he seen such naked, smouldering hatred. Salander looked just as deranged as her casebook indicated.

    “No,” she said, so quietly that he barely heard the word. “I can get home on my own.”

    He put a hand on her shoulder.

    “Are you sure?”

    She nodded. His grip on her shoulder tightened.

    “Remember what we agreed. You’ll come back here next Saturday.”

    She nodded again. Cowed. He let her go.

--

    Salander spent the week in bed with pain in her abdomen, bleeding from her rectum, and less visible wounds that would take longer to heal. What she had gone through was very different from the first rape in his office; it was no longer a matter of coercion and degradation. This was systematic brutality.

    She realised much too late that she had utterly misjudged Bjurman.

    She had assumed he was on a power trip and liked to dominate, not that he was an all-out sadist. He had kept her in handcuffs half the night. Several times she believed he meant to kill her, and at one point he had pressed a pillow over her face until she thought she was going to pass out.

    She did not cry.

    Apart from the tears of pure physical pain she shed not a single tear. When she left the apartment she made her way with difficulty to the taxi stand at Odenplan. With difficulty she climbed the stairs to her own apartment. She showered and wiped the blood from her genitals. Then she drank a pint of water with two Rohypnol and stumbled to her bed and pulled the duvet over her head.

** When two young Swedes befriend a pair of border guards, the other girl ends up getting raped

17-year old Vivi and Elna are on an overnight bicycling trip in the summer of 1941. They meet two young border guards near the Norwegian border and the summer night they spend together ends badly for Elna. Later she gives birth to her rapist's daughter.

Daisy Sisters (1982) by Henning Mankell, pages 43-45 of 651. The original book is in Swedish and it has not been translated into English. The following text is my humble attempt of a translation to English from the Finnish translation of Daisy Sisters they had in our local library.

    Suddenly Vivi and Fingers have disappeared to the darkest corner of the barn, and when Elna feels an urgent need to go out into the night to get some fresh air, pale Nils accompanies her eagerly. But why on earth he drags the other sleeping bag with him? Handsome he’s not, but he seems to be suspect to peculiar whims. And why not? They can lie outside a moment in the beautiful summer night. Dew is refreshing and dim summer stars spin like shimmering wasps in the sky. Or are they bolts of lightning in her head, behind her eyelids? She really can’t tell.

    And when Nils tries stubbornly to crawl on top of her, she lets him, assuming it’s something she has to put up with, and she knows exactly at which point she’s going to tell him to stop. But the man isn’t satisfied with hands and head, face and neck. He claws and yanks tenaciously. When he gets his hands under her dress and starts squeezing her breast, Elna has had enough and rolls over on her stomach. It seems like he’s going to leave her alone; she hears him fuss next to her, but why should she care? The grass is moist and cool against her face, actually she should sleep already, she has a hunch she’s going to see a lot of dreams. But then the man is on top of her again. Before she has time to react he has pulled her dress up on her back and yanked her panties down to her knees. She’s furious. She doesn’t want this, but arousal has given him strength and Elna has to flail and struggle a long time before she manages to turn on her back again. She sees that Nils doesn’t have his pants on. His penis juts out from beneath the hem of his shirt, and it’s not pale like his face but purple and engorged. He tears her panties off and forces himself between her legs. When Elna grabs his hair and pulls, the man gives her a hard cuff on the ear and pins her hands down. He pokes and pokes but can’t find the right spot, and Elna twists and turns all she can. She manages to squeeze his testicles, giving him a jolt, but as if the pain gives him more strength he aims true and thrusts himself inside her with an agonized grunt. Elna realizes she’s being raped. Her face still stings from the force of his slap, booze makes everything hazy – upstairs and downstairs. She fights him but can’t get free. He pants and pumps and it feels like he’s up deep in her belly. Then he twitches hard a few times, gasps and drools, and collapses heavily on top of her. When Elna now beats his back with her fists, the man doesn’t care. Elna inches away from under him. He lies stretched out on the ground, huffing. Elna spots her panties in the grass, puts them on and finds her crotch all sticky. She has only one thought, she wants to sleep. She takes the sleeping bag and staggers to the barn wall. She crawls in the bag and zips the zipper close all the way up. She just wants to sleep. What happened didn’t happen. In the morning everything will be better and they still have a long way to pedal.

    In the morning the men are gone. When Elna wakes up Vivi is sitting down making coffee on a portable stove. It’s a beautiful new day. A bumblebee buzzes by her head. Elna’s mouth is dry and she has a throbbing headache.

    - Good morning, Vivi says. – Look at the state of you!

    The state of her? She crawls from the bag and totters shakily into the barn where she has a small mirror in her bag. When she sees her face she remembers Nils hitting her. She has a scratch mark on her cheek and a bruise on her neck. Whether it’s the result of a love bite or a smack she can’t say.

** A deckhand assaults young Susan in a dark sinking cruise ship

The Poseidon Adventure (1969) by Paul Gallico, end of chapter 13. Excerpt from an eBook.

    She moved cautiously down the first aisle to her left. Two doors were shut but a third at the far end was open and as she illuminated the room to investigate, she thought she would die of fright.

    Within, overhead, an indescribable, heart-stopping 'thing' was coiled as though to pounce upon her. She thought she saw a dead white face, black insect body and not only two arms reaching for her, but tentacles waving snakelike and glittering wickedly in the torchlight. It was so unexpected, so monstrous, so unbelievable, so imminent that her limbs froze and her throat constricted choking off her scream.

    Then she was seized from behind in a relentless grip, paralysing her with cold terror. Her light was knocked from her hand, but before it went out it flashed across the monstrous thing on the ceiling, still immobile, and she was aware that it was another pair of arms that had embraced her. She had not heard the soft footsteps or breathing behind her. It was this knowledge that kept her from fainting; this embrace was human. It took her, spun her about and pinioned her down. A hand was forced over her mouth.

    She felt herself thrown violently upon her back and with the hand still cruelly pressing her lips to prevent outcry, a body, a something, a someone lay on top of her in such a manner that she was unable to move.

    Strangely she was able to separate the two horrors now; the 'thing' from the ceiling and that other pressing her down, imprisoning her limbs and her will. She felt helplessly immobilized not only by the one holding her but by the weight of the darkness itself enveloping her. A hand tore at her underclothes and not until she felt the sharp internal pain did she understand that she had been pierced and entered - was being violated, abused, defiled and taken.

    Oddly enough the word 'rape' never entered her mind. She was aware only that something was being done to her and that she was powerless to move or cry out, helpless from hurt and the awful indecency of the jostling. The smothering hand pressed so hard that she felt her teeth cutting into her lips. Darkness, evil and pain!

    The agony continued. She wanted to shed tears like a child who is being beaten, but could not. Sounds reached her ears but not like any she had ever heard before; hardly human but frightening in their intensity and so, in the end, she could only lie there filled at last with knowledge and recognition, wondering when he would have done with her.

    The sounds and the movements ceased and the body still lay upon her. The physical pain diminished but transferred itself to somewhere within her being at her very centre, an anguish of grief. The hand was removed from her face but she no longer cared about or even thought of calling out or giving vent to any kind of cry. She was lost; the blackness was a bottomless pit into which she was falling, falling, from which she would never rise again.

--

Hurting in every part of her body, within and without, Susan picked herself up off the floor, retrieved the torch and arranged her clothing. She did not bother to examine herself. It was all being done by that other Susan that had been born out of that moment of darkness and with whom she must now get acquainted. She walked painfully to the entrance of the alley and as her torch flashed across it, she was once more picked up by the beam of the big lantern.

    She heard her father's voice echoing down the long alley, 'Hello there, Susan! Are you all right?'