He slammed the door behind him, and in his rush into the room, almost stumbled over a wide metal cot. On it lay a nude woman, her legs drawn up to her stomach, her arms shielding her head, her red hair a dirty tangle on the mattress, which was speckled with dried bloodstains.

The room smelled of camphor and Lippincott assumed it must be from the ointment that glistened on the girl's flanks over fresh and precisely drawn lash marks. Lippincott suddenly felt compassion for the creature and was tempted to leave the room, perhaps even buy her freedom, when she peered from beneath her folded arms and seeing a man with a box, rose slowly from the cot. When he saw her young breasts flecked with dried blood as she rose from the cot, a driving rage enveloped him, and when she dutifully walked to the dirty, blood-spattered wall and raised her hands above her head to an iron ring, Lippincott was trembling. He fumbled the chains around her wrists, then pounced on the whip as if someone might snatch it from him.

As he readied himself for the stroke, the girl asked, "Do you want screaming?" She was American.

"Yes, screaming. Lot of screaming. If you don't scream, I'll whip harder and harder."

Lippincott whipped and the girl screamed with each cutting crack. Back came the whip, then forward, crack, and the polished snakelike cord glistened with blood, back and forward, back and forward, faster until the screams and the whip and the cracking became a single sound of anguish and then it was over. James Forsythe Lippincott was spent and with the sudden quenching of his strange and sudden thirst, his powers of reasoning assumed command and he was suddenly afraid.

He realized now the girl had screamed almost as a duty despite the great pain. She was probably drugged. Her back looked like raw meat.