The questioning took a rougher turn. I demanded to know why he was lying, and he insisted that he wasn’t. We questioned him about details on the license, and he knew everything. He knew Bernard’s social security, his mother’s maiden name, and the city where he’d been born. Still, none of us could believe–really believe–that this hulking man was actually the man from the photos. So we cuffed him (I noticed at the time, to my disgust, that it gave him an erection) tried to undo the collar, but discovered the lock had been glued shut. It ended up being easier for us to cut the chain instead, we arrested him for filing a false report, and took him to the station.
It was when we took him to the interrogation room that he first got a good look at himself in the one way mirror–and his reaction…I have never seen a man look so horrified at himself in my entire life. He denied it, he thought it was a trick, he started raving about how this was Master’s doing, that he was being tested, that of course he wouldn’t abandon him, but that Bernard believed he had failed him somehow. I didn’t get anything useful out of him, so we stuck him in a cell for the night, and in the meantime, we ran the stranger’s prints in the database to try and figure out who this fucker was claiming to be Bernard Goldwell.
We got a match, but not the one we expected. The fingerprints of the victim did in fact belong to Bernard Goldwell, from a background check done for a security firm a few years prior. But the picture attached to the file, again, bore no resemblance to the man we had sitting in the cell. I didn’t sleep much that night, let me tell you. I spent the entire night trying to figure out how, exactly, this man could fake all of this, because the possibility that the man was in fact who he said he is…I didn’t even know how to begin processing that. I didn’t know how to begin processing most of what I had witnessed that day–thought at this point, I can officially say I have seen stranger shit than this.
So the next day, I sat down with him, alone, and started the conversation over. I didn’t know how to explain any of this, and so I asked Bernard to explain it. I wanted to know exactly what the man had done to him down in the basement for ten days, and maybe, along the way, I would learn what, exactly, had happened to take the Bernard from the photos and turn him into this man sitting across from me, still wearing that heavy metal collar like it was the most natural thing in the world.
He was hesitant, but I worked it out of him, eventually. He confessed that he’d invited the man who’d done this to him over to his house for a hookup, and that night…something had happened. When he arrived, the man was slight, wore glasses, seemed awkward and small and a bit nerdy. However, he had warmed up quickly, and gotten horny quickly, and plans for a beer and a chat were skipped, as the man took Bernard straight into the bedroom, but somewhere between the front door and the bedroom, he’d…changed.
He got taller, and hairier, and rougher, and more muscular. Bernard had always had fantasies about rough, submissive sex, but nothing he’d ever acted on, or imagined doing beyond mere imagination, but that night, something inside him unlocked. It…started out as a rape, the man definitely raped him that night, though in the interview Bernard tried to hedge it somewhat. It was forced, but not bad. He’d been asking for it. He wasn’t into it at first, but as it went on, he started actually enjoying the rough treatment, even if the man he was with didn’t seem to be engaging with what he was doing at all. He didn’t speak, and he didn’t do…much at all, aside from fuck, for…hours, reaching orgasm several times that first night. When Bernard assumed he’d finally finished, the man had drugged him, and when he woke next, he was down in the basement, collared, tied up, and watching the man hammer the spike right into the brick wall–barehanded.
He’d been even bigger, then, and his eyes, apparently, had turned entirely black. When Bernard got to that detail, he shook in his seat, and he looked at me, holding back tears, and then looked at himself in the mirror. He couldn’t believe it either, I think. I still thought it was impossible. Even after talking with Bernard, and coming to believe he was telling me something he thought was true, I still thought it was impossible until the next case surfaced a couple weeks later. Bernard went on and detailed some of what the man had done to him…which mostly was a lot of sex. The man didn’t speak at all that Bernard could recall, but he had somehow always known what Master desired from him, almost like there was a whisper of some kind in the back of his mind, some other voice, something between his own fantasies and some other entity entirely speaking to him, speaking about him, right into his mind.
He slept in the basement. He was given food and water twice a day. He used a bucket as a toilet, and Master emptied it promptly after he used it. Beyond that, he would rape him, over and over again…and as far as Bernard could really tell, whatever had happened to him, whatever had happened to change him from the scrawny guy in the photos to the hulking bear sitting across from me, had happened slowly, so slowly he never he realized it was happening until he’d seen himself in the mirror here. Then, that morning of the 911 call, Master had never come down with his breakfast. A couple hours later, we’d arrived, and here we were.
It wasn’t the whole story, I could tell well enough, but it was as close to the truth as I was going to get, but the confusion had ruined our chance of getting anything useful from his body in a rape kit, and he, and his body, was so unreliable, even if we’d found a suspect, there was no way this story was going to work in court–mostly because Bernard had no interest in pressing charges. With no crime that I could see, even if I couldn’t explain Bernard’s strange transformation, and with nowhere to go on this rape and kidnapping, we let him go–and in doing so, we forgot to get that damn collar off of him, believe it or not.
Bracken's Corner 