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.

The Bruiser.

That’s what happens when the media catches wind of something like this, they need something catchy, a phrase that they can use to reduce the entire investigation into a second, something Pavlovian they can use against their audience. They say it, send that jolt of fear into the hearts of everyone they’ve been conditioning, and watch the eyes turn to them, and the money pour in. The Bruiser, fuck, what a fuckup that whole fucking thing was, right down to the interview, that really capped the whole thing off with a fucking cherry. Still, I’m getting ahead of myself. I told myself I would start at the beginning, leave this as a…final report, of a sort. I have a feeling I’ll need something like this, once this is all said and done. Once I finally find him, and I’m close. Closer than he thinks.

Me. Right now, as for most of my life, I’m Detective Adam Hoft, the lead investigator of the…bug-fucking crazy serial rapes of men in the city, of which there have pressently been four known cases. I regarded myself as jaded, I thought I had seen everything, but this shit–this shit defies reason. All of it. I can’t explain some of the things I have seen in the course of this case, and I don’t think I ever will be able to explain it until I finally catch this crazy fuck…but I gotta be honest, I’m fucking terrified of him, and you should be too. That Pavlovian shit? Good. Be terrified of him, lock your doors, observe the curfew, because the few details you know? You don’t know shit. But let’s start at the beginning, like I said, with the first victim, Bernard Goldwell.

On the morning of September 24th, the precinct 911 received an anonymous call from a cellphone, which ended up being a burner, about a rape victim. The speaker gave the address twice, and then hung up without answering any of the questions asked by dispatch. I myself wasn’t called in until around noon, once the cops who responded to the call realized they weren’t dealing with something…conventional.

When the officers arrived at the small house the caller had identified, they found the door unlocked, and entered. The building was empty, but down in the basement, the officers found a man, later identified as Bernard, sleeping on the concrete floor wearing nothing other than a thick metal collar, which was attached to a heavy metal chain, attached to a stake which had been driven into the brick wall of the basement. He was dehydrated and disoriented, and for several minutes he demanded the officers get “Master”, that he needed him, screaming for him, attacking anyone who tried to get close in order to free him, telling them that if he got free, Master would be furious.

Like I said, hardly a conventional case, and I’ve seen some strange shit before. I was called in, and conducted my first interview with him down in the basement, still in the collar and chained to the wall–and still completely naked. It was…hell of a first impression, and I could see why some of the officers initially thought this must be some elaborate prank, because Bernard did not seem to be the kind of person you would expect to get raped.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I know that men can be, and regularly are, sexually assaulted, but there are some kinds of guys that you don’t think would go down easily–and Bernard appeared to be one of those sorts of guys. He was big–several inches over six feet tall, and burly. Hell, more than burly, he was built like a brick shithouse, as my dad would say. Thickly muscled, with a thick layer of fat, lots of hair–a real man’s man, if you get the picture. Not the sort of character you might associate with being chained down in a basement, calling out for a master.

Still, by the time I arrived, he had gained some coherence, though he still refused to let any of us unlock the collar. It had to stay on, he told us. Master had told him it had to stay on, and so on it would stay. We chatted a bit, I got him comfortable with me, and then I started probing…but his answers were…well, a bit unbelievable. He didn’t know how long he had been down in the basement, but he guessed it had been several days. In fact, when we nailed down the timeline later, we determined he had been held captive for almost ten days, all told. I asked him if he knew where he was, and he said that he did–that this was his house. He lived here alone, but when I asked him who had done this to him, and how he’d gotten in (since no one had found any evidence of forced entry) he clammed up.

At first, I thought he was just ashamed. After all, ten days locked down in a basement can do strange thing to someone’s mind, but it wasn’t that. I asked him a few other questions, and he gave clear answers, showing he obviously remembered what had happened well enough, but when it came time to ask him who had done this to him, and what he had done, he would go vague and try and tell me he didn’t remember anything, which I could tell was bullshit. Then, one of the other officers who was looking for evidence upstairs, found the photos.

They were photos of Bernard Goldwell, but the man in the photos was most certainly not the man down in the basement. We went looking for other things, and found his wallet in the pocket of some pants upstairs in the master bedroom, and sure enough, the man on the license was the same man in the photos, which is to say, we all assumed that the man down in the basement was not, in fact, Bernard. No–the picture was of some young fellow, easily a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than the man down in the basement, with no beard, and no hair to be seen.