He held up her limp form by her long, flowing red hair, which he wrapped tightly about his fist. With his left hand he reached for the knife, the blade clicking out with a noise like a viper's hiss. Unconscious, or half-conscious, he knew not which, the woman now would give over the prize he sought. It was this that made the hunt worthwhile. All the searching, the watching and waiting, all of it came to this end.

He had lured her away from the noise and crowd of the bar with a promise of a secret place where they could smoke grass. She was all for that.

She was not a beautiful woman up close, yet her flaming hair was irresistible, and her willingness made his work simpler. And now he held her radiant hair in his hand and pulled back so tightly on it that the scalp rose by degrees. It was this that made life bearable and worthwhile. She would be a fine addition to his collection.

A broken jaw had left her unconscious. She'd wised up at the last, torn loose from him and run into the trees in blind search for safety. They were miles off the main road. He tracked her easily, knocked her down, and pummeled her into submission. But that was then and this was now, a different time, a different woman.

Now it was time to enjoy her. He wanted to extend every enervating moment, yet he could hardly hold back as he played the knife over the forehead, just above the eyes.

He had lightly joked with her, and they'd spoken of the impending hurricane season, which usually drenched central Florida, sometimes for weeks at a time, despite the fact that the storm was way out to sea, or in the Gulf of Mexico. He told her lies about himself, from a bogus name to an imagined job teaching at the local high school, and that he sometimes enjoyed scuba diving in order to relax. She ate it up, especially the scuba diving, saying that, to her, took guts. She claimed to be a complete klutz in the water, even in the bathtub. He had countered with a smirky little remark about how he could teach her to dive for something in her tub, but that he'd have to be there with her for it to work. They'd laughed, giggled, kissed, and petted before he could wait no longer to take what he'd come for.

They had gone to her place. She'd apologized for the mess in the dingy little bungalow, which sat in a row of houses along a canal. There were neighbors on both sides of her, but trees obscured the view and the lights were out--and he felt safe to proceed with her as he'd planned. By the time they'd smoked two joints, he was ready to explode with anxiety and agitation, ready to take what was his. She kept asking him if he'd take her to the new theme park that had opened near Disney World sometime, a place called Wet 'n Wild, to enjoy water sports of all kinds. He'd finally had enough of her palaver and raised up over her to knock her hard into a table lamp with his first blow. She was no trouble from that moment on--she was his. His and the little one's, but she hadn't seen the other one as he crawled through the unlatched window.

His scowling face would be her last earthly memory. She succumbed to the blows he rained upon her.

Now his large, cold hand knotted her curls and pulled the hair so tight that it simply lifted her weight, and with his razor-sharp knife he began carefully to cut away at her forehead, an incision an inch above the eyes. Blood began to collect in her eyebrows and over the closed eyelids as he worked the incision deeper, going up at the ends toward the crown. He was doing it, parting the scalp from the skull in a wide, rectangular pattern. He was scalping her cleanly and efficiently.

Even unconscious, she seemed to shrivel with the operation, contracting within herself, as if he were pulling her brain somehow through her pores. All he wanted was the brain crop of fire-red hair and the square of skin that nettled the hair together at its roots. In his haste he realized only now that the hair color was not natural. Still, it was something, and it must be made to do.

Working over her, he felt her body jerk as the scalp released itself, one section at a time, like an adhesive label in the way it peeled away--as if grateful and wanting and urgent.

It was his now, and she was left uglier than before, but it mattered not a whit. She'd die before dawn, and any disfigurement wasn't likely to disturb her then. He chuckled over the joking thought he had made: it wasn't often he felt amused, only at moments such as this, when he could lift the bloody, dank scalp up to the light and examine it to his full satisfaction. It wasn't likely to ruin her modeling career, he thought, recalling how she had shown him pictures of herself in tight skirts and tall boots, posing draped over stools and the back of a couch, when she spoke of how, if she'd like, she could be a model.

Orlando, Florida, as filled as it was with discos and bars, singles hangouts, shopping malls, and the weak and helpless and elderly, presented a challenge: a familiar, yet different, even odd terrain for him. The environment here was filled with strange monoliths, the dirt replaced by tarmac, bush all but nonexistent, but the prey--that remained the same: human.

Feeling good was easy when you could achieve what you set out to achieve, bring down the foe, skin it, tear off its hair. This negated all the illogical truths surrounding him, corrected the limitations of terrain and topography. So it wasn't a real jungle. When the prey was beneath the spear, a man was still a man in the deepest sense. A man could give vent to his spleen, his reptilian tastes, his reptilian brain, if he knew how to go about it.

It was this that made all the searching and waiting and wondering worth it, made life bearable, and rounded out the collection back at his digs. The girl would likely die of her wounds, and even if she did not, she'd seen nothing. He struck with the speed and accuracy of a leopard, knocked her unconscious, and brought his knife to bear. She never knew what hit her. She'd not even had a second to scream. Again he was confusing her with another victim. The little man told him so when he came slavering his way up her legs, slitting her skirt with his knife and beginning to take what he wished off her body.

The man he had pretended to be, to entice the woman to give herself to him, did not exist. That man had never been in the room with her ... he'd been only an illusion. What crawled in over the ledge and thudded to the floor, now that was no illusion, that was the little man with the power. While he himself worried all day long if the rains would let up, the little man fasted and prayed, telling his god they didn't hunt well in heavy, wet, rain-drenched clothing. The little man had to feel light, be ready to spring at a moment's notice.

Her long hair, limp with the weight of the scalp at the end now, tickled between his fingers. It was so like vines ripped from a trellis, the scalp the fruit, dripping blood. He held it up to the weak light coming from a nearby bulb. His eyes fastened on the long, red hair. It would be a beautiful addition to the home, and if found to be potent in its power, a fine ingredient in their next soup. Lots of things went into his stews and soups, strained out only after they'd released their potency through a steady boil, a day's patient cooking. But this, this looked to him like a wall ornament to accompany his macramé, and the other scalps tethered there.

All it needs is a good curing and drying out. He could put it up and take it down and fondle and caress it, rub it into his groin or chest whenever he liked, partake of it in a wholly different fashion. He liked to fulfill his needs, from hunger to tactile desires to capturing such a prize. It all went together to make of him a well-rounded personality. He laughed inwardly at the thought.

Hair was interesting and wonderful, but it wasn't hair alone that motivated him. Nor was it envy or jealousy, or a sick hatred of women brought on by his mother's cruel treatment of him--none of that nonsense. His desire was motivated by the potency factor of hair. All of life, according to scientists, resided in a single strand of hair, all the DNA of any individual. In a sense, he had just escaped with the soul of the dying "model." Vain bitch ... beauty was only skin-deep, but hair--now that was forever. After all, wasn't it hair that made the beast so attractive to the beauty?

They wanted other things from the girl before they'd leave her to die here.

He wanted a patch of skin from her left thigh, some pubic hair for another ritual meal, more skin from around her breast--just a little nip--and he wanted her nails, painted and long as they were. Her toenails, too.

He went about the work of stripping what he wished from her, paying little heed now to the gory baldness or the satisfied look on the pinched features of the little man working at the other end of the woman. The little man's total concentration was on the items he had come to fetch, and he took them from his perch over her chest like a succubus. Ian tried to remember all the items his dwarf brother, Van, had come to fetch. Van took each item with careless cuts. Ian placed the scalp in a large plastic baggie and went about doing the same for the other items, each to its own bag. As he worked, he stuffed the full plastic bags into his sport coat pocket.

This would take time, and they did want to take their time over the still-breathing woman. Ian dragged her down onto the floor beneath a window in the semi-dark room where he occasionally looked out, listening to the chirping of cicadas, crickets, and an annoyed squirrel. He saw movement at the house next door, so he reached over to the lamp and flicked it off. They could see out, but no one could see in. Adjusting their eyes to the dark, they began to take their choice picks. It was not unlike the work of a medical doctor over a corpse, Ian thought as Van worked. Then a disturbing feeling of foreboding came into his head: a sinister feeling, a feeling that someone or something was, at this very moment, stalking them.

The victim regained consciousness and screamed before he dug the knife into her throat, cutting short her cry. She blacked out and began to bleed to death as Van, a little shaken, continued his incisions.

Had they done right in choosing this one, in coming here and carrying out their plan? Or had they made a fatal error? Ian cursed himself for the indecision and the sudden fear and doubt.

"It's going to be all right ... all right," Van said, taking his hand, reassuring him with a squeeze and a munchkin smile. Then he got back to cutting up the dying woman.