Gloria was waiting impatiently at the door of her silver-colored trailer when Hawkins returned from his camper. She was wearing a man's shirt tied to make a kind of halter and a pair of ragged jeans and boots, her usual around-camp wear. "Well, how'd it go, Henry? Hurry up, tell me!" she urged eagerly. Nearly an hour had passed since he came over here through the wooded thicket to dump that powerful aphrodisiac into the new blonde's drink, and she was beside herself with expectant curiosity.
"She took it like mother's milk," he grinned in the macabre yellow glare of the trailer's outside bulb. "Shouldn't be long now."
"Ooo, I can hardly wait," the mid-thirtyish woman squealed. "Al, hey Al, Henry's back!" she yelled in that sort of hoarse whisper-shout of someone wishing to yell without being heard too far away. A pot-bellied slight balding man in his mid-forties shuffled groggily into view from the battered trailer's tiny bedroom. He was holding an open half-quart can of beer and an unlit cigarette was dangling from his lower lip. It stayed there as he spoke, held in place by the wetness of the beer he'd obviously just finished. "Went like clockwork, huh, Henry?" he inquired, dropping the emptied beer can into a plastic trash can lined with newspaper that was positioned by the bedroom door. "When you think she'll be ready? I wouldn't mind a piece o' her ass myself. Did you see those legs? And tits! Man, she's got a pair like one o' them fold-out girlies."
Gloria glared at him half seriously. "You just shut your mouth, Al Badger. You can't even satisfy the woman you've got, much less go spreading it around."
Henry laughed out loud and his employee's face momentarily flushed. "Shit, Gloria," said the heavier one with the tee-shirt that failed to cover his protruding belly. "It'd take half the men in Canada to satisfy you and you know it."
"Goddamn right, if they all had cocks like that scrawny one of yours!" she taunted.
"Scrawny! You can go to hell, you ol' whore, I ain't never had any complaints before!"
"Now, now, you two, save all that energy for later. And anyway, Gloria, you're gonna' be gettin' all the cock you can handle when we give that first show."
Gloria felt a shiver of anticipation run up her spine at just the thought. She'd done some pretty far-out things since signing up with Henry Hawkins, at least since he found out there wasn't any money in menagerie shows for kiddies and bored grownups. That was when he decided to add something new, something special just for the men-folks and an occasional thrill-seeking woman or two. That was where she came in – the special show, the one that cost five dollars a head and was well worth it. She put one on, all right, left them with their tongues hanging out when she'd polished off that wolf of Henry's… and sometimes a donkey if the crowd was right and she felt up to it. Not to mention the one or two she always took out of the audience, just to give the locals something to talk about after they'd pulled up and left. But sometime on this tour, they would try something new and different… and even Gloria was nervous about how it would work out.
"Gimme' a beer, Al, and I'll go back and see how our new little girl is doing with the something special I gave her. She oughta' be about to come in her pants about right now."
"How about it, Henry? You gonna' share this one now, or have I got to stand in line?"
"Oh no, not tonight, it's too soon for that. But I tell you what – you two come on over in a little while and take a look-see through that window over the sink. Maybe you'll get a little show, who knows!"
Sarah had already slipped out of her clothes and into a pale green nightie before Henry Hawkins walked the distance over to Al and Gloria's trailer. She was tired and sleepy and the couple of drinks her new boss fixed her made it even worse, so all she wanted was to get under those covers and close her eyes.
But then it happened… not all at once, but in little short spurts, brief quivering spasms of intense feeling and stimulation that coursed through her scantily-clad young body in surge after surge of frightening strangeness. It didn't worry her much at first; after all, it could have been anything – the onset of some virus from all the travel and excitement, or maybe just her insides knotting up from the newness of all this or… but there was soon no way of kidding herself. Something, indeed, had happened to her, just as surely as if a hidden switch inside her brain had been triggered open. First the feeling of blood rushing heatedly to her belly, then the tingling spreading upward through her thighs, then to her lushly quivering breasts where they reddened slightly and began to swell with an excitement all their own. And then her tiny young nipples began to throb as if in wicked perverse accompaniment to the unknown song of quickening desire that was somehow welling inside her at this very moment.
Her mind reeled for a moment and then her confused thoughts, blurred by the effects of the unaccustomed liquor, began to come together in one frightening melange of apprehension and suspicious fear. What is happening to me? Something's wrong… maybe I've been poisoned. Yes, that's it, poisoned! No, that can't be right, who would poison me? Maybe it's the liquor, maybe I'm allergic to something in those drinks.
"You sick or somethin', Sarah?" She jumped half a foot off the camper floor at the sudden intrusion; turning, startled, she saw that Mr. Hawkins had let himself in through the unlocked door and was standing there in the doorway only a few feet away. Only she couldn't see him, at least not clearly. He was more a smeared, shapeless mass to her blurry eyes than the man she remembered from just a short while ago.
"You scared me. I didn't know you were coming back," she said slowly and deliberately, wondering if the words sounded the same on the other side of her lips as they did to her. She was shaking her head from side to side, as if that might clear the murkiness from her mind and enable her to think clearly once again…
"Sorry, honey," he smiled. "I guess I should have knocked. Didn't know you were getting ready for bed." He glanced down along the scarcely concealed smooth curves of her voluptuous young body, her high jutting breasts and long shapely legs clearly visible to his obviously appraising stare. She crossed her arms over her firmly ripened breasts and stirred uncomfortably, uneasy under the suddenly coldness of his gaze.
"I… I guess I must have a bit of an upset stomach. Maybe it's the change in scenery. I've heard it can do that to you, huh?"
"That's right, Sarah, just a little virus or something," he said warmly, and she quickly felt reassured, though no less uncomfortable standing here like this. He might have been old enough to be her father, but that was no fatherly look in his eyes when he first came in. "Better let me take a look. I'm no doctor, but traveling around like I do in the back country, I've had to pick up a bit of medicine just to keep all my folk in one piece. Not to mention all the vet'rinary learning I've managed to accumulate."
"Oh, I'm all right. It's n-nothing," she stammered nervously as he stepped toward her. She was afraid of him – she didn't like this new chilling hardness in his eyes. It was incredible – even when he talked so sweetly, it was still there. It couldn't have been there before… or maybe she just didn't see it then. "P-please, really, it's just a cold or something. I'll go on to bed and I'll be as fit as can be in the morning, honest!"
A menacing, yellow-toothed grin opened his face like it had been hacked with a cleaver. "Just the same, I better take a look. Can't be too careful, you know."
The rough-skinned man stepped toward her, and the terrified young blonde backed hastily toward the rear of the camper, as if some sort of security were offered by the wall at her back, though there was no way out except through the door behind Hawkins or through the tiny crawlway into the truck cab which was out of the question. She stopped moving backwards only when her back touched the back wall, her neck just below the edge of the bed that was above the truck cab. There was nowhere else to go. Suddenly, with no warning, he reached out to her and, with a coarse sneering laugh, gripped the flimsy gauze-like sheerness of her nightie in one calloused hand and, with a quick twist, yanked the thin garment from her smooth shoulders, ripping it in half like it was a strip of toweling. She stood all but naked before his eagerly probing eyes, as much confused and astonished as frightened, only the soft protruding mound of her drug-inflamed vagina still hidden from his cold appraising stare by her thin panties.
"Please, please," she begged, and her melon-firm breasts heaved with every agonizing plea. "You can't mean this, Mr. Hawkins! This isn't right, you just can't! Please!" Tears streamed from the corner of her eyes as she hoarsely begged for mercy, but there was not a hint of hesitation in the older man's eyes… he knew what he wanted, and he would get it. It was just a matter of time.
"Why, Missy, I reckon' I just don't know what you're talking about," he drawled, affecting his finest Georgia-cracker tone and looking not-at-all dumb and innocent of any wrong-doing. He grinned wider as his hand seemed to absent-mindedly roam along the inside of his pants leg. Sarah's eyes widened in genuine fright when she spotted the rapidly-swelling bulge that grew right before her eyes along the inside of his thigh.
"You oughta' be gettin' about right," he leered. "Notice anything different the last half-hour or so?"
Sarah's thoughts whirled dizzily… I haven't been poisoned, I've been drugged! That's why I feel so strange! I can see it now… he put something in my drink!
His open palm touched her nakedly quivering breast, his fingers brushing lightly against her upturned, quivering nipple. A shiver of terror and revulsion rippled through her chest and tied knots in her trembling belly. Maybe if she had been less frightened, less caught-unaware, she would have noticed better the still-growing, festering something that had plagued her senses earlier. But Sarah could not fully grasp it, could not begin to comprehend the depth of her ensnarement now… she was trapped, tied, and bound as surely as if by a dozen fetters – and fast on her way to the deepest, vilest depths of human depravity… and there was no way on earth to stop it!
"No… please, n-no, Mr. Hawkins," she trembled. "You've had too much to drink or something. You-you're not yourself… please, just leave me alone and we'll forget this ever happened, please!"
Sarah knew her plight was not totally hopeless; there was still a hope left for her. Maybe he would leave her alone after all. Maybe if she could just grit her teeth and let him touch her, just hold back the nausea and revulsion long enough to let his dirty fingers course over her warm, naked flesh, maybe that would satisfy him and the nice Mr. Hawkins she knew before would take his rightful place again. She knew even to think such things was wrong, but what choice was there? She could scream for help… but everyone within earshot was an employee of this man, dependent on him for bread and their very survival. How could they be expected to aid her, a total stranger, at the expense of their own livelihoods? Of course, maybe he would leave her alone and just go away if she screamed, but that would be the end of her job. That would mean being dumped up here, penniless, in the wilds of Northern Canada or worse still, having to go back to Jamie in Blackjack, head-hung, and begging for forgiveness. No, I won't go back there, no matter what, I can't go back to Jamie. That's over and done, and I've got to make this new life work or there's nowhere left for me to go. I've got to… got to!
Perhaps a more experienced woman, craftier in the ways of the world and of desiring men, would have seen the futility in those thoughts, seen the hopelessness of such a choice and have taken off on a new tack, leaving all this and her past, too, behind. Maybe even Sarah Olsen herself could have made a clearer-headed decision that night if she hadn't been doped on enough Spanish Fly to drive a dozen women insane with animal lust… but the decision was made, the die was cast, and Sarah Olsen took the one last step that catapulted her into a shadowy world she didn't know existed, one that might be the only one she would ever know.