"Ghosts can't raise a whip.", Red Feline thought, "This guy is for real, this situation is real, it is not a dream.". The realization of the reality of her circumstances brought new fears into her.

She struggled between living the intensity of her ordeal, while at the same time she wanted to be away, safe, at home.

But there was something else happening as well. As the whip fell on her back, the images she carried inside became more detailed and less imagined. They were becoming more like memories of real events. Perhaps it was the pain of the whip that was giving a dimension of reality to her fantasies.

Were they the product of her imagination? Or were they memories of a distant past? Of a different life? One after the other, the lashes ripped her shirt slowly, revealing her white skin under it, breaking it and leaving red marks, some of them bloody.

One particular lash felt like a cut across her lower back. The stinging pain increased with her movements as her shirt's edge touched the open wound. It was all so real, at the same time it felt like a nightmare.

There was a mirror in front of her and every time she opened her eyes she could see herself, her hanging body, the Man in Black, almost hidden by the shadows, lashing at her from his dark confines, his faced covered with a black mask, she couldn't even make out his eyes.

He was as mysterious as the moment she was living. She couldn't recognize herself the way she was, her face also covered by a mask with big holes around her eyes and mouth.

She didn't know what the point of the mask was, perhaps a fetish of the Man in Black. The lash fell again on the same spot where the skin was open.

Red Feline let out a scream of pain that send her mind into a dark void for a brief moment, but long enough for a series of moments to pass through her head.

She was again that captive girl, Piroska, seeing what was a simple barrack when she was first captured, become a large village and soon as big as a city. Progress had been made and not only soldiers were now occupying the land of her ancestors. The province was now populated by merchants, civil servants, families of Romans. The Romans even sent a man to rule the entire province which they began to call Antipolis.

Piroska and her friends were trained to serve, they were excellent cooks and very orderly and they were also taught the arts of love. They could be great lovers if needed, they were taught that their lives were simply to serve their rulers and disobedience or rebellion were met with severity.

No one dared to break the rules. All the young girls had grown to the age when they were going to be sent to different masters, and Piroska knew her day was coming.

Her aunt and mentor knew what was in her niece's mind and feared for her, but she also knew that the girl would be out of her hands and her destiny was her's alone.

Red Feline felt as if she was floating between two worlds, one where the pain was immediate, the other where time was compressed and passing in segments.

At times she felt she had made a mistake entering the house, but who would have thought that inside that house there was such a room and such a person and where everything seemed to have been prepared for her. She could not believe that this was a random case, that the man in black was out to get just anyone.

She believed that it was her he wanted, it was her that he expected and it was her that he called. It was his beckoning that she heard. It was not just the house that called her, it was the person inside, the Man in Black, that incited her to walk into this nightmare.

The lash kept falling, breaking her shirt or what was left of it, and her skin.

One lash wrapped itself around her waist and as the whip was pulled away it burned into her skin, Red Feline cried out and cursed the man hitting her, and yet, she was still not sure that he was real, or that the moment was real at all.

She was still between the old dark room and the cave where she knew she had once hanged, a long time before. A very long time. The images were making more sense, she recognized more of what before was simply a bunch of images with general attributes. Now there were faces, expressions, feelings.

There was a warm feeling for the woman who protected her during her growing years. There was the anger for the people who killed her parents. There was the pain of seeing her mother hang and burn.

But weren't those images just bizarre concoctions of her imagination which she used to stimulate herself? She was in that house to find out exactly what it all meant.