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she knew herself.

He tried to engage her in discussion about various things, as if she were an honored guest. He brought newspapers and magazines for her and then, on subsequent visits, sought her opinion on the things she read. Through it all he was careful to treat her with unfailing courtesy.
But no matter how kind his demeanor or beguiling his charms he would not feed her. That, he said, would never change until she came to love him as he loved her.

"How can you say you love me and starve me at the same time? How can this slow death make me love you back?" Sylvie asked him over and over, but his response never changed.

His expression beneath the horrible scars etched there by some long ago tragedy was thoughtful. He was unspeakably ugly, her captor. To look upon him was to shudder with revulsion. "When you realize that I hold the keys to your freedom, indeed to the very fiber of your existence, then you will understand."

But she never had, and as the hunger grew to proportions beyond any previous frame of reference, she understood it even less. In fact, her hatred of him grew with each passing day. Whenever she looked at her painfully distended stomach, or was seized by horrendous cramps as her body slowly consumed itself, she despised him even more than the unending hunger, which gave her agonies the likes of which she could scarcely endure.

In the real world she had known her abductor only as the maintenance man for the office building where she spent her days filing and typing and answering endless phone calls from angry customers. Hideously disfigured by scars, he had a face at which most could only stare in ill-disguised revulsion. His mouth, which had only the barest suggestion of human form, showed teeth yellowed and rotting from some oral disease. His eyes were all but buried beneath a mass of badly healed tis-sue. His hands, large and capable of strangling a large animal with little effort, were covered with the same horrible scars. Behind closed doors of the twenty-story high rise he was laughingly referred to as the "Troll".

Sylvie, always one to defend the helpless and under privileged, took pity upon the hapless creature. On the occasions when she worked late into the night, finishing this proposal or typing that letter, she would see him in the halls and stop to speak, or merely smile and wave as she passed by an open office door and glimpsed him there. At first he was openly startled by her amiability. He would glance nervously around as if making

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