He told you to only call him Mask. His face was always obscured. He rarely spoke. When he did, his voice was quiet, as if he was afraid of the world hearing him.

He kept you in the basement, chained to a radiator. He fed you, gave you water and sometimes milk. Sometimes even soda, if he was feeling extra generous. He couldn’t bring himself to kill you.

You didn’t like being kidnapped, of course, or being held captive. But Mask was nice. Mask cared, or seemed to care, anyway. And you started feeling an unbearable absence every time he would leave the house on his murder sprees with those two girls of his. When he was gone overnight, his father — coincidentally the sheriff — would feed you. He was less nice. He thought his son was a fool to keep you alive, with the chance of someone finding you or you escaping. But he would never encroach on that boundary and kill you.

Mask has been gone for three days, tied up on the longest chase of his criminal career. He finally comes home and his first order of business is to stalk down the stairs of the basement, still in his dirty and bloody clothes, to see if you were still where he left you.

“I see my father didn’t let you rot away,” he jokes in a lighthearted tone. But you are not amused.