Danielle Thorpe was asleep in her bed, unaware of the feint green aura that was hovering by her window.

It flickered by the glass; lingering for some minutes, peeping in through the curtains before silently clambering through the window and glancing around.

On the far side of the room there was a bed, one half of it empty, the other half containing a beautiful woman. Her breathing was calm and regular. Her hair was sprayed evenly on her pillow in the shape of a fan.

The light paused, and stopped. It was hungry and excited, and it peered at the girl as she slumbered, noticing that the sheets on the empty side of the bed were crisp and that the duvet was unruffled. Kevin, her boyfriend, was absent. Danielle was alone in her bed.

The light took its time, sliding inquisitively across to Danielle's wardrobe where it opened the door and peered inside at her miscellaneous assortment of skirts, trousers, vests, tee-shirts and blouses. They hung neatly on two metal rails, formal clothes on the left; casual on the right. Shoes were at the bottom; and bags, accessories and hats filled the shelf at the top. The light closed the wardrobe door and travelled on to Danielle's dresser where it slid open her underwear drawer. It studied the piles of thongs, bras, stockings, garters, camisoles and pasties before continuing to the top of the dresser where it paused to examine each of the objects in turn.

There was a bottle of perfume and a tube of red lipstick to the left. Next to it was a pottery dish containing hairpins and a single discarded half-used compact, but it was at the next object that the light loitered: a framed photograph of Danielle posing on a beach.

The light dawdled and tarried because the picture was a private, bedroom trinket that had been snapped by Kevin on his and Danielle's first romantic holiday. He'd beguiled and inveigled her into posing for him and she'd reluctantly slipped off her bikini - first the top, then the bottom. Hot, embarrassed, naked; somewhat wet between the legs and tingling with sexual anticipation she'd smiled coyly at the camera and he'd snapped her. Her eyes had been steaming, her breasts aching and her nipples swollen and enlarged.

After the holiday, Kevin had sorted through the various pictures he'd taken and he'd printed the one that he regarded as the hottest and most daring of them all. Danielle's legs were open is this shot. Her moistness and clitoris were both unashamedly exposed, and her finger was touching them both.

Kevin had demanded that the picture be placed in the centre of the dresser, and Danielle had been reluctant and embarrassed. There'd been a row. Kevin had stormed out. Danielle had been forced to give way.

The light touched the picture, caressing Danielle's hard aching breasts and it tickled her nipples. It stroked her flat young stomach and moved south where it focused on her smooth bare open slit, her clit and the finger that touched it. It grew excited as it gazed at her pink sticky folds and it lengthened and brightened and its beat became faster.

The light studied the shy, blushing face staring back at it, committing each of those features to its memory. It concentrated on Danielle's pose, on her thighs and the curve of her waist, on her arms and her shoulders and it shimmied. It became brighter and warmer, and then it shifted across the thick pink pile where it found a wooden chair and a woman's clothes untidily forsaken: jeans, shoes, tee-shirt; also a bra and a pair of black hose haphazardly draped across the chair's back in a moment of youthful rashness.

Again the light paused and it studied the bra and then it picked up the hose and it stretched each of the legs in turn, putting its hand and arm inside each of them, becoming stronger and warmer as it did so, and brighter and longer. It imagined wrapping the hose about Danielle's neck and then pulling the hose tight, watching as her face darkened and she began to kick out and fight.

It moved on, casting its dark, inky pall on the bed, the double one that contained the sleeping princess, and there it paused. It stopped. All in the room was silent. One half of the bed was empty. The sheets remained crisp and the duvet was unruffled. Kevin was absent. He was working.

Tonight, Danielle was alone in her bed, asleep, eyes closed, and so the residual green glow caressed her skin from the street outside, a touch of light that was warm and yet inanimate, unearthly and yet distinctly male in its sexual orientation. Danielle groaned in her sleep. She felt the contact and instinctively brought her hand to her face and rubbed her cheek. Maybe an insect had landed there. Maybe it had decided to crawl the short distance from her lip to her ear, but it hadn't. There was no insect resting on her cheek: only the glow of the faint distant light.

Somehow Danielle seemed to sense the aura at her side and that it was hovering there, a strange unnatural green radiance. She became unconsciously aware of it, and as she did so, the light slowly transformed itself into a tall, dark stranger wearing a mask and a woolen sweater.

Danielle rolled over and stirred. She could see a man in her sleep and she could sense his arousal and his cock. She could smell his lotion and she could feel his yearning and lust, and instantly her heart quickened. It chased, and she murmured softly in her sleep.

Soon she imagined him sitting on the bed by her side and that he had a knife in his hand because he'd pulled it from a sheaf and he was caressing her throat with its blade, abrading her soft skin. Yet she imagined that he did so tenderly and without any threat, except the one she imagined. He bent down and he kissed her on the cheek, then on the forehead and finally full on the lips.

This finally caused her to awaken, and at once, she felt the knife hovering against her throat and she felt the warm imprint of the strong virile kiss on her lips. She felt and sensed it without opening her eyes, but nevertheless, in her blind panic, she forced her eyelids to part and an impression formed in her mind that there was a man in her room, a stranger who possessed toned muscles, a green shadow and a mask to cover his face. He wasn't real at the beginning. He was a dream but then his image hardened and she saw him leering at her, and also the knife gleaming and she became stiff with fear and scared and vulnerable, and she had no idea what she should do.

She remembered to breathe. It came slowly. It hurt. She was breathing. Inhaling. Aching. "Have you got an aspirin?" the man asked her, his knife moving lasciviously across her soft naked skin, following the curve of her shoulder down across her breast and moving inevitably beneath the duvet where it became hidden from view. "I've got a headache," he added.

Danielle clutched at the covers and tugged them up towards her chin, doing so defensively to protect herself from the knife and the man. "An aspirin?" she gasped, feeling the knife flirting with her breasts, first the left one and then the right one, teasing them in turn from under the covers.

The stranger nodded to her and then with bright shining eyes, he grabbed the duvet and dragged it down. She couldn't stop him, but the worst bit was that inside herself she knew that she didn't want to stop him. She wanted him to look at her and she was vulnerable in a way that she found both frighteningly sexy and confusing.

Who was this man? Not Kevin; that was obvious. And what did he want? Why was he here? Before she could answer, his strength shifted and suddenly the sheets and duvet were down to her waist and she was exposed to him and he was staring at her thin cotton shirt.

"Yes," he said simply, and his knife pricked at her shoulder, not hard or dangerously, but as an emphatic warning that she should do precisely as he directed. "I have a headache; so do you have an aspirin?"

Suddenly she realized that the thin cotton shirt was all she had on, for she'd retired to bed without any pajama bottoms or bra, or panties.

"I want an aspirin," he said firmly, studying her tits and she could feel her nipples reacting to his brutal attention. They were swelling and becoming hard and sensitive and poking through her shirt, and she could feel that he'd noticed, because he was licking his lips, liking it enormously. "As I say, I've got a headache," he repeated.

The words came as a jumble that made some kind of sense but did so in a way that was illogical and meaningless. Why was he here? All Danielle could think right now was that the shirt was too thin and insufficient beneath his hot hungry gaze and it seemed to becoming thinner and even more transparent in her imagination because he could see the outline of her breasts and the mark of her nipples.

"You're not wearing a bra," he said mirthlessly, stabbing in the direction of her breasts with the knife.

"No," she answered faintly. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize I'd need one."

"You don't," he said. "Not for my sake, anyway."

She felt her nipples hardening and she was squirming because he was watching her breasts swelling from inside her shirt. Worse: he was caressing her skin and outlining her breasts with the knife. She couldn't move and she couldn't stop him from looking. Her whole body was stiff; rigid, unbending while the knife was large and unwieldy and pressing at her chest, pinning her down to her bed.

"My boyfriend will be home soon," she stammered, and her mouth was dry, because she could feel how transparent the shirt had become and the shallowness of her breathing.

"No, he won't," the stranger retorted, pricking her with the knife, but this time lower, much lower, because the knife was heading downwards from her breasts. It moved under her shirt and she gasped, because he was stretching the fabric from off her shoulders and away from her breasts so that they were obscenely exposed.

He could see them. Never mind that the material was transparent. He was looking at her boobs through his mask and tickling each of them with his knife, and pretending that he wasn't. He could see how hard and swollen and tender her nipples had become. "You're lying," he said, pressing at her breasts with the edge of his knife. "Kevin's at work. He's out until morning so we have plenty of time. But first you must be punished for lying."

She tensed up in terror. "Punished?"

"Yes."

And at that he nicked the underside of her breast with his knife, not badly or in a way that brought blood, but even so, it caused her throat to constrict and she sensed how tired and vulnerable she was. He could rape her here in her bed and there was nothing she could do.

He could kill her.

"How do you know about Kevin?" she asked, floundering in frenzy because she couldn't see his face or discern his thoughts except through what he was doing, and with one flick of his wrist he could kill her.

He touched her breasts, caressing them softly and kindly and warmly, and she felt exposed and frightened, and yet: what else?