Chains in Mind

by S. May

  This man had once been a teacher. When Patricia had been sixteen, he had been twenty-four, and the head of English in her school. As she had specialised in English, she had seen quite a lot of him. He was quite good-looking, and had been the object of any number of schoolgirl crushes. That had put her off him for a start: already, she loathed the idea of girls fawning over a man, any man. Then again, he had been, perhaps, rather too strict. Some might say it was probably due to nervousness rather than malice: after all, he was very young to be the head of a department, and anyway, it wouldn’t have affected a well-behaved girl at all. But Patricia was not inclined to be so understanding. She had been a rebel, and angry, and bored at school, and he had given her frequent detentions.

  It was her smoking, though, that had really made her hate him. He had caught her several times, had almost got her expelled, and she wasn’t one to let it go, or see his point of view. Her simmering resentment of him had lasted until she had left for university.

  When she had seen him again, walking down the street, six months ago, it had all come back to her in a wave of emotion that had made her dizzy for a moment, and she had felt a fierce joy as the possibility of revenge opened up in front of her. Carefully, she had controlled her expression, and greeted him pleasantly. Yes, he remembered her vividly. She mentioned that she no longer smoked, and they laughed over the past. He asked about her life, and she lied easily. She asked him about his. He hadn’t been married. His girlfriend had recently left him, after six years living together. He was still at the same school.

  It wasn’t difficult to take him. She simply turned up at his house the next weekend with a box. It was a present for him, she explained, in return for all that he had done for her. Socially, it was hardly possible for him not to invite her in. As soon as the two of them were settled in the sitting room, she asked to use the bathroom, and used the time to let in her waiting muscle men. Then she used them to hold him down while she took as long as she needed to administer the drug.

  So now here he was: a toy in her bedroom, ready to be tormented. She felt hugely smug about the reversal in their conditions. Now he would feel her revenge. He was the only slave that she was really vindictive towards. Any cruelties towards her other servants were almost incidental, or a light amusement for her, even if they suffered. But he was a target, a conduit, for all her remembered teenage rage against authority, particularly male authority. With him, it was more intense; with him, she really meant it. She felt a thrill of pleasure as she started her little game.

  “Hello, Mr. Prentice, sir,” she said, her voice full of phoney innocence. He roused himself. He wasn’t allowed to speak until he was spoken to, so this was his cue. He raised his head.

  “Hello, Patricia.” His throat was so dry it was almost a croak. He was the only one of her slaves allowed to use her name, and that was only to enact this ironic little scene which she had devised and which she enjoyed so much.

  “I wonder. Would it be alright if I smoked, sir?”

  He tried to speak but his voice failed. He cleared his throat and tried again.

  “Quite alright, Patricia. Please allow me to help.” He said the words that he had been given, helplessly. She smiled at him, and strolled over to a silver cigar box on the bedside table. Nonchalantly, she picked a cigar from the neatly arrayed selection inside, and took it over to the cage. These cigars had been hand rolled, and they each needed the end to be cut off before they could be lit. She poked it through the bars.

  Mr. Prentice took it from her, his strong, but long and sensitive, fingers almost touching hers as the cigar was passed. With her standing, and him slumped in his suspended cage, his head was just a little below her. His eyes were locked on hers as he bit off about a quarter of an inch, twisting and tearing with his teeth to get through the thickness of the cigar as neatly as possible. The tobacco tasted foul, Patricia knew. Mr. Prentice started chewing the piece he had bitten off, just as her script required, his stubble-covered jaw working up and down. Even after all this time, his face still screwed up involuntarily at the bitterness of it, and he broke eye contact, looking down and away. There was no spitting it out: she required him to eat it, and her word was law. He handed the prepared cigar back to her and had to look up again, still chewing.

  “May I give you a light?” he asked, and she smiled sweetly.

  “How kind of you, Mr. Prentice.”

  He had one match, and a strip to strike it on was glued to the back of his hand. As Patricia held the cigar to her full lips, he held the lighted match to the end. She was leaning forwards, over him. His hand was trembling a little, possibly from fear of what was to come, possibly just from being in a cage so long, as he concentrated on the flame. Patricia puffed at the cigar until it was well alight. She sighed. She took a long drag, and blew the smoke into his face. He coughed, but managed to retain the tobacco in his mouth. He chewed methodically.

  Patricia didn’t try to work out exactly what Mr. Prentice was thinking right now. He lived to serve her and was totally obedient - the nanotech treatment that he had been given guaranteed his loyalty - but she hoped that he was still able to hate what she did to him. A willing sacrifice for her pleasure was not enough for her.

  She only smoked during the repeated enactments of this scene. It was true, what she had told him about giving up smoking, and it had taken her a few weeks to get re-accustomed to the habit and stop coughing, herself. She waited, enjoying the cigar, blowing each puff into his face as he ate the tough leaves. She loved the expression of disgust on his face. Her gaze ran over his naked body. His muscles looked tough and straplike, but he was thin: she didn’t overfeed him. He wasn’t dirty: her other slaves saw to that. Standing next to him, she could detect a faint smell of soap, and an even fainter aroma which was probably him, not strong enough to be unpleasant.

  Eventually he swallowed the last of the tobacco, with a shudder.

  “But sir, smoking is bad for me, isn’t it?” Patricia asked, sounding concerned and respectful, like a dutiful schoolgirl. “What do you think, sir? Should I put it out?” The cigar smouldered in her elegant hand, the kimono sleeve falling back from her flawless forearm as she held it up.

  Mr. Prentice’s voice was quavering now. “Yes, Patricia. I think you should put it out. Please allow me to help.” He spoke with a dreadful quiet resignation. Unbidden, he twisted himself round in the cage to turn away from her, and pressed his back hard against the bars, bracing himself with his feet against the far side of the sphere. His fingers clenched in the bars above his head. His breathing began to come more rapidly, and she could see his ribs moving in and out, as he tried to ready himself for the climax of the drama.

  There was a ‘no smoking’ sign drawn on his back: a circle with a line through it, crossing out a stylized picture of a cigarette, the design made up of scores of individual spots. Most of these spots had been made with a blue marker pen, and were re-inked when they began to fade, but many had already been replaced with something more permanent: little white circles of puckered skin. Week by week, Patricia was drawing on his back with cigar burns. A half-dozen of the more recent ones were still red and blistered and angry-looking. Her vengeance was a terrible thing.

  Patricia took her time considering where to place the next burn, her hand hovering over his back as if she were choosing a delightful treat from a chocolate box. She liked to keep the design as even as possible, converting the pen marks into burns one by one all over the drawing, rather than starting at one side and working steadily to the other side. Eventually, she touched him, almost caressing him with the tip of her finger, letting him know where she had chosen.

  “Here, I think,” she said. Mr. Prentice made no reply.

  She had selected a blue spot making up part of the outer circle, right between his shoulder blades. She applied the cigar through the cage bars, stubbing it out on his skin, twisting, to crush the end and p
ut it out. Mr. Prentice let out a groan and a quiver ran through his body. His face was turned away from her, but she thought he was weeping. That gratified her enormously.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose smoking is unhealthy. It is so good of you to set me straight about that Mr. Prentice, sir. I’m sure I won’t forget, with you here constantly to remind me. Would you mind disposing of the remains?”

  He turned round to face her. Yes, there were tears on his cheeks.

  “I’d be delighted. Thank you, Patricia,” he croaked. She handed the extinguished cigar through the bars. In the five minutes it had been alight not much had been consumed. Now it was Mr. Prentice’s job to eat the rest. He took a bite from the unburnt end and started chewing again.

  Patricia felt an almost physical pleasure at the satisfactory completion of her game. She gave a sigh, and a little shiver of delight. Then, she turned away, smiling contentedly. Mr. Prentice had fulfilled his function: he had brightened her morning with his torment, and now he would again be a silent ornament in her room, until she chose to play with him again.

  At the back of her mind she knew that her other servants would let him out briefly to be scrubbed and toileted, but that happened when she was elsewhere, and she didn’t have to think about it. Nor did she have to watch to know that he would eat up the rest of the cigar dutifully. In any case, there was nowhere he could hide it, nothing else he could do with it: letting the residue fall on her bedroom carpet was unthinkable. She had him right where she wanted him.

  And when she had finished the sign on his back, well, maybe she would send him back to school. She hadn’t decided yet. Officially, he was on a hastily arranged sabbatical, so he could still be reinserted there as her agent. Mr. Prentice was only a head of department, of course: she would also have to enslave the headmaster, at least, to achieve any particular objective.

  Schools weren’t a priority; but there was no harm in thinking ahead. Nebulous schemes floated into her mind, about how to change schools, how to educate girls to command, and train boys to obey. Patricia hummed brightly to herself as she went for her shower, in excellent spirits, her brain bubbling with ideas.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Forty minutes later, Patricia emerged from her room and descended to the ground floor. She was wearing a knee-length white cotton skirt that flared out from pleats at the waist, a short white jacket over a bright turquoise blouse, and white high-heeled court shoes that tapped loudly against the polished marble floors as she walked along the wide, airy, corridors.

  She arrived at a panel half-way between the music room and the library, in the side of the corridor. It had dozens of rectangles of different sizes and shapes and colours on it, defined by heavy black lines. It looked just like a section of wall, like the many other panels that were set at irregular intervals along the passageway, enlivening the blank, white, surface with colour. She pressed a specific sequence of eight of the rectangles with her palm. Silently, the panel swung back, revealing stairs slanting steeply downwards.

  Patricia went through, shutting the concealed door behind her. The stairway was narrow with a low ceiling: claustrophobic: it was trying to squeeze unnoticed between the spaces of the house proper. Dim lights were set into the wall at waist level, every few yards. Brushing the fingertips of one hand against the side to steady herself, treading delicately, she descended the steep and very long flight of steps. It was about two normal storeys before the tunnel levelled out and widened into a corridor about eight feet wide and eight feet high.

  Now she was well below the main house, and her surroundings were again clean and bright, lit by fluorescent tubes. The floor, walls, and ceiling were of polished concrete. The distant hum of an air-conditioning unit hardly disturbed the flat ambience of underground silence; each click of her heels on the concrete floor died away instantly. Bright orange electricity cables ran along the ceiling, held in place by metal clips, detouring under the concrete roof beams that interrupted their path every few yards. A flicker of a frown passed over her face: ideally, she would have liked the ugly cables hidden in some way, but apparently the concrete was too hard to drill; and it was scarcely an important issue.

  She came to a steel door, blocking the tunnel. It resembled a hatch in a ship, with a framing of steel, a sill six inches high, and a wheel in the middle to drive the bolts home. In the middle of the wheel was a combination lock. She unlocked the door, stepped through, and swung it shut behind her, using both hands. It clanged, and she spun the wheel to lock it. Fifty paces further on, there was another door, but even thicker and heavier: almost a blast-proof door. She negotiated this, too. Nothing was too much security, to protect the source of her power.

  She came to a last door, smaller and simpler: steel, but the size and shape of a regular house door; she opened it with a key. Beyond was a large, brightly lit, white, room. Various large items of scientific equipment stood against the walls, some of them uncluttered, others apparently modified, with panels removed, trailing a mess of electrical cabling and crumpled aluminium foil. She’d known the name of each piece, and roughly what it did, when she had ordered it, but even though she knew their importance, such things had little hold on her mind: now she only recognised three different kinds of nanometre-scale microscopes, and a number of biochemical-reactor machines.

  Standing at a bench, fiddling with a test-tube of something, stood a small, balding, middle-aged man, with thick glasses, wearing a white coat. Seeing her, he put the test-tube down carefully, taking his time. He looked around himself, to check that he wouldn’t knock against anything important, and then dropped to his knees, his head bowed.

  “Hello, darling,” Patricia purred.

  “Hello, mistress.”

  This was her husband, Donald. It still thrilled Patricia, how effective the nano-treatment was: Donald had invented it, knew exactly what it did, but that made no difference: he worshipped his wife and would do anything to serve her. It had not always been so.

  ***

  It was nine years ago, that Patricia had first heard of him; when she was twenty-one and he was forty-six. She was doing an English degree, and didn’t usually pay any attention to that odd sub-species of her fellow students, the science nerds: they had no social skills and no dress sense, so for her, they hardly existed: just part of the scenery. But she had happened to be in the common room one day on her own, and she had overheard two of her geeky contemporaries talking about this genius professor in their department.

  “In nanotech, he’s light years ahead of the game,” one was saying airily. “When he comes through, he’s going to make billions.”

  Patricia had just happened to read an article in a magazine the day before, saying that nanotechnology was the coming thing, and that there were vast fortunes to be made. The comment struck a chord with her. Idly, she looked up this professor, this future billionaire, on the university web site. Not married. No children. That was interesting. She asked around. It was the general opinion: this man was the best in his field, globally, and expected to do great things.

  Patricia was not unintelligent, but she knew that her looks were her main talent: she had already lined up the possibility of some small-time modelling work for after graduation in the summer. She wanted nothing so much as to be rich. She went along to one of this boffin’s lectures; she didn’t understand a word, but that wasn’t the point: she was studying him, not his work.

  He spoke confidently about his subject, using a pen on the overhead projector to point out particular points on his prepared slides. He was articulate and fluent, as he enthused about his topic, lost in his intellectual passion. At the end of the lecture, though, it was very different. A small group of students formed around him to ask questions about the lecture, and his body language gave him away. She saw him physically shrink back from the face to face interaction, hunching his shoulders and folding his arms. Clearly he was painfully sh
y. He wasn’t gay, she was certain, because his nervousness seemed to be even worse with the female students, and worse still the prettier they were. He could hardly look at them, his gaze flickering over them and away, as he gave monosyllabic answers to their questions. One or two went away hurt, mistaking shyness for hostility, but Patricia could see why he was so curt. It was obvious to her why he had never married: he kept women away, and he was short, and weedy-looking, and talked for hours about dull, dull, stuff. Never mind. She could have him, she was sure.

  It seemed obvious to her: this guy would make a mint, and she would spend it, and, middle-aged, innocent geek that he was, she would have no trouble manipulating him, getting what she wanted, even having casual affairs on the side, for her physical needs. She didn’t worry about companionship: she had never really seen men as people, anyway. Best to wait ‘til after graduation, though: he might have scruples about getting involved with a student, and she didn’t want him thrown out of the university.

  She let her plans lie. She graduated with a second-class degree, and managed to get that modelling work, filling in as an assistant at a photographic agency in between jobs. She kept in touch with contacts at the university, waiting for an opportunity to arise.

  After a few months, she managed to get invited to a party the professor would be attending. It was an annual event by the head of the professor’s department, and all the academic staff would be there. She tracked down one of his graduate students who had been in her year - it turned out that she only vaguely recalled him, but as she expected, as was her due, he knew exactly who she was, and was dazzled when she called him up out of the blue. Yes, naturally he had been invited. Yes, of course he would be delighted, overjoyed, to take her along. She dumped that nerd as soon as they got inside.