The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  “If they hadn’t wanted to extend her pain, their only option would have been to strike harder, so that the switches would break faster. It wasn’t over until all the switches were broken.” Justine was flushed, and her eyes were moist, but I wanted to be sure she fully understood the intensity of those long-ago experiences, the differing assumptions of the times. For Gen-X, sadomasochistic sex rituals were more widely practiced; at a minimum, they were known. Now, no kind of sex is ever approved in America, but the fact of their popularity was at least acknowledged. In those other times, these had been forbidden pleasures in the extreme.

  “Like it’s been waiting here all those years, for me. I’m sure I was born for this!” I had, of course, surmised this evening might have been heading this direction, but I had to be very careful.

  “Babe, you’ve known me less than seventy-two hours.”

  “I was way outta control at the Orchid.” She was casting about, seeking what was required of her. “Don’t you wanna punish me for that?” she asked, trying to sound light; but this was not a joke. I could feel her quaking as I touched her.

  “Remember that I’ve been playing this game all my life,” I told her, massaging the tense muscles in her shoulders. I’d resolved that we would not go off into a trivial, stylized scenario. This was too “up close and personal.” “The only distress would have been any suggestion that, having found you, I might lose you, that you might dance off in a different direction.”

  She stood clutching her little bag in front of her with both hands. She looked, for all the world, like a young girl waiting at a terminal for her first long trip. “Nay, please. When you’re finished with me tonight, I hope that thought is no longer possible. I’ve nowhere else to go, no place to hide.” Even the abrasive punker dialect had softened.

  She recited the obvious, like a catechism, and I knew it was for the pure thrill of hearing herself say the words. “I do wish I’d been that blonde girl, I really do, with so many watching me hurt. But this may be as if, more appropriate? Three days, for sure; no one knows where I am or whom I’m with. Miles from anyone, dead of night, and I can’t get outta here.” I remembered her handing me the keys.

  ————————

  “IN GEORGIA, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM?” she tried to quip, then went on with effort. “I’ve been brave so far, haven’t I? That’s why, in the bag—a whip and other things you might use to hurt me, and I tried not to be sissy when I picked them out. Like, all night if you want; whip me till I lose it. You can do anything you want to me, and I’ve tried every way I know to ask for it.” Her anticipation was laced with a fear that was real enough, but when she concluded, “Hey, bring it on! While I’ve still got the ass for it?” I could sense she wasn’t speaking of the pain, exactly.

  I then regretted not having fully confessed my love to her, before these demands were put on it, but that would have to wait. The dominant role obliges much in timing and sensitivity. Anyone who thinks it only a matter of doing a number on a helpless person is a fool. Sadly, fools abound. At that moment, the prospect of giving Justine what she’d set herself up for was less appealing than the erotic thought of her in bondage. Most sadomasochistic sex is situational, yet her mind-set demanded that her pain threshold be approached—the very vulnerability that was stimulating her made real.

  I took her bag from her and told her, coldly as I could manage, to take off her clothes, turning away to examine what she’d brought. I had to smile at the novice’s choice of the Arabian manacles. Most adequate to the task, surely, had we been in the Rufai “Hall of Torture,” but not if one is concerned with avoiding repeated visits to the hand therapist. There were various clamps, ropes, a whip that was a bundle of long thongs, with one set of ends strapped together to serve as a handle.

  The leather was so old and dried as to look like something else she might have found in the house. I doubted that it would survive one good use. I regarded a seriously cruel-looking set of metal pincers. Considering the damage those could inflict, I thought yes, it’s true; she’s no “sissy!” Justine stumbled and nearly fell, awkwardly struggling out of her pants. Vanished, along with her typical speech, was the amateur stripper’s grace. Still, this was but another variety of erotic image, and she was turning me on as I held the pincers close to her bare breasts.

  “You were not really expecting these to be used?” was my noncommittal inquiry.

  All was becoming too real for her easily to maintain a role. “Shit, I hope you don’t.” She grimaced at the “nasty gadget,” looking askance with sincere dismay.

  “I do know how to use them,” I stated evenly, not intending to do any such thing, but I was getting myself in character. I let her stand there naked, tearfully hugging her belly, while I found some old bar rags to pad the manacles. I was entertaining images of Seabrook’s Justine from Witchcraft. My plan, such as it was, had been largely to just let her hang by her wrists—until she was exhausted as I was becoming. Problem with younger women is that you always seem to have a tiger by the tail.

  I threaded the rope between the old rings on the insides of the columns and dropped the ends. Then I manacled her wrists, which she obediently held out to me, palms together as in prayer. Justine shivered as the squeal of the locking bolts reverberated in the silence of our vault. She watched, with something like enchantment, each small step of what was happening to her. I rigged more rope, which could tauten that running between the columns, and secured the dangling ends to her manacles.

  Like every submissive, her gaze had doted on the securing of first one hand, then the other. Her fingers splayed, as if exultant at relief from obligation to effect anything further. I advised her that it would go easier on her arms and shoulders, as long as she was able to hold on to the ropes that I pressed into her palms.

  Wide-eyed, she nodded understanding and asked if I were going to tie her ankles. She was so appealing, in her abject exposure, that I kissed her deep and long to feel her quiver against me. When I told her that I wanted her sufficiently free to twist and turn, she moaned and parted her thighs to my touch, her excitement at a fever pitch. She blushed when I touched my fingers to her lips, for her to taste her own wetness, and tried to get her legs around me.

  I denied her release. “If you come, it will be when your body betrays you, one more spasm of your flesh surrendering to what’s happening to you.” I hitched up the rope array, tying off my line to another ring at the base of a column. She gave a little startled cry when she was drawn taut, just barely able to balance on her toes, so that the stress was distributed through her feet and legs as well. I initiated blows to her back, buttocks, and backs of her thighs, snapping the thongs slowly and regularly so that she might anticipate the hits. Her muscles tensed against the blows across her bare skin, which would begin to seem as dull explosions from within.

  At first, she stared up fixedly, to where her clenched fingers twisted at the ropes, though she clearly remained aware of my movements reflected in the mirror. The tears that had welled in her reddened eyes began to trickle down her cheeks. In anticipation of each bite of the whip, her eyes closed and brow knitted. At every hit, tremors ran like waves down her musculature to her straining feet. Face flushed, she bit her lip, loath to yield anything easily.

  When I moved around to work on her soft front, she goaded me, through the thus far silent tears. “Hey, he did fuck me, and he wasn’t very nice about it either!” She threw the club operator at me in a final provocative bid at attitude. “He needs to call me!”

  “You enjoyed it?” I suspected this was not dissimilar from the way she used to jerk her stepfather’s chain. Trifling with an embrace of the dark side, craving to recognize herself as ravished, defiled—all this stood somehow correlative with…

  “I was up on you, waiting out there while it went down,” she sobbed the admission. “I played like you had brought me there for that, like it was something you had given to me!” There had been no doubt of her experience with kinky sex.
I was reasonably sure that, wherever she wanted to be taken, something more was indicated. I approached her from behind and grabbed her hair, jerking her head painfully back.

  “Justine!” I barked. “This isn’t just about sex, about how great a little ‘slut’ you are, or the daddy you missed. You’ve been stroking the images of this place that I gave you. You were seeing them from outside, through other eyes, confusing your vicarious thrill with the suffering of figures you found attractive. This is about your real pain, about you and the agony of life! If you want fantasy, imagine how ugly the ride would have been had those boys in Louisiana gotten their hands on you.”

  “They would, would’ve really hurt me,” she whimpered.

  “You asked for it, and tonight you’re going to get the realities.” I shoved her head roughly forward to face the mirror. “Look at yourself. You’ll see everything that happens to you, all night long, have to watch what’s done to your pretty little bod. I’m going to wear this whip out on you,” I threatened, calculating that the old, stiff thongs would not take at all long to disintegrate. “Tonight will be your night in hell, babe, and all you can do is endure it.”

  There was no way I was going to really mess her up. Neither had I any intention of the session going on nearly that long. That was a head trip, but it had the desired effect. My diatribe left her crying like a terrified child, looking at her crucified reflection with a sort of grief as at loss of self. I believed that wrapped within this was, paradoxically, some hidden hurt against which the very punishment promised release. Even then, the psychological purge had already been accomplished.

  Even so, I’d committed to her feeling something in every inch, from chin to toes. I could not hold back, for refusal to deliver is the single perception guaranteed to make a submissive feel rejected. As she involuntarily contorted from the increasing frequency and severity of the lashes, she would only present a fresh part of herself for their burning attentions.

  Writhing temptingly about, she would alternately jerk up first one knee then the other, in futile protection of her belly and crotch. But I did not linger on those areas. Such technique betrays a chauvinistic lack of imagination. There is a term for a woman’s experience of something beating between her legs. It’s called routine copulation. When, on the other hand, the thongs would wrap around her body and she felt their tips bite the tender areas of her breasts and flanks, I knew the sensation was like fire. She began to scream uncontrollably.

  Grasping with her entire being the hopelessness of her condition, she ceased tensing against the blows. No longer was she straining to contain or localize the pain. Instead, she was feeling and receiving everything, letting it consume her—becoming the pain. Acquiescing to its spread and flow through every fiber, her body guilelessly sought the angle from whence the next whiplash would be coming.

  It did not take long for her tormented calves and arches to give up, and she sagged from the ropes. I hitched the array still tighter, drawing her feet entirely off the floor. Her screams became frenzied when I mercilessly whipped the soles of her feet. Due to the most basic of instincts, that of running, an assault on the feet elicits a visceral response. It amounts to an invasion of the primal core of one’s being.

  Nowhere else to go, I sat down to recoup, sweating and with heart pounding. I closely monitored her, hanging there in her longed-for crucifixion. Catastrophic as the final barrage may have felt, I’d actually inflicted no more than small welts and scratches. To my eye, she was even more beautiful, with her head thrown back in a paroxysm that exalted rather than desecrated.

  I glanced up at the corner of the balcony. Was this what you would have wanted to see, old woman? Might you be sitting there now, spectrally watching all this happen to your human flesh and blood? Can you taste her pain?

  My attention returned to Justine. I belatedly considered that this really was not safe. No one knew we were there; what if I had a heart attack right then? It could happen. When I saw the muscles of her arms and shoulders go slack, I sprang to the ropes and slipped their knots. Her unconscious weight sank the array so that she was partially supported by her dragging legs.

  I laid her back in my lap, verifying that her breathing was all right. I gently stroked her red welts and without warning she convulsed in my arms. “… not hell if you’re there,” she whimpered. I started to respond, but discerned she was still out. I smiled as she muttered something about “stairway to heaven.”

  While being worked to the point of unconsciousness is an archetypal fantasy of submissives, I had minimal experience with anyone genuinely passing out on me. Wondering at the scraps of her dreams, I thought that I’d now most certainly have to educate her—as to Seabrook’s handling of the original Justine. Also see if she remembered any of the images about which she was complaining. Maybe her ancestress’s genetics had conferred on her a similar talent. I fingered her silver manacles, remotely associating them more with the Druse than the Rufai.

  Then she murmured again, and I passed over another threshold of credulity. First I identified that indeterminate something that had marginally tainted her speech from time to time. Now it was distinctive. This Texas girl should not, even rarely, speak with an accent of the old Bronx. They didn’t even talk that way up there anymore! Nor, without reading Witchcraft, was it explicable for her to whine, like a still younger girl, “… oh why’d you do that? I wanted to see the rest of the circus. THE OLD LION WAS SO FUNNY…”

  ————————

  I didn’t move, just sat there and held her for the longest time. But, after that, my eyes never left the corner of the balcony.

  Finally, I could no longer endure the silence of the dream-club with its ghosts, Justine’s and my own. Getting her to her feet, I half carried her to the car, then went back to lock up. Stuffing her clothes into the bag along with the manacles, I left the whip and pincers behind. As expected, the old leather was frayed and falling apart. Should we happen to be stopped by police on the foggy predawn drive, me toting an out-of-it naked girl with extensive abrasions—let’s say I didn’t want to spend the rest of the morning being interviewed by social workers?

  Happily, the drive turned out uneventful, though spooky. My thoughts ran amongst a matrix of remote associations. Thinking of the old woman living in these foggy Georgia hills had mournful lyrics running around my brain, of a Civil War widow wandering through the Southern mountains. The trick was that you really couldn’t say whether it were a madwoman or a ghost, weeping there in the morning rain, who no longer remembered that the war had ended forty years before.

  Old Dixie was certainly the place for time-haunted souls. I recalled Seabrook and his advertising agency in the ’teens, which Ward Greene had portrayed setting up a reunion of the elderly Confederate veterans then still living. Someday soon, I wanted to track down what records might still exist in Atlanta to confirm Greene’s image of the agency doing the publicity work on Birth of a Nation. I’d seen that classic reactionary film in Nashville, during the same long-ago Southern tour that had brought Linda and me to The Château.

  “I’m hungry!” Justine startled me. Issuing a sleepy litany of complaints on everything except her unquestionable discomfort, she then dropped her seat back and turned away. That jogged my stream of consciousness back toward boyhood, to the ruins of a Civil War–era structure, still standing alongside a shunned river-bottom road. My parents would point it out to me during infernally hot automobile trips in a 1952 Dodge. I would kneel in the seat and watch out the back window as it receded into the heat waves billowing off the Texas asphalt. It would seem to me that the mighty conflict had been just over my shoulder, rather than a long lifetime before my birth.

  Maybe that cast some light on how I’d been touched by the poignant conclusion of Ward Moore’s classic book, Bring the Jubilee. Perhaps derivative of Leinster’s original, his time traveler had lamented, after more or less accidentally changing the course of the Civil War:

  Are they really gone, irrevo
cably lost, in a future which never existed, which couldn’t exist, once the chain of causation was broken? Or do they exist after all, in a universe in which the South won the battle of Gettysburg… I would give so much to believe this, but I cannot… Children know about such things. They close their eyes and pray, “Please God, make it didn’t happen.” Often they open their eyes to find it happened anyway, but this does not shake their faith that many times the prayer is granted.

  Adults smile, but can any of them be sure the memories they cherish were the same yesterday? Do they know that a past cannot be expunged? Children know it can. And once lost, that particular past can never be regained. Another and another, perhaps, but never the same one. There are no parallel universes—though this one may be sinuous and inconstant.67

  My reverie on continuities, or the lack of same, was hardly diminished as I eased the Del Sol through the fog-shrouded streets of Buford and up to the house. Justine’s disoriented state had morphed into fitful sleep. I was concerned that a healthy young adult should so succumb to the degree of physical stress she had endured. I felt certain that more was going on there.

  As I beheld the gay window lights through the trees and fog, something of indeterminate origin twisted in my heart. Shutting down the engine, I contemplated the drowsing girl. Matted hair curled about her face, like the photo I’d seen of a girl Seabrook had trussed up back in 1930. The colors of the lamps across her face brought back lines…

  “… the colors and the lines that trace the past will in the semi-darkness form a face, a sleeping face…” Where did that come from? How did the rest go?

  Remembering her little thought about the old woman wanting to have a light in every window, I shook myself to dispel something cold that had crept in with the fog. Of course she had a connection with the old woman! She was of her flesh and blood. Perhaps of Seabrook’s as well, it had been suggested. Of course echoes of those old selves would resonate within her being. Conventional theory be damned, we do have a multifaceted connection with those gone before. We feel it in our very flesh.