Strange Desires

by Joe Simpson Walker

  “Are you getting anywhere?” came Mistress Christine’s voice.

  Desperately, Trevor clawed. “No.”

  He gave up. “You’ve got longer nails than me. Have a go at mine.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can,” she said. “I can’t feel anything in my hands. Let’s shout, Trevor, please - let’s both shout together...”

  “All right. Lie still. Don’t worry about it,” Trevor snapped.

  He rolled over again, and came to rest with her bound feet before his eyes. He craned his head up close, and smelt boot leather; he closed his teeth on the knot, and tried again to pull apart the hard little lump of cord. Again, it was no good. The knot was just too small and tight.

  His eyes followed the path of the rope: a single loop tied round her ankles, half a dozen more wound over it, then three loops wound between, and there another knot. From there it travelled tautly upwards, past her vast bottom in its equally taut covering of black satin and lace, up to the chain of her handcuffs. Trevor saw now that she was as tightly cuffed as him, maybe tighter. The metal had sunk into her fat wrists, and her hands had turned purple; the nails were long and were painted bright red, making a pretty horrible clash of colours. But he had a new idea. He shifted up a few inches, till he could get his mouth to the stretch of rope between her wrists and ankles; he got a portion of it firmly between his jaws, and began to grind his teeth hard.

  For an unbearable length of time, he ground and ground; but as he struggled on, he began to taste the cord’s surface breaking, its fibres splitting and parting on the outside. He gnawed harder, scraped his two rows of teeth sideways on, then gnawed again. He stopped to get his breath and looked at what he’d done; the rope was almost half bitten through. With a renewed effort he started again, and now the tautness of the cord helped; the natural pull of Mistress Christine’s feet strained the weakened connection harder and harder. Little more than the thickness of string was left, no more than a thread: suddenly the last remnant parted, and the ends were pulled out of either side of Trevor’s mouth as Mistress Christine’s legs were free to stretch.

  “Ow! Oh! Ow!” she gasped as her knees unbent.

  “Can you kick your feet loose now?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Still lying on her side, she kicked vigorously enough: her thighs pumped back and forth like hefty pink pistons as she pulled and pushed first one knee, then the other. But the rope around her ankles held fast. “It’s no good. Can’t you bite them apart?”

  “Christ, how long will that take?” Trevor groaned. “And I’m near done in. You’ve just been lying on your side for the last half hour. Look here, can you get up on to your feet? If you could stand and - and hop to the door, you could get your bag, and then we’d have the key. Will you try that?”

  It’s like asking a hippopotamus to get on its hind legs and hop, he thought. Mistress Christine raised her head and looked at him without answering. Possibly she read his mind.

  But she was as desperate as he was to escape. She sat up and shook her head, to get her hair clear of her face as best she could. Her big bare breasts flapped and bounced, and the shoulder straps of her basque dropped to somewhere around her biceps. Then she began hauling herself clumsily forward, lifting her arse and setting it down a foot at a time, wincing with the pain of placing half her weight on her cruelly cuffed hands.

  She reached the door and turned herself around, backing up against it. She planted the soles of her boots firmly against the floor, and began to push herself upwards, leaning her bulk on the door. “That’s good!” Trevor said. “You’re getting there.”

  At her full height, Mistress Christine’s head was on a level with the bag as it hung. “How am I gonna get it off the peg? There’s no way I can get my hands to it.”

  “Get your teeth into the bottom of it and lift your head. It’ll come off. Then let it drop. Once it’s on the floor I can get it.”

  “Okay...” She bent her head and fastened a bite on to the lower part of the bag, filling as much of her mouth as she could.

  “That’s it. Raise your head... a bit more... that’s it, you’ve got the strap clear of the peg... now just toss your head to one side and let it go.”

  By way of illustration, Trevor gave his own head a vigorous toss to the left. Mistress Christine imitated his movement. Unfortunately, Trevor was mistaken about the bag’s having been lifted clear of the peg. Mistress Christine tossed her head, only to meet with an unexpected and disastrous resistance. For a moment she staggered, and strove to keep her balance with her ankles bound together. Then she lost it. With a muffled squeal, she toppled, face forward.

  As chance would have it, she landed on Trevor. His body broke her fall and she rolled off him, winded but not much hurt. Trevor was knocked breathless, and a spasm of fury ran through him. Useless, he thought, raging with frustration and blaming her; useless fucking fat cow...! But then he saw an object lying on the floor between them.

  It was Mistress Christine’s duffle bag. The shoulder strap was broken.

  Not only did the bag contain the key to the handcuffs, but there was a sharp little knife: once Trevor had got back to back with Mistress Christine and unlocked her wrists, and she’d turned over and unlocked his, they were able to cut their feet loose in a matter of moments. “I always take it with me, just in case I can’t undo my own knots.”

  Trevor laughed, although she hadn’t made a joke. Mistress Christine was laughing, too. All of a sudden they were ready to laugh at anything.

  “I’ll get dressed and go. I suppose you’ll have to call the police?”

  “Yeah. No need to bring you into it at all - I’ll say I was here alone, and they tied me up and left the key to the cuffs where I could wriggle to it. You’ll have to leave me one pair, in case they want them for evidence. If I don’t get them back I’ll pay for new ones. Come downstairs with me and have a drink,” he said, catching her arm as she got up and began to reach for her clothes. “I want one before I have to look over the house. You need one too.”

  He spoke with the expansive, slightly hysterical generosity always shared by people at the end of an ordeal. Mistress Christine was ready to respond: in her collapsed basque, lacy knickers and riding boots, she followed him out of the spare room. Trevor led the way down, naked but for the dressing gown, which had come untied as he struggled on the carpet. It hung open and he didn’t bother to close it; hardly even noticed his penis hung down, limp and forgotten for the time being. He led the way into the front lounge.

  “Hello there.”

  Trevor stood paralysed; Mistress Christine ran up against him, then saw what he’d seen and froze too.

  For a room that had been visited by burglars, the lounge was remarkably tidy: a chair or two were missing, maybe, but you wouldn’t have known if you were a stranger. And it was occupied by two people, a man and a woman sitting together on the sofa. The man was about forty and was dressed in blue overalls, and Trevor had never seen his face before. The woman was Trevor’s wife, Ruth.

  “Hello there,” she said again. “We’ve just been wondering how you were getting on. We heard you yelling before, so we knew you weren’t about to suffocate. We’d have come and untied you - eventually.”

  Trevor raised his arm and pointed at the man in blue overalls. “Who’s that?” he gasped.

  “His name’s Ray Marriott. He’s a friend of mine. He’s got his own removals business. I know what business she’s in, too.” Her eyes fell on Mistress Christine. “I don’t blame you for making a living, love, but I don’t want you in my home. Get your things and get out. Now.”

  Mistress Christine’s plump face flooded with crimson; without a word she turned and fled upstairs again.

  “You’re going, too, Trevor,” Ruth went on. “Ray and his lads have sorted out everything that belongs to you, and a few bits of furn
iture. They’ll keep them stored till you say what address you want them sent to. I want you to leave here now. You’ll be hearing from my solicitors.”

  “Ruth!” Trevor gasped, “I - I’ll fight you.”

  “If you want the publicity, I don’t mind.”

  “What you’ve done to me today, it’s breaking the law! It must be!” Again, his finger stabbed towards the man on the sofa. “He held a gun on me!”

  Ray, as his name was, grinned broadly. He reached a hand into his overalls, and brought it out holding the gun. He took swift aim and pulled the trigger; even as Trevor flinched violently, nothing happened but a sharp click of plastic.

  He roared with laughter, and Ruth joined in. “Not your afternoon, pal,” he said. “It’s just not your afternoon.”

  Shelly’s Role

  Shelly’s rubber mask clung to her chin, sealed her lips and hampered her breathing, but it wouldn’t have actually prevented her from speaking. Caleb and Demetra made her wear it as a badge of submission, a reminder that in their ritual, her role was that of a silent assistant. Sometimes while she stood waiting for her cue to move, the thought crossed her mind that she’d been through this often enough to know she had to keep her mouth shut. But she didn’t complain.

  The three of them, Caleb, Demetra and Shelly, played out the ritual in a large windowless room, decorated from floor to ceiling all in scarlet. Two antique oil lamps burned down from brackets on the walls, one at either end of the room. The lamps were too small for the space they were hung to illuminate, and that was deliberate: the room’s furnishings, strange enough sights in themselves, were more than half lost in shadow. There was a chemical tank, which might originally have been part of some industrial fire-fighting appliance; taller than a human being, it stood in the lamplight, a phallic silhouette broken by the shapes of valves and wheels, with a long rubber hose attached to its head. There was an object which was recognisable as a free-standing clothes-rack, but it was hung with items that were not clothing, not in any normal sense of the word. There was a hook made of steel, light but strong, with four sharp prongs curving upwards. Fixed to the hook was a steel cable; several feet of its length lay about the floor, from where it travelled slackly upwards to the ceiling. It was raised and lowered by means of a crank handle bolted to the wall. Next to the crank a big brass lever stood fixed to the floor, like the levers in an old-fashioned railway signal-box. Shelly stood next to the lever, her hair tied back in a ponytail, clad in her costume of a black cire leotard and rubber chin-mask. She stood with her back straight and her arms folded, waiting while Demetra performed the first stage of the ritual: the preparation of Caleb’s bare body.

  Unclothed, Caleb was as naked as it was possible to be. When the hair on the crown of his head had started to thin, he’d chosen to go with the flow by shaving his scalp completely; then, by means of blades, creams and electrolysis, he’d taken the process further. He stood now, a tall, powerfully built man in his late thirties without a single hair growing anywhere on his skin.

  Demetra rubbed him down with talc. Beginning with his feet, she travelled on up his calves, up his thighs. She progressed to the broad expanses of his chest, back and buttocks. From there she moved sideways, to his elbows and forearms and then down to his hands, splaying the fingers out wide and carefully powdering between each digit. She was too short to reach the uppermost parts of his body; but when she was ready to powder his shoulders, neck and head, without a word, without even a prompting gesture, he dropped to his knees. She delved into the contours of his face, burrowing her fingertips into his ears and eye-sockets and down the sides of his nose.

  Finally, after everywhere else had been thoroughly dusted and rubbed, she gave special attention to his groin. He remained kneeling and Demetra got down in front of him, squatting on her haunches. She was about the same age as Caleb, but physically they were unlike. He was tall and muscular, she was short, slim and small-breasted. His skin was a deep pink, hers a dark, tanned olive. He was hairless, she had a mane of jet-black hair falling down her back. Thick tufts sprouted under her armpits and a bridge of hair above her nose connected her eyebrows, and there was even the shadow of a moustache on her upper lip. And where he was completely and utterly naked, she was costumed in a small g-string and a pair of knee-length black boots.

  Twice, three times, Demetra charged her hand with a fresh supply of the talc. As she rubbed, the powder settled well into the skin of her fingers and palm, whitening them; olive cracks showed at the joints. She was careful not to spill any, but a sprinkling of grains had dropped on to the toes of her boots, and rested there, like dull white stars in a shiny night sky. She powdered Caleb’s genitals, lifting his testes, rubbing his penis hard, encouraging it to stand at its most erect. Caleb grunted softly with pleasure; otherwise, there was silence.

  All the while, Shelly’s role was to stand by the wall with arms folded, looking on. She was an athletic girl and the standing didn’t take much out of her. There was no clock in the room and she might have lost track of time, but for the mask over her chin and mouth. As the long, slow minutes passed by, she perspired; the rubber met her perspiration, and held it tightly in place. By now the mask clung as if it had been backed with glue. She could only breathe in and out through her nostrils, and at regular intervals had to swallow a mouthful of saliva. The picture of a bottle of cool water hung vividly in her mind. She tried to push it away. Any minute now, it’d be time to move...

  Caleb dropped backwards to the floor and lay still. Demetra stood up and wiped the talc from her fingers. When she turned again to Caleb, it was part of the ritual that their assistant, Shelly, should be ready at her side, arms extended forward, bearing an article just taken down from the rack: Caleb’s ‘seal-suit’.

  That was what Shelly called it in her mind. If it had a proper name, she didn’t know what that name was. It was a limbless body-sheath made of heavy-duty black rubber, with a built-in hood. Once inside the seal-suit, Caleb would be enclosed from head to toe, blinded, immobilised and completely unable to release himself. It was Demetra and Shelly’s task to get him into it.

  The suit lay on the floor; face down and zip open, revealing a slit that ran down from the back of the neck to the rear ankles. Taking Caleb by the shoulders and feet, the two women lifted him, turned him over and thrust him in, pulling the tight rubber hood over his head, smoothing it down under his chin. There followed a struggle to get the rest of the suit around his torso, arms and legs, and to pull the zip gradually downwards. Even with his skin so well prepared, it was difficult. The seal-suit had been tailored exactly to Caleb’s measurements: he’d only have had to put on a little weight, or neglect his regular work-outs, and it would have ceased to be negotiable. While Demetra and Shelly laboured, he neither resisted their efforts nor helped them, but rested in their hands, his eyes closed, his limbs limp, as physically inert as if he’d been drugged into unconsciousness. Yet he was fully aware of what was going on, and would remain so. The ritual was, among other things, a way for him to practise some kind of mental technique he had, some trick of switching off his normal reflexes.

  In the silence and shadow, small sounds were magnified in Shelly’s ears. All the while she could hear her own breath, sucked in through her nose, finding its natural exit sealed by sweat and rubber, and hissing out the way it had come. The seal-suit growled and squeaked as its fabric was stretched taut. Kneeling at Shelly’s side, Demetra released her breath in short, sweaty grunts. Now and then she emitted a private noise of frustration at some slight difficulty. Although they were working together she hardly bothered to communicate with Shelly, not even by gestures or eye contact. Each woman had her assigned role to play, and each was expected to know it by heart.

  It was Demetra’s place to draw down the zip, to seal Caleb at last inside the body-sheath. Shelly helped her turn him over on to his back, and she examined the rubber hood again. It had no eyeholes, only t
wo small round holes at the nose, slightly smaller in diameter than Caleb’s nostrils, and a slit, narrower than his mouth. Demetra had to make sure that these were correctly aligned; meanwhile, it was Shelly’s place to step to the rack, and bring from it a breathing mask and scuba-type oxygen cylinder.

  Demetra strapped the mask on to the lower half of Caleb’s face; then Shelly turned him halfway over again, and held him while she fastened the cylinder to his back. Tubes connected cylinder to mask, a pressure gauge fluttered into life, Demetra adjusted the pressure till the needle on the gauge stood still. Caleb was now breathing comfortably; for approximately two hours to come, he could remain entirely cut off from the world. It was time to add another layer of enclosure: again, Shelly had no proper name for this next piece of equipment, but she thought of it as ‘the sack’.

  She and Demetra together were needed to unhook the sack from its hanging-place: it was something over seven feet long, and made of heavy grey canvas. Several pieces of metal were attached to it as well, including a valve made of solid brass. On the outside its surface was coarse and as the women hauled it about, the skin of their hands was rubbed red and raw. But within it was soft to the touch, for it was lined with exceptionally smooth black leather. Caleb slid in easily, feet first and could be pushed to the bottom with no great effort, with no risk of scratching or tearing the surface of his rubber chrysalis. A circular zip at the head of the sack fastened it shut; the zip was then concealed from view, and the seal made airtight by a collar of velcro-covered canvas. Demetra pressed the collar into place, rubbing it firmly down with all her olive fingers. Standing behind her, Shelly took the chance to get rid of a trapped breath and draw in some fresh air. She wriggled her lips beneath the mask, and broke them free; though as soon as her chin was still, the rubber settled clammily back into place.