The initial strike burned enough flesh to cauterize the wound, so the pain was minimal. But the terror on her psyche was recorded as a tiny spasm of pure sexual joy rippling through her body with this vile a fantasy realized.
With the branding over, Emerson whisked the blindfold away and took Daphne’s face in his hands, kissing her hard on the mouth, an anxious kiss. Bo had untied the ropes and she slumped into her husband’s arms.
The gathering on the beach was over.
The waves on the lake lapped softly against the shore, and from behind the swirling clouds a few stars and a three-quarter moon peeked through. The bonfire was no more than a glowing pile of ash and embers. This night was spent. There could be no more.
“We need some refreshment,” Emerson finally said, revived. “Let’s get ourselves up the hill, huh?”
“We’re going for a midnight swim,” Zack called to him, pulling himself and Kathy Ann from the sand and running toward the lake. Bo and Penelope joined them, while Emerson, arm and arm with his wife, climbed the hill to the house.
The couple moved through the porch, into the dark house and up the stairs to the sleeping balcony. They could hear the others splashing in the water, and still see a faint glow on the beach.
“You were beautiful, Daphne,” Emerson said to her as his nakedness hovered over hers. “The finest creature on this planet, I swear, luv.”
As he spoke, his finger outlined her nipple tenderly. Her body shook with a small tremor.
She could feel the tightness of the brand. It all seemed so strange to her being with this man, who in some senses she hardly knew. How could she survive him? One minute like a demon born in hell, the next minute her greatest champion. Could anyone truly love and revile a human being at the same time? Her doubts about his sanity would gnaw at her for a very long time. But for this one hour at the blackest time of day, she would think nothing of her concerns and accept the loving tenderness he so meagerly granted.
***
Sadie
Did you ever think that Emerson Gray might be …what? Using you, perhaps for experimentation?
Daphne
Is that how it sounds? She thought a moment. Don’t let me paint such a brutal picture of my husband. He had a lot of amazing qualities anyone would admire. I know the sexual activity had a cruel quality to it and even I didn’t completely buy his great, glowing compliments afterwards. They did smack of placating. But I was placated by them; I wanted to think he loved and revered me as much, even though I suspected that he was not quite that capable of loving. He was certainly not the only e’sHe’ He’
young man to prevaricate his way into a woman’s good graces. But men really don’t know much about love at an early age. I think they, more than women, require time to understand what love means. It takes practice and sincerity, and that may take a little life experience to get right. And some are destined to remain like little boys, don’t you think? Unable to relate on a level deeper than the physical. She pauses, deep in thought.
Ah! But back to Emerson in those early years. Yes, he was experimenting with the boundaries of the permissible. He was brutally honest with himself, and expected the same from everyone. That was why the night on the beach. Penelope was forced to admit her vulnerability; Kathy Ann stared her jealousy in the face, Zack showed her that he would never be anything but a quixotic magician of moods, and Bo got another taste of the cruelty inside him that he often tried to deny. Emerson…well, he was the master of ceremonies, the Lord of the unveiling. And in that he unveiled his monster, the sadist with little heart. I’m not sure that was a surprise to anyone, but it I think the impact of his brutal genius left us all concerned that…
Sadie after waiting for Daphne to finish
Concerned that what?
Daphne she looks up staring into the woman’s clear brown eyes
Concerned that what we thought was a façade was really all that Emerson was.
Sadie
And perhaps that seemed more likely after what happened next?
Daphne stared dreamily into space and didn’t answer.
Chapter Five
The house was quiet. Bo had gone back to town early and the girls were sleeping upstairs. Emerson and Zack were on the porch in the dark, staring out into the forest of trees and to where the lake should be. The quiet set their souls on edge.
“It’s not enough, Zack,” Emerson was the first to speak after a long silence.
“What’s not enough?”
He shifted restlessly in his chair. “I feel like I’m on the verge of something immense and extraordinary.”
“What, in your writing? You still doing those commentaries on Blake and Keats?”
“I finished those a year ago,” he replied, his tone implying that Zack should already know that.
Zack thought a moment. “You know, I don’t recall you reading anything new to the Club, I mean really new in the last year.” It sounded like an accusation.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. You ride us for great achievement and we’re making progress. I mean look at Kathy Ann, getting that novella published.”
“It’s drivel.”
“Of course, it’s drivel. That’s how she thinks, but it’s well written, passionate drivel.”
Emerson laughed, dryly.
“If it hadn’t been for you, she never would have finished it,” Zack said.
“Yes, I was sick and tired of hearing her whine about it. The woman’s too smalzy for me. If it weren’t for you…”
“I love her company, Em,” he cut him off, “and she makes love like a beast.”
“Yes, yes, I know, but we’re way off the point here. I’m not talking about something immense having anything to do—at least directly—with what I or any one of us writes.”
“Then what are you getting at?”
“This is something very different,” his voice dimmed to match the shadowy look on his face. “I have an evil in me that keeps harping at my—oh, I’d say heart, but the feeling is not located in my heart, more like my gut, my crotch.”
“What kind of evil?”
“Our sluts are wonders when it comes to their sexual willingness. But soon, this will all grow old? If we let the game play out in any normal fashion, we’ll be sitting here twenty years from now listening to children’s laughter echo through the woods and chugging beer, whilst our little wives are in the kitchen making sandwiches and talking about their latest recipe for hamburger. Can you imagine getting old like that?”
“I can imagine worse,” Zack answered. “But I also can’t imagine that being my life or yours.”
“That’s what I mean. It’s not our lot. I’ve accepted that and still I feel shoved into the role.”
“You’re the one who got married. Come on, where in the hell did that come from?”
Emerson shrugged. “It was right at the time.”
“And now?”
“Still right, I think. I love her as much as I’ll love any woman…and I’m smart enough to know there won’t be many women who will thrive on the kind of abuse I tend to heap on them.”
Zack shook his head. “You damn pervert.”
“Exactly.” His face suddenly lightened and he leaned forward, forearms resting on his legs. Through the surrounding darkness, he looked straight into Zack’s eyes, while his own blue ones seemed to leap out of the shadows cold as icy arrows. “What if, we did the unforgivable, the shocking…” his voice seemed to lower as he spoke, “what if…” he paused and thought a moment, then spoke with a chilling verve backing each word, “what if we abduct a woman, a virgin, a blameless innocent and hold her captive in the basement here as our sex toy.”
Zack heard the proposal and his eyes grew wide, but he didn’t say a word.
“We keep her blindfolded, on short rations, naked, caged, gagged if we must…We whip her at will, fuck her like savages, and train her to accept it all, to love it all, until she’s begging for more. In effect, we ta
ke our anarchy, our domestic revolution and create the extraordinary… we turn an innocent nymph into the most outrageous immoral slut…”
The frenzy in his eyes had not abated, but for the moment, he waited for some verbal response from Zack.
“And how long do we keep her?”
“Until we’re tired of her. A week, a month, the rest of the summer, until next year. However long it takes.”
“Takes for what?”
“To win her compliance. To gain her trust. To subvert the girl until she will do anything we ask of her.”
“So, you have someone in mind?” Zack asked noncommittally.
Emerson smiled. “Actually, I do.” He snickered.
“Really? Who? Do I know her?”
“Yes. You do.” His energy seemed to rise and there was just the slightest quavering in his voice, suggesting both excitement and fear. “I was thinking of that little waitress at Zen’s, remember the tart with the run-on mouth, said she was new to the city, all she had was an old Aunt back in Toledo. She was taking acting classes and was going to make a name for herself.”
Zack knew the girl. “Great bod. Tits, ass, a naughty little swish. Good moral values, Em. She blushed when you asked if she had a boyfriend, made some silly remark about being a good girl, and how she planned to remain so.”
“Yes, that’s the one. Just got off the boat with a handful of dreams in her pocket.”
“Yeah, she said she’d do her aunt proud.” Zack started to smile with his interest warming. “You know her name?”
“I don’t want to know her name. We’ll make one up. The anonymous girl from nowhere, like a blank slate. Think of her bound in chains, knocked from one fantasy life to a very different one—ours.” He stood up and nervously paced the floor. “Think of it, Zack. Think of it. She will be ours to mold; we’ll make her anything we desire. We’ll give her the life she longs for— ” his eyes lit with a devilish gleam, “it’ll just happen in a more roundabout way than she expected.”
Zack shook his head. “Hey, I don’t know, Emerson. This is the craziest sounding thing you’ve ever cooked up.”
“I didn’t cook it up,” he said with a hint of anger in his voice. “I never think anything up. It comes from way deep down. And the desires aren’t so subtle anymore.”
“You plan on making the others part of this?”
“Of course.”
“What makes you think they’ll go along?”
“I know they will. I’ve seen it.”
“What do you mean, you’ve seen it?”
“My dreams are filled with the pictures, Zack, vivid pictures, and everyone’s there, doing what we do best when we’re together, celebrating sexual anarchy, making madness real. They have to be there. They have to be to make it work.”
“You realize that we could be incarcerated for the rest of our lives if we get caught, you, me, Bo and the girls. You really want to take the risk? For us? For them?”
“I’m going to take the risk, Zack. I have to. We have to. Otherwise we’ll live through this crazy period of existence and have done not one truly extraordinary thing. We have to do it. I can’t say why, not exactly, but I know we must. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it too.”
“Well, yeah, of course, I feel it. You got my cock already wagging for it. But you’re scaring me, Em, it’s nonsense, it’s a pipe dream that could hurt a lot of people.”
Emerson fell back in his chair in a slouch. “Yes,” he sighed. “I suppose it could. But a lot of things we do could hurt a lot of people. And it’s possible that this one won’t. Maybe our slut will be a better woman after it’s over. Did you ever think of that?”
“Hey, you haven’t given me time to think about it. I don’t know.”
“Well, think then, and once you think it through, you will see that it’s the most wonderfully perverse test we can give ourselves.”
***
Sadie
You say that you knew nothing of their plans?
Daphne
Nothing. None of us had a clue, until it was too late.
Sadie
Too late, as in . . .?
Daphne
She was already in our midst. And the game was on. By the time we understood the full intent behind Emerson’s plan, we were all implicated.
***
They heard the car crushing gravel in the drive as it pulled to a stop. The encroaching night had stolen the lazy afternoon, and now the air was filled with some anxiety no one could yet grasp. Emerson promised a spectacular surprise, but they had expected him back for dinner. At nearly nine o’clock the pizza boxes lay strewn across the kitchen counter, just a half dozen pieces left for Emerson, Zack and Bo. They would probably complain.
A terrible thump at the backdoor followed the sound of the car door closing.
Daphne jumped from her chair and moved toward the kitchen, thinking that the two might have brought back groceries.
“What the fuck—!” her voice rang out in bewildered surprise, the exclamation drawing Penelope and Kathy Ann from the porch.
Seconds later— “What is that?” Penelope exclaimed. The three women watched the large burlap bag the men carried shift and contort, as if there were a struggling person inside. The muffled grunts of a female voice stung the air.
“To the cellar,” Emerson shouted. “Daphne, open the door!”
Daphne moved instinctively, and then watched from the top of the stairs as the three men carried their prize into the old root cellar. After a minute of stunned silence, the women took the stairs in a matter of seconds, and stopped short as soon as their feet hit the hard dirt floor. Neither of them could recall having ever been in the cellar beneath the house. What they saw there now only made the incomprehensible moment more bewildering.
The cellar was a meager twenty-foot square of stone walls and hard-packed earth; its air musty and damp as cellars are known to be. There were shelves and a table to their right, nothing odd in that. The room was windowless, plain and unused for the most part. Exactly as they expected.
What made their jaws drop, however, was the alarming scene before them as the three men struggled with the floundering sack of angry body parts. While the burly Bo with Zack’s assistance held the sack steady, Emerson worked at the knotted drawstring closure. A minute or two and it finally gave way, allowing the burlap to be drawn back and the body inside freed—at least freed from this startling confinement. The female body unveiled dropped to the dirt and wriggled uselessly. Her wrists had been bound behind her back and her feet and legs were roped together to ensure that she couldn’t stand. Her mouth was gagged, while one of the black sash blindfolds used in the ceremony on the beach was tightly tied over her eyes. A crop of red curls covered her head, sticking out now in odd angles, a complete mess after so much struggle.
Six pairs of eyes intently focused on the wildly gyrating form, each in their own way stunned to silence. The only sounds in the room were the girl’s grunts and groans as she witlessly attempted to free herself. The full impact of the scene was compounded by the fact that the girl and her male captors were inside an odd enclosure, roughly eight by six feet in the corner of the cellar, which looked as if it had been recently constructed. Vertical steel bars were fixed along a horizontal base that had been hammered into the floor. The bars were then affixed to beams along the ceiling, effectively making a prison cell inside the cellar. A small door opened into the space, swinging on new steel hinges. Apparently, the room would lock tight with the chain and large padlock that were hanging loose now from one side of the opening.
“Hand me the cane,” Emerson ordered Bo.
A surprisingly compliant Bo did just that, then turned and backed out of the cell to give Emerson some space. Zack joined him outside the enclosure, where the two stood in wait. The three women edged a bit closer, curious but frightened by what they saw.
“It’s no use struggling, girl,” Emerson said coldly. “You won’t be freed from the ropes if you fight an
d when you’re freed you’ll still be imprisoned.”
She seemed to freeze with fear hearing the sound of Emerson’s voice, and feeling the tip of his cane as it made a gentle journey around her body.
“It’s okay. There’s really nothing to be afraid of.”
The girl made some grunting reply. Her response was not surprising, although her response to Emerson’s teasing cane was curious. Her body seemed to jump with life every time the tip nudged a leg, or arm, or a thrust-out breast, as if she were quaking erotically, which she couldn’t possibly be doing. Not yet.
Emerson continued prodding her with a delicate touch and, in time, the cane’s movement seemed to calm her.
“You’re going to be just fine,” he spoke again, “and I promise, you won’t be hurt, as long as you cooperate.” He tapped her thigh with the cane for emphasis. “Your time with us will become the outstanding moment of your life, the singular experience on which the rest of your life will hinge. The fulcrum between the time before with its wasted, useless years, and the time after, which will be more amazing than you ever could imagine.”
It was unlikely that the bound girl or her audience understood what Emerson meant by what he said. But his soothing tones seemed to lower the anxiety of the entire room until they were all seeming to breathe in unison with him. That was the sort of spell Emerson could cast. His five friends understood this. They had been mesmerized by him before and should know better, but once again, just like the girl, they succumbed to his words and the promise behind them.
“We mean you no harm; in fact quite the opposite,” he continued, circling her immobile form. “It is my intention to bring you to an ecstasy of body and spirit you would never have imagined. You are in a crucible of great possibility. Don’t despair and do not lose hope. It will not last forever.”
The Abduction of Veronica X Page 5