“I understand that.”
His eyes narrowed as if he didn’t believe I truly understood, but he went on. “What are the terms you want?”
“Terms?”
“How long?”
“I’d decided on two years.”
He nodded. “And you said you prefer integrating this livelihood with your present life?”
“I’d prefer that, yes.”
“I should warn you that is difficult to do. I make demands. If you cannot meet them, then that’s a violation of the contract and I’m not obligated to pay you. I assume that the monetary benefits are important to you?”
I hadn’t really thought much about the money, even though I knew it was generous. But answering him, I naturally agreed.
“In order to be paid, the contract requires your absolute compliance with me in all matters. Understand that, because I don’t want to have you barking at me otherwise a few months from now.”
“I can’t see that I will.”
He chuckled under his breath. “Yeah, you all do before long.” His cynical amusement turned into a snicker. “One thing you’ll come to understand, Duchet, the contracts are set up for the benefit of the master, not the slave. Any violations on your part will not be missed.”
I nodded, expecting nothing less. Why this grim conversation filled me with such overwhelming desire, I couldn’t understand, but I could think of nothing other than placing a good part of my life in this man’s hands and walking the same path Rowena walked. There was no way I’d turn back, no matter how he tried to dissuade me. I sensed that Sergei felt that resolve.
“And what about the pay?” I asked.
“You’ll receive in total 100,000 culiars. 1,000 a month as a stipend, the balance at the end of the contract, provided you’ve fulfilled all the agreements. If there are some provisions or violations, they’ll need to be redeemed by more service until the entire debt to the contract is paid. Contracts are never shorted by either master or slave. For the kind of arrangement you’re speaking of I’ll require a minimum of twenty hours of your service per week. You can’t plan on that in any particular form. You’ll most likely work in the bordello, but I haven’t yet decided. There will be times when the entire twenty hours will be served at one stretch, other weeks it will be served sporadically. Actually, I rarely take submissives in this kind of arrangement any more. I’d prefer them full time, but …”
He didn’t finish his sentence, telling me why he’d go outside his rules to make this contract with me. Interrupted by a man anxious to speak with him, I was dismissed, Sergei telling me that he’d schedule the hearing for one week later to the day, a Wednesday at noon. A card with the court’s address was pressed into my hand. “And one more thing,” he said as I started to leave. “You’ll need two days free if you sign the documents. Arrange that with your employer.”
I nodded and left the bar.
***
For three days after the meeting with Sergei, I dove into my work at the paper thinking I needed to do that in order to keep my decision firm. Afraid that my overactive mind would try talking me out of the contract, it was best not to let my thoughts become cannon fodder for legions of self-doubt to massacre. Besides, my body had all the answers. My flesh needed this, my spirit required it.
The only voice I wanted to listen to was Rowena’s. Hearing her devilish laughter, the way she mocked the world with her stories, I knew she was drawing me into her from her grave. Whatever path it took to reach the sexual/psychic places she’d traversed, I would follow. I never expected to feel the visions that she reported. Mostly, I just wanted to feel the peace in the dark realms of my sexuality where I never had any fulfillment. I expected this long slow love affair with that element of me would resound forever through the rest of my days.
The paper was great solace that week. News in the outside world was frenetic, sending all the reporters chasing. Writing assignments like mine were put aside in favor of getting my editing done. That was good, since it was such mindless work. I hadn’t had a run-in with Gatov in days and I was grateful for that. Though when he finally caught up with me, his message to me was unexpected.
“I’m not happy about the circumstances, Chloe Duchet, but it appears you have a champion in the higher echelons that’s overruled the reassignment I planned for you.”
“Reassignment?” I asked. “I thought you were going to fire me?”
“No, actually I pegged you for a position in processing.”
“What? I have been out of that department for two years.”
“Well then, you can be glad you’re not going back.”
“You really hate me, don’t you?” I said seeing the disappointment on his face.
“No, Duchet, I just like annoying you.”
I thought he was serious and then he smiled, although it was not a kind smile.
“I planned to have you supervise the night crew.”
“Good god!” I scowled.
“A lateral move,” he reminded me. “Though it’s been blocked.”
“Good, that’s really good. Because I would have quit,” I said, still bewildered by the whole scene. Stomping out the door, I was left to wonder what I’d really done to piss off Max Gatov so much, and who it was that protected me from going back to the past. Supervisor or not, I would have quit, and he understood that.
Tuesday before the contract meeting, I had another date with Rowena. How she seemed to smile at my nervous predicament. I thought of her having been swept off the street with little choice of her fate, while my choice was so deliberate. She was mocking me I’m sure, her goading ways prodding me for the moments when I was about to falter. Her journal had become such a gift. When I first stole it I’d planned to take it back to Gatov, the antiquities merchant, but there was no way. It bore my fingerprints on the cover, and there were a dozen places where I’d had to tape the pages back together, practically rendering it worthless as a salable antique.
I planned to fall asleep reading her words, and I did.
11/30 - All these days since my conversation with Boheme have been so crazy. I hate that because I haven’t be able to write, though I think there is some method in my master’s omnipotence over me. For long hours I find myself naked, tied to chairs in the downstairs room, made to look like an ornament rather than a woman. My mind reels, thoughts come and go, though it isn’t visions coming to me, just useless thinking. The worst was yesterday when I wore rods in all three sexual orifices and was tethered to the wall of Boheme’s office. He came and went around me as if I were nothing more than a painting on the wall, or at best a lifeless statue. When I’m not bound for his pleasure in the downstairs, he keeps me tied to the whipping post in my darkened room. There the emptiness of my existence is so extreme, I think some moments that I’ll lose my sanity. Though when this madness becomes the most acute, I suddenly feel his hands on me, an orgasmic wave whipping through me like a cold March wind.
Only once in this time has he taken any pleasure for himself. I was lying on my bed after long, aching hours in bondage. Kneeling over me, his erection was placed at my lips and I took that rod deep until I choked from the sperm that filled my mouth. I’m aware, with a jealous streak of desperation, that my master pleasures himself with a half dozen nymphs that run about his house. At his beck and call, these luscious young examples of nubile grace, bathe him, massage him and make love to him, even when he’s at work.
The night Boheme used my mouth, I was able to speak briefly after he’d finished. “Have your other slaves been through the trials I go though?”
“No, just you,” he replied.
I could have questioned him more, but he was annoyed with that first question, so I didn’t speak again, and watched him walk out the door.
Most of these nights my hands have been tied to the bedrails so even if I had the desire to write, I wouldn’t be able to. After having had such an opening conversation with Boheme, it hurts me to find him so unwilling to do anything
except reduce me to this servile state—the purpose of which remains a mystery. Every day that passes, I begin to think more and more that his vile and inhuman streak is paramount in his essence; and that the intimate evening we shared was just an interesting curiosity for a man who wants only mind candy and confections for his flesh.
12/2 - I’m recuperating. The bed feels like down from a hundred young geese and wild birds. I rock on its surface to soothe myself, letting my mind float free. It’s been this way for nearly twelve hours since Boheme brought me back upstairs.
Yesterday, when I was sure I would be treated to the same deleterious state I’d known for days, I was instead taken to the rack I’d seen in the sideroom off his private salon. There were no fresh faced women cavorting around him to make me jealous, it was just Boheme and me.
Climbing on the apparatus, I lay on my back. A narrow bed was all that was available to support my spine, though it had been cushioned enough so it wasn’t initially uncomfortable. I could feel the desire in my belly and loins as he spread my legs out wide exposing the center of myself. My hips, half off the end, seemed suspended like a ball floating in the air. My pubis throbbed awaiting the torture that would follow. My arms, like my legs were strung out on either side of me, following the rails of the rack. Tied down, I was at my master’s mercy. My high-collared neck seemed stretched beyond its limits, but protected from the major assault that would begin. Boheme was very careful with the bondage.
Beginning with clamps, he placed ones on my nipples, others were attached to the baby soft tissue about my breasts. More still were affixed to my labia. The inner labia rings were pulled tight and anchored down so that with any movement at all I’d feel a firm tug.
“You’re wet,” Boheme noticed with fingers prodding my vagina. I think he realized that I was a mere caress away from a climax because he withdrew them abruptly. If I could have reached with my cunt to feel any stimulation at all, the edge would have spilled like water spilling over my thirsty lips. Denied, I waited for more, my body impatient for I could feel that strange state beginning to shape my mind’s thoughts.
The effect of the clamps became more apparent the longer they pinched my skin. Dull aches turned into pain, and that pain moved in rivulets, through nerve ends, feeling as if it was burning me and I could stand no more. When a clamp was withdrawn, I screamed. The blood flowing back to that famished flesh burst with pain, which brought a shock to my system. I was in tears.
“You want more, don’t you?” he said, whispering to me with such affection, the tears turned sweet.
Another clamp on my thighs, I was sure I couldn’t tolerate it. Jerking, I was instantly reminded of my pulled labia, the rings feeling as though they might tear through the skin. I couldn’t move without another new pain racing towards my brain as more clamps were placed about my breasts and belly then attached to wires that strung me up like a vine against a trellis. I’m sure the ivy that adorned my body looked as if it were being jerked about by a rude wind.
When I opened my eyes again, there was my master with a long tapered candle poised above me. I shrieked expecting an excruciating burn, though my fears were not founded in truth. The hot wax, like all the other torments was just a new aphrodisiac. Dripping candle wax down my chest, Boheme’s face gleamed in the eerie glow of that flame as if he was a sorcerer, not a man at all.
There was such desire to squirm within the bonds, though I knew any movement would only bring a fresh burst of sensation. That desire became so great, the tears that flowed were a plea for more from my torturer. I quivered in anticipation of each burn of paraffin dropped on my skin, the torture not in the pain but in the waiting. With the fingers of his free hand, Boheme carefully fondled the damp folds between my legs, reminding me of the end that would result. Yet once again, when I was about to climax, he withdrew the stimulation.
This time, however, with his withdrawal the climax didn’t stop. The orgasm trickled through me, a lovely moment before the aches and spasms returned. It was only a prelude. In some regards that orgasm didn’t go away but remained with me, heightening my body’s sensitivity to the implements of torture. My mind swam, reaching an altered state. Visions began, a stream of them in an unending dance. I heard words from statesmen not yet born. I saw the remnants of bloody battles, names like Rigor, Epsentium, and Ruel appearing as my inner self wondered who these people were? Had they even been born?
When I wasn’t seeing savagery, that pain and pleasure, hand in hand, took me on a journey through the most brilliant garden of a country cottage where the smell of roses and the morning mist were wafting toward my nostrils.
And then all at once, like wiping the slate of myself clean, like a chalkboard being washed with cool clear water, everything ceased.
I thought perhaps I’d died. And yet, I wasn’t floating to heaven. I wasn’t even outside my body. Instead, I felt myself in my normal human form. And when I opened my eyes, with my reason returning to reality, I found that all the clamps and wires and candle wax had disappeared. There was just Boheme staring down into my eyes.
“You were breathtaking to watch,” he told me. “You writhe inside yourself, scream so beautifully, I could watch you like that forever, my love.”
Such tenderness!
I beheld his face thinking that he must have seen God through me, his expression was so glorious.
And for me, such peace. Aware of my body, I still felt the throbs, the pulled, clamped and pinched places, which were no longer pulled, clamped and pinched. The memory of them lingered so sweetly, I was anxious to touch myself.
“What visions did you see?” my master asked me.
“I recounted the names, those I recognized and those I didn’t. I made a clean sweep of all the activity of my inner brain, telling him about the chaos, how Prussia will die again, how the French and the Czechs and the Slavs will combine their governments into one.”
He looked at me astounded, and then almost amused at how absurd the thoughts were. Removing all my bonds, he lifted me from the rack, and brought me upstairs. He laid with me, I think his amusement still quite apparent on his lips, though he said nothing of it. Instead, he became a lover to me with his hands combing my flesh with a lover’s zeal. Though there was not a place on my body that did not ache, I answered his eagerness with my own heated reply. As if my atoms merged with his atoms we drifted in and out of a conscious and a sexual state for some time, until at last he’d been satisfied, and we both slipped off to sleep.
Though it was hours ago now, I can still feel his hands and smell the perfume of his sweat. My flesh still throbs everywhere, and in my thoughts, the absurd pictures of a general mutiny reign like some crazy circus.
Chapter Five
The sky a muddy gray, the morning fog having just lifted, I was disappointed that this day, of all days, didn’t appear more friendly. After all, I was taking an enormous leap in my life, and I would have liked it to greet me with a few encouraging signs. The weather was not one.
A sign I did pay attention to was the lightness of my step, product of my breezy mood. I awakened happy and relieved that this day I’d be signing the papers to begin my sexual life. At the steps of the courthouse, I looked up to see not just the muddy sky, but a falcon streaming across the gray. That was my second sign, seeing that strange bird in a place so far removed from its habitat. Was that falcon me? I wondered smiling. Like the falcon, I was outside my normal habitat and the feeling refreshed me. No, I didn’t really need the weather and signs to signal the rightness of this decision, all I needed was the inner conviction, the knowledge that after years of pondering my true identity, I was now acting on it.
Inside the tired structure there were endless halls to walk down until I found Cubicle A-32. The room was at the end of the hall at the very back of the building, smelling of must as if it was not used often. I hoped someone would open the window, but since all I saw were grim faces when I gazed inside, I didn’t think it proper to ask. I wondered why so grim,
when I was elated by what would take place that morning.
“Chloe Armenia Duchet?”
There was a magistrate behind a desk looking at me over the top of his glasses. His black suit was smudged with something white on the cuffs, probably the remnants of his morning pastry. Seeing the heavy gavel beside him I sobered a little.
“Yes, sir?” I said rising from my seat.
“You’re here to sign a sexual contract?”
“Yes sir.”
“The laws require that the contract be read in full before you sign anything. You’ve been appointed counsel to advise you of any matters that are unclear to you. Is that understood.”
“Yes, sir.”
I gazed briefly around the room: at Sergei who sat silently at a table by the left wall; at his counsel, another grim faced man; and at my own counselor, a woman with auburn hair swept back off her face in a poufy pompadour, and eyes that bugged out so much I had the image of them popping from their sockets. Her dress was gray, austere like the sky that morning, the only sign of life her red red lips, thick ones, which would be fascinating to watch should they speak. She nodded to me in an official way and I nodded back.
The magistrate cleared his throat. “In the matter of Chloe Duchet, we read this document as full disclosure of the agreement made between said Duchet and Sergei Romanov, as member of the Bach Consortium.”
I raised my hand and the magistrate stopped, looking at me annoyed.
“May I consult?” I asked timidly.
“That’s the point.” He nodded toward my counselor.
I whispered to the woman next to me my question. She whispered back though not so quietly that a tuned in ear wouldn’t hear.
“The Bach Consortium is an organization of contract holders that will oversee this agreement. They would rule in any conflict, though that’s rarely allowed. Mostly they exist to give more power to the masters.”
I nodded. The magistrate, satisfied that I had my question answered, started again.
Into the Dark Wilds Page 6