Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

After that, Colleen was allowed a bath once a month. She had to go through the water torture one more time, but for subsequent baths, she was left alone in the bathroom to wash herself—at least she thought she was alone. She was not allowed to remove the blindfold, so she could not see if she was being watched.

  Naturally, while she was upstairs in the relative freedom of the bathroom, she would think about escape. The Hookers were way ahead of her. Janice warned her that any attempt to walk out of the back door would be the same as putting a shotgun to her own head and pulling the trigger. But could she, she wondered, wrap herself in a towel and crash through the window? Would she escape injury? Could she reach safety? There were too many dire consequences if she got it wrong. After her bath, she was returned to her box.

  For the first few months of her captivity, Colleen did not even know the name of her captors. But then she heard the man ask “Jan” to pass him a small whip. Colleen knew that using the name would result in another whipping. But at least she knew something about her tormentors. She had a small secret she could cherish.

  Colleen also tried to figure out what was going on in the head of the woman. Why did she allow the man—her husband presumably—to do what he was doing to Colleen? Did she enjoy watching what he did to her? Sometimes, Colleen knew, the woman whipped her too. She prodded her with sharp objects and, on one occasion, bit her. But she did not seem to take the same pleasure in sadism as her spouse did.

  Then life began to change for Colleen. One night, she was let out of her box. Her chains were undone and she was set to work sanding a knotty burl. She had to do this with a heavy box still strapped on her head. The task took several nights. Later, she assumed, the burl was varnished and sold. It seems she was bringing money into the house.

  One night, in late November Colleen thought, she was taken to a small workshop under the stairs and ordered to take her blindfold off. For the first time in six months, she could see. Then she was set to work shelling walnuts. As a precaution, the man put handcuffs around her ankles. When her night’s work was done, her ankles had swollen up and it was difficult to get the cuffs off. After that, they were dispensed with.

  A new routine began. During the day, she would be kept in the box. Then the man would come and get her, feed her leftovers, and inflict some pain on her for his own amusement. Then she would be taken to the workshop where she was put to work with her blindfold off. During the night, her usual task was to shell walnuts or pecans. Then the woman taught her how to do macramé and crochet. Again, she assumed that the product of her labor was being sold. She was left alone in the workshop all night with a bedpan, which she could use whenever she needed to. One night, she even plucked up the courage to try the door. It was locked.

  However, sometimes there was no work to be done and she was left in the box all day. As the basement grew colder, Colleen knew Christmas was approaching, though she could not tell which day was the actual holiday. In the normal course of events, Christmas would be followed by her birthday—this year her twenty-first—and the New Year. Colleen passed all three in her box.

  Sometime later, she was in the workshop one night when the man came to visit her. For the first time since he had held a knife to her throat, she saw his face. She also saw that he was wearing a western-style belt with the name “Cameron” engraved on the back. Behind him, Colleen could see Janice. She had bandages on her knees.

  Colleen was told that a man from “The Company” was upstairs. The man showed her a newspaper article about women being sold as slaves in the United States. They were given slave names and would be held as a slave for life. Those who resisted where sent to Rent-A-Dungeon in San Francisco for “remedial training.”

  Cameron then produced what looked like a legal document. It was dated January 25, 1978, and purported to be a contract between “Colleen Stan, hereafter known as Slave, and Michael Powers, hereafter known at Master.” In it, she was to sign herself over to her slave master, body and soul. She was to do everything she was told without question. Every part of her belonged to him. She was not to wear underwear—or anything at all without his permission. Nor was she to cross her legs in his presence.

  She was forced to sign. The contract was then witnessed by the woman, who signed under the name “Janet Powers.”

  Colleen then asked what was wrong with the woman’s knees. The man explained that she had been a slave and had escaped. When she was recaptured, she was taken to Rent-A-Dungeon where she was nailed up to be tortured to death. When he saw her, he had taken pity on her, bought her, and married her, but her knees had been badly damaged during her punishment.

  Hooker then described in detail about what had happened to one slave who had run away. The Company had tracked down her family and tortured her mother until she told them where her daughter was. The girl’s fingers and toes were pulled off. Her arms and legs were amputated without anesthetic. Her eardrums were punctured and her eyeballs burned out with a soldering iron. Her hair was then braided and used to suspend her torso from a hook on the ceiling of her master’s bedroom. Given food and water, it took her a year to die. After what Colleen had been through already, this sounded all too credible.

  From now on, she was to address him as Master or Sir and his wife and Mistress or Ma’am. She must ask for permission even to go to the restroom. To speak to them, she must kneel with her arms at her sides and look at the floor.

  After she signed, a slave collar with her slave name “Kay” on it was fastened around her neck. A laminated card came from The Company, showing that she had been registered. She was then allowed upstairs to wash dishes and clean up, though she was not allowed to sit on the furniture. While doing her chores, she came across a letter written by Cameron to The Company complaining about her poor performance. This helped convince her that The Company did exist. That idea coerced her into absolute obedience. She feared for her family if she tried to run away. Nor did she want to be strung up again, or nailed up and crucified.

  The master wanted to keep her naked, but the mistress insisted that she wear a nightgown upstairs in front of their daughter. But Hooker developed a new routine. When he shouted, “Attention,” she was to strip off her nightgown and brace herself in the doorway between the living room and dining room. Then he would whip her for minor infractions.

  In February 1978, Colleen was taken upstairs. She was then tied spread-eagle on the Hookers’ water bed and left blindfolded. She felt the man on one side other her; the woman was on the other. They began kissing her all over her body. The man began to rape her, but the woman jumped up and ran into the bathroom. Colleen could hear her crying and throwing up. The man followed her to the bathroom and seemed to be trying to comfort her.

  After that, the woman was brusque with her. It was as if Colleen was threatening her relationship with her husband. As Colleen was older than her “mistress,” she found it particularly humiliating to kneel before her.

  On April 28, 1978, Colleen was left in the workshop all day and all night. She was given no food, and outside she could hear things being moved around. In the small hours of the morning, she was handcuffed and blindfolded, and taken out of the house. She was put in the front seat of a pickup with her head in the woman’s lap. After a drive of about twenty minutes, she was taken out of the pickup and guided up some steps. When the blindfold and handcuffs were removed, she found herself in a mobile home. There, in the bedroom, she was put in another box, smaller than before, which fitted under the couple’s water bed. This was where she would sleep from now on. She was allowed a bedpan in there, but she would have to put up with the stench until she was let out. And who could tell when that would be? Like the previous box, this one had a double skin. Her purse and other meager possessions were stored in between the inner and outer skins. Between the two skins, she also saw a picture of another girl with dark eyes. Had she been an earlier victim? Colleen knew better than to ask.

  If there was no cleaning to be done or the Hooker’s appetite for infl
icting pain had abated, Colleen would be left in the box twenty-three hours a day. Then in the late spring, she was given some clothes—denim shorts, a tank top, and a pair of tennis shoes. Underwear was not permitted, of course. She was then allowed out of the trailer to do some digging to install the utilities. Cameron’s brother Dexter turned up. According to Cameron, he and their father, Harold, were also involved in The Company. Harold lived in Arkansas, where he had a large dungeon, Cameron said. He kept twenty-six slaves there and enjoyed torturing them.

  Colleen was told not to act like a slave in front of them. There was to be no kneeling to ask permission, and she was not to walk around nude. If they knew she was a slave, Cameron said, they would borrow her. And that would be the worse for her. Instead she was to pretend to be their housekeeper and babysitter.

  One day, Harold arrived to find Colleen scrubbing the trailer floor naked. Janice rushed her into the bed and got her to put some clothes on. She then asked Cameron if it was not time to take “Kay” home. Cameron pretended to do so. While Janice kept his parents busy, Cameron took Colleen outside and locked her in a storage shed. Then he drove off, pretending he was taking her home. In due course, Colleen was introduced as Kay to Janice’s parents, who did not spot anything was wrong.

  That summer, Colleen was frequently let out to work on the garden. The Hookers always kept a close watch on her. Nevertheless, she enjoyed being out in the sunshine. But the pleasure was not to last. One day, she was ordered out of her box to find that Hooker had constructed a reinforced frame that she could be strapped to for bondage sessions.

  The problem for Hooker was that his family might drop by without warning. And his daughter was getting bigger. So he constructed a second storage shed in the garden. Colleen would be taken there, stripped naked, blindfolded, gagged, strung up, and whipped.

  Janice sometimes accompanied her husband to the shed to watch the bondage sessions. Colleen was suspended by the arms. Blindfolded, she could not seen Janice and she accidentally swung toward Janice and kicked her in the stomach. Cameron was furious. He took her sleeping bag from her box, so she had to sleep on the rough particleboard. In the next torture session in the shed, he brought matches and burned her breasts.

  When Janice went out, Hooker would sometimes take Colleen to the shed for a special torture session. At the end of it, he would want her to cuddle him. On one occasion, he said she could say anything she liked to him. She was taken aback. It had been more than a year since she’d had any conversation. Now he wanted to hear from his worthless slave woman. She could not think of anything to say, so she asked when he first realized that he wanted to hurt women. He said when he was five or six years old he had begun to draw pictures of women in bondage.

  She asked what would he do if someone did that to his daughter. “Kill them,” he said. So how did he think her father felt about what he was doing to her? That was the end of the conversation, and she was returned to her box. On a hot summer day, it was unbearably stuffy in there. For once, she was grateful that he kept her naked.

  Colleen was in the box when Janice gave birth to her second daughter on the water bed above. And she was in there for another Christmas, her twenty-second birthday, and then New Year.

  With another mouth to feed, Colleen’s meager rations were cut. Janice got an evening job. Hooker used her absence to rape Colleen, though she had to be tied up first and he would make the sex as rough and painful as possible. Colleen did not think that Janice knew that he raped her while she was away and she was in no position to tell her. He always used a condom because he knew he could not afford to get Colleen pregnant. On other occasions, he would suspend Colleen naked from the frame while he sat and watched TV. On weekends, Janice would join him watching television while Colleen hung there in agony.

  Cameron’s sadism began to seek new outlets. He would drive her out to an isolated dirt road, where he forced her to run, despite her generally poor health. If she did not, he threatened to put a chain around her neck and drag her behind the car. At a lake, he would make her strip and swim ten laps. He would even do this when his children, the older now two, were in the car.

  Later, Colleen would be sent out from the trailer to run around a circuit that he had already timed. If she was not back on schedule, he said he would contact The Company. The threat was enough. She enjoyed going jogging because it gave her precious minutes on her own outdoors. She did not think of escape. There was no point in running to the neighbors. She assumed they were involved with The Company. After all, they must have known that she was a slave because she had a slave collar around her neck—a new tight one that Hooker had soldered closed.

  The jogging came to an end when one of the neighbors stopped her for chat. She tried to break off the conversation, but the delay prevented her getting home in the allotted time. The Hookers were furious. If she had been a moment longer, they would have called The Company.

  Fear of The Company affected every part of her life. There was no escape. Colleen came to believe that they were everywhere, even in her dreams. On more than one occasion she dreamt that she had been handed on to a series of slave masters who were even more sadistic than Hooker. This made her all the more determined to be a good slave.

  Colleen was set to work making macramé plant holders again, at night, chained to the back of the toilet. One night she found she did not have enough material to complete the design, so she altered the design to suit the amount of material. As punishment, she was suspended from the frame with her feet off the ground. Wires were taped to her breasts and the insides of her thighs, Cameron administered electrical shocks while he and his wife watched TV with the volume turned up to drown out her screams. When it was over, Colleen found that her flesh had been burned where the wires had been taped to her.

  From her box, Colleen could hear Cameron hammering and sawing. This was never a good sign. When he let her out, Janice was not there. He told Colleen to go and have a shower. This usually meant she was going to be raped. When she came out of the shower naked, there was a T-shaped torture device he had made on the floor. He blindfolded her and strapped her arms to the crossbar of the T and her ankles to the foot. He said he was doing this, not as a punishment, but because he wanted to. Then, using a wrench, he turned a mechanism in the trunk of the T that lengthened it. He ran his hands up and down her naked body to feel the tension in her flesh. She could tell this gave him immense pleasure. He kept turning the mechanism. The pain was excruciating. It reached a point where she found she could hardly breathe and she passed out. When she came to, he forced her to beg for mercy. Then he raped her vaginally and orally. After that he began turning the mechanism again with all his might. This would have killed her if one of the straps holding her arms had not broken under the strain.

  As it was, it left Colleen with a dislocated shoulder. Eventually, she knocked it back into place by hitting her arm hard against the side of box.

  Later Colleen was dragged out of her box and given Cold Duck to drink. Then when she was a little tipsy she was forced to perform oral sex on Janice, who was lying naked, spread-eagle on the bed. Colleen was put back in her box. Then, while Janice and Hooker were having sex above, she found herself dry heaving.

  That fall, Hooker took her out on job cutting cedar fence posts. When they reached the site where the trees were being cut, Hooker waved to a big man with a beard. He told her that he was with The Company and was particularly hard on female slaves. On the way home in the pickup, Hooker told her to remove her pants and masturbate with the handle of his whip.

  The slave collar round her neck was inviting too many questions, Hooker said. So he removed it. But The Company insisted that she carry some slave identification, so he used a needle to pierce her labia and attached a gold hoop earring. This was done without any anesthetic.

  Hooker got Colleen to dig a hole under one of the storage sheds. They lined it with bricks. This dungeon would be her new home. In due course, he said, he would expand it to accomm
odate four of five other slaves. Colleen dreaded this. As senior slave, he said, it would be her job to torture the new girls into submission.

  That December, to her surprise, Colleen was asked what she wanted for Christmas. She asked for a Bible. It was not forthcoming on Christmas Day, her twenty-third birthday, or at the New Year. However, on January 11, the Bible appeared. Colleen asked the Hookers to inscribe it. Their dedication read: “A gift to Kay Powers from Cameron and Jan.”

  After that, when she had finished her chores, Colleen would get down on her knees, bow her head, and ask permission to read the Bible before she was put in her box. The Hookers gave their permission and Colleen was chained to the toilet where she could spend the evening reading.

  That year she was given clothing—mostly second-hand—and even some underwear. Then Cameron took her panhandling in Reno. His story was that he had a bet with another member of The Company that she could make more money than his slave. Later, he took her panhandling in a mall in Red Bluff. A policeman told her to move on. She said nothing and ran back to Hooker, terrified that her encounter with the police might come to the attention of The Company.

  Janice took a day job. As Cameron also worked during the day, this meant Colleen was left alone with the children most of the time. She had become a trusted slave. She was moved out of her box and was allowed to sleep in the back bathroom where the chain padlocked around her neck was made long enough for her to stand up. This was of little help when, early one morning, one of the Hookers’ daughters asked her to get her some cereal. Colleen suggested that she ask her mommy and daddy. Hooker told Colleen to lock the bathroom door from the inside in the future.

  With the Hookers out at work, Colleen had to cook for the whole family. But everything she did was criticized, and she was frequently beaten. She was also allowed to eat with the family—or, at least, on the floor beside the table, unless one of the Hookers’ parents came to dinner.