“They are and I am happy to wear anything that pleases you. But when I go outside, it would be easier if I wore a housedress. People get confused when they see a slave with long hair wearing a full dress.”
“So? They get confused. What does that matter?”
“When I went to your car wearing this dress a few minutes ago, two young men stopped and confronted me about it. They threatened me and I had to threaten them back to make them to leave me alone. I don’t think that they would have done it if I had been more easily identified as a slave.”
The professor mulled that over while he chewed a piece of garlic bread. “I see,” he said when he was finished. “I’ll get you a housedress, then.”
“I hesitate to mention it, but there are a couple of other things that would be useful. Usually the kennelmen keep slaves supplied, but–“ she shrugged “–we don’t have that here.”
“I’ve never found a need for a kennel service, not having a kennel. So what else do you need?”
“I am accustomed to having lubricant and a butt plug that is two inches in diameter. I need to keep my anus loose so that it will be enjoyable to men when they penetrate me that way.” She was shocked that she could speak so easily about such intimate matters. She had been a lady only six months earlier and had never heard of a butt plug, much less dreamed of having a man’s cock shoved in her asshole. The ability of a human being to accept new circumstances can be amazing.
The professor flicked his hand casually. “You don’t need to worry about that stuff here. You’re never going to be used for sex. I don’t partake of such things myself and I do not lend my slaves out to my guests.”
Irene was dismayed. She liked sex. She had made herself a slave because her husband had not fucked her often enough when she was a lady. “I would like to service you. I have some exceptional talents. You might find me more enjoyable than other women.”
“No doubt. But I’m not equipped for the job. I had a bout of prostate cancer when I was forty-five. I needed rather extensive surgery. The doctors were successful in excising the entire malignancy, but the operations – there were more than one – left me non-functional. Not just impotent but with drastically-decreased sensation. I don’t miss sex as much as people assume. I was never that enthusiastic about it. Not having to worry about it at all is actually a bit of a relief.”
“Oh.” Irene was at a loss for words. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Not at all, my dear. Like I said, it’s not such a big deal for me.”
She ate in silence for a few minutes.
“I …” She paused, not yet having found the right words, then surged ahead. “I hope you don’t mind a personal question but you have been so forthright with me so I hope it’s okay. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want. But I was wondering if your interest in … in subjecting women to extreme … sensations is–“
The professor held up his hand. “You want to ask if I became a sadist because I could no longer enjoy normal sexual relations with women. Is that right?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Of course you are. You have an inquiring mind and that’s an obvious hypothesis given what I’ve told you about my history. The answer is no. I was a sadist long before I became impotent. My interest in torturing women blossomed at puberty. That is likely why I was less interested in sex than most other young men. I was always able to take pleasure from more intense sensations than mere carnal pleasures.”
After the meal, the professor retired to the study while Irene cleared the table and washed the dishes.
When her chores were done, he invited her to sit down in the study with him.
“I’ve read your essay,” he said. “It’s good. I liked your description of the dull ache throughout your body that was caused by the constant pressure of the sharp nails against your skin. Very vivid. I think, though, that you could have expounded more on your thoughts as you lay awake all night. It was your first night in my studio. You had no idea what was going to happen to you. It was late and you were exhausted and I was torturing you by depriving you of sleep. In fact, you were being tortured in three different ways: by the nails pressing deep into your flesh; by sleep deprivation; and by fear of the unknown. The psychological torture was as important as the physical torture so you should have compared that to what you felt when the four of us were taking turns electrocuting your left nipple yesterday.”
“I understand. I can re-write it if you want.”
“I would like to see you expand it further.”
His wish was her command.
When he gave the sheets back to her, they were covered in notations in red ink.
She retired to her bedroom and worked on the re-write until she was too tired to continue.
She fell into a deep, dreamless sleep in the wonderfully comfortable bed.
* * *
Over breakfast – waffles with blueberries and Vienna sausages – the professor said, “I’ll be working at home today. If you need anything, you can find me in the workshop. That’s the end door in the back wall of the studio.”
“What would you like me to do?” she asked.
“Keep the house clean. Apart from that, whatever you want. Most of the time, I’ll rely on you to entertain yourself. As I’ve told you, I recommend that you become a student of pain. I have a reasonable body of literature on the subject here. When you exhaust that, you may come with me to the university and look for source material in their library. If you like, I can arrange for you to audit some classes in psychology, history, biology, and so forth that may include relevant material.”
It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the professor intended to leave her alone for the day. Her two previous owners had left her alone in their kennels for most of the time. But in the professor’s home, she felt more like a lady than a slave. As a lady, she had always had things to do. They were the trivial, boring activities that were expected of a lady – planning dinners, answering correspondence, painting and embroidering, playing the clavier and flute – but they still filled her days.
As a slave, she had spent most of her time waiting to be fucked or punished by her owner and his guests, which happened almost every day. Her days were filled not with constant tedious activity but with anticipation of intense experiences.
Right now in the professor’s home, she had neither. Little was expected of her apart from basic housekeeping; and she had little to look forward to. Presumably she would be tortured again at some point, but the professor showed little inclination to torture her every day. When she had been lost in a poker game to a notorious sadist, she had imagined a life of constant pain. But, thankfully, the reality was nothing like that. Her biggest disappointment was that he was not going to satisfy her sexually, either himself or by giving his guests access to her body.
She was only twenty-eight years old and had no desire to waste her remaining youth in celibacy. Especially when she knew that she would never live to old age.
She spent the morning perusing the professor’s collection of books. She began sampling from his extensive collection of sado-masochistic pornography. It was generally appalling – badly written, often barely grammatical, with trivial plots, weak character development, and standardized, hackneyed situations that were repeated over and over again.
The professor had underlined and annotated the various descriptions of torture. From his notes, she could see that he was as unimpressed by the quality of the writing and story-telling as she was.
Unlike the professor, she was more interested in the descriptions of sexual acts. The professor never bothered making notes about those. As she read about women being fucked with little foreplay but superhuman enthusiasm in a variety of fanciful ways, her thoughts kept drifting back to the two young louts who had accosted her the previous evening. Instead of driving them off, she could have offered herself to them for a quick fuck in the backseat of their car.
The more she imagined their eager young cock
s buried deep in her cunt while her vaginal muscles were tightening about them, the more she regretted having only teased them with a brief flash of her forbidden crotch and then sent them away frustrated. She had frustrated herself as much as she had frustrated them. Maybe more.
After a couple of hours, she was bored almost to tears by the pornography and turned to the histories. They were more interesting, if only because they were better written. But they were academic volumes, not popular treatments and they lacked either wit or drama.
She had not seen the professor by one o’clock, so she ventured down to his workshop.
The noise of a loud machine penetrated the door.
She had to knock hard several times. Suddenly, the noise abated and the professor yelled, “Come in!”
She opened the door and stepped carefully into the workshop.
It was a large room filled with wood and tools and benches. The professor was standing next to a workbench holding a machine that she would eventually learn was called a belt sander. He was wearing denim coveralls, a tee-shirt, and tan work boots. Everything, including him, was layered with fine sawdust.
“What would you like, my dear?”
“It’s just after one,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d like me to bring you some lunch.”
“No, thank you. I seldom eat lunch. But you may prepare something for yourself if you wish.”
“That’s all right. I don’t eat much during the day, either.” In the kennels, the slaves were served two meals a day, neither filling. They were kept hungry most of the time. Most owners preferred svelte slaves. “What are you making?”
He ran his fingers over the wood on the bench. “A crucifixion frame. I sold my last one.”
“To Lord Hoffman. I know. I once lost a game at an entertainment and was crucified in it for half an hour.”
“How did you like it?”
“Not much. It was the most painful thing that I had ever experienced. I didn’t know that I could be made to suffer any worse pain until you tortured my left nipple a couple of days ago. That was far worse.”
“That lasted longer. We spent almost three hours working on your nipple. If you had spent three hours being crucified, you might have found that worse.”
“I don’t think that I could survive three hours of crucifixion.”
“Oh, sure you could. I once kept a slave in crucifixion for more than seven hours before her breathing became so labored that we had to release her. The ligaments in her shoulders, elbows, and wrists suffered considerable strain. It took almost a month before she could raise her arms without pain again.”
“A month?”
“Carl devised a most amusing game. He would slowly attach weights to clamps on her nipples and watch her decide at what accumulated weight it was worth the pain in her arms to raise her hands to her chest to support the weight. Three days after her crucifixion, her threshold was almost a full pound on each nipple, but only six days afterward, it was less than eight ounces. That’s how we knew when her arms stopped hurting. After four weeks, she would reach up and grab the clamps before Carl hung the first weight on them.”
Irene wondered if her ligaments might have healed faster if these sadists hadn’t kept forcing her to put more stress on them every day.
“I’m not sure that the slave found Carl’s game so amusing,” she said.
“She cried a lot. That amused us.”
She wondered if the professor were deliberately being outrageous to upset her. He was as interested in psychological torture as in physical torture. For all she knew, he might have been inventing the story of Carl’s nipple-weight game out of whole cloth just to watch her face blanch.
“How long will it take for you to finish the crucifixion frame?” she asked.
“A few weeks. I only work in here a couple of days a week. Most of the time is spent finishing the word. Sanding, sealing, and varnishing. If it were only a matter of building the mechanics, I could do it in a few days. But the aesthetics are important. Maybe more important than the mechanics.”
“When you were playing that poker game against Lord Snow, you wagered your torture devices as stakes against me. You told him that it took you ten years to build them.”
“That was true. It took me a long time to work out the mechanisms for some of them. And I wasn’t so good with tools when I started. Which was about a decade ago.”
“You said that it would take you ten years to replace them.”
He grinned. “I might have exaggerated that a bit. Now that I know what I’m doing, I could probably replace them all in less than a year.”
“I’ve been thinking about something else.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“You won me in a poker game because you got a lucky hand.”
“I’m a lucky fellow.”
“It was well after midnight when you put me to bed on the nails and I didn’t sleep, so I was up early the next morning. But my bedroom closet had a number of dresses and shoes in it that fit me perfectly.”
“Hmmm. That was lucky, too.”
“There wasn’t time to get dresses tailored and shoes made between the time I was laid on the bed of nails and the time I got up. If you didn’t know beforehand that you were going to get a full house, aces high, and win me, how did you know what size dresses and shoes to put in my closet?”
“That is a mystery, isn’t it?”
“No so mysterious if you had a dozen carefully stacked cards up your sleeve and slipped them onto the top of the deck during your last deal.”
The professor tried to look shocked but he couldn’t mask a grin. “My dear! Are you accusing me of cheating?”
“Not at all. Just of being really, really lucky.”
“I’m lucky that I have you to torture. You’re going to have another session tomorrow.”
Irene quailed at his words. Her left nipple throbbed a little at the memory of her last session. Her right nipple throbbed in anticipation of receiving the same treatment within twenty-four hours.
But the professor had a different idea in mind.
“I’d like you to go into the studio and examine the devices. Choose the one that you would like us to use on you tomorrow.”
It was a cruel man who would force his victim to choose the method by which she would be tortured.
“Don’t bother trying to find one that will be less painful than the others. By adjusting heights and tensions, we can make any device as painful as any other. Instead, think about which experience you will find most interesting. Or, if you don’t understand how one of them works, you might think about choosing it so that you can learn about it.”
What a lovely idea, she thought. I’m sure going to do that, all right. But she said, “Okay.”
“Also, I’d like you to write an essay about your experience in the crucifixion frame. Include as much as you can remember about how it felt and what you thought about it at the time.”
“Okay.”
He slid goggles over his eyes and turned the sander on.
She left for the studio. She had a painful decision to make.
* * *
Moe and Carl eyed Irene’s naked body while she walked across the studio. She didn’t believe that the bulges in their pants arose only from anticipation of seeing her tortured so she arched her back to thrust her breasts out and put as much wriggle into her walk as she could. They didn’t look at her face until she stopped in front of them.
They knew that the professor wouldn’t let them use her for pleasure so making them lust after her with no chance of satisfaction was her little revenge in advance for the pain that they would soon make her endure.
And, maybe, if they were horny enough, they would cut her torture session short so that they could hurry home to their wives, mistresses, or slaves – whomever was available to them for sexual use.
The professor wasn’t the only one in the room who could play mind games.
He seemed to be oblivious to
her little side play with his friends. “Tell us how you would like to be tortured today, my dear.”
His wording annoyed her. He knew damned well that she wouldn’t like to be tortured. Forcing her to choose her pain and then implying that choosing meant liking was a cruel way to emphasize and mock her powerlessness.
He had promised to deliver an equal amount of pain no matter what device she chose, so she had decided to try one that she didn’t know. She strolled to a thick wooden wedge that was mounted, thin edge upward, on a sturdy pedestal. A screw jack mechanism allowed the height of the pedestal to be adjusted. At the moment, the upward facing edge was at the height of her waist.
“This one is pretty.” In fact, the device was pretty. It was constructed from birds-eye maple that had been filled and sanded to a mirror finish before it was varnished.
She ran her fingers along the edge. It wasn’t sharp; it was rounded to about the radius of her little finger.
“A good choice,” the professor said. “The Spanish horse is a venerable device. It was popular during the Inquisition. Of course, I modernized the design somewhat, but the basic principle is the same.”
A pair of handcuffs were draped over the wedge. “I assume these are necessary.” She picked them up.
“Behind your back, my dear. We wouldn’t want you to be tempted to support yourself with your hands.” The professor knelt and began turning a crank that protruded halfway down the pedestal. The wooden wedge began to descend.
Irene snapped one side of the handcuffs around her left wrist. It had been a while since she had worn handcuffs and she was surprised anew by how uncomfortable the unforgiving edges felt against her soft skin.
She put her hands behind her back and fumbled for a minute before managing to close the cuff on her other wrist as well.
Neither Moe nor Carl made any move to help her. They just watched in fascination as her tits were thrust forward by her posture and bounced about by her squirming. They didn’t seem to realize that she was deliberately squirming and bouncing more than necessary.
A minute later, the professor had lowered the wooden wedge to below the level of her crotch.
The Fine Art of Torture (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 3) Page 5