So they would have gone back to the embassy and told them – what? Probably that yes, I was dead. A car crash, an accident, a fall from a cliff… something that wouldn’t have required them to produce a body. Or maybe they had. Maybe, right now, my mother was standing by the graveside of some unknown unfortunate, weeping for the daughter who was taken too soon. Who sleeps with angels. Maybe they’d already had that yard sale.
I thought I could maybe ask the Doctor if he knew what my folks had been told. After all, if he couldn’t lie, he’d have to tell me the truth. But, far from the expansive, chatty man to whom I’d become accustomed, he might have been a stranger when he visited me next, coldly mauling me as he carried out his examination, sticking a gloved finger inside my asshole as far as he could reach, and rewarding my gasp of pain with a sharp slap on the buttocks.
Then he pulled out that penlight penis of his and poked it into my mouth, to slobber and slurp at till he reached his squeaking orgasm and, after he’d left, I’m not sure what hurt the most; the possibility that I had somehow offended him? Or the fact that, if he’d only asked, I’d have happily sucked him of my own free will, and made a lot better job of it as well.
Or was his behavior, the total
unpredictability of his moods, just another facet of the game we were playing, a disorientation technique that would keep me off-guard, convince me that I was making progress in some areas, only to be slapped callously back to earth every time? I made up my mind never to rise to his friendliness again. But if he wanted to play Master and servant, that’s precisely what we were going to do.
Penny came to me that morning. There was no mention of the last time I saw her; in fact, there really wasn’t much talking at all. Rather, we simply sat, me feeling
increasingly awkward, Penny happily leafing through my journal, giggling occasionally, and firing the occasional question. The Doctor was right. She wasn’t the halfwit I’d taken her for; behind that naïve, bland exterior, there was a determination and an opinionated curiosity that was all but boundless.
“When you’re with your Master,” I asked her. “What happens… what does he do if you do something wrong?”
She looked at me blankly. “What could I do wrong?” “I don’t know – let’s pretend. Imagine you’ve displeased him in some way. How does he punish you?”
Again that blank look. “Why would he punish me?”
“Does he spank you?”
“Of course. Everybody gets spanked.” She giggled girlishly. “Does he… does he hit you with anything else?”
“There’s the lash. But that’s only for special occasions.”
“Such as?” “Once, I’d been having tummy troubles and… when he came to me, I had soiled my sheets, and I was still dirty. Down there.” She inclined her head in the general direction of her hind quarters. “So he went away, then came back with the lash and we did that instead.”
“Did it hurt?” “Of course it hurt, you silly goose. Doesn’t it hurt when you are lashed?” Her eyes brightened, as though she’d just hatched the most brilliant idea in the world. “You could almost see the light bulb flash on above her head. “If you like, I’ll tell my Master. I’m sure they could find a bigger whip.”
“No, no, mine hurts just plenty. But I was wondering if you hate the lash? Do you like being hurt?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it? It hurts for a while, then it stops hurting. But my Master is happy and that makes me happy.” “Are you ever unhappy?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Sometimes when my Master goes away… my real Master, that is. I wish he didn’t have to. But he always tells his friends to look after me, and they always do. In fact, sometimes they’re so keen that more than one of them come to me at a time, and I have to find a hole for all of them. It’s a good job we have so many, isn’t it!”
There really wasn’t an answer to that. If she enjoyed being gang-banged, then who was I to pass judgment? There are plenty of other women who share her tastes, after all, and they’re not all locked away in windowless rooms. I decided to try another route. “Do you ever get to be the Master?”
“Mistress,” she corrected.
“Okay, Mistress.” “Of course I do. Don’t you remember, in the Main Hall? You were all wrapped up in plastic. I was your Mistress, and I could do whatever I wanted with you. That was so much fun.”
I was shocked. She hadn’t even recognized my distress. So far as she was concerned, I was just another willing plaything. Just as she was someone else’s and… I wondered. Was that what was really going on here?
In my mind, this entire establishment operated according to a firm and unyielding hierarchy. There were the gaolers… the Doctor, the Magician, Magdalene and her peculiarly inclined husband, all the men who’d beaten and abused me; and there were the prisoners: myself, Penny, Chloe.
What if it was more fluid than that, though? I remembered what Magdalene had said to me last night: what would I like to do with her? And the consequences of my not knowing: we must all exchange roles. Had I really misjudged the situation that badly?
Had I really spent so much time trying to stop them from breaking my will, that I completely ignored the possibility that they were trying to free it? Reach inside the depths of your soul… touch what is squirming inside. Okay, I didn’t much like the “squirming” part, but I could certainly reach. I could certainly touch.
The whole business about always telling the truth that the Doctor kept going on about. I thought he meant I had always to tell the truth to the Masters. When what he really meant was, I should always tell it to myself. How could I have been so stupid? I could have hit myself. Instead I had to jerk my mind back to Penny, as she asked me a question.
“What? Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
“I asked if you were ever a Mistress before you came here.” “Sometimes,” I said. I took my journal from her, turned back a few pages. “This was many years before I came here.”
She read the story in her usual clumsy style, every fiber of her attention focused on the words, then looked up at me. “Yes, but this is make-believe.”
“No it isn’t. This really happened. To me.” She shook her head. “No it didn’t. It’s stupid. It’s… it’s…” - and then she launched into quite the longest speech I had ever heard come out of her mouth, one that was all the more astonishing because it was so absolutely out-of-character.
“It’s like what a young girl would write in her secret diary, except she knows deep down that the diary isn’t so secret, that her mother reads it every day, so she writes things that she thinks will shock her, without knowing that her mother has done things that the daughter could never dream of.
“That’s why there’s a whip in the wardrobe in her bedroom, and a rubber suit hanging on her daddy’s hook in the bathroom. But when the little girl sees those things, she thinks the whip’s there for emergencies, in case a circus comes through town and the ringmaster breaks his own one, and the rubber suit is just in case the main drain clogs up, and daddy needs to go down the sewer. Because that’s what she was told. So she sits and writes her funny stories, and then she leaves the diary half-hidden beneath her mattress, and she spends all day giggling at how horrified her mother must be feeling.”
“And you think that’s what I’m doing?” “Isn’t it?” She reached out a hand, stroked my bare breast. “Now, what do you do?”
I froze, watching her hand knead the flesh, tweak the nipple. “Well?” she repeated.
“I let you do it,” I said softly.
“Yes, because you want me to. But if you didn’t, then what would you do?”
“I’d stop you.” “Exactly.” Her hand retreated; I felt a tinge of disappointment as it returned to my lap, but I didn’t move. “But then I read your stories and it’s all… I want you, and I dream of…Schoolgirl stuff.”
“But I do it as well,” I told her, my voice sounding a lot more defensive than I intended it to. Penny just looked at me, though. �
��I suppose you could say that,” she shrugged. “But you could do a lot better.”
We lapsed back into the awkward silence for a time, and then she rose. “I should go now. But I’ll come back again, if you like?” Again she was the little girl, bright-eyed and anxious not to offend, and not a glimpse of the reasoning woman who’d been sitting beside me just a few moments before. I tried to look just as childlike. “Yes, I’d like that very much. Thank you.”
I spent the rest of the day reading through my journal. I’d have to ask for a new one soon, this volume was almost finished. But I was more concerned about the things Penny had said. ‘Schoolgirl-ish’. Which my mind translated to “tame… wishy-washy….” The dreadful thing was, she was right, in a way.
Laid out before me was every significant romantic encounter I’d enjoyed since college, twenty tears of humping and grinding, giving head and getting it back.
But once I’d learned the physical basics, what really changed? The faces, the places, the circumstances. But the physicality of it wasn’t simply the same every time, it was mundanely so, like an endless series of remakes of the same boring porno movie, and the only real difference between any of them was, the star was a little bit older every time…eighteen here, twenty-two there, thirty-one here, forty-one now. And, though I knew perfectly well that I could keep the average man very happy indeed… why would I want to settle for average? Penny obviously hadn’t.
I remembered something the Doctor said, on one of the first occasions he actually talked with me. The business about St Paul, suddenly seeing the light on the road to Damascus, and how things didn’t work like that round here. He was right, they didn’t. I realized that I’d been gathering this data for weeks then months, quietly filing it away so deep in my mind that I didn’t even know it was there, like a vast psychic jigsaw that I wouldn’t know I was putting together until I inserted the final piece. Or the next-to-final piece. I still had to make sure that I’d actually done it correctly.
I was writing again when Penny returned, bringing me what I had come to consider my evening meal. She looked ravishing; she’d changed her outfit since morning, dispensing with the mini-dresses that I had never seen her without, in favor of striped leg-warmers, a suede micro-skirt that was barely a whisper of material, and a breathtakingly low-cut tank top. I wolfwhistled comically, and she smiled broadly. “My Master told me to dress myself up. This is his favorite.” She giggled. “It looks a bit old-fashioned to me, very early seventies. Maybe it reminds him of when he was young!”
I giggled with her. “There are a lot of the men around here like that, aren’t there?” “Well, you know boys mature a lot later than girls. Maybe they need a few more years before they’re actually able to do it
properly.”
I smiled. I wanted to tell her that age had nothing to do with it. I’ve known teenagers who can fuck like a dream, and experienced oldies who just fumble and fart, then roll off and fall straight to sleep. But I really wasn’t in the mood for another of our prolonged misunderstandings. Besides, I had
something else on my mind that I wanted to try.
“Penny, you remember when you were here before, and the Doc… that man walked in? And we both fell to our knees before him?” “Oh yes,” Penny breathed. “He’s so dreamy, isn’t he?”
“How about… if it happens again, if he walks in like that again, instead of us falling on our knees, let’s make him kneel before us. Shall we do that?”
Penny looked thoughtful for a moment. “And then what?” “Whatever we want. We could have him kiss us, we could whip him, we could do anything we chose.”
“We could have him…” she leaned forward. “You know how, sometimes, two Masters will both try to put their thing in your mouth at the same time, and you don’t know what to do, because you don’t want to leave either of them out, so you try and take them both at the same time?”
I didn’t… thank God… but I nodded anyway. “Well, we could give him our – you know – at the same time, and he’d have to find out how to lick us both together.”
“The next time we see him,” I breathed. “Promise?”
“Promise. And don’t you start without me. I should go now, I don’t want to keep my Master waiting. You should dress as well.”
I lay back on the bed. “In what? I’ve not had a stitch to wear since I got here. Apart from at Christmas.”
Her face was a mask of disbelief; I thought, for a moment, that she was going to sympathize with me. Instead, she flung open the closet. “Well, what’s all this then?” It was stuffed with clothing, the same majestic array that I’d been brought before
Christmas, and had assumed they’d simply carted away again. It never even occurred to me that they might have been hung away for me to wear; so far as I was concerned, the only thing that was ever in that closet was the cigarettes. And the Magician had taken them.
I ran to the dresser. It, too, was filled. “You mean to say you didn’t know? Oh, you are silly. I thought you just enjoyed parading around in the altogether. Well, I suppose that means I won’t be seeing quite so much of you in future, doesn’t it? She laughed at her joke; stopped for a moment to make sure that I knew it was a joke, then bounced gaily out of the room.
I dressed slowly and, once again,
conservatively. I envied Penny the Master who made his own demands and pleasures known so straightforwardly – I wasn’t even certain who my Master was. The Magician, I supposed, but I rarely saw him anymore. In fact, the Doctor was the only man I’d seen since that day in the Main Hall. Maybe he was my Master?
I wondered, for a moment, about the plan that Penny and I had hatched, how nice to have a co-conspirator, someone else to share the blame – and I shut that thought away the moment I heard it. Was it as wise as I’d originally thought? Perhaps I should have suggested we try it out on her Master first, just to gauge her reaction. But it was too late now and, besides, I had never knowingly seen her Master. She certainly knew mine, though.
Speak of the Devil; barely had I thought about him than the Magician entered the room, watching as I finished dressing. “You’re ready,” he said, then left again. I followed a moment or two behind him and, as before, as we walked towards the Main Hall, I was aware of the commotion going on behind all those other doors.
It no longer concerned me that I had no idea how vast this place might be, nor a clue of what took place in those other, so secret rooms. Presumably like my apartment, and the rooms where I’d encountered Magdalene and her husband, they simply held the other residents, and that Masters and slaves, submissives and dominators, perverts and policemen just rattled around their own little routines, just as I was rattling through mine, until the calendar turned up something to draw them altogether again. By my
reckoning, a week had elapsed since the last time we all came together. Tonight, therefore, must be New Year’s Eve.
The Main Hall was laid out as before, with the four great wooden bleachers arranged against each wall, and the tables and seats in long rows on each level. Unlike last time, however, we entered the room amid a throng of other people, so many that it wasn’t until I was ushered to a seat, halfway up the side bleacher, with my back towards the window, that I realized that the Magician was no longer by my side.
Looking around, I spotted him in the same seat he’d occupied last time, in a row with the Doctor and the Executioner – no Weasel. Further up the same block, I saw Magdalene and Harrison; as I surveyed the room, I recognized other faces as well, including Penny and Chloe, sitting one behind the other almost opposite me. Penny caught my glance and gave me a little wave; I wondered if Chloe had seen, or even recognized me?
The center of the room caught my
attention. At Christmas – and, indeed, on my last visit – a huge table had dominated the empty square of carpet. Tonight, a great metal frame hung there, from which three or four pairs of manacles dangled listlessly. No prizes, I thought, for guessing what tonight’s show was goin
g to entail, and I wondered who the lucky participants were to be. The fact that I had been allowed to enter the hall with no more fanfare than any of the hundred or so others here, however, assured me that I was not to be one of them. Again the meal was enormous, serving after serving and, this time, I ate with all the passion it deserved. I didn’t have the feeling that I’d simply been sat wherever I might fit, either.
With the exception of a handful of enclaves that I assumed had been set aside for gays, the guests were arranged male-female-malefemale, although there was no guarantee that the males you were given actually were male. The cute Australian guy sat beside me had barely made himself comfortable before demanding of my other neighbor, “What the fuck do you do with your cock when you sit down?” – and detailing the sex change he’d finally completed just a couple of weeks before. “I’ve only just taken the bandages off, and the thing is already flopping around like an elephant’s trunk. If I’d known they were this much trouble, I’d never have bothered.”
It was a little disconcerting, too, to turn around to see who kept kicking my back, and find myself facing a woman’s back end, as she knelt beneath the table, blowing the guy who sat behind me. He, meanwhile ate unconcernedly on, as though this sort of thing happened to him every day. Maybe it did.
Our plates were cleared away, coffee was served, and an expectant silence began to settle over the room. Stepping out from behind a curtain, four young women costumed in school uniforms skipped and frolicked coquettishly across the floor, turning somersaults and displaying their regulation blue knickers, tripping one another with hockey sticks, sending one another’s straw boaters flying. The crowd began clapping in time to their antics, encouraging the girls to further feats of mischief, before hushing again as a
schoolmaster, towering tall, with pince-nez and mortar board, strode out behind them, flourishing a cane. “Apparently,” a voice to my right drawled unenthusiastically, “they left this evening’s entertainment to the English contingent.”
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