Excerpt from “The Naked Appeal”

 

Chelsea looked into the anxious, hopeful faces of the five other women about her as they huddled shivering slightly in the wings of Kingsmead’s small Riverside Theatre waiting to be called back out on stage. Beside herself, there was Tammy, Rona, Jill, Karen and Blanch.  They were cold because they were dressed only in bikinis with high heeled shoes and rosettes like wrist-corsages with their first names on.  It was not the ideal dress for the un-heated backstage of a provincial theatre in England.  But actors put up with such discomforts for the sake of their craft. 

Well, if she was perfectly honest, they weren’t real actors, Chelsea admitted to herself.  They were more part-time models and theatrical hopefuls with acting aspirations and more looks than talent.  But they had made it this far...

‘They did say they were casting six parts, didn’t they?’  Tammy asked anxiously.

‘Yeah, six,’ Rona assured her.

‘I’m trying to think where I’ve seen him before,’ Jill said. ‘Anyone know what films he’s made?’

‘Wasn’t it that factory workers human rights documentary?’  Karen said doubtfully.

‘I thought it was something set in medieval China,’ Blanche suggested.

They were auditioning for a film set during a 1970’s beauty pageant with the working title: The Flesh Game.  Hence the swimsuits and the dated hairstyles some of them had adopted to look the part.  They had spent a couple of hours as members of an ever diminishing group of bikini-clad women, strutting about on stage, twirling and pouting.  They wouldn’t be the leads in the film, but they were promised speaking roles if they were successful.  Between them they had all attended hundreds of such auditions, Chelsea thought, most of which had led nowhere.  But this one felt different somehow…

‘Can you come back on stage, please,’ Griffiths, the audition manager, called out.

They paraded back out onto the small stage and stood in the spotlights, peering out into the gloomy auditorium and a lean man in his early forties man seated in the third row of the stalls.  He wore a dark suit, gloves and wraparound dark glasses and had slicked back hair and a saturnine beard.  He was Ben Christensen: the director of The Flesh Game, and at that moment he was the most important person in their universe.

Seated beside Christensen was the second of his assistants, also dark suited and wearing glasses, but much bulkier in build with a full beard.  Chelsea had heard him called “Lang”.  He had been taking notes as they had assessed the girls, pairing the initial fifty plus hopefuls who had attended down to the final half dozen, and had relayed Christensen’s stage directions.  So far, Christensen had said nothing directly to them.  But there was an inner intensity about him, as if this really mattered.  Chelsea felt her heart lift.  Perhaps this would be her big break… 

As the women watched them conversing in low tones, Griffiths carried a small table out onto the stage and set it down in front of them.  He was built on the same lines as Lang, and also wore dark glasses with a full moustache and sideboards.   There was a bottle of mineral water and a row of six paper cups set out on the table.  Griffiths opened the bottle and poured equal measures out into the cups.

‘This is the scene when your characters forget the rivalry that’s almost destroyed them and come together,’ Lang said.  ‘In the film those will be glasses filled with vodka.  We want to see you clink them together, then raise them in a toast and say: “‘Fuck the lot of them!  Here’s to us!’”.  You drink them down in one gulp, smash them on the floor and then hug and kiss each other and cry with joy, because you know you’re free from the flesh game at last.  Right… Action…’

As they had been directed, they each took up a cup and pretended to clink them together.  They spoke their lines with feeling, downed the water in one and then threw the cups to the floor.  Deliriously they hugged and kissed each other.  As Chelsea embraced the soft, warm bodies, she felt several pairs of nipples standing up in barely concealed excitement.  This was it…

‘Thank you… that’s all we need to see…’ Lang called out.

Still linked arm in arm, the women turned anxiously to face the auditorium.

For the first time, Christensen rose and spoke directly to them.  ‘I’m pleased to say that you are all exactly what I’ve been looking for,’ he said with a kind of intense passion that sent a shiver through Chelsea’s spine.  ‘You will be in my next production.  In fact, I can promise all of you featured roles…’

While the other girls whooped in excitement, Chelsea felt dizzy with delight…

Actually, she was just feeling dizzy… she was suddenly sweating despite the chill… her legs were turning to rubber…

Chelsea sank to the floor shaking her head to try to clear it.  How could she get ill now?  Then, through rapidly misting eyes, she saw the other girls were also staggering about and dropping to their knees.  What was wrong with them?

Everything was getting dark… the curtain was coming down… and somebody was laughing…

* * *

Chelsea woke with the feel of warm bare flesh all around her.  After a few moments she realized that her head was pillowed on a bare female breast.  It was not an unpleasant sensation but to her sluggish mind, it seemed wrong somehow.  Was she still in the theatre?

As awareness gradually returned, she found that for some reason her arms were twisted awkwardly behind her back and there was something plugging her mouth.  There were stirrings about her as the jumble of flesh in which she nestled began to move.  She heard mumbles and moans and muffled voices filling with panic. 

Chelsea willed her gummy eyes open and looked blearily about her.

She was inside a low barred cage about a metre high and large enough to take three single mattresses laid out side by side.  On these were sprawled, squirming and wriggling, the rest of the girls from the audition. 

They were all stark naked, their mouths were plugged by rubber ball gags and they had belts buckled about their waists to which were hooked the cuffs locked about their wrists that confine their hands to the small of their backs.  As they stirred, there came the clink and rattle of chains.  They each had rubber-lined metal collars locked about their necks.  Large shiny metal tags like dog tags hung from the front rings of the collars with their first names stamped on them.

From their collars, slack chain leashes curved up to the roof of cage, gathering together as they rose, until they passed through a gap between the bars.  Their handles were hung on a bracket of six hooks on top of the centre of the cage and set above a slot between the bars leading to the cage’s single small door.

Chelsea saw fear and panic filling the eyes of the other women as they blinked and stared at each other in disbelief and dismay and felt its stomach-clenching grasp take hold of her as well. What had happened to them?  Where were they?   She struggled onto her knees, swaying unsteadily as her hair brushed the roof of the cage, and peered out though its bars.  The others joined her in a press of bare flesh.

There was not much to see.  The cage sat in a stone-walled room painted with peeling whitewash and with a worn stone slab floor and a high-set window comprised of three leaded panels separated by stone mullions with bars across them.  A pile of pillows and duvets were stacked in a corner.  A tall wide black curtain hung across one side of the room, closing it off from some larger space beyond. 

There were fresh whimpers of fear.  Rona began to push against the cage door with her shoulder, trying to make it open, while Tammy and Karen started to twist and tug on the leash chains clipped to their collars.

Then the curtain parted and Christensen, Griffiths and Lang strode through it.

They still wore their wraparound sunglasses, but they had removed their jackets and rolled up their sleeves.  Griffiths and Lang’s shirts were now open at the neck, while Christensen now wore a clerical dog collar.  All three of them carried what looked like oversized flyswatters, with chunky handles and thin solid rubber blades instead of an open mesh, crossed by bare electric wires. 

At the sight of them the women shrank away against the further walls of the cage, trying ineffectively to cover themselves up with their knees and thighs.  Chelsea felt her cheeks burning in embarrassment even as her stomach churned with fear.

Christensen laughed. ‘It looks like our sleeping beauties are awake at last,’ he commented to his companions.  ‘I’m sure they’re full of questions, but first they must have a lesson in obedience…’

Christensen unlocked the cage while Griffiths and Lang hauled on the leash chains dangling from the rack of hooks above it.  A violent jerk on her collar pulled Chelsea off her knees and she joined the whimpering, squirming, tangle of bare flesh as the women were dragged by their necks one by one out of the cage’s small doorway, which was just large enough for them to pass through with their heads bowed.  As they emerged, they were grabbed by the hair and hauled onto their feet and then pushed face forward across the top of the cage so that their bare breasts ground against its bars and then slid between them.  Griffiths and Lang took up the slack in their leashes and refastened them to the row of hooks along the top of the cage, holding them in position.

When they were all doubled over one side of the cage, presenting their captors with a row of bare trembling buttocks, Christensen stroked the blade of his paddle across their posterior cheeks and suddenly they froze in dread.

‘While you are in our power, you will do what you’re told without question or hesitation,’ he told them.  ‘This is an electric spanking paddle.  It can inflict great pain without doing any permanent physical damage.  It is just a taste of the pain you will feel if you disobey us…’ 

And, taking up their positions, the three men mercilessly beat the six women with their electric paddle blades. 

Chelsea screamed and sobbed along with the rest as the blades smacked against their buttocks, sending ripples through their flesh, while echoes of the impacts rang back from the hard stone walls.  The rigid side of the cage was jammed against their hips and stomachs so there was no escaping the full power of the blows.  The smack of the rubber was bad enough by itself, but it was enhanced tenfold by the sharp crackle and stab of pain that the electric wires inflicted.  They seemed to have a physical might all of their own, hammering into their helpless posteriors and making their muscles spasm wildly.

Their bare breasts dangling through the roof bars of the cage jerked and bobbed about as they flinched and squirmed, while tears from their streaming eyes dripped onto the mattress.  Chelsea sobbed and bit on her gag ball as the echoes of their screams filled the air and mingled with the relentless crack and smack of rubber on soft female flesh.

The beating must have lasted a minute, although it felt far longer.  Then the three men rested their paddles and examined the burning row of buttocks before them, now tinted a blazing scarlet.  The questing fingers slid between their sore cheeks and investigated the clefts of their sex mouths.  The women snivelled and moaned at their intimate touch, but they were too numb with shock to resist it.

‘Are you going to be good girls?’ Christensen asked them.

Dazed and cowed by their beating, they nodded fearfully.

‘Will you do everything we tell you without question?’ he asked.  As he did so, he rubbed the edge of his electric paddle blade between their thighs so that it cut up into the clefts of their pussies.

Whimpering they nodded again.  Even though such subservience appalled her, at that moment Chelsea didn’t have the courage or strength to defy him.  And so she nodded meekly along with the rest.

‘Good.  Now I’m going to show you where you’ll be working and explain what you’re going to do here…’ 

Griffiths and Lang unhooked their leashes from the top of the cage and pulled the women upright.  They clipped the ends of their leashes to the backs of the collars of the woman in front of them until they were formed up into a coffle.  Christensen took up the end of the lead leash, while Griffiths and Lang followed on behind.  Stumbling slightly and whimpering as each step tugged on the sore flesh of their burning bottoms, the six naked women were led through the heavy black curtain...