CHAPTER FOURTEEN: TRIAL BY PLEASURE - Mary's Story

 

I snapped awake with the awful pain around my neck as the collar shock went off. I had no idea how long I had dozed, nor - for a moment - did I even know where I was. Then it came back, and briefly seemed like a dream, until the reality struck home. It was one of those instants when you actually wish it was a dream, like when you've lost a loved one, and you think he or she will still walk through the door as though there's simply been some God-awful cock-up. Yes, it's all been a mistake - here I am.

Maybe I'd wake up in my bed at Bilboes, having just had a little too much wine, but the pain was too real. I lay on my stomach on the floor, my breasts pressed into the dirt. My wrists were drawn back to meet at my ankles in a horrid hog tie, but made worse through the use of iron manacles bolted around wrists and ankles, all four linked together by chains only a link or two long. I came back to reality and the pain of the manacles cutting into my flesh. I have worn such manacles many times, and for us females they are usually far too loose on our slender wrists, but these had been made specially. They opened in two halves, each the shape of a squashed semi-circle, for the human wrist is not round. They were of heavy wrought iron with a hinge on one side and bolted together on the other where two flanges met. More to the point, they were small, had been specially made, and fitted tightly.

I had been lying here for hours, the cramps working their way into my shoulders and legs, for there was no way I could get comfortable still with the e-collar locked on my neck. The chain from this was barely a metre long and was locked on to an identical collar around Monica's neck. She was secured in identical fashion, the two of us once again trapped in our grated cell in the floor.

It seemed Monica had also been jolted from whatever daydream she had been seeking to hide in. She turned her head awkwardly towards me and groaned.

"Did you have that dream again?"

"The one with the girl? No. But it wasn't really a dream."

"I know. You said you were awake."

"I know. And I was. Jesus, Mary, it still bugs me. I've never experienced anything like it. In all the pain and darkness I certainly didn't dream it. It was... surreal? It was like someone was there in my head with me. I can't stop thinking about it. If it had just been the once, I might have written it off as a pain aberration, but both times it was real. I could feel her sensing my pain. It was...comforting, I guess. Steven's behind this."

"What?"

"I just know it. I don't know how. But this girl - this person inside my head is linked to him."

"We know they must be looking for us," I said.

"Sure, but where? Even we have no idea where we are, except somewhere in New Zealand. Would they have been able to figure that out?"

"I reckon. Our girls - and Steven - aren't just pretty faces."

"But how do they find us? It keeps coming back to that."

"And you think that some sort of telepathy thing is going on?"

"Oh shit, I don't know. It was just this really weird experience, like I said. But her being in my mind was ...reassuring. In between all the pain I felt her warmth, like she was trying to contact me. Hell, Mary, you know me. I'm not into all this spiritual stuff. I can call a spade a frigging shovel with the best of them. You and I don't go for this sort of fanciful behaviour. You've known me longer than anyone. I don't make up this sort of thing."

"No. You don't," I agreed, still not convinced that the beatings, the lack of sleep and the forced restraints had not had a delusory effect on our minds. I was about to go on when suddenly one of the drains leading into our pit erupted in a spurt of water, like someone had just pulled the plug from a full bathtub.

"What the-!"

The water came flooding in and I looked around desperately to see if it would be draining out again equally fast through one of the other outlets. Certainly it was running into them, but didn't seem to be draining. In less than ten seconds the pit was started to fill up, turning the floor first into mud, then into a pool as the water rose around our breasts and stomachs. Jesus! What was Warren playing at now?

"Warren! You bastard! Turn off the damned water!" I screamed. There was nothing to suggest that anyone was even within earshot. Suddenly I wondered if this was deliberate or something nobody was even aware of in such an old building.

Monica and I thrashed uselessly in our restraints. The water rose to our faces and we arched our backs to lift our heads higher, but it was made so difficult with the weight of the heavy steel collars pulling at our necks. We squirmed about, trying to get support for our heads, to angle our heads against the side of the pit. Even then the tops of our heads came up against the solid steel grating locked in place above us. We screamed at the top of our lungs and tugged futilely at the iron manacles securing our wrists and ankles, all of which was futile. The water chilled my body as it reached the surface of my back and began to creep around my hands arms and ankles.

I twisted my head sideways, trying to raise my mouth and nose above the rising water. Monica was doing the same, her head turned in my direction. I looked into her eyes and wondered if this was how everything was going to end as we gasped for breath. I shut my mouth as the cold water reached my lips. My whole body was now submerged. In other circumstances perhaps I might have floated, but not with all the ironware weighing me down. I was breathing through my nose for a long time, straining every fibre in my body to grab those last few precious lungfuls before I became aware that the water level was slowly dropping. I opened my mouth and gasped a deeper draught of air, sucking it in as the water continued to drop.

The water torture had sent adrenalin surging through our systems, had made us exert muscles already tired and strained from extended strict bondage positions, and had added a new element of fear and panic to the pain we had already gone through. We should not have been surprised at Warren's inventiveness. He was going to make us suffer long and hard. One hundred days was three months. I did not think I could manage it, though I did not want to voice this to Monica. We only had each other to rely on and I knew she would rely on me as much as I on her. But for all her strong will, Monica was human, just as I was. Warren would be pacing his tortures so that we maintained some spirit of resistance along the way. Reducing us to gibbering wrecks after a week would take the edge of what was obviously a carefully thought-out plan. He wanted to see us suffer for the full one hundred days, being sufficiently compos mentis during the entire process for him to gain the full extent of enjoyment and revenge that he knew he deserved.

This logic should have been enough to reassure me that the water level would not rise higher than it did, but when you're locked in iron restraints and bent hard against unyielding concrete and steel while breathing in slurps of water, it's hard to rely on such logic.

We were lying there, faces in the mud, gasping like beached fish when Warren appeared.

"Did we enjoy bath time?" he asked genially, squatting down beside the grating. "I wonder how long you could manage that position? Ten minutes? Half an hour? Just how strong is your survival instinct, Mary? Perhaps this is something you should have thought about when you and Trish invaded my apartment and kept me prisoner for a week while you pillaged my bank accounts and property." I wasn't going to get into an argument over the fact that we were merely recovering the ownership papers for Bilboes that he had stolen from Monica. I closed my eyes and said nothing. "What a shame Trish couldn't be here to share this experience. But I already have something in mind for the rest of your troupe.

"And Monica, perhaps you should have thought about ending up nearly drowning in a floor pit before you sabotaged my computer and framed me in front of the world. Can you blame me for this? After what I went through in prison? I don't think so. By any natural order of justice, I would say you two have it coming. Wouldn't you agree, Ivana?"

"I think you are being very generous, Warren," came the husky voice of Ivana Marchenko.

I imagined her standing next to Warren but I was too exhausted to make the effort to look up. Instead I looked at Monica, in time to see her close her eyes in resignation. We had not yet seen Dimitri and had concluded that he was not here. We couldn't decide whether Ivana's presence meant a fresh set of ideas for making things worse, or an outsider that might lend us a hope of survival.

"In Moscow they would simply end up in the Vodootvodny Canal with nothing to identify them - like fingers and teeth." Her words sent a chill down my spine.

"But where is the fun in that?"

"Oh, the fun comes earlier." Her voice was cold and pitiless. I wondered how on earth we had got mixed up with these people.

"Just to show you what a generous person I really am, I am going to allow you a little R and R. Time out from your prison. A little pleasure in your lives. Would you like that, Mary? Monica?"

Somehow I did not think I would like it at all.

 

That was how we came to be locked to a wooden supporting post in a small room adjacent to where we had been kept in the pit. The post was of ancient-looking grey hardwood about thirty centimetres square - a major support column for a beam running the length of the room. Monica and I were back to back on either side of the post, fastened in place by steel bit gags attached to the post, immobilising our heads. My gag was made of steel bar as thick as my finger shaped like a "W", where the middle part of the letter curved in and out of my mouth trapping my tongue, and the two side bars passed along the sides of my head to be secured in some sort of clamp that I couldn't see, fixed to the post. Our wrists remained locked behind us in the iron cuffs, while the chain linking our ankle cuffs was replaced by two separate chains, pulling our ankles apart and attaching them to rings screwed to the floor.

It was not the worst position I had ever been in, but it was also a long way short of being my idea of pleasure, either. I was under no illusions that Warren would have some devious intention, and this expectation was soon fulfilled.

Crap, I thought, when I first saw the device he carried into the room. On top of a stand as high as my knee was a small vertical wheel with what amounted to a piston fixed to each side. Turn the wheel and the connections converted the rotary movement into vertical thrusts. I knew exactly what our 'pleasure' was about to comprise.

It took Warren and Ivana a few minutes to set up the gear, running a power lead in through the door from somewhere outside the room. It gave me a chance to study the place, for it was not a room we had been in previously.

I had concluded that the building we were in was a disused specialist factory of some sort. The structure was of brick and concrete and in the course of being dragged from one place of torture to another I had glimpsed old rusting conveyors that suggested maybe something like coal, sugar or cement or some other such material process had taken place here. Some of the rooms were many metres to the roof, while others were small and cramped and had old machinery still in place bolted to the floor. Many windows were broken and the place had an eerie quality, especially when we had been left alone at night secured in some particularly inventive way. The silence and darkness had been broken only by our grunts of pain and occasional sobs as everything became too much.

I had not been able to see much of the outside. There seemed to be lots of trees and from one room we had glimpsed an unforested hill with grazing sheep. There was no electricity within the building, which meant Warren had to supply his own using long power leads, if he wanted the pleasure of us being on the end of anything electrical - and we had certainly received that quite sufficiently, to date. During the night he used a portable battery light for his own purposes, leaving us either in the dark entirely, or else with just a candle that eventually burnt out. This latter option I found particularly cruel, for we became fixated on the candle and when it finally died, the enveloping night became much more forbidding and oppressive. I knew it was all part of his psychological hold on us, but such knowledge didn't make things any easier.

Now I watched with resignation as he trailed the power cord across the floor and fitted the two dildos to the ends of the pistons. The pistons were aluminium pipes that slid through guides fixed to a rigid centre shaft. I had no doubt where the ends of the two shafts were going, and tried to make no sound as he first eased one up my arse, and then the second one - a considerably larger one, I might add - into its place at the front.

Now I have nothing against anal sex, but I prefer it in the form of a male, not a machine. The same goes for the more conventional form. I knew this was going to be quite pleasant to start with, and made all the more so by Warren's fingers gently caressing and massaging my clit before the switch was thrown. Whatever had happened to Warren's private bits in prison, he still knew how to press a woman's buttons, and I was no exception. The fact that I couldn't move and or utter coherent speech had that regrettable effect for anybody whose life centres on bondage - it made the sensation all the more heightened and difficult to resist. Even the fact that this was not some cute little fantasy from which we would be released after an hour was not sufficient to quench the fires that Warren lit.

When the machine between my legs finally started, I was pretty warmed up. The pistons were set 180 degrees apart on the wheel, which meant alternating thrusts front and back. The dildos slid in and out with well-lubricated smoothness, and I found my body responding to the pleasurable sensations regardless of what my brain might be saying otherwise. I tried to concentrate on other things, but the internal tide was rising, and trying to do times tables in my head was just exhausting, draining me further after all I had been through. I did not know whether to resist or give in, nor did I have any idea how long this was going to go for.

The warmth in my loins was delicious, and I found myself succumbing to the urge to give in, to put all the pain out of my mind and surrender to the incessant, almost lulling thrusts. It was just too easy to slide down the slope and submerge myself in the sea of pleasure as the first orgasm slowly built up and eventually submerged me. As it overcame me I clanked my wrists behind me and gurgled into the gag, but the restraints were otherwise rigid and I could not move my head or legs. I tried to contract my pelvis, but the remorseless rise and fall inside me pushed me over again, this time in a more intense, sudden climax that seemed to come out of nowhere.

I desperately tried to turn my mind to the suppression of the waves of rapture rising up from down south, thinking of anything except that. Sweat was starting to run down my body as the device pounded away remorselessly. I had no idea of the passing of time. A third orgasm left me gasping around the iron bar in my mouth.

Ivana appeared with a squirt of lubricant as though oiling a machine, allowing her fingers to touch all the pressure points that only a woman knows really well. Predictably this got me going again and I only vaguely took in her look of amusement as I gurgled incoherently. I hated myself so much at that moment but could do nothing to change anything.

Somewhere in the distance I was aware of Warren on the other side of the post and stifled screams from Monica that might have been pain, but probably were pleasure. Just as I thought I might be over the worst of it, Ivana produced a sonic vibrator - the sort that look like electric toothbrushes but have an insidious little vibrating head guaranteed to send your clit into orbit. That was where I was minutes later, but the explosions didn't stop, despite my pleas around the steel bar in my mouth. The relentless intruders continued to slide inexorably in and out, in and out, enlivened every now and then by Ivana and her toy. By then I was begging for it to stop. Even a whipping would have been preferable. There is definitely too much of a good thing, and despite all the men that might wish for multiple orgasms, like King Midas's gift it could also be a curse.

Pleasure became pain, then ecstasy again, and my consciousness began to dissolve in a haze of overwhelming pleasure...