Party Piece

Part 2.

I’d never been fond of auctions. I hated the damn things, loathed them, if I’m honest. Patricia, of course, loved them. My wife had the competitive spirit I lacked. The more intense the bidding, the more she enjoyed the battle, especially when ‘the boys’, some professional types from ‘the trade’, were around and bidding! I had attended more than a few with her while furnishing our home. Not the cheap house-clearance auctions full of broken or unwanted tat that the deceased’s relatives were eager to get rid of, but the more upmarket ones searching for pictures, period furniture, and silverware. Patricia had a passion for antique silver that I could never quite understand. It was expensive, blackened or discoloured at the slightest chance, and then took ages to clean. Plus, the so-called ‘decent’ pieces were always horrendously costly, not to mention often ugly to my inexperienced eye.

It was in the back of a nearly empty auction room, a few months into our marriage, that we had our first major argument. It was the first, but certainly not the last, time my wife would call me a ‘useless wimp’ in an overly loud, angry whisper! We were on holiday, exploring the West Country, and stopped in one of those historic market towns in Cornwall that no longer held a weekly market. Instead, the central space opposite the town hall had become a car park for tourists visiting the many cafés, Olde Worlde tea shops, and numerous antique shops. By an unfortunate chance, two of the larger shops were holding auctions that afternoon, and both featured a selection of dreadful paintings and tarnished silver that immediately caught my wife’s eye.

Long story short, Madam attended one venue and managed to acquire half her targeted ‘bargains’, despite several predatory traders being present. I was given a list of lot numbers and dispatched to the smaller of the two events, the one with fewer attendees—mostly curious locals, tourists and amateur punters. Even with that very mediocre opposition, I still managed to acquire only one item from her list. As usual, I jumped in too early and then wimped out too quickly during the bidding—the foolish coward that I was, lacking her confident knack for dominating the competition. Even the one minor item I did manage to buy wasn’t an acceptable peace offering. The scornful words ‘How much?’ seemed to echo in my ears for days. It felt like I couldn’t win either way—perhaps an early warning of what was to come in our relationship.

Unlike Patricia, I derived no pleasure from the initial rummage and search for hidden treasures among the general dusty rubbish, nor from the thrill of the chase or from assessing the commercial competition at an auction. Similarly, I took no satisfaction in the final cut and thrust of the bidding war, nor even on those rare occasions when I secured a piece. That smug sense of victory, of satisfaction most ‘amateur’ buyers displayed at the hammer's irrevocable fall, eluded me.

I attribute some of this to the fact that, personality-wise, I was quite a shy and self-conscious person, and it was impossible to remain a wallflower at a fast-paced auction when all eyes were on you as a bidder. Considering all that, it was very ironic that, despite my best efforts to avoid the damn things, I should end up participating in one in a way I could never have imagined. Lot Number 4, the late addition to the non-existent House of Danvers auction catalogue, was seemingly the highlight of the evening for those perverts still present and sober.

Now I was alone in an empty room, embarrassingly clad, a gag in my mouth, secured to a metal frame on a raised podium. Sold, would you believe! Sold to the highest bidder, like one of Patricia’s silver snuff boxes or some other piece of useless antique crap. Alone but not alone, for I could hear laughter and voices from the adjoining room, where those observing or participating in the bizarre auction had decamped. Old man Danvers had suggested a brief adjournment for late-night nibbles and refreshments before the evening’s grand finale. He’d glanced in my direction as he made that announcement, and I hadn’t liked that look, not one bit, nor the giggle that came from my wife, sitting in the front row next to Douglas Armstrong,  Mister fucking masculinity himself, the treacherous bitch!

No, I was not a fan of auctions; I avoided them like the plague, but my luck had seemingly run out tonight. Not only could I not avoid this one, but I’d unwittingly become the main attraction in this crazy, ongoing charade! Nor could I voice my objection to the proceedings, with the vast red object wedged in my mouth. That had been done earlier by Danvers’s bitch of a daughter, the friend of ‘Miss Hannah’, moments after I’d been delivered to that horrible nightmare stable, and that was only the start of my induction into a new and terrifying reality!

I was sadly mistaken if I expected my recent sale to person or persons unknown via this incredible auction to be the crowning event of the nightmare evening. The subsequent coronation they’d planned for me exceeded anything my now fully rational but disbelieving mind could have imagined!

*****

It had stopped raining, I noted absently as the huge Yank effortlessly carried me through the last of several doors into the cold, damp night air. I’d given up kicking him, partly because it had no effect and partly because my transporter had growled that if I kept it up, he’d rip my balls off. Then he’d laughed and added that it wasn’t like I’d be needing them again anyway.

The stable was a large, modern brick building with a brightly lit interior. It also stank. Stank to high heaven, I thought. There was a smell of hay and animals, of leather harness and sawdust, but these were overlaid with other, more obnoxious odours, piss, shit, and stale, unwashed bodies, and worse, perhaps? An unpleasant, invisible miasma assailed my senses the moment we entered.

Over on one side, I saw those two farm women talking to a young girl, one of the ones who’d been torturing that poor guy in the cage earlier. The three of them were standing around a fourth woman. I was carried over, just like a fresh sack of hay, for a feeding trough.

“Brought the bitch over like your mum said, Miss Hannah,” the man mountain growled in that deep Southern accent. “Where do you want her put?”

The girl turned to look at me. God, she was a little beauty, about nineteen or twenty, with long golden hair and the sort of face that only ever needs the lightest dusting of make-up. I guessed she was almost the spitting image of her mother at that age, but her eyes were those of the older woman I’d just left. Blue, hard and cruel. Eyes that froze you to the bone.

“Thank you, Orlando. Down there towards the other end, use the ratchet hoist, string it up, please. I’ll get around to her shortly.” She looked at her chunky Apple wristwatch. “Plenty of time still before they will want it on the block.”

The big bastard grunted, turned, and walked halfway towards the far end of the building, then abruptly dropped me to the floor like a sack of vegetables. Before I could react, he stooped to grab an arm, snapped what looked like a single handcuff onto my wrist, then did the same with the other. He bent and yanked my shoes off, one, two, tossing them carelessly aside, laughing as I vainly kicked out at him. A moment later, he was winding some ratchet winch, and I found myself dangling, suspended by my wrists with only the front of my feet touching the ground, which gave me something else to think about. It was painful. It was also bloody terrifying.

“There ya go, honey,” he drawled, patting me on the cheek. “Hey, if Lady Danvers hadn’t already got plans for you, Sweetie, I might have put in a bid or two myself”

The guy was fucking huge, gigantic. Even dangling as I was at full stretch, with the balls of my feet just touching the dirt floor, he still seemed to tower over me. He paused for a second. A pink tongue ran over his fat lips, and then a hand the size of a shovel reached around to fondle and squeeze my left buttock, not too gently.

“Can’t complain about ma pay here, but ah aint in the same league as the folks back there,” he whispered, lowering his face to mine. “Pity, otherwise, as I say, I’d be tempted to bid on a cutie like you, baby.” He then roared with laughter, gave me a playful slap on the behind, and took himself off, still chuckling and muttering under his breath.

I was terrified. An icy feeling that chilled me to the bone, the fog that had clouded my brain, had been replaced by a cold, hard realisation of an unpleasant nature. This wasn’t some bizarre party game, some over-the-top fetish fancy-dress party. Awareness was finally dawning; despite the degree of incredulity, I’d already exhibited and still partly felt. There was something else as well, that drink Patricia had thrust at me as I mooched down the stairs, such an unaccustomed gesture, particularly given the mood she was in!

Everything was unbelievable, yet I realised this was a genuine, for-real fuck-crazy situation. Not only was my wife mixed up in it, but the… crazy bitch had somehow got me involved. All that talk just now from what’s-her-face, the crazy Danvers woman, about me, the office, and that prick Armstrong. Shit, was that for real, too? No way?

Embezzlement, the evil old bitch had said. No! No, I thought. Who would believe that? Would anyone who knew me believe it? I was scrupulously honest, too honest. My only fault in that direction, if any, was naiveté. I froze mid-kick, trying to get both feet firmly on the ground. Christ, my arms were hurting, and I could barely touch the floor with my toes. Fuck, this was crazy. I opened my mouth to shout to that group of women further down, but something stopped me for the moment.

Jeez, this was fucking ridiculous, and even as I squirmed, more sobering thoughts about the office came to mind. Naiveté and laziness. How much time had I put in recently? How many times had I skived off or passed ‘the parcel’ to a colleague, the ‘hot potato’ I was too lazy to deal with? I shivered. I remembered some of the hostile looks flashed in my direction when I did put in an appearance… late! Marrying the boss’s daughter, yeah, maybe I had been back-pedalling somewhat ever since!

Shit. I thought. Shit and shit and shit! Just who the hell knew me anyway? We’d recently downsized the office, hadn’t we, pending a big restructure and an enhanced IT department. Patricia had been the main instigator, doing all the planning and recruitment. It had all made sense at the time, hadn’t it? Sound financial sense if we were to outgrow the rather antiquated operating style from her father’s era.

I dangled in my bonds, feet still scrabbling but momentarily oblivious to everything bar my immediate thoughts. We’d even relocated to a cheaper place, with better facilities, more modern, and nearer to home. Less of a damn commute. It had meant downsizing a lot of the old staff, preparatory to replacing them with new skill sets. Still, we’d been generous, very generous, with redundancy payments—no complaints, except from me about the cost. No bad will, and many of them were older employees who’d taken advantage of the generous company pension set up by Patricia’s father and were reluctant to extend their own commutes to the new building.

New faces. Lots of new faces who hardly knew me. The boss’s husband, rarely seen, too damn busy making new contacts - out at the nineteenth hole! He knew the office gossip only too well. Shit and sugar! That bitch of an office manager, Sarah, that fucking wrinkled, sour-faced, virginal religious nutter! Shit and sugar, that bitch had been with the firm since the dawn of time, ultra-loyal to father then daughter, and she hated him, didn’t she? Polite, subservient, but always with barely concealed contempt for the interloper, the one who wasn’t really one of them, marriage notwithstanding. Christ, Mister fucking masculinity had charmed the bitch on his very first day, hadn’t he? And if she had his resignation letter and the slightest hint of wrongdoing on his part. Shit, shit and fucking sugar lumps!

“Hey!” I yelled as the pain in his wrists brought him back to full awareness of his situation. “Hey, hey, you lot, hey, let me down, damn you. This isn’t funny, you know, hoy!”

So far, in my indignation and outrage, plus everything else, I had not paid much attention to my surroundings. Now, with the sudden onset of total panic, I directed my shouts towards the group of women standing at the other end of the long building. Four of them turned towards me. One didn’t. Two girls were from the entrance hall, one of them presumably his host's daughter. The other pair were the women who had had that bizarre conversation, which had barely registered with me while I stood, seething, next to Lady Antonia. Something about farming, ploughing, horses, or whatever. As if that had been important!

“I’ll deal with it”, the other young girl said and walked towards me.

“Thanks, Tiff”, Hannah replied. “Just shut it the fuck up, don’t mark it though, it’s supposed to be totally fresh when it goes upstairs later!”

“K, I know the drill, sweetie”, Tiffany tossed back over her shoulder.

“Hurry up,” I shouted impatiently at the sexy young blonde girl, who was approaching and taking her sweet damn time about it, too. “Come on, you lazy bitch, move it. This is hurting my arms for Christ’s sake. I don’t find this very funny. The fucking joke’s gone way too far already!”

She might have been amused, but I certainly wasn’t. I saw a brief look of surprise, then amusement, flicker across her face, but other than that, she paid me no heed, passing behind me and disappearing. A moment later, I heard her boots scrunching in the dirt behind me, and once again she ignored me, walking straight past, swinging something red in her hand.

“Hey, hey, you missy!”

The girl picked up a small step stool from the opposite side and returned, placing it directly in front of me. She climbed the three steps until she stood on the non-slip rubberised top, looking down at me as I drew breath for another angry tirade.

“Missy?” she queried, rapping the top of my head hard with her knuckles.

“Fuck, hey, quit it. That bloody well hurt!” I yelled.

“Poor boy,” she sneered in a supposedly soothing tone that wasn’t. “Sarcastic, yes; soothing, no!” “Just a teeny, little love pat on the bonce, and you’re already complaining. You’re not going to be much fun, are you?” she giggled. “Then again, maybe you will be!”

“For God’s sake, this is hurting me. Who the hell allowed that bloody great thug to do this?” I snarled indignantly. “Look, I told Lady whatnot back there, I’m not playing, not interested. This isn’t my fucking scene, for Christ’s sake! This isn’t my thing; I tell you so, please get that through your fucking lame-brained heads! NOT MY THING!  So you, Miss whoever the hell you are, just let me down NOW! Go on, or I’ll have the fucking law come down on you like a ton of bricks!”

I glared at her in raging anger, almost stumbling over my words in my haste to spit them out. I glared up, seething, to meet a pair of calm, clear, cool, grey, green, youthful eyes that looked down at me with… with what? Amusement, yes, amusement. The bitch found this funny. Amusement and something else. Certainly, there was no hint of warmth to accompany it. If anything, there was… contempt? It certainly wasn’t a concern for her or me. Nor was it fear of any consequence. Certainly, no look of alarm or apology!

A sudden spasm shook me, and I shivered as I dangled there, desperately trying to let my toes take some of the weight off my over-stretched arms. Fear, real fear. I was the one afraid, suddenly terribly afraid. That look, my situation, this whole crazy evening. Where the hell had my mind gone? My arms hurt like hell. I shook my head again and again. That image flashed into my head, and a voice, my wife’s voice. ‘Here, drink this if you are so het up. It will calm you down before we set off. Go on…… bitter, bitter taste!’

The girl raised a black leather-gloved hand to wipe some of my flying spittle from her cheek slowly. She looked at it with sour distaste, then wiped it on my hair. “Not nice, not nice at all,” she told me with a thin smile. “And as for the law, then they’re already here, some of them anyway, for the party. At least two members of parliament, one senior cabinet minister. Oh, and we shouldn’t forget my Uncle Bob. He’s not in uniform, but he’s the Deputy Chief Constable hereabouts. That’s kinda like a general in the army, if you didn’t know. A very senior policeman. Now be a good girl and open wide for this.”

‘This’ was a round red object with a couple of black straps and a metal buckle. She waved it six inches in front of my face. I shivered as anger and fear rose, and I knew, or thought I knew, what it was. I opened my mouth to protest, but immediately thought better of it and firmly clamped my jaw shut.

“No, ok then, silly, we’ll do it the hard way, but no marks Hannah said!”

Next second, I was screaming my head off, Jesus Christ, the fucking agony. I writhed and bounced as I hung there like some damned marionette at the behest of some drunken puppeteer. My legs kicked out wildly, one after the other, as I sought relief from the fire that had suddenly erupted in my testicles. I wanted to double up, put my hands down to my precious parts, and dance and hop about, anything to protect and ease the screaming pain. I couldn’t even, as I momentarily forgot the pain in my over-stretched arms and shoulders.

Movement was a luxury denied me. I hung there, helpless, writhing on tiptoes in my bonds, desperate to extinguish that agonising fire, gasping mouthful after mouthful of air, my ears ringing with a series of pained shrieks and obscenities I knew were pouring from my mouth. Jesus, the young bitch had ruined me for life!

A vocal luxury of expression abruptly terminated. My eyes were screwed shut, so I felt rather than saw the rubber ball pushed hard into my screaming mouth. There was a brief moment when my teeth tried to respond automatically to the intruder, but it was pushed past them before they could organise any effective resistance. Fingers pinched my nostrils together, and my lungs, still desperate for copious quantities of air, forced my mouth wider. My eyes opened in time to see a white cotton V and a tanned cleavage before my sight was briefly blanked out by soft cotton backed by even softer, warm, sweet, scented flesh. Just for a second, as she leaned into me and fastened a strap behind my head, pulling it tight, adding another brief spurt of pain as the hair she’d caught in the buckle wrenched at its roots.

Her face swam back into view. Young, blonde, pretty, sexy, desirable, yet with a gleeful look of cruelty that scared the shit out of me, almost literally. For a brief moment, the pain in my groin was forgotten, the place where this bitch had planted her knee without the slightest warning. I yelped mutely into the gag, wincing in agony as gloved fingers grabbed at my trousers to close firmly around my throbbing ball sac.

“Like I said, silly, no nasty marks, well, none on the outside,” she giggled, and for a brief moment looked like a cute, mischievous ten-year-old who’d been caught out doing something naughty, rather than a sexy eighteen - or nineteen-year-old holding a grown man where he was most vulnerable and conscious of that fact!

“All done,” she called over one shoulder, dismounted from the stool, picked it up, and returned it to the far wall before walking back to join the others, who seemed to have just concluded their discussions. The group turned as one and walked down towards where I dangled helplessly, conscious once more of how much my wrists, arms and shoulders hurt and how difficult it was to balance on my toes.

“Nice one,” the tall, young blonde girl in front told her smaller friend. “Here, you can put old Bluebell away for me if you like. Stupid animal’s just been a wee bit too feisty, so give her a few reminders once she’s stalled, will you, honey?”

My scrabbling feet seemed to find a hold, even though I felt like some poor heretic sampling one of the Inquisition's racks for the first time. Hell, maybe something had given. Every damn muscle and tendon in my body already felt stretched and screaming, not to mention the sore spot between my legs, which was slowly subsiding to an ache, dull but still painful enough to make me keenly aware of how vulnerable I now was.

“Mmmffff” I tried my angry best, but nothing emerged from between my stretched lips bar some well-muffled but undecipherable noises and a skein of drool that I could already feel pooling wetly on my upper chest through my shirt. “Mmmff”, I tried my best and wanted to stamp my feet in anger and frustration, but dared not. I’d achieved a very precarious balance on my well-stretched legs to partly relieve the growing pain in my taut arms and wrists.

The other three women seemed to have stopped to look at something, but young Miss ‘Ball Breaker’ strode past without so much as a glance in my direction. One arm raised, she gripped the head, or rather the leather harness about the head, of a much taller, near-naked woman whom she firmly led towards the open doors of a horse stall further down. I gaped after them, or rather, I would have gaped had my mouth been free to perform the necessary ‘gob struck’ operation.

A shaven head crowned by a high ponytail turned towards me, and I caught a brief glimpse of a pair of sad brown eyes staring at me through numerous leather straps, wide, wild eyes that were damp with tears, large, frightened, sad, hopeless eyes. Eyes that spoke to me of horrors experienced and others as yet unimagined. My gaze met hers in what, at one and the same time, was the most fleeting and the longest second of my life. The suffering and dread in those woeful eyes shook me to the very core!

My brain took in far more than my eyes did. That girl, a woman, revealed her generous figure, with large, wobbling breasts. Naked but not quite, harnessed and booted, armless or virtually so, her white shoulders bent cruelly back and encased in a long leather sheath. She staggered forward at the end of a leash fastened to a high collar around her neck, part walking, part stumbling in heavy, clumsy knee-high boots with strange, clumsy-looking soles. Although tightly bound in some sort of bondage gear, it revealed far more of her voluptuous figure than it concealed.

More frightening to my staring eyes in that fleeting glimpse were the harsh marks that marred much of the naked flesh on view. Thighs, buttocks and heavy breasts alike were covered with a lattice of red and purple stripes of varying shades, some in a distinctive shape. Jesus, no, yes, almost every visible inch of flesh, and there was plenty on show, carried the faded scars and marks of past brutality.

The wretched woman was hauled past me like a reluctant dog on a leash. “Move faster, animal,” I heard my recent tormentor snap. There was a flicker of movement, a thwack, and a muted squeal of pain. Both sounds were quickly repeated, and as I turned my head as far left as I could manage, I saw her wielding a riding crop, the tip of which left those distinctive, odd-shaped marks!

The pair disappeared into a stall, and as I turned my head back to ease the strain, I saw, for the first time, another head similarly head-garbed and silenced, with a mouth stretched wide over whatever it was they had forced and strapped there. They stared at me over the top of the low door to their enclosures, their heads and harnesses, upper torsos visible, both men and women. I looked along the row at a half-dozen or so such captive figures. The sound of muted squeals, that sickening sound of leather against flesh, and its accompanying muted squeal came a dozen times from the stall my recent tormentor and her victim had entered.

My mind was reeling, chiding me for my crass stupidity and naiveté as everything I’d seen and heard that evening fast-forwarded. They say that happens when you are about to die. Was I about to die, or worse, I wondered? As I looked at those poor people staring back at me, I seriously wondered whether the ‘or worse’ might indeed be the less unpleasant of the two options. But, and it was one hell of a big but… how the hell could this sick shit be happening? Maybe I was still drugged and… and what’s the word, hallucinating, but my arms and toes told a different story.

How stupid can anyone be? I asked myself. Shit and shite! These fuckers were for real, absolute, and one hundred per cent real fucking perverts and sadists, and my wife… Christ, did she really know all about these monsters? Was she really involved in all this, this… Like I said, my mind was reeling, but only for a moment before being brought up short.

“Don’t worry,” a youthful female voice sniggered. “You are not destined for a barn or a stable, not just yet, anyway.” It was the other young blonde, my host’s daughter, no doubt, who’d come down to view me with the two older women. “Maybe one day you’ll end up in one, though,” she added with a sneer.

“Humph! Not in ours it won’t!” It was that horrible hawkish-looking woman in the ugly tweeds who’d spoken, and even as she spoke, she reached out a pudgy hand and brutally squeezed my right bicep extremely hard, making me shriek into the foul rubber ball in my mouth.

“Little weed hasn’t got any muscles worth a damn, hell, that mare of your’n we just bought has got more pulling power in one leg than this wimp’s got altogether! Lord knows what it’ll look like in the flesh! What say you, Babs, honey?” She released my arm, turning to her younger, prettier partner.

Prettier, except for her eyes, which looked me up and down and then into mine with an intense eagerness that was frightening. There was lust in that gaze, not the normal lusts of the flesh but something infinitely more horrible, something cruel and terrible. When she softly spoke, it was in a tone that held a degree of unfrequented longing.

“Keep it in mind, love. My birthday is not that far off, and you promised me a special one this time, remember. I’ve never had a totally fresh, unabused one to finish off, you know. Weak it might be, but I expect I could make a fresh one last for a whole week or more, see if I could beat my record!” She suddenly laughed, a short, cruel laugh. “If I were extra careful, of course!”

I shuddered, not so much at her words, which barely registered, but at the look in her eyes. I flinched as Hannah reached towards me with her riding crop. She didn’t strike, merely using the leather flap at the end to prod my trousered groin, then made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Tch! Orlando’s very dependable, but not the most imaginative type, or maybe that’s unfair. I should have been a bit more explicit, perhaps,” she chided herself. “Let's see if she’s hiding anything worth looking at!”

She placed the crop between her teeth, winked at me, and then I let out a strangled gasp into that huge red thing filling my mouth. She deftly unhooked my belt, yanked my zip down, and swiftly divested me of my striped trousers and boxer shorts. She tossed the latter away and held the former aloft for a moment like some sort of trophy, her expression one of amused contempt. “What the hell was Patricia thinking of, letting him out in public dressed in this hideous crap!”

The two women chuckled as the girl wriggled her pretty nose, screwed my suit trousers into a ball and casually tossed them away. Despite my situation, I experienced a twinge of embarrassment at her words, which shows just how awful that ill-chosen suit of mine was.  A fleeting moment because she immediately removed that nasty-looking crop from between her teeth and used the business end to heft my shrunken penis while I squirmed on my toes.

“Just like his wife told me”, she sneered. “Not got anything down here worth a damn either. Hardly even worth the effort of gelding a creature like this!”

I screamed into that gag as the young bitch casually flicked my cock up slightly, then smacked the tip of her crop down hard on it in one swift movement.

The older woman snorted in amusement, then turned to her partner. “What's with this careful rubbish? Just when have you ever been careful, darling? Come on, let’s go get a drink.” She looked at the tiny watch on her fat wrist. “Rodney has had ample time to get everybody merry on the cheapo plonk, so now’s about the time the old miser generally brings out the good stuff, stingy old bugger! Probably some interesting other actions going on down about now as well to watch!” She tugged on her companion’s arm. “Let’s go circulate and be social!”

The pretty one called Babs hesitated for a second. She reached out to gently nip my cheek between her thumb and forefinger, leaning closer. “I might just bid on you myself later,” she whispered, her cold, dead eyes alight with a dreadful hunger. “Just think on it, wimp. I might have you strung up in my stable this time tomorrow, singing so sweetly for my ears alone as my steel-cored whip slowly strips the flesh from your bones.”

*****

I had completely lost all track of time. My legs, my poor legs and ankles, hurt like hell, and there was no relief, none at all. Arms and legs. I’d tried, from time to time, to ease the pain by lifting first one leg and then the other, but it didn’t help much, merely doubling the pain in the standing leg. Relief was probably more in the mind than in the flesh. Initially, it had been my arms, but as time went on, more and more of my agony focused on my poor, straining toes and feet.

The total lack of any other stimulant to distract me from the strain and ache didn’t help either. The young bitch had placed a loose leather bag of some sort over my head before they left. I could hear a little, but there was little to hear: the rustle of straw nearby, odd, muted grunts, once the bang of a door and footsteps approaching, then receding, and nothing much else. All I could smell was leather, and I could see nothing but blackness, except for a slight luminance if I shook my head and quickly looked down towards the bottom edge of the bag.

Christ, it was hurting, and what a bloody weird sight I must look. Naked from the waist down, bar my socks, upper half vest, shirt, tie, and stripped suit jacket. I recalled there had been a hole in one of those socks as well, but somehow, given my present predicament, that wasn’t the least bit important! I was hardly likely to be embarrassed by that, given how my wedding tackle was on display for all and sundry to see.

“Hardly in the same class as mummy’s prize stallion, is it! That beast of a monster can give even the most reluctant mare or filly a temporary slice of heaven!” That had been Hannah’s parting comment as her friend joined them, and the foursome had left the stable, leaving him hanging like that. The remark had stung. Hell, if that was the problem, if that’s why his wife was unhappy, if… Christ, why not a divorce or something? Why this… this craziness… It was unbelievable!

My imagination was working overtime, and nothing it envisaged was particularly pleasant. My wife, my treacherous wife, how could she? Pregnant and upstairs? Upstairs with that… that… with him! Mister fucking masculinity himself! Could that be true? I had to accept it was true, given my present circumstances. It would be stupid to think otherwise. But why? That question ricocheted around and around in my mind. Why? What had I done… or maybe it was what I hadn’t done or couldn’t do? God, that little bitch with her crop, and it wasn’t just that that had stung him. His wife had she really mocked him so cruelly to these people?

Like an old VHS tape player stuttering on fast forward, I was replaying recent scenes in my mind’s eye. The man in the cage, that fucker leading his wife away so confidently, his hand squeezing her bottom, and her going oh so willingly, without a backward glance at him. That guy on the end of a dog leash, the tiny woman with that Amazon, the curvaceous young maid with her grotesque old-school boy parody, the two women who’d… God, she wouldn’t really do such sadistic and cruel things, would she? I shivered, remembering how she’d looked at me, and deep down I knew she did and, given the slightest chance, would do so to him as well!

Grotesque. That was the right word. Grotesque, unbelievable, and yet… the woman I’d seen in this very building, and all those others I’d seen before they’d covered my head. This was a stable, wasn’t it, but not one that contained horses! Christ, how many like that poor woman did it contain, and… and all those people, those guests back at the house, were they the same as the Danvers couple? They must be of similar ilk, and what had the girl said? The law was already here. Unbelievable!

My mind slowly descended into a numb limbo as I hopped automatically from one leg to the other, and my overworked but disbelieving brain slowed the flickering images to a crawl, then to near blankness, as I hung there in dumb misery. I wasn’t asleep. How the hell could I be? But the degree of conscious awareness was certainly seeping from me as I slowly adapted to the awful situation.

Light, sudden, blinding light, and a painful slap to my right cheek brought me back from the edge of an improbable wakeful doze to full awareness of the present. The two young blond bitches were back. One had ripped the leather bag from my head, and the other, Hannah, swung her palm against my cheek again.

“Wakey wakey, bitch, party time!” she told him. “Goodness, was that you snoring just then? I’m impressed by your stamina. I hope you’ve saved some for later!”

“I should have strung it up by the goolies, maybe”, the other girl laughed.

“Well, it’s not as if she will be needing them again, ever!” Hannah added, laughing. “C’mon, give me a hand here. Go fetch the steps so I can free it from the overhead pulley thing.”

Resistance, what resistance! I ached all over and could barely walk as I staggered between them. The sheer relief of being able to plant my feet flat on the ground and of my poor arms no longer supporting my weight. So relieved, in fact, that it took a few moments to register that they’d pulled my tortured arms behind my back and snapped a pair of steel handcuffs around my wrists. The hard rubber ball in my mouth remained, though, and as they dragged me along, all I could do was mouth muted questions into its semi-ridged red rubber surface.

A vast shadow came through a door to the left, huge and still clad in an immaculate black dinner suit with a bow tie. He gave an abbreviated bow to the approaching threesome. “Your Mama asked me to come over, Miss Hannah, and see if y’all need me to fetch her back for you?”

“That was very thoughtful of her. Thank you, Orlando. I peeped into the kitchen, but the cook told me you were out on an errand somewhere.” She lowered her voice. “Cookie looked to be in one of her moods; she was flogging the hell out of Betsy, so I didn’t linger!”

The huge man chuckled. “Cook sure don’t stand for no shit, not never. That lazy old bitch yer mom gave her to help out never seems to learn nuffin! Likely that was when yer mom was telling me to find you. Seems we passed each other on the same darn errand, some Miss”

“No matter. You’re here now. You can take this useless wimp up to my room and fasten it to the frame for us. Time to get her ready. Oh, and Mum said to tell you she expects you to be ‘up for it later!’ Her exact phrase, not mine, but we both know what she means. Daddy will have had far too many brandies to be any use to her!”

“Sure thing, Miss Hannah, when ain't I up for it? A very handsome woman is your mama,” the huge man chuckled as he grabbed me once more, seemingly without effort, and retraced our earlier route, the two girls following on behind. This time, I was so knackered and mentally zonked that I didn’t even aim a single kick at the big bugger! I felt somehow detached and adrift, going with the flow, lacking the strength to fight the current. Boy, if I’d known then what I know now!

The monsoon was back. I absently noticed as we left the stable and headed back towards the big house. It was raining heavily again, and given everything else, I’m not sure why that should have occupied my mind, but it did, along with seething thoughts I was less prepared to face. ‘Get her ready,’ the young bitch had said. Ready for what? That reminded me of something else. Why this fixation on the female nomenclature? My hosts… or should that be captors, that mega-rich pair of bastards… had kept calling me Jacquie, hadn’t they? Why?

“Do you have a scarecrow in the fields?” I heard Tiffany ask, giggling.

“What? Why on earth should we… Oh, I get you!” Hannah laughed. “Add that horrible suit jacket of his to his trousers, and that’ll keep the local bird population at bay. Winner of the worst-dressed scarecrow in the country award, I’d bet! The sooner we get this bitch dressed and on the auction block, the better, I reckon!”