Modeling The Torture Shoes

Author's Note: An image of the iron monosandal that set my imagination going can be found under https://www.medievalwarfare.info/torture.htm#crushing (full URL, since more elegant link anchoring in HTML does not seem to work – why not?). I regret I can't reproduce it here for copyright reasons.

A Fantasy

"OK, young lady. Put your soles on the baseplate." The torturer's voice is deceptively soft, almost caring. You are naked, heavy leather belts strapping you to a massive, straight-backed, ancient chair. The sight of your bound body, flesh bulging between the leather straps, turns you on as you look down at your feet. They are bathed in light because there's a ceiling spotlight directed at them. The audience, about fifteen anonymous shapes in semi-darkness around you on ordinary chairs like in a classroom, are staring intently at them, too. They have gone very quiet.

No one has their smartphone out in this fantasy, because smartphones are a long way in the future. It's the mid-Eighties, the men are wearing moustaches and their hair parted in the middle, the two or three women in the room are sporting "big hair" and shoulder-padded frilly blouses. Everybody except you is in tight stonewashed jeans as a matter of course. A further shadowy indistinct moustached shape is videotaping the session on a Sony camcorder, though. They've promised you a copy of the tape.

You hesitate for a second, but then you obey, feeling the thick iron baseplate of the torture shoes under your bare soles. "Push your ankles forward against the front part of the shackles. Like that. Very good. Hold still." The torturer closes the back half-rings of the shackles around your ankles, clamps them securely, inserts two padlocks, snaps them shut. He flicks his index finger against the padlocks, making them dangle. You know he has the only key to them. Your ankles are immobilized, you can't withdraw your feet anymore. There's no turning back now.

"Lift your toes." He strokes the sensitive upper sides of your bare toes. You lift them obediently. "This is the toe press. I'll push it over your naked toes now. It will crush them and also secure them against the baseplate, so you can't move your feet at all anymore." He slides two long, flat iron clamps back over your naked, exposed toes. The clamps run forward and backward in ruts on the baseplate and can be lowered with two wing nuts on screws at each end. He takes his time, adjusting the clamps carefully and deliberately, until the first joint of each toe just peeps out from under the iron. Only then he screws down the four nuts, one after the other, nice and slow, for you to watch helplessly, but does not tighten them yet. He just makes sure your toes are completely immobilized. You can feel the clamps have little bumps on their lower side, pressing lightly against your toes now. You swallow excitedly.

Your naked feet are now securely fastened into something like a pair of iron sandals with just one continuous sole – an iron monosandal, if you will, which you can't take off. You wiggle your feet a little and writhe in your straps, but you don't want to escape. Your heart ist beating slowly and heavily, your stomach is fluttering, your mouth is dry, and it's the best feeling in the world, better than sex. You're a barefooter, but your naked feet that you're used to think of as tough und durable, suddenly look very vulnerable.

But this is not about injuring them. These torture sandals will give you just pain – nothing more, but also nothing less. You will have to stand the pain. To its full extent, its full duration. You swallow again, feeling lightheaded.

"Now we'll give the heel thorns one or two turns each, which will also press the back part of the ankle shackles down on your Achilles tendons. Notice that the edge of that shackle is serrated." The baseplate of the torture shoes has a horizontal slot under each heel into which a small key or spanner is now being inserted. You hear a little clinking sound. The left heel thorn, a massive screw with an obtuse point, starts to dig into the heelpad of your sole from below, then the right one into the right heelpad. Not painful yet, just uncomfortable. You have to lift your heels a little, feeling the serrated edges of the ankle shackles digging into the tender skin above your Achilles tendons.

"Now, these are the shin screws", the torturer continues, pointing to the two wingbolts protruding from the front of the ankle shackles. "They act directly upon the very sensitive periost tissue around the bone, because there is no muscle or fat covering the shinbone. They're two-pronged like a fork, so they won't slip away to the sides because the shinbone has a sort of edge at the front. They hurt immensely when tightened all the way, but for now we won't do that. Just a little bit, so they have a good grip."

You nod silently.

The torturer turns the two wingbolts a few times. You feel two blunt points pressing against each of your shinbones now, directly above your ankles. "So. Your naked feet are now locked nice and tight into the torture shoes", the torturer explains with pedantic relish. "Helplessly and inescapably." He starts caressing your feet for the audience, holding your ankles, massaging the backs, tracing your toenails with one fingertip – almost intimate touches you normally wouldn't allow from a stranger. "Wiggle and struggle all you want, the torture will just hurt all the more that way. Enjoy your helplessness. You do enjoy it, don't you?"

You swallow again, nodding silently again. He is right, you are enjoying it.

"Let's start, then. First, we'll crush your naked toes all the way. Those bumps on the inside of the clamps are very painful, and they'll feel as if your joints are cracked open, but don't worry, you'll just have blue toes tomorrow. There's no permanent damage." The wingnuts turn easily in his fingers at first, then slower. All you can do is watch helplessly and wiggle your captive bare toes a little, with the clamps coming down on them inexorably, pressing and squeezing. It hurts. It hurts like hell. Soon you are wheezing loudly, straining in your chair. Your chest is heaving, your breasts going up and down with your breath.

"Why, we haven't even started", the torturer smiles. "Now we'll turn the heel thorns up all the way..." Again the clinking of the little spanner-like tool under your heels. Once, twice, three times on your left foot, then once, twice, three times on your right foot. You fear each clink and can't wait for it at the same time. The invisible screws dig mercilessly into your naked heelpads from below, very slowly. You cannot lift your heels any further, as they're stopped by the ankle shackles, their serrated edge cutting into the skin on your Achilles tendons. There must be blood already. Ten turns later the heel thorns hurt so much they make you moan uncontrollably. You vividly imagine them breaking through the skin, even though you know they don't, and the pain doesn't lessen, it stays constant. Tears are running down your cheeks.

"I think I'll tighten that toe press just a little bit more for you, young lady. Watch." He puts the little tool aside, begins to screw down the four wingnuts again, one after the other, one full revolution each. You throw back your head in silent agony. Your crushed bare toes are throbbing in unbelievable pain.

"Now for the shin screws." The wing screws are being turned without mercy now, alternating between left and right, although the pressure on your sensitive shinbones is unbearable already. Your every breath is a ragged fight for air now, you are writhing ceaselessly, you can't stop it, even if every movement, as the torturer predicted, makes the pain in your feet worse.

"How about just one more turn on the toe press. For good measure." He slowly, deliberately, under your unbelieving stare, gives each of the four wingnuts another turn, crushing your naked toes still a little more. They have turned dark red by now, the nails purple, sending waves of pain through your whole naked body. The torturer contemplates his work, visibly contented. "Now we'll leave you like that for a while. Enjoy."

"Leave me? For how long?", you moan, staring at your feet helplessly being crushed in their iron prison. But you don't want it to end, confused by your own feelings. You are wearing the torture shoes. What an exquisite torment! What an ecstatic ordeal! You are torn between pain and euphoria.

"Let's see. An hour perhaps." You scream as he flicks a fingertip lightly against the backs of your tortured feet.

"An hour?!" You can't stand the pain even now! But you find in a way you also crave it.

"There comes a moment", he explains calmly, "when your will to resist is broken and you accept the pain. You are yearning for it already."

Again, he is right. The ecstasy wins. You can hear you are wailing ceaselessly, a low keening sound, writhing in your chair, securely held by your straps, an endless, strangely graceful seated dance. You're a great show for the audience, but it feels even better for yourself. You are drifting as if on a cloud. "The best moment is yet to come", you hear the torturer say. "Imagine how much it will hurt once we loosen the screws again... And loosen them we will have to eventually, so there's no way around that. – Right, she's all set up", he is turning towards the audience now. "Coffee, anybody?"

*

"Entschuldigung, junge Dame? Wir schließen jetzt. Siebzehn Uhr."

Yanked out of your daydream, you look up, a little disoriented. The museum guard is standing before you, an inconspicuous, obliging man with wispy greying hair, looking rather like the torturer in your fantasy. He repeats himself in a sort of schoolteacher's English readily enough when you blink at him uncomprehendingly. "Excuse me, young lady? We are closing now. Seventeen o' clock."

On display all around you see iron and wooden devices, expressly and ingeniously made for inflicting pain on the female body – breast presses with jagged edges, Pears of Anguish for insertion into the vagina and anus, branding irons for tender cheeks, breasts, and buttocks, cruel vices for dainty fingers, toes, and nipples. It's a rainy day in the grey, cool Summer of 1985, and you are a British girl on her European backpacking Interrail tour between the last day of school and her first Art School semester in Autumn. You're stuck for the day in this quaint little town in Franconia, sticking your nose into the local Arts and Crafts Museum, housed in the town's Witches' Tower (the former Witches' Tower, you hope) because there is absolutely nothing else to do here. There is a special room dedicated to the Witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century, a hysteria which hit this region of Germany particularly hard, and the associated horrors of the Holy Inquisition. An uncontrollable force made you stop before the exhibited iron torture shoes with their screws, clamps and thorns, an original artifact, genuine and functional, obviously not a horror prop for gawking tourists.

The museum guard shows you out. You're the last visitor. Noticing your bare feet, the toes peeping out from under the hem of your long, flower-printed skirt with every step, he nods slowly to himself. You're a barefooter, kind of a hippie girl, traveling through Europe with a backpack and a guitar, but without any shoes in your luggage, seeing the local sights and being a sight to see for the locals. Your bare feet look the part, too – they are tan, tough, strong, beautiful, dirty from the cobblestone streets, and absolutely sexy. "I saw you admiring them for hours. You would like to wear them, wouldn't you?", the guard unexpectedly asks when switching off the lights and locking the ancient heavy wooden door behind you. Standing outside on the sandstone stoop, oak leaves, heavy with rain, agitated by the wind, are dripping and whispering all around you.

You nod silently, clamping your lips between your teeth. There is no doubt what he's talking about. You've always had a fetish for your own feet, and always those fantasies of having them helplessly tortured – and being incredibly turned on by it. The sight of the torture shoes was all you needed to bring them out, and it was probably not hard to guess for him.

"If you are really interested", the guard pedantically stresses, looking about him watchfully like a conspirator, "we have here a small group of... history fans. We meet tonight, in the Torture Room of the Museum." From his minute hesitation it's clear what kind of history fans he means. It's the Eighties, bondage and BDSM play isn't yet mainstream by a long way. One has to be discreet, especially if disappropriating museum inventory as toys for torture play. "Voluntary models for the devices are always welcome. Come to the back door at eight, over behind the parking lot. We will let you wear the torture shoes. Not just try them on. Wear them."

"Really? Is' das wahr? Wirklick?", you answer in your classroom German, too surprised to hide your enthusiasm.

"Wirklich. Ask the man who'll open the door for Dr. Matthäus. That's me. He'll let you in." He smiles apologetically. "Just for the record: You are eighteen, aren't you?"

"I am. Been for nearly two months now. Seit fast dzwei Mounate", you smile back, nodding again. "Danke. I'll be there." Your naked soles make cute little pitch-pitch sounds on the wet blue cobblestones as you walk down the street towards the hostel you're staying in.

You'll be there. You know you'll be there.

*

Watching that VHS tape, long since digitized, decades later, after a long journey through everything the BDSM Lifestyle has to offer, you'll look fondly at your bare feet which have gone through countless ecstatic bastinados by now, with you calling out the strokes loudly, the torturer starting anew every time you screamed the wrong number. You've danced on nailboards, had your soles used as an ashtray, with lit cigars being stubbed out on them, and as a dartboard while writhing in fetters, you've had wedges hammered (very carefully, though) into Spanish Boots with your feet inside them, and even your graduation project at Art School in 1989 was a bondage and foot torture show, hidden in plain sight: You had yourself installed, in the nude of course and bodypainted in bronze, as a living statue in the lobby of the School's headquarters building for a day to great acclaim, with feet and ankles inescapably encased in the cement of the temporary pedestal. Your bare feet were scalded when the cement set and dried, as you had known they would be, and you were in pain the whole time, but for you the pain was part of the performance. (Your teacher, who had instructed you to use harmless plaster for the pedestal, nearly had a heart attack, threatening to throw you into the Thames in your cement shoes, but had to relent when your fellow students and the media began enthusing about your bold, innovative artistic performance. In the end, she had to call in a brigade of delighted and very helpful firemen who freed you with a jackhammer while you gave interviews nonstop, your bronze-painted naked body, feet cemented into the pedestal, all over the news. Afterwards, you could barely walk for three days on your scalded feet, but earned your degree cum laude.) You've really done it all. But the breathless tension of what turned out to be your very first session, on that rainy evening in the little museum, still grabs you again instantly when you remember modeling those torture shoes.

***