The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (29 page)

“Like it’s been waiting here all those years, for me. I’m sure I was born for this!” I had, of course, surmised this evening
might have been heading this direction, but I had to be very careful.

“Babe, you’ve known me less than seventy-two hours.”

“I was way outta control at the Orchid.” She was casting about, seeking what was required of her. “Don’t you wanna punish
me for that?” she asked, trying to sound light; but this was not a joke. I could feel her quaking as I touched her.

“Remember that I’ve been playing this game all my life,” I told her, massaging the tense muscles in her shoulders. I’d resolved
that we would not go off into a trivial, stylized scenario. This was too “up close and personal.” “The only distress would
have been any suggestion that, having found you, I might lose you, that you might dance off in a different direction.”

She stood clutching her little bag in front of her with both hands. She looked, for all the world, like a young girl waiting
at a terminal for her first long trip. “Nay, please. When you’re finished with me tonight, I hope that thought is no longer
possible. I’ve nowhere else to go, no place to hide.” Even the abrasive punker dialect had softened.

She recited the obvious, like a catechism, and I knew it was for the pure thrill of hearing herself say the words. “I do wish
I’d been that blonde girl, I really do, with so many watching me hurt. But this may be as if, more appropriate? Three days,
for sure; no one knows where I am or whom I’m with. Miles from anyone, dead of night, and I can’t get outta here.” I remembered
her handing me the keys.

————————

“I
N
G
EORGIA,
NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM?
” she tried to quip, then went on with effort. “I’ve been brave so far, haven’t I? That’s why, in the bag—a whip and other
things you might use to hurt me, and I tried not to be sissy when I picked them out. Like, all night if you want; whip me
till I lose it. You can do anything you want to me, and I’ve tried every way I know to ask for it.” Her anticipation was laced
with a fear that was real enough, but when she concluded, “Hey, bring it
on!
While I’ve still got the ass for it?” I could sense she wasn’t speaking of the pain, exactly.

I then regretted not having fully confessed my love to her, before these demands were put on it, but that would have to wait.
The dominant role obliges much in timing and sensitivity. Anyone who thinks it only a matter of doing a number on a helpless
person is a fool. Sadly, fools abound. At that moment, the prospect of giving Justine what she’d set herself up for was less
appealing than the erotic thought of her in bondage. Most sadomasochistic sex is situational, yet her mind-set demanded that
her pain threshold be approached—the very vulnerability that was stimulating her made real.

I took her bag from her and told her, coldly as I could manage, to take off her clothes, turning away to examine what she’d
brought. I had to smile at the novice’s choice of the Arabian manacles. Most adequate to the task, surely, had we been in
the
Rufai
“Hall of Torture,” but not if one is concerned with avoiding repeated visits to the hand therapist. There were various clamps,
ropes, a whip that was a bundle of long thongs, with one set of ends strapped together to serve as a handle.

The leather was so old and dried as to look like something else she might have found in the house. I doubted that it would
survive one good use. I regarded a seriously cruel-looking set of metal pincers. Considering the damage those could inflict,
I thought
yes, it’s true; she’s no “sissy!”
Justine stumbled and nearly fell, awkwardly struggling out of her pants. Vanished, along with her typical speech, was the
amateur stripper’s grace. Still, this was but another variety of erotic image, and she was turning me on as I held the pincers
close to her bare breasts.

“You were not really expecting these to be used?” was my noncommittal inquiry.

All was becoming too real for her easily to maintain a role. “Shit, I hope you don’t.” She grimaced at the “nasty gadget,”
looking askance with sincere dismay.

“I do know how to use them,” I stated evenly, not intending to do any such thing, but I was getting myself in character. I
let her stand there naked, tearfully hugging her belly, while I found some old bar rags to pad the manacles. I was entertaining
images of Seabrook’s Justine from
Witchcraft.
My plan, such as it was, had been largely to just let her hang by her wrists—until she was exhausted as I was becoming. Problem
with younger women is that you always seem to have a tiger by the tail.

I threaded the rope between the old rings on the insides of the columns and dropped the ends. Then I manacled her wrists,
which she obediently held out to me, palms together as in prayer. Justine shivered as the squeal of the locking bolts reverberated
in the silence of our vault. She watched, with something like enchantment, each small step of what was happening to her. I
rigged more rope, which could tauten that running between the columns, and secured the dangling ends to her manacles.

Like every submissive, her gaze had doted on the securing of first one hand, then the other. Her fingers splayed, as if exultant
at relief from obligation to effect anything further. I advised her that it would go easier on her arms and shoulders, as
long as she was able to hold on to the ropes that I pressed into her palms.

Wide-eyed, she nodded understanding and asked if I were going to tie her ankles. She was so appealing, in her abject exposure,
that I kissed her deep and long to feel her quiver against me. When I told her that I wanted her sufficiently free to twist
and turn, she moaned and parted her thighs to my touch, her excitement at a fever pitch. She blushed when I touched my fingers
to her lips, for her to taste her own wetness, and tried to get her legs around me.

I denied her release. “If you come, it will be when your body betrays you, one more spasm of your flesh surrendering to what’s
happening to you.” I hitched up the rope array, tying off my line to another ring at the base of a column. She gave a little
startled cry when she was drawn taut, just barely able to balance on her toes, so that the stress was distributed through
her feet and legs as well. I initiated blows to her back, buttocks, and backs of her thighs, snapping the thongs slowly and
regularly so that she might anticipate the hits. Her muscles tensed against the blows across her bare skin, which would begin
to seem as dull explosions from within.

At first, she stared up fixedly, to where her clenched fingers twisted at the ropes, though she clearly remained aware of
my movements reflected in the mirror. The tears that had welled in her reddened eyes began to trickle down her cheeks. In
anticipation of each bite of the whip, her eyes closed and brow knitted. At every hit, tremors ran like waves down her musculature
to her straining feet. Face flushed, she bit her lip, loath to yield anything easily.

When I moved around to work on her soft front, she goaded me, through the thus far silent tears. “Hey, he did fuck me, and
he wasn’t very nice about it either!” She threw the club operator at me in a final provocative bid at attitude. “He needs
to call me!”

“You enjoyed it?” I suspected this was not dissimilar from the way she used to jerk her stepfather’s chain. Trifling with
an embrace of the dark side, craving to recognize herself as ravished, defiled—all this stood somehow correlative with…

“I was up on you, waiting out there while it went down,” she sobbed the admission. “I played like you had brought me there
for that, like it was something you had given to me!” There had been no doubt of her experience with kinky sex. I was reasonably
sure that, wherever she wanted to be taken, something more was indicated. I approached her from behind and grabbed her hair,
jerking her head painfully back.

“Justine!” I barked. “This isn’t just about sex, about how great a little ‘slut’ you are, or the daddy you missed. You’ve
been stroking the images of this place that I gave you. You were seeing them from outside, through other eyes, confusing your
vicarious thrill with the suffering of figures you found attractive. This is about your real pain, about you and the agony
of life! If you want fantasy, imagine how ugly the ride would have been had those boys in Louisiana gotten their hands on
you.”

“They would, would’ve really hurt me,” she whimpered.

“You asked for it, and tonight you’re going to get the realities.” I shoved her head roughly forward to face the mirror. “Look
at yourself. You’ll see everything that happens to you, all night long, have to watch what’s done to your pretty little bod.
I’m going to wear this whip out on you,” I threatened, calculating that the old, stiff thongs would not take at all long to
disintegrate. “Tonight will be your night in hell, babe, and all you can do is endure it.”

There was no way I was going to really mess her up. Neither had I any intention of the session going on nearly that long.
That was a head trip, but it had the desired effect. My diatribe left her crying like a terrified child, looking at her crucified
reflection with a sort of grief as at loss of self. I believed that wrapped within this was, paradoxically, some hidden hurt
against which the very punishment promised release. Even then, the psychological purge had already been accomplished.

Even so, I’d committed to her feeling something in every inch, from chin to toes. I could not hold back, for refusal to deliver
is the single perception guaranteed to make a submissive feel rejected. As she involuntarily contorted from the increasing
frequency and severity of the lashes, she would only present a fresh part of herself for their burning attentions.

Writhing temptingly about, she would alternately jerk up first one knee then the other, in futile protection of her belly
and crotch. But I did not linger on those areas. Such technique betrays a chauvinistic lack of imagination. There is a term
for a woman’s experience of something beating between her legs. It’s called
routine copulation.
When, on the other hand, the thongs would wrap around her body and she felt their tips bite the tender areas of her breasts
and flanks, I knew the sensation was like fire. She began to scream uncontrollably.

Grasping with her entire being the hopelessness of her condition, she ceased tensing against the blows. No longer was she
straining to contain or localize the pain. Instead, she was feeling and receiving everything, letting it consume her—
becoming
the pain. Acquiescing to its spread and flow through every fiber, her body guilelessly sought the angle from whence the next
whiplash would be coming.

It did not take long for her tormented calves and arches to give up, and she sagged from the ropes. I hitched the array still
tighter, drawing her feet entirely off the floor. Her screams became frenzied when I mercilessly whipped the soles of her
feet. Due to the most basic of instincts, that of running, an assault on the feet elicits a visceral response. It amounts
to an invasion of the primal core of one’s being.

Nowhere else to go, I sat down to recoup, sweating and with heart pounding. I closely monitored her, hanging there in her
longed-for crucifixion. Catastrophic as the final barrage may have felt, I’d actually inflicted no more than small welts and
scratches. To my eye, she was even more beautiful, with her head thrown back in a paroxysm that exalted rather than desecrated.

I glanced up at the corner of the balcony.
Was this what you would have wanted to see, old woman? Might you be sitting there now, spectrally watching all this happen
to your human flesh and blood? Can you taste her pain?

My attention returned to Justine. I belatedly considered that this really was not safe. No one knew we were there; what if
I had a heart attack right then? It could happen. When I saw the muscles of her arms and shoulders go slack, I sprang to the
ropes and slipped their knots. Her unconscious weight sank the array so that she was partially supported by her dragging legs.

I laid her back in my lap, verifying that her breathing was all right. I gently stroked her red welts and without warning
she convulsed in my arms. “… not hell if you’re there,” she whimpered. I started to respond, but discerned she was still out.
I smiled as she muttered something about “stairway to heaven.”

While being worked to the point of unconsciousness is an archetypal fantasy of submissives, I had minimal experience with
anyone genuinely passing out on me. Wondering at the scraps of her dreams, I thought that I’d now most certainly have to educate
her—as to Seabrook’s handling of the original Justine. Also see if she remembered any of the images about which she was complaining.
Maybe her ancestress’s genetics had conferred on her a similar talent. I fingered her silver manacles, remotely associating
them more with the
Druse
than the
Rufai.

Then she murmured again, and I passed over another threshold of credulity. First I identified that indeterminate something
that had marginally tainted her speech from time to time. Now it was distinctive. This Texas girl should not, even rarely,
speak with an accent of the old Bronx. They didn’t even talk that way up there anymore! Nor, without reading
Witchcraft,
was it explicable for her to whine, like a still younger girl, “… oh why’d you do that? I wanted to see the rest of the circus.
T
HE OLD LION WAS SO FUNNY…
”

————————

I didn’t move, just sat there and held her for the longest time. But, after that, my eyes never left the corner of the balcony.

Finally, I could no longer endure the silence of the dream-club with its ghosts, Justine’s and my own. Getting her to her
feet, I half carried her to the car, then went back to lock up. Stuffing her clothes into the bag along with the manacles,
I left the whip and pincers behind. As expected, the old leather was frayed and falling apart. Should we happen to be stopped
by police on the foggy predawn drive, me toting an out-of-it naked girl with extensive abrasions—let’s say I didn’t want to
spend the rest of the morning being interviewed by social workers?