CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Pal had a lot of time to think after Paul Harshman had tom up her rear entrance and almost destroyed the only mental retreat she had – the memory world peopled only by a pair of twelve-year-old romantic sweethearts.
It took a number of hours of soul-searching contemplation to get back most of her pride and self-confidence. Most, but not all.
She couldn't quite forgive herself for betraying the private, secret relationship between Terry and herself. She tried to convince herself that it was not a serious betrayal, because in all the intervening years, Terry had not searched her out and claimed her as he had promised.
And after all, she told herself, she was only flesh and blood – female at that – and could not be expected to suffer physical agony to keep a secret that might have meaning only to herself.
Yet, it had been her own voluntary blurting out of the first treacherous and prideful words that had started it. If she was so quick to betray their treasured relationship out of pride how could she blame it on the fear of pain?
No – she could never quite regain the entire person that had been Palmyra Weston before that betrayal.
For a while, it had consoled her to delude herself that her underlying motive in blatting out Terry's name was partly to punish Terry for having deserted her; breaking his promise.
But that consolation hadn't lasted long. She had thought too many times through the years of too many reasons why Terry might be unable to get to her. He must remain innocent and true to his promise until she knew otherwise. After all, he might even be dead.
That thought started her off crying again.
With young men all over the country being killed needlessly in wars, traffic accidents, and all sorts of things, it suddenly seemed all too logical that Terry might have been long dead when she betrayed their private love.
But after hours of self-recrimination and repeated arguments with herself that tore her apart over and over again, she had to do something to retain her sanity.
She took the easiest way she knew.
She forced herself to believe that she had done the best she could under the circumstances, and that she could only go on in the future by continuing to stay alive and as undamaged as she could. What happened after she might escape or be rescued somehow from all this, would depend upon Fate.
Then she began once more to think about the possibilities of escape. First, she had to attempt to figure out just what sort of people were Paul Harshman and Jonas Stillwell.
Pal had handled some pretty difficult patients in her short career. Some of them had been termed impossible by other nurses, but Pal had managed them by trying to analyze their problems.
She would have to analyze Paul and Jonas the same way. Figure out what made them the mean bastards they were. Since she had to start somewhere, she decided to take Paul's word for it that Stillwell was the most sadistic. It could pay to unravel the reasons for his sadism first.
She knew that he was terribly sensitive about his malformed penis. It was entirely understandable. A man was apt to be touchy enough if he though he had been shortchanged in that department, according to the texts she had read.
If a fellow could develop an inferiority complex over having less size than he thought he should have, how much more would it bug a man to have a dog-like appendage that elicited laughter from the females he tried to use it on?
Yes, that one thing could be the entire key to his problem.
Jonas Stillwell's reputation in the field of antibiotics was no secret to any contemporary nurse or doctor. And she knew that it would take a very deep-rooted aberration to move such a man to risk his career.
But yet, wait a minute! Hadn't Jonas, with the equipment he had been cursed with, achieved something that she suspected no other man could have accomplished? After all, how many men were there with such a penis? She had read of none in the textbooks.
If she could build his ego by making him believe that he was blessed instead of cursed with that clever little wiry dog-pecker, he might be cured of the mental aberration. Might even be grateful enough to help her away from here.
After thinking it over, she was less inclined to count on his gratitude being that bountiful. He could hardly risk his career on the possibility of her silence.
But even if he just stopped being a threat to her physical condition, wouldn't that be worth it? She resolved to try it.
Then there was Paul.
At first, she had thought that Paul couldn't get his gun off without first indulging himself in a little sadism. He had been mean enough, she thought, on those initial occasions when he made her submit to him sexually. She knew there were plenty of people with just such an impotence.
And the leather outfit he used sometimes was evidence of a sort. She had long known of the peculiar but not uncommon love some men – and women, too – had for the feel and sight and smell of leather, especially during sepal experiences.
So, with the obvious intelligence and shrewdness he had, what had made Paul seek this kind of sexual expression. He had proved that it wasn't a mandatory requirement for him to have an erection or to ejaculate.
She had received his pungent spurtings in her cunt and her mouth too often to believe that the leather or the sadism were absolute necessities.
But, hold it right there! She had been thinking of sadism as a purely corporal-punishment type if attitude. Yet, she knew that there was a lot more to it than that.
If he subjugated her – humiliated her and degraded her – that was a type of sadism in itself. Oh, lots of people enjoyed reading about the sufferings of others – particularly common were those addicted to the more violent movies and TV programs.
But if a man required actual domination of this type over a female before he could make it with her, then he had a problem, whip or no whip.
Why, every man had a little of that latent sadism in him. Even Terry Monahan! Although he had apologized tearfully afterward, it must have been just such a potential quality in him that had made him do what he did to Pal that day at the orphanage when she was drinking from the garden hose.
He had let her get the trickling nozzle up to her mouth, and smiled sweetly as she started to drink from it, then he had turned the faucet on full, almost drowning her and leaving her with a sore throat for days. To say nothing of soaking her clothes completely and getting her into trouble with the staff.
Because she hadn't squealed on him, they had become even better friends after that.
Well, then. What was the difference between men like Terry, who controlled themselves after possibly one or more small outbursts, and men like Paul, who seemed to need a steady diet of victims?
If she could solve that, she might be able to win Paul over, just as she intended to try to charm Jonas through the knowledge she thought she had of his motivation.
Just as she thought she might have started on the way toward her salvation, just by concentrating on the personality factors and indulging herself in a little parlor psychiatry, the vision of Heidi's ruined body popped onto the projection screen in her mind.
It was more than a small aberration which could lead men to destroy a lovely female body like that!
As she kept Heidi's pitiful condition on her mind, she grew more and more frightened. And by the time she had sought for every possible excuse for such action, and failed, she had completely changed her mind about both Paul and Jonas.
If either of them were sane enough to be salvaged by her pitiful efforts as an amateur psychiatrist, they could not have allowed that poor German girl to be so hopelessly destroyed.
There was only one answer – and it shattered her hopes for any success at winning these men through psychological means: she was at the mercy of a pair of madmen!