She withdrew her hands.
“It’s the way the Organization wants it to be. I already told you. You’ve got to go with whatever they want from you. Really, truly smit. With all your heart and soul. Just like I did. Then nobody else will get hurt. Nobody. Not even you anymore.”
“But I don’t…”
She got up. “We’ll talk again soon, I promise. But right now I’ve got a billion things to do. The place is a goddamn mess. So you just sit there awhile and think about what I said. Think real hard.”
“I don’t… I don’t even know your name.”
She almost laughed. “Don’t worry. There’s time for that too. Think of it as being on a need-to-know basis. Like in the movies, right?” She picked up the plate and flicked the wall switch and left her there in darkness thinking, first step taken. Stephen will be pleased.
It was important to please him.
EIGHT
4:45 p.m.
The headbox seemed to have gotten smaller. That was impossible she knew but the damp darkness seemed more enclosing than before. The musty-carpet smell thicker. She tried to move her head as though movement could clear the air, circulate the air inside but she could only move it slightly, half an inch or so in either direction because the back was latched to the X-frame. She was spread-eagled on the X-frame. Facing outward to whatever, whoever was out there.
She had been here about half an hour now. That was what she guessed. Guessing the time was her one form of recreation. It held no rewards because she never knew if she was right or wrong. But it was better than thinking.
Images kept skittering like night-crabs across a moonless beach.
Rushing to the plane that day, late as was usual in those days after Danny died, so late leaving her parents’ winter home in Sarasota that she almost missed the flight, a packed Freddy Laker flight where you had to seat yourself, leaning over a man in an aisle seat way in the back, breathless, saying to him is this seat taken? and the man who was Greg Glover she learned after two vodka tonics to sooth her nerves, the man then taking off his sunglasses and smiling saying no, it’s all yours.
The frozen ice. The hole in the frozen ice so small she could barely believe he’d slipped through. The surface of the ice for yards and yards around. Searching the pale bright face of it for a hand, a boot, a glimpse of clothing.
She and Annie little girls, kissing each other goodbye at her dad’s car because Annie went to Catholic school and Catholic school started earlier than public school did and it was the end of the summer so Annie had to go back, leave Rockport and Sara who wouldn’t see her now for another whole two weeks. Both of them crying the innocent tears of little girls who are wholly in love with one another and unashamed.
The ice. The face she had never found but had imagined countless times pressed up to the ice from beneath. Cold ice and drifting water.
All these memories. Good and tender. Bad and worse. Leveled somehow onto the same plane now. Each a heavy weight upon her heart as heavy as the headbox on her shoulders. Racing unbidden through her consciousness to torment her.
It was better to guess the time. How long she had been in this or that position. The exact time of day. The hour, the minute, the creeping passage of seconds.
The only game she herself had devised and not them.
She flinched when he touched her.
He smiled and mentally noted it for later. Flinching was grounds for punishment. Of course she didn’t know that yet but she would.
He strapped the leather belt around her waist and buckled it. From the belt depended half a dozen wide silver rings but he wouldn’t be needing them just now. He adjusted the belt so that the second, vertical buckle was in the center of her back and the second leather beltstrap hung directly between her legs in front. He opened the jar of Vaseline and lightly greased the thick four-inch leather dildo in the center of the belt. Opened her up and greased her too. She tried to squirm away from his fingers inside h but there wasn’t far she could go on the X-frame.
Another breach of conduct duly noted.
He held her open and inserted the dildo and even with the Vaseline she was dry and tight but by moving it back and forth, in and out he got it into her up to the hilt and then ran the strap up through the cheeks of her ass and through the second buckle and tightened it firmly and buckled it off.
He could hear her faintly squealing inside the box.
He stood back and watched the roll of her hips, she was trying to scrape the thing off against the X-frame but both belts were buckled up tight, they were there for the duration, the belts were going nowhere.
For as long as he wanted.
To remind her exactly who was who in this relationship of theirs.
He walked over to his worktable and opened a drawer and took out the Polaroid camera.
All she could think of from then on was this thing inside her.
This lifeless thing fucking her. This constant violation.
She couldn’t begin to guess how many minutes, how may hours it stayed there.
NINE
6:10 p.m.
The two of them stood behind her as he lifted off the headbox and tied the black scarf over her eyes. Kath could see the raw spots where the box had rested on her collarbones. She wondered how the harness and dildo felt. It was new. He’d never made her wear one. She felt a twinge of something that was almost like jealousy but of course it wasn’t that because jealousy in this case would be ridiculous. They were probably damned uncomfortable. She watched him gag her.
They moved around in front of her, Kath following behind, giving him space. Knowing he’d need it.
“Here’s the story,” Stephen said. “The rules are that I do anything I want with you and you don’t flinch, you don’t pull away. You don’t resist in any way whatsoever. You understand me? Even when I put my fingers inside you like I did before. All I was doing was opening you up, lubricating you so it wouldn’t hurt so much. And you try to pull away. A that’s stupid and B it breaks the rules. So I guess you can figure what comes next. Sorry.”
The whip had eight long leather tongues, each tongue ending in a twisted ball.
She had felt it on her own body. An evil old acquaintance. The tongues stung you, raised instant welts if he whipped you hard enough. The balls bruised you, punched at you like tiny fists. Which was worse she couldn’t say.
She watched him drag the whip up sidearm from the concrete floor and slap her heavily across the breasts, first one breast and then the other, over and over, slap, slap, his arm like a metronome. Regular and more brutal she knew precisely because of the regularity, red streaks appearing instantly on Sara’s pale flesh, she wasn’t a topless sunbather like Kath was, she was probably too modest, blotching as he crisscrossed them with new strokes a she knew that the woman would welt up soon and that if he continued long enough the welts would bleed. She heard the woman screaming inside the gag, saw the muscles of her face pinch tight with pain, the body writhing and shocked by each successive blow and trying with no hope whatsoever to avoid them, every blow aimed at her breasts, each and every one with no relief except that he was moving from from one breast to the other, not much there, breasts being a kind of thing of his, a kind of fixation with him like having babies was a fixation with him and maybe they were connected, they probably were. He liked to suck her own breasts and bite them especially the nipples, he was like a baby himself sometimes always wanting mama’s titty and she knew how this felt, she knew exactly how Sara felt under the whip. She’d been there. She could feel it in her own breasts, tingling.