There was a sort of screw effect. I had to watch while Cedric tightened it. I suddenly realised that I was going to be watching the whole exercise. Little Terry was going to be tortured and she was going to have a front seat view of her own flesh and bone being torn up. I surged against those straps that were tight around my ankles, waist above my breasts, my elbows and wrists. I was fixed, but good.
Cedric kept turning the knob. I began to suspect that he had flubbed the operation, when suddenly the awful contraption began to take hold. I stiffened and looked at his intent face. I don’t know why I looked. Cedric wasn’t going to rescue me. Why should he? This was as much my idea as his.
"It is beginning to hurt," I said, just to keep him informed.
"Good." He spoke the word as though in confirmation. He was absorbed.
The next turn had me gasping. He paid no attention, but twisted again. I screamed. I couldn’t help it. I just had to. I screamed and screamed again. It was that sort of pain. A girl has no defences against it. It possessed you and you didn’t know its limits. The screams were half pain and half fear. Now I could understand why – in the past – the better torturers had always used thumbscrews.
The damn chair and the straps were part of it. I could not move enough to matter. I fought those straps, but did not budge. My master thoughtfully tightened one or two of them while I was still screaming. He had discovered the ideal instrument. It would go on and on hurting me even when he was doing something else. He could even leave the room and the horrible thing would continue to bite and wrack and burn so that I could cry and cry and plead and plead when there was no one to listen. If there had been any question of my saying ‘yes’ to something, I’m sure I would have said it.
Cedric – thoughtfully – gave it one more turn.
A girl can’t really describe an experience like this. At least I can’t. When you think of it there is not a large vocabulary of words to explain pain. You have heard them all. Then there are things that I blurted out, mostly pleading. You know: ‘oh please stop… I’ll do anything…’ I exhausted my repertoire of those too. It was sort of an explosion of everything at once. Cedric listened gravely. And watched, with glowing eyes.
I felt the impotence of slavery. A slave cannot bargain. She has nothing to offer. Her master owns all of her already. She cannot threaten, she has no weapon to threaten with. The stock situations in which a girl is tortured are on the premise that something is required of her besides screams: she can stop what is being done to her by saying yes. She may not say it, but the choice is there. With a slave girl it is definitely not. It will stop only when someone else decides they are tired with that particular bit of fun. The metal ugliness was on my hand. But it might as well have been all of me. The pain was. That’s all little Terry had become: one huge flaming agony. A strange and awful thing that twisted and shrank me inside and caused the noise I made to be without words or form, they were just a continuous ululation of suffering. You see, that darn thing on my hand wasn’t like a whip. No cut followed by variations, perhaps a pause if you are lucky. This never stopped, never relented. You knew it would not stop unless some mechanical motions were made first.
My poor hand! There it was sticking out from the strap that cinched my wrist light, tight down against the wood and on it, clutching it like some dread beetle, was this strangely shaped contraption spawned from a nightmare centuries old. Sorry if I sound a bit like a hyperbole. But I’m trying to tell you. I was watching. I saw it all.. I saw my hand and the thing on it. But I could not move it. The strap was such a lovely neat circle. It held my wrist so beautifully. Anything I tried to do with my fingers hurt too much to be worthwhile.
To make the whole thing worse was the knowledge that there was nothing to stop Cedric turning the screw again. I knew, of course, that if he did I would die, my hand would never be any use again. I hadn’t any hope of fainting. I’ve never fainted in my life. I think that fainting bit went out with corsets and constipation. I watched his face, in between throwing my head all over the place. I was the only thing I could move. Cedric was very happy. He’d got hold of a bit of me that had never been used, a virgin hand. It was an exploration for both of us. He reached once more towards the knob.
"Stop!!!"
Involuntarily I barked that single word as though I had authority. It just popped out. Cedric paused, startled. Then he saw me. I mean he really saw me. Since he’d strapped me in the chair and we’d half laughingly puzzled out the thumbscrew I’d become, for him, just a delightful curved and tastefully strapped feminine something that provided the most stimulating erotic sounds and motions. Now he blinked and beheld poor little Terry Esmond’s face wet with tears and drawn and lined in agony. I’m sure my face must have looked awful, even if the rest of me didn’t. It made him pause and think.
"Pretty awful, eh?"
Just pleasantly conversational. I could have killed him. I just increased the tempo of inarticulate noises. He perked up. "I’m not gonna take it off, y’know." He was feeling his oats.
I sort of zeroed in with focus on his eyes. "Oh Cedric. I’m only girl. I’m not made or iron…" I trailed it off in agony and tossed my head. I wasn’t acting. It was real. I couldn’t be flip about it. So it must have been pretty bad.
CHAPTER 5
"Now see here…! Dorinda sat up straight pulling futilely at her imprisoned wrists in instinctive anger. The motion thrust her breasts into a flattering prominence. She bore Mark’s appreciative scrutiny with flushed cheeks and an inward tremor. "I do not wish to be whipped," she assured them with flat finality. "Or anything else either," she added without being quite sure what she referred to. Having enjoyed her breasts, Mark’s eyes raised to meet her own angry stare. He was obviously puzzled. "Do you mean to tell us that absolute clod never briefed you on the drill?"
"I’m not who you think I am."
They were full of surprises.
"Over to the column," Mark tersely ordered his sister.
"Oh no darling! Please…!" Terry wailed.
Mark rose to his feet. He had suddenly ceased to be a boy. Terry gave him a penitent grimace, shrugged her shoulders and resumed the pose in which Dorinda had first beheld her. She offered her wrists for the fetters. When the metal bands circled them she pulled as though to assure herself that she was indeed securely chained. "I hate you," she said to her brother without conviction. She turned her mischievous eyes toward Dorinda.
"You watch your P’s and Q’s," she warned. "He’s quite merciless."
Dorinda yearned to run. But what was the use! There was still hope that she was involved in no more than a mild behavioural oddity. But she viewed brother and sister with new and startled eyes.
"I wanted to be in on it," Terry complained petulantly to her brother. "You’re an absolute beast, darling." Suddenly, perkily, she thrust her tongue out at him in a provocative gesture of defiance.
Quietly, without haste and without anger, Mark lifted his sister’s left foot off the floor and fastened it to the side of the marble by a shackle, already provided. Terry must now perforce stand on one foot. I a little while it would become a real punishment. "Little girls should be seen and not heard," he admonished without anger.
"Oh, Mark! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… Oh, no, not on one foot
… Please!" Her captive ankle struggled against the metal that held it a foot from the floor.
Mark laughingly bent and kissed the pouting lips. "You asked for it, darling. You know you did."
"Oh, all right! So I asked for it!" Terry admitted.
The siblings smiled at each other in pure love and perfect understanding.
Mark grasped Dorinda’s arm. "Come along," he said cheerfully. "I think we need to have a little walk."
Dorinda could not have agreed more. But she felt little optimism. The sight of the naked girl chained to the pillar made chaos in her thoughts. It was too unreal! Terry, instead of struggling and complaining, contrived to make herself quite beautiful. Perhaps she posed? Or possessed some unnatural grace. Standing on her one free foot she leaned negligently against the stone to which she was chained. The one raised leg by which she was being penalised enhanced the appeal of the picture that she made, as did the seemingly effortless raising of her arms to the shackles that held them so invincibly. She radiated the perfection of line and posture of an artist’s model. She was very beautiful. She gave the departing girl a smile of encouragement, her own condition forgotten. "Don’t be awkward, darling," she advised. "Or you’ll hurt when you sit down." The silvery peal of her laughter followed them from the terrace.