When I heard the door open behind me, I jumped in surprise and almost screamed with both terror and relief. At last I would get to see the person behind all this.
When he stepped into view, I didn't know whether to scream or laugh. He was dressed completely in black leather with black metal studs all over. His head was completely enclosed in a leather hood with a studded flap across the mouth, and he wore heavy leather gauntlets on his hands. If he held his head at the right angle to the torchlight, I could just make out his eyes through the rectangular slits in the mask. He was the perfect image of Hollywood's version of a medieval torturer. It was almost funny, but very disturbingly real.
"Where am I?" I asked, more to get him to speak than from any hope that he would really answer the question and I could tell Neeka where to send the cops.
He said nothing. He went over to the table and opened a box and reached inside. he came over to me and held something up in front of my face. It looked like a big ring with straps on it.
"Open your mouth," he said. His voice was soft and high-pitched. It didn't go at all with the leather and the studs.
"Why?" I asked, trying to keep him talking.
Instead of an answer, he reached out to the brazier and pulled out a short metal rod with a sharp point on it. The point and about three inches of the rod was glowing cherry red. He held it directly in front of my eyes so I could get a nice close look at it. My face prickled from the intense heat and my eyes started to tear up. It was a very convincing argument for my cooperation and I opened my mouth wide without making any further comment.
He put the hot iron back into the brazier and held the ring in front of my mouth again. I strained to open my mouth wider, and then wider still when he didn't move. Finally, with my jaws about to unhinge, he dropped the ring into my mouth, where my teeth closed on it by reflex.
He fastened the straps behind my head, pulling the ring even further into my mouth. Then he bent over and looked through the ring into my mouth — what for I had no clue.
"Rules," he said, tersely. He had a slight lisp as well as a high voice and the hiss was starting to creep me out. "You may not talk. You may scream if you like. I expect that. If you try to talk there will be pain. Do you understand?"
Without thinking, I said, "Ah unuhhanh" and realized that I had just broken the first rule. Now I was going to suffer the consequence.
He went back to the table and brought over several instruments, which he placed out of sight behind my head. He held up one of them, a pair of pliers with wide flat jaws, and said, "Stick out your tongue."
I thought it over too long, and he put out a hand in the direction of the brazier. Immediately, I stuck my tongue out through the ring. For my compliance, he was very gentle with the pliers. He gripped the end of my tongue and pulled only as hard as necessary to get it stretched out as far as it would go. I had been afraid he would rip it out by the root. As it was, it was still pulled out to the limit, which was far enough that I could easily see what he did next.
He placed a big clamp onto my extended tongue and tightened it down so it would not slip. He released the pliers. He took another instrument and placed its jaws around my tongue so that it pressed into the center and through a hole in the clamp's jaws. He squeezed the handle and I felt something sharp pierce my tongue straight through from top to bottom.
The pain was bad, but it was over quickly. I didn't scream and I couldn't flinch. I had no choice but to lie there and let him do whatever he wanted to me. When I opened my eyes again and blinked away the tears, I saw that he had pierced my tongue with a metal sleeve the diameter of a pencil through which he inserted a steel rod that was longer than the diameter of the ring gag in my mouth. My tongue was trapped. I could not pull it back into my mouth. The sleeve staunched the blood and kept the rod from pulling the hole wider. There would be no more talking from me.
"Good girl," he told me, talking as though I were a pet dog that he was training. "Do you see that cooperation is important? I can make you comply with my instructions, but I would much rather have your cooperation."
I hesitated, then I nodded my understanding. I was helpless. If I resisted, if I failed to obey instructions, it would be worse. If I cooperated in my own torture, I would be spared some of the more unpleasant treatments. It was a real deal with the devil — damned if you do and damned if you don't.
"Excellent. Then we have an understanding. Now, I will answer some of the questions that you can no longer ask. First, we are in a place that I have spent a good bit of time and no small amount of money making completely soundproof. You may scream until your lungs burst and your vocal cords are torn apart, but no one will hear you. Please scream for me now, so that you will know that this is so."
I didn't want to know what the penalty was for remaining silent. I screamed. The gag limited me, but I screamed as loud as I could.
"Not very convincing, I'm afraid," he said, and went away.
I was immediately terrified. This was obviously a game he played with each victim — get them to scream and then teach them how to do it properly by giving them a reason to do so. I had a bad feeling that he had a way to motivate even the most reluctant vocalist. Even as terror rose up inside me, so did a certain anticipation of what he would do to me next. The tongue piercing and trapping had been unexpected and creative. Clearly he had put a lot of thought and preparation into this. He had had plenty of opportunity to practice on other victims and as far I knew all of them had survived the ordeal.
The only things that seriously worried me were the words 'mutilation' and 'institutionalized' in the crime summary and Sgt Adams' reluctance to go into any detail about what he had done to the other girls. I would probably be alive when he was finished with me, but what condition I would be in was still a very large unknown. I began to doubt there was much security in knowing that the other girls had survived. I imagined some things that would make survival less than a happy outcome and the vividness of the images fed my fear until it became like a living thing, anchored deep in my gut.
He came back with a device that was a wooden box with dials and knobs on the front. Attached to the box by a wire was shiny metal cylinder about eight inches long and two inches in diameter. Two other wires ended in copper alligator clips. He sat the box on a rolling stand and pushed it up beside my table. Reaching under the table, he started fiddling with a control of some sort. Slowly, I felt my legs being forced apart as the table split in the middle and pivoted apart just under my butt.
When he had my legs at a 90-degree angle and my knees slightly elevated, he reached up and put his gloved hands on my breasts and started to fondle me. Even with the clumsy gloves, he was good at it. His touch was firm, but gentle. Although I kept expecting him to hurt me, he didn't. He squeezed and stroked my breasts purposefully for several minutes until my nipples swelled up and out, eager for more stimulation. As soon as he saw that I was becoming aroused, he moved on to my sensitive nipples and started stroking and tugging them. My traitorous flesh responded to his touch and they became stiff and hard under the rough leather of his gauntlets.
My state of sexual excitement stood out in stark contrast to the terror I felt. My body welcomed it as an alternative to the unbearable tension of fear and I felt myself quickly rise to pitch of arousal despite my determination to resist.
When he saw that I was breathing harder and trying to squirm against my bonds, he went around the foot of the table and stood between my spread legs. I jerked when he touched my pussy, the terror of what might happen to me at any moment leapt to the front of my mind and jibbered horrible things in my ear. The man only stroked my quivering sex softly and I gratefully relaxed and gave myself over to the rapidly spreading lust that his fondling was generating in my body.
He spread my pussy lips apart with his thick-gloved fingers and pushed one inside me and pulled it back out again. I saw him hold his hand up in the light. His glove was wet with my juice.
He picked up the metal cylinder, put it against my pussy opening and then pushed it slowly but firmly inside. Penetration by something that large made me tense and strain against the straps. At first it felt cold, but it quickly warmed once it was in contact with my vaginal walls. As I got used to its presence, I relaxed again and waited for the next step.
He took the alligator clips and, spreading them as wide open as they would go, pushed them over the ends of my distended nipples. He let them go with a snap that sent the sharp teeth deep into my tender pink flesh and made me scream from the sudden pain.
My eyes were watering and I whimpered from the pain of the clips biting into my nipples while I watched him turn a dial on the front of the wooden box and then put his hand on one of the switches.
"Now, my dear. Let's try that scream again."
He flipped the switch and a bolt of the most horrible pain I had ever felt seared through me from my nipples to my pussy. My body arched involuntarily against the straps and I screamed so loudly that I thought I would rip my vocal cords right out of my throat. I screamed so hard that I thought my ribs would crack from compressing the air going out of my windpipe. The charge of electricity running through my body made the muscles in my abdomen and chest contract so tightly that I thought they would be torn apart. For the first split second, even though the majority of my consciousness was set afire with the incredible agony, some distant part of my mind recognized that this was the real reason for the strength of the straps — they weren't designed to resist my attempts to escape, they were designed to hold me in place even though my muscles were contracting hard enough to rip me apart.
I bit down on the gag viciously. If it hadn't been there I probably would have bit my tongue off or pulverized all my teeth. As it was, my mouth was held open so wide that I couldn't get enough leverage to do anything of the sort.
I have no idea how long he let the current course through me. The intensity of the pain made time seem to stand still. I was in an infinite amount of pain for an eternity. Pain was all. Pain simply was. I think I screamed the whole time.
At last I heard a click as he shut off the switch and the pain vanished as quickly as it had come. Nevertheless, I went on screaming until my body was sure that the suffering was really over, then I slowed to a raspy groan. I was suddenly grateful for his permission to scream. Not to have been able to scream would have meant going insane in a matter of seconds.
"Very good. You have a fine voice, although I doubt you will be using it for a while after today. You impress me. Many of my guests have passed out by now.
"Now where was I? Oh yes, you understand that there will be no rescue and no escape no matter how much you scream?"
I nodded, jerkily. Tears flowed from my eyes in a steady stream and ran down the sides of my face and into my ears.
"And you realize that you must cooperate with me, that if you fail to do so I will give you more pain that you ever imagined?"
I nodded again. My abdominal muscles were still convulsing where the electricity had overloaded the nerves. My breasts were taut and hard on my chest because the muscles under them were cramped tight. My nipples felt like they had been burned to a crisp by the current. My vagina was clenched tightly around the metal cylinder and I thought it might be fused to my flesh.
He removed the clips from my nipples and I was very relieved to discover that they still had nerves left in them and they had not been burned into charred lumps by the machine. He had no trouble removing the cylinder either. It came free with no trace of the seared flesh that I had expected to see.
"Good girl. Now I will let you in on a secret. This," he waved his hand to include the whole torture chamber, "is not what it seems. Nor am I what I seem. No, no, no! Granted, I started with little more than a desire to take revenge on girls, to punish them for spurning me, for laughing at me, for humiliating me!"
His eyes became wild behind the mask at this point. I was afraid he was about to lose control and I didn't want to think what he might do to me then. He took several deep breaths and calmed down before resuming his speech.
"No. I had a better idea. I decided that simple punishment was not the answer. I found that, after a while, sweet revenge turned to ashes in my mouth. I looked for a more positive solution. And I found it! Think of today's events as a test. I'm sure you've had to take tests in school that you found to be disagreeable. Well, I will be subjecting you to a series of rather unpleasant tests that will help me to determine if you should be returned to the world in an improved version of your former self, or if you should be branded a failure as a female. I have here a tool that I designed specifically for that purpose. I am sure you will find it interesting. The other girls who were unlucky enough to make its acquaintance will certainly never forget it."
He went to the brazier and turned one of the iron rods while he pumped the bellows with his foot. The temperature in the room went up sharply and the pool of sweat in my navel overflowed and ran down my abdomen and between my spread legs, where it felt like a drop of boiling water, scalding my tender parts as it rolled through the valley of my sex.
After pumping that bellows for what seemed like a long time, he pulled out the iron he had been working whose end was buried under the coals. He knocked the ash and coals off and held it up for me to see. The end of the rod was a foot-long, two-inch thick cylinder with a rounded knob on the end. It was an iron dildo that shone brightly with incandescent heat and it instantly commanded my undivided attention.
I was as transfixed by the rod of glowing iron as a rabbit might be when finding itself within striking distance of a deadly viper. I dared not breathe or blink. I could not look away. My breathing quickened and my heart raced. I was horrified at the obvious use for this crude metal device that gave off such intense waves of heat that I could feel from five feet away.
I tried to swallow, but my throat was already bone dry from having my mouth held open by the gag. I was petrified at the thought that I might be receiving the brutal affections of this hideous device. At the same time I felt a flash of heat in my abdomen and my stupid pussy started contracting wildly, as though it couldn't wait to embrace the metal monster that would be the last fuck it would ever get.
As I stared at the branding iron I felt a horrid compulsion seize me. It took hold all of a sudden and I was shocked at how quickly and thoroughly it crushed my self-control. As the heat of it radiated through me, it sapped my strength along with my will and I felt weak and helpless to fight off the dreadful feeling that came over me.
I felt myself drawn irresistibly to the glowing phallus, yearning for it against my will and against my judgment. My legs strained against the straps, not to close protectively, but to spread my pussy open wider in eager anticipation of the ultimate act of copulation. The inevitability of this unnatural intercourse fell over me like a leaden shroud. I felt I had been sentenced to the same ghastly fate that had been cruelly meted out to those who had been here before me and that I must resign myself to that fate and even meet it willingly.