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2. The Cabin
Her heart is pounding. She must calm down, get her fear under control! There has to be a way out of this! Byron Madding is obviously insane, but there must be a way to reach him, to make him understand he can't get away with this, that he has to stop before it reaches a point where there's no way out for him. He has a reputation at the school for being a brilliant math teacher. His students seem to have a love-fear relationship with him. She must have really upset him with that stupid confrontation about him ogling the young girls. But wouldn't he have hurt her already if he planned to do so? Why this crazy business of tying her up and taking her to God knows where?
There was an obvious answer, of course, but it scared her too much to think about it.
Trouble is, this has already gone way too far. He must know that. She must convince him she'll keep quiet about all this if he just comes to his senses and lets her go, then resigns from Geoffrey Bartholomew High. He won't believe her if there are no consequences at all in the deal, so she'll tell him he has to resign. That's her only card. She won't charge him with assault; she won't charge him with criminal threatening; she won't charge him with kidnaping. She won't say a thing to anyone. He'll be scot free if he just lets her go and resigns, effective at the end of the school year. That's only another few weeks. He should be able to find another position easily. A sweet, relatively painless resolution to this mess he's made, if he'll only let her go.
The trip has gone on forever! For hours it seems. And the road has become rougher. She's being tossed about on the hard floor. Her shoulder hurts, and her hips. Where in God's world is he taking her?
When will anyone notice that she's gone? Do the maintenance people work weekends? They must. Will they ask anyone about the lone car still parked there? Normally her boy friend would be worrying right about now; he would certainly be concerned when she didn't show up for their Friday night dinner together, which nearly always led to an overnight of extensive lovemaking. Except, wouldn't you know it, this weekend he's off for some solitary camping and fishing on Long Pond. He won't realize anything's wrong until he gets back Sunday night and tries to call her. Or Monday when he tries again. And how about the school? How long will it be before someone figures out there's something seriously amiss about an English teacher suddenly gone AWOL?
And when she's finally reported missing, is there some automatic wait-and-see period before the police will do anything about it? Or will they find her car still parked at the school with strange damage to her car door. Surely that will alert everyone to the possibility that she's been abducted! But then what? Will they connect her disappearance to Byron Madding and somehow be able to track her down that way? Worse, will it be in time to save her from whatever he has planned for her?
The SUV is really tossing her around now. The engine is grinding in a low gear. This is not good! Wherever they are, it's not the highway, nor even a decent secondary road. It's well off the beaten track. The stale damp air under the woolen blanket is suffocating. She's awash in sweat from fear and her own body heat. Her jaw aches from being forced open so long by the soggy gag. Her ear is resting in a puddle of her own drool. Fright has loosened her urinary sphincter and her pantyhose and skirt are wet, adding an illogical sense of shame to her fear.
The vehicle bounces to a stop, throwing her into a maelstrom of relief and dread. The door by her head opens and the blanket is whipped off her body. A strong scent of pine and earth rushes in. She tries to look cool and collected, the better to reason with him. But she's terrified!
She hears his feet crunch around to the driver's side. That door opens and he's leaning in, untying the rope that holds her ankles to the track of the front seat. Now he's releasing the belts around her ankles and legs, but leaves the belt around her arms and rib cage, just under her breasts. Oddly, he takes off her shoes.
He climbs back out, slams the door and comes back around to the other side. He disconnects her leash from the seat track, pulls her out of the SUV and stands her up. She staggers on her stocking feet, her legs complaining at the sudden return to function, her feet cold on damp dirt and prickly weeds. They're in thick, unkempt woods, the SUV parked on the vestigial remains of an ancient logging road, now thoroughly grassed over and all but swallowed up by the encroaching undergrowth. She sees the road (if you can call it that) splits into a brief Y for a turn-around. Beyond that is the merest trace of a footpath leading off into even thicker new-growth woodland.
"Now we're going to take a walk," her captor informs her. "Give me any trouble and I'll start removing patches of your skin." He brandishes the syringe to make his point. "I've experimented with certain animals and I can assure you it does not appear to be a pleasant experience."
He turns and strides off on the barely discernable path, pulling her along behind him on the leash. A reluctant and fearful dog. The overgrown path is a nightmare of painful rocks, pebbles, vines, cone shards, roots and forest debris biting into her tender feet. Her thin pantyhose is soon torn and bloody. She whimpers as she picks her way along, half walking, half trotting, not daring to stumble and incur this crazy man's psychotic wrath.
The path keeps branching, each new segment more obscure than the last, the man relentlessly trudging onward, yanking on her leash. She trips and falls over a hidden branch that has dropped from a towering white pine, its trunk bristling with dead and rotting limbs snuffed by the light-hogging green canopy at the very top. She looks up to see the syringe pointed at her face and scrambles in an awkward panic, rolling to her knees and somehow to her feet. She moans and begs with her eyes that he not push the plunger! He aims a short burst at the tree trunk and a five-inch circle of bark promptly bursts into steam and boils. Satisfied with the terror that floods over her, he turns and yanks harshly at the leash. Humiliation and fear combine to break her spirit. She cries as the endless trek through the underbrush goes on and on.
In her heart she knows there will be no reasoning, no negotiations. How can she even try with this damned gag in her mouth? The farther he drags her from civilization, the slimmer her chances for coming out of this alive. Or coming out of it at all! Where can this be leading but to a shallow grave no one will ever find? Only wild animals drawn to the stench, looking for a good meal.
She salves her anxiety with proactive fantasy solutions. If she had the guts, she would run up behind him (like Catwoman or Xena), knock him down with a kick to the kidneys and drive a heel into his throat to put the bastard out of commission. She would dig his keys out of his pocket, unlock the handcuffs, wriggle out of the belt, throw off the dog collar and sprint back to the SUV and freedom. But the heady smoke of the fantasy dissipates in the depressing reality of her fast-tiring English teacher's body, and the paralyzing fear of the horror contained in the syringe.
Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there is a ramshackle cabin in front of them, nearly invisible in the opaque tangle of bushy young trees and undergrowth. Its cladding is rough, uneven and crooked wooden boards, badly weathered. The windows appear to be boarded up on the inside. The roof is an unruly clutter of barely attached shingles. Byron unlocks a heavy padlock on the door — much heavier than the door would seem to warrant — and pulls it open. She sees that, in fact, the door is much thicker and heavier than it appeared. He thrusts her rudely inside the cabin and slams the door behind them, locking it with a bar bolt.
The interior is nothing like the outside. Far from ramshackle, the floor is solid pine planking, the walls and ceiling finished and covered with sound-proofing tile. And the windows are not boarded over at all; light filters through some kind of thick material that must be, she realizes, one-way glass. They can see out, but no one can see in. As she takes in the contents of the room, a frightening comprehension begins to form. Ropes, chains, shackles, pulleys, bars, cages, trestles, poles, winches, a variety of unusual steel tables, chairs and machinery, a large pegboard holding an assortment of whips, canes, belts, riding crops, other items she can't identify.
She has never seen anything like this before and even as a full understand of the implications sinks in, she finds herself positioned under a rope dangling from a pulley. Byron ties it to her handcuffs and pulls on the other end of the rope, drawing her arms up behind her and forcing her to bend over at the waist. He secures the other end of the rope to a wing hitch, leaving her in a position that is most uncomfortable and getting more so every minute as her shoulders register the strain.
Her discomfort is mixed with relief as she sees him empty the syringe into a jar and place both items in a steel storage cabinet. The cabinet is about four feet tall and contains thirty drawers stacked ten deep and three across. She estimates each drawer to be about four inches high, ten inches wide and maybe fourteen inches deep. God knows what other appalling things they contain.
He opens another drawer, pulls out a pair of scissors and starts toward her. She watches him, eyes wide, expecting the worst, conjuring terrible possibilities in her mind. Fearfully, she shies away from him. Constrained by the rope and her awkward posture, she can only scrabble around in a tight circle like a wounded crab. He grabs her arm.
"Stand still, you stupid bitch. I'm not going to hurt you. Yet."
She has no choice. His grip is hurting her arm. She sniffles and keens through her gag.
He's cutting the sleeve of her jacket, starting at the cuff and working his way up to the shoulder where the cut turns ninety degrees and circles her arm. He peels the material away. Then he does the same with the other sleeve.
For the moment her fear is overridden by her reflexive outrage at the mutilation of her expensive jacket. The material, including the pad, is too thick at the shoulder for the shears, so he exchanges them for a box cutter. Fear replaces outrage again as he slashes at the cloth until he can tear the garment entirely off despite her handcuffed wrists.
She still fails to see where this is going until he begins on her pale blue silk blouse. When that is gone, he snips the straps of her bra and with a flick she is naked from the waist up. Now she is crying, both from fear and humiliation.
But he's only half way there.
He unbuttons the waist of her sensible black skirt and slips it down over her hips and legs, careful not to dislodge any of the tiny bits of forest detritus still clinging to it from her fall. When she's reluctant to lift her legs so he can take the skirt away, he lifts them for her, making her produce muffled gasps of pain. She's more cooperative when he removes her pantyhose.
Now she is entirely nude. He laughs at her expression, a wild montage of fear, frustration, anger and embarrassment. She is grunting, bobbing back and forth, trying to talk.
He removes another item from the drawers and approaches her, speaking in a maddeningly calm voice.
"Good news and bad news, Miss Primrose. The good news is that you don't have to worry about the acid any more. I have retired it. It served its purpose. The bad news is that I will be using this device." He held it up. It was a rod with a handle, button and controls on one end. The other end came to a double pronged fork. "Do you recognize it?"
She shakes her head.
"It's a cattle prod. It's used all over the world under a variety of names and for a variety of purposes. Law enforcement loves it for handling prisoners, making bloodless arrests and for crowd control. Among other things. I use it for much the same thing for what I call 'attitude adjustment.' It has both external and internal applications. We will begin with the external. Would you like a demonstration?"
She shakes her head violently, spittle flying off the corners of her mouth.
"Now, see, that's the wrong attitude. We'll have to adjust it."
He touches the prongs to her thigh and pushes the button. She leaps backwards, screaming through the gag, hanging herself painfully.
"Let's try it again. Would you like a demonstration?"
She bursts into tears and stares at him, her eyes huge, caught in a no-win situation. "Silence is not the correct answer," he says and touches her other thigh. She screams and dances away from it in a feckless arc.
"The proper answer is, 'Yes, Sir. Please.' I will then grant your wish and demonstrate it. Unfortunately, until you answer properly I am obliged to continue using it on you anyway. It is rumored, Miss Primrose, that you are fairly intelligent; so why don't you put your brain to work, while you still can, and deduce the least painful course of action. Now, once again: would you like a demonstration?"
After a tearful hesitation, she mushes out the correct words, as best she can. "Eh, er. Eee."
This time he touches it to her right arm. Again she screams and lunges to the left.
"Very good. Now you have the right attitude. See how that works? That's what the external application feels like. In due course you'll have a chance to experience the internal application which is even more . . . intense, shall we say?"
He places the prod on top of the cabinet and fishes a heavy iron collar out of another drawer. It's about two inches high with a five inch diameter, hinged on one side. After removing the dog collar, he closes it around her neck and locks it on with a bolt, using two wrenches to tighten the nut so that it cannot be removed with fingers. The thick rusty iron looks wonderfully incongruous on her dainty neck. He attaches a chain to a ring in the collar, a chain that runs through an overhead pulley. Within minutes her wrists are released from the rope and the chain pulls her up on to her toes. The collar bites into her jaw but her shoulders are greatly relieved.
He stands directly in front of her, his eyes boring into hers. "Now I'm going to remove your gag. This does not mean that you may talk. You may talk only when you are given permission. If you break this rule, I will use the cattle prod on you until you decide to adjust your attitude. The correct attitude is total obedience. Do you understand?"
A look of fury flashes through her face, but she smothers it and nods.
"What do you say?"
"Eh, er."
"Good." He removes the gag.
Her eyes close in bliss as she works her jaw and her tongue, licking up the saliva that had collected around her lips because she could not swallow it. She wants to yell at him, to scream her anger at what he's done to her, at the outrageous affront to her dignity, making her stand here in the nude and play his obedience games! But he has the cattle prod and she knows he'll use it.
He pushes a heavy wooden chair against the back of her legs. Taking two lengths of rope, he ties her ankles to the front legs of the chair. He lowers the chain attached to her collar so she can sit and ties her knees to the tops of the chair legs and her body to the back of the chair. Then he pulls up a chair of his own and sits down facing her. He admires her wide open sex while she fumes in silence, staring up into the far corner to avoid seeing his eyes.
"Now then, Lili . . . You don't mind me calling you Lili, do you? Seems a little silly to call you Miss Primrose when we're on such intimate terms, soon to be much more intimate. Don't you agree?"
"Yeah," she mumbles, seething, holding her temper.
Suddenly his voice has a hard edge. "That is not a proper response, Lili." He extends the double prongs of the prod toward her exposed inner thighs.
"Yes, Sir!" she quickly amends, squirming uselessly and adding "Please don't!"
"Please what ?" he says, his voice rising. "Did I ask your opinion on whether or not I should correct your attitude?"
"No Sir! No Sir! I'm sorry!" she says, emitting little squeaks as the prod gets closer.
"You have once again incurred a need for correction and you will ask for what you deserve. You will say, 'Please, Sir, correct me.'"
"Yes, Sir! No! Please, I'm sorry!" She's becoming hysterical.
She screams as the prod makes contact, searing pain erupting where the voltage arcs between the two electrodes.
"Give me the correct response, Lili," he says, and zaps her again.
She screams again, but the agony sharpens her wits. "Please Sir, correct me Sir!"
"Certainly," he says and puts the points on the flesh right next to her furrow.
Her scream is more sustained this time. She rocks back and forth on the seat, trying to speed up the fade out of the pain, sobbing now.
"That's better," he says, leaning back in his chair again. He can see the tension in her body begin to ebb a little. He's earned her respect. But he's confident he'll have many more opportunities to adjust her attitude before it's time for the final solution to Miss Primrose. "The thing is," he goes on smoothly, "your observation was quite correct. I do ogle the girls. Every chance I get. And why not? If they wear fuck-me clothes in public, their obvious intent is to attract the attention of males who would like to fuck them. I am such a male and they have my attention. I do know better, of course, than to actually fuck them while they're still under age and still students at my school. I am a lech, but I'm neither stupid nor reckless. Unlike you."
He sees her eyes flare up, then flicker to the cattle prod in his lap. She has the sense to hold her tongue. He continues.
"You spotted me looking over the girls and were too stupid to ignore it, like everybody else. No, you had to get up on your high horse and come preach to me about 'propriety' and threaten me. Then you were reckless enough to admit no one else knows about your little morality crusade. That means I can eliminate you and your threat and no one will link your disappearance to me."
Suddenly she realizes her situation is a lot more dire than the pain of a cattle prod.
"That's not true," she blurts out. "I've discussed what you've been doing with several other people and told them I was going to report you!"
"Oh? Who?"
"Several teachers."
"Which teachers?"
"I'm not going to tell you. You've got to stop this craziness and let me go! You can't get away with it. They'll be on to you as soon as they know I've gone."
He smiles lazily. "Somehow I choose to believe your earlier assurance that no one else knew about what you had observed. It surely would have strengthened your hand to tell me they did, yet you denied it. No, I think this change in story is merely to save your pretty neck. But all you've done is create yet another need to adjust your attitude. What do you say?"
"Mr. Madden, this is crazy. I'm telling you I . . ."
He touches the prod to her abdomen and presses the button. She screams! "Please! Listen . . ."
He touches it to her right breast. She screams again.
He leans closer and exaggerates his enunciation. "What . . . do . . . you . . . say?"
She is strangling on her tears in her panic, but she manages to say it. "Please correct me, Sir!"
"Good." He touches her once again, this time on the outer lip of her sex.
She wails in agony before dissolving into shudders.
When she has calmed down, he says, "You must really come to terms with your situation. I will explain it to you. Because of your arrogant indiscretion, your life is forfeit. It is in my hands, now. But you are also a beautiful and very marketable young woman, and that opens up opportunities for both fun and profit. Accordingly, I intend to play with you for my own amusement while I prospect for willing buyers. That is, the highest bidders. I'm confident I can make a handsome profit off you, which is not only poetic justice, considering you were ready to destroy me, but absolutely the finest way to dispose of your enemies. I have extensive world-wide contacts and should have no trouble drumming up acceptable bids. Needless to say, what your eventual buyer does with you is his business. But just so you know, no female who has been in this room has ever reappeared to tell her story. You will be no exception."
Lili remains sensibly mute as he stands up and unties the rope around her upper body, then pulls on the chain connected to her collar and forces her to stand up. He lowers a metal bar to just above her head. It is suspended from two ropes running through pulleys and has a shackle on each end. Using a box cutter, he cuts off the plastic handcuffs and swiftly locks her wrists into the cuffs at the ends of the bar. The bar is then raised until her arms are fully extended upward. He takes another bar from the pegboard; it's almost identical to the bar to which her wrists are cuffed, but the shackles at the ends are slightly larger. He removes the ropes tying her legs to the chair, pushes the chair out of the way and attaches that bar to her ankles, forcing her feet well apart.
He lifts a digital camera out of one of the cabinet drawers and snaps pictures of her from all angles. Then, from another drawer he pulls out an aerosol can of lather and an old fashioned straight razor. There's a sink on the wall to her left with a pump. He draws water from the pump into a basin and brings everything over to where she stands, legs spread.
"I tend to favor a nice thick bush like yours," he says. "More natural. But most buyers these days insist on a cleanly shaved pussy."
He proceeds to shave her, glancing up in amusement as she chews on her lower lip, trying to suppress her outrage, fearful of the primitive razor. But he handles it like a pro, shaving her cleanly and blotting her dry. She yelps when, without warning, he makes a small slash under her right breast. She cries out at the sting and the sight of blood.
"Oops! I shall have to be more careful with this thing," he says with a smile, and stanches the blood with her skirt, pantyhose and bra. It's not a deep cut, and after a while it stops bleeding. He drops the bloody garments carefully into a plastic bag and seals it.
"Now it's time for us to become intimately acquainted," he tells Lili. "If you have any problems with that, I'll be happy to put a gag back in your mouth and show you what the cattle prod feels like inside your vaginal canal." He cocks an eyebrow and waits a few beats, but she says nothing. "Excellent."
He releases her wrists from the overhead bar, slackens the chain attached to her collar, draws a small metal table up against her butt and makes her lie down on it. It's only large enough to support her bottom and the small of her back. He lashes her ankles to the legs of the table at one end and her wrists to the legs at the other end, then ties her hair into a rope hanging from the ceiling to hold up the top half of her body. She is now splayed out and helpless, her legs spread, her sex exposed and her hair pulling painfully at her scalp when she tries to relax and fall back. He adjusts the height of the table with a hand crank, stands between her thighs and unzips. He sticks a finger in her vagina, decides she's too dry and uses some salad oil to lubricate himself (for his comfort, not hers) and rams himself into the private depths of the bitch who tried to bring him down. He hammers away to the rhythm of her sobbing until he comes in a tremendous rush, pounding his ejaculate into her. He remains inside for the afterglow spasms and the tingling sensations from his ultra-sensitized member as he glides slowly in and out of her warm receptacle.
When he's too soft to continue, he pulls out, stuffs a tennis ball in her mouth, tapes it in place and leaves her to endure the increasing strain of her position while he uses his cell phone to start contacting prospective buyers. She listens to his side of the conversations with rising trepidation.
"She's the next thing to a virgin," he tells one. "Young, innocent, beautiful. And intelligent, too. She'll appeal to your most discriminating clientele. She needs a bit of obedience training, but I'll give you a discount for that." To another he says, "She'll pay for herself in a month. After that, it's pure profits. She's young and strong, you can use her for anything. Might last six, seven years. Even then she'll still be good for resale to the snuff market." To yet another he intones, "She's petite, gorgeous and she cries easily. A really cute, sensitive little thing. They'll get tears out of her with very little effort. And for the hard stuff she has a really heart breaking scream." To still another he declares, "She's prime meat. Young, tender. Very pretty, too. Slim but well endowed. She'd be perfect for the upcoming M ä dchenbraten. Sure, I'll e-mail you some snapshots. Believe me, you won't be disappointed! Yeah, she can be ready for shipment as soon as the money arrives. But you'd better hurry; I've got several interested buyers already offering top dollar."
When he finishes, he pulls a full size inner spring mattress to the center of the floor, setting it on four cinder blocks to lift if off the floor. A few minutes later Lili Primrose is stretched out face up on the innerspring, her wrists and ankles cuffed to each corner. The chain still connects her iron collar to the overhead beam — just in case she somehow tears loose from the innerspring. Byron pulls a large pan out of a lift-top wooden box and slides it under the innerspring directly beneath her crotch.
"It's been nice," he says, removing the tennis ball gag, "but I've got some details to take care of. Oops! Did I just dangle a preposition? Sorry about that. Even in the most extreme circumstances we must strive for . . . propriety . . . in all things. So let me rephrase that in a proper grammatical syntax: 'There are some details of which I must take care.' Do you approve, Miss morally conscientious English teacher?"
He pauses to see if she'll take the bait. But she remembers the pain of the cattle prod and holds her tongue. He sighs, disappointed, and pinches her left nipple hard, making her grimace. "I asked you a question, bitch teacher." He pinches the other nipple harder, making her yip. "Answer me! Correctly, now!"
"Yes, Sir. It was better," she says, her voice contorted in a conflict of fear and anger.
"That's a good little bitch," he says through a sardonic smile. "And it's all I want to hear out of you until morning."
He finds a roll of clear wrapping tape in the cabinet and presses it over her closed mouth, winding it round and around her head in several layers from just under her nose to the curve of her chin, then vertically over her head and under her jaw.
"I'll be back in the morning to play with you," he tells her as he puts the rest of the roll back into the cabinet. "It looks like we've hit the market at a good time, so I'll be able to nail down a good price for you. In the meantime, if you can't hold your bladder or your bowels, go ahead and disgrace yourself. That pan under your bed will collect it. Perhaps we can even find an imaginative way to recycle what you produce."
He takes more pictures of her spreadeagled on the innerspring, then pockets the camera, unbolts the door and picks up the plastic bag containing her bloody clothes.
"By the way," he says over his shoulder, "you'd better hope nobody comes to rescue you. The place is booby trapped. See those nozzles?" He points to an array of nozzles aimed at the door, windows and at her, all sprouting from a rectangle of pipes attached to the rafters, the pipes originating from what appears to be a propane gas tank in a corner. "That tank over there is filled with cyanide gas under high pressure," he explains. "Once I'm outside and arm the system, anyone who attempts to enter will trigger a discharge of the gas through those nozzles. You and your rescuer will be dead within ten to fifteen seconds. Sleep tight."
He closes the door behind him. She hears the click of the lock. Then silence.
Byron uncovers the hidden control box and pushes the arming sequence, reminding himself to bring a fresh auto battery in the morning. He takes a circuitous route back to the SUV, his standard procedure to help avoid creating an obvious path. He tosses the plastic bag on the floor and revs up the SUV. There's a game he wants to catch on TV. But first he has to take care of a vital detail in the interest of covering his ass.
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