1.06.2012

Chapter 17: In Need of Ewers, Truly

Time slowed to a standstill, frozen like the water in the center of the room. Two light bulbs filled upside down cages in the freezer ceiling. The rules and conditions of physical laws no longer strictly applied to the area. Once the ice would have been clear and white, but now it looked exactly like frozen ink. Something about the presence of evil affected the molecules at the spectral level; that certain something had a lot to do with the desires of the entity that caused the color shift.

Devon Washington sat on a box of preformed hamburgers opposite the unit's door, unable to stop shivering despite the heavy coat he kept within to stay warm when he had work to do inside. He tried not to look at the face peering through the door's small, film covered window at him, mostly a futile effort. He knew about the thing on the other side. Even though a part of him was hardened to terrible things, fear coursed through his veins. One glance into the all-pupil eyes in the hall outside turned some of Devon's blood to ice, just like the water on the floor. If something opened his veins the blood inside him would have been brighter than normal, but there was no way anyone could know that.

"You did very well, Devon," the being spoke. It looked human to a casual observer. The sound of the voice gave it away as much as the eyes to anyone focused. The words slipped from between pale lips with the tiny echoes of bugs feet while they investigated a container filled with rotten meat. The creature intended the sound to be that way, for effect. Indeed, it could have named the exact mausoleum where it originally heard such a thing, only to store it in memory to be reproduced on future occasions.

"Why are you still here? I didn't do anything all that bad, and I did what I did to be left alone. That was the agreement." Devon spoke with volume to get his emotions under control. His voice didn't conjure any grotesque associations. His will and resolve returned somewhat with the physical action of producing the communication. He had done something instead of sitting paralyzed with anxiety and foreboding. He spoke.

"I'm still here because you crossed the line. Man. You hurt an innocent child."

The creature smiled. The teeth behind the lips were perfect, pearly whites, but there were bits of uncooked flesh trapped between the canines and bi-cuspids on both sides. The fact that the flesh obviously belonged to a white person did not reassure Devon in any way. One more little trick accompanied the sight. Washington believed he could smell acute halitosis.

The dark skinned cook stammered, unprepared by the creature's statement and disgusted by the sensory perceptions that were not entirely real. "I didn't hurt anyone. All I did was get the kid in some trouble at school. It wasn't a big deal. And this was supposed to be the last thing I ever had to do."

"That you can sit there and say that false accusations don't hurt anyone shows so much about your character. A man went to the electric chair because of you, because you bore false witness; you lied. Now an innocent little boy has faced accusations of vile behavior, once again because of something you did. This story is going to follow him around, in his juvenile record, for the duration of his stay in this great state. Maybe even longer. And the only thing you can think about is going free. You haven't changed a bit."

The truth of the accusations penetrated the cook's consciousness like a fish hook. He felt psychic pain reverberating inside him as the words about the little boy echoed in his thoughts. While Devon heard the words as they were spoken, saw the entity's mouth move while pronouncing each syllable, he heard it all as his own thoughts while he huddled on the box. He felt remorse inside him, deep pain that he once again acted against the good and pure to save himself. He prayed.

The evil thing wearing the guise of a man uttered contempt. It issued forth in no language, but translated into English before arriving in Washington's awareness. "So now you beg forgiveness for spreading your filth in the world. It's so easy for you. All you have to do is ask and you are forgiven. That man was so much greater than this world deserved. That He gave up his life for the like's of you absolutely astonishes me. Even as you grovel internally, He has already forgiven you. You humans just have no idea how lucky you are."

Devon began to shed tears before the evil presence finished speaking, but he still heard it all. "No I am leaving, Devon Washington. Thank you for your help. In the days and weeks to come the true depth of your actions will become clear to you. You were not beyond saving, this time. We still have high hopes you will cross the line and wind up so far away from grace even your messiah won't listen. You have it in you. We're proud of you."

As suddenly as the horrifying being had appeared and driven the cook into the freezer it disappeared. Devon heaved until a thin stream of bile spewed from his mouth down to the floor. The seconds began going by again. He could tell because normal sound returned. The sound of the freezer kicking on set wheels inside his mind into motion. Light slowly refracted until the ice on the floor looked white and clear again. The creature was gone.

Washington stopped weeping, but he knew the remorse would be a long time departing. He never meant to harm a child in any way, and he managed to convince himself the task he found at hand would not do so. He buried the pain of his own false accusations in a crevice in his memories so he could accomplish what needed to be done. With all the secrets pulled aside he felt all the pain he caused the child, even though the little boy had barely suffered from it so far. Devon hoped the principal of the school would find the compassion to buck regulations and bury the incident so Mark Thompson would completely forget it ever happened, but it was too small a thing for the principal to be concerned about, Devon was sure.

Devon Washington received nothing from the forces of evil. He did not take contracts to perform services in exchange for goods or favors. Complicated applied to the situation very well.

From a very young age Washington perceived the world differently from other human beings. He saw things other people did not see. He heard them and smelled them too. He thought of all the bad things as devils, just as he thought of the good beings he saw as angels. The differences between the two strains of Washington's metaphysical perceptions could not be easily described with words such as good and evil because his experiences went beyond the reaches of logic and normal language, but while describing the bad as evil was not easy, and was too shallow, he knew it would be incorrect to use any other term. It should be noted that "perceptions" is really the only good word with which to refer to Washington's experiences; nobody else shared the experiences.

Over the course of his long life Washington pieced together a lot of knowledge that could not be learned from any books or in any classrooms, at least not any he knew about. As far as he could tell real angels were sinless, virginal human women. Children came in a very close second in purity, but their free will had not been given enough rein yet to demonstrate the depth of their inner goodness. The world had plenty of good men, but none Washington ever encountered struck him as even remotely holy on a divine level.

It really wouldn't surprise anyone who knew him that some of the things Devon Washington believed to be true were not, and some of the things he did not believe were very true. The fact that all the devils were the same being had completely escaped his attention, owing to the fact that he placed too much faith in his own perceptions. He also mistook the angelic for actual divine entities. Delving any further into Devon's mythology is best left for another time.

The long vicious cycle in which Devon Washington found himself trapped did originate with a bargain he struck with the devil while he was still a very young man. The terms of the agreement in no way included the exchange of his undying soul for anything. In practice the agreement worked out a lot closer to such an arrangement than he thought possible at the time he made the deal.

Over the course of his life Devon Washington decided that deals with the devil's different faces were always the same. He assumed evil always wanted someone with clouded morality and sight such as his to arrange for an innocent human being to suffer hardship, because that was the only infernal arrangement he ever encountered. He started off by agreeing to help convict a man of murder in exchange for absolute mastery of the guitar.

Devon Washington cherished an electric Les Paul that he inherited from his father. It was the only thing his father left him. When one day one of the devils that he had seen occasionally throughout his life appeared to be open to communication, Washington decided to discuss the subject of a deal with it. He calculated that he could live comfortably forever with the money he would make from being a world renowned musician. He approached the discussion carefully.

Washington would have rejected the devil's proposition entirely if every detail had been known at the time of the agreement. An agreement was reached in which Devon testified falsely against a man in a murder case, but the devil made it seem very much like the man was guilty before Devon agreed. The devil told the truth after the man was convicted of a murder he did not commit, a truth that very much made that man a victim as well.

Devon's conscience ate at him after the jury decided to sentence the innocent man to death. One morning, having arrived at the truth of the matter because of the devil's gloating, Washington decided he could not live with himself if the state executed an innocent man because of his own false testimony. Devon got dressed in nice clothes, looking ahead to being booked for perjury.

Before Washington could get into his car he was shot in the head by the convicted man's brother. The bullet entered Devon's skull through his left eardrum, and also damaged that part of the responsible for hearing. The attack left him completely tone deaf, although still able to hear very clearly. He would not perceive anything he heard for almost eight months however, for he lapsed into a coma. During that time the man he testified against was murdered in prison and the man's brother was convicted of attempted murder. Washington would have a considerable burden of guilt to bear for the rest of his life and would never be the musical super star he had wanted to be.

Not long after regaining consciousness from the coma Devon realized that his reality had changed significantly. Devils stopped by to chat with him on a regular basis, or, rather, direct their speech at him. He couldn't communicate in return or he would have been committed to a mental institution faster than a Port Allen crackhead could cross the Mississippi River on payday. Evil was delighted that Washington had not died, for he would have done so in state of grace and been free forever. Instead of going to heaven the young man, still only in his twenties, was subjected to mental torment whenever the devil got bored or had some plan in mind.

Devon Washington had a strong psyche and deep spiritual beliefs, so it took a couple of years for him to break. It took twenty-six months, in fact, of seeing, hearing and smelling a devil that the rest of the world could not perceive before Washington couldn't take it anymore. He just wanted it to stop, to be left alone. Not only did the power of evil have a lot of things to say that could be considered real downers, but Devon's angels seemed to avoid him with great alacrity during those visitations. He not only could not meet angelic women, but they practically vanished from his life altogether. After that he began entering into very trivial agreements in exchange for periods of his life in which he would be undisturbed by any unholy entity.

Not until he agreed to get a little boy in trouble did Washington ever agree to anything he personally found egregious. It was supposed to be the last thing he would ever do for "a devil," but as the events of the night showed that was not to be the case. He had not carried out his end of the bargain to the letter. The mess for which Mark Thompson was to be accused was supposed to be extremely nasty and objectionable.

In the end Devon decided not to carry out the devil's wishes to a tee. The entity's visitation had not been surprising, although the discussion had been. Devon expected to eventually hear about failing to include filth in the scene, but not so quickly. He didn't hear about that at all, and was instead confronted as though he had done exactly what the devil hoped for. He was deeply shaken by how serious the encounter had been, and concluded that he had been entirely correct about the level of protection children receive from God and His son. The things the entity said revealed to Washington that he could very well have fallen far from grace if he had sinned too deeply against innocence.

Devon picked himself up from his seat in the freezer, feeling his old bones creak and ache as he did so. The cook was in his late forties, and consoled his own suffering with the knowledge that the older he got the closer he came to eternal peace. He opened the door of the freezer and set about leaving the restaurant to go home, as though nothing had happened. He wasn't looking forward to the moral discomfort of learning more about the child and the false accusation, but he had to admit his curiosity was peaked.

The back of the kitchen reeked of blood. Devon could see gradually vanishing footsteps that ended abruptly at the back wall. As always they resembled melted spots in the shape of a goat's hoof that appeared to contain miniscule living creatures unless examined directly, in which case they disappeared more rapidly and emitted faint traces of sulfur fumes in the process.

The bulletin board on the back door sported a brand new certificate Washington couldn't help but notice on his way out. It read:
Devon Washington
Second Place Winner
∞Elysium Cooking Contest∞
for his own new recipe
★Little Boy's Head Drizzled in Chocolate Sauce★
He hadn't sold his soul for an eternity of torment, Washington mused, it just felt like it. He wondered if anybody who may have considered hell could be a bad joke had pondered just how horrible a joke could be. After stepping outside and locking the door Devon noticed a body beside a car in the parking lot. He could see a large pool of blood around it, and didn't have to look closely to notice chew marks. He walked to his car, got in and drove away, having decided the corpse was not his problem, if it was really there.





⌷♰⌷

[To be examined for errors that may have occurred during digital transcription process at a later time. As I mentioned in the long lead up to the release of this chapter, I decided to significantly alter my approach to A Mist of Blood Red Goauche. Efforts to force the work to adhere to the confines of normal reality would have resulted in disaster. The original Chapter Seventeen was discarded because it was too mundane to be enjoyable. Chapter Eighteen was rewritten with the intent of making the reader's entertainment the highest goal.]

8.10.2011

Braɪdəl on a Lark: Chapter Fourteen

Lacey, as the girls in school called her, felt the eyes of the portly man Kincaid all over her as she finished applying olive oil and churned kelp skin cream to her torso, legs, bottom and arms. The place in which she found herself, called the spa, and the walk to it from her room indicated that the building must be a rather large mansion. Southwestern colors and adobe set the standard for the design in the hallway, the room she had been in and a stairwell she noticed on the way to the spa. The extremely large bathroom area with a whirlpool jacuzzi, a steam bath, a hot bath, elongated mirrors and counters exhibited stylistic interior decorating based on Hindu art from the vast Asian subcontinent.

In finality Ivana used a powder puff to apply a small amount of gold and talcum powder as Kincaid instructed. That man had changed from the toga he wore for some hidden reason to normal business attire. From the way he looked at her she began to doubt her presuppositions about his sexual abnormality. After the second quick set of pats with the pad he took it away from her. Her hair sat damp in a huge curled braid on top of her head, and a corner of her mind nagged furiously at her lack of dry fabric. She still bore chafe marks from her captivity in the abandoned motel room. The marks burned only slightly but increased her dissatisfaction intensely.

First Kincaid reaffixed the sharp, thin chain to Ivana's wrist. Then, as if a barrier to communication lifted between then, he began talking to her. All traces of a soft spoken fop's accent disappeared from his voice, a vocal trait Ivana had mistaken for effeminate. He tugged on her leash as he began to speak.

"I assume you haven't spoken much because you are traumatized by this experience, whether or not you'd like to believe that. Any young lady would be. There's no shame in finding yourself at a loss for words after being sold into slavery."

"We don't have slavery in the United States. There's no way this sort of thing could happen regularly without anyone noticing. This is some sort of staged event. This is something you people did to me, just to me," Ivana declared in a slightly raised voice. Her words were almost overly articulated and emphatic.

"I have to say that you are both correct and incorrect in your assertions. You are the only person involved. Slavery does still exist, however, here in the states and everywhere else.

"The worst sort of slavery is a lot more common than many people think. Young women, and sometimes even young men, though I shudder to think about it, are given regular doses of physically addictive substances while held captive. Once addicted the victims need the drug to prevent withdrawal. Withdrawal sickness has been described as so horrible the addict will do anything to get the drug. In cases of white slavery the victims use their bodies to pay their way further and further into the nightmare. White slavery is hardly a good description of the loathsome practice, since everything about it is like a stain on the goodness of humanity, but that is what it's called."

"The situation you find yourself in is nothing at all like that. My wife and I bought you outright from a black market business that deals in human lives. Anything and everything exists for people who have an abundance of wealth. We have a mountain of money, but new experiences are difficult to come by. Once we heard you are a virgin we simply couldn't resist. Besides, we were so happy with our third slave we decided it would be nice to get a fourth. Four gives our hobby a tight association with the square, if one thinks about it," Gregory Kincaid smiled slightly, pleased with the thought.

"You're insane. You're going to have to let me go. You can't keep me here forever. Either I'll escape or someone will find me. If you let me go I promise I won't say anything. You can just go back to your sick little fantasies of being a Roman or something, and I'll go home and take anti-anxiety pills until I don't remember this happened."

Kincaid tugged on her leash and Lacey followed him out of the posh bathroom and down a short hall. A door to her left opened into a closet that was bigger than her entire bedroom back home. She found herself enjoying being in a place that eloquently showed the wealth of the owners. Taking a look at the wardrobe she felt small butterflies. There were so many sexy looking things to wear. She loved to be garbed to allure, but her immediate, gut level response caused further irritability. Contentment could cost her the edge in finding a way out.

"Find something you like in the way of bra and panties, and make sure they are leather, black, tiny," the fat man said as he hooked her leash to a ring by the door. "We weren't pretending to be Romans, we were having a theme party. It was an event that reunited many of us from a University of Colorado fraternity house 30 years ago."

Ivana found a set she liked almost immediately. Only after she commenced to get dressed did she start to blush. Not having any clothes on had begun to feel normal. Covering up her nudity gave her goosebumps, a tingly effect further accentuated by the risue outfit. The center of the bras cups were missing, circles ringed with minute silver and mother of pearl beads. The circles framed her aureolas exactly. As the skin around her nipples tightened and raised she could feel the glittering adornments rub as they turned on unseen threads.

To remain focused on denying herself any pleasure from the experience Ivana set to gathering information from Kincaid. "Why am I here? Of all the girls in this country, why am I the one who got kidnapped and brought here?"

"You're far from being just a girl, sweetie. There are parts of the world where virginity at your age would be considered an absolute rarity. To be years past legal adulthood with your hymen still intact is simply phenomenal. I've never had one. We're going to have an extraordinary time together, you and I, but not before Ms. M. completely breaks and trains you. I want you in a state of complete abandonment to your own desires. You will beg."

The way the man said those things caused fear to stir in Ivana's inner core. She felt cold all over. For a few minutes she thought the couple could be kindly, eccentric millionaires who merely paid for a thrill. The way Kincaid spoke revealed a deep familiarity with the fetishes and practices she associated with someone in her position. In some dark fantasies back home she cuddled up to the disturbing ideas as she heated herself to the boiling point. There in that closet, in stark reality, the idea of being collared, whipped, subjugated and controlled, frightened her terribly.

Ivana tried to play it off. "You still haven't given me the slightest hint of why I am here. I'm just a farm girl. How would anyone even know I existed in the first place, much less conjecture about my virginity?"

"You attended high school with the son of one of the most powerful men in Texas. You may remember him. You accused him of raping you during the first semester of your senior year."

"Toby Schneider's father is powerful?" Ivana's response conveyed her immediate recognition of the incident to which Kincaid referred. She at once tried to back pedal. "I confessed to making it up. I told everyone it was all my fault, and that I was sorry."

"That's not exactly what happened. You had young Mr. Schneider arrested on the charge. Not until Mr. Schneider's defense attorneys procured a court order to have you undergo a physical examination did you evacuate the claim," Gregory Kincaid iterated with a tone so full of meaning and depth it caused Ivana's heart to palpitate. This man she now belonged to knew about the worst thing she had ever done, and he knew it in detail.

"I never meant for anything bad to happen to Toby." Lacey's words fell from her lips pleadingly, defensively. Even as she uttered the arrant falsehood she knew how transparent the lie.

"Toby's father believes the exact opposite true. You concocted the entire story out of pure malice. It was your heartfelt desire to see Mr. Schneider's life ruined before he even got started."

"But I took it all back. I suffered more because of it than he did. I had to write an apology to our entire class. It all amounted to nothing in the end. Nothing bad really happened," Ivana sputtered and insisted. Bright crimson heat flushed her cheeks, and her eyes darted furtively in a subconscious admission of guilt.

"After that apology you wrote letters to several of your friends claiming that you told the truth all along, that your parents forced you to drop charges. I even have one of them," Kincaid stated so matter of factly it almost sounded like "Tah-dah."

"It starts, 'Dear Elizabeth.' I wonder if Elizabeth knows about your bad side. In any case, 'Toby forced himself on me. No amount of money in the world, not even a mountain of lawyers, can change the truth of that.' That doesn't sound remotely like, 'I lied. Toby Schneider is innocent.' Does it sound that way to you?"

Ivana looked at dust on the floor and thought of herself as dirty on the inside, having, from her perspective, completely lost the moral highground. The hollow ring of her lies denied her the ability to feel anything but guilty, and hidden where no person could ever go a lightbulb came on. She felt she deserved to be owned, to be punished for what she had done. Her secret fantasies could never become pleasure through sheer force. Without an acceptance of the terms of her surrender by her own irrefutable logic, her situation could never be anything but despicable. An angle of her personality that said differently clicked into alignment. She could not admit to herself an ability to extract fulfillment from her ordeal, but a part of her had found the means.

"No. It sounds like I continued lying," Ivana admitted.

"No, what?"

"I kept lying," she told Kincaid in slightly shrill frustration.

"That's more than obvious, but you need to learn how to address me properly. You will address me as Master. That's the first thing you need to learn. The second thing you need to learn is that Ms. M. must always be addressed as Mistress. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"I had the feeling you're a slow learner. Yes, what?"

"Yes, Master."

"That's a start. Now get yourself together. You're about to be introduced to the household. After that you will be instructed as to your role here, and become fully acquainted with our rules and disciplinary procedures. And I have a ton of questions about you that are dying to be answered. I'm going to have a wonderful time. Are you ready?"

"Yes."

"That's one lash. I expect you'll do a lot better job of listening and responding after you understand what each one of those lashes means to you."

Kincaid freed a short riding crop from a hook on the back of his belt. He smacked Ivana across her left buttock. The action elicited a sharp cry from the young lady.

"Let's get moving now. There are so many things you need to learn today, and so little time."

_______________________________________________


[Partially edited]

8.02.2011

Chapter Nine

Ivana Lacey Curtis remained unharmed when she regained her cognitive facilities, but her mental state warped the boundaries of terms like troubled and annoyed. She opened her eyes in a tastefully decorated boudoir. Pale sunlight filtered through sheer, embroidered linen curtains.

Adobe walls and gigantic old growth Douglas fir beams constituted the body of the room, but nothing about it struck the eye as rough hewn. A baseboard jutted out far enough to perch upon and skirted the floor all the way around. Small alcoves on either side of a louvered door exhibited several highly colorful pieces of native American pottery.

Someone tucked her between soft sheets in a capacious, firm bed after the haze of her maddening captivity. Voluminous feather pillows propped up her head and shoulders. On an obsidian topped table nearby a miniature teapot steamed next to a saucer with a dainty cup.

Upon bringing up her hand to rub her eyes Ivana discovered a thin pewter bracelet. A long silver chain fastened to the bracelet secured her to the head of the bedstead, locked in place on the side rail. The tiny, fragile looking links failed to break upon immediate attempts. Instead she almost sustained cuts to her hands.

Almost five feet of chain dangled off of the bed. She noticed the chamber pot and reddened. The luxury of her own bathroom in a dirty private jail cell seemed a thing of the past. That moment also brought the realization of her own nudity. She exhaled heavily and flopped her arm back down.

A voluptuous lady in her mid-twenties came in through the slatted door. She stood almost six feet tall and had long black hair. She wore a pink sundress, Navajo jewelry and sandals. She looked at Ivana with disdain.

"Kincaid will be in momentarily to take you to bathe and get dressed. Do your best to clean yourself up and make yourself presentable. The terms of your stay here depend on how you conduct yourself. Strive to be excellent and you will be treated as excellent. Slack and you will be hung out to dry. Do I make myself clear?"

"I don't understand what's going on. Where am I?"

"Come now. Don't pretend you can't remember. My husband bought you."

The words fell on Ivana's ears like a clap of thunder. They triggered a foggy recollection of events she must have blocked out of her mind. The hidden memories overflowed from her subconscious mind and consumed all her synapses.

Lacey had awakened in the chair once again with her perspective shifted 180 degrees, without obstruction of her sight or vision. She could tell it was the same room. What she believed to be a small circular room proved only a semi-circle behind the center of a large stage. She looked out into a small private theater from the bondage of the chair.

Clothing no longer covered her body. At least a dozen people sat in comfortable seats before the stage. They absent mindedly looked her over now and then as they spoke amongst themselves. Men and women comprised the audience, although masks enshrouded their featurs. The shock of the situation dashed Ivana's concentration to pieces.

The robed figure sauntered into her field of vision. The person no longer wore a hood. Lacey recognized the person immediately.

Lacey lapsed into a deep depression when her maternal grandmother died. For a few months she rode into town to see a psychologist. That man stood brazenly before her on the stage.

The doctor displayed her to the audience with a comfortable ease that hinted at his experience with the practice. He danced feathers across her flesh until her vocal cords became sore and she writhed in the bonds uncontrollably. The audience grew restless with the performance. One member hooted for a change of pace.

Another man crossed the hardened amalgamation floor. His proportion and strength immediately impressed itself ominously upon Lacey. The man measured six feet in height but no visible portion of him wasn't taut and corded with muscle. He wore neither a robe nor a shirt. A pair of black leather shorts barely extended into the upper region of his thighs. The outfit was undoubtedly selected to tantalize certain members of the assembly. His lower extremities also boasted a pair of jet colored rubber booties. They accentuated the man's tan and highlighted the intricate outline of his leg muscles at the lowest part of the calf.

The funereally garbed psychologist and the dismayingly toned assistant released Ivana only to escort her to front and center. The helper pulled in close to fasten her hands over her head. He almost rubbed his rippled abdomen against her softness as she, appalled and aghast, sagged and fought unconsciousness.

Every detail of Lacey's misfortune rose from the gray grave of suppression. The men forced her body to respond in ways she hated to recollect. Her resolve and loathing of them fractured as they broke her down into an animal state. Before the auction ended she begged for sexual release, the core of her spirit crushed. Her value skyrocketed at that. Some there rejoiced in the brutality of natural predation.

The woman wearing a squash blossom necklace departed the bedchamber. The man called Kincaid arrived lickety-split. He was portly and wore a toga.

"Let's get you to the spa. It's going to take lots of work to get you fresh again. You are not a rare orchid at the moment." His voice had an ethereal lilt to it.

"Oh, thank God. A fat homosexual. I'll have him wrapped around my finger in no time. Such creatures adore a pretty woman, since their greatest desire is to be one," Ivana calculated silently. "None of the people involved will ever forget my wrath."

6.25.2011

Seiss, Six,

Ivana opened her eyes and went into a state of panic. The calamity of the recent past flooded into the forefront of her awareness. She sat bolt upright, sweating and distraught.

The overhead light left the far reaches of the confining space dark and gloomy. The dinginess of the bare concrete floor and the emptiness of her surroundings weakened her morale. The sheets of metal bolted to the window frame gave little doubt as to the nature of the environment. She was locked in a place that had been designed expressly for the purpose of keeping a person captive. Homesickness and despair gnawed at Ivana's resolve. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

Ivana's mother and father, Sherry and Fisher Curtis, placed a stone wall between their public lives and their home life. The Curtises already spent much of their time in seclusion. The self sufficiency of the ranch provided them the privilege of not having to venture out very often. Fisher graduated from the University of Texas with a dual degree in agriculture and business, and had been friends with some of the more prominent citizens of the state. He devoted himself to his business and family, but every now and then one of his old friends talked him into attending an event. Ivana could count the parties she had attended on the fingers of one hand.

She stopped crying and wiped her face with the towel. She brought it to bed with her before she went to sleep the fourth time. Ivana waited for food again, wondering what it was like outside. The room had become uncomfortably warm. Sweat began to bother her, but not nearly as much as the boredom. The abrasions on her ankle had swollen and reddened. Every time she moved her leg the irritation reminded her she could not move about freely.

Ivana decided to fake a trip to the shower to see if she could get the food any faster that way. Sure enough, someone slid the tray through the door and closed it quickly. She didn't use the element of trickery to attempt to catch a glimpse of her captor. That could wait until the next time.

The young lady grabbed the tray and plopped down on the bed. Barely halfway through the second sandwich her eyes grew heavy and sleep washed over her like a tidal wave. She managed to lie down before slipping into unconsciousness.

When Miss Curtis woke up she found herself in an entirely new room. The chamber contained nothing but the chair. The area she could see was circular and had a diameter of approximately eight feet. The curved wall, the floor and the ceiling was constructed of an aggregate of cement and gravel. Ivana immediately felt a striking difference in the temperature of the room. It was chilly.

She couldn't move at all. Her arms, legs, sternum and neck were solidly fastened with straps to a straight backed chair with many hooks and hinges. The belt around her neck constricted her breathing ever so slightly, as did the tight restraint just below her chest. Her nose itched, and she couldn't scratch it.

Ivana had an unobstructed view of a heavy steel portal four feet away. A sliding plate in its upper portion would allow someone to see through it. The sealed edges around the entryway had no cracks in them. A shock went through her when the tumblers of the lock turned and it opened.

A figure wearing a black robe and hood stood in the ingress to the bare niche. The area behind that individual was unlighted. Ivana's heart leaped in her chest as the figure entered and she noticed a suitcase in one leather gloved hand. The door swung closed by itself as the specter of her fear crossed the distance between them.

The innocent woman endeavored to speak, but she only managed to sputter incoherent combinations of vowels and consonants. Before she could say anything articulate a rolling metal table was beside her with the suitcase on top of it. The person next to her opened it and pulled something out.

A large velvet blindfold with an elastic band was secured in place over her eyes. Next the robed presence put a pair of fur covered headphones over Ivana's head and plugged them in somewhere behind her. A mask similar to the ones high altitude pilots wear for oxygen fit snugly over her mouth, but it served only to limit her oxygen intake, not supply more. Her heart raced and she felt faint.

An electronically garbled voice sounded in Ivana's ears while she teetered on the brink of hysteria. The voice sounded completely computerized, but didn't have the metallic ring of a vocoder. It hovered in the tenor range. The pitch called to mind an older woman. "Lacy, I'm going to ask you a few questions. If you don't want to be punished you will answer them honestly and directly. Do you understand?"

"Ye-yes," she managed to utter through the sharp anxiety. Evidently the mask had a microphone inside of it, because Ivana wasn't pressed to speak up or repeat herself.

The fact that the individual used her middle name unnerved her further. Nobody she knew outside of her immediate family had any idea what her middle name was, except for her grandparents. She couldn't remember the last time she heard her own middle name.

"Are you still a virgin, Lacy?"

"Wha... what?" she felt her cheeks turning the color of bright rouge.

"Answer the question. Are you still a virgin? Tell the truth."

"Yes. Yes, I'm still a virgin."

For some reason Ivana felt wistful about the answer. She was brought up believing that chastity was akin to spiritual purity. In that moment she felt she had missed out on one of the great things in life. She worried she may die without ever knowing what it was like. Worse than that, the idea that she might experience sexuality for the first time at the hands of an abductor finally sank in. Once again her eyes misted, but the form fitting blindfold kept them closed.

"How old were you when you experienced menarche?"

"I don't understand."

"When did you get your first menstrual cycle?"

"Right after I was 12 years old."

"Have you ever experienced any abnormalities in your cycle? Do you have particularly bad occurrences of premenstrual syndrome?"

"No. Uh, no." Her hot breath reflected back into her mouth. It added to the sensation of being trapped. The prolonged constriction of oxygen kept her light headed. She was sweating again, despite the cool air.

"Have you ever been to the doctor for anything related to the female genitalia?"

"No. Never," she answered smartly, put off by the line of questioning.

"Well, then. I need to take a look at you," the hooded figure said in a tone she could not decipher.

Lacy wanted to protest. She tried to move her hands and arms, but they wouldn't budge a fraction of an inch. The mask was removed from her face. The cool air on her lips starkly contrasted with the cloying warmth of her own respiration.

"Open your mouth," the voice instructed.

She did as she was told. She expected a dental examination after the line of questioning. Instead her captor inserted a thick rubber bit between her teeth and buckled the tethers behind her head. She emitted a couple of involuntary sounds of indignation at the process.

Lacy felt leather gloves as her legs were separated and fastened spread wide apart. The person fiddled with the back of the chair for a couple of seconds and it lay back flat, and the arms of the chair slid down into place. The new position tightened the strap around her midsection. Then she felt her dress being pulled up. The crisp air made her acutely aware. When she felt her hidden place opened up to full view, blood rushed to her face, neck and shoulders. She had never felt humiliation before in her life.

"So you were telling the truth. It warms the heart to know that sexual abstinence is still alive and well in this day and age."

The examination, for it could have been nothing else, was over almost as quickly as it started. Her legs were rejoined at the thighs, calves and ankles. The base of the chair was raised so that she lay supine.

"I'm going to give you something to help you rest. You have a big day tomorrow. There are some people who want to see you."

Lacy did her best to speak. A squeal escaped her throat when she felt the pinprick of a needle entering her flesh. She got out, "Mno, g-no, g-no," over and over again before oblivion conquered her waking state.

Blood Red Mist: Three

The abandoned motel room, or at least that's what Ivana equated it with, had no views of the outside world. Light barely penetrated through a few tiny cracks around the solitary door. The only light came from single bulbs protected by small metal cages in the ceiling of the main room and the bathroom. The bed and the nightstand, the only pieces of furniture in the room, were made of metal and bolted to the floor. The air barely moved.

For the thousandth time Ivana pried at the manacle around her right ankle with her bare fingers. She had already broken her nails down to the quick and drawn blood from both her fingertips and the skin around the manacle. There was no budging the unforgiving piece of steel.

The last memory Ivana had of freedom was of a party at a mansion on the beach in Galveston. It had been a political rally for a close friend of her father. She stood on a railing overlooking the waves and sipped soda with a handsome college student she met that evening. Cool sea breezes tempered the warm June air, and she had felt a desire to have fun build within her. She recalled leaving the party to ride in the young man's car, for fun, and then nothing else.

Ivana Curtis grew up outside of a small town on the far northeastern reaches of Houston. The only world she knew throughout her childhood was the family ranch, handed down through generations, and the town, where the years seemed to stand still. Her mother and father never took her into Houston until she learned so much about it from students at the tiny school she was dying to go. She only saw the city a few times before she graduated from high school.

As she sat captive on the edge of the bed she cursed the naïveté a sheltered upbringing such as hers allowed to exist. She hated herself for having left the party with someone she didn't know. She at least could be thankful that she had not been violated. Ivana decided that she had to have been kidnapped for ransom. Any more insidious reason would have left her in far worse circumstances.

There was no way to gauge the passage of time in the small room. Ivana knew she had slept twice, and both times had awakened hungry. She had screamed her lungs out for hours of the ordeal, and had worked at her bond until she finally gave up. She knew she had been there at least forty eight hours, but she had the suspicion that it could be closer to three days.

The kidnapper(s) had left her fully clothed, and there was a towel in the bathroom. The chain reached far enough for her to take a shower. She resisted the impulse until after the second time she slept, fearing there may be a hidden camera. After some consideration she took a shower, preferring cleanliness to modesty if she was under observation.

The water burned where the skin around Ivana's ankle had chafed. She used the small bottle of hospital shampoo and body wash sitting on the shelf in the shower, but avoided that area. The sound of the runnng water helped ease her mind somewhat, and she managed to stop being frazzled about her predicament. When the hot water ran out she shut it all off and dried herself.

"There's no point in getting clean if getting dressed will just make me dirty again," Ivana thought to herself. Looking at her panties she shook her head and washed them under the faucet. She wrung them out thoroughly and hung them over the edge of the sink to dry completely. The dress she wore did not receive such a treatment.

Once more she cast about for anything to give slight leverage in her position. Right then Ivana wished she had worn a bra just so she could have the elastic and metal hooks. She refused to accept her situation passively. Thoughts of escape and convicting the perpetrator in the future never left her awareness.

The door in the other room opened immediately after she pulled the dress over her head. She heard it, but her location prevented her from seeing anything. She bolted out of the bathroom only to see a tray on the floor and the door slamming closed once more.

Ivana started yelling again: "Hey! Who are you? You're not going to get away with this! Let me out of here!" She didn't go on beyond there. The platter made it obvious that she had not been forgotten or abandoned in the room.

The tray had no plates or utensils, but it did have food and a styrofoam cup full of water on it. An apple, a banana and three ham sandwiches sat on the platter. She retrieved it carefully from beside the door, so as not to spill the water, and sat down on the edge of the bed. She saved the water until after she had eaten the fruit, happy to finally have a cup. Then she washed down the frugal first course.

Not until after she finished the water did the suspicion she may have been drugged even enter her mind. She sighed. There was no use worrying about it after the fact.

A significant period of time went by and she still did not feel altered in any way. She finished the food, put the platter down by the bed, refilled the cup and laid down. Ivana decided to calm down about things and keep herself stable and rested for whatever the future might bring. Her mind was still working on a plan to achieve freedom when she fell asleep again. It was a horrible way to spend the week following a nineteenth birthday.

5.14.2011

Seiss, Six

Ivana opened her eyes and went into a state of panic. The calamity of the recent past flooded into the forefront of her awareness. She sat bolt upright, sweating and distraught.

The overhead light left the far reaches of the confining space dark and gloomy. The dinginess of the bare concrete floor and the emptiness of her surroundings weakened her morale. The sheets of metal bolted to the window frame gave little doubt as to the nature of the environment. She was locked in a place that had been designed expressly for the purpose of keeping a person captive. Homesickness and despair gnawed at Ivana's resolve. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

Ivana's mother and father, Sherry and Fisher Curtis, placed a stone wall between their public lives and their home life. The Curtises already spent much of their time in seclusion. The self sufficiency of the ranch provided them the privilege of not having to venture out very often. Fisher graduated from the University of Texas with a dual degree in agriculture and business, and had been friends with some of the more prominent citizens of the state. He devoted himself to his business and family, but every now and then one of his old friends talked him into attending an event. Ivana could count the parties she had attended on the fingers of one hand.

She stopped crying and wiped her face with the towel. She brought it to bed with her before she went to sleep the fourth time. Ivana waited for food again, wondering what it was like outside. The room had become uncomfortably warm. Sweat began to bother her, but not nearly as much as the boredom. The abrasions on her ankle had swollen and reddened. Every time she moved her leg the irritation reminded her she could not move about freely.

Ivana decided to fake a trip to the shower to see if she could get the food any faster that way. Sure enough, someone slid the tray through the door and closed it quickly. She didn't use the element of trickery to attempt to catch a glimpse of her captor. That could wait until the next time.

The young lady grabbed the tray and plopped down on the bed. Barely halfway through the second sandwich her eyes grew heavy and sleep washed over her like a tidal wave. She managed to lie down before slipping into unconsciousness.

When Miss Curtis woke up she found herself in an entirely new room. The chamber contained nothing but the chair. The area she could see was circular and had a diameter of approximately eight feet. The curved wall, the floor and the ceiling was constructed of an aggregate of cement and gravel. Ivana immediately felt a striking difference in the temperature of the room. It was chilly.

She couldn't move at all. Her arms, legs, sternum and neck were solidly fastened with straps to a straight backed chair with many hooks and hinges. The belt around her neck constricted her breathing ever so slightly, as did the tight restraint just below her chest. Her nose itched, and she couldn't scratch it.

Ivana had an unobstructed view of a heavy steel portal four feet away. A sliding plate in its upper portion would allow someone to see through it. The sealed edges around the entryway had no cracks in them. A shock went through her when the tumblers of the lock turned and it opened.

A figure wearing a black robe and hood stood in the ingress to the bare niche. The area behind that individual was unlighted. Ivana's heart leaped in her chest as the figure entered and she noticed a suitcase in one leather gloved hand. The door swung closed by itself as the specter of her fear crossed the distance between them.

The innocent woman endeavored to speak, but she only managed to sputter incoherent combinations of vowels and consonants. Before she could say anything articulate a rolling metal table was beside her with the suitcase on top of it. The person next to her opened it and pulled something out.

A large velvet blindfold with an elastic band was secured in place over her eyes. Next the robed presence put a pair of fur covered headphones over Ivana's head and plugged them in somewhere behind her. A mask similar to the ones high altitude pilots wear for oxygen fit snugly over her mouth, but it served only to limit her oxygen intake, not supply more. Her heart raced and she felt faint.

An electronically garbled voice sounded in Ivana's ears while she teetered on the brink of hysteria. The voice sounded completely computerized, but didn't have the metallic ring of a vocoder. It hovered in the tenor range. The pitch called to mind an older woman. "Lacy, I'm going to ask you a few questions. If you don't want to be punished you will answer them honestly and directly. Do you understand?"

"Ye-yes," she managed to utter through the sharp anxiety. Evidently the mask had a microphone inside of it, because Ivana wasn't pressed to speak up or repeat herself.

The fact that the individual used her middle name unnerved her further. Nobody she knew outside of her immediate family had any idea what her middle name was, except for her grandparents. She couldn't remember the last time she heard her own middle name.

"Are you still a virgin, Lacy?"

"Wha... what?" she felt her cheeks turning the color of bright rouge.

"Answer the question. Are you still a virgin? Tell the truth."

"Yes. Yes, I'm still a virgin."

For some reason Ivana felt wistful about the answer. She was brought up believing that chastity was akin to spiritual purity. In that moment she felt she had missed out on one of the great things in life. She worried she may die without ever knowing what it was like. Worse than that, the idea that she might experience sexuality for the first time at the hands of a rapist finally sank in. Once again her eyes misted, but the form fitting blindfold kept them closed.

"How old were you when you experienced menarche?"

"I don't understand."

"When did you get your first menstrual cycle?"

"Right after I was 12 years old."

"Have you ever experienced any abnormalities in your cycle? Do you have particularly bad occurrences of premenstrual syndrome?"

"No. Uh, no." Her hot breath reflected back into her mouth. It added to the sensation of being trapped. The prolonged constriction of oxygen kept her light headed. She was sweating again, despite the cool air.

"Have you ever been to the doctor for anything related to the female genitalia?"

"No. Never," she answered smartly, put off by the line of questioning.

"Well, then. I need to take a look at you," the hooded figure said in a tone she could not decipher.

Lacy wanted to protest. She tried to move her hands and arms, but they wouldn't budge a fraction of an inch. The mask was removed from her face. The cool air on her lips starkly contrasted with the cloying warmth of her own respiration.

"Open your mouth," the voice instructed.

She did as she was told. She expected a dental examination after the line of questioning. Instead her captor inserted a thick rubber bit between her teeth and buckled the tethers behind her head. She emitted a couple of involuntary sounds of indignation at the process.

Lacy felt leather gloves as her panties were removed and her legs were separated and fastened spread wide apart. The person fiddled with the back of the chair for a couple of seconds and it lay back flat, and the arms of the chair slid down into place. The new position tightened the strap around her midsection. Then she felt her dress being pulled up. The crisp air made her acutely aware of her sex. When she felt fingers disuniting her hidden place and opening her up to full view, blood rushed to her face, neck and shoulders. She had never felt humiliation before in her life.

"So you were telling the truth. It warms the heart to know that sexual abstinence is still alive and well in this day and age."

The examination, for it could have been nothing else, was over almost as quickly as it started. Her legs were rejoined at the thighs, calves and ankles. The base of the chair was raised so that she lay supine.

"I'm going to give you something to help you rest. You have a big day tomorrow. There are some people who want to see you."

Lacy did her best to speak. A squeal escaped her throat when she felt the pinprick of a needle entering her flesh. She got out, "Mno, g-no, g-no," over and over again before oblivion conquered her waking state.

5.01.2011

Sixteen: Rejected Content

[As brief as this is, I would not recommend anyone squeamish read this. Angle of approach rejected -- this is shock content. I stopped before I got started, really. It's only here because I decided to stop deleting things.]
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With every electric start and stop corrugated aluminum shimmered and banged against the slack allowed by nails wormed slightly loose over years from the wall studs of the machine shop, a rectangular flyspeck portion of the barn set aside for woodwork. The reciprocating saw bogged down repeatedly. Torres noted that he chose poorly by apportioning the corpse with the bulky power tool. He barely started before the method waxed problematic, but then he lacked experience dividing a body into smaller parts. He learned as he went along.

Copious amounts of blood, darker than maroon, some of it almost black, sprayed in every direction as the Milwaukee Sawzall knockoff gnawed at the man's left glenohumeral joint. The gruesome mess quickly outweighed the already questionable benefits of reducing a human body to slabs of meat and sacks of bones. Nestor raced against the onset of rigor mortis and the morning arrival of the Old Man's business partner. He lost patience with the Sawzall and pulled the Bowie knife from the scabbard on his belt.

Old Man Collins meant well when he suggested using the power tools. Torres should have known better. New technology muddied the water in tasks mankind handled perfectly well with rudimentary technology since the stone age. Within fifteen minutes Nestor separated the arms and legs of the body from the torso. He positioned the two feet neatly side by side facing the remainder of parts.