BDSM Library - Story: Stiffkey Blues, Chapter: Chapter 5 Fieldwork

Chapter 5: Fieldwork

In Mill Cottage, Angela was looking out of the window at the top of the stairway. The view stretched across the cottage’s small garden and beyond to the great, broad, expanse of marsh that divided them from the low ridge of the sand dunes fringing the beach a mile a way. A small group was making its way along the bank beside the ditch that ran from the mill towards the sea. “Who do you think they are?” she said to Krysta, who was coming up the stairs behind her.

Krysta peered over her shoulder. “Hmm,” she said, “raincoats, binoculars… Well, they’re either a bunch of perverts or, more likely, twitchers.”

“Twitchers?”

“Sorry; bird watchers. We get a lot of them along the coast here. Looking for the latest rarity blown in from the North Sea. There’s a hide further along The Drain.” She pointed along the ditch that ran beside the cottage and on down to the coast. “They are probably off down there.”

“Oh, right. Seems a bit late though. It will be dark in an hour or so.”

“There’s no accounting for twitchers,” Krysta said. “If they hear there’s something unusual around they’ll be dozens of them turning up in no time. Mind you it’s more likely they’re installing themselves so they can catch the last of the birds flying in at sunset.”

“Well, rather them than me. It looks cold out there. What are we doing this evening?”

“I think we were planning to get together in a minute or two downstairs and decide. I think Celia fancies a trip along the coast to a pub, but I’m not sure about the others.”

“OK I’ll be right down, I’ll just drop this off,” said Angela, waving her notebook as she headed off to her room.

When Angela got down to the living room, Celia, Madeleine, Krysta and Penny were all sitting deep in conversation. “Looks like there’s two schools of thought,” Madeleine said. “Celia fancies a trip out. Krysta and I are hoping to work on a new story together. I think Penny wants to stay here too?” Penny nodded. “But Celia doesn’t really want to go out on her own.” Celia nodded too.

“Well,” said Angela. “I don’t mind a trip out if you want a companion.”

From the bird watcher’s hide on the marsh two pairs of binoculars were focussed on the cottage rather than on any of the wildlife. They watched as two of the girls emerged from the house got into a car and drove off. They watched as another of the girls walked down the garden and into the summer house that was perched between the garden and the marsh. Reg turned to Deirdre. “Coop a taiy?” he said holding up a thermos flask. She nodded it was cold in the hide and they still had a while to wait. They watched as the sun began to slip towards the horizon. Then it was time to move.

++++++

Madeleine was the first one to fall victim to the attention of Reg and Deirdre. It was sunset, she had been sitting in the summer house at the end of the garden enjoying the last of the afternoon’s sun as it glinted on the water of the ditches and ponds of the marsh. She was jotting down ideas for her next story, wrestling with a particularly irritating piece of plot that had her heroine smuggling herself into the prince’s palace where she was determined to join his harem.

As she emerged from the summer house the sun, low in the sky, was dazzling. She didn’t see the black garbed figure approach her from behind, where he had been hidden by the summer house. The first that she knew of the assault was when a heavy cloth was clamped over her mouth and she felt herself being spun around and dragged behind the summer house. She tried to strike out but her assailant had gripped her so that her arms were clamped to her sides. The strength of her attacker carried her forward towards the wind pump tower. The cloth over her mouth half stifled her and she was finding it harder and harder to breathe, partly the result of panic and partly the effect of the grip of her attacker.

She was pushed to the floor and while one hand gripped her wrists behind her she felt something being tied across her mouth, cramming the heavy cloth back into her throat. Ropes were being pulled around her wrists and, at the same time, her ankles. Two attackers, she thought, terrified.

“Is that gag alright?” one of them asked.

“Yeah, sure,” responded the other. A woman’s voice this time. “That cable tie will keep the cloth wadded in. She won’t make much noise.”

Madeleine moaned in an attempt to prove them wrong. She didn’t succeed. All that came out was a muffled, garbled, grunt.

Her assailants hadn’t finished though. More ropes were tied around her as she was rolled this way and that. Her elbows were pulled almost together behind her back. More rope locked her arms against her body. More bound her knees – in spite of her struggles and squeals as the man pushed his hand between her legs to thread the rope through. Then, worst of all, there was the painful jerk as her wrists and ankles were pulled closely together by more rope tied between them.

“Stick her down there out of the way,” the woman said and Madeleine felt herself lifted and then lowered into a concrete lined channel that ran across the floor.

Hogtied as she was she felt hardly able to move. She certainly couldn’t get out of the three foot deep trench. Her attackers looked down at her – evidently satisfied with their work - and then left.

Madeleine lay terrified and alone. Stupid though she knew it was, all she could think of was Krysta’s words about bats and rats.

Madeleine wasn’t alone for long, though. A few minutes later a mewling and sound of overturning boxes accompanied Krysta as she was bundled, kicking and struggling, into the pump house by the two masked attackers. Krysta too had been bound and gagged, a cloth wadded into her mouth like Madeleine’s and a cable tie jerked cruelly across her mouth to keep it in place, ropes around her body and, Madeleine assumed, wrists. The two masked figures pushed Krysta across to one of the iron pillars that held up the upper floor of the building. Ignoring Madeleine’s grunts of protest they set to work. Ropes fixed Krysta to the pillar.

“Come on, hurry up!” the woman urged as the man knotted off the ropes fixing Krysta’s ankles to the pillar and the two hurried out.

Krysta grunted into her gag as she saw her friend trussed as helplessly as she herself was. She tried to struggle free wriggling against the topes that held her to the pillar and flexing her fingers behind her back to try to get at the knots that kept her captive.

As Krysta wriggled she managed to at least bend her knees swivelling around, trying to get some pressure on the ropes around her waist. As she did so she banged her knee painfully against a metal bar, knocking it away from her.

As the bar swung away a grinding and creaking sound caused both girls to stop their struggles. From high above them the noise grew as the sails of the pump began to turn and Krysta realised that in her struggles she had knocked off the brake that kept the mill silent.

Her first reaction was to be pleased. Perhaps someone would notice and come to their rescue but then she heard Madeleine squealing with a panic stricken intensity.

She looked across to where Madeleine was laying, helplessly hog-tied. She could see what Madeleine could. At the far end of the channel a rusted rod had started to rotate, driven, apparently by the action of the sails. As it did so a series of gears, cranks and levers began slowly but inexorably to lift what looked like a small door through the wall of the pump house at the end of the concrete channel. Water started to spill around the edge of the door. Madeleine had realised that she was tied up in one of the pump’s sluices and that as the door opened the channel that she was in would be filled with water as the pump lifted water out of the marsh. Madeleine’s squeals were now being drowned out by the creaking of the pump’s mechanism as the sails gathered pace in the wind. The door at the end of the sluice was open now and Madeleine and Krysta could hear the first gasps of the pump as its cylinders cycled, building suction and dragging the cold marsh water into its innards ready to spew it out again along the sluice.

The pump coughed a gallon or two of water into the sluice. Even that was enough to drench Madeleine as it spilled down across her. She tried to struggle upright as the second cycle of the pump lifted a larger quantity of water and dumped it into the sluice. The third cycle knocked her down with its force. The fourth swept down over her, icy cold, knocking the breath from her and leaving her gasping.

It was at that moment that their two captors reappeared. The woman, seeing Madeleine’s predicament, reached down and dragged her from the sluice as another, bigger, drenching hammered down the sluice.

The man, seeing how Krysta had dislodged the wind pump’s brake snorted, “Silly cow!” and pulled on the lever. A groaning, wrenching, sound signalled the slowing of the sails and the sigh of the pump and the splash of the water in the sluice began to slow too.

All characters fictitious

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