CHAPTER ONE

   With Bill gone, we could devote our entire time to the piggery. On Friday, both Justin and Jason arrived in the latter's sports car to help as promised. We set to with a will, Robbie and Jason with electric brick-cutting tools to cut channels at the right height in the walls of the sties for the wires that controlled the collars, Justin and I outside in the yard cutting the big tarpaulin into six foot by six squares. Having shyly confessed that he'd come to enjoy going without clothes, he worked like me, naked apart from boots and gloves. When we'd cut up the tarpaulin, we did the same to the sheets of one inch foam rubber, trimming them to the same size. That done, we each took brick-cutters into the piggery and helped the others with the channelling.

  It was a long, hot, dusty job, and we were all glad when it was finished. After a brief break for lunch, Robbie and Jason ran the wires along the channels and covered them with mortar, whilst Justin and I took a wheelbarrow into the vegetable garden and filled it with the clayey soil. We brought in several loads, piling some outside each sty, and when that was done we all broke for tea. We finished by putting down the tarpaulins on the floor of each sty, and putting down a layer of foam rubber. Then, over that, we shovelled two inches of soil before knocking off, when Justin and I went for a long walk over the moor, returning to shower before pre-dinner drinks.

  With the light-hearted insouciance of young men, Jason and Justin had decided to spend the night with us. Pooh-poohing our stated lack of accommodation,they said they would sleep in the barn, on the straw bales, having brought sleeping bags for the purpose. After dinner we all sat long into the warm twilight over beer, Jason continuing to tease his friend about the latter's stubborn refusal to put on any clothes. Later, the others went to bed, leaving Justin and Jason to join me in a nightcap and accompany me on my late evening stroll about the outbuildings.

  I expect we made an odd trio, Jason in jeans and Tee shirt, with a light jacket to ward off the chill, whilst Justin and I were naked, the former shivering now and then whilst enduring the affectionate mockery of his friend. As for me, I consoled Justin by telling him he'd soon acclimatise, but I expect he was glad to climb into the warmth of his sleeping bag at last!

CHAPTER TWO

  The next morning, sweating and swearing, we dragged out of a pile of junk the old water bowser Robbie had earmarked to bring the cow manure slurry we needed. Robbie and I left the others to the job of removing the wheels and cleaning and greasing every moving part, including the primitive petrol-driven pump which would be used to fill and empty it. Robbie drove off with the wheels in his van to get some second-hand tyres fitted to them, and I occupied myself with the first of the collars and a box full of the tiny batteries. I was to make four collars, two to fit necks of fourteen to seventeen inches in circumference, two for necks sixteen to nineteen, thus straddling, we hoped, the majority of prospective clients. A delicate and time-consuming task, I estimated it would take me four days working on and off, but that they would be ready for their first wearers in good time.

  I made tea at eleven. Robbie wasn't back, probably haggling with some scrap-dealer, and Evadne was visiting a client; woman-like, her contribution to the work had been limited to criticism and to marvelling audibly and objectionably at our lack of application.

  Rebecca, called from the study, came to join us. Impishly, she was even more provokingly dressed than usual, purely on purpose to embarrass Justin, I believed. She certainly succeeded, for he flushed pink when he emerged naked and saw her sitting there, and for two pins I think he would have fled!

But then he probably remembered she'd seen him without his clothes before, when he was released from his box, and he took his seat with some recovering of his equanimity, ignoring her wicked grin.

  It was nearly teatime when the two youngsters, tired and grimy, came to tell me they'd finished work on the bowser, and they were just in time, for Robbie returned with the newly-shod wheels whilst we were having tea.

  Afterwards, we fitted the two wheels on the greased axle of the bowser, a job which was harder and more complicated than we'd thought. Finished at last, we knocked off early, and I took Justin for a walk on the moor and a bathe in the tarn to cool our sweating bodies, leaving Jason and Robbie to shower and change, Jason to put on clean clothes, and Robbie to don his usual panties and shift.

  We returned to find that Evadne had rung on her way home, enquiring if we wanted her to pick up fish and chips for everyone, and that they'd told her yes, which was O.K with Justin and me. Both us immediately hurried to shower, he using the one in the house and me the one outside, emerging just in time to see Evadne drive into the yard.

  We all enjoyed pre-dinner drinks outside whilst our meal warmed up in the oven. Afterwards, we devoured it with hearty appetites whilst giving Evadne a report on our progress. She seemed happy enough, and we all sat and chatted for a bit until Rebecca, Evadne and Robbie went in to watch television, leaving me, Justin and Jason drinking wine in the twilight. And so passed Saturday.

CHAPTER THREE

  On Sunday we all rose late. I had to call the two younger men, who'd taken a bottle of whisky to their beds and passed it back and forth until they fell asleep. They looked very much the worse for wear, and I took them both for a bracing walk over the moor to clear their heads before our late breakfast. There would be nothing for us to do until Evadne returned with the bowser full of cow-slurry which she was to collect from a farmer a few miles away in the guise of needing it for fertiliser. Robbie went to his workshop and tinkered with the chaff-blower he'd made, a fearsome machine on wheels with a wide, stove-pipe nozzle and and an interior seemingly full of whirling, razor-sharp knives powered by an electric motor. I kept well away from this contraption.

  We hung about all morning, and when Evadne did finally return, we made her park the Land Rover and the towed bowser well downwind whilst we ate a frugal lunch. The afternoon, we all knew, would be dirty and smelly.

  Justin and I fetched a bale of straw from the barn in the wheelbarrow, leaving Robbie and Jason to wheel the chaff-cutter into the piggery and plug it in. We stood back and watched as Robbie switched on his infernal machine and Jason began to feed handfuls of straw into the hopper on top until Robbie told us irritably to come and help, and in no time a veritable blizzard of tiny bits of straw was spraying from the wide nozzle.

  Robbie sprayed an inch-thick layer of chaff over the soil in the first sty, and moved on to the next. The dust was terrible, and we stopped to get masks from the workshop before carrying on. When all the floor of the four sties we'd chosen were covered, Robbie wheeled the machine out of the way and we all went out to guide him as he reversed the bowser as into the piggery as far as he could. He fetched wide hoses and straightened them before screwing the connector at one end to the outlet of the bowser and picking up the spout at the other. The pump on the bowser clanked and wheezed into operation amidst a cloud of blue smoke, and Robbie picked up the hose.

  Justin and I stood in the entrance, well away from the smell, whilst Jason, still prudently wearing his mask, stood by the bowser ready to open the outlet valve. He did so on Robbie's instructions, and at once the engine's note deepened and a spray of stinking slurry sprayed from the end of the hose.

  Robbie put down a layer of slurry three inches deep on the floor of each of the sties, and by the time he'd finished the stench was unbearable. Gasping for breath, he and Jason staggered outside, tearing their masks off as they came. Cold lemonade was served, and we drank it down as far from the piggery as we could.

    'Don't worry,' said Rebecca, who'd made and brought out our drinks. 'The smell will die down; it's only because the slurry's been stirred up.'

  All the same, we allowed an hour to pass before we ventured into the piggery again where we found she'd been right; the smell was now of what one might call manageable proportions and I expected one would become used to it after a time.

  All that remained to be done now was to cover the slurry with another inch of chaff, which Jason and Robbie did. We cleared away, taking the blower back to the workshop and towing the bowser over to the big compost heap on the far side of the vegetable garden to empty it before washing out the interior. Then we went back to inspect our work.

  The wooden covers we'd put over the broad, shallow troughs Robbie had cast out of dark grey concrete were removed by leaning over the walls of each sty. The covers had kept out nearly all of the blowing chaff and slurry, and what remained wouldn't matter; our guests were 'pigs,' after all, and a little dirt in their troughs wouldn't hurt them, we told ourselves! The chromed-steel spigots of the bite-drinkers, in use by 'real' pigs only a few months ago and purchased second-hand by us from a bankrupt piggery worked, spurted out a jet of water each time the little trigger below was pressed. So far, so good, we all thought.

  The whole piggery was about fifty feet long by twenty wide, the larger part, with four sties on either side divided by a passageway six feet wide, taking up forty feet, of which the first ten feet was an open space which would serve for our guests to remove their clothing and prepare for their ordeal. The whole area, and not only the sties themselves, was wired to control the permitted height of the collar wearers, and the idea was that, once they were collared, the power would be turned on.

  Robbie and I could cope with that, and our young helpers departed after tea, Justin leaving it to the last minutes to reluctantly don his clothes and being teased for it by his friend Jason.

CHAPTER FOUR

  We had plenty of time, and work proceeded in a leisurely fashion for me and Robbie. Not so for the girls, for they broke into a positive fury of cleaning and polishing in the house – God knows why, but that's women for you. One day, a lorry turned up with a pallet of coarse paper sacks which the driver unloaded at the bottom of our drive, and me and Robbie took the van down to bring them up to the yard. They were plain sacks, seeming full of marble-sized grey-brown pellets, and we wondered what they were until Evadne told us they contained the food supply for our guests.

    'One of them is a director of an animal feed factory,' she said. 'He's had these specially made. They're full of pig-meal, but it's very different from the usual stuff; it's almost entirely fibrous bulk, with very little nutritional value. We're supposed to feed them half a bucket-full each three times daily, early morning, mid-day, and in the evening, and the idea is that they'll be so hungry they'll be forced to eat it, and be hungry again an hour or so later.'

    'Means they'll be shitting a lot!' Rebecca giggled.

    'Well, that's authentic for pigs!' Evadne laughed, and I could see her point.

  Everything was ready a full two days before our guest were due to arrive, and on Saturday morning I went into the stench of the piggery for yet another final check. It was warm, even hot, about ninety degrees F, and I knew it would climb to ninety-five in the afternoon. Robbie's heating had worked quite well during the cold, clear, early June nights, keeping the temperature at a steady eighty according to our thermometer, so our chief fear, that our guests would be cold, had been dissipated.

  Straw had been laid down everywhere to save the knees of our guests when they were driven into their sties, and, on impulse, I dropped to all fours in the passageway.

  Keeping my head level, I shambled up and down, astonished by how short a distance I could see ahead of me. I was struck, too, by how the four foot high walls loomed over me until I realised my eye level was only some twenty inches above the floor, and I wondered how it would be to spend what would seem endless days and nights surrounded by the dirty brick walls of a sty and shuddered.

  I think we were all a bit nervous on that sunny Monday morning our guests were due to arrive. Would the collars work as we expected? Robbie said they would, they were fully charged, and they would trickle-charge throughout unless the batteries were drained by repeated attempts to rise, at which they delivered their maximum power. The other three were worried about that, but I, who'd worn and tested a collar, was not, and I grew tired of telling them that anyone who suffered the first shock wouldn't be repeating the experience.

CHAPTER FIVE

  At ten o'clock, we were all assembled outside the kitchen when a large car drove up with a passenger sitting beside the driver and two more in the rear. We watched them alight and walk towards us, each carrying a small but expensive case They refused tea, and after a brief exchange of pleasantries, we proceeded as per the carefully drafted programme they'd given us beforehand.

  Their 'sow,' a buxom woman in her fifties, went first, accompanied by a solemn Rebecca. We made stilted small talk for a few minutes, then Rebecca appeared in the doorway of the piggery, gave us the 'thumbs up,' and came over to join us.

  The two 'hogs,' and the 'boar,' plump, prosperous individuals, went next, and I ushered them inside, noticing how their nostrils flared at the smell within the piggery. There was no sign of the 'sow' except for the closed case containing her clothing, but we could hear faint, muffled, astonishingly life-like grunts from the sties further inside.

    'The hogs first, I think,' the 'boar' said to me. 'Come on, chaps!'

  The two men, flushed with a mixture of excitement and embarrassment, at once removed their clothing, packing it carefully away into the cases they'd carried in with them.  Next, they each took up an odd-looking contraption of rubber and plastic, along with a tube of what looked remarkably like glue. Having been told they were to play the roles of  'hogs,' castrated male pigs, I was expecting some sort of chastity device, but when they began to stuff their testicles and penises into the triangular plastic gadgets, I realised what they were. Their genitals tightly confined, they smeared glue around the lips of the chastity device and pressed it to the skin of their shaven groins, holding them there for several seconds until they took their hands away, satisfied they was firmly held in place. Each turned to pick up something else, and I couldn't help noticing that, due to the smooth, featureless, flash-coloured plastic covering their groins, they now looked as sexless as dolls.

  In turn, they faced the small mirror we'd put up on the wall. Looking at their reflections, they swiftly inserted two long, narrow plastic tabs, one blue and one pink, in the lobe of their right ears, pierced for that purpose. Presumably the blue tag denoted a male and the pink a female, the combination telling an observer that the wearers were gelded boars, yet a further demonstration of their commitment to their roles. After inserting their plastic gags, they put in opaque contact lens to limit their vision, the watching 'boar' told me when I gave him a questioning look.

They inserted their gags in their mouths, bit down on them, and extended their hands for me to slip on the mitts and lock them on their wrists. I buckled their collars around their necks, breathing a silent prayer of thanks that the sizes Robbie had selected fitted them, then told them to get on all-fours. Then I spoke to them.  

    'I'm going to operate the switch on your collars which will energise them,' I said carefully. 'I advise you strongly not to lift your heads more than an inch or so from then on. After that, if you feel an itching or a crawling sensation on the upper-most part of your body, lower it instantly or you'll suffer unimaginable pain.' I sighed and went on, trying my utmost to impress upon them the importance of keeping all parts of their bodies below the trigger-level. 'Well, you're bound to find out the hard way,' I said wearily. 'But I can promise you that you won't do it again!'

  Using the electronic key Robbie and Norman had made, I pressed the requisite buttons and saw the tiny diode in each collar flash red, indicating their collars were operational.

  There was one further refinement, which caused me to marvel at their dedication to authenticity.

Taking care to keep my head turned away, I dusted their backs with powder from a tin, careful not to get any on my hands, for the 'boar' told me it was a mild, long-lasting irritant designed to produced itching and encourage them to roll about on the floor of their sties to ease it. Then I took up one of the narrow, translucent paper strips I'd been given. Peeling off the backing, I pressed one of them to the back of each right thigh to run downwards from just beneath the swell of their buttocks. Peeling off strips, I saw the short series of letters and numbers they'd left behind as a transfer, the serial number of their pig identities in bright blue.

  The 'hogs' went into the pig roles, and a very good job they made of it, too. Grunting inquisitively, they began to move about, their heads lowered as if in search of food, and I picked up the stick Robbie had made from one inch dowelling, four feet long and with a blunt point at one end.

  I'd never driven pigs before, but Rebecca had, and had instructed me in a manner which I'd found uncomfortably cold-blooded. But it had to be done, and I rapped one of them hard on the side of his rump to get him to join his companion and heard his grunt of surprise and shock.

With growing confidence, I prodded him out of the changing room and into the main part of the piggery. The 'sow' came, grunting inquisitively, to the gate of the larger holding pen where she'd been put by Rebecca, and I rapped her on the side of her head to discourage her, bringing from her startled grunt of pain. I hardly recognised her, for she must have been wearing a wig when she arrived, and now her hair was cropped as short as that of her male companions. Opening the gate, I drove my 'hog' inside and closed the gate on them, bolting it firmly. Then I went outside and summoned the next 'hog.'

  With both 'hogs' and the 'sow' in the bigger holding pen, it was the turn of the 'boar.' His preparations didn't include a chastity device, of course, but they did include him inserting a ring through his nose, much to my surprise. I'd wondered what he was doing when I saw his face in the mirror with a fastidious finger in one nostril. Seconds later, a tiny plug of soft, flesh-coloured plastic popped out of the side of his nose and fell into his waiting palm. The plug from the other nostril followed, disclosing a puckered hole on either side of his nose just above the lobes. With practised ease, he inserted a hinged, opened steel ring through the holes and squeezed it closed with a faint click.

  I looked at his nose-ring in fascination. It was quite substantial, being nearly a quarter inch in diameter, and it was large enough for to rest upon his upper lip, but he was already extending his hands for his mitts.

  Once he was on all-fours, 'branded' and collared, and with a blue plastic strip in his ear lobe to proclaim him a functioning male, I gave him the usual warning, about trying to stand. There was a different procedure in taking him to his sty. Rebecca, who'd been lurking in readiness just outside the doorway, darted in and stooped to clip the end of the short, thin chain she carried to his nose-ring. He grunted angrily, and made to back away, but she rapped him hard on the side of his head with her stick, dazing him for long enough to attach the chain.

  Leading the 'boar' was not nearly as easy as herding the others. Living up to the bellicose reputation of  physically whole male pigs, he grunted in rage at every prod from my stick, and he would have turned around and attacked me if it were not for the pain Rebecca caused him by tugging him back with the chain. I couldn't help thinking how well he was playing his role when he finally subsided into a sullen acceptance, but when he'd been led into the smaller pen and his chain wrapped around one of the horizontal bars, allowing him only a few inches of slack, he glared at us angrily through bloodshot eyes. There followed a slight modification the their programme: we left them to it and went back to table outside the kitchen for tea, and, in my case, a smoke.

  Evadne and Robbie looked at us anxiously, but we smiled at them in silence as a token that all had gone well. Twenty minutes later, Rebecca broke the silence by saying briskly that our 'pigs' should be acclimatised by now, and that we should install them in their new homes.

    'It will take all four of us,' she said. Putting down her cup and rising to her feet, she led the way to the piggery.

  Our entrance produced a series of querulous grunts from the 'sow' and angry ones from the tethered 'boar' in the other pen, whilst the two hogs, whom we'd found lying down, scrambled warily to all-fours.

    'Him first!' Rebecca announced, picking up a long pole with a hook on one end. 'Ivor, you and Evadne follow me into the pen and stand behind him. Don't forget your sticks! Robbie, you walk a few feet in front when I get him out, and be ready to open the door of the top sty on the left and bolt it closed behind him.'

  Her dispositions made, Rebecca strode confidently up to the gate of the pen and opened it wide. The 'boar,' chained by his nose to one of the lower rails of the pen, grunted in rage, and tried to swing his bulk sideways to squash her against the walls. Evadne was too quick for him, dealing him several heavy blows to his shoulder and ribs, whilst I struck him on the side of his head hard enough to daze him and allow Rebecca to deftly slide the hook through his nose-ring and detach the chain which had kept him tethered.

  The 'boar's' squeals of rage became grunts of pain as Rebecca rotated the pole a little and twisted the ring in his nose. Walking slowly backwards, she pulled on the pole. He followed reluctantly, encouraged by blows and jabs from our sticks whilst Rebecca controlled his every movement with the pole she held firmly in both hands.

    'Keep hitting him! Don't give him time to think about resisting!' Rebecca called out to us. We obeyed her with a will, partly out of fear of his savagery, partly out of anger at his exasperating refusal to co-operate. Walking behind him, side by side, we rained down blows on his back and his fleshy haunches, causing him to utter loud, angry grunts of pain and rage with each step he was forced to take. Near the end of the passageway, with him opposite the open door of the sty, Rebecca shifted her grip on the pole, leaning over the wall to half pull, half push him inside. There wasn't room for both Evadne and me in the doorway, and she prodded him from there whilst I, heedless of the squashy filth under my bare feet, slipped by her into the sty and added my efforts to hers.

  Rebecca manoeuvred him to face his trough and drew him close to the wall. There, attached to a staple, dangled a short chain, and she twisted the ring in his nose viciously with one hand to immobilise him with pain whilst reaching down for the end of the chain and clipping it to his nose-ring.

    'Phew!' Evadne exclaimed, wiping the sweat form her face. 'You can come out now, Ivor,' she told me, and I did, Robbie quick to slam closed the heavy wooden door behind me and slide home its two thick bolts.

    'The others won't be a problem,' remarked Rebecca en route back down the passageway. 'Hogs only want to eat and sleep, and sows are much more submissive than boars.'

  And so it proved, and it took only a few minutes to drive them from the pen and up the passageway in a single frightened, huddled body, herding them into their sties en route and bolting the doors on them. Once installed, they calmed down, and we left them exchanging soft grunts as they explored their sties. All but the chained 'boar,' from whom there was only an angry silence.

CHAPTER SIX

   We all felt a sense of anti-climax afterwards as we drifted away to our various tasks. It wasn't yet eleven o'clock, and we met again at one for the cheese salad Evadne had made for us without, for my part, giving our guests a single thought. The programme called  for them to be fed for the first time tomorrow morning when it was estimated they'd be ravenously hungry enough to fill their bellies with the non-nutritious pig-meal.

Otherwise, said Rebecca, they could be left entirely alone. Anyway, imagining the stench in the piggery now that the wandering 'pigs' had stirred the mixture of straw, earth and slurry into a churned-up morass, no one wanted to go inside particularly.

  An hour into the afternoon, I ceased work. Bored and restless, I chatted with Robbie for a bit, and then decided to take a walk over the moor and bathe in the tarn. As usual, the moor was deserted apart from a few far-off blobs of dirty cotton wool that were grazing sheep, and there was no one to see as I strode naked over the coarse grass – not that I cared if there were. The water in the tarn was cold and refreshing, and I came out shivering to  stand in the sunlight and dry off. Sitting on a rock, I lit a cigar from the cache I kept there in a damp-proof crevice and smoked contentedly before stretching out on the fragrant turf for a nap. Waking, I bathed again and then made my way home, arriving in good time for tea.

  Around the table, I noticed my friends were more subdued than usual, probably due to the unseen presence of our four guests, for many a glance was cast at the piggery fifty yards away downwind, its wide door open to let out some of the stifling heat. But no sounds came from there, and there was no sign of any activity.

    'They'll be asleep,' Rebecca said, breaking the silence. 'They'll sleep most of the time, particularly the hogs. It's not as if there's anything else to do,' she laughed.

    'They must be mad,' Robbie said quietly.

    'Takes all sorts,' Evadne remarked philosophically. 'Don't knock it!'

  She had a good point, the more so as their joint eccentricity was bringing us in four thousand much needed pounds!

  In fact, Evadne was already planning for the future, when the 'pigs' had gone and their collars were available again. 'Dogs,' she kept saying; proper, serious players who wanted long-term enjoyment of their 'hobby.' There must be lots of those, she speculated, and she fell to wondering how much she could charge to rent out the collars to them. And she had another iron in the fire: slaves!

    'Why haven't we thought about that before?' she demanded. 'Hosting slaves, I mean. I wonder how much they'd pay for a week's authentic slavery?'

  She fell into a brown study. We looked at each other and left.

  I did another hour's work and knocked off for the day. After picking a salad to go with dinner (and noticing, with a groan, how much weeding needed doing in the vegetable garden) I took two bottles of over to Robbie's workshop and enticed him to sit outside with me.

  At dinner, eaten outside as usual in the summer, Evadne again brought up the subject of slaves, asking us for ideas on what work of importance we could put them to.

   'Well,' I said, after a pause. 'There's weeding the vegetable garden for a start!'

   'Yes!' Rebecca said eagerly, for she and I did most of the work in there.

   'And the flower beds in the front garden,' Evadne said thoughtfully, for they were her pride and joy.

    'There's all those old bricks from when that outhouse fell down want sorting out,' Robbie said. 'The good ones want saving; they'll come in handy, and the bad ones can be used to fill in some of the ruts in the track.

    'And there's housework,' said Evadne, obviously warming to the idea of having a paying slave.

'Dammit! I think I'll invite would-be slaves to contact me via my website.'

  Robbie demurred, asking how she knew Evadne knew they'd be suitable, as he put it. Evadne dealt with that briskly, saying the usual slave was typical of his group; a submissive, middle-aged man,  probably a retired clerical worker. They'd do as they was told, and they'd put up with any treatment they believed to be authentic.

  She left us, and we saw her crouched over the communal laptop at the kitchen table. We grinned at each other.

    'Poor buggers!' Robbie remarked, opening another bottle of wine.  

    Late that night, when everyone had gone to bed – Robbie with Evadne – I took my usual stroll with my dram and my cigar, pausing outside the now closed door of the piggery. I'd already looked at the screen on the kitchen laptop which showed the views from the cameras Robbie had installed over each sty; they had switched to infra-red mode, and the green blobs which the bodies of the inmates had shown them all to be lying down, presumably asleep in the foetid darkness. The door opened soundlessly on its greased hinges, and I stopped it after a foot or so and poked my head inside to listen.

  In contrast to the cold freshness of the June night, the air was hot and stagnant, with the heavy smell of a cowshed, and silent apart from an occasional soft snore or grunt. One of them stirred, probably our 'boar,' for I heard the soft clink of his chain on its staple as he shifted in his sleep. Closing the door gently, I continued on my way.

CHAPTER SEVEN

   I was late coming down to breakfast, and found the others already around the table in the kitchen with Rebecca at the stove cooking eggs and bacon. I took my seat with an apology, noting that Robbie looked particularly smug and satiated as usual after sleeping with Evadne. She, looking like a cat who'd swallowed a canary, told me that, instead on putting up an invitation on her website, had written to a slave dealer with the result that she, and her 'entourage' had been invited to a sale of slaves at a BDSM Club a fortnight on Sunday.

  I was staggered. 'What do you mean, a slave dealer?' I asked feebly.

    'Should have thought it was obvious,' Evadne grinned. 'Would-be slaves offer themselves to him, and he sells them!'

    'But that means someone has to buy them,' I protested. 'Isn't it usual for a slave to pay his Mistress or Master?'

  Evadne sighed, and explained patiently how the system worked, although most of it went in one ear and out of other, so astonished was I by the very idea of slaves and slave-dealers in England, but it seemed to involve the would-be slave offering a sum of money - say, a thousand pounds – to the dealer to sell his services for a fixed spell. The slave would be put on display, the audience would bid for him, and the difference between the amount of money bid by the winner would go to the dealer and auctioneer, whilst the remainder went to the slave's new owner, or something like that.

    'Ah,' I said wisely, when Evadne had finished. 'So that's how it works!'

    'You'll be coming with us, of course,' she informed me. 'With me and Rebecca, I mean, as part of my entourage. Can't have two ladies attending without their slave!'  

    'Slave?' I squawked. Then: 'Not on your life! No, no, no, no; include me out!'

  Rebecca then informed me that she'd already fed our guests; this made me feel a little guilty about not getting up early to help her, and I volunteered to give them their mid-day feed. But she said 'no,' she would help; all I had to do was to give her a call before beginning.

  We all set to work after breakfast, Evadne, no doubt still pursuing some money-making scheme regarding slaves, drove away to accompany a client to the Tax Office for him to be interrogated by an official, Rebecca to her drawing board, and Robbie to his workshop. As for myself, at a loose end between jobs, I devoted my morning to weeding the long rows of plants in the vegetable garden, a boring task and one which made me think owning a slave might be a good idea after all!

  At twelve-thirty, I emptied the wheelbarrow of weeds on to the compost heap and went back to the yard just in time to meet Rebecca, who'd been preparing our simple lunch of cheese and ham sandwiches and home-made pickles.

  The stagnant, over-warm air in the piggery was heavy with the odour of the bedding the inmates had churned into a morass of chaff and cow manure, and inquisitive grunts greeted our entrance to become louder and more urgent when they heard the clanking of the handles of our buckets.

    'They know it's feeding time!' Rebecca grinned as she scooped the crumbly pellets into the four buckets. We picked up two buckets each and advanced into the main area of the building where the noisy grunting increased in volume.

  It took only minutes to empty our burdens into the troughs below, and we took deep breaths of the fresh air outside when we exited. Leaving the wide door open to allow some of the heat inside to escape, we went for our lunch.

  That evening, Rebecca and I agreed that it didn't need both of us to feed our guests. Starting tomorrow, she would care for them on the odd dates, and I on the even ones. That suited me, particularly as the next day was the fifth of the month!

  Over dinner, we heard nothing from Evadne on the subject of slaves or BDSM Clubs; that suited me, too, but I resolved to keep a wary eye on her, knowing her devious mind and persuasive tongue.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

  Feeding our guests on alternate days became a routine, and on Monday the tenth it seemed to me  almost as if I'd been doing it for weeks. From the previous Friday, I'd been in the habit of visiting them now and then. Taking a tip from the knowledgeable Rebecca, I'd even got a stick which I used to scratch their dirt-caked backs. 'Real pigs' enjoyed that, she'd told me, and so, to my surprise, so did their human imitators.

  It was that dead time of afternoon, two hours or so after lunch and an hour before tea, and I was fed-up with my work. There was no signs of life; Rebecca and Evadne had gone off shopping, and Robbie was in his workshop, deeply engrossed in the innards of some electronic gadget or other. It was hot and sultry, and I expected a storm later, probably about nine in the evening, with thunder and lightning. With nothing better to do, I sauntered over to the piggery and entered. Standing in the doorway leading to the main section, I breathed in the hot, humid air, its original powerful smell of cow manure now overlaid by the stench of the wastes of its human occupants. Still, it wasn't so bad – or I'd become used to it – and I picked up my stick from where I'd left it leaning on the wall near the entrance and walked softly up the central corridor between the sties.

  The two hogs were deeply asleep, flies wandering about on their dirty flanks. The 'sow' was in the middle of her sty, standing with her back to me, and emptying her bowels into the stinking mud. Grunting with satisfaction, she turned around and came forward, her sagging belly and breasts barely clearing the churned up mix of excrement and chaff covering the floor. Ignorant of my presence, she waddled over to her trough and fixed her mouth over the spigot of her bite-drinker.

She'd been rolling on her back previously, and a mixture of brown slime and chaff was sliding down her flanks. It would dry and flake off in time, but for the present I leaned over the wall and began to run the stick up and down her spine.

  She liked it very much indeed judging by her soft grunts of enjoyment. I began to scratch her back with the end of the stick, marvelling mildly at how easy it was to give simple pleasure to an animal.

She gave a grunt of disappointment when I ceased my attentions, and continued to stand there apparently hoping I'd resume them, but after a few moments spent watching her, I moved the few feet to look down at the 'boar' over the wall of his sty.

  Out of all four 'pigs,' I marvelled most of all at their leader, their 'boar.' His existence was worse even than theirs; they could roam the thirty-six square feet of their sties, but he was restricted to shuffling back and forth only a few inches owing to the shortness of the chain linking the ring in his nose to the staple in the wall just above his trough. More or less fixed in place in a corner of his sty, his only view was of the dirty brick wall directly in front of him. True, he was the only male still capable of coupling with a female, but that must be scant consolation, the more so as he would only ever do so at the instigation of his keepers. Was his still functioning maleness really worth the few seconds of sexual activity he might be allowed to enjoy, held on a chain as he covered a sow in a concrete pen? Well, perhaps he thought it was, I speculated as I looked down on the filthy back below. At least he might have the opportunity one day, unlike the effectively castrated males in the other sties.

  Every time I'd observed him, he'd acted the part of the angry male animal to perfection. Even now, perhaps vaguely aware of my presence looking down on him, he was grunting loudly and sullenly, and now then shaking his head violently, making his chain rattle on its staple. He was the only resident of the piggery I didn't favour with my attentions, perhaps because I feared a possibly violent reaction to the touch of the stick. Well, I thought as I re-entered the open air, at least they only had the rest of today, tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday to endure. On Thursday morning, they would re-join the world of humanity, and I wondered if they realised it.

  Probably not, I thought, wandering over the yard in the direction of Robbie's workshop. Our guests would be locked away in their own timeless little world, a world bounded by the dirty walls of their sties, in which nothing ever happened but being fed.

  Robbie was absent, probably out on the moor where he went to think whenever some especially knotty problem presented itself. I stole a bottle of beer from his refrigerator and took it outside to the table under the kitchen window. Lighting a cigar which I fetched from the house, I sat and brooded over our guests.

  Here were these four people, all middle-aged, all wealthy and well-mannered, well-spoken and educated, cultivated and intelligent; what demon possessed them in wanting to live as pigs?

Was it something of a holiday for them, a temporary refuge from the endless choices human beings were forced to make in their daily lives? Perhaps it was; perhaps that was part of the attraction for Justin, Jason, and Bill, this helplessness and total reliance on others to choose for them. They had to eat what we gave them, they had to stay where we put them, with no choice in these matters, and maybe, deep down, that was what they craved. It took all sorts, Evadne was fond of saying, and, by God, she was right! But perhaps this sort of thing was to be celebrated as an example of the infinite variety of humanity.

  With such deep philosophical reflections I consoled myself until tea time, when Robbie had I made a scanty repast of tea and slices of the not entirely successful, chocolate cake Rebecca had made.

  It was six o'clock when the girls returned, bringing with them fish and chips which were put into the oven to heat whilst we unloaded their car, then assembled outside for pre-dinner drinks. It would be dark early tonight; the sky had clouded over and a warm breeze had sprung up, harbingers of the approaching storm. I excused myself in order to feed the 'pigs', noting how dark it was in the piggery, and joined my companions for dinner.

  The evening grew hot and oppressive. We all knew what that meant, and everyone but me went early to bed, Evadne with Rebecca. At ten o'clock, the storm broke; a gale howled around the house and the rain came pelting down. Of course, there was no question of strolling about with a cigar and a glass in the downpour, but I'd stashed a bottle, a glass, a cigar, and a lighter in the barn previously  against this eventuality. Anyway, I'd always exulted in pitting my bare body against the elements, summer and winter, and I went out into the storm with no protection other than a hat of Robbie's which I pulled on to keep the rain from my eyes.

  Outside, the rain beat down on my unprotected skin as I walked along the side of the house out of the gale. It was warm rain, by my standards, although I knew it would become cold later as the trailing edge of the storm passed over. Taking advantage of a momentary lull in the gale, I came away from the relative shelter of the house and ventured out into the open yard, making for the barn, its wide open front visible in the weak lighting.

  The wind played with me like a cat with a mouse, sluicing me with water from all directions with no warning, and I was glad to enter the shelter of the barn. The rain drummed deafeningly on the corrugated iron roof high above as I groped for my stash. Finding it, I poured out a dram, lit a cigar, and sat down on a bale of straw to enjoy them.

  The wind dropped a little, but the rain lashed down with doubled fury, so hard and fast that the big drops bounded back upwards from the ground, making the sight of the lighted windows of the kitchen blurred and indistinct. Lightning flashed, and thunder rolled, and although the centre of the storm, by my reckoning, would pass overhead, the lightning was still more than bright enough to make the house, and those outbuildings visible to me, stand out starkly against the pitch blackness of the night.

  Amongst the latter was the low silhouette of the piggery, and I wondered what the inmates made of the fury outside their prison. Had their minds, starved of diversion for so long, gone so deeply into their roles that they were cowering at the back of their sties like terrified animals? Or were they still sufficiently human to know the sudden flashes and loud crashing sounds from overhead for what they were? Maybe both, I reflected; some people, despite knowing thunderstorms were relatively harmless, still feared them in some atavistic fashion.

  As I watched, the wind fell altogether, but only for a moment. Then it rose again, as powerful as before, but from the opposite direction, blowing the rain with it. The temperature dropped like a stone, a sure sign that the storm was passing, and I shivered. Draining my glass and tossing the end of my cigar outside, I saw its red glow wink out. Then I rose to my feet and dashed outside, braving the force of the wind and the icy lash of the rain, en route as quickly as I could to the welcoming door of the kitchen.

  Panting, I stood on the doormat just inside to allow the water streaming my body to soak into it. The warmth was welcome, for I'd previously made up the big stove, which was never allowed to go out as it was the sole source of our hot water. The logs blazed cheerfully, and I pulled up a kitchen chair and sat before the stove, toasting my body in its warmth. After an interval, I poured myself a glass of the rum the girls enjoyed in their cocoa every night before bed, and when I'd drunk that, I went to bed also.

CHAPTER NINE

  The next day passed. The weather had recovered its usual sunny warmth, and it was hot in the piggery that evening when Rebecca and I fed our 'pigs' the last meal they would eat from their troughs. In three days they'd be freed, and it felt strange that they didn't know it. They'd be as hungry as hell, and perhaps vaguely wondering why they hadn't been fed as usual, but the brief abstinence would allow their bowels to settle after their long diet of fibrous pig-meal. We left them without ceremony and went for dinner, after which Evadne sprang a surprise upon us by telling us she had something to discuss regarding our guests. Summoning us back to the kitchen table, she placed a thick envelope before us, its open flap showing the edges of numerous twenty pound notes.

    'A thousand pounds,' she said. 'An extra thousand, I should have said, and what we have to do for it, if we agree, is this...'

  Evadne explained the nature of the proposition she'd agreed to consider, and when she'd finished we sat in stunned silence. Rebecca was first to speak. 'That's gross!'

  I said nothing, merely marvelling inwardly at the lengths people would go to in fulfilling their fantasies. As for Robbie, he, too said nothing. Characteristically, his engineer's mind was considering possible techniques to meet this unexpected demand. The silence became oppressive. Rebecca, her face still expressing shock and distaste, stared at the table, Evadne likewise, her face flushed and probably regretting agreeing to consider the proposition put to her by our guests in the first place. It seemed that none of the others wished to break the silence, so I, who prided myself on my pragmatism, did so.

    'Well,' I said. 'I know we're all reluctant to do this sort of thing; it's never been a consideration before with only a solitary 'animal' as a guest. It's 'steamy,' I know, and very near the knuckle, but it's perfectly authentic. And there's another point. You say, Evadne, that our guests will think none the worse of us if we don't comply with their request, and I believe it. But they will be disappointed and might think they could find somewhere and someone who would cater for this need. We've spent a lot of money, some of it borrowed, on this facility, and we need our guests to return in the future. I say we should go ahead,' I finished, looking around to see their reactions.

  The tension broke. Evadne briskly gathered up the envelope full of money and Rebecca, the only one of us with experience in this sort of thing, sketched the apparatus in Robbie's notebook for his benefit. 'Of course,' he said after studying the drawing. 'It will be a little different; the user will not be the same shape. Now, Rebecca, how do they secure the victim in this contraption?'

  Evadne and I left them to it and went outside with a bottle of wine – we needed it! I asked her when she intended to do the thing our guests had asked her, and she said hurriedly that it should be done as soon as Robbie had finished whatever it was he'd have to build for the purpose.

    'Will they know when the time comes?' I asked after a pause.

  Evadne considered for some moments. 'I don't think they will, either of them,' she said at last. 'By now, they'll be deep in their little private worlds, and when we take them from their sties they'll conclude they're about to released.'

  I said nothing. I was recognising the truth of what she'd said about the 'little private worlds' of our guests. When I visited them between feeds, I would find them lying peacefully in the mud of their sties, grunting softly in mindless contentment in perfect imitation of the creatures they were simulating – physically, and, by now, probably mentally also.

  We left it at that by mutual consent. Evadne drained her glass and went indoors, just as Robbie emerged with a fresh bottle. I lit a cigar and we sat in a companionable silence in the warm darkness until bedtime.

CHAPTER TEN

  Robbie had finished before lunch the next day, and we all trooped over to his workshop to inspect his latest brainchild. It was a simple enough construction, but nothing would do but that it was tested, and all eyes fixed on me.

    'I'm sure it will be all right as it is,' I told them.  Then: 'Why is it always me who has to be the guinea pig?'

    'Because you don't have to take off your clothes, Ivor!' Rebecca giggled.

  Swearing, I dropped to all-fours and walked on to the wooden platform. Robbie, helped by Evadne, secured me in place with the fitted straps, padded for comfort, and when they'd finished were gratified to find me entirely immobilised. 'There!' I whined when I was freed and back on my feet. 'I told you it work all right!'

  Together, Robbie and I carrying the wooden base and the girls bringing the frame, we went into the humid, foetid heat of the piggery where our entry was welcomed with urgent grunts.

    'Feeding time,' Rebecca remarked laconically, and I helped with the buckets of pellets. Doing so, I noticed Evadne scatter a packet of white powder over our boar's meal, but I said nothing when she winked at me. Leaving our guests noisily shuffling down the contents of their troughs, we left and went for lunch.

  The meal was eaten in silence, and more wine was drunk than usual, perhaps too much so early in the day. Afterwards, we were in no hurry to begin; the washing up was done and for a long time we sat around the table, moodily sipping wine in silence as the enormity of what we were about to do came home to us. And yet it was perfectly authentic treatment for certain domestic animals, and it wasn't as if we'd be doing it without their consent –we already had that. All the same, I couldn't rid myself of a certain distaste and embarrassment, and nor could the others, I thought looking at their faces. Evadne rallied us, telling us quietly that it would be much easier if we thought of our guests as they wanted us to; as simple animals. And then, after another brief interval of silence: 'Well; better get on with it,' she said, rising to her feet.

  On the slow walk across the yard to the piggery, Robbie suddenly asked how could Evadne be sure that our 'boar' would 'perform,' as he put it delicately.. Evadne grinned, and said it was all taken care of. The 'boar' had already ingested part one of a powerful male aphrodisiac, part two was to be sprayed on the 'sow's' genitals. 'He won't be able to resist the urge,' she chuckled. 'He's told me it's extremely powerful, but loses its effect in only a couple of minutes. But that's all the time he'll need. We'll be done and out of there in ten minutes,' she ended cheerfully. 'But don't you two men worry,' she added as an afterthought. 'You haven't had part one of the drug, so part two won't affect you.'

Rebecca giggled, winking at Robbie who was muttering into his beard.

  Having been fed so recently, our guests were dozing with bloated stomachs and greeted our entrance with faint grunts of enquiry without stirring from their comfortable beds in the mud. Only the 'boar' was, as usual, disturbed by hearing our footsteps, showing his anger by rattling his chain in its staple. We ignored him for the time being, stopping before reaching his sty next to the one where the 'sow' lay dozing. With the aid of our sticks, we soon roused her and prodded her from her pen. Grunting drowsily, she waddled down the corridor between the rows of sties until walking on to the wooden floor of the device she was to occupy and arriving at its barred end where she stopped, puzzled by the obstruction in her path.

  I closed the door behind her, trapping her, and Evadne and Robbie on either side, aided by Rebecca at the front, strapped the now noisily protesting creature in position. Then we stood back and checked her restraints.

  With straps around her wrists, upper arms, neck, thighs, lower legs, and ankles, she was totally immobilised. Rebecca patted her huge, grimy rump, and we went off to fetch the 'boar.'

  For some moments we stood outside the sty and regarded its occupant. His tether was too short and the walls of his sty too high for him to see us, but he knew we were there. Thick, stinking, brown slime sliding from the flank he'd been lying on, he was grunting angrily and rattling his chain under our silent – and somewhat nervous – scrutiny.

  For the first time, I noticed how big he seemed. He weighed more than 250 pounds, his flabby belly almost brushing the thick mud he stood in. The first dose of the aphrodisiac had taken effect, we saw, for his member was protruding and stiff. Rebecca glanced at us. 'Better get on with it,' she said briskly.

  At the last moment before entering the piggery, we'd changed our sticks for cattle prods on the grounds of effectiveness, and now, as we prodded the angry creature, bringing forth grunts of rage of pain, Rebecca set to work.

  I saw with admiration the deft way in which she hooked the 'boar's' nose-ring with the pole she carried, pushing him back a few inches to enable her to detach his tether chain with her free hand. Evadne opened the sty door and stood back while Rebecca tug on the pole and Robbie and I prodded the heavy flanks and buttocks of our 'boar' to encourage him to leave his pen.

  We succeeded in the end in persuading him to follow Rebecca down the passageway past the other sties, but he did so slowly and reluctantly, his rage unabated, and I marvelled at his seeming indifference to the pain we were causing him with our crackling electric prods and the continuing tugs on his nose.

  Rebecca was a few feet from the pinioned 'sow' when Evadne passed behind her and sprayed an oily, colourless liquid into the cleft between the fat thighs. The effect on the 'boar,' once he'd been dragged a little closer, was immediate. His angry grunts took on a new urgency, his member lengthened and stiffened, a clear liquid dripping from its enlarged tip, and now, instead of being tugged along by the pole, he waddled forward unstoppably, pushing Rebecca before him.

  She, having obviously foreseen his sudden enthusiasm (perish the thought that she'd done this sort of thing before!) skipped around the immobilised 'sow' to stand in front, adjust her grip on the pole accordingly to allow it to slide through her hands as the 'boar' advanced.

  The 'sow' had fouled herself in the interval, and we watched in a sort of sick fascination as the man on all-fours before us came up against her flabby buttocks. He stopped perforce, and then, with a mighty effort, reared up on his knees to fall on the trapped back of his 'sow,' his belly coming down on her with a fleshy of moist, grimy skin on skin.

  This stage in proceedings had been discussed. Rebecca, perhaps mischievously, had spoken of the possibility that the 'boar's' penis might need guiding into the necessary orifice, to the horror of her male listeners. But Evadne, scoffing at our squeamishness, had volunteered to help in this way if needed to, and now she crouched at the 'boar's' side in readiness, a rubber glove on her hand. Her services were unneeded. The huge buttocks thrust suddenly forward, causing the 'sow' to utter a loud grunt of shock, and then the activity took its usual course amidst a frenzy of grunts.

  It was all over in seconds. The 'boar,' having spent a few moments prostrate in exhaustion on her back, withdrew, leaving his glistening semen seeping down the inside of her inner thighs. A little subdued, we took the sated 'boar' back to his sty. He was much more co-operative now, with only occasional flashes of his usual anger, and we soon had him chained up again where he stretched out on his belly in the mud, snorting and grunting with satisfaction. The 'sow' was dealt with in the same way, and we left her grunting querulously in her sty, apparently non the worse for her ordeal.

  On the way out, I looked into the sties holding our two other male guests, the ones simulating gelded males. They were settling down again, having been roused by the sounds of activity outside, and I wondered if they knew what had happened between the other two members of their group, and whether they were jealous of their male leader. Had each trapped penis tried to straighten and stiffen in its prison of rubber and plastic? Well, we'd probably find out in the post-mortem discussion we generally held at the end of a session!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

  We'd long ago discussed the procedure we'd adopt for freeing our 'piggy' guests. We had only two old bathtubs, both of which Robbie and I would place over the drain in the centre of the yard, so we'd free two of them, let them clean themselves up, probably with several changes of water, and then free the two remaining, and we estimated that the whole thing would take about two hours. And so, at ten o'clock on Thursday morning, ten days after they'd entered the piggery, we all went inside to release the first pair of our guests.

  The 'boar' would be first. Rebecca thought it would need all four of us, armed with sticks, to drive him from his sty and out of the piggery judging by his temper, made worse by his not being fed since yesterday. It sounds crazy, I know, but he seemed to have sunk so deeply into his role as an enraged male animal as to somehow convince us of its reality. Eager grunting greeted our entrance – the inmates obviously expected this to be a day like the others, and to be fed – but we walked on to the end of the piggery and looked over the wall at the creature chained up in the stinking sty.

  Rebecca intended to waste no time. Our moves had been well rehearsed, and when Rebecca had leaned over the wall with her pole and hooked the 'boar's' nose ring with a single deft movement, we leaned over the wall of the sty to prod him into action.

  With the chain detached from its nose-ring, Rebecca pushed and pulled on the pole to try and manoeuvre the angry creature she controlled to a position where it could be driven straight from the sty, remembering as she did that her charge could see almost nothing in front of him. By dint of our enthusiastic prodding, she managed to get him directly opposite the wide open door of his sty.     The creature's back was in front of me, brown slime sliding from its flanks, refusing to move despite the pain Rebecca must have been causing it by pulling on the ring in its nose. I began to prod the backs of its flabby, dirt-caked thighs and haunches, harder and harder, exasperated by its intransigence. Finally, grunting loudly with rage, pain and fear, it began to shamble forward.

  Once out of its sty, making it turn ninety degrees to be led down the central passageway proved another problem, and it was only by dint of hard, angry jabs from the prods of all three of us that we succeeded. En route past the other sties, the angry grunting of their 'boar' brought forth answering grunts of surprise and fear from his companions, unable to grasp what was happening beyond the walls of their prisons but hungry and uneasy at this change in their routine.

  It was easier to drive and lead the 'boar' now, as it was a straight road through the piggery and out into the yard, but he persisted in stopping now and then, causing the three of us in the rear to rain down a hail of jabs and blows on the dirty back and buttocks. Finally we got him outside where Rebecca secured the pole low down on the wall, dragging the his head downwards until his face  almost touched the ground. We'd done this to protect Evadne, whose task would be to kneel by his side and coax him out of the world he'd inhabited over the last ten days.

    'Nigel! Nigel! It's over!' Evadne said, loudly and clearly, and we watched anxiously, willing her to succeed. 'Nigel, come back! It's over!' Evadne repeated again and again. Then, almost as if the air was being let out of a tyre, he seemed to deflate, the rage and fear draining from him. The grunting stopped, and he gave a tiny whimper. Rebecca detached the hook in the pole from his nose ring, and he lifted his head, a new awareness about him.

  I moved forward and unbuckled his collar whilst Evadne coaxed him into lifting each mitt in turn for her to clean the dirt from the leather before she unlocked them from around his wrists and gently pulled them over his hands. We stood back, but he remained motionless on all-fours, apparently still dazed by the fact of his freedom, and we left it to Evadne to convince him that he was free to stand upright whilst Robbie began filling the first on the old bathtubs with warm, scented water.

  Compared to her 'boar,' the 'sow' was easy to extract from her sty. Rebecca prodded her to one side to allow me to pen the door and enter, getting behind her to prod her huge, sagging buttocks and encourage her to leave. Once outside, Rebecca and I sauntered slowly behind her, now and then rapping her hips with our stick to keep her on a straight course until we reached the open air and gave her over to Evadne. The 'boar,' having finally been convinced he could raise himself without fear of the agony caused by his now absent collar, was wallowing in a bathtub, its water, a deep brown in colour, even now gushing into the drain and being replaced with clean water by a sweating Robbie. It didn't take long so for Evadne to bring back the woman from wherever she'd been in her mind, and minutes later she was gingerly lowering herself into the adjacent tub with its promise of cleanliness.

  Evadne helped Robbie with the hot water, filling and re-filling the baths whilst Rebecca and I took a break. Until the baths had been forsaken in favour of the nearby outside shower, we couldn't bring out the 'hogs;' besides, we'd used nearly all the hot water and would have to wait half an hour for more to heat up.

  Both our guests emerged from the tub at the same time. Gesturing towards the shower, the man said something which came out as uncouth animal sounds. Grinning, he placed a finger in his mouth and unhooked his gag from his teeth. His first words for ten days were 'Ladies first!' and we all laughed in relief.

  Naked, our guest sauntered back and forth in the hot sunshine, still apparently getting used to his freedom of movement and to the fresh sights which met his eyes. The woman finally came out of the shower in a billow of steam. Pink and clean at last, wearing only the old sandals we'd provided, she too began to roam about until coaxed to the table outside the kitchen for a cup of tea. Leaving them to it, Rebecca and I went back into the heat and stench of the piggery, where, so confident had we become, we succeeded in freeing both 'hogs' and herding them out together.

  Like their 'sow,' Rodney and Rupert – as we learnt their names to be – were much easier to bring back from that mysterious world where they'd existed as 'real' pigs, although they possessed the same reluctance to raise themselves from all-fours until being convinced they wouldn't be punished for it. The baths were ready again, and the two ex-'hogs' were soon lying in them, exulting in the water washing their dirt-caked bodies.

  By half-past eleven, all four of our guest, still naked but clean and scented, were gathered around the table outside drinking tea and eating the toast Evadne had insisted on making for them in lieu of the meal they feared their bowels wouldn't yet be able to cope with. The fact was, Rupert said, that he lost all control over his bladder and bowels, not physically, but mentally, allow them to ease themselves whenever they were full, and his companions agreed this had been the case with them, too. Nobody minded this; it all added to the authenticity of the experience, they remarked!

  We were congratulated on the collars; fearsome things, they all told us. Everyone of them had tried to rise, but none had tried a second time, and it was with real regret that they learnt that four collars was all there would be for the time being, and that they would be for rent, and not for sale.

  To the glee of Evadne, they began to discuss future occasions. They might, they said, attend together, or individually, and said they give us what notice they could. Displaying a total lack of embarrassment or self-consciousness, they even asked if we could arrange to get some real pigs to share their sties. But as to the events of three days ago, neither Nigel nor Antonia, the 'sow,'  said anything, and I and Evadne felt too self-conscious to ask.

      'I suppose sharing sties with real pigs could be arranged,' Evadne  told them. 'If it would be safe. We must find out.'

  Rupert and I went for a short stroll on the moor, him saying he needed to stretch his legs, which was no surprise. We talked as we went, and he himself broached the subject of whether their 'sow' and their 'boar' had actually mated. I said they had, and asked him if he'd noticed the unusual activity.

    'Yes,' he said. 'I'd no idea what was going on, and my mind wasn't working properly. It took me some time to conclude that you were letting us out at last, but when all the noise died down and you didn't free us, I dismissed the whole matter and dozed off again. When did it happen? Five or six days ago?'

  He was shocked to learn that only three days had passed since then, but put it down to his own hopeless confusion about the length of time he'd been imprisoned. Rupert's story was much the same as all the others: Bill, Jason, Justin; they all lost track of time surprisingly quickly. 'After a few feeds,' Rupert said as he puffed on one of my cigars, 'I'd no idea of whether I'd been in the sty three days or six, or nine, and it didn't seem to matter, somehow!' He laughed, and remarked that he'd like to endure a session in the future whose length wouldn't be predetermined. 'Perhaps you could roll a die every day, or spin a coin to end it,' he suggested, and I replied that I'd bear it in mind as we returned to the others.

   Reluctant to put on their clothes, as we'd found was usually the case after a session, our guests made their leave about one o'clock, gently teasing Nigel on account of his forgetting to remove the ring in his nose.

    'Well, that's that!' Evadne said briskly. 'We can leave the piggery and the sties as they are, ready for them, or some other punters, to use. Now, how about lunch?'