Voodoo Doll

by Ashley Zacharias

Prelude:

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich are different than you and me.”

Earnest Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”

   – an apocryphal anecdote oft told by Hemingway

Is Fitzgerald or Hemingway right? Are the desires of the fantastically wealthy fundamentally different than ours? Or do they simply have the means to turn fantasies that we all share into their reality?

* * *

The Wedding Present:

“You’re my dream team.” Lori smiled at the men sitting around the table. “I want to thank you for helping me give my fiancé the most wonderful wedding gift ever. Me.”

Dr. Anthony smiled. “Your gratitude is even more welcome than the embarrassingly large fees that you’re paying us.”

“The whole procedure is going to cost a few million dollars.” Lori shrugged. “Steve and I can afford it. I want to be his six million dollar woman.”

Dr. Kaford did not smile. “The money is not the issue. I still can’t believe that you are serious about wanting us to do this thing to you. It’s outrageous.”

Lori nodded. “It is outrageous. But I am a sexual masochist. I embraced that reality a long time ago. I want what I want. And I want you to do this outrageous thing to me.”

“You might want it but the buck stops with me,” Kaford said. “I’m the surgeon. There are serious ethical concerns in play here. The six million dollar woman was enhanced by her prosthetics. You will be harmed. I took an oath to do no harm. I have deep misgivings about harming you just because your husband wants it.”

“I’m doing this because I want it. Steve doesn’t know anything about it. And it’s going to stay that way until we’re on our honeymoon.” She smiled. “But he’s going to love my enhancements when he does learn about them. I have no doubt about that. I know exactly what I’m doing to myself and I don’t see it as harming me. You shouldn’t look it that way, either.”

“If an insane person asks me to help him commit suicide, then I send him to a psychiatrist. I don’t cut his throat for him. It doesn’t matter if what he wants to die. It doesn’t matter if he sincerely believes that he’s going a better life in heaven. What matters is that I know that it’s wrong.”

Lori’s face flushed with sudden anger. “I’m not insane and I’m not committing suicide.”

Anthony spoke up before she could say more. “Dr. Kaford, as a psychologist and Lori’s therapist, I can assure you that her desires may be unusual but they are not a symptom of mental illness. You’re having difficulty because you can’t believe that she is a true masochist. I specialize in this subject so I talk to people like Lori every day in my practice. People have no problem believing that sadists exist. We have all met them and know them. The people at the other end of the same continuum, masochists, are just as prevalent as sadists, but they are much harder to see. They don’t stand out in the crowd. They are naturally camouflaged as shy, cooperative people who are easy to overlook.

“Part of the reason that you find it so hard to believe that Lori is one of those people is that you assume that masochists must be unhappy, unsuccessful people. You assume that masochism must be a destructive trait. I can assure you that that is not true. Masochism can be a highly adaptive trait. Masochists are, on average, more successful than sadists. Take Lori as an example.” He paused and looked at her. “You don’t mind if I talk about you, personally, for a minute, do you?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Not at all. That’s why we are here. I want my dream team to know everything about me so that my wedding present can be perfect.”

He smiled back. He had genuine affection for Lori. Most men did. “Of course.” He addressed the other men at the table. “So, let’s consider the specific case of Lori. She likes to submit to men. She likes to feel a moderate amount of pain on occasion. Not constant or severe pain. In fact, she doesn’t actually like the pain itself. She’s not supposed to. She likes the threat of pain. She likes the anticipation of pain. She likes knowing that pain is coming and that she is helpless to stop it. In the same way, she likes the anticipation of humiliation. The anticipation of helplessness. The anticipation of sexual abuse. She dreads the operations that we will perform on her, not because there will be some pain from the procedure itself, but because they will render her helpless. But she loves feeling that dread. She loves the fear and she is looking forward to a lifetime of constant fear of what will happen to her at her husband’s hands for the rest of their marriage.

“But, before you call that insane, you better consider what this personality trait has done for her. It gave her the ability to excel at one of the most competitive universities in the world because she would happily forgo short-term pleasures and confine herself to her studies. It made her an athlete because she was happy to endure the pain of a rigorous exercise regime. It gave her a willingness to embrace adventure that made her attractive to one of the wealthiest men in the country. She’s obviously beautiful, but so are millions of other women her age. Lori caught Steve’s eye because she offered more of herself to him in ways that all those other women could not.

“Before you judge her harshly, you would do well to consider if you have been any more successful in achieving your goals than she has been in achieving hers.”

“If her goal is to get her husband’s money and this is the way she’s doing it, then I guess you’re right.”

“No,” Lori snapped. “I don’t have to do this to get his money. He has given me a generous prenup. If our marriage fails, I will be wealthy whether I have done this to myself or not. The only role that money plays in this plan is that it gives me the means to hire the best people in the world to execute it.”

“You would better off giving the money to a therapist to cure you,” Kaford said. “You’ve already admitted that you’re in therapy with Dr. Anthony. Give him time to cure you.”

“Please,” Dr. Anthony said. “That’s not why she’s in therapy. Lori is mentally sound. Possibly she is the most mentally balanced person in this room. Her therapy is only to help her deal with a few people in her life who know about her masochism and can’t come to terms with it. The masochism itself isn’t a disease to be cured. It’s simply part of the woman that Lori is. Talking about curing her is like talking about curing a homosexual. It’s wrong and insulting. And futile.”

Kaford shrugged. “I’ll have to take your word for all that. I’ll never understand it. I’ll perform the operations, as agreed, but not because I think it’s right. And not for the money. I’ll do it mostly because I’ll never get a chance to try something this radical again. Or to work with such a diverse and accomplished set of colleagues. It is a fascinating experiment. If Ms. Willows wants to make herself a guinea pig, that’s her choice. I won’t question her motives any further.”

“I’m more than a guinea pig, Dr. Kaford. I designed the experiment. I am the intellectual force behind it. That makes me more scientist than a guinea pig.”

He shrugged.

“Let’s move on,” Anthony said. “Are we on schedule?”

Ahbed al Sadi spoke up. “The prototype has passed all the tests. It checks out perfectly. We only need the green light to start producing the eight devices.” He looked at Lori. “I brought the prototype with me if you want to see how it works.”

She shook her head. “I definitely do not want to see it work. I never want to see the mechanism. You’re the internationally-respected biomechanical engineer. If you say that it works, then I’ll take your word for it. If Dr. Kaford and Dr. King are satisfied, then you have the green light to start producing the devices.”

“They’ll be ready in a month. Add another month for testing and tweaking and we’ll be good to go.”

“I’ll schedule the operating theater and staff for the first week in February,” Kaford said. “You’ll probably be fully recovered in three to four weeks. But even if it takes twice that time, you’ll still be in great shape for a June wedding. A well-designed regime of post-recovery physiotherapy will ensure that.”

“Great,” Lori said. But she looked more frightened than happy. Her impending modifications were becoming more real by the minute and dread was flooding through her. The dread that she loved as much as life itself.

There was silence for a minute, then Gordon King spoke. “The user interface design was finished and approved two months ago. We’ve implemented the first generation software. It’ll be debugged and beta-tested in another six weeks. The interface itself will be manufactured by the time the devices are available. We’ll have ample time to bench test the complete system before it’s implanted. I really like the voodoo interface. I’m sure that your husband will love it. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen anything that’s as intuitive as the doll. And it’s going to look great. Holly did a terrific job on the visual design. She spent a lot of time researching voodoo artifacts.”

Lori nodded. “I’m pleased to hear that. I want every detail to be perfect. I want Steve to love this gift.”

Kaford shook his head. “I can’t believe that you can spend all this time and money and he doesn’t know what you’re doing with it?”

“Nope. This is going to be a complete surprise to him.”

“You’re really sure that he’s going to like what you’re doing to yourself? Completely positive?”

Lori smiled broadly. “I know him. Believe me, he’s going to love it. If I wasn’t absolutely positive, I wouldn’t be doing this.”

“I hope you’re right.”

* * *

Lori held her arms over her head so that her bridesmaids could fit her wedding gown on her. With her elbows in her face, she took another critical look at the scars around them. They were clearly visible, but not so prominent that her bridesmaids bothered to comment on them.

Before the operation, she had discussed the scarring with Dr. Kaford. Severe scarring would not have stopped her from having the operation, but she hadn’t wanted it to be an unpleasant surprise afterward.

He had explained that the operation would be like building a ship in a bottle. The devices came in pieces and would be assembled through numerous small holes. She would be left with a half dozen inch-long scars around her elbows and knees. Her shoulders and hips were worse because the devices implanted there were more complex. Something about one verses two degrees of freedom.

In any event, the scarring had been far less than she had expected. She was thrilled about that.

The numerous wounds had been healing for almost four months and looked acceptable for the wedding pictures.

What had surprised her more was the new shape of her major joints. She had known that the devices would show as knobs at her knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders but they were not as prominent as she had expected. The biomechanical engineer had worked closely with the human factors designer to make the visual appearance of her limbs look natural. The skin and muscle flowed over the knobs in smooth curves from their widest part to the narrowest so that, even though her elbows were more than an inch wider at the joint than they had been, everything looked properly organic and proportional.

To accommodate her new shape, the wedding dress had to be refitted and altered in the sleeves and at the hips and shoulders last month but it looked terrific. As her maid of honor fastened the long row of tiny buttons up the back, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She looked great. Steve was going to be blown away when he saw her walk down the aisle an hour from now.

Spending buckets of cash bought a quality product.

She had seen little of Steve since February. She had told him only that she had some minor but time-consuming business to resolve before the wedding. She assured him that it was nothing that he should be concerned about, simply a lot of details that needed her input.

He didn’t question her. He was an understanding fellow. She would not be marrying him if he were not.

This was going to be a wonderful wedding and a great wedding night, in no small part because she and Steve had been apart during so much of the past four months.

She would not give him his wedding present until the first full day of their honeymoon.

Wondering what he would do to her after that gave her something to dread. Just thinking about it made her heart pound and her head feel light.

She loved that feeling of dread.

Tomorrow they’d be flying in the family jet over to a private island in the Aegean Sea. Their honeymoon would start for real the day after that. She was looking forward to that day even more than she had been looking forward to her wedding.

After she was dressed and made up, she walked with her bridesmaids to the church vestibule. Her joints felt almost normal. Maybe slightly stiffer, but the change was barely detectable. The physiotherapist had told her that it helped a lot that she was so athletic. Her muscles easily compensated for the changes that had been made to her.

She would have no problem making love to Steve tonight. It would feel natural.

But the second night of the honeymoon would be a whole different experience for both of them. There’d be nothing natural happening on that night.

* * *

She was wearing a short, sleeveless summer dress, suitable for lounging around the family’s private Greek island in June. Steve and she had finished a light breakfast of fruit salad. They were ready to enjoy the first full day of their honeymoon.

He looked content.

She tried to conceal her terror at what she was about to do to herself. Her heart was pounding and her hands were sweating.

“I haven’t given you your wedding present yet,” she said.

He smiled. “You are all the present that I want.”

“That’s what I’m giving you. Myself. But in a way that you never imagined. Wait here.”

She fetched a gift box from the top shelf of the closet. It was a foot tall and a few inches wide and deep.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Open it and find out,” she said, forcing a smile.

“It’s heavy,” he said. He untied the silver ribbon and pulled the blue wrapping paper away with agonizing slowness to reveal a polished wooden box. “Nice jewelry box. Thanks.”

“The gift is inside.”

“Jewelry?” He opened the lid. “It’s a doll.”

“It’s a voodoo doll.”

He pulled it from the box and smiled. “It looks like you.”

“It has to look like me. It’s sympathetic magic. It gives you power over me.”

“It has pins in it.” There was a small pin with a white plastic head sticking a quarter inch out of each knee, each hip, each elbow, and each shoulder. “I guess a voodoo doll should have pins in it.”

“The pins are pulled all the way out right now,” she said. “They can slide all the way in. But don’t do that yet. Wait until I explain how it works.”

“Okay.” He frowned at her, then at the doll.

“The knees, hips, elbows and shoulders bend. You can put the doll into a variety of positions. Try moving one of the joints.”

He bent the doll’s elbow so that its hand was pointing out from its body.

She stood up in front of him, took a breath, and said, “Now push the pin in.”

He pushed the pin so that silver shaft slid into the doll leaving the round plastic head tight against the doll’s elbow. The head glowed red.

“Like that?” he said, looking up.

“Just like that,” she replied as her arm moved to match the angle of the doll’s arm. “See, when the pin is pushed in, I will move to match the position of the doll.”

“If you want.”

“No, I have to do it no matter what I want. I have no choice. The voodoo doll controls me. Sympathetic magic means that I have to do whatever the doll does, whether I want to do it or not. I don’t want my arm bent like this but I will not be able to move it from this position for as long as the pin is pushed into the doll. As long as you control the doll, you control my body. You can put me into any position that you like and there’s nothing that I can do about it. That’s my gift to you.”

“How can that happen?” he asked.

She pointed to her elbow with her other hand. “Can you see that my elbow is wider than it used to be? Unnaturally wide?”

“I guess it looks a little wider, but I hadn’t really noticed.”

“And you see these scars?”

“I wasn’t going to mention them until you did.”

“My joint is wider and there are scars around it because I’ve had a device implanted in it. It’s called a biomechanical governor. It’s like a brake on the joint. It’s attached to the bones above and below the elbow. When it’s activated, it locks the joint into some position and holds it there. My elbow will stay locked in this exact position until the governor is released. I’ve had governors implanted in both elbows, shoulders, hips, and knees. They’re all controlled by that doll.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. He carefully pulled the pin a quarter inch out of the doll’s elbow. The red light went off and Lori’s arm dropped back to her side. She flexed the elbow experimentally.

Then her arms began to rise and her elbows bend. In a minute, her hands came together behind her head, thrusting her breasts forward.

Steve had moved the doll’s arms into exactly that position and pushed the four pins into place.

“That’s right,” Lori said. “Now I have to stay in this position for as long as you want.”

Steve rose from his chair, walked to his bride, and caressed her breasts. “This is nice,” he said.

“I’m glad you like it.”

“You have to stay like this for as long as I want? No matter what I do?”

“Within an hour limit. The device is programmed to release my joints after an hour. That’s necessary to ensure that I get proper circulation and don’t form blood clots. But you can keep putting me in one position after another all day and all night if you want. You just have to keep changing my position at least once an hour.”

“What about batteries? It must take an awful lot of power to move your limbs against your will.”

“No. That’s not how it works. The only power required by the governors is a little bit to activate some kind of friction mechanism in disks on each side of each joint. The power to move my limbs comes from my own muscles. When you push the pin into the doll’s joint, a radio signal tells the governor to engage but nothing else happens. If I could keep the joint perfectly still, then I could keep it in its original position rather than conforming to the one on the doll. But I can’t. Every little twitch and quiver of my muscles moves my joint a fraction of a degree. The governor only allows it to move toward the desired position, never away. Inevitably, I’ll end up posed exactly as the doll, no matter how hard I try to resist. All I can do is try to slow the movement by being as still as possible. It’s really tiring to try to not move even a fraction of a degree and I’ll lose in the end anyway. It’s not worth the effort so I just let it happen.”

“But even that takes some power.”

“The batteries for the governors are rechargeable and there are little generators in the governors. Every time I move an arm or leg, the batteries get recharged a little. They’ll never need to be replaced. I’m told that they’ll last longer than I will.”

He pulled out the pins and Lori’s arms fell back to her sides.

“Isn’t this dangerous? If I move your legs, I could make you fall and hurt yourself.”

“Try it. Put the doll on its knees and then push in the pins.”

When he did it, Lori slowly and gracefully sank to her knees. When she was kneeling in front of him, she said, “See. It’s sophisticated. The doll is the interface to a laptop computer that I booted up in the back room of the suite this morning. The computer calculates the best way to move me into the desired position and forces me to make the correct sequence of moves to get me there safely. It won’t let you do something that’s obviously dangerous like trying to make me balance on one leg because I’d fall down. There’s an override dialog on the computer, though. If you tried to make me balance on one leg, it would refuse but the computer in the other room would ask if I was supported. For example if you tied my arms to a hook in the ceiling and then went in there and answered the question to tell it that I was supported, the computer would go ahead and make me stand on one leg. I have to trust that you won’t lie to the computer and hurt me.”

He kissed her. “I won’t. At least not accidentally. But if I put you in a spanking position, you can be pretty sure that you’ll be getting a spanking in your future.”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. Now, if you’ll release me, I’ll show you something else.”

“I don’t know if I should. I like having you kneeling in front of me like this.”

“If you like it, you can put me right back here any time you want. You don’t need my permission.”

“I like that.” He pulled the pins to free her.

She stood and stretched. “Okay. Now, there’s something else in the box that you didn’t notice.”

“You mean these pieces of chain with the lockets on them?”

“Magic chains. The lockets are little radio transmitters.”

“Okay. Magic chains. Do I chain the doll up? Why would I do that? If I understand what you said, you’re already constrained by the pins in your joints.”

“I’ll show you. Put the doll on the table and then lay chain around it, a few inches away.”

He did as he was told.

“Now watch what happens to me.” She began walking toward him, then suddenly stopped. “That’s it. That’s as far as my legs will let me move in that direction.” She began feeling the air in front of her and walking sideways. “It’s like an invisible wall. I can’t bend my arms and legs to move past this point no matter how hard I try. Not until you move the chain away from the doll.”

“Or until an hour has passed.”

“That limit doesn’t apply to the chains.” She stepped back and swung her arms around. “My joints aren’t frozen so there’s no risk of clotting. The chain is effective for twelve hours by default but you can override that on the keyboard and trap me somewhere for as long as you like. There is a caveat. If you make the space so small that I can only stand up, it will expand the space to allow me to lie down after four hours. But, as soon as I get up again, it will herd me back into my allotted space for another four hours. Also, the computer will release me completely after forty-eight hours to ensure that I don’t die of dehydration. But, if you’re taking care of me, you can tell the computer that I’ve been given food and water and keep overriding the program to imprison me in a limited space for as long as you like.” She looked at him. “But I trust that you won’t put me in a virtual prison for too long.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll always be too eager to do something else to you to keep you in one place for long.” He put the chain back in the box and sat back down at the table.

She smiled happily. “When we get home, you’ll find a scale diagram of the house on the desk in your den. If you put the doll on any part of that diagram and lay chains around it, you can restrict me to any part of the house that pleases you. Incidentally, there is a permanent restriction that keeps me from ever going into your den again so I recommend that you keep the doll in there if you don’t want me to get up to any mischief with it.”

She sat across from him and watched him think about the implications of her gift.

After a few minutes, he said, “What if I move the doll’s arm while I keep the pin inserted?”

“It’s your doll. Try it.”

He moved the doll’s arm to a variety of positions and watched Lori slowly mimic the doll’s movements.

“It will keep trying to put me into the doll’s position no matter how you change it,” she said as he forced her to wave slowly at him.

She looked at the bulge in his pants and knew what was coming. This was their honeymoon. She had been looking forward to experiencing the inevitable consequence of the doll for a long time.

He stood the doll upright with it’s arms hanging straight down and pushed all the pins in.

Lori slowly stood, the backs of her knees pushing her chair away. In a standing position, the governors allowed her the little movements of her legs that were necessary for her to keep her balance, but never gave her enough freedom to take a step. The program was smart that way.

Steve pushed the chair further back so that he could walk behind her.

She was powerless to stop him from unbuttoning the summer dress and sliding off her shoulders and then pushing it over her hips to fall to the ground. She was powerless to stop him from sliding her panties to her ankles.

Without releasing her, he bent the doll down onto its hands and knees with its legs spread wide.

He mounted his new bride like a dog. She never liked this position. It was humiliating and gave her little physical stimulation. But there wasn’t a thing that she could do to stop him, save begging him not to do it to her. She would never do that. Begging would be even more humiliating than being used. And she could trust Steve to use her anyway, no matter how she begged.

From now on, her husband could take her like this, or any other way, as often as he wished.

He spent the remainder of the honeymoon fascinated with his new doll, posing his bride in one odd position after another.

Her wedding gift was as wonderful she had hoped it would be.

* * *

The Anniversary Present:

The day of their first anniversary began as had a great many mornings in the year since Lori and Steve had wed.

When the alarm sounded, Steve turned it off and got out of bed immediately. Lori woke, but stayed motionless in the bed and tried to doze for a while longer. Often, Steve would permit that but, almost as often, he did not leave her to sleep peace.

She never knew how her day would start.

This morning, she woke from her doze to find herself slowly propping herself up in bed, her elbows and shoulders moving stiffly in response to her sleepy twitches. She looked across to see the voodoo doll standing upright on the stand on Steve’s side of the bed, all the pins pushed home and glowing red. She would soon be standing at attention, awaiting his pleasure. The computer knew where the bed was so it would move her off, onto the floor, before forcing her to her feet.

When Steve finished brushing his teeth, he came back into the bedroom and casually stripped Lori’s nightgown from her. For her own convenience, she wore nightgowns that could be removed when her arms were hanging straight down. If she had chosen ones that required her hands to be raised over her head, Steve would simply force her to stand with her arms raised as though she were surrendering to an old west movie bandit.

She preferred to keep things as dignified as she could. She knew that Steve would soon force her into some far less dignified pose for the next hour. She would have no choice about that.

As soon as she was nude, he returned to the doll and freed her knees and hips.

“End of the bed,” he said.

If she refused, he could make her to walk by moving the doll’s pinned legs in small steps. He had become adept at that. But it was slow and she was in danger of falling during the procedure. She preferred to move herself wherever he directed to save time, effort, and risk.

He carried the doll into the bathroom and, a few seconds later, started running hot water for shaving.

While the water ran, Lori felt her legs moving together and stiffening. At the same time, her arms began to straighten and rise. She did not assist them but did not resist, either. She was in no hurry to assume the position that Steve was dictating with the doll – she’d be frozen in that position for long enough as it was – but she knew that it was not worth the effort to fight the inevitable, either. Every little movement that she made as she worked the kinks out of her sleep-stiffened muscles brought her closer to her final pose.

When Steve finished shaving, he came out of the bathroom and looked at his wife for a long moment, appreciating her beauty.

She was standing nude at the foot of their bed, stretched into a lewd parody of the statue of Jesus the Redeemer that overlooks Rio. Her legs were held stiffly together and her arms outstretched straight on each side.

He held her while he kissed her on the lips. She returned his kiss with enthusiasm. After a year of marriage, she loved her husband more than ever. He spent some time caressing her breasts. He loved to fondle her breasts. They were full and pert but she was sure that if they were small or pendulous, he would have loved them just as much. He was a breast man to the core.

After he’d enjoyed them thoroughly, he returned to the bathroom to take his morning shower.

She thought his practice of forcing her out of bed and making her assume some odd position two or three times a week to be tedious and childish but she never complained about it.

If it amused him to do this to her, she would be happy to endure it.

He looked at her frequently as he dressed in one of his suits. When he was finished, she said, “Have a good day, dear.”

“I will,” he said. “You too.” He gave her a quick kiss, gentle so as not to knock her over, and then left.

It took between a half hour and forty-five minutes for him to prepare for the day and leave the house. He never used the doll to release her on these mornings so she was left posed alone in the house for the remainder of the hour, waiting for the computer to time out and free her.

When she could, she liked to use these period of forced posing to mediate. On mornings like this, she could not. Standing positions required that she concentrate on keeping her balance. It wasn’t difficult but she couldn’t Zen out, either. She didn’t want to fall and break an arm.

She preferred that Steve leave her on her hands and knees, or sometimes if he was feeling merciful, sitting on the bed or lying on the floor. But she had no say in the matter. She was happy because it suited her to conform to his whims .

The alarm was set for eight. After being frozen in some pose until nine o’clock for more than a hundred mornings during the first year of their marriage, she knew to never schedule any appointments before ten o’clock.

This particular position was stressful, but not in the way that it would appear to an uninformed observer. Because her shoulder and elbow joints were locked solid, her arms did not get tired. She did not have to exert any effort to keep them raised.

However, because her feet were not spread and she could not move her arms to maintain her balance, her ankles and calves had to work constantly to keep her from tipping over.

When the computer released her, her legs were tired and she was pleased to be able to sit down. On the toilet, first, because she was given no opportunity to relieve herself of her morning water on mornings when she was posed.

After showering and dressing, she went downstairs. There was a crystal vase filled with red roses on the kitchen table. The anniversary card was beautiful and touching. It sounded like he had composed the romantic message himself because it referred slyly to her willingness to stand by him whenever he needed her, no matter what difficulties that posed for her.

A handwritten note that was attached to the card promised that he would take her to dinner at seven tonight.

It was their wedding anniversary so she assumed that there would be sex after dinner. She wondered if he would use the doll or if they would do it the natural way.

She thought it most likely that he would put the doll away and have regular, old-fashioned sex because that was more romantic and Steve liked romance.

On the other hand, they made love the usual way most of the time. Steve liked to feel how she responded to him – she was an active and athletic lover – so he used the doll to constrain her movements during sex only a few times a month. That was mostly for her benefit. Sometimes she needed to feel like she was being abused more than loved.

Considering that, he might have decided to make tonight memorable for her sake by using the doll in some new and creative way. He could be surprisingly creative.

Steve had not told her what would happen tonight but it could still go either way.

He knew that she loved the anticipation of abuse far more than the actual act. In service of that, he usually told her in advance, sometimes days in advance, when she could expect harsh treatment. Not always, though. Occasionally he surprised her by suddenly forcing her to make herself sexually available and then took her without warning. In the past year, he had surprised her like that in the car, in their backyard at night, and once, in his office when she delivered some papers that he had forgotten at home. The possibility of that he might take advantage of her vulnerability anywhere at any time gave her a small constant thrill of fear. She loved that feeling.

On the night of their first anniversary, he took her to their favorite restaurant and relieved her uncertainty while they were waiting for the chef to prepare a fine dinner of Provençal cuisine. “No voodoo tonight, dear. But I’m making this a long weekend so that we can go away and celebrate our anniversary in a very special way. On Friday morning, we’ll be taking the family jet to a surprise destination. This is a gift that I expect to enjoy more than you. Much more than you. I’m in a cruel mood and I fear that you’re going to suffer through three terribly difficult days. I recommend that you get as much rest as you can for the next few days because you’ll not get much during your weekend of torment.”

Lori’s heart began to pound. Steve was sweet most of the time, but he could be frightfully cruel when he put his mind to it. That was one of the things that she found most attractive about him. She had no doubt that she was going to be forced to endure an exceptionally miserable weekend.

He loved her and he understood her needs. He proved that tonight when he had given her what she loved most – days to anticipate the coming horror, her fear compounded because she could not guess what form it would take.

She fell silent for a few minutes, giving herself time to think about what might happen and let her fear build. Then she reached across the table, took his hand, and whispered, in a voice that quavered with fear, “Thank you.”

* * *

The Gulfstream set down on a small island in the Caribbean.

“Where are we?” Lori asked.

“We’re off the coast of Nicaragua. I bought an island for us,” Steve said. “It has an official name, but we’ll call it Voodoo Island because the whole place is permeated by black magic.”

Suddenly, Lori became acutely aware of the governors that were affixed to her joints. She knew exactly what kind of magic would be found here. The kind that would give her no choice about where she could go or what she could do when she was here. The kind of magic that would make the three-day weekend feel excruciatingly long.

The possibilities were terrifying.

Her chance of escape, zero.

As soon as the steward deployed the ramp, Lori felt the governors engage. She was not being controlled as the doll controlled her but as the chains did. She was being herded off the aircraft. She could move her arms and legs freely as long as she moved toward the exit, but her joints locked if she tried to move away from it.

Steve followed her as she was forced down the ramp and across the tarmac. She had to move toward a low grass and bamboo hut on the side of the airstrip.

“This is the change room,” Steve said. “On Voodoo Island, we wear only clothing that is appropriate for us. I’ll see you later.” He went through a door marked “Guests”.

She was herded through another door. The sign above that one said, “Zombies”.

That was appropriate. She was feeling more like a zombie every minute.

She was in a room with a door on either side. A single locker was labeled with her name and a sign that instructed her to place all clothing, including shoes and undergarments into the locker.

A single locker because she was the only zombie on the island.

She stared at the sign for a long time.

...all her clothing...

...including undergarments...

If she obeyed the sign, she would be nude. Buck naked and barefoot.

But if she did not comply voluntarily, she was certain that she would be forced. Steve had stripped her many times in the year since she had given him the voodoo doll. He simply froze her joints to render her completely powerless to stop him from undressing her.

He loved to look at her naked body.

She unbuttoned the front of her blouse, and then the cuffs. But before she shrugged it off, she paused and looked down at her bra showing through the gap. This was a small hut. If she removed all her clothes and stepped back through outer the door, she would be outside without a stitch to cover her. Out there, in the open, feeling the wind and sun against her skin. Everyone around would see her naked. The pilot of the Gulfstream. The steward if he glanced out the window. Anyone.

But she had no choice.

Her hands were shaking as she put the blouse into the locker.

What would happen when all her clothes were inside and she closed the door? Would it lock? When would she get her clothes back?

But what choice did she have?

She gritted her teeth and finished stripping.

As soon as she closed the locker, the door on the other side of the room opened, mercifully into another interior space. She felt her joints begin to lock when she moved in any direction but through that door.

Before she moved her feet, she tried to reach back to the locker and test the door to see if it had latched and locked. She could not. Her elbows and shoulders froze when she tried to reach toward it.

No one needed to lock a door against her when a computer could restrict her from touching it.

She walked through the newly-opened door and found herself in a cubicle. Like the outer room, this also had two doors opposite each other.

To her relief, she saw clothing, a grass skirt, hanging on a hook on the wall.

But to her dismay, she found that the hook held only a grass skirt. There was no halter or blouse to cover her breasts nor shoes to protect her bare feet.

She took the skirt from the hook and examined it. It was made of fake grass. It was some kind of stiff fabric that, hopefully, was more robust than real grass. And, hopefully, more comfortable.

The leather waistband fit low on her hips and the grass strips ended halfway down her calf. It would have been modest but for two facts. First, it left her torso naked; and second, every time she took a step, the grass strips parted, baring her leg all the way to her crotch. If she had let herself grow naturally instead of having regular bikini waxes, she would have been showing hair with every step.

She prayed that the island was deserted but for her and Steve.

As soon as she settled the skirt about her hips, the other door opened and she was herded out of the hut into bright sunlight. She had entered the hut on the runway side. Now she exited on the far side, facing a lush, emerald green jungle.

Steve was waiting for her. He was wearing a straw hat, Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts and sandals. She was sure that he wore underwear beneath the shorts. He looked like he was on vacation.

When she felt the warm jungle breeze blow through the leaves of the grass skirt and tickle her most intimate parts, she knew that she was not on vacation.

She was here to serve his pleasure.

Steve stared at her for a moment, and then said, “You look beautiful.”

“Thanks,” she replied, wryly. “I’m glad that you’re enjoying the view.” She heard the Gulfstream take off behind her. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the silver bird gain altitude. The pilot and steward were no longer on the island and would not see her half naked. She was thankful for that small mercy.

If Steve were the only person to see her dressed in nothing but a grass skirt, it wouldn’t be so bad.

Then he said, “Our guests are going to love you.”

“Guests! What guests?” Lori was shocked and appalled. Steve had never humiliated her in public before. She felt her face flush as she looked frantically around to see if there were other people watching her.

“Nobody you know,” Steve replied. “They’ll be arriving in a couple of hours.”

“I don’t want to be seen like this.”

“I don’t imagine that you do. Do you expect me to care?”

She looked down at her naked breasts. “No,” she said quietly.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll be easy for you to entertain our guests. It’ll be like you’re on autopilot. You could do it in your sleep. If you get a chance to sleep. But enough of that. Let’s go make sure that the staff will be ready to serve dinner on time.”

“Staff?” She was appalled anew.

“We have a staff of nine on the island,” Steve said. “Come on. They’re going to love meeting you.”

Nine. As Lori followed Steve down a well-groomed pathway, she couldn’t tell if the liquid flowing down her face was sweat or tears.

She expected to be shedding ample quantities of both during the next three days.

* * *

“Lori, I’d like you to meet Maria, Consuela, and Valencia. They take care of housecleaning, do laundry and bring service to the guests in their rooms.”

The three women in modern maid uniforms looked at Lori’s naked breasts with disdain.

“¡Una mujerzuela! ¡Golfa! ¡Zorra!” Maria, the prettiest one said with a sneer.

“¡Ramera! ¡Puta sucia!” the youngest woman, Valencia, snapped.

“Una mujer perdida,” the older woman, Consuela, said in a soft tone.

“Si,” Valencia replied, “La perdida.” There was no soft note in hers.

Lori looked at Steve because he spoke better Spanish than her. He shrugged. “None of the staff speak English. They’re discussing exactly what kind of slut you are. Spanish provides quite a number of options. They disagree about which label would best describe you. Don’t worry. This is just their first impression. By the end of the weekend, they’ll know exactly what to call you.”

Lori wanted to flee.

“Come on,” Steve said. “Let’s meet the kitchen staff.”

The huge mansion by the sea looked like a colonial relic but Lori had a clear impression that it was newly built. It was like the Pirates of the Caribbean Disneyland ride that’s decorated to look old but never quite feels authentic. Maybe it was the faint odor of fresh paint that tainted the air, maybe it was the absence of accumulated dirt in the little cracks and crevasses that would be too tight to clean, or maybe it was that none of the staff looked at home yet. This was all as new to them as it was to her.

She was not surprised to find that the kitchen was filled with shiny modern appliances. She wondered how many guests were coming today. As a student, she had waitressed at three different restaurants and knew what could be done in a professional kitchen. Fully staffed, this kitchen could feed a hundred people.

The chef and sous chef, Juan and Luis, wore black jackets and hats. The chef looked to be a man in his fifties and the sous chef, in his late twenties. Both were overweight, the chef by considerably more than the sous chef. His cheeks hung in heavy jowls and his chin bulged halfway down his neck.

The serving maids, Carmine and Olivia, were lovely young women in their early twenties. They wore full, pale blue, ankle-length dresses with puffed sleeves and white ruffles filling the bodice. They looked like they had just stepped out of the eighteenth century. Or Disneyland’s Blue Bayou restaurant.

The male cooks stared openly at Lori’s naked tits. They were practically drooling. She watched the older man’s eyes drift down to her skirt and his hands twitched as though he wanted desperately to reach out and part the grass to seek the treasure hidden within.

The servers’ reaction was worse than the men’s open lust. Both looked utterly humiliated simply to be in Lori’s presence. Neither one could meet anyone’s eyes. Both stared at the floor, their ears flushed bright red, their hands clasped in front of them, as though protecting their own sex. They could have been twins.

“The waitresses are lovely, don’t you think?” Steve said. “So shy and innocent. So modest. I don’t think either one has any idea how beautiful she is.”

Lori said nothing. Steve’s implied comparison of her to the servers pushed her to a low.

“I think the cooks like you,” he continued. “Should I tell them that I’m going to give you to them some day? That they’ll be able to spend as long as they like doing whatever they want with you? And that you won’t make a move to stop them? That would make their eyes shine bright, wouldn’t it?”

She looked at her husband in mute shock.

“Of course, if I make a promise like that to them, I’ll be obligated to keep it. What do you think? Should I give them something to look forward to?”

“Please don’t,” she whispered hoarsely, barely able to force the words from her dry mouth.

“No? Not now? Okay. But maybe some day. We’ll see.”

She looked at the fat chef and tried not to imagine his weight pressing her into the ground while he rocked back and forth, grinding his sex into her crotch. The sous chef would be standing over her, drooling, hungry for his turn. And his turn after that. And after that. The more she tried not to imagine the scene, the more vividly it impressed itself in her mind.

Her stomach churned in fear and disgust.

Where would Steve be in that scene? Flying back to America, one of the beautiful young serving maids sitting beside him, a shiny new diamond engagement ring gracing her lovely finger.

Would his new fiancée’s major joints be enlarged by the governors implanted in her limbs? Would she do the same as Lori had done for Steve? He would surely make that a condition of their engagement. To be the wife of a wealthy American, a Nicaraguan serving girl would surely agree to anything.

“Come and see the gardens,” he said.

As she followed him through the mansion, she thought again about the guests that were due to arrive this afternoon. If Steve was thinking about giving her to the staff some day, was he planning to offer her to his guests this weekend? Now that they were no longer newlyweds, did her husband intend to make her body public property? He had never mentioned wife swapping, but what man ever told his woman about his darkest fantasies?

Her body was his to dispose of as he wished. She had given it to him on their honeymoon and now she could do nothing to stop him from doing anything with it. That was a gift freely given to him and she would not try to take it back for as long as they were married, no matter what he chose to do with her.

But that didn’t mean that she had to like it.

Acres of formal gardens lay behind the mansion. They were gorgeous. Beds of traditional British flowers like roses, peonies, and asters were intermixed with profusions of outrageous tropical blossoms.

There was no need for a greenhouse on the island. A large section of the garden was devoted to growing orchids outdoors as nature intended.

In the back of the garden, hedges were planted and shaped to form a small labyrinth. It was not large enough for anyone to get lost for long but it featured several large open spaces that were hidden from view. Small, well-groomed trees grew in the middle of some of those open spaces. An orange tree in one, an apple tree in another, a palm tree in a third.

There was a topiary on the lawn between the labyrinth and the formal gardens. Thick tropical shrubs that Lori could not identify had been trimmed into the shape of grotesque gargoyles.

That was where they found the gardeners, Manuel and Paco, raking up the detritus from the freshly trimmed botanical sculptures.

“In this climate, things grow so fast that the topiary has to be trimmed weekly,” Steve commented. “Manuel and Paco are the busiest servants on the island. They should be rewarded for their hard work.”

“The gardens are beautiful,” she said.

He looked at her with a sparkle in his eye. “Before the weekend is over, you’ll have a chance to show them personally how deeply you appreciate their efforts.”

Her heart leapt into her throat. Manuel was a stump. His legs were short, almost dwarfish, and his body thick and round like a barrel. He looked as strong as a horse. She suspected that he would be hung like one as well. He had that air.

Paco was tall and slender, but not the least bit graceful. He was gangly with big, dirty hands and ragged, untended fingernails. His mouth hung slack and his eyes dull. He looked like he was developmentally challenged. She doubted that he had learned to read even simple texts. He had that air.

Lori was no snob, she had worked her way through university, but the thought of either of these men touching her was revolting.

She raised her arm to wipe a bit of sweat from her cheek. It felt stiff. Were the governors engaged? Was she already being put in some lewd pose that would make it easy for these men to ravish her right here on the lawn?

She dropped her arm. It fell naturally; the joint flexed easily. She was just imagining things.

Now. There was no question that force would be applied to her joints soon enough; and in ways that would make her regret having ever given her husband dominion over her body.

She had never felt like she was so far from home.

So alone.

She heard the distant sound of a helicopter. As it grew louder, Steve said, “The first group of guests is arriving. We should get ready to meet them.” He began walking back toward the mansion.

The first group?

* * *

Lori was surprised yet again. Steve left her alone in the middle of the garden outside the mansion. “I’ll see you inside later.”

Invisible walls formed around her and began forcing her to the side of the garden. She was terrified that she was being delivered back to the gardeners to endure a long night of rape.

Instead she was forced into a small brick-clad shed tucked discreetly into a stand of shrubbery. At first, she assumed that it was a gardening shed. A place where the gardeners would come to store their tools and use her available pussy. But, as she got closer, feared that it would turn out to be some kind of prison, complete with torture chamber. Where a parade of men would come to use her available pussy.

Instead, when she opened the door, she found that it was a change room, complete with sink and vanity.

A lovely red satin, floor-length dinner gown was hanging from a hook. There were matching medium-heeled, red pumps on the floor.

She was not going to have her naked tits bouncing and her grass skirt parting at the waist when she was forced to curtsy to the guests.

She almost cried in relief.

She wasted no time in cleaning herself at the sink, then slipping the gown over her head. It fit perfectly, of course.

There was no underwear. She was disappointed, but not surprised. She could not have worn a bra because the back of the dress consisted only of a twist of fabric straps. But that didn’t matter; the cups in front provided enough support to keep her from flopping. Not that her breasts flopped much. They were naturally large but she was only twenty-six and maintained herself in top condition.

The lack of panties ensured that the satin would drape over her hips without any visible panty line. Anything but a thong would have been wrong. If she were dressing for dinner at home, she would have forgone panties and worn only pantyhose under this dress.

Today, there was no pantyhose available, but the hem fell below the ankle, so there was no need to show her legs. This would be cooler.

The pumps were like a Manolo Blahnik sandal. They had a single large red strap that covered most of the toe. She laughed at the thought. Like Blahnik? Undoubtedly, they were Blahnik. Nobody in the Willows family bought knock-offs. Not even for a weekend of kinky sex games. Especially not for a weekend of kinky sex games.

A triple strand of black pearls rested on a stand on the vanity. It perfectly matched the black mother of pearl bosses at the point where the straps of the dress attached to the tops of the cups.

When she finished her makeup, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She looked like the perfect lady of the house. She noted that the scars on the arms from her operations had faded considerably in the last year.

She spent the late afternoon with Steve, playing hostess. It was a role that she had perfected. She mingled with the guests in the garden from five to seven, helping the serving girls make sure that everyone’s glass was full, and making small talk. They were hosting twelve couples who had arrived in three helicopter trips from the mainland. She knew none of the guests and, though all were drawn from the best social circles, none of them knew each other. Their conversation consisted mostly of asking where everybody was from, what they did, and who they knew.

Everyone behaved impeccably, but there was an air of illicit excitement underlying the conversation. It was as though everyone harbored the same dark secret but skirted around the topic because no one wanted to be the first to confess.

The closest that anyone approached the main topic was to ask each other if they knew what was planned for the remainder of the weekend.

No one knew.

No one included Lori. She wasn’t the only one who wanted to know, but she was the only one who dreaded the answer.

* * *

Dinner was served in the formal dining room on fine china with silver place settings and linen napkins. The main course featured a choice between seafood and chicken, though there was a vegetarian option for a few of the guests who were bent that way.

The food was delicious, from appetizer to dessert. Fat Manuel was a first class chef.

When the guests finished the last of their lemon-lime sorbet islands floating in raspberry puree and the last dish was cleared, the lights flickered and dimmed slightly. All eyes turned to look Lori’s direction, but they were not looking at her, they were looking at something behind her.

Lori wanted to turn around to see what was so interesting but she could not move. When she tried, she discovered that all her joints were frozen.

Her heart sank and her stomach churned in fear.

She knew that being paraded before the staff while wearing nothing but a grass skirt had been but a gentle prelude to the terrible ordeal that had been promised.

Now the real torture was about to begin.

She heard a woman’s voice begin to speak in deep, sonorous tones. Tori recognized the accent and dialect as Haitian. The timbre made her visualize a large, black woman in her fifties.

“You white people call this Voodoo Island. I’ve come to tell you why. Brace yourselves because this is a horror story, rich with fear and pain. This island has been cursed for two hundred years. When you came here to laugh and play, in your ignorance, you put yourself in mortal peril.

“One of your number will pay for this affront to history by spending her days suffering the pain and horror visited upon her by this curse.”

Lori, forced to face their guests, felt her fear sink deeper with every word that the woman spoke. Some of them looked fascinated, some nervous, but she alone felt terror. She alone knew that bespoken curse was on her head. And she alone knew that the curse was no idle threat. She would suffer real torture before the weekend was over. She could trust Steve to ensure that.

“In the year of our lord, eighteen ten, black slaves were brought to this island from far Africa. They had been ripped from their land and families, chained together, and transported in the hold of a filthy sailing ship. Half of those men and women died on the ocean and were thrown into the sea like so much garbage.

“One of the unfortunates who survived the journey was called Mary by her new owner because could not be bothered to ask her real name. Later she became known as Mary the Fey because she was a high priestess of an ancient religion. She drew power from her pagan gods. Power that she used to help the other slaves. She cast spells to cure some of their diseases, protect them from evil, and bring them such love as was possible in their miserable lives.”

As Lori sat frozen, facing down the table, waiting to hear how this story was going to be applied to her, she noticed that the two serving girls were standing at the other end of the room, slightly behind and to each side of Steve’s chair, watching the performance. They were transfixed, more intent on the narrative than any of the guests.

“As Mary settled into the new world, her power grew. It soon drew the attention of the white priest who came the island to comfort the slave owners and forgive their sins against the slaves. Their sins were legion and the white men and women needed all the forgiveness that they could get. Especially when the white men visited the slave huts late at night and, nine months later, little babies were born with skin only half as dark as their mothers’.

“Mary the Fey cursed those men. She called on the power of the old gods of the old world to wilt the organs when they came to the huts with rape in their minds. The complained to their priest that Mary’s evil curses were robbing them of their manhood. The priest had the men seize Mary and bring her before him. He accused of witchcraft and condemned her. His Bible said that he could not suffer a witch to live. But suffering an easy death was not enough. First, he would make her suffer in life. And everyone on the island would see the witch suffer so that no slave would dare, ever again, to defy his owner.

“She was stripped and chained. Then she was publicly tortured for two days. The slave owners were entertained and the slaves horrified. By Sunday morning, she was near death. The priest delivered mass on Sunday morning, then, as the sun rose toward the zenith, she was buried alive. Buried in the most terrible way he could devise.

“The slaves were forced to dig a shallow grave, three feet deep, in the middle of the path between their huts and the fields. To ensure that her spirit would never find peace, the grave was floored with large stones and then lined with stinging nettles. She was wrapped in chains and placed facedown in that terrible bed. Facedown so that she would spend eternity looking at Hell instead of Heaven. She was covered with a blanket of nettles and then covered with fresh earth.

“Because the grave had been placed in the middle of the slave’s daily path, they had to walk on it every time they went to the fields in the morning and came back at night. The overseers watched to make sure that no slave ever stepped around it.

“Because the grave was so shallow, the stench of Mary’s rotting body escaped to permeate the air for weeks, a nauseating reminder of the fate that would be visited upon any slave who dared interfere with the masters’ carnal pleasures.

“Something else escaped from that terrible grave, though. Something that the slave owners should have anticipated, having seen her power. As Mary was being buried, she had cast her final and most powerful curse over the entire island. She called on her ancient gods to inflict the same horrors upon a white woman that had been inflicted on her. Not once but every time white women were on the island.

“That curse was memorialized by a miracle. Before the moon bloomed full again, a tree sprouted from Mary’s rocky bed, its roots entwining her bones and pulling her decaying flesh into its heartwood. That tree still grows on this island, two hundred years later. It harbors Mary’s spirit and keeps her curse alive. And it keeps itself alive. Every man who has ever tried to cut that tree down has dropped dead before his axe or saw could touched its trunk.

“Even today, if there are white women on the island, then Mary’s spirit will possessed one of them and make her suffer the tortures that were inflicted upon Mary. The one who is chosen she will suffer in public so that her companions will see and regret what their forefathers did to Mary the Fey.

“The curse drove the white man from this island and, for more than a hundred years, only the black man lived her. But now, you have returned and brought the curse into your midst.

“Foolish people, one of you has already been possessed by Mary’s spirit and is doomed to suffer her torment. The rest of you need to head this warning. As that tree is protected by Mary’s curse, so is the doomed woman protected from you. Do not try to interfere with her torture in any way. If you touch her, the curse of Mary the Fey will strike you down on the spot.

“I know this all to be true because I am the ghost of Mary the Fey.”

There was silence for a moment, then a little nervous giggling from a few of the guests. Lori watched their faces as they looked from one to the other, trying to see if one of them was possessed.

Lori could not move but she assumed that the narrator was gone. She did not know if the ghost had disappeared by magical means or simply walked out of the room.

So this was her fate. She was to be tortured in front of these people all weekend as a warning against the evil of slavery. Ironic because she had made herself a slave to her husband the day after their wedding.

Her legs moved a bit; the governors were allowing them to slide back under her chair but not forward. Her hips allowed her to lean forward slightly to move her center of balance over her feet.

She knew this ritual. The governors in her joints were going to force her to stand upright.

There was no sense resisting. If she tried to stop standing when she was halfway up, she would only strain her muscles to no useful end. She was going to have to conserve her strength.

As she stood, her chair scraped backward across the hardwood floor.

“Lori,” Steve called down the table, “aren’t you going to stay for coffee?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. Everyone could hear the terror in her voice.

“Why are you standing up?”

“I don’t have any choice. I’m being forced to my feet.”

Everyone watched as she slowly, jerkily, bent over the table. Suddenly, the clasp on the black pearl necklace failed and it dropped onto the white cloth, leaving her neck unadorned.

She straightened and began shuffling backward, her slow steps looking eerily like a zombie’s gait. As she backed up, her legs pushed the chair aside. The scraping was loud in the silent room.

After a few steps, her arms rose from her sides and kept rising as she continued to shuffle backwards. She had no idea where she was going. There were no governors in her neck and she could have turned to peer over her shoulder, but she saw no point to it.

She tried to remember the story. What was the first part of Mary’s torment? To be stripped and put into chains. She wondered if Steve would strip the dress from her or if that was why the serving girls remained in the room. They had made no move to serve coffee but were still standing behind Steve.

By the time she reached the back wall, her arms were sticking straight above her head.

She felt something cold against the back of her wrists. When she looked up, she saw, with dismay, that there were open manacles stuck to the wall. No one had noticed them or the chains that rose above because they were somewhat camouflaged by the pattern of the wallpaper.

Steve was not going to rely on the governors on her joints to control her – that was too subtle for this weekend – he was going to resort to blunt force that was visible to every guest.

As her wrists jerked into the waiting cuffs, they closed, smoothly trapping her in irons.

The joints in her arms and legs were released. She could flex her arms slightly but the iron chains ensured that she could not lower them. The audience could not see that the inner surfaces of the manacles inflated, probably with hydraulic oil, so that her wrists were gripped snuggly. She was smart enough to know what that meant. She could now be hoisted by the wrists without the sharp edges of the manacles cutting her flesh to the bone.

Small mercy, that.

The manacles and chains separated from the wall and began moving smoothly along tracks hidden in the ceiling, forcing her to shuffle forward. The stopped pulling her when she had been returned to within a few feet of the table.

Apparently the curse would chained her first, then strip her. She was wearing no underwear. To strip her, someone had to remove only her dress and shoes.

She was forced to stand before the audience for a minute with her arms upraised and endure their inspection. She wanted to weep with terror but let only a quiet sob escape her lips. Some small, practical corner of her mind was thankful that she kept her armpits shaved but was bothered by the amount of cold sweat dripping over her ribs toward the top hem of her dress.

Without warning, the decorative black mother of pearl bosses on each side of her demure cleavage released their hold on her shoulder straps. The cups fell forward, freeing her breasts, while the straps slithered back over her shoulders. The top half of the dress slipped down to pool around her hips, just below her waist.

She froze in shock at her unexpected exposure.

An involuntary gasp of surprise escaped her lips and she looked down at her naked breasts.

When she looked up she felt the humiliation of two-dozen pairs of eyes staring at her. A couple of men looked away but most ogled her as openly as the servants had done this morning. Lust for female flesh was made all men equal.

Some of the women looked at her with undisguised disgust, as though she were to blame for her nudity. Others looked first at her, then at their husbands in disgust at their appreciation of her nudity.

Everyone in the room, with the exception of Steve, thought that she was doing this voluntarily. They thought that she was a stripper or, more accurately, a porn star acting in an obscene play.

She flushed and hung her head. She could not hide, but she did not have to look back at them.

She felt the chains grow tight. The manacles begin to pull on her wrists. Each chain was connected in a yoke to two sides of each manacle so that they did not slew but remained at right angles to her arms. Her shoulders were strained past the point of discomfort as she was pulled into the air.

She groaned softly.

When her feet were higher than the edge of the table, the straps that held her shoes in place slipped apart and the lovely red pumps fell to the floor.

Her only remaining garment was the dress that was hanging around her hips. Some mechanism hidden beneath material that had been gathered at the back of the dress into a ruffle activated. The seam at the back parted, from waist to hem.

There was nothing left to hold the dress to her body. It flowed to the floor.

The men seated nearest to Lori were looking up into her sex. She pressed her legs as tightly together as possible to preserve that tiny shred of modesty.

“I was hung by my wrists for hours,” the voice of Mary said.

The guests looked past Lori’s hanging body. Apparently the woman playing Mary’s ghost had reappeared.

“The pain was excruciating. It never relented, never faded, just grew stronger and more terrible with every minute that passed.”

Lori felt what the woman was describing. Her shoulders were already aching fiercely and there was no way that she could relieve the stress. Her feet could not reach the table in front of her and the chair that she where she had sat during the meal had been pushed far back when she had been shuffling around.

The mounting pain forced a moan from her throat.

The two servants served tea and coffee to the guests while Lori hung by her wrists and suffered.

After a quarter of an hour, her groans all but drowned out the clink of cup against saucer and the chatter of the guests.

They discussed her performance with the distant remove of a flock of amateur theater critics.

“She’s hamming it up a little too much.”

“No, I think she’s feeling real pain right now.”

“It’s fake. She’s got some kind of harness rigged up.”

A derisive laugh. “A harness? Where do you think she could hide a harness? She’s as naked as a babe. There’s no place to hide anything.”

“It’s in the back, behind her.”

“Go look. I’ll bet there’s nothing supporting her. Look how much she’s sweating. It’s pouring off her. She can’t fake that.”

Lori’s eyes were closed. She heard the scrape of chairs and then footsteps approaching. They circled her.

“See. Nothing back here.” The man’s voice was close. He could have reached out and touched her if he wanted. “Look how the muscles in her shoulders are twitching. They’re jumping all over the place. You can’t fake that.”

“You can fake anything.” The other voice spoke up at her. “Hey, you. This is fake, right? You’re just acting, right. Tell us how it’s done.”

Lori didn’t answer. There was nothing that she could say that would convince the unbeliever and she was suffering too much misery to bother trying.

Suddenly there was a loud snap and her body convulsed with excruciating pain. Every muscle twitched and contracted.

Lori howled.

“Jesus Christ!” a man swore loudly behind her. “That hurt.”

“She’s electrified,” the other voice said. “That hurt her worse than you. Do you think that she faked that, too?”

“That could have killed me.”

“You were warned.” The voice of Mary’s ghost filled the room. “Try to interfere with the doomed woman’s torment and you will be struck down.”

“Jesus Christ,” the man said again, but softer this time. “I could have been killed.”

“Probably not,” a woman who was still seated at the table said. “If I were engineering this, I’d be trickling a high voltage into her through the cuffs. Miniscule current. She’d mostly be holding a large static charge. When you touch her, she discharges but almost no current flows through her. If you want to find out, touch her again, twice in quick succession. The first touch will discharge her like last time and the second touch won’t hurt at all because she won’t be recharged yet.”

“No thanks,” the man behind her said. “That hurt like hell and I’m not volunteering for that again.”

Lori was grateful for the man’s cowardice. His touch had hurt her more than him because it convulsed her badly-abused muscles in her arms and shoulders. She didn’t think that she could take another shock.

Of course, if every man in the room decided to come up and shock her, there wasn’t a damned thing that she could do about it except to scream in pain over and over again.

Her shoulders were on fire and her wrists were aching. Mary’s ghost was absolutely right. Her arms and shoulders were supporting her entire weight. The pain from having the upper half of her body racked by gravity got worse by the minute. She did not habituate to it and it did not fade into numbness.

She gave her leg a little kick. The motion only intensified the pain in her upper joints.

She wanted to start screaming for mercy and never stop.

“Please,” she said.

She had barely spoken above a whisper but the room fell silent.

“Please stop. Please let me down.” Her quiet words seemed to echo.

“Please stop?” There was a sarcastic sneer in Mary’s ghost’s voice. “That’s what I said. I screamed it until my voice was hoarse. I begged for mercy. Begged for days. The white men laughed at my funny antics. Laughed like I was a clown, performing for their amusement.”

No one in this room was laughing.

“You know when they let me down?” the ghost voice asked. “They let me down when they wanted to rape me. That’s when they let me down. When they wanted to spend the rest of the night raping me.”

Different silences have a different quality. The silence in the room changed in some indescribable but definite way from fascination to shock.

“They staked me out on the ground and came at me in the dark, alone and in twos and threes, all night long. They raped me by torchlight. And, when all the men were sated, they continued to abuse me with any object that came to hand. When dawn broke, I could feel blood was flowing from my sex like warm water from a tipped bucket.”

The men and women around the table stared at Lori’s naked body, the men with hunger, the women with horror.

“Tonight, the white men who raped me will rape this doomed woman with equal vigor.”

Lori moaned, though no one knew if it were from the pain she was feeling or the fear of what was coming. She had never been raped. She wanted to never be raped. What she wanted was inconsequential.

All that mattered was if Steve wanted her to be raped.

Apparently he did.

A few minutes later, when the chains lowered her and her feet touched the floor again, she could barely stand, so horrified she was about what she would soon have to endure.

She wanted the chains to haul her back up and hold her aloft, out of reach of any rapist, until the weekend was over. Some horrors were worse than simple pain.

The manacles fell from her wrists and her joints stiffened, holding her upright. On trembling legs, she shuffled down the length of the room, past the ranks of silent guests, and out of the front door.

This was no gentle herding. Her quivering muscles supplying the movement; the governors were controlling the direction of the motion.

Hers was the gait of a zombie – a slow, barely controlled, but relentless shuffle toward some evil end.

Steve followed her and the guests followed him.

One of the women said, “I don’t want to see this.”

A serving maids said, “Drinks will be served in the parlor if anyone cares to stay inside.”

Several of the women followed the maid. The rest of the women and all of the men followed Lori.

As Lori shuffled along, she wondered if the women who went back were the ones who trusted their husbands not to rape her or if they were the ones who didn’t care what their husbands did.

Her arms were left free so that, when she was forced to shuffle down the handicap ramp outside the rear doors of the mansion – a decidedly un-colonial feature – she was able to grab the handrail to ensure that she didn’t fall.

Her right shoulder ached when she put even that much pressure on it. She hoped that she wasn’t permanently damaged.

There was a new feature on the lawn between the mansion and the formal gardens. Many closely-spaced clay pots were arranged in a large circle. Four heavy wooden stakes had been driven into the ground inside that circle. A thick leather strap was tied at one end to each of the posts. The other end of each strap lay free on the ground.

She was forced to shuffle into the circle and lay on her back on the ground. The air was warm enough – this was a tropical island – but the grass was damp beneath her naked skin.

Her elbows and knees stiffened. Her arms moved from the shoulder toward one pair of stakes and her legs spread from the hip towards the other. When her limbs stopped moving, she was left spread-eagled, her arms akimbo and her legs stretched as wide as they would go, pulling her lower lips apart and stretching her sex wide. Men were staring down into her most intimate recesses.

She wanted to scream that she was being physically forced to do this. That she would never voluntarily expose herself like this to strangers, not for any amount of money, but she chose to suffer her humiliation in silence. Protesting would do no good when she was unchained and everyone had seen her position herself without any visible coercion.

The guests remained outside the circle but Mary’s ghost entered from out of the dark on the garden side. She knelt down to secure Lori’s wrists and ankles with turns of the leather straps. She wove the loose ends into the wrapping. It was not exactly a knot and not too tight, but it was secure. Lori would not be able to free herself. She would remain here for the night, vulnerable and available to any man who wanted her.

She couldn’t believe that her husband would let innumerable strange men rape her, but the promise had been made through the words of the curse, twice repeated.

This was the first time that Lori had been able to see Mary’s ghost. She was, as expected, a black women. Dark black with heavy features and long, wild hair. She was wearing as simple white smock, made of a course cloth, and a few beads. Nothing exotic or elaborate. Exactly what an eighteenth century slave might have worn.

She was younger than Lori expected, mid-thirties rather than middle aged, but large. Muscular, not fat. When her limbs were being secured, Lori had a sense of the woman’s solid strength. Lori was fit, an athlete, but she knew that this black woman was far stronger than her.

For a ghost she was terribly substantial.

As she worked to secure Lori, she did not smile or speak. Her face was impassive. Her demeanor, workmanlike.

As soon as Lori’s limbs were secured, the governors released her joints. She relaxed for a moment, then the leather straps drew taut. Some mechanism had caused the wooden stakes to turn, winding the leather straps tighter around them.

Lori could not move any limb more than a couple of inches.

Mary’s ghost stepped out of the circle and raised her arms and face to the starry sky.

She chanted briefly and tongues of fire rose from the clay pots that ringed Lori. The small yellow flames illuminated the vulnerable woman. As promised, she was to be raped by torchlight.

Her heart pounded and her chest heaved in terror. A year ago, she had known that she was agreeing in advance to anything. But she had never thought that she was agreeing to gang rape by a dozen men.

Mary’s ghost walked back into the darkness without a word.

“Shall we leave our doomed woman to her fate?” Steve asked the assembled guests. “It’s time to join the others in the parlor and enjoy an after-dinner drink before we retire.”

So, the men were not invited to fall upon Lori now, like a pack of maddened beasts. According to the terms of the curse, they were to come to her in the dark of night, alone and in small groups, to ravish her mercilessly until dawn.

She saw the wisdom of asking them to retire to the parlor. Sober, they might suffer from too much civility. They would be less inhibited after they’d taken a few drinks and could come out here alone and unobserved.

She took what rest she could. She would need her strength to endure the ordeal that was coming.

* * *

Time passed. An hour? Two? Lori was in a dilemma. She was bored and wanted something to happen. But she did not want to be raped. The idea appalled her.

She wanted to have her cake and eat it, too.

Her thoughts kept returning to the promise of impending rape. Steve would be arranging it behind the scenes. Did he really want to see his wife be fucked by another man? She had never worried about that because she thought that he was too selfish to share her.

She, as well, wanting nothing more than to remain faithful to him.

If she were raped tonight, would that make her unfaithful? She had always believed that rape, especially forcible rape, could not be considered sexual behavior, at least for the woman. In her opinion, the raped wife was still a faithful woman because she had done nothing to betray her husband.

But in this situation, she had done something. She had put herself in her husband’s power, knowing that it was possible for him to give her body to other men. Did voluntarily allowing herself to be put in this position make her a second-order adulteress? And, worse, she had made it clear over and over that she wanted to be abused. She had never explicitly said that rape was off the table.

On the other hand, did this make Steve an adulteress by proxy because he was the one who had made the choice for her to have sex with men outside their marriage?

Would a court consider this grounds for divorce? Without any doubt.

She had no intention of divorcing Steve, no matter what he did to her tonight, or tomorrow night, or ever. But she would have to reframe her view of him.

She put those questions out of her mind and tried to fall asleep. She was unsurprised when cruel Morpheus denied her that blessed release from consciousness.

She was exhausted but wound too tight to sleep. Literally. The leather straps that were wound around the stakes pulled her too taut to be comfortable. She could not relax enough to fall asleep when she was stretched out like a hide being tanned.

The night was chill but enough heat radiated from the ring of small firepots her to keep her warm. The flames were also effective at keeping the bugs away.

That was no small blessing.

Lights began winking on in upstairs windows and winking out downstairs. The guests were going to bed.

She saw faces in the windows. Guests were looking down at her before tucking themselves in, making sure that she was still there, stretched wide to be available for their use later.

She was not far from the windows – forty or fifty feet – and was oriented with her open crotch facing the mansion. That was no accident. She could see the guests’ faces clearly so she knew that they could see her obscene display equally clearly.

And, if they wanted a better view, they could come down onto the lawn and inspect her as closely as they wished. Close enough to see every hair and pore. Close enough to see her natural lubrication leaking out between her excited and swollen lips.

She didn’t want to be raped, but her traitorous body was prepared for penetration.

As the bedroom lights winked out, one by one, she wondered how many wives and girlfriends in those soft beds were being ravished in her place.

The smart women would do what they could to exhaust their men’s sexual energy and leave them too depleted for a night of rape. They would urge their men to fuck them as many times as they could. And, if some of them enjoyed secret fantasies of being raped, they might think on what was happening on the mansion lawn and enjoy themselves as much as their partners.

The foolish women would throw a fit of pique and freeze their men out of their bed, trying vainly to punish them for having looked at her naked body when she had been hanging on display and then coming out to the garden to watch her being prepared for sex. Those women would be blindly driving their men out to the garden to seek relief from their sexual frustration.

She prayed that all the women in the mansion were smart. Geniuses, even.

She would hate like hell to be the means of relief for any sexually frustrated husband.

Her hopes were extinguished along with the last bedroom light.

Some foolish woman was not fucking husband with wild abandon. She could see a dark male shadow hulking across the lawn toward her, rape on his mind.

Before he reached the ring of potted fires, they all died down, leaving her in darkness.

No fair. Mary’s ghost had promised that she would be raped by torchlight. She did not want to be raped, but if she did, she wanted to see who was doing the evil to her.

But she could understand the rapist having a different wish. If the men could not remain anonymous, they would be reluctant to abuse her. The guests’ needs took priority both over her desires and the curse’s stated parameters.

Her only hope was that the man who was standing over her, pulling down his pants by starlight, was Steve. If she had to be raped, she wanted to be raped by her husband. She could live with that. She could even take perverse enjoyment in that.

A harsh voice said, “This is what I like. A cunt already spread open, just waiting to be fucked. This saves me a lot of work.”

Oh, God. It was not Steve’s voice. The accent might have been Spanish. Was this a guest or one of the staff?

No more words were spoken.

The man’s cock was already rigid. His wife had not been smart enough to drain him of his lust. Without ceremony, he dropped to his knees, thrust into her, and began pounding deep and hard.

She was stretched too tight to respond in any way. Her only choice was to passively take whatever he did to her.

He did it fast. After a few thrusts, he groaned, pulsed his seed into the depths of her belly, and then relaxed on top of her.

She had to wait for another few minutes for him to push himself back to his feet, pull up his pants, and stagger off back to the mansion.

He uttered no word of appreciation or satisfaction.

She expected none.

As he reached the porch steps, the potted fires that ringed her blossomed again.

She lay stretched between four stakes, feeling dirty and used, and could only wait for another man to come down and use her again.

She did not have to wait long. Within minutes, two more men emerged from the mansion.

This time was different. When the men approached the firepots, they did not extinguish. To the contrary, the dozen flames between her and the two men flared up, rising almost three feet high, a fence of flame that threatened to singe Lori’s feet.

A bass voice shouted, “What the hell!”

An appropriate comment, considering the hellish appearance of the firepots on that side of the circle.

A minute later, when the flames settled down to their previous low burn, she saw that the men had retreated a few steps back toward the mansion.

One of the men stepped forward again and the firepots between him and Lori flared high again. A little experimentation showed that, the closer he approached, the higher the flames grew.

“There’s something over here,” the other man said.

“What?” the first man asked.

“A doll,” the second man said.

Lori’s heart sunk. She knew what a doll would mean on Voodoo Island.

“So what?”

“So, it’s tied down to this piece of wood, just like the woman over there. It even looks like her.”

“Let me see.”

The two men huddled over a piece of log that had been flattened on top. Lori would swear that it had not been there earlier.

“Will you look at that,” one said. “Down between her legs.”

“Is that like a maggot or a termite?”

“No. It’s hard. It feels like a little piece of white bone.”

“A little boner.”

One of the men glanced back at Lori. “Holy shit. Look at that,” he said, pointing toward her crotch.

Lori raised her head and saw what he was pointing at. A skeletal hand had thrust up out of the ground between her legs. It was clutching a long, thick piece of broken femur. The end that was pointed toward her sex was smooth and rounded.

“I don’t get it,” the first man said.

“I do,” the second replied. “See that big bone nailed to the side of the log. It’s a handle. Watch.” When he pushed the big bone for ward, the little one between the doll’s legs pushed toward it’s crotch.

As the model dildo touched the doll, so the dildo-sized bone touched Lori’s moist lower lips. She was pulled to taut to not squirm away from it.

She heard a low hum coming from it and felt it vibrating against her.

God, no.

“Keep going,” one man urged the other.

He did.

The vibrating dildo slid between her lips and inside her. He kept pushing until six or seven inches was embedded in her, vibrating her whole crotch.

“This is amazing,” he said. “I can feel her. When the bone over there touched her, it felt like the one in my hand was touching her, too. I felt it slide into her. I can feel around with it.”

Lori could certainly feel the vibrating bone inside her.

God, yes, she could feel it.

She felt herself becoming aroused.

God, yes.

Her breathing quickened and her breasts heaved. She opened her mouth wide to gasp for more air.

The man on the joystick began working it in and out, then up and down, then tilting it forward and backward. “I can move it all around.” He hit her G spot and she began to moan.

The other man was watching her with wide eyes. “I think she’s going to come,” he said. “Keep doing that.”

God, no!

She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t put on a show like that. She couldn’t come in front of total strangers who were masturbating her by remote control.

She couldn’t stop it.

She came like a freight train. Her hips jerked and twisted on the dildo that impaled her while she screamed, “God! God! God!” Her entire body convulsed from wrists to ankles for the longest time, before falling quiescent.

Mercifully, the man withdrew the dildo from her hypersensitive cunt when her orgasm ended.

“Wow,” he said. “That was something. I’ve never seen my wife come like that.”

“Yeah,” the other man said. “That was something. Let’s do it again.”

God, no.

“You try it,” the first man said, magnanimously.

“I wonder if I can reach up to her clit.”

He could.

Being forced to come a second time, so soon after the first, was a long, painful affair.

“What’re you doing?” a new voice asked.

“Like Mary said, raping the woman. With a piece of bone. It’s a lot of fun. You want to try it?”

“Sure.”

The first man showed the third how it worked.

The new man spent a long time playing with Lori by remote control, working the dildo from her clit, along the crack between her lips and thighs, pushing it deep inside her, then pulling it back out to do it all again.

Lori whimpered and begged for him to stop. She was still sensitive from the first two orgasms and his rough touch was agonizing.

But the man took her protests as a challenge and was determined to make her come a third time.

He kept working and working at her and eventually he succeeded in forcing a weak but genuine response from her. He took unwarranted pride in his success.

The men chatted about whether she could be made to come a fourth time.

She remembered that Mary’s ghost had said that the men who had raped her two hundred years ago would rape Lori anew tonight. And that she had been raped by objects at hand. If the dildo were an actual bone from one of those mythical eighteenth-century rapists, and if the skeletal hand that held it were the last remains of one of those ancient bodies, then Mary’s statement was literally true.

“Do you think the bone will reach her asshole?” the third man said.

God, no!

“Let’s try it!”

They spent a few minutes poking the bone around Lori’s peritoneum but couldn’t get it low enough to penetrate her cheeks.

“Nope,” the man said. “It won’t get down to her back door.”

“Too bad.”

Lori was relieved. Then it occurred to her that this was just Friday night. She had another day and night and day of torment after that. Anal rape might be a part of the curse that would come later. Her asshole had never been penetrated. She considered that to be the most degrading sexual act possible and wanted to remain an anal virgin. The thought that she might suffer that particular violation before Sunday night brought her dread back fivefold stronger.

After molesting her with the bone dildo for a few more minutes, making her whimper in pain throughout, the three men decided that they had exhausted the possibilities and returned to their beds and wives.

Half an hour later, another man discovered the voodoo doll and figured out how it worked. Then another after that. For the rest of the night, men came out to the garden with such regularity that Lori surmised that they were looking out their bedroom windows to see if she was still there and, when they saw other men already near her, came down to see what was so interesting.

Every man who came down, abused her aching cunt viciously with the bond dildo, ramming it home hard again and again, twisting it to probe every cranny of her sex, leaving it buzzing inside her and walking away when he was finished with her.

Lori didn’t have to be a genius to know why these men were so cruel to her. It was obvious. These were the frustrated men. The ones who didn’t get laid by their wives. They wanted to make some woman pay for that and she was available. But raping her by remote control didn’t do anything to relieve them of their frustration. She got abused the way a rape victim would but these men didn’t get the sexual release that a rapist would.

She hoped that abusing her made more than a few of these men get sufficiently excited and lose enough of their inhibitions to go back up to their rooms, wake their wives, and use their brute strength to fuck them silly despite their protests.

The stupid bitches deserved it for letting their men get so frustrated that they had come down here and abuse her so cruelly for so little satisfaction.

She didn’t get a wink of sleep all night. Dawn found her utterly exhausted.

When the sun had risen completely above the horizon, more than a dozen of the guests, including Steve and Mary’s ghost, gathered around her.

Her strength was so depleted that, after Mary’s ghost untied her, Steve and another man had to help her stand up.

Her legs were quivering so badly that they didn’t dare let go of her for fear that she would fall back down.

Mary’s ghost was relentless. “As the sun rose, the men visited another torture on me. The plantation owner used a sweatbox to punish slaves who refused to work. I was locked into it from dawn until dusk. When I was pulled back out after dinner, I left half my skin burned to the iron sides of the box.

“This doomed woman will suffer as I suffered.”

She pointed toward the back of the garden.

Lori had not noticed the low black iron box that was sitting on a patch of bare earth. She was too weak even to perform the zombie shuffle. Steve and the other man half dragged her to the box.

Mary swung the top open so that the men could fold Lori inside.

The box was small. She could only fit by kneeling and bending double to press her breasts against her upper thighs.

The top was closed with a resounding clang.

Meager light entered through three small holes that had been drilled in one side to admit a little air.

“Remember,” Mary’s voice called through the holes. “Don’t touch the sides when the sun climbs high or you’ll get burned.” She laughed brightly at her cruel joke. The box was so small that Lori’s scalp, back, butt, arms, and legs were pressed tight against the iron sides.

“Breakfast will be served in the dining room,” Steve’s voice said.

Lori heard footsteps fading away.

There was nothing more to see here. Just an iron box sitting in the sun.

She began to weep with misery. She couldn’t take any more torture but she had no choice. And this was only Saturday morning. She had a day and a half of suffering yet to endure. After a short while, her knees began to ache on the hard ground.

Then, a miracle. The floor of the sweatbox began to descend, lowering her into the earth. The inside of the box was a miniature elevator.

When the door opened, she struggled out and found herself in a subterranean room. It was equipped with a toilet and shower. There was a bed. A real bed, not just a cot. And a table with a hot breakfast waiting – a western omelet, orange juice, sausages, toast and jelly – exactly what she would have ordered in a restaurant.

She began to weep anew, this time in relief.

Her ordeal was far from over – undoubtedly the worst was yet to come – but someone cared that she be rested enough to survive the entire ordeal.

* * *

“Please return to the elevator,” a soft but insistent mechanical voice demanded.

Lori had no choice about that. Her governors were creating invisible walls to force her out of bed and into the elevator.

She was sore from head to foot. Her crotch hurt even worse than her shoulders. The hours of repeated penetrations had not drawn blood but they had bruised and stretched the walls of her vagina mercilessly. If she were raped again, it would not only be degrading, it would be agonizing. Even consensual, gentle sex would be painful.

Obeying the recorded voice, she squeezed herself back into the tiny elevator and closed the door.

When she was returned to the inside of the box, she began sweating. It was baking hot. Not hot enough to burn her skin, but hot enough to make her feel like she was suffocating.

She didn’t know what time it was but there was bright light coming through the small air holes. It didn’t look like dusk out there.

Her break was over, her ordeal underway again. She was not going to be released until she had endured a full measure of misery.

And she’d undoubtedly be made to suffer even worse punishment after that.

She might have been kneeling in the suffocating heat for only a half hour, or maybe even a full hour, but it felt like she had been there for days. Her knees felt like they were on fire, being burned by hot pokers from the inside, and her back ached terribly. Sweat pouring down her face in rivers stung her eyes no matter how diligently she tried to wipe them dry. She suspected that she was wiping as many tears as drops of sweat.

When the lid was finally opened, she had to close her eyes tight against the burning light of the setting sun. She couldn’t see how many guests were there to watch her be pulled out of the box. But she could hear Mary’s voice.

“I was more dead than alive when they pulled me from the box. But they showed no mercy. I was wrapped in chains and dragged to the sea.”

As Mary spoke, heavy, black iron chains were wrapped tight about Lori’s torso. The free ends were not locked on but tucked under, out of reach of her hands, to secure them. They must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. Lori staggered under their weight as she was dragged across the lawn and around the mansion to the seaside.

“After burning me all day in the iron box, they drowned me in iron chains.”

Lori was a strong swimmer but the thought of drowning terrified her. Her eyes grew round. She shook her head and screamed in protest as Steve and the other man dragged her into the warm waves up to her waist.

The guests assembled on shore watched in fascination as she was toppled over onto her back.

She barely managed to grab a breath before her head sank beneath the surface. She struggled mightily against the chains but they were too heavy for her to sit up, much less stand again. All she could do was thrash her legs about in a futile waste of effort.

She was using her air too fast. She forced herself to stop struggling and relax in her chains. Either the men would pull her out or she would drown. There was no third alternative.

They were in no hurry. Seconds passed like hours as Lori began to starve for oxygen but they made no move toward her. When she could hold her breath no longer, she began letting the air trickle out of her lungs to deceive them into thinking that she was about to breathe again.

When her lungs were empty, the men still made no move toward her. She watched their image broken by the silvery surface of the water as they stood there impassively.

She was going to die.

Then they bent down, grabbed the chains and pulled her into the air. She gasped two great gulps of precious air before they dropped her to the bottom again.

Her tissues were already depleted of oxygen. She would not be able to hold this breath for as long as the previous. But, at least this time, she did not make the mistake of struggling. She immediately conserved her oxygen by remaining completely passive.

Men had been torturing women by forced immersion for hundreds of years. Ducking stools have been preserved from medieval times. Sometimes the punishment was fatal, either through carelessness or contrivance.

Lori could only pray that Steve would let her live.

She had already begun to suck brine when they raised her this time. She was still coughing and sputtering when they dropped her into the water for the third time.

Lying on the sandy bottom, drowning, trying desperately to keep her body from sucking salt water into her lungs, not knowing when or if her face would be dragged back up into the air, was the most horrible torture that she could imagine. She wished that she were back in the sweatbox. Back hanging by her wrists from the dining room ceiling. Back being raped over and over by remote control. Anything but this.

The old myth says that a drowning man dies when he goes down for the third time. That may be true because the drowning man gets less air with each breath and his struggling body needs so much more as all the oxygen has been depleted from his blood and tissues.

This was the third time that she had gone down.

She tried to accept death.

This time when they brought her up, they held her head above water for long enough for her to stop gasping and take a proper breath. She thought this part of her ordeal was over but she was wrong. They dropped her into the water for the fourth time.

How many times would she have to endure this?

Then, in horror, she watched Steve and the other man walk away. Their legs faded into the clear Caribbean water. They were leaving her to die.

This was not what had happened to Mary. She was buried alive under tons of stones, not drowned. Lori wanted to live long enough to be buried alive, too.

As her breath ran out, the pain of trying not to drown was agonizing. Letting herself die was fast looking like a rational alternative.

Her only alternative because no one was coming back to save her.

She could not tell how much her salty tears contributed to the seawater before someone grabbed the chains and hauled her back to the surface.

Steve had circled around, out of her sight, and come back to her from over her head where she was not looking.

It had taken a long time. Almost too long. There was salt water in her throat and she kept choking when she tried to breathe.

She hated Steve for doing this to her. This was more than she had offered when she had given him the voodoo doll a year ago. The control that she had given to him did not include the power of life and death. He had promised that she would not be injured.

* * *

“All that they had done to me was not enough to sate the white men’s lust for pain,” Mary’s ghost told the guests as Lori knelt on her hands and knees on the sand, coughing and choking, still trying to expel the brine from her lungs. Still encumbered in the iron chain.

The woman standing closest looked down at her in annoyance because her struggles to breathe made it hard to hear how Mary intended to torture her next.

Lori tried to survive less raucously.

“At sundown, they stretched me between two trees and flogged me bloody. Every man was given an opportunity to wield the whip and feel the impact of the lash on my back. They beat the skin from my back and continued to flog me. They cut me to the bone, and continued. They stripped the flesh from my ribs and still they continued. They beat me until no man’s arm had enough strength left to swing the lash even one more time. Then they soaked my back with rum and left me hanging in agony between those two trees.

“Before the priest went to bed that night, he came to me and told me how I would be buried alive in my grave at noon. He wanted me to have something interesting to think about while I hung from those trees all night.

“The screwworm flies came by the millions to lay eggs in my dying flesh. I could not brush them away.

“No man came to rape me that night. My body was too putrid to arouse even the most lustful rake.

“In the morning, they left me hanging there while the other slaves were forced to dig my grave and gather stones to line it. Then they were sent to the garden patch to gather piles of stinging nettles.

“By noon Sunday, the flies’ eggs had hatched and a countless multitude of screwworms was burrowing deep to feast on my flesh.

“Even the terrible death that the priest had devised would be a mercy when it finally came.”

The ghost looked at Lori. “Prepare yourself to be flogged,” she intoned.

Two men hauled Loir to her feet and removed the chains from her body so that her governors could zombie walk her back to the garden.

She wondered if Mary’s ghost had been told about the governors or if she, like everyone else here, thought that Lori was doing all this voluntarily.

They must all think that she’s incredibly brave.

There were two matched trees at the edge of the lawn beside the mansion. All the plants in the garden were real; there were no concrete and plastic movie props here. Had Steve had been so lucky that he had bought an island with two trees that were exactly the right distance apart to allow ropes to stretch her arms akimbo. Trees that were not only sturdy enough but each with a branch at exactly the right height to keep a rope from slipping down the trunk and letting her relax a bit.

When she was lashed into place, crucified naked between the trees instead of tied to a single cross, Steve laid a cruel-looking cat o’ nine tails on the ground in front of her so that she could contemplate it at leisure while he and the guests adjourned to the dining room to partake of a sumptuous dinner.

Lori had been served a late lunch in the underground room beneath the sweatbox but so it would not kill her to be deprived of supper. But hunger was never pleasant. Her stomach growled and she was glad that she had been given a flogger to contemplate and not a plate of delicious food that she couldn’t reach. That would have been a worse torture.

She was to be flogged. By the guests? By Mary’s substantial ghost? Or by some clever mechanism that would operate in a way similar to the dildo that had allowed any men who wished to rape her without touching her.

How severe would the flogging be? She was pretty sure that she wouldn’t have the flesh stripped from her back down to her ribcage. But she was equally sure that she would not be given a pass on the pain, either. Every torture so far had been administered with precision, each one exceeding the limit of her ability to handle pain and humiliation by the exact amount necessary to make her regret ever being born.

She had no doubt that this one would exceed her capacity to endure pain by an equal amount.

Lori had been a practicing masochist since puberty, openly after her second year at university, so she had arranged to be flogged before. But whips and paddles were not her favorite fetish, so she had only had light sessions to get some experience. She had never been seriously whipped; had only received token lashes at her request. The most painful beating that she had suffered was an extended spanking with a light, broad wooden paddle that had left her butt bruised and sore for a couple of days.

Steve liked to spank her, and his hand stung her butt, but Lori found that more erotic than punishing.

She had never allowed myself to be caned because that could cause permanent damage.

She was especially concerned about being cut with the cat. It was not so much the pain – she could handle a considerable amount of pain, especially when she was bound and had no choice – but she feared scarring. She had seen women who bore disfiguring scars from badly-handled whips and properly-handled canes. She did not consider such scars a desirable fashion statement and did not want to have people staring and whispering when she wore backless evening gowns or bathing suits.

She tested the ropes that bound her wide-stretched arms to the two trees. They did not give more than an inch. She was going to have to endure whatever Mary and Steve had planned for her, whether she liked it or not.

Her stomach churned. This time it was not from hunger.

The beach curved around the mansion so she was looking out over the water from this side of the garden. It would have been a lovely view if she had not been partially drowned in that water only an hour earlier. And if she were not waiting for some new torture to begin.

She looked down at the flogger again. Nine long black leather tails were attached to a thick, eighteen-inch long, leather-wrapped handle. The handle looked too thick to fit comfortably in a woman’s small hands, but it would undoubtedly feel great to a man with big hands and a strong grip. The tails looked like broad strips of leather but, when Steve had been waving it around, they had looked lighter than she would have expected. Would this flogging feel like a beating with a handful of black crepe ribbons? Would her first real flogging be a disappointment?

Lori didn’t want to be flogged until her back had been turned into a slab of raw meat, but she didn’t want to be tickled, either.

She remembered the tortures that she had endured so far and knew that tickling would not be on the menu for tonight. One way or another, she would again be pushed past the limit of her endurance.

She grew weary of speculating and put her imminent flogging out of her mind. She’d rather watch the sun set over the water in peace.

Darkness comes fast in the tropics. The stars were blazing brightly when she saw her shadow dancing across the grass. The crowd that was approaching behind her was lighting its way with torches. A lot of torches. The hubbub sounded like she would be entertaining a full house with her suffering. None of the wives had chosen to stay in the parlor and miss out on the Saturday night spectacle.

The mistress of ceremony, Mary’s ghost, was on hand once again to direct her torture. Lori watched her walk around and pick up the flogger. Then she looked past Lori to the crowd assembled behind her. “Everyone who wishes may administer up to three strokes of this cat o’ nine tails to the doomed woman’s back. She may, therefore, receive as many as seventy-five strokes tonight. You do not need to strike her hard. Every stroke, light or hard will inflict the same amount of pain. The pain will be agonizing. It is impossible to strike a mild blow with this cat. The pain is so severe that the doomed woman must be given a full minute to recover after each stroke and prepare herself for the next one. I have a deathwatch beetle in this box. It was chosen for the regularity of its percussion. When it taps, you may administer the next stroke. Not before.”

She carried the flogger back to the crowd that was standing behind Lori and handed it to the nearest man. “Three strokes. Wait for the beetle’s deathly song between each stroke.”

She did not ask for volunteers. Did not ask the man if he wanted to torture Lori. If he did not, it was his responsibility to speak up.

“It’s light,” he said.

“It’s cursed,” Mary’s ghost replied. “It does not have to be heavy to hurt. Strike the doomed woman.”

He struck.

Lori’s back blossomed in agony. She screamed and pulled as hard as she could against the ropes that bound her to the trees. She couldn’t believe that the cat could cause this much pain. Surely this first stroke had already cut her to the bone.

Seventy-four strokes to go? There was no way that she could endure seventy-four more strokes like this one.

But there was no way to escape them, either.

She gasped for air and then consciously tried to steady her breathing to a deep regular rhythm.

She almost had herself back under control when she heard a loud, rapid ticking from the little wooden box.

Her back blossomed in agony again. Again her scream echoed across the island.

Again, she convulsed against the ropes that bound her. If they had not been heavy ropes, well tied, she would have broken them in her desperation to escape.

A woman behind her snickered. “God, she’s really hamming this up. Talk about a phony show. Nothing hurts as bad as she’s pretending. That little whip isn’t even leaving marks on her back.”

No marks? Lori was sure that she had been cut to the bone. No marks?

“You doubt the pain that she is suffering?” Mary’s ghost’s voice said. “If you felt a stroke of my cat, you would fall to your knees in agony.”

“Bullshit,” the woman said. “It would barely sting. Look how light the tails are. Go ahead. Hit my back. I’ll show you.”

“Really?” the man with the flogger said.

“Yeah. Really. Here. I’ll show you. Unzip me and I’ll hold my dress out of the way.”

There was the sound of a zipper sliding down. “Go ahead. Hit me.” A few seconds later, the swish of the cat was followed by a shriek that almost broke Lori’s eardrums. “Fucking Hell!” the woman screamed. “What the hell is that? Jesus Christ that hurts. God damn it. What is that thing?”

Lori knew. She had heard of such a device once. The cat was electrified. Fine electrodes ran down each side of the broad tails and left a narrow, intense band of pain wherever they touched skin. There was a battery and a high voltage source in the handle.

“That woman can’t take seventy-five strokes of this thing,” the woman said. “It’s inhuman. It’s dangerous. She’ll die of the pain alone.”

The deathwatch beetle drummed.

Lori tensed her back in anticipation.

The man struck again and Lori screamed again.

The flogger changed hands. And in the next three minutes, Lori suffered three more strokes of the electric cat.

It was brutal. And she had to take sixty-nine more if every guest plus Steve wanted a turn at her.

When the flogger changed hands again, another woman spoke out. “I want to feel it, Jack. Lay a stroke on my back so I can feel what Tiffany was talking about. Here. Let me take off my blouse.”

A minute later, the other woman howled. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Jesus Christ. I can’t believe how bad that hurt. Jesus Christ. That woman must be suffering something awful.”

The deathwatch beetle tapped again.

Lori screamed again. Sixty-eight left. Or maybe sixty-two if the two women who had foolishly volunteered each to suffer a stroke of their own took pity on her.

They did not. Two strokes later, the first woman who had taken a stroke, the one who hadn’t believed that the flogger caused real pain until she felt it herself, spoke up. Rather than granting any mercy to Lori, she asked to have the next turn with the cat.

She struck hard each time the deathwatch beetle tapped. Three strokes later, when she gave up the cat, she said, “God, that felt good. Doing that to someone else. If you really want to appreciate it, before your turn, take a stroke on your own back so that you’ll know exactly what you’re doing to her. It’ll make the experience way more intense. Almost spiritual.”

The other woman who had taken a stroke said, “Absolutely. Give me that thing.” Lori’s back soon felt the delight that the woman took in making her suffer.

That became the new norm. For every few strokes that Lori suffered, one of the guests asked for their own stroke. There was a pause while the guest stripped off a shirt or blouse or opened the back of a dress, quickly followed by a piercing scream, a stream of curses, and uninformed discussion about how such an innocuous feeling whip could cause such agony.

Not one guest who had felt the cat on his own back felt the slightest inclination to show mercy toward Lori. To the contrary, having suffered a single stroke made the guests feel more entitled to beat their suffering into Lori’s back seventy-five fold. Even some guests who had declined the opportunity to flog her the first time around, eagerly asked to have a turn after they had experienced a taste of her agony.

Lori was forced to endure every one of the seventy-five strokes that were permitted.

After the first fifteen strokes, she was crying copiously between her screams. Not a single guest was moved to give her mercy.

After twenty strokes, she began begging. Pleading for them to stop. Her piteous supplications only spurred the floggers to greater excess. One of the guests even suggested that everyone should be allowed four strokes so that Lori would suffer a full hundred lashes, a more esthetically pleasing number.

Mary’s ghost had been emphatic in denying that request.

By fifty strokes, Lori’s voice was so hoarse that her screams could barely be heard over the conversation of the guests. That degraded timbre made her crippled shrieks sound all the more terrible.

There were a dozen pairs of invited guests. Twenty-four, so the last flogger, the twenty-fifth who delivered the last three terrible lashes, had to be Lori’s loving husband, Steve.

The entire flogging, interrupted frequently for discussion and guests lashing each other, lasted for more than two hours.

After the last stroke was delivered, the ground beneath Lori’s feet was muddy from the sweat and tears that had been pouring off her body for all that time.

There was no blood.

Her back would not even be seriously bruised, much less scarred.

Lori hung limp between the two trees for another half hour, exhausted, her energy totally drained, while the guests stood about and chatted casually about how much they had enjoyed this wonderful experience. Not one tried to speak directly to her, which she appreciated. She was in no state to make small talk with any of them.

They spoke about how much they were looking forward to the grand finale on Sunday morning – Lori being buried alive in a rocky, nettle-lined grave. It did not bother them in the least that the victim of that final torture was hanging next to them, listening to every word.

Lori would bet that not one of those guests considered himself to be a sadist. They were merely members of an audience enjoying a particularly interesting entertainment that was being staged for their benefit.

Eventually, they drifted back to the mansion to put themselves to bed, taking their torches with them and leaving Lori, naked and sweaty, to shiver alone in the darkness. There were no firepots here to warm her.

Her entire body was aching, not only from having been forced to stand so long with her arms stretched wide, but because every one of the seventy-five lashes of the electric cat had wracked her body with brutal convulsions. Every muscle in her arms and back was badly strained.

Two or three hours later, she heard footsteps approaching behind her. Her shadow danced on the grass as a torch drew close.

Hands released her wrists and she folded to the ground.

Steve lay down beside her and pulled a rough wool blanket over both him and her. “You should rest for a while,” he said. “I have to tie you back up before dawn and tomorrow is going to be a hard day for you.”

She barked a short, hoarse laugh.

“I’m glad that you still have a sense of humor,” he said.

She snuggled into his warm arms.

After a few minutes, he said, “I have to make love to you. You have no idea how horny your flogging made me. And all the rest of the guests, too. There isn’t a woman in that mansion who doesn’t want to get well fucked tonight.”

“I’m yours,” Lori said, “to use as you wish.”

Not only was she cold and exhausted, not only did her entire body ache, but her sex was still bruised and tender from hour after hour of brutal penetration by the dildo the entire previous night.

The hard sod beneath her back gave her no comfort.

She was dripping wet but still groaned in pain when he penetrated her. She kept groaning as he thrust into that tender spot but, after a couple of minutes, her mounting arousal transformed her pain into pleasure. When she came, she screamed as loudly as when she had felt the sear of the electric lash.

Afterward, she fell asleep in her husband’s arms.

Twice he awakened her to make love to her again. Both times she suffered pain when she accepted him and felt that pain transformed into pleasure, but each time it took longer as their lust lost its edge.

But, each time, she screamed anew when she came.

After the third time, he stroked her head and whispered, “I hope the guests heard that. They’ll think that you’re being flogged again.”

“I hope they do. It may stimulate them wake their partners and have their way with them again tonight. I want those women who flogged me half to death to get fucked silly.”

When the sky grew light enough for him to see her face, he stood her up and tied her akimbo between the trees again. His last words were, “You’ll be buried alive at noon. Be prepared to rest in your grave for a long time.”

She could not help but wonder if a long time meant eternity.

* * *

Lori was standing at the foot of her grave. As described, it was shallow, three feet deep, and lined with large stones, averaging five or six inches in diameter.

Her legs were fastened together at the ankles and again above her knees with heavy iron chains and heavy locks. Her hands were manacled behind her back. Other chains ran around her torso at her waist and above her breasts.

Each chain was connected to two iron bars that extended the length of her body, one on each side. Her elbows were chained to these bars. The chains and bars kept her body straight and rigid. The assistant gardener stood behind her and kept a hand on the chain around her upper torso to ensure that she did not topple into the grave and break her neck, depriving the audience of a more prolonged and painful death scene.

Her shoulders were pulled back by the chains, thrusting her breasts forward and upward. Her profile would be the envy of any trollop.

The men standing at the far end of the grave eyed her with frank appreciation.

The women beside them were more interested in the freshly-picked stinging nettles piled beside the hole. The nettles were not native to the island but had been imported by Europeans two hundred years ago for their medicinal properties.

Lori knew that contact with the nettles would be painful but had never touched one herself. She assumed that people had good reason to call them stinging nettles.

Those stones in the grave were no mattress; lying on them alone would be painful. Covering them with a sheet of nettles would not make them any softer.

Steve had promised that she would be resting on those stones and nettles for a long time. With the weight of three feet of dirt on top of her. And what had Mary’s ghost said? That her grave had been placed on a path so that everyone would have to walk on her dying corpse. This grave had been dug at the entrance to the topiary labyrinth. There was no way for anyone to walk into or out of there without walking the length of the grave. Where she would be buried.

“After the burial, lunch will be served in the center of the labyrinth,” Steve announced.

Anyone who wanted to eat would have to walk over Lori’s grave immediately after she was interred.

Manuel, the stumpy gardener, began arranging the nettles from the nearest pile in a thick layer over the rocks. He wore heavy leather gloves that came halfway to his elbow to handle the nettles.

“Do they really sting?” one of the women asked.

“Pick one up and find out,” her companion replied.

The woman reached out and tentatively pressed her finger against a leaf. “Ouch,” she said. “It’s like a bee sting. Maybe not quite as strong.”

“The tiny needles are hollow and contain acetylcholine and formic acid,” the man replied. “The same as what hornets inject when they sting you. The nettle’s sting is not as strong because each needle is small. But to lie on a bed of those things is going to hurt awful bad.”

The woman examined her finger. “It’s still stinging.”

“The hairs are still embedded in your skin, still leaking the painful poison into you. It burns now and it will itch later because there are histamines in the needles as well. The effect should fade in a day or so.”

Lori was impressed by the man’s expertise but not comforted by his description. She was soon going to experience all over her body the pain that his partner was feeling in a little spot on her finger.

She met the woman’s eyes and the woman returned a broad smile.

When Manuel had finished covering the stones, Steve signaled him to stand at Lori’s left side while he stood on her right. Each man grabbed an iron bar and used it as a handle to tilt her to a horizontal position over the end of her grave. The heavy links on the chains pressed painfully into her flesh. They would press far more painfully when they were lying between Lori’s body and the beach stones. The men carried her into the grave and gently laid her on the bed of nettle-covered stones.

Her nipples contacted the leaves first, immediately followed by the rest of her breasts. Burning pain flowered across her chest. When the men released their grip, her thighs, belly and hips were also pressed hard into the stinging mass.

She shrieked as the pain spread over the entire front of her body.

She did not think it an accident that two stones pressed directly on her breasts, compacting them and driving the nettles’ stinging hairs deep into her skin. Someone had taken care to place the stones in the most cruel pattern possible. That was solely for her benefit. The guests would never know how her body rested on the stones. Would never know that they had been placed to dig into the most tender parts rather than cradle her as gently as possible. Never know that they had been strategically placed to ensure that as much of her skin as possible was pressed tight against the nettles.

The guests thought that the entire performance was designed for their entertainment. But Lori knew that they were brought here to watch only because that would humiliate her as deeply as possible. The fine details of this weekend were experienced by her alone. This was her anniversary present.

Her face was spared the burning nettles. They had not been placed over that part of the stones. Steve pressed on the back of her head, pushing her face down hard into them. Her face slid into a space between the rocks. “Keep your face right there,” he said quietly so that only she could hear. “It’s important.”

Through the red fog of pain, she understood why. There was fresh air blowing out of a large crack between those rocks. More significantly, those were not real rocks. When she pushed against them, they formed a soft, rubbery ring that molded snugly against her cheeks, chin, and nose to create a hidden air mask.

This was the only place that she could put her face to keep from suffocating to death when dirt was packed around her.

She felt Steve push something sticky against the side of her neck. An electrode. Then something else, some kind of sensor, was slipped onto her earlobe. Her health would be monitored for as long as she was buried.

She had mixed feelings about these measures. Without them, she would have to be pulled out of the grave within a couple of minutes. She would suffer only for the briefest time. With air and blood flow monitoring, she could be left in the grave for hours. Maybe for longer than a full day.

The pain from the nettles continued to grow as she lay on them. With every tiny twitch, with the movement of every breath more tiny poisoned hairs penetrated her skin. And the longer the hairs remained there, the more poison leaked into her.

She felt like she was being burned alive.

The nettles provided the bright treble notes in this symphony of pain. The bass notes were supplied by the stones that pressed the heavy chains into her thighs, belly, and upper torso. The agony they induced came in heavy, oppressive waves.

Manuel began spreading the second pile of nettles over her back and she knew a whole new level of pain. Some say that the soft brush of a nettle leaf over bare skin is more painful than a forceful touch.

Nettles were piled against her skin from the soles of her bare feet to the nape of her neck, doubling the area of her skin that was in contact with them.

She howled into the rocky cup that fed her fresh air.

Then she felt the thump of a shovelful of dirt against her feet.

Her burial had begun.

Shovel after shovel of earth covered her and pressed the nettles more firmly against her skin, beginning with her feet and working up her legs, back, and finally her head. As the dirt filled the hole, it made the nettles wrap around her and sting the sides of her legs and torso, doubling again the area of her body that was being stung.

She forced herself to keep her nose and mouth pressed firmly into the rocky cup while dirt covered her head. She exerted all her discipline to keep her eyes closed. Rocks and nettles were bad enough. She didn’t want grit in her eyes, too. That would have been more than her sanity could bear.

Soon her hearing was muffled so thoroughly that she was totally deafened. Light no longer glowed through her closed lids, rendering her completely blind.

Her hair was pasted to her scalp by the weight of the earth on it. It would take a whole bottle of shampoo to get her hair clean again. A Costco-sized bottle.

As the grave was filled, the weight of earth in it pressed down on her, but not so much as to compress her chest and make breathing impossible. That had been carefully calculated. Neither Lori nor the guests knew that the first pile, from which Manuel had taken the first shovelfuls to cover her, was pure, sanitized soil. Only as much of that was put into the grave as was necessary to cover completely the nettle leaves. After that, he filled the bulk of the grave from a second pile, which was a gritty-looking mixture that contained some soil but mostly consisted of grains of small, brown-colored, lightweight, rigid plastic. For the benefit of the audience, Manuel took care to move as though the shovelfuls of the lighter mixture were as heavy as real earth.

The last few inches were again taken from the pile of real soil.

Filling the entire grave took Manuel almost half an hour.

When the grave was filled to the top, Manuel tamped the soil down until it was firm enough to walk on, first with the back of the shovel, then with his boots, adding more soil as it was compressed.

He continued until the grave was slightly mounded above the level of the surrounding ground.

Though the final result looked impressive, there was only a moderate weight on any square inch of Lori’s back. The iron bars that had been chained tightly at points along the length of her body had strategic importance. If not for them, she might have panicked and tried to push herself back out of her grave. That would have disastrous consequences. She would likely lose the use of the air mask but fail to break out quickly enough to keep from suffocating.

In strict bondage, it didn’t matter if she panicked. No matter how desperately she tried to move, she could barely wriggle. There was no need for the governors to lock her joints while she was interred. Because her movements were so limited, she could not accurately estimate how little pressure was bearing down on her. Though she could breathe with only slight difficulty, she felt like she was being crushed under a heavy weight of earth.

The rocks, chains, and nettles were the most obvious means of torture in this ordeal. Her breasts were tortured worse than most of the parts of her body, aching from the pressure of the rocks crushing them against her ribs and stinging from the nettles that were wrapped against them. Yet she couldn’t shift even a fraction of an inch to get any relief whatsoever. The other parts of her body, including her collarbones, shins, thighs, abdomen, feet, and suffered almost as much. An especially cruel rock was positioned at her crotch. Whereas all the other stones were round and smooth, that one was shaped like a blunt pyramid that thrust hard between her legs to put pressure on the front of her vulva. It didn’t reach as far as her clitoris but it spread the tops of her thighs slightly and pressed a large clump of nettle leaves against her tender sex.

Bad as all that was, the real torture was the crushing claustrophobia. The feeling of utter hopelessness. Deprived of her senses, Lori could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing but pain, and had no hope of quick release. No one could walk up and unlock her; she had to be dug out of three feet of earth first. Fifty cubic feet. A couple of hundred shovelfuls. A half hour of steady digging.

However long she had been interred, she knew that she would be there for more than half an hour longer.

She had ample time to perform all the calculations in her head.

She sucked desperately at the air flowing into the rubbery cup that covered her nose and mouth. She had access to more oxygen that she needed but she was acutely aware that if anything interrupted that flow, she would die in minutes, long before she could be disinterred. Every breath could be her last. Though she had ample oxygen, she was living one breath away from suffocation.

She felt her face pushed harder into the rocky cup. Then her breasts. Then her pelvis. Someone was walking the length of her grave, entering the labyrinth.

This was repeated again and again. The crowd was going to lunch and every footstep caused more pain in the buried woman’s body.

She remembered the last thing that Steve had said to her when he left her alone last night. The sentence marched through her mind again and again: Be prepared to rest in your grave for a long time. For a long time. For a long time.

When every minute felt like an hour, an hour felt like a year, and the accumulation of hours was an eternity.

During that eternity, her only sensation was the bursts of pain that were caused by someone walking over her grave.

A new thought made her smile into the cup. She could not be raped now. Only a woman who was fully alive could be raped.

She was no longer fully alive. She was suffering eternal living death.

She was truly a zombie now.

* * *

Resurrection:

The pressure on Lori’s back increased significantly, all over not in spots like when someone was walking on her. She found it hard to draw a breath and began to panic. Then it decreased more and more. She couldn’t tell what was happening. Then a new sensation. Hands were pulling at the dirt and leaves covering her back, brushing dirt away from her face.

“Don’t open your eyes yet,” were the first words that she had heard in forever. “Don’t move yet.”

She kept her eyes closed, waiting for a surprise.

The surprise was a spray of water against her closed lids.

“Okay, the dirt’s been washed away. You can open them.”

She lifted her head from the rocky cup and blinked. The sky was dusky but it was still too bright for her to look around without squinting.

Several hands lifted her off the bed of nettles and stones and laid on her stomach on a white sheet.

“How long?” she asked as hands began working the locks open.

“About eight hours,” Steve said. “We served supper to the guests before they left.”

“All gone?”

“The last helicopter left a few minutes ago.”

She looked over at the grave. There were piles of dirt scattered around and the ground was littered with nettle leaves and stems. In the middle of the disarray, the grave itself was inverted. The bed of rocks where she had spent the day was thrust a few inches above ground level.

“What?” she said, not knowing how to phrase the question. She wasn’t thinking clearly yet.

Steve saw where she was looking. “Hydraulics. The bed of the grave is a single solid piece and the whole thing lifts straight up. The dirt and plastic bead mixture is light and most of it falls off to the side as the bed rises. It took less than ten seconds to bring you to the surface.”

The last lock fell free and Steve unwrapped the chains from her body. When her arms were freed, she flexed them experimentally, then her legs. Everything was stiff and sore but seemed to be working.

“Time to get you looked at,” he said. “Do you want us to help you roll over onto your back before we move you?”

Us? She turned her head in the other direction. There was a woman in a plain pastel pink dress. She didn’t understand why she didn’t recognize her. Steve had said that all the guests were gone and she’d been introduced to the staff on the first day. “Who?”

“I’m Beth,” the woman said. “I’m the resident nurse.”

Another man stepped into sight to stand beside her. “I’m Dr. Anson. I’m a trauma specialist, but, as the resident doctor, I’ll treat any illness on the island.”

She turned back to look at Steve. “What?”

“When you arrived, I introduced you to the public staff. There’s another few people who work behind the scenes that you didn’t meet. We keep a doctor and nurse on the island because we do some rather extreme things and we’re too far from the mainland to rely on their hospital. Our infirmary includes a reasonably well-equipped emergency room.”

“Let’s turn you over.”

“Okay.”

Steve, the nurse and the doctor helped her roll onto her back on the narrow cot. The nurse did something and she was lifted to waist height. She’d been put on a gurney.

“I can walk.”

“I’m sure you can,” Steve said, “but we’d like you to rest. You’ve been through a lot during the last forty-eight hours.”

They rolled her through the gardens to a discreet door on the far side of the mansion.

For the next hour, the nurse cleaned her off while the doctor treated her various contusions and other minor injuries. She paid special attention to flushing the dirt out her ear canals.

The doctor gave her a shot and rubbed lotion over her still-naked body, including her vulva. The lotion barely reduced the sting of the nettles. Her ordeal was supposed to be over but she was still feeling pain and humiliation.

“It still stings,” she said as he carefully rubbed lotion into the folds around her clitoral hood.

“Remaining in such close contact with the stinging nettles over such a large area of your body for such a long time left your skin packed with tiny hollow hairs filled with acetylcholine, histamine, and formic acid. There’s no way to remove the stinging hairs but they’re not embedded too deeply and your body will reject them over the next few days. They’re so small that you won’t notice it.

“The injection was an antihistamine to try to control the rash but it probably won’t have much effect. The lotion is mostly calamine with a bit of hydrocortisone to reduce the temptation to scratch. Try to leave the rash alone until it disappears. I’ve put a big bottle of lotion in your room. Don’t be shy about using it.

“There’s not much that I can do about the stinging. Your body should flush the chemicals away in another few hours. It might take as long as twenty-four. You’ve taken a pretty big dose. Until then, you’ll have to put up with the discomfort that you’re feeling. The antihistamine shot will probably make you sleepy. As well, you’re physically and mentally exhausted. If you can get some sleep, that will help more than anything.”

“I’ll try.”

“If you want, I can give you a stronger sleeping tablet. Something that’s more certain to knock you out for a while.”

It was tempting, but she said, “No, thanks. I’ll wait and see how I do on my own.”

“If you change your mind, let me know. I’ll be here if you need me for anything. Anything at all.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re going to have quite severe bruises over much of the front of your body, but they will fade. The rash from the nettles will be worse. For the next few days your body is going to look rather a mess but don’t worry about it. Within a week, you should be as beautiful as the day you came here.”

“Thanks,” she said again. She was uncomfortable with a doctor giving her a compliment about her appearance. It didn’t seem professional. “I’d like to go take a shower now.” The nurse had done a fairly good job of giving her a sponge bath, but she didn’t feel anything like clean yet.

“Do you want a chair?” The doctor gestured to a wheel chair parked against the wall.

“No, thanks. I don’t feel too bad. Mostly a little stiff.”

“Just be careful about falling down. If you feel lightheaded or uncertain on your feet, just lean against something or sit down and wait. Someone will be there with a chair in a few minutes.”

She was certain that the whole island was wired for video and that the doctor had been watching her entire ordeal on camera from the minute that she stepped off the helicopter. And would continue to watch her until she boarded it for the return flight.

The idea creeped her out so she put it out of her mind.

“How do I get out of here?”

“Steve is waiting for you in my office. Through that door.”

She was still naked. No one had offered her a robe or even a hospital gown. She didn’t bother asking for one. She was sure that everyone on the island, the behind the scenes crew as well as the public staff, had seen everything that she had to offer. In spades.

Steve took her straight to master bedroom ensuite and ran the shower for her.

He left the door open and waited in the bedroom to make sure that she was all right.

She had to shampoo her hair three times before she got all the grit out of it.

After she rinsed the soap off, she adjusted the temperature and stood in a cool spray for a long time, just letting the water run off her. It helped with the sting from the nettles more than anything else that she could do.

When she toweled off, she was careful to blot the dampness away rather than rub it. Her body was a massive rash, front and back, and she didn’t want to make it itch any more than she had to.

“How do you feel?” Steve asked when she walked back into the bedroom.

“Like my skin is on fire,” she said. “The doctor said that the pain might continue for hours.”

“God, you’re so hot,” Steve said.

“I’m a mess,” she said, looking down at herself.

“You’re more beautiful than ever,” he said.

“I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten all day.”

“We can eat in the dining room if you want, or I can have anything you like brought up here.”

The suite was palatial. When she had been a student, she had lived in an apartment that was smaller than this – and shared it with two other women. “I’d rather stay here.”

“What would you like?”

“Surprise me,” she said. Then laughed. “This weekend has been nothing but one big surprise.”

Over the dinner, she said, “This whole weekend must have cost a fortune. Not a small fortune, a real fortune.”

“Don’t worry about that. This is a profit center. According to conservative projections, within a year we’ll be close to breaking even. Within five years, we’ll be making buckets of money from this place.”

“I don’t understand. How?”

“It’s a resort for wealthy people who want to experience an unusual adventure when they come to the Caribbean instead of just sitting on a tropical beach sucking down piña coladas. The guests this weekend paid twenty thousand dollars per couple to help torture you. That’s a quarter of a million dollars in gross revenue in one weekend. But this was the grand opening special. The standard adventure will cost guests thirty thousand dollars per couple for five days. They’ll get about the same experience as our guests got this weekend, but they’ll also have a couple of days to relax on the beach, get some sun, and enjoy some music and dancing. We’re already booked solid for the next six months. That’s a guaranteed gross revenue of nine million dollars and I’m pretty sure that we’ll fill up the second half of the year just as easily. We’ll shut down for a month every year to refurbish, but we’ll still gross sixteen point five million dollars per annum. That covers our operating costs and leaves a considerable amount left to pay off a chunk of the initial investment.”

Lori stopped eating and stared at Steve

When the silence grew too long, he asked, “What?”

“On our wedding, I gave myself to you with the explicit promise that you could do with me as you wished. But I trusted your judgment. You can’t seriously expect me to endure this ordeal every week for the amusement of the paying customers.”

“God, no! Of course not. You don’t have to come here ever again if you don’t want to.”

“Then what?”

“Those two serving maids that were hanging around that first night? When you were literally hanging around? You were probably didn’t notice that they had ringside seats for the rest of your ordeal, too. They’re the actresses who’ll be performing for the rest of the year. They were learning how to react authentically to the various tortures. They’ll be performing on alternate weeks. As well, they’ll train more actresses.”

“You think that you can pay anyone enough to be tortured every week like I was?”

“No. Not at all. I mean, I could find a new victim every week. There’s plenty of young women on the mainland who’d put up with what you went through for enough money. Fifty or sixty thousand dollars will buy a hell of a lot down here. But they wouldn’t be reliable. It would be a disaster if even one of them chickened out halfway through and started screaming about giving up the money if I’d let them go. And then threatened to report me and all the guests to the police for assault. No. Not many women are as tough as you. The only reason that I put you through the real thing was because I thought that you wanted it. In the future, there’ll be a lot more acting and a lot less real torture.

“There’ll still be some. The actresses understand that some parts of the role will be difficult and painful. But the worst parts will be illusion. For example, the voltage on the cat can be remotely controlled. It’ll be cranked up to full strength if the guests hit each other again, but choked down to quarter strength when the actresses are flogged. They’ll have just enough sting to stimulate the actress but it will be much more tolerable than what we put you through.

“I hired a bunch of Disney-trained engineers and designers – what Disney calls imagineers – to design the island and the program. They know how to put on a great show.”

Lori smiled. “You’re a businessman all the way to the core.”

“I believe in hiring the best experts and trusting them to do things right.” He paused. “I hired a few members of your dream team to help design your ordeal. Dr. Anthony, al Said, and Dr. King, advised the imagineers about how to make this weekend’s program best appeal to you. Do you mind?”

She was a little taken aback to discover that her husband knew about the team that had designed her wedding gift. But she wouldn’t complain about that. It seemed like nitpicking. “That’s okay.”

“Good. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to know about them or not.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“So? Did it work? Did you like the ordeal that they designed?”

She was silent for a long minute. “I hated every minute of it. But that’s good. That’s what’s supposed to happen. The experience could only have been good if I’d hated it. I loved the anticipation of it. I loved the dread that I felt knowing that something terrible was going to happen to me. I loved the terror of knowing that, no matter how much I was suffering at any point in the weekend, something worse was going to happen next. I loved that it was real torture. And, now, I love the satisfaction of knowing that I endured it all. I’m going to relive this weekend in my imagination for years. So, no, I didn’t like any part of the ordeal. But I love that you did it to me. It was the perfect anniversary present. Thank you, so much.”

They sat in contented silence for a minute while she ate a few more bites of steak tartar and cucumber salad.

When she cleaned the plate, she said, “That was delicious. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. You want more?”

She shook her head. “I want to sleep. I can eat more later.”

“Anything you want, any time you want.”

She smiled, then her smile morphed into a moue of puzzlement. “Do you know what most shocked me this weekend?”

“I can’t imagine that any part was more shocking than any other part.”

“I found it shocking that every single guest was so eager to participate in torturing me. The more certain they were that I was truly suffering, the more they wanted to hurt me. It was most obvious in the flogging scene. But the simulated rape was the same. Not all the men came down but every one that did took a turn with the joystick. They knew what they were doing to me. They jammed that thing into me as brutally as the mechanism permitted and twisted it around as far as they could. They knew that, despite the orgasms that they forced out of me, I wasn’t enjoying a moment of it but that only made them more sadistic. They loved forcing me to scream as loudly and writhe on the ground as much as possible. The only time anyone objected to anything was during the first part of the first evening. Once they got past those initial qualms, they jumped on the bandwagon without another thought. When you were burying me, I don’t think they cared if it was real or not, only that it would be intolerably painful. In fact, the way some of the women were looking at me, I think they were hoping that I was being killed for real. They wanted to see a snuff performance. I don’t know how you found that many guests who were all sociopaths. That must have been hard.”

“I didn’t select them in any way except for their willingness to pay the admission fee. They were a typical cross section of humanity. Or at least, of that part of humanity that doesn’t mind spending ten thousand dollars a head for a weekend of high entertainment. But I wasn’t surprised by their sadism. Your psychologist, Dr. Anthony, told me to expect that. He mentioned the famous experiments by Milgram and Zimbardo. He also referred to a lot of research on bystander intervention done in the sixties. He warned me that participation rates would be higher than I expected. Anytime we allowed any guest to torture you, we had to design it so that you wouldn’t be injured if every one of them wanted to do the same thing. Also, he assured me that the people who didn’t participate would still be willing to stand back and watch. We could do anything to you that we wanted and we wouldn’t have to worry about the guests intervening. Every one of us is a potential Nazi.

“The program forced the guests into a psychological vicious cycle. At the beginning, they didn’t want to see anybody hurt. When they realized that you were suffering for real and they couldn’t stop it, they had to find a way to rationalize it. They invented reasons why you deserved to be punished. You volunteered. You knew what you were getting into. You never said some magic phrase, like saying that you wanted to be released in some special way. You just screamed for mercy in a general way. Most importantly, I was the host and, therefore, in charge. If I failed to stop it, then I was responsible for what happened. They even made me responsible for their decisions. Everything was on my head, not theirs, so they could do whatever they wanted.

“That first rationalization, however weak, greased their skids for a fast slide into hell. The more they participated in hurting you, even passively by not intervening, the more reason they had to want to hurt you. If they felt guilty, that was your fault, not theirs. Besides, they could see that everyone else was going along with the program so they should, too.

“If their rationale for hurting you was shaky, that meant that they had to participate more actively to prove that their rationale were true. And the more certain they became that their reasons would be accepted, the more they could hurt you, requiring even more extensive rationalizations that had to be further tested by ramping up the torture. A vicious circle.

“The ultimate rationalization was when they let themselves be punished by taking lashes on their own back with the electric cat. The pain that they suffered was ultimately your fault because you were the reason that they were there. They felt fully justified in making you suffer worse pain than they did. Besides, it didn’t kill them so it wouldn’t kill you. You should be as tough as they were.”

“They got hit once, I got hit seventy-five times.”

“Sure, but they felt the pain when the whip their backs. They didn’t feel the pain when it hit yours. The pain of one stroke on their back hurt them more than the pain of dozens of strokes on your back so the equation was balanced as far as they were concerned.

“Also, you didn’t see how much the sexual tension contributed to breaking down their rationality. Your pain became their pleasure. You couldn’t see what was going on while you were being whipped because everyone was behind you. Everyone was stripping to the waist. Shirts and bras were lying all over the ground. Toplessness was the new norm and no one wanted to stay dressed above the waist and be the outsider. Getting a lash from the whip became an excuse to shed their repression. Women who were be too shy to show even much cleavage to threw modesty to the wind and bared their breasts with glee. They were being urged to do it by their husbands who wanted the approval of all the other men.

“You probably didn’t know that we had to stop some of the men from raping you as you hung there. If we had allowed that, rape would have become the new norm and the crowd would have started a full-on orgy on the grass behind you. I wouldn’t have cared about a spontaneous orgy but you would have been helpless in the middle of it all. I was afraid that you’d get badly hurt if they got too far out of control.

“The implicit promise of sexual freedom was a big part of the attraction for the guests. We offered only couples rates and we made it clear that there would be only one king-sized bed in each room. Nobody lingered in the parlor on Saturday night. Once we got back to the mansion, the guests couldn’t wait to get up to their bedrooms. And they didn’t all spend the whole night with the one who brung them. On Friday night, everyone pretty much stayed with their own partners but on Saturday night, a lot of women were pattering back and forth between rooms.”

He pointed to the curtains that were pulled back from the windows. “It’s no accident that the curtains in every room are tied back with extra long velvet ropes, either. In the morning, a surprising number of the curtains were hanging free and the ropes were tied to the bedposts.

“You didn’t get much sleep this weekend, but you probably got more than any of the guests. They were so exhausted that they could barely climb back into the helicopters this evening.

“The result of our psychological manipulations was that by Sunday morning, the guests saw you as different than them. By the time you were buried, most of them had completely dehumanized you. You were seen as an object with no real feelings. Every time you screamed for mercy, they interpreted that as you asking for more pain because that was what had happened to you all weekend. Every time that you begged for mercy we hurt you worse. So you had to know that that was the way that your world worked. It was only logical that if you said no you had to mean yes. They lost all empathy with you. Nobody really cared if you were suffocating to death in your grave while they walked across it to get to their bagels and lox. In fact, I think that a lot of them thought that we had really killed you at last. And that was what they wanted. If you were dead, they didn’t have any further obligation to you.”

“That’s horrible. It took only forty-eight hours to turn a crowd of average people into sadistic sociopaths. I saw it but I find it hard to believe, even now.”

“Don’t underestimate your role and mine in that. We gave them permission to do it. Me by showing them that it was all right to hurt you and you by never trying to run away.”

“They didn’t know that governors were controlling my joints.”

“I don’t think they would have cared. No matter what you did, no matter how obvious the chains, they would have interpreted your presence as implying consent at some level.”

“This was a hell of an experience. At every level.”

“You want to know what shocked the hell out of me?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Just before we left for the airstrip, one of the husbands pulled me aside. His wife had told him to ask me if she could be the doomed woman in some future performance. As long as we didn’t kill her at the end. She wasn’t making any commitment yet; she just wanted to explore the possibility. Gives you something to think about, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not as surprised as you. I’m not the only masochist in the world, you know. There’d probably be at least a couple of us in every group of a dozen couples. You could find quite a few women who wouldn’t mind being the doomed woman for a weekend. The main thing that would stop them all from volunteering is that they don’t know if they can trust you as much as I do.”

“You know, this was a pretty intense experience for me, too.”

“It was terrific. Thank you.”

“You know, if you want, you can come back and do it again. Any time, any way you want it. All of it or part of it. With or without an audience.”

“Thanks but I don’t think so. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt. I can’t do something this extreme very often. I loved having done it once but I don’t want to do the same thing all over again. At least, not for a long time.”

Steve’s face fell. “So I guess I should stop using the doll to control you at home. At least for a while, anyway.”

She looked shocked. “No. That’s not what I’m saying at all. You better keep me on edge at home or I’ll be terribly disappointed in you. Those fun games aren’t anything like the intensity of this weekend. You haven’t stopped me from being a masochist. You’ve only found my limit for long-term torture. I still love your day-to-day domination of me. Surely you see the difference between making love to me while I’m frozen and being buried alive for eight hours. One has nothing to do with the other.”

He smiled. “I get it.”

“Good. Besides, I’m not keen to do this again because there’s no surprises left here. That was a critical part of the fun of this weekend. If I’d knowed ahead of time exactly what was going to happen to me, the weekend would have been more tedious than shocking. If you want to bring me back here, you’d have to design a different ordeal for me. You could. There’s a lot of potential left in the voodoo theme. Maybe a mask that’s fastened onto my face that does unpleasant things to me. Forces my mouth open and cuts off my sight at interesting moments. Maybe a little breath play. I really hate that. Drowning me in the ocean may not have seemed like a big deal to you but it was probably the worst part of the weekend for me.”

He smiled. “I’ll remember that.”

Lori’s heart skipped a beat and her mouth suddenly went dry. Maybe she shouldn’t have told him that. She imagined water boarding in her future.

Steve continued, “We’re going to do more than that. To keep the guests entertained, we’ll be changing the program completely every year. Next year we might stage something around a pirate theme. Kidnapping and rape. A gang of dirty pirates torturing a poor maid to find out where the treasure is hidden. And, if she doesn’t know about any treasure, then she can’t tell them where it is and she will be powerless to stop the torture.”

“Mmmm. That would be horrible. I think that I’d like that. I could look forward to spending a miserable weekend suffering at the hand of the Dread Pirate Roberts.”

“And the year after that, maybe the Spaniards and the Mayans. I bet that a Mayan chieftain would love to take revenge on a Spanish maiden who strayed into the jungle. And a Spanish Inquisitor can come to the New World some year to question a sexy young nun about her heretical beliefs. No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Now you’re talking. This is why I love you. I think I know what I want for a gift on my second anniversary. God. My cunt is already dripping all over the chair just thinking about the possibilities. If I wasn’t such a repulsive mess, I’d fuck you right here and now.”

“You’ve never been more beautiful than you are right now. But you’re too sore and tired to want me banging you tonight. I can wait for a few days.”

“Like hell! What kind of wife do you think I am that I’d make my husband wait to fuck me when he’s horny now? I’m a hell of a lot tougher than you think. Where’s that voodoo doll? Did you bring it with you?”

“I never leave home without it. The box is in the dresser. Top drawer.”

She retrieved the doll from its box and posed it with its bent knees spread as wide as they’d go and its head pushed down on arms that were crossed on the floor.

She knelt on the floor in the center of the room, put the doll in front of her, as far away as her arms could stretch, and then pushed every pin in, turning all the heads red.

Her body began to move, pulling her arms back and folding them underneath her head. In a few seconds, she was no longer able to reach the doll to release herself.

When she settling into the position, which thrust her ass high in the air, she turned her head up from the floor to look at her husband. “I’m all yours. I trust that you won’t to release me until you’ve used me to your heart’s content.”

He didn’t.

After he was well and truly sated, he pulled the pins out of the doll, helped her into bed and tucked her in.

She slept like the dead. The living dead.

As was appropriate on Voodoo Island.

* * *

Coda:

The guest who had her husband ask Steve if she could star as the doomed woman followed through. She returned to play that role in December as a Christmas present for her husband.

To ensure that she would be completely and utterly degraded, she also secretly arranged for her husband’s mistress to accompany him – to watch her be publicly humiliated; to take part in torturing her; and to share her husband’s bed while she was tied and helpless outside, watching the lights go out in their bedroom window.

It is rumored that, when they returned home, the mistress broke off her affair with the husband and never saw him again. She could not compete with a wife who was willing to suffer such pain and humiliation for her husband’s sake. She didn’t even want to try.

Dr. Anthony heard the story and began including it in his public lectures as another example of the power that a masochist can use to accomplish her goal.