F Campbell - Chain of Jedrah

“Does the need to strip yourself at each beginning bother you?” Rannah asked curiously.

“It was Yousef who stripped me yesterday. He ruined all my clothes. I supposed it was done as . . . as part of my punishment.”

“It was.”

Stacie set aside the last of her scanty clothing and stood naked. “No, I don’t mind stripping before you. It’s the purpose of being stripped that bothers me.”

“I have left the door open to tempt you. Go, run if you wish. Does your nakedness doubly impel you to flight?”

The captive looked at the wide portal without interest.

“All nakedness does is make me want to crouch in a corner and hide my face and as much of the rest as I can,” she confessed dolefully.

“Go and do it then,” Rannah laughed.

Stacie squirmed, her eyes imploring. “I can’t even do that now you’ve told me to. You’re just having fun with me. If you really want to know, I feel like saying: Come on, let’s get on with it.”

“Say it then, Stacie.”

The naked girl took a deep breath. Already she knew there was a thread between this dark-eyed maiden and herself, a thread that would grow and grow regardless of other things. Rannah’s curiosity about her state of mind was a part of it. She tossed reticence to the winds. “Please start my torture, Rannah.”

First a belt very tight around her slim waist. The scent of her torturess was tangible in the closeness of the buckling. Next the Arab girl bound Stacie’s hands behind her back, palm to palm, the cords neatly positioned and cruelly knotted with the cinching band that joined them between the prisoned wrists and then continued on to be drawn between the naked thighs and threaded through a ring in the front of the belt itself.

They were face to face now, the torturess and she who was to be tortured, both were breathing faster than their need. Rannah touched the passive lips with her own, then pulled upon the cord.

It was the beginning! Stacie recognized it as such. It was also the end of any possibility of resistance, she was too firmly tied. She gasped as the cord parted her buttocks, cut at her crotch and entered between the lips of her sex. Rannah facilitated its entry within her flesh by a firm application of finger and thumb. The cord was tugged, and tugged again. It hurt bitterly so that the captive gasped and knew shame at what had been done to her.

The pull of the cord beneath her loins compelled Stacie to stand erect, even to arch herself back to ease the pain. Her arms and hands had been pulled down and down so that they were completely lost to her. She stood, her shoulders wrenched back, her loins afire, and wondered if this was it or if there might be something more.

There was something more.

It was a triangular metal rod, of no great dimensions. It held a ring at each end. It was positioned between her arms and her back, the pressure of her strained pose held it there without support while the trapeze bar was lowered from the ceiling. The bar itself sustained short chains at each end, on them were hooks. Stacie looked up fearfully and guessed.

Again there was the intimacy of female bodies while the hooks were inserted in the rings. Then the naked body braced itself as the hidden motor gathered up the slack that stood between the helpless flesh and its punishment. At her back, Stacie could feel Rannah’s strong fingers positioning the rod and compressing her skin so that as the mechanism tautened it would not be pinched. And then the moment! The awful moment when the rod nestled itself into her armpits, bit into her skin with a sharp edge of the triangle and lifted her from the floor.

For a moment her toes searched frantically for the comforting solidity no longer there. By the time the whirr of the motor ceased they were twelve inches above the floor, and their owner breathless with pain.

“It is best that I go,” Rannah said calmly. “You may be ashamed of what your lips permit, nor do I wish to hear. Perhaps after a long time I will visit you.” Leaving she shut tight the door and turned a key.

Alone with the unbearable! Stacie understood. If Rannah had stayed to hear she would now be pouring out her pleas. It was so urgent that she tell of the impossibility of such pain or the bearing of it. So vital that someone be made aware of the need to put her feet back on the floor before her arms were wrenched from their sockets or the sharp edge of the rod ate its way through the flesh and bone and severed them. But there was no one to listen, so Stacie screamed. What else could she do? She screamed steadily for a very long time. Screaming exhausts. When there is none to hear, it shames itself and dies. But a beneficent nature has provided an immense versatility of expression for the tortured: moans, small inarticulate words and cries, sounds that have no place in the world of sanity. But, because of the place in which they are uttered, are the most eloquent of all. Stacie used them all.

She soon discovered it best not to move. She could kick to her heart’s content and move her head as she wished. But it hurt, all of it. To set her suspended nudity in motion as a pendulum was worst of all, she swung and could not halt the momentum. It would die its own death and no other. While she swung she was sure the pain was greater. To hang limp and passive was the best, a poor best to be sure, but all that she could do, to hang with screaming agony beneath each arm.

It was quite different from the whip. The captive had supposed that pain was pain, you suffered it in degrees. But this was different, here was no scalding cut of a leather thong across naked skin. No impact. Here was a relentless imposition without count, agony without intermission, pain without pause. The thing in her armpits was a live enemy against which she had no defense. It worked its will with her, and its will was merciless. Stacie’s tears accompanied her moans.

Why, oh why, must she be left to suffer alone! That was the cruellest thing of all. The pain was so great that the suspended girl cherished the illusion that had Rannah been present to witness she must inevitably have ended it. Surely no one anywhere at any time had known anything like this! It was not within the realm of bearing. By night she would hang lifeless, she was sure of it. If only Rannah would return! Stacie wonderingly heard her own voice far away crying, “Please, oh please . . . Oh please . . . !”

It was not the poor hurt shoulders alone. Stacie found herself tied ingeniously. Her weight on the rod pulled at her arms, and they in turn pulled at her wrists: the poor hurt wrists so helplessly tied together that she could no longer move even her fingers. But the chain of agony did not stop there, it continued on its way with the cord now deeply bedded at the apex of her legs and within her cleft vagina. It was a band of fire as implacable as the rod.

Stacie Blair was being tortured.

The naked girl could not measure time. It might have been an hour or several hours before she fell silent, all sound exhausted save the laboured breaths that themselves imparted pain. If Stacie could have stopped them and lived she would have done so, each respiration delivered her flesh anew to the burrowing rod. She puzzled that she still lived, that she was still conscious. Why, oh why, could not the blackness take her for its own and end her suffering?

There came the time she knew she would neither faint nor die. It must be possible, then, for a girl to suffer anything! Facing the knowledge she found no comfort. The discomfort meant only an endless vista of torture that could go on and on forever. Or would she be granted holidays! Her life’s work now was to be tortured. She found herself light-heartedly wondering about a five-day week, sick leave and statutory holidays . . . Could she wheedle privilege from Rannah!