In the dungeon a kind of routine sets in during the first week. The first days, the Master is only interested in his newest acquisition, which at least gives me the satisfaction of taking the heat off the young girl.
When he comes to get me, he orders me to take off my clothes before he even opens the cell, and I comply. There’s no gain in antagonizing the man over such things.
Then by the end of that week, the rapist starts taking Loretta to his pleasure room again from time to time. On these occasions, I listen carefully, but I soon come to the conclusion that the said pleasure room must have a padded door that is closed during the proceedings. From our cell, I can’t hear anything of what’s going on in there.
When it is my turn again, I try to engage the rapist in conversation as much as possible, even though I find this highly distasteful and disagreeable. The man is so cold, so ruthless and self-centred, that these chats with him send a chill through my spine at every word. But I believe it is important to keep him talking.
The conversations never last long, anyway. They last only as long as it takes the rapist to set up his victim on one of his contraptions, and they always end brusquely with a punch in the stomach before the gag is applied. When I am tied to the wall with my arms above me, I find that I can prolong our chat by jiggling my breasts in a particularly fetching way; and on the rack, it is the shaving of the pubic area, when needed, that especially absorbs the man and makes him forget himself in conversation…
In a strange way he seems to like these exchanges, and at one time he confides that at least with me he can have an intelligent heart-to-heart, not like with Loretta, who is “way too young”, and something of an “airhead”.
“Well, now that you have me, darling Master, why don’t you let her go?”
“Oh no, girl. That is out of the question. She knows a lot more about me than you do. Besides, I’m thinking of having a threesome, once in a while… In fact—or rather: in theory—you’re the one I could let go without any risk to myself. You know absolutely nothing about me, and you have no idea where we are… You’re just a stupid blind girl!”
“Are you saying that Loretta knows who you are and where this lair of yours is located?”
“All I’m saying is that the young one knows a lot more than she is letting on, but that she’s smart enough to keep it to herself… You see, that little Miss Holier-than-thou is not as innocent as she wants you to believe.”
When I have been brought back to our cell that night, I broach the subject as soon as I can speak. Loretta starts sobbing straight away, which takes me aback. Then, in her typically roundabout style of speech, interspersed with a profusion of sobs, hiccups and sighs, the girl confesses that she has not been kidnapped at all.
This is something that I already know: that she has met the Master at the hippie commune where she stayed after running away from home. That she has followed him voluntarily, because he was plying her with “groovy” drugs. But it is the part I didn’t know yet that really appals me: that she has stayed in the house with him for a while, right here, above the dungeon. That he has even taken her down a couple of times to show her his “secret pleasure room”; it even seemed exciting at the time. “I just digged the kinky sex, you know, but that’s because I was stoned out of my mind half of the time.” And finally, after living upstairs with her new lover for a few weeks, Loretta became bored with him and wanted to leave, she wanted to “move on”, but that then the Master had forced her to stay and locked her up down here…
“Oh darling, don’t cry,” I say at the end of the story, “You were lured, you were tricked, it’s not your fault…”
“I know, but I feel so stupid!”
“Well don’t! It’s too late for that now…”
“But I should have seen it coming! I should never have trusted such an old bloke…”
“You know, what happened to you is only human; it’s nothing new. It’s the story of Little Red Riding Hood, it’s Bluebeard, it’s a timeless story! And believe me, the Master has broken almost every law in the book… Even if he managed to trick you, he is still guilty, he’s a criminal…”
“But I just can’t believe that I jumped into the sack with him and that we had great sex at first!”
“Well, even if you offered yourself, he had no right to have sex with a fifteen year old girl. That’s a heinous crime!”
Still Loretta is inconsolable, snivelling and stuttering, so I move forwards on the floor and say: “Come here, let me give you a nice foot massage to calm you down…” And I do just that for a long while; then in the end, when Loretta has stopped crying, we just sit there silently with our legs entwined. Finally I say, “Let’s go to bed, now. Tomorrow morning we’ll discuss this further…”
While I try to go to sleep, the recent revelations racing through my mind, I tell myself, “We already knew that the Master’s statements are unreliable. Even Loretta is aware of it. But the fact that she herself turns out to be not entirely candid in what she tells me and what she holds back, that I find disturbing!”
The next morning, the first thing I want to know is, “What happened at the Island?”
“What do you mean? What’s the Island, anyway?”
“The commune! Where you met the Master!”
“Oh! is that how it’s called? I didn’t even know that the commune had a name…”
“Well, what happened? How did you get to know the Master?”
“Well, what can I say? He was just hanging around there… He provided everybody with goodies. You know: pot, speed, LSD, the stuff we were taking all the time…”
“And did Santa Claus have a name?”
“We only knew him as Jumping Jack.”
“Jumping Jack? Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. Probably because he was so bouncy and bubbly at the time. You have no idea how different he was from now. Always joking and laughing, always friendly… We just loved him, all of us!”
“Yeah… It seems to me that all of you were quite easy to deceive, too. Anyway, this man called Jack took you home with him, yes?”
“That’s right. He said he was going to take special care of me, spoil his hippie princess rotten…”
“Okay. So he brought you here in his car… Have you any idea to which neighbourhood he took you that day? The name of the street maybe?”
“No, sorry. I can only say that we’re in South London: we went over a bridge on the Thames that day…”
“Good! Which one? Do you remember which bridge you crossed?”
“No! They all look the same to me… Jesus!”
“Okay, it doesn’t matter! So you arrived at the house with the Master. You didn’t happen to look at his family name on the mailbox? You didn’t see it on the front door or above the doorbell?”
“No, I told you, I don’t know his family name!”
“All right, never mind. What I’m interested in now is what the house looks like from the outside. I’m guessing a freestanding, single family home with a high-walled garden all around…”
“That’s it exactly! How can you tell?”
“It just has to be…
Painstakingly, I spend the next hours trying to make Loretta describe the Master’s house and the neighbourhood around it. What could she see from the windows? Didn’t she look out of the window of her room on the first floor, when she stayed there for a couple of weeks? But it is useless: the girl seems only to have had a tenuous grasp on reality during her stay above ground, her mind perhaps addled by drugs… I marvel at the fact that someone with two perfectly functioning eyes to see the world with, seems to be using them so little.
The only subject where some more information can be gathered, is that of the secret entrance to the hidden cellar. This at least appears to have made a great impression on the girl, and it now turns out that she has entered the Master’s secret lair through it at least half a dozen times. When closed, the ordinary, inconspicuous closet attached to it makes the door completely invisible. No one inspecting the “normal” cellar in the basement of the house would ever suspect the existence of another, hidden one behind the closet.
What also has made a great impression on the girl is that after he locked her up, the Master forced her to kick her drug addictions cold turkey. “The bastard! Suddenly he refused to give me anything… How I suffered!”
“Well, then at least one good thing came out of all this…”
“Ha-ha! How straight you are, old lady. Pathetic!”
I say, “You know what your problem is, darling Master?”
“No, my blind slave girl, you tell me.”
“You just don’t seem to have any imagination.”
“How’s that?”
“Most men fantasize about having a slave girl or two at their disposal from time to time, right? But you’re the only one who goes to the tremendous trouble of actually looking after and providing for a couple of those in your own cellar. Do you realize how much simpler it would be to just keep this kind of thing a fantasy? Or to visit a good brothel from time to time? A kinky club or something?”
“Well, I beg to differ, there, girl. That wouldn’t be the same thing at all. I at least am making real what almost every man on the planet only dreams of… Doesn’t that make me superior to all those idle wankers?”
“No. My point exactly. It only emphasizes your lack of imagination… Your approach is just too literal-minded. Don’t you ever find that acting out your deepest desires is in fact something of a putdown?”
“Nope. Sorry for you girl, but I don’t.”
“Oh well… Your lack of imagination is even worse than I thought, then.”
Again, I marvel at such a discussion, and that the man seems to enjoy this while he is raping me. This time my neck and wrists are locked in the holes between the beams of a pillory, so that I am forced to bend over, my behind exposed. The man has just been giving me a spanking with his bare hands, and now he is violating me from behind. He doesn’t find it necessary to gag me and just keeps the conversation going.
The pillory is the third contraption the Master has installed in his underground pleasure room. I tell myself that it’s a good thing I couldn’t see this whole cabinet of horrors when I regained consciousness in this place, on that first night. On the other hand, the girl did see it all the first time she came here, and then she came back of her own accord half a dozen times… Unbelievable!
But now, while he is still taking his pleasure in his typically longwinded way, the man casually drops one of his bombshells: “I’ve heard about your escape plans. You want to knock me out with a head butt during a transfer… I can only tell you: forget it!”
I tense, and feel such a chill going through my spine, that it leaves me speechless.
“Yeah, I gottcha there, huh? You wouldn’t have expected me to get on to your little schemes…”
“So you do listen in on us after all… I was always very doubtful that the mics were actually there…”
“I never said anything about microphones, bitch. I only said I can always find out what you two are talking about. Actually it’s Loretta who told me everything I wanted to know.”
My mind reels: “Oh Loretta! How could you!” But then the man imitates the German accent of the stock character of a Nazi torturer: “Vi haff vayz to mek pipple tok!”
“Good God! What did you do to the poor girl? She’s only sixteen, you coward!”
The man cackles with laughter, before he punches me viciously and puts the gag on. “I realize now that I’m taking a tremendous risk by keeping two slaves. Maybe I’ll have to kill one of you, but I’m just wondering: which one?”
Finally he’s done, and squeezes the clamp around my throat and brings me back to the cell.
As soon as I get my vocal cords under control again, I tell Loretta what I have just heard, that the Master is aware of our escape plans. Then, with great concern, I ask, “Did the bastard hurt you, poor Lorry?”
“Well, no, he didn’t really torture me or anything… It’s just, you know, he was taunting me, telling me how stupid I am, and he got on my nerves, so I couldn’t help bragging a bit, that you have a plan and that you are going to get us out of here… And then the bastard tricked me into telling him some more.”
“Oh God, Loretta! This is not helping! I have to be able to rely on you!”
“Don’t call me Loretta! Everybody calls me Lorry!”
Loretta and I are both tied up against the wall with our arms raised above our heads, standing side by side. The Master has been very busy, ferrying both of us to the pleasure room and tying us up. I wasn’t even aware of the existence of a second set of straps on the wall. Now, with everything finally set up properly, he makes an announcement in the tone of an enthusiastic scoutmaster.
“Okay, listen up, girls. I’ve decided that keeping two slave girls is too much of a hassle, so I’m going to have to kill one of you. Of course the big question is: which one? So, after thinking it over, I have decided that I’m going to keep the one who is best at suffering in silence… So here is what we’re going to do: I’m going to whip your bare tits real hard with my faithful horsewhip, taking turns between the two of you, and the first one who utters a sound is going to die. Of course it is not forbidden to jiggle those titties in an enticing way… It may even help you to save your skin!”
“Excuse me,” I say as soon as the Master has completed his explanations. “I hate to be a spoilsport, but your little game is not on: I’m going to scream straight away! I’ll be the one you’ll have to kill… There’s no way I’ll try to stay alive by having you murder a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“Oh! how very noble of you. Well, you may be tired of living, but have you any idea how painful your death is going to be? Have you any idea how I’m going to kill you?”
“I’m guessing that you’ll use the clamp. I’m also guessing that you’ve done this before. There must have been other poor girls before Loretta, and you’ve murdered them too… Am I right?”
“Never mind about that. But you’re damn right about the clamp! Which means that I can choke you for as long as I want. In fact, I’ll fuck you while you’re slowly dying. And not just once, mind you, but several times…”
“Well, in the end the result will be the same. Either you kill me, or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways…”
“Well, it’s funny that you should say that… Because you see, I was more or less expecting that you would try to spoil the fun. I anticipated that, and I’ve given it some thought too. So let’s change the rules of the game. I whip you both, and if Loretta cries first, I’m going to gouge her eyes out. If it’s you, I’m going to pierce your eardrums… In either case I believe I won’t have any trouble with you two anymore.”
Loretta cries out in horror, and I don’t say a word. I must admit that I’m struck with terror too; I feel the hairs at the base of my neck standing on end… This has always been my biggest fear in life: to go deaf as well as being blind. My worst nightmare!
“Now you’re not so cocky anymore, eh? Rather silent all of a sudden? And I can assure you that I’m perfectly capable of doing it. It’s very simple, really. I’ll come down while you’re asleep, chloroform you, and just use an awl or a sharpened screwdriver to pierce your eardrums. Or Loretta’s eyeballs…”
“Yeah, well, you sadistic bastard! can’t you see that this doesn’t change anything? I have no choice: I can’t do anything that would make you maim Loretta instead of me…”
“Then you’ll have to say bye-bye to your hearing.” The man pulls viciously at one of my ears. “You’ll be locked up for good inside your own head...” He now raps his knuckles hard on my forehead. “You’re gonna be very lonely in there!”
“Well, if you’re foolish enough to do this, I won’t be able to say a word to you anymore, which you will find a bit boring after a while. And I’ll no longer have to hear the ugly sound of your voice, which will be a bonus for me…”
“Well that’s fine by me. I’m fed up with you, little Miss Blind-Angel-of-Wrath!”