The house was quiet. Bo had gone back to town early and the girls were sleeping upstairs. Emerson and Zack were on the porch in the dark, staring out into the forest of trees and to where the lake should be. The quiet set their souls on edge.
“It’s not enough, Zack,” Emerson was the first to speak after a long silence.
“What’s not enough?”
He shifted restlessly in his chair. “I feel like I’m on the verge of something immense and extraordinary.”
“What, in your writing? You still doing those commentaries on Blake and Keats?”
“I finished those a year ago,” he replied, his tone implying that Zack should already know that.
Zack thought a moment. “You know, I don’t recall you reading anything new to the Club, I mean really new in the last year.” It sounded like an accusation.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. You ride us for great achievement and we’re making progress. I mean look at Kathy Ann, getting that novella published.”
“It’s drivel.”
“Of course, it’s drivel. That’s how she thinks, but it’s well written, passionate drivel.”
Emerson laughed, dryly.
“If it hadn’t been for you, she never would have finished it,” Zack said.
“Yes, I was sick and tired of hearing her whine about it. The woman’s too smalzy for me. If it weren’t for you…”
“I love her company, Em,” he cut him off, “and she makes love like a beast.”
“Yes, yes, I know, but we’re way off the point here. I’m not talking about something immense having anything to do—at least directly—with what I or any one of us writes.”
“Then what are you getting at?”
“This is something very different,” his voice dimmed to match the shadowy look on his face. “I have an evil in me that keeps harping at my—oh, I’d say heart, but the feeling is not located in my heart, more like my gut, my crotch.”
“What kind of evil?”
“Our sluts are wonders when it comes to their sexual willingness. But soon, this will all grow old? If we let the game play out in any normal fashion, we’ll be sitting here twenty years from now listening to children’s laughter echo through the woods and chugging beer, whilst our little wives are in the kitchen making sandwiches and talking about their latest recipe for hamburger. Can you imagine getting old like that?”
“I can imagine worse,” Zack answered. “But I also can’t imagine that being my life or yours.”
“That’s what I mean. It’s not our lot. I’ve accepted that and still I feel shoved into the role.”
“You’re the one who got married. Come on, where in the hell did that come from?”
Emerson shrugged. “It was right at the time.”
“And now?”
“Still right, I think. I love her as much as I’ll love any woman…and I’m smart enough to know there won’t be many women who will thrive on the kind of abuse I tend to heap on them.”
Zack shook his head. “You damn pervert.”
“Exactly.” His face suddenly lightened and he leaned forward, forearms resting on his legs. Through the surrounding darkness, he looked straight into Zack’s eyes, while his own blue ones seemed to leap out of the shadows cold as icy arrows. “What if, we did the unforgivable, the shocking…” his voice seemed to lower as he spoke, “what if…” he paused and thought a moment, then spoke with a chilling verve backing each word, “what if we abduct a woman, a virgin, a blameless innocent and hold her captive in the basement here as our sex toy.”
Zack heard the proposal and his eyes grew wide, but he didn’t say a word.
“We keep her blindfolded, on short rations, naked, caged, gagged if we must…We whip her at will, fuck her like savages, and train her to accept it all, to love it all, until she’s begging for more. In effect, we take our anarchy, our domestic revolution and create the extraordinary… we turn an innocent nymph into the most outrageous immoral slut…”
The frenzy in his eyes had not abated, but for the moment, he waited for some verbal response from Zack.
“And how long do we keep her?”
“Until we’re tired of her. A week, a month, the rest of the summer, until next year. However long it takes.”
“Takes for what?”
“To win her compliance. To gain her trust. To subvert the girl until she will do anything we ask of her.”
“So, you have someone in mind?” Zack asked noncommittally.
Emerson smiled. “Actually, I do.” He snickered.
“Really? Who? Do I know her?”
“Yes. You do.” His energy seemed to rise and there was just the slightest quavering in his voice, suggesting both excitement and fear. “I was thinking of that little waitress at Zen’s, remember the tart with the run-on mouth, said she was new to the city, all she had was an old Aunt back in Toledo. She was taking acting classes and was going to make a name for herself.”
Zack knew the girl. “Great bod. Tits, ass, a naughty little swish. Good moral values, Em. She blushed when you asked if she had a boyfriend, made some silly remark about being a good girl, and how she planned to remain so.”
“Yes, that’s the one. Just got off the boat with a handful of dreams in her pocket.”
“Yeah, she said she’d do her aunt proud.” Zack started to smile with his interest warming. “You know her name?”
“I don’t want to know her name. We’ll make one up. The anonymous girl from nowhere, like a blank slate. Think of her bound in chains, knocked from one fantasy life to a very different one—ours.” He stood up and nervously paced the floor. “Think of it, Zack. Think of it. She will be ours to mold; we’ll make her anything we desire. We’ll give her the life she longs for— ” his eyes lit with a devilish gleam, “it’ll just happen in a more roundabout way than she expected.”
Zack shook his head. “Hey, I don’t know, Emerson. This is the craziest sounding thing you’ve ever cooked up.”
“I didn’t cook it up,” he said with a hint of anger in his voice. “I never think anything up. It comes from way deep down. And the desires aren’t so subtle anymore.”
“You plan on making the others part of this?”
“Of course.”
“What makes you think they’ll go along?”
“I know they will. I’ve seen it.”
“What do you mean, you’ve seen it?”
“My dreams are filled with the pictures, Zack, vivid pictures, and everyone’s there, doing what we do best when we’re together, celebrating sexual anarchy, making madness real. They have to be there. They have to be to make it work.”
“You realize that we could be incarcerated for the rest of our lives if we get caught, you, me, Bo and the girls. You really want to take the risk? For us? For them?”
“I’m going to take the risk, Zack. I have to. We have to. Otherwise we’ll live through this crazy period of existence and have done not one truly extraordinary thing. We have to do it. I can’t say why, not exactly, but I know we must. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it too.”
“Well, yeah, of course, I feel it. You got my cock already wagging for it. But you’re scaring me, Em, it’s nonsense, it’s a pipe dream that could hurt a lot of people.”
Emerson fell back in his chair in a slouch. “Yes,” he sighed. “I suppose it could. But a lot of things we do could hurt a lot of people. And it’s possible that this one won’t. Maybe our slut will be a better woman after it’s over. Did you ever think of that?”
“Hey, you haven’t given me time to think about it. I don’t know.”
“Well, think then, and once you think it through, you will see that it’s the most wonderfully perverse test we can give ourselves.”
***
You say that you knew nothing of their plans?
Nothing. None of us had a clue, until it was too late.
Too late, as in . . .?
She was already in our midst. And the game was on. By the time we understood the full intent behind Emerson’s plan, we were all implicated.
***
They heard the car crushing gravel in the drive as it pulled to a stop. The encroaching night had stolen the lazy afternoon, and now the air was filled with some anxiety no one could yet grasp. Emerson promised a spectacular surprise, but they had expected him back for dinner. At nearly nine o’clock the pizza boxes lay strewn across the kitchen counter, just a half dozen pieces left for Emerson, Zack and Bo. They would probably complain.
A terrible thump at the backdoor followed the sound of the car door closing.
Daphne jumped from her chair and moved toward the kitchen, thinking that the two might have brought back groceries.
“What the fuck—!” her voice rang out in bewildered surprise, the exclamation drawing Penelope and Kathy Ann from the porch.
Seconds later— “What is that?” Penelope exclaimed. The three women watched the large burlap bag the men carried shift and contort, as if there were a struggling person inside. The muffled grunts of a female voice stung the air.
“To the cellar,” Emerson shouted. “Daphne, open the door!”
Daphne moved instinctively, and then watched from the top of the stairs as the three men carried their prize into the old root cellar. After a minute of stunned silence, the women took the stairs in a matter of seconds, and stopped short as soon as their feet hit the hard dirt floor. Neither of them could recall having ever been in the cellar beneath the house. What they saw there now only made the incomprehensible moment more bewildering.
The cellar was a meager twenty-foot square of stone walls and hard-packed earth; its air musty and damp as cellars are known to be. There were shelves and a table to their right, nothing odd in that. The room was windowless, plain and unused for the most part. Exactly as they expected.
What made their jaws drop, however, was the alarming scene before them as the three men struggled with the floundering sack of angry body parts. While the burly Bo with Zack’s assistance held the sack steady, Emerson worked at the knotted drawstring closure. A minute or two and it finally gave way, allowing the burlap to be drawn back and the body inside freed—at least freed from this startling confinement. The female body unveiled dropped to the dirt and wriggled uselessly. Her wrists had been bound behind her back and her feet and legs were roped together to ensure that she couldn’t stand. Her mouth was gagged, while one of the black sash blindfolds used in the ceremony on the beach was tightly tied over her eyes. A crop of red curls covered her head, sticking out now in odd angles, a complete mess after so much struggle.
Six pairs of eyes intently focused on the wildly gyrating form, each in their own way stunned to silence. The only sounds in the room were the girl’s grunts and groans as she witlessly attempted to free herself. The full impact of the scene was compounded by the fact that the girl and her male captors were inside an odd enclosure, roughly eight by six feet in the corner of the cellar, which looked as if it had been recently constructed. Vertical steel bars were fixed along a horizontal base that had been hammered into the floor. The bars were then affixed to beams along the ceiling, effectively making a prison cell inside the cellar. A small door opened into the space, swinging on new steel hinges. Apparently, the room would lock tight with the chain and large padlock that were hanging loose now from one side of the opening.
“Hand me the cane,” Emerson ordered Bo.
A surprisingly compliant Bo did just that, then turned and backed out of the cell to give Emerson some space. Zack joined him outside the enclosure, where the two stood in wait. The three women edged a bit closer, curious but frightened by what they saw.
“It’s no use struggling, girl,” Emerson said coldly. “You won’t be freed from the ropes if you fight and when you’re freed you’ll still be imprisoned.”
She seemed to freeze with fear hearing the sound of Emerson’s voice, and feeling the tip of his cane as it made a gentle journey around her body.
“It’s okay. There’s really nothing to be afraid of.”
The girl made some grunting reply. Her response was not surprising, although her response to Emerson’s teasing cane was curious. Her body seemed to jump with life every time the tip nudged a leg, or arm, or a thrust-out breast, as if she were quaking erotically, which she couldn’t possibly be doing. Not yet.
Emerson continued prodding her with a delicate touch and, in time, the cane’s movement seemed to calm her.
“You’re going to be just fine,” he spoke again, “and I promise, you won’t be hurt, as long as you cooperate.” He tapped her thigh with the cane for emphasis. “Your time with us will become the outstanding moment of your life, the singular experience on which the rest of your life will hinge. The fulcrum between the time before with its wasted, useless years, and the time after, which will be more amazing than you ever could imagine.”
It was unlikely that the bound girl or her audience understood what Emerson meant by what he said. But his soothing tones seemed to lower the anxiety of the entire room until they were all seeming to breathe in unison with him. That was the sort of spell Emerson could cast. His five friends understood this. They had been mesmerized by him before and should know better, but once again, just like the girl, they succumbed to his words and the promise behind them.
“We mean you no harm; in fact quite the opposite,” he continued, circling her immobile form. “It is my intention to bring you to an ecstasy of body and spirit you would never have imagined. You are in a crucible of great possibility. Don’t despair and do not lose hope. It will not last forever.”
The girl grunted, while those gathered around her tried to imagine what she would say.
“Em—” Penny started to speak.
“Hush!” he leveled her with a toxic stare before she could finish his name. Then he nodded to the upstairs, moving toward the women, shooing them to the staircase, with tersely whispered vows. “You’ll have your answers soon enough. Don’t go crazy on me now. Five minutes. We’ll be up in five minutes.”
He used the cane to spur them on, following closely at their heels until they were at the top of the stairs where he closed the door with a firm click.
Penelope and Kathy Ann immediately turned about with their eyes focused on Daphne.
“What?” she shook her head, “I’m as shocked as you are.”
“You have no idea who that girl is?” Penelope charged in a throaty whisper.
“No. No I don’t.”
“I think he’s gone off the deep end, Daph,” Kathy Ann charged.
Daphne shook her head, “I – I don’t know.”
“Well, he damn well better get his ass up here in his five minutes or I’m going back down there and find out what the bastards are doing,” Penny fumed.
Emerson returned to his captive, who for those few minutes lay inert, gathering dust on the dirt floor. One wondered what she could be thinking now. Was she in shock; or simply numb? Were Emerson’s words still having their trancelike effect? It seemed too simple, the crime so easily perpetrated, just as they had planned….
They’d watched hidden in the alley by the Zen Café, waiting for her to leave her shift. She moved with a pleasing, upbeat gait as she walked the seven blocks toward her apartment. Emerson and Zack had tailed her twice before to plan her abduction, and they had agreed to abandon their plans if she veered from her normal route home from work. Luckily, she hadn’t.
Hers was a lonely part of town where abduction would be simple. They’d dressed as black as the night, Emerson tailing her on foot while Zack drove one of his family’s little used vehicles—she’d never remember the featureless Dodge if it came to that—and Bo sat in the back seat. On a side street between neighborhoods where she normally took a shortcut to her apartment building, they pulled up behind her, while the tailing Emerson grabbed her from behind and shoved her into the car.
She wouldn’t see beyond Bo’s mask, and once he had her in his firm grip, the blindfold went over her eyes, the gag followed and then the ropes. Finally, the burlap bag contained her thrashing movements enough to make the long drive back to the forest retreat.
No one said a word the entire way—which was part of Emerson’s instructions.
The girl had immense spunk, thrashing about as best she could in the confined space. But finally, she’d succumbed to her exhaustion and lay inert on the floor of the vehicle until they arrived at their destination.
Emerson circled her body now, returning to her his previous methodology, gently prodding her with the cane as he spoke. “You’re our captive, girl, until the time we choose to free you. There is no way out. No escape, no negotiation, no way to avoid what will happen next. That is the facts of your confinement.” He let his message sink in and then added, “But do not lose heart.
“When you’re freed, your reward will be considerable, that I promise. Until then, it is imperative that you do exactly as we tell you; your disobedience will be met with harsh rebukes. Punishment is avoidable, however, thus I suggest you set your mind to obey without exception. I know you have little reason to trust us, but in time, you will. Consider this a vacation from your real life and look for it to change who you are forever.”
He circled her silently one more time, then pressed the cane between her legs where it was sure to hit her at the home of her most sensitive physical response. He felt her flinch against the bamboo and was pleased with this first sexual response.
“In our my world, our world, you’ll be known as Veronica X. Has good ring, don’t you think? A bit of sophistication. Classy.” He paused as if she’d actually respond. Of course, she couldn’t. “While you’re with us, that is who you’ll be to us. Internalize that name, create a persona for Veronica X, identify with her, and I’m sure you’ll find your stay with us a little easier to take. There is nothing to fear here but your own imaginings.” He gave her a moment to think on that before finishing. “That’s all you need to know for now, Veronica X, all that matters. You’ll learn more in the days ahead. Now, I’m sure you’re tired, so we’ll be leaving you in your cell.” He motioned to Bo and Zack, who moved in quickly, untying the ropes that bound her wrists, her legs and feet, and then retying her to pallet bed, with her arms above her head and her feet secured below.
“We’ll see you at sunrise,” Emerson said as he followed his friends out of the cell, then shut it with a clang. He chained the door of bars in place and clicked the padlock shut.
The three then left the cellar and moved upstairs.