It is terrible: the laughter has started again. Instead of their gentle caresses, they begin to manipulate her mercilessly. The hands that have stroked her breasts now tweak her nipples; the finger that has massaged her thighs and lightly slid inside her begins to jab.
There is no kindness now. Her gag is quickly removed, and against the rosy jut of her mouth, a hard penis prods her. She opens her lips to let the thick shaft inside. Her hair is grabbed, pulling her head back, so that the penis can slide deeper inside her, down so far that it touches the back of her throat. She is manipulated by the back of her neck, her head pushed forward onto the pistoning cock. She has to struggle against each hard thrust so that she can still breathe. It seems a Sisiphusian task: no matter how vigorous the movements of her tongue and lips, the cock only demands more. She loses track of time; the whole of her consciousness focuses on the hot meat pulsating in her mouth.
Eventually she feels the cock twitching inside her, and with an extra violent thrust it explodes in her mouth. Thick seed slides down her throat.
As soon as one man withdraws from her, another enters. Her head is again tugged back; another hard cock is thrust into her. It goes on without end, her body stretched, pulled, manipulated; she is a mere object of their pleasure, a mere function of their lust. She feels that it will never be over...
Sometimes the dream ends there.
Sometimes she is suddenly left alone again, and the same fear of being left forever returns. They have gone. Perhaps nobody will come back. She is still tethered to the metal rods; she is still lying on the cold stone. For a moment she futilely tries to struggle against the metal of her chains, but the more she struggles the more her arms throb. Her body aches in so many places she can no longer detect a precise location, her skin prickles with the aftermath of her thrashing, and, under her skin, her whole body feels a keen rawness.
The door opens and she stares into a blinding light. She knows that her punishment is not over, that everything that has happened to her has been mere prelude to what she is about to undergo.
She knows she is waiting for him. Him? The dream is not always the same: what happens is the same; how she feels is the same; the ending is the same; the woman and the four leather figures are the same. The dream is almost always the same, but there is one important difference:
him
, the man, the man changes. It is always some man in her life. Once, and how embarrassing and terrifying that she could have conjured some dream imagery, it had been her favourite uncle. Another time it had been a schoolteacher on which she had had a childhood crush. In the last few years, the man has, more often than not, been a current boyfriend or a casual acquaintance. But this time, and her dream is as logical as it is shameful, it is James Hyde-Lee.
James Hyde-Lee, the famous writer known for a dozen or so popular novels full of gentle humour, of life affirmation, of forgiveness and human generosity, stoical, kind James Hyde-Lee, a sixty-five-year-old widow, is walking towards her. He is the man. It could only be him. He does not wear leather, but a gray, bespoke suit and a silver silk scarf is tucked around his throat.
He is still a virile man, with young, blue, intelligent eyes and a kindly, almost avuncular smile. But she knows that this is not a kind man. He can mean her only harm, because all the men in her dreams always only mean to hurt her.
'You know that you want this,' he says in a kindly, patrician voice.
Again she nods her head, against her will.
Strangely, she finds herself lying on her front, her breasts pushed against the cold stone. She can see nothing. Her eyes have been covered with a scarf. Being deprived of her sight is a torture, because she is so certain he is going to hurt her, but she does not know how or when or why. With the woman she had scrunched her eyes closed, not wanting to see, but now she wants to see.
There is no noise in the room, apart from her own heavy breathing. She does not know what he is doing, what he might be planning. If only she could see his eyes then she might not be so frightened.
The whip lashes the firm cheeks of her bottom, the heavy pain scorches her flesh. It is much harder than before. The woman was only playing, teasing, compared to this. She is shuddering with the pain. It feels as if she has been struck by lightning. Her body jerks against the immensity of it.
The second stroke is even more violent, catching her on the back of her thighs. The woman has lashed her on the front of her thighs and she imagines a ring of red stretching all around her. The pain is on the outside, but inside her too, racking her mind, confusing her, debilitating her reason until she feels that she is going mad. How could anything hurt so much? It is limitless, beyond her comprehension. The surreal nature of her dream carries within it a hyper-reality of pain.
The lash again! There is no laughter from James Hyde-Lee, just a terrifying, still silence. The lash again and again! The silence only broken by the crack of the whip and then the voice: 'You know that you want this?'
She is nodding, assenting to her torment. She is agreeing to being hurt!
The lash comes down onto her blushed, trembling body, on the quivering cheeks of her bottom, on the top of her thighs and the small of her back, and the voice says after every lash, 'You know you want this, Lillian! You know you want this very much!' And each time her head nods.
Unlike before, when the woman thrashed her, there is no peak, no nadir of pain, each lash is worse than the last, less worse than the lash to come.
She tries to visualize her pained skin, to imagine how many red marks have been laid onto the whiteness of her, but she cannot. The lash comes down again.
Only when her body has reached the absolute limit of pain is the whip thrown to the floor. She can hear the wooden handle click against the stone. Two old wrinkled hands are touching her, rubbing against her once smooth skin. They nip and scratch her, where whiplash has already scarred. Her bottom is being kneaded by the near septuagenarian hands of James Hyde-Lee, winner of international awards, awarded with honorary doctorates.
His hands are going further down, grabbing the rubicund flesh of her bottom, separating her buttocks. It is an agony of course; the slightest touch would be an agony after such a thrashing.
She feels repulsed by such contact. To be touched so intimately, there on the flesh-taut surround of her anus, by such an old man disgusts her, his wrinkled old hands pushing into that tight opening, and she is so tight. Then a finger is inside her, jabbing into her, remorselessly. To feel so impotent against such a thing, such a repulsive thing, the indignity of it, to be molested like this by such an old man.
There is more flesh now pressing into her and in her stultifying horror she realizes that he is trying to ram his cock into her bottom. His ancient cock pushes into her hard and she feels his clammy old hands nipping her inflamed skin and there is nothing she can do about it. She is useless, destroyed.
'You know you want this?'
Suddenly he pulls the gag from her; she is free at last to scream her resistance, to cry out against the multiple cruelties that have been inflicted on her, to protest, to complain. She feels her lips parting, her tongue pushing against the back of her upper teeth.
YYYYeeeeeeeesssssssss!!!
As the taxi sped through the lush, spring, Tuscan countryside, Lillian flicked through the file again, the dappled light illuminating the hastily scrawled notes she had made on the plane. She liked the idea of the provisional, opening chapter. It would set the book up nicely, point to ambivalences in Hyde-Lee's character that would engage the casual reader.
It was a great professional opportunity for her. She'd been working on the book for a year now and if it was successful, it would shade the three other writer's biographies she had already written, the last about William J. Symonds, an Oxford contemporary of Hyde-Lee. However Symonds, like all her other previous subjects, was a minor character compared to James Hyde-Lee.
She had been pestering Hyde-Lee for months for an interview and finally he had relented.
'Miss Simpson, I hear you're interested in me.' She had recognized his cultured English voice immediately. She was a little nervous speaking to him.
'Yes, I am, Mr Hyde-Lee, very interested.'
'Well in that case, maybe we should meet.'
'I'd be delighted.'
'I don't travel so much these days. I live in Italy with my half-brother, Lance Willingham.'
'Well, perhaps I could visit you.'
'It's a bit of a hike, but we can put you up for a day or two. I don't really have more time than that.'
He had sounded quite brusque on the telephone, but Lillian had barely noticed, so happy was she to finally have an interview with him. After the phone call, she had wasted no time arranging her trip. And here she was, one week later, heading towards Hyde-Lee's home. As Lillian discarded her file and gazed onto the sumptuous green of the countryside around her, she could not help but feel excited at the prospect of meeting Hyde-Lee.
On reaching Forte Dei Marmi, the upmarket seaside resort where Hyde-Lee lived, the cab turned down a side road, then halted by a pair of wrought-iron gates.
Lillian noticed how astronomically high the meter was. As she searched through her purse for the correct number of notes, she saw a tall, blond man walking towards her from the other side of the gates. Lillian wound down the window of the car.
'Miss Simpson,' he shouted through the metal barrier.
'Yes, that's right.'
'You're a little late,' the blond man said, a tone of admonishment in his voice. He was clearly English. It was not only the accent; Lillian had realized his nationality even before he had spoken. There was something very English about his demeanour and the measured, deliberate manner he had walked towards the car.
'Yes, I'm sorry, I...'
'Never mind.' There was no kindness in his voice.
He was handsome, pretty-boned, with a thick, square chest pushing out the gray serge of his suit. It seemed outlandish to be dressed in such clothes when the May sun baked the Italian earth.
She climbed out of the taxi and went to the boot to fetch her luggage.
'Don't worry about that. I'll get somebody to fetch it,' he said agitatedly, handing a bundle of rolled up notes to the taxi driver and with machine gun rapidity informed him in staccato Italian to wait while Senora Simpson's luggage was reclaimed by a servant from the house.
'Follow me, please,' he said turning around, before Lillian could protest about him paying her taxi fare.
The house, set fifty meters back from the road, was a huge three-storey baroque affair, with sandy-coloured walls and large latticed windows. She entered through a grand oak door into a huge marble-floored hall. The hall, and the whole house for that matter, spoke of a lavish but tasteful opulence.
The hall really was fabulous. It was not only the checkered marble floor or the terracotta walls lined with the paintings of the great artists of the renaissance that impressed her. The oak banister of the staircase was extraordinary: it had such delicate carvings of nymphs and cupids. There was also an enormous crystal chandelier that hung in the center of a wonderfully painted ceiling of scantily clad girls whose pale beauty reminded her of the female figures from the paintings of Botticelli.
She was led up the wooden staircase. There must have been at least ten rooms on each floor, and from the balustrade she got another view of the colossal size of the building.
The blond man opened a door, and she entered into an elegant boudoir. It was beautiful, with French windows leading onto a tiled balcony that faced the snow-capped mountains to the back of the resort. The walls of the room were painted in a soothing azure and there hung from them two or three impressive paintings of Venice executed in the style of Canaletto. In the centre of the room was a plain double wooden bed, an antique chest of drawers, and beside it and an elegant, free-standing, ornamental lamp. Rather incongruously, considering the age and ambience of the room, there was a black, slim-line television set on an ancient mahogany table placed next to the wall opposite the bed.
'Miss Simpson.' The tall, blond man looked intently into her eyes for the first time. 'This is your room. Your luggage will be brought up shortly.'
She stared back at him, wondering why he was being so preposterously formal with her. He seemed too young to behave with such old-fashioned and stiff decorum.
'When can I see Mr Hyde-Lee?'
'Mr Hyde-Lee will speak to you this evening. He is a little indisposed today. He apologizes for his absence. You can take dinner with him in his private quarters this evening.' He glanced at her as a schoolteacher might at an impertinent child. 'Next door you will find a bathroom where you can freshen up. Dinner is served at seven. You are quite free to walk around the grounds if you so wish. Mr Hyde-Lee also told me to inform you that his library is at your disposal. It is on the ground floor next to the dining room.'
'Thank you very much Mr...'
'Mr Everton.'
'Mr Everton, can I ask one last question?'
'Of course.'
'May I ask who you are?'
'I am Lord Willingham's personal assistant. I attend to all his domestic requirements. Now is there anything else you require?'
'No, I don't think so.'
He bowed his head with a kind of supercilious servility that made Lillian want to burst out laughing.
On his way out of the door he was passed by a sumptuously attractive woman with beautiful shiny black hair tied up in a chignon. She wore a black maid's uniform with a white pinny. She deposited Lillian's bags without speaking, but Lillian caught her eyes, and fleetingly thought that she could detect some warning in their black centre.
A few minutes after the maid had exited, Everton reappeared, as Lillian was unpacking her bags, the new lingerie she had bought at Heathrow sprawled all over the bed.